48: Still Tired After Drinking Water? – The Missing Piece of Hydration & Energy with Dr. Aaron Hartman

If you're eating breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack, between those, a snack before you go to bed. And it takes six or eight hours, six plus or minus, to start using glycogen, for example, you stay stuck in a sugar only metabolism and your brain and your body becomes addicted, so to speak, or stuck in using sugar only as your source of energy. What are the three foods that are draining your energy, that are leading to some of your brain fog, fatigue, hormone irregularities. That's what we're gonna talk about today in this mini session. We're doing these once a week, towards the end of the week, posting these previously on social media as well as our podcast. These are ways we're answering questions people are asking us in the clinic as well as on social media. And this week's question has to do with three major foods that are draining you adversely impacting you. The one which by now, hopefully most of you all know about, are unhealthy fats. These are the trans fats, seed oils, hydrogenate oils, canola, soy oil. Every cell in your body is made of fat. The outer cell membrane is made of fat. And if you have the right kinds of fats, these are very fluid, very flexible. If you get the wrong kind of fats, these actually become harder. So the way I kind of think about it is a fresh garden hose, brand new, it's really flexible, moves. You know, you can move around the yard. As they get older, they get hard and cracked and start breaking and you get these little breakages and the hose starts leaking. You see the same thing with rubber bands, you see the same thing with balloons. This phenomena happens in your cells when you get partially plasticized, partially plastic oils, which is what? Margarine, Crisco. Any semi solid fat that once was liquid. You take a vegetable oil, a corn oil, and you turn into solid. These things are partially plasticized and are just absolutely horrible for your cell membranes. These can affect your brain function, affect neuron function, insulation for all your neurons, this myelin sheath, well, this is going to affect that as well. So all of a sudden, well, you feel energy levels can be made better just by eating healthy fats. So how much healthy fats? You know, three or four tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil using real avocado oil, ghee butter. My personal favorite is actually using phospholipids like phosphacylcholine, because they specifically help with brain function. So what's the other thing that's robbing you of your energy? It's actually seemed a little paradoxical. A little strange, but overconsumption of carbohydrates, especially sugar. How's this work? What happens is your body was made to transition from using different kinds of energy. You know, if you have a meal, you turn carbohydrates, whatever, into sugar in your, in your blood. And usually you run through this in about six hours, plus or minus between six and eight hours, your body will start using glycogen stores, usually muscle and liver as your source of energy, will convert that into glucose, you'll use it. And then when you get to 12 to 16 hours, if you haven't eaten, your body will start tapping into fat sources and making ketone bodies. And by the time you get to 18 hours, it takes me personally about 18 hours before I go into significant ketosis when I'm fasting.

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If you're eating breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack. Between those, a snack before you go to bed. And it takes six or eight hours, six plus or minus, to start using glycogen. For example, you stay stuck in a sugar only metabolism and your brain and your body becomes addicted, so to speak, or stuck in using sugar only as your source of energy. So why is this important? Because your sugar level fluctuates throughout the day. You have a meal that goes up, you know, two to three hours, it starts going down, four hours, it goes really low, you eat, it goes up again. You have your coffee with a lot of sugar in it, you go to your Starbucks and you put your high fructose corn syrup, you know, whatever it is, all those fluctuations, your brain especially becomes super sensitive to it because it's the only source of energy it knows how to use because of consumption of these processed foods, especially the sugar. And what happens is because you don't have these fasting episodes, you don't go from a sugar, glycogen, fat metabolism, you're stuck in sugar. So if you're not eating throughout the day, all of a sudden you get tired and Fatigued. And so what this looks like is, you know, low sugar, I'm hangry, I'm irritable, I'm jittery, I'm shaky. I can't think well until I get some type of carbohydrates. If you actually think about it, it sounds kind of sort of like an addiction, right? You know, you get jittery, hangry, irritable, you can't handle people until you get whatever your snack is. This is a marker not of you needing more carbs. It's a marker of your actually excessive consumption, and it can rob you of your energy. So we talked about fats, we talked about carbs. The other thing is chronic dehydration coupled with not having enough electrolytes. Typically, the average American, this doesn't account for extremes, wants to consume about half their body weight in ounces of water. So if you weigh, you know, 150 pounds, for example, you want to consume about 70 ounces of water a day. The average American gets nowhere close to this. And because of consumption of tea and coffee, we get chronically dehydrated. For every cup of a caffeinated beverage like coffee or tea, you need about 2 cups of water to counteract the dehydrating effect of that. So what that means is if you have a cup or two of coffee a day, you need four cups of water just to counteract the dehydrating impact of that. And then you add on electrolytes, you know, potassium, sodium, magnesium, trace minerals, rare earth minerals that we used to find in water from natural sources that now are extracted. And then we don't have these electrolytes and minerals in our food system because of processed food. All of a sudden, the. The lack of electrolytes and minerals with water causes your cells to actually become dehydrated. So you can drink water. It goes right through you. You drink and drink. You feel dehydrated because you don't have the minerals that actually help the water get into the cells. So these three things alone, if you're having brain fog, feeling fatigued, kind of dragging can help what your body is being robbed of your energy. Come back. A simple biohack that works for so many people. Again, hydration with electrolytes, healthy fats, and just watching those carbs and sugars. If this information's helpful, please, like, share, subscribe below. We have tons of great nutritional information on our website, over 300 blogs. Please. If you have any questions, please ask them below. We're here as a resource for you to answer your questions you have. If this is helpful, please share it and otherwise, we'll talk to you soon. Take care.

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