Authors@Google: Dr. Susan Kleiner

>>Dr. Susan Kleiner: I walked into this building, it's like the good mood building; colors and
it's so g-o-o-d. [laughs] Google, right.
So it is great to be here, I'm thrilled to be on the Google campus in my backyard and
it's just so nice to know that your whole programming here is starting to center around
health and fitness. At lunch we were talking about that it's time to take a stand, that
if we don't have health we don't have the fundamental tools to progress, to proceed,
and certainly to excel. So health is critically important. What I have learned in the years
of being a sports nutritionist is that health is great but we have very important performance
goals that we also want to accomplish. Wouldn't it be great if those could overlap? And most
people really want to be happy, that's what everybody wants.
What was interesting to me when I said to you, "How do you feel?" is that there was,
you know, like one or two who said "good," I heard happy, but everybody else was kind
of quiet. And you know it's very interesting when I go into an elementary school and I
ask the kids, "Tell me how do you feel?" they right away can tell me, "I feel happy, I have
ants in my pants, I have too much energy, I'm sleepy," they yell it out with no inhibition
at all. I go to a middle school and I say, "How do you feel?" and they all look at each
other. [chuckles]
[laughter]
And once somebody says something then they've all got permission to say something and they
all can pretty much say to me as well how they're feeling at that moment, they are connected.
Many of them will say they're tired, many of them will say a little anxious, some of
them say that they're very happy, they're starting to have some different feelings at
that point.
When I get to high school it gets a little quieter, certainly when I get to colleges
and definitely work settings it gets quieter and quieter. People are less willing to express
how they feel or are becoming more and more disconnected from how they feel. Just as we've
talked about in the nutrition field for decades that Americans are disconnected from the neck
down, that when we walk by plate glass windows we don't look at ourselves, we have mirrors
from the neck up, we don't wanna know what we look like from the neck down. We are also
encouraged by our society to disconnect from the neck up. You're too tired? Take some caffeine.
You're sad? Take a pill. You're overworked? Too bad, keep going. You don't have time to
exercise because it makes you feel better? Well you really better get to work and make
a dollar. So we are being encouraged to ignore how we feel, but how we feel is in fact what
it's all about.
And so I encourage you to look at my faces up here [chuckles] and when I put this together
and this is stuff that I love, serendipity, these are actually all up there alphabetically,
but you'll notice that all the ones in the center are the happy ones. Nobody wants to
be on the outside team, everyone wants to be on the inside and everyone wants to be
confident, happy, and optimistic. And in fact what you eat has a huge impact on whether
you're on the inside or the outside, whether you're feeling good, happy, optimistic, confident,
or you're feeling anger, anxiety, not coping well, sad; what you eat plays a profound role
in how you feel.
So I love this, Will Rogers says, "You know you've got to exercise your brain just like
your muscles." And we talk about this and you have to feed your brain just like you
have to feed your muscles.
These athletes no matter how well trained, how genetically gifted, how well skilled and
drilled they are, if they can't get out of bed in the morning because they're depressed
it doesn't matter how hard they've trained; they can't get to the starting line let alone
the finish line.
And the beginning of The Good Mood Diet, actually the kernel of the beginning of the thought
of The Good Mood Diet came from when I did work with a very high profile, very elite
athlete who couldn't get out of bed in the morning and was being paid a boat load of
money to show up.
So what I found at that time and what I've continued to preach and work on in my practice
is that you must feed your brain. That in fact if it was all about what we weighed,
which is what society tells us, everyone needs to get on the scale and pay attention to what
you weigh, that the goal is weight loss, that we all should weigh less and we all should
be thinking about weighing less. If that's really what mattered to us in how we felt,
we would all be thin. We know that diets work. But we go on a diet, it makes us feel bad
and it doesn't matter if you've lost weight. You go off of it.
So what The Good Mood Diet is, is the blending of cutting edge sports nutrition, although
I kind of hide it in there because if I talk too much about sports nutrition it would scare
everybody away, but nobody knows how to help people alter their body composition, gain
muscle, lose fat like a sports nutritionist. But blended with cutting edge neurobiology
of food is what I call it; the neuroscience of food. How food affects the health of the
brain, mood, cognitive function, our ability to rest and relax, our ability to have the
mental energy and focus when we need it; when you blend those it's a powerful force to make
you feel the difference. So that when you follow this kind of concept and then you go
off of it, it's not about what's happening with your weight that changes you, because
any of you who have tried to lose weight know that it takes a long time before you say,
"Oh I really outta try and lose this weight again." What happens with The Good Mood Diet
is that within weeks you've realized that you feel so bad you can't wait to be back
on the diet. And this is what I learned from clients and from Good Mood Diet groups around
the city and the country as I did this.
