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Transcript
- 01:19 About Dr. Carri Drzyzga
- 02:13 What is Functional Medicine?
- 03:20 Underlying Causes of Fatigue
- 05:15 Neurotransmitter Imbalance and Fatigue
- 06:26 Parasite Infection and Fatigue
- 09:23 Brain Fatigue
- 11:41 Trans Fats and Brain Health
- 13:32 Hair Mineral Analysis, Calcium and Magnesium
- 14:22 Specific Brain Symptoms
- 17:45 Amino Acid Replacement Therapy
- 19:47 Neurotransmitter Testing
- 23:04 Addiction and Neurotransmitter Imbalance
- 24:36 Tips for Maintaining a Sharp and Focused Brain
- 28:06 Three Tips for Brain Health and Fatigue
- 34:36 Most Pressing Health Issue in the World Today
- 36:26 More About Dr. Drzyzga
Wendy Myers: Hello! My name is Wendy Myers. Welcome to the Live to 110 Podcast. You can find me on my website, myersdetox.com. I have lots of information there for you about diet, lifestyle, supplementation, detoxification and how to heal your health conditions naturally.
Today, we have Dr. Carri Drzyzga on the podcast today. She is a chiropractor and naturopathic doctor. And she’s going to be talking to us about how you reduce brain fatigue. A lot of people have fatigue in their lives, and it’s not necessarily from body fatigue, but from brain fatigue. So she’s going to give you a lot of tips and tricks on how to improve your brain health and reduce brain fatigue.
The Live to 110 Podcast is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or health condition, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Please consult your health care practitioner before engaging in any treatment that I suggest today or we suggest today on the show.
Wendy Myers: Dr. Carri Drzyzga is known as the Functional Medicine Doc and go-to expert on finding the root cause of health problems so that you can feel normal again. She is a chiropractor and naturopathic doctor, and hosts the popular podcast, The Functional Medicine Radio Show.
She’s also the author of the hit book, Reclaim Your Energy and Feel Normal Again! Fixing the Root Cause of Your Fatigue with Natural Treatments. And Dr. Carri’s newest program, it’s an online health program, is called Entrepreneurial Fatigue: How to Feel Your Body and Brain for Entrepreneurial Success.
She has a private practice with functional medicine in Ontario located in Ottawa, Ontario. And you can find her at DrCarri.com.
Hello, Carri! Thank you so much for being on the show.
Dr. Carri Drzyzga: Hi, Wendy! Thanks for having me on.
Wendy Myers: Well, why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and how you got into functional medicine?
Dr. Carri Drzyzga: Well, I guess, first, I’ll start with functional medicine because a lot of people haven’t heard about what that is.
Functional medicine is about finding the cause, fixing the cause so that you can feel normal again. So basically, find the cause means we look at the body as a whole because everything in your body really is connected. And we understand that intricacy is between hormone balance, brain health, digestion, the immune system and all of that because really, it’s all connected. And again, the goal is to find the root underlying cause and then treat that naturally, which usually means using diet, exercise, stress management, taking the right supplements, the herbs, using other kinds of natural treatments to really get your body back into balance so that you regain your health again, and you feel normal again.
So functional medicine is not band aide medicine which is what most medicine is these days. It’s about really getting to the cause and fixing it. So that’s what functional medicine is.
Wendy Myers: And so, why is functional medicine important in helping to resolve the underlying causes of fatigue?
Dr. Carri Drzyzga: Well, I guess, if you never get to the root cause, the fatigue is always going to be there and you’ll be on medications for life, or you’re just going to keep suffering for life.
Actually, a common story when patients come to see me in my private practice at Functional Medicine Ontario, I often hear them say, “Dr. Carri, I’ve been to my family doctor. They’ve run all the tests. Everything is normal. The doctor doesn’t know what’s wrong. They told me I need to take a vacation or I need to take three months off of work on a burnout leave or my other option was to start an antidepressant.”
And patients know intuitively that there’s something wrong inside. There’s something out of balance. And so that’s why they come to see me for functional medicine to really find what’s wrong. Otherwise, like I said, you’ll never get better.
Wendy Myers: Yes. And so what are some of the underlying causes of fatigue?
