About

Cloud Nine Kitchen is a food and wellness blog aimed at helping to improve mental health and wellbeing.

What you’ll find here:

Healthy and nutritious recipes filled with all the right ingredients to help lead a healthy lifestyle, both physically and mentally.
A way to use the process of cooking as an achievable goal and therapeutic outlet on even the darkest of days and when motivation is low.
Articles on helping achieve your best mental and physical health.
Honest and open insights from a long-time mental health sufferer documenting her journey to finding better mental health through good nutrition and physical activity.

My Illness and Me

My name is Nevada. Before you ask (and everyone does), my name has nothing to do with my place of conception. Rather it owes itself to my mother’s particular fondness of Steve McQueen movies; Nevada Smith to be specific. So please feel free to call me Steve, should you find yourself so inclined.

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In March 2017, I quit my job at a large national law firm in London after 8 years of studying and working in law. I had a mental health break down leaving me unable to work. In fact, it left me unable to do most things: I couldn’t wake up, wash or dress myself, eat, or just be kind to myself in the basic way many people take for granted in daily living.

This wasn’t my first such breakdown and it’s unlikely to be my last. Since the age of 12, I have been continually treated by medical professionals with a range of therapies and medications for depression, anxiety, and borderline personality disorder.

The thing is, I wouldn’t call any of these approaches treatments in the true sense of the word. Of course, they treat certain elements or by-products of my disorder, however I find it’s largely a case of management. At the end of the day, there isn’t any ‘cure’ for borderline personality disorder.

In my state of unemployment and unfulfilling housewifery, I started to think about how I had managed slightly to pull myself out of my last bout of darkness; at least to the stage that I was able to reflect on such a feat.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy: Breaking the Cycle

When I first started Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) at the age of about 13, I remember being shown a diagram something like this one:

CBT cycle chart by Cloud Nine Kitchen

The theory is essentially that our thoughts, feelings, behaviours, and physical symptoms are all interlinked with each other. So negative thoughts will in turn affect behaviours, feelings and will manifest physical consequences. Likewise, for example, poor physical states, such as lack of sleep or altered body image, will reinforce poor thoughts, feelings, and behaviours etc.

The key, so it goes, to improving your mood and symptoms, is to somehow break this tightly interlinked cycle at one cog to positively affect the others.

So I remember sitting in the office with my psychologist at the time and thinking this was one of the most patronising things I had ever been told. Of course eating well or sleeping well will affect your mood and other related elements. It seemed so simple. But then revisiting this idea recently, I thought about it: whilst I knew this information, was I actually putting any of it in to action?

Having realised this, though, what could I actually, physically do to break this cycle? I mean, if I can’t sleep – I can’t just flip a switch and make myself sleep. When I can’t see the point in living, I can’t magically jump out of bed and pop on my motivation hat for the day to go out and socialise – I can’t even get showered and dressed. I had to take one day when I felt OK to push myself to try and find a small thing that motivated me enough to break through and start this wheel in motion.

Physical Fitness

Plenty of people had suggested the gym as a great way of releasing endorphins to raise my mood and lose some weight. And plenty of times I had retorted with excuses: I couldn’t leave the house; I was too anxious to go on my own; I didn’t care about losing weight; I would probably fail anyway.

The truth is though I had put on a lot of weight. Whilst unhappy at work I would binge eat Kinder Buenos to find a temporary sugar-fuelled happiness. I would completely punish myself and reinforce my feelings of self-and-body hatred by excessively eating to prove to myself that I was the fat waste I so strongly believed myself to be. Even when I left employment, I would eat nothing all day only to then binge on whatever takeaway or processed foods my husband could bring late at night because I didn’t have the energy to cook. It was a shame because I had always loved cooking. But like so many other things, I felt my illness had robbed me of this small joy and as a result I was living off highly processed foods with little nutritional value, only serving to further exacerbate my low mood and lethargy.

So I did it. I signed up to the gym and started attending group exercise classes. Very slowly at first but then steadily building my frequency and then, suddenly, I started noticing small changes. I was returning home feeling upbeat, accomplished, and motivated to do things. I was proud of what my body was achieving – the endurance, strength, and flexibility it had, the muscle tone that was developing, and the weight that was dropping. I was watching my body physically improve. The more I went the gym, the more accountable I was making myself. The instructors and other class attendees came to recognise my face and would notice when I wasn’t there. All of these things had fuelled a fitness and wellness fire in me.

