Well, I find having a natural diet free of processed food helps loads. And regular exercise.
For background, as a kid, I was pretty happy. I started having mental health problems and physical health problems after my parent's divorce, I also got fat. From when I was born basically, to 5th grade, my father got me all my food. He cooked 90% of the food I ate from scratch, usually from organic ingredients. I'd have a half dose of a strong adult multivitamin, and usually fish oil and vitamin C and papaya enzymes everyday. I'd also play outside for like, ever, as a kid. Usually from when I got home from school at 3, until dark, I'd be outside everyday.
This all changed 5th grade, my new diet was my mom buying all processed food. Canned ravioli, frozen pizza, and Hot Pockets became staple foods, whereas a normal meal under my father's "rule" was say, a piece of salmon, brown rice, some steamed or sauted veggie of some sort, and a little salad, all cooked from scratch. That and I was taken off the vitamins, too. During this time, and before, my sisters wouldn't eat any of the food my dad cooked. My mom would cook meals separately for them. Oddly, both of them needed braces for their teeth, and all mine came in perfectly straight. Quite a difference nutrition will make, no?
Anyway, that's more a generality. It depends on what you wish to do. Everyone should probably take a multivitamin and eat all their food cooked themselves mostly from scratch. The rest is up to your goals. The main thing I've found helpful is studying Chinese medicine theory, Chinese medicine has actually quite a bit to say about mental health, as it's connected in Chinese medicine to physical health. Like I've had various ailments, and it's quite amazing what simple dietary changes can do. For example, my back was hurting. I thought I injured it in some way weightlifting. Not really. What the actual problem was adrenal insufficiency was causing my back to hurt. In Chinese medicine, the kidneys, for example, are connected to back pain. Your adrenal glands are on top of the kidneys. So once I cut down the caffeine, my back pain stopped. Also took more Vitamin C, to allow the adrenals to function better, and tada, no back pain.
But as far as specifics go, it's hard to really know what minerals or herbs to take. In general, a bit more Vitamin C will help most people I think, and most people are usually pretty magnesium deficient. So those supplements will help. Taurine helped me, too. Other herbs that helped me are adaptogens, like ginseng and rhodiola rosea. Rhodiola Rosea is exponentially superior to Ritalin, in my opinion. The adaptogens are in general better than caffeine/pharm. stims, but they still for the most part shouldn't be taken forever. But as "bandaid" type meds, I like them.
You can manipulate foods this way, too. Chinese medicine food therapy separates food into yin, yang, warming, cool, moist, etc. So you can use the Chinese medicine terminology and diagnosis to help, but even without TCM it can be helpful. For example, potatoes have (or maybe are a precursor?) to GABA, which relieves anxiety. Eggs have cholesterol, which your body needs to make hormones, specifically the steroidal hormones. Meat can also help a lot of people, too, if you don't go crazy with it, meat is really concentrated in lots of vitamins and minerals. Going to the Chinese medicine thing with meat, lots of vegans or people without much meat in their diet (like my mother) always complain of being cold. You can touch their hands and they'll be ice cold, and you'll touch other people's hands and they'll be warm or hot. This is sorta where the concept of "heat" in Chinese medicine comes from. In one of the few pages I've read of how TCM treats AS, many people with AS have a heat deficiency. I don't, though, so again, it'd probably be best to see a TCM doctor and see wtf is actually going on, as I need to do. Meat, along with that, provides some amino acids you can't really get from plants, and that in studies, AS people have problems synthesizing, like l-carnitine and taurine, and meat is also where your body gets creatine, which helps brain function, too. Not that I'm advocating a super high meat diet or anything like that, too high you can get inflammation and stuff from it (your body gets too acidic) but yeah. Different foods can influence you in different ways.
Lastly, as far as exercise goes, I'd say try for an hour a day of an activity you actually enjoy doing, preferably outside. Go for regular hikes. For me personally, I feel outdoors I can think better. If you wanna get "serious" about fitness, do an actual sport and train to get good in the sport. Then it gives your fitness an actual goal instead of a vague one.
Obviously get as much sleep as possible (something I don't do, yay.) Preferably like 8 or more hours a night.
Again, it's hard to get really specific, as the "ideal" diet and whatnot varies from person to person. And in many ways, it's sort of just going around the problem. If you feel like crap because you're socially rejected, your life is still gonna suck, and food and minerals and whatnot, can't really "cure" it, just manage it, the same way medications will. But, the food and whatnot will help manage and give you momentum possibly to improve other areas of your life. For example, people are much nicer to me at 195lbs and muscular than at 230lbs. But there are some people who do well socially despite being 230lbs. See? But if it takes looking like an Abercrombie model to get a date, and you can't do it any other way, well, that's just adaptation. Maybe you could improve your social skills and whatnot, but if that's a dead-end (which it seems to be with AS), then you have to try to work around the problem. In this sense, there's people with zero activity and crap diets, that are fat, and are happy, because they get social validation and have otherwise OK lives. So they don't need to care about their diets, because even if they'd be happier with a better diet, they're happy enough (I guess, or maybe everyone is secretly miserable or something) without having a healthy lifestyle.
Probably longer than you wanted, but yeah.
30 Dec 2012, 6:00 pm
