In my book Change Your Brain, Change Your Body, I wrote about how you can use your brain to improve the health of your heart, skin, energy, focus, memory, sexual function, and weight. In it, I revealed that based on our brain imaging work at the Amen Clinics with tens of thousands of patients from eighty different countries over the last twenty years, we have discovered two of the major secrets why most diets don’t work. And contrary to what you might think, they have nothing to do with your lack of desire to lose weight or your willpower. In fact, for some people the harder they try to lose weight, the worse it gets.
The first secret is that most weight problems occur between your ears. So stapling your stomach may, in fact, be working on the wrong organ. Not to mention that ten years after gastric banding surgery, the success rate is a disappointing 31 percent. It is your brain that pushes you away from the table telling you that you’ve had enough, and it is your brain that gives you permission to have that second bowl of ice cream, making you look and feel like a blob. If you want a better body, the first place to always start is by having a better brain.
The second secret, based on our brain imaging work, is that there is not just one brain pattern associated with being overweight; there are at least five different patterns. Giving everyone the same diet plan will make some people better and a lot of people worse. Knowing about your own specific brain will make losing weight and keeping it off a whole lot easier.
The response to these revelations has been amazing, and the book vaulted onto the New York Times bestseller list and stayed there for months. I knew people would respond to the message that their brain and weight are intricately connected and that if you boost your brain you can have a better body. What I wasn’t prepared for, though, was the deluge of desperate requests from readers asking for more specific help on how to use their brains to lose their bellies.
Ever since Change Your Brain, Change Your Body hit cyberspace and store shelves, people have been calling and e-mailing our clinics; posting comments on my blog; and talking to me at book signings, speaking engagements, and other events. What the overwhelming majority of them were begging for was a simple step-by-step brain-based program for weight loss.
The Amen Solution: The Brain Healthy Way to Lose Weight and
Keep It Off is that program.
I like to call it weight loss for thoughtful people. This is definitely not weight loss for dummies. As you know, there are a lot of dumb ways to try to lose weight. You may have even tried some of them. You know the kinds of methods I am talking about—the cookie diet, mustard diet, eat anything you want for an hour a day diet, cabbage soup diet, part-time diet (one day on, one day off), grapefruit diet, baby food diet, liquid diet, juice detox diet, coconut oil diet, ice cube diet, ice cream diet, grape diet, eat only one kind of food per meal diet, caveman diet, red wine diet, pizza diet, one-day diet, three-day diet, seven-day diet, peanut butter diet, and even the tapeworm diet (yes, some people are actually willing to swallow a tapeworm to try to lose weight). These types of gimmicky diets promise fast results—“Lose 10 pounds in seven days!”—but are more likely to set you up for failure in the long run.
My favorite story about dumb ways to lose weight came from one of my public television appearances. When I got to one of the stations for a live on-air appearance, a colleague I will call Jim, with whom I had worked before, looked thinner. I asked Jim what he was doing. He told me he was on the hCG diet. Human chorionic gonadotropin is a pregnancy hormone that, in conjunction with a 500-calorie-a-day diet (yikes!), has been reported to help people with rapid weight loss. The placebo-controlled studies with hCG have been less than impressive. Nonetheless, my friend did very well on the diet, losing 20 pounds. It is a diet you can only do for twenty-six days at a time because people seem to become immune to its effects. On the last day of the diet, as a way to celebrate his weight loss, Jim told me he called his favorite deep-dish pizza restaurant in Chicago and ordered two large deep-dish pizzas that he planned to gorge on over the weekend.
When he told me this story, I looked at him like he was the dumbest person on the planet. “You’re kidding me, right?” I asked as I looked into his eyes.
“No, why?” he replied defensively.
“You are acting like an alcoholic who just got out of rehab, and as a way to celebrate, you are going to get drunk!” Not exactly a sign of intelligent life.
When I saw him several months later, he had put back on all the weight he had lost.
The seeds for this book came from two projects at the Amen Clinics. First, a few years ago I wrote a twelve-week home study course for conquering anxiety and depression, using principles I had been teaching for years at the Amen Clinics. There is good scientific evidence that many people can improve their mood and decrease their level of anxiety by implementing specific strategies at home.
When I was on the follow-up calls with our ninety participants, the majority of people told me they felt less anxious and less depressed, which I had expected, but what I didn’t expect was that some people told me that they had also lost 10, 20, and even 30 pounds in the twelve weeks and found that their memory and focus were better as well. In listening to those calls I had an “aha” moment and realized that with a better brain you also get a better body and a better mind.
Science backs up this discovery. Research presented at the annual meeting of the Society of Ingestive Behavior in 2009 found that depressed patients who followed a six-month behavioral weight-loss program not only lost weight but also reported a significant drop in their symptoms of depression. Lose weight, get happier.
The second project that’s helped seed this book is my work in performing the world’s largest brain imaging / brain rehabilitation study on active and retired professional football players. We have evaluated and treated more than one hundred players. For many years, the NFL has said that it didn’t know if playing professional football caused long-term brain damage. After a number of players came to see me with dementia, depression, and obesity, I decided to study their brains and answer once and for all the question “Does playing football damage the brain?” The answer, which did not surprise anyone except perhaps some in the NFL, was of course playing professional football causes long-term brain damage. You cannot get hit by guys like Minnesota Viking Ron Yary (6′5″ and 255 pounds) thirty to fifty times a game and not expect to have some trouble.
