In order to properly fuel ourselves we need to understand our body. Knowing what parts of our body need what kinds of food is vital to be able to help feed ourselves correctly.
What food is going to our brain? What food does our brain actually need? How much does it need? How will that affect our guts’ relationship with our brain? These are just some of the questions we should be asking, and answering, in order to fuel ourselves properly.
In this episode I share:
- My advice for how to think about your body and brain
- Why it’s important to consider what your brain needs when it comes to considering what you’re going to eat
- What is the blood brain barrier and what does it do?
- The significant impact even mild dehydration can have on our cognitive abilities
- The side effects of fluctuations in blood sugar levels
- The amount of fats that make up the brain and why they are important
- Some of the physiological responses that can happen if we are under eating
- The ways the brain and gut are connected
- What can happen to our adrenals when we’re not fuelling ourselves adequately
- The side effects that can occur to our thyroid if we are underfuelling
- The power of being strategic and intentional
- The mistake I see people make with their meals for the day
- How you actually create a meal that your body and brain need and the elements to break it down into
- Where to get all the different fats our brain need
Key Quotes
“I know breakfast can be hard if you aren’t good at having breakfast. But it’s like any area, you don’t become good if you don’t practice.”
“If you are inconsistent every single day, your body and your brain has no idea what consistency looks like.”
“Fuelling is about giving your body what it needs rather than missing the mark and playing catch ups.”
Episode Resources
Jessica Spendlove Website – www.jessicaspendlove.com
Jessica Spendlove Keynotes – JessicaspendloveKeynotes – Jessica Spendlove
The High-Performance Profile Quiz https://jessicaspendlove.com/quiz/
Jess Spendlove Instagram https://www.instagram.com/jess_spendlove_dietitian/?hl=en
Jess Spendlove LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-spendlove-64173bb8/
About Your Host
Jessica Spendlove | Wellbeing Speaker & High Performance Strategist
Jess Spendlove is an international wellbeing and high performance speaker, coach, and advisor. With over 15 years of experience across corporate leadership, elite sport and the military she is known for helping ambitious leaders and teams optimise energy, build resilience, and sustain peak performance.
As one of Australia’s leading performance dietitians and a trusted voice in executive wellbeing, Jess delivers science-backed strategies that empower individuals, teams and organisations to thrive under pressure and achieve long-term success.
Episode Transcript
The following transcript has been automatically generated and not checked for accuracy
Jess (00:02.206)
Today I want to talk about a really important concept when it comes to shifting how you think about what you eat.
This approach is about considering what your brain needs. Now, the brain is ultimately the CEO of your body. It controls and directs every single decision, every single organ, every single function. So when you think about it that way, it’s really important that we nourish our brain, we hydrate our brain and we make decisions on how we eat, when we eat, with knowing that. Now, before we get into today’s episode,
I wanted to briefly mention the high performance profile quiz. This quiz is designed for motivated, driven, ambitious individuals who are looking to pinpoint their unique profile and know what their right next step is on their journey to optimizing their wellbeing and performance.
This quiz will identify if you are the overachiever, the all or nothing human, or the ticking time bomb. And once you know that, you will be guided on what your right next step is on your wellness journey. You will be guided on what your right next step is to elevating how you feel, perform, and function.
Now, before we dive into today’s topic, I want to set the stage and get you thinking about your brain and your body the same as you would think about a leadership team, a CEO and an organization. Just as when it comes to any kind of comp- just- just as a company’s performance relies on the capabilities and the decisions of its leadership team, so does your overall well-being and performance on how well.
Jess (01:48.59)
Just as a company’s performance relies on the capabilities and the leadership and the decision-making of its leadership team, so does our overall wellbeing and performance on how well we treat our brain. When it comes to hydration, for example, even a mild amount of dehydration can significantly impact our energy levels, our physical and our cognitive performance. Now, you may wonder why that’s the case,
Jess (02:19.144)
water and even 2% in dehydration can lead to increased mental fatigue, increased drowsiness and when we’re considering physical performance it can increase fatigue and reduce our overall output. So by simply viewing our brain and what it needs to perform at its best this is a significant mindset shift that can really deliver changes to how we eat.
