I’ve Been Struggling a Lot With Brain Fog Recently and Feel Like I Run Out of Energy so Quickly. What Would You Recommend As Steps to Getting Back to Myself?
15 Dec 2025 · 13 min
Podcast episode (Ask the Health Expert) hosted by JJ Virgin featuring ads and a guest segment with Dr. Bill Cole addressing brain fog and low energy. Dr. Bill Cole explains low cellular ATP and hormone resistance (e.g., thyroid/insulin resistance) as probable causes and recommends whole-food diets, reducing sugar and inflammatory fats, and a ketogenic/fat-adaptation approach; he references his son Dr. Will Cole's book Ketotarian. The episode also contains multiple sponsor ads (Wayfair, Earth Breeze, Buffalo Trace, Monarch, Dick’s Sporting Goods) and brief host introductions.
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I've been struggling a lot with Brain Frog recently and I feel like I've run out of energy so quickly. What would you recommend as steps to getting back to myself?
Foreign.
This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times best selling author, celebrity nutrition.
Expert and fitness hall of famer. I've been on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions and now I'm sharing what I found with you.
Welcome to Ask the Health Expert.
Kelsey from Instagram asks. I've been struggling a lot with brain fog lately and feel like I've run out of energy so quickly. What would you recommend as steps to getting back to myself? All right, this is a first here on the Ask the Health Expert podcast. I've got the father of one of our guests who's been on a couple times you all know and love, Dr. Will Cole. Well, now I've got Dr. Bill Cole. His dad is on today to be answering questions for you. So Dr. Bill Cole is a functional medicine expert and a health coach. And he is the founder and creator of the key cellular, nutrition and cellular health accelerator programs. And he there, by the way, with a team of more than 30 dedicated health experts educate individuals on the steps needed to start improving their well being. His specialty really is the 40 to 65 year old women market. So I'm like, come on over to the show. Dr. Bill. Also, he has been a competitive bodybuilder, skilled hunter, avid golfer, but for the last 36 years, his biggest passion is natural health and that's been his main focus. So I am super excited to have him with us today. Stay with us. We'll be right back to answer that question.
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When I hear that type of question, the first thing that immediately comes to my mind a big red flag actually that the person is not generating enough with called ATP, which is it's produced inside of our cell in our mitochondria, which are there are energy factories inside our cell and this ATP you can think of as like gasoline for the cell. And one of the very first things that we see with somebody who's not producing enough energy in the cell is that besides the fact that they're going to have low energy is the fact that they're going to have symptoms like brain fog. That's going to be a very major symptom. Other things would be like constipation, difficulty losing weight and such. But no doubt brain fog and a lack of energy are at the top of the list. So you know, you have to identify why. Why is this person not producing enough energy inside the cell? This ATP, it stands for adenosine triphosphate. Don't need to know that, but that's what ATP stands for. So this gasoline in the cell is really manufactured whenever our hormones and our nutrients gain access to the cell. And I'm going to use an example here. In thyroid hormone, the active thyroid hormone is called T3. So T3 gains entrance to the cell by Docking on its own receptor on the cell membrane, and then it sends its signal inside to the cell, which or it communicates with the mitochondria. These are the energy factories. And it tells your energy factories burn fat for energy, for instance. And the issue arises whenever we have something called hormone resistance, and it's really epidemic in our society. People have heard of insulin resistance as it relates to a diabetic. And just as an aside, people think, when they think of hormone problems, they think of a deficiency of hormones. That's not what we're talking about. We're actually talking about an abundance of hormones. Like with insulin resistance, the typical type 2 diabetic, especially in the beginning, has too much insulin. Their cells though, are not hearing the message right? And so they get symptoms like they don't have enough. But when you actually check the blood, they have a lot. Well, the same thing applies with thyroid, that you can have an abundance of hormones, but if those hormones cannot get past that inflamed, damaged cell membrane, then you're going to wind up with symptoms like you don't have enough hormones. One of them is going to be a lack of energy production. And this lack of ATP inside the cell is going to fuel a lot of different problems because we require energy for so much, right, to just even get through our day. The typical person that I'll see here, they just have a whole cascade of symptoms that go along with this, especially as time goes on. What I would recommend for a person like that is they're going to need to switch over to a whole food diet. They need to get away from the things that are damaging us at the cell level. Too much sugar, too many bad fats, exposure to toxins and the like. So they've got to clean up their diet. That's going to be a major recommendation. Get rid of the sugar, get rid of the bad fats, replace the bad fats with healthy fats like extra virgin olive oil, virgin coconut oil, pastured eggs, wild salmon, grass fed beef, things of that nature that's going to provide your cells what they need to begin this process of reducing inflammation and healing that cell membrane. More importantly, healing the receptors to the hormones on the membrane where now the hormones can attach. They can get their signal into the mitochondria and then you can start to produce more energy. Now there is something that I think is really important. If a person has symptoms like that and one of their other symptoms is they have trouble losing weight, what we would call weight loss resistance. No matter how little they eat, no matter how much they exercise and weight loss just doesn't happen. They're going to generally need to change the type of diet they're consuming and what I would recommend, because a typical person, they're stuck in what we call sugar burning mode. There's only two ways you get energy, sugar and fat, period. Most people can go sugar to fat, sugar to fat. Person who's in weight loss resistance, they're stuck in sugar burning mode. Because we consume way too many sugars over a lifetime, we lose the ability to burn fat in the mitochondria. So we have to shift that over now and we actually have to force the body to become better at burning fat. We call that being fat adapted. So what I would recommend for that person is to go do a keto diet. But a healthy keto diet, shift away from the excess carbs, go lower in carbs, get your body into the state we call ketosis. There's a great book that I can recommend. It's my son, his name's Dr. Will Cole. He has a book called Ketotarian bestseller on Amazon. It'll give someone all of the tips that they need to be able to make this transition and become an effective fat burner, which is going to do so much more than even what I just described described in terms of health. Once again, it's just one of the things that we see so commonly, right, These health conditions that are related to cell damage, which is almost always related to a problem with the diet, what I would call a standard American diet. Too much sugar, too many inflammatory type fats. That's what really has to change. In other words, we have to stop throwing gasoline on a fire. That's the big thing. It's like so many the other things that we see, right? It's does boil down to what we might even call triggers. One of the triggers is going to be a bad diet. Too many sugars, too many inflammatory fats. We've got to move away from that, go into a whole food existence, because that's what's going to create the environment in our body that's going to be supportive of cellular healing. I want to make this point really quick. It does boil down to our cell. No matter what symptom disease a person has, it's always traceable back to something gone wrong at that building block level. And if we don't deal with that, then that's going to continue to exist. And we're not going to allow this. We're not going to be able to see the things reverse.
This is JJ with Ask the Health Expert.
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