--:-- Mel Robbins: Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast. Today, you and I are going to get real about cravings, appetite, hunger, how to rein in the emotional eating.
--:-- Mel Robbins: For me personally, I've got a bag here. These are black truffle potato chips. These are the bane of my existence. Oh my God. My kids have introduced me to these things. I have to tell you, I have this insane craving for black truffle potato chips every single day around two o'clock in the afternoon. And I can plow through an entire bag of these things. I don't even know if I'm hungry or not. I just all of a sudden, boom, two o'clock hits. I have to have a potato chip.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And I don't know if you've ever been stuck in that cycle of yo-yo dieting or you're finished with dinner, you promise yourself you're not going to eat something, and all of a sudden you got to have ice cream. What is that about? Well, today we're going to dig deep into the science. Dr. Amy Shaw is a double board certified doctor. She received her training from Cornell, she did a residency at Harvard and a fellowship at Columbia. She's an expert on intermittent fasting, food allergies, hormones, and you guessed it, hunger, cravings, appetite.
--:-- Mel Robbins: In fact, you have been asking for Dr. Amy Shaw to come on the show. Her latest book, *I'm So F-ing Hungry: Why We Crave, What We Crave, and What to Do About It*. Dr. Amy Shaw is here to tell us what to do about it. Dr. Amy, it is such a pleasure to meet you.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Such a pleasure to be here and to meet you.
--:-- Mel Robbins: One of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you, Dr. Amy, is you're a licensed and trained nutritionist with Ivy League degrees and you're also a medical doctor and you understand nutrition and the science of nutrition. And so when I'm listening to somebody who's a wellness expert that got themselves in shape, who has figured this out in their life, I listen to them differently than I listen to a medical doctor who is also a nutritionist and understands it from the inside out. And so I'm thrilled that you're here. And I want to start with the difference between hunger, appetite, and cravings. So we're all on the same page.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Great question. The simplest way to think about it is when you're sitting at dinner and you had this amazing dinner—appetizer, drinks, entree—and you are full, you're ready to go. And the waiter comes out and says, "We have these special desserts that we just made tonight and they are out of this world." And everyone looks at each other and they're like, "Well, we're full, but we really want that dessert." That's cravings.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: That's not hunger. You're no longer hungry. You're actually pretty full, extra full, right? But you're working on that cravings pathway. And that cravings pathway is super strong. It's the same cravings pathway that alcohol uses, drugs, sugar. Cravings is a dopamine pathway. Whereas hunger is your natural need to get nutrients. Actually, you can go for many days, even a month, without food.
--:-- Mel Robbins: A month?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Yes. People fast for a month. From my background, my family is Jain and they fast for long periods of time. And there is a fasting month where you actually eat nothing and just drink water. So our hunger signals are reminders to eat because your body does not want you to go a full month without remembering to eat. So ghrelin, you might have heard of this hunger hormone. It's released to remind us to eat. So the same time every day, you get hungry, you get reminded to eat, and your ghrelin comes and goes. So some people just aren't hungry in the morning. Some people get very hungry at night, no matter what they've eaten all day because of that ghrelin cycling. So if you understand that it's a cycle, it's a reminder. You don't always have to take that reminder, but it's a reminder.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Huh. So what is appetite?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Appetite is the overall interest in food. Have you ever seen a dog when they're sick? They're just not interested. Their appetite is dampened. It will dampen your cravings and your hunger pathways to let you heal. So hunger is this need to eat, right? That is tied to the biological imperative to stay alive. Appetite is the desire for food. And we've all had those periods in our life where we've felt sick. I mean, my allergies are crazy right now and I'm not that hungry. Normally I would be ravenous right now. So my appetite is the correct word. I don't have much of an appetite.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And then cravings. This is one of the reasons why I love your book, *I'm So F-ing Hungry*, so much because I've learned that our cravings and the eating patterns that we have that aren't healthy for us are based on the brain, not based on emotion, but that actually there is a whole hormone cycle to this thing.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Oh, it's so complicated. So there was a French philosopher in 1825, Jean-Claude Saverin, and he said, "Show me what you eat and I'll show you who you are." And even today, that stands true, right? Show me what you eat and I'll tell you who you are. Because our lives are dictated through food. We have now food addictions. And some of it is not our fault. A lot of it is not our fault.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Yeah, you actually say that in this book. You say that you get into these habits of eating unhealthy things—the pulling up at the drive-thru and ordering the extra large fries and the burger on the way home from work. And then you feel like crap and then you have a craving and then you eat something else. And that it's not your fault. How is it not your fault if you're the one putting the food in your mouth?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Think about it. Have you ever been to Miami? I always talk about the Miami phenomenon. The first time I went, I was in med school and I saw all the flashing lights and the people and the music and the craziness. And I was like, "Oh my God," my dopamine receptors were firing.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: That's what happens the first time you eat a sugary food, like an ice cream or a McDonald's burger, and you get a huge burst of dopamine. And then on day three of being in Miami, all of a sudden, it doesn't seem loud. It doesn't seem as entertaining. You need to turn the volume up. You need to go to the club now because you're kind of used to it. You don't even feel excited or happy just from being out on the street. You actually need to turn up the volume. And so that's what's happening to us. We're having this Miami South Beach effect in our brains when we're eating all of this sweet food, these processed foods that don't occur in nature. That dopamine explosion happening day after day after day. And so the problem is you need more and more and more to get that same dopamine release. And guess what happens on the other end, Mel?
--:-- Mel Robbins: I don't know.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Dopamine has this weird after effect where it makes you irritable. It makes you uncomfortable and it makes you crave that food so badly that you just want to almost make yourself not feel the pain anymore. And so dopamine has this effect on us that we'll eat it, we'll get the pleasure, but then there's that pain aspect to it. Because you want it again.
