Dhru Purohit Show - #204: How to Get Your Energy Back TODAY with Dr. Amy Shah

Episode Date: April 1, 2021

Does it feel like your life is too busy, your days are too short, and you're feeling overworked, overstressed, and overtired? Chances are you’ve asked your doctor for help, only to be told that it��s because of your age, or your workload, or, worse, that it’s just “normal.” If so, you’re not alone.  Women in particular are suffering from an epidemic of fatigue and burnout. So many women feel alone in their inability to manage all of their personal and professional demands. Many assume their fatigue is just a normal and inevitable part of life, but it’s not normal at all.  On today’s episode of The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru speaks with Dr. Amy Shah, a double board-certified medical doctor and wellness expert specializing in allergy, immunology, hormones, and gut health. She graduated Magna Cum Laude from Cornell University's School of Nutrition and went on to complete her MD, residency and fellowship training at Einstein, Harvard, and Columbia University hospitals. She's been named in the Top Doc list 2016, '17,'18, '19 and '20 by Phoenix Magazine and featured on National TV and magazines such as Elle, People, Shape, and Allure. She lives in Phoenix, AZ, loves being active and is married with two children. Her first book, I'm So Effing Tired was just released. In this episode, we dive into:  -The car accident that changed Dr. Shah’s life (8:40) -The army inside our body and the role nutrition plays when it comes to burnout (18:59)  -Fasting with our circadian rhythm (28:42)  -The importance of getting sunlight first thing in the morning (33:03)  -The most important change Dr. Shah made in her diet (35:31) -The 4S’s for creating healthy meals (43:11)  -How to optimize our biological rhythms (54:48)  -How to create a morning and evening routine to sync with our circadian rhythm (1:02:30)  -Setting boundaries and not feeling guilty about it (1:16:19) -Why fasting is different for women and the right way to do it (1:27:18) For more on Dr. Shah you can follow her on Instagram @FastingMD, on Facebook @AmyShahMD, on Twitter @AmyShahMD, and through her website https://amymdwellness.com/. Get her book, I'm So Effing Tired: A Proven Plan to Beat Burnout, Boost Your Energy, and Reclaim Your Life at http://imsoeffingtired.com/.   For more on Dhru Purohit, be sure to follow him on Instagram @dhrupurohit, on Facebook @dhruxpurohit, on Twitter @dhrupurohit, and on YouTube @dhrupurohit. You can also text Dhru at [phone] or click here https://my.community.com/dhrupurohit. Interested in joining Dhru’s Broken Brain Podcast Facebook Community? Submit your request to join here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2819627591487473/. This episode is brought to you by CogniBiotics. CogniBiotics is a brain and mood-enhancing probiotic from BiOptimizers that contains specifically chosen strains with a high level of research supporting mental health and performance. CogniBiotics also contains 17 nootropic and adaptogenic herbs which work in synergy with your gut bacteria to boost cognitive function, mood, and stress resilience. If you want to support your own gut-brain axis, BiOptimizers is offering my community a special deal of 10% off. Just go to www.cognibiotics.com/dhru and use code DHRU10. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You know, all of my life, I put a lot of pressure on myself. And I think all of us, you know, we wear our hard work and our burnout as a badge of honor. And I was there. I was not sleeping. I was working crazy hours. I would come home. I'd spend time with the kids. And then I would study late at night.

And there was just no time for, you know, any of the things that I enjoy doing because that would be, you know, lazy. Hi, everyone. Drew Prode here. We have another fantastic conversation. for you here today. It's on the topic of why are we all so effing tired. I'm interviewing Dr. Amy Shaw, who's an incredible physician who's written a new book, and we're going to be talking about burnout, fasting, circadian rhythms, and how to reset if you are so effing tired. Stay tuned. It's a wide-ranging conversation. I think you're going to enjoy it. This episode of the

podcast is brought to you by cognobiotics by bio optimizers. Many of you probably have seen the documentary that I made with my business partner, Dr. Mark Hyman, called Broken Brain. And inside of that documentary, we had a whole team of experts around the world from different institutions talk about the gut brain access, which has some really powerful impacts for how we feel and function every day. These days, we all hear about the power of probiotics and how they can support the good bacteria living in our gut.

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The code is Drew 10. today to get 10% off one of my favorite probiotics out there. Now back to this week's episode. Dr. Amy Shaw, welcome to the podcast. It's a pleasure to have you here. Thank you so much for having me. This is so cool. We were chitch chatting a little earlier, but the book is called, the book is about being effing tired. And I wanted to check in and see on your book tour, and as a mom and still practicing physician, how are you doing? Doing good. I, actually stick to my own advice. I get my morning routine in. I get my sleep. If I get my sunlight, then I'm good to go. So I feel good today. I'm good. We're also chatting a little bit of when

you get off equilibrium, what are the signals? What do you pay attention to that's a sign that I've gotten a little bit too far off? I need to reset. I need to ask for help. What is that for you that you've gotten a little bit, lack of a better term, off track for yourself. Yeah. For me, definitely, it's my emotional control. So if I, I'm always working, and I think you, all of us, we're always working on our mind control, right? So how we react to things.

When I find that I'm losing control of my emotions, I'm getting a little too angry or short or impatient, too emotional about things around. we, that's when I know that I'm not on the right track. And that's a first sign and that I need to pull back, maybe get a little more sleep, some nature time, go back to my basic self-care things to get myself reset. Because when I'm at my best, I want to be patient. I want to be kind. And I want to be focused and energetic. And if I'm not those things, that's when I know that things are not going well. It's interesting because also I think for women, this is a big topic.

It's for everybody. Yeah. But also because you're such an advocate for women and speaking up and paying attention to their body and advocating for their own health and making sure they ask questions and all those beautiful things which we'll get into. It's a really delicate thing of both checking in but also feeling like, hey, if I'm angry also too, it could be for good reason and it's all right to express that. Right. So the way I think about it is that in our culture, all of us, women especially are taught that if someone is mean to you, be extra nice, you know, be smother them with kindness.

And I think that what I've learned over the years is that, no, it's okay actually to pull back from people in your life that are constantly toxic or draining your energy. and it's okay to concentrate more on people who bring you good energy and it's okay to manage it. And so when you're managing your energy and you learn how to manage your energy, then you can be more cognizant of when you're losing a little bit of control on your own energy exchange. So yeah, you're right. I think before I was always concentrating on being the most well-liked person in the room. And then as I wrote this book and went through my own journey, I realize it's not about being the nicest person to everyone. It's about managing your own energy because otherwise you end up being depleted by people

who are kind of energy leeches. And you have to learn the difference between someone you need to give your energy to versus someone you shouldn't. Yeah. And I think that when you are effing, tired, I often think about that as synonymous with reactionary. You're reactionary to the world that's there. You're reactionary to the priorities of other people. You're reactionary to the comparison algorithm that's thrown in front of you. You're reactionary to societal pressures,

whether you be man, woman, or anybody else that's out there. You're just reactionary. When you feel good, there's a little bit of space between you and the stimulus that's there. So you have the ability to say, You know what? Okay, you know what? I'm going to treat this person with heavy kindness right now because I can see that's the best thing for the situation. Or you know what? I'm going to be incredibly firm and kind because that's what's needed. You know what? I need to express my anger because I've been holding on to it and I don't want to live with this resentment. But whatever it is, it's less about having a game plan and it's more about when you feel good, you can react how you want to react. Absolutely. I read this fact that really changed so much for me. So the first 60 to 90 seconds of someone saying something to you is reactionary. It's actually your neural

stimulation. So you cannot control that. It's your, if someone says you threw, we're not invited to the big party that all your friends were. It's hurtful for the first 60 to 90 seconds. And if you act right then, you may say something hurtful or you may say something that you may regret later. But after 60 to 90 seconds, it's up to you to form a response, to decide if you're going to dwell on this or are you going to move on. And when I learned that fact, I really started being able to manage my energy better because then after 60 to 90 seconds, you feel it. It's okay. It's a reaction that is neurologically built into you, right? And then after that, you decide what you want to do.

that information. You either put it away and move on. You decide that you want to learn about it further. And that's up to you. So what you said, the little bit of space is actually is actual, like in time. There is a little bit of space that you must give yourself. Otherwise, you really always just reacting. Yeah. And you know that you said an important line is that you must give yourself, which means it's not just about the thinking brain. It's also the body. Because there's some evidence that shows that your body feels something first and your mind is the last or your brain is the last to sort of put it together and add meaning to it. Yeah.

So when you don't take care of yourself, when you're tired, when you're hungry, when you've gone beyond, you're not trusting your gut or taking care of your gut, which we're going to jump into that. Your body will react for you before you can even think. And that's when people, we all know that. You become, you know, as like Dave Asprey said on our podcast last time, you become hypoglybici. upset or hangary or whatever it else it is. Absolutely. In fact, the whole theory that we can get into, the whole trifecta that I talk about,

the gut hormones and immune system, that comes from the research on the brain-body connection. So I was so shocked to find out that the brain-body connection is just not, you know, what you're thinking, how does it even connect to your body and how you take care of yourself? How does it connect to the brain? And those three systems are really involved in how your brain communicates with you that, hey, I'm tired, I need rest. And then how the body communicates with the brain that, hey, I'm sick, inflamed. I need rest.

And so that fatigue comes from either place, right? So you can be from mental fatigue, which you saw during this last year. We were not doing much at all. But the burnout rates are risen 33%. So we know that there's a mental aspect of fatigue. And then we know that there's a physical, obviously a physical aspect of fatigue. But often we don't realize that it's a combination of things that are happening that are creating that feeling of fatigue to the brain. Let's set the stage with a little bit of hero's journey and talk about how did you get into the space and teaching people.

You kind of had like a pretty big moment in your life that turned things around. And we'd love for you to set the stage. And if you want to share that story, be great. Yeah. Here's the thing. I think so many of us can relate to feeling like your mind is going at a million miles per hour all the time. So I was a young doctor with two young children.

And I had a practice. And they said to me, this is your practice. You go for it. You know, we'll be your partners. and you make it your own. And then I had these young children who were literally dependent on me for everything. And then I had my second board certification exam coming up, which meant I'm double board certified.

And each time you get board certification, you also have to pass this exam a few months later. It's very, very rigorous. And, you know, all of my life, I put a lot of pressure on myself. And I think all of us, you know, we wear our hard work and our burnout as a badge of honor. And I was there. I was not sleeping. I was working crazy hours. I would come home.

