This transcript is brought to you thanks to the hard work of Cheryl Meyers.

Welcome Bec to the Keto Woman podcast. How are you doing today?

I’m doing really well. Thank you Daisy. Thanks for having me.

Loving the conference?

It’s awesome. I’m learning so, so much, my brain is full.

Mine too. It’s, it feels like there’s a little bit of space there left to maybe squeeze some more knowledge in, but I was just saying earlier before we started, I sometimes feel have this sort of limit to how much you can stuff in, in a limited period of time. But you made the comment and I think that’s absolutely true that they’ve got a really nice pace with different presentations going on that that just stops you having that overload effect.

I agree. I think that they’ve balanced the high level public health content with the getting down into the weeds with the technical stuff really well. So you can come through a technical presentation and just have a little bit of a break and zoom out and take on something that’s a bit more big picture. I really like the way they’ve balanced that.

Yeah, me too. So tell us a bit about you.

I am 35 years old. I’ve had Type 1 diabetes since I was 17. I’ve been eating low carb for about 17 and a half years. So seven or eight months post diagnosis, I switched to a low carb diet and have been Keto since about 2012 when I started experimenting with a Ketogenic approach for endurance exercise. I’m also the CEO and one of the founders of the Type 1 diabetes family center in Perth, in Western Australia. And that’s a facility and service of which I’m immensely proud. 

We’re now supporting more than a thousand people impacted by Type 1 diabetes in our state. And we very much have an holistic and food first approach to diabetes management encompassing not only nutrition, certainly, but insulin therapy, being versed up on all the tools, the technical tools and devices that you can use to manage diabetes, but also mental wellness, peer support and very much that wraparound social support element that I think is needed for a life well lived with a chronic disease like diabetes.

I think it’s really important to take that holistic approach.

Absolutely. And I think that we’ve had a very medical model of care for Type 1 diabetes that’s really focused on insulin therapy and insulin delivery devices. And I feel that zooming out and looking at all the different pillars of good diabetes care and good health and nutrition, exercise, mental support, and indeed family support. That’s why we called ourselves the Type 1 diabetes family center as far as I’m concerned, Type 1 diabetes is a team sport. Every person in a family is impacted by a diagnosis, and every person needs to be knowledgeable, compassionate to the person living with diabetes but also to themselves because it is a long journey and it can go on a lot of different directions and the family center is there to help people through that.

And it’s great this working together with the patient and their family, which is really important, but with the medical care they’re getting. I was talking to Belinda Lennerz earlier and she was saying that there’s often this mismatch between the patient and the practitioner they’re working with and that they’re quite often feeling really alone because they’re going out on a bit of a limb getting involved in this way of eating and then not feeling supported. So it’s really nice to hear that there are more practices at least embracing this approach even if they can’t necessarily promote it, but it sounds like you’re able to take it more to that level to actually promote it and suggested as a way of eating and a lifestyle to adopt that’s really going to help manage the lifestyle for the Type 1 diabetic in question.

Yes, we are, we believe that a low carbohydrate approach should be on the table as one of the first line therapies in relation to Type 1 diabetes management. Obviously it’s always going to be adjunct to good insulin therapy. However, we’re not afraid to talk about it. We feel that it is not that controversial. It’s just eating real food. And it is certainly central to our approach to care. If patients want to come in and talk about it, then we’ll have the conversation because at the family center, we believe that people with Type 1 should be supported to transition to or maintain a low carbohydrate approach with solid dietetic support. They need to be meeting their micronutrients, they need to be meeting their energy requirements. And I think that not everybody does it well alone. And if we’re able to provide them that clinical support, then that’s what we’re here to do.

We are not necessarily leading with it. We lead with the holistic approach that I think the patient-centered approach is really what we’re about, in that when patients come into the family center, the first question they’re asked is what are your goals? And we really work with those because if somebody comes in and, HbA1c isn’t their goal and it’s not their focus, but perhaps weight management or exercise or managing hypos is, then we’ve got to go in building a relationship on what they need, rather than necessarily going away and say, well HbA1c is the marker of good diabetes management. That doesn’t necessarily serve them. So, that’s what we do.

And what are the most common concerns that people have when they come to you? The primary concerns, the things that are impacting their lives in the most negative way that they’re trying to fix or find strategies to help, you know. What are the most common problems that people are asking for help?

In relation to diet and Type 1 diabetes or more generally?

I suppose generally, because you take that holistic approach in just managing their Type 1 diabetes. What are the biggest issues that they have that really impact living a quote/ unquote normal life?

Before we opened the family center, we ran a whole series of focus groups asking parents of kids with Type 1 and adolescents and young people with Type 1 what they needed. And the theme that came through most strongly was connection. They said to us, we feel isolated. We feel alone. We feel unsupported and underserved by not only the medical community but by the community at large. People don’t understand our disease. It’s invisible, which is in some ways a blessing and in some ways a curse, because the general community doesn’t see it, doesn’t understand it. And the power of connection is transformative. And that’s why we have very much led with a peer support approach. 

We’ve set up online communities that are thriving with parents of kids with Type 1 and now adults, and they’re running through closed Facebook groups. And as you’re known as someone participating in the social media world in relation to Keto and this way of eating, it’s just a live dynamic community. And so we’ve set those up. We have hundreds of engagements every day through our online communities and we also have a lot of face to face connection and events. So that’s how we have tried to build a community in Western Australia, our own people with Type 1, because we want to make sure that people don’t have to live that lonely road, and that they, they can feel connected. And I think the value of connection is not only in the sense of not feeling isolated and alone, it’s also the information exchange that happens when you’re part of a bigger community, the hive brain that you can tap into of hundreds of people that have experienced what you’re experiencing and can offer insight and advice and knowledge. I think there’s huge value in that as well.

That’s a really big difference, isn’t it? I can remember when I had my first weight loss surgery and I was just completely isolated and just couldn’t do it, wasn’t getting good information from the bariatric team and there was just nowhere to access the information until I started finding online groups, you know, and that surgery didn’t go well, but when I had the revision surgery, I had access to all these online groups and the difference was incredible. Being able to make contact with people who are going through, have been through the same thing. It’s just worlds apart from dealing with the theory of it from someone who hasn’t experienced it. It’s just so much more reassuring to be able to, to talk to your peers in that situation isn’t it?

It absolutely is and we’ve made that central to the philosophy at the family center in that nearly every member of our team is personally impacted by Type 1 so it goes all the way through to the people. I truly believe that people with Type 1 diabetes should be working in diabetes organizations because there is that sense of, again, connection. You can drop your shoulders when you walk into the family center because everybody there gets it and that ocean deep compassion, that’s the stuff. That’s the stuff that changes the trajectory of people’s Type 1 diabetes management that helps them come to terms with it, to make peace with it because they see others who are living with it and working well with it. And I think that’s what we aim to create.

I’d be really interested to hear more about your personal experience about when you got your diagnosis. What led up to that? What led up to you know, you obviously realized that something was going wrong, there was a problem, but I’d just be interested to hear more about that.

It was interesting. It came off the back of it very, very stressful year. I had finished my final year exams and I was the goody two shoes over achiever at high school who was the captain of everything. And I had, I believe that maybe that lead in of that sort of eight to 12 months of high stress in my final year at school, was possibly one of the triggers of my diabetes diagnosis, which was in April the following year. So I got a really unwell over a series of, you know, short months and lost a lot of weight. I think I lost 12, 14 kilos over a couple of months. Started—the thirst is just indescribable, and I remember I would wake up through the night and probably I drank the worst thing I possibly could have drank. I still couldn’t, I couldn’t even go near a glass of it today. And that was apple and guava juice. I went through liters of the stuff! And indeed I remember being at a wedding, and that night I was so thirsty, I drank five carafes of lemonade. I mean, and I, I remember the fellow I was with thinking, what is wrong with this girl? 

And I was just making my sugar level higher and higher and higher and getting thirstier and thirstier. I had every symptom in the book, blurry vision, sores that wouldn’t heal, leg cramps—and finally my mom dragged me to the doctor. I had, she had made several appointments for me, which I had canceled cause I hate going to the doctor. And I went to see my GP who did a finger stick. And, actually no, he did a blood draw and I got a phone call the next day and I’ll never forget his voice. He said, ‘Rebecca, you have diabetes.’ And it was his very final sentence. And my heart sank. I didn’t really know what that meant, but I knew it was bad. And he basically said, get to the hospital asap. And I went there and I was diagnosed and it was just this whirlwind of three or four days. I was admitted. I was given my first insulin injection, which made me feel instantly better, which was wonderful. 

But then I was given the education and I will never forget again, they gave an brought in an orange and a needle and they made me practice learning how to inject with the orange because it’s the same sort of texture as flesh, apparently. So I injected a number of times and then they gave me a fresh needle and said, okay, now it’s your turn. And that was it. That was the start of five to seven injections of insulin every day. I think on calculation I’ve probably had around 45,000 injections in my life. It was the start of eight to 10 blood glucose finger pricks every day. And it was the beginning of the counting, the endless counting of carbohydrates, fats and proteins, plugging that into complex insulin to carbohydrate ratios, which change in my body four to five times a day. The string theory that you have to do to manage insulin dose calculations. And I guess the beginning of that fear, which lasted in a very intense way for the first eight months, of administering a hormone that is so powerful, it will kill me if I get the dose wrong in what back then was in really quite large amounts and had me afraid to take a walk around the block.

That’s incredible.

Or to go to sleep or any of those things that are normal life we should be able to do without thinking. And that was the beginning of my journey towards finding a solution.

Yeah. So what advice were you given when it comes to diet?

Eat according to the Australian guide to healthy eating, which was, you know, 8 to 12 serves of starchy vegetables and grain based carbohydrates every day. Limit fat, lots of fruit and I did, I dutifully did that for the first eight months. It was cereal and toast for breakfast. I had sandwiches for lunch, I had fruit for snacks. I had pasta for dinner and every meal, my blood glucose surged high and then crushed low because insulin is a woefully blunt tool. Synthetic insulin in any case, it is not even close to the sensitivity of a physiological insulin response. So I was trying to deal with these tsunamis of glucose charging into my system with, you know, great big wads of exogenously delivered artificial insulin and a lot of guesswork.

That’s what strikes me—that the calculations are just fraught with danger because they can only be guesstimates at best.

They are. And I think that we’re given this advice as people with Type 1 that here is this thing called the insulin to carbohydrate ratio. And if you count your carbs accurately and you weigh them and you’d do the ratio, then your dose is going to be good. And I really genuinely think that many members of the medical profession believe that works. It’s not sound science, it’s much more art than it is science because there are so many factors that influence not only the carbohydrates and the rate at which they’re absorbed into our system, but also how fast insulin is absorbed. I know from years of practice that if I put my needle in my stomach it’s going to work a lot faster than if I put it into my arm. And if I put it into my bum, it’s going to work in a different way altogether. 

