today’s guest with you. We have a gentleman whose work I ...sanesolution.com/CalMythSummitTranscripts/TheCalorieMyth-Daniel… · Program that Allows You to See and Heal the Seven

entheos.com The Calorie Myth 1

Jonathan: Hey, everybody, Jonathan Bailor back with another bonus

Smarter Science of Slim show. I am so honored to be sharing

today’s guest with you. We have a gentleman whose work I’ve

been a fan of for many, many years, has literally transformed

the lives and the minds of hundreds of thousands of people all

around the world.

I think he has a spandex S on his chest that he wears

underneath his medical garb because he is just all over doing all

kinds of good stuff. He’s a physician, a psychiatrist, a teacher, a

multiple New York Times bestselling author of more than 30

books. I can’t believe his hand just hasn’t fallen off. His most

recent book topping the list was Unleash the Power of the

Human Brain.

He’s widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost experts on

applying brain-imaging science to clinical psychiatric practice.

You’ve seen him on Newsweek, Parade, New York Times Magazine,

The Washington Post, basically everywhere. His new book is

http://www.entheos.com/

http://www.entheos.com/The-Calorie-Myth


incredibly exciting. It’s called Healing ADD - The Breakthrough

Program that Allows You to See and Heal the Seven Types of ADD.

There’s only one man in the world with that CV. Dr. Daniel Amen,

welcome to the show brother.

Daniel: Thanks, Jonathan. What a pleasure for me.

Jonathan: Dr. Amen, let’s just jump right into this. Your newest book,

Healing ADD revised edition promises us an amazing amount of

power over an amazingly growing epidemic. Can you tell us a bit

more about this?

Daniel: Well, ADD or what a lot of people call ADHD is really the most

controversial diagnosis in our society. Yet when it is left

untreated it devastates people’s lives. Everybody has an opinion

on it, you should take medicine, you shouldn’t take medicine, it’s

a fad, it’s an excuse for bad behavior.

If you look at the statistics, 35 percent of these kids never finish

high school. Forty-six percent of untreated, aggressive,

hyperactive boys will be arrested for a felony. It’s associated with

an increased risk of drug abuse, alcohol abuse, obesity,

Alzheimer’s disease, depression, divorce, job changes. It’s not a

minor problem.

Treating it effectively, which does not always mean medication, is

absolutely critical or you end up with a life that’s nowhere near

your potential. At the Amen Clinics, I have six clinics around the

country, we see about 3,000 patients a month. Half of them have

ADD. The most exciting transformational stories often come

from our ADD kids, teenagers, adults, even older adults. We

couldn’t be more excited to share this information with the

world.

Jonathan: Dr. Amen, I so appreciate the framing you just gave which is

regardless of people’s opinions on ADD, the data around the

quality of life and the quality of impact of individuals who have

this diagnosis have on society is irrefutable.




To know that whatever your opinion on ADD is, that individuals

who suffer from it can do something about it and therefore

potentially not have all those negative consequences you just

listed out, that seems like a win no matter what one’s beliefs.

Daniel: The exciting thing for us is that you can take a child or an adult

who’s failing at school or at their job, in relationships, and look at

their brain. That’s what we do at the Amen Clinics. We have built

this database of 85,000 scans on people from 93 countries. You

can see the trouble in their brain.

Then through either natural means including diet and exercise,

natural supplements or medications, you can literally change

their brains. When you do you change their lives. They can go

from Ds and Fs to As and Bs or chronically fighting with their

parents or with their spouse and really revolutionize their lives.

You just can’t ignore that. It’s easy. The easy answer, of course, is

always to blame the person or blame their parents. The more

thoughtful answer is why is he struggling or why is she struggling

and what is it that I can do about it?

I have a wonderful case where I literally saw four generations of

this family. It started with a 15-year-old girl who was cutting

herself, failing in school, making really bad decisions. She

Xeroxed inappropriate body parts at school and got suspended

and then she ran away at which point I got to meet her.

When we looked at her brain she had overall low activity in the

front part of her brain. Well, the front part of your brain is all

about forethought, judgment, focus, planning, impulse control,

learning from the mistakes you make.

When we optimized that part of her brain she went from Ds and

Fs, lots of bad decisions to straight As. We’re so excited. Then I

saw her brother, then I saw her father, then I saw her

grandfather because ADD is clearly something that runs in




families. The transformation for that system was so much better,

which is why I just love this work.

