Physical Strategies for Fighting Depression Part II: Diet, Vocabulary and Positive Activity

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The first article on Physical Strategies for Fighting Depression discussed the importance of exercise. This article discusses the impact on depression of making minor changes in your diet, vocabulary and the activities you engage in.

Diet as a protection against depression

A major physical strategy in the fight against depression is your diet. What you eat has a substantial effect on your body and your mind. The food you put into your system determines how well your body and your mind function.

Food as a fuel

Just as a car needs the right type of fuel to perform at its best so does your body. You would not expect your car to perform if you put water in the gas tank, so why would expect your body to perform when you give it junk as fuel?

Scientists have long been coming to the conclusion that the reason  terminal dread diseases like heart disease, high blood pressure and cancer (the #1 killers in the US) are at their highest prevalence ever is lack of exercise and the poor diet of recent generations.

Processed Foods

Almost everything the average person eats is processed in some way. And all those preservatives, chemicals and poor cooking methods are having a negative effect on our bodies and our minds. Just as excess sugar will cause kids to become hyperactive, certain foods will make you more predisposed to suffer depression. They will slow down your metabolism, steal your energy, and affect the balance of hormones and neurotransmitters in your system.

Lots of Fish

As I am not a nutritionist, I can only advise that you eat healthier. However, I have found that several foods contribute to poor well being and make it more difficult for me to successfully treat my depression. You can look out for a subsequent article on what I believe to be the optimal diet for maintaining optimal physical and mental health. But in short, I have cut out milk, flour and processed foods. I limit sugar and red meat and try to eat fish three times a week as studies have shown that fish directly helps to reduce depression.

Veggies to fight depression

I try to incorporate a lot of fresh salads, greens, and vegetables into my diet. In fact I generally try to follow the 70/30 rule – 70 percent of the food on my plate ought to be vegetables, preferably green vegetables.

Poor food preparation methods can also steal the nutrients from the food and leave your body starving on large quantities of empty calories. Frying and stewing in particular I have cut out altogether. Grilling, steaming and baking are much healthier options. A healthier body leads to a clearer mind which makes it much easier to fight depression.

Avoid alcohol and coffee

Alcohol and coffee should be avoided by all those prone to depression. Alcohol is actually a depressant and depresses or slows down the nervous system. Chances are that although you might feel an initial high after a drink, it soon turns to the blues.

Coffee conversely can overstimulate you and make thoughts seem too fast and uncontrollable. Coffee has the effect of making your internal environment chaotic. Calm is another critical weapon in the fight against depression, as will be discussed in the article on environmental strategies for battling depression.

Water – your best friend

Drinking more water is probably one of the most important dietary changes you can make in the fight against depression. The body is 70% water and needs a substantial amount of water intake to function in an optimal state. When it does not get enough water it starts to conserve and prioritise allocation of water. This inevitably means that certain bodily processes suffer.

Increasing water intake also has the effect of flushing toxins and other depression contributing components from your system at a faster rate. If you make only one dietary change in your fight against depression, increase your water intake.

You might also want to squeeze some lemon or lime into your drinking water, as this has an alkalizing effect on your body. The human body functions optimally in a slightly alkaline environment. Most fast and processed foods have an acidifying effect on the body, so lemon water can help to neutralize this effect.

Positive Vocabulary

Vocabulary is really a result of your thinking however I will list it here under the physical depression-fighting strategies as it is an action of the body.

Exaggeration

The current speech trend encourages over-exaggeration, and this encourages depression. How many times have you the uttered the phrase “I am just going to die if….”? Or “I am having the worse day ever”? Or “Nothing ever goes right in my life”?

Realistically none of these statements is true at any given time. The article on Achieving Your Goals explains how to change your vocabulary. The thinking that results in this vocabulary is pessimistic thinking. It has been shown that pessimists are much more likely to suffer severe depression. It would be well worth your while to explore the series on How to become an Optmist and the article on The Different Explanatory Styles of Optimism and Pessimism. All these articles deal fully with changing the thoughts that result in a negative vocabulary by changing the accompanying pessimistic explanatory style.

Realistic vocabulary

In order to fight depression, you must try to keep your vocabulary realistic, as explained in The Power of Realistic Positive Thinking. What will really happen if you don’t meet the deadline or make the meeting? Whatever it is, surely you won’t die? Try to speak only the reality and leave the exaggerations out altogether.

