The Mood Cure

Take Charge of Your Emotions in 24 Hours Using Food and Supplements

JULIA ROSS, M.A.

Dedication

To all those who have sought help and not found it.

And to Emmanuel.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Foreword

STEP 1 Gaining a New Perspective on Your Moods

CHAPTER 1. Are Your Emotions True or False?

CHAPTER 2. Identifying Your False MoodsMoods: The Four-Part Mood-Type Questionnaire

STEP 2 Eliminating the Four Most Common Mood Imbalances

CHAPTER 3. Lifting the Dark Cloud: Eliminating the Depression and Anxiety Caused by Inadequate Serotonin

CHAPTER 4. Blasting the Blahs: Rebuilding Your Energy, Motivation, and Capacity to Focus

CHAPTER 5. All Stressed Out: How to Recover from Adrenal Overload

CHAPTER 6. Too Sensitive to Life’s Pain? How to Amplify Your Own Comforting Endorphins

STEP 3 Creating Your Nutritherapy Master Plan

CHAPTER 7. Out with the Bad-Mood Foods: Ridding Your Diet of Emotionally Hazardous Edibles

CHAPTER 8. Your Good-Mood Food Master Plan: Choosing the Best Foods for You

CHAPTER 9. Good-Mood Menus: Recipes and Ideas for Everyday Eating

CHAPTER 10. Your Master Supplement Plan: Putting Your Mood Repair Program Together

STEP 4 Getting Help with Special Mood Repair Projects

CHAPTER 11. Moods and Meds: When Antidepressant Nutrients Can Do a Better Job

CHAPTER 12. Sleep and Your Moods: Getting the Kind of Rest You Really Need

CHAPTER 13. Nutritional Rehab: The Missing Key to a Successful Recovery from Addiction

The Mood Cure Tool Kits

RESOURCE TOOL KIT Finding Practitioners, Testing, Supplements, Special Foods, Products, and Services

THYROID TOOL KIT Testing and Rebalancing

ADRENAL TOOL KIT Testing and Rebalancing

SEX HORMONE TOOL KIT Testing and Rebalancing

FOOD CRAVING TOOL KIT Are You Addicted to Sweets, Starches, or Fats?

Index

Acknowledgments

Author’s Note

Notes

Other Works

Copyright

About the Publisher

Foreword

We certainly need a Mood Cure in the United States, but do you need one in the United Kingdom? Let’s compare the emotional facts of life in the U.S. with those in the U.K. They’re similar, but there are some interesting differences.

U.S. rates of depression and anxiety have tripled in the past ten years, with more than one in five adults now affected. The use of antidepressants is increasing so rapidly among both adults and children that Prozac (Fluoxetine) has become one of the ten top-selling drugs in the country.

How does the mood climate in the U.K. compare? According to the World Health Organization, depression is the second most common disability, after heart disease, throughout Europe, including the U.K., just as it is in the U.S. Within the U.K. itself, more than one in six adults were found to be either depressed, anxious, or both, in a large government survey published in 2001. As a result, Britons are also using antidepressants routinely, but not at quite the U.S. rate. In 2000, Fluoxetine became the seventeenth largest selling drug in the country and Efexor the eighteenth.

What accounts for the British having a serious, but somewhat less alarming, incidence of mood malaise than we have in the U.S.? There are three major factors at work here: food quality, exercise frequency, and access to bright sunlight. The food quality in the U.K. is slightly superior to that in the U.S., with more fresh food and less packaged food eaten, though that quality is steadily declining as it follows U.S. trends. On the other hand, British weather is much worse and Britons are almost as sedentary as Americans. This means that the dietary advantage that you in Britain still have is partly counterbalanced by lack of sunlight and lack of exercise, so you must vigilantly safe-guard it.

The Mood Cure is intended to help you discover mood-healthy foods and avoid mood-toxic foods by learning from our Yankee mistakes. For example, as you read about the low-fat experiment that failed in the U.S., you can consider enjoying butter on your potatoes once again.

This book will also recommend some wonderfully helpful nutrient supplements. Take Vitamin D, for example. It can be a powerful mood enhancer and is especially critical for you in the U.K. because you don’t get enough sunlight to stimulate its natural production. In 2002 the results of a study on the use of supplements made headlines all over the U.K. In it two groups of prisoners in a maximum-security prison were given identical meals three times a day. One group was given vitamins, minerals and essential fats as supplements, including 800 IU’s of Vitamin D, the Sunshine Vitamin. The other group was given dummy capsules. Those given the supplements committed 40% fewer violent crimes than those who were not.

Our experience at the U.S. clinic that I run is similar to that of the clinicians who administered the U.K. prison study: we have observed that, even when people adopt a relatively nutritious diet (most Americans subsist on diets inferior to the prison diet in the U.K. study!), it’s often not enough to reverse the deeper nutrient deficiencies that can trigger feelings like irritability, depression, anxiety and stress. The use of therapeutic dietary supplements, for a few months, is usually critical for the effective relief of these kinds of mood problems.