Now, I realized a long time ago not everybody can get a scan.

Based on thousands of scans, in the book Healing ADD we have a

link where people can go online and take our ADD type

questionnaire so they know what type they have.

See, ADD and the same thing’s true for anxiety, depression,

addictions and even obesity, they’re not singular, simple

disorders in the brain. They all have multiple types. Knowing

your type of ADD and in this book I talk about seven different

types of ADD, that leads to more targeted treatment and better

outcomes. Quite frankly, it’s the reason why Ritalin has a bad

reputation.

Ritalin’s a great drug for the right brain and it’s a nightmare for

the wrong brain. It is literally like glasses for people who can’t see

for the right brain, optimizing it. You give it to the wrong brain,

specifically a type we call the ring of fire, you’ll make people

suicidal or homicidal.

One of the I think most unique aspects of my work, because it’s

all based on imaging work that we do, is ADD’s not one thing.

Stop giving people Ritalin. You help some people, no doubt, but

you make other people dramatically worse.

Jonathan: Dr. Amen, with the seven distinct types of ADD it sounds like

without question in your work people can learn how to get the

specifics, get a specific treatment. Have you found things across

all types of neurological challenges that pretty universally if you

do these three things you’re going to live better?

Daniel: No question. My focus is on brain health and I always say the

three things to do are brain envy, you have to start caring,

nobody cares about their brain which is why you can let little kids

put their heads in helmets and start slamming them up against

other people. That’s pretty crazy when you think about it. Brain

envy.




Then you have to avoid bad things. Drugs and alcohol, brain

injuries are obvious. What’s not obvious is if you’re overweight

the size of your brain goes down. Or if you have diabetes or

hypertension the size of your brain goes down. Brain envy, avoid

bad.

Then do good. Those regular brain healthy habits, which include

an optimal diet which is different than most people think of an

optimal diet. We were fed a lot of bad information, you should be

on a low-fat diet, 60 percent of the solid weight of your brain is

fat. If somebody calls you a fathead, say thank you. You do not

want to be on a low-fat diet because low levels of cholesterol are

associated with homicide, suicide and depression.

The right diet, which we can talk about, exercise helps everybody

but not too much exercise. I am totally not a fan of extreme

sports because it’s too much stress on people’s brain. Then

simple supplements, multivitamin, fish oil.

When it comes to ADD it’s not any fish oil that works, it’s fish oil

that’s higher in a certain component called EPA as opposed to

DHA. Those would be the simple things.

Quite frankly, there’s a whole chapter on diet and ADD. At the

Amen Clinics our best testimonials come from getting people’s

diets right. It works often quickly, it’s effective. The problem is

you’re in a war.

You are clearly in a war when it comes to food because there is

so much bad food trying to be shoved down your throat used by

all marketing means possible, including Katherine Webb, the new

girl on the Carl’s commercials. She’s stunning and dripping

ketchup all over her body. You’re in a war. It’s critical to get your

food right.

Jonathan: Dr. Amen, if some of our listeners are parents and the believe

their child may be struggling with ADD or just something related

to it, are there specific inputs like eliminate this, just stop




exposing your child to this, these point things where you’ve seen

with the elimination of soda. I don’t know, I mean you’re the

expert not me, you could see just this one, two, three simple

swaps or eliminations or replacements potentially a complete or

major relief from symptoms?

Daniel: Well, I think it’s more complicated than that. I think it’s really

important people know if they have it. That’s the first step. Then

what kind. If we argue for one-size fits all then I think we

generally lose. We lose the complexity.

People will do the simple things, they won’t work and then they’ll

get demoralized. If they have ADD they’ll try it for like two days

and if it doesn’t work then they’re back to the fast food.

No child should be drinking soda, no child should be drinking

fruit juice, no child should be eating foods that were raised with

pesticides or hormones. I really know you interviewed Tana, my

wife. The Omni Diet is actually the official diet of the Amen

Clinics. Seventy percent plant based foods, 30 percent high

quality protein. Add to that healthy fat and that’s just an amazing

diet.

We put our autistic and ADD kids on elimination diets all the

time, eliminate corn, soy, gluten, dairy, sugar. Get radical,

positive shifts. Even still, it’s more complicated than that because

a compulsive person or what we call over-focused ADD where

they have all the features of ADD, short attention span,

distractibility, restlessness, impulse control, disorganization,

procrastination, the classic ADD person that has all of those does

really well on the high protein diet.

