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Transcript
- 02:22 Eating for Sleep
- 05:35 Tips to improve sleep
- 15:41 Timing of sleep
- 19:27 Impaired sleep
- 27:57 Supplements
- 34:58 REM Rehab
Wendy Myers: Welcome to the Live to 110 Podcast. I’m your host, Wendy Myers. You can find me at myersdetox.com. And if you only want to live to 90, my site is not for you. Here is my podcast co-host, General Leigh Lowery.
Leigh Lowery: Hi, everybody. I’m glad to be here with you today.
Wendy Myers: You guys can find her on generalleigh.com. Go there if you want to learn how to eat, rest, sleep and repeat. I love her tagline on her site! It’s just all kinds of stuff about fitness and nutritional on there. It’s really, really a good site. Go check it out.
Today, we’re going to be reviewing one of my very good friends, Evan Brand of notjustpaleo.com. He has written a book where he has co-authored with Kevin Geary. It’s called REM Rehab. I highly recommend that you guys go out and get this book. It talks about all about how to improve your sleep and all the different things that affect sleep like your blood sugar and the timing of when you sleep, what impairs sleep, Supplements and all the different tips that you need to get a good night’s rest, which is the foundation of health.
Leigh Lowery: It’s going to be an awesome show. But first, we have to do the disclaimer. Please keep in mind that this program is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or health condition. It is not a substitute for professional medical advice. The Live to 110 Podcast is solely information in nature, so please consult your health care practitioner before trying anything that we suggest, any treatment that we suggest on this show. So here we go!
Wendy Myers: So Evan, it’s so nice to have you on the show.
Evan Brand: Yeah, thank you. I’m really happy to be with you all. This is an important topic to me because I was a miserable dude for a while when it comes to sleep, so I think I have a pretty good handle on this thing now.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, and you’ve been on the podcast before. You’re one of my third guests on the podcast. It’s a Live to 110 classic about the Paleo diet and ancestral fitness. You’re big on the Paleo thing yourself.
Wendy Myers: Personally, that Paleo diet is the foundation of getting good sleep. What is your opinion on that?
Evan Brand: I would say definitely, yeah. It actually provides the raw materials that you need to make the neurotransmitters which allow you to sleep. So in that sense for sure, people that are excluding things from their diet, they may think that things and their diet are messing up their sleep, but things that aren’t in your diet can mess up your sleep just as much if not more. So yeah, definitely.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Well, let’s talk about that a little bit about how the proteins in the meat make neurotransmitters.
Evan Brand: It’s a pretty complicated conversion process. I’ve looked at the chart – and those charts are always crazy – seeing how a certain raw material and amino acid from your meat actually turns into basically, eventually, turns into melatonin.
So you basically have to start by just explaining to people that meats are made up of amino acids and these are essential. Many of them are essential, there’s some non-essential amino acids too, but we have to have meat and there’s no way around it. I wish there was for some people that don’t like meat, but unfortunately, you have to have it in your diet to produce melatonin.
And so it starts with tryptophan. There’s ten essential amino acids and tryptophan is one of them. You have to have it to produce serotonin also. So if we start on the left of the chart, basically you input food. Tryptophan is pulled from the food. That extra trpytophan can be converted to serotonin, and serotonin is required for melatonin production.
So if we go back to the beginning with food, if you don’t have that, if you don’t have the good quality meat there in the beginning, you can’t have tryptophan, you can’t have serotonin and you can’t have melatonin. So you’re going to be depressed, you’re going to be a miserable person and you’re not going to be able to sleep very well too.
Leigh Lowery: I’m not laughing. I’m just thinking to myself, “Oh, my gosh. I can’t even imagine taking meat out of my diet. What would happen to me? I would just crash.”
Wendy Myers: Well, I can tell you what will happen because I went vegetarian and then vegan for two years. I saw every movie on NetFlix because I would wake up every night in the middle of the night and I could not go back to sleep for an hour or two – sometimes three hours. For that whole two years, I literally saw every indie movie and blockbuster on NetFlix.
Evan Brand: Really?
Wendy Myers: I’m not even joking. It started with my pregnancy. Your hormones get all messed up and you start waking up naturally in the middle of the night. But then about six months after I gave birth, I decided to go vegetarian and it just exacerbated everything for years. Literally, for years, I did not get a good night sleep until I went Paleo.
Evan Brand: That’s crazy. Yeah, I believe it. I mean, people, they don’t have to eat just grass-fed beef. You can have eggs and poultry and you can have nuts and seeds too. If you have quality access, you can have dairy too. Maybe that’s why they always gave Santa milk or something, I don’t know. You can get some tryptophan from it, but…
Wendy Myers: Oh, yeah.
Wendy Myers: So what is your number one tip to improve sleep?