I'd spend time with the kids. And then I would study late at night. And there was just no time for, you know, any of the things that I enjoy doing because that would be, you know, lazy or that means that I'm not unmotivated. That means that I wasn't really doing what I was supposed to do. Can I ask just because, you know, we come from a similar Salvation background, actually from, you know, similar Gujarati backgrounds and everything. Are your parents doctors? Was it just, I mean, obviously a lot of immigrants have just this incredible work ethic as they had to. You know, they had to sort of sacrifice their health and bodies to make the life for their kids that they needed to.

Were your parents doctors? Or did you see that modeled kind of growing up? Absolutely. My dad was not a doctor. He was an engineer. But he was the hardest working person, you know, ever. for very immigrant, similar to many immigrants. And he was the one he was advising me. He said, don't worry, do this all. We'll help you as much as we can because in his eyes, he felt like

we should all be working as hard as we can. And he's an amazing person. It's such a hard worker. But for me, that was creating a sense of I need to work even harder to make all of these things happen for me. So my mind was always going at a million miles per hour. One day, I knew I was burned out, but I didn't know, I couldn't pause because then everything would fall apart in my eyes. So one day my partners asked if we could do a meeting after work at five. And I thought to myself, oh, my gosh, I have to pick up my kids shortly thereafter.

But I didn't have the courage to even say that because I thought, well, what are they going to think of me as a young doctor. Maybe they're going to think I'm not as committed or whatever. So I said, sure, I'll stay. And then I thought to myself, okay, I'll just rush out and I'll go get them and everything will be fine because the center closed at six. And I knew that it would be such an embarrassment if I showed up there at later than six because they would have to keep it open for me. So I sat there during the meeting and I can't even concentrate on what they're saying because in my mind I'm like calculating how many minutes it's going to take me to do this. You're in two places at once.

Yeah. And you know, we've all been there where our minds cannot even focus on the task at hand. And when you're in a burnout state, you're almost like disconnected from your body. So it's not just fatigue. It's also this disconnect. And so then as soon as the meeting was over, of course, it went way over. And I didn't have the guts to say that I needed to leave. So I ran to the car. And I'm rushing.

And you know when you're driving and you're making these split second. decisions. And I was making a turn into the center's parking lot or right before the center's parking lot. And I got into this huge accident. I was making a left and there's someone who's coming straight. And it wasn't really my fault, I per se, but I did probably make a very quick left without seeing that person coming super fast. So that was the first time in my life. I'd ever seen all of the airbags in the entire car, you know, side front. And I felt like I was spitting for hours, but really it was minutes. It was a big intersection.

And then as soon as I hit something, I opened the door. And the first thing I did, I had like glass and blood and everywhere. And the first thing I did is like I started running towards the center because I said, oh my God, they're like, it's six now and they're wait, they're going to be judging me for being late. I literally was running off the scene of this life-threatening accident to try to. get the kids before it was too late and that I was so worried about what she would think of me if I showed up late. And that was really the state of my life at that point. It was like there was

no room for error. And that big error for me was such a great pause for about a week where I kind of had to step back and say, what am I doing? What do I really want? How do I really want my life to look like and why am I spending so much time doing all these things yet feeling exhausted and unmotivated and short and having all these symptoms that I never had before, GI symptoms, anxiety symptoms, sleep symptoms. So that's when my whole journey started. That's how I start. and this is how my whole journey into wellness started because my Western medicine training, I was a nutritionist nutrition major in college. I, you know, went to, did internal medicine, then I did immunology, allergy.

Nothing. And my whole training was preparing me to help myself. And I know at that point, I knew that there were so many other people in that same place. And so I really dug deep into this topic. And that's where I got some solution. And I know I heard so much about like mental solutions. Oh, do meditation or do this training to help you with burnout. But I didn't see anyone really talking about mind-body solutions.

And so that's where I went with this. It's, we're, well, first of all, were you okay? You said blood in the accident. Were you okay with the other person okay? So, yes. So luckily there was no major, I mean, I was sore and I had cuts and bruises. and of course the car was completely totaled, but we were, everybody came out of it alive. That's good.

Knock on wood. Yeah. You know, I think moments like that are a big wake-up call as they were. And it's kind of like, if you think about the classic sort of arc of the hero's journey, whether you're ready for the adventure or you get thrusted into it, and often most of us get thrusted into it, it'll just send you along. So you got thrust on this journey. And one of the things, I don't know if I'm jumping too far ahead, but one of the things you did was you went to your doctors at the time, right?

Because doctors have doctors. Yeah. And you said, basically, like, what's wrong with me? Yeah. First of all, I didn't have a doctor because doctors don't have doctors. But I said, maybe I'm missing something because fatigue, as you know, can have many medical causes. Iron deficiency, B12, you know, there's thyroid. There's a million medical diagnoses that could lead to fatigue.

So I thought, well, maybe I'm just not able to treat myself. So I actually found super smart colleagues that were willing to just run some tests on me and check what maybe I was missing. And I was embarrassed because when the test came back, they all said, oh, you're normal. Like everything is within normal limits. And I kind of felt like, well, I feel embarrassed now. like I asked them to do these tests and nothing came up. So I must be.

And they said, oh, you know, you're busy. Your mom. You're getting older. And it was, it's like that you just go back home and you're like, okay, well, there's really, maybe it's all in my head. And that's when I really started to do the nutritional part of it, the changing of the gut health and looking into how does this all relate to burnout? And that's how my journey started.

And now I see so many people saying the same thing to me. Like, you know, I went to my doctor, either they found something, we fixed it, and I'm still tired, or there's nothing that they could find or things were within normal limits. Even I didn't realize back then that, you know, even today, 2021, we really don't have the ability to check for burnout, to check for causes of fatigue that aren't from an organ being severely injured or broken. So that's the problem, as you know. Yeah. The traditional conventional medicine, which is so great, we're so thankful for it. It's almost like, well, things don't show up unless they're really, really bad and very obvious to show up on the current diagnostic solutions that are available.

There's this whole category that many people, including yourself, talk about, of subclinical things that don't have a formal name necessarily yet. in the traditional world, but are getting a lot more attention. So for you, continuing on the story, what was one of the first things? You mentioned nutrition. What was one of the first distinctions you had? That, wow. Okay, everybody said I was normal, that this is normal, that what I'm feeling is normal.

But in my research, in my experimentation with my own body, I'm finding that I was taught one thing in medical school, but I'm actually experiencing something else in my own explorations. The big thing I think that changed so much is I learned that we have an army inside of our bodies. They are the gut bacteria. The gut bacteria in our bodies are literally like a military that is constantly in communication with our brain, with our immune system, with our hormones, and they're making all these decisions. And it's if you deplete that army, which we do a lot with our antibiotics by the way we eat or we starve that army, which is what we do on a daily basis, we end up having very little communication between our immune system and our brain and our gut. And we end up having all kinds of symptoms not only in our gut, but outside of our gut. So when I found out how important this army is into our bodies, I started thinking, okay, well, why doesn't everyone know about this?

Why aren't we taught how to keep this army very healthy? And even during this pandemic, I was surprised that there were so little talked about about how to keep that gut health healthy because your immune system is relying on those bacteria army members to communicate with them. It's like they're on walkie-talkie all day and saying, hey, I need your help. You need to go here. You need, you know, this is a foreign thing coming in. We need to attack it. And then communicating with the brain, what's happening. And that was a game changer for me because I said, then I said, whoa, I need to learn how we can all strengthen this army, have more of this army.

So the more and the more diverse and the more robust and the more. robust this army is, the better you will feel and the better your immune system, the better your hormones and the better your long-term health. So that really was the key kind of differentiating factor of what I had heard about burnout and fatigue, about, you know, changing your mindset. This to me was new information that, oh, I can improve how I feel, how I think my burnout by what I'm eating. And burnout and food connection to me was new and not something I'd ever learned in nutrition or medical school. We had learned about, you know, how immune system can

help you fight disease. You know, then we learned about how hormones can separately help you, you know, procreate. But we don't really talk about how that helps you feel good on a daily basis and how they all interact together. I want to talk a little bit about your upbringing to connect that. What was your, before kind of digging into this world about the microbiome, what was your diet like and what were you kind of eating? We of course know and you write about it in your book. We'll chat a little bit more about that, stress, mindset, these things, of course impact gut

health. But what was your diet like at the time before you switch things up? So, Drew, you have a very similar background as me, but a lot of people, you have. people who are watching or listening may not know, but I grew up as a vegetarian, an Indian, South Asian vegetarian. And that sounds so healthy, right? Like you're, but what I was actually eating was a whole bunch of refined carbohydrates and fried foods because that was what I learned to eat from my family when they moved to the U.S. And I later found out that the diet really did change when we got to the U.S. It was very different when we were in India. But the diet that they

adopted was the American vegetarian diet, which included Pizza Hut every Friday night for us. That was like the big treat and Coke and Doritos because they were vegetarian. And we would have them, you know, as a treat. And it was the special treat that we got when like people came to visit or whatever. So my diet was full of refined carbohydrates, sugar and fried foods. What I realized is that, wow, I was getting little to no fiber every single day. And this whole concept of the gut bacterial army, they survive. Their food is fiber. And so what I realized is that I was literally starving my own gut bacteria. No wonder I was feeling the way I was. Even through nutrition school, I think people now know, but in nutrition school, we learned about

calories, fat, protein, but there was no real practical, very little practical advice about how do you manage on a daily basis your mood, your fatigue, your gut health by eating, you know, certain foods. It was just like, you know, eat cereal. And then it was like, eat fruit and all these things. And I was eating cereal. I was eating fruit. But I was really not eating the things that were going to help me get out.

out of this place that I was in. I grew up on a very similar diet. So I actually grew up vegetarian. Yeah. And processed vegetarian diet. You'd have some of the benefits that you had in the South Asian diet still is, you know, when parents would make home-cooked meals, obviously there was a lot of spices, which was always great. And they would, especially if you do make, like, more traditional Indian food, you do get a lot

of exposure to different vegetables. They are super, super cooked, like overly cooked. Yeah, totally. And then, but I think that the sugar component, you know, very much, even in India, right, our diet did change when people came to America and, yes, we started eating Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. But even in India, you know, post-industrial sort of revolution, even over there, it's like I would always tell my friends, like, you never find a salad in India, right? You'll find like cucumbers and tomatoes that are kind of on the side, but you'll never find a salad. Partly that is because of sanitation and other things like that and kind of cleanliness. and other things and not having access to refrigerators, but you would never find, like, raw

foods or a lot of, a ton of vegetables that weren't completely, completely cooked and, like, overly blanched out. So you'll appreciate this. I remember when I did my research at Harvard in the summers when I went to Cornell for undergrad, but I would go to Boston for the summers because my parents had moved there and I was doing research and we would go to these restaurants and there would be a whole bunch of South Asian vegetarians and the way they would phrase it is like, we want some vegetarian choices but no vegetables. And so the question, the way they phrased it at every restaurant was, like, give me options that are vegetarian that don't include any vegetables.