Dr. Carri Drzyzga: That’s a really good question. So in my book, Reclaim Your Energy and Feel Normal Again, I outlined 8 out of the 14 basic causes that I found. At the top of the list, the top two, which should always be checked, these are the two things that medical doctors typically check. First on the list is anemia and second is thyroid.
Actually, a lot of people have thyroid problems even though they’ve been told their thyroid is normal.
Above and beyond that we have nutrient deficiencies. There can be food allergies and food sensitivities. There can be infections in the gut like parasite infections or bacterial overgrowth or yeast infections. There can be imbalances within the brain.
There can be many different reasons. That gives you an idea of some of the things that when a patient comes in, I’m checking for.
Wendy Myers: Yes, and when people have gut infections, since the gut makes so many neurotransmitters like serotonin, that can definitely cause an imbalance of neurotransmitters as well, that promote fatigue.
Dr. Carri Drzyzga: Exactly. So one of the things, if I’m suspecting it’s neurotransmitters, of course, in my head, I’m always saying, “Okay, what’s the cause of that?” So if it’s neurotransmitters, “Well, what’s the cause of that?”
If we just bring it to the very basic fundamentals, a lot of people aren’t eating enough protein in their diet. And protein, if you remember from science and biology, protein is this big, long freight train and it gets broken down into amino acids, which are the individual train cars. And those amino acids are the building blocks of all of your neurotransmitters.
So sometimes people aren’t eating enough protein in their diet and then along those lines also, some people just aren’t digesting and absorbing their protein very well. So if you have a tendency to have low stomach acid or if they’re not making enough digestive enzymes, they might be eating enough protein, but it’s not getting into their bloodstream to then make the neurotransmitters.
Wendy Myers: A lot of my clients present with symptoms of gut infection. I just presume that everyone that walked through the door has a parasite infection of some sort because it’s so common. Can you talk a little bit about how common those are and how those can cause fatigue in the body?
Dr. Carri Drzyzga: Absolutely. So it’s funny, Wendy, that you bring this up because I just had a patient in my office yesterday. He flew in from Cairo, Egypt to see me. And one of the big symptoms, he’s got fatigue, he also has a foggy brain and poor memory, just feels aches and pains throughout his body. And of course, his doctor said everything is normal.
So I did a lot of testing on him because he’s only in my office for a short period of time before he flies back to Cairo. So one of the things I did was a complete stool analysis. And I did an organic acid test. I found three infections in him. I found an amoeba infection and h-pylori infection, which causes low stomach acid, which causes not enough good protein digestion, and then lack of neurotransmitters. And then the third was a yeast infection.
People would think, “Well, how would I ever get infections?” The reality is they are extremely common. You are at most risk for having a gut infection or some critter living in your stomach or intestines. One, if you’ve been on birth control pills at any time in your life for a long period of time, if you are a frequent user of painkillers and anti-inflammatories, that is a big underlying cause of SIBO, which is small intestinal bacterial overgrowth.
Let’s see, antibiotics, of course, so frequent antibiotic use. I know, for myself, when I was a teenager, I had super bad acne. And so what did they do? They put you on tetracycline and other antibiotics just for months and years on end. And that can really wreck your gut.
But what the research is finding with antibiotics is that one round of antibiotics can mess up your intestines for about four years.
So we talked about birth control pills, painkillers, antibiotics, and then the other one is a very frequent cause of infection is people that are using antacid and acid blockers. You need to understand that your stomach acid, one of the purposes of having nice, strong stomach acid is it sterilizes the food as it comes down because our food is loaded with mold, yeast and all kinds of stuff. So it sterilizes the food. And so if your stomach acid is being blocked by medication, it’s an open door for infections to come in and then just create chaos in your body.
Wendy Myers: Let’s talk a little bit about the brain’s role in fatigue, what things can cause fatigue in the brain.
Dr. Carri Drzyzga: So very fundamentally, if we think about the brain, the brain requires three basic things. So one is oxygen, the second is stimulation and the third is nutrients, the biggest one being glucose.
So if we just talk about the first, which is oxygen, I find a lot of people have very poor circulation. They have cold hands and cold feet, even a cold nose. Those are all signs of very poor circulation. And what that means is there’s also not enough blood going into your brain. And so that can be a cause of fatigue and brain imbalance.
