Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Dr. Amy Shah on How You Can Control Your Food Cravings EP 261

Episode Date: March 2, 2023

Get ready for a groundbreaking conversation about the connection between your brain, gut microbiome, and food! On today's episode of the Passion Struck podcast, Dr. Amy Shah shares her groundbreaking insights on health and wellness. As a double board-certified doctor and nutritional expert with degrees from Cornell, Harvard, and Columbia University, Dr. Shah is highly qualified to provide valuable information. She is also the author of the new book, "I'm So Effing Hungry." Tune in to learn about the fascinating link between your gut biome and your mind. Dr. Amy Shah and I Explore Why We Crave What We Crave and What to Do About It During this fast-paced hour, Dr. Shah uncovers more mysteries about gut health, the brain-gut-bacteria connection, and other essential aspects that can help you feel and live better. Check out the full show notes below: Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://passionstruck.com/dr-amy-shah-you-can-control-your-food-cravings/  Brought to you by Policygenius. With Policygenius, you can find life insurance policies that start at just $39 per month for $2 million of coverage. --► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to: https://passionstruck.com/deals/  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally! --► Prefer to watch this interview: https://youtu.be/rzKEKdkl84Q  --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnRMiles Want to find your purpose in life? I provide my six simple steps to achieving it - passionstruck.com/5-simple-steps-to-find-your-passion-in-life/ Want to hear my best interviews from 2022? Check out episode 233 on intentional greatness and episode 234 on intentional behavior change. ===== FOLLOW ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnrmiles.c0m  Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/ 

coming up next on the Passion Struck Podcast. So that got back to kind of acts as an army and they are communicating with our brain, they're communicating with our hormones, with our immune system, and they are helping us digest, they're helping us make decisions, they are helping us create cravings for the right things.

And the sad thing is John, that we didn't really understand this and 97% of Americans are starving that gut mattress. Welcome to PassionStruct. Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can

become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guest-ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello everyone and welcome back to episode 261 of PassionStruck. Recently ranked by InterviewValue is one of the top free podcasts for mindset. And thank you to each and every one of you who come back weekly to listen and learn, had to live better, be better, and impact the world.

And if you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here. Or you simply wanna introduce this to a friend or family member. We now have episode stutter packs, which are collections of our fans favorite episodes that we organize into convenient topics that give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show.

Either go to Spotify or passionstruck.com, slash stutter way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show. Either go to Spotify or PassionStruct.com slash starter packs to get started. And in case you missed my interview from earlier in the week, it featured New York Times best-selling author Stephen Kotler, who is one of the leading experts in the world on human performance, and we discuss his brand new book, Narcountry. Please check it out in case you missed it. And last week I had two great interviews as well, One with Dr. Mark Heimann, also on the science of longevity, and also Oksana Masters, who's the most decorated Paralympian in Winter Olympic history, and we discuss her new memoir, The Hard Parts. I also wanted to thank you so much for supporting the show and the ratings and reviews that you give

us. I also know our guests love to read the reviews if you love their episodes. Thank you again so much for supporting the show. It means so much to us and helping bring more people into the passion star community. Now let's talk about today's episode with Dr. Amy Shaw, which tackles the understanding of why we crave what we crave and what to do about it. We discuss her new book, I'm so effing hungry. And in our interview, we address such questions as, how did your hunger get so screwed up? What is the difference between hunger, cravings, and appetite? What are the hunger hijackers? How is most food engineered? What is your gut microbiome? And how can it control your hunger? How can thinking of yourself as a

healthy person actually help you become one? We will even tackle topics such as circadian rhythm, and it's affect, unhunger, and how to best time your workouts, the balance hunger, and promote sleep. Dr. Amy Shaw is a double, forward certified medical doctor, a nutrition expert with training from Cornell, Columbia, and Harvard universities. Dr. Amy Shaw is a double, forward certified medical doctor, and nutrition expert with training from Cornell, Columbia, and Harvard universities. Dr. Amy Shaw is a double, forward certified medical doctor, and nutrition expert with training from Cornell, Columbia, and Harvard universities. Dr. Amy Shaw is a double, forward certified medical doctor, and nutrition expert with training from Cornell, Columbia, and Harvard universities. Dr. Amy

Dr. Amy Shaw is a double, forward certified medical doctor, and nutrition expert with training from Cornell, Columbia, and Harvard universities. Dr. Amy Shaw is a double, forward certified medical doctor, and nutrition expert with training from Cornell, Columbia, and Harvard universities. Dr. Amy Shaw is a from her background in internal medicine, and allergy, immunology, as well as her own wellness journey. Dr. Amy Shaw is a dedicated her practice to helping her patients feel better and live healthier through her integrative and holistic approach to wellness. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now let that journey begin.

I am so ecstatic today to welcome Dr. Amy Shaw. Welcome, Amy. Thank you so much for having me. Well, I'm going to start off by putting your book right up here so the audience can see it. And if it's on YouTube, we'll make sure we even do a bigger splash of it. But congratulations. What an accomplishment. Oh, thank you so much. I think it's much needed in this crazy time that we live in. It sure is, as we're going to get into, I think this is something that everyone in this audience of the passion start community can relate to. But I'm going to start here as we discussed prior to bringing you on the show,