--:-- Mel Robbins: There was something that you just said that really caught my attention. I've never heard anybody say this before. It's that you get the dopamine rush from eating things that are not available in nature.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Yeah.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Can you explain that?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: When you eat an apple, you get the sugar, but you get water, electrolytes, antioxidants, and fiber. Most importantly. That is how sugar is made in nature. So you see a fruit tree—your dopamine pathway, we think, was made to help us survive and want to find that tree with the ripe fruit to keep us going, to keep us agitated enough to try to look for more food just to keep us surviving. Now take it thousands of years later. We have ultra processed foods, which I will define for you later, that don't have any fiber, that don't have any vitamins to tell the body that you've eaten something. And they pack the sugar in such a small amount of food that the explosion of dopamine you get is similar to a drug like cocaine.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Or being in South Beach.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Yes. It's like, boom, boom. And then you have a drop and then you crave the candy bar or whatever it was that you just had that was ultra processed.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So I want to make sure that everybody just heard that the connection between your cravings and your appetite and your hunger and how this is attached to dopamine. The rush of dopamine, the drop of dopamine, the craving cycle that you're now trapped in. So what does ultra processed mean?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Ultra processed is really simple. If you could not make it in your kitchen or any kitchen because the ingredients are not ingredients of food, then it's ultra processed. Ultra processed means you cannot recreate that food in your kitchen, even if you had access to any ingredient in the world. So that's a lot of things—Doritos, Kit Kats, Sundays. If you think about it, we often have the option of getting the minimally processed or non-processed version. But it's often easier. The shelf life is easier when they're in packaged foods. But the ingredients in there, we don't even know exactly what each one of them does. We just know that when you consume them at the highest quantities, you have 80% more mental health days than someone who's consuming the lowest quantities.
--:-- Mel Robbins: You just said that if you eat more whole naturally occurring foods, that you will be 80% better when it comes to the number of days that you are feeling good mentally. Is that true?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: We are starting to understand that ultra processed foods not only make us more inflamed, which we can talk about why inflammation is bad, but it ages you, gives you cancer, diabetes, heart disease—that's the root of all of it. It makes you sad, anxious, and it lowers your length of life. If you look at all cause mortality, ultra processed foods will shorten your life. And yet, Mel, we live in a world where kids are eating over 70% of their diet that is ultra processed.
--:-- Mel Robbins: You said this thing earlier, and I didn't want to interrupt you. I'm almost embarrassed to ask this question. How do you know when you're full?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: It's such a good question. We've forgotten, right, what it feels like to be hungry or be full. We're almost always just relying on external cues to tell us that. So there are various ways to feel full. We have a couple of hormones that make us feel full. Leptin is one of them. CCK is another one. And there are various signals that they give our brain, mostly just to stop eating. So if you feel full, you won't want to eat food. However, the cravings pathway kicks in. So you may want to eat desserts, but you won't want to eat real food. So a quick way to test this is: would you eat a bowl of vegetables right now?
--:-- Mel Robbins: Right now? No.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Then you're not hungry.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So can you explain to us what is going on in our bodies as it relates to feeling hungry?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: We now know, Mel, that our brain is not just in charge of our cravings and our mood and the way we show up in the world. We always think, "Oh, if you feel sad, do therapy or start to think good thoughts." Right. But we now know that there's this connection between the brain and the gut. When we're an embryo, they're connected. They're one. And then they stretch out and they move apart to the different ends of the body.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: So you could say that they kind of happen from one ball of cells. And we can definitely say with confidence that changing our gut environment has a bigger impact on our brain than we ever thought. And when you eat food, there's an impact in your gut that's sent directly to your brain. And your brain then sends signals back down to your gut. And the way you show up in the world is a result of this communication.
--:-- Mel Robbins: In my mind, what I'm visualizing is ChatGPT right now and AI and how you just insert this thing and it spits out that thing. I'll take what I ate for lunch. So I had a salad. I had a handful of walnuts. I had a couple scoops of a chocolate mousse keto thing. I had a coconut macaroon. And I'm thinking that all of that represents input into like the ChatGPT. And what gets spit out from that is a message to my brain. Am I tracking right?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: That's exactly what's happening. In fact, it's two ways. You have to remember that our body is really smart. So they usually use two different pathways for each thing. When you eat sugar, for example, it stimulates your brain straight from your mouth. And then you have these other receptors, these neuropods in the gut that sense the sugar also. And they are making their own assessment and sending it to the gut. So the gut is like, "Oh yeah, it's sugar because I knew it was coming because I felt it from the mouth. And now you guys are telling me the same thing." So everything matches and you get the response. So they work together in understanding what's happening in your body.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Wow. It's amazing how sophisticated our bodies are. Amazing. As I'm mindlessly chucking walnuts into my mouth, I'm not thinking about the fact that there are these neurotransmitters, there's all this signaling going on. That is so interesting, Dr. Amy. Tell you what, let's hear a quick word from our sponsors and let's pick right back up on this topic when we return. We'll be right back.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Welcome back. I'm Mel Robbins and I'm here with Dr. Amy Shaw. Her latest book is *Why Am I So F-ing Hungry?* We're talking cravings, hunger, appetite, and most importantly, what you can do to get yours under control. And so you in your book, Dr. Amy, you write that if you're in a cycle of emotional eating or if you're in a cycle where you have all of these cravings and you're always hungry and you're eating the wrong things, that it's not your fault.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: It's not your fault.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And it's not your fault because your brain and your hormones are getting triggered by all this ultra processed food.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And the ultra processed food, it sounds like, is food that keeps you craving it.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Because it's not occurring in the natural world. And so your brain is like, "Holy smokes, this Snickers bar is incredible. Oh my gosh. Whatever it is that I pulled out of a box and ripped out of a package and stuck into the air fryer. This is tantalizing because it's got all these chemicals in it."
