E37 - Early Christmas Present: Brain Warrior's Way
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Hey there, it’s Dr. Tiffany. I want to welcome you to Integrative Mental Health Therapy with Dr. Tiffany. It has been a while. I have been on a bit of a hiatus, unintentionally, unplanned, just kind of organically responding to life circumstances and just allowing my system to be where it is and to just kind of navigate what has come up. I have learned with myself that to prevent burnout, I’ve got to toggle. And so it’s been a season of personal challenges as well as higher demand, a lot more intensives, intense intensives. And as resources go out, I have to start to just kind of manage them. And so that’s where I’ve been. And so, you know, it’s a holiday season. And what I’m going to be doing here is releasing just some gifts, some educational gifts, workshops, webinars that I recorded that I just want to share with you as just some freebies.
So instead of recording podcasts and releasing previously recorded workshops as podcasts, and then I will see you on the other side of my birthday, mid to late January with some insights and just fresh perspective. I hope you have a happy holiday season. Be well and happy new year.
So we are talking about the Brain Warrior’s Way. This is actually a program that is coming out of the Amen Clinic that I use every single day and I use it in my practice. I use it in my personal life. And it’s something that I have been kind of implementing since goodness, 2011 is when I first got introduced to the Amen Clinic and started to integrate their work into my mental health practice and nutrition coaching and all those things.
As life went on, I started to implement it even more in my life with my husband who has been diagnosed with attention deficit and he needed to do something that was natural and didn’t want to go the medication route. And we started to do more of this in my household. And I will go on to tell you a little bit more about the story of my journey in just a second, but that is why we’re talking about Brain Warrior’s Way.
Now big picture. Some of you have participated, those of you who are in attendance and those who will get the recording, you have participated in my programs in the past. I have done webinars here recently, workshops recently on gut health, gut and brain health, how to take care of your mental health from a holistic perspective.
What we’re doing here with the Brain Warrior’s Way is this is kind of me reaching out and saying, are you someone who’s not even at that level where you know that you need to be looking at functional medicine, naturopathic medicine, the gut brain health connection, and you’re really like, you know what, I just know I’m not focused, I’m foggy, I’m fatigued. I have a good life, but I don’t feel good about my life.
And I just want something. I want somebody to tell me what’s going on with me. If that is you, then this is for you because this is a foundational, fundamental level of like what I base all my work on now. Because I met the Amen Clinic’s work back in 2011 and absolutely felt like it was a missing piece in mental health.
One of the things that Dr. Amen says all the time is we are one of the few fields that don’t look at the organ that we treat. And this quote here says that your brain is the organ of your personality, your character, and intelligence is heavily involved in making you who you are. I’m going to ask you today during this workshop to take some notes. And one of those notes, if you can just plot a piece of paper, do this on your phone, take notes on your phone, but make that note that mental health is this diagnosis of symptoms. Mental health is a diagnosis of symptoms and we don’t look at the brain itself before treating it.
Mental health comes from how your brain is functioning, how healthy your brain is. So doesn’t it make sense to have some idea of brain health, of brain systems, and that’s what the Brain Warrior’s Way is.
So today we’re talking about mastery. Now this Brain Warrior’s Way and this whole process runs deep. There’s a podcast, there have been whole half day workshops and trainings. I have a master class that I’ll talk to you about a little bit at the end. What we’re focusing on today is a few concepts to help you walk away with a brain that feels better. So you’re going to have some idea of what you need to do to have a brain that feels better.
And this concept of mastery. And even though I started a little bit later, I’ll make sure I wrap on time. If there are any questions that you have that you want to make sure you get answered during this workshop, please put them in the chat box. I’m happy to answer them and I’ll get into the mission.
So you’re here today and you’re thinking, I would love a better brain. I would love a happier brain. I would love more energy. I would love more focus. I would like to feel better. And so then let me tell you about the mission of Brain Warrior’s Way.
The whole idea from Dr. Amen and his wife was to create a community of brain warriors who would not only create health for themselves, but then teach others and then hopefully transform the health of our world. And I took that very seriously as I started to walk down this path.
