Читать книгу The Mood Cure: Take Charge of Your Emotions in 24 Hours Using Food and Supplements - Julia Ross - Страница 11

I am the director of a clinic that’s been doing nutritional mood repair for over fifteen years, but I’ve actually been a professional dealing with emotional disorders and mood problems since 1975. Early in my career I worked in residential psychiatric settings; later I worked with individuals and families, led intensive therapy groups and workshops, and ran treatment programs for adults and adolescents with addictions and eating disorders. Now I run my own clinic, Recovery Systems, in Mill Valley, California, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.

In 1980, as director of my first counseling program, I began to suspect that poor nutrition was playing a role in the cases that did not respond to our intensive programs of psychotherapy and spiritual support. Our less successful clients were often “emotional eaters.” They either consumed lots of cookies, ice cream, chips, and fast food or skipped meals altogether and drank lots of coffee and caffeinated sodas. I started hiring nutritionists to explore the possibility of a food-mood connection, and we soon realized that we were on the brink of a powerful breakthrough. Clients who could be persuaded to eat plenty of protein and fresh vegetables three times a day and avoid caffeine, sweets, and refined starches, like white bread and pasta, felt much better emotionally (as well as physically). When they ate well, even those who had major psychological work to do were able to make steady advances in counseling with much less anguish and backsliding. However, the clients who did not make the nutritional changes—despite new communication skills, exercise, long vacations, and moderate work hours—did not do nearly as well.

I was encouraged by these results, but I also had to admit that it took the clients who were able to stick with it about ten weeks to fully withdraw from their bad-mood junk foods. For most of them, this was ten weeks of food cravings, fatigue, headaches, and only very slowly diminishing mood swings. More important, too many of our clients just couldn’t wait it out and went back to their old junk foods and debilitating moods.

We needed something more.