If you give the over-focused ADD person that diet you make

them mean. They focus better on the things that upset them.

The treatment really gets targeted to what your brain needs.

Jonathan: Dr. Amen, this is so empowering. In all the thousands of people

you’ve worked with it seems like we have a bit of a paradox here

because you made the excellent point that we’re in a constant




war. This is so complicated and there’s so much specificity

needed for each diagnosis. There are some common

denominators, like if our children are receiving poisonous inputs

24/7, 365 it’s going to be pretty difficult for other things to work.

I know in the large parts of our culture, foods that comprise the

Omni Diet as well as a sane lifestyle, which are very, very similar

because they’re both rooted in the same science, are just not

available. These food deserts.

Where can we start to see the societal change it seems like we

must have to establish the baseline on which more specific

treatment can be applied?

Daniel: The goal my wife and I have is really to create warriors for the

health of their brains and their bodies. If you get your diet right

and you get your brain under control you then influence your

children to do that. Then your spouse. Then your friends. Then

your business and then your church.

We have created many warriors and we’re so excited but

ultimately the transformation first has to happen inside you and

then inside your system. We help to plant these principles into

one of the largest churches in America, and then one of the

largest drug treatment programs in America. We’re so excited by

the number of lives changed.

Often, one of the things that gets in the way is people have

undiagnosed ADD of one form or another and they can’t follow

through and they get distracted. Then they hate themselves

because they know how to do better but they can’t stay with it,

they can’t stay focused.

Jonathan: Brilliant. Dr. Amen, I salute you with all that I have for the

amazing work that you’re doing. I support you in any way that I

can to create these wellness warriors to protect your brain and

to manifest the unique glory that we were all put here to create.

Tell us where we can get more information about your upcoming

book and just you and your great work in general.




Daniel: Well, I’d love it if people went to our website at AmenClinics.com.

Amen, like the last word in a prayer, Clinics dot com. Then the

book will be available on Amazon, BarnesAndNoble.com, in

bookstores everywhere. We are just so excited.

If they go to AmenClinics.com they can actually take our healing

ADD test for free and then get a lot of information about the

book and other products we have. We have a new product

coming out called Healing ADD at Home in 30 Days.

Jonathan: Brilliant. Dr. Daniel Amen, thank you for doing so much for so

many and for keeping up the passion, keeping the hope and faith

alive. I so appreciate it as well as you sharing your time with us

today.

Daniel: Thank you, Jonathan.

Jonathan: Listeners, I hope you enjoyed this wonderful and empowering

conversation as much as I did. Again, our guest today is the

delightful Dr. Daniel Amen. You can learn more about him and

his upcoming book Healing ADD at his website AmenClinics.com.

Remember, this week and every week after, eat smarter, exercise

smarter and live better. Chat with you soon.

Jonathan: Dr. Amen, that was lovely. Thank you so much. I love your

passion.

Daniel: You’re welcome.

Jonathan: All right, cool. Let’s go ahead and just do a quick drink break here

and now we’ll go ahead and do about 30 minutes for en*theos.

This one, if at all possible, Dr. Amen, let’s keep this one much

more general just because this audience, the title of this

conference is The Calorie Myths - How Modern Metabolic Science is

Flipping Traditional Diet and Exercise on Its Head.



http://amenclinics.com/

http://barnesandnoble.com/




What I’d really like to focus on with you is tell your story, we’ll talk

about all the work you’ve done at the church and in your clinics

and then the surprising findings you found. Basically we touched

on this in brief but just traditional wisdom is just eat fewer

calories and eat low-fat diet and what you’ve seen there. Just jog

all day and what you’ve seen there. All that good stuff. Sound

good?

Daniel: Great.

Jonathan: Okay, wonderful. Let me go ahead and just write down

where we’re at here. 21:30. All right, excellent, sir. Ready to go?

Daniel: I’m ready.

Jonathan: All right, here we go.

Hey, everybody. Jonathan Bailor back and I am uniquely excited

about today’s session because we have a gentleman who has

literally changed the lives and changed the minds of tens if not

hundreds of thousands of people all across the world.

He is a physician, a psychiatrist, a teacher, a multiple New York

Times bestselling author of 30 books. That’s just phenomenal.