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Yeah, it's the Miami Beach phenomenon, right? You get to South Beach and you're like, "Whoa," your brain is like, "I feel good right now. And I want that again." And then it's, "I want more of that again." Right. And the problem with our world is we're not educated about that. But I, as a physician, said to myself, how many times was I rewarding myself with Starbucks and peppermint mochas? And I would say to myself, "Oh, I did a good job today, so I'm going to get this sweet thing." And then it was every day. And then it was twice a day. And by the end of it, I had to recognize myself that this was happening to me. We need to talk about it more because if we can make ourselves happier, less irritable, less chasing things, we're going to be happier people. We're going to live longer. And so for me, this was like, okay, all these companies know about it and they're creating foods to trigger that pathway. Why don't we know about it? So we actually can be in control.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Well, when we hear "food," you think calories. You think how many grams of fat, how many grams of sugar. I've never talked to anybody about the fact that there is this dopamine, serotonin, all of these hormones are impacted by it. And it's also being driven by this kind of craving cycle in your brain. And so what do we do if we're not responsible for this situation? How the hell do we fix it? Where do we all begin?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: The thing is, first understand that food creates mood. Food creates mood. So we're always trying to find ways to make ourselves happier, think more clearly, be more satisfied. And that's why I got so interested in this work. Because with my background in nutrition and being a doctor, I thought, well, if we can control our mood through food and the actions that we take on a daily basis, why are we talking about this? Why isn't this first line therapy? There's really good research, a new study from South Australia, that the combination of diet and exercise was 1.5 times more effective for depression than the leading medications.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Now explain why, because that's a big research result. That just through food and exercise, it was found to be one and a half times more effective than medication alone.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: And if you think about it, they actually even put therapy and medications—the traditional treatment—into one category. And they compared that with changing your diet, with changing your sleep, your exercise, lifestyle habits. And they said, "We should be prescribing this as first-line therapy for depression." There are multiple anxiety studies, ADHD. I mean, we are missing the boat. Obviously we're not doing something right because depression is skyrocketing. So is anxiety. So is obesity. So is diabetes. So is cardiovascular disease. So the status quo is not working. So why not employ these techniques and put them at the forefront? Things like we talked about already and that are in the book are teaching you that we have control. Yes, do all the things, but also change the way you eat, change the way you exercise, get more sunlight.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Well, you might be depressed and anxious and struggling with a lot of stuff because of what you're eating. And because of your lifestyle right now. And so I think it's really great news to hear that you can feel better if you start to eat better. And that this whole cycle that you are trapped in, in terms of the cravings that never end and the cycle of emotional eating and feeling lethargic and feeling anxious, that you can, based on the research and based on the work that you do with patients around the world, that when you take your food intake seriously, you can profoundly change your mood, you can change your body, you can change your lifestyle, all of it. But it begins with the food. So let's talk about food that you can eat to balance dopamine naturally. What are those foods?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: You want to be eating foods that are high in the amino acid tyrosine. Tyrosine is the precursor for L-dopa in the brain, and then L-dopa gets converted to dopamine. So that's how we have dopamine. In the past, it was thought, well, you can't really do anything to boost the dopamine levels in your brain. Like food has no connection. It's down here. The brain is up here. So everyone used to say, well, it doesn't really matter. It's just about calories. But now we know that eating more foods that are high in tyrosine can help boost your dopamine.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Wow. What are some of those foods?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: One of them is dairy foods. So tyrosine is an amino acid, so high protein foods. So dairy, soy, nuts, cherries.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: So what I would suggest is, say you're having a breakfast in the morning. You want to boost dopamine. Dopamine is very closely related to epinephrine, norepinephrine, and epinephrine, which is adrenaline. So in the morning, you want to feel awake, alert, and motivated. You want to eat things with higher dopamine that are going to boost your dopamine.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So give me an example of what would be a great thing to eat for breakfast.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: I love cottage cheese.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: I know cottage cheese is controversial. You can do yogurt instead.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Who's mad at cottage cheese?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Some people. I mean, cottage cheese is having a moment on social media.
--:-- Mel Robbins: As in it's bad?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: No, people either love it or hate it. It's a divisive food because of the texture. And so I love it, but some people don't.
--:-- Mel Robbins: People need better hobbies if they're arguing about cottage cheese online.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: It is. But it's having a moment, thankfully. And there's the cottage cheese ice cream. There's all these cottage cheese...
--:-- Mel Robbins: Cottage cheese ice cream?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Yes. It's all the rage. It's viral.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: You blend the cottage cheese with a little bit of sweetener and fruit and freeze it. And then you scoop it out like ice cream.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Wow. Is it any good?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: It's delicious.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Okay. Who knew? Cottage cheese. It's the new cauliflower. It can turn into anything.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: So cottage cheese in the morning with fruit and nuts. And you have got yourself a high dopamine breakfast.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Wow. Okay. You also say there's six ways that you can boost serotonin naturally. So serotonin is kind of the calm, chill, happiness hormone. And so that's a nice one to do maybe in the evening.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Tryptophan is the amino acid, as you might have heard of tryptophan because of turkey, but it's also ever present in eggs. It's in dairy food, lean meats, fish. And the way you can actually really get your zen feeling from that is pair it with a complex carbohydrate. So sweet potato or squash or quinoa, and have the protein and the carbohydrate, and it gets you this nice burst of serotonin. So serotonin is really good for people for obviously mood, but also for sleep because serotonin is very close to melatonin. And those people who struggle with nighttime awakenings should try the serotonin boosting foods in the evening.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Wow. I cannot thank you enough for explaining this to us. Let's hit pause real quick so we can hear a word from our sponsors because they're allowing us to bring this to everybody at zero cost. And don't you go anywhere. We got so much more to cover when we come back.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Welcome back. I'm Mel Robbins and I'm here with Dr. Amy Shaw. So Dr. Amy, one thing that you said that was very interesting is that sometimes when you feel hungry, you're actually thirsty. How do you know the difference?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Hunger and thirst are very closely related in the brain and it's often mistaken. And as you know, often when you go on a health plan, trainers intuitively know this. They'll say, "First thing you do is drink 80 ounces of water." And I always used to say, "There's no science behind 80 ounces of water." I thought you were supposed to drink like...
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Our kidneys are very smart, very good at titrating how much water and electrolyte balance we have. So you want to drink about eight ounces for every hour that you're awake. So maybe more like 64, but that's even not science-based. It's just kind of an estimate, a guesstimate. You can't really overdo it. So it's nicer to have more. But the big thing that it does is that it helps us calm the hunger because when you're dehydrated, your body sends you thirst, but it also feels like hunger. And so when you're adequately hydrating, you're able to feel fuller because you're not getting confused. And so I think it's an easy, super easy thing anyone can do is increase their water intake and just watch. You're not going to be as hungry as you were before.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So if anytime I feel hungry, should I drink a cup of water?
--:-- Mel Robbins: Or do I ask myself if I want vegetables? What's the trick?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Both. So when you're trying to navigate this and you have—first of all, take out as many ultra processed foods as you can. That's step one.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Step one. So did you hear Dr. Amy? No ultra processed food. It's going to be hard to do.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: No. We'll say instead of 60% for adults or 70% for kids, we would want to go to 40 or 30%, right? So it's the occasional ultra processed food. So that way you can actually hear the signals and you're not getting drowned out by all this altered signaling that's happening. And then you start to take note. You say, "Wow, every day around one o'clock is when..." But that's for me, I'm giving my own example. After lunch is when I start to crave sweets, even though I'm not hungry. And so I'll ask myself—and I'm in the office usually—I'll ask myself, "Am I hungry or am I just wanting something sweet?" And that's the first question. And then I'll ask myself the vegetable test. "Would I want a bowl of vegetables right now?" No. So then I say, "Let me just drink a glass of water. See how I feel in 15 minutes." So I get up, I drink a glass of water. I might have a sparkling water. I try to make it fun. You add some lemon or lime. And then ask yourself, "Are you still hungry or craving, or are you fine?" And that's a way to get back with yourself, right? We're always trying to be the most authentic version of ourselves. And that goes with, "What does my body want right now? What does it really want versus what is the world telling me I want?" And if you're on a sugar and processed food cycle, you can't hear your own signals.