Evan Brand: I would say you’ve got to get rid of the artificial light. It’s bad stuff. We live in a world where when it gets dark, people go run and turn on the light bulb. It’s just completely the opposite of what we’ve done for almost all, I’d say 99.99% of human evolution. It’s really hurting us. The light bulb has only been around about a hundred years, but humans have been around (depending to who you listen to) a million years plus in some shape or form. A hundred years is the blink of an eye just like our modern society has been here for a blink of an eye compared to the gatherer way of life.
So I think if we start there, that’s probably the best thing and the easiest way that people can do to fix their sleep because some of the diet stuff and the blood sugar stuff that we could talk about, that’s overwhelming to people at first.
I’ve had Dr. Hansler – and Wendy, I don’t know if you’ve listened to those episodes, the guy from the Low Blue Light Institute on my podcast twice.
Wendy Myers: I did listen to one of those.
Evan Brand: Yeah, he’s 88 years old and he’s been studying this stuff for 40 years. And now he feels guilty because he used to work at GE developing brighter light bulbs for, like I said, 40 to 50 years and then he finds out…
Wendy Myers: …he’s personally responsible for the sleep epidemic.
Evan Brand: Literally. I mean, yeah. He literally is. This guy can’t sleep at night due to the stress. I guess that’s something to watch out for too.
Artificial light at night is going to be disrupting your melatonin. I found out recently that not only your eyes pick up light, but your skin is sort of a clock also. Our skin is the biggest organ in the body and it does pick up light. People that are not having shirt on – I usually never wear a shirt unless I have to, but…
Leigh Lowery: Sorry, I’m with you.
Evan Brand: For sure. I hate wearing shirts. But if I’m exposing my skin, my chest to artificial light at night, I’m screwing myself up there too as well as my eyeballs. It really does affect you.
I just now read a book that people need to read also. It’s called Lights Out by T.S. Wiley. What happens when we expose ourselves to so much artificial light at night time is we basically go through two days worth of living in one day. And so literally, when the lights are on, cortisol production is up. It just has to be. That’s the nature of light. That’s what gets you up in the morning, light. That’s what drives cortisol and what drives these rhythms.
So as cortisol, our stress and go-go-go hormone is beginning to fall throughout the day and night, it’s supposed to be getting lowest near midnight. Not me, but a lot of people my age, they don’t even start doing things until midnight. And so that drives cortisol way back up again and you’re just going to be burning through all of these extra hormones and chemicals.
And so the way that T.S. Wiley puts it in the book, she says we can’t cheat nature and we can’t cheat time. And so while you may go through two days in one day, that day has to come from somewhere. It comes off the end of your life. So in effect, you’re basically speeding up the aging process. You’re doubling down with your time. It’s really interesting…
Leigh Lowery: That is interesting. I wonder would happen. My sister sleeps with the light on in her room. I don’t know what she’s in. She sleeps with the television on. I can’t even imagine what her cortisol levels probably look like.
Evan Brand: Is she stressed out all the time?
Leigh Lowery: She doesn’t sleep well. I don’t know. With my sister, you can’t really tell. She seems to manage stress well. But a lot of people like that, they’re internalizing it. So I really don’t know. Her sleep isn’t that great, but she has this thing where she sleeps with both the television and an artificial light on. Her boyfriend is like yourself, pretty knowledgeable and has changed all the light bulbs out in the house so that there aren’t that unnatural light that you’re talking about. But still, it’s interesting.
Wendy Myers: And Evan, tell us about why it’s important to sleep with blacked out curtains. For me, I started sleeping with a sleep mask and it has made all the difference in the quality of my sleep.
Evan Brand: Yeah, for sure. Sleep masks or the curtains are really awesome. We have so much light pollution in the cities now. You’re all out in Los Angeles. You know I’m here in Austin. The city here is growing – not as big as Los Angeles, but it’s growing and there’s lights everywhere. If people were educated enough about how a small amount of light can actually affect you –
And I’ll tell you, they did a study where they shined a quarter-sized – just a quarter-sized – light behind a guy’s kneecap and that was enough to suppress melatonin level. And so knowing that, I really take it serious when it comes to light pollution. If you’re trying to sleep at night and there’s a street light, regardless of the color shining in, that’s going to affect you.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Is that because you have light receptors in your skin?
Evan Brand: Yeah, I would say it’s probably the skin or the fact that your eyelids, they’re the thinnest skin on your body and so they’re very, very sensitive. I mean, you know even if you have your eyes closed and your significant other gets up and turns a bathroom lights on. You see that. Your eyelids are so thin, so I’m sure they pick up on it too.
You’ve got to take the light seriously even if you have a little charging light. Hopefully, you’re not keeping your phone right by your head, but if you are, please just cover up the lights on that stuff – your VCRs (if anybody has those anymore), blu-ray players and all that stuff. Everything has these little charging lights on it now. Most of the time, they’re blue LEDs, which is the color of light that suppresses melatonin the most.
