Daily Brain Nourishment

Welcome back! In this episode, we dive into nourishing your brain through six foundational food strategies designed to support memory, focus, mood, and long-term brain health. Whether you’re eating Jolie Life meals or preparing your own, these daily principles will help ensure you’re fueling your brain with purpose and intention.

We walk through a powerful checklist you can use daily to make sure you're meeting your nutritional goals—especially on days when you're not eating with Jolie Life. Here's what we cover:

🧠 Omega-3s – Crucial for memory, focus, and mood. Learn the best food sources and why flaxseed is one of our go-tos.

🌈 Polyphenols – The antioxidants your brain needs to fight oxidation and neurodegeneration. Found in berries, cacao, olive oil, green tea, and more.

💪 Protein – Key to neurotransmitter function, energy, and motivation. We share how to space it evenly throughout your day for maximum benefit.

🌱 Fiber + Fermented Foods – A two-for-one combo that feeds your gut microbiome and stabilizes energy for your brain. Discover how to truly eat a high-fiber diet (hint: it’s more than whole wheat bread!).

💧 Hydration – Mild dehydration can impair memory and mood. We discuss how to hydrate effectively with both water and food.

🔁 Stable Blood Sugar – Fluctuations in glucose increase brain fog and neuroinflammation. We share real strategies for balancing blood sugar and avoiding hidden sources of sugar.

Throughout the episode, we emphasize the importance of real food, minimizing processed ingredients, and becoming mindful of sneaky sugar sources in everyday foods.

This is your daily brain-boosting food roadmap—simple, actionable, and empowering. 🌿

📋 Be sure to download the Foundational Food Strategies Checklist and keep it close as a daily guide.
🌐 Learn more or contact us at TheJolieLife.com
📧 Email: jolie@thejolielife.com

If this episode helped you feel more confident in how you nourish your body and brain, please subscribe, share, and leave a review. Let’s keep growing together!

