All the good food in the world won't overcome stress and negativity

In Nutritional Therapy, we talk of overrides – crises that can overwhelm your body, stopping it from reaching balance or homeostasis where optimal health resides.

These overrides can be about your immunity (an infection or virus), endocrine system (when your hormones or your body's messengers are imbalanced), or blood sugar (such as insulin resistance or hypoglycaemia, low blood sugar).

But what I sometimes see is people with stress or emotional overrides. These might be clients with recurring chronic illnesses or autoimmune diseases who don't get better despite eating well and doing everything else 'right'. Other people know how to eat well but sometimes lose the plot and don't know why.

'But surely that mind stuff can't influence the body that much?' you might say.

Stress, along with negative thoughts and beliefs, can create ongoing imbalances in your body. They do this by activating your stress or emergency hormones like cortisol, or perhaps even adrenaline, one step up.

These emergency hormones shut off your body's normal processes like digestion, immunity and cell repair, which over time can lead to disease and prevent healing.

In terms of your mind, stress turns your attention towards survival. This makes you live in your senses, narrowing your focus and turning your life into a limited and superficial experience. This can be frustrating and lead to more negative emotions in a vicious cycle.

Stress can also turn your genes on an off. The field of epigenetics tells us that 90% of our health is controlled by your environment, like the food we eat, our exposure to environmental toxins and our exercise habits.

This means that even if you have no genetic predisposition to a disease, healthy genes can be made to behave badly and vice versa.

But your thoughts and feelings can also have a major impact on how your genes express themselves.

This is because when you think something, your brain releases neurotransmitters, or chemical messengers that once again control most all of your body's functions, from digestion and hormones to your mood.

Each of the 30-40 trillion cells in your body has thousands of receptors for these, but each one only responds to one type of protein or peptide.

If you feel sadness or happiness, each emotion releases a flood of specific proteins called neuropeptides. When they connect with those cell receptors, they change the structure of each cell.

Then when that cell divides, the new one will have more of that particular protein receptor. So happy thoughts create happy-receptive cells, and sad thoughts create sad-receptive cells. These impact your health by changing the expression of your genes.

As you can see, whatever you put into your body matters, be it your food, thoughts or the air you breathe. While nutrition is the FOUNDATION of good health, no amount of good food is going to overcome negativity and stress.

The good thing is that because your cells are constantly renewing, you can change your health.

This is what I help people do using Nutritional Therapy – which optimises your gut and brain health, and therefore your mood and mental health – and Transformation Coaching – using proven techniques based in neuroscience, to find the ROOT CUASE of your stress and replace negative thoughts and toxic habits with new and productive ones.

When you combine the two modalities, you're maximising your chances of finding balance and feeling well in every sense of the word.