The Craig Van Cast

I Cured My Brain Fog by Fixing My Gut (not my brain) | 62

Craig Van

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Your 3pm energy crash isn't a caffeine problem. It's a gut inflammation problem, caused by the 'healthy' foods you're eating.

I'll show you the 5-stage fire that's killing your focus and exactly how to put it out.


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So you're a high performer, a founder, an executive, maybe an athlete, someone who builds reality instead of accepting it. You've optimized everything. You follow what's supposedly a healthy diet. You track your sleep, you crush your workouts, but you still crash at 3:00 PM What nobody's telling you about the afternoon crash, destroying your focus is that it has nothing to do with needing more coffee, and it has everything to do with foods that are creating inflammation in your gut. What if I told you that your supposedly healthy diet is causing more inflammation than a donut? I know because I lived it for years. I thought I was doing everything right, avoiding the bad things, following every protocol I trusted tracking every metric I believed that mattered yet. I'd still have days where my brain felt like a marshmallow. Days where reading a simple email was a struggle. Days where my supposedly optimized life felt like pushing through mud. Then I discovered something, which changed everything for me. The brain fog, the afternoon crash, the weird joint pain, they're not separate problems. They're all smoke signals from the same fire. A fire that's coming from your gut. I'm gonna show you how to put that fire out. I'm gonna show you how it even starts in the first place so that you can reclaim your focus and unlock the consistent high level energy that your mission requires. Let me start by telling you about a pattern I kept seeing in my therapeutic movement practice. A client would come in with pain in both shoulders or both hips, or both knees or both wrists, pain on both sides of the body. At first, I treated it like a mechanical problem, but something always bothered me. What are the odds of injuring both sides of your body in exactly the same way? At exactly the same time? My understanding of how microtrauma and the cumulative stress builds over time, says that the chances are almost zero. It wasn't a mechanical problem. It was a signal. Fortunately, I was learning a lot about nutrition and systemic inflammation At the same time, I. was deep in the world of functional medicine, studying the work of pioneers like, Dr. Mark Hyman, Chris Kresser and many others. and that's when I found the answer. They were all talking about the same thing. Inflammation derived from the gut. the source of my patient's pain. It wasn't in their joints. Even though that's where they felt the pain, the root cause of their problem was in their gut. The body was sending smoke signals and I was trying to fix a smoke instead of trying to find the fire. Okay. That symmetrical pain was the result of systemic inflammation, a fire that starts in your gut and spreads everywhere. The likelihood of having both sides of your body injured in exactly the same way at exactly the same time is almost zero, but the chances of inflammation causing pain in both sides of your body at the same time is extremely high, With just a few questions probing into my client's nutrition, it was clear that they were flooding their body with inflammatory foods that could explain the inflammation and pain. but because we're all biologically unique, that same fire that shows up as joint pain in one person shows up as brain fog, afternoon crashes, or decision fatigue in another person. Your ability to think clearly or to lead or to create, it all starts in your gut. If your gut is on fire, nothing else matters. Your gut is central to your nutrition, which is central to your health, which is central to your performance, which is central to your mission. So if your gut is on fire, nothing else matters. When most people hear gut health, they think about the obvious symptoms. Bloating, indigestion, stomach pain. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. The real danger, the one that's silently killing your performance, is the invisible fire of systemic inflammation. That symmetrical joint pain I saw in my clients that was just a smoke signal. The afternoon crash you feel, well that's another smoke signal. The brain fog, they've cloud your thinking. Just another signal from the same fire. Your brain fog isn't a brain problem. Your joint pain isn't just a joint problem, and your fatigue isn't just a willpower problem. They're all gut problems in disguise smoke from a fire that you didn't even know was burning. So how does this fire start? How does a healthy food like ailments end up setting your brain on fire? Well, It happens in a five step chain reaction, a cascade that can begin with a single bite, but end with cognitive collapse. And once you understand the sequence, you can finally break the chain. The first stage starts with the food you eat and not only junk food. I'm also talking about the foods that are pretending to be healthy. Foods like grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, even some vegetables. I used to eat a lot of almonds until I discovered that they were one of the biggest drivers of my gut derived inflammation. Throw in some chronic