--:-- Mel Robbins: How can you explain the cycle? Because I think a lot of us are on the cycle, but we don't realize it. So like you, right around two o'clock, we have a colleague who I adore, who always has dark chocolate. And I've worked with her for long enough that now two o'clock rolls around and I am looking for the candy, looking for the chocolate. Explain the craving cycle so that we can spot it when we're in it. Because I'm assuming that is a craving cycle I'm in.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: This is the best way to think about the craving cycle. When you eat something that you badly crave, it's pleasure mixed with pain. So discomfort. So you're eating it, but you're almost like, "Oh, should I be eating this? When can I get this again? Am I having too much?" It isn't a pure pleasure feeling. It's a pleasure, and then, "When am I going to get it again? I need to stop eating it right now." Most people can identify, based on this description, some foods that trigger that in them. And it could be a warm chocolate chip cookie. It could be—you just eat it and you're like, "Oh, I can't wait to have this again," or "I'm eating too much." And that's the craving cycle right there. And alcohol is very typical for people. I have women clients who say to me all the time, "I crave that glass of wine or two glasses of wine at the end of the day." And it's almost like if I don't get it, I'm irritable. And I just don't feel right. And that's the cravings pathway right there.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So it's interesting to hear you describe it like that because I'm sitting here trying to think, have I ever felt that with an apple? I'm like, no. Have I ever felt that with broccoli? No. But I do feel that in both the case of chocolate, I feel it sometimes in French fries or a croissant. The first bite is heaven. And then I start this conflicted inner dialogue around it. What is actually going on inside of us that creates that inner conflict?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: It's the dopamine. Dopamine release also activates neural pathways that make us feel uncomfortable, agitated. That's why it's so—if you understand that dopamine pathway that we're describing, now you think about it and you see why people get irritable. They have poor mood, make bad decisions when they are consistently releasing dopamine from foods or video games, Instagram. We live in a world where you could actually deplete your dopamine and you'll feel exhausted and you'll feel like ADHD. You can't concentrate. It will feel like you're not really interested in anything anymore. Life isn't—you don't want to go work out.
--:-- Mel Robbins: It sounds like burnout.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Yeah. It's your dopamine pathways that can get burned out in this world that we live in because there are so many excessive releases. If you play the video games, you eat the sugary food—and so many of us do so many of these things. Like I said, I was that person. Unless you have all those things, you feel uncomfortable and irritable.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Can you explain the biology of hunger and cravings?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: It's extremely important to know the difference and to know what's happening in your brain and your body. When you're hungry, you have hunger hormones like ghrelin that are released to tell you to get nutrients from food. It's the way we survive in this world. And cravings, on the other hand, also have to do with survival, but it's telling us to go for the high impact foods. So cravings is the pleasure hormone cycle. It's a whole different pathway. Does not use ghrelin. It is going through the dopamine pathway. Completely different area of your brain. Hunger and cravings are completely separate. Now they obviously pair together in many ways, like when women diet all the time. If you have lived in this world and you have ever been on some crash diets, like I have, your dopamine levels—meaning your cravings—go up, but so does the volume of your ghrelin. Why? Because your body is sensing that you're not eating enough, that you skip meals, that you might be going into a deep caloric deficit. And so it is turning up the volume. So on the hunger side, it's turning up the volume on ghrelin. On the craving side, it's turning up the volume on dopamine. So the two separate pathways become one, and people will say when you're dieting, you're just starving—both for food and for desserts—and your hunger is just out of control and so are your cravings.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Wow. So that's fascinating to know that it's two different pathways. That a craving is very different and it's a signal and part of the dopamine cycle.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And that ghrelin—is that what it's called?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: It sounds like gremlin, but it's ghrelin. Ghrelin. Ghrelin, leptin, neuropeptide YY, CCK. We have all these hormones that are supposed to remind us to eat, to tell us we're full. That's all part of hunger.
--:-- Mel Robbins: The craving pathway is the one we struggle with all the time.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: It's the dopamine pathway.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I really get this. I think I get this because what I'm realizing is you have a biological need to feed yourself or you will die.
--:-- Mel Robbins: But most of us are not struggling with our biological need to eat. We are struggling with the dopamine cycling and crashing that comes with cravings.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Yes. Holy smokes. Dopamine is the most powerful motivator. And food companies, video game companies, gambling, porn — they all know that dopamine is so strong, Mel, that dopamine is the only neurotransmitter in our body that can get us out of a seat, whatever we're doing, stop whatever we're doing, get in a car and go get that thing that dopamine is telling us to do.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Yeah. It's like drive, go, do. You can't think about anything else.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So what you just mentioned, leptin, what is it and how do you use it to hack hunger?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Leptin is our fullness signal. So the opposite of ghrelin.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: And it's great because it tells us, hey, you're full. You don't need to eat anymore. And so leptin, when it gets released, makes us just say, I'm good. And we want more leptin to understand our hunger cues. Our leptin often, we can't hear it because everything else is so loud. So one of the best ways to sensitize your leptin is to sleep more.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Really?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: That's one of the best ways. If you've ever noticed after a bad night's sleep —
--:-- Mel Robbins: I want to eat.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: You want to eat. Why? And you just don't feel full. Your leptin is 33% less.
