Eating right, feeling good

Eating good food has the power to make us feel good. It's as simple as that. If you have taken a WoW Power Walking course, you know we stress balancing the macronutrients - food, water, protein, carbohydrates, and fat - so that we feel good every time we eat. Many diets recommend playing around with the balance of macronutrients - the high protein diet, the low fat diet, the no carb diet. All fail because the body becomes starved for a key macronutrient. These macronutrients play an interesting role in the manufacture of certain chemical neurotransmitters such as serotonin and dopamine in the brain which means their existence or lack thereof, has immediate and dramatic effects on our mood. Yes, we actually do have control over our mood through what we eat.

While I have known this for some time and we have incorporated it into our program to train power walkers, a new book is out now that is entirely based on eating to feel good. It is called The Good Mood Diet by Susan Kleinberg. I heard Ms. Kleiner speak last August at the Can-Fit-Pro conference in Toronto (a leading North American conference for fitness and health professionals) and I highly recommend the book. I am about half way through reading it now. Ms. Kleiner is a leading nutritionist in the U.S and she has published another excellent book I would recommend to anyone called Power Eating.

Within the first few sentences of the book she asks the reader to think about how they feel. This is so elemental and right in alignment with the WoW philosophy of listening to our bodies. I'll be back to this blog with some other thought provoking and palate pleasing ideas based on eating to feel good.