And so even just the basic where you put your needle in is going to impact how fast the insulin works. And then there are myriad other factors around absorption of tissues at the site, you know, how active you’ve been. I think wonderful Adam Brown has isolated 42 factors that impact blood glucose and a lot of them are food and obviously insulin related. But it is, it is just such a complex beast, and the advice that you’re given that here’s the formula, go forth and conquer. It just falls flat. And yet I think so many people, it raises this false hope that “We’ve got, we’ve got a tool, we have a formula,” and it just doesn’t work like that.

There are just variables at every level, every turn. But yet you’re being told that this is quite an accurate linear equation that you should be able to master. So if things aren’t going quite right, which I imagine is probably the norm or certainly not going right all the time, the logical conclusion of that is well, I must be doing it wrong.

Absolutely. And there, I think the feeling of I am a failure is a very familiar feeling for people with Type 1, because you know, we’re set up to hope and believe that with the formulas and with the counting, you know, we’ve got this control over diabetes and that doesn’t work. And then when we go in to see practitioners around it who aren’t compassionate to the daily experience of living with Type 1, it can feel like you’re a naughty kid being dragged in front of the principal. You know, they’re there. I remember going in to see my endocrinologist and he would flip through my diet, my book, you know, there’s apps for this stuff now, but I used to write down all blood sugar levels and, and I might have fantastic control for weeks, but then he’d flipped back and he’d point to the hypo that I had on the 7th of April, which is months before, and he said, what happened here? And the whole appointment many times would be zero in on something that went wrong and reverse engineering that. And so there is never a sense—well there wasn’t in my experience—it wasn’t a sense of congratulating me or celebrating me for the things I did right. It was more around, okay, how do we hone in on the risks and that and the stuff that I didn’t do right. 

And I think the hard thing about Type 1 is that it’s all on me. All of those calculations, all of the discipline around food, around exercise, around managing those myriad factors, it’s all on me to manage. There’s no other thing I can blame. And so when it goes wrong, it does feel like my fault. And that can be a really hard thing to deal with. And learning more recently around self-compassion, and building that resilience and, and compassionate self-talk and behavior has been a really important piece for me and a relatively new thing. But we have to be compassionate to ourselves because there’s a lot of management that goes into diabetes at any given moment. 25% of my brain space is taken up with calculations.

Got to allow some room for other things. What triggered, led you to start looking for something else? A different way of managing all this?

There wasn’t a particular incident. I just woke up one morning and said, I can’t live like this, I’ve had enough. I there has to be another way. And I think I went, it wasn’t Google then, I went online and found the Dr. Bernstein “Diabetes Solution.” I wish I could remember the search terms that I plugged in to find that, but I saved up, I was working in a video store as a student at the time and I was earning $11 an hour and I had to save up, I think it was about $68 to buy this book and pay for the shipping. And it took weeks to come from America. There was no Amazon or Book Depository then. And I read it, I devoured it and it made so much sense in indeed I had already been restricting carbohydrate in the lead in to getting this book because I just couldn’t cope with the high, the feeling of my high blood sugar. And then reading that was very much validation. 

So I took those high level principles I felt much more confident about it and implemented them into my life. And almost immediately everything changed. My insulin dose has dropped by 75%, and they still remain very, very low. So my error margins dropped significantly because I wasn’t, dosing myself with industrial doses of insulin anymore. My hypos became mild instead of completely brain frying, you know, shaking, sweating, terrifying things. And everything became so much easier. My roller coaster blood glucose levels smoothed out and I have maintained that way of eating, with a few blips, admittedly, for the last 17 and a half years and maintained A1Cs in the low fives and high fours. I think my highest A1C ever was 6.6 for the majority of that time. It has completely changed my trajectory, with this disease and my ability to live a rich and full and active life with it.

Yeah, and I can just sense that switch from despair and I just can’t do this anymore to one of hope and potential of happiness and normality.

Absolutely. And people say, Oh wow, but isn’t eating low carb hard? I think it might take a bit of discipline. I find it extremely easy now, and a bit of creativity in the kitchen.

It takes some discipline to start with.

Yeah, I agree. It takes, you know, build your knowledge base, get committed, be disciplined around navigating your food choices and you know, get creative. Although it’s getting easier and easier now. It wasn’t easy then because they were no low carb conversations happening. I was very much out in the wild. But it is something that we can do and we can thrive with. And you’re absolutely right. Once you have that foundation and that base laid around the confidence and the skills to eat low carb and navigate food, then it becomes so much easier and life does feel more hopeful.

I was at a party last night, Pamela Zorn had laid out a wonderful array of food and we were just laughing, you know, joking saying this, this way of eating is so onerous. There were two or three different kinds of crackers, there was a delicious smoked salmon dip. She’d made cultured butter, cultured truffle butter, poppers, prime rib, smoked chicken.

Where was my invitation?

Is so hard. How can anyone think eating that is onerous in any way? Yes, the transition is difficult because apart from anything else, you know, most people are just fighting that carb addiction. But once you’re through that and you can just revel in so many things that we’ve been told for so long are bad because they’re full of fat, but they’re delicious.

Yes, yes.

But you’re a swimmer, a competitive swimmer.

That’s right.

Tell us about that and how that all the implications of that with the Type 1.

I love swimming. I’ve been swimming since I was a kid. And I’ll dial back a little bit into sort of transitioning across into Keto because it has been, I had to take a long hiatus from swimming until I really got Keto right, because for various reasons there were difficulties, technical difficulties around testing my blood glucose in the water. But also the transition across to Keto in 2012 was around endurance exercise. Generally. I was doing long distance mountain bike racing at that point and triathlon and the conversation around ketogenic diets and becoming fat adapted sort of came across my radar with Steve Phinney and Jeff Volek’s book, “The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance.” And that really changed my thinking around how I could become a better endurance athlete by becoming completely fat adapted.

At that point I’d probably been low carb, and eating above the Keto threshold. When I read that book, I dropped my carbohydrate considerably and change my macronutrient ratio and found myself racing around mountain bike courses with a big smile on my face and endless energy. And that really helped me feel safe and confident to come back to swimming because I felt having watched my blood glucose stay completely stable while I raced and trained on land, I felt confident that I could get back in the water. And at that point, because I was not able to test my blood, I could still trust that it was going to stay stable. So that was really the push that I needed and certainly wanted to be able to get back into swimming. And I have since gone on and done the Rottnest channel swim twice now, which is a 20 kilometer swim to an island off Perth.

We’ve got a few big plans to do a double crossing next year. So that would be a pretty major achievement that I’d really love to tackle. But we do a huge amount of training, so squad sessions, sessions in the river, sessions in the ocean every week in the lead up to these races. And yeah, fueling it with a ketogenic approach. It’s quite remarkable when I see my swimming friends who are taking on carbohydrates every 20 minutes while we’re training and gel shots and we’re having to drop drink bottles with PowerAde right up and down the beach when we do our long sets and they all remark, you know, how do you do this without any fuel? And I think I’ve got enough fuel in my left bum cheek to swim to Madagascar and it feels wonderful and very freeing to not only be able to feel like I have an endless source of slow burn energy, not have to eat because—eating while swimming, I don’t know if you’ve ever tried it. It’s not an easy thing to do—

I can’t imagine it would be, no.

—when you’ve got a salty tongue and you’re tried to ingest something while you’re treading water because you’re not allowed to hang onto a boat that’s against the race rules. It’s, it’s not a fun thing, you know? And I’ve got mates that ate peanut butter sandwiches and all sorts of ridiculous things out there and they’re great. I’d rather just keep swimming, thanks. But also finally to trust that I can, my blood glucose is going to say stable. That’s the holy grail of exercise formulas for someone with Type 1. So it’s something that ketogenic diet has very much enabled me to do and, and to do well, which I’m really happy about.

I can still remember my mum used to drum into me that I wasn’t allowed to swim until at least an hour after I’d eaten. So I think I’d constantly have that voice in my head. Well, you can’t possibly eat and be swimming at the same time.

You’d have to take a little rest, a siesta floating on your back. I don’t actually understand.

I don’t know where that has come from either. But it was just something that was this really strict rule.

Yeah, I’ve heard that too as a kid. So I don’t know about that.

Presumably then you must have seen quite a difference with the practicalities of how you were organizing that your swim before and after Keto. It sounds like you’re not having to take on any fuel at all, you know, in the competition swimming or do you have to take on some?

I could very easily do it completely fasted. I guess the only reason why I need or I would refuel during a long race is if I get a bit hungry or to lift my spirit. Because if you’re face down in murky green water for hours and hours on end with no one to talk to you and just inside your own head, sometimes it’s nice to take a break and having something nice to eat is, or take on board is just something to do. I think the other reason why I might take some nutrition in is to keep me warm and that does actually really help. Yeah, there’s no real need for it. I can run on ketones and feel like I’ve got perfectly stable energy levels throughout long swims.

But you did need it before, pre-keto?

Pre-keto, I was doing a little bit of swimming, but I think that at that point I had a lot less knowledge and the skills weren’t there in relation to how I manage diabetes and I wasn’t doing particularly well, which made me sort of avoid swimming to a certain extent, the testing regimen was a lot more onerous. Now I wear a Freestyle Libre, which is the little sensor I can put the receiver in a waterproof phone bag and just scan myself in the water so I’m totally self-sufficient. Then I’d have to stop and dry my fingers and get warm and test my blood and it was just fairly onerous to do. So I think that combination of the technology and the ketogenic approach is really just allowed me to do swimming with the freedom that I want to do it with without having to constantly think about or be anxious about blood sugar levels and how I’m going to test them next.

I remember Richard Morris telling me about the practicalities. You have to have the insulin you potentially need floating out there, accessible for you to use when you need it?

Yes. So, when I race, I have a paddler, a support paddler and he would have my hydration, nutrition, insulin or preprepped, my glucose monitor in the Libre. And when we stop to do a blood sugar test, he will throw me Libre. I can’t touch the boat. I’ve got to tread water, scan. If I made insulin, he’s got the pens, he has to throw that to me. It’s got a float on it so that it doesn’t sink because I can’t even be passed something because that would be a disqualification. I have practiced treading water and injecting insulin. It’s not as difficult as you might think with a pen in particular. And yeah. So all of those transitions have to be practiced before race day to make sure that we’re doing it right. I’m not going to be disqualified and I can do all the diabetes management tasks that I need to do.

What’s the distance? How long are you talking about with these races and the time that it takes?

We would do 10 kilometer swims regularly on the weekends and the distance for the race, this recent one’s 19.7 kilometers. So what’s that? About 12 and a half miles, I think. The first time I did it was horrific. It took nearly 10 hours. I got stuck in a horrible current and I swam over the same rock for about two hours, at one point I think it was soul destroying.

I was going to say, that sounds like the ultimate in frustration.

It was awful and I was seasick and I didn’t know that I got seasick until about 10 k’s in, when I started being sick and my heart just sank because I thought, oh my gosh, I’ve got a long way to go. If the only thing that’s going to fix me at this point, because I can’t keep anything down, is being on land and I have 10 kilometers to swim. So that took me six hours, that last 10 k’s of that race because of the current issue. And because I had to stop every 15 minutes to puke. But if not for keto at that point, if I had of been a carb dependent athlete and I needed to have nutrition going in every 15 or 20 minutes, that would have been my swim over, you know—and I trained for six months for this race. 