And that was like the prerequisite for anything that we were going to order because otherwise they would give you a plate of steamed vegetables as your vegetarian dish. And so it was funny how you really learn a lot of that. But you're right, though, if you look at traditional Indian food and now I help my parents and my family kind of wade through all of this stuff and say, listen, turmeric and ginger and garlic and pepper and cardamom and cinnamon, these are the most anti-inflammatory gut health promoting foods on the planet. The spices that you use on a daily basis are those. And so you can add them to foods that are very, very healthy, like dolls. There are so many amazingly healthy foods that you can be eating. If you just kind of focus on that a little bit more and focus on the less on the breads and the refined foods a little bit, you know, change it up a little bit. Totally.

And I mean, especially if we look at like ancestry and also, you know, there's a big whole section about exercising and fasting and we'll get to those. These were things that were baked into our culture. In India, people were regularly fasting. If you go to the rural parts of Gradroth and I've been there and you go visit the rice patties and the other stuff or the coastal areas, people are lean, right? The ones that are working on the farms and the fields, they're lean. They might be 70 years old. They have like basically kind of like a little bit of like a four pack, right, or a two pack or a six pack. They were fasting was regularly part of the culture, whether it was for religious purposes or whether it was.

was just because that's how you lived and you didn't always have access. But they were also moving a lot. So when you look at like a high rice diet, which is pretty typical, India, China, you're out in the fields all day. You're farming. You're doing other stuff. And now our lifestyle isn't that way. I don't know about you, but my dad was into sports and he played professional cricket

in Kenya, but I didn't see parents like growing up doing a lot of outdoorsy things or sort of working out, right? It was when you played sports or you went to the local picnic that families were hosting together. But movement was not something I grew up seeing in my community. Yeah. My grandfather actually only used his bike to go everywhere. And he lived well into his 90s being active. And that was such a great, when I was looking into all the science, I was like, that makes so much sense.

He had a sense of community. And he would visit his friends on the way to the course. courthouse because he was a lawyer and then he would spend hours with them on the way home. And there's a ton of nature and movement and fasting and community and all of these things that were built into the culture that we have taken out of our culture. And the fasting aspect, I saw you on another podcast. I think it was with Dave. And you said it exactly right. In many cultures, probably most cultures, the way they fast is with circadian rhythms. And when I looked into the literature, and I did all the research, that is the way you're supposed to fast with circadian rhythms.

That means that you don't eat late into the night and then fast all day during the day. That is a wrong physiological way to do it. You should be eating until sunset or shortly after and then fast at that point and fast overnight so that you're not eating during the dark hours and then you are eating during the light hour. So most of the fasting that we do intermittent fasting that people talk about in our culture is actually timed wrong. Yeah. And physiological. Yeah.

And I was in that podcast you referencing, I was talking about my chat with Walter Longo's team and their work and everything. Joseph is CEO. And he was like, you know, what a lot of people don't understand about fasting is that traditionally in most cultures around the world that fast for different reasons, they eat breakfast. Right. they're not switching it in the evening and sort of skipping everything and then eating in the evening. If they are doing, let's say, more than an intermittent fast 12 hour overnight, you're going to break that all down and the differences between men and women and everything we're going to get into that. And I remember thinking growing up, that was basically the case for my parents.

They would have breakfast or like, let's say a brunch and then they would fast the rest of the day if often in the Hindu, Vedic Jain traditions, it's often usually for like spiritual or There might be a holiday or other things like that, or especially as you get older, fasting is sort of baked into the culture and doing it. I was like, yeah, that's crazy because most of my friends over here that are doing some version of fasting, a lot of my guy friends, they won't eat anything in the morning, might have a little bit of coffee, and then they'll eat their one meal, like maybe after lunch or like at dinner time.

And again, it's all about experimentation and people playing with stuff, but that's typically, I think that we have to look at cultures that have been doing this for a little. little bit of time to take some inspiration on what direction we want to go in. Oh, yeah. And there's great studies to support that. There's a big breakfast study that's probably the most famous study about meal timing. They looked at 700, 500, 200 calories spread throughout the day. So when were you going to have your 700 calorie meal? When were you going to have your 500? When were you going to have your 200? They made all different groups. and they tested them.

They had the same number of calories, the same food. And it was very clear that you should not have your 700 at the end of the day. Like the 8 p.m. meal should not be the 700 calorie meal. You are going to be much better off having your 700 calorie meal, either at your 8 a.m. meal or as your 12 p.m. meal. And so what they found is the big breakfast, and their conclusions were, eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a queen, and then dinner like a prince, and then dinner like a pauper. And it really makes sense that really if you're looking at optimal metabolic control,

and we can get into the science behind this, but it is very clear that dinner, especially if you're having a later dinner, should be your smallest meal of the day. Melatonin, our sleep hormone, actually not only tells our brain to prepare for sleep, but it also tells our pancreas to stop making insulin and to stop making digestive enzymes. And so two to three hours before bed, whether you like it or not, your body has a signal to shut it down metabolically. And so if you're eating tons of food at that time, no wonder you get metabolic disease, obesity, gain weight, you know, insulin, dysregulation, poor sleep, and reflux, because it's physiologically

not a good time for you to eat. Which connects right into the other, you know, recommendation you have, which is in the morning why it's so important to have that exposure to the sun, which most of us just don't get because we're in our boxes the whole day. Chat a little bit more about that since we're on the topic. You know, through, I think it makes so much evolutionary sense and biological sense that when you wake up in the morning, you are supposed to see light. Your body needs that signal. So our circadian rhythms, our internal clocks, need that external signal to turn on all the brain processes, to turn on our metabolic processes. And so what you want is to tell the brain, hey, it's time to be focused, time to be energetic, time to do really, you know, complex tasks.

And you want to tell your metabolism the same thing. Hey, food, it's coming, get ready, you know, get everything going. And we have peripheral clocks in every one of our cells. So every single organism, whether it's a human or not, has a circadian clock. And in our bodies, humans, we actually have a center, a master clock in our super chyazmatic nucleus in our brain. And that is directly connected to the retinal receptor. So we're always looking to see when it's light and when it's dark so we can kind of fine-tune

that clock in the brain and tell the rest of the body what to do. So if you really understand that, then you would understand that, hey, it's so important to get even a few minutes of direct light in the morning when you wake up and get, you know, a few minutes of darkness, if not a few hours of darkness in the evening to kind of tell the body, hey, it is time to do the repair and renewal processes because they're getting feedback. And the sad thing is, is that our body's extra sensitive at night to light because it's trying to see, wait a second, does Drew want me to stay up because there's a danger? Should I be hypervigilant? Because there's some kind of reason I cannot work on my repair and renewal processes. And so when you're blasting yourself with that blue light

from walking around in Target and then watching Netflix and then, you know, looking at your phone and your computer, you're basically telling your body, hey, no, it's not time to repair and renew. It's time to stay awake because there's some kind of, you know, problem happening here. There's a danger. And so we're really shortchanging our repair and renewal processes by timing the lighting wrong. So true. I want to come back to the gut because you made some changes. So tell us like, what did you do then?

And then what did you actually notice? We've done so many episodes in the gut microbiome. We haven't often looked through the lens of like, I'm so tired or I'm so effing tired. What changes did you make at that time? And then what did you feel in your body? Biggest change I made is that I added some prebiotic fiber to my diet. So when I learned the science, I learned, okay, these are Army, this army, they have food preferences, they have personalities, they have roles, and we want a lot of

them, and we want diversity in there. And what they eat for food is prebiotic fiber. And I realized in my diet, I had very little, zero, probably, less than 15 grams of prebiotic fiber. And this is true for 95% of Americans. Our fiber goals for Americans is about 25 to 30 grams for women and about 35 to 40 for men. But when you looked at hunter-gatherer societies, we were consuming about 120 grams of prebiotic fiber. Can I pause there for a second? So I'd love to dig into that one a little bit more because we did an episode a few weeks ago. And we post a video online where we were talking about some of those studies, about 100 to 150 grams. And it was quite an uproar and a little bit of a controversy that came up. And so I'd love to parse it out for my audience's

and also for my own understanding on things. What was the pushback? So the study that was in reference of the hunter-gatherers and them having 100 to, let's say, 150, you mentioned 120, was the Hudson tribe, the Hudson tribe. Yeah, Hudsonia. And that study came out of Stanford, and there was a microbiologist over there, and we actually reached out to them to actually ask them onto the podcast to talk about that. And there's two main studies that were done on that group.

There was one talking about the seasonal. I think the title was seasonal variation of the foods. And then inside of there, the reference to the 100 to 150 grams. It was not clear the methodology of how they were, you know, parsing that out. So that's why we reached out to the people that put it together. And I'm hoping to have them on the podcast. The other one was, I don't know if it was by the same group, but same tribe. And it was talking about how tubers, which is often referred to these hunter-gather societies,

especially the Hudson, is how it's a fallback food. that they have that's there. And when we had posted, it was a conversation with a friend of ours, a colleague, Dr. Mary Perdey, online. I saw that. And there's been a bunch of people that have questioned that study and the findings from it because how they were sort of put out there. And I think it is very extreme. Like, I don't think, I think we can say this, but I don't think that any of us can get there or want to get there or have the ability to get there with our current. GI tracks, but we definitely shouldn't be at 15 grams.

Right. And I think that's the most important lesson of it. You know, a lot of people chiming in, you know, some folks from like the carnivore community and everything like that. But also some people that are coming in regularly and saying, listen, we just have to put a caveat. If you go and try to have 120 grams of fiber, which if you convert to cups, you know, there's different recommendations that are out there.

But, you know, we've had Terry Walls in the podcast, Dr. Terry Walls. She sort of says, you know, nine cups is what she's shooting for, especially for. for her MS and autoimmune patients. But I didn't know what 150 grams was in terms of cups, but it's basically like some ridiculous number. It's like 25 grams or 30 grams. Sorry, it's 20 to 30 cups that are out there, depending on the range that's out there.

No, there's no way. Did that person, Mary, say that people should be eating that much? No, no, no. Oh, okay. Same reference as you did. But people are saying that. Our hunter-gather societies have had, which was well, it's been mentioned in NPR.

It's mentioned a lot of places. but there was some scrutiny on the study that was there. But I think the bottom line is they ate more fiber than us. And there have been other studies that have been done on stool weight of those folks, modern day hunter-gather societies. And where the average American has a stool weight of about four ounces, those individuals that have a higher stool weight of anywhere from a pound to two pounds is the total stool weight that could be there.

