Good everyone, Sam here.
So this week I am taking off overseas with my biggest little girl, Evie, taking her to New York to look at some university courses or college courses they call them over there, which means for you, we're going to go back and look at some of my favorite episodes, and I'm sure that some of your favorite episodes, or perhaps some that you've missed altogether.
One of those was with one of my absolute favorites.
Doctor Joanna McMillan, who joined us earlier this year, and we spoke was a great conversation about how you fuel your mind for better cognitive performance. It really was a great conversation. Highly recommend checking that one.
Out if you missed it or as a refresher.
And then we're going to head to doctor Libby Weaver, who is going to speak about what happens when we overload our mind, which then turns into stress.
I think at this time of.
Year it's cold, our next holiday or next break might not be just around the corner. It feels like we've got a massive load on us, you know, school holidays, everything's sort of going on. So giving some advice from experts far more knowledgeable than me on how to take care of our brain.
I thought was really.
Apt timing to learn about taking better care of our brains, particularly when things just become a bit overwhelming and a bit full on. These are two fantastic experts to get some really practical advice on how to take care of your brain, particularly stressful.
Middle part of the year. So make sure you have a listen. This is the wood life. Let's get into it for our listeners that don't know.
Joanna is one of Australia's best nutrition scientists. She's an author and she's got this incredible audio book called Mindful, which is with f U double L And that's as I hear Joanna part of a series, so it's Mindful and releasing in May is Heartful, which.
Yes, the one that I've just recorded and is coming out very soon. That's heartful. What sweet for a healthier heart?
So let's let's talk about actually how food makes us feel. And you know, the first question I wanted to ask you was about sugar.
You know, what is.
This sugar crash or this three pm pick me up that everyone sort of craves and why is that happening to many of us? And what foods can we consume to best to best combat this, well, I think the.
First thing to really do because I see so much confusion around the word sugar, because I think, you know, with this sort of messaging that's gone on about sugar's bad, sugar's toxic, sugar sys. To a scientist, sugar is at its fundamental level, we've got the most simple sugars and that includes glucose that runs in your bloodstream. Now, if you didn't have glucose running in your bloodstream, you're dead.
So the idea, I mean, it just is so scientifically nonsensical to anyone who's even studied high school chemistry to think that, you know, saying sugar is toxic.
What people really mean by talking.
About sugar is the refined table sugar, which is actually mostly sucrose, but sometimes it's high fructose corn syrup or I mean, there's you know, there's a multitude of different ways that refined sugars are added into two foods. That's the thing that's the problem. And then we've got the discussion that then gets confused with it, which is about control of your own blood sugar, which is the glucose
in your blood. And we do know that if you've got type two diabetes and you've got poorly controlled blood glucose levels, that is enormously bad for your health and it puts you risk of a whole load of other chronic conditions. So control of blood glucose is very, very important, and even for those of us who don't have diabetes of any sort, and so it's really important for all of us to avoid big blood glucose spikes, and we want to try to allow our body to have very
gentle rises and falls. It's normal for your blood glucose to rise after meals that contain carbohydrate in particular, that's where most of it's going to come from. These are normal rises and falls, so it's not about not having any rise. Glucose is the fuel for your brain. It's the primary fuel for your brain, and your brain uses honestly, about twenty five percent of the glucose that's running through
your blood across the day. You know a quarter of that at least is going to fuel in your brain, especially if you're really using your brain. So it's worth sort of recognizing that. And you know, lots of your listeners are also exercisers. If you're doing exercise of any kind of intensity. You want to have some glucose there.
You know that's going to fuel. You can't use that quickly, so you want to be able to have that glucose at you're disposable to do some of those particularly tougher workouts. The differentiation has to come from what's the problem with these highly refined sugars. Now, if I take a piece of fruit, that sugar is bound up in plant cell walls, along with a bunch of different nutrients. There's what we call the food matrix. So your body has to break down those plant cell walls to get at the sugar.
