(cheerful music)
- What are the best ways to combat depression?
How do we do this from multiple angles
and increase our chances for success?
I was inspired this week by a story
on CNN about a man named Kevin Curry.
Kevin Curry is a southerner, southern United States,
who was overweight, highly depressed,
and had great faith in God,
and prayed to God to take away his depression.
Everyone else felt happy, he said.
The sun was shining, the birds were singing
and they wanted to be outside.
He just wanted to crawl under his covers and die.
He lost his job.
He lost his girlfriend.
And at a certain point,
life just didn't seem worth living anymore.
And so he had a plan, a plan to take his life,
and he did research on the best ways to cut himself,
to slit his wrists to make sure
that he would actually die from it.
And he made marks with a sharpie on his arm
for exactly where to do it.
He got a phone call from his therapist who said,
"I was thinking of you, could we do a session tomorrow?
Could you come in tomorrow and talk to me?"
And he says, "Okay."
He said, "I was gonna have a last meal
with one of my best friends.
Not tell them that I was gonna kill myself.
But I decided to stall that and go see my therapist."
And the therapist noticed on his arm the Sharpie marks
and asked him what those were.
He broke down crying,
and explained, "This is where I'm gonna
cut my wrists and take my life."
He says until then he had
kind of a superficial relationship with his therapist.
They hadn't gone very deep,
but here they talked about his spirituality,
they talked about his depression,
they talked about his history.
He felt this real bond and connection,
and his therapist said to him,
"listen, if you had a cold
wouldn't you go down to the CVC,
go down to the pharmacy,
and get some meds or get some help
to deal with it? Your cold?"
He says, "Yeah, absolutely."
She says, "So why not for your depression?"
He'd been seeing her for therapy,
but didn't really describe what he was going through.
She says, "You can make some changes
and take some things to help with the depression."
So for him, in his case,
antidepressants were part of the solution.
When she says, "There's nothing wrong with you
or your faith."
And he decided he was going to take it one step further.
"What help can I get? And how can I help myself?"
He decided he didn't just wanna feel better,
he wanted to look better, and that those two meshed.
And so he started exercising three hours a day,
five days a week.
And he wasn't seeing much change in his physique.
And he says, "You can't out-train a poor diet."
And so he got really, really into studying about nutrition,
how to cook healthy, how to do meal prep,
you know, and he started something called
Fit Men Cook, which you can look that up.
We'll leave a link in the description for Fit Men Cook.
Where he started looking up recipes and
learning how to cook and to prepare,
'cause he didn't want to sacrifice.
As a southerner, he was used to comfort food.
He was used to these really delicious flavors,
and he didn't wanna sacrifice flavor to eat healthy,
so he got immersed in how to cook healthy
and still have delicious flavors and delicious foods.
But he found that in exercising regularly
and changing his diet and nutrition,
and in his case, there were antidepressants involved,
but he says what really got him over the hump,
these changes that he made physically for himself,
and that, he felt happy again.
He felt hopeful and he felt energetic
and he felt optimistic.
Now, he gives him this article six keys,
six keys to combating depression.
The first is to self-identify the signs of depression
and seek help.
and I wanna tell you what the signs of depression are.
If you feel consistently hopeless, helpless, worthless,
if you cry easily and it's hard to stop,
if you are irritable, if you have thoughts or ideas
or plans to hurt yourself or kill yourself,
if you have a hard time getting out of bed,
taking a shower, performing daily tasks,
if you're constantly in a state of overwhelm,
you don't need to have all of these symptoms,
if you've lost interest in things
that you used to find enjoyable,
these are signs of clinical depression.
Get help.
There's no shame in it.
It's not a sign of weakness that you have it.
It's a sign that your brain and your body
are out of balance,
life stressors are getting to you.
Get help.
- I'm swaddling you.
- I know what you're doing.
- I'm swaddling you.
- I know what you're doing.
- Come here.
- The second thing he says is to make meals simple.
He's says stock up on foods
that don't take much effort to prepare,
like eggs, yogurt, and canned tuna.
And he says find one nutritious recipe to cook each week.
And the big reason for that is
he says it feeds your soul to find new recipes.
It keeps you excited,
it keeps you, you know, researching and looking
and moving forward.
He says it's just exciting to not just
settle into pure routine.
But to tantalize your taste buds as it were, right.
(upbeat music)
And he says, do a social media check,
and I love this.
He says unfollow any feeds that make you feel negative.
Unfollow any feeds on social media
that make you feel negative.
- You gotta be kidding me.
- Wow, you realize how many people have read this?
I'm up to 2,000 followers since last night.
- You're trending, bro.
- They're sending me messages,
they're goading me into responding.
- Don't do it. - Don't do that.
- Don't do it, man, don't respond.
- Don't, take the high road.
- Set a fitness goal that works with your diet
as well as, I would add, to your schedule
and the other things you have going on.
(grunts of pain)
- Last be kind to yourself.
And this is crucial.
With depression comes a rush
of negative thoughts,
negative self-beliefs.
And oftentimes the cruelest person to you is you.
And the only way to turn it around
is to start with being kind to yourself.
How, and people say, I don't know how to be kind to myself.
Okay. What would you do to be kind to others?
Would you take them out to dinner?
Would you listen to them as they talk about their problems?
Oftentimes we brush our problems away
because we got other things to focus on.
If someone needed kindness, would you serve them?
Would you make time for them?
Would you help them?
Would you make them laugh or have them take a break?
Can you do these things for yourself?
Be kind to yourself.
- [Friend] You gonna look good after this, man.
- Thanks man.
- [Woman] So ready?
- Yep.
(Counting in Japanese)
(Screams in pain)
- Folks. Depression is real.
Anyone who tells you, it's not a real thing or pull yourself
up by your bootstraps or it's all in your head.
Doesn't know what they're talking about.
It is real.
It is overwhelming.
It is debilitating, but you can combat it.
You can fight it.
You can have a better life.
The link between mind and body is strong.
The research supporting better nutrition
exercise and rest to combat depression is ironclad.
Take care of yourself and see what it does for you.
So I'm a licensed therapist, Jonathan Decker
co-founder of Mended Light, reacting
to the news and we'll see you next time.
(Upbeat music)