The Mood Cure: Take Charge of Your Emotions in 24 Hours Using Food and Supplements. Julia Ross
has a powerful muscle-relaxing effect, it can also powerfully stimulate our natural painkillers, the endorphins. That’s part of why the serotonin-specific nutrients I’m about to reveal can be so effective with painful conditions like migraines and arthritic pain, particularly in combination with a good-mood diet, the basic supplements, and the elimination of allergy foods.
Do You Have Afternoon and Evening Cravings for Ice Cream, Sweets, Cereal, and Other Artificial Serotonin Boosters—Especially in the Winter?
Do you find yourself eating high-carbohydrate snacks in the late afternoons and evenings when both the light and your serotonin production start to sink? Does this really get out of hand during the darker months between Halloween and Valentine’s Day? Most of these SAD calories are nutritionally empty, or worse than empty, and they are as potent as drugs in the way they can manipulate your brain and body. They can set off bodywide stress, causing your pancreas to release insulin in order to remove the excess carbohydrates from your bloodstream and store them as fat. The insulin sweeps most of the amino acids out of your bloodstream, along with the carbs. Only one amino gets left behind—tryptophan—and it goes right into your brain, unimpeded by the other aminos that usually crowd it out.
Ice cream, cereal and milk, and hot chocolate are favorite nighttime fixes because they contain tryptophan (all milk products do) as well as sugar. Unfortunately, these sweet foods are also highly addictive and can quickly turn into unneeded pounds. More important, they also raise blood sugar levels too high and can put you at real risk of developing diabetes. Hundreds of our clients have inadvertently developed Type II diabetes, or come close to it, as a result of using sweets to raise their serotonin levels.
Whether you start to yearn for a Snickers bar at three P.M. or ice cream at nine P.M., the real question here is: are you craving carbs because your serotonin levels have dropped with the sun? If you’re a regular afternoon or evening craver, I’d bet on it. If you wake up in the night and eat carbs, it’s a dead certainty. Swallowing one or two pro-serotonin nutrients right before you’d ordinarily crave carbs will typically knock out these cravings on the spot and spare you the negative mood that may have directed you to the fridge in the first place.
Alcohol is another carbohydrate commonly used as compensation for low serotonin levels. Do you find yourself needing a beer, a glass of wine, or a cocktail before dinner, when serotonin levels start to drop rapidly? You won’t need to when you’ve raised your serotonin levels naturally. (Ironically, alcohol and other drugs actually reduce serotonin levels in the long run.)
Marijuana can alter many brain functions, including serotonin levels, which is why so many people smoke pot in the evenings to relax and get to sleep. But marijuana, like alcohol, ends up inhibiting serotonin production and can become addictive. It also has negative effects on brain, lung, heart, and reproductive functions.
One of the extraordinary virtues of natural serotonin boosting is that it breeds neither dependence nor diabetes. You’ll be pleased, as so many of our clients have been, to enjoy its safe, effective, and legal relaxation without any negative consequences. If you suspect that low serotonin has made you, like so many others, dependent on alcohol or pot, please also look into chapter 13.
THE SPECTACULAR SUPPLEMENTS THAT POWER SEROTONIN
The Twenty-four-Hour 5-HTP Transformation
The almost instant solution to most low-serotonin problems is an inexpensive nutrient supplement made from an African bean. It can be found in most health food stores. It’s 5-HTP (5-hydroxy trytophan). Your body can make its own 5-HTP to convert into serotonin, but there’s one catch: It must have enough tryptophan on hand from food to make it out of, and chances are it doesn’t. If you take a 5-HTP supplement, though, your serotonin production will no longer be dependent on the tryptophan you may or may not get in food. That means that you can quickly yet naturally replenish your serotonin stores and begin to feel the return of your true emotional self in minutes.
Although 5-HTP has been studied and used extensively in Japan and Europe since before 1980, our clinic began using it only when it became available in the United States in 1997. Since then, we have seen hundreds of almost instant transformations in mood as a direct result of its use.
As an antidepressant, 5-HTP is so effective that it has repeatedly matched or outperformed many of the most established antidepressant drugs, including Prozac, without the negative side effects so often associated with these drugs. In a 1980 study of ninety-nine patients who had been deeply depressed for an average of nine years, almost half achieved complete recovery, while others experienced significant improvement after being given 5-HTP supplements. The study’s author, Dr. J. J. Van Hiele, had this to say about the benefits of 5-HTP: “I have never in 20 years used an agent which: (1) was effective so quickly; (2) restored the patients so completely to the persons they had been and their partners had known; [and] (3) was so entirely without side effects.”12
Numerous other studies also attest to 5-HTP’s remarkable safety and effectiveness, even when compared to prescription antidepressants:
My staff and I have been amazed at how quickly 5-HTP can lift the spirits of clients who had been depressed for so long that they had forgotten what it was like to be cheerful and optimistic. Within a day or two after starting their 5-HTP, they typically report that their feelings of anxiety and negativity have evaporated, that their sleep has improved, and that their self-esteem has been restored. Amazingly, we have seen these 5-HTP transformations take place before our very eyes, in as little as ten minutes. We have watched as surly teens turned into friendly humans, cranky adults turned into comedians, and shy, self-conscious people turned into real charmers.
One of my favorite 5-HTP success stories was told to me by Lynne, a driven, accomplished, and edgy advertising executive who came to see me after she’d been terminated from her job owing to a company merger. Although she initially came because of depression over her job loss, after we’d talked for a while, she realized that she had actually been living under a dark cloud for almost as long as she could remember. Lynne realized that even during the height of her professional success she had not felt good about her accomplishments and was too concerned with the negative possibilities in her life to focus on the positive realities. Like other dark-cloud types, Lynne also stayed up late at night, either worrying or working on projects. As a result, she’d wake up tired and drink