I talk about 8 functional foods that can help calm inflammation, boost neurotransmitter synthesis and restore common nutrient deficiencies that might contribute to low mood and mental health conditions.
My name is Dr. Talia Marcheggiani. I’m a naturopathic doctor with a focus in mental health and emotional wellness as well as hormonal health and hormone balancing, and today I’m going to deliver a short video about some foods that you can add to your diet to help your mental health.
These are all medicinal foods that act like prescriptions, like anti-depressants, that you can just add to your diet. So, a lot of these foods are recommended based on the idea that depression is an inflammatory condition in the brain. There’s more and more research that shows that there’s low levels of inflammation in people who have depression and anxiety and other mental health conditions like bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, ADD, ADHD and even sub-diagnostic symptoms, such as brain fog and cognitive disruptions. So all of these are a result of some kind of inflammation in the brain. And so a lot of these foods are working to heal depression and anxiety with their ant-inflammatory properties.
And so the first thing that’s recommended to eat are lots of anti-inflammatory fats. These are omega 3 fatty acids such as fish oil. So you can either increase the amount of fish oil by having fatty fish three times a week. You can remember what a fatty fish is by the acronym SMASH. And SMASH stands for sardines, mackerel, anchovy, salmon and herring, and also trout, so SMASHT. And these kinds of fish are rich in the omega 3’s EPA and DHA. Our body can make EPA, but some of us have impaired ability to make it. And so supplementing is necessary for a lot of these people. If you’re looking for a fish oil, make sure you look for one that has a higher amount of EPA compared to DHA. This is very important, because studies on depression are very favourable for fish oil supplementation, but the ratio of EPA to DHA has to be at least 3:1 or higher, and the higher the ratio, the higher the amount of EPA relative to DHA, the better the anti-depressant effects, and the mood-regulating effects. So, fish oil actually showed positive outcomes treating bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, so there’s a mood-stabilizing effect as well. And we think because our brain is made up largely of DHA and EPA, but also the anti-inflammatory effects are very helpful for mood and emotional balancing and mood balancing.
Coconut oil is also another great oil you can add to your diet. Coconut oil is a saturated fat, but it’s rich in something called Medium Chain Triglycerides. So these are saturated fats that the body uses readily for energy. So they don’t go through the normal process of digestion that other fats have to go through. They’re absorbed in our lymphatic system. So we get those fats, the energy from those fats, right away.
Coconut oil is very anti-bacterial and anti-fungal, so it can help regulate bacterial balance in our gut and it can give you a boost of energy. There’s also some evidence that being in ketosis, so this means relying on fats for energy, as opposed to carbohydrates, and, to an extent, proteins. Being in ketosis, so burning fat for fuel: body fat or dietary fat, has a mood-stabilizing effect. And so you might read about intermittent fasting, Ketogenic diet. I wouldn’t recommend doing that without working with a functional medicine practitioner, nutritionist or a naturopath, because there are some negative downsides to doing those kinds of diets prolonged, without supervision, but there is some growing evidence for that. But one thing you can do is add coconut oil to a morning smoothie, or eat a couple of tablespoons in the morning, even looking at some Bulletproof coffee recipes, that can also help with keeping your mood steady or your energy high in the morning.
Staying on the topic of fats and nuts, something that is really great for mental health are Brazil nuts. And Brazil nuts are high in a nutrient called selenium, which our body needs to create an anti-oxidant, the main anti-oxidant in our body, glutathione. You may have heard me talk about n-acetyl cysteine, NAC, which is an amino acid that I often recommend for people with bipolar disorder, for schizophrenia and, to an extent, depression and anxiety, and especially personality disorders, like borderline personality. There can be a very strong mood-stabilizing effect with NAC. And that’s probably because—we’re not exactly sure why that is—but it’s probably because NAC is the precursor to what our body uses to make glutathione, but we can’t make glutathione without selenium. So two brazil nuts a day, and they’re really delicious and fun to eat, they’re big nuts—two brazil nuts a day gives you the 200 mcg of selenium that’s the therapeutic dose. It’s also helpful for thyroid health.
Another thing I tend to recommend and am recommending a lot more in my practice is collagen, specifically gelatin, but for the more health-food minded people, going with a collagen hydrosylate supplement from grass-fed meat is something that I often recommend. But, for most people and myself, I just throw some gelatin that you can buy at Bulk Barn, into a shake or into a seed bowl, or into something that I’m eating like oatmeal, or I’ll make jello out of it.
So, gelatin is really rich in collagen, so it’s made from the hooves of animals, and collagen has a gut-stabilizing effect, so it can help heal the gut. A lot of us suffer from something called “leaky gut” in which inflammation in the gut makes its way to the rest of our body and can affect our brain. Leaky gut can often result in “leaky brain”, resulting in inflammation in the brain and then mental health symptoms. So, collagen helps to repair the gut barrier and the blood-brain barrier. It’s also very anti-inflammatory because it’s high in an amino acid called glycine, which is a calming neurotransmitter as well as an amino acid. It can also help balance the immune system. So anyone that has a low level of autoimmunity, or maybe your immune system is on the sluggish side and you’re getting colds and flus and infections more readily than others, collagen is a great supplement for that. Because our main sources of protein: meat, legumes, whole grains, nuts and seeds, don’t contain a lot of glycine. We’re pretty glycine deficient in our society because we’re not eating that much gelatin, we’re not getting as much bone broth. And so you can get collagen from from making bone broth, from stewing bones and accessing that bone marrow, or you can get it from something like gelatin, which is from hooves, from the collagen-rich membranes, the cartilages, of animals. There’s also fish collagen for more pescatarian-oriented people.
Collagen is also really great for anti-aging, for treating hair loss, for skin and for cellulite. So, all aesthetic things that might bring someone in to my practice, but also really great for mood balancing. A good source of protein as well.
You can either just throw it into a shake, mix it into some water or make your own jello. And I make jello by boiling some fruit, about a cup of blueberries in water. I boil it until the blueberry juice is extracted, then I add a couple tablespoons of gelatin and then I put it in the fridge until it’s hard. And you have a natural jello you can serve to your kids. It’s pretty good.
Another great food to help balance your mood and mental health is turmeric. Turmeric, or curcumin, as it’s scientifically called, is a spice that is used mostly in India. It’s a yellow spice, it stains things yellow: your clothes, your counter, your intestines. It has very very strong anti-inflammatory benefits. It also helps the liver detoxify, it’s been shown to have anti-cancer properties, it’s a really powerful, nutrient-rich plant, root. So studies have shown that two grams per day of turmeric actually outperformed Prozac for treating depression and probably this is due to its anti-inflammatory properties in really lowering inflammation in the brain, which we know is really one of the underlying roots of depression. The way that we get to that inflammation is different in every person with depression, but there is this kind of common thread of inflammation that’s going on in every case of mental health condition, mental illness. So, adding turmeric to foods, or supplementing with turmeric, is a great way to combat that inflammation and keep moods balanced.
Some other foods you might want to add to your diet are foods that are rich in zinc. So, these are mainly things like pumpkin seeds. You’ve got to get around two cups, though, of pumpkin seeds, to get a decent therapeutic dose of zinc, or oysters. Or you can supplement with zinc. Zinc, again, is anti-inflammatory, it can help heal the gut. We need it to make neurotransmitters and enzymes that our brain needs to rebalance mood. And there’re also some studies that zinc increases something called BDNF. BDNF is a chemical in the brain that help with neurogenesis, this is the creation of new neurons in an area of the brain called the hippocampus. So you may have heard “you can’t teach and old dog new tricks” or that our neurons never regenerate once we reach a certain age, and this is not true because new research has shown that we do have neurogenesis, something called neurogenesis, that increases and changes and grows new neurons even as we age. And so anyone suffering from brain fog or really high amounts of cognitive stress, or mental illness, maybe benefit from zinc as that increases the neurogenic abilities of the brain. It’s also very anti-inflammatory and it can help with leaky gut and leaky brain situations. Vegetarians, unfortunately, are often deficient in zinc just because we get most of it from animal products and animal sources, but really upping your pumpkin seed intake might get you to a therapeutic level of zinc or you can supplement as well.
Another really great addition to your diet to help balance mood and to improve your mental and cognitive health are fermented foods. So, these include things like kefir, kombucha, kim chee, saurkraut, and yogurt, if you do dairy. These things, they contain probiotics, and studies show that it may be better to supplement or to add fermented foods to your diet rather than supplementing with a probiotic, and this is obviously an individualized recommendation that would have to be made by a doctor, but adding fermented foods to your diet, especially if you make them at home and ferment them at home, like you make your own kombucha or your own kefir, that can actually boost the probiotic capacity of your gut. Probiotics actually make neurotransmitters, they make things like serotonin, and the calming neurotransmitter GABA and they can help us digest our food, like gluten, as well as combat inflammation and regulate our entire immune system. It’s also important to feed those probiotics with something called resistant starch that you can find in carbohydrates that have been cooled to room temperature after they’ve been cooked, so, for example brown rice that’s after it’s been cooked as been cooled to room temperature, potato starch, green bananas, black beans, and jerusalem artichokes. These are all starches that bacteria feed on and that keeps them populated in the gut. Coconut oil tends to kill more pathogenic bacteria and therefore can promote a healthy bacterial balance.
And lastly, I’m going to talk about leafy greens. So, adding a cup of spinach, or two cups of spinach or chard to your diet will give you the amount of magnesium you need. Magnesium has a calming effect on the body. We need it to make the neurotransmitters like serotonin, dopamine and melatonin, to help with sleep. Magnesium also can help balance mood and help us with stress. A lot of us suffer from stress. It can also make our brain more resilient to stress, as stress is one of the major causes of neuro-inflammation in people with mental illness and this can be stress from a significant trauma, it can be psychosocial stress, interpersonal stress, the stress of being out of work, even long-term chronic stress or burnout from school and work and things like that. So, two cups of spinach gives you your daily magnesium serving. You can also get it from chocolate but you need to eat quite a bit of chocolate.
So, in boosting your mental health, or in promoting mental and emotional wellness, you can add all of these foods to your diet and balance your inflammation, feel good and nourish yourself.
I talk about 5 essential tools for caring for your mental and emotional health. These are powerful self-care practices that can help balance your mind and emotions.
Hello, everybody, my name is Dr. Talia Marcheggiani. I am a naturopathic doctor with a focus in mental health and hormonal health.
Despite the increasing amount of research into mental health conditions and psychiatric conditions, and the increase in interventions and early recognition and pharmaceutical therapies that come with mental health diagnoses, we’re actually seeing more debility in mental health outcomes: more debility, more morbidity. So we’re seeing worsening of outcomes even though we’re applying more interventions.
So, how could this be? You expect that the better the drugs that we’re developing, the less disease we should encounter, if those drugs are actually working to counteract the disease process. We’re not seeing that in the realm of mental health, especially when it comes to the common conditions such as depression and anxiety.
And when it comes to disease in the west, we’re not really winning the war against disease. So, things like cardiovascular disease, cancer, hormone imbalances such as diabetes, hypothyroidism, mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety, ADD and ADHD, infertility, neurological disease such as MS and Parkinson’s, autoimmune disease, such as, again, MS and things like Hashimoto’s Thryoiditis and myasthenia gravis, and immunodeficiencies such as HIV. All of these diseases are on the rise, all of these chronic, lifelong diseases. And so, despite these advances in research and drug development, we’re not seeing an improvement in our ability to manage these diseases or prevent them.
And there is obviously not one simple solution to this problem, but one thing I want to point our attention to is this increase in stress and this connection to stress and the diseases that I mentioned. Obviously it’s not just one cause, that would simplify the entire system to an almost ludicrous degree, but there is an estimation that 75-90% of hospital visits are either directly or indirectly related to stress.
And some of the symptoms of stress, so chronic stress or even acute stress, are an increased heart rate, elevated blood pressure, elevated blood sugar, decreased memory and cognition, disrupted levels of serotonin, leading to depression and anxiety, disrupted levels of the other hormones such as dopamine and norepinephrine, and addiction to stress, so a chance in the opioid receptors and the brain structure, altered hormone synthesis, increased inflammation, altered gut flora, etc., etc., and a change in the immune system. So, basically, every system of the body is affected by stress. And being in a prolonged, acute state of stress is lethal to the body.
So, we can look at the rise of cardiovascular disease and diabetes and the fact that stress increases our heart rate and increases our blood pressure and increases our blood sugar. And we can make some of those connections between the symptoms of stress and the diseases that are increasing in our society.
When it comes to mental health, we see how our neurotransmitters and our brain structure and our gut and our immune systems are affected by chronic stress and we can infer that some mental health conditions are either caused by or aggravated by this chronic stress situation. And, so, by not addressing stress and by not looking into stress and finding healthy ways to manage it, we’re doing ourselves a disservice in the management of these diseases and the prevention of them,
So, there’s a few theories that connect—there’s that Monoamine Hypothesis when it comes to mental health, that people with depression and anxiety have this inherent brain imbalance. So they don’t make enough serotonin, or their brains for some reason aren’t responding to serotonin. Again, it’s a very reductionistic model because it reduces all of the experience of depression and anxiety and conditions such as ADD and ADHD and bipolar down to one single neurotransmitter and it oversimplifies the entire system and the entire constellation of symptoms that people can experience and the life situations surrounding these conditions and the fact that they’re comorbid with things like stress and poverty and childhood trauma and those kinds of things.
But there’s some other theories that we can look at, and some other kind of pieces of the puzzle that we can add to create a more inclusive narrative. So there’s a theory called the Mind-Body Theory and this kind of arises as a counteraction, or a counter-philosophy to what Descartes discovered or decided that he discovered, which was that the mind and body are separate entities—this dualistic hypothesis. We know absolutely that that’s not true but our mind and body are completely connected and that our mind probably doesn’t reside only in our brain because our nervous system extends throughout the entire body and our minds are also inter-relational, so they’re a product our environments and our relationships with other people as well.
We know that the gut is the second brain, for the amount of neurons that it inhabits and the neurotransmitters that influence its function. Our gut health affects our mood depending on how healthy it is. And we call this connection, another word for it, a more scientific word, is “Psychoneuroimmunology”. This is the connection between the immune system, the nervous system, and our psychology, our mood: our thoughts and emotions. So, we know that everything in the body is interconnected and you can’t prescribe an antibiotic and not expect that there’ll be sequelae or consequences, or side effects that affect a different body system. And we see that all the time now, but we have to understand how tugging on one thread in this interconnected web is going to affect another piece of it further down the line.
There’s also this Energetic Model of mental health, and that’s that the emotions have their own energy. There’s this theory that the emotions can manifest as physical symptoms and we see this in the work of Gabor Mate, who writes extensively about stress and addictions and mental health, in his book “The Body Says No”. He talks about how the health of our thoughts and emotions impact our physical stress. And so it’s not just that our thoughts and emotions can impact our mental health, but also our physical health and might set the stage for us to get conditions like cancer, or autoimmune disease, and all of the other diseases that I mentioned.
So, when it comes to stress and our mental health and emotional wellbeing, we need to take a proactive approach. Just like we do with getting vaccinations, and preventing colds and flus, and getting proper nutrition, and exercise and all of that, we need to be strategic about how we manage our stress.