So yeah, like you mentioned, Leigh, switching out the bulbs, that’s a good thing to do, but light will still affect you. Even if you get a bulb and if people can go look at the store, you want something near 3000 Kelvin (3000K), you’ll see. If you can go less, if you can get something like 2200K, that’s great and if you can get something pure orange (like Low Blue Light carries), that’s what you really want because that’s going to affect you the least.
But yeah, night time lights are really crazy and they’re everywhere. You’ve got to be conscious about them.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I think for a lot of people because there’s so many lights everywhere that you pretty much have to get blacked out curtains in your bedroom and just block everything out.
Evan Brand: Yeah, unless you live somewhere really awesome and you have some land or some open space behind you, behind your house or where your bedroom is where you can naturally wake up. That’s what’s hard for me is when you block out the light, you’re blocking out the sun too. So in the morning, it’s still dark in your room, so you have the choice to get those artificial sunrise lights. I think it’s just crazy that we have to recreate everything now because we’ve kind of messed it up.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I know for myself because I do a lot of computer work that I’m very hyper aware of when I’m being naughty. I put my daughter to bed at nine o’clock. I try to go to bed with her as much as I can and get a good night’s rest, but there’s many times that I’ve got a deadline and I got to get up and work. I can tell I always go to bed really easily at nine o’clock. I put my sleep mask on. But when I get up and do computer work, it’s really stimulating. I’m really stimulated by that light and then it takes me an hour, thirty minutes to go to sleep once I do lay down at midnight or what have you because my melatonin has been suppressed.
I even use efflux light dimmer on my computer, so that it’s not as bright at night. I think that’s a really good thing to use if you are using a computer. But it definitely does negatively impact my sleep.
Evan Brand: Yeah. And you know, there’s a company called Uvex. Everybody gets them now. They’re about $8. They’re a pair of glasses. They look like safety glasses. They’re really stylish, but they’re on Amazon for $8 or $9 and I think the model is 1933X, but that’s what I wear. It’s just kind of a sporty version of safety glasses that are orange.
It’s funny because if you test them, you put them on, you go look at a blue LED light, you can’t even really see it. It’s kind of like a really dim green color, so it works for sure. Those will make a huge difference. I mean, if your significant other is not willing to change the light bulbs or willing to reduce the amount of light in your home at night time, you can at least wear those and save yourself.
Melatonin fights cancer too. It’s one of the most important anti-oxidants, the most powerful anti-oxidants we have in the body. So it’s not just for sleep.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, it’s easy to forget that. It’s really, really important to sleep to fight cancer as well because of that melatonin factor.
Evan Brand: Well, oxytocin is a good one too. If you’re reducing your light exposure and cuddling at the same time, you’re like doubling your cancer-fighting ability.
Wendy Myers: Now, I don’t know how cuddly you’re going to be on those orange glasses, Evan.
Evan Brand: Hey, it works. You’d be surprised.
Leigh Lowery: That’s a good pick-up line too. You can do it. “I’ll raise your oxytocin and your melotonin right now, right now.”
Wendy Myers: I think you’re nerding out in those orange glasses.
Wendy Myers: So what about the timing of sleep? When is the best time to go sleep?
Evan Brand: 9 p.m. I know that sounds crazy, but…
Wendy Myers: Oh, boy! I hit the nail in the head.
Leigh Lowery: I go to bed at 8:45, so we’re good.
Wendy Myers: Oh, you beat me… whatever.
Evan Brand: Do you really?
Leigh Lowery: Yeah. I’m the best sleeper ever. I don’t know how that’s possible, but I am. I’m a great, little sleeper.
Evan Brand: Wow! Well, good for you. Yeah, I’d say 9 p.m. 10 p.m., it gets late. But in the summer, I’d say closer to 10 p.m. is good. Another quote that I’ll pull from the Lights Out book, the T.S. Wiley girl, she says, “Going to bed at nine o’clock is going to negatively impact your social life,” and then she says, “yes, but so will cancer and death.” I hate that she put it that blunt, but that’s true.
Wendy Myers: I like her. She’s very dramatic as I am.
Evan Brand: Yeah, for sure. You should have her on the show.
Leigh Lowery: We love drama.
Evan Brand: Yeah, she’d be a good guest. But no, nine o’clock just because your cortisol is starting to drop as your melatonin is starting to rise. If you ever look at a chart of how these two hormones interact and intersect with each other, it’s really interesting.
But most people, they get that second wind. Right before they go to bed for some reason, the energy kicks back in and that’s just because your circadian clock is just off. Like I said, you’re on the iPhone, you’re on the computer, whatever it is. So if you do want to do that stuff, throw on those glasses I mentioned and you’ll be protected, but you still got to be aware of it.