There's usually lots of fiber, nutrients, antioxidants, all sorts of other stuff there, So that takes time, and the sugars are then absorbed nice and slowly up into your bloodstream, and then you make use of all those nutrients. It's a complete food package. It's a very different thing. If I take the plant, and you can get sugar from all sorts of different plants. It might be sugar cane, sugar beet, it might be from a parsnipper, from whatever, and you extract the sugar and you get rid of
everything else. That's in the plant, so you don't have any fiber, you don't have any nutrients. You've simply extracted, processed, and refined the sugar on its own, and then you have that or you have it added, you know, when it's added ubiquitously into so many other foods, and that becomes a problem because you don't have that full food package.
And it's not just the problem of the sugar. You know, often we point the finger at sugar, but actually it's the foods and drinks that have too much of that added sugar in it that usually also have the process fats, the refined starch, the wrong you know, low nutrient density, way too many calories per bite of the food.
So we get these really.
Energy dense, moorish, highly palatable foods that make us want to eat them more. So we're really talking you know, junk foods and package snacks.
They've got the.
Scientifically designed combination of salt, sugar, fat, crunch, you know, to make them so moorish, so we overeat them, but they're not giving us the nutrients that we need. So it's really those foods. So rather than pointing the finger of brame, I feel at sugar is one. You've got to really differentiate between what are naturally present sugars in foods like fruit, even raw honey. I mean, honey's been around. If you want a paleo food, honey is a true
paleo food. These are foods that are generally really good for us, and it's.
Those ultra process foods.
And that's where research science has moved towards talking about ultra process foods or upfs, instead of this sort of point in the finger, blame it transfats or gluten or sugar or whatever we individually pick out. It's the ultra process foods that are ultimately the problem.
And so do you. I mean, you've given a really good explanation for what people need to look out for.
But even when you are listing the different ways sugar is added into package products and the clever ways that the food manufacturers label them as you know, corn syrup, and so you know they've got twenty five different meanings because they don't write sugar deliberately, because they don't want you to go through the ingredient list and think it's full of sugar, because it's full of all these other things.
You don't really understand what they are.
What are your top tips for our listeners who don't have your background or even my background.
Is it as simple as donated events in a packet?
Yeah, well it's not as it's not as hard core is saying you can't have anything in a packet. Look, if we could have a perfect world, we'd all still be hunting and growing our own veggies and hand chooks in the backyard.
But look, we don't have lives like that.
Most of us now live in cities rather than in the country, and we have to be able to buy our food and we can use modern I you know, I'm a scientist.
I want to be able to.
Use modern science, modern technology, modern ways of preserving food to make it easier for me to follow a healthy diet. So, yes, you can have some canned produce. Frozen produce is fantastic. You don't have to use chemical preservatives and things when you're freezing foods. So, but you just have to look for one of the right foods to be able to so canned legings, can tomatoes, canned sweet corn, these things
are great and the foods are highly nutritious. Frozen veggies, frozen berries, you know these sorts of things are absolutely brilliant. You know, I don't object to, you know, packets of pasta, but make your own sauce and make your and you can buy good sauces, but it's generally it's so easy to make your own ingredients. So use some level of these kind of convenience foods. But the best advice I can give when it comes to a food in a
packet is read the ingredients list. And you hinted at this there when you said, oh, if you read the ingredients list and there's stuff there that it's clearly not a food. And there's loads of these ingredients that you think that sounds like it should be in the pharmacy, not in the supermarket, the foedback, it's probably not that
great a choice. Whereas if you can identify, oh, this has got a list of ingredients, it's bread that's got flour, serdo culture, some salt and water, maybe some olive oil in it, that's a great bread. Whereas if it's a bread that's got sugar in it, which doesn't happen much
in Australia. It's mostly sort of from breosh breads or burger buns, you know, and you can and read the ingredients and it's got preservatives and it's got you know, flour improvers, and then suddenly you're recognizing, okay, this is getting further away from what would be a more traditional food.
What about fats? Good fats, bad fats? And what's sort of the simplest way to explain do you do? You find is to explain that to people that allows them to make bitter choices.
