Clarion Mindful Month: Nutritionist Lily Soutter Helps Feed Clarion’s Minds

This week, we welcomed Lily Soutter, Nutritionist, to round off our annual Clarion Mindful Month. 

In a busy PR agency, it can be easy to forget sometimes that food equals fuel. Lily shared invaluable insights into how best to fuel our bodies with the right nutrients to help enhance mental wellbeing and energy, exploring the all-important connection between our diets, brain chemistry, and mood. 

Lily’s top tips included:

•    Eating attentively reduces mindless snacking by 30%, so try some mindful eating by eating away from distraction, eating slowly, chewing thoroughly, and savouring the flavour

•    The perfect good mood food plate is made up of 50% vegetables, 25% carbs, and 25% protein and healthy fats

•    Combining protein with carbohydrates helps produce happy hormones 

•    Dehydration can impact energy, mood, concentration, headaches, and even short-term memory – stay hydrated by keeping a water bottle on your desk, adding fruits to water for a nutrient hit, and choosing herbal or fruit teas, or even cold-water infusion teabags

•    The gut is our second brain, so its important to optimise gut health – that can be done through getting enough fibre, eating the rainbow and fermented foods, managing stress and taking probiotics

We also took home some useful facts and figures, such as 60% of our brain is made up of fat, and even had a hands-on demonstration and taste test of Lily’s signature energy balls!

Clarion Mindful Month saw the return of our weekly mindful hours, where we give everyone one hour back each week for the month to do something that helps get them into the right mindset, and importantly, remain there. From gym sessions, hair appointments, horse rides, evening sauna sessions, bouldering, and even just finishing a book we can’t put down, the team was able to take some all-important time for themselves amid a busy start to the year.