How to Regain Your Brain Energy with Dr. Steven Gundry

A Problem Of Our Own Making

• 60% of Americans complain of fatigue and generalized tiredness. In fact, the two main reasons people visit Dr. Gundry’s website are that they need more energy, or they feel tired all the time.
• A lot of times we eat a lot of meals on the go or grab some fast food and then experience a mid-afternoon slump. It’s common to think it’s the food that is making us tired, that it’s contributing to how we feel.
• While it isn’t the food that is causing us to feel tired, this energy crisis is a problem we’ve created.
• We’re overfed and underpowered. To understand that, we have to understand how our body produces energy.
• Imagine your body is a freeway. Our mitochondria, energy-producing organelles which make our energy currency ATP (adenosine triphosphate).
• Part of this process in creating ATP is the movement of protons and electrons running up and down this highway. As they move, we gradually produce ATP
• If we experience a mitochondria rush hour though, with tons of traffic coming in but not moving, it isn’t able to process anything and things literally grind to a halt.
• One of the things that can cause mitochondria rush hour is ultra-processed food. These foods are instantly absorbed as refined sugars, refined fats, and refined proteins. And they throw us into an instantaneous rush hour.

We used to run on the misconception that the appropriate way to eat was three square meals and two snacks throughout our day.

• In truth, the average American actually eats and snacks for 16 hours. And because so much of that is ultra-processed foods, our bodies are experiencing rush hour that entire time.
• This fatigue is happening to all of us, at all ages and stages in life. Even millennials are suffering from low energy and brain fog.
• In his practice, they use a general code for fatigue and malaise. 50% of his patients have this.  He noticed that when he teaches his patients how to eat, their fatigue and malaise go away.

It’s All In The Small, Simple Steps

• Like the title indicates, the answer to regaining energy is paradoxical
• The more you can shorten the window of time that you eat, the better. From the start of the day to the end of the day, compress that window to as short as possible.
• This is called time-controlled eating or intermittent fasting.
• By narrowing the length of time that rush hour occurs in your mitochondria, the more energy you’ll actually produce.
• The perfect window is 6 hours.

Dr. Gundry, as far as he knows, was the first person back in 2006 to write about time-controlled eating.

• For the last twenty years, during the winter, he actually compresses his entire calorie intake to 2 hours.
• Imagine how productive you are able to be when you have twenty-two out of twenty-four hours that you’re not eating.

But this isn’t something you jump right into. Most people, up to 80%, are metabolically inflexible and they can’t switch from burning sugar to burning fat as a fuel.

• If you normally eat breakfast at 7 am, the first day, you’ll want to delay eating until 8 am. The next day push to 9 am. And so on, until you reach noon.
• Give yourself two days off, whether it’s the weekend or your weekend. And eat whatever, and more importantly, whenever you want.
• On Monday, push to 8 am and start the cycle all over again.
• In six weeks, you’ll be eating breakfast, or breaking your fast, by noon easily and without feeling hungry.

Like anything we do, whether it’s an athlete building their power or learning how to speed read, we have to learn how to do things in steps. That’s what The Energy Paradox does, breaks learning how to eat into steps.

That’s The Why And The When. Is There A What?

• Most people have heard of probiotics. We get it from eating yogurt or taking supplements, but prebiotics are something we’re only just now talking about.
• Prebiotics are what the good bacteria in our gut eat. It’s one of the big things that’s been missing in our diet for the last fifty years or so. And we can classify them as fibers or resistant starches.
• In a typical hunter-gatherer society, you’ll eat up to 150 grams of fiber every day. If you’re lucky, the average American eats around 12 grams of fiber every day.
• Without prebiotics, probiotics don’t have what they need to eat.
• Even more important, without prebiotics our communication system between our gut microbiome and us is disrupted. This communication system is called postbiotics.
• Prebiotics give the microbiome what they need to produce this communication system that tells our mitochondria to create energy.
• The more prebiotic fiber people eat, the more energy their bodies will create.
• The best way we can do this is through food containing inulin.
• These are foods in the chicory family. Things radicchio, Belgium endive, and Jerusalem artichokes are pure inulin.
• There’s even a sweetener that is pure inulin called, Just Like Sugar.
• You can also take inulin powder or capsules.

Inulin directly feeds the friendly bacteria, paving the way for postbiotics to do their work.

• The gut is probably the first brain, directing the information to our brain instead of vice versa.
• We have more neurons in our gut than in our entire spinal cord.
• For every fiber in the vagus nerve going from our brain to our heart and gut, there are actually nine fibers going up from the gut to the brain.
• One of Dr. Gundry’s favorite sayings is: the road to health is paved with good intestines.
• Fatigue is not your fate and you can get your energy back.

Share With Us

• Take a screenshot of this episode, tag us on social media (@drstevengundry & @jimkwik ), and share one thing––one small simple step you are going to do, to be able to tap more energy.
• I’ll be reposting my favorite posts and will gift one lucky listener a copy of Dr. Gundry’s new book.
• Get Dr. Gundry’s book, The Energy Paradox, here.
• Connect with Dr. Gundry and get more information on how to reclaim your energy, here.