The World Health Organization defines mental health as “A state of well-being in which every individual realizes his or her own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to her or his community.” So, notice that this definition isn’t simply the absence of disease and it’s not necessarily a normalizing—being “happy” or not having a diagnosis. This definition is about realizing one’s potential and experiencing emotional “wellness”, for lack of a better word. So, an ability to cope with life’s stressors and to live a life of meaning and purpose.
So I want to talk about 5 tools that are really important for establishing a self-care and emotional wellness routine, for improving mental health. These strategies may not be sufficient enough for more serious psychiatric conditions, but I believe that they form the foundation of proper lifestyle strategies to help with increasing our emotional wellness and our ability to cope with life’s stressors.
So the first one I want to talk about is something called “Self-Care”, which is becoming kind of a buzzword in high-stress communities such as universities, and even some offices and corporations. So, one of the first things I want to talk about is the power of saying “No”. Sometimes saying No, especially for more agreeable individuals, and a lot of the time for women, saying no is a difficult thing for us to do.
When I give this presentation to a group I always ask them, “Why is it hard for you to say no? What would happen if you didn’t say no? Let’s say a friend invites you out and you’re just not feeling it, or you’re invited to a baby shower and it’s just more than you can handle and you wish you could say no, but you don’t.” And, one thing that everybody says is that they’d feel guilty, if they said no. This is sort of universal. And so I ask them, “What would happen if you didn’t say no? What would happen if you went along with it, even if you just didn’t have the energy to devote to this commitment?” And people say that they’d feel resentment. And so when it comes to deciding what things to take on and what things to discriminate against in terms of the tasks that we take on, the commitments that we make, we’re kind of stuck between this dichotomy between feeling guilt and resentment spectrum. One of my mentors, Gabor Mate, in his book “The Body Says No”, talks about when faced with this choice between guilt and resentment, especially when we’re more prone to guilt-avoidance by saying yes more often than maybe we should, he said “choose guilty every time”, because the feeling of guilt, and obviously this isn’t a hard or fast rule, but the feeling of guilt is more indicative that you’re taking care of yourself.
His theory as well is that resentment tends to build up in the body and contributes to the cause of more disease such as cancer and this cancer personality that he writes about is the woman that will say yes to things and is scared to say no out of guilt. So, resentment is far more damaging for the body and therefore, when trying to avoid guilt, maybe move towards guilt, especially when you know that you might be taking on more than you should. And also pay attention to the idea that when we say yes to things we’re saying no to other things. So, we’re always saying “no” and “yes”. We only have 24 hours in the day and so, by saying yes to that baby shower that you’d rather not go to, what are you saying no to? Are you saying no to doing a yoga class for you, or getting extra sleep, or saving your money for a family vacation? So, paying attention to those commitments that we make. There’s a great article online called “The Law of F- Yes! Or No.” And this law is, if you’re faced with a decision and you’re not feeling like this, “F- Yes!”, then say no and save that time and save those commitments for something else that you’re more enthusiastic about.
When it comes to self-care, there’s another great article that talks about the BACE method, so that’s BACE. And this stands for these 4 pillars of self-care. And the first one of body-care. So that’s making sure you have a healthy diet, that you’re supporting yourself nutritionally, that you’re getting movement in, that you’re sleeping enough. A is acceptance, just allowing the emotions, and that self-care, that self-love to come through. C is connection, so establishing those interpersonal relationships and prioritizing them, especially relationships that feel nurturing, where you can be your authentic self. And E is enjoyment, finding activities that are fun and cause a sense of enthusiasm and enjoyment in your life. And this is something that’s often a problem for a lot of adults with lots of responsibilities that, when I ask them to rate on a scale of 1 to 10 how much fun they have, or how satisfied they are with the amount of fun in their life, they often rate it pretty low.
A lecture that I attended, there was a woman who was talking about self-love and improving self-worth and recommends asking oneself this: “what would someone who loves themselves do? Or say?” and that can be pretty powerful for just examining how our internal dialogue is manifesting and how we’re talking to ourselves and treating ourselves. Would someone who loves themselves eat that? Or say that? Or do that activity or say yes to that commitment? And, you know, just sitting with that question can be really helpful for changing some behaviours, or adding perspective to our daily lives.
There’s also this, lastly in the realm of self-care, there’s this idea of Wu Wei, which is a Taoist idea, which is translated roughly into the art of “effortless action”. In our society we’re kind of educated to pair action with effort. So, we don’t feel like we deserve success unless our success was the result of a massive amount of effort that we’ve put in, and stress. And, according to wu wei, this idea that action is objective, we can measure it, but effort is subjective. So, you can see if you’re performing an action, but the perception of effort behind it is this kind of subjective and thought-based experience. So, we can do the laundry or DO the laundry. We can do laundry from a place of self-love and self-care, like “I want to care for my clothes, and to have nice clothes to wear tomorrow and I’m going to do this for myself and I’m going to be mindful as I do it”. And I’m going to do this out of necessity, but also out of a natural drive that’s coming from this place within. Or I can have laundry on my to-do list that’s causing me stress. So, sometimes even wu wei is about doing less and not feeling guilty for that.
The second tool for emotional wellness is journalling and writing. This is one of my favourites. So, journalling allows us to keep a record, to get creative, and to engage in self-expression. And when we write we engage both sides of our brains: the motor centres, the language centres, the centres that are involved in language perception and in language generation, also our visual centres. So, a lot of the brain is lit up in the act of writing and that can help integrate some of our deeper thought processes.
Writing down things leads to clarity and focus. We’re forced to deepen our thought processes and remove ourselves from some of the cognitive loops we might be engaged in. We can complete our thoughts and reach their inevitable, often ridiculous conclusions and this kind of comes from some core beliefs, or, we call them “automatic thoughts.” Like, “I’m a failure” or “I’m worthless”. Those kind of things that our brain generates based on past experiences that may not be relevant anymore to who we are now. Through writing we’re forced to look inside of ourselves, to causes and explanations for how we feel. We’re also able to express ourselves and rid the body of pent up emotions, such as anger and aggression and sadness, shame.
I often recommend that people write a letter. Especially if there’s someone in the past that’s done damage to them, or hurt them. Someone that they miss, sometimes remembering somebody through a letter: sometimes people wish that they could communicate with someone who’s passed away or is no longer in their life anymore and, through this letter-writing, you’re able to.
I also have people write letters to themselves from the perspective of their personality at age 80, and this can sometimes provide perspective for patients who are depressed and young, because it gives them an idea; it increases the perspective of their lives. And sometimes I have people personify and anthropomorphize their problems or addictions and write letters to that or write letters from that and through that process can learn a lot about the relationship between themselves and alcoholism, for example.
There’s another great activity I like called the “God Jar”, for people that have constant worries or wake themselves up at night and process things or who are anxious about the future—The God Jar or the Wish Jar. And so, you get a mason jar and little pieces of paper and you write things that you’re worried about or things that you’re anxious about or thinking about and you scrunch them up and throw them into this jar and, in essence, symbolically, you’re giving those problems to “God”, or to the universe or you’re just simply filing them away for later use. And this is sort of a subconscious, or conscious, dumping of your problems, especially if you don’t have immediate control over them. I mean, in the middle of the night you’re not going to be able to finish your taxes when you’re supposed to be sleeping, or solve a problem at work. And that can often worsen our problems, when we’re not getting enough sleep. Then I sometimes have people open up that jar 6 months later and take a look at some of the things they’ve written and that can also generate feelings of accomplishment and achievement and perspective when you find out that those things that you were so worried about 6 months ago are no longer even relevant and you barely remember them. So, it’s pretty powerful.
Another great exercise is something called a Gratitude Journal. And there’s a Ted Talk about this that, for 21 days, and I like to tell people to do this for a full month, 28 days. If you write 3 things that you’re grateful for at the end of the day for 21 days, it actually changes your brain structure and helps you see things in a more positive light and focus on the blessings, rather than the things that you lack. Our brains have a negative bias. So, they’re wired to pay attention to the things that we’re missing out on and that we’re lacking and when we focus on and acknowledge the things that are going right for us, it can sort of change our perspective. And, throughout the day, as you’re doing this exercise, you’re going to be paying attention to things that you’re going to have to write down later, so you’re paying attention to the things that went well, that you want to include in your gratitude journal. And this can have profound effects.
There’s some studies about journalling. And there was a study that showed that patients with HIV or AIDS, who wrote about their life for 30 minutes had an increased CD4 T cell count—and that’s the cells in the body that are affected by the HIV virus. So, by simply writing about their lives, something profound, it wasn’t just a grocery list. But writing something profound about their lives, such as sharing their life story, actually increased their immune system’s ability to function in the face of the HIV virus.
And then, similarly, there was another study in patient with rheumatoid arthritis—this is an autoimmune condition—they had these patients write for 20 minutes a day, for 3 days, and they found that their symptoms went down and their immunoreactivity went down. So we’re seeing these two studies, and we’re not exactly sure of the causal effect, these studies are a little bit correlative and very difficult to control for, because patients who are in the study, subjects know if they’re writing in their journal or not. But these studies were controlled against people who were just kind of mindlessly writing about grocery lists. So, it was writing about more profound concepts and sort of outlining a significant life event, or life story, or significant events that were happening in the day that had an emotional charge to them.
So, we find that engaging in journalling, even 20 or 30 minutes a day, can actually modulate the immune system. So, if you have a immunodeficiency issue, like HIV, it can increase immunoreactivity, and if you have an autoimmune disease like rheumatoid arthritis, or asthma, if can lower that immunoreactivity and inflammation. So there’s this evidence that journalling and our thoughts and emotions are directly impacting our immune system and our immune system’s ability to function and balance itself.
The third tool for mental and emotional wellness is interpersonal support. And, being a naturopathic doctor who does a lot of counselling in my practice, I tend to favour psychotherapy and counselling as a form of social support for people that don’t feel that they can be authentic or have that deep connection with people in their lives.
There’s evidence that loneliness is the new epidemic, especially in our society and, as social animals, connecting with others is part of our biology, part of who we are. Through therapy, what I really like about it, is it can help us reframe the past and our personal identity. We can start to identify some automatic thoughts and core beliefs, which are deep-seated beliefs that may not serve us anymore in the present and may actually be contributing to feelings of low mood or behaviours that are unwanted. It can also allow us to rewrite our life story, so, looking back on the past and reframing certain events, from the perspective of someone maybe with more resources and power. For example, someone with a history of trauma may have an idea of powerlessness and being victimized and, in every single story of trauma that I’ve encountered, people have always responded in some way. Either psychologically, mentally, emotionally, if not in action, and sometimes just recognizing these responses changes our whole perception of the event and our identities in the present, our ability to act in the present. So, there is evidence that stress is related to our perception of things that happen, not actually what happened. So, for example, imagine somebody that’s just broken up with their girlfriend and they were very in love. And you can image what their mental and emotional state would be like. Maybe the next day they don’t feel like getting out of bed, there’s clothes all over the floor, they haven’t brushed their teeth, they’re feeling extremely sad, and crying. And nothing has changed biologically in this person, but the situation surrounding their life has changed. Then imagine that this person wakes up the next day and they’re in this state of low mood and depression. And they get a phone call. And it’s their girlfriend saying, “you know, I’d like to get back together, I made a mistake, I’m in love with you and I don’t want to be broken up anymore.” So you can imagine that this person’s mood is going to change rapidly as the situation changes. And so, there is a change in their circumstances, but not in their physical biology.
And sometimes, in past events, there’s the story that our minds create around what happened, and then there’s the actual events that happened. So you might call your partner and they don’t pick up the phone, and we start to create a story about why that is. Maybe it’s because they don’t love us anymore, they want to break up with us, that we’re worthless, that no one’s ever loved us, that we’ll never find love, that we’ll always be alone. But, in actuality, we don’t know those things and the only thing that’s happening is they’re just not picking up the phone and there’s thousands of explanations for that.
We perceive situations based on our personal histories, our physical conditions, our state of minds, etc., and things that we’ve learned in the past and also our core beliefs. So, we filter our experiences through our perceptions and our identities and personalities and so, by understanding more about these things, we can understand why we pick out certain events and draw conclusions from the connection between those events rather than others. There’s some people that, when they fail a test, they just think, “Oh, it was a hard test, or maybe I didn’t study hard enough.” And there’s others that think “I’m a failure, I’ll never pass anything, there’s no point in trying, I’m dropping out of school.” And so it’s not just the event but our perception of the event that change our thoughts, mood and behaviours.
Another great thing that therapy and social support can do, is help us identify our passions and purpose in life. So there’s a psychological that I really like to listen to called Jordan Peterson that talks about how the purpose of life is not necessarily well-being and happiness, because happiness is a state that can be derived chemically, through doing things like cocaine, or substance abuse, and happiness might just be a disposition that certain people embody better than others and that life is suffering. And this is present in Buddhist philosophy that no matter how we live, we’re going to encounter events that are devastating for us, and that are hard for us to deal with. And so, in those situations, we’re not going to feel happy, so what’s going to drive us? What’s going to push us forward? What’s going to keep us going in those times and so his theory or idea is that we should look for what makes it worth it: what adds meaning to our life. What is our potential in life? What is our purpose? What gives us that sense of meaning such that, when we encounter these situations of suffering and hopelessness that we’re able to continue on. So, having a direction for our lives, and having a sense of identity and purpose that gets us up in the morning and makes us move forward, even when we’re not particularly feeling happy that day.
Therapy and social support are also great for just self-acceptance. So, having other people mirror back to us who we are and how we’re being in the world.
The 4th tool for emotional wellness is mindfulness and meditation, so very very powerful tools. It’s arguably very difficult to be healthy in this day and age without some form of mindfulness meditation, or meditation practice to combat the increase in stress that we encounter in our society. So, mindfulness is—there’s many different techniques, but the main tenant is just taking the perspective of the compassionate, detached observer to our thoughts, emotions and physical sensations. So, when we split our mind or watch our thoughts, we can get a better sense of awareness of how emotions and thoughts arise in our body, pass through our bodies, and how we’re not them—that there’s this observer role that we can also take, that we can watch ourselves from.
Mindfulness allows us to stay in the present and reframe certain situations and just slow time down so that we’re not victims to the whims of our biology, that we’re able to understand it a little bit more. And there’s a great resource on the internet called “Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction” that’s a secular kind of meditation by a man in Massachusetts called Jon Kabat Zinn and you can download body scan meditations or take a course in MBSR in your town. I highly recommend them; they’re really great for developing mindfulness practice.
There’s also yoga, and qi gong and tai qi, and these kind of integrated, mindfulness-based and physical exercises that can help slow us down, bring us into the present and help us observe our minds and emotions a little bit better. And there’re amazing for managing stress. There’s good evidence building about them helping us deal with stress and manage our mental health conditions.
And the 5th tool for mental and emotional wellness is to look at that mind-body connection that I mentioned before. The mind-body theory sees our thoughts and emotions as energy that can impact our cellular biology, from that idea of psychoneuroimmunology. And there’s increasing evidence about this and how calming our thoughts down, doing some mindfulness meditation, can affect our heart-rate and can affect our blood pressure, and journalling can affect how our immune system responds.
There’s this idea that if our thoughts and emotions aren’t processed properly they can become trapped and stagnated in the body and contribute to disease. So, Gabor Mate mentioned that resentment can build up and lead to things like cancer. It’s one of his theories that he’s observed through working with patients.
