Good Mood Food
Certain foods encourage your body and brain to produce the neurotransmitters and hormones that help you to feel happy, calm, positive and encourage restful sleep. Normal and healthy levels of serotonin even help to prevent cravings for sugary, fatty and stodgy foods, so ensuring that you’re eating plenty of good mood foods each day can really help to keep your health and fitness on track.
Protein is one of the best types of good mood food:
Without eating enough protein, your moods may suffer and you could find it hard to feel positive, happy, optimistic and calm. Instead, feelings of anxiety, depression and low self-esteem may creep in, along with less than healthy food cravings.
Protein Food Helps a Happy Mood:
The various neurotransmitters that help you to feel cheerful, are formed from the amino acids in foods, and especially foods richer in protein.
Eat Protein with Every Meal and Snack:
Whether you eat meat, poultry, fish and eggs or not, I would encourage you to eat some protein foods with every meal or snack.
The protein foods that contain the serotonin precursor, tryptophan, are especially important for boosting your mood, and I get great results from eating lentils, chickpeas, hummus, quinoa, almonds, walnuts, chia seeds, hemp seeds, nutritional yeast and adding a plant-based protein powder to smoothies and smoothie bowls.
All of those foods are a complete source of essential amino acids, especially tryptophan, and are used in many of my Eat Yourself Fit recipes.