Retraining the brain to beat stress is the key to losing weight and keeping it off. There’s overwhelming evidence that many people who lose weight through dieting quickly regain it. This is because people have learned to ignore their brain – an organ which has been dictating behaviour since prehistoric times – and have accepted emotional eating that comes with living an over-stressed lifestyle, according to Professor Selena Bartlett from QUT’s Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation. Diets can in fact make us fatter and more stressed, says Prof Bartlett “When we are stressed our brain seeks pleasure and that’s the problem,” says Prof Bartlett. And the more stress you experience, the more your brain seeks pleasure to counter it. Choosing to beat stress in order to loose weight has long been advocated by US neuroscientist, Dr Caroline Leaf. Stress, like real food, is not inherently bad – it makes people alert and ready for action. But it depends on how a person reacts to stress that determines the outcome of a situation and in this case weight loss, according to Dr Leaf. “Thoughts are real things that occupy mental real estate,” she said during her 2015 TEDx talk on the power of our thoughts. If a person chooses to react wrongly to a challenging situation, they enter stage two of the stress reaction. “During this stage, high levels of cortisol circulate in the blood for extended periods of time, in turn contributing to prolonged high blood sugar that can also lead to insulin resistance, pre- diabetes, and weight gain, since prolonged high levels of cortisol lead to the accumulation of fat instead of fat breakdown. “In this toxic situation, fat tends to accumulate around the middle of the body and is a risk factor for heart disease,” writes Dr Leaf. In fact, prolonged, high levels of cortisol can lead to Cushing’s Syndrome – characterised by fat accumulation around the middle and back of the human body. The good news is that it’s possible to override the way the amygdala – the emotional part of our brain – responds to stress, says Prof Bartlett. “When the rational brain is in charge; sustainable weight loss is possible,” she said. PROFESSOR BARTLETT’S FIVE STEPS TO HELP MAKE THIS HAPPEN: 1. Be compassionate to your brain – it is an amazing organ that can be severely damaged by stress, especially in childhood while it’s developing. 2. Get to know the brain – an awareness of how the amygdala – an almond-shape set of neurons located deep in the brain’s medial temporal lobes – drives your behaviour is critical to overriding unhealthy impulses. 3. Identify when your amygdala is taking over in stressful situations and acknowledge when you’re tempted by the urge to eat comforting food, like sugar. 4. Replace food and alcohol with deep breathing, stretching, walking, running or any movement that feels good. 5. Reduce sugar and alcohol intake and increase cardiovascular and high intensity exercise – these will help to heal your brain of its stress-induced damage and build a strong, healthy body.

With Dr James Meucke AM Imagine knowing that there are ingredients in food and drinks that when consumed over time are slowly and silently leading toward type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease and in the worst case blindness. In this powerful episode with Dr James Muecke AM who is the Lieutenant Governor of South Australia and an Adelaide-based eye surgeon, we discuss how a poor diet is the leading cause of death. The startling understanding is that type 2 diabetes may be preventable through changing our diet. A pivotal moment happened for James when his patient Neil, woke up and was blind in both eyes, as a result of his type 2 diabetes. Further still, even if you have type 2 diabetes, imagine knowing that it may be possible, in some cases, to change your diet and have remission?
James is Australian of the Year for 2020 for his 32 years of humanitarian work. He is using this powerful platform to raise awareness of our poor diet, laden with sugary drinks and ultra-processed foods, which is devastating the health of Australians. Not only is he improving awareness in Australia through his influence with government and other organisations. He and I discuss how we were both addicted to sugar and what we did to reduce it and improve our health.
Dr James Muecke here graduated with Honors from Adelaide University Medical School in 1988. Following his internship at Royal Adelaide Hospital, James lived and worked as a volunteer doctor in Kenya in 1989. After completing ophthalmology training in Adelaide in 1995, James worked as an eye surgeon in Jerusalem for 12 months. James furthered his expertise with a Fellowship in Ocular Oncology at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London. He returned to Adelaide in 1998 where he has been a Visiting Consultant and Senior Lecturer at Royal Adelaide Hospital (retired 2020) and Women’s & Children’s Hospital (retired 2016). James established the Ocular Oncology Units at these two centres upon his return. James has taught the diagnosis and management of eye cancer in ten countries in Asia. He founded not-for-profit organization Sight For All in 2008, turning his boundless energy into a fight against blindness in the Aboriginal and mainstream communities of Australia and many of the poorest countries of the world. Sight For All’s comprehensive and sustainable projects are now impacting the lives of over one million people each year. His commitment to social impact and humanitarian endeavors has earnt him a number of awards including an Order of Australia in 2012, the Australian Medical Association’s President’s Leadership Award in 2013, and Ernst & Young’s Social Entrepreneur for Australia in 2015. Degree of Doctor of the University (honoris causa), University of Adelaide, 2021 Australian of the Year , 2020. South Australian of the Year , 2019. University of Adelaide Distinguished Alumni Award , 2019 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year (Australia, Social Category), 2015 Finalist, Pride of Australia Medal , 2014 President’s Leadership Award for blindness prevention in developing countries - Australian Medical Association, 2013. Rural Health and Wellbeing Award for service to Aboriginal eye health in South Australia. Member of the Order of Australia for the provision of eye health services to Asian and Australian Aboriginal communities, 2012. Learn more about Dr James Muecke AM here.
https://sightforall.org/about/