So conceptually we think about feeding your brain because most of us eat by default, you
can't eat this, you can't eat that, you can't eat the next thing, don't eat, avoid, limit,
those are the language of the diet world. And so whatever's left over is what ends up
on your plate which isn't very fun, it isn't very inspirational, and it probably doesn't
taste very good either so nobody wants to do that.
A typical weight loss diet is very low in calories, it's so low in calories I always
say it wouldn't feed a small pigeon and in fact the foods that you particularly are told
to avoid make those diets depressing. Not depressing because, gee, you wish you could
eat other food, it's because in fact they are biochemically depressing.
So let's talk about that. I'm gonna do a little bit of a science course here very quickly
because I'm an educator and a motivator and I know that when you reach a certain point
and you don't understand why you're doing something you stop, but if you understand
why you keep going, you can make the choice to keep going.
So did anybody ever play with a chemistry set? Yeah, and I almost burned down my parents'
basement with the chemistry set [laughs] at one time in my life. But think of your body
as a chemistry set; we are kind of this bag of chemicals. And so food is the chemistry
that enters our body; our stomach is kinda that Erlenmeyer flask and your metabolism
is the Bunsen burner underneath. So when you eat the food goes into your stomach and you
shake it around and you have your metabolic rate going and it ends up going into your
blood stream, digested, absorbed into your blood stream. What do you think the very first
organ is that's affected by the food that you eat? Just yell it out.
>> female #1: The brain.
>>Dr. Susan Kleiner: The brain, right, see I know I got a smart group here. Most people
say the liver, the heart, no the brain. In fact I want you to think about this because
it's so incredible: you don't even have to even swallow the food for it to affect your
brain. Think about when you get really hungry and you haven't eaten maybe for hours, you
put something in your mouth and you're chewing it and you just go, "Ah I feel so much better,
I'm eating." Well it didn't even hit your stomach yet and you're brain is affected by
the fact that you've put food in your mouth. So imagine the power of eating the right foods,
the right combinations of foods at the right times and the impact that those can have on
your brain.
So mechanisms of mood. Well mood is very complex, it occurs in many, by a sort of a synergy
of changes in several different parts of the brain and the neurotransmitters are sort of
the connectors, the chemicals that connect and communicate from one brain cell to the
next; in fact from one cell in the central nervous system to every other cell in the
central nervous system. But we're talking about mood, what goes on in the brain.
Serotonin, now there are a number of different neurotransmitters, we're going to focus on
serotonin today because it is the most abundant neurotransmitter that influences mood, it
is also probably one of the most well understood. You know serotonin by anti-depressant drugs
today, they always are trying to raise serotonin levels in the brain.
Shift to what is the building block of serotonin in the brain? Tryptophan. Tryptophan is an
amino acid, comes in from protein, it is essential in the diet, we cannot manufacture enough
of it in the body, it is the building block of serotonin in the brain; it's found in the
blood, the precursor to serotonin. Now we know that tryptophan is essential to raise
serotonin levels in the brain because if we deplete the body from tryptophan then serotonin
levels drop. And all this kind of connection is important because what I talk about is
evidence based, meaning that it's scientifically supported; the data are there for the information
that I'm giving you here today and what's written in The Good Mood Diet.
[pause]
So if tryptophan is what is required to raise serotonin levels in the brain, it is the building
block, then one would assume that a very high protein diet should raise your mood. In most
instances diets that are very high in protein and very low in carb do the opposite. You
wouldn't wanna work for anybody who was on a very high protein low carb diet, you wouldn't
wanna be married to anybody that was on that diet, you wouldn't wanna have to partner with
anybody at work on that diet because it actually lowers serotonin levels in most people. People
become angry, aggressive, depressed, poor coping skills, all of those happen yet we
have an abundance of tryptophan. Why?
[pause]
Well --
[pause]
amazingly, and I always borrow a phrase, it's the carbohydrates stupid, [chuckles] is what
you'll read in The Good Mood Diet because in fact it is the carbohydrate in your diet
that allows tryptophan to cross the blood brain barrier and enter the brain. Now you
know this, you know this in your gut, you know this fundamentally. What ingredient,
what single food makes you feel really good really fast?
>>male #1: Sugar.
[pause]
Sugar, right. So don't ever let anybody tell you that sugar doesn't make you feel good.
