Julie Simon, MFT is an Los Angeles based therapist who works with people and their relationship with food. She has written When Food is Comfort and The Emotional Eaters Repair Manual. She also runs Overeating Recovery groups and has a 12 week program that can be done in person or remotely.
I recently received an email from her where she outlines the different brain chemicals that stimulate mood-related brain chemicals.
While you may not be anywhere near food addiction or struggling with overeating, this is interesting information.
I’m always looking out for ways to know what our internal signals mean and this falls right in line with kind of information.
Sometimes you might not realize you are feeling depleted in a certain kind of way, but you might notice a food craving you can’t resist. It’s just more concrete. And you might find yourself acting on it.
People get information from their internal world in different ways and it’s wise to recognize those signals so you can care for yourself in the most efficient and effective way.
To find out more about how you naturally best recognize your internal signals, go here. There’s some great information in that post on how to manage stress according to your personal way of operating.
Eating to balance mood-related chemicals would definitely fall under the category of behavioral cues that indicate you are feeling stress or depletion.
Check out Julie’s breakdown of those foods that stimulate the mood-related chemicals in her post here. You might learn something new about yourself or find that your craving make sense.
Knowing this information means that it comes into your conscious awareness, where you have the power to work with it. When a behavior or craving is operating outside your conscious awareness, you have little ability to change or work with it. This is one of the reasons knowledge is power!
