Change Your Brain Every Day - Are You Struggling with Brain Fog? This Could Be Why

Episode Date: April 22, 2021

Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen answer listener's questions about pandemic weight gain, how to lose it, and how to maintain healthy habits going forward. 

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain spec imaging to personalize treatment to your brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com.

The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to brainmd.com. Welcome back. We've been talking about letting go in this week's episodes, but today we're going to be answering your questions. We would love to hear from you. If you learn anything, please post it, tag us, tag someone else that you think would benefit from this and leave us a review. We love to hear from you guys. So if you leave us a review, we will enter you into a drawing to win one of our books. Either your brain is always listening. I love that book that you just wrote or my new book, the relentless courage of a scared child, but you have a review. I do. J and S Hillman. Wonderful. This podcast has been wonderful.

I've only been listening for a short time, only because I just found it. I fully intend to binge it. I've been struggling for years. Now I'm trying to find a way to make a scan happen for me. I bought the cookbook and just started reading. Your brain is always listening. I came across Daniel and Tana Amen listening to Robin McGraw's, I've got a secret. Thank you, Robin. I'm trying the happy saffron now. I'm

hoping with this and work on my part, I can clear the 10 plus years of brain fog. As my grandmother would say, thank you. Thank you thank you thank you i would actually love to hear back from you and see how it's working um i want to know what's going on with your brain fog after you use the program for a few months because that's our experience we've actually studied the outcomes on our six-month class and one of the biggest results was that people had more clarity and more focus well and you know i, you know, I know when we have guests, we often don't have a chance to get to people's questions, but now we do. Now we do.

First question. Tana, what's your favorite healthy snack to eat on the go? Okay. So I want to start by saying not the same program is great for everybody. So some people want more healthy carbs. I tend to go high fat, low carb. Um, so I love coconut wraps. Coconut wraps are, um, pure wraps makes a great coconut wrap. They make curry flavor and plain flavor. I will put sometimes some nut butter on them or I'll use some salmon or tuna or leftover chicken that we have. Love that with avocado. That's like a quick snack that I can make. Nuts are always a

good snack. I do like a lot of greens, even though I'm low carb, I don't include greens in that because they're high fiber, and they don't have sugar in them. So lots of greens, and I will sometimes dip those into avocado or something like that. So those types of snacks are my favorite snacks. High fat, low carb. Well, mine. I actually make mine. Brain and love bars. It's brain healthy chocolate. Chocolate is super big. And my other one is your hot chocolate that you make me every night. So much fun.

I love that. It's like so comforting. Costco organic vanilla unsweetened almond milk. Heaping teaspoon of raw cacao. Yep. Organic raw cacao. And some chocolate stevia from sweet leaf. Mix it up.

Tastes amazing. And I turn it into a keto snack by adding some MCT oil or some ghee or grass fed butter to it. And you don't want the calories, but for me, believe it. I mean, it's just my,

my metabolic makeup is as long as I'm having really healthy calories and I'm eating a high fat diet, low carb diet, I tend to lean out and have way more energy and focus. But that's because my brain type is I tend to be a little foggy when I eat carbs. So, and if you're an OCD person, like my daughter, what are healthy snacks for them? So she tends to eat like a lot of different types of veggies with hummus is one of her go to snacks. Another one that we both like actually is a basil spread on those coconut wraps

that I talked about with like chicken, but she will add some sort of like a carb to it some sort of veggie to it that's more carbohydrate based. She'll eat sweet potatoes. Yeah, carrots or something like that. I don't I skip that. Um, but I don't know squash. Right? Right. Butternut squash. Right. Right. And she'll often have sliced apples with almond butter, those types of things. I tend to avoid fruit, most fruit with the exception of berries, and occasionally I'll have things like apples.

Are there certain ages at which a body's metabolism slows down? Oh, yes. Oh, my gosh. My biggest frustration. I was always so proud of myself because I thought I had trained my metabolism because I had a really, really high metabolism all the way up until the last year and a half. And I was like, oh, I'm going to be this way forever.

You mean until you turned 50? Until I went into menopause, Yeah. Until I started menopause. And I'm so frustrated now, because now I actually have to pay attention. I used to be able to eat so much because I worked out and I mean, healthy food, but I would eat so much and never really paid attention to it. And I was lean, lean, lean, like really lean. And now I'm like, what is happening? Like, I actually have to pay attention. So menopause is a big time for women. After a baby, that can actually but breastfeeding will help you. So after a baby, that can be a big time. But middle age, like

that's the time for men, it could actually be in their later 30s. Well, and they also when their wives get pregnant they gain sympathy pounds yeah i never noticed that oh no it's true i just noticed that when i was a teenager i worked out a lot um i could eat anything i wanted yeah it's sort of chloe's boyfriend can eat anything he wants and yes skinny as a rail and i know that's not going it's not going to last for him and so if you have bad habits they tend to persist until you like what happened yeah and it wasn't just um it's not just when you hit a certain age your hormones shift that's why it's because your hormones change and so like when you hit menopause or middle age, even for men, when your testosterone drops, um, it's going to change you.