If you decide that you’d like professional help in your mood repair project, you’re in the right country. Fortunately, as you’ll see in The Mood Cure’s Resource Section pages 289–348, Britain is rich in practitioners trained to use specific supplements and dietary strategies to eliminate mood problems. Antony Haynes, whose busy London Nutrition Clinic is regularly featured in the national media, Patrick Holford, author and founder of The Institute for Optimum Nutrition, and Amanda Geary, author and head of The Food and Mood Project are three of the leading figures in this field, but there are many other holistic nutritionists throughout the U.K. Many are members of the British Association of Nutritional Therapists, whose contact information you’ll find on page 290.

Unfortunately, the British public’s access to many mood-saving nutrient supplements is threatened in the European Union by two international directives in particular, operating under the umbrella of CODEX. These are the Food Supplement Directive and the Traditional Medicines Directive. Should these be passed as law, nutrients such as 5-HTP and herbs such as Saint-Johns wort would be under threat. These two supplements feed and stimulate the area of the brain that produces serotonin, our most important natural anti-depressant. As I explain in Chapter 3 the use of these two specific nutrients can be essential for those of you experiencing depression or anxiety and who are looking for an alternative to drugs like Fluoxetine.

I wish you all the best in your personal and collective attempts to retain your access to mood and health-vital supplements. I include, in the Resource Section, specific U.K. sources for the supplements I recommend in The Mood Cure. However I also refer to many resources in the U.S., so that you can be guaranteed of your Mood Cure no matter what local restrictions you may encounter.

Step 1 Gaining a New Perspective on Your Moods

CHAPTER 1 Are Your Emotions True or False?

If you’re often feeling depressed, anxious, or stressed, you’re not alone. We’re in a bad-mood epidemic, a hundred times more likely to have significant mood problems than people born a hundred years ago.¹ And these problems are on the rise. Adult rates of depression and anxiety have tripled since 1990,²,³ and over 80 percent of those who consult medical doctors today complain of excessive stress.⁴ Even our children are in trouble, with at least one in ten suffering from significant mood disorders.⁵ Our mood problems are increasing so fast that, by 2020, they will outrank AIDS, accidents, and violence as the primary causes of early death and disability.⁶

It’s clear that our moods are deteriorating at unprecedented rates. What isn’t so clear is why. What is this tidal wave of emotional malaise all about? Are our lives so much more unhappy than they were a hundred years ago, or even ten years ago? It’s true that we’re facing some unprecedented adversity in the twenty-first century. But even if it is the high pressure, or the absence of family support, or the terrorist threat, for example, why are we now so unresponsive to traditionally reliable remedies like long vacations, psychotherapy, and spiritual counsel? Why are we forced to turn more and more to medication for solace?

In this book, I’m proposing that much of our increasing emotional distress stems from easily correctable malfunctions in our brain and body chemistry—malfunctions that are primarily the result of critical, unmet nutritional needs. More important, I am proposing a complete yet easy-to-implement nutritional repair plan that can actually start to eliminate what I call our “false moods” in twenty-four hours.

TRUE EMOTIONS VS. FALSE MOODS

Some negative feelings are unavoidable and even beneficial. They’re what I call “true emotions.” These true, genuine responses to the real difficulties we encounter in life can be hard to take. They can even be unbearable at times, depending on the kinds of ordeals we face. But they can also be vitally important. True grief moves us through our losses, true fear warns us of danger, true anger can defend us from abuse, and true shame can teach us to grow and change. These true emotions typically pass, or diminish naturally, and even when they get repressed or misdirected, they can usually be relieved through counseling. But when we suffer for no justifiable reason; when the pain of a broken heart doesn’t mend like a broken bone; when rest, psychotherapy, prayer, and meditation can make little impact—then we must suspect the emotional impostor, the meaningless biochemical error—the “false mood.”

Figuring out the difference between false moods and true emotions is the first step in your Mood Cure. Once you’ve mastered that, you can move on to eliminate the fraudulent feelings, of depression, anxiety, sadness, and irritability, that are interfering with your natural capacity to enjoy life.

Learning to Spot a False Mood

When your boss cancels a long-scheduled vacation, you may get justifiably angry, and the next day you won’t have any trouble remembering what triggered your anger. At other times, you just seem to “snap” when your child forgets to take out the garbage. Later you say, “I don’t know what got into me.” The first case is a genuine emotion, the second is a definite counterfeit.

Thinking of a loved one who has died may make you teary, but if every sad or sentimental TV commercial brings you to tears, you’re in the grip of false pain.

PMS is notorious for its bad moods. If you’re reasonably even-tempered the rest of the month, but become teary and nasty before your period, you’re experiencing a clear-cut case of hormonally disrupted emotional balance—a false mood.