Transcript

Welcome back today we are going to talk about nourishing your brain with foundational food strategies with this there's also a chuckless that you can use daily to make sure that you are meeting your objectives. If you are eating Jolie life, you have the mat, we make sure that you've met them. This checkless is for you to use when you are not eating and joy lights, so that you know that you are covering your foundational food strategies. that we are going to talk about six areas of eating or six ingredients shall we say that you need to incorporate into your diet every single day? First stop is a mega threes a mega three is incredibly important for your brain as it relates to building memories. creating focus and elevating your mood, a mega threes, the research on mood elevation is amazing. So we want to make sure that we are prioritizing our mega threes for our mood, for our memory and for our focus. So how do you get your daily oga threes? You get them through fatty fish, um your salmon, your mackerel, all those are high in omega threes. you get them through nuts like walnuts again high in omega threes and you get it through flax seed, flax seed is the way that we jol life puts a mega threes into your diet most regularly. Every single sauce that you get from us has flaxine in it. There's a reason for this, and it's because your memory is so important, your focus is so important and your mood is so important, and so that's one thing that we do for you all the time. The other aspect of your daily bringing brain help are polyphenols, polyphenols are compounds that help protect your neurons from oxidation. What's oxidation oxidation is the reaction of oxygen with certain molecules and it creates things like rust? It creates your silver turning brown, but in our brains it literally damages our neurons. We don't want a rusted brain, for sure, so we want to protect from oxidation. How do you do that polyphenol sometimes called anti oxiden because they work against oxidation are what you need to bind with the oxygen and this is the unstable oxygen. This is not the oxygen that you're respirating. to bind with those free radicals so that they do not seek a electron from your neurons and create damage to your neurons, so that's why we want these polyphenols. Where might you find polyphenols, you find them in some of my favorite places you find them in berries, blueberries, blackberries, strawberries, raspberries, if you're in New Jersey like I am, you get the wild wine berries. They look like little baby strawberries. your berries are going to give you high polyphenols. The color glies their antioxidation capabilities. Cacal again, one of my favorites, chocolate, dark 80% dark chocolate or more I sometimes add raw cao to to my smoothie, often at Jolie. We put it in your breakfasts, and even in some of your sauces, because of the high polyphenol impact, and it makes you feel good. Theides helping your neurons, it does cacao crosses over to a mood booster also. olive oil and olives again another jolie favorite it helps your body to detox so well, and it gives you really good healthy fats. olive oil I cannot say enough good things about it in terms of its protective nature and it helps to reduce inflammation, which, as we talked about before, the brain is very inflammation sensitive, and so we want to keep inflammation at a minimum. Thus our olive oil, green tea, another green tea matcha another way to protect your brain to protect your neurons from oxidation, and I will put a special plug in for matcha and green tea because they're so effective at not only protecting your brain, but also helping your body to fight cancers. So a special plug for those guys. protein. You need protein daily and you need it evenly space. So try not to do the protein gorge where you are, you know, not eating protein, breakfast, lunch and then you are loading in the steak. Protein is going to work best when it is spaced throughout the day, so think 2020, 20, 30, 30, 30, where you're spacing your grams of protein evenly throughout your day if there's going to be a meal that's going to suffer a little bit in the protein realm, let that meal be dinner actually, but keep your protein up for your breakfast and for your lunch. The exception to this is you can opt to have your breakfast be more of a high fat breakfast and then you put your protein in the other areas. So an example of that would be having avocado toast for breakfast Instead you are really putting that like food impact into the healthy fats. That's okay. And then for lunch, you have like a chicken stir fry. For instance. So having your protein daily evenly spacing it so that it's there all the time, protein supports your neurotransmitter function, which helps you to feel motivated, helps you to be clear in your mind. If you have a problem with motivation in the morning or in the afternoon, I ask that you really up your protein in morning and afternoon and that's going to help smooth out the lack of motivation and you'll find it so much easier for you to focus and get stuff done because you are supporting dopamine, which is the neural transmitter that helps you feel motivated. that helps you focus, that helps you say yes, let's get this done. And so we want to have high protein particularly during the times when we are super productive. So high protein and a little reminder here is that protein comes from plants just as it comes from animals. It's just with plants, variety is necessary to make sure you have all your amino acids that you need in the cupboard, but plant protein is as valid as animal protein, so don't forget you get protein from both places. So we have our omega threes. We have our polyphenols, and we have our protein. Next up is I am a tofer. I'm kind of cheating here. fiber and ferminous foods. I'll deal with fiber first fiber is I can't say enough good things about fiber. I just have to tell you the truth. It's super good for your good health, but also it feeds your microbes and that's one reason why it's good for your gut health, but the other part of that is our microbes are responsible for more than we recognize, and every time there's new research being released on what your microbes do, I'm like wow, they help with your metabolism. They help with limiting inflammation. They help with mood, they help with sleep, they help with motivation. You really want to focus on feeding them well. Hence the fiber, because the fiber is their food. The other reason why we want to high fiber diet is it helps us to create that very constant stream of energy to our brain because fiber traps energy in our intestines and allows for the release of energy to be to be metred to be slower, so that there's not a big spike in energy that our brain can't really take full advantage of. So our fiber comes from where it is fiber come from. fiber is the salmon brain of plants. So the way you're going to get to a high fiber diet is by eating your fruits and vegetables. That