Now we're gonna talk about why too much sugar is on my Feel-Bad Foods list, but understand
the science and why in the short term sugar makes you feel so good. Now you know it's
very simple, it's very rapidly digested and enters the blood stream. When carbohydrate
levels go up, when blood sugar goes up, insulin, the hormone that helps take blood sugar out
of the blood and transfer it into the muscles or to the liver, when insulin goes up as well,
it stimulates a whole separate cascade of biochemical events that actually take out
all the other competing amino acids in the blood stream that compete with tryptophan
to cross the blood brain barrier and they leave tryptophan out there all alone.
There are seven other amino acids that resemble tryptophan. Those seven other amino acids
compete for the same receptor molecule, the same usher that takes tryptophan into the
brain. And so when you have a very high protein diet you have a lot of those competitive amino
acids around and those compete with tryptophan and so a proportionately lower amount of tryptophan
gets into the brain.
If, on the other hand, you could remove those competitive amino acids, which is what happens
when you eat carbohydrate and amazingly it takes those amino acids and shuttles them
to the muscle cell where we want the muscle to recover, repair, and grow after exercise,
since we're all active. It leaves tryptophan out there with little competition to enter
into the brain and raise serotonin levels; this happens in an infinitesimal, small amount
of time.
And so the sugar that you eat raises of course not only serotonin, there are number of other
neurotransmitters that are raised as well that are too much for me to go into today.
But when it comes to raising mood, carbohydrate plays an enormously important role; so important
that diets that are lower than 40 percent of calories as carbohydrate have been shown
to be depressing, literally depressing.
So ideally we should eat carbohydrate and protein together; it is the ideal fuel and
recovery combination for muscles, it is also a beautiful combination for the brain, giving
you the tryptophan that you need and enhancing the movement of tryptophan into the brain
to raise serotonin levels.
Well so I said sugar makes you feel good. Well then why do we keep telling people to
stop eating so much sugar? Well this is why, and we've had a discussion sort of nationally
about insulin resistance. That's something that if you have a lot of sugar over a long
period of time and you start to gain weight, can happen. So over a long period of time
you can develop insulin resistance and move slowly into the beginning of Type II diabetes.
However, that's long way off.
What also happens when you eat a lot of sugar frequently is that it is considered a stress
by the body. When your blood sugar levels rapidly rise insulin meets it and lowers it
and rises again and lowers it; your body responds with a stress response to that. One of the
results of the stress hormone response is protein degradation, breaking down proteins.
This is kind of part of that fight or flight response, we're talking about a very short
term, acute response to a stress.
And so if you begin to degrade proteins you are flooding your bloodstream once again with
lots and lots of protein and lowering the serotonin level. There you have to go back
and eat more sugar to then help move the tryptophan into the brain and so you get on, in a very
short period of time, within four to five days, maximum seven days, your body will begin
using other neurotransmitters as well to force a craving for more and more sugar so that
you can raise the serotonin levels over and over again.
So in addition to the long term stress that lots of sugar puts on your body this is a
very acute short term stress and it's why you begin on a daily basis to want more and
more sugar because you want to raise your mood. It's a biological function, a biological
urge. This is not about do you have the willpower, this is about making the choices that alter
your physiological responses.
So we go back to the foods that were served in the cafeteria today; slow digesting, whole
carbohydrate, sources rich in carbohydrate. So of course whole grains, fruits, vegetables,
beans, those are all wonderful sources of slowly digesting carbohydrates that keep you
even all day long, keep your blood sugar levels even.
[pause]
What types of proteins? There are lots of different proteins, they are mostly all absolutely
wonderful. I have some favorites.
Now fish is on here obviously for the fish oil that we will get to in a moment, but there's
new data on fish protein in and of itself showing that fish protein may help the body,
we call it, mobilize the fat stores in the abdomen. Meaning that no you can't spot reduce
by eating loads of fish, but that fish protein can enhance, the fat cells in our abdomen
can be different than some of the fat cells in the rest of the body, and so if you can
help turn those on and get them more active, which is what fish protein has been shown
to do, along with the fish oils, then you can hopefully reduce this midsection that
increases the risk of disease over the years. So that is a great benefit of fish and we
will talk about the fish oils in a moment.
You're gonna see milk up there. I am a very big advocate of milk and this is why: milk
is an ideal good mood food; it's carbohydrate and protein together. The protein in milk
is high in tryptophan, the protein in milk is also high in an amino acid, leucine, that
is the trigger for protein metabolism so after you exercise you enhance your recovery. And
as I said it has the natural carbohydrate lactose in there. It also has Vitamin D which
is required for the manufacture of serotonin. So there's a natural combination of nutrients
in milk that is a true good mood food.
