I had the absolute privilege of being invited along to speak at the Dandelion Conference in Crawley in April. The Dandelion Training Company is committed to supporting children’s mental health and provides training & qualifications for professionals working with young people. I was invited along to speak about the connection between nutrition and young people’s mental health which is an absolute passion point for me.
I thought I would drop in with a couple of bits that people identified as their big takeaways from my talk as I thought it might be useful for some people….
Why We Eat..
If food/eating was purely for physiological reasons i.e. was just fuel then it would be purely a case of filling the tank to the right level. It’d be like having a car. You’d add the correct type of fuel to the correct levels and the job’d be a good ‘un.
BUT that’s not the case.
Food is so much more than that.
food is social – we eat together, we connect & communicate with food.
food is celebratory – we eat to mark events and to celebrate the good things in life.
we eat in grief
we eat in sadness
we feed emotions
we fuel exercise & adventures
we fuel growth
we feed through love
we cook as a gift
we cook to show love & affection
we eat through rituals and routines
we eat as traditions
Food is more than fuel and are relationships with food (and even certain food types) are much more than the simplicity of the particular food stuff.
It’s why when people band around the whole “well just eat less” thing about weight loss that it’s simply not that easy OR they approach it with a “you’d feel better if you didn’t just eat crap” it simply isn’t useful. Food has many more emotional, psychological and mindset impacts on us.
Thinking of the way we eat, perhaps even what emotions we are seeking to ignite and our habits/routines and beliefs are much more useful than the blanket – food is fuel, if you eat less you’ll lose weight or stop eating crap and you’ll feel better.
This is a question that I always ask/asked people to ponder when I was working with young people ~ where’s the dopamine??
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that plays a role in pleasure, motivation, and learning. So in essence it’s a feel good stimuli!
The behaviour that’s being exhibited is done in order to achieve a feeling, to feel good!
This is often even more so the case when we are supporting children with ADHD (who, studies have found, have decreased levels of dopamine and/or don’t process dopamine effectively – a deficit of dopamine means young people need to seek it more) and children who are struggling with their mental health and simply want to feel better.
We are look at this through the lense of nutrition. We often eat in order to feel good – to have that hit of dopamine, to be able to have that wee high. It can look like overeating, it can look like scoffing (eating very quickly and without thought), it can look like constant hunger.
I am thinking of bring together a pack to help support this – let me know if it’s something you’d be interested in.
Anyhaps…..
Is there other ways that this dopamine hit can be achieved? In the moment we probably can’t think what those other things are.
Maybe consider bringing together a little list of things that can be alternatives, think about the things that give you that feeling that you crave that are sometimes feelings you chase through food. If we have the ideas already easily accessible (i.e. we don’t need to think what they might even be) then it might be that every now and then we can find alternative ways of chasing the dopamine.
That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t eat for pleasure, we most certainly should AND it doesn’t mean that emotional eating is bad, it’s a tool we can use every now & then for sure BUT sometimes having alternatives supports us to feel nourished in every way, in the long term.
At the weekend, after I’d delivered my talk at the conference, I saw this written down as a takeaway on lots of notebooks!
It’s important that we are more grape than raisin and that we actively encourage young people to prioritise hydration.
Why?? Because it’s a game changer this bad boy. We all know we should drink more water. I used to eye roll 
and do the whole “yeah, yeah” thing. Until you are consistently well hydrated you absolutely don’t know how awesome it feels – the proof only comes after consistent hydration and then a day without it being present – BOOM 
that’s when you see the truth about being hydrated.
IMPACT – cognitive function, mood, energy, decision making, skin – EVERYTHING!
One of my slides at the conference at the weekend was this image.
It seemed to hit home with a few people! It’s a really easy representation of what can happen for a lot of people – including young people.
If you eat crap you can often feel like crap, when you feel like crap then you often just wanna eat crap and so the cycle can continue.
There’s often much more to it then it being in a cycle and there are things that you can do to break the cycle.
It’s about look at what’s underpinning the cycle, what are the reasons that the cycle has established and working on that.
Those are some of the highlights of my talk!
