What Does Your Gut Have to Do With Your Brain?

Good morning, my friend. I hope you're doing well. It is Mind Change Monday.

Mind Change Monday and I'm Dr. Lee Warren.

So glad and grateful, honored really to be with you for another episode of the Dr. Lee Warren Podcast.

We're going to do a little self brain surgery today aimed at helping us change

our minds because as I always tell you, you can't change your life until you change your mind.

We had some unbelievable episodes last week. We had Tish Harrison Warren on Friday.

If you haven't heard that episode yet go back and listen to it had an incredible

conversation about advent and about Lament and about her book prayer in the

night and what to do when life really knocks you out She's a bereaved parent

like Lisa and I are and just an unbelievable conversation and then Saturday.

Probably my favorite self brain surgery episode of all time.

I just want you to go listen to it. It was an incredible look at the sort of

neurobiology and biochemistry of what happens in your brain when you change

your mind and And I was trying to address this question from a listener who

said, hey, why is it not just a trick?

Why am I not being disingenuous when I feel sad or feel anxious and I just tell myself to feel better?

Why is that not just some kind of neuroscience hack?

And I went into the biochemistry and the gene regulation aspects of why changing

your mind changes your life, why thoughts become things, why the things you're

actively doing are the things that you're getting better at.

We did all that on the episode season 9 episode 48 from Saturday thoughts regulate

gene expression Positive thinking is not a trick.

That is an important and Powerful episode is kind of a bookend to Friday's episode,

which was a re -release I'm sorry Thursday's episode for throwback Thursday

of tricking your brain or changing your mind We also had Philip Yancey thrown

in there for another new conversation with him on Wednesday of last week and we had Dr.

Michael Gillen on Monday of last week. We had talked about three home runs of

conversations this past week, and I just hope you had a chance to absorb those episodes.

Now, today it's Mind Change Monday, and we're gonna do a couple of things that are different.

One is we're gonna have our first edition of three things I learned from three books I love.

I've been promising you this. People have been writing in and say,

hey, you recommend so many books. You reference and mention so many books.

Do an episode sometime about those books and give us some info about the books

that you read. Go a little deeper. So we're gonna do that today.

Before we do that though, we're gonna do something completely different.

Remember the old Monty Python sketch, and now for something completely different.

We're going to do that and we're going to talk about your gut and why your gut

and your brain are so intimately connected And what that has to do with your

immune system and what it has to do with changing your mind and changing your

life And why in the world would dr.

Warren the brain surgeon be talking about your gut? Well, we're going to get

into that in a few minutes And we're going to go way back in time to 1993 to

a very young budding Biochemistry scientist medical student dr.

Warren in the lab and what that has to do with today, and I think it'll be fun

We're even going to give you my very first commercial on the podcast of all

time and there's a very specific reason why I'm going to do that for you.

But today's Mind Change Monday and we're going to get after it in just a minute.

But before we do any of those things, my friend, I have one question for you.

Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes, there's only one rule.

You have to change your mind first. And my friend, there's a place where the

neuroscience of how your mind works smashes together with faith,

and everything starts to make sense. Are you ready to change your life?

Well, this is the place, Self -Brain Surgery School.

I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired,

take control of our thinking, and find real hope.

This is where we learn to become healthier, feel better, and be happier.

This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.

This is where we start today. Are you ready?

This is your podcast. This is your place. This is your time,

my friend. And let's get after it.

Music.

Alright, you ready to get after it? So as I've gotten older now,

I'm only 54 I'm not father time or anything, but as I've gotten older I've recognized that.

Not only me but my patients and even

my family members who are my age or older Are getting

sick a little bit more often and I've been concerned about this We're getting

a few more colds a little bit more sensitive to kovat getting the flu more often

And I've just noticed that and I've been paying attention and the research is

clear our population in the United States and really all over the Western world

is getting less healthy as time goes by.

We're getting more prone to illness.

Why is that? Well it has a lot to do with our diet, has a lot to do with our gut,

has a lot to do with the immune system modulation that you may not understand

or know that your immune system is heavily involved with the bacteria called

the microbiome that the system and organization of billions of bacteria in your

gut called the microbiome.

The gut microbiome has a tremendous amount to do with your immune system health, okay?