I have been to various parts of India many times and I started going there around 2002. And I always loved the foods in India. In fact, it was one of my favorite aspects about it. And I noticed from the first time that I was there, compared to the last time that the foods had drastically changed from really being plant focused to then I noticed that the diet was becoming more and more similar

to what we have over here in the West and overly processed. And interestingly enough, you have observed yourself, some of these exact changes in your family members. Can you talk about that and more importantly, relate that to why you started to do this research on diets and nutrition and ultimately how that culminated into writing this book? Yeah, so many important things

that you just brought up there, Dan. I mean, first of all, you've been to India probably more times and spent more cumulative time than even I have in Indian descent. So I think that's amazing to have that world view. But one of the best things about having a world view is you get to see these changes over time. And India is one of the places that has the creators of spices and foods that are largely plant based. That we know that can contribute to a healthy gut bacteria and a healthy mind and body. But we've been following the Western trends as is every

single country around the world. And what's happened is when people get access to cheaper ways to produce food, ways to create food substances that are highly palatable, meaning that if you have a grain of a wheat bread that is super, super tough and has a lot of fiber, it's not going to be as enjoyable to the consumer as something that's very bleached and white and ready. And so what's happened to India's, what's happened to all over the world now is that we have gone to a more refined fibrolysis diet because that's

what's one easily consumable. Eat it fast. It stays fresh for longer. It tastes better because you get that dopamine rush to your brain faster because there's no fibro kind of holding it back. And so for all those reasons, my parents developed disease, my father and all of his family developed disease very quickly after moving to the US because they went from eating home cooked Indian vegetarian food

to a very processed fast food diet because they were making ends meet, they're working really hard to late at night and it was like pizza and coconut Doritos and whatever most inexpensive food options were. And when I saw that and I saw how it ravaged my entire family and really there hopes and dreams about what they wanted to do with their lives. Like they had spent so much of their lives just to get to America. And then to watch them kind of feel like,

oh wow, like now we have to deal with this debilitating disease. Little did I know then about what diabetes even was and how you treat it. And it just motivated me to say like, what is going on here? And it wasn't later until the medical school that I realized that there was this phenomenon of people coming from less industrialized countries into America or more industrialized countries where they all had the same effect. Almost all of them changed their gut bacteria.

They worsened their metabolic health and a lot of them developed diseases like diabetes and heart disease because of this rapid change in their diet. Yeah, it is truly amazing. And we're going to get into where process food come from here in a few moments. But I wanted to go first to your book and you started out by discussing why it is that we crave food. And my question is, why is it that for so many men and women that hunger has become their greatest enemy? That's such a great point. And that's why I wrote this book. I mean, so many of us are consumed

with food thoughts or cravings. And I try to talk about in the book that all of these concepts about cravings. We're referring to not just food, but alcohol, gambling, sex, all of these referring to not just food, but alcohol, gambling, sex, all of these cravings of that consumers, that all comes from the same place. And it's our dopamine system and our brain. It's built there to keep us alive and safe and survive. So you want to remember the tree with all the fruit on it when you pass by it in the forest. And you want to remember it so clearly that when you're hungry, you'll remember exactly where that tree with all that fruit was, right? So our dopamine system is met to keep us alive. It's met to be so strong that we will get up and go to the place where we found it last time to kind of

deal with that craving. And so if you think about it, it comes from a really good survival place, but if you don't know that, you will be craving the wrong things because you'll think, oh, I'm hungry for these donuts that are across town. And cravings are that bad. We know with alcohol and drugs and all gambling sex food, right? If your dopamine system is asking you to get that thing, you will get up out of your chair, you will drive across town, and you will get that thing. And the problem is now, since we have no knowledge about this, nobody's ever taught us,

And the problem is now, since we have no knowledge about this, nobody's ever taught us, we are basically inundated with these companies and people who actually know the dopamine system. You don't think Vegas knows the dopamine system. You don't think the food companies know, they know exactly how it works. For example, with gambling, the way the dopamine system works is that you get the biggest dopamine rush when you get a surprise reward. So like if you're playing, you lose, and then you get a win like random, that is a big burst of dopamine, same with video games like they know how to deal with that system. Food companies know, hey, we want to light up as many of those dopamine areas of the brain as possible.

They know how to make their food hyper-palatable that no real food could ever compete with that. So my goal with this book is to say, hey, this is knowledge that we should have gotten in high school, middle school, whatever, about how our brains work so that you can properly manage your emotions, be happier, and have cravings for the right things because there are dopamine cravings for really good things too. You'll crave exercise, you will crave love, you'll crave sunshine, you'll crave healthy foods. So kind of learning that so we can make a U-turn because where we're going right now is a wrong direction. Well, I kind of agree more with you on

that point. I interviewed Dr. Carif, it's Gerald a few months ago. She wrote a great book this year called Younger U, where she is really an expert in epigenetics and DNA methylation. She was hovering how do you extend not your

chronological age, but your biological age? And her formula and yours have many of the same components in it. I'm not going to steal your thunder, but really she talks a lot about diet. And it's interesting that we don't understand the consequences that come from this constant hunger, but it's something that you point out right at the launch of the book. And I know probably everyone who's listening to this show has had a craving or has felt hungry at times.

But what is the consequence of this becomes a chronic thing? Yeah, first of all, I wanted to tell people that it's not your fault. If you're always hungry or you're always craving, you're wondering like feeding yourself up because you're white knuckleling through all of this, I want to tell you it's not your fault. We live in a world that is understands these systems and they're taking advantage of it. And so when we just do the normal thing, we kind of are salt-intity these traps of hunger and cravings, right? So first of all, I want to say that it's not your fault that you are in a situation where you may be constantly

craving or hungry, right? And then we got to understand what is true hunger and what is cravings. So true hunger is a biological phenomenon, right? You need nutrition to survive. And unfortunately in our world we get that confused because in almost 50% of the population is close to being obese at this point. We're in the high 40s at this point close to 50%. That means that most or at least half of the people in the Western world are actually getting too much nutrition

in maybe the wrong ways. And now it's time to understand what is a hunger and what is a craving and what are you going to do to re-steer your brain and your body so that you crave the right things and you understand hunger from cravings. Because right now, the signals are very mixed and it's hard to hear your body if you don't understand this. Yeah, and I know for myself and I'm sure many of the listeners

have probably gone through this. I did this title wave through it. It seemed like a decade plus in my life where I'd gain weight, lose weight, gain weight, lose weight, and there was this constant suffering because of this relationship that I had with food. And part of it was giving it my cravings. I think part of it was stress from my job, from life, from not getting enough sleep. What are some of these major reasons for why we experience hunger?