One of the most recent of which was Unleashing the Power of

the Female Brain and also the most recent of which is Healing

ADD - The Breakthrough Program that Allows You to See and

Heal the Seven Types of ADD.

He is widely regarded as the world’s foremost expert on

applying brain-imaging science to clinical psychiatric practice.

The reason I wanted to bring him in for this wonderful

conference is because after I believe it’s more than 80,000 brain

scans he has proven that a lot of what we’ve been told in terms

of these calorie myths literally can break your brain and he can

prove it.

Dr. Daniel Amen, welcome brother.




Daniel: Thank you so much.

Jonathan: Well, Dr. Amen, before we just jump right into this, you are such

a unique man who does such unique work. Tell us a bit about

your personal story. You’ve got these Amen Clinics, you do brain

scans. Tell us about the mission you’ve been rocking so far in

your life.

Daniel: I’m a classically trained psychiatrist. Before I was a psychiatrist I

was an x-ray technician. There I learned the phrase, “How do you

know unless you look?”

I fell in love with psychiatry because I realized it has the potential

to change generations of people. I’m like, well, we really should

be looking at what we do.

At the Amen Clinics on a routine basis we scan our patients with

a study called brain SPECT images and SPECT looks at blood flow

and activity. Looking at the brain revolutionized my life because I

realized some simple things. Drugs and alcohol cause brain

damage, that’s why you don’t use them. That playing football or

other contact sports often cause brain damage. That’s why we

should be protecting our children from those things.

Then some other big lessons came up, like as your weight goes

up the size and function of your brain goes down. Oh no, that

should scare the fat off anyone. Or as your blood sugar goes up

brain atrophy occurs and the size of your brain goes down. Or

blood pressure, when it goes up blood flow to your brain and

subsequently brain atrophy goes down.

What I have learned we’ve now looked at 85,000 scans on

patients from 93 countries and it’s just very clear that you have a

choice in how fast your brain ages.

You accelerate it through your behavior or you can decelerate it.

How exciting is that that I actually have a choice and I choose

because I have this little term I like called brain envy, I want a

better brain. I choose to do things to really support it. That’s




what we do with people all over the world, is we teach them to

have brain envy and how to have a better brain no matter what

their age.

Jonathan: Dr. Amen, the thing that really appealed to me about your work

besides the transformation effect that it has on people’s lives

and minds, is your research which is again your primary

research. You’re adding an entirely new type of a research to this

conversation with brain scanning.

You have found that many of these lifestyle choices we’ve been

told are healthy and that we should pursue actually cause brain

damage. Maybe not in the traditional sense of the word but in a

more figurative sense of the word. Is that fair?

Daniel: Well, yes I would say literal sense of the word. Low fat diets are

not good for your brain because the brain is 60 percent fat.

When you take out the water and just brain tissue, 60 percent of

it is fat. You have this big blob of fat between your ears. Low fat

diets are in fact bad for your brain. Wow, that’s just so weird

because since the ‘80s people have been going low fat, low fat,

low fat, cholesterol is of the devil.

Twenty percent of your brain is cholesterol. You have low

cholesterol levels, it’s associated with homicide, suicide and

depression.

Another myth, and it’s one of the reasons I really like your work,

is a calorie is a calorie. That’s just total nonsense. There’s toxic

fuel and there’s really healthy fuel. The kind of calories you put in

your body are absolutely essential.

Jonathan: Dr. Amen, I know we had some conversations before we started

recording today about trans fats, but these are the freaking red

lights. These things, just like for example if you smoke cigarettes

it destroys your lungs. If you put these foods into your body, and

I don’t care if they’re in 100 calorie snack packs, just like I don’t

care if you smoke one pack of cigarettes a day versus two packs




of cigarettes a day, these substances you could put in your

mouth are to your brain like cigarettes are to your lungs?

Daniel: If you think of artificial sweeteners, like aspartame, they are

known excitotoxins. They stimulate your brain to get really

excited but then it hurts it. I’m not a big fan.

I’m also not a fan of fruit juice because it’s too much sugar. When

you unwrap fruit from its fiber source it can turn toxic in your

body. People go, “I really want to get my child to drink his or her

apple juice,” it’s just a bad idea. Give them the apple and

encourage them to eat it, perhaps with a little almond butter.