This is a symbiotic relationship with the bacteria in your gut that are very

important in how healthy you are.

In our diet, the things we eat and drink and the way that we've lived our lives

is affecting that and it's changing over time, not for our benefit.

And in medicine, we keep inventing drugs to try to modulate it.

Antibiotics and anti -acids and all kinds of different things to try to deal

with the sicknesses that we get.

But we've done a poor job in Western medicine at least in addressing the root

problem which is the the way that our diet is affecting our gut microbiome.

Of course, if you pay attention to popular books, there's a book every year

that comes out. Somebody writes a book.

Some doctor somewhere writes a book with a plan for getting your gut going and

wheat belly and wheat brain and then the gut microbiome and all these books

and they're important and they're all picking at one part of the problem.

But I want to introduce you today to something that was really quite surprising to me.

I was updating my CV not long ago. A CV is, of course, the medical professionals and academics,

fancy word for resume, but the CV curriculum vitae that we have to,

every time we redo our credentials or apply for credentials at a new hospital

or re -up our medical malpractice insurance or any of that,

we have to provide a copy of our CV.

And I was doing some consulting work for a company and they needed a copy of

my CV and I realized I hadn't updated it in a year or so.

So I went and updated it. And in the course of reviewing my CV.

I always go down memory lane because at the end of it there's a long list of

publications and all the things I've written and all the scientific articles

I've done and all the book chapters and the medical work that I've done is all

listed there, all the talks I've given all over the world and everything.

And I remembered finally a time in my life in the early 90s and mid -90s when I was working.

I was a biochemistry student at college at the Oklahoma Christian University

and at the same time I was working at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation in the lab of Dr.

John Harley, who is a rheumatologist, a well -known immunologist that unlocked

some of the big secrets in the disease called lupus and other autoimmune diseases.

And his colleague Hal Schofield, who was my direct mentor, and Hal's research

was all about something called HLA -B27 and its impact on a disease called ankylosing spondylitis,

which is an autoimmune disease that causes spine arthritis and joint arthritis

and all kinds of other problems.

And Hal's research interest was in how bacterial infections or bacteria in your

body could potentially be part of what the problem is in triggering the autoimmune

response that leads to these arthritic diseases like HLA,

like ankylosing spondylitis, and even ulcerative colitis, and there's another

one in the eye called anterior uveitis, that all seem to be related to mutations in the HLA -B27 gene.

So I was working in his lab, and my job was to synthesize proteins and attach them to,

these trays where we could run tests of blood samples

against these proteins to see if any of them acted as an antigen which is the

trigger for an immune response and we could try to then begin to understand

how people were getting rheumatoid arthritis and lupus and ankylosing spondylitis

and anterior uveitis and ulcerative colitis and all these diseases that seem

to have something to do with HLA -B27.

Well what in the world is an HLA?

HLA stands for human leukocyte antigen. I promise I'm going somewhere with this.

HLA stands for Human Leukocyte Antigen and it's this complex of genes on chromosome

6 in humans that encode cell surface

proteins, these molecules that get attached to the surface of cells.

And those cell surface proteins are responsible for regulation of the immune system.

The HLA system is also sometimes called the major histocompatibility complex,

so that's found in every animal, but in humans it's called human leukocyte antigen.

And this actually, the science of human leukocyte antigens came out of the research

around organ transplantation.

Because when they first started trying to transplant organs in people,

they realized that what they were finding is that organs get rejected.

You take a kidney out of one person, give it to another person,

if they don't match up in all kinds of different immunological markers,

then the organ gets rejected. and you can kill the patient or the organ dies

and you haven't done anybody any good.

So in the science of trying to figure out how they could transplant organs successfully,

they discovered these antigens, these biological markers on cell surfaces that

seemed to code for the triggering of the immune responses that led to the rejection of those organs.

And that whole science led to the discovery of what now is known as HLA,

the human leukocyte antigen complexes on chromosome six.

And that all turns out to be incredibly important in the autoimmune disease

families, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis, all those kinds of

diseases, including ankylosing spondylitis.

Now fast forward 30 years and I'm a practicing neurosurgeon and guess what I

sometimes or frequently see in my office?