One of the major reasons I think this is something maybe people don't know much about and I think that's why I want to bring it up is circadian rhythms. So what that means is there's when we eat and sleep and wake at the wrong times, we are giving our body mixed signals. So what I mean is there is a clock in every single one of ourselves. There is a central clock in our hypothalamus that when we see sun through our retina, it goes directly to that center and send signals and to all of our genes because we are programmed to eat food during the day,

to rest our brain and digestion during the night, to rest our brain and digestion during the night, to exercise in daylight hours. Because if you think about it for thousands of years, that's how we evolved, right? Like moving, eating during the day, resting, fasting, sleeping during the night. Now, what's happened, and this has gotten especially worse during the pandemic, is that we're

doing things at all hours, because now we have access to Uber Eheats or microwave meals right at midnight, and then we can stay up all night, not all day, we don't get sunlight. And what we realize is that a lot of psychiatrists actually have been talking about how so much of this rise in depression is just circadian rhythm misalignment, meaning that you're not sleeping enough, you're not getting enough light during the day, you're eating at all hours, not moving at the times that your body is meant to move. And so all of the signals that go into these cells are not getting there and these clocks are damaged or broken. And that's really thought to be a big reason

for the rise in depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms during the pandemic and because of modern life. So that's one thing that I think there's a whole chapter on it in the book because I feel like these are simple things like today if somebody is listening watching, they can get 20 minutes of sunlight during the day, get some movement, get a good night's sleep, like couple nights this week, and you will already see a rise in your mood. I mean, you and I both anecdotally know,

but this has been shown in studies that you can absolutely see a difference in your health, and that has nothing to do with the food that you're eating. The food that you're eating is the big lever, but like this is the easiest thing that you could do today to actually change the trajectory of both your diseases, your aging, and also your mental health. Yeah, and I wasn't going to go here yet, but I'll just jump into it, because it's something I know a lot about. Earlier in the year, I had Dr. Sarah Madnick on the episode,

if you're not familiar with her, she's up there with Matthew Walker and others has been one of the most prominent sleep experts in the world. And she has a new book out, called The Power of the Downstate, where she talks about many of the things that you were just talking about,

that going out in the middle of the day for a 10 minute walk to reset yourself, it's almost as or more effective than getting REM sleep. And by doing these things on a regular basis, especially mixed in with getting your circadian rhythm into an alignment is so important for so many different functions of your life. And what was surprising to me is it really doesn't take a lot to practice

this. I've heard both her and Andrew Huberman and Matthew mentioned that all you really have to do is go outside for about eight to ten minutes. It's important that you don't wear sunglasses. Obviously, you don't want to look in the sun, but all you want to do is get exposure to it. And then at the end of the day, you can walk your dog or take a short walk right around dusk, and it kind of resets that whole system. And what I remember them saying, and you'll have to tell me if I'm correct or not, is they said, just doing this three or four times a week if you can't do it every day is enough to keep your body on that cycle. But so important yeah.

Yeah, and I think we disregard it right I have a high schooler so I know that the parents out there can relate like these guys are on. These guys are on just an altered schedule, right? So a lot of these kids are playing sports to late at night. So they're eating dinner super late at night and then they're staying up super late and getting up very early to go to school. And what I was saying to him is that what's happening to a lot of these teens

is like, they come home and they're not going outside unless they play sports, right? So they're not getting enough sunlight they're completely shifting their sleep and wake clock and not getting enough sleep on most nights and then they're eating 75% ultra-process foods because that's what teens eat in America and if you look statistically that's pretty much a super recipe for depression and disease in the long run, right? Like you set yourself up at a young age on this path.

And it just gets worse. You're in this college and alcohol use and staying up late. So what happens is when you understand this knowledge, I'm not saying never stay up late or never go out with your friends or never eat ultra-process foods, but when we understand the impact of doing this day after day in that level, then you will realize that, oh, just these easy little switches is going to make a big difference. force my kids and luckily they have sports and they have things up for some to be outside but I think it's so important for these kids and young adults to get daylight because they could be on their phones and do everything indoors and never see light and they will eat foods and you can't blame these young people right? You're gonna choose Doritos over a salad every single time if you

don't understand the benefits of eating a soup or a salad, your taste buds are going to steer you to that food that gives you the biggest serotonin and dopamine release, which is the highly processed food with flavor enhancers that kind of light up the brain, my drugs or alcohol. Yeah, it's amazing since I've cut out more and more processed foods. When I do eat

them, how big an effect that I see it has on my gut, my overall energy levels, my cognitive levels. So once you start cutting that out, you really see this dramatic difference. But I wanted to go back to your family for a second and mine too, because I think similar to yours have a long history of autoimmune diseases and type 2 diabetes. And what was interesting is I was researching you and getting prepped for this interview. I actually learned, which I didn't know before, that the first introduction of mass scale process foods

actually started in the 18th century and early 19th century to cater to the military in large part. And it went on that package foods really began catching on in the general public in the 1920s when World War I brought out new methods of food processing and many men were at war at that point.