Eggs. Well we're gonna talk about the yolk and it's there and that'll be in the next
section on fats, but of course egg protein is an ideal protein highly biologically available.
Now turkey most people nod their head and they say, "Yeah I've heard turkey's high in
tryptophan and I know that at Thanksgiving I get really sleepy after my Thanksgiving
meal. It must be from that tryptophan." And I say, "Oh it was probably the 2,000 calories
and five glasses of wine that you had --
[laughter]
[chuckles] at your Thanksgiving meal [laughs] not necessarily the tryptophan, but yes turkey
is high in tryptophan." And I said, "Does it make you sleepy in the evening?"
Well in fact we have 16 different receptor molecules in the brain that recognize serotonin
and so those turn on and off on the light/dark cycle. So based on Circadian rhythms during
the day serotonin makes you feel alert, awake, you're calm but sort of alive and ready to
go and keeps your mood elevated. When it gets dark outside in the evening serotonin helps
your body quiet down, relax, and get ready for rest. And so you can make use of that,
you can what I say put your food to work for you. If you have dairy or milk in the evening
you can help turn on that relaxation cycle.
Now if I said to you, "Have a glass of milk in the evening," most people would add –
>>male #2: Cookies.
>>Dr. Susan Kleiner: [chuckles] cookies right. So I like to just add the chocolate or the
cocoa powder right to the milk, heat it up, and there's nothin' wrong with having a little
bit of cocoa powder it makes everything taste better. And so a hot cocoa in the evening
is actually part of the Good Mood plan, helping you rest and get ready for bed in the evening.
Fat. We have had a horrible fat phobia in this country and what we are learning is turning
nutrition advice on its head.
[pause]
Not only are diets that are lower than 25 percent of calories depressing, lower than
25 percent of calories from fat are in the diet we have a lowered ability to cope with
stress and increased incidents of anxiety and anger. So when I'm out on the road I wish
I had some kinda avocado or somethin' to hand out to people [chuckles] while I'm drivin'
around on Seattle roads 'cause people are pretty angry and aren't coping very well with
stress.
But one of the things that you can do is begin to enjoy the high performance fats that we
must have in our diets. The data is now showing that these fats are so critically important,
including fish oil, they are so critically important to the health of the brain and the
brain cell that if you do not have adequate fats in the diet the brain will slow down
fat metabolism, meaning you will not burn optimum amounts of fats in the body. So if
you are on a very low fat diet and you're trying to lose weight you won't lose the fat
that you can. And if you are on a diet restricted in calories you may lose more lean tissue
than you want rather than preferentially burning the fat. With the goal of raising the whole
amount of fat that's available proportionately for the brain cell membrane and the entire
central nervous system that is lined with fat, the brain will turn off fat burning.
So high performance fats.
[pause]
Certainly avocados, olive oil, nuts, seeds. When we talk about extra virgin olive oil
one of the great benefits of extra virgin olive oil is that it contains a compound that's
identical to ibuprofen. When you get that peppery finish that makes you kind of go [ ] if
you ever dip in extra virgin olive oil itself, that compound that gives you that little burning
sensation, that peppery finish, is actually a very powerful anti-inflammatory. And so
extra virgin olive oil is special compared to all the different olive oils.
Fish oil. Fish oil is unique, flax seed oil, hemp seed, none of those replace the two compounds
found in fish oil or marine oils, DHA and EPA those are required in the brain. ALA,
the third Omega fat which is a great anti-inflammatory found in much of the plant kingdom is not
a substitute no matter what you've been told. On the best day with the best genetic possibilities
when you've eaten the best diet, a maximum of five to maybe ten percent of that ALA will
be converted to DHA or EPA. So the body just does not have the capacity to replace it.
DHA is absolutely essential to the function of a brain cell; it is what keeps the inflammatory
processes in the brain cell in check. Inflammation and oxidation are a side effect of being alive;
we all have it going on. In the brain and in the body we have systems to help fight
this all the time. The system that is critical in the brain depends on the Omega-3 fat DHA.
[pause]
Because fat is so essential to the mass of the brain, 60 percent of the mass of the brain
is fat, so you must have fat in your diet. Because the composition of a brain cell membrane
so depends on DHA and on fat, if DHA isn't around it will replace DHA with another fat;
that fat can function structurally but it is not a functional anti-inflammatory compound
so that inflammation proceeds unchecked.