Most people would say love has nothing to do with money or work or joy. Have you considered what is their money: joy: love equation? What ratios would you devote to each of these. If you are like the majority of people in high performing organisations, you would rate love as the least important. James Rhee now has 1 million views on TED, for his kindness at work talk. This is not the “being nice” version of kindness nor the “Love Eat Pray” version of love. This is about the human need to be seen and heard and the feeling of safety generated that leads the people and their brain health toward creativity, innovation, and purpose. James is an expert at building back businesses, especially when they on their knees, through optimising the unmeasurable, “goodwill” of its people and translating this into the balance sheet. In the process of turning around Ashley Stewart, a near bankrupt, consumer women’s clothing brand for plus size, moderate income, black women. He captured “goodwill” by operationalising our collective human ambition to be better. In this interview, we discuss businesses that operationalise “goodwill”, through kindness and love toward their people. In contrast, workplace stress, does completely the opposite, as Forbes recently published an article showing the main reason people want to leave their job is an awful boss or a toxic and stressful workplace. Similarly, people remain in jobs because they feel appreciated, thanked, and feel part of driving the purpose of the business. Goodwill pervades every aspect of the business, and it is almost akin to that feeling you have when you are part of something much greater than yourself. Some refer this feeling to “energy or soul or spirit”, words not often used in business. The synergistic benefit derived from the “combined human capital” of a team behind its leader is notoriously difficult to measure, and unfortunately, when it leaves, it is felt fast and furious. James has learnt that authentic leaders, not only lead by example, but capture and bottle the essence of the communal nature of human capital. He discusses how kind people across a business, raise the whole business to unforeseen levels, drive thriving processes and balance sheets and most importantly build better future leaders. We talk about ways to transform the inevitability of a future being a technology driven and much-touted universal base income, a concept of providing a low payment to everyone, due to the disappearance of work to giving individuals opportunities and knowledge to grow businesses that build back better Societies. Within each of us, lies a renaissance opportunity springing forth in the post-pandemic 2022’s. James was given a red helicopter when he was 5 by a father of his friend at his school, to say thank you to James giving his son something to eat at lunchtime. The red helicopter materialised “goodwill” and gave James his most important lesson for life, and that is, how to make tangible the intangible nature of human capital component of “goodwill. James is the founder of Red Helicopter, a media EdTech start-up to accelerate business school education for all, he teaches at MIT Sloan, and Howard University. The first assignment the students are given is to answer the question: what their optimal money is, joy, love equation for life. What is yours? Join us on an exciting episode #79 of the Thriving Minds podcast.