I had to keep this going and keep improving. I was determined not to stagnate or regress. It was time to tackle another behaviour: food.

The Food Battle

My theory went that the food I was, or indeed wasn’t, putting in to my body was affecting my mood both directly, through nutrition deficiency, and also indirectly, for example through the impact it was having on my fitness capabilities, skin and hair, or sleep quality.

I started researching and found that there is a wealth of literature and studies out there* concerning the effect that deficiencies in certain vitamins, proteins, and fats can have on mental health – and conversely the positive effects getting the right amount of these nutrients can have on the mind and mental cognitions.

The good news was my motivation was now higher to start tackling the food issue. Seeing results in fitness and wanting to improve meant I now had a solid goal to work towards. I was going to limit my refined sugar and processed-food intake and up my use of good fats, protein, fibre, and vitamins.

The first thing was ensuring I was making myself a healthy post-workout lunch so at least once a day – on my post-gym high – I was making something healthy for me to eat which was going to aid my muscle recovery and keep my energy levels up. This was a huge change in itself because I was used to not eating at all during the day. I started to gain a real sense of pride that I was taking better care of myself and felt accomplished that I had achieved something. Even though it was a small task, it was another tick on my daily to-do checklist.

Once I was in this habit, I slowly started adding home-cooked, healthy dinners as well. With the better nutrition, I not only noticed a difference in my fitness levels, but also my skin and hair were looking better. These factors boosted my self-esteem and in turn increased my mood. With a more balanced and healthy eating pattern, my mood swings were also calming down. I had more energy and I gained such a strong sense of accomplishment: even if I had done nothing else on a given day, I had gone to the gym and cooked two healthy meals. In the darkest pits of depression, this can and did feel like an unbelievable achievement.

I also noticed the enjoyment I was getting out of planning and cooking the meals themselves. The physical process of cooking and being mindful of the ingredients I was using, focused my mind on the task at hand and distracted me from my inner monologue. It became a therapeutic outlet and I actually started looking forward to making my meals. To then be able to share these meals with my husband, friends, or family on occasions only added to my sense of pride in seeing them enjoy what I had made which upped my self-esteem further.

The all-round impact these changes made to my life were, and continue to be, immense. I was finally seeing this CBT cycle in action: my thoughts, my behaviours, my mood, and my physical symptoms were changing. I started going back to reading in my spare time, something I hadn’t done since before my last breakdown. I was socialising more and I was taking a pride in my appearance again. My lifestyle had changed and with it, so was my mood, allowing me to better manage my illness.

Cloud Nine Kitchen: Now and the Future

This lifestyle is not about food deprivation in any shape or form. Nor is it about punishing yourself for having a bad day. I’m still on medication and I still have my bad days, weeks, even months. But these feel more peppered in between generally good, accomplished days. This is a far cry from before where it was bad days in a sea of…well, slightly less-bad days.

Even now, I can certainly still be found with a large stuffed crust pizza when the need calls. The important thing is that it is no longer my go-to call for happiness. I’m more prepared with healthier – and often tastier – alternative foods for those days when I don’t want to leave my bed. And eating these alternative food fills me with a little boost knowing that it’s something I’ve made.

This lifestyle is not about ‘curing’ my illness, because it won’t, but it is about giving me something to focus on. It’s about helping me learn to like myself a bit more. By caring for my body I’m showing kindness to myself. I’m finding joy in an activity and, through it, taking more control over my symptoms. I’m being kind to myself by, instead of focusing on all the things I haven’t done with my day or my life, appreciating that I got up out of bed, I went to the gym, and I cooked a meal. And sometimes that’s more than good enough.

*There are many websites, articles, and papers on this idea but some of the most resourceful and accessible links are the following:

DISCLAIMER:

I am not a medical professional, nor am I a trained nutritionist or psychologist. Whilst my lifestyle change is inspired by academic research and schools of psychology, I do not advocate that anyone suffering from mental health difficulties should adopt this lifestyle in lieu of following medical advice or treatment. Nor do I profess that incorporating these dietary changes will definitively cure anyone else’s symptoms. There is such a wide range of mental illnesses and I speak only of my own experiences managing my own diagnosis.

The purpose of this blog is to share details of the lifestyle changes and coping mechanisms which have effectively helped me manage my illness, in tandem with medical treatment, in the hope that they might help others too.