Got the blues? Fiona Tankard explains how changing her diet put a smile on her face.
Fiona Tankard used to go through spells of feeling very low. Plagued by patches of mild depression, the mother-of-two felt especially bad just before her period. “I used to get a lot of premenstrual syndrome (PMS) which would make me miserable and irritable,” says the 41-year-old teacher from Oxfordshire. She eventually went to her GP, who prescribed her antidepressants. But she decided not to pick up the tablets from the chemist as she feared that she would become reliant on them. “I realised that I didn’t want to go down the chemical route. I know a lot of people who have found antidepressants useful, but I wanted to try other remedies first.” One such remedy was to prove simple but effective: changing her diet. “I have a friend who is a nutritional expert, and she made me realise that food can control your moods,” Tankard says. She realised that not only was her diet high in the sugary foods that elicit a brief high as they release a concentrated burst of energy into the body, but also that her small and irregular meals (she would often skip breakfast) meant that she snacked throughout the day on unhealthy fodder. Tankard suspected that this could be contributing to her bad moods and she decided to overhaul her diet. Her new eating plan means always eating breakfast, usually porridge, which releases energy slowly instead of in a sudden burst; ditching chocolate and sugary snacks for fruit and seeds or oatcakes with hoummos; and choosing lunches of filling bean salads or rye-bread sandwiches instead of soup in a cup. “I used to be starving by 4pm and would get home from work and eat everything in sight. But I realised that I could prevent this by eating a filling meal earlier in the day,” she says. A long-established sweet tooth made cutting back on much-loved puddings the most difficult part of her new diet. “I always used to be thinking about chocolate and puddings, and where my next sweet was coming from. But now I look at them and they don’t mean anything. I know how it will mess with my blood sugar and I no longer want one.” She started to notice an improvement in her moods after only a week on her new diet. And despite the occasional lapse back to her old ways – not helped by the large amount of chocolate she received at Christmas – she has managed to stick to it.
“I feel a lot healthier and more energetic since starting my new eating regimen. I’m less impatient than I used to be, and I don’t feel so up and down. I also don’t notice my PMS any more; I’m not looking at the calendar thinking ‘Oh no, it’s that time of the month again’.”
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