Wellness Tip of the Week: Avoiding the "hangry" feeling

How does food and nutrition impact focus, mood, and stress levels? During this week’s wellness tip, Aaron Shaw, OTR/L, CHT, CSCS, healthspan coach and host of the Healthspan Digest podcast, discusses the importance of maintaining stable blood sugar levels to prevent the "hangry" feeling induced by blood sugar crashes. To avoid these crashes, Shaw shares some quick snacks veterinary professionals can graze on throughout the day.

Below is the video transcript, lightly edited for clarity:

Aaron Shaw, OTR/L, CHT, CSCS: Hey, this is Aaron Shaw with another Wellness Tip of the Week. Today, I want to talk about something that affects your focus, your mood, and your stress level. We're talking about food and nutrition.

If you've ever found yourself necessarily skipping a lunch, powering through a lunch, or not being able to eat enough throughout the day, and then later on, you find yourself being a little snappy, a little foggy headed, [or] a little more stressed out than you feel like you should be, well, that's what we would expect because you probably have low blood sugar.

When your blood sugar crashes, there's this response with our body that releases cortisol and adrenaline. These are stress hormones. We know this. So that sensation of feeling "hangry," which is both hungry and angry—it's real. It's your body's full-system stress response to not having level blood sugar.

Let me give you 2 quick snacks you can have to keep at your desk [or] in the break room that you can grab and graze on throughout the day to keep your blood sugar a little more level. The first thing I love is hard-boiled eggs with some fruit. Hard-boiled eggs will give you some protein, and fruit—real fruit—is a great way to give you the protein, [which] will kind of level you out and [provide] a little bit of natural sugars.

The second thing that I really love to go to, again, is certainly a fruit with some nut butter. Same principles—it'll give you some protein and some natural sugars. When you graze on this throughout the day, you're giving your body a chance to have a maintained blood sugar level. You won't have those crashes, [crave] super sugary stuff, and then go back in the break room [where] you have donuts or some other food that is going to spike your blood sugar. You're going to be on this roller coaster, and your emotional state [and] well-being is going to be on that roller coaster as well.

So, we want to level that out because mental health is not just in your head, it's in your nutrition as well. It's in the small things that we do day-to-day, and our small choices add up, and...you really need to fuel up, because you've got important work to do. You’ve got to take care of your clients. You’ve got to take care of each other, and most importantly, you've got to take care of yourself. So, join me next week for another Wellness Tip of the Week.