EFR 876: Neuronutrition - How the Brain and Body's Neurobiological Response to Stress Influence Your Diet with Timothy Frie

00:00 - Chase (Host) The following is an Operation Podcast production.

00:03 - Tim (Guest) For me. I had never really learned how to eat in a way that met my body's nutritional needs. I'd spent my entire life struggling to understand okay, am I hungry? Should I eat now? Should I eat this much? And I think a lot of people can relate to that, but we're just so used to dieting and looking to different diets to tell us how to eat. We're just so used to dieting and looking to different diets to tell us how to eat without realizing, though there's a reason. We reach for a diet when we feel stressed or when we want to change our body, and it's because we've never learned how to feed ourselves. We've never really learned what nutrition is, so I think this kind of sounds silly to say, but I think we need to define what nutrition is.

00:40 It's not just the food that you eat. That's your diet. You know the time you eat it, how much you eat. Those are all you know dietary behaviors. That's your diet. Nutrition is all about cell metabolism. It is about your cells having the nutrients that they need to sustain life and create life for you, and we never learn how to eat in a way that is conducive to creating our life. We learn how to follow rules, we learn about different sorts of food categories, we learn how to read a nutrition label, but how much carbohydrate do we actually need to be able to focus? How much protein do we actually need to not only build muscle and, you know, maintain our skeletal muscle mass? But how much protein does our brain need to produce neurotransmitters?

01:22 It's you know dietary protein, amino acids are necessary for our brain's existence, and I think we've just kind of lost sight of what nutrition actually is. I'm Timothy Fry. I'm a neuro-nutritionist and nutritional neuropsychology researcher, and this is Ever Forward Radio.

01:42 - Chase (Host) Hey everyone and welcome back to Ever Forward Radio. Your host, chase Yuning, here, Army veteran, wellness entrepreneur, certified health coach, and today I am joined by the new homie, mr Timothy Fry. Tim is a neuro nutritionist, nutritional psychology researcher, educator and writer. He explores how trauma, grief and burnout shapes our relationship with food, and in his work and in our conversation today, he is going to teach us how to eat well, meet our nutritional needs in ways that are within our means and capacity despite it all. In other words, he studies, teaches and supports others me and you about how the stressful life experiences that we have endured influences how, when, why and what we eat, but, more importantly, what we can do about it. Tim believes that nutrition is the substrate of our existence and that most nutrition behavior is, in fact, unconscious, and that's because we most likely have been conditioned to disconnect from ourselves. More importantly, that our body is not trying to sabotage us, contrary to popular belief or past experiences. Subscribing to the show, following the show on your podcast platform of choice, takes all of two, three seconds, and it does wonders to support the show and help me and my guests reach as many people as possible and to help as many others live a life ever forward as possible. Thank you so much for subscribing to the show.

03:14 Let's jump in with Timothy Fry, but first let me put you on to one of my favorite things that I do every day for my wellness, for health, my sanity. I pour myself a cup of coffee, but not just any coffee. I'm talking about black from strong coffee company, and I want you to pay attention, because if you're still just chugging any old cup of Joe, it's time to level up. Black is the coffee that fuels your body and mind with more than just caffeine. See, that's because it's packed with organic coffee, first and foremost, mct oil for brain fuel and L-theanine for smooth energy, so you get all the focus without the crash. Not to mention it's loaded with adaptogens to help your body handle stress like a pro my favorite thing ever ashwagandha. So whether you're hitting the gym, crushing work or just looking for a clean, delicious pick-me-up, black has your back. And the best part is you can get 15% off of each and every purchase. Just use my name at Chase C-H-A-S-E at strongcoffeecompanycom. It's delicious, hot, delicious iced. You can't go wrong. Black from Strong Coffee Company, because your morning deserves better. Strongcoffeecompanycom. Check out code Chase for 15% off.

04:30 I got a really interesting guest for you here today in a topic that I have not really, through this particular lens, gotten into. On the show. We've talked about nutrition, we've talked about brain health in a lot of different ways, but we are bringing the worlds together today and a little bit of trauma healing. It's like a little bit of trauma. Not to downplay trauma, we're like salt bank trauma here. But I've got Timothy Fry on the show. Welcome man, thanks for having me. So you are a nutritionist, neuro nutritionist, nutritional neuropsychology researcher and writer, exploring how trauma, grief and neuro complexity influence nutritional behavior. What do you do? What does that mean? What does that?

05:08 - Tim (Guest) mean Nutritional neuroscience is really. It's a pretty niche field. Most people in America are not familiar with it. We're more familiar with brain health nutrition or nutritional psychiatry. Neuro nutrition and nutritional neuroscience looks at how the foods that we eat, the supplements that we take and our relationship with food influence our neurobiology or our brain function, and also kind of the inverse of that. How does our brain and whether we have neuroinflammation or our education level or what's happening with our neural health how does that influence our food-related behavior and our food decisions? How does that influence our food-related behavior and our food decisions? So that's kind of what neuro-nutrition is. My area of interest is in how traumatic life experiences and experiences with grief or just really any intense stressful experience influence eating behavior and appetite. I got into this because when I was in graduate school I was researching how DHA supplementation improved concussive injury symptoms in school age athletes.

06:07 - Chase (Host) Fatty acids. Fatty acids Omega-3. Omega-3. Okay.

06:10 - Tim (Guest) Exactly DHA in particular, and I found that in some of my research doing that, I not only came across this field of of neuro nutrition, but also realized that a lot of the same regions of the brain that are impacted by traumatic stress also play some role in appetite regulation. So it's no surprise that, you know, our stressful and traumatic life experiences would impact our appetite.

06:36 - Chase (Host) I would have to imagine the person hearing that is thinking now oh, you mean just like when I'm stressed out, that's when I reach for the pint of ice cream. You know, it's maybe more than that. It's more of an influence of past traumatic experiences. Other than man, I've had a hard day.

06:50 - Tim (Guest) Yeah, I would say a little bit of both. What you're describing there kind of sounds like emotional eating, which I think a better term for that might be effective displacement eating. You know, emotional eating is not eating when you experience an emotion, which is what most people think emotional eating is. But that's actually not what it is. Emotional eating is a form of malnutrition where people engage in overeating or like binge eating, which puts them in a state of overnutrition which you know leads to us gaining weight and obesity, which is also a nutritional health risk. So you know that's called overnutrition. Emotional eating, eating when you have an emotion. That's not really a big deal. That's okay, it's fine for humans to do that. But people who struggle with emotional eating and this effective displacement eating, they're trying to avoid feeling the emotion and experiencing an emotion, so they replace the emotional sensation with the digestive process.

07:58 So, yeah, that's part of some of the ways that trauma can influence our relationship with food.

08:04 - Chase (Host) Now I know that we're going to really kind of dive into some maybe heavy, some more scientific terms, but also some terms, some nutrients, some aspects of health that I think my audience at least should be somewhat familiar with.

08:17 But that's why we had the expert here to kind of help us learn a little bit more and dive deeper.

08:22 But before we get into the weeds of it, you have this incredible post that I think just really helped me wrap my head around this concept, and I would love to have you I'm going to share your words, I would love to have you kind of expand on it beyond what you just already did, so the listener, the viewer, can really again more qualitatively kind of understand this world of nutrition, brain, health, trauma, response, all kind of through the lens of recovery. Quote, tim Fry when you feed yourself, you're not just filling your stomach, you are delivering information to your cells and instructions to your DNA. Many of the same types of cells that are interpreting the information from the food that you eat and the DNA that contains the biological blueprint for your existence also receives information and instructions from your life experiences. If you never learn how your life experiences have shaped your mind, brain and body and how your relationship with your health, your body and food have been impacted. As a result, it's incredibly difficult to heal, grow and recover.

09:29 - Tim (Guest) You know, we all deserve and need to know how we've been impacted by our life experiences in order to take care of ourselves. One of the reasons that I started studying nutrition, or even became interested in trauma as a field of study, is because of my own life experiences. I was largely unaware, for, I would say, about a decade of my life. Because of my own life experiences, I was largely unaware, for, I would say, about a decade of my life, how my own early life and childhood experiences had shaped my health and my view of the world. And you know, a lot of us see eating as just something that we do to stay alive, and that's true. Hunger is very much kind of an evolutionary survival mechanism. It's a signal that our body needs more nutrition and that we need to eat in order to sustain our existence. For me, I had never really learned how to eat in a way that met my body's nutritional needs. I'd spent my entire life struggling to understand okay, am I hungry, should I eat now? Should I eat this much? Understands okay, am I hungry, should I eat now? Should I eat this much? And I think a lot of people can relate to that, but they're, we're just so used to dieting and looking to different diets to tell us how to eat, without realizing, though, there's a reason we reach for a diet when we feel stressed or when we want to change our body, and it's because we've never learned how to feed ourselves. We've never really learned what nutrition is, so I think this kind of sounds silly to say, but I think we need to define what nutrition is.

10:47 It's not just the food that you eat. That's your diet. You know the time you eat it, how much you eat. Those are all you know dietary behaviors. That's your diet. Nutrition is all about cell metabolism. It is about your cells having the nutrients that they need to sustain life and create life for you, and we never learn how to eat in a way that is conducive to creating our life. We learn how to follow rules, we learn about different sorts of food categories, we learn how to read a nutrition label, but how much carbohydrate do we actually need to be able to focus? How much protein do we actually need to not only build muscle and maintain our skeletal muscle mass focus? How much protein do we actually need to not only build muscle and, you know, maintain our skeletal muscle mass? But how much protein. Does our brain need to produce neurotransmitters?