Imagine exiting a train station and rounding the corner in an urban part of London for the first time, on your own, without knowing a single person to start studying in a Design School after growing up in a small town. This is exactly the unlikely path taken by Lisa Scharoun, now Professor and Head of the School of Design at QUT. This never occurred to her growing up as one of 5 children in the middle of rural U.S.A. As Steve Jobs famously quoted, you can only join the dots looking backwards. What comes to your mind when you hear the word design? At first, it invokes fashion, architecture, and iPhones. Then, after talking with Lisa on the Thriving minds podcast , it became clear that expert design is the gateway that provides the simplest solution for complex problems. For example, it was the discovery of the design of DNA, the double helix, consisting of two strands that wind around each other like a twisted ladder that led to the scientific and genomics revolution. The simple design was discovered in1953 by a team of scientists putting together the pieces of a puzzle built by hundreds of scientists, starting with Friedrich Miescher in 1869. Watson and Crick, with the help of Rosalind Franklin, and others, used cardboard cut-outs on a table of the individual chemical components of the four bases (AC TG) and other nucleotide subunits that make up the chemical structure of DNA. Watson and Crick shifted molecules around on their desktops. It took a team working together inflow to discover the double helix structure of DNA built by nature’s simple design. Together they solved one of the most complex scientific problems, being the way in which all living forms are connected to each other (see Pray et al., 2008). What could be more complex than designing teams to achieve flow states? The ability of team members together to flow arises from a complex array of small daily decisions each member has made. From choices of how to get up in the morning, amount of exercise, and the food being eaten. In Lisa’s case, her life flowed from exchanging letters with a family friend at 10 years old in Germany into studying and working across the USA, UK, China, Singapore, and Australia and becoming International expertise in design. Her team flow was designed by creating a collaborative environment with a mantra of ‘change comes by design’. They created a set of promotional posters for the Olympic Village that highlighted the history and significant contributions that Australian Paralympic athletes have contributed to the sport. This set of posters, created for the London 2012 games, has subsequently been showcased at the US Embassy in Canberra as well as at every subsequent Paralympic Games. As we enter the post-pandemic COVID-19 era, the dominant design we face is how to live sustainably within an economic model that demands consumption and growth. A design solution to this complex puzzle is greatly needed, for example, how would we re-wild the Earth as proposed by David Attenborough. Please join Lisa and I as we discuss how to design teams that flow. Citation: Pray, L. (2008) Discovery of DNA structure and function: Watson and Crick. Nature Education 1(1):100

With Sarrah Le Marquand, Editor in Chief Stellar and Body and Soul Magazine. There is no doubt, to be human right now is not easy. It is almost impossible not to feel the shift underneath in the world order and the feeling is palpable. For us in Queensland and NSW, this is on top of catastrophic floods, and the pandemic. It is OK to be human and feel the suffering. It is also OK, to escape for a few minutes into worlds that seem far removed from danger, clean-up, masks, and strife. This is the beauty of creating worlds for others to escape to. Join us today with Sarrah Le Marquand is the founding editor-in-chief of Stellar, the country’s most read Sunday magazine, and also editor-in-chief of Body+Soul, Australia’s leading health media brand. Sarrah is also a weekly panellist on the Today show and is a regular co-host of The Project. She has appeared on Sky News, Q&A, The Drum, Studio 10, The Morning Show, Sunrise and is a frequent guest on ABC Radio. In 2021 she was announced as the first ever ambassador for Women’s Community Shelters, an Australian charity providing crisis accommodation for women and children experiencing domestic violence. Thank you Sarrah for everything you are doing to help others have some relief. This is the guest on Episode #82 on the Thriving Minds podcast.

With Dr Tara Walker, neuroscientist I can hear you now. I don’t run, or I am too old to run or the classic, I want to protect my knees, and the list goes on. This is exactly what I use to think. Exercise is the one thing shown across several studies to help the brain produce new cells or neurons, also called neuroplasticity. Dr Tara Walker, a neuroscientist, at the Queensland Brain Institute has spent the last 20 years trying to work out how running helps the brain’s memory centres function more effectively. In a recent high-profile journal, she and her colleagues published a remarkable discovery, that a trace element, selenium, they found in the blood leads to the production of more brain cells in the part of the brain, called the hippocampus, that helps us learn new things and remember old ones. Selenium can be found in nuts, grains and fresh fruit and vegetables and particularly in brazil nuts. For example, one brazil nut a day is enough. Having brazil nuts does not help and can lead to problems. As much as we might like to take a supplement rather than run or exercise. There will never be enough benefits conferred from supplements that are equivalent to exercise. The main reason is that exercise gets the heart pumping blood and oxygen to nearly every place in the body and keeps the heart and body fit. It activates skeletal muscle that helps with insulin sensitivity and diabetes. The benefit list goes on and on. There is a lot of debate about how much exercise is the right amount. Can you do too much exercise? The right prescription of exercise has not been worked out. But there is no doubt that some form of movement everyday matter to stay healthy. For those of us not able to walk or run, then we can move our arms. If this is not the case, then we can learn something new, like a language, or meet new people. The brain needs a lot of novelty, and learning to stay healthy. Dr Walker has gone one step further than many of us and that is to work out through experiments how exercise improves factors in the blood that leads to changes in the brain. This was ground-breaking research. The most surprising discovery was just how much memory is improved with aging from adding exercise and the supplement, selenium. This leads to the idea that what you eat matters to getting the brain benefits from exercise. Dr Walker also didn’t think she could run. She was a swimmer when she was young. But by taking small steps, she slowly built up to running. She thought a 10km fun run was her limit, but then came the half and full marathon and now she is training for a 60 km trail run in the mountains in Brisbane. While she runs, her best ideas come, and this is how she decided to examine the blood of animals exercising to discover that proteins related to selenium are changed. This was the beginning of an 8-year project to demonstrate how exercise changes the brain. It takes a village running together to make breakthroughs in neuroscience. What amazing work, and how lucky are we to interview her on episode #80 of the Thriving Minds podcast.