And I’m going to ask you if you take something away today that someone in your life could benefit from, then it’s never too early to start to become a brain warrior. Share this information with someone that you care about because that’s the mission.
And I’m going to be honest, when I encountered this mission statement, I thought it was just like a little corny. I was like, this is a bit hokey for me, but sure, I don’t know if I’m as enthusiastic about like being a brain warrior.
And then over time, what has happened for me is I’ve worked with more people and my brain health has been something I’ve had to improve and I understand how important the brain is in mental health. I’m like, yes, absolutely. Brain warrior is exactly what we should be calling this.
So a note here to make. You will get this recording. You see that it’s being recorded. So you can take notes, but know that you’re going to get the recording.
Seven steps to mastery. So maybe make a note of like, okay, so what does mastery look like. What are we talking about. So before I tell you more about me, I want you to understand what we’re even talking about. This is going to be mastery over your brain and your body.
So if you’re like, I don’t know about being a brain warrior. I’m just tired. I want you to know that everything in your body is controlled by your brain. Everything in your body is controlled by your brain.
So when we’re talking about being a brain warrior and we’re talking about mastery, it makes sense that we’re also talking about the body.
Today, we’re going to talk about mindset, assessment, some about sustenance, some about the training and habits. And then we won’t get deeply into the remaining steps of essence, responsibility, and years long. I will be doing another workshop. I will talk more about those then. But for sure we’re going to get through the first few today.
But these are the seven steps in the master class and then in the coaching group that I have. We do work on all seven steps to just really get to true mastery over your brain and body. And I want you to know that this is possible.
The work that comes out of the Amen Clinics, it has been amazing.
So let me just back out a little bit, tell you about me. Tell you a little bit more about the Amen Clinic in case you’re someone receiving this recording or someone who’s on the call today who doesn’t know about the Amen Clinic.
In some of my previous workshops, I’ve talked a lot about my history. I won’t go into that in super depth because I don’t think some of these details are as related to what we’re talking about today. But I have mentioned in the past, you know, I have a high ACEs score.
ACEs is adverse childhood experiences. I do have a high ACEs score, which means that my nervous system, my brain, is set to be more sensitive to future issues. The CDC did a ton of research back in the 80s to 90s around adverse childhood experiences indicating health in the future.
I’ve dealt with infections, toxins, emotional struggles, executive function challenges, fogginess and fatigue. Probably like a lot of people who either work with me or are interested in the work that I do, these things are familiar.
So let me connect my story with the Amen Clinics. The Amen Clinics have been around. Dr. Amen started out as a psychiatrist and then he became very interested in brain imaging as a psychiatrist who struggled with how poorly the medications worked over time. He didn’t like the fact that when you prescribe medication to people, their brain actually makes changes around the medication and has to adapt to it.
Maybe we’re happy that the person is less anxious and maybe we’re happy the person’s less depressed, but those long-term changes can have side effects and consequences. That was one part of it.
The other thing was that what you eventually would learn is that a brain on medication wasn’t necessarily a healthier brain. And what would it be like if we taught people true brain health.
And that is where a psychiatrist put down his prescription pad and started doing imaging. And he went from working in a hospital setting to now he has nine practices nationwide, an army of clinicians who work in some of his locations, but like me, have our own private practices.
Many of you are familiar with the Brain MD line, the supplements that I use, all because he believed if you feed people healthy food, you teach them how to take care of their brain, they won’t need medication. And if you show them their brain, they’ll develop what’s called brain envy and want a healthy brain and will make those changes.
I had the pleasure of meeting him in 2016 at a conference and was able to chat with him just briefly and went from using some of his tools to being a fully certified brain practitioner through him.
At that point, I had become a functional medicine practitioner. I had become a naturopathic doctor already. I was a licensed psychotherapist. I thought I knew a lot. This took my practice over the edge. It was a game changer.
The dabbling I was doing personally, everything became next level once I integrated his supplements and his approach of assessment and this mastery that you’re going to learn about changed my practice.
My husband was one of my first real kind of in-depth blended integrative clients for me. Because he was somebody who was able to have access to all the different things that I was learning and I was able to help him deal with his ADHD symptoms more naturally.