But the fact that I didn’t have to take anything on board as I was being sick, that was something that I was thinking far out, I’m so glad that I’ve adapted to this approach because I just don’t need to have the fuel. It’s awful vomiting, but I can get through that. The second time I did it, which was last week, it took me seven hours. So I took three hours off my PB, which I’m really happy with. You don’t do that every day. And it was a brilliant swim, I had a great time. I had a tiny little bit too much long acting insulin on board, which I started to really wear in the last couple of hours of the race. So I did need to take some glucose on to counteract that. But again, first 14 k’s was a breeze. I had half a YoPRO yogurt, which was three grams of carbs just so that I could take some medication on board at the 10 k mark and more sea sickness tablets. And that was all I would have needed if not for that tiny little bit too much insulin. So I felt a lot better through that race.

So you’re out there apart from your support team, you’re out there on your own. Multiple people are racing but yeah. So all on your own

Yeah, the Rottnest Channel Swim is an iconic event in WA [Western Australia], they have about two and a half thousand participants, not all solos. There’s about 300 odd solos that attempt to do it each year and the rest of doing it in duos and teams. So it’s a busy race. It thins out a bit in the middle, but very congested at the start and the finish, I don’t think I would swim to Rottnest just on my own. I like the safety in numbers concept as you may know, WA is also the shark attack capital of the world at the moment. So I think that I’m, I’m happy to be in the mix there, but it’s a lovely swim. You can see the bottom the whole way. And it really is a stunning environment.

You’ve mentioned a few times how things were when you were first diagnosed and the technical advances in things that are available to you to help you manage and monitor this. Perhaps you could just share a little bit about the change that you’ve seen over the years that you’ve been dealing with this.

When I was first diagnosed, it was obviously a blood glucose monitor. That’s the only technology that was out then. And I used that for many years. Indeed, I still do when I had to take breaks from the Libre or CGM. And obviously that’s evolved to continuous glucose monitoring and the Libre Flash glucose monitoring devices. I think both of them have been absolute game changers in Type 1 diabetes care. Unfortunately they’re not as affordable as they need to be for the Type 1 community. And that’s something that they’re suddenly changing to a certain extent in Australia. They are now federally subsidized for people under 21 and fingers crossed that they subsidize them for adults as well. But the visibility of blood glucose levels is something that when we work with people at the family center, the lights go on when they see the blood glucose surge that happens after they eat carbohydrate.

It’s instant. When I was diagnosed, and indeed even now, the advice, I still hear that people are told this, I was actively discouraged from testing my glucose after meals. I was told test before, so before breakfast, eat your breakfast and then don’t test again until before lunch. And of course in the meantime, my blood glucose would have gone up to 15, 17, 20—and it would come back down very nicely into range and I might be 5.6 before lunch, but meanwhile I spent three hours with my blood sugar level out of range.

What was the reasoning for that then? It doesn’t seem to make any sense—you would’ve thought you’d need to know what was going on in-between?

Well, the rationale would be it’s going to happen anyway. And if you know about it, you want to correct it with more insulin and if you correct it with more insulin and you end up in a hypo because there’s going to land in the safe range, it be all right.

That is obviously that linear equation, again, that doesn’t exist…

Well it just disregarded the three hours after every meal that I would spend outside of range. And if I didn’t know about it then I couldn’t even act on it. And at that point, the only, apart from reducing carbohydrate, I could change the time I took my insulin, take it a little earlier. So it married up with the carbohydrate curve perhaps as a mitigating strategy. But I wasn’t even given access to that information. And it took me becoming an overzealous blood glucose tester to the point where I had to have letters written by my doctor to the National Diabetes Services Scheme, justifying why I needed so many blood glucose test strips because people thought, I think they thought I was selling them on the black market or something. Because I was doing 20 tests a day cause I just needed to understand.

So CGM—now people, it’s visible. You know, we’ve got 288 glucose readings a day and it’s just sensational information. And I think that people really have the tools now to be able to act on that and change their management strategies to adapt their food and their insulin therapy due to better manage diabetes. That’s glucose monitoring technology. Obviously the insulin pumps have come a long way. I don’t use one, but I see their benefits particularly in children. Kids need that flexibility I think around being able to manage insulin and basal rates according to their very sporadic levels of activity. I think as adults we can be a little bit more structured about activity choices. Whereas kids, I think, you know, type Type 1 diabetes already feels like a straightjacket if they can run and play when they feel like running and playing and we can just drop their basal rates, I think that’s fantastic. 

The other thing I think the benefit is micro bolusing. The pumps give the ability to bolus and indeed run basal rates at much more sensitively fine-tuned doses than you can get with a syringe or a pen. There are real benefits to the pump. That said, there are also the downside. Wearable technology has mechanical issues, you know, pump fat failures, bubbles in the line. All the things that happen that come along with pumps that people need to think about as does CGM. It’s very intrusive if you’ve got a phone or a device alarming at you all the time, especially if you’re trying to run really tight thresholds, you will hear alarms often. It will interrupt your day and your sleep and your thinking. And that’s one of the pieces that I think that we don’t do very well in Type 1 diabetes care is prepare people for the psychological burden of the wearable devices. The very active wearing a piece of space junk our kids call it on our bodies and getting the questions and the curiosity from the community at large and have to explain diabetes over and over again. That can become a real drag. So there’s light and shade around technology, and I think we have to be really careful in the way we talk about it because in our diabetes community pumps are almost incentivized. I hear this thing of when we get to the pump, like when we graduate to a pump,

Yeah, this is the goal for everybody.

Yeah. And a pump is just a glorified insulin delivery device. You know, it might be snazzy, but it isn’t going to change the fact that you’re still making all the decisions. We do have closed loop technology that is just starting to be released, which was really exciting. So that means a continuous glucose monitor is talking to the pump and automatically adjusting basal rates. The person still has to think, they still have to do meal announcements in exercise announcements. So they’re actively managing those variables.

Yet the tendency is to think that it’s all just going to be automated and they can, the worry goes away because the responsibility is taken on by these interacting machines that are just going to manage it all for them.

Indeed. And that plays out both in the community at large, where people, every time there’s a big news article, Oh closed loop technology, somebody rings me up and goes, they’ve got an artificial pancreas now—your problems are all solved. And you know, that’s absolutely not the case. And then within the Type 1 community, when we see the research plays out, when you put people on pumps, their A1Cs in the first 12 months often going up because they themselves think, ah, I’m on a pump now, it’s all automated. And so, and that’s a bit of a hard reality when they realize, Whoa, actually I still have to do the inputs. I choose not to use a pump primarily because there are no pumps that are waterproof. So that’s a little bit of a struggle for me. But also because I’ve found a really great regimen with the insulins that I use and I feel like if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Interestingly, I have a retro thing going on with the insulin that I use. So when I was first diagnosed, there wasn’t any rapid acting insulin. I was put onto regular human insulin, which is now considered so old school, you know, pharmacies don’t stock it. When I asked my GP for it, he looked at me like I had grown a second head. You know, why do you want this old insulin, over the years, over the time I progressed to the newer analog insulins for a period of time there. But I’ve since come back to using R, the regular insulin, in the last few years because it’s remarkable in how the time action profile and the peak of R insulin marries up with a protein glucose spike that I get. So protein spikes my glucose after four to five hours and that is exactly the time when R peaks. So, it’s really interesting that you know, we can actually look to the older insulin technology and find it useful in this new way of eating.

That is interesting. I found it interesting as well what Jake Kushner was saying about how potentially these automated systems with the insulin pump, how it potentially could work particularly well if you were eating low carb because you had, the blood glucose ranges were moving in a much tighter band.

Yes. And the increases are not as sharp. So if you’re eating a mostly protein and fat based diet, you’ll have sort of these mild peaks and that’s something that the pump can keep up with so that the pump can actually automatically adjust a basal rate rather than requiring a big bolus of insulin in order to keep up with that protein and fat curve. And I think that, I mean that is really the ultimate hands-off diabetes management. I mean, you’re not actually having to actively put meal announcements or food announcements into that pump, which is almost, I mean, I hate to say the word cure, but it’s certainly lightens that mental burden, which is one of the hardest things to bear with diabetes.

Yeah. So it feels like, instead of having to do that micromanaging throughout the day, if you more macro manage, pun intended, I guess, with your overall diet. And look at focusing on that. But that’s not having to look at the details all the time. I can see that being quite freeing. Obviously you’ve still got to carry on paying attention, but you’re managing it with more broad brush strokes and maybe this technology and equipment could take care of those finer details.

Absolutely.

It can free you up a little bit more for day to day living.

That’s the ultimate application for the closed loop system. And indeed are you familiar with the We Are Not Waiting movement?

No.

The We Are Not Waiting movement created a technology initially called Nightscout. It’s open source. It’s created by citizen scientists, mums and dads and people with Type 1 diabetes around kitchen tables around the world where they hacked continuous glucose monitors and firstly worked out a way to bounce the information to phones for remote monitoring. Awesome. Especially for parents. The next step has been the development of the open artificial pancreas system and the loop system. So these are again hacked systems where people are essentially running the closed loop type technology and have been for a number of years now well before the companies have released it. I have a friend at home, Kyle Masterman, who is a sensational athlete, low carber and he’s running an open APS and he has messaged me a number of times and says, I haven’t given myself a bolus all week.

And the system is just running in the background and managing things for him, and it’s giving him these micro boluses of insulin as he eats a big protein meal, you see the insulin start to catch up and his blood sugar level is insanely good. The thing I think the system hasn’t quite adapted to, is exercise yet, and that’s the next piece. But the idea that the food variable and the insulin variable can run in the background. That is awesome.

Yeah, I think that sending the same way when we haven’t spoken too much on that, but the tendency is just to look at food. But it sounds like looking at your activity level is hugely important.

I’ve worked out over years of experimentation than any exercise that spikes my heart rate over about one 80 beats per minute is going to raise my blood sugar level. So I actually need to take insulin in order to do high intensity interval training or spin class or anything where I’m going to do sprints. That’s so counterintuitive. I need insulin to exercise. Hang on a minute. The other thing that causes my blood sugar level to go up is glycolytic exercise, like lifting. Then the opposite effect happens if I’m doing longer, slower endurance stuff. If I’ve got the formula in my basal insulin dose right, and keeping in mind that I inject that, you know, I’ve got, I’m committed for 16 to 18 hours of a certain activity level once I do that. So sometimes it’s seven o’clock in the morning, I take a certain dose and I do a different activity than I anticipated in the evening. And sometimes you can get that wrong, but if I’ve got my basal conditions right, then my blood sugar level with endurance exercise normally stay stable.

