Heal Your Emotions With Food

Heal Your Emotions With Food

 These foods can help regulate your moods naturally. Sadness and grief: Reach for cauliflower, turnips, and asparagus.  Asparagus naturally encourages healthy bronchial tissues to open up the lungs when sadness makes you feel like you just can't take a deep breath. Turnips and cauliflower help support your immune system so that the process of living together and healing grief doesn't leave you vulnerable to colds, flu, and bacterial infections. Dealing with emotional grief without the added stress of physical illness can be challenging enough. So try these foods to help protect your health during the grieving process. Affirm when you eat these foods: I breathe deeply and have strong immunity. Anxiety: Reach for yellow/orange foods like pineapple, pineapple, watermelon, and sweet potatoes (great for curbing carb cravings—and yes, you can microwave potatoes as a quick snack, though I generally don't recommend microwaving). Cinnamon and ginger teas will also help suppress anxiety. Similarly, a cup of butternut squash soup can soothe anxiety. Look for low-sugar varieties. In Chinese medicine, foods that affect anxiety resonate with the energies of the stomach and spleen, or "earth" energies. So they help a person come back to the center when feelings are strong, which can also support the processing of other feelings such as sadness, grief, disappointment, anger, and fear. Affirm as you eat this food: I am focused and strong. Fear: Reach for deep-sea fish like salmon or tuna. If you're vegan, reach for seaweed like nori, wakame, and kombu. These foods resonate with the kidneys and bladder in the Chinese medicine system, which we associate with the element of "water," which rules courage or fear. Sometimes fear can exist as a reaction to situations all by itself, or it can be a secondary emotional response to other emotional states.  Seafood can help overcome fear and connect us back to states of courage by supporting our adrenal glands, which can go into overdrive with the fight-or-flight response when we feel strong emotions. When you eat these foods, affirm: I am brave and strong. Anger: Reach for any green leafy vegetable such as spinach, mustard or collard greens, romaine lettuce, or kale. Go for spirulina, cucumber, and low-carb green vegetable juices. Anger in the Chinese medicine system resides in the "wooden" organs of the liver and gallbladder. naturally frustrating or irritating. These foods allow you to access your natural patience and compassion even when you're feeling angry. Drink a bottle of juice like Suja uber greens that is low in calories (and no, I'm not getting paid to drink the product - I drink the juice) when you're in the middle of feeling angry. Or juice cucumbers, cilantro, lemon, green apple, and peppermint yourself. It's amazing how much more peaceful you'll feel when you take a moment to detox your liver and gallbladder with healing foods. Affirm when you eat these foods: Compassion and patience overcome anger and frustration.These foods help specifically calm the heart energies associated with fast-moving energy and that high feeling that won't allow you to sleep, rest or focus your thoughts. Imagine a flame spreading in many direction.