Depression: Let's talk (about food!)

I have a black dog and the black dog tells me to eat like there's no tomorrow. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has boldly chosen to make depression this year's World Health Day theme. The article below is not an authoritative or expert one; it's merely my personal, lived experience about depression, and how it distorts my relationship with food.

Imagine having an expensive, favourite dress - you know, the one you save for "special occasions".

^When I think of a special dress, a red, over the top one comes to mind!

Now imagine you're wearing that dress on a normal day - with the expectation that the normal day will become a special one. And you repeat this the next day, and so on - until the dress loses its magic and stops being a special dress.

I realised I started having a similar approach to food. Don't get me wrong, I love food. I'm like that rat in Ratatouille. Food excites me and is one of my favourite things in life. But lately, the shine has worn off - like in that dress - as I try to seek comfort in eating. Food thus became less of an exciting process of discovery, and more of a mind-numbing tool. We've all had such emotional eating phases.

People dealing with depression often have an unhealthy relationship with food, and I am one of them. Food became my go-to comfort zone, my fix. Chocolate became a medicine. Phrases such "I need comfort food today" became a daily leitmotiv, dragging with it the accompanying carb-laden pizzas, chocolate, ice-cream. During a particularly bad week, I ate a whole pack of Mini Mars Bars in a week - 33 of them, I think. Urgh. Definitely not the best way to get ready for the beach.

Depression also brings about a feeling of tiredness that makes even small tasks such as peeling a carrot seem herculean; this adds fuel to the fire and always prompts me to look for quick fix dinners.

After a while, cooking no longer was the fun, exploratory journey I would undertake; it became more of a chore. The taste of food became blurred; it dawned on me that most of the time I was probably not enjoying the food very much - I was probably hanging on to the hope that it would make me feel better or I would be busy feeling guilty about ingesting the carbs or berating myself for being so undisciplined. Meanwhile the rising needle on the scales looked at me accusingly.

What's more, eating in an ad-hoc way was not sustainable - and I mean it in the environmental sense. I quickly found out that junk food had so much more packaging than if I were to be cooking my own meal (and think of how regularly I was buying said junk food). Not to mention that each time you dip a spoon in that jar of palliative Nutella you're killing an Ourang-Utan in Borneo or something.

Gosh. If only food was the one aspect of life that the black dog didn't touch.

Eating healthy can be a challenge in itself; but when the black dog hits, either your appetite is gone or you feel like a bottomless pit. In my case, it's the latter. But nothing is insurmountable. My challenge to myself is to do a little bit, week after week, to test out good habits, and hopefully keep them on track. I tried getting my sleep pattern under control - it's work in progress - and I was astounded by the heaps of advice, stories, and confessions that came my way when I posted about it on Instagram.

My next challenge, for the coming week, is to reign in my "comfort eating" habits and go back to finding joy and vivacity in cooking up strange vegetarian things. Let's see how it goes - and if you're having, or ever had, a similar experience - with comfort eating gone out of hand - I'd love to hear about it!

There are so many healthy yet naughty recipes to be tried. Depression, you can't keep me away from them forever!

^ One of the cool cafés in London where we had a big but surprisingly healthy meal... I'll write about it soon!

A few words about the "Black Dog":

As for talking about depression...

Recently, I've been surprised by how many people have a depression story to tell - or maybe it's not that surprising at all. If, according to WHO, more than 300 million suffer from depression, chances are you've already met someone who's had, or is having, an episode or struggle with a "black dog":

Today, coming out with a depression story is not so much of an issue in many circles as having the right mechanisms to deal with it is. For many Millennials, depression is actually a constant, and through initiatives such as the decision of WHO to celebrate it, there are now open, public spaces where we can talk about it.

The challenge, in these cases, is then to find the appropriate response. In my case, I found that my work structure wasn't particularly generous to people suffering from depression: the hierarchy does not believe in mental illnesses beyond " stress", and makes strenuous demands on my brain, my time, my emotional ability to handle things.

In Mauritius, the silence around depression is deafening. Which is why the theme chosen by the WHO resonates so strongly: let's talk.