So he did all the things I do in my practice, the functional medicine, the naturopathic medicine, but I used Dr. Amen’s brain typing approach to figure out the kind of brain my husband had and then I was able to customize the supplementation, the diet, the exercise, all of it to my husband’s brain.
That was the first time I’d seen something that transformative. Prior to that, I’d been doing piecemeal things but didn’t have anything really comprehensive.
So that’s what you’re going to learn about. You’re going to learn about somebody who, he was fine. He just was unfocused and moody. But he was fine. He was not dealing with a psychiatric diagnosis. He was just somebody who didn’t feel like he was living his best life.
I was able to take what we will learn here and apply it to him, get the supplements dialed in, and it really opened his brain up. It changed his mood. His mood evened out over time and really resulted in a career change, much more focus, and ability to show up in his life in a way that he didn’t think possible.
He literally went back to school, ended up in IT, and left the field that he was in because his brain changed so much with the work that we ended up doing.
It changed my family. It made me a huge fan of the Amen approach. That’s what Dr. Amen’s work does and that is why I’m finally talking about this outside of my practice.
If you come to work with me and you say, I want to get my brain back. Tiffany, help me get my brain back. I do assessments. I do natural medicine workups. These are something that people will do with me if they want that functional medicine, all the labs, assessment.
I do one day intensives, five day safe and sound trauma rewiring intensives and nervous system resets. People will come to me and they’ll say, I want one of these. And if I have the time, I’m able to take them on one-on-one as a client.
But if they want one of these services, they have to go through the Amen Clinic assessment to do anything with me. That is how much I trust this approach because it helped my brain, changed my husband’s brain.
And then in 2018, I ended up having a SPECT scan.
So let me explain what a SPECT scan is. This was my brain. Now, in 2018, I got to talk to Dr. Amen yet again. I was at a clinicians only training and he was signing his books and telling us about what we were going to be doing next and getting his mission out into the world. And I said some things and he said, you know, you should go ahead and finally do the SPECT scanning.
So let’s look at a brain. Let’s look at a healthy brain versus an unhealthy brain. I just knew my brain looked like this healthy brain. Now my brain didn’t feel like a healthy brain, but I just knew it looked like the healthy brain because I was exercising all the time. I ate really healthy. I ate a paleo diet. I took all the Amen Center supplements. I did all the mental health therapy things that you’re supposed to do. I had a good spiritual practice. I just knew I had a healthy brain and it never occurred to me that I needed to do a SPECT scan.
So now here’s how we do things if you cannot afford a SPECT scan. Dr. Amen’s clinics created a battery of questionnaires and it’s what I use as a clinician out in the field. We have you do like a five to six page assessment and it helps us to figure out what kind of brain you would have if you got your brain scanned.
Scans are private pay. Now I do send people to get them done, but now post-COVID they’ve gone from $4,500 to $5,500 out of pocket. Not everybody can do that. I don’t require that everyone does a scan to work with me. I do require that everyone does the questionnaire to work with me.
With the questionnaire, I’m able to tell you how your brain would probably look. So I’m able to give you an idea of if you had a scan, what category you would fall into based off the questionnaires. Dr. Amen’s clinics took 200,000 scans and distilled them into questionnaires that help someone like me tell you what kind of brain you would have.
I just knew that I was going to have this healthy brain. This is the happier, healthier, wealthier, more successful brain on the left. When your brain looks like this, and I’ll explain why it would look like this, this is, you know, he says a sadder, sicker, poorer, less successful brain on the right. You don’t have a good family connection. You don’t feel good.
All the things you were asking for help with are going to come down to how healthy your brain looks. And they’ve identified at the Amen Clinic things like news being toxic, addictive technology showing up here.
Your brain is involved in everything you do and different things can affect how healthy or unhealthy your brain is. I’m going to talk a little bit more about things that have nothing to do with technology and the news that make your brain healthy or unhealthy.
But these are the images of brains that you can get if you go to the Amen Clinic. A SPECT scan looks at blood flow. This brain on the left has great blood flow. This brain on the right has poor blood flow.
