What if the way you eat is directly shaping how you think, feel, and cope?
Serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine- the molecules your brain uses to regulate mood, motivation, and stress response- are synthesized from essential amino acids. Amino acids that come from food. That means what you put on your plate every day either supports your brain health or quietly undermines it.
In this episode of Thrive on Plants, I sit down with Dr. Elizabeth Winings, Psychiatric-Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, Diplomate of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, Assistant Professor of Nursing at Jacksonville University, and founder of Winings Wellness, a seven-provider integrative mental health practice built on a premise most clinics still haven't adopted: mental health care should be preventive, not just reactive.
Dr. Winings' path to this work started at the VA, watching patients lose limbs to poorly controlled diabetes and asking a question most clinicians don't ask out loud: when do we stop treating the consequences and start addressing the cause? That question led her to a doctoral internship at TrueNorth Health Center in California, years in inpatient pediatric psychiatry, and ultimately to founding a practice where nutrition, lifestyle medicine, and mental health care operate as one.
In this episode, we discuss:
- The concept of preventive mental health care: what it is, why most people don't know it's possible, and how to start building it now
- How emotions work as neurobiological signals and why learning to read them changes everything
- The grief, identity, and psychological weight of cancer survivorship that medicine rarely addresses
- Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), nervous system regulation, and the long arc of mental health across a lifetime
- Breaking down cultural and systemic barriers to mental health care access
- What Dr. Winings actually asks her patients about food at every single visit
- How to know when your intuition is speaking and how to stop talking yourself out of it
This is a conversation about eating, thinking, feeling, and building a life that is not just longer, but genuinely more whole.
Connect with Dr. Elizabeth Winings
Website: https://winingswellness.com/
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