Well, one of the best things that's happened over the course of my career from when I was an early dietitian, low fat diets were you know, really in thing, and it was really difficult to get people to even consider eating an avocado or you know, nuts were out.
And again it was because of that can't exist.
Fat was fat, and fat was a yeah.
And fat made fact. That was just the assumption because.
Nobody was really stepping back and looking at the big picture. And actually the recognition of good fats has come partly from the heart health understanding, understanding that these good fats in your diet actually have a really good effect on your blood cholesterol profile. And when I say profile, I mean it's your total cholesterol doesn't tell you very much.
You need to know the breakdown of the of the way that the different cholesterol and other fats are being carried in your diet, in your in your blood story. But it's also come from the recognition of fat is a huge part of your brain.
Your brain is a very.
Fatty tissue and it's and it's got concentrated levels of the long chain a Mega three fats that we get from things like oily fish. So I think it's a combination of the heart health understanding and the brain health understanding that oh, hang on, we need these really good fats in our diet, and these really long chain omega threes for example. Although we can make them from short chain of mega trees from some plant foods for example, like walnuts and chi and fla seed, we're not.
Very good at doing it.
So there's been this recognition that will actually, you know, these are essential fats for us to have our optimal health. And then we've got the impact of now understanding the impact of fat on digestion, metabolism and even glycimic induction. And when you've got some good fats there in the meal, it slows down digestion absorption. We've also got fat soluble antioxidants.
That's relatively new research suddenly realizing, well, we can eat a raw carrot, but you're not going to absorb that beta caroteene unless you've drizzled some oil on your salad or you've roasted that carrot the oven and got the fats going into there so that the fat soluble carotenoids can then be absorbed.
So and we've got fat soluble.
Vitamins of course, so we suddenly have this recognition that will hang on, not all fats are bad, and then we've got this sort of progress of nutrition science starting to understand and the principles are exactly the same as for sugar. That when you get those fats mostly in their whole food form or from things like extra virgin oliveil, that's really just the freshly squeezed juice of the olive.
A very different scenario to highly processed seed oils, which I know are a little controversial because you've got many dietitians that will tell you there's no problem with those, but I'm not one of them. To me, those are ultra processed foods. So these kind of fats, avocado, nuts, and seeds, oily fish, you know, and some of the other fats that are found in these whole foods are generally really good for us. And extra virgin olive oil is head and shoulders above. There is just a different
category of food to most other kind of oils. Avocado oil is probably one that comes close but doesn't have the same sort of pattern of polyphenols and other are phytoin nutrients that.
Are there in the oil.
So these are foods that we definitely should be including in our diet.
Talk about that sort of food brain connection and why it's so important, And do you tend to agree that I feel like we miss it a bit, like it doesn't get spoken about as much, does it.
I entirely agree it doesn't.
And it's only in recent years, even in research circles, you know, you know, my early career, we sort of talked. We understood that diet had some role to play in brain perform and it's certainly long term brain health in terms of your risk of dementia. And there was some understanding of diet was important in things like depression and other mood disorders that nobody could really even in research circles, it wasn't really understood the mechanisms, you know, was it
to do with nutrients? Was it to do And now I think there's been this sort of explosion in research and interest in research, so therefore that stimulates more research that we've got a much better understanding of what those mechanisms are. And I say this in my introduction to Mindful that you know, we used to think of the brain and many people still do this's just elusive thing. It's what makes your personality exactly influence over it, and
that can be further from the truth. You know, it of course it is involved in your in your personality and what makes you you, but it also is like any other organ in your body, it requires nutrients. It requires fuel to function at its best. You know, nothing affects your brain more than being dehydrated as a very simple tool, you know, making sure that you're staying well
hydrated is absolutely key for your brain performance. So now we've we've you know, got to a stage where we still don't understand every connection to the brain, but we now understand it is partly the nutrients. So the brain needs specific nutrients. It needs iron for example, it needs iodine, iodines and nutrient that's really flown under the radar unless you're pregnant, because it's been recognized iodines essential for brain development in the fetus, but then also in young infants.