And then second on the list, we said, was stimulation. And some of the key things, you could do brain exercises and there are many different ways to do brain exercises like Sudoku and online brain-learning games like Lumosity and things like that.
Wendy Myers: Go on a heath website.
Dr. Carri Drzyzga: Yeah. Read, just read. Reading and learning new things, that’s a really good way to stimulate your brain.
And then the other thing is exercise. Physical movement, neurologically, is very complex, and that creates a lot of stimulation for the brain as well.
So we talked about oxygen, stimulation and then the last thing was glucose or getting adequate nutrition. And a lot of people, they’re eating too much sugar, too much carbs and they’re on a blood sugar rollercoaster. And that certainly impacts brain health.
Those are three basic ways. There are lots of different things we can do to help make the brain stronger and healthier because when it comes to fatigue, most fatigue, if you think about it, is brain-based fatigue. It’s not so much physical fatigue. If you were chopping wood all day, you would feel physical fatigue, but your brain would still be sharp. But what most people are feeling is brain-based fatigue. So their brain is tired but their body is fine. And some people are tired, but wired also.
Wendy Myers: How do trans-fats affect the brain? My understanding is that trans-fats are like these plasticizers that make the cell membranes really hard. Wouldn’t that affect glucose getting into the cell?
Dr. Carri Drzyzga: Exactly! It affects a lot of different things. So you just mentioned it, glucose getting into the cell. If we just take a couple of steps back, think about, for the listeners out there and the viewers out there, cells in your body, your body is made up of billions of cell, a cell would be like a water balloon. It should be very pliable, soft and squishy. And the rubber membrane of the balloon would be the membrane of the cell. And that membrane of every cell in our body is made of fats, actually.
So we’re eating too many unhealthy fats like trans-fats, that membrane becomes very rigid and solid. It makes hard to get nutrients into the cell and hard to get toxins out of the cell. So you can have lots of vitamins floating around in your bloodstream, but if they’re not getting into the cell, because that’s where all the work gets done, inside of the cell, they do you no good.
And so some of the good, healthy fats that can help make that membrane more loose, more pliable and more squishy are omega-3 fatty acids, especially DHA. That’s a big one for the brain and nervous system, for the health of the brain and the nervous system.
And then other kinds of health fats like coconut oil, avocado oil, there are lots of healthy fats that we can use.
So making simple diet changes over the long run can have a good effect on your brain. And then we could say conversely, if you’re not making those diet changes, that’s going to have a detrimental effect in your brain health too
Wendy Myers: There’s something very common in hair mineral analysis (I’m big on hair mineral analysis), when people have really high levels of calcium on their hair test, when it’s over about 65 (most people are over a hundred), the same thing can happen with calcium where you have the cell, where if you have too much calcium-reducing cell permeability, the same thing happens. Glucose can’t get in and nutrients can’t get in and toxins can’t get out.
So all you guys sucking down that calcium like it’s going out of style, you might want to re-think that strategy because it’s not always the best for every person. Everyone is different. I think most people don’t need a ton of calcium. We’re getting way too much.
Dr. Carri Drzyzga: You’re right. Most people need more magnesium instead of the calcium.
Wendy Myers: Yes, because magnesium is the boss of calcium and tells calcium where to go. So I absolutely agree with you.
So what are some of the specific symptoms that would tell you that your brain needs help?
Dr. Carri Drzyzga: Okay, so that’s a good question too and one that I get a lot. So usually with fatigue, the first question I’ll ask my patient is, if you can rate your energy – so you listeners and viewers, you can do this right now. If you could rate your energy from 0 to 10, 0 is no energy at all, and 10 is your batteries are in full charge, how would you rate your energy, day in and day out?
And I would say, if you’re rating yourself at eight or higher, that’s great. But lower than that you have some level of fatigue, and probably some level of brain involvement too.
So other signs of specific brain involvement – as you know, Wendy, there are four major brain chemicals in the body. So we have serotonin (that’s the most popular one that people hear about), dopamine, acetylcholine and GABA.
Let’s see, I have some notes on my computer here, so I can remember all of the little intricacies of these different neurotransmitters.
Acetylcholine, if you have an imbalance of acetylcholine, you would have that typical senior moment of a feeling, where you forget where you put your keys, you’re forgetting directions, just tending to lose things, even forgetting words. Those are all small signs of acetylcholine deficiency.