If I’ve got it wrong, sometimes it will drop off a little. So that seems to play out as a general assumption for most people with Type 1. High intensity—blood glucose spike, low intensity—blood glucose is stable or drop. And bringing that into play is really important. , because when you’re dosing insulin, you’re not only dosing on what you’re about to eat, you’re also thinking how much activity have I done in the last three to 24 hours and how much activity do I anticipate doing probably in the next three to eight hours. And so as you say, you’re bringing in another set of variables, the duration, the time, and the intensity of activity or another few variables if you want to really drill down into it that you have to consider.

It sounds like you have to be super organized and good at planning.

Absolutely. I think that’s something that diabetes has taught me. It’s not my strong suit, but amongst a whole lot of other lessons, being a good planner. And I think almost to the extent where that too for a while it took over my life about planning and routine and I would become very anxious if my routine was interrupted and started to try and build a little bit more, I guess being able to be a little bit more relaxed about changes to the plan has been again, a more recent project.

Well, I could go on talking to you for hours. We’re being ushered and nagged by—interesting enough, the room needs to be set up for an exercise and movement session. I like to round off the podcast with a top tip, which can be anything you like, but I think maybe it would be nice to give your top advice for somebody who’s just been diagnosed with Type 1.

Connect with community. Clinicians took me some of the way—the community took me the rest of the way. If you have access through online groups or face to face support, other people who are walking a mile in your shoes, the information exchange, the support and understanding that you will get is the key to not only understanding diabetes well, but making peace with diabetes. And I feel that that community is transformative. It’s absolutely essential.

Well, thank you so much. It’s been a great pleasure for me and really interesting. I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to interview a few of you who have Type 1 or involved with Type 1 and it’s been very interesting and an education for me and hopefully will be for the listeners as well. So thank you so much. It’s been a great pleasure.

Thanks for taking an interest in people with Type 1. It’s important to us and thank you to all your listeners for being interested also.

This transcript is brought to you thanks to the hard work of Michelle Richter.

Welcome to a very special edition of Keto women podcast. I have here with me today not one guest but three. Ash.

(Ashlee) Hi

Tracey and Jody, welcome to the keto women podcast. How are you all doing today?

(Tracey) Very well. Thank you.

(Dr Jody) Wonderful to be here. Nice to meet you.

(Ashlee) I’m feeling awesome.

And Ash is my youngest ever extraordinary woman on the podcast. So, we’re here really to talk mostly about you. So let’s hear from you, tell me a bit about you, your story.

(Ashlee) Well my name is Ashlee. I am a type one diabetic and I have been for two and a half years. I am eating keto, which is low carb. We started a bit before I was diagnosed except it wasn’t completely keto. A few meals we had every now and then were keto, but we really started doing the real low carb one month after I was diagnosed.

And you enjoy eating this way?

(Ashlee) Yes, because we can have alternatives for different foods and meals and yeah,

I just had a squizz at the contents of your fridge and you got quite a few tasty looking things in there.

(Ashlee) Yes, they are very yummy. 

So let’s hear a bit from Mum and just elaborate a bit on the story and you know how it all came about. Must have been very worrying for you, the diagnosis and the treatment and what’s been happening.

Well Ash was diagnosed on the 25th of August, 2016. She was sick leading up to it. She actually was sick. She had chicken pox about maybe two months before that. Um, she seemed to have got better from that, and then a couple of weeks before that she was sort of just was a bit lethargic, not feeling very well. So, I packed the kids up and went up to Queensland, which is nice and sunny and I thought we’ve just got to get away from this cold winter. We went away, everything was fine.

When we came back I started to notice little differences and I thought they were girly hormones cos we just cry over something or we’d do something. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that this was signs of type one diabetes. But looking back now, there were signs, it came to a couple of days, It was about a Thursday. She had um, a year seven orientation. She was fine, she was happy, she was great. By Saturday morning she was starting to not feel great and I thought we’ve just had a big week, have a sleep. She slept all day again Sunday. By Monday she was, “Mum, I’m not really well” and I thought  something’s not right here. Like you’re never really this sick. So I booked a doctor’s appointment for Wednesday cause that’s all I could get in. Never thinking we should rush this.

By Tuesday afternoon she wasn’t crash hot. She wasn’t really talking to me. I’d have to say her name very clearly like “Ashlee“, and she’d wake up and she’d look at me and fortunate enough, my husband is in army reserves. He came home that night on the Wednesday night, thank goodness. And we would just sort of sitting, chatting in bed about what he’d been up to and she got up to go to the bathroom and she missed the bathroom because this is a sign of, ‘cos you drink so much water when you’re in the state of being diagnosed with type one. And she missed the bathroom ‘cos she was unaware, also too ‘cos her bloods were probably sky high. 

By Thursday morning when we woke up, her breathing was odd. I cannot explain to you what it was like to listen to her breathing. Um, her eyes were rolling in the back of her head when I was speaking to her. So, my first thoughts were going through like, she’s got meningococcal meningitis, diabetes, just never, we didn’t know anyone with diabetes. Um, I had never come across, we don’t even have type two diagnosed at that stage in our family. We rushed her up to the GP because we’d had that appointment, thank goodness that I made. However, he had no idea what he was looking at when we got there. And he said, “I think you need to go to the hospital.” And I said, “Well, if you don’t know, we need to go find somebody that does”. Annd off we went to the hospital driving.

I kept saying her name to her as we were in the car ‘cos I was so scared because she’s sort of passing in and out. Um, we got to the hospital and it was just very thankful that the nurse behind the counter knew what she was looking at and she goes, is she a diabetic? And I went, I don’t know. She yelled out she needed a glucometer and it came quickly. She pricked her and the next minute there was a bed. Ashlee’s thrown on a bed and she’s being rushed up the whole way. Pete’s grabbed the other two kids. Lucky he’s like six foot five and he’s got these kids under his arm and we’re just running after Ashlee, and I was sitting in this room with about 12, nine to 12 doctors and nurses.

She had tubes coming out of everywhere. Machines were beeping and buzzing tests were going on and I had no idea what was happening, people going she’s a diabetic, and I went, what does that mean? The only thing I knew about diabetes was amputation of limbs. So of course. So then I started panicking and then after that she got much better cause we had insulin and things like that. And, and then I had a dietician come around and talk to me about the fact that I’m, now that Ashley has insulin and we know this beautiful thing that she was hiding from us. “She has diabetes and now she’s got it, she’s got insulin, everything’s gonna be fine because she can eat whatever she wants, she can even have Mcdonald’s”.

Oh, okay. And I stood there and thought, this is odd, Mcdonald’s? She’s the sickest child I have but now you’re telling me I can have Mcdonald’s. So, things like juice, jelly beans, chips, all this carbohydrate foods started coming home because, well, one, I was told I needed it. And so you’re very, uh, you’re taught so much about Hypos, um, hypoglycemia events that you stress out about the thought of saying the word. So, I had, you know, massive jars of jelly beans ready for these horrible events. Children doing meltdowns on the floor because well if Ashlee gets one, we want one. And I, I was losing my mind because here is a mother trying to give nutrition to my children, having a type one diabetic and needing apparently needing these foods.

So eventually, after a horrible event where Ashlee’s glucose levels just dropped one night, I decided I needed to go on a, I needed to go back to my roots, which was food. And we started low carb, which was really good. Um, we were doing really well until her HBA1 C’s started going up and I thought, well, this is what, what’s, what’s going on here? What am I doing wrong? I’ve changed the food. Then I worked out after elimination and things that we don’t actually know what insulin is. What is insulin? What does it do in the body? What does she need it for? And so many times I’ve been bullied by endocrinologists, laughed at by doctors, nurses, because why bother teaching me? I’m just a mom. You should just listen and do as you’re told. I’m not that kind of person. This is my baby here. I need to know what’s going on.

For months and up to a year. I had no help, nothing until my wonderful dad, bless him, he watches all his, I call them his Keto gods, but he has these beautiful people that he watches and he’s learnt so much for himself. He watched an episode with Mike Mutzel who runs high intensity health and it was on this wonderful type one diabetic specialist that he met, I think in his father’s town, and  He did an interview with her, my dad, myself, and Ashlee because dad had come down for Christmas. We sat on the couch and we just think I had tears and I think my eyes almost popped out of my head and Ashlee just sat there and she goes, “I want to talk to her”. And I went, “Okay, let’s make this happen”.

I got straight on my phone, I booked in an appointment, a 20 minute get to know you session. And from then on, it’s just been onwards and upwards because I met this fantastic, beautiful women Dr Jody, who’s just taught me, I mean, our first session was on the importance of Basal Insulin. My knees went weak. I just, I’m sitting there, I’m looking at my husband, I’m going, Oh my God, Oh my God, we’re talking about insulin. I need to know this. And I was there with my pen and paper like I was, you know, ready to go into university. I’m studying and I, I still remember our first session together. It just gave me so much hope, but someone was teaching me, someone was finally teaching me what my daughter was diagnosed, and I had this feeling of I can actually be her Mum again for a whole year, I felt completely lost that I couldn’t be her Mum, but she was given to me. How can that be? How can I be given this beautiful child who’s now going through this horrible thing, but I can’t be a Mum. So that’s where we are and we’ve now 18 months or almost 18 months, and we’re just, we’re all thriving. I’m a Mum of four children now to a type one diabetic to the other three and we’re just, we’re bopping along. She’s got an HBA1C now 5.4. And I’m really proud of her. She’s amazing.

Well that’s fantastic. There was something I just wanted to ask you about, just to go back a little bit, when you said going back to your roots and the food and that’s what you know about and the low carb so this is something that you’d been involved with before, you know, how did you know to go to that? What led you there?

When I was about 13/14, I became anorexic. I was obsessed with food and wanting to be really healthy. I was into sport and I went down a very dark path with food, um, more so it was just, I wasn’t eating enough. And after I was diagnosed, my father said to me, that’s it, you’re not swimming. And that was my life. Swimming was my absolute life. And I thought, well, I’ve got to get myself better. How am I gonna get better? I’ve got to work out a relationship here with food. So, I turned those horrible thoughts into a passion and that’s where I’ve just myself have been learning what fuels me, what fuels my body. And I’ve done that for years and years and years. When I was 18 I was in a very stressful household. My mother was very stressful. Um, I ended up getting sinus infection after a sinus infection and I then started researching and looking into natural medicine things.

And so I combined my love of food and natural medicine and I’ve just sort of always criss-crossed those paths on my own. Just reading. I mean YouTube is an absolute blessing. I love listening to podcasts, watching YouTube videos because I can learn on my own accord. But six months before Ashley was diagnosed, my father started watching sugar videos, things about sugar and then he put two and two together and you know, oh my goodness, carbs are sugar. And we, so we sat down together and worked out some recipes. I love to cook. I’ve always loved to cook since I was about seven, the kitchen and I were just best mates. And so, he called me and said, “Let’s work out some recipes”. So, I started dabbling into what low carb foods was, what it meant, meals. And so  I thought this is great, I can incorporate it into our family. And so, I started learning about low carb through more of a metabolic syndrome type two diabetic approach.

But I just knew that night when I was really upset and I knew I went back to my roots, I knew I needed to go back to food because food has always been that really important part of me, I’ve always understood that.