11:30 it's you know, dietary protein, amino acids are necessary for our brain's existence and, um, I think we've just kind of lost sight of what nutrition actually is amidst all the dieting, and you know everything that's happening right now.

11:43 - Chase (Host) So, yeah, that's such a good point and, you know, it kind of takes me back to so many conversations I have with people like yourself. It takes me back to my days as a clinical health coach and that was a struggle that I didn't know that I was having with a lot of my clients, my patients, was the difference between nutrition and a diet. People assume that if I go on a diet, that means I'm improving my nutrition, means I'm cleaning up my nutrition, means I'm finally getting quote here good nutrition. But a diet yeah to your point, it's just the method, the parameters, the protocol, the timing, the quantity, the type of nutrition that we are consuming. You can have a great one and a poor, the other, and just because you have one doesn't mean you have the other.

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16:14 - Tim (Guest) Yeah, absolutely. I mean you can be simultaneously meeting your caloric energy needs and your brain's energy needs, but not meeting your your amino acid needs or some other micronutrient needs. You know, and, um, you know, I think for a lot of people who are trying to eat in a way that's conducive for their mental health, um, you know, we're hearing a lot about the mind diet lately, which is kind of a combination of the Mediterranean diet and the dash diet, hearing a lot about keto being really good for your brain, and you know all these different dietary patterns. But the diet that's really good for your brain is the one that gives your brain the nutrients it needs to sustain your existence, and that's going to look a little bit different for everybody, but the diet that's best for you is also the one that's really good for your mind. You need to be able to manage the demands of that diet.

17:04 That diet, you know, something else that I think a lot of people misunderstand, including practitioners, about dieting is, you know, preparing meals, organizing food, shopping, eating, cooking. Those are all executive functions. They require a lot of planning, organization, ranking, prioritizing and people who have chronic illness and lots of or different autoimmune diseases, malignancies, neurodegenerative conditions they all impair executive function. Adhd, ocd, depression, anxiety, ptsd all of these things impair executive function, which is why it can be difficult when you have a chronic illness to meet your nutritional needs, because it is truly a demanding cognitive task to sit down and think about all these things. So it's one thing to tell people, oh, we'll just follow a diet or just eat these foods, um, within the capacity that you have, how do you actually do that?

17:53 - Chase (Host) Yeah, the how is the tricky part. Where the rubber meets the road is the tricky part. Absolutely, you can be empowered and educated all you want, but then, when it comes to application, um, that's where a lot of people will falter. Yeah, yeah, which kind of gets us to this whole world you have of neuro nutrition and you believe that you have found a vital and often overlooked requisite for traumatic stress recovery neuro nutrition. What is it and why do you think most of us have never heard of this before?

18:23 - Tim (Guest) Yeah Well, you know neuro nutrition is. You can just look at it as the brain and nervous systems needs from a nutritional perspective. What nutrients does the brain and nervous system need to do what it needs to do? A lot of people think about digestion and hunger and appetite as being endocrine or hormonally driven, and that's certainly true. There's, there's, you know it's. It's a being endocrine or hormonally driven, and that's certainly true. It's a neuroendocrine process.

18:47 But the majority of processes related to appetite digestion in particular is largely driven by the nervous system. The state of nervous system that you're in whether you're in a parasympathetic or really relaxed state or a sympathetic or really aroused state before you eat or while you're eating has a direct impact on your food choice and your food behavior and how fast you might eat and what foods that you choose. Yeah, um, you know we can look at some of the polyvagal theory work for this. You know where we have, you know, kind of a window of tolerance.

19:19 So we're right now, we're within our window of tolerance.

19:22 - Chase (Host) I might be a little hyper aroused a little nervous to be here, but uh you know we're, you're our digestive systems right now, or you know we're not digesting.

19:30 - Tim (Guest) We're kind of in like a homeostatic state where we're doing Okay, our bodies know that we're safe. I ate breakfast this morning. I'm assuming you probably ate or you're not feeling hungry. Our bodies are pretty chill right now. Um, when we are experiencing stress from work or we get into an argument with our partner or we just see something really stressful online and we just doom scroll for 30 minutes, that information that our brain is taking in from these life experiences is signaling different parts of the brain and different parts of the nervous system that influence digestion and appetite and food seeking behavior.

20:03 To answer your question, it's wild and it's a pretty big oversight in a blind spot when we're working with people. One in three Americans will experience a trauma at some point in their life. The majority of people who do experience a traumatic event don't necessarily go on to develop PTSD, but you can be experiencing the consequences of traumatic stress without meeting the clinical criteria for PTSD, and I think that a lot of people who struggle with their relationship with food have at some point along the way experienced traumatic stress. They're not aware of it and they've just kind of internalized all of their eating behaviors. They I just need to get it together. I got to figure this out. I just need to, you know, figure out how to commit to this thing and develop more discipline. But I think there's there's a little bit more to that. So I see neuro nutrition as a requisite for traumatic stress recovery, because the very same regions of the brain that are impacted by traumatic stress also play some role in appetite regulation or digestion, which also plays some role in food cue reactivity and you know how we're responding to different cues to eat in our environment.

21:13 And it was a ton of research looking at people who have experienced early childhood trauma, childhood adversity, women in particular. And we know that. You know the greater the amount of childhood adversity that someone experiences, the more likely they are to have a dysfunctional relationship with food. May not necessarily be an eating disorder or disordered eating, but they experience more food noise and just kind of thinking about food and feeling more stress about food. The other part to that I think is really critical is the cell danger response. Cell danger response is essentially a collection of evolutionarily driven responses within our mitochondria and within within our cells that respond to a perception of threat or danger. It can be an insult from environmental toxicant. It can be an external stressor. It can be trauma. You know something that we observe.

22:07 - Chase (Host) Does it need to be one significant traumatic event or could it be like microtraumas, kind of compounding, like what you just said made me think of? You know, pollutants, you know, if we're exposed to something in small levels for days, weeks, months, years, that might kind of result in what we're talking about. It might not have to be. Oh, I had this significant death at this seven-year-old phase.

22:34 - Tim (Guest) Right, yeah, exactly so. Danger response is implicated in pretty much every chronic and autoimmune disease that we're aware of. The key feature, though, of whether or not this becomes a traumatic stressor, or whether or not this is something that's going to become chronic or long-term, is whether that CDR is able to deactivate and turn off. When people are exposed to small stressors over long periods of time, or they're exposed to a very significant stressor to a short period of time, that CDR remains on and your cells basically get into this danger state where your cholesterol synthesis gets impaired or glucose metabolism, all kinds of things start happening to compensate for what your body believes bit that cell danger response turns on, and it causes all kinds of dysfunction in the body, and some of the most notable ways it can impact us is through appetite dysregulation, and that happens in a way that most of us aren't even really aware that it's happening.

23:38 - Chase (Host) It makes me think is there this CDR cellular danger response? Is there an actual like mechanism of action that we're talking about, or is it just kind of like a series of unexplicable symptoms? And then we can kind of look at things like oh, poor mitochondria function, poor metabolic function, maybe insulin resistance. A lot of things that kind of get grouped into other chronic illnesses and diseases like metabolic, like metabolic syndrome.

24:06 - Tim (Guest) Yeah, there's. No, there's no test to see. Okay, is your CDR on or off? You know it's, it really is. You'd be looking at what the response is and what's happening at the cellular level. So, um, you know, for a lot of people who have insulin resistance or some sort of cardiometabolic dysfunction, um, you could assume that there is some cell danger response at play, because any sort of inflammation is also activating the CDR and those processes too. But again, the key is, is this on for a short period of time? And it's okay to come on and off, and it does for all of us, but for some people that CDR remains activated for too long. The body maladaptively changes as a result, and then you end up with a host of health conditions and health challenges that okay, um, you know, in our current health system we kind of I call it symptom whack-a-mole, you know we're just kind of like, you know, trying all these different things.

24:52 One medication for all these different. You know aspects of metabolic dysfunction and then you know we try to address it with diet. We say, okay, you know we need to. You know, reduce your calories or you eat a more metabolically healthy diet again, if we're not accounting for the bigger picture there, there's many other missing pieces to that puzzle.

25:10 - Chase (Host) Okay. So I'm hearing stress response leading to some sort of nutritional imbalance which then can lead to chronic illness, disease, metabolic syndrome. It might not actually be a diagnosed situation, but it could just be not your ideal state. You know you are out of homeostasis. Is the opposite kind of true? So let's say, if we're going working on our nutrition and it kind of gets our body back to a state where we did have a traumatic event, does it work in reverse?

25:46 - Tim (Guest) basically, it can. It really depends on the person. You know. I don't want to go as far as to say that you can erase the consequence of trauma, because you know most well, to be fair, some of the neuroanatomical changes, the ways that your brain changes in response to trauma, we don't really know if they're permanent or not. They may be transient. It may be something where you know people have a short-term maladaptive response. But some of these other things I kind of see it as a feedback loop, you know.

26:14 So if you you have a traumatic event and you know you have a short-term period where you're noticeably like, you're eating more, you've noticed your appetite is dysregulated, you're eating at times you wouldn't usually eat. Your schedule's really messed up because you're trying to recover from what happened. Some people never recover from that. They adapt to these life experiences in a way that's so profound that it just kind of these trauma responses become their lifestyle and they're unaware of it. It becomes their new norm. It becomes the new norm, exactly. And people who have more social support, people who have greater level of nutritional literacy, people who have more secure attachment styles, has even been associated with, you know, dysfunctional eating and you know childhood trauma, early Interesting. You know, those people are able to rebound more quickly than people who don't have any sort of support or adequate support.