Just try to chill out your mind. Another thing that people do – I don’t even know if I wrote about it in the book (hopefully, I did) – is that mental aspect of sleep to where people are so in a rush and they’re so overscheduled with everything that they don’t even – you know what I’m saying? You get in autopilot mode and you don’t even cognitively think about what’s going on until you lay down on the pillow. And so right as you’re entering that alpha state right there, that in between sleep and not-sleep state, that’s where the real thoughts happen. You think of stuff you need to do or stuff you need to write down and then you could easily stay up an extra hour just thinking about everything that you put off all day.
So I think it’s important to try to make a bedtime routine also whether it’s taking a warm bath 30 minutes before sleep with some epsom salt, maybe a couple of drops of essential oils. I like eucalyptus and orange. Just try to lie down and stretch out. Maybe you can write a journal down, write your emotions down, something like that. You got to unload the brain. I think it gets overloaded throughout the day and that keeps you up too.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I used to be guilty of that. I would lay down and go to sleep and then I’d start thinking about, “I got to do this… I got to do that tomorrow… blah-blah-blah… I’m going to write this down” and it would prevent me from going to sleep. So now I have a practice where I kind of do a little meditation.
I kind of do the Roy Masters observation meditation where I just train my mind to not let thoughts come in, where I just kind of focus on looking inside my skull and just try to meditate almost and then it relaxes me and I go to sleep.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I’ve tried that since you told me about that method. That’s the one where you put all your energy on your right hand. Yeah, it works. It’s really cool. I did it outside the other day and it was kind of like, “Whoa!” I didn’t realize – I mean, it put me into a pretty good state quickly. The trees and everything just took a whole new dimension to them. I’m like, “Wow! I’m meditating that quick. Wow.”
Wendy Myers: Yeah, some people can have a pretty profound experience with that. They really start feeling a lot of energy. And it’s definitely very effective.
Evan Brand: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: And so what are some of the things that impair sleep? I hear a lot of my clients complain that they’re not able to sleep, they wake up in the middle of the night, they have to go pee a bunch of times and all kinds of issues with sleeping. So what are some of the number one issues that people may not be aware of that impair sleep?
Evan Brand: Well I guess I’ll start with the one that everybody probably knows, but they don’t think about and that’s caffeine. Depending on the person, studies have shown that caffeine have a half-life of up to three days in your system. And so people that think their morning cup of coffee at 6 a.m. is not affecting them, it very well could be if you have a slow metabolism of caffeine. So that’s a big one.
For me, I’m pretty sensitive to anything. I don’t know. I guess maybe having a clean diet makes you more reactive to Supplements and products, but a cup of coffee for me even 4-6 ounces, I’m just whoa! It cranks my switch up and I’m ready to go. It can for sure affect your sleep.
If you ever noticed that people who smoke cigarettes, they always have a cup of coffee with them and that’s because they’re chasing the buzz because smokers metabolize caffeine 50% faster. And so it’s no coincidence somebody with a cigarette and a cup of joe at the same time. They’re double trying to boost themselves up.
Also – and Wendy, you may have covered the negative effects of birth control – birth control doubles the time that it takes to metabolize caffeine also.
Wendy Myers: Oh, wow! I didn’t know that.
Evan Brand: Yeah. So it can take you up to 10-12 hours to complete the whole process of excreting caffeine. And pregnancy, it takes 9-11 hours to metabolize caffeine in pregnant women.
There was one other thing I wanted to mention about it. Let me see if I can find it here. I think it was Asians that they metabolize caffeine super slow. I don’t have it here, but it’s in the book, so maybe that’ll give people a reason to pick it up.
Wendy Myers: That’s something similar to how a lot of Asians for whatever genetic reasons don’t metabolize alcohol as well either. That’s in that similar van.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And the other thing – like I said, people probably know about caffeine, maybe not that detailed into it – the big thing is just blood sugar. And so if people haven’t switched over to more ancestral diet and you’re having the blood sugar roller coaster up and down, that affects your sleep. It just goes back to cortisol once again.
If you chase sugar, you boost your blood sugar up to make you feel good, give you pleasure. Insulin has to come out, otherwise that excess sugar will kill you, so the blood sugar plummets, gets shoved into the fat cells. Now blood sugar is too low and you’re immobilized and so cortisol has to shoot out to boost you up to get you moving again. Like we said, cortisol is the go-go hormone. So when blood sugar is not stabilized like it is in an ancestral higher fat diet, blood sugar goes haywire and so do your hormones. And so you’re going to be stressed out on a hormonal level and you’re going to be energetically pushed by your hormones too. So that’s just another way that this way of eating can benefit you.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, that’s what I tell all my clients. Do not eat at night especially if you’re trying to lose weight. People do snack or say, “I snack. I try to eat a fatty thing like maybe a piece of cheese or a parmesan crisp or something if I have to snack on something because it’s not going to affect blood sugar as much,” but for those people that are eating at night and then they go to sleep after they eat, they’re not going to sleep well.