We know that there’s this connection between physical manifestations of symptoms and physical conditions and certain emotional causes. In medicine we know this because every time a study is done, a randomized control trial, two groups need to be divided amongst the subjects. One is given a placebo, an inert pill. And this idea that someone who believes they’re taking medicine will notice a positive effect, is something that we just take for granted, but we build into every single study that we do, if it’s a good study. So, this idea that you can take a pill, believe it’s helping you, and actually physically notice a change in your body is really remarkable. And this just proves that there’s this connection between the mind and body, that we can further explore and exploit.
So, there’s things like herbal remedies that help our body increase our cells’ resilience to stress and help manage the stress hormone cortisol. And these are some herbs called adaptogens. So, they literally help us adapt to stress. And these are things like withania or ashwaghanda, rhodiola, ginseng, even nervine herbs like St. John’s Wort and skullcap can help balance our neurotransmitters and our stress hormones and lower inflammation in the body.
Doing self-care things like getting a massage, or getting acupuncture can help. And there’s a study that compares acupuncture to Prozac, so getting one acupuncture session a week for 6 weeks was actually comparable to Prozac for decreasing symptoms of depression and anxiety.
In my practice I always address diet and gut health and just make sure people are absorbing their nutrients, that they’re guts are producing the proper amounts of neurotransmitters, that there’s the proper bacterial balance, that there’s no inflammation being caused by a gut dysregulation. And we also want to remove those external stressors that can be contributing to an impaired digestive system. So, there is this saying that “we are what we eat,” but more accurately, we are what we absorb, because you can eat a lot of stuff, but, depending on how you’re digestion is functioning, we might not be absorbing all of it and incorporating it into our body, into our cells.
So, inflammation in the gut, caused by a bacterial imbalance, or food sensitivities can impact our health and we have some evidence that depression and anxiety can be caused by some latent levels of inflammation in the brain. And we know that there is an impact on gut health and increasing levels of inflammation and also stress. And really lowering that stress response, healing the gut, can have huge impacts on our mood. Establishing routine, and sleep are major pillars. So, I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a patient who felt mentally healthy when they had disrupted sleep. A lot of the time having a ritual around sleep and getting into a routine and waking up at the same time every day, really working on getting deep sleep—so avoiding electronic use before bedtime, trying to get as many hours before 12 am of sleep as possible, so preferably having a 10pm bedtime or winding down around 10 pm. Doing things like teas, or hot baths, or reading a book before bed or doing some yoga or stretches or meditation before bed to teach the body that it’s time to start relaxing is really important and has huge impacts on health, on our mood, on our emotional wellness, our ability to cope with stress, our ability to heal from stress, and our ability to balance inflammation and the immune system.
There’s evidence that exercise—I mean exercise is arguably the first-line therapy for someone with depression, especially someone under the age of 24. Instead of reaching for pharmaceutical interventions, such as selective-serotonin reuptake inhibitors, more psychiatrists are recommending exercise to young patients, which is wonderful. I’m so happy about that! And, so 30 minutes of a moderate to intense form of exercise such as weight training, or running or moving your body, can help release some of those trapped emotions, as well as boost those neurotransmitters and help our body increase its resilience against stress.
And then, finally, I just want to point out that making sure that we’re supporting our neurotransmitter synthesis through diet is really important. So, making sure that we’re getting enough magnesium, zinc and B vitamins, and proteins and amino acids, which are all helping us create the neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine that are going to impact our mood and mental health. So, we can journal, but we are physical beings, and we are a product of our biology. So, by supporting that biology through proper nutrition, we’re able to incorporate those nutrients and create the proper components of our body for proper mental and emotional wellness.
So, I also like to ask people this miracle question. So, this is the final thing that I’m just going to conclude on. The Miracle Question is from a modality called “Solution-Focused Therapy”. And this question is, “if you woke up tomorrow and all of your issues were completely gone, you woke up in an amazing 10 out of 10 state of energy and physical well-being and mental and emotional well-being, what would be possible for you? What would your day look like?” If you can stand in that place and sort of write down what you’re aiming at, what you’re aiming towards, it helps set the stage for taking the proper actions that preserve your mental and emotional wellness. And it also helps you stand in a new territory, one that’s not of disease or illness, but one of possibility.
And, finally, I was at this free meditation circle as we were talking about self-love, and we were talking about how difficult it can be to love oneself. Because, oftentimes we have these core beliefs that drive our psyches and oftentimes these core beliefs are negative. And so what was said was that it’s often hard to stand in a place of self-love when you’re intent on changing things and you’re not happy with where you are now. And so, he said, the person running the meditation said, “self-love is like a garden. So, you can nourish the soil and water the seeds, but you can’t actively force the garden to grow.” So what you can do is, you can take care of the things you love in yourself, all the things that you have in your right now, rather than trying to be somewhere that you’re not currently at. And this is kind of like when you have, for parents out there, if you have a child, you love your 4-year old child, and you don’t put expectations on them that you would a 25-year old. So, you’re loving your 4-year old at where they’re at, but also recognizing that this is somebody who is developing and so you’re loving their potential to develop, just as you’re loving their 4-year old incarnation, their 4-year old manifestation of their personalities. So you’re loving their potential to grow, just as you love the seeds that you’ve planted in your garden, but you’re also loving things where they’re at. And through that act of self-love and tending to the garden, or tending to your child, you’re encouraging that growth and development in the directions that you want.
My name is Dr. Talia Marcheggiani. I’m a naturopathic doctor and I work in Bloor West Village, in Toronto.
Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, or PCOS, is the most common hormonal imbalance in women of reproductive age and can result in weight gain, infertility, acne, irregular cycles and unwanted hair growth. I talk about a naturopathic and functional approach to managing symptoms of PCOS and restoring hormone balance.
Hello, everybody. My name is Dr. Talia Marcheggiani. I’m recording to you guys from my clinic in Bloor West Village. It’s called Bloor West Wellness Clinic. And today I want to talk to you guys about one of my favourite conditions to treat when it comes to naturopathic medicine. And this condition is called Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. And this is an endocrine, or hormonal condition, and it affects about 10% of women. It’s the most common cause of hormonal imbalance in women of menstruating age. And it’s a syndrome, so it’s not a disease. There’s a different constellation of symptoms that arise with it and this could be one of the causes of infertility in a lot of women. And because the symptom pictures are so diverse, it’s really hard for a lot of women to be suspected for a diagnosis of PCOS, or polycystic ovarian syndrome.
So, PCOS, the hallmark, the diagnostic criteria, based on the Rotterdam Criteria, is having either two of these three symptoms: anovulation or oligomenorrhea, which means having periods that are irregular. So, either having more than one period per month or missed cycles and long cycles of 6 weeks or more. The average female menstrual cycle is about 26-34 days, so having periods outside of that “normal” range could indicate one of the symptoms of PCOS. The other one is something called “hirsutism”, which is caused by high androgens, or male sex hormones, like testosterone or DHEA. And some of the symptoms of that are acne, so hormonal acne, those pustular, cystic acne that happens around the chin and jaw-line, or the chest and back. And “hirsutism”, which is the male-pattern hair growth, which is great, if you’re a woman, to have, which is the hair on the mustache and chin. So, you kind of sport a Frida Kahlo mustache and probably have to deal with that on the regular. Similarly, having hair loss on the scalp, is another sign. So, when you think of men, men will typically experience male-pattern hair loss, and hair-growth in the facial area.
And the third symptoms is the presence of cysts on the ovaries, which is diagnosed or sighted with a transvaginal ultrasound. There’s a scope placed through the vagina and an ultrasound is done to see if there are cysts on the ovaries.
It can also be diagnosed with lab work, so that’s not using the Rotterdam criteria, but there are two hormones that the brain makes that control the ovaries and these are called FSH, or follicle-stimulating hormone, and LH, lutenizing hormone. The brain makes the hormones and they tell the ovaries when to ovulate and the ovaries also make LH, lutenizing hormone after they’ve ovulated, or after the corpus luteum forms, after ovulation should happen, so whether the egg is fertilized or not, the corpus luteum will form.
And so PCOS is probable when you order labs and find that, so the FSH and LH should be almost the same, they should be at a 1:1 ratio and PCOS suspect when the LH to FSH ratio is 2:1 or higher. So you have either 2 or more times the LH than you have FSH. And this is because in PCOS, the ovaries will secrete a lot more LH and that is one of the reasons why they hypothesize that there are high androgens, because the LH can stimulate more androgen release.
So, there’s a “skinny PCOS”, so these are women with those symptoms that don’t experience obesity or metabolic syndrome, and then there’s the metabolic syndrome type of PCOS and in these patients there’s an insulin-resistance present, or a glucose-intolerance. And so these women will frequently experience hypoglycaemic crashes. They’ll also probably be on the obese side and really struggle to keep weight off and they’ll experience the low energy, the cravings for carbs. They’ll experience the hunger that comes two hours after a meal, despite having eaten an adequate amount of fat and protein, and this is really problematic for them because they’re set up for diabetes and for cardiovascular disease down the line. And then they’re also experiencing symptoms of obesity and they’re not super happy with how they look.
And we’re not exactly sure what causes PCOS in women. There’s evidence for it being heritable, so genetically passed on. There’s evidence for it being caused by insulin-dysregulation, and perhaps the ovaries are not responding properly to insulin. What insulin does, is it helps us take in fuel or glucose into our cells and, just like all the cells in our body, the ovaries require insulin to absorb glucose so that they can function properly. And so one of the theories of PCOS is that the ovaries are resisting insulin and the insulin is signalling them to grow, but they’re growing in the absence of proper fuel, or proper glucose as fuel and so they’re creating these follicles, or cysts.
And so, absence of periods, or irregular periods; male-pattern hair growth; obesity; infertility and then the presence of those cysts on the ovaries are all symptoms of PCOS. So, when we’re trying to get a diagnosis, we’ll send patients in for a transvaginal ultrasound. We’ll also look at their fasting blood glucose and fasting insulin. We’ll look at their progesterone and estrogen, because oftentimes these women are suffering from estrogen-dominance: there’s low progesterone and high estrogen in relation to the levels of progesterone. We’ll look at their FSH and their LH, and I’ll also check out their thyroid because oftentimes the symptoms of hypothyroidism and PCOS are overlapping and so I want to find out if there’s a thyroid pathology happening in the background.
So, one of the main reasons that women will come in with PCOS is because they’re trying to get pregnant, or they want to preserve their fertility in the future. They might come in for acne issues or the hair growth, or just to sort out their periods, but the main reason that they come in is fertility. And 40% of women with PCOS do experience infertility or fertility challenges. So this is a big issue for them.
And the reason I love treating PCOS in my practice is I find that, and this is sort of perhaps not technical or scientific, but I find that the personality of women with PCOS tends to be more phlegmatic, so they’re usually more agreeable, and happier and patients that really want to do good work and so it’s really enjoyable to work with them. But also, the reason I love treating patients with PCOS is because there are so many effective strategies that naturopathic medicine offers and I don’t see an equal amount of strategies in the conventional system.
And I’ll talk a little bit about some of the conventional therapies of PCOS. So, what happens is, in conventional therapy, is they kind of look at the symptoms in the syndrome spectrum and they kind of try to deal with each symptom individually. So they look at irregular periods and they’ll prescribe a birth control pill. So, like, “ok, we’ll just over-ride your own hormonal production and we’ll control your periods and get you cycling regularly”, which obviously doesn’t treat the underlying hormonal imbalance, because you’re just placing exogenous, fake hormones on top of the picture.
Or they’ll say, “ok, there’s blood-sugar dysregulation, so I’m going to prescribe a diabetic medication called ‘metformin’, which will help resensitize your cells to insulin”, which again is not the best strategy, although there’s some evidence to support that this helps. But, we’re not again treating the underlying issue of insulin resistance and metformin is pretty toxic to oocytes, or ovarian cells, so when you’re treating infertility you’re not setting the body up for healthy ovulation and producing a healthy baby. So, ehh, metformin.
And then we have, they’ll treat the high androgen symptoms, the hirsutism symptoms, the hyperandrogenism, by prescribing spironolactone, or Yas or Yasmin birth control pills, that block androgens. And, again, not the best strategy because it’s not treating the underlying cause, and there’s some evidence that Yas and Yasmin are one of the oral contraceptive pills that set you up for a higher risk of blood clots compared to other pills. So, women who are taking these are slightly higher than normal, compared to other birth control pills, risk of pulmonary embolism, deep vein thromboses, and those kind of blood clotting issues, which could be fatal. So, that’s an issue, right? And, again, not treating the underlying cause.
So there’s not that many great therapies and they’re not holistic. They’re not looking at the whole picture, they’re kind of reactionary and they’re just treating the symptoms. And then in terms of fertility, so women will undergo IVF treatments or they’ll be prescribed ovulation drugs like Clomid, which increase estrogen and get your body ovulating, kind of forcing ovulation to happen and again can be an issue because these women with PCOS are having sometimes an estrogen dominance picture, so their estrogen is high in relation to their low progesterone and so adding more estrogen-promoting drugs like clomid could just make life a mental and emotional disaster for these women while they still have the drug in their bodies. That could happen to a lot of women, but, again, not the best. It could achieve the end goal of getting pregnant, by increasing your chances, but we’re not looking at what’s going on.
And so, what happens, if when I first see a patient with PCOS, we’ll run the labs, or I’ll get the labs that their family doctor has run, if that was done recently, and we’ll take a look at their symptoms, so I’ll ask them how their periods are, and if they get PMS symptoms, and how often their periods come. And I’ll get them to track their periods, so I can see are they happening regularly, and they’re just very far apart? Or are they all over the place? We’ll look at their FSH and their LH, to see if they have that classic high LH to FSH ratio, and we’ll look at their insulin and fasting blood glucose and their testosterone. And I’ll ask them about symptoms, like acne and hair growth and we’ll talk about weight loss and if they’re getting those hypoglycaemic or insulin resistance symptoms. And we’ll talk about mood and emotions and digestion as well, which I talk about with all my patients, and energy and things like that, because we want to get a holistic picture and we want to —the reason is when I’m treating people I’m treating from the premise that it’s possible to be healthy and we can influence our health and the more I examine healthcare, and the healthcare model that is conventional, the more I doubt that that’s the premise that they’re standing on. Right? They’re kind of looking at making symptoms manageable, or maybe achieving outcomes or end goals, or preventing death and things like that, but they’re not coming at health conditions from a place of: “this person can influence the situation that they’re in through targeting and trying to understand the root cause of what’s going on, and then treating that.” So that’s where I’m coming at it. I’m looking at the whole picture, and I’m trying to understand this person’s unique hormonal imbalance and what the symptoms are that manifest from that.
Then it comes to choosing a treatment plan, so there’s lot of treatment that have a robust amount of evidence surrounding them and so you frequently hear people say that naturopathic medicine, or functional medicine, of these natural forms of medicine have no evidence and they’re pseudoscientific, well there’s tons of evidence for increasing fertility and improving PCOS using natural remedies, like nutriceutical remedies and herbal remedies.
