Mojo Monday: Becoming Mentally Fit Part 3 - Feed Your Mind With Carly Taylor

Today Carly talks about food as a foundational pillar of mental fitness. This is part 3 of the becoming mentally fit series.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hi everyone, It's Carli Taylor here for this week's Mojo Monday.
So today we are going to talk about food as
a foundational pillar of mental fitness. So this is part
three of the Becoming Mentally Fit series. And look, we're
talking about these pillars of mental fitness, but we know
that they're not separate. They're all intertwined. So what we

(00:32):
eat and drink is very much influenced by our mindset.
Can be our overall mindset, So our overall attitude towards
food or our mindset in the moment and the choices
that we make of what to eat or drink, our
mindset has a huge impact on that. So becoming aware

(00:53):
of your mind and the chatter in that moment is
really crucial. We'll always justify a glass of wine after
a stressful day. So if I'm not aware that that's
where my mind will go, and it's Tuesday, which is
an alcohol free day for me, then I can easily
fall into this sort of reactive mode just doing what

(01:15):
my mind says based on how I feel in that moment,
which might not serve me well the next day. So
awareness of your inner chatter around food is really crucial
because that's how you take control over whether you reach
for that wine or the chocolate or the chips or not.
And that can take a lot of discomfort tolerance too,

(01:37):
because giving, in let's face, it is a lot easier.
So I've been watching the SBS series alone and it's
really it really sparked me thinking about why we eat.
And if you haven't seen it, it's a fantastic series.
It's a reality series and it's very raw, very real,

(01:58):
and it's quite rutal because contestants are dropped into these
remote wilderness areas and they're dropped there alone and they've
got to survive. And the one I was watching is
called a Loone Frozen and it's based in Canada, Canada,
which has brutal like the weather, conditions are insane, and

(02:21):
one of the contestants, Amos, said something that does really
stuck with me. So when you're out there, you're not
eating for enjoyment or pleasure or from boredom. You're eating
to survive. And he referred to it as the survival diet,
which I'm sure is the language for survivalists, but it

(02:43):
was it was new to me, and so every decision
around food when it's about survival, is about calories, so
it's about fuel and preferably protein and fat, but it's
whatever that you can find. There's no there's no abundance
of food, especially when the winter sets in and you

(03:07):
burn more calories looking for food than you actually eat,
and if you lose too much weight, they pull you out.
And there's a whole different relationship to food that they
have food on a loan. When they find it, it's
like it's sacred because it's about survival. And when they
do get protein from a hunt, the gratitude and the

(03:30):
emotion as they eat it is quite incredible. They're so
present with every bite and so connected and grateful to
the animal that they've just hunted. You know, their mindset
towards food is incredibly primal. So let's propel ourselves into
our modern world, which you and I live in right now.

(03:53):
So we're on the opposite of the survival diet, and
a lot of the time we are actually on a
pleasure diet. So we base our decisions on what to
eat around how we feel. We ask our partners, our kids,
what do you feel like for dinner? If we're hungry,
it's like, what do I feel like eating. We don't
ask ourselves what does my body need right now? I'll

(04:17):
base dinner around that, or I'll base my snack around that.
And we have this abundance of calories that we could
consume all day long if we wanted to. And we
can eat for dopamine, we eat for distraction, we eat
for comfort, we can eat based on our mood, we

(04:39):
can eat for entertainment. And unless you are eating with
some sort of intention for training or building muscle, or
aging or weight loss, the issue is that there are
so many choices to make, and those choices include food
that is highly convenient. Because we're busy, we have less
time to be preparing food, food that's made in a factory,

(05:04):
made by man and not nature, and made to be addictive.
So I'm talking about ultraprocessed foods here, food that you
cannot recognize as once being alive. It's full of non
food substances, full of chemicals, and research is now showing
that ultra process foods, which is a dominant part of

(05:25):
the modern diet, are directly linked to poorum mental health outcomes,
including high rates of depression. That anyone that tells you
that food doesn't make a difference to your mental health,
is not up with the research and is living in
the dark ages. And I get really frustrated when I
hear trusted medical practitioners tell their patients that food doesn't

(05:46):
make a difference. And don't get me started on the
hospital food, which I'm completely digressing. But there was a
twenty twenty three systematic review, a meta analysis that included
over two hundred and sixty thousand adults, and it found
that higher ultra process food consumption was linked to a

