Live with Dr.Charryse 🧠 “Improving Your Mood with Food”

Kadrosphere. It is so good to be back. It's been a long time between travel sickness, Thanksgiving. But I'm here. I have tissue nearby just in case we have some, you know, residual come back up. But that being said, I'm glad to be back. I might sound slightly different. Good morning, Gwen. But I'm here. We're back in rhythm. I missed you all dearly, but also don't want to get in front of you and you be like, oh, is she okay? So welcome to live with Dr. Charisse. If this is your first time here, I'm Dr.

Charisse Johnson, the licensed clinical health therapist, mindfulness practitioner, and author. What's up, Buffalo? Come in. Let me know how your week is going. 1 to 10. 1 meaning bad week, 10 meaning it is fabulous. And let me know where you are. I am thankful to be back home here in Charlotte, North Carolina. So let me say what's up to North Carolina, which I often forget to do. How would I rate my week? And I love just this little check in. That's an opportunity. Good morning, Houston. To kind of see where we've been, I would say that my week has been a two.

Started off really rough, but I don't ever let that, you know, make me feel any kind of way because I know that there's a lot of the week left. And that's the good thing about doing a midweek check is it reminds you, where do I want to land? Where do I want? How do I want to finish? Hello, Charleston. For our focus of discussion today, I want to spend some time centered around your mood and food and specifically hellos, Georgia. Looking at how hormones play a role, let me also say this. Whether you're male, female, non binary, however you identify, if you're human, you have hormones.

And it is important, especially for those of you who are listening to this in the moment. During the winter months, during seasons of the year when we're eating, a lot of things that are imbalancing to our hormone. So sometimes we feel like this is a time of year that we're not as happy as we thought we were going to be. We feel like we're moody or energy is down. Some of that might be seasonal affects. Some of that might be that it's darker. There's also a big part of that that comes from the fact that we aren't as intentional about what we're eating.

So we end up eating more sugary or processed foods. Heavy carb, low micronutrients. Those foods are great. I will never tell you not to eat anything. But I will encourage you if you know, you're already in a season where you have mental health challenges, sadness, anxiety, ocd, if you just kind of run low mood as a whole, if you have any type of autoimmune dynamics, thyroid issues, those kind of things. Don't take a day off. Because we are in a situation where we want to eat all the things. And can we be honest?

As we age and mature, we can't eat like we used to. So the things that we could normally get away with, our body doesn't process through those things the same way. Let's take inventory. What is a food that you can say to yourself, honestly, I love this food. I love eating this food. However, I do notice that when I have this food, there might be an emotional reaction or a physical reaction afterwards. So I'll give you a minute. I'm gonna blow my nose. I wish we had a mute button. We don't. Hello, Northern Minnesota.

But I want you to think about that and put that in our chat. A food that, you know, I love this food, but it doesn't always love me. If I have it too much in excess. And then we know it's gonna impact your hormones and which is gonna impact your mood. And so what you eat and how you nourish yourself does matter. I would say for myself, it is chocolate, specifically milk chocolate. I can tend to handle dark chocolate fairly well. You know, it's a much more difficult for me to kind of overdo or overindulge dark chocolate, milk chocolate, or a brownie or chocolate cake or something like that.

I can have it. I will eat it. But I notice that it makes me very teary. Coffee is another one. I love coffee. I have to have it very early in the morning and I need to exercise after it to go ahead and flush it out of my system. Because if I have too much caffeine, it makes me irritable, makes me angsty, because I already have all this neurodivergent energy. And I love what you all are putting in the chat because you see that we're kind of across the board. Could be dairy for some, it could be chicken for some.

I also have a reaction to chicken. I could eat chicken breast for the rest of my life. And it's going to give me high cholesterol because of how my body produces it. Because I am actually not fully African American. I'm part indigenous and Caribbean, and that's more on that land. So my body actually doesn't process chicken as well as Everyone thinks so that's not going to be the staple in my food. But that took me learning that over time. So for today's seven at seven, I want to run through seven dynamics that hormone imbalances can cause.

And then I want to give you a list of foods to encourage you to incorporate to help support your mood through your food, your hormone balance, and your mental well being as a whole. So when we're kind of in a place where our hormones are offline, it can create, number one, cortisol imbalance. So you're in a situation where you're experiencing chronic stress, and as a result of that chronic stress, it can create both anxiety or depression. Let me also say good stress can be chronic stress. So you could be launching something and working through something that is incredible and amazing and you're excited about it, but your body is still responding to the fact that it's overwhelming and that it's overstimulating.