Imagine our communities learning how to start healthy conversations about the brain, in the same way, as we would talk about where we went on vacation. The stigmatization of mental health and illness left the brain being outsourced to a few people. We have tended to focus our efforts on all the things that have gone wrong. The main problem, we cannot change the past. One thing for certain, we can learn a few tricks today and going forward. The first thing to start thinking about, is the brain has untapped potential. Because in the past the brain has been viewed as weak, we have been afraid to talk about the brain to our family and friends. This is changing. We have entered the decade where brain imaging technology has allowed the brain to be displayed for us to see inside it. Try experimenting with the brain's plasticity, and attempt to train it, in a similar way to training other muscles in the body.
Try a new type of conversation, rather than focus on stress and your worries and problems, reframe the conversation to an exciting healthy brain conversation. It may be as simple as: Guess what I did this morning when I woke up? And lead with something like: I looked out the window, into nature, and thought about 3 things I am grateful for, then I did 2 minutes of deep breathing exercises. I noticed that when I directed my attention in this way. I felt a lot better compared to the previous week. I have come to see that I can control what my brain is paying attention to. Before this, I would reach for the alarm on my phone, and then immediately turn my attention to the latest bad news, and then social media. I did not realize that a simple activity like thinking about where my brain is paying attention, can have either a major positive or negative impact on the rest of the day. Learning how to train my brain, with a simple change in my morning routine, was simple but not easy to do. It took me a few weeks for it to become my new normal routine. This change to brain health and fitness in our conversations, focusses on the power of the brain and the control we have over it. Everyone has the opportunity to learn how to become the boss of their brain. Try it and see. Let's make brain health become everyone's business

View this article on Brain health in Body and Soul magazine. Body and Soul magazine has a new section called Brain Health that is dedicated to helping Australians find simple ways to tap into brain health. In this article, we discuss how essential the morning routine is moving the brain into healthy habits of feeling, thinking and being. As we move through new challenges and opportunities throughout 2022, we look forward to offering a little bit of insight from neuroscience that may be of benefit to you and your loved ones. It is becoming more apparent that brain health is everyone's business.

Our recent Body + Soul article looks at some cheat codes for living a good life, thanks to Paralympian Kurt Fearnley. Check the article here.

Authors: Shariff, Masroor , Quik, Maryka , Holgate, Joan , Morgan, Michael , Patkar, Omkar Laxman , Tam, Vincent , Belmer, Arnauld , & Bartlett, Selena (2016) Neuronal nicotinic acetylcholine receptor modulators reduce sugar intake. PLoS One , 11 (3), Article number: 0150270 1-15. Description Excess sugar consumption has been shown to contribute directly to weight gain, thus contributing to the growing worldwide obesity epidemic. Interestingly, increased sugar consumption has been shown to repeatedly elevate dopamine levels in the nucleus accumbens (NAc), in the mesolimbic reward pathway of the brain similar to many drugs of abuse. We report that varenicline, an FDA-approved nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAChR) partial agonist that modulates dopamine in the mesolimbic reward pathway of the brain, significantly reduces sucrose consumption, especially in a long-term consumption paradigm. Similar results were observed with other nAChR drugs, namely mecamylamine and cytisine. Furthermore, we show that long-term sucrose consumption increases alpha4beta2 * and decreases alpha6beta2* nAChRs in the nucleus accumbens, a key brain region associated with reward. Taken together, our results suggest that nAChR drugs such as varenicline may represent a novel treatment strategy for reducing sugar consumption. Link to the study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4814119/pdf/pone.0150270.pdf