Soda, all the studies. There’s not one good study that says if you

drink soda, including diet soda, that it is somehow in your best

interest.

Any food that is laden with pesticides, there’s not one study that

says that’s a good thing for you. So much of our food is not only

genetically modified so it actually produces its own pesticides, so

much of it is sprayed to make it easy to farm. It’s not making it

easy on us as we see the incidence of ADD, autism, depression

skyrocket in our society.

Jonathan: Dr. Amen, you just gave us a wonderful list of substances that

are toxic to our brain. Has your research shown foods that we

should be going out of our way to eat more of? Like a therapeutic

impact on the brain?

Daniel: I think of vegetables of many different colors that are organic as

a pharmacy. Many spices, think saffron, rosemary, thyme, sage,

cinnamon, as medications really for the brain. They taste

amazing if you know how to put them together.

Cumin for curry, when combined with vitamin D, has been

shown to decrease the plaques thought to be responsible for

Alzheimer’s disease.




Then I’m a big fan of fat. Avocados, green leafy vegetables,

walnuts, Brazil nuts, almonds, wild salmon. I’m a huge fan of

foods like that.

Jonathan: Dr. Amen, has your research shown you anything, obviously the

brain is the control center for everything. We often when we

hear people talk about weight problems or being over fat it’s

thought to be a willpower issue. I’ve always wondered it seems

like it’s really more of a neurological condition that we have to

address.

If you take a step back and you have an individual who’s storing

100 pounds of excess fat on their body, why does their brain

make them hungry? They have all these calories and energy

already available to them yet their brain is continuing to tell

them to eat. That’s not because they’re weak. That seems to

indicate that it’s because there’s something deeper going on in

their brain. Did that make any sense?

Daniel: Well, you know how they tell people stapling your stomach is

working on the wrong organ. It’s your brain that pushes you

away from the table telling you that you’ve had enough or it’s

your brain that gives you permission to have the third bowl of ice

cream that makes you look and feel like a blob. If you want a

better body the first place to always start is by getting a better

brain.

That’s where I like to start but the most overweight people are

generally the most malnourished. If you’re malnourished then

you can’t get control of your cravings.

Now, a very simple fix is make sure your vitamin D level is right.

When vitamin D levels are low the hormone leptin that turns off

your appetite becomes ineffective in your brain. Most people

who are overweight, they cover up when they go outside

because they’re ashamed and they’re embarrassed about their

bodies. Their vitamin D levels are even lower still.




What we found in our first weight loss class many years ago, we

had 50 people and 49 of them had low levels of vitamin D. Some

simple fixes can make just a huge, positive difference in getting

yourself under control.

One of the things people don’t know is you have to eat to lose

weight. When your blood sugar goes low, blood flow to the brain

goes low, you make more bad decisions. I protect breakfast. I’m

always making sure no matter where I am in the world I have a

couple of eggs or something to stabilize my blood sugar. I usually

start the day with protein. Protein powder, maybe. It makes a

huge difference.

Jonathan: This is such an empowering and such a different paradigm, Dr.

Amen, from what we’ve been told because I feel the more we can

help people to understand that we have to fix the system itself,

we have to change your brain. If your car isn’t running correctly,

putting less gas in the gas tank will not fix it. If your sink is

clogged, pouring less water in the sink will never fix it.

It seems like we have to change the quality of the inputs because

if you want to cure or treat or fix a system, doing less of that

which broke it can’t fix it. It might break it more slowly but this

whole idea of exercise calories off your body and take fewer in

and that will fix something, that’s just totally backwards it seems.

Am I on the right track?

Daniel: Absolutely. We actually find many of our patients eat more and

lose weight because they’re eating more of the right things. Just

eating more of the wrong things, or actually less of the wrong

things, I actually like that analogy a lot. It doesn’t make sense.

You need the right fuel for your brain and for your body.

We’ve been sold a bill of goods that you have 100 calorie snack

packs, cookies loaded with trans fats. You’re still going to be sick.

Jonathan: You might get sick slower but you’re still on that path to

sickness. We’ve talked a lot about food. One of the other areas of

amazing interest to all of us and I know you’ve had some




surprising findings in your clinics is around exercise. We’ll get

certainly much more specific here but can you give us the high

level of this type of exercise heals your brain and this type of

exercise is either benign or hurts your brain?