There aren’t really holes in this brain. Those holes are where there’s a lack of blood perfusion and it shows up on SPECT imaging.
Now there’s a different way to look at the brain and that is where you look at the circuitry and you look at how the brain is functioning. The brain should not be red. It should be white and blue. My brain was completely red.
Now going into having my SPECT scan, I knew that I was having problems with emotional regulation. I felt brain fog. I felt like my brain was scattered. I didn’t understand what was wrong. I had typed my brain and I had suspected that I had ring of fire, which didn’t make any sense to me. And then I had supplemented it properly.
In 2018, if I had not done what I did, I would not know that my brain was actually quite sick.
In 2019, I would go on to start having speech problems because of how ill my brain was. I credit the Amen Clinic with saving my brain because on paper my weight was great, my blood pressure was low, my cholesterol was perfect. There was nothing wrong with me.
Now you can’t see me, but I hope you hear from the tone of my voice. I felt really frustrated with the medical care I was receiving because I was in perfect health on paper, but this was my brain.
And that is the kind of care that most people are getting. And that is why I believe in this approach because I was not a hypochondriac. And if things had continued, I would have probably had to go out on disability. I was really considering it in early 2019 because I did not know what was wrong with me.
The Amen Clinic would help me ultimately, and I talked about this in my other workshops, ultimately figure out that I had infections. My brain was super toxic. I wasn’t detoxing properly. I had Lyme disease. I had mold exposure. I had mercury toxicity from fillings. I just was not releasing anything in my system and ultimately that would become an autoimmune disorder.
So this is how we get sick in America. This is how we lose our brain. This is how people develop Alzheimer’s. This is what it looks like. It looks like somebody who’s doing all the right things, but because I’m genetically predisposed to being a poor detoxer, my mother had cancer at 40, I looked okay on paper.
But when they looked at my brain, they said, you’re insanely inflamed and you need to go figure out why.
And then when I went into another neurologist and rheumatologist office, they said, you were sick. You’re quite sick. Now looking deeper, this is what’s going on. And we all started this team effort approach of me getting my brain back, reclaiming my health, reclaiming my brain, becoming a warrior.
It is taking years to stabilize this process, but I know personally you can do it and I’ve seen this happen over and over in my practice. I never tell people that what they are experiencing isn’t happening. You just need to know where to look and how to look.
One of the things that we have been trained to understand at the Amen Clinic and just in general is that a picture is worth a thousand words. They do imaging at the Amen Clinic, so we like pictures of brains.
That picture of my brain changed my life. The power of having a map, of knowing where you are and where you’re trying to get, is everything. Without a map, you are lost.
And what I want you to know is if you don’t have $5,500 to go get your brain scan, you can figure this out with me. Because the beautiful thing about what I did in the assessment process was that I had typed my brain properly. I just didn’t know that I needed to level up to functional medicine testing.
I had tested as a potential ring of fire with the questionnaires. And when most people work with me and do the assessments, when they go get their actual brain scan, the assessment was accurate.
So I want you to have confidence. If you can’t go get a brain scan but you’re sitting here today saying, I don’t feel good and I don’t know what’s wrong with me. And Dr. Tiffany didn’t feel good and her husband was unfocused and emotional and he changed his life. And they didn’t have any scans initially and these assessments were helpful.
Maybe I could do that too. You’re absolutely right. Do not give up and do not stop advocating for yourself. The assessments are an alternative for us to use with you for sure.
So let me go into this next slide. Let’s see if I can get this guy to move down.
So let’s talk a little bit about the brain and about a lot of what you’ve heard versus what might and might not be true. The Amen Clinic, what we’re trained to understand is that brain aging is optional. It’s optional.
If you’re like me, losing your words, losing your memory, feeling foggy, having that three p.m. brain slump, feeling emotional, feeling depressed, all this stuff that happens to people, we’re told that this is age. This just happens with age and it’s not true. So write that down. It’s not true. Brain aging is optional.
It is not true that you need to lose your memory. That has a lot to do with mitochondrial health, which we won’t get into, but that’s brain energy. It has to do with food sensitivities. It has to do with nutrient deficiencies. Brain aging is optional. We can figure this out.