So we've suddenly seen, oh, well, if you're taking a pregnancy supplement, you'll see that they've all got iodine in them now. But other than that sort of around pregnancy and young children, I being largely ignored. But actually we know iodine deficiency lowers your IQ.
When you think of it like.
That, you go, oh, my goodness, you actually your nutrition is so important. And then we've got you know, the long chain amegas refats. We've got a whole lot of research studies now showing long chain omegas rays and a combination of bigrot vitamins is essential for your brain health going forward and can reduce your risk of cognitive decline as you get older.
So there's these.
Nutrients that are clearly really really important. And then we've got the fuels. Your brain is a huge I always call it a greedy, a glucose greedy organ because it uses up so much of the glucose in your blood. It can also use ketones, so I know people doing ketogenic diets are going to argue that well, ketones are
really important for the brain. There's some elements of truth in that, but that's that becomes especially important if your brain has some sort of disorder like epilepsy, or it's even being researched for things like chronic migraines that can't be treated, and that might be a situation where brain cells. One of the hypothesis is those brain cells are in some way malfunctioning and not able to use glucose as well. So therefore the secondary fuel of ketones might become important
and then your brain's working better. But whether that has any impact on healthy people is another matter. So for most of us, if your brain's healthy, it wants glucose, It runs well in glucose.
But you want a nice steady stream of.
Glucose going into your blood fueling your brain. And mentioned hydration, and you mentioned exercise.
You know, it's one thing.
I've got a great slide I put up when I do this a corporate talk about brain performance. And there's a brilliant slide of a scan of a brain showing activity in the brain before and after just doing a brisk walk or you know, running up and down the stairwell in your office, or you know, just stimulating your brain because it gets blood flow glowing and you see the brain light up.
So if you've got to get your.
Brain powered up, or you're feeling in a slump and you've got that three o'clock slump, head outside and have a quick walk. Also, getting some sunlight's going to be helpful.
Thank you so so much. You're an absolute gym. I appreciate you so much.
Thanks.
Our guest today is an absolute expert when it comes to talking to women, particularly women in their thirties, forty fifties and sixties, is none other than doctor Libby Weaver, who let me just read these credentials out because wowsers a nutritional biochemist, thirteen yes one three thirteen times best selling author books like The Energy Guide, Women's Wellness Wisdom, and Rushing Woman Syndrome. Libby Weaver, Welcome to the WOODLFE and thanks so much for joining us.
Oh it's a pleasure, Sam, thanks for having me join you.
I love how you talk about dealing with stress. Our audience. Of course, we have men that listen to the show and they will absolutely benefit from this chat, I have no doubt about it. But our audience would be sort of eighty percent women, and through my twenty eight program, which is one of those bikini body programs, it's you know women particularly you know, late twenties sort through to
late fifties, early sixties. Even where would you like to start with how you've been able to help this particular demographic from a stress dealing with stress perspective.
Thank you, that's so generous. So I originally studied nutrition and dietetics and then did honors and then did a PhD in biochemistry. So there's lots of geeky signs in my background. But since then, I've worked with people one on one for over twenty years. And I've combined fourteen years at university with twenty plus years of working one on one with people to create a three pillar approach where I look at the biochemistry, and nutrition and emotions.
So stress comes into all three of those categories. So, for example, when we go into a stress response, obviously our two main stress hormones are adrenaline and cortisol. They activate a part of the nervous system, the sympathetic nervous system, which is essentially the fight or flight response. And I'm sure or most of your listeners know this stuff, but it's a part of the autonomic nervous system, so we
can't instruct it, we can't boss it around. And when we go into that fight or flight response, there's no problem with that as long as we can come out of it and activate the other branch of our nervous system, which is the parasympathetic nervous system, the calm arm. So we want to be a really healthy person just swings between those two branches. And the challenge I find, particularly for a lot of women today's they get stuck in the fight or flight response. They get stuck with that
sympathetic nervous system activation. And I wrote a book in twenty eleven called, which I can't believe is twelve years ago, but I wrote a book in twenty eleven called Rushing Woman Syndrome, basically describing this and the health consequences of always living in a rush and always living with the perception that everything is urgent and that there's a huge amount of pressure, and the way that activates the sympathetic nervous system, which is the fight or flight response, and
how there's no problem with that if we spend a bit of time there, but when we're really healthy, we can swing into that fight or flight response, that sympathetic nervous system activation, and then come out of it and activate what I call the green zone, the parasympathetic nervous system,
which is a really calm arm. And the challenges that I was seeing with more and more of my female clients was that they were stuck in that sympathetic nervous system and then all of the health consequences that that was driving. So obviously, when we're really stressed, it disrupts our sleep, it changes the fuel preferences for the body, so it's a lot harder for us to use body fat efficiently is a fuel we use primarily glucose. We then crave sugar when we're producing a lot of stress hormones.