Yeah, really interesting. And so, to go now to the woman who, it sounds like, has had a major influence on your life. And I can see now listening to you talking about the way you like to learn and really drive your own knowledge and how that influences your life and I can see how it really appealed to you to, to reach out to somebody like this. And I think we’re going to have to have you back on a podcast, a separate podcast just of your own to hear your story ‘cos I bet that’s going to be an interesting one. But for now, to just talk about your involvement with this family and the different things that go on it at a lot of people. And we’re here at the conference and it’s type two diabetes predominantly that that gets talked about and type one gets sort of left in the corner a little bit, although coming much more up to the forefront. You know, I’ve been talking about it with people like Jess Turton, there’s a lot more, research and an understanding about it in the low carb community isn’t there? So, perhaps we could hear from you now then Jody.

Absolutely. So, I’ll just say my name again. My name is Dr Jody Stanislaw and I was diagnosed with diabetes in 1980 so almost 40 years, which is surreal cause I don’t even feel 40,  and I knew the only diabetic I knew was at summer camp because there was no internet, there was no, I mean there was no connection with any other type ones. So, um, it can be very lonely. And once I became a teen, I started asking my doctor a lot of more challenging questions and I’ll never forget the day that when I asked my doctor about blood sugar level with exercise, he just patted me on the knee and said, oh, it’s too difficult for me to explain it to you, you would never understand. And I’m quite certain that he actually didn’t know the answer.

And that’s what I’ve realised is that the majority, hands down of family practice docs or just general medicine docs absolutely are not skilled to truly give a type one the care they need. But the sad thing is, is I’ve also found that many endocrinologists who are supposed to be the experts and diabetes, um, many endocrinologists are also not adequately trained. And I just truly think that the training is not out there. I mean, I’ve been asked, you know, what textbook for type one did you use in med school and I was like, oh, there’s, there’s not a textbook. Everything I’ve learned is really from my own experimentation.

There are a few other type one medical professionals that have written books and they’re just catered not to med schools, they’re catered to patients. So, all of us type ones, we have that bond, where as soon as, even if I see, you know, somebody wearing an insulin pump or a CGM in public, suddenly I’m like, Hey, hey, hey, you know. So, there’s this a really deep bond. And I, um, I learned so many incredible valuable things about how to get better blood sugar level just from my own experimentation over 20, 30 years that I, I went to med school and I also am a very adventurous person. So, I didn’t want to be in a classic, you know, standard hospital job. So, I created an online virtual practice. I have patients in 10 countries and all over the U.S. and I’m so lucky that Tracey and Ashlee found my video. It’s truly a miracle. I mean, I was a little teary when you were telling the story because this is my job to help change lives and help improve lives. And it’s so needed. And we, you know, after a year of being on Skype together, we just met face to face today for the first time ever.

That must’ve been quite an incredible experience. I mean, I met you two. Ash and Tracey, and you are so excited Ash, weren’t you, waiting, waiting to meet this woman. I remember seeing you in your face and you just, you just kept looking, looking at the door, looking at the door. She come yet, is she here, is she here? Uh, yeah. It must’ve, it must’ve been quite something to all get together. I’ve experienced that. We’re talking to people online, but the actual, when you, when you get to meet them, when they’re there in front of you, it’s something else, isn’t it? 

Yeah, very special. So, I feel very fortunate that I get to help people like Tracey and Ashlee and my big passion now is to really help millions or I don’t know how many type ones are online. There’s, I mean there’s only, they say maybe 10 million in the U S or I’m, I mean in the world in the U S it’s anywhere from one to 2 million. Sometimes I hear 3 million, but people don’t really know. The reality is hands down, the education for type one is very poor and standard conventional recommendation is eat as many carbs as you want and take more insulin and this is devastating.

This is absolutely, it creates such poor health for the children it’s very dangerous because they have to give such high doses of insulin that then you can’t necessarily know exactly how much and when you need the insulin, you’re always guessing when you give a shot and if you give too much insulin you can go into a coma and die, you know, and then the high blood sugar levels are creating blindness, heart disease, kidney failure, strokes, gangrene, Alzheimer’s Moodiness. If a child’s blood sugar level is high, they have recognised that you can be excused from taking an exam because the brain doesn’t work. So here they are saying eat as many things as you want and take as much insulin as you want. But the reality is they’re at risk for dying from a low and slow death from highs.

Now I understand why they say that though because before that it was an incredibly strict diet. I weighed and measured every bite of food I ate my entire childhood and so eating disorders are much higher risk of eating disorders when you have type one and so they are justification for why they say, oh, you want to eat like all the rest of the kids is to avoid that. But it’s still, you know, it’s just the pendulum has swung from strict to nothing and neither extreme is good.

Perhaps you could explain exactly how it works and how the whole system works with dealing about your food intake and judging how much insulin you need to inject and when and how the whole system works.

Well, I normally work with people for three months to answer that question, but the conventional doctors will say, count your carbs and for every one unit or for every approximately 15 grams of carb you eat, you need one unit and 99% of type ones, that’s the full education that they get. So, if you eat 30 carbs, you need two units, 45 carbs, three units, like that. That’s it. But the reality is you also need a background dose of insulin.

That’s the first thing that I worked with Tracey with on day one, because your liver is actually putting glucose into your body all day long. So you actually need, I did a seven day water fast once and I still had to take insulin because you absolutely have to have insulin to be alive and your liver is actually feeding your glucose. Insulin, I like to say is the pickup truck for glucose, once you eat, the glucose is absorbed into your bloodstream and then insulin is needed to pick up that glucose and feed it to yourselves, right? So without insulin, the glucose stays in the bloodstream, which is not good, and your cells starve, which is not good.

The first thing I work with patients is just figure out their baseline need, which is to counteract the livers glucose. So we haven’t even talked about dosing for food yet. You have to figure out that first. Then we’re going to look at, there’s many aspects to how to dose a meal. Carbohydrate is one of them, but if you’re going to have a banana versus black beans, it could be the same amount of carbs, but you’re going to have to change the timing, right? Because what’s a banana gonna do? Immediate Spike. A black bean, not immediate spike. So you have to think about glycaemic index.

Then if you’re just eating protein, protein itself actually can raise blood sugar. So many patients think they can just have, you know, all this protein and they don’t have to worry about it. They have one little piece of bread and they think, oh, I only need one unit because I only had 15 grams from the bread, but protein actually can turn into glucose, so I have to teach patients how to dose for protein, which is very different than dosing for Carb, and then actually fat can have an effect on glucose as well. So that is just food.

The size of your meal also is dependent on your dose because the timing, right? You could have this many carbs, but if you have this huge holiday meal, it’s going to be digesting for hours, so you’re going to have to spread out your dose over hours, right? So that’s just food. Stress raises blood sugar, getting sick raises blood sugar, hormonal swings  raise blood sugar. Then there’s just life. Insulin can go bad, it can get too hot and then people are dosing. Then they go high and they don’t know why. Well, your insulin was in the sun, right? Absorption when people dose a really big amount, if they’re eating a lot of carbs, absorption from day to day can vary, especially the bigger dose of insulin you given any one time, the less consistent the absorption.

So these are all the fine tuning details that I teach patients that truly I don’t see, yeah, it’s life changing because all we’re told is dose one unit for 15 grams of carb. And if you go, low eat sugar,

It sounds mind-blowingly complicated. I have to say, I’m feeling overwhelmed and stressed as listening to the thought of, you know, the thought process I’m going through and I’m just, you know, with everything you’re saying, I can just see potential issues with all of it. You know, I talk to people about not completely trusting labels and they’re you know, they’re always going to be an average of the contents. I always cite the packs of Bacon that I buy, you know, and it lists how much protein and how much fat is in there. Well that’s an average. I always pick the ones that’s got a load of fat on it and leave the ones that are really lean. But you can’t tell me, the macros are the same. The macros that are written on the nutritional information on that pack well they can’t possibly be the same. And uh, you know, and that’s the same for everything, isn’t it? So you know, what size is your banana? And it can vary, an apple can be different sweetnesses, and when it’s off season, I mean..

Exactly. 

So presumably it’s only going to be a sort of a guesstimate at best.

Every time and this exactly is where low carb comes in. So the biggest driver of high blood sugar is carbs. So you can see this whole array of conditions and variables that we have to manage every day that if you just reduce your carbs, your job’s going to be a lot easier. It’s still a lot of work and I still go up and down, but my life is so much easier. If I’m going to have a chicken salad, I’m like probably need a unit. I might need another unit later. If I have pasta and bread, I’m like, Oh Gosh, do I need 10 units now? And then I wonder if though, what if they all hit at once and then I go low. So, but then if what if I go high later, well then, if I have a high carb meal, I will only have it at lunch because there’s so many variables for hours after you eat carbs that you have to be on your toes to manage. Are you going to go low, are you going to go high? If you go low you have to eat more sugar. If you go high, you need more insulin. Dinner is always, if there’s ever, I allow myself treats every now and then and I try to always have him at lunch because I don’t have to worry. But yeah, low carb, it just makes sense. And this is not conventional medicine.

Well that’s the thing, logically to me it absolutely makes sense. Just thinking about those highs and lows, that anything you eat is going to cause a rise of some kind instead of having those, you know, nice rolling hills, you know, you have these huge great mountains spikes that and I can see how very difficult it would be to treat those because as we were just saying is it’s really difficult to get the right dose and whenever you go up high you’re gonna come down really low. So, so tricky. Logically it just seems the perfect way to eat.

Diabetes camps, summer camps for kids. They completely embrace, eat whatever you want. I’ve been to diabetes. I mean I’m on staff diabetes camps cause it’s, it is such a huge life changer but unfortunately now I have to kind of, you know hesitate before I recommend them because all my families are low carb. Right. And then they send their kid to diabetes camp and they serve them every carb you can imagine.

I was going to say with the, the swings, the blood swings, they, it’s not only, you know what like for a parent having to watch those blood swings and correct them and change them and do it, it also does mentally challenge and physically challenge your body. Ashlee if going into lows, t’s so draining, it’s exhausting. And even the highs, the body goes into stress mode as you’ve taught us. After you go into like once you pass blood glucose level 10 the body starts going into this mode where it’s going to pee out the calories because it wants to get rid of that sugar that’s now in the system. That sends, the body doing things that it’s got to, quick, we’ve got to get rid of this, we’ve got to get rid of this.

And those highs and lows, those swings, it’s not just the bloods that you worry about, it’s mentally too because they, you know, she feels low, she can’t go and play, she can’t, and then when she’s high, she’s still can’t go play. She can’t go swimming, she can’t concentrate and she gets frustrated with herself. So it really upsets me when I see these bloods because I know from a mum side of things what those little children are going through or anybody with type one, watching them go from a high to a low to a high..

And that is the majority of type ones. That’s how they live their life. 

Very tricky. And what about you Ash? How have you adjusted to this complete life change and it must have been a massively steep learning curve. 

(Ashlee) Mm yeah sort of.