And so many of the women were looking for shortcuts into preparing a meal because they didn't have as many people to feed. Other than that, why do you think it was that the CPG companies started engineering most of our foods that have caused so many ramifications. Because I think about it, basically I gave you a little primer about dopamine. If you light up the pathway of cravings in a person, that person will have a memory of that food and it will create feelings. So dopamine releases not necessarily just a happiness feeling. It's almost like a wanting more feeling. It's a motivational craving feeling. And so they know that if they create that kind of

feeling, you're going to come back for it, you're going to want it in the middle of the night. It's very easy. I went to Cornell for Nutrition School and there was a lab there that a lot of companies would use to test these things because there's a texture, a flavor combination of flavors, and then they will put it at certain special events. For example, baseball games were highly subsidized by Coca-Cola and all the companies that they want you to have a good memory associated with their food. I don't know about you, but I still have those food memories. Like, they're still foods that I see like a cook, like a Kit Kat that reminds you of a fun or warm family experience as a child, and that will stay with you for your entire life. So, a lot of us are dealing with these comfort foods that we call them. And those are

just really memories of food that happened because you ate that food in the presence of a fun happy event. And now you equate that food with fun and happiness. Yeah, I remember a ritual that we had when I was growing up is after church, we couldn't wait for it to be over because we would do a B-line right to McDonald's, which McDonald's had kind of just opened up at our town and we couldn't get enough of it. And don't you feel like now when you go to McDonald's, maybe you don't, I don't know, whatever,

what- I don't go to McDonald's. But the same thing, don't you feel like you still have know what I don't go to McDonald's. You still have that memory when you go past the McDonald's or you're a smell of McDonald's or that kind of memory is really strong and ingrained in a lot of us and so that's what's so hard to break. So I actually talk about in the book ways to break those memories into new ones. Not necessarily break down, erase the old memories, but actually create new food memories. So we know that like I told you,

a intermittent reward schedule is really good for creating a memory about a food. So if you were trying to retrain your brain, you might give yourself an intermittent healthy food reward in a random setting. So it might be Monday, Thursday, and Sunday, and the next week it's all different days. And you savor that food, you reward yourself in a positive way, whether it's a food-based reward or a massage or a new workout, something, but reward yourself in a positive way to build those new pathways so that we're not stuck in those old pathways.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's difficult to do it first, but if you take step-by-step and start taking the choices to start moving away from it before you know it, you don't crave it anymore, but it's taking that first step that's hard. That first step is so hard because our bacteria and our gut, and we should, I'll talk more about that, but the bacteria and our gut is craving the wrong things in the beginning.

So it's like that saying that motivation follows action. So at first, you're gonna take these actions and you're not gonna wanna do it. Like that first day of the gym, that first day, you start eating healthy. Maybe you take an external motivator with a friend or some kind of program, but that first few days is really hard, but as your gut bacteria starts to change,

your gut bacteria will start to help you. So motivation will follow the action. So soon, the gut bacteria will say, oh, we love this stuff that he's eating now. Like we want more of it. It will create serotonin and dopamine endorphins with the right things. And so I always say that saying even though it wasn't pertaining to health, it actually makes a lot of sense. Yeah, and I was going to go here next anyhow. So maybe we'll just take a step back. I think many of the audience has heard the term microbiome. Many might have a better understanding than others. But why don't you discuss for the audience, what is our gut microbiome and why has our gut been dubbed

the second brain? Yeah, such a great question. So we have a bi-directional relationship with our gut. Our brain and gut are a bi-directional highway. So that means when we're thinking anxious thoughts, okay, when we're nervous or stressed, you feel it in your gut, right? Because people will say like, oh, I feel sick to my stomach when you're anxious or nervous or stressed or you might have slow digestion and bloating or so you definitely know that the mind affects the gut. And then I'll tell you that the gut affects the

mind in a way that we're just starting to understand. In fact, so much so that there are microbiota in the gut that have been dubbed biotics because they have the power to actually change our mood from there. So our microbiome in the broad sense is this entire organisms that are living inside of our body outside of our body So we have it on our skin in our mouth. There's an oral microbiome But the largest part of our microbiome is in our gut So what that microbiome does is that we have this entire layer of bacteria that protect our cell wall. So we only have one layer of our own cells and then a thick layer of bacteria kind of protecting us from all the things that are coming through the colon, right?

So that got back to your acts as an army and they are communicating with our brain. They're communicating with our hormones with our immune system and they are helping us digest. They're helping us make decisions. They are helping us create cravings for the right things. And the sad thing is John that we didn't really understand this and 97% of Americans are starving that gut nature. Now if I've described it in the right way, you would be like, why the hell would we want to get rid of that thick protective layer of army-like people, creatures in there, and why would we be starving them?

Why would we be selling them? And it's unbelievable how much we are starving them? Why would we be selling them and it's unbelievable how much we are damaging them every day, every generation through the things that we're doing and so then we wonder why we have more disease, we have autoimmune issues, we have mental health issues, we have metabolic issues. So that's I hope I've described the power of the microbiome and why it's so important right now. Yes, and a follow-on question to that is how are mitochondria tied to our metabolism? So our mitochondria is in every single cell. It's kind of the energy center of ourselves, right? Every single cell in our body has mitochondria and they're creating energy for us. They're fueling the energy in the

cells. We have genes that can help increase the number of mitochondria. We have things that damage the mitochondria. So mitochondria are our cellular energy centers, I would say. Okay, and it was interesting in the interview I did with Dr. Fitzgerald, one of the things she brought up in her research, and it actually came out of the CDC was that people spend 20 to 25 percent of their lifespan dealing with one to two chronic conditions, if not more. And it was just astounding that 85% of Americans, I think, if I have the number correct, by the time they're 60, have at least one chronic condition. And so we're putting all these medicines then in us to fight this.