We all make mistakes and beat ourselves up from time to time. But if you are finding fault with your behavior or appearance almost every day, it’s likely that false feelings of low self-esteem are responsible.

You shouldn’t have to live with these kinds of distorted moods on a regular basis. It’s like having an engine that sputters, preventing you from having a smooth emotional ride. When your brain’s emotional equipment needs a tune-up, you get clues: you don’t sleep well, you worry too much, you start feeling overwhelmed, you lose your enthusiasm or your ability to concentrate. You might also start depending on chocolate, wine, or marijuana to get some relief. If you experience these kinds of symptoms frequently, you may have just come to accept them, assuming them simply to be unfortunate features of your basic personality. But chances are you’re wrong. Now you have an opportunity to discover your true emotional nature.

The Primary Cause of Your False Moods

Your brain is responsible for most of your feelings, both true and false. In concert with some surprisingly brainlike areas of your heart and gut, it transmits your feelings through four highly specialized and potent kinds of mood molecules. If it has plenty of all four, it keeps you as happy as you can possibly be, given your particular life circumstances. But if your brain runs low on these mood transmitters—whether because of a minor genetic miscue, because it’s used them up coping with too much stress, or because you aren’t eating the specific foods it needs—it stops producing normal emotions on a consistent basis. Instead, it starts hitting false emotional notes, like a piano out of tune.

After more than thirty years of intensive, worldwide investigation, most of the false moods and their causes have been identified by one of the fastest-growing fields of science—neuroscience, the field that studies the workings and effects of the brain. Drug companies have been using this information to create products that can give our emotional equipment a quick charge. But that’s not the same thing as a real repair job. Fortunately, the emotional tune-up that we need so badly now is readily available. In fact, the repair tools we need for this crucial effort are shockingly simple. They’re specific foods and nutrient supplements that are so exactly what the brain needs that they can begin to correct emotional malfunctions in just twenty-four hours.

HOW I DISCOVERED THE MOOD CURE

I am the director of a clinic that’s been doing nutritional mood repair for over fifteen years, but I’ve actually been a professional dealing with emotional disorders and mood problems since 1975. Early in my career I worked in residential psychiatric settings; later I worked with individuals and families, led intensive therapy groups and workshops, and ran treatment programs for adults and adolescents with addictions and eating disorders. Now I run my own clinic, Recovery Systems, in Mill Valley, California, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.

In 1980, as director of my first counseling program, I began to suspect that poor nutrition was playing a role in the cases that did not respond to our intensive programs of psychotherapy and spiritual support. Our less successful clients were often “emotional eaters.” They either consumed lots of cookies, ice cream, chips, and fast food or skipped meals altogether and drank lots of coffee and caffeinated sodas. I started hiring nutritionists to explore the possibility of a food-mood connection, and we soon realized that we were on the brink of a powerful breakthrough. Clients who could be persuaded to eat plenty of protein and fresh vegetables three times a day and avoid caffeine, sweets, and refined starches, like white bread and pasta, felt much better emotionally (as well as physically). When they ate well, even those who had major psychological work to do were able to make steady advances in counseling with much less anguish and backsliding. However, the clients who did not make the nutritional changes—despite new communication skills, exercise, long vacations, and moderate work hours—did not do nearly as well.

I was encouraged by these results, but I also had to admit that it took the clients who were able to stick with it about ten weeks to fully withdraw from their bad-mood junk foods. For most of them, this was ten weeks of food cravings, fatigue, headaches, and only very slowly diminishing mood swings. More important, too many of our clients just couldn’t wait it out and went back to their old junk foods and debilitating moods.

We needed something more.

THE AMAZING AMINOS

Around this time, in the mid-1980s, I read about the work of neuroscientist Kenneth Blum, Ph.D., at the University of North Texas. A prolific researcher, Dr. Blum was studying the brain chemistry of alcoholics and drug addicts. In the course of this work, he’d identified a few genes that could hardwire the brain to underproduce its most potent “feel good” brain chemicals and instead produce the “feel bad” mood chemistry that made his subjects so vulnerable to addiction. His research explained the perplexing feelings of anxiety, anger, and depression, the chronic insomnia, and the lack of a sense of well-being that plagued so many addicts even in recovery. He called it the “reward deficiency syndrome.” This finding was fascinating all by itself, but Dr. Blum made another, even more remarkable discovery. He found that he could override the bad-mood genes by giving his research subjects a few supplemental nutrients. These brain foods, called amino acids, are concentrates of common proteins found in food. They were able to jump-start the addicts’ genetically misprogrammed brain chemistry and radically improve their moods. The bottom line: The addicts who took the amino acids were able to stay away from drugs and alcohol. Those who took no aminos had four times higher relapse rates!⁷

I was very excited after reviewing Dr. Blum’s studies. I had a sense that the amino acids were the missing ingredients in my fledgling nutritional therapy program. Since these supplements were identical to nutrients found in food and, unlike drugs, not foreign to the human body, my nutritionists and I felt comfortable recommending them. It was certainly worth a try.

