Has grief changed how you’re eating? Maybe you notice you’re emotionally eating more or craving more carbs. That happens a lot, and the Nutritional Psychiatry of grief is what this video is all about. Hey, I’m Dr. Drew Ramsey, I’m a board-certified psychiatrist, and this channel’s all about connecting food and feelings and mental health, what we call Nutritional Psychiatry and building mental fitness. Now, grief and grief maxxing, as we’ve been calling it, is a series that is about helping you work through and think through grief to understand more of what it’s about and do a better job with it.
We’ve created this series to talk about different aspects of grief to give you more tools to work through grief. It’s such a difficult and challenging set of emotions and feelings, and a lot of times we don’t feel equipped. So this video is all about food and the eating of grief, because grief really changes our appetite. For a lot of us, we experience nausea, or you find yourself kind of in that dissociative, kind of horrible early part of grief. For a lot of people, we don’t remember or prioritize eating. So I want to talk a little bit about that and that some of the foods that definitely you should be thinking about and stocking your kitchen with or your apartment with to make sure that you have during times of grief and grieving.
The first point on grief and Nutritional Psychiatry is around how grief can change appetite. A lot of times people will find themselves with a loss of appetite, just not really feeling hungry, not wanting to think about food. In a lot of ways, this is not wanting to engage in things that we enjoy because we’re feeling so sad, sometimes so lost and disoriented. This is really important to pay attention to because as we don’t eat, of course, as you all know, we get hungry, our blood sugar drops, we’re more irritable, we’re more cranky. We have bigger feelings and so it feels less manageable. This is not what we want during grief. So it’s important just to have that tenet of self awareness, of understanding where you are on this.
Of course, grief can also increase our appetite, whether it’s the classic carb craving or late night eating, or just finding yourself getting kind of over satiated, eating more than you want to, being full. This is a way that it’s always felt to me physiologically we are kind of trying to put ourselves into a food coma, trying to really like satiate and overly satiate, and put ourselves into a state where you can just kind of sit on the couch and not do much.
We really want to identify these early on because neither one of them feel good. It doesn’t feel good to be hungry. It doesn’t feel good to look back and think, I ate way too much of stuff that I don’t like and instead to look at those fundamental principles of Nutritional Psychiatry. Nutritional Psychiatry is all about eating foods that you like, eating plants that you like, thinking about things like avocados and cucumbers and really simple, easy light foods that go great when you’re struggling with grief.
Why? Well, I find that during these times for myself and for my patients doing things with our hands can be really important. So making yourself a little salad, making yourself a a little lunch, again, really simple activities can be very grounding. You also then are often choosing those more nutrient-dense foods. We’re thinking about that classic Nutritional Psychiatry rhyme: seafood, greens, nuts and beans, and a little dark chocolate, rainbow celebrations, don’t forget the fermentations. And that rhyme is to really ground us and give us food categories to think about during times like grief. So pay attention to your appetite. That’s step one. Think about going up, going down. How is this grief affecting me? And where are you in it? Early grief hits very different than that longer chronic grief, where sometimes appetite is affected but because there’s a feeling of apathy.
People who are struggling with long-term loss or struggling with grief of a significant trauma over time, there’s a way that there can be an apathy because it feels like what’s the point? What’s the point of making myself a nice salad or engaging with my food in a way that’s more creative or more meaningful because I’m feeling so down. I think the this video is finding you because it is something that we can do in our everyday life and putting a little bit more effort in usually has a really big payoff. You get more nutrients, you get better digestion. And also I find there’s less shame and guilt of I’m just not taking care of myself when I when I’m not eating well. I hear about this from patients all the time. Their kind of routine gets disrupted and they can just see as hard as they’re trying, it’s a lot of fast food, a lot of processed foods and those do creep back in for all of us really quickly. So during times of grief, check in with that and make sure it’s not affecting you as best you can.