Daniel: I’m actually at heart a fairly lazy person. Running a marathon

actually never appealed to me. I’m sort of glad because some of

the worst brains I’ve ever seen are extreme athletes. If you’re

running 26 miles your unconscious mind is going, “Where’s the

tiger? Why am I running that far?”

What we find is that bursting is actually much more effective for

your metabolism than long periods of intense exercise. We also

really like weight training. The stronger you are as you age, the

less likely you are to get Alzheimer’s disease. It really helps to

balance and optimize your hormones.

Then, given our brain imaging work we’ve found that

coordination exercises are absolutely critical, so dance, table

tennis, tennis are great because they work out a very specific

part of your brain that helps with judgment and cognition.

I like walking, bursting, weight training, coordination exercises

and think those are the things that make you smarter.

Jonathan: Let’s geek out here a little bit because this really empowers our

listeners. That’s because we’ve been fed these calorie myths and

we’ve been told if you go to the gym and look on the treadmill

there’s this fat burning zone and we just want to stay in that zone

for two hours at a time because that enables us to burn more

calories. You and I and the listeners are learning that that is, of

course, bogus.

We talk about burst training and we talk about resistance

training. We do these for much shorter periods of time and the

amount of calories we burn doing them is actually much lower.

What is the systemic effect that these smarter forms of exercise

cause which yield these longer-term brain healing and biology

repairing benefits?




Daniel: As you build muscle it increases your metabolism. Even though

muscle weighs more than fat it’s obviously more compact so you

look cuter. It also increases your metabolism. Fat is not

metabolically active, even though it produces some fairly toxic

things in your body like inflammatory cytokons. Muscle burns a

lot more calories.

The big problem with going to the gym for an hour and working

out is you just gave yourself permission to eat 200 or 300 calorie

donuts. People have found that people who work out on a

regular basis actually give themselves permission to eat badly.

That, I think, is one of the big concerns for me, is it’s not

insurance against a bad diet.

I tell all of my patients, I say, “Look, first thing to do, first thing to

do is get your diet right. I don’t care how much exercise you do if

you’re not eating right. If you don’t put the right fuel in you’re just

going to hurt yourself.” Diet right, then the right type of exercise.

We also talked about bursting, which has been shown in animal

models to increase the actual number of mitochondria in your

cells. Those are the little energy powerhouses in your cells.

Jonathan: The other thing you mentioned, one of the challenges of going

to the gym is it’s almost impossible for that not to have some

impact, making you feel that you’ve now been given permission

to make unhealthy food choices, which we know once we

understand the science that’s saying I ran two miles, now I can go

eat trans fat laden cookies is a bit like saying I ran two miles, I

can now go smoke a pack of cigarettes because they somehow

cancel each other out. That’s missing the point completely.

One other area of your work that I’m a huge fan of, Dr. Amen, is

much more on the spiritual and mission side. It seems like if

we’re spending all of our time counting calories or working out

on a human hamster wheel, that we’re not really living our

mission. I don’t know about you but I don’t think any of us were




put here to count calories or to walk or run on a treadmill all day.

What are your thoughts on that?

Daniel: Yes, I think maybe I’ll politely disagree with the calorie thing. I

think of calories like money. Some people are calorie rich, which

means they just really don’t have to think about that at all. Other

people, like me, are calorie poor. I have the genes that say I

should be fat. I have a fair number of fat people in my family.

I think it’s smart to spend your calories wisely. Even if I’m eating

like the best hormone free, antibiotic free, free range, grass fed

beef, if I eat too much I’m still going to get fat. It’s chemistry and

physics at some point.

I like it when calories are on the menu because I want to spend

them wisely. Calorie restriction has been associated with

longevity in many species. What I do with my patients is just for a

month I want you to weigh and measure everything. I used to be

just famous at lying to myself. I’d look on the box of Grape Nuts

and I want to have a bowl, you look on the label and it says it’s

220 calories a serving. I’d get a bowl, whatever size I really

wanted and then load it up with milk and milk was 80 calories a

serving. Okay, 300 calories for breakfast.

Then I read the fine print, that it’s 220 calories for half a cup. I

went out and got a half a cup measuring cup and put half a cup

into a big bowl. I almost started to cry when I realized how little

that was. Then I got the measuring cup for the cup of milk and,

uh-oh, I was having 800 calories for breakfast. If you do that for

too long, pretty soon you’re fat.