So bottom line, we do need fiber in our diet. and then you can figure out how to personalize it for yourself. And if you think about it, you know, from our backgrounds, it was very clear to me that, oh, yeah, even just 100 years ago, probably our grandparents' age, they didn't always have access to refined flour and refined sugar. And they had to eat a ton more fiber just because you couldn't find a ton. You can't, it's very expensive to buy white sugar or to buy white flour. And so people were at that time consuming a lot more unrefined foods, which are high in fiber.

And so it was kind of part of that society and not until you got a lot of money and ability to take out that fiber. Were you able to consume less? Yeah. I also think looking back at, you know, let's say South Asia, specifically India, there was through the lens of Argyveda, right, which there's some interesting components that are there, time tested. Some make sense still, some maybe don't, just like any kind of philosophy that's out there. The one thing that I say that is very interesting from RUVA was the emphasis on especially certain dosha should not be having a lot of raw food. And I think that the modern equivalent of that, I don't know too much about dosha's, is that

if you do have, if you did grow up on antibiotics like I did and had a lot of gut issues and totally decimated my gut bacteria, not all fibers are equal. and you might have to sort of slowly increase that dose. And in the beginning, we have so much emphasis on here on having raw fruits and vegetables. But in India, they didn't as much focus on those raw vegetables because they were still paying attention to that too much raw vegetables can cause digestive upset for people. Absolutely. Actually, so I looked into Ayurveda a little bit when I was doing my own journey. And the Vata, so there's different dosias, the VATA.

So there's different dosha. The vata dosha is a lot of us because we're type A. We're very stressed and we have weak digestive systems. And that's the docha that is not supposed to have a lot of raw foods. And that's you. You're saying. Yeah. And that's a lot of people.

You can, you know, you're changing dosha's all the time and you have a combination of them. But a lot of us are in that category because we are, it's the air quality. So it's like you're constantly moving tasks. you are, have issues with anxiety, when you're off balance, stress, and those are the people who aren't supposed to be consuming a ton of cold and raw foods. So that made so much sense to me because once you do fix that and you start to move away from the Vatha, maybe you're more a combination, then you can do more of that, salads and cold foods.

But I actually advise people that are going through this to put that layer on. You know, I didn't really talk about it much in the book because it's something that's a very nuanced thing and you have to really talk to someone individually to figure that out. When you were including these prebiotic fibers, what was some of the first things you were doing? Were you having like acacia fiber? Was there particular foods that you were eating? What worked for you at the time? And again, I know it's just your journey, but I think listeners like to hear. Yeah, people's journeys.

So one of the things I started to do was tried to incorporate vegetables in every one of my meals. So I knew that vegetables were the prebiotic fiber that your body needs because what I learned very early is that if you parse out parts of food from their whole state, you're not going to get all the benefits of it. So I learned that from probiotics, for example. Probiotics are actual bacteria that go into your gut. But if you separate that from food, your body knows it's foreign and kills it before it even gets to your gut.

And so the same thing with prebiotics. I wanted it to reach the place that it's supposed to go, which is the lower colon. And so I incorporate a ton of vegetables. So I stuck with the four S's, which is salad, soup, smoothie, or scramble. And so in my mind, I would say I would have one of those things at every one of my meals that had vegetables in it. So it would like a soup with asparagus soup, say. And then I would have a scramble with vegetables and tofu and another meal.

And then I'd have a smoothie, maybe a green smoothie. somewhere in between there. And so that's how I really started to incorporate it into my diet. And then then it becomes a habit. Then you start to crave these things because as you start to add good foods, you have to start to subtract some of the bad foods. And what I realized is that I was eating a ton of convenience foods that were taking the place of all these healthy foods. So instead of a coffee and a protein bar in the morning, I started to have a chai. which had like cinnamon, cardamom, and ginger. And then I'd have a either vegetable protein smoothie,

or I would have my carrots and hummus and then berries on the side as my snack on the way to work. And then I would have like a bigger meal in the middle of the day. And so that's the little changes I made is really took out some of those convenience foods that I thought, you know, in our society, we're told to eat. protein, protein, like more protein, wherever you can get it in powder form and bar form, you know, and that's the most important thing. And so for me, I was always concentrating on that. And I really like didn't even, fiber wasn't even on my radar at that point.

So that was a big change. I want to touch on one other category that you write in the book before we shift from nutrition over to another topic. So you grew up vegetarian at this time as you were starting to do more research. and people are vegetarian for a lot of different reasons. They become vegan for a lot of different reasons. There's so many layers, culture, religion, animal rights, you know, other stuff. Were you still adhering to a vegetarian diet, or did you start to explore out a little bit?

You know, so I found that all the research was pointing towards a high abundance of fruits, vegetables, nuts. and then there was this question of fish. And I, at that time, I was not ready to add fish back into my diet or into my diet. Because through my years of being diet agnostic towards my patients, I learned that people had all different diets and all different preferences and all different upbringings and comfort foods. And I appreciated that. And the research does show that there's some. benefit to eating anti-inflammatory foods, which the pescatarian category would be in there.

However, I was at the point in my life that I wasn't ready to incorporate that just because I had never had it. And I think I believe that you could get the same health effects without including that into your diet. So I started taking some omega-3 supplements from algae. And I started to eat more omega-3 whole foods that are plant foods. based. And it was really just preference because if there was anything that I was going to add to my diet, I couldn't imagine adding fish back as the first thing. And so that's why I didn't do it. But I do

recommend to my patients that if you are someone who has a background or an upbringing or preference or if you say, hey, I love my grass-fed meat, I am diet agnostic in that sense. Like, As long as 90% of your diet is really super healthy, you can do what you want with that 10%. But even those foods could still be healthy. They can be healthy. They can be healthy. They can be healthy in the very, and the research is very unclear about that, as you know. Primarily because it's very difficult to do nutritional studies.

Exactly. It's very difficult to do nutritional studies and parse out what is meat. What is meat? Because when you look at observational studies, people who eat meat are traditionally eating processed meats. So I 100% am on board with the fact that there could be really good evidence coming out that if you did a randomized control trial and you had people eating processed meat versus grass fed, you may find a big difference between those two groups anecdotally.

It seems to be true, right? Same thing with fish intake. I definitely think that there's very good evidence that omega-3 intake in any form is absolutely great for your body. And so when I talk about diet, the way I talk about it is that you really have to just learn the basics of what makes a good diet. And then you can do what you want with the little bit of flexibility you have. Because I don't do well with dairy, but I grew up eating dairy. And I was a lot of my traditional foods that I remember growing up with that are comforting, they were dairy-filled foods.

And so I understand that if you come from a diet of heavy meat consumption or heavy, you know, some other consumption, it's really going to be hard for you to go cold turkey. And maybe you don't even want to do that. And so that's where I think you have to really personalize it for yourself. So maybe you're doing a Mediterranean-style high plant foods, high nuts, olive oil, and spices, anti-inflammatory spices. and then you do add in the personalization that you want. Yeah. It's tough both ways because it's a culture and the people around us. And you know, you and I come from similar cultures.

And I was sharing with you earlier is that, you know, one of my backgrounds from my mom's side is the Jain community. And inside the Jain tradition, Jainism, is this core principle of a Hymsa. It's all about nonviolence. And basically, like, the guiding principle of being Jane is being vegetarian, right? that's like probably more important than anything else that's out there, at least in the modern interpretation. Right. Even though I don't see it that way, I think the mindset piece, the kindness piece, other stuff.

So as I started getting the world of functional medicine, start to do all, get all the labs done on me, start to get deep into the space from a business perspective and meet all these incredible clinicians, I really had to sort of question and say, you know, what do I want to try and what do I want to be open to? And when I first started eating fish into my diet and I was telling my friends that I, you know, grew up with it or also from this community, it was a tough conversation, right? It basically feels like you are letting that community go. It feels like you're doing something, just like in anything. It's almost as if you were Muslim and you decided to be Christian. And everybody's like,

what the fuck is going on? Right? But at the end of the day, that was right for me. And I don't want to be held into any particular belief system. And I also want to respect everybody's belief system. One thing that's very clear is that as things go forward, you don't, you know, when we look at these different societies around the world, people are thriving on all sorts of different diets. They're getting out the processed food, and that's my biggest criticism of the South Asian and the Indian diet, is that Indians in America, who actually, it's actually a huge contrast, they have the highest risk of heart disease out of any ethnic minority, but interestingly enough, they also have some of the top resources. They have the highest income on average, you know,

other stuff. So, you know, we have to see that the reason that I'm bringing up that aspect is that just because you have access doesn't always mean that you can best take care of your health. So we have to improve the education and have a conversation about getting the sugar out, getting the processed foods out, and actually start to return back to these ancient principles, whether you want to be vegan or vegetarian, that's completely up to you. But this modern lifestyle is actually killing us, so we need to intervene. And I 100% agree. And, you know, I really can't subscribe to any particular group when it comes to diet

it because you can't win. So if you, I will happily tell you that being plant forward is a way to go. Plant predominant is the way to go. But I feel like some of these communities, whether it's carnivore, vegan, paleo, keto, they're very steadfast on their principles and only can see their side of the story and really attack other groups that are doing other things. And that's just, I just don't feel like, just like you said, There are many different ways to be healthy.

You can get your fiber, your prebiotic fiber, on almost every one of those diets, except for a few. But we can get into that. But if you are getting your prebiotic fiber in, you are taking out the sugar, you are eating whole foods, then you're in the right ballpark. And whether you decide to go one of those directions, that's up to you. And I don't really feel comfortable saying I'm 100% vegan. because then I wear, you know, sneakers with, you know, leather sometimes. And I don't want to be, you know, that's, I don't want to be perfect on any one of those places. I want to be imperfectly myself.

Yeah, and diet is not the goal. The goal is to have energy to give to everything else that matters in the life. But I think it's important to talk about. And you know what? I'm okay with the divisiveness. And just a reminder for everybody, we can do it in a kind way. We can advocate for where we want to go. We can advocate for our approach.

because that's part of a healthy conversation. I want to hear the best argument on something that I don't do because I was a hardcore vegan. I was a hardcore vegan for seven years of my life. First three, four years, I felt amazing. Tail end of that, I didn't feel as great, right? Again, could have been the way I was doing it. Could have been this, could have been that. And I want people to advocate for whatever approach in any field and anything they do.

