You did it. Yes! You solved a gigantic problem, one you may not have known you had. I am so happy for you because the work you’ve invested in healing the brain body will pay dividends for the rest of your life. Regardless of the symptoms you brought at the beginning of the book, you can now go forward with the brain body powerfully alive and the connection intact.
When the brain body is out of whack, life is hard and confusing, even brutal. It can turn us into zombies going through the motions of life. As you may recall from before you began the Brain Body Diet, the problem of brain/body dysfunction can feel daunting and scary, at times overwhelming—popping a prescription pill may seem like the right answer, or at least the easier answer. German philosopher and cultural critic Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”1 But Nietzsche was dying of syphilis, a terrible infection of the brain body.
Sometimes what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. The brain/body problems described in the book don’t necessarily kill you, but they will weaken you—your health, resolve, clarity, joy, calm, energy to shop for and cook nourishing food, social ties, sense of purpose and meaning. By now you understand that the simple daily lifestyle choices outlined in the book, starting with diet, work better than any prescription.
Lifestyle medicine is the most effective solution to the brain/body dysfunction that we face as women. Your task as you go forward is to keep up the self-directed neuroplasticity—that is, the formation, growth, and development of new brain cells regulated by the behaviors under our own control. You can pick one of your favorite steps from the Brain Body Diet and keep going at it. The practices in this book are designed to activate self-directed neuroplasticity. Keep working your favorite practice and let it work you.
You are never too old for self-directed neurogenesis. As long as you practice it regularly each day, you can perform self-directed neuroplasticity until the day you die. For example, every day I go on a walking meditation with my dog (here). Before I go to bed, I perform a forward bend and hold it for about three minutes (here). I perform high-intensity interval training four times per week (here). These practices create a loop of integrity, of taking in the good, and are now habits. Over time, the emphasis you place on your favorite brain body practices will aggregate into a habit and, eventually, a durable brain/body union.
We all need help. This book is designed to help you reconnect the brain body so you feel whole, no longer at war, no longer full of toxins that cause the brain body to disengage, no longer feeling flabby and wondering why nothing works, no longer depleted after having kids (however long ago), no longer wondering if you’re starting to get Alzheimer’s. My hope is that this final chapter adds further motivation, like wind at your back, as you move forward on the path of healing. Over the years, I’ve learned that staying motivated is a process. Think of it as a hybrid car that goes far on a tank of gas. You don’t need a full tank to keep driving the car; you simply need to watch the gauge and not run out of fuel. Similar to the hybrid, the process is regenerative—driving the vehicle generates more energy, just as the benefits of the Brain Body Diet will keep you motivated to stay on the path. The weight loss, clarity, peace, equanimity, happiness, and mental acuity will energize you and keep you motivated, even more so than when you began.
In this final chapter, I want you to take a moment to connect to your own drive for change. That drive can only come from you, not me. As you consider your own drive for changing the brain body, I want you to praise your success to date and accept any of your weaknesses, false starts, backslides, or plateaus—all in an atmosphere of collaboration rather than confrontation, judgment, or belittling.
Sometimes a difficult experience brings you to a book like Brain Body Diet: a scary diagnosis, a line you drew with your weight, feeling unable to get out of bed in the morning, forgetting a password or a child’s name, stressing out over something you know is minor and not worth it, seeing your kid gain weight, a hospitalization, a family member with Alzheimer’s disease. Whatever it is, there’s one question to answer.
What Do You Want?
When it comes to the brain body, I know what I want. I want to be that woman who sings, gardens, skips with her grandchildren, loves deeply and without regret, causes trouble, protests inequities and injustices, writes books, stays at her ideal body weight set point, teaches yoga, and keeps expanding her soul. My memory sharp as a tack, mind clear and focused, eyes sparkling, energy buoyant. Until about age one hundred, maybe longer, similar to my great-grandmother Mud, who died peacefully in her sleep at age ninety-seven. Mud practiced most of the Brain Body Protocol before the term functional medicine was born.