And so as a result of that, you feel either wound up or then you crash. You feel bad, why am I crashing? I feel guilty. I should be thankful. And then you kind of go back and overcompensate again. So really pay attention to what's your chronic stress look like right now. And good stress is still stress if it's not balanced. Number two, estrogen dominance. Estrogen dominance can happen to both genders. This is not a female only conversation. When we are in a state of estrogen dominance in our mental health, we can experience mood swings and sexual dysfunction, whether that dysfunction is that we're struggling in intimacy, or it could be a dynamic of libido, which I'll mention in a few other things.

But estrogen dominance can create that kind of listless, numb feeling inside of us where we feel like we don't have the energy that we'd like and that we feel very moody even if we catch those moods. And then if we're in a place where estrogen dominance is in place, and then we're also eating things that are endocrine disruptors, so they disrupt our endocrine system's ability to manage our hormones. It can really create quite a storm. Number three, adrenal insufficiency. So when you're in a state of adrenal insufficiency, some telltale signs or what you might be feeling are fatigue, weakness, low blood pressure.

And people will often ask, well, what's the best way for me to know if this is what I'm experiencing? Because you might be in a situation where you go, okay, I know I have mild anxiety. I, I know that I struggle from depression, but I'm feeling things that seem like so much more than this. Then I would go to a hormone specialist, not your primary care physician. Your primary care physician can do very general, general surface labs on your hormone levels, but they do not get to the root of the dozens of different hormones that can be often impacting you.

So I would definitely say find a hormone specialist, sometimes a functional medical doctor, and get a full panel. Number four, insulin resistance. This is something that everyone is a little bit more familiar with in terms of it impacting your energy level, mood, overall health. When we're in a state of insulin resistance, essentially we flood our body with so many sugars that your body is like, I can't keep up and I can't pump enough insulin in you fast enough to kind of process all of this. So it becomes resistant to it and it starts to hold on to everything.

And then as a result of holding on to everything, you're going to feel a little shaky. Your cravings for sugar are going to go up. But sugar is also the problem at the same time. So it really puts you in a catch 22 situation. And then you're going to feel your energy change, you're going to feel your mood change, and you're going to feel that your overall health isn't where you want it to be. Number five, low testosterone. Again, can happen in both genders, just shows up differently. So if you have low testosterone, my mouth is like, my brain needs to slow down.

You'll experience fatigue, decreased libido in men, erectile dysfunction, mood changes, and loss of muscle mass. Here's how this can be helpful too. For those of you that are married, and you may notice some of these things in your opposite identifying partner or spouse. And if that's the case, or same identifying partner, spouse could be either one, you can help really look at what are we eating and how can I shift what we're eating so that we're all feeling the way that we want? I know that intimacy is not something that we talk about.

It's probably something I need to do on a live one day. But at the end of the day, intimacy is extremely invaluable, important. And if we are married and have a partner, that sexual connection is also a part of our mental health. O****** include endorphins. And so if that's not there and you're already sad and you're already depressed and you don't feel like being connected, we don't often like to Mention that all of these things are connected. When we don't eat well, we don't feel well, we don't feel well, we don't love well and we don't love well, we don't feel love and we feel distant and isolated and feel like there's not a good connection.

So I'm always an integrated practitioner. I always want you to consider that your mood and your food don't just impact each other, they impact your entire body system and they do impact your relationships and the way that you show up with other people. Number six, your circadian rhythm. So our hormones regulate our sleep. So if what we are eating is off, balanced, imbalanced and we're not being intentional about that, then that's going to be something that we notice. Whether that could be, you can fall asleep, then you have a difficult time staying asleep, or you may notice that you have a difficult time going to sleep.

Or insomnia, typically those are signs, unless you're just someone that has chronic insomnia, that some level of hormone in your body is off. Insomnia, lack of sleep absolutely impacts our mood. We are going to be more irritable, we're going to have less energy. Then as a result of not getting as much sleep, our appetite is also going to change. And the number seven feedback loops, hormones impact our mental health and our mental health impacts our hormones. They constantly talk to each other. There's this bi directional aspect some of you have heard me talk about, between your gut, where we produce 95% of our serotonin, which is our primary mood neurotransmitter, and how that feedback loop talks to the brain and tells us what we're capable of and what we're not capable of and vice versa.