And then a serotonin imbalance, again, serotonin when it’s really low, usually what you feel is depression. But it’s on a spectrum here, so a little bit of a deficiency of serotonin might feel just a loss of joy or you’re not really getting joy from the things that you used to love to do.
Wendy Myers: And it makes you want to eat sugar and carbs.
Dr. Carri Drzyzga: Yes, eating sugar and carbs actually helps jack up your serotonin. Not enjoying friendships and relationships, unable to fall into a deep, restful sleep could also be a sign of not enough serotonin in your brain.
The next one we’ll talk about is GABA. So GABA calms down the body. If you don’t have enough GABA being made in your brain, you’re going to feel anxious and panicky, having an inner sense of dread or doom for no apparent reason. That could definitely be a GABA imbalance. So just feeling inner tension and just being a worrier, those could be signs of GABA deficiency.
And then the last one is dopamine, and especially for people that work, have jobs, or entrepreneurs, dopamine is the neurotransmitter that motivates us and rewards us. So when dopamine is out of balance, we’re going to have a hard time motivating ourselves. We’re going to be procrastinating, we’re going to feel worthlessness or hopeless, have a hard time handling stress.
So if you any of those symptoms that I just said ring true for you, you need to consider that maybe there’s something going on with your brain health.
Wendy Myers: Are you a big fan of amino acid replacement therapy to tweak the neurotransmitters and increase them or decrease them?
Dr. Carri Drzyzga: I am. I have a million things going through my head right now and they’re not coming out my mouth. It might be acetylcholine, I’m not sure.
I was going to say that I suffered with fatigue really bad after going back to school and getting my second doctor’s degree. And after graduation and passing my board exams, I had such fatigue. Basically, I slept 10 hours a night and I took a two-hour nap every day. And I just thought, I just need some extra sleep and my fatigue will go away, my energy will just bounce right back, and that didn’t happen.
So I started treating myself with functional medicine. And as doctors, we’re trained not to treat ourselves. So I broke the golden rule of don’t treat yourself. Have somebody else treat you. I treated myself with functional medicine and I assessed my adrenals, my cortisol was really bad. So I treated that. I went on a gluten-free diet. I did a stool test on myself and found parasites. I treated those. And every step, my energy got better and better. But it really wasn’t until I addressed my brain that it just clicked right in and my brain was boink! All the neurons were firing again. It was like the light was bright again in my head.
And I did that with using amino acids. So for me, that was a big part. That was the gold nugget for the cure for my fatigue.
But for other people, it’s different because there are many different factors that are going on. But when I have patients that I suspect there’s neurotransmitter imbalances, that is one of my tools that I’ll often use, using different, targeted amino acid therapies to try and regain some amount of balance within the brain.
Wendy Myers: What kind of neurotransmitter testing do you do?
Dr. Carri Drzyzga: So there are pros and cons to neurotransmitter testing. One way, (and I talk about this in the book), it’s called MTO testing, or monoamine transporter optimization analysis. And it’s using urine testing to try and figure out the balance between serotonin and dopamine.
One of the problems with neurotransmitter testing is there’s not a way to really test what’s going on in the brain. We can’t access that and it would be harmful to do a biopsy of the brain. So there’s no direct access to the brain chemistry. And have neurotransmitters within our digestive tract too that are separate from the brain. So some forms of neurotransmitter testing, I find, work really well for patients and I could do the same testing on another group of patients and it doesn’t do anything.
So it’s a very individual thing with functional medicine as to what’s the right thing to do for the patient in front of me. So sometimes I’ll go with symptoms that they’re having. And if I feel like, “They need a little bit more support in dopamine, let’s try that and see what happens,” I’ll do that. And if I suspect there is something more lifelong going – some patients come (and it’s probably the same thing for your practice), they come in and they had depression their entire life. And you suspect there’s probably a genetic factor going on. I’ll start looking deeper into the genes and their methylation pathways.
So there are many different ways to try and assess for neurotransmitters. So there’s functional test, but then there’s also just going on symptoms and trial and error. And again, there’s no direct access to the brain.
