The Mood Cure: Take Charge of Your Emotions in 24 Hours Using Food and Supplements. Julia Ross

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СКАЧАТЬ tune-up with amino acids and a dietary “adjustment” was often all that was required to set them right. These experiences taught me how often false moods run in families.

      Did you think that your father was hard to be around on purpose or that your mother cried at any upset because she was so weak? These are the kinds of questions that I have learned to ask when exploring the types of negative moods that run in families. My clients have often found the answers to be unexpectedly liberating: Although Anna hated to compare her irritability with her father’s rages, when she realized that they shared a common brain chemistry deficiency, she ended up having new compassion for him and less of a hurtful sense that his abusiveness had been personal to her.

      We all know families in which everyone is laid-back and others where no one can slow down; outgoing, cheery families and shy, quiet families; worried, perfectionistic, families and sloppy, low-energy families. Ask yourself as you go through this book, “Do my family members share any of my mood traits?” “Are we the same false mood type?” But you won’t need to worry about being a stick-in-the-mood. Although we used to think that genetic traits were intractable, when it comes to moods, even genetic programming can be reprogrammed remarkably easily by amino acids and other nutrients.

      Is It Your Diet? Regardless of your genes, but especially if your mood-programing genes are inefficient, good nutrition is essential. It’s no coincidence that our grandparents’ generation had a more cheerful disposition than ours, although they certainly had their share of wars, depressions, diseases, and other hardships to deal with. The fact is that their diets were better. They were lucky enough to grow up before the junk food invasion and before low-calorie dieting had become a way of life. They ate “three square-meals” a day, including plenty of protein-rich foods like beef, chicken, fish, eggs, and cheese. Why are these particular foods so important? Because our four neurotransmitters can be made only out of the amino acids found in high-protein foods.

      But protein is not all we need. We also need a good supply of vitamins and minerals to make this magic happen. They’re found in fresh fruits and vegetables, which your grandparents ate in abundance but which are lacking in the standard American and British diet.

      And there’s something else that you may be shocked to learn. If we don’t eat enough of the right kinds of fats, we will not be able to utilize these natural mood-boosting fuels. Our grandparents ate gobs of the fats we’re no longer eating, like butter, and they had much less heart disease, cancer, and depression than we have. (More on this intriguing story in chapter 8.)

      Then there’s the junk food factor. Commercial food processing strips food of the vital nutrients needed to make and operate your brain’s neurotransmitters. These bad-mood foods—including white bread and pasta, sugar-laden cereals and snacks, fried and hydrogenated fats, caffeine, and even the artificial sweeteners in diet soda—can actually interfere with your brain’s efforts to create good moods. You can’t pour sugar or any of these other stressful substances into your mood tanks and expect a smooth emotional ride.

      Is It Your Lifestyle? Our modern lifestyle must share some of the blame for our epidemic of mood imbalance. Too much stress—particularly of the unique twenty-first-century variety—can deplete the brain of its “feel good” neurotransmitters, literally wearing it out. A good night’s sleep, adequate relaxation, and appropriate “down time” are critical to restoring optimal levels of good-mood chemicals, but these simple restorative remedies are getting lost in our “go till you drop” culture.

      Is It Your Hormones? At our clinic, we’ve continued to learn new ways to improve false moods as we’ve bumped into new mood problems that have stumped us. Our biggest lessons, beyond how to fuel the brain’s four emotion-generating neurotransmitters, have been the lessons we’ve learned about hormones. Whether it’s the two thyroid hormones, the thirty-plus adrenal hormones, or the three sex hormones—estrogen, testosterone, and progesterone—their effects on your mood can be powerful. Without enough of all these hormones operating in concert, the neurotransmitters can be stymied. Liberating your brain’s emotional chemistry may require you to launch into a hormone-balancing campaign to eliminate whatever may be holding up the mood show. But don’t be intimidated; I’ll show you how.

      WILL THE MOOD CURE REALLY WORK FOR YOU?

      On November 13, 2000, I made a presentation to a scientific conference held in San Francisco on mood and the brain.⁸ My staff and I had been asked to review the files of one hundred randomly selected clients who had come to our clinic with significant mood problems. Of the one hundred, ninety-eight had reported major improvements in mood within two weeks, most within twenty-four to forty-eight hours, using the amino acids, the basic nutrient supplements, and the good-mood foods that you’ll be reading about in this book. Twelve weeks later, eighty-three had sustained or exceeded those improvements. The depression, anxiety, oversensitivity, and stress that had brought them to us in the first place had disappeared.

      You can expect to experience the same kind of relief from your own false moods, just as quickly. After all, you’ll be using the same techniques. As you’ve seen, many of the nutritional strategies I’ve discovered were developed while I was directing treatment programs for people with addictions and eating disorders. As a result, they’ve been honed on some very serious false moods. If the Mood Cure worked for them, it’s very likely to work for you.

      But the Mood Cure is not for everyone. I would love to be able to say that at our clinic we’ve learned how to eliminate all false mood problems, but I can’t. We do not specialize in, and have very little experience with, severe false mood states such as autism, psychosis, bipolar disorder, violent rage, or paranoia—the biochemical imbalances commonly referred to as mental illnesses. Other clinicians have had experience treating these conditions with natural therapies, sometimes very successfully. Suggestions on finding practitioners, clinics, books, and Web sites that can advise you on how to deal naturally with mood disturbances that The Mood Cure does not address can be found in the “Resource Tool Kit,” page 289. If you have such problems, please do not use the supplements suggested in this book without expert guidance. They could actually make your particular biochemical imbalances worse.

      MOVING INTO YOUR OWN MOOD CURE

      The first step in your Mood Cure, like the first step in any successful repair job, is to identify what needs fixing. In the next chapter, you can start getting down to particulars by filling out the Four-Part Mood-Type Questionnaire. After you’ve completed this false mood profiling, you can move on to the specific repair chapters and the excitement and relief of experiencing your own personal Mood Cure.

      Once you’ve actually shed your false moods for good, you’ll be able to use psychotherapy for any remaining true emotional problems stemming from your early life or from more current difficulties. You’ll certainly be much better equipped to do effective work if you do decide to go into counseling. You’ll also find it much easier to pray and meditate and to exercise, rest, and relax. With this full array of emotional, spiritual, and physical resources available to you, you’ll be able to face whatever lies ahead with strength, serenity, and a sense of humor.

       CHAPTER 2 Identifying Your False Moods

       The Four-Part Mood-Type Questionnaire

      There’s a large chart mounted on the wall of our clinic that lists all the symptoms of the four false mood types. As soon as our clients walk through the СКАЧАТЬ