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Areas › Your body › Food, caffeine and fuel
Calling it self medication instead of a failure of character changes what you do next. You stop trying to out-discipline the craving and start asking what would meet the same need with a longer tail: eating something before you reach the desperate stage, protein alongside the carbohydrate, getting outside, company. The craving usually softens once the low is being met somewhere else as well.
Eat and drink with healthy enjoyment as a reward for what you have done (Quran 52:19). Enjoying food is described as a reward, not as something to be suspicious of.
الطور
كُلُواْ وَٱشۡرَبُواْ هَنِيٓـَٔۢا بِمَا كُنتُمۡ تَعۡمَلُونَ
‘Eat and drink with healthy enjoyment as a reward for what you have done.’
Qur’an 52:19read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Across prospective cohorts, people eating closer to a healthy overall pattern had modestly lower odds of later depression. That finding is about the pattern of eating over time rather than single moments of craving, and it is observational, so other differences between those people could account for part of it. Still, it is a reason to look at the shape of the week rather than judging any one biscuit.
Lassale C, Batty GD, Baghdadli A, Jacka F, Sánchez-Villegas A, Kivimäki M, Akbaraly T. (2019). Healthy dietary indices and risk of depressive outcomes: a systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies.. Molecular psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Carbohydrate briefly helps the brain make serotonin, so reaching for it while low is the body finding the nearest lever.
If a health habit keeps sliding, attach something immediate to it. The apps where you put real money on hitting a step target work for a reason: the payoff arrives now instead of in twenty years.
Own brand products from large retailers were among the worst performers in these tests. A big name on the packet is not a quality check, however much it feels like one.
A child struggling with attention, anxiety and daily reflux at once may be dealing with one problem wearing three coats. Undiagnosed coeliac disease and other food reactions can produce all of it, and the gut symptom is the clue worth following.