When we have low levels of DHA in the body brain cells become, neuroscientists call it
rigid or not plastic. We wanna have fluidity in our cells and when inflammation proceeds
in the brain we lose that fluidity of those cells, communication slows down, neurotransmitters
and electrical impulses cannot move smoothly, cognitive function is lower, memory is decreased,
mood is lowered. People who have low levels of DHA in their diet, people who are low fish
eaters, have a significantly increased risk of depression, not to mention all the other
degenerative diseases of the brain, and many other certainly heart disease and other diseases
in the body.
We are finding that these compounds are critically important. If you don't supplement with anything,
you must supplement with DHA and EPA. If don't want to supplement and you love fish, five
fish meals a week will get you to the amount of recommended fish oil at this point which
is about 1,000 milligrams total every day. So this is critically important.
Now fish oil has also been shown to enhance weight loss; again you're getting the brain
in a more healthy foundational situation so that it will allow for fat metabolism to proceed
in the body.
Eggs. Who's throwin' their egg yolks down the drain?
[pause]
One, two –
[laughter]
I know there's a lot more of you or you're not eating eggs at all.
I want you to know there has never been a study, never been a study, that showed that
an egg yolk a day raises cholesterol levels in healthy people, never been a study. And
now we have four studies that have shown that an egg yolk a day does not raise cholesterol
levels in healthy people. And I would take the big step and say you could probably make
it two egg yolks a day in a healthy person, but it also depends on what else you're eating
in your diet. Now The Good Mood Diet with an egg yolk a day stays within the American
Heart Association guidelines of 300 milligrams of cholesterol, dietary cholesterol a day.
Why am I telling you to eat egg yolks? Well once we get this whole Vitamin D thing straightened
out, Vitamin D right now if you haven't heard of it you're not Googling [laughs] because
it's everywhere and particularly here in the Northwest it is a problem. We have low Vitamin
D nutriture, we don't get much sunshine, and low Vitamin D intake is highly associated
with numerous issues including depression, by the way.
Once we get that taken care of the next nutrient coming down the pike is choline. Choline is
a B vitamin, it is half of the most abundant neurotransmitter in the body, acetylcholine,
responsible for every thought and every movement that we have.
[pause]
In the United States ever since we started dumping egg yolks down the drain we consume
somewhere around 30 percent of our requirement for choline. It is dramatic, there is now
numerous studies on choline, there are studies looking not only at total health but certainly
at brain function. The National Institutes of Mental Health are supplementing people
with degenerative diseases of the brain with two phospholipids found in egg yolks: phosphatidylcholine
and phosphatidylserine and have shown a slowing of the rate of progression of Parkinson's
disease and Alzheimer's disease. And studies in 18 year old boys starting college have
shown enhanced memory when they were supplemented.
So we're at both ends of the spectrum with this, it is a huge problem. If you eat just
an egg yolk a day you get about half of your choline need for the day. And then we find
choline in other foods as well. So it is very important if you are not allergic to eggs
you should be eating an egg yolk a day. An easy way is to boil 'em up at the beginning
of the week and just pop a hard boiled egg in your mouth everyday whatever you do, and
you will find that now you've got another great easy source of protein. And so add that
egg to breakfast and enjoy it because we have cut out a foundational food in our diets.
[pause]
So I want you to think about what you need to eat, not what you can't eat next. Okay,
I'm gonna say that again. Think about what you need to eat, not what you can't eat next.
Americans focus on what they can't eat; it is so depressing [chuckles]. Food is such
an intimate part of our lives, we should be looking forward to eating. We share it with
friends, we share it with our lovers, we share it with our families, we share it at work,
it is a primitive part of our psyche to share food and break bread with another person.
And so when we are more concerned when we're at a party of fighting with the brownie on
the table than we are with talking to the cute guy or girl next to you, that's a real
problem, you're missing out on life, you're limiting your horizons. Focus on what you
need to eat, not what you can't eat next.
Now I have a great story to tell you with Matt Hasselbeck's permission. I worked with
him a number of years ago when he was getting injured a lot and he needed to pack on some
pounds. And so this is just an illustration of how if we crave foods, if we don't feed
ourselves well, our brain will force us to eat certain things that cravings and desires
and what feel like uncontrollable urges with food often can be purely physiological drives
that can be altered if you change the way you eat.