And we can do it in a kind and compassionate way. and we can present new findings, new literature, and one day it'll be a lot easier to do nutritional studies. I think the other thing that's also really interesting is that I think there's new devices that are coming out, I wear a continuous glucose monitor, is that regardless of whether you're vegan, vegetarian, or whatever you eat,

I think that we're realizing, like, blood sugar is super key. You've got to pay attention to that regardless of what you do. You don't want to be in this roller coaster of blood sugar. So I'm going to put a button. We can come back to nutrition. There's so much more that you talk about and are known about, But I feel like I wanted to ask you those questions where normally I don't focus on that on the podcast because I don't care what people eat. I want them to just feel good.

Yeah. Is I feel like you have a unique lens because you're both a physician but also your background and your upbringing. So you have this culmination in these worlds. So you have an interesting perspective. So thanks for entertaining with that. Let's shift from nutrition. Let's talk about what were some of the other things that you got into when it came to addressing this feeling of overful, fatigue, being effing tired. What was another major category that you took on and you started to see

results? The biological rhythms piece, which is what we call chronobiology in the medical literature. We have that clock that we referred to before, not only in our brains, but in every one of ourselves. And then there's also this other clock. So we have circadian rhythms, which are 24, about 24, hour cycles. Then we have infradian rhythms, which are about 28 day cycles. And then there's ultradian rhythms, which are usually very short cycles. So that's like our heartbeat or our breath. And we are cyclical beings. We have to, as you know, controlling your breath and your heart rate is one of the best ways to control your energy, get into that parasympathetic state that counteracts a lot of our stress. So I realized that, hey, I was completely off on all three of those

rhythms. And getting back on all of those was really transformative. So I talk a lot about that. So chronobiology is a piece for me that could change our society. So, you know, in the last 10 years, we have seen so much technology. I mean, we are sitting in a, you know, in a place that wouldn't be, have all this technology about, you know, 10, 20 years ago, cell phones that are lifestyles. So I believe that if clinicians, entrepreneurs, technology can match some of this chronobiology piece, we can be in a better state in a few years from now. So what that means is we're supposed to be seeing light during the day and food. And certain, those light and fooders are two biggest inputs, lights the,

the strongest one. And then we're supposed to be doing certain things at night, including sleeping and fasting and seeing darkness. And having that duality to our days has such an impact on our brain that we don't even understand. We anecdotally know it. Oh yeah, I feel good when I go out and get some sunlight. But there's very good evidence. I mean, the Nobel Prize in medicine went to the circadian rhythm science in, I think, 2017. And really what we're looking at is transformative practices, not just things that are nice to have, things that we can do for our culture, for our population of working people, for our parents, for our children, that could change the game, honestly, because up to 80%

of our genes are controlled by circadian rhythm. So we can improve everything by 80% if we actually listened and tuned ourselves to this. And, you know, a thousand years ago, that was easy. We didn't have microwaves. We didn't have cell phones and Netflix. And we were outdoors a lot because there was no choice. But now the way, because we've been blind to this knowledge, we've built a society that completely ignores this. And so I think that getting back to that in your personal state, but then also on a societal level, is something that can change people's lives.

What were some examples of the way that you were breaking that before you started getting the research? You know, we were chatting earlier, you know, with you being a doctor, naturally even just the whole process of going through med school is a constant sort of barrage on that. And then when you get into your residency and then rotations and other stuff, you're doing overnight shifts, other things like that. It's kind of the way that the system is built. And so you're almost designed on top of the work ethic and the heavy, heavy drive to achieve, which is also a beautiful thing. You probably wouldn't gotten as far as you do. And some of that stress was a good thing, which you talk about. We'll get to that later on.

But what were the ways that you were breaking that if you had to rank like the top couple that then when you feel? fixed it, you noticed a difference. So, Drew, I think what we have to understand is you can break these clocks. They are breakable. So from constantly changing and not sinking with our circadian rhythms, we can break our clocks. And so that as we age, not only do our clocks become weaker, but now they're damaged. And so they can't do the regulation that they used to do and turn on and turn off genes.

And so they're not, so basically you age quicker, you get more metabolic disease and you die earlier. So it's not just, you know, yeah, in the short term, I'm talking about energy, but really in the long term, it's about longevity and health and disease. What I was doing was I had a horrible nighttime routine and I had a horrible morning routine. And I think a lot of people could relate to some of this nighttime routine. the kids would go to bed and I would make sure that they would go to bed and then that's when I started everything. I would turn on the computer. There was a TV in the background.

I would get my snacks and I would sit there late into the late night and study for my boards or study for the next day or, you know, study for something or do something. And I would skimp on my sleep. I would get blast of blue light. So one bout of blue light delays your melatonin by 90 minutes. And then I would eat. Usually you're not making great decisions. Studies show that the decisions you make after 8 p.m.

are usually not good food decisions. Well, not good decisions all around, but usually definitely not good food decisions. And then I would skimp on my sleep. I would get up and I would have like a blasting alarm to try to like wake me up in the morning. it would be pitch black often. And I would, you know, down my caffeine and my breakfast because, you know, you have to jumpstart your metabolism. Like if you don't eat first thing, when you roll out of bed, you're, I thought that you would

not jumpstart your metabolism, which was, you know, the common misnomer, the lie that we've been told by trainers over the years that if you're not constantly eating first thing in the morning and then all throughout the day that you're shortchanging your metabolism. them. And then I would quickly check my phone, email, and I would rush to work. And it was always like this big rush because what I wanted to do is like minimize the time that maximize my sleep time and minimize my morning time. So there was really no time to think. You just like raced off. And what I realized is that there was so much that I was doing wrong with that. And my breakfast, you know, it was this refined breakfast. It was bar and it was coffee or tea or whatever it was. And so I

really, really uprooted my entire routine. And I said, okay, now that I know this piece about chronobiology, about how these things work, I need to start incorporating little things. And just simple things that I change made all the difference for me. So I always tell people, if you take nothing away from the book, just fixed your nighttime and morning routine, and you will see amazing changes in your energy and your burnout levels. Talk about how those changes extrapolated out to your family. You have two kids, a boy and a girl, and for your husband as well. What was going on as you were making these changes because people who listen, we do have

a lot of moms who listen. Shout out to all the moms that are out there and the dads too. There's the practical question of like, how do you bring it over? So we'd love to look through your lens. What was going on with your family and what were some of the things you brought and the results that incurred? Everyone thought I became this, the crazy sleep lady, you know, after I started making these changes. Because the biggest thing I noticed is, oh, my God, I'm eating and I'm like blasting myself with blue light after a certain hour. I need to start sleeping more and really getting that darkness in two to three hours before bed because that's when melatonin is released.

and I need to, you know, sync with my circadian rhythms. And so doing these crazy things like turning down the lights in the evenings and then not allowing any TV after a certain time and then not doing any work on my computer after a certain time and not taking activating phone calls or conversations after a certain time. And that was a very big change and not eating after a certain time, obviously, was a big change as well. So these were all really, really hard. And my friends, my family, everybody thought I'd gone off the deep end.

They thought I was like a freak because all of a sudden I needed to do all this stuff. And, you know, I naturally always knew this. And so it was something that I wanted to get back to because I know I feel like a better person when I wind down before the night is, you know, before I go to bed and then go to bed. So I changed that and I changed my morning routine also. So instead of... And for your family, too? Your family was there? Were they in that same boat?

So the way it worked is that I started about seven or eight years ago with my entire journey. My husband started a few years ago, meaning that for the first five years, he looked at me like I was a freak of nature. Who did I marry? Yeah. Like, who is this person? he already knew I always was a freak of nature, but I think it was even more so then. And he didn't catch on until he was kind of going through his own crisis. And, you know, as you know, we cannot force our families, our partners, our friends to see what, see the light. We can just show them. We can

write about it. We can talk about it. And then it's up to them to make those changes. Totally. Just like we wouldn't want anybody to force us to do something. And it doesn't work. You can do all the forcing you want. I mean, I know. Did you go through a forcing face? I didn't because I've never been in that, I've always been into nutrition and always been into healthy eating and, you know, being a vegetarian. I can't. There was never a time in my life that I wanted to force my views on someone else. And so it was always about, hey, this is what I'm doing for myself, for what I'm learning about, what I'm telling my patients about. and you're welcome to try it. So there's a lot of people who reach out to me now who say, like, you know, do, what about eating

late at night or whatever, you know, dinners or whatever. So then, so in the last couple of years, it's become so easy because everyone's on board now. So we don't eat late. We eat. What time usually? So we eat between 6 and 7 and 6.7 p.m. So there's a good 3 hour before bed.

So I try to make it 2 to 3 hours before. before bed. So there's a little leeway in that. So in the book, I recommend 8 p.m. as your cut off time for all snacks or like tea or wine or whatever it is. And if you were following kind of a traditional pattern, if you're a shift worker, that's like completely not for you. But so we shifted our times of eating. And then we and then in the mornings, I shifted my schedule a little bit. I said, wait, I control my schedule. So I don't need to be rolling out of bed and like rushing to the office. So I gave myself a little bit of a cushion time there where I do my morning routine. And I get a little self-reflection time. And I even actually work out at the mornings now. And that changed everything for me. Having a strict morning routine with pieces of it that I still stick to even when I travel.

and having a strict evening routine. And talk about kids. Yeah. With kids in like the morning and that sort of space, you know, especially during the context of the pandemic, people are just trying to keep their head above water. Yeah. I don't have kids,

but I am so involved with the lives of so many of my friends and families and kids. And we have so many conversations about kids on this podcast. So I am aware enough to know the, everybody's just trying to do their best. especially in the context of schools not necessarily being open all the time and other stuff. How does that extrapolate out to kids? Were you guys doing anything specific? Circadian rhythm is so important for kids, right?

Nature time is so important. Natural light is so important for kids' brains and their bodies. And what we forgot during the pandemic is that kids suffered almost more than we did, right? They are not seeing their friends. They're not seeing light. They're not playing. They're not being able to be creative. Their brains are changing at enormous pace.

And they need that input. So one of the things I changed very early on is I really made sure that they got a good dose of natural light every single day. And that means nature time, especially in the morning, daytime. You know, I recommend to people before 10 a.m. if they can, before noon at least, to get some natural. light. And I made it so that at night, they are, have to disconnect from their devices because during the pandemic, they were an online school. The only way they could communicate with their

friends was through FaceTime or Zoom. So really having them disconnect from that was really difficult. And because just as it is difficult for us. And then having that dimmed lighting, take out the fluorescent lighting. The good thing is we couldn't go to malls or big, fluorescent lighted spaces anymore late at night anyways. But really learning that it's time to get into the zone of, you know, nighttime, which is having your lights turn down. Maybe you're doing a little bit of reading or self-reflection at that time. You're not eating. And you're going to bed to get a full night of sleep. And so for them, they, I don't have them intermittent fast, of course, because we are not trying to get them to, you know, push the limits.

