Dr. Amen Solution – Targeted Weight Loss

The Dr Amen Solution – How Brain Type Determines Weight Loss Success or Failure • An Exclusive Interview with Daniel Amen, MD by Mike Bundrant

Dr Amen is fond of picking on fellow psychiatrists. “We belong to the only medical specialty that doesn’t look at the organ it treats,” Dr Amen told me in a recent interview. “We never look at what we do.  It is crazy.  We are practicing 18th century medicine in twentieth century times.  It is wrong.  The emperor has no clothes!  We diagnose people with ADD, depression, and personality disorders all the time and to refuse to look at their brain is unconscionable.”

As the author of 28 books, including four New York Time’s Best Sellers, and producer of six national public television specials that have aired 40,000 times across the United States, Dr Amen is challenging conventional psychiatry by daring to examine the brain and base his treatment protocols on actual findings. His tool is Brain SPECT Imaging, which is available at select hospitals and clinics around the country.

Perhaps more exciting for practical purposes, Dr Amen has developed a series of questionnaires that tell people what their brain would look like if they got a scan. Dr Amen acknowledges that the questionnaires are not as good as getting an actual scan, but benefit people on a broader spectrum.

Dr Amen’s premise is that problems like obesity, depression, addiction, attention deficit disorder, and violence are not single or simple disorders in the brain.  Each disorder has multiple brain types associated with it and each brain type requires a different treatment protocol.  This means that no single program works for everyone, even though people’s manifesting symptoms may be similar. In fact, giving everyone the same program invites disaster.

I took the opportunity to ask Dr Amen a few more questions about his program as applied to weight loss.

HT: Aren’t there weight loss fundamentals that apply to everyone? What real difference does brain type make?

Dr Amen -  Let me put it this way, doing the right thing consistently will help you no matter what.  Eating the right thing, exercising, taking supplements like multiple vitamins, fish oil, and making sure you optimize your Vitamin D level – all this will help everyone.  So, that is the baseline program.

Dr Amen – But there are five types of people.  There are compulsive people, impulsive people, impulsive-compulsive people, sad people and anxious people.  If I am a compulsive person, please do not put me on a high-protein, low carbohydrate diet because it is going to make me mean.  I was on the Rachel Ray show telling her about this.  She said, “Oh my God, I am a compulsive person.  I went on one of those low carb diets and it is a wonder my husband didn’t leave me because I was just so awful.”

Dr Amen – The type of food does matter to the type of brain.  If you took an impulsive person and put them on the Atkins diet, they actually do very well.  It balances their blood sugar, their energy is better, their focus is better and they do great.  The biggest difference, however, comes with supplements.

Dr Amen – Compulsive people are low in serotonin so we use things to boost serotonin with like 5-HTP, St. John’s wort, inositol or saffron.  Impulsive people have low levels of dopamine, so we would use green tea, L-tyrosine, rhodiola to boost dopamine naturally. The impulsive-compulsive person has low levels of serotonin and dopamine and you need to raise both of them with either supplements or medicine.

Dr Amen – For the sad overeaters, their limbic brain works too hard and we want to raise either nor-epinephrine or dopamine in a way to calm down their emotional brain.  SAM-e is the perfect supplement for them. The next type is our anxious overeater.  They have an area of the brain where the basal ganglia works too hard.  They are nervous, tense, and use food to soothe themselves. We boost GABA in their brain and teach them deep relaxation techniques.

Dr Amen – So, targeted supplementation is really the biggest difference and takes into account my expertise as a psychiatrist and an imaging doctor.  Which brain type are you or which combination of types?  Let’s target your treatment on top of an otherwise smart program.

HT: How does the average person access your work? How can all of us figure out which brain type we are?

Dr Amen – We have non-imaging clinics and studios around the country where people can take the questionnaires. People get on the program that is right for them and it just works.  Everywhere I go in the country people recognize me because of my television shows and people tell me they have “lost ninety pounds because of the you” or “my mom had Alzheimer’s and we put her on the program and she is much better and we didn’t have to put her in a home.”  I am just like a little kid.  It is sort of like my cocaine.   The stories they tell us make a difference in their lives and I couldn’t ask for anything more.

Healthy Times would like to thank Dr Amen and his staff for arranging this interview. For more information on Dr Amen, please visit Dr Amen Solution.