We did this huge health program at Saddleback Church, which

we’re so excited about. I have a new book coming out in

December called The Daniel Plan that I wrote with Rick Warren

and Mark Hyman. It was one of Mark and I’s first fights because

he was like, “Calories, you don’t have to really worry about them,”

and I looked at him like he was nuts. I’m like, “You over spend,

you get bankrupt.” I want people really thinking about being

value spenders.




Like I don’t waste my money, I don’t waste my calories. I don’t

spend them on things that’ll hurt me. Yes, you can get the 100

calorie Oreos and maybe you won’t put on as much weight, but

they’re clearly not valuable for you.

I like the idea of high quality calories. It’s the first principle

behind our nutritional principles. I really want to know how many

I’m eating.

Jonathan: Dr. Amen, it certainly makes sense that this concept of nutrient

density, my mother gave me the same guidance which is make

sure that it’s worth it. What has been your experience? I know

you and your wife, Tana, have a wonderful Omni Diet plan that

you use at all of your clinics which really just focused, like a lot of

people are nowadays, on nutrient-dense foods, getting the most

bang for your buck from a caloric perspective.

When people do that, when they eat the vast majority of the food

they put in their mouth are non-starchy vegetables and high-

quality proteins as well as satisfying whole food and fiber-rich

fats. Do you find that people - personally it’s hard for me to over

eat when I eat that way. Just like the sheer to fit enough calories

in my stomach to make myself chronically overweight when I eat

that way becomes almost difficult. Has that been your

experience?

Daniel: Unfortunately not for me. I really have to watch it. I like being in

the same jeans I was in when I was in high school. There’s a little

bit of my ego or my own vanity. If I’m not careful, it won’t

happen.

With paleo diets, which I’m actually sort of a fan of, I would alter

it some but there are a lot of paleo desserts and my wife is just

amazing with them. You have to really be careful with those

things. Even though they’re high-quality foods, they can still trip

up this very interesting part of your brain called the nucleus

accumbens. All of a sudden you can start wanting them more

than you should.




Jonathan: That’s an interesting topic for conversation, which is this idea

that personally, just for you, Dr. Amen, when you’re a little bit

more conscious about the quantity of food you’re consuming,

are you every hungry or are you completely satisfied?

Daniel: Almost all the time I am completely satisfied. If I stick to my

routine. I travel a lot so it really takes just a little bit of

forethought. I like to say God gave us a big brain for a reason,

that none of this, and you know this, none of this is really hard

when you get focused and you care enough.

It’s the times where I might not sleep or I’m stressed because of

whatever’s happening in my life, those are the vulnerable times.

You have to have sort of your go-to foods. I’m like a squirrel

where I put food everywhere. In my briefcase, it’s in my desk, it’s

in my suitcase when I travel. Just to protect myself against those

times that are more vulnerable.

One of the things I teach my patients are your failures are the

most important thing in your life because they’ll teach you how

to get really well. You just have to pay attention to the times that

it doesn’t go the way you sort of hoped it would go. They’ll teach

you important course correction actions.

Jonathan: It’s so insightful to hear. There’s important distinctions here. I

think oftentimes people, and you know this being a psychiatrist,

people often make things more black and white. I know in your

most recent book about ADD you mentioned there’s seven

different types and it’s very nuanced.

People often have these arguments like calories are completely

irrelevant, they’re like unicorns, which is of course not true. If you

drink 10,000 calories of butter you will gain fat. The question is

will anyone ever do that. At the other end of the spectrum

there’s people who just say, “Eat 1,400 calories of whatever and it

doesn’t really matter.”




What seems to be the more interesting question to ask is why

the human brain would ever ask for more calories than it needs

to be healthy. Therein lies this weird paradox where it seems like

the brain would desire balance, just like it does for blood sugar

and blood pressure, but when we feed it certain things it almost

gets its wires crossed in a sense and starts to give us bad

information and bad instructions.

It’s not that calories don’t count, it’s that if our brain is working

correctly we shouldn’t necessarily have to count them. That

doesn’t mean we go crazy and eat whatever we want whenever

we want, but our brain seems like it should be our ally in this

battle if it’s working correctly. Is that fair?