27:09 - Chase (Host) I've shared this example before, but it kind of brings to light this one patient I had years ago who she, for the first time in over 10 years I'd been working with her one-on-one in a group environment for nutritional counseling, behavior change modification, exercise, all of that.

27:27 And we got her, for the first time in over 10 years, below 300 pounds. But once she got below that threshold she, long story short, just like stopped showing up. She kind of like ghosted the program and me. And once I finally was able to get contact with her she was like you know, I'm so sorry, but all of a sudden I'm having all of these flashbacks to this childhood experience that she shared with me of when she, her sisters and her mom were all everyone but her, excuse me were sexually and physically abused, because at that time she was large, she was an overweight child and she I guess she, her conscious, her mind likened like I'm protected, I'm safe from this man, from this threat, because I'm larger, he doesn't mess with me because I'm bigger. And then once we got her, you know, working to get her not as big again, her body was like no, no, no, this, this isn't safe. Is that kind of what we're talking about here?

28:20 - Tim (Guest) That's a big part of it. You know, the original adverse childhood experiences studies were birthed out of a weight loss and obesity treatment clinic where they looked at over I think it was 17,000. It was over 10,000 people who were enrolled in a weight loss program. And well, the let me go back there for a second. The original ACEs study was not all people that were enrolled in a weight loss program, but people who were receiving treatment at this weight loss clinic were going through exactly what you just described. They would reach a certain point and then they would either drop out of the program or they would kind of start to have issues remaining adherent or compliant which two words I really kind of hate to use in this context.

28:57 But you know, it was found that people who have and many other studies have validated this people who have experienced childhood trauma or even trauma into adulthood, are more likely to be obese. They're more likely to have metabolic syndrome, they're more likely to have insulin resistance and all the health risks associated with that. And it's not necessarily because childhood trauma causes you to gain weight. I think that still kind of sounds kind of mystical to some people. It's like okay, so I'm experiencing things and I'm eating more like what is happening, and I also don't want to blame you know life experiences on someone's body size. We can, you know, do all kinds of things with our body weight and that's still not really be.

29:35 - Chase (Host) you know what we're doing, but you know at the same time to your point.

29:39 - Tim (Guest) I mean, what you're describing really just kind of sounds like metabolic changes you know causing, you know, some of these traumatic stress symptoms. You know the cell danger response is driven entirely by small molecule nutrients, so carbohydrates, amino acids, things like that. And when we start manipulating what's happening with our metabolism, our brain changes. You know our brain metabolism does some things. And when you know we are engaging in really cognitively demanding activities, be it really focusing on our body or even just having this conversation, we have an increased nutrient demand in our brain. We are having, you know, our neural cells are doing all kinds of things or communicating really fast. We, our brain, needs nutrition when we're engaging in complex, not only physical activity but also cognitive activity. And for people who have experienced trauma, you know there's some metabolic differences in that they're explained by that cell danger response. So it makes sense to me that when you start manipulating all these variables in someone's life that impact cell metabolism, that they would start experiencing some of these things.

30:51 - Chase (Host) So it makes me kind of think and I hate to ever say you know, should, and I hate to ever say, like you know everyone blanket statement here, but just speaking in generalities for everyone, for most people to have the most control advantage when it comes to living a fulfilling life, when it comes to being able to keep the weight, the body composition, basically, just like keep promises to themselves when it comes to their health and their health behaviors. Should most people prioritize nutrition that focuses first and foremost on the brain, so that we can square away that cognitive function and maybe even work on repairing some of that traumatic damage that happened years ago again by a single event or a compounding traumatic stressor events, so that we can then, you know, make the best choices later on, Like do we need to take care of the brain first? Is that really paramount?

31:48 - Tim (Guest) Yeah, I think we need to take care of the brain first. A diet that is good for your brain is probably going to be good for every other organ system in your body. And uh, you know, like I said earlier, I think we forget about you know, we know nutrition is really good for your body and your brain, but we forget the mind part. We usually just tell ourselves when we're trying to eat healthy or we start trying to follow some sort of diet well, I'll just figure it out. I need discipline, I'll push through it. Nothing in our brain is as simple as just pushing through it.

32:12 - Chase (Host) You know there's so much going on. Willpower will only take you so far yeah, you know you will reach the threshold sometimes of like what your biochemical, physiological capabilities are.

32:21 - Tim (Guest) Yeah, and you know, I would even say willpower is also a neurobiological thing. You know, because what's happening in your brain that gives you that willpower and that drive and that ambition, and I don't think it's unreasonable to think that a lot of life stress areas of life that are causing you to have to spend more mental attention there whether it's, you know, on your own body and you have a chronic illness, or someone in your life is going through something and you're their caregiver. We don't have unlimited cognitive capacity and sometimes our brain goes. We don't have a lot of capacity to think about food and nutrition tonight. Just pick something up and that's fine. You know, that's fine. Context is important, though. When you've been picking things up and not really thinking about and being proactive about your nutritional needs for years, it's a health risk.

33:06 - Chase (Host) This is kind of sparking something in me that's very pertinent to where I am personally, my, my place of life. I just had a kid and I think you know a lot of people out there you know, can relate. They're either a new parent or they have had children, or even just like a short window of time where all, seemingly all of your healthy behavior habits go out the window, particularly sleep and, just like you know, access and ease to food and just you know, looking, whatever I can eat, I can grab and eat because I need something. Now what I'm trying to get at is I'm trying to pull up a couple of these particular types of supplements and things that I've been focusing on in my nutrition, because I've noticed that my I know sleep deprivation is going to play a big role in this, but I've noticed that, okay, my nutrition, my sleep, has changed.

33:52 My nutrition has really kind of changed in terms of like eating windows, preferred amounts of eating, in terms of quality and quantity. So I've really shifted into focusing on cognition and how can I really, how can I support my brain right now to just have that higher executive function more, you know, more chances than not, and so I've been really leaning to. I've actually increased my essential fats, I've increased um I personally take C15, um and I've also increased fish in the diet and I've also been focusing on cognitive enhancing supplements. Uh, like um, l-tyrosine, acetyl-l-carnitine, l-theanine. There's this one product that I use. It's just called, I think, just brain health, but I'm trying to find the exact kind of breakdown.

34:39 - Tim (Guest) But where I'm getting at is.

34:40 - Chase (Host) I think it would really help maybe getting into this next area of these key nutrients that I know you've mapped out, these 14 actually. Yeah, there's one I use, called brain drive, from a momentous, and it's got acetylcarnitine, l-tyrosine, sodium, you know, electrolytes, vitamin B6, which I know is on the list with you as well Vitamin B12, niacin and a few other things. And, just to your point, I've noticed, by shifting focus on brain health and helping my brain perform as best as possible, I'm more quickly able to get back into making the choices, the willpower, if you will, to your point again, of all the other things I know support my personal wellness goals.

35:22 - Tim (Guest) Yeah, yeah, you know, postpartum for women or even just any anyone who is raising a child, caregiving to any extent that year period of time during that transition seems to be really big for brain health. Being a caregiver is very stressful and I mean, you know that. You know that you're not only navigating and prioritizing and trying to understand your own body's needs. Now you have a whole other human being that you're keeping track of and I think that a lot of people are just kind of thrust out into the world. You're a new parent. Good luck to you, you know it's hard, we all get it and we don't really learn.

35:57 you know how do we adapt our nutritional needs as our life changes, and that's something that a lot of people struggle with. So you know this is an example of you know you have an advantage and that you have really high nutritional literacy. You have some degree of interoceptive awareness to know I need to eat a little bit more today. Okay, I got a busy day. I'm going to have a little bit more carbohydrate earlier in the day, whatever A lot of people don't really know about that.

36:19 So you know where I like to start with people is, you know, thinking about okay, let's just focus on how your body feels and let's start noticing yourself and reconnecting with yourself, Cause I think a lot of us are really disconnected from our bodies because we have to work and we just have to get through the day and we're under so much stress from that Um.

36:37 So once we can figure out how do we reconnect with our body and build more awareness of when we're hungry, the intensity of the hunger, how have we set up our life to either satisfy those hunger cues, or have we been ignoring them, or are we unable to satisfy them, then we can start getting into okay, what do I actually eat? So for a lot of people it really is as annoying and unsexy as this is, it really is the basics, it's the fundamentals. Our brain needs a variety of different micronutrients. It needs a combination of several different amino acids to synthesize different neurotransmitters. So protein is very important. A lot of people who have even a mild, relatively mild protein deficiency have what I would consider to be neuropsychological symptoms. You know they have trouble with executive functioning, they can't focus, they have a hard time staying on task. They feel really scatter minded.

37:32 - Chase (Host) What does a protein deficiency look like? Is this means someone? Is? Are they not hitting the you know kind of I come from like the weight training world, bodybuilding world of like you got to get, you know, one gram per pound of body weight or 0.8, 0.6, 0.8 for most females kind of thing. Is that what we're talking about? Or is it like a hundred grams, or how would you define protein deficiency?

37:49 - Tim (Guest) Yeah, I mean there's a, there's a textbook definition of, you know, protein deficiency. What I think, what I'm talking more about here, is just an insufficient dietary intake, on a regular basis, of dietary protein. You know you can meet your skeletal muscles. You know you can eat enough protein to maintain your skeletal muscle, but if you're also engaging in, you know, really demanding cognitive activity on a regular basis, or maybe you have ADHD, maybe you have PTSD or depression what's going on in the brain?

38:18 - Chase (Host) most people think I need enough protein just for my body, but you're saying there's a level beyond that we might not be aware of in terms of protein deficiency. That is talking about cognitive.