And these medicines also impact our mitochondria, our gut health and metabolism. And they can be everything from things that people are taking from mental health. To the most common one is antibiotics. And I remember, because I always am taking probiotics and probiotics, et cetera. But when you're on an antibiotic, unless you're using a very certain strain, they're basically useless

because you are wiping out that whole gut biome if I understand it correctly. Absolutely, absolutely. So when I describe our adolescents and teenagers and young adults, okay, now we went from 60% for ultra-process fiberless foods to and that group 70, 75% ultra-process foods. So it starts from then, right? They're killing that gut bacteria and the gut bacteria need to make decisions on a daily and hourly and minute by minute basis.

So we are having years of damage down the line. So when you are thinking about why do we have these chronic diseases, you think about how many years you have been taking antibiotics, how many years you've been eating an unhealthy diet, how many years you have been taking antibiotics, how many years you've been eating an unhealthy diet, how many years you've spent not exercising or being in a state of extreme stress, and you can understand why 80% of Americans end up getting one to two chronic diseases, because we're just taxing our bodies in ways that we could easily switch. And the thing I wanted to point out with this book is that, yes, in the ideal world, we would be in the Bahamas and don't have any stress in our lives.

We're eating off the land and exercising all day, right? Seeing sun. Of course, most of us cannot do that. So what are the things that we can do that will make a huge difference in our health? And that's what I wanted to like really hone it on because I'm really busy. I know that you're really busy. There's not a whole lot of things that I can be adding to my day time-wise. And so when I was trying to think of when I made the changes in my life and I made a ton of mistakes, there's some other things that really helped me and made a

huge difference, nutrition-wise, lifestyle-wise, I started to look into the research and I realized, oh well, these are things that could actually help people in very tangible ways with small changes. So, for example, if you go, you decrease your ultra-processed food intake by 10%, so you just eat a little bit less, pack a food, and a little bit more like homemade versions of it. You can lower your risk of depression by 20%. Right? So easy things. You can lower your risk of diabetes.

You can lower your risk of death because ultra-processed food is actually leads to early death and disease, heart disease, cancer, brain disease. So, a little change in your diet can make a huge change in your life down the line. And that's why I talk about nutrition so much because I'm like, whoa, this is something you don't actually have to have more time in your day to do. Like, yes, I make my time to exercise, but I don't want to spend tons of time doing all these other extra things if I don't want to spend tons of time doing all these other

extra things if I don't have to. And changing your diet is one of the biggest levers to changing your overall health. So I focus on that first. And the one definition that I think your listeners and people who are watching today can really take away is that I was confused about what ultra-process food meant. And so I'll just define it for you. It's any food that has ingredients that could not be found in a kitchen. So in any kitchen, not just your kitchen.

But so if you are trying to recreate Doritos, you won't be able to, no matter what ingredients you buy from exotic food stores because it contains chemicals and flavorings and additives that don't exist in a culinary setting. So if you think about that definition, how many of your foods that you're eating are ultra processed, a whole lot. Most chips are not just oil potatoes and salts, and most chips are oils potato salt, and then 10 to 15 other ingredients that don't ever exist in a kitchen. That's

ultra-processed. So you take an orange, and you turn it into an orange soda, and that's an ultra-processed version. If you take an orange and you just squeeze it with just its juice and nothing else, it's not considered ultra processed. So it's a nice way to understand, okay, oh my gosh, there's so many food I'm eating just like randomly that are considered ultra processed that I could change right now.

That's one of the things to do it. Yeah, it's interesting. My grandfather worked for craft foods for almost 40 years and left as the executive director of research. But what's interesting about him is prior to that, he during World War II worked at Fort Detract working in the biochemical division of the army. And so he was working with highly toxic agents such as botulism and anthrax and other things. And so you think it's kind of unusual that craft would hire someone of his unique capabilities. But the bottom line is he's a chemist. And I remember asking him, as I got older, what was he working on?

And it wasn't necessarily the launch of a new food. He was working on all the stabilizers, emulsifiers, everything else that they were trying to patent to figure out how they could get longer longevity out of their food. So he was actually the one who discovered the preservatives that allowed them to bring out seal test and other ice creams. He was the one behind butter buds, if remember that in Marjorins. But it's interesting when you start looking at these chemicals, how much this has been perfected in a lab to preserve these things so that they can stay on the shelf and our supermarkets and in our cupboards for long durations of

time. Well, like these like emulsifiers are great because they allow things to mix together without separating. And that's what emulsifier it lends it together so it's smooth and it doesn't separate in the bottle or whatever, but it's really toxic to our gut bacteria high amounts. I think about, oh, wait, that's nice that my stuff doesn't separate, but I don't really need it because now it's damaging my gut bacteria and high amounts. I'd rather just have it separate in the bottle. Like, I think the next generation, I hope that some of the stuff that you learn from this book is like, hey, I don't really need to get the ice cream that has 35 ingredients.

Maybe I got the one that just has the real stuff in it and bring awareness to the fact that we don't necessarily, I'm not trying to fearmonger about each one of those chemicals because in small amounts, they probably don't amount to anything, but when we look at the data of how we're eating today, we're just eating way too many of those things. And so really kind of cutting that down

could be an easy way. Giving that gut bacteria some food and some of the things that love, some things that helps it flourish, some things that help grow. I mean, that's basic knowledge that I think we don't even have. I mean, we hear the word probiotic and we think we have to buy a pill, right?

So I think that was something that I aimed to educate through. Hey, these are living things in our body and they have personalities, they have tastes, they want certain foods and we are almost blinded to that. We absolutely are. For the sake of time, I'm gonna jump to a couple other topics because I wanna get to your multi-step plan,

but I wanted to jump somewhere else first. And in case the audience didn't catch this episode that I did with Harvard, psychiatrist, Dr. Chris Palmer, and Amy, I'm not sure if you're familiar with who he is, but he recently published this book called Brain Energy. And in it, he discovered that there's a bidirectional relationship between all mental disorders and metabolic disorders.