This mindset can really…
Jess (02:54.314)
So I’ll see you…
This mindset shift of viewing the brain and how powerful it is and how much it influences every other function in our body is a significant influence, can significantly influence our daily choices and those daily choices compounding can significantly impact your overall wellbeing and performance. Now, with that in mind, let’s get into today’s episode.
Team, today we’re shifting gears and we’re starting to think about how we feel and respond and the clues that our body and our brain are telling us. Today I wanna…
Jess (03:39.934)
scrap that soon.
Today I want to talk about some brain facts and how important it is to consider what your brain needs when making a decision on how you’re going to eat and what you’re going to eat. You see, the thing about the body and the brain, it is actually really good at telling us what works for us, but often what happens is we don’t give ourselves the space or the time, or we think it’s, or we think it is as important as all the other things
Jess (04:14.02)
When it comes to our brain, which only weighs 2% of our total body,
Our brain accounts for 20% of our total energy requirements. That means 20% of the food that we eat is utilized by our brain to just function and have its role every single day. Now, this is despite the brain only weighing 2% of our total body weight. So it is a very energy hungry organ and we can start to see why what we eat and when has such a big factor.
Interestingly, the brain is also made up of more than 75% water. Our hydration levels are critical when it comes to maximising our focus, productivity and overall energy levels. Our brain has something called the blood brain barrier, which is a semi-permeable membrane that controls what enters and exits the brain.
mechanism against toxins but it also has specific requirements for nutrients that it likes to cross over for optimal brain function.
When it comes to hydration, as I’ve touched on, even mild dehydration can have a significant impact on our cognitive and our physical performance. Studies show that even just a 1-2% deficit can significantly decrease our cognitive abilities. So these are things like focus, alertness and short-term memory. Now, the World Health Organization released a statement saying that more than 70-80% of the mental fatigue and tiredness
Jess (06:01.596)
day is from dehydration.
Another interesting point around the brain is that it’s heavily reliant on glucose as its primary fuel source. Now what we ideally want to be doing is giving our body high quality, high fibre carbohydrates which are broken down steadily over time into glucose in the blood and then sent to the brain. The key here is that we want to stabilise our blood sugar levels for vital optimal brain function.
stabilizing and maximizing our focus. Fluctuations in blood sugar levels can lead to things like mental fatigue, brain fog, reduced energy span and reduced cognitive abilities. Maintaining balanced blood sugar levels through a well-regulated diet by applying the all-the-elements principles that I discussed in the first episode can significantly enhance your mental performance.
Another really interesting fact is that the brain is made up of about 60% fats and these are specifically omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids. So fats and in particular those omega-3s and omega-6s are essential for brain health including cognitive function and we must obtain them through our diet. They’re really important for contributing to the cell structure and improved… just cut that there.
Now, it’s also important to understand that the brain will down-regulate other organs.
Jess (07:40.718)
Now, it’s also really important to understand that the brain will down-regulate other organs and systems if it’s not getting what it needs. And this can be the result of either under-eating or under-fuelling or being inconsistent or erratic with meals. Now, I’ve mentioned before that consistency really is the name of the game when we’re looking to optimise our energy, our wellbeing and our performance.
the philosophy of we need to eat to fuel our brain it very much stacks up here. Now I want to talk to you for a few minutes about some of the physiological responses that can happen if we’re under eating or regularly eating. What that can then do is the brain What can then happen is the brain will then down regulate some other systems in our body.
Essentially when we have low energy levels, because we’ve established that the brain is a very energy hungry organ, we will then go into a process of conserving energy. Now that process then involves sending messages out to other organs to either slow them down or down regulate them as I said. A few examples of that which I’m going to give you here today is what can happen to our gastrointestinal tract,
also our thyroid. When it comes to our gut, the brain and the gut are tightly connected. They are constantly in communication with each other and this is via something called the gut-brain axis.
Now, in my practice, I see a lot of clients that report gut issues. And when we dig a little bit deeper, nine times out of ten, this is resolved by increasing their overall intake or standardizing or making the intake more consistent. Now I caveat that by saying if there’s anything underlying, we of course need to get to the root cause. Sometimes it can be a combination of the two.
