Food Mental Health

We all know that as a nation our mental health is in crisis. But what most don't know is that a critical ingredient in this debate, and a crucial part of the solution—what we eat—is being ignored. Nutrition has more influence on what we feel, who we become and how we behave than we could ever have imagined. It affects everything from our decision-making to aggression and violence. Yet mental health disorders are overwhelmingly treated as 'mind' problems as if the physical brain—and how we feed it—is irrelevant.

Diet is an essential component of a client's clinical profile. Few therapists, however, have any nutritional training, and many don't know where to begin. In Nutrition Essentials for Mental Health, Leslie Korn provides clinicians with a practical guide to the complex relationship between what we eat and the way we think, feel, and interact with the world. Where there is mental illness there is frequently a history of digestive and nutritional problems. Digestive problems in turn exacerbate mental distress.

In First Bite, the beloved food writer Bee Wilson draws on the latest research from food psychologists, neuroscientists, and nutritionists to reveal that our food habits are shaped by a whole host of factors, including family, culture, memory, gender, hunger, and love.

Having a child with "extreme" picky eating is frustrating and sometimes scary. Children with feeding disorders, food aversions, or selective eating often experience anxiety around food, and the power struggles can negatively impact your relationship with your child. Helping Your Child with Extreme Picky Eating offers hope. After gaining a foundation of understanding of your child's challenges and the dynamics at play, you'll be ready for the five steps that transform feeding and meals, so your child can learn to enjoy a variety of foods in the right amounts for healthy growth.

If you regularly eat when you're not truly hungry, choose unhealthy comfort foods, or eat beyond fullness, something is out of balance. The good news is that the brain can be rewired for optimal emotional health. When Food Is Comfort presents a breakthrough mindfulness practice called inner nurturing, a comprehensive, step-by-step program developed by an author who was herself an emotional eater.

An extraordinary, powerful connection exists between feeling and feeding that, if damaged, may lead to one relying on food for emotional support, rather than seeking authentic happiness. This unique workbook takes on the seven emotions that plague problem eaters—guilt, shame, helplessness, anxiety, disappointment, confusion, and loneliness—and shows them how to embrace and learn from their feelings.

In this groundbreaking guide, Dr. Uma Naidoo presents cutting-edge research about the ways anxiety is rooted in the brain, gut, immune system, and metabolism. Drawing on the latest science on the connection between diet and anxiety, Dr. Naidoo shows us how to effectively use food and nutrition as essential tools for calming the mind.

An internationally renowned neuroscientist, Dr. Wenk has been educating college and medical students about the brain and lecturing around the world for more than 40 years. With this essential book, he vividly demonstrates how a little knowledge about the foods and drugs we eat can teach us a lot about how our brain functions. The information is presented in an irreverent and non-judgmental manner, making it highly accessible to high school teenagers, inquisitive college students, and worried parents.

With Mental Health, Inc., award-winning investigative journalist Art Levine delivers a Shock Doctrine-style exposé of the failures of our out-of-control, profits-driven mental health system, with a special emphasis on the failures of the pharmaceuticals industry, including the treatment of children with antipsychotics and disastrous PTSD protocols for veterans.

"Is this normal picky eating stuff, or is there more going on here?" It's a question many parents worry about, and the same question one mom asked Jennifer Friedman in a session about her son Ryder, who struggled to eat more than chicken nuggets and french fries. In Stories of Extreme Picky Eating, Jennifer invites you into her nutritional therapy office to meet real kids struggling with serious food aversions, and learn the strategies that helped them come to eat a wider variety of nutritious foods with more ease.

Do cravings control your life? Have you tried diet after diet, only to slip back into unhealthy habits? Do you feel guilty after bingeing? You’re not alone, and Control Your Emotional Eating can help. This compassionate, science-based guide offers a practical, supportive approach to changing your relationship with food.

A fact-filled guide to coping with compulsive overeating problems by an experienced addictions doctor who draws on many patients' stories of recovery. Overeating, binge eating, obesity, anorexia, and bulimia - Food Junkies tackles the complex, poorly understood issue of food addiction from the perspective of a medical researcher and dozens of survivors.

Sixty-eight percent of Americans have dieted at some point in their lives. But upwards of 90 percent of people who intentionally lose weight gain it back within five years. And as many as 66 percent of people who embark on weight-loss efforts end up gaining more weight than they lost. If dieting is so clearly ineffective, why are we so obsessed with it? The culprit is diet culture, a system of beliefs that equates thinness to health and moral virtue, promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status, and demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others.

In Dead Weight, Emmeline Clein recounts her struggle with disordered eating alongside the stories of other women: historical figures, pop culture celebrities, and the girls she’s known and loved. Through the story of her own sickness, the raw recollections of interview subjects, and dispatches from social media rabbit holes, Clein challenges stereotypes and renders statistics and science deeply personal and urgent.

Weaving a rich tapestry of multicultural myths, ancient legends, and simple folktales, Anita Johnston, PhD, inspires women to free themselves from disordered eating by discovering the metaphors that are hidden in their own life stories.

If you struggle with binge eating, emotional eating, stress eating, or if you repeatedly manage to lose weight only to gain it all back, you may be approaching things with the wrong mindset. From his perspective as a formerly food-obsessed psychologist - and previous consultant to major food manufacturers - Dr. Livingston shares specific techniques for isolating and permanently dis-empowering your “fat thinking self”.

When Food Is Love examines the motivations behind bingeing and obsessive dieting, and explains how such compulsive behavior sabotages intimate relationships. With compassion and penetrating wisdom, Geneen Roth reveals how to break destructive emotional patterns and learn to satisfy all the hungers, physical and emotional - that make us human.

Everyone knows how hard it can be to maintain a healthy diet. But what if some of the decisions we make about what to eat are beyond our control? Is it possible that food is addictive, like drugs or alcohol? And to what extent does the food industry know, or care, about these vulnerabilities? In Hooked, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Michael Moss sets out to answer these questions - and to find the true peril in our food.

With plenty of expert tips & easy-to-follow techniques that you can effortlessly implement into your life, the DBT Workbook for Emotional Eating reveals how you can finally break free from compulsive overeating and recover from your food addiction.

Overeating, binge eating, obesity, anorexia, and bulimia: Food Junkies tackles the complex, poorly understood issue of food addiction from the perspectives of a medical researcher and dozens of survivors. What exactly is food addiction? Is it possible to draw a hard line between indulging cravings for "comfort food" and engaging in substance abuse? For people struggling with food addictions, recognizing their condition - to say nothing of gaining support and advice - remains a frustrating battle.