But we definitely have a rule that you want to eat a little bit before bed, not eat right before bed. So have a little bit of space between the time you eat dinner and overnight. So for kids, it would be something like, you know, fasting for 10, 11, or 12 hours at most. But really, even that is better than the status quo, which is people eat 15, 16 hours a day. and just having a little bit of space is really good for them. Can I ask a couple more questions about your kids? So diet-wise, right? Parents are always in this place and struggle of how do I get my kids to eat these things that are healthy?

And it's interesting because there's different philosophies and thoughts out there. And I think that actually there are unique challenges for kids who are vegetarian. Yeah. Because kids and human beings, but kids especially, they're wired to seek out calorie-dense, foods. So they're naturally going to gravitate towards whether they're a vegetarian or not. They're going to gravitate towards the extreme condensed forms of calories because that's the most efficient way and that's programmed in their system. It's not like they have a belief system about vegetables or whatever. They just internally know, their body knows, seek out the things that are

calorie dense. How did they're, again, you can't force anybody and you can't, you know, force your kids, but you can put different sort of things around them. How did their nutritional journey evolve as yours evolved? And also, sometimes it's like it didn't, right? Like sometimes it's like, we're just trying to do the best that we can. Yeah. And I think that's, that is a really great point because we are all trying to do the best that we can. And so I don't preach to be the best parent in the world. I'm not. I'm just as imperfect as, you know, the next parent. Kids are, programmed to want the cupcake over the apple. I mean, that's, our brains want sugar and calories and fat, right? So it's natural for them to gravitate towards that. The subconscious wiring

that happens that we all have happened as when we were kids, the comfort foods that we use, the reward foods that we use. That's all programmed in us. If you think about it, when you fall back on your subconscious, you reach for the things that are comforting because of what's been set in your patterns from childhood. And so I appreciate that. And I want them to know that they can get comfort from other things besides food. They can get rewards from other things besides foods. So when they get an A on their report card, I am not surprising them with a chocolate cake.

Because I understand as adults, a lot of us equate happiness with food. food, sadness, and need for comfort or reward with food. And those hyper-dense, like you said, caloric foods as a reward for good behavior is just something that so many of us are trying to fight today. So one of the things I learned is if they do well, we get them something like a present or take them on a trip or, you know, a day trip or an actual trip before the pandemic. don't reward everything with food or don't punish everything with food or don't treat food as a comforting, you know, junk food as a comfort measure. And that was something that I think I really learned. And then the second thing I learned is that to teach them what we know, what we should be teaching in schools, is that foods are engineered to,

processed foods are engineered to take over our brain, to wire, to trigger the parts of our brain that feel pleasure, to release the chemicals, to trigger the addiction parts of our brain. They are made in labs to do that. And I wish I had known, and I tell my kids this all the time, that yes, you love it. And yes, you feel like you want to reach for more. And yes, it's so pleasurable. But that's because it was created in a lab to create that for you in your brain. Natural foods do that, but at decibels lower than these processed foods.

And teaching them that that is something that is from the beginning. That is something that really changed a lot for us. So they know that when you choose those foods, they can, you know, be a sometimes food, but that they're not something that should replace all of the other natural food that actually has signals. They have, you know, fruit has sweetness. Vegetables can be really tasty. But the signal is lower, as you know, than these hyper-processed foods. And if you only eat hyper-processed foods, you are not going to have a taste for these.

lower signal foods. There's an experiment, maybe you know it, but in the wild where birds, when they see a red speck, they start to, a certain type of bird starts to peck. And when you make that speck a little bit bigger through lab work, you can make them peck even faster. And you can make that speck into a big red circle, like a stop sign, and they will go crazy pecking. And that's what's happened with our food industry. They've created these signals. that are the size of a stop sign when we are naturally supposed to see them as specs in nature, right? The triggers for sugar and salt and fat.

So I explain that to them, and it's really, they understand that. And I think that that's something that we could teach in schools easily, that, hey, that's why you gravitate towards the Twinkies and the, you know, the processed fast food. but that's why you should selectively eat the other food so you can retrain your brain not to always be looking for these hyper exaggerated signals. I want to shift a little bit into the psychobiology piece and the mindset piece by connecting it back to your original story. You were chatting earlier when we started this conversation about the guilt that you were

filled with, right? You were in the meeting with your other partners that were there in the medical practice and there was this request to stay later, and there was this guilt and this feeling of being pulled in two different directions. You were speeding on your way over to get your kids and the guilt of what you said specifically, you know, what will they think if I'm late?

And there's the accident component that you got into and then immediately, after checking that everybody's okay, including yourself, the running over in that direction to get your kids because also the feeling of guilt. Tell me a little bit more, as you've been sharing your own journey as both a physician, a mom, a woman who's been open about what the things she's gone through, including that story that we just shared, what have been other messages that you've been getting on the topic of guilt from people that follow you and follow

your work? Absolutely. Whenever I talk about boundaries, it's a hot topic. It's a hot topic for moms, for women, for people just in general, because I think we feel a lot of guilt when our boundaries are really low. and we are pulled in many different directions because we allow ourselves to be pulled in so many different directions. And as soon as you start putting up firm boundaries, there's going to be a little pushback. There's going to be people who don't like it. But eventually they will learn and you will flourish

from having those. And so I really talk about energy management and putting up those boundaries for your own personal energy as something that is something I learned the hard way. And what I hope that people can learn from this book is not just, yeah, change your diet, change what you eat, when you eat, but also really change the way you manage your mind and how you manage your mind energy. Do you really need to have every notification on your phone? Do you really need to watch all the news to be updated all the time? Do you really need to let everyone into your energy?

Do you need to give everyone your energy? That is a piece that I think can be transformative. What's an example of a boundary that you very easily set today that seven years ago, five years ago, ten years ago, it would have been, you would have ruminated on it. Like, should I do it? Should I not? You have the gut feeling that you want to set a boundary there, but you would have been like, I don't know, what will people think of me? Can you think of anything like that that you regularly do today? So many things I regularly do today are boundaries.

And they're kind boundaries. I feel like boundaries is such a negative term. Like, oh, this person has so many boundaries. No, it's actually a really positive thing because you are spreading a positive message by some of the, like some of my boundaries are positive boundaries. So for example, I've told maybe not even verbally, but just by experience. I don't answer my phone, text or emails after a certain hour, like two to three hours before bed. It's done for me. So if you text me at 10 p.m., I will not text you back until the next morning.

And if you want to have a conversation with me about, you know, something that's going on, and unless it's an emergency, I won't take it until the next day, right? So having that boundary on your energy, because I need, what I learned is if I go to sleep after having a very activating conversation, email, text, exchange, whatever, I cannot sleep because I'm focusing on that, you know, you're ruminating on what you just did or it's upsetting or it's really exciting or whatever it is. So that was one really clear boundary. Another clear boundary is that I don't compromise.

on my basics. So my basics are like sleep, sunlight, movement, right? So if I create a life that always includes those things and those are non-negotiables for me, then they will happen. Otherwise, you feel guilty all the time for doing all those things because you're, you didn't build it into your life and you didn't set a boundary around it. It's like as important as an appointment, you know, to, to do those things for yourself. Um, they're, so many. I don't, when I intermittent fast, when I do the circadian fasting, I follow that on the weekdays, especially very aggressively, and I try to stick with it. And so that means that once in a while I will just be having tea when I'm sitting with someone. Or it means that I am, you know,

not going to go to that late night girls dinner on a on a weekday because for me I've protected that time. So really putting up boundaries has been so transformative for me, but they're not mean. It's not like I always thought of boundaries as this thing that I wasn't supposed to do because that would be so mean and I have to be nice and giving to everyone. But I realize that these kind of boundaries are very, very kind to myself. And by being kind to myself, I can be so much better to everyone else. Yeah. And also, too, I think on the topic of mean is that people will interpret things in all sorts of different ways. Their interpretation is their experience, right? And they're allowed to have their experience. If they decide that something's mean or something's not,

but you are coming from a place of you knowing your own intent, right? And the rest can be clarified through conversation. If somebody has an issue, they bring it up. And then you can discuss. I think one layer to add into the boundaries that I think is so key is that, you know, the Instagram meme right now is, you know, get rid of toxic people in your life, other stuff. And I've said this on multiple interviews, but even once to end, it's like end is a really great word to add. And also see what draws you to those folks in the first place. Also see where you've been complicit in allowing them to do the things that are there. Usually when I hear the term people are taking advantage of me, it's like I'm agreeing to do a bunch of shit that I don't want

do. Yeah. And if we don't see that aspect of it, we can get rid of one person or we can set a firm boundary with our family or whatever it might be. And then it just shows up again at work because we haven't seen how we are a part of it. So it's both of those things in the full circle of it is we need to know, why am I being driven towards that? Why, you know, when I was a kid growing up, everybody said, you should be a good little girl or you should do this thing or you should be this type of boy or only, you know, angry people say this, and we unwind those patterns so that we can live the way that we want to live and show up in the world the way that we want to show up in the world.

I love that. I think, you know, having self-reflection is a huge part of this journey of burnout, of just being happy. Because if you're not reflecting on yourself and how can you improve yourself, everything is always going to be broken. You know, everything around you will always be broken because. you cannot expect the world to work the way you wanted to work without working on yourself first. And I think there's another layer to the side of burnout, which is that, I mean, would you say it's,

I can't imagine that you as an Ivy League doctor and all your sort of accolades and double board certified and all that beautiful things, you had to have gone through burnout in that process. So when you look at this lens of everything that you achieved, you wouldn't be the person who you are, the book, the other stuff. How do you think of that in that component? I think that the reason that I'm asking this question, as you can imagine, is that there's so much attention on these conversations of self-care and setting up the boundaries and the other stuff. And I'm looking at you. And I'd love to see how you look at your full journey through that lens. But I think it's actually helping you. The whole point is not to hinder you from doing what you want to do. It's actually helping you.

because if you're not burned out, you are in your element. You are doing the work that you're supposed to be doing in an attentive and energetic and a connected way. And the way I think about it is that these are not things that are going to take you away from your goals. It's actually things that are going to push you towards your goals because you need sustained. Things don't happen overnight. you and I both know that it takes years for us to have a sustained effort to create anything, a book, a business, a life, a family. And that requires the work, this work that we're talking about. So I would argue that we'll get further and will continue to get further. When I start to

do the work on myself, that's when things started to change. That's when I was able to create a life that I wanted. And I think that's true for so many people. Yeah, I think the beautiful thing is that if you have these things and if we give these tools to everybody, but also if we give them to med students and institutions and other stuff, I can't imagine building, you know, I'm going to come from the world of entrepreneurship. I'm in the health field, but I'm not a practitioner. I can't imagine building my first multimillion dollar company without having, you know, had to go on through some sort of what people would say as severe exertion or other stuff. Now, because I've been in this world for quite some time,

I never made such a big bet that I lost the farm in terms of my health. I never completely crashed and burned. I never completely did that. But that brings up this point, which is if you're going to do something amazing in life, you're going to be stressed. You're going to be stressed if you're going to try to build something amazing. If you're going to go through medical school, you're going to be stressed, you're going to have sleepless nights, you're going to have all these things that are there.

but if you have these tools, it's going to be a buffer. Absolutely. It's not about eliminating stress. I mean, there's no such thing, but definitely if you want to do big things, there's no such thing. It's about having the tools at your fingertips to kind of reset yourself. So you can say, hey, this week has been a little bit tough. I need to work on some of the other, you know, my tools, take my tools out of the toolkit.