Jess (09:52.324)
and these amplified issues from under eating. So we don’t wanna just have our head in the sand, we do need to be detective and look at the information. But what can happen when the brain is not getting enough of what it needs, it will down regulate the digestion process in our gut, it can also disrupt our microbiome, and this is called dysbiosis. So if you are someone that suffers from gut issues, I want you to have a reflect,
current eating practices, do you eat regularly? Are you consistent? Or are you eating really irregularly and erratic? Our body and our brain does not like that. It wants to know that it is expecting to get nourished. It is expecting to be satisfied and fueled. So if this is speaking to you, this could be something which is really happening for you. Now the next process I want to touch
Adrenal’s when we’re not fueling ourselves adequately and look this concept of fueling is universal. So You know at the start of my career It’s obviously was focused on athletes and adequate fueling for training But fueling really is the concept of being proactive with your nutrition rather than reactive It’s about giving your body what it needs rather than Missing the mark and then playing catch-ups When we’re missing the mark and playing catch-ups
not getting the best out of ourselves and it’s going to seep through into our energy, our focus, our productivity, our appetite and just our general well-being. So back to our adrenals. When we are conserving energy and we’re down regulating this can lead to increases in cortisol which can also drive our desire to eat certain foods which we may be trying to limit and avoid. It can also
Jess (11:52.064)
health and there can also be an impact with our sleep. When our cortisol levels are spiking later on in the day because we’re stressed that can really interfere with our sleep. Our normal cortisol profile or cycle is elevated cortisol in the morning to wake us up and across the day that reduces but if our cortisol is increased later on in the day or in the evening because we’re stressed and maybe that stress is a byproduct of us not eating enough or
stress on our body and that is going to impact our sleep and overall that’s going to reduce our energy. The third thing I want to touch on is our thyroid and what we do not want to be doing here is starving our brain, starving our body, starving our thyroid. I don’t want to say that actually.
Jess (12:42.198)
When it comes to our thyroid, if we are under-fuelling or being erratic with our intake and this is being impacted, some side effects which can happen can include slowing our thyroid down, we can also have increase in brain fog and we can also have increase in fatigue. Now, none of these organs are working on their own, they’re all interconnected and overlapping with each other and important to call out, I’m not saying that if you are late for lunch
a really disorganized day that all of this is going to happen. Some of these systems will be impacted, some of them won’t. There is always a level of individualization but what I wanted to do here was paint a little bit of a picture about how important it is to fuel your brain to perform and if we’re under eating or irregularly eating and we’re going into a little bit of conservation mode these is some of the down regulations that can happen across our body.
So now that we know all of that, with that in mind, what do we need to do? We need to be solution focused here. This is what this podcast is about, tactical and practical strategies to optimize how you feel, perform and function. When it comes to thinking about nourishing our brain, providing our body with what it needs, I’d really encourage you to go and listen to the first episode where I introduced you to some really important concepts such as all the elements.
This podcast episode is a really great continuation of last week’s episode where I was talking about 6 simple strategies to double your energy because a lot of these overlap into today’s episode as well. So the first one I want to talk about is you need to find your framework. You need to know what works for you. When do you feel your best? If you are inconsistent every single day, your body and your brain has no idea what
looks like. What you ideally want to be doing is working off a baseline framework of however many meals and however many snacks you feel you’re best at. Now I can of course give you guidance and recommendations but I do want to caveat by saying everyone is an individual and it is largely influenced by their activity levels, how long they’re awake and their individual goals. The majority of people
Jess (15:09.842)
in my practice, thrive on three meals and one solid everyday snack, or three meals and two snacks. Now, that may change if you’re really active, you may add in some extra pre-training snacks or primers, but I’m just talking day to day. You might train in the morning, you might walk, that type of, cut that bit, sorry. Now, everyone is an individual, so I would never wanna give you a number because what works for you
different for your friend but that’s where you need to check in with yourself and be honest with yourself and that’s where you need to look at those metrics that matter your energy your appetite and your performance which I covered in episode 2 so which I covered in episode 3 so make sure you listen to that so find your framework the second thing is be consistent in the inconsistency
The second is finding your consistency in the inconsistency. So this is not going for hours on end without eating, without fueling, without giving your body and your brain what it needs. This is looking and having guardrails that you have something every three to four hours. By doing so, this is your best chance of fueling yourself, satisfying yourself and your body and your brain knowing that you regularly get that nourishment that it needs to perform at its best.
