It brings me great joy to announce that my new book, Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind, is now available for pre-order!
What Is the Book About?
This comprehensive guide shows you how to combine the surprising truth about brain food with the cutting-edge science of brain metabolism to optimize your mental health.
Here’s a sneak peek at the table of contents:
The first half of the book focuses on the crucial connections between nutritional quality, metabolic health, and mental health.
Understand why the world finds itself so confused and misguided about what a brain-healthy diet should look like and how that incorrect information—particularly when combined with our modern ultraprocessed toxic food environment—directly contributes to the root causes of mental health problems both great and small. This section includes a whole chapter explaining precisely why associations generated by nutrition epidemiology studies should never be used as evidence to support the health risks or benefits of any food or dietary pattern. There is also an entire chapter dedicated to the uniquely healing benefits of ketogenic diets for specific psychiatric conditions.
The second half of the book is all about food.
Weigh the pros and cons of each food group so you can decide for yourself which whole foods are worth including in your diet based on your dietary preferences and health goals. Learn why red meat is good for you (but not mandatory), grains and legumes are best avoided, which fruits and vegetables are safest and most worth eating, the risks and benefits of dairy products, and positively fascinating facts about eggs that took me completely by surprise! Information from all four chapters about whole foods is then boiled down into a “Quiet Diet” roadmap to better metabolic and mental health. This 8-week discovery plan includes paleo, ketogenic, and carnivore diets that I modified to be “quieter” not only on glucose and insulin levels, but also on the gut, thyroid, mitochondria, and the immune system, so they are especially helpful for sensitive individuals and for people who have tried standard paleo, keto, or carnivore diets and not experienced enough relief from those approaches.
The book also contains:
- Simple ways to test yourself for insulin resistance, including a guide to home glucose monitoring
- Testimonials from individuals who have put mental health conditions into full remission by changing their diets
- A detailed explanation of how ketogenic diets change brain metabolism
- Food lists, recipes, and meal plans for all three dietary strategies
- Tips for making any diet brain-healthier—from vegan to carnivore, and every diet in between
- A curated list of recommended resources
- Hundreds of scientific references
I know there are a lot of books about brain food for you to choose from, so why did I think it was so important to write a new one?
This book is decidedly different from existing books about nutrition and mental health.
I wrote this book because:
Most books about nutrition and mental health ask you to pin your hopes on superfoods (which don’t work) and supplements (which often profit the author), rather than showing you how to improve the nutritional quality of your diet in ways that will minimize your need for supplements.
Most books about nutrition and mental health recommend Mediterranean or “plant-based” diets for optimal brain health without explaining the very real risks of these dietary strategies.
I find it heartbreaking to see so many people working so hard to make healthy food choices based on bad information—information that can damage the brain over time and increase the risk for serious problems with mood and memory.
Huge numbers of people are at high risk for cognitive decline and dementia, and most are under the mistaken impression that their risk is all about age, genes, and family history—things they can’t do anything about. The little-known truth is that simple dietary changes aimed at improving blood sugar and insulin patterns can greatly reduce the risk for these serious conditions.
Too many people with mental health problems have given up hope. They have tried long lists of medications and supplements, years of psychotherapy, meditation, exercise, and dietary changes like cutting out red meat, switching from omelets to oatmeal or homemade green smoothies—with little to no relief. They think they have tried everything already and don’t realize there is SO much more they can do.
There are no books currently available that show people how and why to use ketogenic diets (and other targeted dietary strategies) to address psychiatric symptoms. People with existing mental health problems shouldn’t have to accidentally stumble onto the ketogenic diet to discover its powerful mental health benefits—it is my hope that one day soon, this intervention will be included as a first-line treatment option in mainstream mental health care.
It’s time to take the confusion out of nutrition and replace it with science, simplicity, and common sense. My passion is teaching you how to think for yourself about food so you can make your own informed choices and find what works best for you and your family.
Pre-order season: now through January 22, 2024
Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind is now available for pre-order through most major booksellers including Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, Hachette, Books-a-Million, Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Target.
Robust pre-sales convince international publishers that the book is worth translating into other languages, convince booksellers to stock hardcover copies on their shelves where new audiences can discover it, and motivate journalists to write reviews of the book, which expose new audiences to the content. So, if you already know you’re interested in the book, please consider reserving a copy early rather than waiting until after the release date.
Release Date: January 23, 2024
Hachette/GCP Balance (New York) and Hodder/Yellow Kite (London) will release Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind in print, digital, and audiobook formats on January 23rd in most English-speaking markets around the world including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, India, and South Africa.
I’m also excited to share that sometime after the English language version is released, Asahi Shimbun (Tokyo) will publish a Japanese translation of the book. We will seek additional international contracts in 2024.
Stay Tuned for More
In the coming weeks, there will be more exclusive sneak previews of content, opportunities to connect, discuss the book with me, and ask questions, and other exciting ways to engage about the exciting emerging fields of nutritional and metabolic psychiatry, so please stay tuned. If you’d like to be notified of these events, please sign up for my newsletter.