Matt was known as the ice cream boy in the Seahawks training facility. When I walked
in the first day to work with him all the guys were snickering. And I walked in and
I thought, "God is my fly down, I mean why is everybody laughin'?" I get down and I sit
down with he and his lovely wife and I said, "What's gonna on? Why was everybody laughing
when I walked in?" "Oh," he said, "they've all taken bets on me workin' with you and
who's gonna win the dietician or me." I said, "Why?" "Well," he says, "let me tell you what
I eat." So he told me what he ate during the day and then when he got home in the evening
he'd eat about a quart or more of Haagen-Dazs. And when he would get on the plane to go to
an away game, on the plane for the return he would have five or six Dove bars.
[laughter]
So was this an outta control athlete just taking advantage of the position that he was
in and how active he was or was this some fundamental physiological need for ice cream?
Well after I talked with Matt he told me that during the day he ate around 1,500 calories
worth of food and he trained at least three times during the day, sometimes four, he'd
do his morning workout, his strength program in the training room, they had the team training
at some point in the morning, he'd have quarterback skills and drills, they'd train again in the
afternoon and so by the time he'd get home he said, "About 1,500 calories." Well the
guy needed 5,000 calories a day just to maintain his weight. So when he got home he was starving.
What did the brain say? "Immediate fuel. I need structural component, I need to raise
my mood, and I need fuel, sugar and fat." What better thing than ice cream?
So I put together a program for Matt that gave him around 3,000, 3,500 calories during
the day, much of that in liquid nutrition using smoothies and if you ever see my book
Power Eating it is packed with recovery drinks and smoothies; it is a very important part
of an active person's life whether or not you're burnin' 5,000 calories a day or 1,600
calories a day we are runnin' around a lot and liquid smoothie packed nutrition is a
great convenience.
So for Matt he had between food and smoothies around 3,500 calories a day. When he got home
he had a really nice dinner and of course I still had about I don't know cup and a half
of ice cream in his diet.
And people say to me, "You kept ice cream in it?" Well yeah I mean he could eat 5,000
calories a day and if I gave the guy who was eatin' that much ice cream a diet with no
ice cream he'd say, "Hey, doc you're a nice lady but I'm not gonna follow this diet."
Right? [chuckles] So we kept the ice cream in there in the evening.
After about a week, 10 days, Matt called and he said, "Hey doc, is there a healthier snack
I could eat at night. I don't even want that ice cream anymore."
So with all the permission in the world his body was well fed, his brain was well fed,
he didn't want that anymore. It's such a great illustration of how potent food is in the
choices that you make.
So that if today say you had your lunch and at lunch you ate all these great good mood
foods and then you went and you I don't know the chocolate chip cookies are your absolute
favorite, there is nothing as good as those chocolate chip cookies, and you had a couple
chocolate chip cookies for dessert and while you're sitting here you've been beatin' yourself
up about eating those chocolate chip cookies. And so you go, "You know what I ate those
chocolate chip cookies," and you go back to your desk and it gets to be around I don't
know four o'clock and you're startin' to get hungry and you go, "Nope, no snack because
I ate those chocolate chip cookies." And then you get home and it's dinner time and you
say, "Well I'm pretty hungry but oh I can only eat a salad because I ate those chocolate
chip cookies." And then as it gets on toward the evening you're getting really hungry and,
"I shouldn't eat anything," and you're gettin' really anxious and really stressed and now
anything that doesn't run across the counter is fair game.
[laughter]
Right? So now if there's chocolate chip cookies or there's chocolate cake, who knows what
is in the house, you're eating that and half a dozen other things as well.
Now you really feel bad and you go to sleep and you don't sleep well and you wake up in
the morning and you say, "Oh God I can't eat breakfast now, I ate all that at night and
everything that Dr. Kleiner said, the heck with it. I feel so bad I'm not, I can't follow
anything, I'm just a loser."
Well if you had eaten those chocolate chip cookies and you just loved 'em and you came
in and you heard me speak and I say to you, "No you've really gotta eat every two and
a half to three hours because physiologically you're blood sugar drops whether you eat tofu
or a chocolate chip cookie you're gonna get hungry. So plan what you need to eat in two
and a half to three hours."
And so you go back and you go, "Oh yeah, well a good snack let's see protein. I can have
some nuts, that has healthy fat and some protein, and I can have a piece of fruit, that's a
really good carb, or I can have a piece of cheese, that's a great combination. And now
I have energy to finish my day and go workout."
And you get home and you feel great and you eat your healthy dinner and then you have
your hot cocoa in the evening or if it's kinda hot out, if we don't have air conditioning
we're gonna have cold milk, cold chocolate milk. And you sleep really well and you go
to sleep and you wake up and all of a sudden you've slept so well, you woke up an hour
earlier, maybe you can go for a walk. And you come into work and you're on your way.