So when I hit that menopausal age, what happened was not only do I have to pay more attention now to not put weight on, but my muscles got softer. And so I have to work harder now to have, cause you want some muscle mass because it makes you more sensitive to insulin. It keeps you stronger. So you don't get hurt. Like there's lots of good reasons. And another time in life is whenever you're under chronic stress. Yes. Cortisol.

There's a new study out on what happened in different age groups for weight during the pandemic. Yeah. 40% of people gained weight. Right. Significant amounts of weight. In fact, 40% of people gained weight. Significant amounts of weight. In fact, it was the youngest. Because they were so stressed. Older teenagers and younger adults, for people who gained weight,

their average weight gain was 41 pounds. That's insane. Was crazy. For older people like me, our waking wasn't much, but it's just really horrifying. But cortisol is a killer. So stress is a killer. Because that's going to have a negative impact on their body, probably for the rest of their lives. Yeah. We know people who are overweight in midlife actually have a higher incidence of dementia

because being overweight is a risk factor. Right. people who are overweight in midlife actually have a higher incidence of dementia because being overweight is a risk factor for dementia midlife, not when you're older, because a lot of people have actually died off and frailty is more risk factor for dementia in the elderly. Yeah, absolutely. So to finish that off, so when I was younger, and you know, for a lot of people who have a high metabolism, you can eat more healthy carbs, you get to a certain place in life, whether it's chronic stress, whether it's your hormones shifting, so you get to your 50s or late 40s, and your hormones shift. That's when for me going low carb, high fiber, but low carb, and higher fat, higher protein really, really helped me get back on track.

You know, we should spend more time on food. Yeah. Cause it's a big thing in our house. Yeah. And then food pushers and food sabotagers. Yeah. It's hard. Yeah. Food is hard. Or it's great. It just depends. Are there common areas of weight gain in men and women's bodies as they age? And, you know, I often say that I dearly hope many of the overweight men will deliver the baby because it's belly fat belly fat's the worst and that's the worst because it changes hormonal yeah it makes them produce the wrong kind of estrogen

and um it turns healthy testosterone into estrone which is the cancer promotingpromoting form of estrogen. Can drastic, quick weight loss have an effect, a negative effect on my health? So drastic, quick weight loss, I mean, yes and no. It depends on how much you lose and how fast. But the problem with drastic, quick weight loss is that you tend to not keep it off, especially if you don't really, um, if your goals around it aren't really, really clear and you don't have really solid habits, you don't have really planted habits and how you're doing it. Um, so you want to really watch. We actually prefer that someone actually have a really good plan and they're not, they're not starving themselves they're not doing you know crazy calorie restriction that you cut your calories but you cut them in a really

rational way and you're eating really healthy food because we want you on a program that you can sustain forever i think that's so important that uh um losing weight in a sustainable way that keeps you in the right habits over time is way more important than losing weight quickly. But the one thing I want to say about that, some people will lose weight really fast naturally, even if they're just eating a really healthy program, because especially in the beginning, they'll drop a ton of weight because inflammation comes down fast. If you've been eating really poorly and you're really overweight, you probably have a lot of inflammation. That weight will come down really quick as you drop that inflammation, then it will usually stabilize. So not, it's not always because you just dropped a ton of fat. Um, it's sometimes, and that's good to get rid of the inflammation

is a good thing. So just to clarify that. Right. And people on our program, when we did the brain warriors way, I think our highest weight loss was 56 pounds that they lost in six months. But I've worked with people who have lost 103 pounds, but she did it over a year. And so it was rational. Yeah. That's a great story. Yeah. So you can do this. Um, one more question and then we have to stop. Um, does it matter how often you eat fish? So really depends on the type of fish. Um, so we really like a website called seafood watch.org because they will talk about what's going, the best type of fish and when to eat it and which fish to avoid based on what's going on in the world like if there have been oil spills or what's happening there's so many factors that go into it so we really like that website um so

smaller fish are better than big fish so there's that's a complicated question as far as does it matter how much fish it really matters what kind of fish and where they're from. And the fact that all fish should be wild is not true. So there are some fish that are better off in responsible, sustainably raised environments because if they're doing it well. And so think of it at least once a week because research shows that you actually have more gray matter in your brain if you're eating grilled or baked fish. So this is not fried fish, grilled or baked fish at least once a week. But some of our friends like Tony Robbins, because he was a pescatarian, was eating, and he's a big, big guy, was eating lots of fish every day, like lunch and dinner. And he ended up with high levels of mercury. So you do want to be, I think the really important thing, swordfish, right? So

big fish that are, so get tested, make sure you're being tested. Well, we're so grateful for you. Leave us your comments, questions, or reviews, brainwarriorswaypodcast.com. And we have a very special week for you coming up. Stay with us. If you're enjoying the Brain Warriors Way podcast, please don't forget to subscribe so you'll always know when there's a new episode. And while you're at it, feel free to give us a review or five-star rating as that helps others find the podcast. If you're interested in coming to Amen Clinics, use the code PODCAST10 to get a 10% discount on a full evaluation at amenclinics.com. For more information, give us a call at 855-978-1363.