My friends are curious what I eat and if I make any dietary adjustments for my mental health. I hesitated in writing about my diet because what is beneficial to me may not work for someone else, and honestly, I feel the content is boring because I’m not breaking any new ground. Far more educated individuals than I in psychology, nutrition, and biology already laid out the basics:

• Skyland Trail Nutritionist - Isabel Alvarez, RD, LD

• Stress and Your Body - Robert Sapolsky

• The Happiness Advantage - Shawn Achor

What I think I can offer is a showcase. What I eat on a regular workday, and what I use for sustenance while in a deep depression.

A Regular Workday:

• Breakfast - 16oz black coffee, 2 servings of Kodiak Maple & Brown Sugar Oatmeal, banana, Icelandic yogurt.

• Lunch - Water, tuna sandwich, peanut butter & honey sandwich, trail mix, pistachios, RXBAR.

• Dinner - V8 Strawberry & Banana, shrimp fried rice.

I lean toward seafood, nuts, veggies, and whole-grains for two main reasons. One, my doctor put me on a high cholesterol diet to see if lifestyle changes can bring down my bad cholesterol without needing medication. Second, a Mediterranean Diet is a remarkably healthy diet across a range of human health factors, and there is fascinating research showing a lessening of depressive symptoms with this diet.

My lunch habits have changed drastically since starting my new career. Because I move around so much on the job I needed to change how I ate in the afternoon. Instead of large servings of food, I eat a modest sandwich and then graze through the different nuts, grapes, and other dried fruit I keep in my lunchbox. This gives me the nutritional fuel I need to finish out the latter half of the day without weighing me down.

A Regular Depression:

• Breakfast - Ha! Hahahaha. Assuming I even get out of bed, at most we’re talking a single glass of water.

• Lunch - 1 entire box of goldfish, or whatever crunchy snack foods are nearby.

• Dinner - Large pepperoni and mushroom pizza, full serving of garlic bread, entire pint of Butter Pecan ice cream, more crunchy foodstuffs.

While in a depression my eating habits coalesced into delaying food for as long as possible and then stuffing my face with the most savory items available. Part of this behavior is due to the energy-deficit that comes with depression. If I forgot to put a glass of water on my nightstand then when I woke up thirsty I waited until my urge to drink became overpowering. If I managed to transplant myself to the couch then all I wanted was comfort food. That involved crunch and cheese. In my youth, I’d polish off that 2 pound box of goldfish in an afternoon.

This led to stomach aches, which I always felt I deserved, and a long nap to force my mind into temporary oblivion. Upon waking my body would scream at me for some kind of useful, nutritional calories. My compromise was extra pepperoni on my pizza.

I ate, knowing full well that I’d feel worse after this monstrosity of a meal, but that was also the point. I knew I needed good food, but I also knew I was a horrible person. Good food certainly shouldn’t be wasted on such an abject soul — that is the argument my mind used against me. So I ate what reinforced my depressive thoughts.

Diets are complicated. Please do not take my advice on what to eat and what not to eat. Go to the professionals. What I will recommend is a greater awareness of what you eat and why. What happened just before you ate something you knew wasn’t healthy? How did you actually feel after the temporary satisfaction of eating all the Oreos went away? What foods have you feeling good the longest?

These are helpful questions that guided me toward a better understanding of what certain foods do to my body, and also provided logical ammunition against my depression’s tactic of emotional subterfuge to get me eating poorly.