Dr. Amen and Ron Yary
But the exciting news is that when we put our players on our brain healthy program, many of them not only lost weight (one of our players lost over 100 pounds), they also got smarter and happier at the same time. Plus, their cognitive scores improved, sometimes by 200, 300, or even 400 percent.
Here is an example: Big Ed White, age sixty-two, a four-time Pro Bowl offensive guard for the Minnesota Vikings and later for the San Diego Chargers, played seventeen seasons in the National Football League. When I first met Ed he weighed 365 pounds and scored very poorly on his cognitive testing profile. All of our players take a test called the Microcog, which measures intellectual functioning in nine different areas, including overall general cognitive functioning, information processing speed, attention, reasoning, and memory. He scored very poorly. After six months on our brain healthy / weight-loss program, he had lost 40 pounds, and his test scores increased dramatically (see below).
Our research with the NFL players also demonstrated what other researchers had found: As your weight goes up, your brainpower goes down. Below is a graph of what happens to our players’ reasoning scores as their weight—measured by body mass index (BMI)—goes up. It should make anyone be concerned about their weight.
Research has clearly shown that obesity increases your risk for Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. Plus, Cyrus Raji’s group at the University of Pittsburgh found that the brains of overweight people—people with a BMI between 25 and 30—had 4 percent less volume than the brains of people with lower BMIs, and their brains looked eight years older than healthy people’s. People who were obese—people with a BMI over 30 (Ed White’s BMI when he first came to see us was 45) had 8 percent less brain volume, and their brains looked sixteen years older than healthy people’s.
In this book I will give you the basic steps to boost your brain to become thinner, smarter, and happier at the same time. I will give you a ten-week program to get started. This is the same program we use at the Amen Clinics, and the same program we use with our NFL players. Take note that we started our weight-loss pilot program on December 1, and everybody told us we were crazy to conduct a weight-loss study over the holidays when most people tend to gain weight. But we wanted to make sure our program could stand up to real-life challenges, like holiday feasts and treats. It did. Our group actually lost on average 2.8 pounds during the week of Christmas! On average, our participants lose 10 pounds in ten weeks. (Note that individual results may vary.) Many of our participants have lost much, much more.
Throughout the pages of this book, you will learn much more about these and many other participants in our weight-loss program, including several of our NFL players. In “The Amen Solution All-Stars” profiles, these real-life people will share their personal journeys to a slimmer shape, greater happiness, and improved brain function. I hope their stories will inspire and motivate you.
You will also find “Get Smart to Get Thinner” boxes with thoughtful tips, strategies, insights, and success stories from the everyday people who have been successfully losing weight with this program. These quotes come from our weight-loss program participants as well as people who have posted comments on my blog or posted online reviews of my book Change Your Brain, Change Your Body. I have changed their names to protect their privacy and have edited some of the quotes for space and clarity.
Why ten weeks to start? You need at least seventy days to change bad habits and to start solidifying good ones. However, this is not a ten-week program. This is a program to get control of your brain and your body for the rest of your life. Ten weeks is just a start. If you act like hCG, Chicago deep-dish pizza Jim in the story relayed earlier, you will never get it right. Here is a summary of the program.
Immediately, I will give you the basic steps of the program, so you can get started immediately, including what important numbers you need to know and start improving right away, plus how to keep a daily journal to help your brain develop new neuronal networks to help direct your behavior in a positive way.
To lose weight and keep it off, you must be able to maintain a high level of motivation. In this step I will focus and enhance your desire to be healthier, happier, and smarter.
Food is medicine and can help you be trim, vibrant, happy, and focused, or it can make you plump, sluggish, sad, and stupid. In this step I will give you the Amen Clinics Seven Rules for Brain Healthy Eating. Journaling is a critical part of the program to be successful, so you keep a record of what you put into your body to avoid calorie amnesia.
By now, you have learned our basic steps to lose weight and be happier and smarter, but not everyone is the same. In this section I will explore the five different types of overeaters, the interventions for each type, and what to do if you have more than one type.
Nutritional supplementation can enhance weight control, mood, focus, and memory. Here I will explore a rational scientific approach to using supplements, including ones I think most people should take and ones that may better fit your individual situation.
Cravings are usually what sabotages most people’s success in dieting. In this step I will give you nine secrets to getting control of your cravings to increase the chances this program will be successful.
Both physical and mental exercises are essential to weight loss and a brain healthy life. In this step I will explore the right kinds of physical exercise that rev your metabolism and how new learning also boosts brain metabolism.
Negative thinking patterns make you fat, mentally sluggish, and unhappy. Here I will give you an in-depth look at correcting the automatic negative thoughts, or ANTs, that drive depression and overeating.
Both hypnosis and meditation are powerful tools to enhance brain and body function. I will teach you simple exercises to enhance your brain and your body.
There are many barriers that derail success. Here I will give you simple tools to prevent relapse, stop other people from making you fat, and information on what to do after you reach your ideal weight.
In addition, there is a questionnaire to help you know your type, and many, many tools to help you stay on track for success, including two hundred ways to leave your blubber behind, calorie counts, a grocery shopping list, brain healthy recipes, and flash cards of brain healthy reminders you can cut out and keep with you at all times. On our website, you’ll find even more interactive tools to help you reach your goals.
Boosting your brain to get slimmer, smarter, and happier is a big promise. Follow me for at least ten weeks and let me prove it to you. What do you have to lose? More of your belly while you get a better brain!