38:38 - Tim (Guest) Yes, you know I think sometimes we, we may. Again, we might go okay, well, we have, we might have enough, you know, maybe getting enough protein to maintain physical muscle mass, but if I am eating you know like I eat about a gram per pound of body weight I feel really great on a really high protein diet, and when I get below that, I notice cognitive changes, and and this was, I think this is a demonstration of how we become so disconnected from our bodies. We go okay. This diet says eat 150 grams of protein. I feel better. How do I feel, though, if I ate 170 grams of protein, or 200 grams of protein a day? Do I feel sharper? Do I feel like it's easier for me to initiate tasks? Do I not feel that like three o'clock slump where I'm?

39:18 - Chase (Host) can't focus or whatever during the day. What does not getting enough protein feel like for you in terms of maybe some symptoms and sensations that you think a lot of people might also be struggling with, and they're not linking it to not enough protein.

39:31 - Tim (Guest) Yeah, I think, um, you know, trouble initiating tasks, um so again, kind of like just anything related to executive functioning. So your ability to start a task, your ability to stay focused on that task, um so maintaining attention for a certain period of time, be it 50 seconds or five minutes, and you know, another thing with protein deficiency is, you know, a lot of people can have like skin breakdown and start to have different dermatological issues. If you start having some of these other manifestations of protein deficiency, that's also going to create more stress.

40:07 That's going to make it more difficult for you to focus on one problem that begets another, yeah, so you know, I think for me it's really all about noticing your body over time, which is going to require us to carry out these experiments of. You know, n equals one. How do you feel eating a diet of 150 grams of protein for one week? How does it feel 200 grams, or whatever you know, the following week? And just kind of noticing if you notice any difference. You may not meet the clinical criteria for a protein deficiency. You may not have a frank protein deficiency, but you may notice an increased or, you know, more optimal cognitive state if you will eating a higher protein diet.

40:43 Some people may notice the opposite. They may have you know it's a term called cognitive glucose sensitivity, which just kind of refers to our cognitive capacity in relation to the amount of glucose that our brain is utilizing. Some people are very susceptible to the cognitive changes and big shifts in glucose. So I think most of us have experienced hanger. You know that's a. That's an example of that. So you know thinking about okay, do I need a higher carbohydrate diet? If I have a really not a higher carbohydrate diet, but if I have a really busy day ahead of me, do I feel better when I eat more carbs in the morning than I do later in the day, and I'm just kind of happy that's me for sure.

41:25 - Chase (Host) Yeah, whenever I'm off my game, if it's not sleep you know lack of sleep or less sleep than usual for me it's always like low carb. My body thrives high like a low carb. Day for me is like 200 grams, yeah, uh, it just the way that I've realized my body is over the years.

41:40 - Tim (Guest) Yeah, and you know some people will, you know, struggle with hitting some of those numbers that they know to be good for them in the sense of okay, I feel really good, you know, for them, hit these macros yeah exactly, but again we're kind of going back to trauma and stress and the way it impacts our brain.

41:56 being proactive about our dietary needs also involves some degree of executive functioning and when you have, you know a region of the brain that might've been negatively impacted by trauma and you know some of your appetite signaling is, you know, a little strange or might just feel excuse me, might just feel unfamiliar to you. It's difficult to decipher, like what do I actually need? So, bringing it back to the original question, you know what are some of these nutrients that we need to think about. It's really the basics. The brain uses between 20 and 25% of your total daily energy intake. It is it needs a lot from us. You know it's about a quarter of our total daily energy intake. It loves carbohydrate as its primary source of energy. We know ketones are a perfectly fine replacement for that. If you're on a ketogenic diet, it's fine.

42:44 - Chase (Host) We know that B vitamins, b6, b12, folate are all necessary for neurotransmitter synthesis and neural communication, which is partly why one of the textbook symptoms of vitamin B12 deficiency is like neuralgia pins and needles tingling things like that I also saw in your work here around these top 14 neuro nutrients with B vitamins I think it's huge for inflammation. Nutrients with B vitamins I think is huge for inflammation. You talk about how they also reduce homocysteine levels, protecting neurons from excitotoxic damage, and so I know inflammation right now is a huge biomarker that a lot of people are looking into rightfully so and so I think, just another layer to the importance that we're talking about here.

43:26 - Tim (Guest) Yeah, there's a big component of excuse me, there's a really big inflammatory component of traumatic stress that goes unaccounted for. You know, neuroinflammation inflammation within the brain and within the nervous system is a relatively common feature of PTSD or traumatic stress. In general. We see neuroinflammation in different neurodegenerative conditions like dementia or Alzheimer's, multiple sclerosis, things like that. Neuroinflammation is also pretty common in a number of different autoimmune diseases too, like lupus or Hashimoto's. Some degree of neuroinflammation can be present for people, and a lot of these nutrients that our bodies just need are also going to play a role in mitigating a lot of that inflammation. I think it's also important to kind of go back to the CDR in the context of inflammation, Any sort of immune response to a pathogen or a microbe is also going to initiate that cell danger response. And if you've experienced trauma and let's say you have some sort of metabolic disease, you have an autoimmune disease, you're under high levels of stress. In general, your immune system might be responding a little bit differently to different stressors and inputs.

44:41 - Chase (Host) So that makes a lot of sense.

44:43 - Tim (Guest) Yeah, like it's kind of fundamental you, know, I don't even think we really need to even zoom in there anymore. And you know, when you stack the stress of again living in modern society with being someone who has a chronic illness staying on top of your life, being a new parent or you know what have you? We kind of create these biological conditions where we're more susceptible to threat and more susceptible to insult from all these different things that are happening. But if we can learn how to meet our baseline nutritional needs, it goes a really long way, you know, and most of us here in America are having a hard time doing that right now.

45:18 - Chase (Host) I agree, especially if we're on, you know, the SAD, the standard American diet. You know we're not getting hardly any of these core nutrients, micronutrients, vitamins, minerals you know a few of these others you have listed. Are you know vitamin C, d and E minerals? Um, you know a few of these others you have listed. Are you know vitamin c, d and e, which you know are just really great for I mean fundamental health aspects? But especially if you can maybe go a little bit deeper there, because I think they're pretty familiar for a lot of people, and you know what power and value do vitamin c, d and e hold for neuro nutrition?

45:47 - Tim (Guest) yeah, vitamin c is actually in a pretty pretty in the brain at a pretty high quantity. Um, vitamin C and E are very potent antioxidants in the brain. Um, and we know that a lot of this oxidative stress that comes from, you know, diet and psychological stress, trauma, all these things, Um, it's not necessarily that there's a micronutrient deficiency of E or C that predispose you, but that certainly will. Um, but you know a lot of people are lacking vitamin E and C in their diet in general. Um, the other one that I really want to highlight is iron, which is really important.

46:22 You know, one of the most commonly overlooked presentations of iron are the cognitive symptoms. You know we need iron to for hemoglobin to do what it needs to do and transport oxygen to our tissues, and our brain tissue is no exception to that. A lot of people that I've worked with and I've met over the years and I've been diagnosed with iron deficiency, without anemia, twice in my life, um, due to some chronic illness, flares, or, you know, IBS, and you know, when you're losing a lot of fluid, or from, you know, diarrhea or just from regular physical activity. You know some nutrients are excreted through the body through that and if you don't account for that.

46:57 You know it can be set up for nutrient deficiency, but my primary symptoms of that iron deficiency were having trouble focusing, like I could not get anything done, and it was so intense and you know I had really I had a low ferritin and low iron but was not anemic, um, which to me kind of speaks to the body's brilliance of like being able to compensate.

47:16 - Chase (Host) Some people will develop anemia, but iron is so important for oxygen transport into the brain and several other things and again to a point we highlighted earlier, that you don't have to have a clinical diagnosis or a illness, disease, or even super high or super low biomarker level for something to have these symptoms, to have the downstream effects of these things.

47:40 - Tim (Guest) Yeah, and that's one of the shortcomings.

47:42 - Chase (Host) I think of just conventional nutritional that's the struggle of health care, right, yeah, across the board. You know your doctor's like you're fine, but like no, bro, I'm not.

47:49 - Tim (Guest) Yeah, and then, you know, we kind of have on the other end of the spectrum. You know, I about a year ago on the other end of the spectrum, you know, I about a year ago I was talking to one of my client's therapists and she was like, you know, I was really skeptical about my client working with you because there's so much BS with nutrition and mental health and nutritional psychiatry. I don't know what's legit anymore biochemistry textbook and we know that all of these nutrients are necessary for key brain function, just neural transmission in general. And if we have any sort of micronutrient deficiency, perhaps it does not necessarily align with the textbook definition of a deficiency. All you need to do is try to account for that. You know, try to if you have a suspicion that you may be iron deficient, that's relatively easy to measure. But if you think that iron could potentially be, you know, or any of any of the nutrients, you think that that could potentially be.

48:39 Snapshots across America and we looked at a population that, let's say, was pre-diabetic or type two. Type two diabetes was overweight, chronic fatigue, poor sleep, just you know a myriad.

49:15 - Chase (Host) You're going down the laundry list of what I think a lot of people unfortunately suffer from, uh, in terms of just not feeling well again, whether that's a clinical diagnosis or just they're unwell, and they'll tell you that how they feel. And you can look at them and go just you're living, operating, breathing, walking, talking out of poor health. And you look look at them and go just you're living, operating, breathing, walking, talking out of poor health. And you look at what they're eating. I'd be willing to bet the vast majority would not include high levels, consistent levels, of a lot of these nutrients and brain health focused nutritional components we're talking about. And then you go on the opposite spectrum and you look at people that are high performers, people that people that exercise multiple times per week, that prioritize sleep, that get greens and salads and prioritize protein. You know and look at how they perform and how they think and how they act and how they would describe and define their health.