So, first of all we have something called inositol. Inositol acts like a sugar in the body and what it does is it re-sensitizes the ovaries to insulin and serves as a fuel for the ovaries. And inositol doesn’t have much of a taste, it doesn’t have any side effects. It actually has some positive effects in helping with bipolar disorder and psychosis and those kind of mental health disorders, so if those are comorbid, then it’s great. If you have PCOS and you have bipolar, then inositol is a great choice. And with inositol, there’s some studies that show that in 3 months of supplementing with inositol periods have become regular, hyperandrogenism symptoms have gone down, so the acne and hair growth, and women had a 1 in 2 chance of getting pregnant. And then another 3 months of that, and their chances went up. So, inositol on its own is pretty powerful.
Another nutriceutical is N-acetyl cysteine, so NAC, which helps the liver clear out hormones and rebalance hormones and another great remedy for PCOS. We’re not exactly sure how it works, but there’s some theories about it rebalancing hormones, and perhaps through it’s antioxidant activity, because NAC creates an antioxidant, the main antioxidant in the body called “glutathione”. So, probably through its antioxidant activity, it’s helping the mitochondria, those fuel-houses for the cell, work better.
Another thing, when it comes to PCOS are some herbal remedies. So there’s an herb called vitex that helps establish a healthy hormonal estrogen and progesterone balance and that could be appropriate for some women. And there’s some studies using white peony and licorice that can help lower those hyperandrogenism symptoms. And then there are some herbs like saw palmetto that can help balance those high androgens as well, as they bind up testosterone and DHEA in the blood, so they increase something called sex hormone binding globulin (SHBG) and that can help clear out excess testosterone.
So those are just a few of these herbal and nutriceutical remedies that can be helpful in PCOS and I might prescribe some B-complex or some magnesium depending on how the adrenal glands are functioning and how hormones are cycling. And another thing we really like to do is tackle PCOS with diet and improve that blood-sugar balance if some of those insulin resistant symptoms or metabolic syndrome symptoms are there. And there’s a great study that shows that front-loading, so really increasing the calories that women are eating in the morning, having moderate calories at lunch and then having a lower or lighter dinner, kind of a snack for dinner, is really helpful in promoting fertility, lowering those androgens, resensitizing the ovaries and the other cells in their bodies to insulin and thereby resetting the hormonal stage. Really cool that this study just by changing your diet, although not the easiest change, is helpful for balancing hormones and you’re not doing something toxic, like the birth control pill or metformin, or something like that.
Also, a paleolithic diet, so changing the glycemic index of your diet by choosing fruits and vegetables that are lower on the glycemic index, so those leafy greens and adding fat and protein to every meal. It’s difficult as a vegetarian to shift hormones for the better and so I often recommend a more paleolithic diet to women, however, vegetarians, it is possible to increase your protein, it just takes a little bit more of conscious effort. And the reason that paleo diet is helpful is because it is lower glycemic index and has those higher fruits and vegetables with their antioxidant properties, but it also promotes the healthy fats and having an adequate intake of lean protein, such as your chicken, fish, lean beef, or eggs and even some dairy products depending on how someone tolerates that. And the last thing I’m going to talk about—this is just sort of a PCOS overview—the last thing I’m going to talk about is, with my patients I always work on self-care and stress relief because we know that the stress hormone cortisol can really mess up the other hormones in our body. It can contribute to insulin or worsen insulin resistance. It can worse that estrogen-dominance picture, it can prevent us from making enough progesterone because the progesterone and the cortisol pathway follows the same pathway and so that could be problematic if we need more progesterone but we’re using all of the resources to make it on making cortisol to deal with our stressful lifestyle. And a big part of managing PCOS, I find, is just getting cortisol under control and that might include increasing self-care, getting into things like yoga or meditation or doing some shin-rin yoku, like in the other video where I talk about Japanese Forest Bathing, so spending time in nature. That could be walking in the woods, or gardening, even watering a plant or hanging out with a pet or animal. Doing these things that feel nurturing and feel supportive to the mind and the emotions and help us face the daily stressors that we face with more resilience are all great strategies for managing hormonal health.
So, if you have any questions, just send me an email at connect@taliand.com or you can check out my website at taliand.com and my blog for other articles on hormonal balance, such as estrogen dominance, choosing an oral contraceptive pill, if you need one, and another article that I wrote about PCOS.
I often recommend smoothies as an easy way to manage mental health symptoms, balance blood sugar, reduce inflammation and increase energy. I discuss the types of foods I put into my morning smoothie and their benefits on the body and mind.
Hello, everyone. My name is Dr. Talia Marcheggiani, I’m a naturopathic doctor with a special focus in mental health and emotional wellness and today I’m going to talk to you about how to make one of my favourite breakfasts to recommend patients: the morning smoothie. I always recommend smoothies in the mornings because it’s a great way to take care of a lot of your daily recommended nutrients in terms of protein, vegetable, anti-oxidant-rich berries and a healthy source of fat.
I always recommend somewhere between 20-30 grams of protein in the morning for people with depression and anxiety as well as digestive issues, hormonal imbalances, anything like fatigue or chronic stress because when we wake up in the morning we’ve been fasting for at least 8 hours. Sometimes in healthier cases, it’s actually better to fast for 12 hours and so throughout the night our blood sugar hasn’t been stimulated, we haven’t been increasing our blood sugar throughout the night and so, when we start our morning with something like, in North America, like we usually start, with a piece of toast or some sugar-rich cereal, our blood sugar goes from the lowest point, since we’ve been fasting for so long, and spikes. And then around 10 am, a couple hours after we’ve had our breakfast, our blood sugar will drop again, causing symptoms of hypoglycemia, which can worsen stress, it can trigger cortisol release and cause fatigue, worsening of anxiety and depression. And then throughout the day our blood sugar’s going to go up and down as we start to crave sugar again and it’s more likely to throw us off our balanced state that we want to be in.
So I start by recommending 20-30 g of protein to my patients in the morning and they often ask me what they can eat. And I’ll recommend something like leftovers from the night before, like a chicken breast has about 30 g of protein. Other patients ask “can I eat eggs?” And eggs are wonderful to eat but in order to get 30 g of protein you need to eat about 5 or 6 eggs, which is not typical. We usually eat 1 or 2. Although eggs is a great addition. You can throw eggs into your smoothie as well.
It’s also important to get a nice source of fat in your smoothie. So this is something that we often leave out, we don’t put sources into smoothies and so I recommend something like ground flaxseed or coconut oil, olive oil if you have that lying around, avocado, you can even through your fish oil in, if you’re that kind of person.
And I always throw in a leafy green, which you can’t taste. A cup of something like spinach or kale is a source of leafy greens. It’s full of fat-soluble vitamins as well as things that help us detoxify the estrogens from our body and keep our hormones balanced. This is something I always recommend for women with irregular periods or heavy periods, or things like PCOS, Polycystic ovarian syndrome, endometriosis, infertility. Anything that causes estrogen to go off and if you’ve read some of my articles you know that a lot of us suffer from estrogen-dominance. This is just more estrogen than progesterone in the female body. Even men can suffer from this and that’s because we’re just exposed to so many things, so many toxins in our environment that are activating estrogen receptors. So by eating leafy greens, we allow our bodies to detoxify a lot of those xeno-estrogens, those toxic estrogens in our environment.
So all you need is a blender. I like to throw in some baby spinach, pre-washed. I just eye it and throw in a couple of handfuls. That amount. Just a couple servings of spinach. The nice thing about things like spinach is it blends really well. You don’t taste it and depending on how much other ingredients you throw in, your smoothie might not even be green, so you can also fool your kids by throwing some spinach in their smoothies.
I always throw in some frozen berries. You can put in blueberries or a berry medley. I get it from No Frills for about $11 for a bag. Frozen’s nice because your smoothie gets icey. It might not be the best for winter but the days are still warm our digestive fire is still strong enough to be able to digest things that are cold.
Today the fat I’m going to add is coconut oil. Coconut oil is a saturated fat, but it contains medium-chain triglycerides, which our body doesn’t need to convert into sugar to be used as energy so we can just use them right away as an energy source. It’s great for the skin and it’s great for gut-healing because of its anti-fungal properties. It’s also really good for balancing blood sugar and boosting our metabolism. 2 tablespoons, I put in.
Fats are great medicinal foods. You can throw in a couple tablespoons of olive oil if you have cholesterol issues, blood sugar issues. The right kinds of fats are very anti-inflammatory and we know that inflammation is implicated in things like digestive issues, depression and anxiety, stress and so, by making sure we’re getting the right balance of fats in our diet, you can start in your morning smoothie, by setting your fat balance on the right track, be able to balance inflammation and feel really good throughout the day.
This smoothie will also keep you full really long, well into the afternoon because of the source of fats in it. I like to throw in things like eggs as well, just raw eggs. It’s difficult for me to really recommend it universally to all my patients because there is, of course, the risk of salmonella in raw eggs. So, at your own risk you can try it out, but I find it really makes it taste nice and rich as well as give us a good source of cholesterol. And cholesterol’s a good thing, because we need cholesterol to make hormones. Especially in depression and anxiety. You don’t want to be sacrificing cholesterol or taking—of course this depends on your health history—but there’s a risk of depression in people who are taking statin drugs, cholesterol-lowering drugs that are lowing our cholesterol in the body because how are we making our hormones if we don’t have enough cholesterol.
You can also throw in something like an avocado, it makes it nice and thick and rich or some peanut butter or almond butter, or nut butter. I’m also going to throw in some ground flaxseed.
Flax has two really great medicinal benefits. I use it for hormone-balancing in a lot of my patients with things like period irregularities or amenorrhea, this is not getting your period, infertility. So what flax does is it activates estrogen receptors. But it activates them weakly so if you’ve too much estrogen, the flax competes for the estrogen by binding to receptors preventing those hyper-estrogenic effects and if you don’t have enough estrogen, so in the case of post-menopause or ovarian failure, flax binds to estrogen receptors and causes the estrogen effects that we really want, like libido and energy and the expression of female sex characteristics. It can also clear skin and it’s great for acne, it’s great for regulating periods. It’s great for balancing heavy periods, bringing periods back and making them more regular.
Flax is also great for constipation because it’s a good source of fibre and you need to grind the flax, it needs to be milled. And this is because our body can’t break down whole flaxseeds. So you might have seen breads or crackers where there’s whole flaxseeds and they advertise flax on the package, well it really doesn’t so us any good. It just passes right through the body. It’s not adding those fibres or medicinal fats.
Finally, this is a protein powder that I just got from Bulk Barn. I find that Bulk Barn is the cheapest in terms of protein powders. I use a vegan protein powder. So this is great is you’re vegan or vegetarian. Whey is the best absorbed protein, but personally I have a food sensitivity to whey, caseine and other dairy products, so I go with vegan protein, which is a mix of pea protein, hemp protein and rice protein. But you can also use whey. If you’re sensitive to dairy and not sure if you’re sensitive to whey, always go with a whey isolate, because whey isolate doesn’t contain caseine, which is the protein in milk that most people react to. So it’s just pure whey.
In my protein powder, I also mix gelatin. So gelatin is just a crystalized powder. I put in one scoop of protein powder for 30 grams of protein. So gelatin comes from the hooves of animals. It’s rich in collagen and it can actually increase the amount of collagen in the body. It’s an incomplete protein, so it has a lot of an amino acid called glycine, which most of us are deficient in because we don’t get a lot of glycine from the meat of animals. It’s actually located in the collagen. Glycine’s a really calming neurotransmitter. We use it to bind minerals, so if you’re my patient you might have been prescribed magnesium glycinate, which is an easier absorbed form of magnesium, also a source of glycine, to help calm the body. It activates those suppressive neurotransmitters, the GABA pathways in the brain so it’s great for calming anxiety and great for preparing us for sleep. But it doesn’t make you tired for the rest of the day. What’s great about getting a source of collagen is that it can help with gut healing. It can help with the integrity of the gut in leaky gut situations and it’s great for the skin and hair because we know our skin is made of collagen as well as our joints. So, if you have acne, acne scars, if you’re suffering from premature aging or sun damage, a couple tablespoons of gelatin or collagen hydrosylate is a great thing that you can do every morning.
So I’m just going to add in, as your liquid source you can add in something like water, I usually just use water or almond milk. I’m going to use coconut milk today because it’s delicious. I’m going to mix a little bit of coconut milk with water. Just tap water. I’m going to add some tap water. So how much water you add depends on how thick you want your smoothie and the quality of your blender. I filled it up to about 500 ml. I like to eat a lot in the mornings.
Put it into your blender. So this is my smoothie pre. And then you just pour your smoothie in a glass. Mine’s kind of on the watery side. It turns out purple, not green at all, so you can still fool the kids. If you want to make it sweeter, you can add in half a banana, or even some maple syrup. But it tastes pretty good. It tastes like berries.
So this is great because liquid is obviously, it’s pre-chewed, so it’s easier for our body to absorb the nutrients, which is nice in the morning, especially for people who aren’t really into breakfast. It’s also really portable you can put it in a mason jar or a glass container and take it to work. You can drink it half before leaving for work and half while in your in the car or commute or on the subway. A lot of your nutrition for the day is taken care of. So, even if you, have not-an-ideal lunch or dinner you’ve gotten a great source of highly-absorbable protein, you’ve gotten some gut-healing in in the form of gelatin. You’ve gotten some healthy fats and a serving of leafy greens and anti-oxidant-rich berries. So, you’re on your way for a healthy day.
The key to having healthy, delicious meals on the go is organization. I explain how I overcome a busy schedule by doing a focused grocery-shop, heating up the oven and batch-cooking seven or more whole-food, healthy meals in under three hours.
You know the feeling: you’re finishing up a long day of work, your blood sugar levels are dropping, and you’re wondering what you’re going to eat once you get home. When you assess the situation, you realize that you’re coming home to a fridge that’s empty, and your Julia Childsesque inspiration levels are at an all-time low. You decide on frozen pizza (freezer burnt and sad), and a half-eaten jar of pickles.
My patients sometimes tell me that they don’t have time to cook and so they end up microwaving a Lean Cuisine or throwing limp fish sticks into the oven once they’ve dragged themselves through the front door. I find this interesting because I know that I can stick some chicken breast, squash and broccoli in the oven and have it ready quicker than you can say “leaky gut”. I believe, though, that the secret to success is preparation, mindset, a little bit of organization and nutritional know-how.
I frequently get caught in the “what-am-I-going-to-eat” spiral but, with a fridge stocked with foods that are already cooked and can last for days, I usually end up eating something that’s pretty good for me. Here’s what I do on a weekend, or weeknight when I have a little more wiggle-room in terms of time: batch-cook. With the right prep you can throw together an endless combination of meals with minimal waste that requires very little prep and assembly the day of. What’s more, all of these meals are grain-free and nutrient-rich to keep hormones stable, energy sustained and mood high.
Step 1:Grocery shopping. On the way home from my clinic, I whip out my portable grocery bag and make a quick stop at the grocery store, or meat store and fruit and vegetable markets. When grocery-shopping I’m in and out in record time, and this is because I forgo straining to read complicated labels, or getting lost in heavily-processed middle aisles, and just stick to the peripheries: fruits and vegetables, deli, meat, fish, freezer. 95% of grocery-shopping should be about stocking up on perishables like proteins, veggies and fruits. I buy:
2-3 bags of pre-cut coleslaw, chopped kale, baby spinach and boxes of baby arugula from the pre-washed salad section
fennel, zucchini, broccoli, eggplant, tomatoes from the vegetable section
a bag of apples and avocado from the fruit section
goat cheese and natural sliced turkey breast from the deli section
chicken breast or chicken thighs, ground beef, steak and/or fish from the meat and fish section
eggs from the dairy fridge
frozen blueberries from the freezer
At home, in my cupboards, I know I already have things like: coconut milk, curry spices, salt, pepper, tomato salsa, tomato paste, frozen shrimp (in the freezer), chicken broth, and things like gelatin, flaxseed, pumpkin seeds, vinegar, oils, etc. I also have onions, garlic and lemon in the fridge. If I didn’t have those, I would have picked them up too.
