Mediterranean or MIND Diet

In general I try to eat "healthy". Recently this looks like a bottled V8 greens smoothie/juice for breakfast. This gives me 2.5 servings of fruits/veggies without any extra sugar or anything. Then I might have a snack around lunch time like a small bag of trail mix or a granola bar. My first and only real meal is an early dinner around 5 which usually starts with a salad. I eat so little mainly because food tends to block the absorption of my meds, especiallly foods high in protein. I have had PD for long enough to make some correlations like that.

This leaves my body at a huge caloric deficit at night, which often leads me to abandon all of my discipline at night and crush sweets. There must be a Dopamine rush that goes along with this too, because I will seriously put away an embarassing amount of cookies, ice cream, candy, pie, etc.

I want to change this cycle though. I tried to add more protein to my diet earlier in the day whether it's some oatmeal or a protein shake. This was on the advice of my personal trainer at Crunch fittness. I kept a food journal for about a week and I definitely was not getting enought protein, especially if I wanted to add some lean muscle. But this led to me being parked out more often, longer, and worse during the day which made working out harder to do. A real catch 22.

So I cut the protein back out and my sympoms started to get better and more predictable, but I still feel that my diet could be better. I saw a nutritionist at Emory but, surprise surprise he wasn't very useful. He just said I needed more protein and when I told him this blocks my meds, he didn't have anything else for me.

I finally found some useful information from this podcast/ . They had an episode on the Mediterranean diet or the MIND diet (stands for “Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay) which sounds pretty good. A diet made to combat Neurological degeneration sounds like just what I need. It is also a very lose diet. You pretty much try to eat more Green leafy vegetables, other vegetables, berries, nuts, olive oil, whole grains, fish, beans, poultry, and wine. You try to eat less Butter and margarine, cheese, red meat, fried foods, pastries and sweet, and processed foods in general.

I've done a little bit of research and made a sample meal plan for a week. I'm going to plan out the groceries and stuff and hopefully start Monday. I am actually kind of hopeful this might actually help. My diet is currently way too heavy on margarine, cheese, read meat, and sweets. I know that I can't keep doing the same thing and expecting different results. That would be crazy and luckily I'm not crazy yet.