COMBINING NUTRITHERAPY WITH PSYCHOTHERAPY

Early on, I decided to give the aminos to three women struggling with bulimia, an eating disorder that is normally very difficult to treat. When they came to our clinic, all of them had been working hard in psychotherapy for some time with no improvement. Like most bulimics, they were depressed, obsessive, and self-critical. All were professionally well established, though, and all were married. One was a happily married 26-year-old, one was 35 and very unhappily married, and the third, at 48, needed marital help, but she and her husband were both determined to work things out.

In addition to taking the aminos, these women committed themselves to following our standard program of protein-and-vegetable-rich, reduced-carbohydrate foods and psychotherapy. I was astonished at how the aminos accelerated each client’s progress. Mood improvements that would normally have taken months to achieve began for these women in days. In two weeks on the aminos, all three women had freed themselves of their obsessions with food and most of their associated mood problems. And it kept getting better. After a few months on aminos, the happily married woman, having met all of her goals, graduated from therapy free of both bulimia and mood swings. The unhappily married woman began to do deep and productive therapy after years of being too weakened by her bulimia to use psychotherapy constructively. After her nutritional overhaul, she was able to work through her fears, leave her husband, and establish a happy life for herself. The third woman no longer felt much need for individual therapy (she’d been at it for years) but started couples therapy with good results. All three women were still making excellent progress six months later and starting to go off their aminos. Their psychotherapist was dumbfounded, and so were we.

More than fifteen years and several thousand clients later, the amino acids are still our most effective weapons for fighting false moods. We have consistently found that they not only improve mood almost instantly, but speed up psychotherapy as well. A well-nourished person who has had a brain chemistry tune-up with amino acids gets beyond psychological and emotional obstacles faster, deeper, and more successfully. Not only have our brain-tuned clients had quicker access to critical memories, but they’ve coped better with those memories, no longer paralyzed by biochemically exaggerated feelings of fear, guilt, or pain.

The effects of nutritionally stabilized moods on our clients’ relationships have also been extraordinary. I’ll never forget the first family that we treated with both psychotherapy and nutritherapy. A father and mother came to see us, concerned about their 14-year-old son, who was having attention problems and depression plus headache pain so severe that it often kept him at home from school. It soon became clear that Dad had some serious problems, too. He was obsessively controlling and verbally abusive. Though they had received family counseling many times in the past, nothing had ever improved. When it became clear, after a few sessions, that Dad was actually deeply devoted to his family but simply unable to control his critical, angry feelings, I suggested that he meet with the same staff nutritionist who was seeing his son. He agreed because he could see that his son’s headaches were responding to dietary changes and that his mood and ability to concentrate were improving on the amino acids. When Dad began taking amino acids himself, the change was immediate and powerful: his obsessive, explosive behavior evaporated entirely, much to the amazement and relief of his wife and son. Family therapy proceeded very constructively, since all family members were finally able to listen and respond to one another free of their false moods. Interestingly, Dad also needed some private psychotherapy to adjust to his new emotional style, especially in the business world, where his abrasive personality had become his trademark. In 1995, our staff began suggesting that our clients try potentially helpful aminos right in the office, during their initial assessments. As a result, we’ve actually been present as the amino acids have taken effect, typically within fifteen minutes. We’ve watched and cheered as hundreds of clients shed their false feelings of tension, apathy, irritability, and emotional pain right before our eyes. The word that our clients always use to describe this experience is “amazing.” What’s more, our clients typically need to take the aminos for only three to twelve months. After that, their mood chemistry repairs are usually complete. They must, however, continue eating plenty of protein, vegetables, and other fresh whole foods and taking their basic vitamin, mineral, and fatty acid supplements.

HOW DO THE AMINOS ELIMINATE FALSE MOODS AND REVIVE TRUE EMOTION?

This is the secret: There are twenty-two different kinds of amino acids in high-protein foods like chicken, fish, beef, eggs, and cheese. You may have heard them referred to as the building blocks of protein. Each amino has its own name and unique duties to perform, but only a few very special aminos can serve as fuels for the brain’s four mood engines. Just five or six of these amino acids, taken as supplements, can effectively reverse all four of the brain deficiencies that cause false moods.

Each of the four mood engines in your brain needs a different amino acid fuel. The lower your access to amino fuel, the more false mood symptoms you can develop. The question is how much “gas” do you have in each of your engines? How do you know when you’ve run too low? How can you fill ’em up? Which amino brain fuels do you need? Where can you get them? How long will it take? You’ll soon learn what the best brain foods are for you and how to find and use the amino acid supplements that will jump-start all of your emotional engines and keep them fired up.