Something called spondyloarthropathy, which is an arthritic degeneration of

the spine, sometimes caused by ankylosing spondylitis,

but it also causes facet joint arthritis and sacroiliac joint arthritis and

degenerative disc disease and all kinds of other problems that I see in my practice all the time.

So long story short to say, I was updating my CV and I remember these two papers

that I wrote with Hal Schofield way back in the day, 1993 in.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which was a huge,

huge thing for me academically.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is a huge journal,

the famous journal, and that paper led to, in 1995, another paper in The Lancet,

which is a huge, again, huge honor to be published in The Lancet.

And those two papers, I kid you not, I'm certain, were the most important contributing

factors to me being selected by my residency program to get into training.

It set me apart from other candidates.

I went to a small school that nobody had ever heard of.

A lot of the other applicants had gone to Harvard and Yale and Penn and Duke

and Vanderbilt and Stanford. And here I am coming out of Oklahoma Christian University.

Right? I'm kind of a nobody from a small school, state school as my colleague used to call me.

I went to medical school at a state school, the University of Oklahoma,

not a big famous institution, but I had a differentiator on my CV.

I had a paper in the proceedings in the National Academy of Science as one of the listed authors.

I had a paper in the Lancet, and every time I interviewed for one of those programs,

somewhere to be a neurosurgeon, they brought it up.

Hey, I see that you publish in PNAS and in Lancet. Tell us about your work.

And I told them how I synthesized these proteins and did what Dr.

Schofield asked me to and helped run the assays to identify antibodies that

were important in the triggering of the immune responses that could potentially

have led to ankylosing spondylitis and these other Spondyloarthropathies.

I had no idea back then that this work would still be relevant in 2023.

The first paper, super nerdy, was called An Hypothesis for the HLA -B27 Immune

Dysregulation in Spondyloarthropathy.

Crazy name right? That paper was all about just an idea, a concept,

an hypothesis if you will,

for what might be causing the immune problem that leads to these autoimmune

arthritises like ankylosing spondylitis.

And we realized as we investigated and looked at the data that there are some

bacteria in your gut that bind little snippets of their DNA onto these HLA -B27

molecules that turn out to trigger antibodies that could turn out to trigger these diseases.

That was the idea way back in 1993. Now, two years later in the Lancet we published

another paper, HLA -B27 Binding of Peptide from its own sequence and similar

peptides from bacteria, implications for spondyloarthropathies.

And what we found there is that little pieces of the HLA -B27 molecule had similar.

Amino acid sequences similar genetic coding if you will to similar sequences

in bacteria specifically one called L R R Y L E N G K if you want to hear the actual nerdy,

B27 sequence that looks just like the same sequence on a bacteria That turns

out in your gut and that tricking of the immune system to think that something

healthy is not healthy or something unhealthy is healthy,

can actually turn out to be an unappreciated mechanism of how autoimmune diseases might start.

So those two papers led directly to me getting into my residency program, without any doubt.

Then I didn't think about them again for the next almost 30 years.

I just did the work, went to school, started my surgical training,

got in my surgical practice, went to war, did all the things that we talk about,

went through massive things and all of that.

And here I am almost 30 years later.

Recognizing as I am now a writer a podcaster practice practitioner of neurosurgery

and Guy who's getting into his 50s,

Recognizing that we're not as healthy as we used to be Our society isn't as

healthy as it used to be the Western medicine isn't answering all the problems

That are showing up in our bodies and it's just crystal clear that we're not

as healthy as we ought to be and something's going on Well,

what might be going on is that our choices of what we're putting in our bodies

aren't actually helping our gut microbiome Now this episode is not going to be all about that.

I just wanted to give you this beginning of an understanding of something There's

an incredible book called the mind -gut connection the mind -gut,

Connection and that book is all about this idea that your gut and your brain

are connected And it's absolutely true from medical science. Dr.

Emmer and Meyer Wrote this book. It was published by Harper Collins.

It's just a tremendous look at the mind -gut connection But he says something

right in the very beginning of the book that I want to read to you now just

to give you this Context chapter one of that book the mind -gut connection is

called the mind -body connection is real.

And he says this, over the past 40 to 50 years, something fundamental has gone

wrong with our health and the old model no longer seems to be able to provide

an explanation or a solution of how to fix the problem.