I know for myself when sometimes I’ve snacked and had a piece of chocolate or something before I go to sleep, I don’t sleep well. And then I wake up in the morning kind of almost hung over. I have a hung over feeling. I haven’t slept well. I had a sugar crash. I had to metabolize all those sugar. It definitely impact sleep hugely.
Evan Brand: Yeah, for sure. And chocolate has caffeine in it too, so you’re getting a boost there. But yeah, we talked about tryptophan a little bit, but GABA is important too. I think we’ve talked about GABA [inaudible 00:24:02] probably which is the calming neurotransmitter, it’s the brakes of the brain.
Many people in our society, we don’t have enough GABA. We have so much serotonin and dopamine, the go-go-go’s, but we don’t have any slows. And so it’s like a semi-truck with bicycle brakes. That’s kind of how the modern human is now.
We have to have sulfur to produce GABA, to create it. It’s kind of the raw material. And so sulfur-rich foods like broccoli, cabbage, onions, garlic, things like that, those have sulfur in them and so they can directly then produce GABA. They have to be there. That sulfur has to be there to produce GABA.
Obviously, there are many reasons people don’t have enough GABA just by excess stress and things like that, but GABA is just as important as tryptophan when it comes to having actually restful sleep. It doesn’t matter if you sleep eight hours if it’s poor quality.
Wendy Myers: I think that’s one of the reasons that Xanas is so powerful in our culture or benzodiazepines because that stimulates GABA-production to relax a person.
Evan Brand: That’s crazy, isn’t it? And alcohol too will boost GABA.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, and so people are taking those instead of eating a healthy diet. There’s a lot of people that don’t like garlic and onions or they’re eating broccoli, but it’s poor quality so it doesn’t have a sulfur in it. I know this broccoli at the grocery store doesn’t have a tremendous – it has some sulfur, but not as much as it should like if you grow it in a garden and the soil is really mineralized or what-not. I think a lot of people just don’t get enough sulfur like you said.
Evan Brand: Yeah, I want to eventually start growing my own stuff because like you tell me all the time, even if it’s organic, who knows how much stuff is really in it. That just kills me. So I really want to try to take control of that and grow my own stuff one day.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I just know from my own experience. My uncle has this garden that I love to talk about. He’s been growing vegetables for thirty years. He gave me this broccoli one time. I went to his house and it stunk so bad. It stunk up my whole car. It’s the sulfur. It stunk up my whole refrigerator. And then when I ate it, my fart stunk so bad I could not even tell you. I was like, “I had never experienced a vegetable like this.”
It profoundly changed me in my views on vegetables because I’d never have broccoli from the store stink up my whole car and my butt or whatever like that. So I know that there’s not as much sulfur as there should be in our vegetables at Whole Foods.
Leigh Lowery: Good to know.
Wendy Myers: I’m so sorry, that’s TMI.
Evan Brand: That is not TMI. That’s why you’re my friend. That’s so awesome.
Wendy Myers: I had to go there because that is the truth. We need more sulfur.
Evan Brand: Yeah, that’s a good test. Smell your fart.
Leigh Lowery: Yes.
Evan Brand: That’s a good test to know if your garlic is legit.
Wendy Myers: You want to have stinky farts. I hate to break it to people, but if you’re eating sulfur-rich foods and lots of vegetables, those microbes in your intestines are feeding on that and you’re supposed to be farting.
Leigh Lowery: That is the way it goes. That’s the way it goes. Actually, [inaudible 00:27:29] and cabbages as well, is that correct?
Evan Brand: Yeah, it is.
Leigh Lowery: That’s good. During my body-building season, I tend to put a lot of cabbages as one of the vegetables – cabbage or broccoli, not the stinky broccoli. I’m going to have to go find that, but cabbage in my diet. So I wonder if that’s leading to better sleep and I just didn’t know about it.
Evan Brand: It definitely could be. Everything adds up. Everything is a little piece to the puzzle.
Leigh Lowery: That’s awesome.
Wendy Myers: So what about Supplements? What kind of Supplements do people need to be taking to improve sleep?
Evan Brand: Yeah, this is the one that everybody just think – I think I actually wrote that in the beginning of the chapter. I’m like, “Did you skip straight to this chapter” because everybody wants the quick fix.
Leigh Lowery: That’s right.
Evan Brand: There’s many Supplements. There are some more serious ones that I could’ve mentioned, but I’m not a doctor obviously, so I wanted to keep it as simple and safe as possible for people and do the more – not crazy, but the deeper things to myself as a self-experimenter.
Theanine is one of the best ones. I have suntheanine, which is kind of like the raw or I guess like the first step of theanine straight from the green tea. I don’t know if it comes for the green tea leaves or how they actually manufacture it, but theanine is just an amino acid once again. That’s why yoga and tea are linked up maybe for profit, but also just because drinking tea can put you into that meditative state because of the theanine in there and theanine can boost GABA.