50:05 Even looking at biomarkers, and I think we could say objectively, majority of them would have a lot of this stuff in it. So my point here is that we can really get into the weeds of okay, maybe this thing happened to you and maybe you have poor levels of these nutrients in your body and if we worked on them it could get better. But also just prioritize health, like eat whole foods, move your body often focus on mental health, mind and body, and then you know the the two kind of just begin to eventually I believe, synergistically come together. So it's like we we can really look at the science and get really in the weeds, or we can just, you know, objectively go like eat better or, you know, try or or, even in some populations like that's where you need to focus on education more. Yeah.

50:50 - Tim (Guest) Yeah, I mean yes to all of that. You know one thing that came up for me as you were sharing that is the impact of food insecurity. You know early in life on eating behavior. Later in life you know there is a correlation between food insecurity and you know greater likelihood of developing an eating disorder, disorder eating becoming obese, having metabolic syndrome, all these different things. Because you know, existing in that environment with the stress, the interpersonal and social and economic stress that's usually associated with food insecurity early in life, that shapes your worldview.

51:21 You know and that shapes your view of your body and how and food and your health and what that means to you. And you know I think it's safe to say that you know the the food industry here in this country knows what it's doing.

51:35 - Chase (Host) You know it's very intentional.

51:38 - Tim (Guest) The conspiracy that's actually there is is in plain sight.

51:40 It's what we can see, and the food industry does not exist to nourish our bodies. It exists to make as much profit as possible off human hunger. That's its purpose and I think for a lot of people who look the majority of Americans, I'm sure would rate really high on just life stress in general, if we are living a lifestyle, whether it is within our realm of influence or not, whether these things that we're struggling with are part of choices we've made or not, um, and to be fair, a lot of the things people are struggling with, they're due to societal structures and all these things that are not within our individual realm of control. Um, one thing that is usually within some degree of control is when we eat, how much we eat and things like that. We may not necessarily have access to all of the foods that we want to eat, um, but we can always be intentional and conscious about when we're eating, why we're eating and know why we're eating what we're eating and just have some degree of awareness.

52:44 Um, and I think that a lot of people's lifestyles they're they're so stressed, a lot of people are struggling with executive dysfunction and aren't even aware of it. Um, to stack on the expectations of, okay, cook three meals a day, use only fresh ingredients and take care of your three kids and work full-time and go to school, like that is a lot. Um, you know, sometimes people will come to me thinking that I have like this trauma diet or this trauma supplement protocol.

53:09 - Chase (Host) I haven't, I don't, you know, and I don't think anyone could, because what's? Really I have PTSD. What's my diet? I was emotionally abused. What's my diet? I was sexually abused. What's my diet? I witnessed war. What's my diet? I?

53:21 - Tim (Guest) have no idea. You know, and it's because you know all of us, you know we, we have a unique bio individual. You know picture and we're, we're all very different and trauma is just another one of those variables that makes things a little bit more complicated. It's something that we need to think about and frankly, I think that a lot of um, you know there's a lot of unintentional praying and predatory behavior happening with people who have experienced trauma that are looking for diets and looking for supplements and looking for all these things, and I think those folks can kind of get exploited pretty easily because they're not really even aware that their desire for another diet or another supplement protocol to kind of save them from all of this, yeah, could be a trauma response in and of itself so, yeah, that's their trauma really crying out, because that's like, consciously or subconsciously, them looking for relief from that traumatic event just through the lens now of like feeling something different.

54:16 Yeah, I think a lot of people don't even realize you know to your point that that that's happening yeah, and you know we we look to and it makes sense for us to look to food for some degree of control because we do have some degree of influence over what we eat, how we eat, eat it, how much do we eat. But a lot of us are really unaware of the things in our life that influence and impact. What I'm describing now is like food cue reactivity. So you know the sensory experience whether it's visual, taste, the thought about food, the perception of a certain food influences If we're going to eat that food, how much we eat when we keep eating, do we like this texture?

54:53 There's lots of feedback happening and people who have high levels of life stress seem to have higher levels of food noise, which is an amplified food cue reactivity. It's not just thinking about food, there is a nervous system and neural response happening to those food cues and those people tend to kind of over activation, um, of certain regions of the brain, which is another key characteristic of trauma. Certain parts of the brain become overactive, other parts become hypoactive. And if we're unaware of all of this and we just don't know about any of this and we're just eating whatever we want and we just feel out of control that. You know, our nutritional health will kind of reflect that state of being out of control and it shows up as metabolic dysfunction and all kinds of things.

55:38 - Chase (Host) Is it more perceived stress? And what I mean by that is some people, for whatever reason whether that's by choice and behaviors or past experiences or just natural state seem to just handle stress better. You see people that you know. Maybe they have the same job. One of them is just seemingly always underwater, stressed out, in poor health, and the other person same titles and whatever, it just is like they're fine, or at least outside looking, and they're fine, you know, they take care of themselves, they don't let the stress bother them, but they're still undergoing the same stress, the same physical demands, mental demands, travel, all this stuff. So is the response then just a perception or is it just going to catch up with us later?

56:23 - Tim (Guest) Yeah, well, I think, um, you know, perception also has a neurobiological basis. So what is, what's the neurobiological state within someone's, someone's body that would allow them to perceive a stressor as less?

56:37 severe or more severe people who tend to have grown up in more nurturing, safe environments, people who have high levels of social support, people who make more money, people who have a greater sense of agency and autonomy, tend to handle stress better. Some people are able to, you know, kind of snap back quickly from things, and part of that is because they have the neurobiological conditions that are necessary for them to be able to do that. I think in our society and culture we tend to reach for like oh, this person is more disciplined, they have more and those are real things.

57:15 You know they're very real things, but I always think what's happening in their brain, like, why does someone have these qualities? Why is their brain working in such a way that they would be able to be consistent and handle this well? So you know it really, you know, depends on the person. In terms of trauma, you know those same variables apply If you have support getting through the trauma or during the trauma. That's going to play an impact on how your body is perceiving safety. Have you been left alone after the trauma? Are you isolated safety? Have you been left alone after the trauma? Are you isolated? Do you have pre-existing beliefs about the world that you know all of your biases and fallacies and all the things that your brain already does? Have they been amplified by this trauma?

57:55 - Chase (Host) oh, wow. So it's not just the traumatic event itself, it's all of the um moments and all of the training and all of the you know surrounding people, nature and nurture leading up to it and everything surrounding it immediately after. So kind of like in this trauma sandwich. Basically that's almost as important to understand, to work through as is just the event itself.

58:18 - Tim (Guest) Yeah, and I mean you can. You can apply that to pretty much everything, jason. I mean, all of us have been shaped by our life experiences, the way that I'm perceiving this moment and you know your posture and everything right now has been shaped by my life experiences and what I believe to be true about people, and what I have learned to be true about people, and and same for you. Um, you're receiving and processing all these cues based on everything that you've learned throughout your life.

58:41 - Chase (Host) I'm living in my matrix. Yeah, exactly, and uh, you know when it, when it comes to trauma.

58:46 - Tim (Guest) You know some other variables that that do matter is the, the intensity of the trauma, which you know is a little difficult to measure.

58:53 - Chase (Host) But because that could also be perception, right?

58:55 - Tim (Guest) exactly, yeah so I mean there's some objective classifications of traumas. You know, online there's a really big um. You know people talk, talk about like big T trauma, so this kind of Big T trauma, little T trauma. Yeah, so people are kind of familiar with that.

59:09 - Chase (Host) Can you maybe share a couple examples of both for the audience?

59:11 - Tim (Guest) Yeah, so big T traumas are things that we would think about when we think about textbook PTSD. So you know, witnessing a death, witnessing something violent, or experiencing something violent, a natural disaster, being attacked, being abused, things like that Little t traumas are more associated with, like CPTSD or chronic PTSD. These are things that may not necessarily have evoked a big nervous system or emotional response in the moment, but our brain was adapting, we were learning in that moment. So these are things like different experiences of rejection over and over again, different experiences of a caregiver downplaying the significance of something we were experiencing, being around someone who you know has a substance use issue, and them not really caring about how that impacts us. Those are examples of little t trauma. You know there's there's no real big neurobiological difference in like the type of trauma and its impact, but severity is a variable.

01:00:09 But it's difficult to measure, right, right, yeah, the other thing is the chronicity or the frequency or timing of the trauma. So is it something that happened once or is it something that happened over and over and over again? That's going to determine the intensity of the response, or the intensity of the trauma response.

01:00:27 - Chase (Host) And what about to that aspect of chronicity? What about when it happens to us in terms of our biological age? Because it made me immediately think of we have all these things we hear about in our life, our formidable years of zero to seven or like four to seven, kind of being like when identity and trauma and all these things are really imprinted on us really at a subconscious level. Does that have the same weight, hold the same weight versus something that we can much more regularly recollect or easily recollect, compared to something that we don't really know if we can actually remember?

01:00:56 - Tim (Guest) Yeah, and that's a really cool question. There's some researchers in Greece right now that are actually kind of mapping the impact of a traumatic event in relation to our chronobiological clock. So they're asking the question does the time of day that you experience trauma?

01:01:10 - Chase (Host) influence the severity of.

01:01:11 - Tim (Guest) ALPAC yeah, it's pretty cool.

01:01:12 - Chase (Host) So like if you're going to have a traumatic event, it's better to have it between 12 and 2. Yeah, exactly no way, wow, but I mean the thinking there is.