The four emotion generators in your brain are called “neurotransmitters.” Some of their specific names will probably be familiar to you: serotonin, catecholamines, GABA, and endorphin. Each of these four neurotransmitters has a distinctly different effect on your mood depending largely on the availability of its particular amino acid fuel.

A well-stocked brain produces true emotions: depending on your life circumstances, you’ll generally feel emotionally positive if your key neurotransmitter levels are high.

A poorly stocked brain produces false moods: If you drop too low in any of the key neurotransmitters, you’ll tend to develop a specific set of defective moods as a result.

Your Brain’s True and False Emotional Chemistry

If you’re high in serotonin—you’re positive, confident, flexible, and easygoing.

If you’re sinking in serotonin—you’ll tend to become negative, obsessive, worried, irritable, and sleepless.

If you’re high in catecholamines—you’re energized, upbeat, and alert.

If your catecholamines have crashed—you can sink into a flat, lethargic funk.

If you’re high in GABA—you’re relaxed and stress-free.

If there’s a gap in your GABA—you’ll be wired, stressed, and overwhelmed.

If you’re high in endorphins—you’re full of cozy feelings of comfort, pleasure, and even euphoria at times.

If you’re near the end of your endorphins—you may be crying during commercials and overly sensitive to hurt.

Once any of the false moods evolve, their standard symptoms may come and go, become more or less intense, or remain constant. Whatever the case, the appropriate amino acid fuels, taken as supplements, can reliably, safely, and quickly dispel every vestige of all four false mood types by raising the levels of all four vital neurotransmitters.

Fortunately, every amino acid you’ll need can be easily found at your neighborhood health food store or drugstore or by phone or on-line.

WHY ARE YOUR MOOD ENGINES RUNNING ON EMPTY?

Did You Inherit False Moods? Some of us tolerate the same adverse circumstances with much more serenity than others. My mother endured fifty years of marital stress, polio, cancer, heart disease, gallbladder disease, thyroid disease, and more with relish, grit, high comedy, courage, and selflessness. She was rarely depressed, irritable, or fearful. What was her secret? She had two—she’d inherited her own mother’s nicely balanced brain chemistry, and she always ate lots of the protein that maintained it.

Did you inherit good-mood genes? Many of us didn’t. Over the years, numerous clients have brought in parents, siblings, and children with false mood symptoms very similar to their own. A brief tune-up with amino acids and a dietary “adjustment” was often all that was required to set them right. These experiences taught me how often false moods run in families.

Did you think that your father was hard to be around on purpose or that your mother cried at any upset because she was so weak? These are the kinds of questions that I have learned to ask when exploring the types of negative moods that run in families. My clients have often found the answers to be unexpectedly liberating: Although Anna hated to compare her irritability with her father’s rages, when she realized that they shared a common brain chemistry deficiency, she ended up having new compassion for him and less of a hurtful sense that his abusiveness had been personal to her.

We all know families in which everyone is laid-back and others where no one can slow down; outgoing, cheery families and shy, quiet families; worried, perfectionistic, families and sloppy, low-energy families. Ask yourself as you go through this book, “Do my family members share any of my mood traits?” “Are we the same false mood type?” But you won’t need to worry about being a stick-in-the-mood. Although we used to think that genetic traits were intractable, when it comes to moods, even genetic programming can be reprogrammed remarkably easily by amino acids and other nutrients.

Is It Your Diet? Regardless of your genes, but especially if your mood-programing genes are inefficient, good nutrition is essential. It’s no coincidence that our grandparents’ generation had a more cheerful disposition than ours, although they certainly had their share of wars, depressions, diseases, and other hardships to deal with. The fact is that their diets were better. They were lucky enough to grow up before the junk food invasion and before low-calorie dieting had become a way of life. They ate “three square-meals” a day, including plenty of protein-rich foods like beef, chicken, fish, eggs, and cheese. Why are these particular foods so important? Because our four neurotransmitters can be made only out of the amino acids found in high-protein foods.

But protein is not all we need. We also need a good supply of vitamins and minerals to make this magic happen. They’re found in fresh fruits and vegetables, which your grandparents ate in abundance but which are lacking in the standard American and British diet.

And there’s something else that you may be shocked to learn. If we don’t eat enough of the right kinds of fats, we will not be able to utilize these natural mood-boosting fuels. Our grandparents ate gobs of the fats we’re no longer eating, like butter, and they had much less heart disease, cancer, and depression than we have. (More on this intriguing story in chapter 8.)

Then there’s the junk food factor. Commercial food processing strips food of the vital nutrients needed to make and operate your brain’s neurotransmitters. These bad-mood foods—including white bread and pasta, sugar-laden cereals and snacks, fried and hydrogenated fats, caffeine, and even the artificial sweeteners in diet soda—can actually interfere with your brain’s efforts to create good moods. You can’t pour sugar or any of these other stressful substances into your mood tanks and expect a smooth emotional ride.