Sounds like you’re the kind of person that really just takes it in your stride. 

(Ashlee) I kind of just go with the flow, you know.

Yeah, she’s got a good Mumma, helps her out. 

(Ashlee) Yes. Mum does a lot of work. She tells me when to do insulin and how much I need most of the time at school and whenever I’m home alone or something like that, I normally do it myself. But whenever Mum is near me or around me, she will tell me what to do. 

That’s so great. 

So specifically what was your involvement with these guys? Just educating them a better way to be doing it.

Exactly. Yeah, so I work virtually, so anybody listening they can find me at website and sign up for a free call. In the free call I assess are we a good fit? And then, um, I do series of Skype or phone calls. So I do a minimum of three hours with patients. So that could be three one hour calls or six 30 minute calls. I think we did six one hour calls or something like.

Yeah, we did fortnightly one hour sessions.

One hour every two weeks. Yeah. I always encourage people to really invest in a minimum of three months of working with me because in the past I would give as much as I could in an hour and nothing, it was too overwhelming. Nobody, then we’d have our second appointment and it’s like I just said everything again in appointment number two. So, I’ve actually changed it to 30 minute calls for majority of people now and I spread them out over three months. There’s so much to digest.

And you need to adapt and practice what you’ve learned, then come back and probably reinforcing those lessons, but then gradually learning new things as you go.

Absolutely. And, as a holistic physician, I am not only interested in how their blood sugar level is doing and that they totally understand insulin. I want to know how you’re feeling and you know, how are your bowel movements and what supplements are you on and what are you eating? And are you exercising? I mean, I truly, I’m a holistic physician, which means I want to take care of the whole of you.

I became the kind of physician I was wished I found, which I still have never found. I want somebody that takes care of all of me and asks me how I’m doing. Maybe have an appointment where we don’t even talk about blood sugars. We just talk about, oh my gosh, this is a lot. It’s overwhelming. I know. You know, and it’s so beautiful that I have type one because I have that immediate bond with my patients. There’s a lot to work on. 

That’s what I loved about Jody so much is that she could connect with me, talk to me about everything, but she also could connect with Ashlee, which is something I can’t do. There’s this little small part. I’ll never, I’m not a type one diabetic, and it was so nice to have someone that I trusted to be able to be there for my daughter. And the best thing, I still remember clearly, I think it was about session three we were cold, which is not cold to doctor Jody because she’s has snow, we don’t in Canberra, so were all rugged up in our blankets and Ash was just sort of sitting there and the last 15 minutes of our session, it was all about, Jody just brought it into Ashlee, “How are you feeling? How’s school?” We were talking about some stress levels at school. It wasn’t really anything to do with diabetes, but Jody made it all about Ash, which was just perfect because that’s what it needs to be.

I mean I need to learn. I really do. I’m the mum. But Jody remembers that Ashlee’s the one with type one. Ashlee is the one dealing with this day in, day out, you know I can go and have a shower and forget about it for five, 10 minutes. These two can’t. It’s always there and that was what was really special for me is that Ashlee has someone she can turn to that I trust that can help her with any stage of her life.

Sounds like a really important resource you offer. 

Thank you. 

We were talking a little bit before we started recording. Can we talk about that then? This new Facebook group and the potential that has to reach so many more people.

Right. 

Cause obviously you deal with people as you’ve explained, working one on one, but the power of the Internet is often to be able to extend that reach massively. So perhaps you could tell us a bit about that ‘cos it sounds really exciting.

I’m very excited and it is, I’m so passionate about helping people really, you know, have the transition and the transformation that Ashlee and Tracey have in just a year or two. I’ve had patients that have had this transformation as well, but they had diabetes for 40 years and it took them 40 years to find me. So, year after year of just hearing how much my work has changed lives, I was like, I need to reach the masses. So I’ve spent actually the last two years recording videos and making handouts, and then I had to re-record all the videos and then I made some new handouts and I’ve put my heart and soul into these online courses and they’re actually available now on my website.

Which is?

It’s Dr Jody ND [drjodynd.com] – so that’s d r j o d y n as in naturopathic and then d as in doctor. There is a membership tab there. All the courses are there. I have a course on getting off the blood sugar roller coaster, what to eat and how to dose mastering your blood sugar level with exercise, how to stay positive and avoid burnout because that’s a whole other topic when it’s just like too much and people give up. The three essentials of lowering your a1c, I do group calls. Um, I also have an annual retreat in Sun Valley, Idaho.

But yeah, the Facebook thing is going to be launching in I think it’s March 14th, which is like in a week and it’s basically a monthly subscription for $20 a month and you get access to all of my courses. There’s two live calls a month and I do a weekly live video and I can’t give you details to where to go because the page doesn’t exist yet. But if you go to my website.

Presumably yeah, though there will be updates on your website. 

Yeah. Well if you just go Jody A Stanislaw on Facebook, that’s my Facebook page and then drjodynd.com is my website, so you can definitely find me in those two places already.

And then presumably with this Facebook group you’re going to be building a community. 

Yes

That’s the beauty of it, I mean that’s what I love about coming to conferences like this is the community and making that connection and obviously you’re going to be there to help and teach people, but there’ll be that comradery and the community where the people can help each other as well. 

Exactly and I’m sure Ash and Trace feel like, I mean I feel like I’ve already known them for a year ‘cos I have known them for a year. Although we just physically met today, it certainly doesn’t feel like we just met today. You know, that’s the beauty of the Internet. And so that would be my goal. My goal is to have a thousand people in that membership program within the next three months and then 2000 and I mean given the millions of type ones. My goal is that it’s that easy.

A million by the end of the year. 

Yeah, that’s it, right. 

That’s your challenge! 

Right? I’ll take it. I dream big so,

Well, it’s been really wonderful talking to you three, my first ever four-way podcast 

Okay. 

And my youngest ever extraordinary woman

14. I don’t think we ever said her age.

(Ashlee) Yeah, I’m 14. I was born December 31st, 2004

I’m a December baby too. Well I traditionally wrap up the podcast with a top tip. So as I’ve got three of you, maybe I can get three top tips. Who wants to go first? So a tip for the listeners, it can be anything you like. 

If you know anybody with type one please have them reach out to me

As a parent of a type one, don’t be afraid to keep asking questions and keep learning. Just because you’re a parent, just because you may not be a doctor or a specialist, that doesn’t mean that you can’t learn.

Tracey, you know more than most endocrinologists now

As a teenager and a type one, what would your top tip be? Think of it this way. What would your top tip be to fellow teens who had just had a similar diagnosis?

(Ashlee) Try Low carb. Low carb is the best. It’s healthy, that one. And also ,for type one diabetics, it’s easier to manage bloods.

So yeah, just like we were saying earlier, it actually just makes your life easier.

It makes sense.

And it tastes so good.

It’s much easier for Ashlee when she’s at school because she’s by herself. She’s dealing with things, you know, going in and out of class. She doesn’t have to add up these copious amounts of carbs. She just actually, most of the time at school, she just, what we call like sugar surfing. She just eats morning tea and lunch and then she just watches her CGM. I mean with, thank God for CGM’s.

Continuous Glucose Monitor

She just watches her glucose monitor and she just doses accordingly as she needs to throughout the day and it makes her life. She can just be a teenager and bop along as her bloods are bopping along.

Well. Fantastic. Thank you all very much. It’s been a great pleasure and wonderful to be sat here with you all, not just across the computer screen which is what I usually do so, thank you very much. 

Thank you. 

(Ashlee) Thank you.

Thank you.

This transcript is brought to you thanks to the hard work of Trish Roberts.

Welcome Jennifer to the Keto Woman podcast. How are you doing today?

I’m doing really great, Daisy. I’m so happy to be here talking to you today.

Oh, it’s nice to be talking to you too. Why don’t you tell us a bit about yourself and your journey?

I think I had a fairly regular childhood. I kind of like to start with that. I was a fairly…I’m using quotation marks, although you can’t see that…normal weight up until I was about six years old. I have a picture from when I was in kindergarten and I looked like I was at a…again, quotation marks…normal weight. And then after that I started getting a little bit chunkier. I like to say I was a chubby child, an overweight teenager that grew into an obese adult. And just as I went from high school, I was overweight. I wasn’t terribly overweight, but I was probably about 15 or 20 pounds overweight. And when you’re a teenager you really… it could be a hundred pounds. It feels the same even though it really isn’t. Since I got older and I had the full-time job and started having the children and you’re just kind of gradually gaining weight over time.

I ended up being about 300 pounds and that was just before the birth of my last child. I was 300 pounds. And even after I had my baby, I still only lost about 30 pounds. So I was about 270 pounds. I’m only five foot two. So, I felt that I looked pretty awful and I wasn’t feeling very healthy and I had looked into weight loss surgery because I felt like I had tried everything and just really gotten nowhere. At the time, here where I live in Ontario, Canada, they did not offer any kind of weight loss surgery, that wasn’t paid for by the government and otherwise you had to pay for it out of pocket. And it probably runs like $10,000 or $15,000. If you qualified, you could go and have it done in the United States and they would pay for it. But again, it was a huge process and I was a bit worried about going to another country to have surgery. So after a couple of years they did end up offering surgery here. They really made a very big program into it and quite a process because they recognized that short term it was less expensive for the government to pay for a surgery, than for me to develop diabetes and heart disease and have to have acute care somewhere along the road.

Where were you with all that? Did you have, you know, any health issues, apart from the obesity obviously, but usually there are other things that go with it or was it actually just like I had… really, I actually was fairly healthy from a metabolic and blood work point of view, but it was the practicalities of it that I found very difficult. And I wanted to ask you just going back a little bit, how you found both your pregnancy and then the stresses and strains of dealing with a young child when you were that size. Because, snap, as far as the weight was concerned, that was the weight I was. I’m a little bit taller than you and I know how limiting it was for me and how hard work it made, everything. So I can only imagine how it must have been for you with a baby.

When I was at 300 pounds towards the end of my pregnancy, it was quite awful. I was swollen everywhere. I could barely stand. I could barely walk. I had to leave work about two months early just because there’s no way I could cope. And then after I had the baby, I was still fairly limited in what I could do because I had no strength. But I bounced back pretty quickly, because up until then I’d been a fairly healthy person. I hadn’t had any major health issues other than being overweight. And I think that’s where a lot of people are, that they don’t have a lot of issues and people are almost fatter younger because of the obesity epidemic. I think when I was in my twenties and thirties there really wasn’t that many obese people and now…or at least it didn’t seem like it anyways…and now it’s much more common to see people in their twenties and thirties that are morbidly obese.

And so I think that having a lot of healthy, overweight people – and that it’s a good idea from a government perspective to try and get a handle on costs – to look at trying to help these people that are otherwise healthy before they start developing other issues. And I think I was very lucky that way, that I hadn’t developed any blood pressure or diabetes or heart disease or anything like that. I think I was quite lucky that way. But otherwise, I’d always been fairly healthy. I was strong. I went to the gym quite a lot. I had a physically demanding job, so that way it was, it worked out well for me that, going into the surgery, that was my only issue, was being obese.