Point two is going to be liquid meals. Now, this isn’t what you think. I do want you to pay attention to alcohol and alcohol consumption because numbing those feelings of grief or just celebrating or talking about powerful feelings of grief when you’re intoxicated, I don’t think that’s going to get you there in terms of processing your grief. Liquid meals are because a lot of times there isn’t much appetite, or you’re doing things like arranging a funeral, or you’re just not really feeling that inspired. This is where soups and smoothies are underutilized, particularly soups. Soups are so great, whether it’s some of those wonderful, cool soups in the summer, like a gazpacho or cucumber soup, or just those amazing pasta, bean, vegetable soups. You get so much nutrient density, so many varieties of plants often in there. Don’t forget lentil soup, of course. We can’t continue in this video until I say lentil soup.
Soups are a great meal for grief because you can make them in batches. You’re often hosting groups of people. They’re also wonderful because they store easily. So if you’re feeling down, feeling really sad in the midst of loss, having a big batch of soup in the fridge is, just getting a little bit into a cup, putting in the microwave, and and there you have it. So utilize soups and smoothies and these more, liquid meals as I call them. Because you can get a lot of nutrient density, you can put in some effort and batch cook, and it’s a great way to go.
In terms of smoothies, my quick tips, and you’ll see these in all of my books and recipes, are to utilize this as a delivery vehicle for great fermented foods like kefir or yogurt. Just a little scoop of kefir in your smoothie, and it’s blowing any probiotic supplement out of the water in terms of the kind of probiotic punch that it’s bringing to the smoothie. It is also a great place to slide in some greens, a great place to put in nuts. That’s kind of my secret ingredient and recommendation. Always dropping in cashews or almonds or some type of nuts. You’re adding in fiber, protein, and fat to the smoothie. That makes it more satiating, gives you more minerals and vitamins, and it’s also just more delicious.
Point number three about grief and Nutritional Psychiatry is to think about how you can provide food during times of grief. Oftentimes grief is really disorienting and being of service, being helpful, providing food to people is something that’s almost always in our cultural traditions of looking out for people, understanding that this process of grief involves periods where we’re not going to be as focused on self-care, we’re not going to feel good, motivated, hopeful and we’re going to need some help. So if you’re in the midst of grief and you’re feeling productive, you feel like baking or cooking or making a batch of soup, you can help out with somebody who you know is struggling. It doesn’t have to just be a grief from like a loss, like a funeral happened. Grief happens in all kinds of different ways at different periods in our lives. And it’s something to really pay attention to, be on the lookout for in your life. Not that we want to like, wallow in grief, but that we don’t want to wallow in grief. And the way to prevent that is by recognizing where we’re getting stuck, to focus on building new tools, to connect with ourselves and to engage with the process of grief. That’s what this grief maxxing series is about.
The fourth Nutritional Psychiatry point about grief is how food and tastes and favorite meals can take us back to people and places that we aren’t currently with. Maybe we’ve lost them permanently. Maybe we’ve been displaced from that place or that person for a while. But our food connects us so many of our memories and our great experiences with people are over a good meal. And because of that, food really is orienting and in some ways organizing for a lot of our feelings and relationships, a lot of our attachments. As you’re thinking through a lot of your good friends and relatives, I’m sure you can think about some of the favorite meals or some of the favorite traditions that you have. So if you have a favorite recipe from a friend that you’ve lost, a great way to connect with them and to sit with them in a way is through those foods, those smells, that taste, maybe that process of making it. If you are from a different country and and you’ve migrated somewhere and you’re away from some of those tastes and smells of of your home culture, there probably is no other way like food to kind of connect and and feel embodied and embraced by the tastes and smells of your country and culture.
So I I hope that this fourth way really helps you engage with all of the history that you have in terms of flavors and foods and mobilize some of your attachments and some of your grief process using food.
Please share this with anybody in your life who’s struggling with grief and stuck in it in some way. I hope these helpful tools will help people maximize the experience of grief. What is that? It makes us not scared of connecting. It makes us more loving, more connecting, more attaching creatures. That’s how we build community. That’s how we have rich and rewarding lives. Everyone, thanks so much for your time. I’m Dr. Drew Ramsey. Please subscribe to the channel so you get all these tips. Please leave some comments below on how these are helping you or ideas you have about Nutritional Psychiatry and grief. And I’ll see you in the next video.