--:-- Mel Robbins: You're right. You do wake up after a bad night's sleep feeling like you're starving.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Yeah. But if you have a really good night's sleep, you wake up feeling calm and relaxed.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: And I don't have the hunger pain. So if you think about it, we want to start to use our inner signaling pathways to hear what our body's telling us because our body's really smart. So leptin, one of the best ways is to get more sleep. Another really great way is to eat more omega-3 fatty acids. So omega-3 fatty acids are one of the things in salmon. For people who don't eat fish, it's an algae oil. So you can take the algae oil. Nuts have omega. It's a great way to start to get your leptin back up so that a lot of people will start eating more omega fatty acids and all of a sudden they're not as hungry anymore. And part of the signaling is through both leptin and CCK, which are both kind of the satiation satisfaction.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Don't we all want to just be more satisfied? Now, can you take leptin in a pill?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: There's no leptin in a pill as of yet, but that would be the million dollar drug.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Oh, that's true. That's not what that Ozempic or whatever the heck it's called is doing.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: So GLP-1 —
--:-- Mel Robbins: I don't know what that is.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Is a hormone.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: That matches, that works in conjunction with leptin.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: To make you feel full. The medications, Ozempic, Wegovy, all of those medications in that class are GLP-1 agonists, which means it raises our natural level of these satiation hormones. And so GLP-1 is kind of like leptin in the sense that it makes us feel full and it's naturally released by our gut when we're full. We can eat things like nuts and certain foods that actually release more GLP-1 naturally. So you can get the same effect naturally. So getting more sleep, exercise — these are all ways to actually get more of that natural hormone to make you feel more full.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Wow. Do you have a simple way to stop yourself from overeating if you're just a chronic overeater?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: There's a few simple ways. If you want to stop overeating, one of the things you can do is you pair a good activity right after the bad activity.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So give me an example.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Positive replacement behavior.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: So you did something that you didn't want to do. Maybe you ate an ultra processed food that you are trying to cut down.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Immediately after, go for a sunny walk.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: The positive replacement behavior will slowly get longer and teach your neural pathways that you don't want to be doing the negative. The other way is to retrain your brain. So say you crave this candy bar like a Snickers.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: What you do instead is you take a dark chocolate, also another pleasure creating food.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: And you replace the Snickers with the healthier chocolate.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: And the way you do it is intermittent surprise reward. So let me explain that to you.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: So let's just say it's two o'clock in the afternoon. And Mel has for many months been reaching for an ultra processed candy bar.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: And it is now the new day. I have heard this podcast with Dr. Amy and I'm going to try this approach. What am I doing? You are going to intermittently reward yourself with a healthier version of that dark chocolate. So either pick it out of a fishbowl with little papers in it or ask someone that's working with you to say, randomly, three days a week, I get a reward. But it has to be random because dopamine works the best when you get a random reward. And you're trying to rewire your system.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: To not want that ultra processed candy bar. And instead crave the healthier version. I call it my three, two, one method. So three random days a week, two minutes telling yourself how much you love this chocolate. It's such a better choice. CBT, but just cognitive behavioral therapy saying, I'm so happy I chose this. One minute savoring it. And you do this for two weeks and you have replaced that bad habit with a good one.
--:-- Mel Robbins: No. Okay. So let me just make sure I got this. So if it's three, two, one method, and I'm picking three days this week, could I, if I don't have somebody to do this with me, could I just set an alarm in my phone randomly?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Alarm goes off. Boom. That's the random. Intermittent replacement.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Yes. Second thing I do is I tell myself the reasons why this is a better choice. The reasons why I'm proud of myself. And then the final thing that I do is I pop that sucker in my mouth and I enjoy. Sit down and enjoy it. And slow down the process of enjoying it. How the heck after a couple of weeks of doing this, would this make my brain no longer want the ultra processed candy bar?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Because I'll tell you why. If you look at the other way around in the negative sense, this happens all the time.
--:-- Mel Robbins: That's true.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: We get addicted all the time to things that intermittently reward us with dopamine. Gambling. You don't win. You don't win. You don't win. You don't win. You win big dopamine explosion. Now you want it again. You do that a few times and guess what? Now you're craving that. And so the way it works in real life is the most addicting, the biggest dopamine releases is when you get an intermittent reward. Think about relationships, toxic relationships. That guy or gal gives you the intermittent rewards. They give you what you need just enough to keep you craving and going back for more. You know how this works. This happens all the time. You won't hear from someone and then you will. And it kind of keeps you hooked on that person. And the people who do it often know that intermittently giving them love, attention and affection will be enough to keep them coming back for more.
--:-- Mel Robbins: It's so true. Because if you think about either the times in your life when you've been stuck in that pattern or if you have a friend or a family member who's super annoying and is stuck in a very toxic relationship dynamic, what do they do? They spend a lot of time explaining those intermittent, inconsistent moments where the person actually was a good person, but he actually did do this. They followed through.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Yeah, they followed through.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And so if I go back to the candy bar idea, this is so fascinating. Do you still eat the ultra processed candy bar during the two weeks that I'm trying this intermittent reward thing?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: So you could, but the ideal version would be to take that and give yourself a new kind of addiction or a new craving that is a healthier craving. So you can do that with anything, but candy bar to dark chocolate is a great example. We can do that with so many different things in our life, but food, you can create new memories, new craving pathways. Because dopamine has neural pathways from when you're a kid. So reversing those are tough. You have to do this a few — that's what I'm saying. You got to do it for a few weeks to really feel like now you've replaced that behavior.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Tell me about psychobiotics. What the heck are those and how do they help you stop this cycle of craving?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: They found that there are certain gut bacteria. And they call them psychobiotics because those gut bacteria that's present in people who have depression are the same. And there's gut bacteria that are people that are always like happy or they have a positive outlook on life. They have a specific set of gut bacteria. They noticed that there are even studies where you can take Prevotella. You can take —
--:-- Mel Robbins: What's Prevotella?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: It's a type of bacteria. You can take Lactobacillus, a type of bacteria.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Okay. You can add — should I take this? Like now I'm starting to like, where's my pen? I don't know what to do. I want to be happy or not depressed. I don't want to be eating that chocolate at two o'clock. Dr. Amy, help me.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: So the world of psychobiotics is the next foray for mental health.
--:-- Mel Robbins: It sounds sexy, psychobiotics.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Yeah, like it is that you can actually change your brain through the bacteria in your gut. So this is very similar to what you said about food and mood.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Yes. So if you start to take what Dr. Amy's saying very seriously, she is making the case for why ultra processed foods are messing your mood up and keeping you trapped in these cycles of craving and dopamine that make you feel miserable, that make you feel out of control. And now if I'm tracking correctly, we're going to layer deeper because if we get specific about the bacteria that you put into your gut, the stuff that's going to break all that crap down and that's going to create some sort of magical elixir in your gut that will then chat GP, send the message up to your brain that this has implications for depression, for anxiety, for all kinds of mental health stuff. Is that what you're saying?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: That's what I'm saying. And it's not just anxiety and depression anymore. It is autism, Parkinson's, ADHD, every single mental health condition that we are struggling with in our modern world seems to be stemming from that bidirectional. Like I said, they talk to each other both ways. The brain and the gut. The brain talks to the gut, the gut talks to the brain. And now we're learning that we left this whole half on the table.