Your competitive advantage or disadvantage in life is the actual physical functioning of your brain. There’s research to back this. This is not just an opinion. If you get your brain healthier, your brain changes your life.
Like I said, my husband left his job, decided he was way smarter than he realized he was, decided he was going back to college, got an additional degree and is now working from home playing with a computer. And that was because we changed his brain. And I see this with people all the time.
Your brain is involved in everything you do. How you think, how you feel, how you act, how you interact with people, your intelligence. It’s all of it. Your earning potential, your loving potential. So I want you to fall in love with having a healthy brain. If there is ever anything to be envious of, it is a healthy brain.
I have a lot of post-concussed clients in my practice who do not understand that the car accident they had, the football injuries, physical assault that they experienced, and the head injuries that they experienced as a result of that, all of that has potentially changed their brain from smooth with just a little bit of bumps to full of little holes where there’s not as much blood flow and lumps and bumps on their brain.
And that is why they need mental health support. And that’s okay if we need mental health support. But you don’t want to sit in somebody’s therapy office for five years talking about things when the problem is your brain.
What I have found in practice is the quicker I get to getting a healthy brain, the quicker I am able to help someone learn what exercise is, what dietary changes, what supplements, what root cause explanations they need to be looking at, the shorter my time is with that person.
I don’t want a client for a decade. I don’t want to get a new therapy client and just be looking at that person for the next ten years. I don’t feel like I’ve done my job right if they need to be my client for the rest of their life.
We have to get a healthier brain. When we get a healthier brain, we get a happier person. We get somebody who can reach the goals in their life and their full potential. A healthy brain improves mental health.
Diabetes, obesity, depression, and Alzheimer’s overlap with one another. They really do.
A lot of my ADHDers, because I have a practice that is 80 to 85 percent ADHD, I love working with ADHD. I think ADHDers have fascinating brains. Their brains being neurodivergent means that they can think outside the box, but they have a hard time with boring day-to-day things. So it’s a very discerning, fussy, particular brain.
I help them with those gaps. But I would say that neurodivergency is exacerbated with the same things that play into obesity, the same things that play into depression, and the same things that play into Alzheimer’s.
I do a program through somebody called Dr. Bredesen. It’s the ReCODE program. It’s very much like doing this Brain Warrior’s Way program, but Alzheimer’s needs different kinds of imaging and different interventions.
What is fascinating is a lot of what I do here in Brain Warrior’s Way and in my practice is what I need to do for my Alzheimer’s clients. It’s inflammation. It’s diet. It’s toxicity. It’s exercise. You’ve got to learn how to take care of the brain.
Depression is not purely a psychological issue. Someone who just wants to talk to you about your depression and write a script is not being helpful. You’ve got to get a healthier brain. You’ve got to look at the body of that person who is depressed. You’ve got to look at the body of the person who is anxious. You have to take the full health of the person very seriously.
When you’re diabetic and have higher blood sugar, that actually changes the inflammatory process in the body and that actually changes the brain. So see these as expressions of the same unhealthy lifestyle that can be improved.
There is a cure for these struggles in life. And if you’re someone who has Alzheimer’s in your family and you have ADHD and depression diagnosed for yourself, I need you to be really serious about taking on this lifestyle because your brain is already more vulnerable. But all of these things can be changed.
Dr. Amen tells the story of how his mother’s sixty year old brain was more impressive looking than his thirty three year old brain. He saw her SPECT scan and saw his. He developed brain envy. He stopped drinking diet sodas. He started exercising. He lost twenty pounds. He dropped the circumference of his waistline. He stopped believing every crazy thought that he had and started really challenging his thoughts.
He changed everything. His life changed. He remarried and got into a healthier relationship. And more importantly, his SPECT scan looked much better than it did and he finally caught up to his mother and had a healthier brain.
Now I want us to talk about food. Food fuels success or it drives failure. Food is one of our biggest interventions in this holistic mental health realm and this Brain Warrior’s Way realm.
We’ve got to be thinking about food. Hydration is going to come up here shortly. Part of your mastery is understanding how everything hangs together. Sleep is going to be super important. I’m going to teach you how to take care of your brain.