(06:07):
twenty eight percent increased risk of depression, and every ten
percent increase in ultra processed food intake led to an
eleven percent rise in depression risk. So I will put
the research into the show notes if you're interested in
diving deeper into that. But think about that. We're not

(06:27):
just talking about junk food here. We're talking about food
that is engineered in labs to be hyper palatable, shelf stable.
And I remember when it first came out, I think
in the seventies, like my mum getting so excited about
these foods that were going to last for weeks and
weeks and weeks. So there's shelf stable. They're addictive and

(06:50):
that includes the majority of breakfast cereals, and it includes
super market breads amongst all the obvious stuff. So ultra
processed foods and nutrient poor, they're full of additives that
may negatively impact your gut microbiome, which we now know
plays a crucial role in brain health. So every time
you eat, there's a chemical message to your brain. So

(07:15):
real food nourishes your body and your brain. Ultra processed
food starves it. So when you eat, think of it
as feeding every cell in your body. Every cell has
this energy center called the mitochondria, And think of the
mitochondria as a mouse spinning on a wheel. If it's fed,

(07:36):
it's going to spin all day long. It's going to
have loads of loads of energy. But if you starve it,
it's going to slow down. It's going to become sluggish
and struggle. And that's what happens when we eat a
lot of crappy food. We slow down, we get tired,
we feel sluggish, and it affects our mental fitness. That's

(07:58):
because we're not feeding the cells in our body. We think.
So what we need to do is really think beyond
our stomach and beyond pleasure, and we need to think
of every cell, every cell that's in our body because
they're relying on us to feed them. So I'll take
you through a guide that we have in our house,

(08:20):
and it's called the eighty twenty rule. So eighty percent
of the time we eat real whole food, So think
vegetable fruits, quality proteins, raw nuts, olive oil. Twenty percent
is the treat food. So whatever you consider the best
treat for you, like, you want to get full enjoyment
out it. You want it to be the best quality.

(08:42):
You want to have no guilt around it because you're
giving yourself permission to eat that. And what that means
is that there's a trade off. So my kids have
been brought up and we did Poul and I do
this as well, with this skill of trading off. So
if you do you know your treat for that day,

(09:02):
then you may need to have a trade off with
another treat when another treat opportunity comes along. So you
know your treat is chocolate after dinner, which is my treat,
So I'll turn down the biscuit or the chips during
the day because I know I want to have my
chocolate later on. So pole's trade off when we're out
for dinner, it's saying notice to the dessert because he's

(09:25):
drinking wine. So that's the trade off, So try it
next time you're out for dinner. Make an intentional decision
based on the attitude you want towards food, because attitude
is a choice. So choose your attitude around food, like
sit with that discomfort that that may bring in that moment,

(09:46):
knowing that their choice is under your control. And a
really great guide for this to help with awareness of
what to eat is the Nova Classification classification System. So
it's n OVA. You can just google it. And what
it does is it ranks food based on how processed
it is. So Group one is your unprocessed, minimally processed,

(10:12):
the stuff your great grandmother would recognize, and then it
goes up to group four, which is your ultraprocessed, factory
made food like substances, which is still designed for that
long shelf life and maximum bliss point. So yeah, really
really good guide, very very simple. There's a visual on there,

(10:33):
and yeah, a good one to show the kids as well.
So here's your mojo mundane nudge for this week around food.
When you reach for food, consider the reason you're reaching
for it? Is it for mood regulation? Are you bored?
Are you hungry? And if so, is this food in
your eighty percent? And will it nourish yourselves? Will it

(10:58):
feed that metaphoric little mouth us that needs nourishing energy
to spin that energy wheel? And what is your twenty
percent treat food? What are you willing to trade off
for it? And decide your attitude towards food. You can
intentionally choose your attitude. There is going to be a

(11:19):
part of your mind that's not aligned with that attitude,
and that's okay, that's normal. We all experience that, expect it,
but then choose not to give into it. Because there's
another part of your mind that wants a healthy body
and brain, that wants energy, that wants to age well,
that doesn't want to get preventable diseases. And that's the

(11:41):
part of you you want to listen to. That's the
part of you that you want as your guide. So
allow that part of you to shine through and take control.
So I hope you've got value from that one. Food
is another huge topic, but I think if we can
simplify with our eighty twenty rule and the nova classification system,

(12:05):
it can certainly help us when we are making choices
every day around food. So I have a great week everybody,
and I will catch you next week. See ya.