--:-- Mel Robbins: In terms of the gut, you're absolutely right. Because if you think about it, everybody, we have been addressing mental health from the neck up. And we've been addressing it typically with talk therapy or some sort of pharmaceutical drug that presumably acts on your brain and your neurotransmitters. But aren't the majority of your neurotransmitters in your gut?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Yes. People will say to me, well, those neurotransmitters in the gut are so far from the ones in the brain. But what's fascinating is that we're seeing a very tight correlation. Like I said, they talk to each other. And when your gut is producing lots of dopamine, serotonin, these gut bacteria are signaling to the brain in at least four different ways that we know to also release dopamine and serotonin. And so what they're doing is they're sending signals through the nerves. They're sending hormones. They're sending these things called short chain fatty acids, which the gut bacteria make, and they go to the brain and they make it feel happy or sad. So we are now aware of at least four different ways that what's in your gut is affecting what's going on in your brain.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So Dr. Amy, give me the list. What are the bacteria need to be taken? And what is a bacteria anyway? Like how is bacteria different than food? I know that's a bizarro question, but if I'm eating an apple, the second that you described an apple, you're like, okay, you got sugar, you got water, you got fiber. Fiber is really important. You got certain vitamins that signals to your brain that you're actually eating something and that's going to help you make you be fuller. And I didn't even think about the fact that an apple has all that stuff in it. Where does bacteria come in?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Okay. This is such a great question. It goes back to the fact that we're actually not just ourselves. We're equally bacterial cells. Our body is equally bacterial cells.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I don't even know what the hell that means.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Okay. So in, when you go through the mouth, you go into your throat, you go into your stomach and then there's these intestines.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: And then there's the anus and you poop it out. In that GI tract, there is a world that lives there and it's full of bacteria, viruses, and even protozoans. So like these organisms, there's a world that is living inside of your body that doesn't belong to you.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: If you really think about your mouth and how your mouth leads to a series of internal tubes that lead to the poop chute to get it all out of there, that that's like an internal sewer.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: It is a super highway for outside access through your body. And when you put food in your mouth, your entire GI tract is trying to squeeze nutrients from it and get the waste out. And guess what? They can't do it without the thick lining of gut bacteria that go all the way through to the anal opening. So what I'm saying to you is that there's more bacteria. There's like a thick bacterial lining. There's just like one layer of our own cells that do the work that we need to be done.
--:-- Mel Robbins: If we didn't have the bacteria in there, what would happen?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: We would damage our body all the time.
--:-- Mel Robbins: How so?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: What we are learning now is that as we are modernizing, our thick layer is becoming thinner layer. And then there's areas that aren't even thin. It's almost like blank. And it's just our one layer of gut cells. So what's happening is they get damaged and they get damaged from the toxins that we eat, the foods, the alcohol, the antibiotics, the ibuprofen, all that stuff that we all eat and take in. And what happens is those cell walls get damaged and you start to have problems because when that cell wall gets damaged, I'll give you a visual. There's something traveling through your gut. It damages that cell wall. All of a sudden your whole immune system comes there because it's like a cut. Like something hurt you. Your whole immune system comes there as if you had a cut and says, hey, there's an inflammatory response here. And this keeps happening all over the place. You have all these fires that are now happening and that's inflammation of the gut.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: So when your stomach hurts after you eat gluten, people say, oh, now I can't stand gluten. I can't eat this food. I can't eat that food. I'm having an allergy or I'm having —
--:-- Mel Robbins: Or an intolerance or whatever.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: That's what's happening. And when you hear the word leaky gut, that's what they're referring to.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Got it. Okay, so do we take bacteria? Is this what probiotics are? Like, what is going, like, I don't even know where to start.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: I love that question because I get this every single day. People are always like, so which bacteria do I take?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Is that what a probiotic is?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: A probiotic is a bacteria. A probacteria. Meaning we are for the bacteria going in. A probiotic is an actual bacteria. So we're trying to add more bacteria to that thick lining that can help us.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Got it. Okay.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: But the problem is that studies are inconsistent. Sometimes we're seeing lactobacillus and prevotella are boosting depression, mood. Other times it's not doing anything. Other times it's helping the antidepressant. So we still say, I say, hey, I already know, Mel, how to improve your gut bacteria. And you don't need pills or a probiotic to do that. You need to eat the food that feeds it, meaning fiber, real food, not ultra processed food.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So fiber.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: You need to eat food that have natural bacteria in it. Yogurt, kimchi, kombucha, sauerkraut. Is vinegar good? Apple cider vinegar, the raw.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: You need to eat more of that. In fact, they found that four servings, four to six servings a day of probiotic food was actually the best at increasing the amount of happy bacteria.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Because it seems like everybody's adding probiotics to things. Our body's so smart. Our body knows that when you're carrying bacteria in your gut, they're going to first try to kill it because they think it's foreign. So when you're taking a probiotic pill, a supplement, a lot of it gets killed because your body's like, oh, this is bacteria. We got to kill it. Could be bad bacteria, right? When it's in the mesh —
--:-- Mel Robbins: You think about like in the net of the food?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Yes. In a sauerkraut and a kimchi, even in apple cider vinegar, naturally occurring, they let it pass through. And so it gets to the lower part of the gut where it needs to be. And so we are now realizing that, oh, wait, we should be doing more things that increase a happy bacteria. You know what the number one probiotic is?
--:-- Mel Robbins: I have no idea.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Exercise.
--:-- Mel Robbins: How the hell is exercise a probiotic?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Gut bacteria love when you move.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: And they produce this thing called short chain fatty acids. And I mentioned short chain fatty acids before when I was talking about the brain gut connection. When you exercise, those short chain fatty acids go to the brain, go all over the body and calm the inflammation. They calm your brain. You feel good. And they grow the bacteria in the gut. It's a signal.
--:-- Mel Robbins: It's very clear based on the case that you're making that if you were to focus on mostly whole foods and you were to really become diligent about removing as many unhealthy processed foods from your diet, you would see a significant change in your mood. You would see a significant change in your energy and a significant change in your overall health. If you add in exercise, not only because it helps boost the natural production of bacteria, but we also now know based on this new research study that a change in your diet and consistent exercise can be more effective than taking an antidepressant and going to therapy for depression because your body is designed to heal itself and to run properly. And even if you have spent a lifetime jamming Big Macs down your face and you feel stuck in this craving cycle, that you can reverse this. I think that's so hopeful. You say that you can get rid of, let's say, like a sweet tooth in 30 days. How do you do that? For those of us that like sugar and a coffee, you know who I'm talking to. For those of us that love dessert, we crave it, baby. Like, how do we get rid of it?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: I'm going to tell you something so profound.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: When they did a study, they planned it to be 30 days, actually, to change someone's diet very drastically.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So, like, give me the drastic.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: So if I had to rank the worst food, it would be like high fructose corn syrup soda.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So sodas.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Yep. But drinks also. So juices, orange juice from the grocery store is in the soda category, by the way.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Wait, orange juice from the grocery store?
