Change Your Brain Every Day - Beginning a Journey Towards Health and Wellness, with Darin Olien

Episode Date: September 21, 2020

When it comes to paths to wellness, it’s often our health struggles from early on in life that subconsciously point us in the right direction. This was certainly true for Darin Olien, who along with Zac Efron hosts the new Netflix series Down to Earth. In this episode of the podcast, Darin and the Amens discuss our bodies’ natural tendency towards healing, and how it’s so often sabotaged by the obstacles we tend to place in nature’s way.  For more info on Darin's new book "SuperLife: 5 Simple Fixes That Will Make Your Healthy, Fit, and Eternally Awesome", visit https://www.amazon.com/SuperLife-Simple-Healthy-Eternally-Awesome/dp/0062297198 For more on Darin's new Netflix series "Down to Earth with Zac Efron", visit https://www.netflix.com/title/80230601      

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. Today, we have a very special guest, and I'm very honored to be able to introduce Darren Olin, who wrote the book Super Life.

And you may actually know Darren from his endeavors with Zac Efron in the Net series where they travel around the world. And it's they're searching for healthier, sustainable ways to live. And it's called Down to Earth. We actually checked it out and we thought it was really cool. So we are really honored to have Darren with us today. Another brain warrior after our own heart, who's like really trying to find the healthiest way for people to live and sustain the earth. And we're just really honored you're with us. Thank you so much for joining us.

Oh man, thank you. It's a shared honor to be here and discuss these things with you guys for sure. Can you tell us part of your journey? So how did you get to the point where health is really such an important part of your mission? You know, it's funny because it literally goes all the way back to the point of birth for me. I was premature by two months. And then in 1970, they gave me a 50-50 chance of surviving. So really, it was through a lot of work, really discovering that in an inherent deep level, my first kind of inkling or understanding in this world was I was really, it was dangerous. I was susceptible. And so there was a lot of kind of issues as I was kind of growing up with a resting heart rate of 120 beats per minute, overactive thyroids. They weren't sure my lungs were fully developed. It was all of these things that kind of set this

trajectory. And really just fast forwarding, I was a regular kid from Minnesota and just eating horribly, but what everyone else ate. And spontaneously at the age of 13, I saw in the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, I saw an article on a cleanse. And listen, my mom and dad were definitely not hippies at all. They're regular people. And I just saw this article and I told my mom to get me a bunch of grapefruits and I'm just going to start eating grapefruits. And I think she didn't even really register. She just got grapefruits. Didn't really realize that I was just eating grapefruits for like three days in a row.

And I was the first time consciously I felt the difference between what was going on in my mouth to how I felt. And obviously it helped my brain as well because I was all over the place. And of course, I went back to being a regular kid and I was stimulating myself with literally the old fashioned bottles of Coke. I was drinking about six of those a day and just bouncing off the walls. And then really at 16, I started working out and picking up my first dumbbell and realizing my first messaging was I was weak. I was vulnerable from that birth experience. And so when I started weight training and realizing I could get stronger, I then started going, oh, food is important because I remember I just did that at 13. And so it just kind of started coming together

and I started becoming stronger in a lot of both internally and externally. I then started playing all the sports and football. And then it really, the short answer to the long journey was that I was in college starting fullback and in football. And I had a career-ending injury. And then I couldn't keep playing football. And so then it just these whole worlds came together where I changed majors I studied physiology and nutrition and kinesiology and and then just got the the the awareness that this body is an utter miracle um and if we start putting the right things in place that we can actually heal it. So the allopathic world didn't get me back playing again. It didn't put me back on the field.