01:01:19 - Tim (Guest) You know, one thing that's also characteristic of trauma is something called chronodisruption disruption which is disruption of timekeeping and chronobiology. So we have different clock genes that are, you know, expressed dr michael bruce is coming back on the show.

01:01:32 - Chase (Host) Actually the chronotype, the power of when a great book uh, he was on years ago. But coming back to kind of dive deeper into chronotype, yeah, this is perfect timing.

01:01:39 - Tim (Guest) Yes, pun intended yeah, yeah, you know, uh, chrono, chrono nutrition is a thing that we don't really think about a lot. But you know, chronodisruption is basically when those clock genes, the expression of those different genes, kind of get all wonky and you know, it influences our circadian rhythm and our sleep-wake cycles and we know that sleep disturbances is pretty common in people who have PTSD. Between 50 and 90% of people who have PTSD have some sort of sleep disturbance, be it nightmares, sleepwalking, insomnia or what have you. And it's because of the neurobiological impact of the brain. It's not that just person is unable to shut their brain off or that they're hyperactive. It's, there's, no, there's something neurobiological that you can't necessarily control there. And, um, you know. So, as far as the timing of, you know, across the lifespan, developmental trauma, you know, during developmental years, which I would say is 24 or greater, uh, or sorry, 24 or younger, I would consider, okay, developmental years um.

01:02:35 - Chase (Host) So if a traumatic event happens to us from age, from birth to 24 you're saying that that is going to have a more negative impact on our nutritional choices and our even biological, physiological state later?

01:02:50 - Tim (Guest) in life. Yeah, it seems that you know early childhood um, your early childhood stress and adversity. Greater in life um has a greater development or greater impact on brain development and some of the maladaptive neuroplastic changes that happen as a result. You know traumatic experiences. You know they're induced through neuroplasticity, like trauma. Responses come from neuroplasticity, our brain, you know. Either you know turning something up, turning something down or sort of reorganizing something that's already happening in our brain in response to what we've experienced. People who experience trauma and develop the consequences of post-traumatic stress or PTSD. They've experienced maladaptive neuroplasticity. The way through this is to induce neuroplasticity through trauma therapy or learning, and that's all I see the trauma therapy is. It's inducing neuroplasticity, it's learning, relearning and unlearning how you know this experience has shaped you and how, uh, you know, creating a condition in your body that's safe enough for your body to go. Okay, let me ease off the grip a little bit here.

01:03:55 Let me loosen up my grip a little bit and neuroplasticity, um, you know, we, our brain, cannot engage in any sort of neuroplastic processes without these neuro nutrients that we've been talking about. They're all requisite to neural transmission, neural communication, and the synthesis and neurotransmitters, which it's all the key ingredients for neuroplasticity.

01:04:13 - Chase (Host) I'm so glad to bring this up. This is actually what I had queued up. Next I wanted to get into neuroplasticity.

01:04:18 What is it? Can you define it in a little bit more succinctly than you kind of just did for the audience? And also, I just want to highlight that this was an area for my own personal trauma relief, trauma recovery, ptsd recovery that was so mind blowing to me that now, on the other side of it, I'm like, of course, yes, it makes sense If I can help my brain quite literally relearn things, revisit things and get you know, even to the extent of you know, neural crosstalk, getting parts of my brain to speak that haven't spoken in a long time and for parts of my brain, hemispheres of my brain, to connect in ways that they hadn't before. It was profound, profound in terms of my traumatic healing journey.

01:05:02 And I think this does not get enough credit or awareness that it should, because we can be doing a lot of the right things air court here, right things that ultimately people can feel frustrated by Like why am I not better? Why am I not putting this in my past? Why am I not healed more than this other person? You know, I'm, I'm, I'm walking, I'm sleeping, I'm eating well, I'm going to therapy, but maybe we're just missing something, and I think neuroplasticity is it.

01:05:26 - Tim (Guest) Yeah, well, I mean, this speaks to you know why I think neuro nutrition is a requisite for for traumatic stress recovery, because you can be going to therapy, showing up doing all the things. I've been in therapy. I'm going on 17 years in therapy.

01:05:37 - Chase (Host) I've been in therapy for half my life.

01:05:39 - Tim (Guest) Um, initially it was not voluntary but I'm like this. It's not voluntary, but I'm like this is good for me, like I'm liking this.

01:05:53 - Chase (Host) I'm growing from this. I was unable to talk about my childhood.

01:05:54 - Tim (Guest) For 12 years of that therapy partly due to some pretty shitty therapists, to be frank, but also due to not having safety in my body enough to start talking about things I had convinced myself that any sort of exploration of the past was pointless, because that's what the self-help industry taught me. It's like it's nothing in the past. It's useless. Focus on the present, focus on the future that's what the positive? I was not able to even see a future until I was able to start talking about my past, and that's also something that people who have experienced trauma can struggle with. It's called a sense of a foreshortened future, where you truly do not believe that there's more in store for your life. And in terms of eating behavior, that means there's no point in really even prioritizing my nutrition. I don't matter, it doesn't matter. There's no point in planning meals or thinking about it, because this is pointless. I'm pointless and I had to learn how to be a human again, like I had to learn how to exist again, despite everything that happened to me. And I think that's the difference between fixed mindset and growth mindset. It's not that you're someone who's only focused on the good or on the future. It's that you have the ability to go. Despite all of this, and despite how I feel in my body right now, and despite what I've come to believe as a result of my life experiences, I can still learn from this. I can still learn from this, I can grow, and that's what neuroplasticity is. It's essentially learning.

01:07:10 Neuroplasticity has a number of different definitions. I see it as a strengthening, weakening or reorganization of neural networks within the brain. We can induce neuroplasticity by having conversations, having new experiences and just allowing sensory input into our brains. I think that's also why trauma and early life experiences are particularly potent, because there is a lot of learning and growing and everything happening in the brain, and when you wedge something in there, you know that's not supposed to be there, something too intense. When that's going on, the brain goes Hmm, uh, let me, let me keep us safe from this in the future. This is what we got here, you know. So, uh, you know some people's certain regions of the brain, the volume will actually increase or decrease. Uh, um, in response to childhood trauma, we have, um, you know, volume changes in certain regions of the brain, the amygdala being one that people talk about all the time as being the fear center, but it's an emotional processing center and when your amygdala is overactive it makes everything about life pretty difficult.

01:08:22 I think the message, the prevailing message right now, especially here in America, is like look, kid, you just got to get it together. You know kids are resilient and like well, why do all the adults need therapy for things that happened as?

01:08:34 - Chase (Host) a child. You know if the kids are resilient.

01:08:36 - Tim (Guest) You know we're not resilient.

01:08:38 - Chase (Host) Touche, touche yeah.

01:08:40 - Tim (Guest) I think you know, you being a new parent, you know, I think it's just we're all constantly learning and our brains are always working. You know, our brains do not shut off. Their sole purpose is to keep us alive, to keep us safe, and it is paying attention to what is happening and it never stops doing that. People say, you know, kids are always watching, they're always learning. Yes, and so too, our adults watching, they're always learning. Yes, and so to our adults.

01:09:09 We just happen to have a bigger kind of operating manual, if you will, for the greater index of resources and knowledge that kids don't have and those experiences that we have during those years they're, they can be very potent yeah, a couple more things with neuroplasticity before we move on here.

01:09:23 - Chase (Host) One, what are maybe in some of your experiences or you know, is there more clinically proven, clinically effective ways to have improve neuroplasticity? Cause you know you were talking on, you know well, my, my, my brain's fried today. So you were mentioning like we can improve neuroplasticity by, you know, by talking, doing things like this. But you know, I'm curious, have you seen anything more like clinically effective? Because if someone's like I want to do this but I want to make sure that it's helping my neuroplasticity, what are some proven ways to help neuroplasticity? And two, is there a cap to neuroplasticity?

01:09:58 - Tim (Guest) Yeah, that's a really good question. So one thing I want to start with is that neuroplasticity. You know, like I said, it's strengthening, weakening or reorganizing. A lot of people think it's creating new pathways. That is true especially during in developmental years, but there's not a lot of new pathways that get created later in life. It's really just amplifying, you know, turning some things up, turning things out, expanding, if you will. You know there's a lot of different protocols and different things. You know, I don't know if I'm the person to really answer that question, but in the context of nutrition, like where's the point to where do I start?

01:10:28 - Chase (Host) Where do I start?

01:10:29 - Tim (Guest) learning you know how to take care of myself. How do I kind of reorganize my thoughts around food and reorganize the way that I think about food? I like to start with people with wherever is accessible for them, and that's, you know, kind of ambiguous, and what I mean by that is when I start working with someone I ask a lot of questions about you know what's? Where are your life demands right now? Like, how are you feeling about these different areas of your life? How do you cook? What's your thought process? How do you feel when you're chopping? How do you feel when you're cooking? Do you like feeling, you know, is it easier to cook in the oven than grill for you? Like? Kind of getting into specifics there, um, and I I'm usually able to reach a point where I'm like okay, this person has a really easy time with these types of activities in their life, really difficult time with these types of activities. So if I ask them to focus on taking one supplement once a day for 30 days, that might be pretty easy for this person. If I ask them to think about a way we can make one meal easier for a week, that might be attainable for this person. And there's other people who they're like. No, I will blow out my entire life, you know, within the next 24 hours if you tell me to. But even that I'm always approaching with curiosity. I'm like, why would this person want to learn something so new, so fast? Like, why are we doing that? What are we trying to do here? And you know so.

