Why we are what we eat

During what I usually refer to as my "low time", I suffered from an eating disorder which stemmed from something known as body dysmorphia. This is basically where one spends an unhealthy amount of time worrying about specific aspects of their appearance; in my case it was my weight. I worried about it so much that I took drastic measures to restrict my calorific intake. Some days I only ate 400 calories per day, sometimes less.

The more I obsessed over what I ate and what my body looked like, the more and more depressed I became. Needless to say I lost weight, but it didn't matter because I still obsessed over the size of my thighs and the flatness of my stomach. Obsession was the illness, and one of the symptoms was that I didn't eat enough. My mental health continued to deteriorate.

Fast-forward two years. I had tried anti-depressants which helped me to cope for a while, but the emotional numbness became oppressive. I had took myself off the meds, and had recently dropped out after one year at university. With so much spare time on my hands, I began to read and listen to podcasts a lot.

I wanted to understand myself better, to give myself the literacy to know what my mind and body was experiencing. I clued-up on various contributing factors for good mental health and on tried and tested coping mechanisms such as meditation and regular exercise. I started doing both of these things.

One of the most interesting things I learnt during this time of getting to understand my mind a bit better, was that the gut produces 90% of the body's serotonin (a "happiness" chemical).

It follows that if you don't have a healthy digestive tract, it may not be functioning as well as it should be, and levels of serotonin produced may be compromised.

Known as our second brain, our gut (and more specifically our gut microbiota) has a huge impact on our mental health. The gut communicates with our brain in an interaction known as the gut-brain axis. Ever felt nervous and noticed those "butterflies" in your stomach? That's the brain and the gut talking to each other!

Our body works in harmony as a whole system. To dismiss what we eat as irrelevant to our mental health is like saying that water is unimportant for growing plants. I recommend this podcast if you want to learn more about the affect the gut has on the brain, as well as the endocrine system (hormones) and nervous system.

I realised that my mental state was being worsened by the physical state I was putting my body in. Not only was I not eating food that was good for my gut, I was barely feeding it anything at all! How could my microbes do their job of balancing my hormones (amongst everything else) if I was starving them?

I began to spend a lot of time in the kitchen, which has incidentally always been my happy place. As I slowly began to feed myself again, I made sure that the nutrients counted when I did so. The thought of eating certain food often made me physically anxious - the feeling of a full stomach did the same. But I had reached a state where I would do anything to stop feeling trapped in my own body; to be free from all of the self-imposed restrictions. As I paid attention to what I ate and began to treat the microbes in my gut like a little living garden that needed tending to, my mental health gradually began to stabilise.

Now I'm not saying I was cured of depression overnight because of a bowl of lentils, nor that this is any sort of one-size-fits-all cure for anyone else. Days still pass where I don't feel like looking after my body as well as I know I could. Days still pass when I feel anxious and low no matter how much fruit I eat.

Food is not necessarily the answer, but the facts are out there. Whilst factors such as genes, environment and personal circumstance all contribute to mental health, it remains true that eating well and treating our guts with the same love as we would a beautiful garden is at least one thing we can control when we're dealing with mental health.