• Good mood foods Wisdom from Rachel Kelly
Bouts of depression prompted journalist Rachel Kelly to explore the relationship between mood and food. Mental health, she tells Rachael Oakden, starts with your stomach
Ahealthy eating book that says we should eat more food. That sounds like the sort of healthy eating book that we’d all love to read. Especially when one of the foods it suggests we eat more of is dark chocolate. Its author, Times journalist turned mental health advocate Rachel Kelly, includes dark chocolate as one of her top three “good mood foods” alongside oily fish and green leafy vegetables. “We’ve got so used to hearing that certain foods are ‘bad’ and that we ‘shouldn’t’ eat things,” she says. “But food is your friend and food is on your side.”
Harnessing the nutritional power of food to boost mental wellbeing is at the heart of The Happy Kitchen, the book Rachel co-authored with her nutritional therapist Alice Mackintosh. Five years in the making, the book is her way of sharing the knowledge she has gained during her recovery from severe mental illness. “I was so lucky to be able to speak to Alice,” she says. “But not everyone is going to have that access.”
HOLDING ON TO NORMALITY
When Rachel first met Alice, she was recovering from the clinical depression that had floored her in 1997. An Oxford graduate and daily newspaper reporter married to a city banker, she was living what she now describes as an “overly traded” life in West London, when mild anxiety suddenly spiralled into a crippling depressive episode.
Soon after the birth of her second child, thinking about returning to work, a chance remark from her husband about whose turn it was to look after the baby brought on a terrifying panic attack. “I thought I was having a heart attack; when I got to the hospital I thought I was going to see a cardiologist,” she says. “When the psychiatrist introduced himself, I said, ‘Oh no, I’m not mentally ill. I’m a positive person.’ Mental health was not in my vocabulary.”
She recovered, returned to work and had three more children. But in 2003, shortly after the birth of twins, she suffered a second, more devastating breakdown. “It is so frightening, the most unpleasant thing that’s ever happened to me,” she says. In the busy café, where we’re discussing The Happy Kitchen 14 years later, she grips hold of the table to demonstrate the physical sensation that she’s been trying to hold at bay ever since. “You have this feeling that you’re falling and you’re just trying to hang on, to hold on to normality.”
DISCOVERING HAPPY FOODS
With the help of antidepressants and therapy, Rachel recovered for a second time and began to learn techniques, such as mindfulness, which helped her to avoid a recurrence. But, as for many women in the so-called sandwich generation – growing children, ageing parents – anxiety and insomnia were always circling. These old foes she now recognises as triggers for her depression, so she visited her GP. “She asked me if I’d heard about ‘happy’ foods.”
She hadn’t, but research led her to Harley Street nutritional therapist Alice Mackintosh and the gradual discovery that brain and stomach are linked. “In modern medicine, you’ve got a problem with your mind or a problem with your body,” she explains. “But our heads and stomachs are in a loop, they are not
separate. In the book, we reference some 150 studies by experts, including Dr Michael Gershon, who calls the stomach ‘the second brain’. At the workshops I run on good mood food, people are electrified to learn that 90% of our serotonin is made in our stomachs.”
She is the first to admit that nutrition alone cannot beat the blues. But awareness of how food affects the brain is part of the holistic approach she advocates. “You might not have thought that what you eat affects your mood,” says Rachel, who’s an ambassador for several mental health charities, including Sane and Young Minds. “But here’s telling you that there’s a massive connection, and you can benefit from it.”
Rachel and Alice tested recipes in their own kitchens, publishing the best in The Happy Kitchen alongside advice on how to eat mindfully, to cook meditatively, to eat with pleasure rather than guilt. “We’ve included a dark chocolate brownie recipe,” Rachel says. “Eating a dark chocolate brownie with focus and really enjoying it, that’s a very different experience from scoffing a packet of biscuits without even thinking about it and then feeling terrible.”
CALMING THE STOMACH
We all know that anxiety can affect our stomachs: that gnawing knot that takes hold of our guts before a job »
interview, work presentation or long-haul flight. If an anxious mind can send the stomach into freefall, it follows that an anxious stomach can do the same for the mind. “When I had my first major depressive episode, I felt so sick, I had to throw up,” says Rachel, who described the physical pain of her mental illness in the bestselling 2014 memoir Black Rainbow (for which all author proceeds were donated to Sane). “Our stomach sends messages to our brain all the time. So the takeaway from that is that improving your gut health can improve your mental health.”
Maintaining a strong population of friendly gut bacteria is key to Rachel’s approach. “Research shows that our ancesters ate around 150 different ingredients each week, moving around on the savannah and eating seasonal berries and game,” Rachel says. “Our digestive systems were designed for this. But modern Western man eats around 20 ingredients each week, and if you strip away sugar, wheat and soy, that number shrinks. It’s a really positive, hopeful message that we need to eat more and different kinds of food. It’s not about cutting foods out; it’s about adding them.”
BEGINNING WITH BEETROOT
Boosting mental clarity – Rachel recommends beetroot risotto with goats’ cheese and walnuts – and improving sleep are key. Both are tackled after the first stage: getting back energy. “Anxiety and low mood are really draining,” Rachel says. “When I first saw Alice, I was having a two-hour rest after lunch every day.”
Establishing a routine, planning meals and avoiding blood sugar spikes were at the heart of Alice’s advice. That meant cutting out sugar and refined carbs and replacing them with fibre-rich vegetables and wholegrain carbohydrates. Not because kale is ‘clean’ and sugar is ‘dirty’, as certain high-profile ‘experts’ would have it – “We don’t use the sort of language that makes value judgments,” Rachel stresses – but because eating foods that release sugars more slowly into the bloodstream makes us less tired and less jittery. “I clearly remember one day, it got to four o’clock and I hadn’t needed my rest,” Rachel says. “It was a lovely feeling. When you’ve got more energy, you start to exercise, you eat well, you sleep better: it’s a virtuous circle. It’s hard to say what I was like five years ago, but now I’m like a different person.”
PATH TO PREVENTION
Rachel now focuses on sharing the healing power of good mood food, mindfulness and words ( her love of poetry was vital source of solace during her depression; each chapter of The Happy Kitchen begins with a few lines of verse). She runs workshops for local mental health groups, volunteers in prisons and talks in schools. “Prevention is better than cure,” she says. “That’s why I am doing this stuff. If I’d known some of this, maybe I wouldn’t have been so ill. I love my workshops and my charity work and the journey I’ve been on, but I would not wish it on anyone.”
Through her campaigning, writing and appearances on radio and TV, talking so openly about her problems, Rachel has helped to tackle the stigma still associated with mental illness. “A privileged life doesn’t mean a privileged mental health,” she says. “I was the classic woman trying to be all things to all people: a good daughter, a good friend, a good mum. It never occurred to me that my body would just turn round and say right, that’s it. It can happen to anyone, it really can.”
SIMPLE PLEASURES
The spectre of depression will always be lurking, she says. “It never completely goes away. I feel like I’ve built another person. But I’m careful.” Among the daily strategies that this busy campaigner, wife and mother of five employs is relishing two squares of her favourite organic dark chocolate with a cup of herbal tea. “I make it in my best china mug, I don’t rush, I savour it,” she says. “As soon as I put the kettle on, I know I’m about to have a nice calm pause. It’s like putting the oxygen mask on first. If you look after yourself, you are better able to go out and do things for others. You can’t just keep pouring out like a teapot. You’ve got to fill back up.”
RACHEL’S CUT OUT AND KEEP MOOD FOOD GUIDE