<story><title>Changing Your Diet Can Help Tamp Down Depression, Boost Mood</title><url>https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/10/09/768665411/changing-your-diet-can-help-tamp-down-depression-boost-mood</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>technothrasher</author><text>I dunno for me.  I try to eat healthy and keep my weight down, but I&amp;#x27;m happiest when I&amp;#x27;m eating poorly.  I get kind of run down and depressed when it&amp;#x27;s meal after meal of veggies and chicken, or just small portions of whatever.  A pizza and a soda, or a huge steak and garlic mashed potatoes will lift my mood quickly. Then it&amp;#x27;s very hard to go back to healthy again.  There&amp;#x27;s no question eating healthy helps my physical wellbeing though, so I do it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>H1Supreme</author><text>Replace chicken with steak? In my experience, it&amp;#x27;s not necessarily the perceived healthiness of foods (chicken == healthy, steak == unhealthy), it&amp;#x27;s the carbohydrate amounts.&lt;p&gt;When I was in my 20&amp;#x27;s, I was relatively &amp;quot;hard core&amp;quot; about lifting weights and training. I weighed every meal, brought my own meals to cookouts, estimated macros as best I could. I was pretty obsessed with it all. As a result, I tried every diet out there, multiple times.&lt;p&gt;What I keep coming back to is low carb. By that I mean: Tons of broccoli, lettuce, cauliflower, zucchini, nuts (almonds and pecans primarily), fish, and beef. Plus, hard cheeses like Parmesan and Romano.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not hard to make these meals delicous. And, interestingly enough, I get &amp;quot;run down and depressed&amp;quot; when I don&amp;#x27;t eat this way. It&amp;#x27;s weird to admit that I crave vegetables like I would a piece of pizza. But, if we go out of town for a few days, and eat out a lot, I completely do.</text></comment>
<story><title>Changing Your Diet Can Help Tamp Down Depression, Boost Mood</title><url>https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/10/09/768665411/changing-your-diet-can-help-tamp-down-depression-boost-mood</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>technothrasher</author><text>I dunno for me.  I try to eat healthy and keep my weight down, but I&amp;#x27;m happiest when I&amp;#x27;m eating poorly.  I get kind of run down and depressed when it&amp;#x27;s meal after meal of veggies and chicken, or just small portions of whatever.  A pizza and a soda, or a huge steak and garlic mashed potatoes will lift my mood quickly. Then it&amp;#x27;s very hard to go back to healthy again.  There&amp;#x27;s no question eating healthy helps my physical wellbeing though, so I do it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>awinder</author><text>Big, big fat disclaimer — not a doctor, not a nutritionist, but I am actively enrolled in the school of hard knocks.&lt;p&gt;Soda specifically is going to give you a nice big dose of sugars which your brain is just going to love. But what you’re also doing is kinda training your brain — well when I had that massive pure sugar dose I felt great, now I’m eating chicken and veggies, and wtf where’s the feel-good rush?&lt;p&gt;There’s nothing really wrong with that either if you’re at peace and doing as you’re doing, eating a holistically healthy diet. But I do wonder in audience with clinical depression — if those people might be gravitating towards foods that offer quick pick-me-ups that make them feel like themselves finally, but overall make their depression worse especially when the effect is quickly wears off</text></comment>