Wendy Myers: At least amino acid therapy is inexpensive and it’s safe. And you just have to work by trial and error. But it can be incredibly profound for some people. Even for myself, I realized I had a GABA deficiency. It just dawned on me one day that I couldn’t shut down at the end of the day. I thought I was just stressed out. I started taking GABA and it was just a complete game-changer for me. I just felt much more calm, and I slept through the night, which I’ve been having problems at night waking. GABA for me was huge.
Dr. Carri Drzyzga: Yes, once you find the right formula, the right recipe, you can change a person’s life. But getting there can be a rough road. Once you find it, it’s amazing.
Wendy Myers: And I take l-tyrosine as well. I think I have a little catecholamine or dopamine deficiency. So I take a little tyrosine to kick that up a notch too.
A lot of people that crave sugar or any kind of substance abuse, they’re eating a lot of sugar or smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, drug addiction, they are looking for dopamine. They have dopamine deficiency.
I’ve had a history of alcoholism in my family, so I figured I probably have low dopamine as a genetic issue. So I take some tyrosine to help with that. And it works. It helps.
Dr. Carri Drzyzga: You bring up a great point because a lot of people struggle with some amount of addiction. And again, that’s on a spectrum. You could have a hard diagnosable addiction or you could just have such strong cravings for carbs or chips or whatever.
I’ve had patients where they feel like they have food addictions. They have shopping addictions. Addictions could come in any different shape or form. It doesn’t necessarily have to be food, drugs or alcohol. But if you feel like you have an addiction, even an addictive personality, you have to consider that you could definitely have a dopamine deficiency and it helps tremendously.
I remember one patient that came in to my private practice and she said, “Dr. Carri, I feel like I’m addicted to potato chips” and I said, “Okay, like addicted or addicted? If you have a bag in your house, you can’t eat just one. You just blow through the entire bag.” She’s like, “I blow through the entire bag. It’s terrible. It’s an all-consuming addiction.” So I said, “Okay.”
So one of the things we did was I gave her increasing amounts of tyrosine to help bring up her dopamine levels and just stop it completely.
Wendy Myers: Yes, it’s amazing the changes, the little tweaks you can make that have such profound effects on your life, your behavior and your personality. It’s amazing what supplement therapy can do.
Dr. Carri Drzyzga: Absolutely!
Wendy Myers: So why don’t you tell us a few things, a few tips for the listeners that they can use to keep their brain sharp and focused?
Dr. Carri Drzyzga: Okay, so one thing to do is make sure you’re getting good sleep, really good sleep. So the Centers for Disease Control, or the CDC in the US, consider sleep deprivation as a public health epidemic at this point.
Wendy Myers: They consider a carcinogen too.
Dr. Carri Drzyzga: Yeah, yeah. I think what they define as sleep deprivation was getting six hours or less at night. And what’s really considered an ideal amount of sleep is between seven-and-a-half and nine hours of sleep, so getting good sleep
One of the simple tricks that I tell patients that works pretty much across the board is to wear an eye mask at night because we can have a little bit of light creeping in around windows, we can have the light from our alarm clock, the light from different electronic gadgets. All of those tiny little sources of light will blunt your melatonin production and it prevents you from really getting deep sleep.
So wearing a simple eye mask might not give you more hours of sleep, but it will give you deeper sleep. And just doing that, I’ve had a lot of patients, they’d come in and they’re like, “Holy cow, Dr. Carri, my energy is so much better. I’m not sleeping more, but I’m sleeping better.”
Wendy Myers: That was huge for me too. I always used to make fun of my first husband because he always wore an eye mask. And I thought, “Why do you need that sissy boy?”, but I started to wear one and it was amazing. I could not believe how much better I slept. And I find when I don’t use it that I wake up at night, I have more night-waking issues and I wake up earlier because the light that penetrates through your opaque eyelids, it penetrates through there. I need some acetylcholine as well. But it penetrates through your lids and it wakes up you up. That’s why you have a thin eyelid skin.
Dr. Carri Drzyzga: So that’s one tip. I guess the second tip would be doing a little bit of meditation. So meditation, watching your breathing while you’re doing meditation helps get more oxygen up to your brain. Plus it’s just very calm and relaxing, which can help your GABA levels and which can help your hormone levels as well.