is the only way. Do not think that you are going to get to your high fiber diet by eating whole wheat toasts by eating azekiel bread? That's not the path. It's not giving you enough fiber for it to really qualify as a high fiber diet. You need to literally eat plants, so broccoli cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, carrots, tomatoes, cucumbers, beets, kales, spinach, lettuce, apples, pears, oranges, on avocados, you need to be eating those things. That's where you're going to get your fiber from. And since this is two for, I will touch and fermented foods as it relates to your brain, it goes back to a health a healthier gut a healthier gut equals a healthier brain, and so we want to not only supply the food for our microbes, but we want to be regularly reintroducing them because there are certain things that we're doing that are damaging to our microbe. So you might have a glass of wine, you might be stressed. You might get a stomic bug. You might um be on an antibiotic. All of those things harm your gut microbiome. We make up for that with our fermented foods. and hydration is next up hydration is super important. It really should be the very first thing because it is the foundation of the foundation. Your brain is massive and besides the fat, which a lot of fat is just water, by the way, um your brain needs a lot of water for the cells themselves for the lining for the chemical reactions that happen in your brain hydration even mild dehydration is shown to impair memory and food and mood, not food. mood so if you are sad, how a gloss of water? If you're upset, have a glass of water, if you are having a hard time focusing, have some water if you can't like motivate yourself, have some water, if your brain keeps wandering, have some water water water water water water and hydrate with your food in the brings us to the high fiber foods. Guess what there are also a good way to hydrate yourself. because they too, give you that drip irrigation hydration, which is so helpful and can be better used by your body. so your hydration is superi important my rule of thumb is 1/2 ounce for every pound of body weight. and that, like your protein gets spaced evenly throughout the day, so your drinking constantly if you are a person who has to run to the bathroom, then your front loading your water and your stopping around 7 o'clock, but you're being conscious about that so that you don't have to make a million runs to the bath to the bathroom. And just a note on that, when you start focusing on hydration, it takes a moment for your body to get used to its new normal, even though it loves the new normal, it takes a while, and so you might find yourself running to the bathroom more, but keep hydrating and you'll notice that that happens a lesson less, because your body is going to get more efficient at actually using the water that you're drinking, so hydrate, hydrate, hydrate, mild dehydration has a negative impact on your brain, and then lastly, stable blood sugar, which we touched on when we talked about fiber erratic glucose increases neuro inflammation, so ups and downs glucose spikes and glucose troughs and increase inflammation in your brain, and therefore increase your incidents and severity of brain fog, so we want to keep our brain healthy by stabilizing our blood sugar. How do we do it? Do we have high fiber foods? We never drink our sugar. That means drinks that are high in sugar. We don't drink them because that is like main lining sugar into your blood, and that is a glucose spike bad for your brain, so we don't drink our sugar. We eat a high fiber diet. If we're having a dessert, we're having it after a meal, we're not having it in between meals because if it's only the dessert going into our stomach, guess what gets converted really quick and goes into our blood. and therefore we get an energy spike. Energy spikes are not good for your brain. We want low, steady, energy for your very energy hungry brain. So we stabilize our blood sugar by eating a high fiber diet, saving our desserts for the end of our meals. We do that by never ever ever drinking our sugar, and by overall minimizing the amount of sugar we eat by cutting out pasta's foods, by not sweetening things as much, and remember all sugar is the same as it relates to your brain health, to whether its cane sugar, rather it's maple syrup, whether it's molasses, whether it's coconut sugar, as it relates your brain and how it reacts to sugar, it's all the same. So I want you to reduce your sugar consumption across the board. doesn't matter if it's honey, maple syrup, is for the health of your brain to day and to morrow and the day after reduce the amount of sugar in your diet, so we have sugar that's obvious less obvious sources of sugar in your diet are breads, our pastas, our cereals, our oatmeals, our granola bars, our like the fruit bars that are dried fruit all mashed together, snacking on dried fruit all the time, another one of those blind spots where we are getting a lot of sugar and were not realizing it. These are all places where we might think oh, we have a low sugar diet, but in reality because we depend so heavily on those foods, we have a high sugar diet. so remember that your grains are sugar. There's your table sugar and all of its variations, there's your grains that are sugar, and there's your dehydrated fruit that the dehydration is what makes it a high sugar food. If it wasn't dehydrated, it wouldn't be that way, because the fiber and water in it slowed down, the release of the fructosucro so it wouldn't be that way. So those are your foundational principles for eating and nourish your brain on a daily basis? So this is our goal to daily have a mega threes, to daily include foods that are colorful, high and polyphenols, to space out our protein, to sp space out our water, make sure we're getting adequate amount of both to focus on our fibers, our fruits and our vegetables, so that we can have a stable blood sugar and a very, very healthy gut. and it goes without saying that besides cutting down on sugar, you want to cut down and process foods because they are neither good for your brain or your gut. You definitely don't want things with food dyes in them, and you definitely don't want things with um ingredients that you have absolutely zero idea of what it is. On the um topic of fact, as it relates to your brain and processed foods, we want to avoid fat and processed foods that are things like hydrogenated oils. We want to avoid industrial seed oils like safflower oil, corn oil, those things. um we want to have real food always, and if you're going to get something that is like processed food, make sure it is as clean as possible and then it has as few ingredients as possible, and that you can actually recognize what the ingredients are. So thank you, and look at your foundational food strategies checkless, and this is your daily eating with jolielife, you don't have to worry about it. We got you covered.