So as far as the process went, because it sounds a bit like a similar process to here in France and I know in the UK…I’m not so familiar with the States, but again, I should imagine somewhat similar. It’s a process in differing lengths that you have to go through and you have to tick certain boxes to be eligible for that surgery. Unless of course you’re paying out of pocket and then you can do what you like. But if you’re reliant on some assistance from the government, there’s this process that you have to go through. Did you have any issues with ticking all the boxes or did it just purely come down to you’re a certain weight and so that automatically puts you through? Which was pretty well the case for me actually…I went in and he had his sort of dial that he worked out my BMI and he said, right, this is the surgery for you. And it was literally just because you’re overweight.

That was pretty much the situation for me as well. Here in Ontario, they have what they call a bariatric registry. So you go to your family doctor, you tell them you’re interested in having this surgery, they refer you to this bariatric registry, which then refers you to whatever the closest hospital is in your area that does the surgery, their clinic contacts you, and then you start a series of appointments. You see a social worker. You see a nurse. You see a nutritionist. You see a resident. You meet the surgeon. And this is usually over the course of several months. You have to have an ECG. You have a gastroscopy. You have an abdominal ultrasound so you go through all of this preparation work. Oh, you may or may not have a sleep study to see if you have undiagnosed sleep apnea. You answer a lot of questionnaires. You do blood work.

So it’s quite a process because they want to make sure that you’re relatively healthy going into it. Yes, you do have to have a certain amount of weight on you. From my experience and from what I’ve heard from other people, they go by the BMI, which isn’t the greatest indicator, but that’s generally what their guidelines are and have other co-morbidities. So I mean there’s always the potential to develop diabetes and obviously high blood pressure, heart issues when you’re carrying excess weight. So you’ve pretty much got those co-morbidities down to begin with if you’re morbidly obese. So the process can take anywhere from about nine months to a year to get through all of this.

It’s a lengthy barrage of tests isn’t it? I had the same here put together a dossier of various appointments.

Yes, that’s right. Yeah. I do wish though that in hindsight, I wish that they had done a little bit more emphasis on the social work, mental, emotional aspect of it because I think that that would have been a really big indicator going forward, how I would have managed after the surgery. I don’t know that I ever would’ve been able to manage losing weight without the surgery, but I think that I could have maximized my abilities afterwards if I knew a little bit more about myself as a person and why I had gained the weight to begin with. Because I don’t think people just gain weight in a void. Most people gain weight for a reason. And if I’d been able to understand that going in, I think I would have done much better after. As it was, I struggled for several years with losing weight.

I lost probably about 70 lbs right off the bat, which was great. It put me under 200 pounds, but then I kind of yo-yoed with about 20 pounds here and there, kind of getting down to about 175 at one point. And then I was up to about 220, so I kind of yo-yoed back and forth. And then I had sort of settled around 200 and I just wasn’t able to lose any more. And then I had actually gone back to the bariatric clinic to ask for a revision. I had the vertical sleeve gastrectomy, which is a surgery where they basically leave your digestive system intact. They just cut away the bottom part of your stomach, which is the biggest part. Your stomach is shaped like a banana – essentially how they leave it. And I had gone and asked if I could have a revision to a surgery called a bypass – they do a lot of moving things around and making your stomach into teeny tiny pouch about the size of a golf ball or a tennis ball. And it’s so that you cannot absorb a lot of your nutrients that you’re taking in and that’s how you lose weight.

Yeah, because they bypass part of the digestive tract…part of the intestine is bypassed. That’s literally how it gets its name, isn’t it?

That’s right. Yeah.

You’re not absorbing everything. Just to go back a little bit, two questions. By the sounds of it, they offer different operations. So presumably when you went in, were you given any kind of choice with the operation you had, or were you told the operation that they thought was appropriate for you? What was that initial choice of operation process? If there was any.

What they do here is they generally do the bypass as kind of the gold standard, because that’s the surgery that they really have the most studies on, and long-term data to understand that it’s the one that’s the most successful for most people. The other surgery, the vertical sleeve gastrectomy, is being done a little bit less. It’s a little less invasive and takes a little less time and there are a little less complications with it. And that was the surgery that I was interested in, but understanding that they would probably want to do the bypass, I actually wrote a letter to my surgeon asking him about getting the sleeve. Because I have migraines and I have to be able to take Ibuprofen, and when you have the bypass they discourage you from taking Ibuprofen because long-term use of Ibuprofen, you have the potential to develop ulcers.

And when you’ve got a bypass, getting an ulcer is a bad thing. Especially if you get it in the portion of the stomach that’s been, effectively, sutured off or stitched off. So if I got an ulcer in that spot, they would never be able to see it on an endoscopy if they were checking to see what was going on. Why was I having all of this pain? So that’s why they discourage using Ibuprofen. But with my migraines, that’s the only thing that I could take that was effective for me. I tried with other medications. I couldn’t find anything really that worked as well as Ibuprofen. So I asked him if I could have the sleeve just so I could be able to manage my migraines and he was agreeable to that. And that’s why I got the sleeve. I think they’re doing the sleeve a little bit more now than what they used to.

Maybe because they find that people are having good results with it, or that there’s less complications. I’m not really sure, but it seems to be about half and half – the people that I am in contact with that have had surgery. Some of the people are getting bypass and some are getting sleeve. So it seems to depend on the surgeon when they get in there. Sometimes if the person’s had other surgeries before, they have a lot of adhesions and scarring and things like that, so they prefer to do the sleeve as opposed to doing the bypass, which is a little bit more intensive.

And what advice were you given? Well globally, but for what you should be eating post-op?

The nutritionist at the bariatric clinic that I go to, they advocate a moderate diet in all food groups. Now Canada has this wonderful Canada’s food guide and they advocate a certain number of servings of this and a certain number of servings of that. And that’s kind of what they have to go by because they are a government funded clinic. So they kind of have to follow whatever the government guidelines are, which at this time advocate eating from all the food groups. So they want you to have a certain number of calories. They know right after surgery, you’re not going to be able to eat much. So they advocate getting your protein in, but as the weeks go on, you’re supposed to increase your diet and have a certain amount of carbohydrates, a certain number of fats, a certain amount of protein, protein first always, but they’re still advocating that you should be able to eat moderately from all food groups. And that was difficult for me. So, I just did not get on well after the surgery. I lost a bit. I mean, you’re going to, because for the first few weeks you really just can’t eat, so you’re going to lose weight. So I lost about 70 pounds fairly quickly. But after that, I really struggled because I just could not maintain that moderate diet that the clinic was advocating.

So from a macros point of view, you would see if you were to look at a graph, say, that the protein percentage would be probably the highest macro to start with because of the quantity you can eat. So because of the “protein first” mantra, you’re having to take up most of the available space – most of what you physically can eat in a day. If you’re going to eat your protein first, you’re going to quite often find that there’s not much else you can eat after that. And is this something they were really strict about enforcing because I know it’s something that I came across a lot that they hammered home that all things in moderation – actually from the get go I was given in hospital…bearing in mind, I was in hospital for quite a long time. They had me in for eight days in total.

I nearly went rather bland. Most of that was post-op. I was actually only on liquids. I think they had me fasted properly for the first day post-op and then I was on liquid for a day. But then straight after that, I was actually on pureed or minced up foods. They actually had me ahead of the schedule that I’ve seen in other places. You know, other places are on liquids say, for two weeks afterwards. But the point I’m making here about the macros is that I was given the balanced macros, if you like, so I would have this minced up spoonful of meat, and minced up spoonful of vegetables, and minced up spoonful of mashed potato, or pasta, or whatever it was. They would insist on me eating regular meals. So I was having something like six small meals a day and as those alternate meals between what you think of as the standard meals, were like something like a yogurt or something. It was usually a dairy based sugar – of course, it had in it – snacks in between. It felt like they were feeding me constantly. I just didn’t want the food. But, my point is I certainly didn’t have that protein first. The whole “protein first” mantra I got actually, was from information online in forums and in Facebook groups and things. But were they quite forceful with you about doing that? Was that the message you were getting from your nutrition team?

Yes, absolutely. It was protein first. They were very, very hard and fast that you had to have your protein first.

So even if you could eat nothing else, if all you could eat was your minimum requirement of protein, then that was all you ate in a day.

Yeah, because right after you have the surgery, they give you what our group calls the Bible. So it’s a handbook of what you’re supposed to do, what you’re not supposed to do, and guidelines for each week and suggestions for food. So week one you would be having your protein shakes kind of thing. Now they’ve changed a bit since I had the surgery, they are pushing people along faster. I guess they’ve found that people are recovering from the surgery faster and so can start eating more. I think it’s actually better the way that I did it because I think I did like two weeks of shakes. Then I did like two weeks of full fluids, and then a week of soft foods or puree. And then moving onwards. But yes, protein was absolutely first, but then they would have your carbohydrates. So they would have cream of whatever, soups, cream of mushroom soup. They would want you to have protein, so like your shake. And then if you needed to have chicken or something you would like blend it in a blender and add broth to it, or whatever.

But then they still wanted you to have your other foods, your other carbohydrates, and cream of chicken soups, and oatmeal, cream of wheat, soft cereals like that. And then moving on, when you’re getting to real food – things like Melba toast was okay, and chili. Going to one of the fast food places here that serves a good chili seems to be on everybody’s, the first thing I’m going to do when I get to that week, I’m going to go to this fast food place and get their chili, seems to be quite the thing. And as long as you don’t get the bun, I guess its okay. Not that I think that it’s okay, but I think that they really need to sort of look at those guidelines again to weed out some of these things like Melba toast, which for me was a major trigger food. I can’t just eat one Melba toast but I guess some people can and that’s good for them, if you can eat in moderation. But if I think if I had known a bit more that I couldn’t stop at one Melba toast and looked at it from a different perspective, I think I would have done much better.

I would actually argue that the majority of people who end up having weight loss surgery and actually probably the majority of people who end up morbidly obese have an issue with moderation.

Absolutely.

Because otherwise where would be the problem? And well, more so a problem with moderation with certain foods because we all know when we eat the right way for us having to moderate becomes less of an issue. It’s certain foods that we have trouble with when it comes to control and moderation, and I think it’s going back to what you were saying about going through that process of tests and interviews and appointments with the lead up to surgery; there should be much more emphasis on finding out how and why the person in question that’s on the receiving end of having to have all these tests, got that way in the first place.

That’s right.

And then if you decide that surgery is the right course of action, then tailoring the program afterwards. The two things really that are going to have the most influence as far as that goes, is tailoring their diet to address that, but then also tailoring if it is part of it, the emotional issues that go with it, and the habits that have been formed over years, and why those habits are there.