Is It Your Lifestyle? Our modern lifestyle must share some of the blame for our epidemic of mood imbalance. Too much stress—particularly of the unique twenty-first-century variety—can deplete the brain of its “feel good” neurotransmitters, literally wearing it out. A good night’s sleep, adequate relaxation, and appropriate “down time” are critical to restoring optimal levels of good-mood chemicals, but these simple restorative remedies are getting lost in our “go till you drop” culture.

Is It Your Hormones? At our clinic, we’ve continued to learn new ways to improve false moods as we’ve bumped into new mood problems that have stumped us. Our biggest lessons, beyond how to fuel the brain’s four emotion-generating neurotransmitters, have been the lessons we’ve learned about hormones. Whether it’s the two thyroid hormones, the thirty-plus adrenal hormones, or the three sex hormones—estrogen, testosterone, and progesterone—their effects on your mood can be powerful. Without enough of all these hormones operating in concert, the neurotransmitters can be stymied. Liberating your brain’s emotional chemistry may require you to launch into a hormone-balancing campaign to eliminate whatever may be holding up the mood show. But don’t be intimidated; I’ll show you how.

WILL THE MOOD CURE REALLY WORK FOR YOU?

On November 13, 2000, I made a presentation to a scientific conference held in San Francisco on mood and the brain.⁸ My staff and I had been asked to review the files of one hundred randomly selected clients who had come to our clinic with significant mood problems. Of the one hundred, ninety-eight had reported major improvements in mood within two weeks, most within twenty-four to forty-eight hours, using the amino acids, the basic nutrient supplements, and the good-mood foods that you’ll be reading about in this book. Twelve weeks later, eighty-three had sustained or exceeded those improvements. The depression, anxiety, oversensitivity, and stress that had brought them to us in the first place had disappeared.

You can expect to experience the same kind of relief from your own false moods, just as quickly. After all, you’ll be using the same techniques. As you’ve seen, many of the nutritional strategies I’ve discovered were developed while I was directing treatment programs for people with addictions and eating disorders. As a result, they’ve been honed on some very serious false moods. If the Mood Cure worked for them, it’s very likely to work for you.

But the Mood Cure is not for everyone. I would love to be able to say that at our clinic we’ve learned how to eliminate all false mood problems, but I can’t. We do not specialize in, and have very little experience with, severe false mood states such as autism, psychosis, bipolar disorder, violent rage, or paranoia—the biochemical imbalances commonly referred to as mental illnesses. Other clinicians have had experience treating these conditions with natural therapies, sometimes very successfully. Suggestions on finding practitioners, clinics, books, and Web sites that can advise you on how to deal naturally with mood disturbances that The Mood Cure does not address can be found in the “Resource Tool Kit,” page 289. If you have such problems, please do not use the supplements suggested in this book without expert guidance. They could actually make your particular biochemical imbalances worse.

MOVING INTO YOUR OWN MOOD CURE

The first step in your Mood Cure, like the first step in any successful repair job, is to identify what needs fixing. In the next chapter, you can start getting down to particulars by filling out the Four-Part Mood-Type Questionnaire. After you’ve completed this false mood profiling, you can move on to the specific repair chapters and the excitement and relief of experiencing your own personal Mood Cure.

Once you’ve actually shed your false moods for good, you’ll be able to use psychotherapy for any remaining true emotional problems stemming from your early life or from more current difficulties. You’ll certainly be much better equipped to do effective work if you do decide to go into counseling. You’ll also find it much easier to pray and meditate and to exercise, rest, and relax. With this full array of emotional, spiritual, and physical resources available to you, you’ll be able to face whatever lies ahead with strength, serenity, and a sense of humor.

CHAPTER 2 Identifying Your False Moods
The Four-Part Mood-Type Questionnaire

There’s a large chart mounted on the wall of our clinic that lists all the symptoms of the four false mood types. As soon as our clients walk through the door, their eyes are drawn and then glued to this chart. They’re fascinated by the four different groups of symptoms, exclaiming, “Yeah, that type is me, but that one isn’t,” or, “Wow! I have symptoms of more than one type,” or, “What does it mean if I have all the symptoms on the whole chart?” This deceptively simple chart was fifteen years in the making and is based on the thousands of client interviews and hundreds of research papers that enabled us to gradually identify each of the symptoms of the four false mood types. The questionnaire that you are about to fill out was adapted from this chart.

To identify your own false mood symptoms, start by circling the number next to any of the symptoms on the questionnaire that apply to you. Don’t minimize! Really think about it. If you’re in doubt about whether a certain symptom applies to you, ask someone honest who knows you really well. And don’t be frightened if you have most, or even all, of the mood symptoms on the entire questionnaire. Many of our clients do. It won’t be a problem. You’ll address them all at the same time, using a combination of amino acids and other nutrients.