So what's happening can no longer

be easily explained simply by a single malfunctioning organ or gene.

Instead, we are beginning to realize that the complex regulatory mechanisms

that help our bodies and brains adapt to our rapidly changing environment are

in turn being impacted by our changing lifestyles.

These mechanisms do not operate independently, but as parts of a whole.

They regulate our food intake, metabolism, body weight, our immune system,

and the development and health of our brains.

We are just beginning to realize that the gut, the microbes living in it,

the gut microbiota, bacteria and the signaling molecules that they produce from

their vast number of genes, the microbiome.

Constitute one of the major components of these regulatory systems.

Let me break that down for you.

We're just now figuring out in Western medicine that the bacteria in our gut

and all of the genetic material that they have is recognized and interacted

with by our own immune systems and that begins to affect our health over time,

either positively or negatively.

And the long story short of that is, I realized that if your brain is the supercomputer

that we talk about it all the time,

your gut, my friend, your stomach and your intestinal system is the USB port

where you can stick a thumb drive in and every time you eat something or drink

something or digest something, you are putting information.

Toxins, nutrition, nutrients, vitamins, minerals, bacteria, viruses.

You're giving access to the inside of your whole system by what goes into your gut.

OK, now my overarching mission on my podcast, we say it every time you hear

an episode, is that I'm here to help you become healthier, feel better and be

happier, become healthier, feel better and be happier. Right.

And we talk about a lot of that in the context of how to manage trauma and tragedy

and other massive things and these hard things that we go through in life, right?

But I'm going to tell you that if your body isn't healthy, isn't physically

healthy, you will have a hard time getting your brain working better for you.

And so it's important that we always try to treat our bodies like a temple,

like the Bible says, it's our living essential act of worship.

So it's important to understand that the better we are on the health side,

the better we are on the mental health side, the better able and more resilient we will become.

And our overall quest to become healthier and feel better and be happier to

overcome massive things to find hope and meaning and purpose in our lives again.

If our bodies are working better, then we'll be better overall, right?

So that's just a big picture. Well, something fascinating happened.

I was doing a little bit of reading and research about the gut microbiome and

about all these diseases and disorders that come from alterations in our immune

system. And guess what I found?

My two papers from 1993 and 1995 are being cited in 2021,

22 and 23 in other people's research that's still happening now and they've

come a long way of understanding what this gut microbiome has to do with arthritis

and autoimmune diseases and even central nervous system health.

And my research way back in the day is still relevant.

Why? Because what we've proven now is what we thought way back then that actually

what you put in your body gets chopped up and recognized and presented to your

immune system as either helpful or harmful and if it's recognized as harmful,

it triggers immune responses that make antibodies that then can't tell the difference

between those protein sequences on bacteria that ought not to be there and similar

ones in the gene sequences of molecules that should be there.

That's why organs get rejected, it's why joints become arthritic,

and it has everything to do with why your brain doesn't work well when your

immune system isn't working well.

Okay, that's the tip of the iceberg of some things that we'll talk about in

coming months But in the context of all that I want to tell you I told you at

the start of this episode I recognized that we weren't as healthy as we ought to be.

We're getting sick more often We're getting covid and we're getting the flu

and we're not feeling well We

have a stomach ache frequently and it has everything to do with our diet

And I started looking into ways that we could make that

better I'm talking we meaning me and my family and my

own personal life and my patients And of course

Lisa as always way ahead of me started discovering

that she was using products in our home That

we hadn't talked about and one of those products is from a company

called peak life p iq ue Li fe

their website peak life and peak makes a

whole bunch of things that you can drink teas Elixirs

things that you can shake up into cold beverages and have like

a tea or a cocktail in the evening without alcohol in

it Or you can have them hot in the morning like a

hot tea you can mix them up and other Substances and

you can drink them and they have all kinds of benefits She was using them

for hair skin and nail support immune support digestive

support and they make your skin look better And I started researching what she

was drinking and I realized that it has a big immune system boost And so I started

drinking it too now It's part of what I do every morning is my little cocktail

that I make after I drink coffee which I'm trying to get myself off of or at

least less dependent on.