So a very simple meditation that I teach my patients to do – actually, I have them to do this when they’re in my office getting acupuncture because that’s another tool that I use. So while they’re laying on the table with their needles in, every time they take a deep breath, I’ll have them imagine their favorite color coming in and just flooding their body all the way to their fingertips and their toes. They’ll hold their breath and then they’ll breathe out. And as they breathe out, I’ll have them imagine a color that they hate going out or just blackness going out. So you’re breathing in good energy and you’re breathing our bad energy.
And just doing that for 5 or 10 minutes can really help get a lot more oxygen up into your brain and just help with balancing the different hormones within your body, especially cortisol.
Wendy Myers: What are three tips that listeners can start doing today to help with their brain health and their fatigue?
Dr. Carri Drzyzga: One could be eating better. Make sure you’re getting enough protein in your diet. So in general, the amount of protein you need – you weigh yourself, cut that number in half, whatever that number is, is the grams of protein you should be eating, at a minimum. So if you weigh 160 pounds, at a minimum you should be getting 80 grams of protein a day.
Wendy Myers: I didn’t know you were testing me.
Dr. Carri Drzyzga: I was testing you. At a minimum. And it’s quite telling, to just take the last three days of your diet, write it all out, everything that you ate, and you could very easily just use the internet and type in – I’ll do this with patients and I’ll teach them how to use Google as their tool. And they’ll type in, “how much protein is in a chicken breast?” And bam! A number pops up.
And so you can estimate how much protein you’re getting. And if you’re not eating enough, you know that’s part of what you need to do to help your brain.
Wendy Myers: I have one question. Can you get enough protein if you’re vegetarian or vegan?
Dr. Carri Drzyzga: Oh! Wow, Wendy. I would say no. It makes it a little harder.
One of the things is a lot of vegetarians and vegans are carbivores. They just eat way too many carbs and they’re not eating the healthy vegetarian or vegan should. So if they’re doing everything right, theoretically, they should have enough protein, theoretically. The reality is, a lot of times they’re just not getting enough protein.
You sent me a curveball there.
So protein. The second is hydration. Make sure you’re drinking enough water. So again, if you take your body weight as it is now, divide it in half, that’s how many ounces of water you should be drinking every day. So if we take that 160 pound-person, they should be drinking 80 ounces of water every day. And a cup of water or glass of water is roughly eight ounces, so most people need 8 to 10 glasses of water. In Canada, we do it by liters. So it’s between two and three liters a day.
And again, you could simply put all of those glasses out on your desk or in the kitchen, if you work from home. If you’re at the office, bring in your bottles and just make sure that by the end of the day, you finish off all that water. You’re going to be peeing a lot initially if you’re not used to that, but it can really, really help the health of your brain and the health of your entire body.
So we have protein and water, and then the last thing I would say is healthy fats. So we talked earlier about having squishy, soft cell membranes, so getting enough healthy fats in your diet.
I think people in general are really terrified of eating fat. We’ve been brainwashed to think, “Fat is anybody. Stay away from it.” But healthy fats are a necessity. I know you’ve heard of (I know you’ve heard of, Wendy) the omega-3 fatty acids, they’re considered essential fatty acids. And essential means you have to get them from your diet. Your body cannot make them so you have to get them from your diet. And if you’re not, your body is going to suffer.
So the omega-3 fatty acids from fatty fish, fish oil (that’s what I take because I cannot stand eating fish), EPA and DHA. And then there are the other healthy oils like flaxseed oil, walnut oil, coconut oil, avocado, that was the other one. I really need to help my brain.
Wendy Myers: Butter. We love butter.
Dr. Carri Drzyzga: Yes, grass-fed butter has a lot of good stuff. I made this and I call it my super brain energy smoothie. And what I do is I take two big handfuls of organic spinach and I shove that in my Nutra Bullet. And I put in three raw organic eggs because that’s a lot of protein right there. And that’s a lot of choline to help build acetylcholine.
I’ll put in a couple of tablespoons of ghee, which is clarified butter, organic, grass-fed. And then I’ll put in a couple of tablespoons of coconut oil. I’ll put in a couple of tablespoons of some kind of nut butter. So there could be peanut butter or almond butter. I really love sun butter.
And then I’ll put in a tablespoon-and-a-half of raw cacao powder, half-a-cup of frozen blueberries, a little bit of coconut water. I blitz that up. It tastes like a chocolate milkshake.