So it is genuinely not possible to have great mental health and not pay attention to how we are feeding ourselves and how we are nourishing ourselves. Before I go into the foods that can help balance your hormones, I want you to tell me what's your biggest challenge to how to get a balanced diet? And diet meaning just what you feed yourself, what are you noticing? Are some of your challenges not to perfection, but to making sure that you're being intentional and that you are adequately getting enough variety and nutrients.

What are some challenges that you have? Or if you're in a place that you're like, I don't have any challenges, I'm actually doing really great here, Then what is something that you do that you find beneficial and very helpful to you? So I'm going to pause for a moment and just let a few responses begin to show up. So really just no shame, just to share around what you're seeing and how you're nourishing self. What are your challenges or what do you feel like? Here's what I finally figured out and I'm doing well.

I would say even in my own life, something that I am doing so much better at planning for when I'm outside of the house, whether that's I'm going to be gone for a couple of hours or if I'm traveling, I am much more intentional about what time is it going to be while I'm gone, what area am I going to be in and making sure that I choose restaurants or coffee shops that have something that I need because that used to be a big issue is I would just go out and be with people. It would be at a time that I needed adequate protein and other foods and that wasn't available.

So I ended up getting things that were fine, but it was more so filling my belly instead of nourishing my body and then I would crash afterwards. I see a lot of individuals just saying that one of the most challenging dynamics is work sometimes having accessibility to get to the foods that you need a lot of when you don't prep. Yes, yes, yes. I have learned more than a million times that the weeks that I do not prep are not as beneficial. They're not because I'm off, my energy's off, my mood is off, fatigue is higher, I'm more anxious.

I want to also kind of add this tip in and then I'll get to the foods. If you find that, you know, I don't see how I'm going to be able to prep this week or I'm not feeling well and I'm coming off, I'm not feeling well, or somebody else in my house is not feeling well. Look for places where you also know that you can get whole prepared food to get you started for a couple of days. So maybe that means you go to a Trader Joe's, a Whole Foods, a Sprouts, a Lowe's, sometimes even your favorite restaurant may make really great this or really great that.

Buy enough to get you through a few days until you can work yourself into the motivation of making sure that you have what you need. But I want you to be intentional and realize it's not about what you look like, it's not about your body. It is also about how you are neurobiologically feeling. And what we eat impacts our mood. So Hormone Balancing Foods 4 Foods that Help balance cortisol. You can look up others. This is not, of course, an exhaustive list. This is just the top four in the categories that I've chosen.

So hormone balancing foods in terms of cortisol are banana, avocado, fatty fish, and spinach. Again, if you know that you're constantly stressed and you feel like you're overproducing cortisol because you're feeling angsty and you know you maintain a lot of stress, then look up a larger list of those foods. Those are for the top primary estrogen. Again, we all have it. It needs to be balanced within each of us. Carrots, cruciferous vegetables, ground flax, and green tea. Try to make sure that your green tea is as authentic as possible, not necessarily mixed with something that's artificial.

And then when it comes to ground flax, it's actually more helpful, more beneficial to get whole flax and then use a coffee grinder to ground the flax and then have it. I have an extra coffee grinder that I just use for flax. Ground flax is something that you can easily put in a smoothie in yogurt over berries. One of my favorite snacks is frozen raspberries with cashew butter sprinkled with ground flax. I'm telling you, it is a flavor explosion of like cold and creamy in your mouth. Progesterone.

Top four foods here would be citrus eggs, Brazil nuts and lentils. And then melatonin, which helps with your circadian rhythm and sleep. Sleep would be pistachios. Sardines. I know everyone doesn't like sardines, so look on the list for other things. But it's one of the top ones. I do love sardines. I grew up with them. I just do especially spicy ones. Goji berries and mushrooms. Okay. You may want to go back and listen to these and kind of pull out what's helpful for you. I love that we're now in a situation here on the app that you can move back and forth and start it and stop, stop it at the places that are helpful for you.

All that being said, how I want you to move this from thought to action is to really focus yourself on what you need, how you're nourishing yourself. If you're noticing that you're off, that your mood is off in any way, what are you seeing in terms of what you are putting in your body? And continue throughout the season to really remind yourself that mood and food do go home hand in hand and I want you to be your best self. All right. Love you all. Hope you have an amazing day and we'll talk soon.

Bye.