Step 2: Get cooking. When I get home I toss the heavy bag on the counter, wash my hands, grab the chopping board and knives out of the drawer and get to work. I throw on a favourite podcast (try Invisibilia, The Jordan Peterson Podcast, The Mental Illness Happy Hour, Shrink Rap Radio, Chris Kresser, or Found My Fitness—I welcome your suggestions for future batch-cooking sessions) and begin the batch-cooking.
I chop up the broccoli, eggplant and tomatoes. Setting the oven to 400 degrees, I drizzle coconut oil over the broccoli with some salt and pepper and get it browning in the oven. Next I line a baking sheet with tomatoes and eggplants and some sliced zucchini, add a bit of olive oil, salt, pepper and spices and bake those (when they’re cooked, I’ll add some flaxseeds to give them a breaded-kind of taste with none of the refined carbs and all the hormone-regulating fibre and healthy fats).
I drizzle the chicken breast with lemon and spread tomato salsa on top. Done. When the vegetables are finished I’ll cook it at 350 degrees for about 20-30 minutes, until chicken is cooked through. Then I’ll slice the chicken up to throw on salads or to warm up and have with vegetables.
I start browning the beef with onions, garlic and grass-fed butter. Once beef is browned, I add the shredded cabbage from the bags of coleslaw I bought, and possibly some of the shredded kale. I add coconut milk and curry spices and a little bit of chicken broth, salt and pepper. Thai-style paleo stir-fry done!
I get out a big container and chop up fennel. I mix that up with arugula and store it in the fridge. I’ll add some chicken breast, chopped apple, pumpkin seeds and goat cheese to this tomorrow for a delicious, protein-rich salad lunch. I make dressing out of lemon, tahini, garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper and store that in a little jar in the fridge, so that I can throw it on the salad in the morning. I can also add cut-up sliced turkey breast to this if I run out of chicken.
I pre-spiralize some left-over zucchini with my vegetable spiralizer and store the noodles in the fridge. I make pasta sauce by adding Italian spices and olive oil to diced tomatoes or tomato paste. All I need to do for a low-carb pasta is add the sauce and some shrimp to the noodles and lightly cook until the noodles are soft. Voila: zucchini-noodle shrimp pasta. Also, a major delight of mine are Miracle Noodles, zero-calorie noodles made of glucomannan prebiotic fibre. All you have to do is rinse them. They’re super filling and taste just like rice noodles.
I cook kale, goat cheese and tomatoes together. I add the mixture to muffin tins and add eggs (I add all 12 eggs to make 12 frittatas). When the oven’s free, I cooked everything at 350 degrees until the eggs are cooked through (about 20 minutes). Sometimes I cut up the sliced turkey breast to add or I use it to “line” the muffin cups, for added protein. I let the frittatas cool and then store them in an air-tight container in the fridge.
When the time comes, right before I’m ready to eat, I’ll cook the steak or fish on the stove. Steak takes me about 3-4 minutes to cook it, tops. I just brown eat side for 2-3 minutes and add salt and pepper. Salmon takes no time at all; I might bake it for 15 minutes or sauté it after pre-marinating it with some lemon, butter and dill, or Sriracha hot sauce, garlic, tamari sauce and dash of maple syrup.
I mash up the avocados with cocoa powder, some coconut oil, gelatin, protein powder and a bit of liquid stevia to make avocado pudding. I also save some avocados to eat with meals, add to salads, and mix into smoothies, or sprinkle with salt for a healthy-fat snack.
That’s it! I pack everything up in containers and store in the fridge. All I need to do when I get hungry is spoon out portions, warm and eat. I can also opt for freezing some things if I don’t think I’ll get to them in the next few days.
The verdict: 7+ meals prepared in the time it took me to listen to 1-2 podcast episodes. Here’s what I eat for the next few days:
Breakfasts:
Mini frittatas with kale, goat cheese and tomatoes. I grab 2-3 on my way out the door.
Smoothies: with baby spinach, frozen blueberries, coconut oil, protein powder (already had some), gelatin, water. I throw these in a blender and enjoy.
Avocado pudding
Lunch/Dinner:
Arugula salad with cut up chicken breast, pumpkin seeds, goat cheese, fennel, apple and lemon tahini dressing
Chicken breast and roasted vegetables and/or roasted broccoli
Salmon or steak with broccoli, roasted vegetables, or salad
Cooked eggs with avocado and some arugula salad
Cabbage and ground beef coconut curry (I can add zucchini noodles or Miracle Noodles to this)
Zucchini noodle shrimp pasta with tomato. I can also forgo the shrimp and serve with steak, salmon or chicken breast.
Snacks:
I’ll eat a handful of pumpkin seeds, apples and peanut butter, mini frittatas, turkey breast slices or avocado pudding. I’m usually not much of a snacker, though.
As a naturopathic doctor, one of the first things I recommend to my patients is a breakfast overhaul. Adding healthy fats, protein and vegetables to the first morning meal can change your hormonal signalling and improve your energy and mood.
When it comes to writing my patients prescriptions for pills, even natural ones, I tend to be a minimalist. This means I try to limit my supplement recommendations. Depending on my patients’ concerns, I prefer to work with their diets and lifestyles, making useful tweaks and suggestions to their daily routines. I find my patients appreciate this and often stick to these mini changes in the long-term, which means that a) these changes are easy and sustainable and b) they work! When I begin to work with a new patient for the first time, some of the first recommendations I make is that they begin to rethink the way they do breakfast.
The Standard America Diet may be SAD in many ways, but the main meal that brings a tear to my eye is our affectionately termed “most important meal of the day”—breakfast, when we break our nightly fasts and engage in the consumption of low-nutrient, high-carb atrocities like breakfast cereals, muffins (aka mini cakes) and instant oatmeals packed full of sugar.
I tend to believe that some people do genuinely do well without breakfast. There is some research that suggests that fasting for a portion of the day (at least 12 hours a day) can regulate blood sugar and insulin levels and help us manage our weight and day-time energy levels. It can even help us sleep more deeply. However, for those of us who are hungry in the morning (or a few hours after), there is evidence that getting a complete meal into our bodies within the first hour of waking can start the circadian clocks present in our livers and digestive organs, priming us for a day of abundant energy, good digestion, and an efficient metabolism. In fact, the research on intermittent fasting seems to indicate that skipping dinner, rather than breakfast, might be more beneficial, as our bodies are more insulin-sensitive in the morning and therefore more able to use food for fuel, rather than storing it as fat, at that time of the day.
When we first wake up, our cortisol levels should be at their highest. Cortisol is a stress hormone, yes, but also responsible for giving us feelings of wakefulness and alertness. Eating, especially on a consistent schedule, can help boost cortisol levels, thereby boosting early-morning energy levels. Additionally, like the brain, the liver possess its own circadian rhythms. It punches in its time clock for work once we eat our first bite of food or take our first sip of a non-water beverage, allowing us to digest, detoxify, and process certain hormones in the body.
When it comes to the first meal of the day, there are two basic Breakfast Laws I live by:
The first is to get adequate protein. For most people this means eating at LEAST 20, but preferably 30, grams of protein (about the amount in one decent-sized portion of chicken or beef) in the morning. Protein is the building block of the body: it constructs our neurotransmitters, enzymes and the structure of our cells. When we get adequate amounts at meal-times, it keeps blood sugar stable, which balances mood and energy. Those of us who experience the energy tank around 3pm and crave sweets or require caffeine to get through the rest of the day, often notice that our energy remains stable throughout the day when we eat a high-protein breakfast. However, getting 30 grams of protein in the morning means rethinking what a traditional breakfast looks like: one egg only contains about 5 to 7 grams of protein, depending on size. One cup of oatmeal has only 6. Therefore, I suggest my patients concentrate on adding animal products, such as meats, yogurt and eggs, or vegetarian protein sources like tofu, legumes, peanut butter, and protein powder, to their first meal, or to mix different protein sources (such as turkey and eggs) to get their protein levels up to that 20 to 30-gram range.
The second Breakfast Law is to include healthy fats. Breakfast is a meal, arguably the day’s most important, as that’s when our digestive system is working optimally, our insulin receptors are at their most sensitive, and our metabolism is the most revved. Since a balanced meal contains all of the macronutrients, it’s important not to skip fat in the morning. Fat satiates us and keeps blood sugar stable. It nourishes our brain, cell membranes and forms the backbone of our hormones. Ensuring that we include healthy fats like avocado, olive oil, fish oil, nuts, seeds, grass-fed butter, and coconut, keeps us feeling full and energized well into the afternoon, while giving us a boost to our metabolic rate and improving our fat-burning potential. I tend to recommend coconut oil at this time of day, as the medium-chain triglycerides in coconut oil bypass the digestive system and are used as immediate energy, giving us a much-needed morning boost.
Since the patients I work with are often busy individuals with demanding lives who struggle with chronic stress, hormonal imbalances, mental health concerns and digestive issues, I often suggest beginning the day with a ketogenic breakfast. This means having a breakfast that is high in healthy fats, has a decent amount of protein and micronutrients, from leafy greens or other vegetables, and is low in carbohydrates. By avoiding high levels of carbohydrates early in the morning we harness our body’s fast-burning capacity and regulate our blood sugar and insulin levels. This, in turn, balances our other hormones, such as neurotransmitters, stress hormones and sex hormones. It also keeps inflammation levels low. Eating a high-fat, low-carb breakfast encourages the body to make ketone bodies for energy, which have been shown to promote mental alertness and to balance mood. Patients who take on a ketogenic breakfast for a month often report life-changing effects: more energy throughout the day (avoiding that 3pm crash), brighter mood and mental clarity, less sugar cravings, and greater feelings of satiety that bridge them all the way to lunch-time.
Finally, I often recommend getting a serving of micronutrient-dense leafy greens into the morning meal. We North Americans tend to skimp on our vegetables, especially the majorly health-promoting green leafy ones. Getting one or two servings of vegetables out of the way early on in the day is a great way to boost our vegetable intake.
Here are some healthy and easy-to-throw-together alternatives to that greasy breakfast sandwich lying under a warming lamp in your company’s cafeteria. I swear you’ll never look back:
1. Any variation on the home-made omelette/scrambled eggs/breakfast sandwiches. Grab a bunch of your favourite vegetables, leafy greens preferred, and cook them down in a pan. Add scrambled eggs, a few slices of natural turkey breast, leftover steak, salmon, natural sausages, or tofu (if you’re a vegetarian). Play around with different ingredients like olives, sun-dried tomatoes, roasted zucchini and squash, goat cheese, avocado, arugula, etc. If you need some carbs, serve on gluten-free or sourdough bread, or roll up ingredients into the egg.
2. Mini frittatas. Similar to the omelette idea above, mini frittatas are a pre-prepared version for those of us who have limited time in the morning. You can make these out of virtually anything: ground turkey, kale and goat cheese; sun-dried tomatoes, basil, oregano, olives and arugula; avocado, ham, cheddar and broccoli; thai curry paste, coconut milk and cauliflower; even zucchini, spinach, flaxseed and cocoa powder. Cook up your ingredients sans eggs, then throw everything into a blender (add enough so that you can get your 20 to 30 protein grams from one to three frittatas), ground flaxseed and gelatin (for gut-healing and added protein). Pour into muffin cups and bake at 350 for 20-30 minutes or until eggs are cooked through. Freeze them or store them in the fridge, then grab some on your way out the door to warm up at the office.
3. Smoothies. Smoothies are one of my favourite ways to do breakfast, simply because blending everything together gives you the opportunity to pack a bunch of nutrient-rich foods into one easily digestible, portable place. They tend to taste great too, depending on how you do them.
My three general rules of thumb for creating smoothies is to add: 1) Leafy greens: kale, spinach, chard, etc. 2) Protein: usually in the form of protein powder. I like Vega and Sun Warrior, as vegan sources, but whey isolate also works, if you’re ok with dairy. Pick a protein powder that has no added sugar and at least 20 g of protein per scoop. 3) Fat: half an avocado, or a couple of tablespoons of coconut oil, ground flax or nut butters, etc. After following the three rules, feel free to doctor the smoothie up for variety: add berries, banana or honey to make it sweet and palatable; gelatin/collagen, guar gum or chicory root for gut-healing; cocoa powder to make it chocolate-y (who doesn’t want that); or lemon, spirulina or cilantro to boost your body’s detoxifying prowess in the morning. The possibilities are endless.
My go-to smoothie consists of spinach, frozen blueberries, flaxseed, avocado, coconut oil, water and protein powder. I blend those ingredients up and drink them on the go, or I add nuts and granola on top of a thicker blend and eat it with a spoon as a smoothie bowl. I’m usually full until 1-2 pm.
When my patients protest that their morning routine doesn’t allott them sufficient smoothie-prep time, I suggest they add the unblended ingredients to their blender the night before, storing everything in the fridge. In the morning, all they have to do is hobble over to the “blend” button, throw a lid on everything and fling the entire concoction into their lunch bags. Easy peasy.
4. Yogurt bowls. For those who “do dairy”, one cup of greek yogurt has about 25 grams of protein. I tell my patients to get the highest-fat kind they can find (grocery stores mainly carry up to 2%, whereas natural food stores carry higher fat-content brands). This is because 0% fat yogurt is just bad news; skim milk was used to fatten up pigs in the early 20th century by making them hungrier—it was a well-known trick amongst pig farmers that, for whatever reason, never seemed to become common knowledge for humans. I also encourage my patients to opt for unflavoured, unsweetened yogurt to avoid unnecessary sugar and chemicals. Kefir, or fermented milk, contains multiple strains of gut-loving bacteria and is an effective probiotic, so I often recommend that to patients whose guts needs some love.
To the yogurt, add a combination of chia, flaxseeds, nuts, gelatin, coconut oil, cinnamon and berries. You can store everything in a jar in the fridge overnight (or make a big batch) and grab and go on your way to work. For those who are dairy sensitive or lactose intolerant, coconut yogurt is a delicious alternative. It is protein-sparse, however, so getting protein from other sources, or adding a scoop of protein powder or a few tablespoons of gelatin, is needed to round out the macronutrients.
5. Fat bowls: When I’m in the mood for tons of fats, I make a fatty Paleo “granola” out of various nut and seed butters: tahini, peanut butter (the natural kind where the oil rises to the top) and/or almond butter. I add coconut oil, coconut flakes, ground up nuts (walnuts, almonds, brazil nuts, cashews) and flaxseeds. Then I add cocoa powder and a few drops of liquid stevia and a pinch of sea salt. The whole thing is delicious; like a kind of crunchy, healthier Nutella. You can add one to a half scoop of protein powder or gelatin to boost the protein content. Another fat bowl idea is avocado pudding: add one whole avocado, chocolate protein powder, cocoa powder and some liquid stevia together, and mash everything up by hand or blend in a blender.
