Mastering Cooking for One by Overcoming Your Inner Voice

Do you have an inner voice that seems to sabotage all your attempts to be healthy with food?

I know I do. 

And until recently, that inner voice was leading me astray big time by trying to be kind to me "you're too tired to cook tonight… it's ok to have red wine and potato chips for dinner. You need to rest up."

My inner voice sabotaged all my good plans to eat well and cook for myself. It was a battle royale that I never seemed to win.

There had to be a better way! What if I understood this inner voice better, and we could work together for the best version of me? My solution was to meet my Inner Cook, which solved much of the sabotaging. 

Identify the Barriers – the little voice that sabotaged me

Three Books helped me connect: Dr Jill Bolte-Taylor's book 'Whole Brain Living', Dr Uma Naidoo's The Food Mood Connection' and Prof Filca Jacka's Brain Change'. These three recently published books, by leading researchers, highlighted the many conversations I had with my inner voice ( a.k.a my Inner Cook ).

Dr Jill Bolte-Taylor's book Whole Brain Living, the anatomy of choice and four characters that drive our life, Dr Jill Bolte-Taylor introduced me to a richer and deeper understanding of the left and right hemispheres in my brain and how there are four characters related to the hemispheres in my brain. 

Dr Uma Naidoo's The Mood Food Connection, an indispensable guide to the surprising foods that fight, the book introduced me to the relationship between the foods I crave and my moods. That helped me create my mood food playlists but more of that late

Professor Felicia Jacka from Deacon University's recent book was the third that helped me to have meaningful conversations with my Inner Cook. Brain Change is an engaging read in which she shares world-leading research into the relationships between diet and moods, plus her journey of how our diet can influence our health and moods. This engaging book was informative but also contained practical ways to use a Mediterranean-style diet to help me with my moods. 

With the work of these three remarkable authors, I realised a path to working with the Inner Cook voice that harnesses her advice to prepare and cook food rather than constantly fighting it.

Four voices, not one

Dr Jill Bolte Taylor's Whole Brain Living was a real breakthrough in my understanding of the left and right brain and how these interact. I understood the left and right brain from my previous work in teaching and marketing. Still, her take gave a new dimension to my understanding and ability to control the voices that often sabotage my good intentions. 

In short, she proposes that our emotional limbic tissue is evenly divided between our two hemispheres. As a result, we have four characters that control the conversations in our head, each from a different set of brain cells and each with a unique and often conflicting role to play in our being. The characters are:

Discovering there is a link between my mood and the food I crave

The more I became aware of controlling the conversations. In my head about food, the more I saw patterns in foods that affected my moods. 

I knew that not everything I liked was good for me. My body and sugar have a complicated relationship. Milk and dairy were not always well accepted by my body, even if my mind thought they should be. 

At some level, I was aware that my moods changed when I ate certain foods, but I never closely tracked the relationship as to what made me feel good and what didn't. 

Now I had a civil conversation happening with my Inner Cook. I decided to explore how what I ate impacted my body and moods.

The Food-Mood Connection by Dr Uma Naidoo, a Harvard nutritional psychiatrist, and professionally trained chef book, helped me unpack the complex links. 

This new field of scientific research, nutritional psychiatry, uses dietary changes alongside medication and therapy to treat mental health conditions. 

In her book, Dr Naidoo details what many of us may have felt at a deep level but rarely acted on, that there is a connection between food and our mood. 

She cites recent studies showing that diet can significantly impact mental health conditions such as anxiety, sleep disorders, ADHD to depression, OCD, and dementia.

While she believes we are getting better at identifying and talking about mental health problems, Dr Naidoo believes our ability to listen to our bodies' physical cues has been lost.

We know intuitively that when we are anxious, our tummy feels a bit upset, and when we are depressed, we may feel sluggish and slow. Dr Naidoo's view is many of us focus on the troublesome thoughts and emotions of mental illnesses rather than noticing that the rest of the body was also involved."

Her book details ten mental conditions with details of foods that aggravate or trigger the condition and foods that support or aid the condition. This book has become a great reference to the best food to suit my body to be the healthiest self. The Food Mood Connection also includes menu plans for each health condition discussed, plus everyday recipes that support each condition.

Mood Food Playlist

The realisation of links between mood and foods has led me to many self-observations. What mood was I in when I wanted red wine and chips? Was it about being tired, or was it something else? Mental overwhelm? Feeling anxious about a big deadline that was coming up?

This deeper level of reflection has led to me making many surprising connections, which I have listed in my little recipe book and called my Mood-Food playlist. 

I now know that when my head insists, I must have a toasted white bread cheese and tomato sandwich three times a day; I'm possibly feeling anxious and need a bit of self-care and kindness plus some fibre-rich foods. Chickpeas with my carbs may be better, so hummus and pitta bread are my new go-to. 

My playlist also includes seasonal variations. I'm not a big salad person when it's cold. I swap salad for roast veggies in the cooler months. This style of mood food reflection has led me to realise that it's not just a temperature change driving my food choices. I crave more comfort and cosy foods on a dull and overcast day than on bright sunny days. Ensuring I have a healthy version of comfort food in the pantry these days has been an essential step in removing barriers to my well-being.

Understanding the relationship between mood and food has helped my Inner Cook have the foods I like and need available for me.

You feel how you eat

The third book that aided me in connecting to my Inner Cook was Prof Felice Jacka's Brain Changer. She details the ground-breaking research trial that she led at Deakin University that truly demonstrated that "you feel how you eat".

She was looking to answer the question of how and why diet - good or bad - affects the health of our brain. She was looking to answer the question, 'if I improve my diet, will my mental health improve?'

 The SMILES trail, as the project has become known, produced some surprising results. They found that the more people improved their diets, the more their depression was reduced. 

You feel what you eat. Diet makes a difference. More correctly, the food guidelines do, as it was not a program of strict amounts of food but rather about the type of food eaten that made the difference. They found that following a slightly modified Mediterranean-style diet that is inexpensive and readily available made a significant difference. 

In the book, Prof Jacka not only shares her story of a lifelong challenge with depression and how the finding of the study has benefited her and many others the finding of the SMILEs trail, but she also provides practical advice on what to keep in the pantry to ensure you can easily follow the ground-breaking ModiMed approach to eating as a way of developing good food habits to optimise of mental and physical well-being. 

Remembering to care for ME

Finally, it's important to remember the benefits of caring for yourself. If I don't bother to cook ‘cos there's just me, what am I saying to myself? I'm not worthy? The work of Dr Jill Bolte -Taylor Dr Una Naidoo, and Prof Felice Jacka have helped enrich my understanding of how to connect with my Inner Cook and provided insights into what to have on my mood food playlist so that I can more easily care for both my physical and mental well-being with easy.

Cooking for one can be challenging, but by identifying barriers, finding inspiration (see blog post here), and prioritising self-care, you can overcome the barriers that stop you from being the best version of yourself. So, don't let these barriers hold you back, embrace the opportunity to cook for one and enjoy the delicious meals your Inner Cook can help you create.

 If you would like to learn more about connecting to your Inner Cook then join my new online course.