And so think like an athlete, don't rewind the tape over and over and over again. It
is paralyzing. No matter how many times you rewind that tape about having eaten those
chocolate chip cookies you will never not have eaten those cookies even though we're
really hoping that one time we won't have eaten it, it's never gonna happen. So forget
the past, it doesn't matter what you ate a moment ago, it is absolutely irrelevant.
Think about what you need to eat, whatever you ate you ate, I hope you enjoyed it, it
should have been wonderful, it should have just delighted you. Now think about what you
need to eat next; a snack, a meal, a hot cocoa, whatever it is that's how you stay on the
good mood food highway.
[pause]
So there is a list of Feel-Great Foods in the book and that's because all publishers
want something that magazine editors will stick in a magazine, and so I had to have
a list. [chuckles] You have to have lists, you will see every diet book has lists because
that's what gets into the magazines.
In fact we could fill this room with every food in the world, they all make us feel good,
but some foods make us feel better than other foods in fact, and some foods when we eat
them too frequently as I said with sugar, can make us feel bad.
There's a special group of foods, Anti-inflammatory Foods, and this is worked fundamentally into
the diet, this list is not in the book, but all the foods that are promoted and we talk
about fundamentally this is a big goal when you eat is to eat these foods rich in color
and high performance fats, all of these herbs, are great sources to help reduce inflammation
in the body.
And then the Feel-Bad foods. Well it's a short list fortunately, but they can take up a lot
of our diet. Alcohol, need I say more, it's a central nervous system depressant. [chuckles]
So, you know, in a small amount it can fit into The Good Mood Diet but don't let anybody
tell you that it's a health beverage.
[laughter]
The alcohol companies, the wine companies, I kind of feel like the U.S. Government may
be in cahoots with them as well, really promoting the use of alcohol as a way to get healthy.
In a country that is two-thirds overweight and more than a third obese at this point,
this is a horribly irresponsible stance to take, not to mention the abuse of alcohol.
But the addition of these calories, the slowing of the metabolic rate, the influence that
it has on your physical performance for many days afterwards, it is not a sharp tool to
add to your diet.
If you feel that you are stressed think about the other things that you could add to your
diet before adding alcohol. Now you will see in a moment how it fits into the diet, but
remember it will slow your metabolism, it will slow your cognitive function. For every,
if you have three to five drinks, depending on your size, it takes 72 hours to return
to full physical performance. 72 hours, this is from the University of Notre Dame. So be
aware of what drinking will do.
Caffeine, now caffeine opposite from alcohol, is a stimulant. We know it wakes us up, it
makes us alert, it makes us feel pretty good, it's a performance enhancer. It lowers our
rate of perceived exertion, meaning that when you have a little caffeine before you workout
you don't perceive that you're training as hard as you are so you'll push a little harder
so you get a better training effect, so it will enhance performance.
There's a prudent use of caffeine prior to exercise if you are a caffeine user. Obviously
I don't want you to start using caffeine. Be aware that you're gonna, you hear a lot
of hype about energy drinks; know that a Red Bull, now I'm not promoting it I just want
people to be informed. Yes we are down the road from Starbucks headquarters, but a tall
latte has three times the amount of caffeine as a Red Bull. So just be an informed consumer.
There's a lot of bashing going on right now and there's a lot of good reason for it and
there's a lot of things in energy drinks that are worse than what we're drinkin' in coffee
and coffee has a great anti-inflammatory effect, an anti-oxidant effect. We can go on and on,
but if caffeine is your issue that you're focusing on be informed. And I don't feel
that coffee should be let off the hook when we are talkin' about the amount of caffeine
in energy drinks.
Caffeine in large doses can give you a rebound effect and you know this, everyone has gone
through this at some point unless they really are not a caffeine user. And that is it makes
you feel really great when you have one cup and then two and three and four and then you
start to feel bad. And in the afternoon when you're using caffeine to keep you aware and
alert rather than The Good Mood Diet or gettin' out and goin' for a little walk or drinking
some water because you're probably somewhat dehydrated, the caffeine makes you feel worse
and worse and worse; lowers your focus, decreases your attention time. So be very aware of that.
Fried foods, fatty meats, fatty snack foods, those are promoting inflammation in the body
and our goal is to reduce the inflammation. Just like I talked about in the brain it's
goin' on in the whole body. Fundamentally all of these foods promote inflammation and
heart disease, cancer, etcetera. And so if you have a lot of inflammation in the body
you don't feel good.
And refined sugars and starches we really already talked about.