I don’t want to settle for the default. I see the default setting in Jane, one of my patients mentioned in the last chapter with poor short-term memory. She gets little exercise, drinks too much wine, and eats bread and pasta every day. Jane eats three meals per day with two snacks, starting at 6 a.m. with a mocha, and ending late with dinner around 7 p.m. High blood pressure and inflammation have caused severe cerebral atrophy, which showed up on an MRI of her brain. We are working to reverse these problems—with intermittent fasting, mild ketosis, yoga, supplements, and a low dose of bioidentical estrogen and progesterone, but it’s easier to fix these issues ten or twenty years before symptoms begin.
I see the default in many women in their sixties and older when they are addicted to sugar, are anxious or depressed, and can’t seem to hear or accept what would make them well—the realignment of brain body. They have shrinking brains, a result of brain/body breakdown over decades, and, consequently, shrinking personalities and personal power. In their seventies, they are at a time in life when I would hope they would be enlivening and expanding. They have more free time than ever to make a difference in the world, but they are literally shrinking before my eyes.
No one has to live this way. Certainly I want a different fate, and I hope by now that you do, too. It’s actually a choice, a choice that you make starting in your thirties, forties, and fifties, with downstream effects in later middle age and beyond.
Now it’s your turn. What do you want as you get older? Depressed with a vacant stare and foggy brain at a nursing home, chock-full of dysbiosis and inflammation? Or engaged, happy, calm, and sharp, well into your nineties?
Nietzsche wrote something more applicable to brain body: “If you know the why, you can live any how.” This quote is much more relevant to finishing the Brain Body Diet and moving on with life in a more balanced state. You too can live any how, including the sometimes difficult Advanced Protocols listed in the preceding chapters. Once you finish the Brain Body Diet, you know that this is a life plan—a prescription for the rest of your life to keep your brain body in balance. Repeat the protocol whenever symptoms arise, like a rising body weight, brain fog, addictive tendencies, worry, burnout or depression, or memory loss. Add in one or more steps from the Advanced list. You have the “how,” and when you stay connected to your “why,” you have an impeccable brain/body circuit for current and future health and homeostasis.
Your Choice Going Forward
You’ve learned in this book about the choices you have regarding the broken seven, the key conditions that result from brain/body breakdown, including toxin buildup and brain trash, a rising body weight set point, brain fog, addiction, anxiety, depression, and memory loss. The good news is that you can apply your brain to repair the broken seven and reconnect the brain and body into a cohesive whole. Hopefully, I’ve empowered you to apply your brain to solve these problems that are so prevalent in middle-aged women.
You are not stuck with the brain you have. The brain is malleable: it can keep growing, learning, storing new memories, and changing itself and the function of the body, often regardless of your age and previous deficits. That’s the promise and benefit of neuroplasticity, which you can promote if you regularly remove brain trash, commit to the correct set point, and follow the other recommendations in this book. You want to keep your brain’s synapses expanding and forming new connections throughout your whole life. That will keep you in your right mind.
Sometimes, the body and brain break down in their communication, leaving you with no choice but to pay attention, as I was forced to do after my concussion. The main problem we face is that the brain/body connection is extremely vulnerable to assaults from the environment—the sleep you skip, the sugar you eat, the metals stored in your bones, the wrong microbes you feed—and the inflammation that results. Out of the broken seven, toxins are the most influential when it comes to brain/body health. I used to think of the brain as a data processing machine, but now I think of it as a living entity, adapting and changing in response to the environment and improving with age and strategic environmental cues.
Whether your problem is brain trash, weight, brain fog, addiction, anxiety, depression, or memory loss, or some combination, as you’ve seen in the preceding pages, the Brain Body Diet can prevent and reverse harm to your brain body. We can even grow into the broken places with more wisdom. That’s what I wish for you. When you heal the brain/body wounds, you become stronger than before. Jill Bolte Taylor is a great example.
Stroke of Insight
Let me tell you an interesting story about Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroscientist performing research at Harvard University, who studied some of the issues regarding the brain/body connection.
At age thirty-seven, Jill had a research opportunity few people would want: a ringside seat to her own massive stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain.