01:11:51 To answer your question, you know, is there a good way to induce neuroplasticity? It depends, I don't. I don't want to say yes or no, but I do think what's requisite to neuroplasticity is having a curiosity about what is possible for you and your body, or whatever context it is that you're looking to maybe change some beliefs. If you are coming at any sort of behavior change, whether it's in the context of health or not, through a lens of judgment and criticism and self-hate, it's very difficult to motivate with hate and judgment. You have to motivate with curiosity and care and your body. If we want to shift from maladaptive neuroplastic changes to adaptive and more constructive neuroplastic changes. Your body needs to be safe and one way we can cultivate and foster safety within our body is by being compassionate and curious about ourselves instead of judgmental and criticizing.

01:12:46 - Chase (Host) I'm so glad you bring up the word safety. I think that was an area, that was a feeling, that was a state of being that I did not think would hold so much weight as it wound up holding for me and my own kind of personal mental health journey the last like year or so. And it all comes down to this level of safety. And I think, you know, to my point earlier, my story of my former patient of you know she reached a point subconsciously where she, you know her body, was like we don't feel safe. I think safety.

01:13:18 I want the listener to really kind of just think about that word and dwell on that word and use that word, use that feeling, that state of being, as a filter for maybe when they're analyzing, maybe even critiquing their life.

01:13:32 If you have a health problem, if you aren't where you want to be in life professionally, if you're not making the promises you want for yourself and keeping them, if you're not as active as you, whatever you know your life's purpose and meaning and goals are, um, use the word safety to kind of analyze that and see where you feel safe and where you don't and tug on that thread. And I say that because I did and I still am, and I can tell you the closer that I get to a state of feeling safe has helped open the floodgates and some big, big ways of things that I had no idea were there that have helped me gain clarity into making better choices that help my wellness, my cognition, my performance, my everything. And I had no idea that I would be relying on and using safety as much as I have been this past year.

01:14:28 - Tim (Guest) Yeah, that's incredible. I can relate to so much of that. What you're referring to is something called neuroception, which is our brains and our body's ability to assess safety.

01:14:39 There's two main types of neuroceptive awareness. We have neuroception of danger and neuroception of threat awareness. We have neuroreception of danger and neuroreception of threat and those two states are what's going to put us into either that flight, freeze, spawn, you know response, and I think a lot of us are very used to existing in either of those extremes. You know, we all have a window of tolerance which is kind of like that neutral ground. That's a neuroreception of safety. We all have a window of tolerance which is kind of like that neutral ground. That's a neuroreception of safety. We're digesting food, we're feeling okay, we're feeling safe. But if we are in environments where we're feeling guarded and masking our personality and needing to be someone that we're not, your nervous system works really hard. I was diagnosed with autism at 28 years old and when I look at my entire life and my experiences in therapy up to then, it's no wonder, you know, I never talked about things that happened to me, because not only did I not feel safe around other people, but I didn't even feel safe with myself because I felt like such a mystery. And you know, food became this area of control. You know where I was able to really influence. Okay, I feel good, now I'm going to eat these foods.

01:15:48 I was very structured. To me, the pendulum kind of swung in a really extreme direction. It was like, okay, you're going to develop an eating disorder and yeah, I had something called muscle-oriented disordered eating. You know, my goal for many years was to get as jacked and as big as possible, which I think is fine.

01:16:02 You know it's important to have skeletal muscle mass, but a lot of men, I think, get very hyper fixated on that and the question then kind of becomes what is it that we're actually doing here? Because, you know, to add skeletal muscle mass to your body for health related purposes is very different than I'm going to be a different man or a different person if I have a different amount of skeletal muscle mass on my body. Put that way, it sounds pretty obvious. But um, a lot of us, you know, we start chasing diets and nutrition and manipulating our body when what we're really looking for is safety. And I think a lot of people are especially people who are looking to lose weight. They they're like okay, this, this, this smaller number here is when I'm going to feel safe unnecessarily. Yeah.

01:16:45 - Chase (Host) Not necessarily. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah, you mentioned supplements earlier, kind of just talking about them, not nothing, not one in particular, but I did have a question prepared around this what does taking the wrong supplement look like to you through the lens of neuro nutrition, and how would one know? A quote healthy supplement is actually doing them a disservice. What I mean by that is really, I think, besides nutrition, besides our what we're eating and whole foods, we might be gravitating towards certain supplements that hold the promise of or even clinical evidence, like some I've shared, of higher executive function, helping brain health, metabolism, protein, a lot of different stuff. But if we're not focusing on our neuro nutrition first and working on the traumatic event, it might just be literally money wasted, money down the drain.

01:17:36 - Tim (Guest) Yeah, yeah. Well, I think context is what's really important around supplements. You know, right now there's you can find a supplement for pretty much anything that you'd like to find one for, even ones that are really well researched. You know, sometimes you have, you know, a study population of 20 people. You know that received that study. I would venture to say that the majority of nutrition research is not administering, you know, adverse childhood experience questionnaires or assessing for PTSD.

01:18:00 So we don't really account for the neurobiological impact of trauma in any nutrition research, which is another really big gap here. So you know, that's one nuance I definitely would want people to kind of think about, especially if you're buying something from someone who sells a lot of mental health nutrition supplements. What's the context? You know, in my practice I recommend as few supplements as possible, but I have found that when people are struggling with executive dysfunction, supplementation really does fill that gap, especially people who do need to eat more protein. Perhaps they're not eating enough away or whatever sort of. You know. A protein supplement can go a really long way for people who just need to eat a little bit more and the prospect of preparing a meal or even heating something up is out the window. So supplementation can help us meet baseline nutritional needs. And that's usually my kind of first layer of consideration, like where are we not getting these essential nutrients? From diet? One thing that I've found kind of anecdotally is a lot of people who have experienced trauma do not eat a diet that is rich in omega-3 fatty acids. There's a researcher she looked at food frequency kind of have increased like omega-3 nutrient demand, Though I could say that, knowing what omega-3s do on an oral basis. Maybe there is something there in the future We'll see there is a greater nutrient demand for fatty acids or what have you. You experience trauma, but I think most of the supplemental needs come from the executive dysfunction associated with trauma. The supplemental needs come from the executive dysfunction associated with trauma. People are really struggling with meeting their baseline nutritional needs through food. So I would say the wrong context of using supplementation for trauma is when we're using a supplement with the intent of it erasing something for us or masking something for us.

01:20:05 Lots of supplements out there that talk about, you know, cognitive performance, cognitive enhancing. What does that mean? Like, you know, how was that measured, you know? Or taking a supplement for anxiety. What is it that you're hoping to get out of? A life with less anxiety? And it's kind of the same with medication, you know. People will sometimes say, well, you know, I don't really want to take an anti-anxiety medication, I would rather do something supplemental. And I'm like, great, you know, go either direction, you want to go there. But what is it that you are anticipating, feeling or experiencing as a result of not having as much anxiety? And I think that's kind of like that gray area that we don't always account for when we're working with people and they're following diets and taking a lot of supplements. Once you're feeling less anxiety, or once you are feeling more nourished or your appetite is out of control anymore, what does that? How does that free up your capacity to do deeper work?

01:20:58 - Chase (Host) there you go, yeah, yeah. So it's kind of like, uh, it's a stepping stone to what actually moves the needle. They're tools, they're tools and strategies.

01:21:05 - Tim (Guest) And you know, I think the pharmaceutical industry has done a great job at kind of conditioning us to think like, okay, you're going to take this and then this is going to happen in your body. And yeah, sometimes that's true. But with supplementation, you know, like I've definitely experienced cognitive enhancing benefits of certain supplements, but it's not a one-to-one replacement for a pharmaceutical. So I think, you know, we just kind of have a culture here, especially in America, where we're looking to mask what we're experiencing in our body instead of increasing our capacity to sit with and feel, which is really to our detriment, because, you know, to induce neuroplasticity and to experience something new, we need to be able to sit with the agitation that's associated with that.

01:21:45 You know when we're learning something new, we need to be able to sit, with the agitation that's associated with that. You know, when we're learning something new, nobody likes sitting and listening to the professor talk or you know reading the workbooks or whatever. But when we have a greater capacity to sit with kind of that irritation, agitation, that comes from creating a new neural pathway and creating a new habit or doing something differently, we'd rather do it the other way that's. That's really when we start to be able to change.

01:22:10 - Chase (Host) One of the things that kind of comes to mind is, as, as we're focusing on our, our neuro nutrition, we're getting, you know, focusing on these kinds of you know 14, we didn't get to like all 14, but I'll have them all you know, listed for everybody. You know through your work. Where I'm going is that where, if we kind of focus on neuro nutrition, we get all this stuff dialed in right. Um, if we maximize our neuro nutrition, does that in any way kind of just also work on the traumatic event, like if we heal our body through nutrition, does it also heal the mind, yeah, or does it just get us into like we've been talking about a better place, better physiological state, to then face the mind, to face the emotional, to face the?

01:22:51 - Tim (Guest) trauma. Yeah, it is unfortunately very much the latter. You know, we cannot erase the consequences of anything that has happened to us with nutrition, but what we can do is give our brain and our nervous system what it needs for us to be able to work on whatever it is that we've experienced. You know, some people do certainly notice, you know, if you're eating a diet that is indeed deficient in omega-3 fatty acids. You know there's a lot of nervous system symptoms from that that can mimic anxiety or hyperarousal or you know they can definitely exacerbate a lot of these different symptoms associated with PTSD.

01:23:25 You know the excitotoxicity in the brain and just excitability in general. You may be able to ameliorate some of that with. You know, like glutamate and some of these other things, and there's a lot of other people that are researching that. You know, like, how do these specific supplements or nutrients at this quantity influence brain function or excitability? Or you know hyperactivation or whatever it is? But you know, unfortunately the answer is no, like we cannot heal trauma solely with our diet, but it is, in my opinion, the most accessible for most people and the most potent intervention we can have to give our brain the conditions that it needs to start healing and for it to be conducive to inducing neuroplasticity for us to heal and feel safe again.