200-400 mg capsules of theanine can be found everywhere, but go for the suntheanine. That’s like a way higher version than some of the other ones, but mostly all of these will work. You’ll really feel it. I heard of a sublingual theanine. It’s supposed to be coming out by one of my friend’s companies. That’d be pretty cool because it’ll hit you much quicker than a capsule. You could start there.
Magnesium, which it’s funny that magnesium is considered a supplement even though it’s just something that should’ve been there, but it’s not. Magnesium’s a mineral and there’s many forms of it. Some forms can give you more sleepiness than others and some are more for helping out digestion and stuff like that.
Magnesium glycinate is a good one. I know, Wendy, you are a fan of Pure Encapsulations. They have a magnesium glycinate that’s really good. And also, magnesium citrate, that’s what I use. I use the Natural Calm.
Wendy Myers: That’s what I use too.
Evan Brand: Yeah, it’s good stuff. It tastes delicious. It gives you a little change-up from drinking just pure, plain water all the time. I think I have the raspberry lemon flavor. Sweet Leaf Stevia, I drink that. I’ll just drink a teaspoon or two of that. If you do too much, you’ll know because your poop will be too soft.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, you’ll have some loose bowels. That’s a good test for people. That will really chill you out. I wouldn’t drink it before you’re going to go out with your friends. When you’re going out to the club wearing your blue blocking glasses, of course, I wouldn’t drink magnesium before you go because that will stuff – I mean, it will knock you out pretty good, pretty quickly.
fish oil, that’s actually something that I didn’t know before I started researching for this book. Omega 3 supplementation, of course, it improves depression, but it can improve sleep apnea too. A lot of people, they did this study on people and figured out that many of them were helped just by a high-grade fish oil. So that’s something that you can do.
Tryptophan, you can just do a straight tryptophan supplement. That’s good for you. I’d say about 500 mg for tryptophan. I’ve tested the different levels and that’s what seems to work for me. Of course, everybody is different.
Vitamin D is another one. I’m not exactly sure what or how vitamin D has actually contributed, but I’ve looked at all the studies and read, “Okay, vitamin D has improved people.” I looked at the charts, saw the improvement in sleep quality and like, “Okay, this has to be in there,” but to be honest, I’m not exactly sure how that helps. Maybe you do, Wendy.
Wendy Myers: Not off the top of my head, I don’t know. Vitamin D does so many different things and facilitates so many processes in our body, but I don’t know off-hand about sleep.
Evan Brand: Yeah, it’s complex with vitamin D. It’s like we’re trying to isolate one thing that it does, it’s kind of hard. Magnesium, you could say directly that it helps sleep, but I’ve read upwards of 400 uses that the body has for magnesium. It’s kind of interesting. You could say anything can be helped by magnesium or vitamin D probably.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Yeah. And now one thing I do with my plans – a lot of my clients are fairly old when they come to see me. When I put them in nutritional balancing programs, I know in my own experience, once I put them on 750 mg of chelated calcium citrate and 450 mg of chelated magnesium citrate – it’s divided in three doses over the course of the day each meal and they can take more of that at night if they need to – they start sleeping like babies.
When I started taking those relaxing minerals, within a couple of weeks, I was sleeping through the night, which I had not done for years because of my pregnancy and then my crazy stint as a vegetarian. I was amazed at how those minerals relax you and how profoundly its effects was in my sleep.
So that’s one thing I recommend personally for people having sleep issues. A lot of people take calcium or they don’t take enough or they don’t take the right form. Chelated forms, they’re attached to an amino acid, so it’s a form that’s more absorbable by the body.
Evan Brand: Yeah, that’s really a good point. It’s just as powerful as the sleep medication that people are probably taking. Like I said, not that I’m a doctor, I can’t tell you to quit taking your medications, but if people found out that just some simple minerals could help them sleep instead, I don’t know, it might be a sigh of relief for a lot of people.
Wendy Myers: It’s profound. I’m amazed at the effect. Even sometimes when I have anxiety, I will pop a calcium magnesium and it will calm me right down.
Evan Brand: Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, for sure on the label. I didn’t even know until the other day that they make the Natural Calm here in Austin. I wonder if they’ll let me come in and take a tour and maybe interview them in their lab or something. That’d be cool. But yeah, they call it the anti-stress drink too.
PMS and stuff like that is also helped by magnesium supplementation.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, for sure. That calcium magnesium and even zinc, all those, I tell my clients to take those more towards the end of the day to relax and they just relax right into sleep.
Every single client, one after the other, they all sleep like a baby within a couple of weeks of supplementing that.
Evan Brand: That’s awesome. That’s the way it should be, yeah.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. So are there any other tips from the book that you can give the listeners about how to get better sleep?