On the morning of December 10, 1996, Jill woke up and felt pain behind her left eye, as if she had eaten an ice cream cone too quickly.2 Then as she looked at her hands, she felt dissociated from them—like they were claws. She lost her balance and ability to process information. She later learned that a blood vessel in her brain had exploded. Over four hours, she watched as brain functions shut down one by one: motion, speech, memory, and self-awareness, until she could not walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life. She became an infant in a woman’s body.
“How many brain scientists have been able to study the brain from the inside out? I’ve gotten as much out of this experience of losing my left mind as I have in my entire academic career,” she described in her popular TED Talk. As her left hemisphere—the linear, methodical, categorizing, organizational side of the brain—shut down, her inner chatter ceased. Jill’s right brain took over, and she could tell that she was no longer the choreographer of her own life. The right hemisphere is more Zen. It thinks in pictures and learns kinesthetically, through movement. It is rooted in the present moment, tunes into mystery, and operates in more abstract and mystical realms. Two weeks after the stroke, surgeons removed a golf ball–sized clot that resulted from her hemorrhage.
Perhaps Jill thought her life as she knew it was over, which would be even worse than the default setting of a shrinking brain. It took Jill eight years to recover her ability to think, walk, and talk, but she came back stronger and happier than ever before. The stroke, on the left side of her brain, unleashed a torrent of creative energy from the right side of her brain. Jill was able to choose to respond with her previously neglected, virtually unrecognized right brain—a place of deep inner peace and loving compassion.
Jill is now the most peaceful she has ever been. When the left half of her brain went silent, she experienced a great gift: a deeply different understanding of who she is and knowledge that the world is filled with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people—people who could choose to respond from their right hemispheres at any time and be masters of their own neuroplasticity and neurogenesis.
After my concussion on the left side of my brain, the noise of my left brain got turned down, my ego deflated, and my spirit grew. I felt the peace, joy, and connection that Jill describes. I began listening more to my heart and allowing it to tell my brain what to do. In yoga, we talk about the default setting, part of the human condition, as the illusion of the fabricated mind—called maya in Sanskrit. Much of the illusion is separateness, thinking we are alone and separate, perceiving differences in people compared to ourselves—a left-brain tendency, versus perceiving the similarities and features that unify us.
In my medical practice, I see this illusion at the root of the thought patterns of addiction, anxiety, depression, fear (of memory loss, fatigue, brain fog, or other chronic conditions), and even weight gain. According to the Vedic concept of maya, things that appear to be present are not what they seem, yet we perceive our own illusions as real.3 Maya can lead to a distorted view of reality, and Jill’s stroke pierced the veil of her own illusion, an illusion that I shared before my own traumatic head injury.
Both Jill and I actively promoted neurogenesis in the service of greater balance between the left hemisphere—the logical, factual, and scientific side—and the right hemisphere—the intuitive, imaginative, and holistic side. We both became stronger at the broken places. And having experienced this peace, we both choose to work at retaining it, moment by moment and day by day. Jill adds: “It is liberating to know that I have the ability to choose a peaceful and loving mind (my right mind), whatever my physical or mental circumstances, by deciding to step to the right and bring my thoughts back to the present moment.”4 You, too, can choose to rewire your brain by making the choices outlined in this book until they become habitual. You can even grow your neurospirituality circuits along with your gray matter and, along the way, activate your right brain. That’s self-directed neuroplasticity at its best.
Of course, you don’t have to suffer a concussion or stroke to become happy, peaceful, integrative, and healed. As I slowly recovered from my fall, I learned I had to actively turn off my left hemisphere to create a new way of being in the world. It was an essential part of my own brain/body rehab.
Moving Forward
For most of you, the Brain Body Diet will provide you with a renewed brain/body connection that allows you to reclaim your health, and even create a health metamorphosis in forty days. For others, the Brain Body Protocols will provide the first few steps in the larger journey of discovering the brain/body link, but you will need to continue the protocols until symptoms abate, usually for twelve weeks or sometimes longer, and ideally work with a collaborative functional medicine clinician. The duration depends on the severity of your symptoms: the greater the severity, the longer the duration. Never forget that small steps taken consistently are the most impactful. Repeat the protocols if and when symptoms recur, like when you begin having trouble again with language retrieval or you gain five pounds and don’t know why.