01:24:10 - Chase (Host) I know we've talked a lot about fatty acids, essential fats. You mentioned mentioning omega-3s. I mentioned C15. You've also talked about the importance of protein. We talked about vitamin C, d, e, iron. Are there any other nutrients, micronutrients, essential nutrients that you would recommend someone to focus on? Maybe first, because I'm thinking someone's listening to this and like, oh, like, I'll just work on more vitamin E. Okay, I did more vitamin E in my diet. I'm not feeling the benefits, you know. Is there one that we should start with first? Is there a hierarchy here with these?

01:24:45 - Tim (Guest) Yeah, you know, my hierarchy would that we should start with first. Is there a hierarchy here with these? Yeah, you know my hierarchy would definitely be amino acids, so protein first. You know, making sure you have kind of the fundamentals of you know what your brain needs to synthesize neurotransmitters. Also thinking about like hydration. You know potassium, sodium, magnesium. You know the electrical activity in the brain needs those.

01:25:04 You know and you know that that's really important. Um, so I would prioritize protein and amino acids first. Definitely make sure, you know, hydration, hydration, first amino acids and proteins and then B vitamins. You know B vitamins are really important. Um, B6, b12, folate. You know those. Those three are pretty critical.

01:25:21 - Chase (Host) What are some sources that people can look to to get these, you know, before they maybe they go to, or should they choose supplementation? What are maybe some food choices that they can make regularly that have these high already in?

01:25:32 - Tim (Guest) them. Yeah, I mean, for you know amino acids, you know any, any foods that contain protein. So I'm a really big fan of animal protein Personally. I think that you know if you're someone who likes to eat animal protein, then think about how you can get more animal protein in your diet. I find myself recommending whey to a lot of people who, you know, do not have a dairy allergy or can tolerate that well. You know if they need supplemental protein. You know different sorts of nuts and seeds and really all of the foods that we think we should be eating you know leafy greens.

01:26:01 - Chase (Host) you know all of the Just think healthy food. Yeah, you know every time. You know somebody asks me you know healthy food, yeah.

01:26:04 - Tim (Guest) You know. Every time, you know, somebody asks me you know, like, what are those specific foods? I'm like sure I'll give you this list. But I think that we've become just so disinterested in the fundamentals because there's always this new, really exciting supplement that has a proprietary blend in it and we can just take that instead of thinking about these things. But, um, you know, another thing that is very important for just mental health in general is nutritional diversity and that essentially means eating a wide variety of nutrients and, you know, having a variety of colors in your diet, eating foods that are, you know, have all sorts of different pigments and polyphenols and antioxidants and things in them. If you have a variety of colors in your diet, that's not coming from dyes or coming from the food themselves and you're eating to the point where you're feeling satisfied. It's relatively easy to consume enough of these neuro nutrients. You don't need to eat them in abundance.

01:27:03 But my recommendation for people is to just kind of start, like I said earlier, with what's accessible to you. So if you're someone who knows that, you know I can. I eat a vegetable pretty much every meal. Don't really know if I'm eating enough. Does it feel good to maybe add another, another colorful vegetable, in Um. If you're someone who is eating a lot of carbohydrates and you know you probably don't eat enough protein, could I get a little bit more amino acids and some protein with you know? Whatever source, be it, you know, beans or supplementation wherever you like to get your protein from um.

01:27:34 But I think it just really depends on um someone's overall diet and I I really want to encourage people again to be curious about their diet and when you're thinking about, you know, should I, you know, eat more chia seeds or should I eat more almonds, you know, or whatever you know, think about foods that you do like to eat, because if you're, you know, eating more foods that you truly don't find palatable and don't excite you. One, be curious why, you know. How did you learn that these foods are not exciting or that I don't like these foods? And two, you know how can you kind of expand your, your dietary diversity a little bit.

01:28:08 You know, I've found that a lot of people will say, well, I don't like the specific food, and I've found that some people are just kind of mistaken about that. It's not that they dislike the food, it's they dislike the way the food has been prepared or the way it's been cooked or the way it's been seasoned. I I can't think of a single food I dislike. It just depends on how it's made. You know what it's paired with. So, um, I would encourage people, instead of to you know, write down the list of nutrients, see where you can get them. That'll help you be kind of more mindful of the ingredients and what you're eating, but also just sort of think about how can you bring more into your diet, like where is more? Where can you gain diversity and kind of expand the variety of nutrients in your diet? And if you start with the list of neuro nutrients, and maybe that'll be a good starting point, good place to start.

01:28:53 - Chase (Host) Yeah, absolutely, you have a place to start. Um well, this has been incredible. It's definitely, uh, in some areas familiar, but also in many ways, a very unique lens through which to look at our state of being and beyond just like what we're eating and what we're doing but root causes and underlying conditions, underlying contributing factors that maybe not all of us have been aware of or thought had any role whatsoever. You know, think about past life experiences, stressors, chronic or acute, think about traumatic events. But also I'd even challenge the listener to go I don't think I know of anything, but I'm here to tell you traumatic events have a sneaky way of kind of going under the radar a lot of times and it might unfortunately just take a certain future life event, a trigger, to kind of remind you of it being there and kind of bring that to the surface.

01:29:45 But you know, maybe, know, maybe, don't wait that long, maybe just look a very, take a very honest look at how do you feel. Again, to that point earlier of do I feel safe in all areas of my life? How do I feel? How do I, how am I performing in body, mind and spirit, and my relationships and my job and maybe, just, you know, take this for a stroll, just think about neuro nutrition and see if anything stands out. And, uh, I'm already seeing, feeling, thinking of some ways in which, um, this is shining a unique light. So, thank you, thank you so much, yeah.

01:30:17 - Tim (Guest) Thanks for having me. Like I said, I think this is just something that I think this is essential knowledge. Personally, I think this all needs to be in kind of our standard human operating system, and sure, I really appreciate you letting me share this.

01:30:29 - Chase (Host) So, before I get to my final question, I want to ask is there anything that I haven't asked or anything that we haven't covered that you think the general public right now should be asking of themselves, of their lives, of society, through the lens of neuro nutrition? Well, it's a really good question.

01:30:55 - Tim (Guest) Like I said earlier, I think one of the most important things that we can do for ourselves and for other people is to transmute our criticism into curiosity. We have all been shaped by our life experiences, all of our sensory experiences, things that we've seen, we've heard, we've felt, and that has crafted our worldview and food and our perception of food and perception of our bodies and our perception of health. There's no exception to that. We've just kind of taken in all of this information from our life experiences and accepted it as truth. At some point in our lives, for most people, we start to go. Maybe a lot of the stuff that those adults told me isn't really true or that's not really working for me anymore.

01:31:40 That's not it and if we can be curious and ask why of ourselves, or you know, how did I come to learn this? Or why is this true for this person, or why is this true for me, like those three questions can really help us not only be more empathetic towards ourself, more empathetic towards others as well. So, um, you know, and like I, our relationship with food is no, no exception. Yeah, great answer. Could not agree more.

01:32:12 - Chase (Host) Um, I think the most powerful question we can ask of ourselves, of our life, of our family, of our society, of our partners, is you know why? You know, why do I act this way? Why do I choose this instead of that? Why did I choose them? Why do I believe this? Um, do I believe this? Why choose them? Why do I believe this? Do I believe this? Why do I eat this and not that? Just critique everything not through the lens of judging, not through the lens of you know, is this worth my time or not? Just you know, for the sake of just why, why, why? But just be very curious to your point again and again, personally speaking, when I did that years ago, it really challenged my viewpoints on a lot of things and that was frustrating in some areas, but it was essential in so many others Liberating, liberating.

01:32:57 And I think, ultimately it landed me, and I think when people do this, it will land them in a place of operating out of clarity, total clarity of what they want for their lives, what is important to them, and shedding things that no longer serve them, and shedding people even, or just holding a place for them at a table for a future time, um, but especially when it comes to our nutrition and healing from chronic stress and acute stress, I cannot think of anything more important. Yeah Well, all this is meant to help us move forward and unique areas of our life, to live a life ever forward. So, tim, those two words, man, what does that mean to you? If I were to say or ask you, how do you live a life ever forward? What would you say to that? What does that?

01:33:41 - Tim (Guest) mean to you, yeah, To me. Ever forward means just perpetual curiosity about myself, about others, about how you know my life experiences and others' life experiences has shaped them, and I think the more curiosity that I have and others have, the more empathetic we can be towards ourself and other people.

01:33:58 - Chase (Host) Amen, brother, love it. Thank you so much for your time today. Where can my audience go to connect with you, to learn more? Of course, all of your work and everything will be linked in the show notes and video description box, but is there a book? Is there a place? Is there a website? Where can they go?

01:34:10 - Tim (Guest) Yeah, I did recently just sign with a book agent, so that's coming. Nice Congrats, yeah, thanks, so I mean, I'm on Instagram at Timothy Fry and Threads Timothy Fry most. I've got a couple different programs a practitioner training program that's by application, only that I've coming out soon and I would love to connect with any of you that are just curious to learn more about this stuff.

01:34:32 - Chase (Host) Yeah, we got someone new in your audience over here. It's been great. Shout out Michelle Shapiro for the connection here. Thank you so much for your time, man. Thank you, thanks for having me. For more information on everything you just heard, make sure to check this episode's show notes or head to everforwardradiocom.