Evan Brand: I would just say be aware of what you do in your bedroom. Keep your bedroom to sleep and sex only. If you are watching TV or if you’re sitting on the iPad playing or checking the emails from the bed, your brain, it’s a creature of habit. It loves habit. It creates pathways towards happiness and pleasure, which is why it’s so hard for people to make real change because the sugar addiction – I mean, I’m actually writing about Internet porn and how that’s not really Paleo. It’s funny to word it that way, but…
Wendy Myers: I’ve never heard it worded that way.
Evan Brand: Yeah. I won’t go too off-tangent here, but basically how we are exposed to so many different people, we could see so many different women or men that we never would’ve saw before, that’s really addicting and pleasurable to the brain. The same way it is for sugar and stuff. If you carve this pathway in your brain and it knows every time you pop up the computer, you’re going to go to Facebook, that’s pleasurable in itself. And so combined that with doing that in your bedroom, your brain is not going to know to relax. It’s not going to know it’s time to lay down and rest and go to sleep. It’s going to be time to get up and look at people.
Actually, there’s a therapy called faces therapy. I don’t know if you’ve all heard of this. You can actually watch this video and it’s just showing a bunch of human faces and it’s supposed to stimulate serotonin and actually make you feel happier. For people that are really lonely or feel like they have no friends, you can watch this video. It’s recommended not to watch it at night. Day time is the time when normally, we would be socializing with others and night time, you would probably only be with your significant other.
And so that’s why in my book, I recommend not watching TV shows and stuff before you go to bed because you could be watching a murder show, which is going to stimulate some adrenalin and stuff anyway, but looking at the faces of the people, that’s telling your brain that it’s time to socialize. That’s a little bit more kind of woo-woo for people, but it’s really not. I promise you, it does make a difference.
And so long story short, keep the bedroom for sleep and sex and don’t lay around all day in it just chilling. If you’re going to take a nap, take a nap. If you’re going to sleep, sleep. And that’s it. Get up, get out and program your brain to be awake in other parts of the house.
Wendy Myers: I know I’m very stimulated when I stay up and I watch Scandal. It totally ruins my sleep. It’s too stimulating.
Evan Brand: Yup, I haven’t seen that, but it sounds like it would be for sure.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, it’s a good show. It’s one of my favorite shows, one of my guilty pleasures (one of many).
Evan Brand: Yeah. Yup, I know.
Wendy Myers: So what about you, Leigh, so you say you don’t have any issues with sleep?
Leigh Lowery: You know what? I think at times. For the most part, I really don’t have any issues with sleep, but one of the things I was telling Wendy is earlier this year as I went into a body-building competition I was up for, I changed my diet. I’ve been a clean eater. I eat more Paleo list. I still eat grains, but I am a higher fat, higher protein eater. I ate totally clean.
I decided to switch my diet over to this thing called IIFYM. It’s kind of the brand new trend of how you’re able to eat crap and stay lean… honestly.
Evan Brand: Really?
Leigh Lowery: Here’s the thing about it, if done properly, that is not the diet. It’s just like when you say primal and Paleos, people eat bacon all the time, it’s somebody doing it the wrong way.
So IIFYM, what the opportunity in there is you’re given exact macros for your fat, for your protein and for your carbohydrate needs and fiber and then you have to hit all of those goals. Now, you should eat about 80/20 clean. That’s kind of what the goal is.
What happens is it introduces things back into people’s systems like pop tarts that have insulin-spiking issues. I decided that I was going to follow this diet just to see if I could stay lean and eat stuff that I like.
What happened was my skin started to look terrible. I had poor sleep and I was moodier that I have ever been in my entire life – and I’m pretty moody. So I became erratic moods, having trouble sleeping (which I never had trouble with before).
And it’s not IIFYM. I want to say it’s not the diet. It’s the way that I was doing the diet. I was incorporating processed foods again to see how that affected my body if I could stay lean, but I was leaving out all the important thing. It’s kind of an uneducated way to do it. I was leaving out all the important things like, “How is this going to affect my health, my well-being, my sleep and my mood?” and it affected all those areas.
So I’m back to my original plan, which is more of a clean eating diet without all that processed anything in it.
Evan Brand: Yeah, that’s a good point. I actually thought about that before, but I haven’t talked too much about it on my show. Just the 20% rule, I mean, who knows what people are adding back in. If you’re 80% gluten-free, that’s nothing. It doesn’t matter. One percent gluten is gluten. So you can have an exposure from one time like this lady who came on my show – which Wendy, I think she’s came on yours too. I’m not sure. Beverly Myer?
Wendy Myers: Yes, yes. She was on my show.
Evan Brand: Okay, yeah. She said that her diet is just ridiculously clean. She was a 100% gluten-free from what she knew and she was still having – I don’t know if it was depression and brain fog or something and she found out that the feed that she was holding in her hands to feed her horses had gluten in it. And just that small exposure by touching it with her hand was enough to break out and be moody and be depressed. I was blown away by how sensitive you could actually be to this stuff.
