Health
Recipe of the Month: Green Breakfast Smoothie
Looking for a delicious breakfast recipe? Enjoy this healthy, refreshing and delicious smoothie.
Serotonin
Power Blog
Check back often for articles about your health, nutrition and well-being
from medical and nutritional professionals.
from medical and nutritional professionals.
Serotonin Power Blog
Cravings
How Mindful Snacking Impacts Your Smart Snack List
If snacking is just driven not by hunger or a desire to taste chocolate chip cookies, but by an individual’s emotional need, as it so often is, then a relaxed, restrained, Zen-like approach to selecting snacks may be difficult to achieve.
Cravings
Too Little of a Good Thing: Carbohydrates
I was in charge of refreshments at a reception held for a guest lecturer and, aware of some of the attendees’ dietary limitations, selected gluten-free, sugar-free, dairy-free, and vegan cookies, as well as a large bowl of seasonal fruits.
Cravings
Are We Born, or Made Into, Emotional Overeaters?
Anyone who has eaten when frustrated, angry, bored, worried, exhausted, lonely, or depressed—but not hungry—has engaged in emotional eating
(So that makes most of us.) And for most, the food eaten is less likely to be steamed broccoli, poached chicken breast, or fat-free yogurt and far more likely to be a member of the so-called carbohydrate junk food family.
Celebrities
“Oprah, I Told You So!”
She wouldn’t remember. Why would she? It was at least 15 years ago since I appeared as the only guest on her afternoon television program, discussing the benefits of carbohydrates on mood and controlling appetite. After I wrote a book on how nutrients can influence mental performance and mood, one of her many producers asked me to be on her show.
Antidepressants
Starting Antidepressants? About the Weight Gain…
Like hair loss during chemotherapy, weight gain while on antidepressants is not, fortunately, inevitable. And like hair loss, gaining weight should not be justification for refusing treatment with these drugs, as they may be very effective for a variety of mental disturbances, fibromyalgia, and even menopausal hot flushes. Unfortunately, for those who find themselves gaining weight within weeks of starting on their antidepressants or mood stabilizers, losing this weight is much harder than growing back hair after its loss from chemotherapy.
Antidepressants
Why It’s Hard To Lose Weight After Antidepressants
Side effects from medications are common, although usually not severe enough to halt treatment. Anyone who has listened, perhaps unwillingly, to a recital of side effects associated with a television advertisement for a medication is aware of the number of health problems that might arise while taking that particular drug. But unless the side effect is death (the announcer always seems to mumble at this point), one assumes most of these adverse events go away when the medication is no longer taken.
Cravings
Beating Stress With Potatoes
As I was walking past the Vitamin section of CVS, I heard the word serotonin pass between a young man and a saleswoman. “I can’t find any 5HTP on the shelf,” he was telling her, “…You know, the stuff that makes serotonin? I need some for stress!” She peered at the supplement stocked shelves and nodded. “We must be all out,” she responded. “But there is a health food store a few blocks away. Maybe they have some.”
Cravings
Why Cranky People Crave Sugar
In all the almost hysterical hype about sugar, one fact is never mentioned. This sugar craving by emotionally unhappy individuals may be a symptom of something awry with their serotonin levels.
Antidepressants
Can Antidepressants Turn You Into a Food Addict?
What is a food addiction? Having heard several people explain their inability to lose weight due to this problem, I searched out the answers on, where else? The Internet. It appears there are “addictions,” and there are addictions.
Cravings
How Your Friends Influence Your Weight
To Sally (not her real name), who wrote to me recently about her 100-pound weight gain after being given antidepressant medications for fibromyalgia, the recent study carried out by a group from the Massachusetts General Hospital will come as a surprise.
Cravings
Should You Avoid Exercise Because It Makes You Hungry?
If weight-loss programs advertised on television were to be believed, then it is obvious that the best way to get people to lose weight and keep it off is to eat commercially available, calorie-controlled packaged meals and snacks.