So very briefly and I'm not gonna spend much time on this 'cause I wanna give a little
bit of time for questions, is that the diet does have a strategy and there's two weeks
of menus in there. The first two weeks we call the Good Mood Accelerator. I ask ya give
me two weeks. You can practically hold your breath for two weeks; two weeks is a really
short period of time. You could probably not leave the building here at Google for two
weeks and not really notice it. [laughs] So give me two weeks and really clean yourself
out; eliminate the Feel-Bad Foods.
[pause]
If you want to lose weight it is an outcome of The Good Mood Diet, it is not the goal.
In fact weight loss is a long term goal of changing short little habits: drinking more
water, starting to get exercise, eating more greens, doing all the little things where
on a daily basis you can look back and pat yourself on the back and be successful.
Weight loss takes so long that we don't feel successful, we feel like a failure and so
you stop doing all these other things that have on a daily basis a true impact on your
health and performance. And so those are the goals.
When you do all of those things right if you need to lose weight, you will. In fact my
clients know when they come to me that when they get everything right the first week,
when they finally are doing their real regular workout, they're hydrating the way they're
supposed to, they're eating everything they need to eat, at the end of the week they gain
weight.
[pause]
So don't look at the scale. Those are long term outcomes. Now over time using a scale
can be useful and helpful for monitoring what's going on with us. Think about how you feel,
get very connected with the food that you eat.
And then after the first phase you can add these kind of fun little foods, whoops, fun
little foods back but you don't have to; there's no requirement to doing it.
And I talk about knowing the added sugar in your diet; be aware of where sugar is added
to your diet. When you pick up a box of Shredded Wheat and you look at the nutrition label
there's no sugar, it says zero sugar; wheat doesn't contain sugar, grains don't contain
sugar. So any box that you pick up that's cereal that has sugar in it means that it
was added by the manufacturer and don't think it's from the two slices of little strawberries
that they put in there; there's like two strawberries in a whole box. So it's sugar added. Be informed.
Milk, an eight ounce, and I have a whole section of this in the book, an eight ounce cup of
milk contains 12 grams of sugar, naturally lactose, the natural carbohydrate in milk.
Look at carton of yogurt it will have, if you take plain yogurt it will be slightly
higher because the fluid has been taken out, the solids are more concentrated, you have
13 grams of sugar in a plain carton of yogurt. A flavored carton of yogurt, using sugar,
typically has a minimum of 26 grams, 30 grams. You can start to figure out where the added
sugar is in your diet by reading the labels. Every four grams of sugar is a teaspoon.
[pause]
Every four grams of sugar is a teaspoon.
So I have, if you guys can come up with something less dogmatic sounding than the 10 Commandments
I would love it, but so far I haven't, email me if you come up with something better, but
these are the 10 Commandments and they are a great guideline.
First and foremost it is all about how you feel, think about what you need to eat, not
what you can't eat.
Next, always combine starches with protein and/or healthy fat. Around exercise we leave
the fat out or to a very small minimum because it slows digestion; you don't wanna slow digestion
around exercise. Nourish yourself before and after exercise, and every 2 1/2 to 3 hours
all day long.
I love dairy three times, morning when you wake up, after exercise 'cause it is such
a potent recovery beverage both for hydration and muscle and mental performance, and in
the evening when you wanna rest.
An egg yolk I say or soy every day. Whole soy contains lecithin which also contains,
which has the choline in it.
Nuts every day.
Fish five times a week.
Of course hydration plays an enormous role here; five to six cups of water every day
in addition to all of your beverages, and that is a science based number and we can
talk about where that comes from at another time; may be in the book.
Of course a variety of fruits and vegetables; this is foundational, fundamental. Don't just
eat carrots and apples --
[pause]
and bananas; that's what Americans eat, carrots, apples, and bananas. Spread out [chuckles],
try something new. It is peach season in Washington State. The peaches, half a peach is like the
size of a whole peach, they're each a pound I think, they are fabulous, you can eat them
raw, you can throw them in a smoothie, you can put them in your yogurt, you can make
a pie, you can bake a peach, you can grill a peach, you can broil a peach. Enjoy the
stone fruit this time of year.
And of course I'd be lying to you if I said that it was all about diet. Diet creates the
foundation in your body and your mind so that you can have the energy physically and mentally
to do the other things in life that are so important to making a full rounded, happy
life. And so exercise, rest, relationships, creativity, and spirituality.
And in fact it takes action to have satisfaction. Physiologically you must move to have a sense
of satisfaction. So that is neurochemistry of the brain tied to the movement of the body.