It disrupts our blood ability to regulate our blood glucose. We can end up experiencing insulin resistance and all of the concerns that then come with that. So the list is kind of endless. But Sam, I'm one of those people who wants to follow absolutely everything to the last, take it as far as I can get right to
the heart of something. And in twenty nineteen I wrote a book called The Invisible Load where I wanted to change the conversation around stress, and I very much wanted to acknowledge that there was very real and genuine stress in the world and in people's lives. But there's also a huge amount of stress that we create for ourselves because of how we think, and that's the part we
can change. So I'm always really curious about the beliefs people have, and it was partly why I wanted to write The Invisible Load and change the conversations we were having about stress, so that instead of it being this thing we've got to manage, we look at what it
really is. So, just as an example, before I wrote that book, I ran some focus groups with women and the youngest group they were aged eighteen to twenty five, and I asked them for their two biggest stresses, and by far and away, in all the eighteen to twenty five year old groups, it was body image and social media. And when I share that with older audiences, they don't understand it. So I hear them laugh, I hear them tut tut. It's just so familiar to them. How can
social media be stressful? So when I asked the group aged thirty five to fifty five what stressed them out. One of the most common things that came out was running late. Now, if you think about running late, it's not in and of itself stressful. What makes that stressful is, you know, or we might be going to we might be going to a conference, and we don't want to
miss the first speaker. So there can be a bit of fomo in running late, But mostly what stresses us out about running late is that we're stressed about what the person who'll be on the receiving end of our running late is going to think of us. So if we can realize that, if we get really worked up and recognize that we're stressed, instead of just sitting in the stress and reciting to yourself, I'm so stressed. I'm so stressed, if you can pause and think, Okay, what
is this really about? I can see that I care very much what my boss or one of my colleagues thinks of me. And the reason that inside is helpful is it changes how you then show up. So instead of bursting into the meeting really stressed and letting that permeate the group, you might have a conversation with your colleague or your boss at the end and say, look, I'm so sorry I was late. It's really important to me that you know that I value my job. I work as hard as I can, I try to be
as efficient as I can. They're just going to welcome your dedication and your commitment with that conversation and thank yousitive yeah exactly, and then the stress that the person's experiencing completely dissipates because you've named what it really is.
So the older group, they don't understand why social media is stressful because they use social media to catch up with their friends in Perth when they live on the East Coast, or they watch funny dog videos, so it's entertainment, whereas for the younger group, it's one of the ways
they obtain approval from others. And so part of what I try to help people explore or consider when they feel really stressed, is is it real or genuine stress or is it coming from your perception that others are either disapproving of you in the moment or that they will be disapproving of you if you don't do X y Z. Because that's coming from our thinking and we can change that and it's quite game changing when we start to see that a lot of our rushing, a
lot of our stress comes from the fact that we care about others. Absolutely, it comes from a beautiful place, from a beautiful heart. But we don't just care about others. We actually also care what they think of us, and that's we've got to dig into that to really change our stress response.
And you mentioned this, you said, you know, we're in the sympathetic nervous system where it's all we're all flighty and stressed. And the idea is when we're in a healthy space, we can get into what you call the green zone, and we can flip into the parasympathetic If that doesn't happen naturally, if we're not good at flipping from our bad zone to our good zone, what are some things that we can do from within to get us into that zone.