Have you ever wondered how a brand-new product, an idea or a new way of living appears out of nowhere? Today, we speak to Lydia Pearson, a fashion designer, teacher and someone creating new products and ideas every day. Having led a global fashion brand, Easton Pearson, through the highs and lows of the picky and tricky fashion world. Lydia is not shy about giving something hard a good shot. Nor is she afraid to pull the pin when things are not feeling right. Her biggest lesson in life is that people are everything. The pandemic has shown how important people are as we face and fight a hidden virus. The pandemic has come with consequences to all our health, but at the same time, we are building resilience, strength, and determination. As we head out of the pandemic very slowly, we may want to return to how it was. Instead, imagine that there is something magical and much better waiting to happen just around the corner. We discuss the breaking down of something precious to you, like your hard-working fashion brand, Easton Pearson, into a museum archive. The Easton Pearson fashion archive now inspires generations to come. Lydia discusses the daily courage it took to get up, swim and run when she was at her lowest, that in retrospect, has led to a far better and more fulfilling life. Lydia is now reaching back by teaching younger generations how to create and grow local businesses, and she is moving forward, with a new creation, ShiloLydia, stitching together new creations. The clothes are more artworks with a special purpose, they marry old and the new, by bringing our ancestors back to life. They take the ancestor's table linen, maybe someone we love that is present or passed, and they use the beautifully embroidered parts of the linen and switch it back into repurposed, well-crafted, high-end tailored shirts. Because creativity and having the courage to reinvent ourselves in new ways separates humans from most species. We are all trying to move forward by switching the embroidered parts of our past into our futures to create magic across our communities. Join Lydia and I stitching our expertise together on the Thriving minds podcast.

The New York Times bestselling explains the eight pathologies that underlie all chronic diseases, documents how processed food has impacted them to ruin our health, economy, and environment over the past 50 years, and proposes an urgent manifesto and strategy to cure both us and the planet. Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric neuroendocrinologist who has long been on the cutting edge of medicine and science, challenges our current healthcare paradigm which has gone off the rails under the influence of Big Food, Big Pharma, and Big Government. He insists that if we do not fix our food and change the way we eat, we will continue to court chronic disease, bankrupt healthcare, and threaten the planet. But there is hope: this book explains what’s needed to fix all three. On Episode #85 of the Thriving Minds podcast, we discuss his books, Fat Chance and Metabolical: click the link here . • Medicine for chronic disease treats symptoms, not the disease itself
• Chronic diseases are not “druggable”, but they are “foodable”
• Processed food isn’t just toxic, it’s addictive
• The war between vegan and keto is a false war—the combatants are on the sameside
• Big Food, Big Pharma, and Big Government are on the other side Dr Lustig on the Thriving Minds podcast recording. We met when I was working at UCSF in 2009.
Dr Lustig discusses on the podcast that certain foods — “hyperpalatable foods” — particularly processed foods that are high in sugar, salt and fat can be addictive. Food addiction is still a controversial concept in the scientific community. But researchers find strong evidence that certain foods can trigger binging, craving and withdrawal, responses that are similar to those produced by addictive substances like alcohol, cocaine and tobacco. He makes the case that food is the only lever we have to effect biochemical change to improve our health, Lustig explains what to eat based on two novel criteria: protect the liver, and feed the gut.
Dr Lustig discusses that "Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) account for about 50% of the global disease burden and some 75% of total health-care spending. The role of processed foods in these chronic conditions is undisputed; every country that adopts the high-fat, high-sugar “Western pattern diet” is plagued by the same diseases and costs. But the big question for health professionals is whether the quantity or the quality of foods is to blame. This is an important distinction, because quantity is determined by the user, while quality is determined by the industry.

Some health experts argue that specific components of processed foods – in particular, sugar – are as addictive as cocaine and heroin. For example, sugar is consistently the ingredient with the highest score on the Yale Food Addiction Scale, which measures people’s food cravings.

Not everyone who is exposed to sugar becomes addicted; but, as with alcohol, many do. While refined sugar is the same compound found in fruit, it lacks fiber and has been crystallized for purity. It is this process that turns sugar from a “food” into a “drug,” allowing the food industry to “hook” unsuspecting consumers. The evidence is visible in every aisle of every grocery store, where a staggering 74% of all food items are spiked with added sugar. In fact, sugar’s allure is a big reason why the processed food industry’s current profit margin is 5% (up from 1%), and why so many of us are sick, fat, stupid, broke, depressed, and just plain miserable".
Dr. Robert Lustig is Professor of Pediatric Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Lustig has become a leading public health authority on the impact sugar has on fueling the diabetes, obesity and metabolic syndrome epidemics, and on addressing changes in the food environment to reverse these chronic diseases. In his New York Times best selling book Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processes Food, Obesity, and Disease, Robert documents both the science and the politics that have led to the current pandemic of obesity and chronic disease. In the Fat Chance Cookbook, Robert provides practical examples for applying healthy eating principles with recipes by Cindy Gershen.