Said otherwise, all mental disorders are metabolic disorders. And the evidence showed a link between an imbalance of the organisms that make up the gut, Michael, for as we've been discussing, and all mental illnesses. And you've also been studying this. And in chapter three, you introduced this concept of psychopiotics and how they can improve your mental health. And I was hoping you could just talk about that. We now know that you can transplant the gut microbiome from a schizophrenic person and put it into an animal. Then you can take a non-sc schizophrenic person's microbiome and put it into another set of animals and then mix them all up.

And the scientists who understand behavior of mice can pick out the schizophrenic microbiome mice because the altered gut microbes change their whole mental state. And so we know now that's how powerful these gut bacteria are. We also have studies on depression that you can transplant bacteria and you can create or treat depression. And so I think it's so powerful to realize it's not just about your circumstances like oh my life sucks. It's about so much more than that. There are things you can be doing to improve that gut bacteria, to actually help you fight a depression or in anxiety or now they're looking into all kinds

of mental health disorders like schizophrenia, like autism, like dementia's and how we can maybe reverse these things by changing the gut microbiome. So I think it's really exciting. So what we don't know yet is which bacteria we should be taking by mouth, the probiotic that can actually change it enough.

What we do understand is foods that are probiotic foods have a stronger and more lasting effect on our gut microbiome. So what I need to say is when you eat foods that are fermented, say you have kimchi, apple cider vinegar, you have probiotic yogurt or hot cheese, those bacteria get to that gut bacteria that are in the lower colon and they help it flourish. And there are other foods like foods with fiber that also help that gut bacteria flourish. And we know that can help mental health

in a way that rivals or even is better than the medications out there. So do you hear that audience eat lots of fermented foods? For many foods, fibrous foods, and foods with lots of color. So I talk about polyphenols. Polyphenols are the things that make blueberries blue and bell peppers red and green. It's the brightly colored fruits and vegetables. Those are like gut bacteria love polyphenols. They love fiber, meaning like foods

that have a lot of fiber in it and they love fermented foods. So those are like some of the big categories of foods that you can start to include in your life. If that can actually help not only increase the number of bacteria, because it's not just about the number of bacteria, it's also about how diverse they are, so how many different species that you can grow. And we know that when we were able to look at old colon of mummies, and we found that

there's actually traces, I have no idea, the technology that they use to find out the gut bacteria in those mummies, but they found that they had much more diverse and more organisms in their gut because they were eating very lots of foods that had lots of fiber. And they also didn't have a lot of emulsifiers, antibiotics, medications that kill gut bacteria. And so we know that we can do a lot more to improve our gut microbiome to kind of reach the level that creates health. Exactly. Well, just going back to Dr. Palmer just for a second and you brought up schizophrenia, what led him to start really deep diving this is he had a schizophrenia patient who was one of the worst on the spectrum that they had ever seen.

This person looked to be in a chronic state for the rest of their life. He happened to try them on a ketogenic diet. And after two to three weeks, he was symptom free, which is a pretty drastic state, but it just shows you how much diet can go into this. Well, I'm going to jump from there and an interesting topic that I never really thought of before was in the book you say that intuitive eating is good, but that unlearned eating is better. And I never really thought about that concept before. What is the difference between intuitive eating and unlearned eating and why that difference? Intuitive eating

in its real sense is really healthy. But what a lot of people hear intuitive eating, most of us lay people, right? You hear intuitive eating and you think, oh, if I want an Oreo right now, I should just go get an Oreo right now in two-foot-of-eating, right? But what that person doesn't understand that, Oreos or cojos or pickats or, you know, all these things, they have created a neurotransmitter release in your brain when you eat them,

that kind of hijacks your natural signals of hunger and cravings, right? So you may think you're craving it because your body needs it for hunger, but really it's a artificial craving. And so what I want to tell people is that yes, listen to, don't white knuckle through everything, don't be on a chronic diet. Don't be reading calories on everything. But when you start to remove those foods out of your life and you remove the old patterns that may have been set from when you were at a baseball game with your dad and he bought you hot dog and coke to kind of unlearn some of those eating behaviors or maybe you always

have the actual butter popcorn every time you sit down to watch a show because that's learned eating right and you think that you're craving the popcorn that you needed but it's actually not that it's not your intuition talking it's that learned eating that over the years have happened because our brain doesn't want to do a lot of work. Our brain wants to make it simple. When you come home from work at the end of the day and when you're tired and stressed and all you need is a little bit of feel good neurochemicals,

your body's gonna go back to what it remembers that it gave them feel good chemicals fast. So it's gonna save you. Just eat that cookie and call it a day. Have that glass of wine because that gave you nice relaxing feeling last time and it becomes kind of almost like you feel like that's what your body wants. And so I want to question people when they think very loosely, oh, I'm just going to go with what my body signals me to do. Think about those old patterns that have been set when you come home from work and

wind down glass of wine and it's so great that night time eating, that eating you do in your stress. Like that's not really your true intuition. So we've covered a lot of the backdrop around why we have hunger, why we have craving, what the gut microbiome does, why it has such an impact on us mentally, physically, cognitively. Now we're going to get into Amy's five-step plan, which she starts out in chapter five, that really is set to help provide you freedom from your cravings and hunger. So I mean, I was hoping you could introduce those five steps why you pick them and how they work.

Yeah, here's what I was thinking. When I created the five-step plan, I was thinking that we really need to refresh, rewire, replenish, restore. Our body is capable of doing so many things. Our brain is malleable. Our neural pathways are malleable. We can do so much to change.