Drink this shake and I make it full of athletic greens,

which is a green drink that has all your probiotic and prebiotic and

vitamins And minerals we'll talk about that later and another

product called arm row which is a colostrum product that has

to do with lining your gut with immune barriers like you had when you were a

child that Makes you healthier and then peak and peak has all kinds of different

products and I'm gonna just give you one today If you are interested in getting

into this idea that what you put in your gut helps your brain be healthier and

we're all about getting brain health,

then you can recognize that when wintertime comes, everybody gets a cold.

And when people start coming over to your house or you start going over to their

house for Thanksgiving or Christmas and have all these gatherings with people

who are sneezing and coughing and all of that, you wanna be the one who doesn't get sick.

And maybe you wanna give yourself a little leg up on protecting yourself.

Well, Peak has this group of elixirs that are designed to boost your immune

system and your gut health around the holidays and the wintertime.

They call it the Winter Defense Pouch, and they'll send you a free pouch of

this stuff that's got four different sachets,

or little, little packets of immune -supporting, gut -modulating elixirs if

you spend $150 on their product.

So I'm gonna give you a link in the show notes if you're interested in checking this out.

I know that's a lot of money, but if you think about what we're doing every

day, are we drinking soda, are we drinking alcohol, Are we drinking coffee?

Are we putting stuff into our bodies all day? Yes, most of us are.

And if you add all that up over the course of a month, how much are you spending

on things that go into your gut that give you a stomach ache or raise your blood

pressure or give you diarrhea or don't make you healthier?

And you could choose to put something in there that actually does help you.

Now I'm gonna put a link in the show notes to the Peak products.

You can check it out or not, but if you do, we'll get a little commission on

that which will offset the cost of the podcast that'll help us.

But it'll help you more. So check it out in the show notes. There's a link.

Check it out now We're gonna pivot. I just thought it was fascinating that this

important work and research that's coming out now of how important that gut

Microbiome is to brain health and there's actually some papers coming out now

that have to do with central nervous system disorders like multiple sclerosis,

Glioblastoma other types of brain cancer and there's some

implications that the gut microbiome Microbiome may be involved

in the triggering of even central nervous system diseases

So there's more to this story and we're just now starting

to understand it in Western medicine But I'm telling you that

this is the tip of the iceberg on something very important It'll have a lot

to do with how we can become healthier and feel better and be happier over time

And I'm super geeking out about it because my work from way back in the day

30 years ago is still being talked about in those circles that have to do with the gut microbiome.

Spondyloarthropathies, and brain health.

How cool is that, right? That work you did a long time ago still is relevant today.

That's why we should always do our best, by the way, because everything you

do in your life has a long train to it, a long trail to it, and you never know

how something's gonna turn out to be important later that you do today.

So don't give up. Remember, we serve a God that has a long narrative arc of

a story that he's telling with your life, and you can't always see how it plays

out, but sometimes you get a little peek at it, and I got that with finding

out that my research from a long time ago was still relevant.

And I told you we're gonna talk about a little bit about books today.

We're gonna get into that now. Three things I learned from three books I love.

The first one is Mark Roggepp's book, Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy.

We've talked about it before.

But this is the book that taught me the most about how to pray when you're hurting.

Okay, now it's no secret. I've told you I came from a evangelical tradition

where we basically prayer was what you made of it.

Like you're just supposed to know what to say to God. And I'm telling you,

when you lose a son or something really devastating happens in your life,

you don't know what to say.

It's a gut punch and you don't have any words. Well, it turns out that the church

has given us words all the way back to the garden, the book of Psalms.

A third of them are prayers that Mark Rogap helped me recognize are called laments.

These are prayers where somebody's hurting and they just say to God,

God, this really hurts and I don't know what to say right now.

And it's okay. Like, we're kind of raised to think that you're not supposed

to tell God when you're upset or when you're mad or when you're scared or when

you're hurting, that you're supposed to figure it out on your own and bootstrap it.

That's kind of how I was raised, not by my parents, but by the church at large.

So Mark Roggeps book, Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy, helped me to understand and unlock

the idea that God wants us to shake our fist at Him.

At least we're talking to Him. Like you want your kids, even if they're upset,

you want them talking to you and not the drug dealer on the corner, right?

You want them to talk to you and not the guy on the video game that they're

chatting with. You want them to talk to you when they're hurting.