6. Ketogenic, low-carb pancakes. Blend 3 eggs, 2 tbs of almond butter, 2 tbs of flaxseed, gelatin, a dash of vanilla extract and sea salt to make the batter, then cook like regular pancakes. You can also make these thin by adding a bit more liquid (water, nut milks, coconut milk), and use them as breakfast wraps, wrapping up things like avocado, goat cheese and arugula with them.
7. Leftovers. Most of the time I have non-breakfast food for breakfast. As I’m personally really into the efficiency of batch-cooking, I always have a few servings of protein (chicken, beef or fish) and ready-cooked vegetables in my fridge. I might also have a pot of curry, a stir-fry, paleo chilli or soup in the fridge as well. Many cultures enjoy savoury and spicy foods for breakfast and there’s no reason that leftover curried vegetables and chicken breast don’t make an awesome first meal of the day.
Certain amino acids, when taken therapeutically, can affect our body’s ability to produce neurotransmitters that can greatly impact our mental and emotional health. These therapies can help treat depression, food addictions, alcoholism, psychosis and anxiety, among other things.
Transcript:
Hello, everybody, my name is Dr. Talia Marcheggiani. I am a naturopathic doctor and I work in Toronto and I focus on mental health and hormones, especially women’s hormones.
Today I want to talk to you guys about amino acid therapy and amino acid supplementation in preventing cravings, particularly for substance addictions or sugar addiction, but also for improving our mood and mental health and for treating specific psychiatric conditions.
Amino acids are the building blocks of protein. If you think of a string of beads, amino acids are the individual beads that get connected in a string and then folded up into the proteins that make up our body. Our body is basically just a hunk of protein and water. And these proteins set the stage for all of the chemical reactions, as well as the structure of our body.
When it comes to addictions and mental health conditions, there’s a lot of debate around what sets the stage for someone to experience addiction, or struggle with addictions throughout their life. And one of the things that gets a lot of blame, that also fits the pharmaceutical model, especially when it comes to depression and the prescription of serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, is this idea that mental health and addiction is something innate, that we’re born with and that needs to be corrected chemically with something like a drug like an SSRI. And we know that there’s obviously a genetic component to addictions and mental health and it’s certainly not the fault or moral failing in the person that’s suffering from these kind of things, but we also know that our genes don’t write the entire story of our experience and that, for many people, there’s lifestyle changes that can really influence genetic predispositions.
So a study that was done in rats who had a built-in genetic predisposition to addiction, to cocaine addiction, particularly, because they had a deficiency in a hormone called “dopamine”, or issues with their dopamine synthesis, and cocaine is a really potent stimulator of dopamine, which is kind of like a pleasure and reward hormone, or neurotransmitter, in our brains. These kinds of rats that were treated with amino acids, they didn’t display addictive behaviours, so they were essentially cured and their genetics were no longer relevant in terms of how they were acting out, or their behaviour, which is really promising because it was just amino acid therapy.
So neurotransmitters are hormones that work in our brain; they’re produced and act in the brain. Well, we know now with more research, I mean that’s the traditional definition of neurotransmitter, but from more research we’ve found that there’s evidence for the gut producing certain neurotransmitters like serotonin. So you can watch another video where I talk about the gut and how important it is to have a healthy gut when it comes to managing mental health, especially in depression and anxiety.
There’s a few neurotransmitters that are really, that really influence our behaviour and our mental health status and so the first one I already mentioned is dopamine, which gives us that sense of reward and gives us a sense of pleasure. So, dopamine is active when you’re doing something that is really internally motivating. You’re engrossed in a task. In terms of addictions, it’s that seeking behaviour. So a lot of people will experience pleasure in seeking out their substance of choice or thinking about indulging in sugar when they get home from work. So, that’s dopamine, that’s sort of our—the pleasure that we get from acting in the world and it definitely runs part of the show when it comes to addictions.
To quote another study in rats, so dopamine is really prevalent in our hypothalamus and so, with rats, you can give them a lever where they can direct cocaine directly into that area, and so it gives them a giant hit of dopamine. And rats that are given that option, will choose that option over food and so they’ll just stimulate their brain until they die. They’ll drink some water here and there but most of the time all they do is stimulate their dopamine. So that’s how pleasurable it is. It’s pretty much the influence of how we behave in the world and what goals we set for ourselves in the world as well. It’s how we get our delayed gratification, it’s how we work towards pleasurable tasks and how we engage in things like study or work goals or things like that.
Another neurotransmitter, serotonin, which I’ve talked about before, and that’s what the SSRIs, so selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors are working on. And those are the most widely prescribed psychiatric medications. And that’s the hypothesis that people with depression and anxiety have a deficiency in serotonin: just this kind of innate serotonin deficiency where they either don’t make enough or they’re metabolizing it more quickly than other people. So serotonin is kind of our happy hormone, that’s what gives us a sense of well-being and pleasure. And, there’s no evidence for this hypothesis, however know that through stimulating serotonin pathways, to an extent, we can get some favourable outcomes. We also know that SSRI medications deplete serotonin, and that there’s a connection between serotonin and sugar addictions, because eating sugar will increase serotonin. So a lot of women with sugar cravings during PMS. So a couple of weeks, sometimes up to two weeks before their periods, some women will get really intense cravings for sugar and carbs, and that’s indication of a fall in serotonin before their period, which is causing them to seek out these things to boost their serotonin levels. And that can be treated with amino acids.
And then a third is acetylcholine. So acetylcholine is involved in memory and cognition and sort of that feeling of being engrossed in a task. Not so much involved in pleasure, but in our ability to stay focussed and to concentrate.
A fourth neurotransmitter is called GABA. GABA suppresses our nervous system. So, this is relevant in people with anxiety and this is what the drug class benzodiazepines work on, is GABA receptors. So, in our limbic system, GABA kind of calms down that fight or flight, or that fear state in our body. And oftentimes people who have a heightened nervous system or stress response could use some GABA to calm them down.
So there’s a few amino acids that work on these neurotransmitters. So these neurotransmitters are built with an amino acid backbone. By giving these amino acids, we’re kind of like—if you think of all these neurotransmitters assembled on a factory line, the amino acid is the starting point. So if you’re giving a lot of the supplies, then you’re more likely to cause in increase in production of the thing that you’re increasing the supply for.
We also know that there can be deficiencies in amino acids and therefore, if there’s a shortage of supplies for the key ingredients for the things you’re producing in a factory, you’re not going to get the end result because there’s just not enough of the raw materials to make what you’re trying to make.
So, we can have things like serotonin deficiency not so much because there’s a genetic predisposition, or an issue with the brain’s ability to metabolize it or make it, but maybe that there’s a deficiency in the amino acids, or the vitamins and minerals that are needed to create serotonin.
When it comes to naturopathic medicine and functional medicine, we kind of look at this. We try and see how we can influence the body’s biochemical pathways to get more of what we’re noticing is lacking. And so one of the ways that we can find out which neurotransmitters are lacking is by running some functional tests. That’s not really a big part of my practice because of the cost involved in that, but we can tell a lot through symptoms. So we can tell a lot by asking, are people getting sugar cravings, what’s their drug of choice, are they heading towards cocaine or are they calming their nervous system down and stimulating their GABA pathways with alcohol. Are they trying to get that pleasure sensation with something like heroin? Are they going for stimulants or central nervous system depressants? So, based on what someone is addicted to, or looking at and really breaking down their addictive behaviours, we can find out more about which neurotransmitters might be off. And in a lot of cases there’s a deficiency in many of them.
One of the first things to recommend, just generally, is to increase more protein in the diet, because we know that these amino acids are contained in proteins. And, strangely enough, we don’t get a lot of high-quality protein in our diet in the Standard American Diet, so you think of a bacon and eggs breakfast and McDonald’s lunch and you’re like, ‘well, there’s protein in those foods…’ But, in something like eggs, we’re only getting about 6 grams of protein an egg, whereas I recommend more like 20 to 30 grams of protein in the morning for breakfast. And the reason for this is, of course, to just increase the amount of amino acids that your body can then use to make neurotransmitters, but also to keep blood sugar stable, because drops in blood sugar are going to cause stress hormones to be released and potentially for these neurotransmitters to be altered, worsening addictions, especially addictions to sugar and alcohol, which boost our blood sugar.
So the first thing, dopamine, that amino acid that creates dopamine is tyrosine. So, for some people, and tyrosine is a very stimulating amino acid, so people that kind of have that 2 pm slump, sometimes benefit with some tyrosine, or tyrosine in the morning when they’re feeling really low. And so these people kind of suffer from boredom, they really like stimulants, so they’ll do the caffeine, or they’ll use cocaine on the weekends, or they’re really involved in pleasure-seeking behaviour like, maybe they had a diagnosis of ADHD as a kid, or adult-onset ADHD, which is more involved in traumatic experiences and mental health and neurotransmitter imbalance than it is some genetic predisposition.
Sometimes with these people, supplementing with tyrosine can help, just give them that dopamine boost and keep their nervous system more stimulated so that they don’t need to stimulate it with substances.
For serotonin, the building block is l-tryptophan, which is then made into something called 5-HTP. So some naturopaths will prescribe l-tryptophan as a supplement, I tend to go more with 5-HTP because it passes a step so that your body has to do less work. 5-HTP is really great to help with sleep. It’s good to help with boosting mood, to a certain level, and it’s also really great for PMS sugar cravings, and alcohol cravings. I find myself, personally, so this Christmas I’m going sugar and alcohol free. I’ve been sugar and alcohol free for a few months, but I’m going to carry that on through the holidays, so I’ve had to turn to 5-HTP before my period because I realized how many sugar cravings I get before then. And, miraculously, just with a few hundred milligrams of 5-HTP, I’ve noticed a giant change in the foods that I was craving and in my ability to hold off on having sugar and alcohol. So, pretty powerful.
So, in order to make serotonin, 5-HTP also needs some B vitamins and magnesium. So, people that are deficient in things like B6 and B12 and folate, so I’m looking at vegetarians who often have B12 deficiencies, or vegans. And, actually I see a lot of B12 deficiency or suboptimal B12 in people that eat meat as well, so this isn’t necessarily something is only applicable to vegetarians.
But it’s important for a lot of people to supplement then with these other cofactors that help make serotonin, especially if they’re on an SSRI already. And I don’t advise just doing this on your own, it’s better to do this with a professional who can figure out what’s the underlying cause of a neurotransmitter imbalance and then help prescribe a comprehensive treatment plan that will get you to better neurotransmitter synthesis and treat your symptoms, or the underlying condition.
Something else that I find really helpful, and this is one of my favourite nutrients in psychiatry and in women’s health and something I take is something called N-acetyl cysteine, or NAC, “NAC”. And NAC is from the amino acid cysteine and it produces something called glutathione. So glutathione is the primary antioxidant in the body. This is what our body uses to neutralize all of the free radicals, that is kind of a buzzword—people will tell you to drink green tea, eat blueberries, to get antioxidants, well, the main antioxidant our body uses is something called glutathione, and NAC helps produce glutathione.
It helps our liver detoxify and, in hospitals medical professionals will give people intravenous NAC to treat Tylenol overdose, which we know is liver toxic, so it’s widely recognized that NAC can treat toxicity of the liver. It’s also a powerful antioxidant for the lungs so I prescribe it to patients who are smokers or recovering from smoking or aren’t really ready to quit smoking yet but are experiencing some of the bronchitis, the emphysema, or the increased phlegm or lung issues that go along with a chronic habit of smoking. So, it’s a powerful antioxidant and it has an affinity for the lungs and for excess mucus production. It also helps balance estrogen because of the liver detoxification, so it helps us detoxify estrogen through the liver, and is really helpful for a condition called polycystic ovarian syndrome, which is when the ovaries are producing testosterone and not responding to other hormones properly, so this is really helpful. It also helps with blood sugar balance. NAC’s the best. And so, there’s lots of research for NAC in things like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia and psychosis and OCD. So these more serious psychiatric conditions, NAC can really help balance. And we’re not sure exactly why but one of the hypothesis is that, because it creates glutathione, it helps lower inflammation, and we know that inflammation is implicated in mental health conditions and so that’s why NAC might be so useful. It doesn’t interact with psychiatric medications and so it’s a really big part of my practice.
New research has shown that NAC can help with addictions and cravings for things like nicotine, cannabis, food, so binge eating, cocaine and gambling, interestingly enough. And then there’s a new study that NAC can help treat porn addiction. So, it’s involved in helping lower that desire for, not necessarily substances, or food, but behavioural addictions as well, which is useful. And there’s studies in trichotillomania, so that’s like, compulsive hair plucking—so people will pluck their eyelashes or pluck their hair—or skin picking, and NAC can work pretty rapidly in bringing down those desires and stopping those behaviours.
GABA is something you also might have heard of. So, GABA was a neurotransmitter that I cited before, that calms the nervous system down. GABA, there’s debate about whether it crosses the blood brain barrier. So, our brain has this really tight wall that it prevents certain substances from crossing. That’s to protect our brain tissue from toxins and foreign objects, or foreign substances. So we’re not sure, necessarily, if GABA’s acting on the brain unless there’s a leaky brain situation happening, so kind of like leaky gut, we can also have that with our blood brain barrier. But there’s herbal combinations that help stimulate GABA, that I implement in my practice sometimes to help people that are experiencing panic attacks or anxiety, to get them to a level where they can then make the changes that are going to sustain them. So, things like valerian and hops, and passionflower and something that I prescribe a lot, kava, another herb called lemon balm. So, sometimes combinations of these, or just one of these things can help, especially before bed. And so, one of the indications for GABA deficiency is a craving for wine, especially at the end of the day, and particularly white wine. I guess it has more GABA-stimulating properties. I have a lot of patients, many of them female patients, that just really crave a glass of wine at the end of the day. And a few other patients that will have an after-work beer. So, just doing some GABA, or some GABA herbs, on the way home from work might be enough to decrease that need to reward and balance that nervous system, because the alcohol does have a GABA-stimulating effect and calms people down. It’s us looking for a way to self-medicate and trying to balance our neurotransmitters through the actions that we’re familiar with that don’t necessarily set us up for powerful health because they perpetuate further addictions, like turning to alcohol to calm ourselves back down, or as a reward and stress relief.
And the last neurotransmitter I’m going to talk about is something called l-glutamine. So, glutamine is a fuel for brain cells and for gut cells, as well as kidney cells. It’s another amino acid, it’s involved in creating the neurotransmitter glutamate, which is excitatory. So, this is something that increases our nervous system tone.
So, glutamine we prescribe as naturopaths a lot for leaky gut because it helps feed our enterocytes, or our gut cells, it can help repair them. So, somebody with celiac disease who’s experienced a lot of intestinal damage and has now taken out gluten, might need some glutamine, some l-glutamine to repair the gut cells that were damaged or increase that cell turnover so that they’re no longer experiencing symptoms.
L-glutamine has kind of got a sugary taste, but it doesn’t stimulate us like sugar does, and so one thing that people do when they’re experiencing sugar and alcohol cravings is to take some glutamine powder or open up a capsule of l-glutamine and let it dissolve under their tongue. And they experience a remarkable decrease in their sugar and alcohol cravings, those physiological cravings—the emotional cravings are another piece, obviously—but the physical cravings where our body is really asking for these foods, the l-glutamine can really help calm that down powerfully. So this is something that I’m going to experiment with myself and with some patients that I know could really benefit from this.