Now that you’re aware of toxins, you’ll keep releasing them so they don’t become brain trash. And you’ll avoid future toxic exposures, since that’s easier than removing them. Keep eating plants—and a lot of them. Eating one to two pounds per day of vegetables is what works best: cruciferous vegetables such as cauliflower, broccoli, and Brussels sprouts, as they support your liver; dark green leafy vegetables such as lettuce, spinach, and kale; sulfur-containing onions and garlic. Aim for lots of colors and 35 to 50 grams of fiber per day to absorb toxins in your gut. Sweat more: spin, walk in the forest, do hot or warm yoga, or visit a sauna. Foster friendships with people who eat and live cleanly, so your genomes can upgrade together. Repeat the Brain Body Toxin Protocol (chapter 2) at least twice per year. We can’t rely on the old systems of our body to remove toxins behind the scenes because our bodies are overwhelmed. You’ve already made great progress in relieving your body burden; now you want to maintain your progress.
Let’s not lose sight of what we’ve learned. Unfortunately, the brain body is sometimes vulnerable, prone to being pulled out of balance by modern lifestyle choices and exposures. The seven Brain Body Protocols help us live in a high-performance state where the brain and body are allies. That means there are ongoing, rich, deep conversations occurring between brain/heart, brain/gut (including liver, microbiome, microbiota, immune system), brain/fat, brain/mitochondria, brain/muscles, and even brain/posture. Without those conversations, we can too easily fall back to that default setting that we agreed we’re not settling for. Remember too that you now have a comprehensive diet in your back pocket, not a restrictive and short-term means to an end, but more the ancient Greek version (diaita), a doctor-prescribed program of living that includes a personalized dietary regimen that you’ve just tested on yourself, as well as the important daily habits that help you govern and arbitrate your life—in short, the broader functional medicine protocol that allows you to keep brain body in homeostasis for the win.
This book is about telling the truth, the sometimes difficult truths about being female, middle-aged (forty-plus) and older. The truth is that it’s sometimes damn hard. Our hormones, like estrogen, drop, and our brains get overwhelmed. Metabolism slows down, yet appetite increases and weight climbs. We get more inflamed and feel beleaguered. If you chase the symptoms with medication, you are less likely to heal than if you chart a new path with the lifestyle medicine of the Brain Body Protocols.
Conventional medicine will keep prescribing a pill for every ill and tell you that lifestyle changes aren’t enough. That’s not what I’ve found as a leader in the functional medicine movement and practicing physician. Instead, it’s our only hope of a comprehensive solution. Lifestyle choices, starting with food, play a huge role in brain health and, by extension, brain body health. Together we need to raise the bar. We have a long way to go—please help spread the message by talking to your doctor and other health care professionals about the topics and evidence-based protocols in this book. Tell your loved ones that there is another way to handle the symptoms of brain/body disconnection. Share your own story of challenge and success with me on social media. Help me spread the word. Service is good for the brain body. Please help me get the best information out to people who still suffer and need a change.
Ultimately, I hope you go beyond fixing the broken seven to create a balanced, soulful existence. Balance between the left and right hemispheres, the sympathetic (fight-flight-freeze) and parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) nervous systems, and the HPA axis and endocrine glands, and balance in favor of positive thoughts and feelings about the brain body—that’s the restoration of homeostasis. The only way to achieve it is with comprehensive lifestyle medicine, not the next prescription pill or scientific breakthrough—but with the small daily choices that influence your ability to return to balance. Lifestyle factors powerfully affect brain body and vice versa. In fact, we can set ourselves free with the power of our brain/body connection and unleash that power to experience the peace and joy that Jill did. Leverage the malleability of your brain and become stronger at the broken places. Your body will be at one with itself. You will be healthier and feel more in sync with yourself. Your brain will learn to rewire itself to serve you and your highest purpose.