So yeah, that’s a good point about the pop tarts. I thought about those the other day. I was like, “Man! I remember when I was a kid, I would take the brown sugar cinnamon ones and put them in the microwave and they would just be so soft and gooey and delicious at the time,” but I don’t think it’d be worth it.
Leigh Lowery: Yes. And here’s the thing. I’ve always been a bloody knuckles type of girl. I want to learn the hard way or I want to learn personally how it affects me. Some of those things obviously like long-term health, we can’t actually see how they’re affecting us until later, but I kind of made this decision, “I want to see how I feel.” I always tell Wendy this. I go a lot of times, “How does this make me feel? How are my mood?” Now that I’m older, I try to watch myself and watch internally what’s going on with me – mentally focus, how can I lift better.
And those carbs, like you said, there’s some instant gratification that occurs. It’s a high. There’s a high in sugar that occurs for me, so yeah, I might be a little lift in that moment a little bit more or feel like I’m getting that high, but the crash that comes with it and the roller coaster that’s starting to occur – and honestly, as a woman, I don’t want my skin to look bad. The fact that I started to see all of these things occurring from introducing those corn syrups and starches and things back into my system that I wasn’t used to was enough for me to say, “Okay, I’m going to retract what I’m doing and I’m going to get back to what I know.”
So that’s the difference that it made for me for sure. Sleep was part of that. Sleep was definitely part of that.
Evan Brand: Yeah. Definitely, yes. Skip the pop tarts. I thought about it. I was like, “Man…” And also, that was one of the things that I found out as a kid that would just keep me going at night. So when I was like 13 playing video games, I was using the TV – of course the light from that – to keep me up and then I was just fueling myself with warm cinnamon pop tarts. I’m sure it was a great combination.
Wendy Myers: In my lifetime, I’ve eaten hundreds of strawberry pop tarts. I’m so bad…
Leigh Lowery: Yeah.
Evan Brand: Yeah.
[00:43:29]
Wendy Myers: So Evan, where can we find your book?
Evan Brand: It’s at REMRehab.com. It’s there. Actually, you can preorder it right now. I don’t know when the show airs, but it’ll be out March 27th 2014. You can preorder it right now. We actually have a bunch of people preordering, which is pretty exciting because that means people need help. I think it might be a wealth elephant in the room that people are talking about all these other stuff during the day to optimize your energy and productivity and coffee, coffee, but nobody’s talking about the chill out time.
So hopefully, this will help people. If you go there to REM Rehab and you pick it up, there’s one version, just the basic version of it and you get just the ebook and then the support group that we made for it, but if you get the bigger version of the package, you’ll get the audio book too, which I’ll be recording myself. And so that should be pretty fun. And then there’s going to be a support group for that too.
And then Kevin, he wrote an ebook some time last year. I think he sells it for $25, but he’s giving it away for free to people who’d preordered. It’s called Eight Unhealthy Eating Triggers. These are all being in the psychology and stuff. He talks about the mental aspects that keep driving people back to do bad habits they know they shouldn’t do and stuff like that. So you can get that for free along with this one if you buy it. So that’s just an extra little marketing tactic to see if people will get the combo because there’s good information in there.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, there’s also a link on your site on notjustpaleo.com. I’ve seen that. Really nice-looking book cover. So congratulations, Evan. I’m really excited for you that you’ve written a book and you have such a popular podcast, the Not Just Paleo Podcast. I’ve seen it up there on #25 on health on iTunes. So congratulations, you’re doing great work. You deserve the success that’s coming to you.
Evan Brand: Oh. Well, thanks, Wendy. I appreciate it. Yeah, I mean, you’ve been here the whole time with me. Since the beginning, you’re one of my first guest on my show. I saw you and I’m like, “Oh, man. This chick looks so smart. Let me get her on my show and…”
Wendy Myers: Yeah. I’m happy I’ve been on there six times. I can’t believe it was six times.
Evan Brand: That’s crazy. Yeah, people should check that out if they haven’t already. That’ll give them more reason to check my podcast. We’ve covered all kinds of stuff – estrogen. We did a huge, probably exhaustive episode on artificial things in our health care products. That’s a good one to check out. There’s some other ones that they can go see.
So obviously, they’re probably on iTunes already from your podcast, but if they just look me up, Evan Brand or Paleo, you’ll find me. I’m there. There’s a wealth information. That’s my goal. It’s just to try to provide every angle that’s possible on health and happiness because they both are important.
Leigh Lowery: Awesome.
Wendy Myers: Well, thank you so much for being on the show, Evan. I’m really glad we had you on because I think it’s a really important topic, getting people sleeping better. It’s one of the biggest foundations of health that people need to be focusing on. I think it’s the number one thing that people need to be focusing on if they’re trying to change their lifestyle.
Evan Brand: Yeah, for sure. Thank you all. It’s fun to talk with you. The other last thing I’ll say is you sleep for – well, hopefully, you sleep for a third of your life. And so hopefully, that won’t…