As soon as I say the raw eggs, they just shut down. “What are you talking about? That is nuts!” But the patients that do this, they’re like, “Oh, my gosh, Dr. Carri, that tastes so good. And my god, I don’t have to eat all day long. I’m satisfied all day long.”
And there’s a ton of healthy fats in there. There’s a lot of good protein in there. You’ve got the blueberries and the spinach, which are both considered super foods.
So that’s my basic recipe for my super brain energy smoothie.
Wendy, I think you should try it out.
Wendy Myers: I think I will. I’m trying to reduce my oxalate, so maybe I’ll skip the spinach, but I’ll do the other stuff.
Dr. Carri Drzyzga: Well, I guess you could swap it out with something else.
Wendy Myers: Yes, for sure, some lettuce or something.
Wendy Myers: Thank you so much for those tips. I think it’s really important people have to take care of their brains and they have to understand why their brain might not be working so well. So can you tell the listeners a little bit about what you think is the most pressing health issue in the world today? It’s a question I like to ask all of my guests.
Dr. Carri Drzyzga: Oh, my gosh. What is the most pressing issue? About health today? I’m going to say apathy. That is the most pressing issue. It’s mindset. I think most people they don’t value their health. They don’t take responsibility for their health. And because they don’t do those two things, they just don’t care about their health. They don’t put it as their number one priority. It should be having good health.
And I think that really is the core of where all of these different diseases are coming from. Because if you’re taking good care of your health, it’s your most precious asset. You could prevent a ton of diseases just by having the mindset of putting your health first.
Wendy Myers: I absolutely agree with you. I love that answer because I think a lot of people think it’s not going to happen to them, that they’re not going to get a disease or whatnot. And you have to start thinking about your health before you get sick. You have to because the chances are pretty good. The statistics are there, all over the internet. One in two is going to get diabetes. One in three is going to get cancer. It just goes on and on and on. Your chances of getting a disease are really high depending on your genetic susceptibility and your diet and lifestyle that turn on and off the genes. So I absolutely agree with you.
Dr. Carri Drzyzga: Thank you.
Wendy Myers: Well, Doctor, again thank you so much for being on the show. Can you tell the listeners more about you, your website and how they can work with you, et cetera?
Dr. Carri Drzyzga: Sure. So I’ve got a lot of websites. I’ve got my website for my private practice, a website for my book. But I guess my home base, the best place to find me would be at DrCarri.com. And that’s spelled D-R-C-A-R-R-I dot com. And that’s where you can find me, my podcast, my blog. Soon will be coming Dr. Carri TV, and my most recent program that I’m working, and you touched on it at the top of the show is my Entrepreneurial Fatigue Program.
So I think fatigue affects a lot of people, entrepreneurs especially. I really feel small business owners and entrepreneurs are the backbone of our economy, of our world’s economy, not just Canada and the US, but of our world’s economy. So whatever we can do to help an entrepreneur’s brain to function better so that they can find the next big breakthrough, they can find creative solutions to problems, anything like that, I think that, like I said, is the backbone of our economy.
So that’s the newest program that I’m working on. And that should be coming out within the next one to two months.
Wendy Myers: That’s really, really interesting, to have a health program specific for entrepreneurs. I love it.
Dr. Carri Drzyzga: They’re just like everybody else. They tend to not take care of their health. They get stressed, they’re overworked, they get busy, busy, busy, they’re burning the candle at both ends. Just like everybody else, the diet tends to fall to the waste side. The exercise tends to fall to the waste side. So you can never shut off your brain. You know what that’s like, Wendy.
Wendy Myers: I know exactly what that’s like. I have to work really hard to shut my brain off. It’s a problem. And it promotes adrenal fatigue. It’s very, very difficult to heal adrenal fatigue when you love your work and you’re working all the time. I think it’s a very program that you have.
Dr. Carri Drzyzga: Thank you.
Wendy Myers: Again, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Dr. Carri Drzyzga: it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on.
Wendy Myers: And listeners, you can find me at myersdetox.com. You can find my healing and detox program at MineralPower.com. And my online health program called BodyBioRehab.com that’s launching May 1st. Hopefully, if I’m lucky, if I can work 16 hours a day, I’d get my brain nice and fatigued to bring this wonderful health program out to you.
And thank you so much for listening to the Live to 110 Podcast.