--:-- Mel Robbins: Is in the soda category?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: It's heat pasteurized.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: It's hot. So all those vitamins that we were hoping for are nuked. The fiber is filtered out and all you're left with is the water and the sugar. So it's like people drink juice as if it's a health food, right? Soda has a bad connotation, right? But juice is just as bad. Like it rivals a soda.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Wow. Okay. What's another one?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: So high fructose corn syrup soda is probably the top.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Processed meats.
--:-- Mel Robbins: What is a processed meat?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: So processed meats means not your grass fed burger, but the one from the drive through. There's additives in it. It's not just the meat. Bacon often have nitrates and they have flavoring and sugar. So processed meat, hot dogs is a great example.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: They're just basically putting a bunch of meat together, but they're adding all these other non-food items. So they said, let's just switch their diet so drastically and actually do it in a clinical center where they're only allowed to eat with us. And they change it to a high vegetable, fruit, no juices or sodas, no processed meat. They started to look at their stool to see what the gut bacteria were doing. So we can find out, okay, like how long does this really take? How long does it take? Guess how long it took to see a marked difference.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I have no idea.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Three days.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Three days?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: In three days of this rapid shift in diet, you had a whole new gut bacterial colonies happening.
--:-- Mel Robbins: That's all it took?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: That's all it took. This is a study in Nature, the highest level journal in the world. It's like the Harvard of journals. The big picture here is you have the power. Like you always say, and I always say this too, we can save ourselves. We can change our mood. We can change our lifespan. We can change how we come into this world every day. We have the power and it takes three days.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Wow. Talk to me about drinking warm water. Why warm water? That sounds horrendous.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: It's not meant to say that water — I would say water is so good for you, whether you drink it cold, whether you drink it warm. But there are some theories that if you drink water warm or room temperature, it's more easily absorbed for you.
--:-- Mel Robbins: By what?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: And it can give you — your body.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Your body.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: And so there's no warming that needs to happen because we're internally 98 degrees or —
--:-- Mel Robbins: That's true.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: How do you know if you're getting enough sleep based on the things that you study?
--:-- Mel Robbins: Yes. Because you're eight hours. Yeah. How many hours do you sleep by the way?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: The older I get, the more boring I am. So I would say nine or 10.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Yeah. I love that.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: People who sleep less than six hours have a higher mortality. They have lower mood, and they are hungrier, as we said, with the leptin. What you want to do is really realize how much sleep you need is when you sleep without an alarm, how many hours do you sleep? And not when you're sleep deprived, but —
--:-- Mel Robbins: Oh, I bet I sleep 10 hours.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Yeah, that's —
--:-- Mel Robbins: If I don't have an alarm on, I sleep way longer than I think I'm going to.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: When you look at the last couple of weeks of your life, the best days, the days when you felt the most refreshed, the best mood, were the days I got the highest amount of sleep. That's by far. That's how much sleep you need. And every American that's listening to this is going to be like, I can't sleep that much. But you think about your best days of your life happened when you slept adequately. It changes your hunger hormones. It changes your hormones in general, for women, especially as we get older, this is important. It changes your mood. It changes your ability to make decisions.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: And your interactions with other people. So why would you want to skimp on that? Why would you say that you'll be like everybody else, sleep when you're dead? When you look at the data, the data says opposite. It says, if you don't sleep, you'll be dead much earlier.
--:-- Mel Robbins: That's true.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: If you don't sleep, you will be more depressed, more anxious, have more hunger and craving signals. You are going to be a version of yourself that is a shell of what you want to be.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Can you walk us through what you would recommend, what is on our plate and when are we actually eating? For like, you know, complete hormone balance.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Yes, we didn't even talk about circadian rhythms, but Mel, sunlight and darkness run our bodies. We have internal clocks in every one of our cells. So routines are excessively important in terms of our mood and our body, our nutrition. So when you wake up in the morning, you want to get sunlight. I have a rule. When you wake up, go get sunlight first. Sky before screens.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Oh, I love that.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: So sky before screens is how you should start your day. Your body is wired to see sunlight in the morning. Even if it's a cloudy day, it just has to be bright light. You can just walk out outside. For me, it's my back door. Just walk out for a few minutes. It could be two to 10 minutes. For me, I'm usually just in my pajamas. I'm coming back in and getting ready for the day.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Okay. So you don't want to have food or caffeine in the first 45 minutes of your day. Why?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: I'll tell you why. When you wake up, you feel groggy, right?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: That grogginess is partially, mostly from adenosine in your brain.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Adenosine.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Adenosine.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: And it clears out within 30, 40 minutes. It clears out. Then you have your coffee. Then you eat your food. And the reason why is coffee blocks our adenosine receptor. It just blocks it from actually binding.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: So if you don't let the adenosine clear out and you just drink your coffee, when the coffee wears off in a couple of hours, that adenosine is still there. And it just binds those receptors and you feel excessively tired. And that's why you think you need another cup of coffee. And then you're fully dependent. Like the people that wake up and they need the coffee right then and then they need it again at like 10 o'clock and then they need it again at one o'clock. It's because you're not letting that adenosine go.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: You need to let that clear out.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I'm guilty of this. So I'm going to try this tomorrow. I'm going to wake up. I'm going to wait 45 minutes. Then I'm going to have my coffee. I'm going to see if I have a craving for a second cup.
--:-- Mel Robbins: That is fascinating. Okay. So you want to let it clear out naturally because it's not going to clear out naturally if you start the caffeine cycle right away.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Got it.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So clear it out for 45 minutes. Get our sun in. What's next?