Don’t doom your entire day by pronouncing that you are having a bad day. Since I have started being realistic in my vocabulary I have had some days that started off with some very negative events but ended up fantastically.

Be aware of your words

In order to win the battle against depression it is imperative that you pay close attention to your words, and adjust them accordingly, particularly with respect to adjectives. You will find that “This is just awful” will actually be “This is not so good but I can fix it.”

Every event cannot possibly be “an absolute disaster”, “just awful”, “terrible”, “doomed”, “the worse thing ever”, “dreadful”, “horrific” and so on.

Actively sit down and find more appropriate and realistic adjectives for negative events, such as “bad”, “not so good”, “unpleasant”, “uncomfortable”, “slightly embarrassing”, “disagreeable”, “distasteful” and even “mediocre”.

How vocabulary affects depression

The reason this is an important depression-fighting strategy is that the latter group of words imply an event that while not optimal is still manageable and fixable. The former group of words implies that all hope is completely lost – an attitude which feeds depression.

Your vocabulary sends a firm message to your subconscious, which as discussed in the article on Affirmations and Your Subconscious, tries to make whatever you truly believe (and in this case, what you say), a reality. By using negative vocabulary you are also reducing the likelihood of recognising any of the positive aspects of the situation. Most situations have both positive and negative aspects to them as discussed in The Power of Realistic Positive Thinking.

Engage in enjoyable activities

The final depression fighting strategy is to engage in activities which you find enjoyable. This may seem obvious but bears mentioning due to how powerful it is in effectively reducing the incidence of depressive episodes.

Depression tends to be an all-encompassing disease, overwhelming all facets of your life. The key to fighting it is to take back as many timeslots as you can from depression. So you basically want to spend as much time as possible enjoying yourself.

Engage in fun activities

When you are in the midst of depression it is sometimes hard to imagine yourself ever enjoying anything again. At this point it is critical that you remind yourself of the activities you usually enjoy and consciously seek them. Again, you might not feel like doing this, but you need to exert a conscious effort to do so as it will be instrumental in propelling you out of your depression.

Increase your fun activities

When you are not experiencing a depressive episode try to explore new activities and identify new ones to enjoy. The more activities you routinely enjoy, the greater the likelihood that one of them will be able to help you out of your depressive episode.

Avoid the TV

One word of caution: refrain from TV watching. If the activity that you usually enjoy is watching television, I advise against engaging excessively in this activity while depressed. Watching television is a vegetative state which engages the mind only on a superficial level and gives the body no opportunity to move, and thus no opportunity for endorphin production.

The mind not being fully engaged can resort freely to continuing its negative depressive thinking, which will only serve to deepen the depression. Seek to take part in more active, engaging pursuits. Paint a picture, take a bike ride, visit a museum, take a jog in the park, play with the dogs, visit your grandparents, help out someone in need, listen to some uplifting music, read up on fighting depression. Write an article on winning the fight against depression even

Engage in productive activites

Engaging in activities which are productive and allow you to contribute to society will give you great accomplishment feedback. This will reinforce to you on a regular basis the fact that what you do makes a difference and this will automatically counteract thoughts of uselessness and hopelessness. The greater the number of productive activites you engage in the more useful you will feel, and the less prone you will be to depressive feelings.

Engaging in enjoyable and productive activities has the added bonus of diluting the occurrence of negative pessimistic thoughts, which are the root of depression. Positive activity gives you less time to brood and mope and escalate your negative thinking into full-fledged depression.

Weeding out your habitual negative thinking is the most important key to winning the fight against depression as we will discuss in the next article.

“Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.” ~ Sir Winston Churchill.

 

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Related Articles:

• How to Fight Depression Naturally
• Physical Strategies for Fighting Depression Part I: Exercise
• How to become an Optimist – Part I
• How to be Happy – Training yourself to enjoy life
• The Power of Realistic Positive Thinking
• Your Capacity for Change
• Affirmations and Your Subconscious
• Optimism vs. Pessimism
• The Different Explanatory Styles of Optimism and Pessimism

Posted in A New Start, Depression, Optimism and Positive Thinking, Self Discipline |   2 Comments »

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 4th, 2006 at 8:19 am and is filed under A New Start, Depression, Optimism and Positive Thinking, Self Discipline . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.