Sleep better, feel better and lose weight. What’s the secret?

Getting more sleep, feeling better and losing weight. These are things millions of people want. How do you get them? What’s the secret?

In Brain Body Diet, I have devised a 40-Day protocol to help women become a lean, calm, energized, happy version of themselves.

Here’s the super short version of how to achieve that as I explained to ABC7 KGO-TV anchor, Larry Beil last week. (It was such a fun interview and I am not sure which one of us is the bigger basketball fan!)

• Be careful with your fork. Make sure you are getting your vegetables.

• Be careful with the timing of when you eat. This really impacts brain fog and also your ability to lose weight. I recommend intermittent fasting (IF). I go into detail in my book about what this looks like on a daily basis and the steps you can take to introduce IF into your lifestyle.

• Be on top of your sleep. Get 7 to 8.5 hours every night. Use a tracker to ensure you get 90 minutes of deep sleep.

• Be thoughtful about your social connections. What we call your social genomics are probably one of the most important things when it comes to your health. When I say social connections, I don’t mean how many followers you have on Instagram, although positive interactions online can raise oxytocin in your brain, which helps with social bonding. What I mean is eating food in an environment that really serves you, with benevolent people. That helps to turn on a virtuous cycle in the body.

I am a doctor and I love BIG DATA. If I recommend something, it means I have the science to back it up. I spent over three years researching the content for Brain Body Diet, and it includes over 2500 citations. For those who love the science as much as I do, you can download your copy of the Notes section from the book that includes every study and research paper cited.

Here’s one example of how science shows how the health of our gut can have a direct impact on our mental health.  I had a period of anxiety that happened when I took a month of antibiotics. Most people don’t realize that there is a gut-brain connection. If you take antibiotics, it increases your risk of anxiety by 15 to 47%. That’s huge! But have you ever been warned about that? What happens is that you disrupt the gut, which then disrupts the brain and it can lead to anxiety depression and brain fog. Making sure you get plenty of prebiotic food can help to repair the damage to your gut by feeding the good bugs and bacteria.

One of the most important things to take into account when we are trying to lose weight or keep it under control is that our DNA is not necessarily working with us. As I write in Brain Body Diet, “It dawned on me that my poor genes just carried out their orders from twenty-five thousand years ago: make her fat so she can survive.” These orders worked well when we were hunting for our food. But now the stressors are different; however we are still wired the same way.

Our DNA evolved millions of years ago and we are stuck with the same DNA. Yet back then, we didn’t eat breakfast, lunch and dinner, and snacks in between. We slept longer. We have to bring some of those things back to our DNA. Otherwise, there is a mismatch between our genes and our environment. Intermittent fasting helps with that, making sure you get the sleep that you need. Let’s not forget to mention the toxic world our bodies have to cope with. We need to take out the trash in the body that builds up from our daily exposure to environmental toxins. We need to do it in an active way. We can’t just rely on our liver to do it.

Purchase your copy of Brain Body Diet today to learn how to lose weight, de-stress, detoxify, improve your sleep, and reduce anxiety, depression and brain fog