--:-- Mel Robbins: Okay. So no intermittent fasting.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: So everybody, I love intermittent fasting.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Then why are we eating? Because I do it the opposite way. Talk to me.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: There's very good evidence that for thousands of years, we ate in one scheduled way, which is daylight hours.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: There was no microwaves, Uber Eats. They had a fire and you'd maybe eat an hour or two after sundown. That's it, right?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: You are not snacking at midnight. There's nowhere to store the food thousands of years ago. Our internal clocks are set so that when melatonin hits two to three hours before bed, your organs shut down. You cannot process sugar as well as you did. You can't take it into your muscles. You're not releasing digestive enzymes. When you're eating late at night, you're waking your body up in the middle of the night and asking it to do a math problem. Your body is going to be like, I don't want to do this. That's what happens when you eat late at night.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Holy smokes.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: You put your body in conflict with itself.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: And so intermittent fasting, everyone's doing it the wrong way. They're eating way late into the night and then they don't eat all day when the sun is out.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Right.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Like that's the time that your body's ready for food.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Right.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: So ideally, you wait an hour because nobody needs to be eating every minute of every day. Americans just, we just eat 14 to 16 hours a day. It's just too much, right? So you wake up, maybe you get some movement and you get your sunlight, you eat about an hour or two even after you wake up. You don't need to push it to two, three, four o'clock. Like people are doing this thing. There's good evidence that skipping meals is actually bad for you. And that people who do it habitually actually have worse health outcomes.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Okay. Got it. So eat your breakfast. You want to have a high dopamine breakfast.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Yeah.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Let's have, you know, cottage cheese, eggs, tofu, scramble, veggies, nuts, berries. Great. When do I eat next?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Then I'm already hungry.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Well, no, I am. I'm hungry right now.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Yeah.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I eat vegetables. I would eat vegetables right now. So that must mean I'm hungry, but I got to have a glass of water first. And then ask myself that again.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I'm learning.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Then you tune in with the inner mouth, the brain gut mouth.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Yep. Okay. So then you can eat when you're hungry. Again, you can use your inner cues. Could be 12, could be one. Whatever your inner cues.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Okay.
--:-- Mel Robbins: You'll notice your ghrelin is set on a timer. Every day you'll get hungry at the same time.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: So hello ghrelin.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Yeah. It just, I think, dumped on me.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Yeah. So what do you eat for lunch? The healthier you eat earlier in the day, the better your chance of sticking to it. So they always say exercise and eating healthier foods, breakfast and lunch is your best chance. So for me, I try to eat the same things every day.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So what do you eat for lunch?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: So I eat a salad for lunch. I usually put a protein source on it. It could be different beans, nuts, it could tofu. You could do eggs. You could do salmon, whatever you want. Protein and veggies. A salad with protein on it. And I always have a fermented probiotic food with my lunch because that's the best time for you to get in at least one to two servings of the kimchi, of the sauerkraut. It could be kombucha for a drink, apple cider vinegar in your dressing. So that's when you have the best chance. Really simple. It can be very simple.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And then your dinner is when you want to eat. If you are someone, yes, you're learning. I'm paying attention. So if I know it's not sexy to say eat carbs, but carbs actually can be very healthy for you, especially in vegetable form, sweet potato, quinoa, whatever it is. You can eat that later in the day if you want to have that big boost of serotonin.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: And what about snacks? If I'm like legit hungry, but I'm not really craving anything.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: But I'm legit hungry midday. What's your go-to snack?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: So remember that protein has this effect on your body that it tells your hunger hormones to stop. So if you want more leptin, eat more protein. So your snack can be yogurt. Your snack can be a protein shake. Your snack can be a piece of cheese. Something with protein, because that will keep your dopamine levels up and it will keep your hunger hormones stable.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: So protein snack. I think women especially, we're eating just too little protein. There is a theory that the reason we get fat from eating ultra processed food is because it's so low in protein that your brain never gets the signal that you're full. Your protein threshold is never met.
--:-- Mel Robbins: One final thing I want to ask you, because we didn't really cover it: gluten. Everybody I know is gluten-free.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Yeah, it's not the gluten. There's very few people who are actually allergic to gluten. And like I told you, I have a degree in allergy and the way we look at it is that if you're allergic to gluten, you'll have anaphylaxis. That's gluten allergy. It is very common to have GI issues with processed gluten. So when you eat a lot of bread, pizza, carbs, but that's not the gluten itself. It's the fact that you're eating processed food. So gluten gets mislabeled all the time.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: What I say to people is go gluten free for a few weeks, three to four weeks. See how you feel. When you add the gluten back, don't add back the bread, the cookies, the cakes, and the processed gluten. Add back a small wheat bulgur, like in a salad. Add back a healthy sourdough bread. Add back wheat in small unprocessed amounts and then see how you feel. And what I realized is that people villainize gluten all the time. And in America, gluten-free has become such a tagline that those foods are more unhealthy.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Oh, because of all the processing.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Look at you, doctor.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Amy, is there anything else on this topic that we did not get?
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: I think we covered so much. I think, like you said, and I have taken this to heart, is that there is no pill that's going to save you. There is no person that's going to save you. You, when you learn about all this, when you actually listen to your own self, you are going to be the one who saves yourself.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Well, Dr. Amy Shaw, let me just say thank you, because without this information, we can't save ourselves. And you've explained the internal, extremely elegant but complicated systems inside of us so that it makes sense, so that we understand why these choices, these substitutions, why it actually matters. Like that's my huge takeaway. I have never actually understood any of this at the level that you just explained. And that's an enormous gift. So thank you, thank you, thank you. I appreciate you. You give so much amazing information to everyone that it's just a gift to be here and to speak to you.
--:-- Dr. Amy Shaw: Well, feelings mutual, babe.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Wasn't she great? Well, you know who else is great? You are. So before we go, I just want to remind you that I love you, I believe in you, and I believe in your ability to take back your health, to make a million happy psychobiotics yourself. Now go make a bowl of raw vegetables. Put down the potato chips. See, I'm learning. I hope you're learning too.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I wish I had not worn these high-waisted pants. It's like wearing a tourniquet when you sit down. We have 10 minutes before Dr. Shaw arrives. Hand me those potato chips. I cannot stop eating them. This is not an ad, by the way.
--:-- [Sound of Mel eating potato chips]
--:-- Mel Robbins: Okay. All right. I'll start over. This is so good. Yum. But I don't think you want me chewing. I was trying to enjoy it. I'm sorry, guys. Here we go. Is there anything in my teeth? That was my breastbone. She's coming. Take these potato chips. Oh!
--:-- Mel Robbins: And one more thing. And no, this is not a blooper. This is the legal language. You know, what the lawyers write and what I need to read to you. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend. I am not a licensed therapist. And this podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist or other qualified professional. Got it? Good. I'll see you in the next episode.
