07.12.10
Food is Fun??
As part of Dr. Nancy Mramor’s Happiness Project, here is more on the food=happiness quotient. Sign up for Dr. Nancy’s free e-Zine series to find out how to Have Your Best Year Yet! Read how humor=happiness in my June e-Zine article I wrote for Nancy’s Happiness Project.
Food Can Make You Happy, or Can It? 
By Dr. Nancy Mramor
Happiness comes from many of the things that we have shared in these Happiness E-zines, such as success, changes in brain chemistry, reaching goals and humor with many more topics to come. But truly what we know about happiness is that when you are drawn by a positive powerful vision of your futures to be happy, that obstacles can be removed and doors opened. As you envision a positive future, you focus on and are drawn into that future. Positive emotions, meaning and life purpose, positive mastery/competence and positive relationships drive you to happy futures, says Dr. Martin Seligman, former president of the American Psychological Assn. and author of Authentic Happiness.
Then along comes food. Food is one of the most convoluted topics I have ever come across. Ways of eating are ancestrally embedded in your bodies and behavior that either make you happy and healthy or just the reverse. The incidence of diet-related illness in our country is higher each year and the stigma of overweight causes judgments about those who have been unable to overcome bad genes and training or those who eat emotionally; this drives self-esteem down, a leading cause of poor eating habits.
Amy Farrell, Ph.D. of the Pennsylvania Psychological Association states in the May Update that HAES (Health At Every Size) draws from a new perspective. The new approach asks not how we can make fat people thin, but how do we make people healthy? She cites research from the University of California that showed that moving toward healthy eating instead of moving away from unhealthy eating resulted in the highest levels of success. The group that had moved toward had higher self-esteem, kept weight off and noticed significant health improvements, even if they did not lose weight. They learned to enjoy their health and food and started new habits that endured. The research supports Dr. Selgman’s ideas about what will make us happy and draw us forward into a compelling future that we imagine and create.
Moving toward a great relationship with food can be medicine for the body and soul and can bring new life to the cells, allowing healing to take place in remarkable ways. Old unhealthy choices can poison the body, creating toxicity, upsetting the endocrine balance, and valuable oxygen needed for life. Food can heal or create stress, mend or destroy, soothe or mislead the body in your drive toward health and happiness.
I fully appreciate the approach of food as a way of health, energy and mood regulation that this month’s authors take. These colleagues and friends are two of the finest and most enduring chefs, writers, and teachers that I have ever met. Deborah Barr and Janet McKee have both shared so much with me about food that I utilize continually in my diet and food preparation, so now I will turn the fork over to them. But before I do, I want to tell you about a little organic treat (commonly known as a desert substitute) called mochi. If you have a sweet tooth and want to cut down on sugar look this one up. Now that the mystery food bait has been set, Bon Appétit!