So I wanted to give this talk, just to give you guys some easy things to try over the holidays, especially when you’re experiencing some of those sugar or alcohol cravings or getting into a situation where your vices are playing out in excess. I know that this is going to be helpful for me, because of my commitment to no sugar or alcohol this holiday season, which is actually easier than it sounds. And one thing to note too, is that with amino acids, because we’re pushing pathways, they don’t work necessarily like drugs that can take, like an SSRI can take 4 to 6 weeks before it’s effect comes on. These work within days. So, when I was experiencing sugar cravings before my period last month, and I started to take 5-HTP, which remember stimulates serotonin, or helps us produce serotonin, and can help with sugar cravings, and carb cravings. When I started to take 5-HTP, I noticed this sense of well-being and uplifted mood within a few days and it was a noticeable effect, as well as deepened sleep. My sugar cravings immediately dissipated when I started taking it. So it took a few doses to eliminate my sugar cravings and then a few days to increase my mood, which I didn’t even realize was kind of falling, based on that serotonin deficiency before my period. So, these are really powerful therapies that you can try. I don’t advise doing it on your own, but seeking the help of a professional, but these are things that can really help balance brain chemistry during the holiday season and set you up for better mental health.
So, next talk I’m going to talk about leaky gut and leaky brain and how avoiding gluten can help with mental health conditions. So, have a great holiday, everyone and I’ll see you next time. My name is Dr. Talia Marcheggiani, and I’m a naturopathic doctor who practices in Toronto. If you have any questions give me a shout on my email at connect@taliand.com. Happy Holidays.
My mother tells a story about my childhood where she is standing in the kitchen, preparing dinner. I stand below her, tugging at her shirt, and begging for food.
“I’m hungry”, I say, according to her recollection of that moment and many others like it; she says that as a child I was always preoccupied with food. My constant yearning for something munch got to the point where every time she tried to cook dinner, I’d follow her to the kitchen, like a hungry dog, and persistently beg for food. I was insatiable, she claims. But, as an adult looking back I wonder, insatiable for what?
I remember that moment, but from the third person perspective. So I wonder if it’s as past events sometimes go, where the telling of a memory from an outsider’s perspective serves to reshape it in the imagination. I can feel the emotions, however, watching my 4-year old form tugging on my mother’s clothing, her body towering over me, her face far away. She stands at the stove. I remember feeling full of… what was that yearning? Was it for food? Was it hunger for physical sustenance or nutrition from some other source? I wonder if the constant, nagging hunger was an articulation, in 4-year old vocabulary, of the need for something else: attention, affection or reprieve from boredom. I remember being told at one point that my favourite show was on and felt some of the anxiety of missing what I was lacking dissipate: a clue.
As a child, adults occupy the gateway to food. As adults, the gateways take on another form. Perhaps it is anxiety about body shape or the guilt of knowing that eating too much of a certain kind of thing isn’t nutritious. Perhaps the barrier to sustenance is financial. However, when I stand now in the kitchen, bent over the fridge, arm slung over the open door, contemplating a snack, I know that I am making a choice. And, for myself, as for many others, it’s not always clear whether the call to eat is hunger and physiologically based.
In the west, we have an abundance problem. More and more adults are reaching obese proportions. Metabolic diseases of excess like diabetes and cardiovascular disease are increasing and more and more women are experiencing the hormonal dysregulation that can come from carrying more body fat.
While I don’t recommend aspiring to the emaciated standard that we see plastered on magazines, Pinterest ads or runways, I do think that, for many people, balancing energy intake with energy output could be beneficial for optimal health and hormonal signalling. Body fat is metabolically active. It also stores toxins and alters that way our body metabolizes and responds to hormones, insulin being just one example, estrogen being another. Therefore, conditions like PCOS, infertility, diabetes, PMS and dysmenorrhea, or certain inflammatory conditions might benefit from a certain amount of weight loss.
An addition here: this post is not about body-shame or even necessarily about weight loss per se. It’s about overcoming emotional eating patterns that might even derive from the same disordered patterns that manifest in anorexia or bulimia. The goal of this post is to bring more awareness to how we operate within the complex relationships many of have with food and with our own bodies.
There are many reasons why we eat and physiological hunger is only one of them. Tangled up in the cognitive understanding of “hunger” is a desire for pleasure, a desire to experiment, to taste, to experience a food, to share with family and friends, to enjoy life. There are also deeply emotional reasons for wanting food: to nurture oneself, as reward, to combat boredom and to smother one’s emotions like anxiety, depression, ennui, yearning for something else— we often eat to avoid feeling.
Health issues aside, I believe that Emotional Eating (as it’s so-called) is problematic because it dampens our experience of living. By stuffing down our emotions by stuffing our faces we prevent ourselves from feeling emotions that it might be beneficial for us to feel in order to move through live in ways that are more self-aware, mature, self-developed and meaningful. While some emotional reasons to eat might be legitimate (acknowledging your beloved grandmother’s hard work by having a few bites of her handmade gnocchi, for instance), many of the reasons we eat linger below the surface of our conscious mind, resulting in us suffering from the consequences of psychological mechanisms that we are unaware of. I believe in making choices from a place of conscious awareness, rather than a place of subconscious suffering.
In heading directly into the reasons I am tempted to emotionally eat, I’ve learned quite a lot about myself. I’ve ended up eating less, as I’ve become more aware of the non-hunger-related reasons that I reach for a snack, but that doesn’t have to be the end goal for everyone. I believe that just understanding ourselves through uncovering and analyzing the emotions that influence our everyday behaviours can have life-changing effects; it allows us to know ourselves better.
As I work through the process of understanding why I overeat, I’ve realized there are a few steps to address. I believe that there are layers to the reasons we enact unconscious behaviours and first, it is important to untangle the physiological from the emotional reasons for eating, understand what real hunger feels like, address the “logical” reasons for overeating and then, when ready, head straight into the emotions that might cause overeating to occur
Distinguishing between physiological hunger and emotional hunger:
The first step, of course, is to distinguish between physiological/physical hunger—the body’s cry for food, calories and nourishment—and emotional hunger. Typically, physiological hunger comes on slowly. It starts with a slow burn of the stomach, growling, a feeling of slight gnawing. It grows as the hours pass. For some it might feel like a drop in blood sugar (more on this later): feeling lower energy, dizzy and perhaps irritable. Physiological hunger occurs hours after the last meal, provided the last meal was sufficient. Usually, if one drinks water at this time, the physiological hunger subsides and then returns. Essentially, eating a meal or snack will result in the hunger vanishing and returning again still hours later.
Emotional hunger, however, is different. It starts with an upper body desire to eat. It might be triggered by commercials, social situations, or certain strong emotions. There might be cognitive reasons to eat (“I might be hungry later” or, “Oh! We’re passing by that taco place I like!”) that are not directly guided by the physical desire for sustenance. Emotional eating is often felt in the mouth, rather than the stomach. It might be brought on by the desire to taste or experience the food, rather than to fill oneself. The cravings might be specific, or for a certain food-source, such as cookies (this is not a hard and fast rule, however). Emotional hunger does not vanish from drinking water. Emotional hunger comes on suddenly, and is often not relieved by eating the prescribed amount of food (having a full meal); oftentimes we finish lunch only to find ourselves unable to get the cookies at the downstairs coffee shop out of our heads.
2. Settling hormonal reasons for overeating: serotonin, insulin, cortisol:
Not all physiological hunger, however, is experienced as the slow, gnawing, slightly burning, grumbling stomach sensation described above. Sometimes we experience the need to eat because our blood sugar has crashed, or our neurological needs for serotonin have gone up. We might eat because stress hormones have caused blood sugar to spike and then crash. We might also experience certain cravings for food because our physiological needs for macronutrients; like carbs, fat or protein; or micronutrients, like sodium or magnesium, have not been met.
Therefore, it becomes essential to address the hormonal imbalances and nutritional deficiencies that might be causing us to overeat. Oftentimes, getting off the blood sugar rollercoaster is the first step. This often involves a combination of substituting sugar and refined flours for whole grains, increasing fats and protein, and, of course, avoiding eating carbohydrate or sugar-rich foods on their own. It often involves having a protein-rich breakfast. I tend to address this step first whenever my patients come in and express feeling “hangry”: irritable and angry between mealtimes.
Often drops in brain-levels of serotonin cause us to crave carbohydrate-rich foods. This is very common for women experiencing PMS. In this case, balancing hormones, and perhaps supplementing with amino acids like l-glutamine, tryptophan and 5-HTP, can go a long way.
One of the questions I ask my patients who crave a snack at 2-3 pm (a mere 2-3 hours after their lunchtime meal), assuming their lunch contained adequate nutrients, is “Do you crave, sugar, caffeine, salt or a combination of the above?” Cravings for sugar or salt at this time might indicate a drop in cortisol and give us a clue, combined with the presence of other symptoms, that this person is in a state of chronic stress, burnout or adrenal fatigue. In this case, it is essential to support the adrenal glands with herbs, nutrients, rest, and consuming adequate protein during the afternoon crash.
Finally, when it comes to cravings for foods like chocolate, meat or nuts, or even specific vegetables (when living in South America I would experience over-whelming cravings for broccoli, funnily enough), I find it important to identify any nutrient deficiencies. It is common to experience a deficiency in something like magnesium, iron, selenium, zinc, and the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K; and our bodies will do their best to beg us for the specific foods they’ve come to learn contain these nutrients. Either consciously eating more of these foods (like brazil nuts in order to obtain more selenium), preferably in their healthiest form (such as dark chocolate, as opposed to milk chocolate, to obtain magnesium), or directly supplementing (in the case of severe deficiency), often results in the cravings diminishing.
3. The Hunger Scale and food diaries:
One of the first things I have patients do is understand the Hunger Scale. There are a variety of these scales on the internet that help us cognitively understand the stages the body goes through on its quest to ask for food and it’s attempt to communicate fullness. Being able to point to certain levels of hunger and fullness and pinpoint those physiological feelings on the Hunger Scale allows us to further flush out the subtleties between a physical or emotional desire for food.
Food diaries, I find, can help bring more awareness to one’s daily habits. Oftentimes, keeping a food diary for a few weeks is enough for some patients to drop their unwanted eating behaviours altogether. Other times, it can help us detect food sensitivities and unhealthier eating patterns or food choices. It also helps me, as a practitioner, work off of a map that illustrates a patient’s diet and lifestyle routines in order to avoid imposing my own ideas in way that may not be sustainable or workable for that particular individual.
A word about diet diaries, however: when recording food for the purpose of uncovering emotional eating behaviours, I often stress that it is important to record every single food. Sometimes people will avoid writing in their diary after a binge, or outlining each food eating when they feel that they’ve lost control, writing instead “junk food”. Guilt can keep us from fully confronting certain behaviours we’d rather not have acted out. However, I want to emphasize that the diary is not a confession. It’s not, nor should it be, an account of perfect eating or evidence that we have healed. Keeping a diet diary is simply a tool to slow down our actions and examine them. It’s a means of finding out how things are, not immediately changing them into what we’d like them to be. This is an important reminder. The best place to start any investigation into being is from a place of curiosity. Remember that the point of this exercise is to observe and record, not necessarily to change, not yet; it is very difficult or even, I would argue, impossible to completely eradicate a behaviour if the reasons for engaging in that behaviour escape our conscious awareness.
Therefore, recording food allows us to begin to poke at the fortress that contains the subconscious mind. We start to slow down and uncouple the thoughts and emotions from the actions that they precede and, in doing so, develop some insights into how we work. It can also help to start jotting down other relevant points that might intersect with what was eaten. These pieces of information might include time of day, where you were, what thoughts were popping into your head, and how you felt before and after eating the food. As we observe, more information begins to enter our conscious experience, allowing us to better understand ourselves.
4. Pealing back the layers: Understanding the “practical” and logical reasons for overeating:
One of the things that I have noticed, through my own work with addressing emotional eating, is that there are often layers to the “reasons” one might overeat. Some of the first layers I encountered were cognitive, or seemingly “logical” reasons. For example, I noticed that before eating without hunger I might justify it by thinking “I need to finish the rest of these, I don’t want them to go to waste”, or “I’ll finish these in order to clean out the container”, or “I should eat something now so I won’t be hungry later”, or “I didn’t eat enough (insert type of food) today so I’ll just eat something now, for my health”, or “If I don’t have some (blank) at so and so’s house, she’ll be offended”.
When looking more closely into these justifications, I found them to be flawed. However, they were logical enough for me to eat for reasons other than to satisfy a legitimate, physiological yearning for nutrients. It’s interesting to see how the mind often tries to trick us into certain behaviours and how we comply with its logic without argument.
5. Addressing the practical reasons: Planning:
In order to address the first layer of rationale for eating when not hungry, I decided to do the following: I would plan my next meal and either have it ready in the fridge, or pack it with me to go, and then I would wait all day until I was hungry enough to eat it. I would repeatedly ask myself, every time I thought of reaching for my portions, “Am I hungry now?” And would answer that question with, “Is there a rumbling in my stomach? No? Then it’s not time to eat.”
I found it would often be a several hours later before my body would genuinely ask for the food. I also found that eating satisfied the physical hunger often much sooner than it took me to finish the food. I realized how I often eat much more food and much more often, than I genuinely need.
However, holding off eating until physical hunger arises takes a conscious effort that is often unsustainable. Few of us can move through our busy lives constantly asking ourselves how hungry we are and when, and then have food at the ready to satisfy that hunger with appropriate, healthy choices. Therefore, I used this practice as a mere stepping stone to move through the deeper layers of emotional eating. By addressing the rational and logical reasons for overeating, I was able to get in touch with the deeper, emotional (and, arguably, real) reasons for which I was eating without hunger.
6. Pealing back the layers: Understanding the deeper, emotional reasons for overeating:
For a while I would wake up, make myself a coffee, and then wait until I felt hungry. Sometimes the feeling would arise in a few minutes, sometimes it would take hours. Depending on what I’d eaten the previous day and what my activity levels were, I would often not get hungry until well into the afternoon. However, the thoughts of eating something would frequently persist. And when the thoughts came up, whereas before they would be satisfied by me having something to eat, I now resisted them. When I resisted the thoughts, their associated emotions would strengthen. I then decided to journal before reaching for food, especially when I wasn’t sure if I was actually hungry or not.
Journalling can help us pull up, process and make sense of some of our emotions. I would write about what I might be feeling—what I might be asking for that wasn’t food. Through doing this, emotional reasons for hunger began to surface. The more I held off eating, the stronger and more clear the emotions became. It was a deeply uncomfortable process. This is why we emotionally eat—removing the emotions is often far more pleasant than dealing with them.
Emotions that surfaced were anxiety, ennui, boredom, loneliness and sometimes even anger. However, boredom and a listless, almost nihilistic, sense of ennui were among the two most common emotions I realized that eating medicated for me. For me, eating was entertainment. It broke up the monotony of the day and gave my senses something to experience. It gave my body something to do: chewing, tasting and digestion. Not eating made that sense of boredom grow stronger.