These things are hard to do. I’m going to teach you how to do these hard things. That is the Brain Warrior’s Way and that’s what I do for my clients.
Recently Oppenheimer was at the movie theater. So we know that was a movie about weapons of mass destruction. The Amen Clinic feels like these are the real weapons of mass destruction. That is a gun.
Pretty dramatic different approach to life than I think most of us are accustomed to. People don’t see these foods as creating a lot of the problems that we have in our society.
When you start doing the testing, you do realize that highly processed foods, the cookies, the cakes, the buns, the bread, all these things, foods that are high in pesticides.
Remember that when I went to the Amen Clinic and I had my brain scanned, I was very high in chemicals. When I actually had my testing done, it turned out that I was not detoxing any of the chemicals I was coming in contact with.
Pesticides, BPA, chemicals that were off gassing off of furniture, plastics. I wasn’t detoxing any of them and this was causing a lot of health issues for my brain. That was part of why my brain was so inflamed.
And then ultimately part of reclaiming my brain was learning how to detox it. So in my practice now we actually do a lot of the same tests that I had to do to figure out what was going on and why I was toxic.
High glycemic foods. So those are, if you don’t know, you might want to make a note of this. High glycemic foods are going to be foods that are high in sugar. Or if they’re not high in sugar, they’re actually going to break down into a lot of sugar in the body.
I won’t do a full nutrition session here, but we’re looking for foods that are high in fiber. High fiber foods are typically lower glycemic. So those are going to be things like salads and whole grains. Something like oatmeal is a lower glycemic food. Something like sweet potatoes is lower glycemic. Broccoli is lower glycemic. That’s what you’re going for. You’re going for low glycemic foods.
These foods that are highly processed, high in pesticides, high glycemic, that are going to create diabetes, low fiber, and fake foods, those are the real weapons of mass destruction because they destroy your brain.
And this comment here, poisonous behavior is pervasive. It’s a statement about how normalized all of this is. This is what we all grew up on. This is what we see.
If you deal with somebody who has diabetes in your family, I don’t have to tell you that these foods are not healthy for that person. You know that. And if you have someone who has Alzheimer’s, these foods were and are contributing to that process.
These are the weapons of mass destruction.
So then we clean the diet out. One thing that the Amen Clinic is really focused on and concerned about is the obesity crisis. The fact that we are getting more and more overweight as a society, not from eating healthy foods, but because of toxicity, because of these highly processed foods.
The bigger our waist gets, the smaller our brain becomes. There’s a correlation between the brain shrinking and the waistline expanding.
So we are trained to go after diabetes and struggles with obesity with lifestyle changes. It’s not about getting a person to a specific way they must be, but helping that person make sure that there’s more muscle on their body versus fat and that they’re taking their health seriously.
So let me talk a little bit about some of this mastery. We won’t get into the one page miracle because I want to mind time and make sure you have some good information here.
The idea of assessment. Know your brain scan. If you can’t do the brain scan, we do the assessment that I talked about. That’s fine. Paper and pencil is fine for your assessment.
I want you to make a note to know what your numbers are. I want you to get blood work done. If you don’t do that with me, walk away from this workshop today and say, what is my blood work saying. What does my cholesterol look like. What does my blood sugar look like. What is my weight.
What do my numbers look like. What is my waist circumference. How much fiber. Let’s go back. How much fiber am I getting on a daily basis.
Make this note. You need thirty to fifty grams of fiber a day. Are you getting that much fiber. Know your numbers. Know your numbers.
High glycemic. How much sugar are you supposed to get in. Does anyone know. I want to go ahead and ask a question. Do you know how much sugar you should not or should have in a day.
What is the max amount of sugar you should probably have in a day.
Thirty six grams. That is very specific and very helpful. I love that. That is so much better than what most people are doing.
As a female, you should not have more than about twenty five grams. As a child, it’s twenty grams. And for men, men can get away with thirty grams a day.
Most people are averaging sixty grams of sugar a day. That’s just regular, not even dealing with diabetes or any of the things we’re talking about. That’s way too much for our brain health.