You're glad when they do, even if what they're talking to you about is a little painful sometimes.

And that's what lament prayers do for us, Okay, so mark Roggeps book three things.

I picked up from him number one suffering creates,

Self absorption this this idea that our natural bias is to individualize suffering

that something happens To the world around us and we find a way to say why is

this always happened to me?

And so it's important to recognize it when you're hurting. You're not the only

one that's ever hurt like that You're not the only one that's hurting now You're

not the only one that's going through something hard and why am I saying that

not to minimize your pain?

But to help you see, as I talk about in my book, Hope is the First Dose,

that suffering is extraordinary individually, but it's an ordinary part of the human experience.

And that helps you not be overwhelmed by it. That recognizing that you're not

the only one suffering doesn't diminish your pain, but it helps you to see that

God is not single -handedly stomping on your life, that this is something that happens to people.

And the hope comes in the fact that He has promised to get down into that painful

story with us and help us navigate it.

So our natural bias is to individualize suffering.

I got that from Mark Rogap. The other thing is what is lament?

Lament is a prayer offered in pain that leads to trust.

Lament is a prayer offered in pain that leads to trust. If I'm scared and I'm

hurting and I'm too nervous to even go to my dad about it,

I'm afraid, but I finally do, I say, dad I've

got this big problem and I don't know what to do and he says oh I can

help you with that and he helps me with it and it gets better

and then I end up trusting my dad more so

the next time I heard or that my mom or my sister or whoever my pastor whoever

I brought it to the next time I'm less hesitant to bring them something that's

hard because I trust them more that's what lament does with your relationship

with God okay it's a prayer offered in pain you're You're scared,

you don't know what to do, you're not sure where to turn, but you give it to God anyway,

and somehow he helps you navigate it.

And then the next time you're hurting, because guess what? Massive things don't

just happen once, they happen more than once, right? Because we live in a world full of pain.

So God says, hey, you trusted me with that. I'm gonna change your brain a little

bit so it'll be more wired to trust me more easily next time.

And before you know it, those hard things start to become more easily navigatable

because you know where to turn when life gets hard.

And you don't hesitate as long. And you go faster to the one who can help you.

A prayer offered in pain.

That leads to trust and the last one I completely stole this line,

From mark vrogap is hope springs from truth rehearsed hope springs from truth rehearsed Okay,

I say that all the time if you're hopeless and you're worried and you're scared

you get you some prehab in your heart And you fall back on some things that

you've repped a bunch of times before wait a minute I know what god's gonna

do here. I know he's done this before.

I know he helped me get through this I know it's gonna be okay.

That's how you find hope.

That's how you manufacture hope when you're hurting Hope Springs from truth

rehearsed Okay So that's three things.

I learned from Mark Roget's book I'm gonna sprinkle two more of those into episodes

during the course of this week The next book will be bird by bird by and Lamont

and the last one this week will be happiness by Randy Alcorn I've got three

things I learned from each of those two books So this week over the course of the episodes,

you're gonna get three things I learned from three books I loved.

Or three books that I love in the present tense.

And the first one is Mark Vroegheb's book, Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy.

Listen friend, we've talked a lot about weird stuff today.

The gut microbiome, how changing what you put in your gut actually helps what

changes, actually helps your immune system get stronger, right?

And I covered all that ground just to say this, I want you to recognize that

you can change your mind, and that will change the expression of proteins and

upregulation and downregulation of genes in your body.

And we've talked about that, how thoughts become things. But there's an input

source that starts way down in your gut and what you put in your mouth that turns into...

The building blocks of those proteins and genes that get transcribed and all

the stuff that your brain can do and trigger in your body, you've got to have

a good starting point, right?

You got to have a good base of materials to use for all that construction.

And so if you want to become healthier and feel better and be happier,

start thinking a little bit more critically about what you put into that system

because everything you put in your gut will affect the health of your gut microbiome

and that will turn into healthier outcomes or less healthy outcomes.

You'll feel better or you'll feel worse and I just want you to start paying

attention this week. Just pay attention.

Change what you eat for a couple of hours. Like something if you normally would

reach for a donut, don't reach for a donut instead.

Choose something a little bit healthier and pay attention to how you feel in

the hours and in the next day.