And I do this all the time. I'm sure you do too. Because now that I have the tools and I know the tools, then I know what to do. What problem with our society is that we have too many talking heads telling us do this, do that, eat this, supplement with that. And I lost sight, and I think a lot of people lost sight of what tools actually should I be using and what are the ones that actually work and which are the ones that I should kind of keep as an extra on the side in case I finish using all my tools and I have extra time. Speaking of tools, the book is filled with them. What is something that we didn't get

a chance to touch on that you really want to share and that you're proud about that you covered? Oh, well, I wanted to touch on the women and intermittent fasting piece. Please, let's go jump into it. Really, really quick. And can I ask one question as you set that up? Your Instagram handle is Fasting MD. How did that, how did you choose that? As you were picking a handle, what brought you about? What happened is when I sort of It used to be Amy Shaw, MD. And as soon as I started to talk about all this stuff, people were like, oh, yeah, I know about this. I know about that.

I know about gut health. I know about circadian rhythms or seemingly so. What they were really interested in is, hey, you said this thing about fasting. Tell me more. And so I realized that there was a hole in the knowledge base for people. And people were so interested in this. world of fasting and I saw so much misinformation about it that I felt a need to really go deep. So I spent a lot of time separating fact from fiction, helping people kind of figure out what

fasting could be right for them, and especially with women being very different than men oftentimes. And they would dive into these fasting regimens and say, oh, this is not working. And then I would, you know, steer them the right direction. And so that's how that happened. And so I see so much misinformation that I felt the need to be on the internet talking about it. So before that, I was really not on Instagram at all. And then once I started talking about this, that's when I started to have bigger presence.

So it's kind of a piece of my story that happened because that's where the education need was. and that's where I saw my place on social media because I really didn't want to do social media. I was kind of like I needed to figure out what was my role in helping people through social media. So that's how that happened. So let's go back to what you wanted to share about the fasting piece and women. I think what I found so confusing when I was starting my fasting journey is that, you know, there's so little information on fasting for women. and women don't really know where to go with this. And I think what I talked about a lot in the book is how to create a fasting regimen

that is one, metabolically beneficial but also easy to incorporate and then suitable for women. So I think most fasting books are written by men for men and they know that there's women that will read it, but they figure, well, they'll just, you know, do the same thing or modify it as needed. But what I wanted to address is the fact that, one, we're wired differently. And two, that anybody can do anything they want. But if you're really looking for burnout, fatigue solutions, this circadian piece to fasting can be really beneficial and super easy for people to incorporate and easy on their metabolism as well so that you're not getting the hunger and the cravings and the disturbed sleep

and the hangary or whatever he calls it. What is, what is? Hypolybici. All of those things don't happen. And what people tell me is like, oh, women shouldn't intermittent fast. So there's these studies out there. And what I wanted to put to rest is that there is one study that has six rats in the study that where they fasted every other day for 24 hours.

every other day for 12 weeks. Now, mind you, rats' metabolisms are six times human metabolisms. So think about that. So 24-hour fast for a rat is like a six-day fast for us, right? So if you did that to me or even you, there would be really bad hormonal effects on our body. And that's what happened in that six rat study. That's the only one that shows any definite, you know, definite problems with fertility in women. And so what I wanted to clarify is, hey, exercise is a hormetic stressor, but we would never tell women not to exercise. That's stupid, right?

Like, it's like, yeah, that if you excessively exercise, you could lose your period and you could have problems with fertility. Absolutely. But that's not a reason not to exercise. And that's the exact same thing I would say about intermittent fasting. Intramid fasting is like exercise. You can give a hormetic stressor that is huge and negative, but that would not preclude people from, should not preclude people from trying it. It's actually very beneficial to our bodies.

And by not doing it, you're actually hurting yourself more. So that's the clarification I would add. Yeah. And I think that as the wellness world continues to get more sophisticated, which then has impacts on a lot of different things, it comes down to a lot of also the definition. Right? When people were talking about fasting in the beginning, it was like, Well, what kind of fasting are you talking about? So naturally, people would take that.

I remember back in the days of being a vegan, I knew a lot of women back then that were doing three, four-day fast because that's what they thought that was related to spiritual growth. You know, it was often tied into that. There was a sense of, oh, this is what yogis are doing, individuals that were out there. And I actually had a very close friend who was fasting regularly on a very low-fat vegan diet,

had been that way for about two years and she completely lost her period, right? And at that time, I've talked about this a little bit before. It was nuts because even some people in the community were like, oh, that's okay for women. You know, women are like not, they don't necessarily have to have a period or whatever. You know, again, just when you're not trained, you don't have information on it. You're just going to make shit up. But it also, not only does that happen in that sort of extreme wellness belief system, it often happens to in the conventional medicine.

10 years ago, I founded a little less than 10 years ago, nine years ago, I co-founded a company called Clean with Dr. Alejandro Younger. And we had built in, we didn't call it intermittent fasting at the time. We just called it the 12-hour window, right? You stop eating at a certain time. And because we had a lot of celebrities that were doing the program, Gwana Petro, Demi Moore, Donna Karen, all these people who have been very vocal. and they would talk about how great they felt.

We got attacked by all sorts of mainstream media. They would go to a nutritionist at, you know, NYU or Columbia or a doctor somewhere, and they say there's no evidence at all that this is the type of thing. And I think an important thing to realize for a lot of people is that there's a saying, which is, you know, the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence, right? Just because we don't have, maybe the studies had not caught up at the time, all the work that Walter Long ago was doing here in UC had not been published. But there was people that were looking at these different traditions around the world and talking

about the benefits and then individuals who were trying it and saying that they benefited from it. So I think that you can get criticism on any side as I'm sure you have gotten. Recently there was Dr. Will Cole and his book got a lot of criticism that was going on there because people interpreted it as something that it wasn't. And I think, again, as long as we're all kind, we can have good debates about all this stuff and get on the same page and separate out, you know, fact from fiction. And I think it's a great point to just say that you're going to get attacked

whether you tell people the right stuff. You know, following just evidence-based medicine is what we've been taught to do as Western clinicians. It's like, when I was in my fellowship at Columbia, even saying something as something like, hey, hormones seems to be influencing our immune cells. Like, that was like, okay, well, there's not that much data out there that shows that. And we all anecdotally knew this, but it was like this big research project that we were trying to prove the thing that was happening. And I think that has taken it a little too far, in my opinion, sometimes. Now, of course, we don't want misinformation floating all over the place. So I do believe that there should be some barriers, you know, some guardrails to talking about wellness and medicine.

But you can take, you can be evidence informed and make really great changes to your own life and other people's lives. and maybe there's not an exact double-blind randomized control trial for it, but it really does make sense based on what the evidence says up to that date. So I get criticized all the time by some doctors who say, well, where is the circadian fasting evidence-based double-blind placebo-control trial on thousands of humans? And I said, well, it's coming. It's coming. Sock Institute's doing the studies. You know, there's lots of them. There's smaller studies. There's animal studies. There's, there's so much peripheral evidence. So you can't really win with these kind of populations. When you realize that you are a hypocrite and everybody's a hypocrite, right? Like earlier,

we were talking about the fiber study. Yeah. Yeah. You know, there's one study that's done on the Hunza. Yeah. There might have been some extrapolations that definitely were reported, but it's not fully there, but we talk about it. And so we have a conversation and we go dig into it. Everybody has a missing piece of the puzzle. Where's the evidence that, you know, where's the double-blind placebo-controlled trials that vaccines are safe for pregnant women? Right.

They're not. But, again, we make public health decisions, leave it up to people and say, okay, it seems to be, you know, so you can recommend it if you want to, at least in conventional medicine, WHO. show. There's so many aspects. And also, I think another misnomer is evidence-based medicine is not just clinical trials. It's also clinical experience. That is evidence. That is evidence if you are treating people, and especially in other countries around the world where there's not access to do big clinical trials, Paul Farmer in Haiti, you know, other groups in Africa that are trying to address issues with malaria, they're getting results and they're helping people avoid malaria.

by bringing in certain, you know, interventions, and those aren't always tested with a big trial. So I think that, you know, evidence-based medicine, there's so many layers to it. I think the most important thing is you pick up a book like yours, you see that there's a strong argument, you see that there is some peripheral evidence for certain areas and extremely strong evidence for other areas. And then it's kind of like, try it. What's the worst that's going to happen? You're not taking a statin for 20 years, right?

You're trying something. That's free. You're trying something that's free or super low cost. And then you can make up your own mind about the situation because you'll see how you feel. And that's where I think that we do need to expand that conversation. And it will. It will continue to become more sophisticated as the wellness world. And wellness has already gone mainstream.

You already have big institutions. investing so many resources on nutritional psychiatry, fasting, nutritional interventions. Like we've already, not that it's a battle, right, but it's already been won because people are growing up, med students like yourself, researchers, clinicians are growing up, they've had their own health issues, and now they're growing up with this understanding that these things actually make a difference and all of a sudden you wake up and it's all mainstream now and then we work on the next thing. It was really actually important to me, through, to get the support of my mainstream medical colleagues.

I know you work with a ton of, you've interviewed, worked with tons of wellness figures that have maybe strayed a little bit from the mainstream or, you know, maybe don't need. But for me, it was important to stay in the crossroads of nutritional science, Western conventional cutting-ed science, and the ancient data that we have from cultures. And I wanted to stay at that crossroads because I feel like we could be doing a million things. But if we stay where all of that meets, we're likely to make the best decisions.

And in my mind, that's always been the guiding principle. What does the ancient civilizations do, the blue zones, the people who live along is the happiest? is what does the medical science say? And, you know, where is the nutritional science behind this? And if we can find a few things that fit all three kind of at that crossroads, that's where I kind of live. And it's beautiful. And you had the ability to do that.