When you’ve gone through all four parts of the questionnaire, go back and score each part to see which false mood type (or types) you seem to fit.

THE FOUR-PART MOOD-TYPE QUESTIONNAIRE

Circle the number next to each symptom that you identify with. Total your score in each section and compare it to the cut-off score. If your score is over the cut-off, or if you have only a few of the symptoms described in a section but they bother you (or those close to you) on a regular basis, turn to the chapter indicated.

Part I. Are You Under a Dark Cloud?

3 Do you have a tendency to be negative, to see the glass as half-empty rather than half-full? Do you have dark, pessimistic thoughts?

3 Are you often worried and anxious?

3 Do you have feelings of low self-esteem and lack confidence? Do you easily get to feeling self-critical and guilty?

3 Do you have obsessive, repetitive, angry, or useless thoughts that you just can’t turn off—for instance, when you’re trying to get to sleep?

3 Does your behavior often get a bit, or a lot, obsessive? Is it hard for you to make transitions, to be flexible? Are you a perfectionist, or a control freak? A computer, TV, or work addict?

3 Do you really dislike the dark weather or have a clear-cut fall/winter depression (SAD)?

2 Are you apt to be irritable, impatient, edgy, or angry?

3 Do you tend to be shy or fearful? Do you get nervous or panicky about heights, flying, enclosed spaces, public performance, spiders, snakes, bridges, crowds, leaving the house, or anything else?

2 Have you had anxiety attacks or panic attacks (your heart races, it’s hard to breathe)?

2 Do you get PMS or menopausal moodiness (tears, anger, depression)?

3 Do you hate hot weather?

2 Are you a night owl, or do you often find it hard to get to sleep even through you want to?

2 Do you wake up in the night, have restless or light sleep, or wake up too early in the morning?

3 Do you routinely like to have sweet or starchy snacks, wine, or marijuana in the afternoons, evenings, or in the middle of the night (but not earlier in the day)?

2 Do you find relief from any of the above symptoms through exercise?

3 Have you had fibromyalgia (unexplained muscle pain) or TMJ (pain, tension, and grinding associated with your jaw)?

2 Have you had suicidal thoughts or plans?

Total __________ If your score is more than 12 in part 1, turn to chapter 3, page 25.

Part 2. Are You Suffering from the Blahs?

3 Do you often feel depressed—the flat, bored, apathetic kind?

2 Are you low on physical or mental energy? Do you feel tired a lot, have to push yourself to exercise?

2 Is your drive, enthusiasm, and motivation quota on the low side?

3 Do you have difficulty focusing or concentrating?

3 Do you need a lot of sleep? Are you slow to wake up in the morning?

3 Are you easily chilled? Do you have cold hands or feet?

2 Do you tend to put on weight too easily?

3 Do you feel the need to get more alert and motivated by consuming a lot of coffee or other “uppers” like sugar, diet soda, ephedra, or cocaine?

Total __________ If your score is more than 6 in part 2, turn to chapter 4, page 53.

Part 3. Is Stress Your Problem?

3 Do you often feel overworked, pressured, or deadlined?

1 Do you have trouble relaxing or loosening up?

1 Does your body tend to be stiff, uptight, tense?

2 Are you easily upset, frustrated, or snappy under stress?

3 Do you often feel overwhelmed or as though you just can’t get it all done?

2 Do you feel weak or shaky at times?

3 Are you sensitive to bright light, noise, or chemical fumes? Do you need to wear dark glasses a lot?

3 Do you feel significantly worse if you skip meals or go too long without eating?

2 Do you use tobacco, alcohol, food, or drugs to relax and calm down?

Total__________ If your score is more than 8 in part 3, turn to chapter 5, page 77.

Part 4. Are you Too Sensitive to Life’s Pain?

3 Do you consider yourself or do others consider you to be very sensitive? Does emotional pain or perhaps physical pain really get to you?

2 Do you tear up or cry easily—for instance, even during TV commercials?

2 Do you tend to avoid dealing with painful issues?

3 Do you find it hard to get over losses or get through grieving?

2 Have you been through a great deal of physical or emotional pain?

3 Do you crave pleasure, comfort, reward, enjoyment, or numbing from treats like chocolate, bread, wine, romance novels, marijuana, tobacco, or lattes?

Total _________ If your score is more than 6 in part 4, turn to chapter 6, page 100.

True-Life Stories of the Four False Mood Types

Cara had a typical case of the “dark clouds.” She’d been low in confidence all her life. She was a doer, though—her underwear drawer was a work of art, and her boss adored her perfect projects and reports (not that she was ever satisfied herself). She worried a lot and woke up in the night feeling panicky at times. She had recently started to feel really depressed and had tried an antidepressant but hadn’t liked its side-effects, though it had lifted her mood a bit. She’d tried therapy, but hadn’t had much to talk about—she’d come from a close, warm family, and her adult life had gone fairly well. She was out of luck till she came to our clinic and completed her mood profile, which showed that she had almost every symptom in part 1! She left with some targeted brain repair supplements and the next day called to report the best night’s sleep and the best morning mood she’d had in years.