Just pay a little attention do a little research just for yourself not putting

guilt on you I'm not saying change your whole life and everything that's going

on with you is because of what you eat I'm not saying that at all it's not true

I'm saying do a little research with your own body and see how the machine that God made,

responds to different choices that you make okay so maybe we can stop paying

tomorrow taxes based on our dietary choices maybe we can start feeling better

tomorrow and have a little leg up on the next day because we've been a bit kinder

to our gut and helped our immune system be a little bit healthier.

Maybe we chose to drink some tea instead of another glass of wine.

Maybe we chose to put something healthy in there instead of something that's going to hurt us.

And I would just suggest if you routinely eat something that the next thing

you do is grab the Pepsod, then maybe you could change what you eat and you

won't need the Pepsod. Just think about that.

The last thing I'll say is this I hear from a lot of people about weight loss,

And how they struggle with diet and they have a hard time getting the weight

off and the number one mind shift that I want You to make Is that anybody who

is struggling to lose weight regardless of your genetics?

Regardless of what it is that you're eating or not eating regardless of what

you may have in your family history If you're struggling to lose weight all

those people have one thing in common and that is that they are in a calorie surplus state

Okay, if you're losing weight, you're in a calorie deficit state and if you're

gaining weight you're in a calorie surplus state.

So all the other things being true, if you're having trouble losing weight,

it's because at the end of the day, it's because you're taking in more calories

than your body is burning.

And so you will never get weight loss going in the right direction until you

get into a calorie deficit state.

Okay, and there's way more to it than that. But the bottom line is true.

If you're intaking more than you're burning you're going

to gain weight and if you're intaking less than

you're burning you're going to lose weight and so all the

Everything else that can be said about diet and exercise

and genetics and diabetes and all the other things You cannot lose weight if

you're adding more calories than you're burning off And so start thinking critically

about that as we start looking at this Overarching goal of becoming healthier

and feeling better and being happier in all aspects of our lives which is really

what New Thing November is about, right?

It's all the stuff that I've done up to this point, what got me here won't get me there.

If there is where I want to find more hope and the belief that my life can really

look different than it has in the past, if there is something different than

here, then what got me here won't get me there.

And if I'm stuck, then I've got to make some changes in order to see any progress, right?

So I just want you to start thinking about these different things.

We're not talking about guilt.

We're not talking about shame We're not talking about any of that stuff We're

talking about what can I do today with the reality of understanding how my body is put together?

So that I can be be grateful for the ways in which I'm fearfully and wonderfully

made and I can recognize That some of the choices that have led me to this place where I'm saying,

you know what it's time It's time to make some changes that some of those choices

will not help me in the place that I want to get to,

And so when I want to become healthier and feel better and be happier I've got

to draw a line and say the things I've done that got me to this place have to

leave I've got to leave some of those things behind and go to the next place

and that's going to require some Decisions and some changes and that's what

we're all about and it's mine to change Monday So what better day than to say, you know what?

I'm gonna look critically today what I put into my body what I put into my mind

I'm going to look at those places where I've got USB ports that I'm allowing

the world to stick stuff in,

Information or dietary choices or toxins or

anything else that might be hindering my ability to get there from here Because

remember hope is the belief that you can get there from here And all I want

you to do my friend is change your mind so you can change your life So you can

become healthier and feel better and be happier and the good news is You can start today.

Music.

Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren Podcast is brought to you by my

brand new book, Hope is the First Dose.

It's a treatment plan for recovering from trauma, tragedy, and other massive things.

It's available everywhere books are sold, and I narrated the audio books.

Hey, the theme music for the show is Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker,

available for free at TommyWalkerMinistries .org.

They are supplying worship resources for worshipers

all over the world to worship the Most High God

And if you're interested in learning more check out Tommy

Walker ministries Or if you need prayer go

to the prayer wall at W Lee Warren and d .com slash prayer W Lee Warren md .com

slash prayer and go to my website and sign up for the newsletter self brain

surgery every Sunday Since 2014 helping people in all 50 states and 60 plus

countries around the world I'm Dr.

Lee Warren and I'll talk to you soon. Remember, you can't change your life until

you change your mind. And the good news is you can start today.

Music.