7. Addressing the emotional reasons: Nurturing and preventing:
Knowing more about the root emotional causes for overeating allowed me to work more closely with the source of my behaviour. I find that the closer we get to the source, to the roots, the more effective we are at removing the weeds, or behaviours, from our lives. I knew now that if I didn’t want to overeat, I would have to prevent myself from getting bored. I would have to have checklists of things to do. I would stay active and engaged in life: in my work, my friendships, and the other non-food-related things that brought meaning to my life.
During this time, I did more yoga and meditated. I journaled and wrote. I also meditated on boredom. I traced it back to where I might have felt it in my life before and noticed themes of boredom in my childhood. I realized that the child tugging on her mother’s shirt and asking when dinner was ready was probably a child who needed something to do, a child who was bored.
8. Pealing back the layers further: Working directly with core emotions:
Going even further, we can begin to peal back the layers of the emotional reasons for overeating in order to avoid replacing one “addiction” with another—such as replacing overeating with over-busying oneself, distraction or overworking. I began to find other emotions that ran deeper than mere boredom. I also realized that whenever I had felt boredom in the past, there was a threshold, often filled with discomfort, that I would eventually surpass. Once surpassing this threshold, a well of creativity, or a plethora of interesting insights, would spring forth. I remember as a child I would create stories, or lie on my bed and stare that the ceiling of my bedroom, contemplating the nature of the universe. These beautiful moments had been made possible by boredom and my courage to not distract myself from it.
Working with a therapist, or doing some deep inner work, we can access the core beliefs and emotions that might cause these emotional reasons for overeating to exist. Oftentimes we encounter core beliefs whose effects spill out into other areas of our lives, preventing us from living fully and consciously. Working through these beliefs can be deeply satisfying and help us experience transformational self-growth.
9. Setbacks: Understanding Change Theory:
Finally, engaging in this process of self-discovery doesn’t follow the same pattern in every person. Some people may find that their reasons for overeating are dissolved as soon as they start recording the foods they eat (this is surprisingly common). Others might find that years of working with a therapist have resulted in a mere dent in their ability to eat in response to hunger and to stop unwanted eating behaviours. In most everyone progress is not linear.
Change Theory and the Stages of Change schema depicts the alteration of behaviours as cyclical, rather than linear. As we move through the stages, we enter a cycle of pre-contemplation, contemplation, planning, action and maintenance. Sometimes we fall out of the cycle and relapse. Many people working with behavioural changes and addictions prefer to rename relapse “prolapse”, claiming that prolapse is a necessary stage for continuing the cycle of change and that much is to be learned from failing at something. It is through observing how the world produces unexpected results, and then attempting to understand the unexpected while trying again, where learning takes place. We don’t really learn if we don’t fail.
Sometimes addictive behaviours, emotional eating included, worsen at a time when someone is on the verge of making a massive breakthrough. Sometimes poking at a new layer of the source of unwanted behaviour accompanies an exacerbation in the practice of that behaviour. Having curiosity and self-compassion throughout the process is essential. Savouring the increased self-awareness that comes with any effort to effect change in one’s life is part of the enjoyment of the experience.
In response to my very popular article about the Mirena IUD and how that can upset hormone balance, or further an existing imbalance, I talk about a condition called “estrogen dominance” can result in hormonal symptoms, such as PMS, infertility, weight gain and anxiety.
Hello everyone, my name is Dr. Talia Marcheggiani. I’m a naturopathic doctor with a special focus in mental health and hormones, especially women’s hormones.
So, today I’m going to talk about an article I wrote about a year and a half ago that gotten a lot of activity online and it’s called “Let’s Talk Mirena: Anxiety and Hormone Imbalance”. I wrote the article because I was seeing a few patients who had the Mirena IUD and a series of similar symptoms. So, anxiety, panic attacks, and just a general sense of hormone imbalance. And when we ran their labs, when I looked at the levels of progesterone in their blood, they had very low progesterone. So I wrote an article about this and about the phenomenon of “estrogen dominance” that we naturopaths talk about a lot. And I got this resounding response online, so even today, sometimes, I’ll get a couple emails a day of people expressing their experiences and their agreement with the article and their confusion and frustration and anxiety around some of the symptoms that they’ve been experiencing since getting the IUD.
So, the reason I wrote the article is not because I don’t agree with the Mirena IUD. I’ve written another article called “Having a Healthy Birth Control Experience” in which I state that as a form of contraception, a hormonal birth control and a hormonal implant such as the IUD can be really great measures against unwanted pregnancy, because their efficacies are very very high—I think the Mirena IUDis about 99%pregnancy avoidance— and you don’t need to think about it, you don’t need to take a pill every day, so for some women this is ideal.
The issue is that a lot of women are being prescribed the Mirena IUD as a solution for Estrogen Dominance. And so what I find in my clinical practice, and I’ll talk more about estrogen dominance in the course of this video, but what I find in my clinical practice is, because it doesn’t address the underlying cause, and because it’s hormonal in and of itself, and it adds more hormones to the body, in a specific location, the uterus, and because it doesn’t address the underlying imbalance, it either worsens or ignores the condition of estrogen dominance, causing symptoms to get worse and women to feel frustrated and lost and then write to me.
Mirena is often prescribed to women with heavy and painful menstrual bleeding. So, this could be a diagnosis of endometriosis, or ovarian cysts, or just symptoms that they’re experiencing. So a lot of them might be experiencing iron deficiency because of the heaviness of the bleeding and a lot of women are out of commission for a couple of days every month because their period is so heavy and uncomfortable and they feel weak and they’re in pain and maybe they deal with really intense PMS. Some of my patients deal with PMS for 2 weeks out of the month, which is crazy and super uncomfortable.
Conventional medical doctors prescribe the Mirena IUD to combat these symptoms because with birth control and the IUD, one of the side effects is really light periods and some people don’t even get their period at all on Mirena and so you can imagine, if you’re period is this time of the month where you can’t go to work and you’re just basically hemorrhaging from the insides, then it would be a massive relief to not have to deal with a period anymore for 5 years, which is how long the hormones last in Mirena.
But one of the issues is that we need to look at the cause of these symptoms. Oftentimes these symptoms are caused by a difference in estrogen and progesterone, so these are two of the main female sex hormones. One of the things that happens in conditions like endometriosis or heavy and painful periods is that the estrogen is high in relation to the progesterone in the body. And so this is really apparent in a condition like endometriosis where there’s often high estrogen and also fibroids. So both of those cause terrible periods, and they need to be ruled out when periods are heavy and uncomfortable. And then there’s ways that we can deal with that as naturopaths.
But even without an underlying health condition, just primary dysmenorrhea, that’s not caused by another diagnosis is often the result of estrogen dominance.
And so the Mirena, because it’s made of only progesterone, can help with the uterine symptoms of estrogen dominance, which would be the heavy and painful periods. However, we have estrogen and progesterone receptors all over our body, not just in our uterus, and so when we’re putting hormones in one part of the body, and they’re not ending up in the rest of the body, we start to worsen that deficiency, or that relative deficiency in progesterone.
So women will mention, and one of the most common symptoms is anxiety and panic attacks, because progesterone this kind of calming effect on the central nervous system, on the brain, so it kind of chills you out and helps you handle stress.
Estrogen is a hormone that causes women to ovulate, so it’s a pro-ovulatory hormone and it also helps build up the uterine lining. So the more estrogen we have, the thicker the lining and therefore when we shed the lining during our period, the more we have to shed. So, more estrogen, the thicker the lining, the heavier and, by proxy, more painful the period.
Progesterone is a hormone that, in terms of reproduction, it helps us maintain the lining (of the uterus). So, if you ovulate and then that egg gets fertilized by sperm, then the egg gets implanted in the uterus and progesterone starts to increase, so pregnancy is a very progesterone dominant condition and one of the signs of a low progesterone state is when women who have been pregnant say that that’s the most balanced they’ve ever felt because progesterone is naturally higher in pregnancy.
Progesterone starts to rise when you become pregnant and that maintains the lining throughout the 9 months and then, after the 9 months, you have your baby. If the egg doesn’t become fertilized then progesterone rises for the last 2 weeks of the cycle and then it falls, along with estrogen, you shed your lining and then you have a period.
And for some women, they sail right into their periods. They have no PMS symptoms, they might feel a little bit bloated a couple of hours before and then they go to the washroom and go, “ok, look, there’s blood I’m having my period.” And for other women, it’s not the case, they get warning signs, like i said, before two weeks, so pretty much from ovulation to when their period happens. So, half of their life: 2 weeks out of every month.
And so, what happens with a lot of women is that there’s higher estrogen in relation to progesterone. So we call this “Estrogen Dominance”. And there can be three possibilities in this state. One is that estrogen is abnormally high and progesterone is normal, or optimal. Another is that estrogen is normal or optimal, progesterone is low, and a third option is that you have both at the same time: so estrogen is high and abnormal and progesterone is low and that’s more common than you think in a lot of women who are dealing with really severe symptoms, that divide between the two hormones is really off. And, as I mentioned before, prescribing birth control pill or Mirena IUD are not solutions because they’re not correcting the underlying imbalance. They’re not looking at the cause of why this imbalance is happening in the first place. Instead, they introduce foreign, fake or synthetic hormones into the system to try and correct the balance, but our body has a delicate balance and a delicate ecology and so when we try and shift that balance artificially sometimes we pay the price and we don’t necessarily feel balanced.
So, why does this occur? Why do people get estrogen dominance and how do you fix it? So, when it comes to the first situation, high estrogen, and normal progesterone, there’s a couple of reasons why estrogen might be high. So the first is exposure to foreign estrogen, or excess estrogens in the environment. And, so many of you may have heard of these “xenoestrogens”, or toxic estrogens, from sources such as BPA, so the lining of tin cans, or those plastic water bottles or baby bottles that everyone was throwing out and replacing with glass and stainless steel, which is a great idea. So, we’re in contact with these in the environment through the cosmetics, cleaning products, and some of the plastics that we hold and interact with on a daily basis. And paper receipts have this as well. So cashiers and people that handle receipts regularly are in contact with BPA. And it’s absorbed through the skin. So just this exposure to these toxic estrogens can activate estrogen receptors and it increases estrogen in the body. And that’s problematic. We know that these can also set the stage for hormonal cancers, like breast cancer, you might have heard of estrogen-receptor positive breast cancer, or ovarian cancer and endometrial cancer and cervical cancer. So these are all kind of these foreign estrogens influence the body’s hormones in a negative way causing growths.
The second reason why estrogen might be high is the reduced ability of the body to detoxify estrogens. So, when we’re done using the estrogen that we need, our liver cleans our blood of estrogen, then we dump the estrogen biproducts into the colon and then we eliminate them by having a bowel movement. And this is a normal process in lowering the toxic estrogen or the estrogen metabolites, the estrogen we don’t need anymore. And so when this process is either over-burdened by too many xenoestrogens, so those plastic estrogens, or limited in some way because our liver is trying to detoxify other things, such as alcohol, or tylenol, or some of these over-the-counter drugs, the liver just can’t handle the burden and so, in terms of treatment we need to bolster the liver’s detoxification abilities. And a lot of the time those two things exist at the same time: you’re getting too many foreign estrogens, we need to clean up the environment and the diet and make sure everything you’re getting is promoting a healthy estrogen metabolism.
And then, why progesterone might be low, which is the other arm or possibility of this estrogen dominance condition that I’m speaking of is stress, mainly. So, when we’re stressed out, and we’re dealing with a lot our body produces a hormone called cortisol and that’s the “stress hormone” that helps us deal with high amounts of pressure and stress. And a lot of the time stress is not perceived so, just this feeling of being tired and wired, disrupted sleep, sugar cravings around 3-4pm, having a difficult time getting up in the morning, feeling a little bit stretched thin, maybe feeling a drop in motivation, are all signs of chronic stress. So what happens is our adrenal glands, these pyramid-shaped endocrine glands that sit on top of the kidneys, they make cortisol. And when our body has more cortisol than it needs, or when it needs to make progesterone, it takes the cortisol and it makes progesterone with it. So it’s kind of like leftover cortisol that it’s not using gets made into progesterone. After ovulation, the ovaries also produce progesterone, but part of the progesterone production in the body come from the adrenal glands.
So you can imagine: if you’re stressed out and you’re spending all of your adrenal function on making cortisol you’re not going to have enough time or resources to make progesterone. So a lot of bringing up progesterone balance is by either lowering environmental stress or increasing adrenal function. We also look a nutrient deficiencies and we can also look at bringing pituitary balance by using an herb called vitex, which can help balance hormones and kind of right that estrogen-progesterone imbalance that might be going on.
So what happens when you give the Mirena, or you give an oral contraceptive to deal with this? Well, what happens is, there’s an imbalance and you induce another imbalance kind of over top. So, the body is still not making enough progesterone, there’s still too much estrogen, toxic estrogen, and what you’re doing is giving synthetic progesterone, which doesn’t have the same effects, progestins, synthetic progesterone, it doesn’t have the same effects as regular progesterone and often doesn’t work on the brain, so it doesn’t have that low anxiety effect, that calming effect, and it doesn’t prevent the estrogen-dominant cancers, it doesn’t help with ovarian cysts, it doesn’t manage endometriosis, other than stopping your periods, perhaps, if you’re reacting to it. And then you’re also, if you’re doing a combined oral contraceptive pill, you’re introducing more xenoestrogens to the body that your liver then has to clear out and that are going to cause more of those estrogen-dominant symptoms. And, in the colon we know that oral contraceptives can cause a bacterial imbalance, so a dysbiosis in the gut and potentially constipation and so that throws off our whole system. I’ve talked about how important that gut bacteria is for mental health and mood and just digestion and everything. So, more cells are in our gut than in the rest of our body. So our gut microbiome is super important to our health and well-being.
So, how does a naturopathic doctor address estrogen dominance? This is a big part of my practice especially because I see a lot of women with month-long PMS, acne, polycystic ovarian syndrome, so irregular periods, or missed periods, or they have a family history of hormone-dominant cancers and they’re trying to prevent these things from happening down the line, or they’re just having terrible periods. They’re having weight gain, or bloating, or anxiety that’s related to the period or really bad PMS, so mood swings, depression around their period or a condition called PMDD, which is really really severe depression right before the period.
So the first thing I do is order labs. And so your medical doctor might have done labs, gotten your estrogen and progesterone measured in your blood and your doctor might have said, “oh, it’s fine, it’s normal”, and this is true to the extent that when your medical doctor is evaluating your labs, they’re looking at massive reference ranges. So our reference ranges are a bit more narrow because we’re trying to look at the optimal levels for fertility and for feeling like your optimal, amazing self. We’re looking at, “is your estrogen within an optimal range, is your estrogen on the high side, and therefore, could be brought down? And does that match your symptom picture? Do you have estrogen dominance symptoms and a relatively high estrogen level? Is your progesterone lower than optimal to maintain a uterine lining in pregnancy, to not have a miscarriage in the first trimesters, etc. etc.” So we look at labs, and then we, using our natural therapies, we prescribe diet, supplements, and some lifestyle changes to help re-establish that hormonal balance.
So, if you have any more questions, just send me an email, at connect@taliand.com or check out some of the articles that I mentioned in this video.
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In this video I give an education talk to a group of seniors at the Bernard Betel Centre about naturopathic medicine. I discuss our philosophy, education, what kinds of conditions we treat and answer some questions along the way.