The next thing is you need to be strategic and intentional. So this is about getting on the front foot. This is about giving your body what it needs to elevate how you feel and then to sustain that. Whereas what I see people doing is just flying out the door, not having breakfast or only having a coffee, getting on with their day, getting to lunch, and then the wheels fall off in the afternoon. Team, if the wheels are falling off in the afternoon,
That is a direct reflection of what is or isn’t happening in the morning. I know breakfast can be hard if you aren’t good at having breakfast, but it is like any area of your life. You don’t just become good at something if you don’t practice. You don’t wake up one morning and you just know Spanish if you haven’t taken Spanish lessons. You don’t walk into a gym and bench press 100 kilos if you’ve never lifted a weight before.
Jess (17:32.772)
if you’ve not trained for it. I think you get the gist of what I’m trying to say here. The mindset is that you are undertaking nutrition training and you’re training your body and your brain to understand what it needs. It doesn’t know. You’ve never been given it. Therefore it is not just going to tell you and cue in, hey I need to eat this at this time. But the beautiful thing about listening to me on this podcast is that I can teach you so you can train
And the best thing is once you commit to that for a period of time, you feel elevated and this just becomes your new normal. That is my goal for you. We are looking to embed behaviours so you are then on autopilot. But it does take a few weeks of focus commitment, which is why we only want to focus on one thing at a time so we’re not overwhelming ourselves. And the last thing I want to touch on is all the elements.
that Rubik’s Cube or that jigsaw puzzle on how you actually create a meal that your body and your brain needs. I went into more detail in this in the first episode so please tune in, please have a listen if you haven’t already and if you have, listen to it again, it always serves as a great refresher on what the four elements are which is protein, carbs, colours and healthy fats and what their
protein is to satisfy and sustain us. Our carbs are to fuel our body and our brain. These are broken down into glucose. We want them consistently across our day in similar amounts unless we’re exercising or training. We wanna increase them around that. And that will really help stabilize those blood sugar levels. We want colors for that vitality and nourishment. We want it for those antioxidant compounds which is so protective for our cognitive
our cognitive health as well as our gut health. And this extends to things like polyphenols, bioactive compounds, our vitamins and minerals and our whole broader range of antioxidants. And luckily last those healthy fats. We don’t want to neglect them because they protect us. And as I mentioned our brain is a really fat rich organ. Omega-3s and omega-6s. We want to get them in our diet. We want to be having particularly omega-3s
Jess (20:01.912)
which we get from like our oily fish, walnuts, certain nuts and seeds, very abundantly rich in omega-3 fatty acids. We wanna be having two to three serves of oily fish a week and even then, for all of my high performing clients, I recommend that they supplement with a high dose omega-3 fish oil supplement. The numbers we’re looking for there are 2000 milligrams of EPA and 2000 milligrams of DHA.
anti-inflammatory standpoint it has cardiovascular protective effects. It’s also very good from an overall inflammation so if you’ve got any joints any tendon issues very helpful there. Whereas our DHA is specifically those really good omega-3 fatty acids which are great for our brain health that is the particular type of fat which is predominantly in our brain. For those developing it’s essential for brain development and for overall when we’re
Jess (21:01.852)
over time as well as those antioxidants in our overall intake and removing those ultra processed foods having a high dose of those DHA in that overall omega-3 fatty acid supplement is critical. So to summarize you need to eat to perform. Our brain is the CEO of our body and when we start to fuel ourselves and hydrate ourselves knowing that we will start to give this really powerful
organ, what it needs, so then it can help our entire body to optimize how we perform. The thing is when we start to dial in and understand how we respond to certain behaviors and our overall dietary pattern, we really can begin to hack our own behavior, which I know so many of you want. That’s why you’re here listening to me. So here…
Here you will often hear me talking about the need to be intentional and proactive rather than reactive. Being intentional and proactive are very high performing behaviors and that’s because when we start to do that, the return on investment from a compounding effect when we’re consistent is profound. So if today’s episode has resonated with you, shoot me a message on Instagram and LinkedIn and let me know what has spoken to you.
If you’re keen on some more personalised services to help you elevate your wellbeing and performance and hack your own behaviour, I offer personalised strategy sessions or more in-depth coaching programs which include high-touch support, fast impact and long-term behaviour change. You can find more information in the show notes, otherwise I’ll be back again next week.