And it was the right move with your pedigree and the intersection. And there was somebody that came 10 years before you and came 10 years before them. And everybody has their role to play. Yeah. Right. Like it's all good, right? It's all good. And everybody's fighting for the right thing to ultimately end up having people feel healthier, happier. And at the end of the day, you know, I know there's a lot of it's a challenging time right now in the context of information just in general. But I will say that because we don't have a centralized authority saying what we can say about nutrition, what we can't say,

it's the reason that people like yourself are out there and able to share on social media. You know, there was a really good interview that I saw with one of the original founders of the ACLU, and he was like, the important thing for us to remember right now in this very polarizing world where our truth is so real to us. And so we want to make sure that anything that counteracts that we maybe shouldn't have a platform, is that if you grew up in the time that we did, this is him talking, you really understand that free speech and ability to have. Now, we want to as much as possible have it through the lens of kindness and other stuff.

Within the context of what really free speech is, we're not talking about yelling fire in the theater. It's how societies grow. It's how they evolve. We had one more point that I'll just add in. We had Dr. Jason Fung on the podcast, right? It does so much research in the world of fasting and has written some of the, preeminent books on it and then also recently wrote a book about cancer. You go to WebMD and you type in, you know, sugar and cancer and right there right in front of you from WebMD, from a well-trained

doctor, I think from Mass General or another hospital, there's no evidence at all. It's completely misinformation that sugar has anything to do with cancer. It's like, okay, great, from his lens and perspective and what he's looking at as evidence, that's true from his perspective. But there's a whole world of information that he's not aware of. The latest science, the latest research that's out there that is showing that there is a connection. So both people are coming from truth of where they're showcasing, and we need that healthy debate between the two of them. Anyways, I went off on a monologue. This is supposed to be about you.

No, I loved it. It was very important. Very well said. In closing here, you know, your book is both for men and women. everybody but you really did want to talk about burnout especially with women because it was an area that you feel is not getting that attention it deserves how can we as people who are listening whether you're a woman or not whether you are or somebody who has young kids or not wherever you are what do you think are some of the we talked about the individual

changes that can be made what are some of the societal or family changes that can be there that allow for less likelihood of the negative consequences that women in particular are feeling from burnout. Fatigue and burnout for too long has been brushed aside or worn actually as a badge of honor in our society. And we need to change that. We need to teach our society, meaning that our employers, our teachers, our teachers, the world that it's overworking and being constantly fatigued and cranky and, you know,

that's not the badge of honor. Being able to keep your focus and your health with small little changes that will make you even more productive in the future is the actual badge of honor. So stop rewarding the wrong behaviors and start. rewarding the right behaviors. And maybe we create systems that make it easier for people to have many times of the day where they can incorporate some of these things and help people in the future and the future societies. Art technology, you're in, you're, you know, so innovative. You're an entrepreneur and there's so many entrepreneurs who are watching this. There are things that we

can do to make our lives easier and to prevent burnout in this way, that can help people now and, you know, 10 years down the line, that would make us more productive. And we should be honoring and we should be pushing those people to create solutions for us because fatigue and burnout is not honorable. It's something that we should be changing. Well, what's something, if you can imagine, take yourself back to that day of the accident, right? Is there, you've already talked about the ownership piece of Gil and all those layers and drive and other things. Is there something, as people are trying to be more conscious, right? As employers are trying to be more aware, is there a conversation that you would have liked to have?

Again, it's not that people are only aware of what they're aware of, but if you're partners could have had a conversation with you that would have supported you at the time, not that they weren't supportive, right? It was not. But just taking the practicality of like, somebody is listening here, there might be somebody that's in their world, you know, a woman that might be headed in that direction, right? What would have been a conversation that you would have, you, that would have been helpful at the time?

The conversation that I should have had that I do have with myself and others now, is that. And so first, I'll get, I would love to hear that too, but what would you have loved them do in terms of checking in with you. Yeah. Okay. I would have loved if we could have had a conversation about how to be a leader. How do you want to be a leader? What is your leadership style? What are the things that you need to be the best leader that you can be? And if I had known that, then I would have said, hey, I can't do meetings at 5 p.m. That for my leadership style, that doesn't doesn't work for me. But let's do it in the morning. Let's do it, you know, midday or whatever. Changing things about our culture, allowing women or men or anybody who wants to have a different

leadership style because of their, for whatever reason, should be a conversation that should be had. I can be an effective leader, a great leader, and you can too, but we have our own styles. And we don't have to be like the person that came before us. We can be our own leader and do things in an amazing way, but it's different from the person before us. So I think that's what I wish I knew. Yeah. I think as my team is mostly women that work in our team, incredible women, including my sister who works with me too. She's the head of content for all of our companies. And a small thing that we do, again, I don't, I've never had kids, right? Yes, I'm the CEO, I'm the boss, but there's only so much that I'm aware of. So there's things that I'm not going to know about,

right? Not every time is it somebody who is trying to not be accommodating. They may not even know. Just like if we go to a different culture, we just don't know about things. But I think asking and reminding people and just checking in like, hey, is it a challenge or if it's a challenge to make these meetings and as everybody's working at home, which a lot more people are aware of, tell us, we'll reschedule it. Yes. And I do think that, for a lot of women, right? I just want to stick on that subject because you've shared about this.

Past guests have shared about this too is that it's tough to bring things up. That doesn't mean it's always somebody else's fault. It just means that it's tough. Societal pressures, your own thing of, I don't want people to treat me different because I'm a woman. I have two amazing sisters that are very career-driven,

right? They're very good at speaking up, and it's still even sometimes challenging for them as it is for other people that are out there. So knowing that it is can be challenging, especially in a very high pressure environment, like being a, you know, physician or any other type of career. Just even repeatedly checking in, I've had team members that the first two times I brought it up, especially there in you hire, like, hey, listen, you know,

I know everybody's working at home, but if you ever have a time with this meeting and we need to switch, even if it's the week of, just let me know. Set it once. No, no, no, it's fine. It's fine. everything's fine, right? It's fine. It might be the response. Hey, a few weeks later on. Just wanted to mention, listen, I'm not trying to be annoying, but just wanted to bring it up again because I might have seen that they were struggling or they were on mute a lot or whatever. No, no, it's fine. I don't want to, you know, third time. Listen, now that you mention it, I just want to bring something up. Yeah. So even sometimes when we do check in, somebody might not feel comfortable. They don't know how to bring it up. They don't want to let other people down.

And that's why I think that we all need to have a little bit more compassion in this space. Compassion for the person who doesn't know how to speak up. Compassion for the boss or the employer, whether they're male, female or whatever, that they may not understand or they may have forgotten what it's like to be a woman and have kids at this age. So the more compassion we have, the more that we're all willing to just kind of put ourselves in each other's shoes and say, okay, how would I want this person to bring, how would I want somebody to bring it up to me if I wasn't aware. How would I want somebody to ask me if I wasn't as comfortable to bring it up? I think that that in itself could help a lot of people become

more aware and go down the path of supporting each other in any aspect of life. I love it. I wish you were my boss back the day when I was working in those hospitals and you know, you had to ask, there's no, you know, there's no asking for anything different than what was already set in stone for hundreds of years at Harvard and Columbia. And the hope is as more women are in different leadership rules, which is happening, and of course we need more of it that's out there because they come in with that perspective, they're going to know the changes that need to be made. Yeah.

They're going to need, no, nope, that's not. We can't be doing that. you know, we got a shift and go in a different direction. 100%. Amy, it's been a fantastic conversation. Tell us all the good stuff of how and where people go to get the book and just your ecosystem, your world that you've so beautifully put together, even though you didn't want to be on social media, your social media famous now and you put out great content on Instagram.

Give us the rundown out of all the beautiful things, starting with the book. The book is at I'm So Effing Tired.com, and you can get it anywhere. Your local bookstore is a great place to grab it because I always want to support these small businesses, especially bookstores with the pandemic. You can find me at Amy Shaw MD on Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook. And then at amy MD Wellness.com is my website. Amazing. And any fun, are you guys going to do any kind of like, challenges or do you have any lives coming up or anything that people can look forward to?

So whenever anybody purchases the book, they can sign up for a three-day kind of free circadian fasting challenge, which doesn't just include circadian fasting, but also some of the things that I talked about today, like getting the sunlight, you know, doing the nighttime routine. You can get started and then you get some recipes to jumpstart. As you know, I included a ton of recipes that have South. Asian inspiration, not only for our family and friends that may have South Asian roots, but for people who want to experiment with new spices and new foods. So that's what comes with anybody who plays. Well, I think after your book tour is done here, we got to get you to India

because they really need it over there, right? Oh, yeah. A fastest growing rate of diabetes and all this sort of stuff. They've lost fasting. But they also eat it like midnight. They also like there's so much more unhealthy here in India if you have resources, right? If you are, you have resources. Oh, did you know that in Delhi you can't see sunlight? It's nuts. It's crazy. Between the pollution, everything else. Like, I get so sick every time I go to India. I love the country. I love it. And I want the best for them, but they need this right now. So we got to get you over there next. Dr. Amy Shai. It's a fantastic book. I want to encourage anybody that's here that's listening to pick up the book, but also pick up a second copy and give it to somebody who you think could benefit

from it, somebody that's experiencing burnout, especially because the book comes from this beautiful perspective of Amy's story and background. I think that women especially could extremely relate to it. You know, we need stories told at different lenses with different perspectives because they all hit people in different ways. So maybe somebody wasn't interested in fasting before because it was written from a different perspective. But in this perspective, they're all of a sudden interested in. They're interested in blue light blocking and these other aspects. So pick up two copies and give one to somebody you love. Dr. Amy Shaw, thank you for coming down here.

And thank you for your work. Thank you so much for having me. This was so fun. Hi, everyone. It's Drew again. Thank you so much for today's episode. If you enjoyed it, please do me a huge favor. Share it with a friend.

That's the best thing you can do. Honestly, if you subscribe, it's great. If you write a review, that's great. But the best thing you can do is if you enjoyed this conversation, share it with somebody who can make a different. in their life. That would mean the world to me, and it could change their life for the better. By the way, I don't know if you noticed, but we have a new podcast name. This was called the Broken Brain podcast, and we've pivoted. It's now called the Drew Perot-Proit podcast, named after

yours truly. It's about the right time after 200 episodes in a couple years in the game where no longer the broken brain name serves me, and it's time to go in a different direction, which is how I chose the rebrand. If you like it, if you don't, if you want to say hi, shoot me a note. You can text message me at 302-200-6-4-3 or find me on Instagram at at Drew Perroyd. That's D-H-R-U-P-U-R-O-H-I-T and shoot me a DM. I will see you next week.