So my aim with this book was not to shame anyone, was not to make them feel bad if they have cravings or hunger all the time. In fact, my whole point is, hey, I was there too. We've all been there. My family was there. I've been down both the negative health pathways and anxiety stress pathway. I know that it's really hard to get out of that dark place. And here's the steps I had to do all over again and not make the mistakes that I did. Here are the steps that I would take to refresh my entire body. And the steps are both food-based, but they're also habit-based.

So we talk a lot about sleep, we talk about exercise, we talk about circadian rhythms, we talk about food, and we talk a lot about sleep, we talk about exercise, we talk about estercadian rhythms, we talk about food, and we talk about, oh, I think that's kind of the topics that we cover today, really taking a step-by-step approach instead of saying, do all of these things. I'm like, okay, you know what, I know you can't sleep eight hours every night, give me two nights a week. That seems to be the minimum that you can still get

the benefits of two good nights of sleep. You're a young parent, crazy travel schedule. Give me two nights a week that you can get a good night's sleep. Then when it comes to food, I'm like, here are the six foods that you want to start to incorporate in your diet on a daily basis. You don't have to get all six every day,

but here's some of the foods. Here's the list. Here's the things that you can be doing. And so, what I want to do is empower people to change the tide. We are going down this path, the depression of disease, of metabolic disease. But we, if we have the tools that I put right there, like these are things that are well studied and well established, we can actually change a whole trajectory of not only our lives, but of the lives of our families, the lives of our neighbors, our friends, our colleagues. So it has a lot of power.

Okay, and then the next chapter, after you introduce this, you bring up the concept of intermittent rewards. Why should we use them when we're on this journey? And what is your three-two-one technique? Yeah, I love the intermittent rewards because think about it. When I told you about that dopamine pathway, gambling, internet dating, and video games, all work this three-two-one, the negative part of the three-two-one technique, which is they give you intermittent rewards, so you get a prize or a win randomly. And that is the biggest

potent release of dopamine in our brain. Okay. And when we kind of celebrate that reward, we create a memory around it. And then when we do that enough time, it creates a pathway that's like ferment or semi-permanage. So now I'm gonna tell you, let's turn that around. Let's make it a positive pathway. So you give yourself an intermittent reward of a positive thing, okay? So say you plan or you tell someone else, hey, three days this week randomly,

let's pick and celebrate a way that work or with a healthy treat. And you take this healthy treat and you celebrate yourself. You celebrate that you made a good choice. You celebrate that you've done a good thing. You feel good about it. You create that new memory. So three random days a week, two minutes of celebration,

and one minute where you sit down and savor it. So you're creating a new memory pathway when you're doing this and when you do this over and over again over a few weeks time it becomes a neural pathway and so now every time you get this new healthy food or this new healthy activity that feels good to you you get that person dopamine that you want to motivate you to do more of that. Okay, well I think that's great and something that we can use not just when it comes to what we're talking about today, but I think it's a lesson you can apply to other habits that you're trying to build as well. Well, if you're trying to get to a goal at work, right,

give yourself intermittent rewards and celebrate it internally, not too big, right? You want to celebrate it so that you get this, you celebrate the moment of that reward and you let it motivate you to do more of that. There's an author, Benjamin Hardy, who had a great book earlier in the year called The Gap and the Gain, and in it, and I'm touching on this interment and reward, he said, we do so much damage because we end up measuring ourselves against the Gap instead of the Gain. The Gap is we look at someone else and we measure ourselves against their progress instead

of our own. So it'd be like me trying to measure myself against J. Shetty. And you just, instead of rewarding yourself, you, it backfires. Whereas when you're in the game, you're measuring yourself against the past version of yourself compared to where you are now. When you start looking at it like that,

and you start using these intermittent rewards, it so much quickens your pace of becoming ideally the future self that you want to be. So I just bring that up as a coaching point. Absolutely, because this intermittent reward schedule is built to create your own pathway of reward, right? You are creating a motivational cycle in yourself. And that's really what you want. Why don't you motivate yourself to be a better person and to strive for your goal. So this can be applied to career very easily. Okay. And I just had two or three more questions that I know the audience would want to hear your

answers on. So people who are familiar with this show and have listened to me know that I practice intermittent fasting on a very regular basis, meaning pretty much every day. And I have a lot of people who say, how can you do it? But after you get into it, it just feels for not to do it. So what are your recommendations on intermittent fasting and why is it so important not to eat within three hours of bedtime? Yeah, that's a great question. So intermittent fasting to me is very similar to exercise.

Everybody knows about exercise. Everybody knows how healthy it is. Everybody knows that there are many types of exercise. I mean, you could go to the gym or you could go to dance class, you could do yoga or you could do an ultramarathon. Those are vastly impacts on your metabolism, on your brain, on your muscles, right? Same with intermittent fasting.

Just saying you're intermittent fasting might mean you're doing a 12 to 15 hour fast overnight. It might mean you're doing a 12 to 15 hour fast overnight, it might mean you're doing a 24 hour fast, it might mean you're doing an 18 hour fast every day. So it can mean so many different things. And so I want to make sure that people realize like when they see all these studies out there that are all over the place, realize that they define it in different ways. A lot of the studies are looking at alternate day eating, which is like you eat like normally one day and you eat very few calories the next day. That's the type of fasting

they've looked at. Then they look at people who are doing 16, 8, meaning people who are fast and they don't eat till 12 or 1. And then they eat it all the way until 8 or 9. And then they fast for 16 hours. So that there's so many different ways to do it. So what I always go back to is, hey, let's take the busiest person I know, the mom of three kids who is trying to improve for metabolic health. That's when I talk about really using those circadian rhythms again, see if I do fasting. So our brain and our digestive system both need a break overnight. Our melatonin hormone that goes to our brain to tell us to be get sleepy also goes to our pancreas which you tell us to turn down insulin production. So we don't want to be eat late meals at night.