So again. Tiffany, I’m fatigued. Tiffany, I’m unfocused. Tiffany, at three o’clock my brain crashes. I am emotional. I am sad. I am angry. I am anxious. I cannot focus.
I want you to walk away from this and get to know your numbers. How much sugar am I having daily. How much fiber am I having. What is my waist measurement. What is my weight on the scale. What is my blood sugar. What is my A1C. What is my blood pressure.
This is how we begin to change the brain and get it healthier.
So part of mastery is you don’t have to get a brain scan because I have a great assessment for you. When you do that brain scan, you get your brain type. I’m going to talk about those.
But know your basic numbers. Please make a note of what your numbers are.
Remember, we need a map. With your numbers and your brain type, I now have a bit of a map because I know where I need to get you to and I know where you are.
We’re going to assess and fight the war for your brain on multiple fronts. The first place you start is food.
Today you walk away and you say, Tiffany literally had the audacity to tell me that hamburger buns were a weapon of mass destruction. It’s kind of silly, but you’re going to remember that.
You’re going to think twice about whether you need that highly processed, high sugar food or whether you can eat something that’s higher in fiber and better for your brain.
Keep simple food rules.
At the Amen Clinic they say we need to operate from the seventy thirty rule. Seventy percent of the time you’re on track. Thirty percent you’re doing fun stuff.
For my clients, it’s often eighty twenty or eighty five fifteen. I have not found that people who end up in my office can get away with seventy thirty, but you might need to start there.
Make that note. Seventy percent on track. Thirty percent off track.
Alcohol is not a health food. Wine is not a health food. That is thirty percent. That is not in the seventy.
Water. Please make this note. You need half your body weight in ounces of water daily. Half your body weight in ounces of water.
If it’s hot, you need even more. If you have coffee, you need more. If you drink alcohol and go to the gym, you need more. Those are diuretics.
Most people are lucky if they get two sixteen ounce bottles of water. Routinely people are dehydrated.
You came to me and said you’re fatigued and unfocused. I don’t feel good. I’m telling you, you’re probably dehydrated.
Easy math. If you weigh one hundred forty pounds, that’s seventy ounces of water.
Coffee only helps water consumption if it’s decaf. Green and black tea with caffeine does not count toward hydration. They take away from your water.
I love coffee. I love Bulletproof Coffee. It is high in caffeine and it does take away water.
If you have eight ounces of coffee, you need eight ounces of water. Same for tea.
Fruits and vegetables are high water sources.
I don’t like fruit juice. Fruit juice is bad. That fits into the bad sugar category. Eat the orange. Eat the apple.
If you pull people off sugary beverages, brain fog improves and mood issues get better.
Smoothies, green juice, fruits and vegetables do contribute to hydration.
Drink half your body weight in ounces. Don’t drink your calories.
Hydration improves cognitive function. Hydrating can increase your strength by nineteen percent.
Muscles need hydration.
I won’t get into brain types in great detail, but this is important.
There are sixteen brain types based off five main types.
Balanced. Rare. Hug them and don’t let them go.
Spontaneous. Low prefrontal cortex. Low dopamine. ADHD.
Persistent. High anterior cingulate gyrus. Rigid. Less happy.
Sensitive. High limbic activity. More depressed brain.
Cautious. High basal ganglia. Anxiety.
Who said you only get one problem. At one point I was part spontaneous, part persistent, and part cautious.
This tells me how to supplement, how to test, what foods to eat, and how to motivate someone based on their brain.
So take a moment and write. Why do you care to get healthy. Four positives. Four negatives.
Positives. Focus. Energy. Better relationships. And your fourth.
Negatives. Cost. Effort. Missing out. Emotional discomfort of change.
You will get the recording.
Know your numbers.
Mindset matters. Optimize. Don’t normalize.
Food is either medicine or poison.
Yes this is complicated. It is not impossible.
Thank you for your participation today. Thank you for your patience.
Those watching the recording, same thing.
Thank you for your time and attention. I love sharing this information.
Please reach out if you have questions.
I will connect with you in the next workshop. Stay tuned. And until next time, please be well.