Emma was too lethargic to clean up her underwear drawer. She had “the blahs,” the kind of low-energy depression that too often made her unmotivated, unexcited, and unfocused. She was sick of being an emotional flatliner, but she had no idea what was wrong or what to do about it. We did, though. We could see that she needed our most brain-stimulating nutrient supplements. Fifteen minutes after she took them, we could see that she was feeling more like the person she was meant to be: humorous, sharp, and more alert. This became a permanent state of being for her after a few months of nutritional brain repair work and a revitalization of her thyroid function.

Rob had plenty of drive and energy, but he was a real “stress” type. Years of sixty-to-eighty-hour workweeks, too much coffee and fast food, and too many skipped meals, plus a drawn-out child custody battle, had turned him into a tense, wired, and tired mess. He was clearly sinking into adrenal burnout. On his new antistress supplements and regular meals, he was able to cut out his coffee without a backward glance, cut back his work hours, and begin to feel like a new man.

Sam was “too sensitive.” He teared up whenever he talked about anything painful. He avoided hashing out problems with his wife because it was just too uncomfortable for him. Instead, he tuned out with a beer or a bowl of ice cream in front of the TV. Things started to change when we recommended some supplements that allowed him to tolerate pain more easily and enjoy life a lot more (without either the beer or the ice cream). Then, when he was no longer overly sensitive, we recommended couples therapy, which he was then able to tolerate and even enjoy.

HOW TO USE THE MOOD CURE

Now that you’ve completed and tallied the questionnaire, you’ve taken the first step in your Mood Cure: you know which false mood type (or types) you are. Having this crucial information will allow you to move on to step two, “Eliminating the Four Most Common Mood Imbalances.” There you will discover what is causing you to have a particular set of false moods and what you can do about it. At the bottom of each part of the questionnaire, next to your score, you’ll find the page number of the chapter that will tell you more about your symptoms and all about the solutions to that particular mood type’s problem. For example, if you find yourself checking off symptoms in part 1, “Are You Under a Dark Cloud?” you’ll turn to chapter 3, “Lifting the Dark Cloud.” Each chapter ends with “Action Steps” that summarize all its suggestions, to make them easy to follow.

If you recognize significant symptoms in two, three, or all four parts of the questionnaire, you’ll read each of the corresponding chapters. If your score is under the cut-off number in any part of the questionnaire and the symptoms you do identify with are significant, look over the relevant chapter to explore further.

Next you’ll move on to step three, “Creating Your Nutritherapy Master Plan.” There you’ll learn about the good-mood foods that will become the heart of your diet and about how to avoid the bad-mood foods. I’ll make it easy for you by providing simple and tasty menus and recipes.

Step three also features a master supplement plan that will provide you with several key pieces of your Mood Cure. First, it describes the basic vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients that I want you to make a permanent part of your life. Second, it warns you of anything that might make it unwise for you to take a particular supplement. Finally, it provides a master list of all the special repair supplements recommended in each chapter of the book. You’ll copy this list and check off just the items you’ll be using for your own supplement plan. Then you’ll take your list to the store, get your supplies, start taking your supplements, eat your good-mood foods, and watch your false moods slip away.

As you work through steps two and three of The Mood Cure, you may find that you have other mood-related troubles beyond the big four and a mood-poor diet. Step four, “Getting Help with Special Mood Repair Projects,” provides the answers if you have questions about sleep difficulties, addiction problems, or alternatives to antidepressant medications.

The Mood Cure concludes with five tool kits. The “Resource Tool Kit” will help you locate all the products and services described in the book. The next three tool kits give you the detailed, technical advice you’ll need in order to deal with any hormonal imbalances that may be holding up the mood repair process. Finally, the “Food Craving Tool Kit” will outline effective options if “emotional eating” is a particular problem for you.

When Are You Cured?

You should start feeling cured in the first week as your nutritherapy program begins to take hold. At some point, in a few weeks or months, depending on your unique biochemical needs, your repair process will be complete. You will have corrected the underlying imbalances that had produced your false moods in the first place. After that, you’ll be able to travel on your own true emotional power, so you’ll stop taking the special repair supplements and continue to feel just as good without them. All you’ll need to do to maintain your new sense of well-being and prevent a relapse into false moods after that will be to keep eating lots of good-mood food and taking a few basic nutrient supplements.

I wish you a very smooth and rapid shedding of your false moods and the enjoyment of discovering your true emotional self!

Step 2 Eliminating the Four Most Common Mood Imbalances

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.