stress, caffeine, inadequate sleep, maybe even some medications, and you've lit the match capable of a bonfire. In the second stage, your gut wall cracks open, and here's where it gets really interesting. Your gut lining should be the most tightly controlled fortress in your body, only letting through what you need, because your gut lining is the barrier between your bloodstream and the external world. Trigger foods damage and disturb the integrity of our guts walls. Dr. Alessio Fasano discovered a master protein called zonulin. Think of it as the bouncer for your bloodstream. When our food triggers mess with this bouncer, he goes on a permanent break. The gates of our gut swing wide open. This is what they call leaky gut, and yes, it is as bad as it sounds. In the third stage, toxins flood your bloodstream and with the fortress walls down, chaos follows a toxic cocktail, pours directly into your blood. We are talking about undigested food particles, chunks of protein that should have been broken down, bacterial toxins called lipo polysaccharides, environmental chemicals, even waste products that should have stayed in your gut. Dr. Patrice Kaney and his team have a terrifying name for when these invaders enter your blood metabolic endotoxemia. And that translates to your own metabolism is poisoning you from the inside out. Kenny's research found that the wrong diet can increase these toxins in your bloodstream by over 70%. This is not a leak. This is a flood. In the fourth stage, your immune system panics your body, sees these invaders and hits the panic button hard It releases waves of inflammatory molecules. Think of them as emergency flares. They're supposed to signal a crisis, but the smoke they create clouds, everything. It's kind of like calling the entire army. For a single spy, the collateral damage is huge. Finally, in the fifth stage, your brain catches on fire. Here's the part that should terrify every high performer. Those inflammatory molecules don't stay put. They travel everywhere. Their favorite destination is your brain. They cross into your brain and create what researchers call neuroinflammation. It is literally your brain on fire. the result. Brain fog so thick, you can't think straight. Decision fatigue that kills your leadership energy, crashes that destroy your momentum, that feeling of walking through mud when you most need to be feeling light and agile. This is the hidden cycle, destroying your performance. Food triggers, gut breaches, toxin invasions, immune panics, brains on fire. Five sneaky stages hammering us from the inside out, and not only from the obviously toxic foods, but also from many apparently healthy foods. I understand if you think this is a bit complicated or maybe sounds a bit farfetched, but it's not, I promise you. What's important is this is a solvable engineering problem. Here's the fundamental shift that changed my life. Most of us live as puppets to our symptoms. We believe that brain fog is random, or that fatigue is inevitable, and we depend on generic advice from our favorite guru. Then we just hope for the best. But what if you could become a pilot instead? While the puppet is controlled by circumstances and relies on external rules, the pilot grabs the controls and responds to signals in real time. What if you understood that there are no bad brain days, only high inflammation days. This is the difference between being a victim and being a detective. You don't need another nootropic and you don't need more caffeine. You need to stop the problem at its source. Think about it. Would you keep adding oil to a car that's leaking or would you fix the leak? Your gut is the leak. Everything that's not fixing the gut is just managing symptoms. So how do you start? How do you escape the cycle of generic advice and find what works for you? We've all been programmed to follow rules made for the average person, but your biology isn't average your mission. Isn't average. The energy you need isn't average. To get the best results, you need a personalized approach. You need a map for your own unique system. This is why I created the body compass. It's the framework I use to avoid guessing and to know exactly which foods fuel me and which ones inflame me. It's definitely not another diet. It's a navigation tool, a framework that makes all diets obsolete. The path from foggy to focused starts with one thing. Awareness. You need to be aware of the foods causing inflammation in your unique body. I've distilled the core, the meat of this framework into a simple one page poster. It categorizes foods along a spectrum from the most common inflammatory triggers to the most reliable healing foods. Here's what you can do right now. Print it, put it on your fridge, and start noticing the patterns between what you eat and how you feel. Every ignored signal programs your body for per every ignored signal programs, your body for poor performance and chronic disease. Every choice made with awareness builds the path to sustained energy and clarity. Your next level of performance is waiting on the other side of this decision. Stop following dogma. Start running your own experiments. Get the poster and start your investigation now. The link is in the description below. Stop guessing. Start navigating your energy, your clarity and your entire mission depend on it. I hope I've made that crystal clear.