It didn't make me feel better because I was absolutely depressed. When you're a kid that wants to play football and do all these things, naturally, that just came to a crashing halt. So once I started getting into that, that was it. And then it kind of progressed from there. I was fascinated with food and nutrition and realized that a lot of these ingredients and even these marketing words didn't equate to actually what was showing up not only as food in the marketplace, but also as supplements. So then I started literally formulating things and traveling around the world to sources of where these great medicinal plants are. And from there, I started really getting into it. And so yeah, that's the quick version

of how I've kind of through my own needs and necessity and really going all the way back to the beginning, I had to find the answers myself. Wow. So I don't know if you know, but I did the big NFL study when the NFL was sort of not telling the truth about traumatic brain injury in football. I have 300 NFL players, cool players like Terry Bradshaw and Freddie Dreyer and Jack Youngblood. And the incidence of brain damage is stunning. But 80% of our players get better. We put them on a brain health program, which just speaks to the miracle of our bodies. If you put them in a healing environment, no matter how bad you have been to them, they can be better. How exciting is that? I felt a couple of parallels with you.

As you were telling your story, you were a sick kid. I was a couple of parallels with you as you were telling your story. You're a sick kid. I was a very sick kid. Super sick kid, had cancer at 23 that kept coming back. Lots of issues, always on antibiotics when I was a little frequent flyer at the hospital. And then it was around 16 that I discovered working out. And I didn't really know how to eat healthy, but I discovered working out and my journey sort of began there. And it's interesting when I hear so many people that we work with who are like, well, I've just always been this way. I was born this way. And I'm like, I'm the healthiest I've ever been in my fifties. And I was really sick at one point and so much that I wanted to die. I got, I went into a deep depression. So I was like listening to your journey and I'm like,

wow, it's just, there's so many parallels. And here I've seen your show on Netflix and I'd like, you're incredibly healthy. So I just, you know, you look great. You're healthy. You're living this amazing life. And I just want people listening to hear that. And it kind of doesn't matter. You, even if you've been bad to your brain and your body for a long time, you can still make it better. You just need to start now. You need to get started. Yeah. I mean, it's a miracle in just both of what you're saying. I mean, the force of nature that wants to heal and drive forward is so powerful, but we've also put so many stumbling blocks in front of ourselves from these modern day kind of conveniences that kind of have a sting to them in our life and the kind of food quality that's just plummeted

since industrial revolution. And going back to, I think, the health of, it's like diversity, I think, and challenges breed opportunity. Um, I think I saved myself from a lot more hits in the head on the one hand doc, right? So, uh, and through that kind of stopping that abrupt stopping, it turned this curiosity and this fascination on with this healing potentiality that exists within us and so there's very two very strong principles if you eliminate the exposure to things that are causing disease and you can easily go down a list of 60,000 toxins emitted in our atmosphere every year that are untested are not necessarily biologically supportive, and on and on and on.

But then if you increase these nutrient-dense compounds and plants and life-giving waters, then the miracles literally are kind of spewing out and benefiting us as we go. And I can't imagine, it would be fun to be like a fly on the wall to some of the people that you're dealing with, because I think that having seen it myself in my own way, you see the power that happens if you stop one thing that's causing harm and you turn on the other things that are causing life. You're right. There is no stopping life in that way. So it's very- Well, I often say brain health is three things. It's brain envy. You have to care about it. Freud was wrong. Penis envy is not the cause of anybody's problem. I've not seen it once in my 40-year psychiatric career. But you have to care about your brain

and then avoid things that hurt it, just like you talked about, and do things that help it. And you just have to know the lists. And I'm sure our lists are actually probably very similar. I went to our daughter's second grade class and 20 things on the board. And I'm like, so separate the healthy things from the unhealthy things. And they got everything right, except orange juice, which they put in the healthy category. And I'm like, no, way too much sugar to have a glass of orange juice. It's the sugar of five oranges. Yeah, just eat the oranges. Eat the orange and you'll be great. So I think none of it is hard if we get the right mindset. So when we come back,

we're going to ask Darren about some of his most effective tips on how to have a better brain, a better body, and a better life. If there's one thing you learned, write it down, take a picture of it

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