Daniel: Well, but our brain unfortunately is not our ally because it’s

primitive. It is working to protect ourselves from famine. The

brain evolved or was made, created during times of scarcity. It

has a scarcity mentality. Years and years and years ago there

were not fat people because they killed what they needed at the

moment. It was worried.

The baseline state of your brain is not a happy state. It’s an

anxious state. That helped us survive because if you were

worried about the future you were much more likely to survive

than if you were the don’t worry, be happy person living in the

moment.

We have to come to grips with our primitive brain and I think it’s

one of the reasons people overeat. Then if you combine that

with the food companies that hire these very smart scientists to

hijack your brain, really with that information you put out to the

world people are up the creek without a paddle.

They know how to work on the bullet point to hijack this very

interesting part of your brain called the nucleus accumbens

that’s a little pleasure button in your brain that just turns you on.

Unfortunately they can make you really sick.

Jonathan: Not only sick.




Daniel: When we did the sick program at Saddleback one of the women

came to me and said, “I would rather get Alzheimer’s disease

than give up sugar.” I looked at her like she was nuts. I’m like,

“Did you date the bad boys in high school?” Clearly that’s a crazy

idea, but it happens when your brain gets hijacked.

Jonathan: Absolutely. Both my father and sister work in addictions

counseling and it is just classic addictive behavior where an

individual who is addicted to cocaine, let’s say, which has actually

been shown in some recent studies at the University of

Connecticut to be less desirable to rats than the middle portion

of Oreos. People who are addicted to cocaine, it’s destroying

their families, it’s destroying everything in their life. They would

still rather have cocaine than preserve everything else about

their life.

We see similar things like that happening with substances that

are sold to our children in schools. It’s hard not to want to start a

revolution, do you know what I mean?

Daniel: I think that’s what a thoughtful person does. The thoughtful

person today wants to be a revolutionary. They realize that our

children and our grandchildren will never be able to afford the

tsunami of illness that’s coming their way, and that’s not fair.

As the debt we’re leaving to our children is not fair to them

because it comes from our undisciplined thinking, the same

thing is true with food. Seventy-five percent of the healthcare

dollars in this country are spent on chronic preventable illnesses

and in large part it’s driven by Wall Street greed.

Food companies having to make profits for the next quarter are

not thinking about the long-term health of our society. There are

hundreds of studies now that say as your weight goes up the size

and function of your brain goes down. Two-thirds of our

country’s overweight, one-third is obese. It’s estimated by 2020

that 50 percent of us will be obese. It’s the biggest brain drain in

the history of our society.




Jonathan: Dr. Amen, this has been just incredibly insightful. It’s indicative

of the nuance that is characteristic of your work, which is that we

all need to look at our unique circumstances and of course

ensure we’re taking high quality inputs into our body, ensure

we’re doing high quality movement with our body and then, of

course, be sensitive to the fact that there are a lot of stresses

and external factors in life that can hijack the brain. We need to,

as you said, comprise our brain and have that brain envy.

Dr. Amen, where can we learn more about all the great work

you’re doing? Thirty books already, I can only imagine there’s 30

more in the works.

Daniel: People can go to our website at AmenClinics.com. Amen, like the

last word in a prayer, clinics dot com. In December it’s a little

crazy, I have three books coming out, The Daniel Plan with Rick

Warren and Mark Hymen, how to plant these principles into your

life and into your church. Healing ADD about the seven different

types we’ve seen. The paperback for my book Unleash the Power

of the Female Brain.

Lots of things that we have created to help people love their

brains and get really healthy.

Jonathan: I love it. Well, loving the brain, loving the body and then

empowering us to love the world we’ve been blessed with and

that we certainly need to apply some love to. It seems like it may

not be going down the right track. It’s an amazing mission. I so

thank you for living that and empowering hundreds of

thousands of others to do so.

Folks, again, please learn more about our wonderful guest, Dr.

Daniel Amen, over at his website AmenClinics.com. He is literally

a content machine so you will never run out of things to read

and watch over at AmenClinics.com.

Dr. Amen, thank you again for joining us today. It’s been an

absolute pleasure.







Daniel: Thank you, Jonathan.

Jonathan: Listeners, please remember this week and every week after, eat

smarter, exercise smarter and live better. Chat with you soon.



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today’s guest with you. We have a gentleman whose work I ...sanesolution.com/CalMythSummitTranscripts/TheCalorieMyth-Daniel… · Program that Allows You to See and Heal the Seven