Yes, very much so, sad so, because the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system, so the red zone and the green zone for ease of remembering, because they're part of what's called the autonomic nervous system. Which all people need to understand about that is that you can't
boss it around, you can't instruct it. We can't be sitting there with bucket loads of adrenaline zooming through our blood, sitting at our computer with six hundred unopened emails and having had four coffees already in the morning, with all the adrenaline behind that. We can't just sit at our desk and go, oh, just chill out, man, you know it's all good. You can't override it with your thoughts.
So the only thing that science has currently shown that allows us to influence getting out of the red zone and into the green zone is extending the length of our exhalation. So I think it's partly why things like yoga and other breath focus practices have become so popular.
Does that work proactively and reactively?
Look?
Does that yes?
So when it's a genuine threat to your life. So if a car drives out in front of you and you've got a slam on your brakes, it's not going to pull you out of that quicker, but your recovery will be quicker. So where it's really beneficial is if you watch a little baby breathe. They breathe in and out through their cute little nostrils, and their little belly goes up with their belly expands with the inhalation and then it shrinks back towards their spine when they exhale,
So that's obviously diafromatic breathing. And when we breathe in that way, we communicate to every cell in our body that we're safe, because we wouldn't be able to breathe like that if our life was truly in danger, because the idea of short, shallow breaths is that it increases blood pressure. It diverts the blood away from our digestive system to our periphery, to our arms and our legs, because that allows us to do the fight or flight response.
But you can hear in what I've just said that digestion is compromised when we're in the fight or flight response. And certainly in Australia, one in five women have irritable bowel syndrome and food plays a role in that very much, But so does this stress response, and I don't think that's talked about enough. And then of course it changes the fuel that you're going to use in that moment.
It shifts your preference away from using fat as a fuel to primarily using glucose because that's your fast burning fuel. That's the one that's going to give you the fast energy to get out of the danger your body thinks it's in and you need all of that to happen if your life's literally in danger. But the problem with modern life, obviously is that we might have high circulating levels of adrenaline and be in this red zone in
the sympathetic nervous system activation. We might be in that place because we've had a few coffees, because block your ears everyone, Caffeine leads us to produce adrenaline. Our perceptions of pressure and urgency can lead us, obviously to produce adrenaline. Now I'm not saying for a second that there aren't things that aren't urgent.
Of course there are.
If you get a phone call from school that your child's been injured, that's urgent. You want to get there as quickly as you can. But what a lot of us do is we've made what we get to do each day full of pressure and urgency, and we forget that. We can choose to see it in a different way. Even though it might be a busy day, it might be a jam pack day. We can choose to see that as something that we've got to live it with intensity, or we can just do it and execute it and
live it and actually enjoy it. So we forget though that we get to choose that. And then the third big area that leads us to produce adrenaline is worrying what consciously or unconsciously, worrying what other people think of us in the light that we just spoke about a moment ago. So to the tools to get us out
of the red zone and into the green zone. Some people do really well when they decrease what's activating the red zone caffeine, exploring perceptions of pressure and urgency, and really diving into that inner work of worrying about seeking the approval of others basically, and then other people they
don't want to look at that. They would rather just become a lot more breath aware, and so then you live a lot more from that place of diafromatic breathing, longer exhalations, and then you notice it very quickly when you've come out of it when it's not necessary. So you might be in a board meeting and you think, oh,
I've gone into this heightened response. Okay, I can slow my breathing down because I'm safe I'm just worried, you know, about some feedback on possibly about to get but I'm actually really safe, so I'll communicate to that to my body through my breath.
Thank you so so much. What's your website called? Just for people if they want a bit more information, give yourself a plug.
Thanks Sam, It's doctor Libby dot com.
Doctor Libby, thanks so much for joining us on the Woodlife and speak to you soon.
It was a joy.
Thanks hep, Sam, thanks as always so much for listening. Please please, please, as always let me know if there's any topics that you would like to discuss, any experts you would like us to interview. Leave us a little voice note. There's a link in the show notes. I'll chat to you next week.