It's like waking your soft up in the middle of the night and asking yourself to do like a math problem, right? You're just much more delayed. You'll make mistakes. In the next morning, you're going to be grow and unrested. And that's how the gut is when you eat very late at night. The data for how bad night shift eating is on metabolism is just very clear. We even have mouse models at mimic nighttime eating that helps to show incision depression, diabetes, heart disease. So we know that even though we can stay up all night, our gut does not like to stay up all night. And so really trying to turn down really limit your eating two to three hours before bed is one of the easiest ways to practice intermittent passing because if you do that

Then say you finish your last meal at seven Then you don't need until 9 a.m. The next morning. That's a 14 hour fast right there and that almost requires very little change to your lifestyle So that's where I always tell people to start. It's like going for a daily walk. Like it's something that everyone, almost everyone can do and fit into their life. And then after that, you can do what you want. You can run that ultramarathon, you can try the yoga class. They're all different kinds of fasting regimens and there's like three day fasts and a five and a fasting mimicking diet and all that stuff. But really get that base right. Get that circadian rhythm style fasting.

And then you can move from there if you'd like, or you could be like me. I mostly do just a circadian style fasting for most of the month. And that's just how I live. Okay. And then since you brought up exercise, similar to that, I know I work out first thing in the mornings, but I know from what I've heard before

that if you do your workouts too late into the day, that can also impact your sleep and hunger. So the way exercise is, is that your body is optimized to exercise both in the morning for certain things. Like it's definitely more aerobic capacity. It is, you're more likely to stick with it. If you do it in the morning, you're more likely to have better portion control and hunger and craving hormones. If you do it in the morning, in the afternoon,

late afternoon, early evening, you have better strength and you can get better hormone bursts in the evening. But after that kind of late at night, it's almost the same thing where your body has a circadian clock. And as soon as the hormones of nighttime, like melatonin, get released, everything kind of goes into repair and renewal mode. And so you're just more likely to get injured, you're more likely to not get as many hormonal benefits.

And for some people, it interferes with their sleep as well. Okay. And then on the topic of exercise in the book, you brought up that yoga of all things can help you curb cravings and choose healthier foods. How in the world does that work? Yeah. So if you've ever done any kind of mindful exercise, you will realize that one of the things it does, it kind of changes your mental state, you changes your hormones. If you are stressed, it will bring down your cortisol.

If you are hungry, it will kind of balance that grueling and leptin. So people that do yoga often realize that they're getting multiple benefits. They're getting the mindfulness, they're getting the stress control, and they're getting multiple benefits. They're getting the mindfulness, they're getting the stress control and they're getting the cravings and hunger control. And so I think it's a great option for those who are looking not just for flexibility, but those who are really looking to kind of retrain

those hunger and stress hormones into a place where they feel more in control. And I feel the same way about nature-based exercise. Nature exercise is something that I think that people really underuse. I said something like, don't underestimate the power of a quiet nature walk. Like, I mean, just saying, imagining yourself in that scenario is coming to people right because you bring your cortisol down you're rescinking your circadian rhythms with seeing natural light the colors and the shapes of the leaves and trees are

soothing to your brain and so we know that those strategies these exercise strategies actually gonna help you in your journey of learning yourself? Well, great. Well, for the audience, I'm going to just show it again. I'm so effing hungry, is really a great book. And one of the things that Amy does that makes it so digestible is you shouldn't feel anxious about reading this book because she boils down complex topics into easily understandable and digestible ways with a very easy to understand five step process that she then backs up by giving you the types of foods you should eat plus recipes, et cetera. So I highly recommend this. And then the other thing that you can do is you can check out her website and I'll have her tell you it here in a second.

But I discovered she's got a great blog that she puts everything from recipes to low sugar drinks, alcoholic drinks to other things on. So Amy, what are the best ways for the audience to find out more about you? Thanks so much for having me in this amazing conversation. I'm at AmyMDMDwellness.com. I'm on social media on Instagram at fasting, MD at FAST, T-I-N-G-M-D. And I'm at aimieShot, MD on Twitter and Facebook.

Okay, and then aimie, I always like to end with this question. If there was one thing that you wanted a listener or reader to take away from the book, or this episode, what would it be? You can save yourself. There are things that you can do, eat, think, create that will make you a happier and better person. It's not just about your circumstances or what you've been dealt.

You have the power to save yourself. Well, Amy, thank you so much for coming on the show, such an honor for you to be here, and such great content for our audience. I so appreciate you. Thank you so much for having me. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Dr. Amy Shaw. I wanted to thank Amy, Harvest Books, and Alyssa Fortnato for the privilege of having her appear. Links to all things Amy will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show. All proceeds go to supporting the show. Avertiser deals and discount

codes are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals. Videos are on YouTube at John Armiles and Passionstruck Clips. I'm on LinkedIn and you can also find me at John Armeyles on both Twitter and Instagram. You're about to hear a preview of the PassionStruck podcast interview I did with former fighter pilot and retired Air Force Colonel Kim Campbell. And we discuss her brand new book, Flying in the Face of Fear, Lessons Unleading with Courage. I think this idea of this fighter pilot debriefing, having time to debr and learn from your mistakes really forced me to learn to fail forward. A failure where I kind of stayed and that mindset of mistake and failing and not learning from it did not go well for me. And so having this

idea of failing forward and learning from mistakes was something that I learned early and then took with me for the rest of my career. The fee for this show is that you share it with those that you care about. If you know somebody who can apply the lessons that we gave on today's show, please definitely share it with those that you love and care about. The greatest compliment that you can give us is to share this show.

In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen. And until next time, live life ash and strife.