Food and Mood: The Complete Guide to Eating Well and Feeling Your Best (A Henry Holt Reference Book)

A consulting nutritionist and contributing editor to Shape magazine offers an enlightened look at nutrition for body and mind. "A personal blueprint for controlling not only your cravings, but your appetite, your weight, and maybe even your life. Solid, well-researched science that's fun to read."--New York Daily News.

In the early 1990s, when Elizabeth Somer, M.A., R.D., a nationally recognized award-winning nutrition expert and the nutrition correspondent for Good Morning America, wrote the first edition of her groundbreaking book, Food & Mood, scientists were just beginning to understand how what we eat affects how we feel. Over the past several years, nutrition research has exploded, and this edition of Food & Mood has been completely revised and updated to reflect the latest findings on the relationship between diet and mental and emotional well-being.

Food & Mood covers all the bases for eating right for a healthy body and mind and includes practical, nutritionally sound advice for putting Somer's Feel Good Diet into practice. Somer starts out by simply and eloquently elucidating the science behind the food-mood link. She explains how food affects mood; the basis of food cravings; how diet is connected to stress, PMS, and fatigue; and what foods banish the blues, boost brain power, and improve sleep naturally. Need to stop overeating and abusing food? In the second section, Somer gives compassionate, pragmatic advice for turning your eating habits around for good. The final section gives detailed, step-by-step suggestions and guidelines to help you eat right to feel great. Included are shopping tips, daily menus, information on designing a supplement program, and tantalizing recipes. (Who knew burritos, brownies, and chocolate chip cupcakes could be good for you?) --Ellen Albertson