I think that’s absolutely right, but I think the issue from the bariatric clinic or even the health care system in general, is that it’s going to cost a lot more money than doing the surgery and turning people loose. Because if you want to be completely honest, and people always say I’m an emotional eater and what they really mean to say, but they don’t want to say it out loud is, is I’m a food addict. I’m a carbohydrate addict. Because saying that you’re an addict is a negative thing that people don’t want to admit to. Saying I’m an emotional eater sounds much better, but it’s the same thing. If you’re an addict, it’s because you have this compulsion to do something that you know is going to have a negative outcome. So if I go and I’m upset, I’ve had a fight with my husband and I go to the refrigerator and I get a quart of Haagen-Dazs and I know I’m going to feel like crap afterwards, but I eat it anyways.

That’s an addiction. It’s no different than as if I took a beer or I smoked some crack or whatever. It’s exactly the same, but it’s harder I think to admit to because somebody that doesn’t think that – oh, I would never do anything like that. I’m not an alcoholic. I’m not a meth addict – are going to have to cop to, I’m an addict. And it’s a lot easier to say, oh, I’m an emotional eater, than I’m an addict. But sometimes you have to get a little bit hard with it. You have to look at the truth. And the truth is, is that you cannot control your eating. And even after you’ve had the surgery, you cannot control your eating because they’re not doing surgery on your brain. They’re doing surgery on your stomach. And at some point, even if I’ve had the surgery, my brain is still going to say to me, ooh, I want carbohydrates and therefore I’m going to eat carbohydrates.

It doesn’t make a difference whether I’ve had surgery or not. I think some people need to have surgery. I needed to have surgery. Even if I had done keto I don’t know that I still wouldn’t have been able to stop eating carbohydrates. I don’t know. I don’t know for sure, but I think that definitely there’s a place for surgery, but at the same time people regain weight all the time with these surgeries. All the time because they don’t get that chance to overcome that carbohydrate addiction because they are being told that you should be able to eat moderately.

Yes, I absolutely agree with that and I think it’s the biggest failing of the system and I think just like with any other trap that people fall into, it’s the same almost as something like Weight Watchers or any kind of plan that somebody adheres to and has some success with weight loss, and then something goes wrong and they regain. What they’re told is it’s not the program’s fault. There’s no problem with the program. The problem is with you. You’ve messed up. You failed. You failed to adhere to it. That’s where the problem lies. But that is the biggest flaw that I see of weight loss surgery because basically the message that I see coming across is, we are going to impose on you an enforced restrictive eating plan – that’s basically what it is – we’re going to make you, because we’re going to adjust your body so that it is physically impossible for you to eat more than a certain amount.

So it’s like you going on your calorie controlled diet, going to Weight Watchers, going to whatever. It’s a bit unfair that I always mention Weight Watchers, but I forget the names of all the others. Use Weight Watchers as a global term for all these diet programs. But the problem is, if you could stick to that kind of program, if they were sustainable, then there wouldn’t be a problem and the exact same thing happens with weight loss surgery. This is the problem I see coming from people who’ve had it, who all of a sudden think this is amazing. I can suddenly eat in moderation. Problem solved. I can do exactly what people have been telling me to do all these years. I can do exactly what my surgery team are telling me what to do.

It’s fine. It’s easy. This is going to work. This is going to be me for the rest of my life. I can still eat cake. I can still eat ice cream when I want it. Everything’s wonderful. Except it’s not, is it? That wears off. It might take longer than one of these programs that you’ve gone to that involves you using just your willpower and sticking to it. You know, think of this as someone’s enforcing that willpower on you, but it does not last. Apart from an absolute tiny, tiny minority, it doesn’t last. And so if you don’t address those problems, if you don’t address and change your way of eating, you’re going quote unquote, fail. But it’s not you who’s failing. Again, just like with so many people who’ve been on this podcast who’ve had that lightning bolt moment when they’ve read someone like Gary Taubes who says, it’s not your fault.

Well it’s the same, except these people are going back. These people are working on another level because they’re going back just like you did, and we’ll come back to that, with me going off on this tangent, but you going back – and they ended up going back – and having revision surgery. So they have a second surgery. And I’m one of those people. The problem with my first one was it was the band, which is just a nightmare surgery that fortunately is happening less and less now. But a lot of people have the sleeve and then go on to have a bypass, or DS – a Duodenal Switch. Of course, that’s how it started the sleeve, wasn’t it? It was the first stage process for the DS surgery. And sadly I think a lot of surgeons still actually do have that attitude. And I have heard people whose surgeons have said to them, we’re going to give you the sleeve, but the chances are you’re going to be back in a couple of years for revision surgery either to the DS or bypass. That I think is criminal.

That’s right, yes. When I first got onto the idea about addiction, which was I think a couple of years ago, I thought everybody that had had ever had to have weight loss surgery was a food addict. And then after sort of seeing some more people in my Facebook group, or with my weight loss surgery Facebook group, and there are a lot of people that, they have their surgery and they are able to eat moderately, and they are able to lose weight, and God love them, I wish I was one of them. And after thinking about what my perspective was on food addiction, and then when I got into keto as well, I came to the conclusion that there’s a lot of people that they’re using food to smother their feelings, they’re emotional eaters. At some point or another they worked through whatever it was.

Maybe they had problems with their husband or their wife, or whatever. They worked through it, but they’re stuck in that addictive carb cycle, and they can’t break free of that carb cycle. They have the surgery which breaks them free of the carb cycle, and then they’re able to eat moderately. They go on their merry way, they lose weight with the surgery and they’re good to go. And then the rest of us, I think either we’re still dealing with the emotional issues – we’ve just kind of never worked through them completely or we’re just too stuck in that carb cycle. Because they do say that carbohydrates are as addictive as any kind of opioid and maybe we are just kind of stuck in that’s the way that we’re going to be forever. Whether we’ve got still got some underlying emotional issues or not. And yes, people will regain and then they try and go back or a second surgery, which I did.

I went to see if I could get another surgery because I was stuck. I wasn’t losing weight. I went back to the bariatric clinic. I asked them about getting a revision. At that time though – they go by the BMI – they said, no, your BMI is too low, we won’t do another surgery. I was pretty upset by that afterwards. In hindsight, I’m glad that I didn’t, and I’m glad that I’m addressing the other issues because maybe I wouldn’t have got to that place where I needed to see that there’s other things going on. This is why I can’t lose weight. So I’m glad in hindsight that I didn’t get the other surgery. But I think from the get go they sort of need to look a little bit deeper into why people are needing the surgery to begin with.

And doing a second surgery – when somebody comes back to them – that’s when they really need to say, okay, you had one surgery, you’re not making it work, what’s going on? Don’t just automatically sign them up for another surgery. Maybe some people will need it. People that are 500 pounds – here anyways in Ontario – they will do the sleeve as the first step. It’s planned to do the DS when they’ve lost like about a hundred pounds. When it’s a little bit safer for them to be under the anesthetic for the longer period of time that it would take to do that surgery. So sometimes it’s a plan to step surgery, but other times people are getting it because their weight loss is stalled. And I think that that’s when they need to do a little bit more intensive digging into why aren’t you losing weight?

Like let’s look outside of the box. Let’s look at what you’re eating. But then it kind of goes back to – a lot of people have talked about this – the current healthcare systems don’t want to admit that they were wrong about the carbohydrates. That it’s not an essential part of your meal plan – there’s no such thing as essential carbohydrates – but they don’t want to admit that because that goes against everything that they’ve been saying for the last what, 50 years or so. And that’s not what our government supports, so we’re kind of stuck.

Sometimes it is the case obviously, that people do need to go back for the second phase of the operation. That happens, especially for people who started off at a much higher weight. But yes, that’s exactly why they started doing the sleeve because they found that a lot of people were having so much success with it. It’s that first stage of a two stage operation, and they weren’t needing to go onto the second stage when they started using it a lot more. But, yes I think you’re right. I think at that point when someone goes back for a revision, or goes back to say that they’re regaining weight, and why they’re regaining weight, there shouldn’t be that assumption that they’ve done something wrong and the way to fix it is another operation. Just to go back to the whole moderation thing.

I think there are echoes with this. It’s not just with people who’ve had weight loss surgery that these principles apply. I think there are lots of people who start doing keto who it’s almost like that magic switch that is switched by having the weight loss surgery. Suddenly you can do everything in moderation. Suddenly your hunger and satiety signals start working perfectly. And you hear lots of people saying this. Richard Morris is a really good example. When you hear him talking about how back in the carbie days, he could eat vast quantities, but now he is doing keto, once he’s full, that’s it. He stops eating. He doesn’t have cravings. All is hunky dory. But there are some of us, if we still have these addiction issues that they’re not completely fixed by keto. Just like they’re not completely fixed with weight loss surgery, and although those signals they tune back up much better, we still have to combat those other issues that are going on.

Oh, I absolutely agree with you on that. They really need to start looking a little bit more at what’s going on in your mental and emotional state rather than just, what are you eating and why aren’t you eating hundred grams of carbohydrates, and thinking that that’s the answer. Because it’s not. But I mean counseling is intensive. Not everybody wants to do it. They don’t want to dive into those kinds of issues, but they would rather go and have another surgery and think that’s going to fix them. I do have a lot of people say; I’m so hungry all the time. And I’ll say, if you stop eating carbohydrates, I promise you, you will stop being hungry.

And then I tell them the story – Dr Fung likes to use this, and I’ve heard Megan Ramos say it on podcasts before – they use this wood analogy where carbohydrates are your fast burning wood and fats are your hardwood that takes longer to burn. So if you’re going to go out, and you’ve got your fireplace and you want something to burn in it, and you’ve got all this lovely hardwood that you’ve been stocking, and instead you throw in an old dining room chair that’s made out of softwood that burns in 15 seconds. And in 15 seconds you need more wood for the fire. Well, that’s kind of your body. Your carbohydrates burn off instantly and you need more carbohydrates. So that’s why you’re always hungry. Your body is just screaming out for carbs.

But if you give it fat – you give it that nice hardwood that takes longer to burn – then you don’t feel hungry. So that’s the kind of the analogy that I use – and that’s Megan’s analogy, not mine, I never take credit for that – because I think it’s something that people will understand – that if you give your body something that’s going to take longer to burn, and if you listen to your body…that’s key too, is you have to listen and understand why am I hungry? Well I’m hungry because maybe I haven’t eaten in 18 hours, or maybe it’s because what I had an hour ago, like I had a bowl of pasta, has already burned off. So if you just kind of eat nice fats and protein, and not have any carbohydrates, you’re not going to be hungry. At least your body’s not going to be hungry, and maybe your head’s still going to be hungry, and that’s a whole other story that we’re talking about as well.

Well that’s the problem, isn’t it? It’s this interference that goes on between your body and your brain. It’s the interference that goes on between that’s the problem. You mentioned before about how it often comes down to potentially a cost, but I would have thought that the extra cost of tailoring the program a bit more, tailoring it nutritionally and adding on counseling, is a lot cheaper than revision surgery. I think maybe part of the problem is having to admit that the nutrition advice they’re giving is not correct, and having to change that; and they can’t go back on that.

That’s right. Especially with us being government funded, they can’t go and say, oh no, we don’t want you to eat carbohydrates when our Canada’s food guide – the latest one that just came out – is almost entirely plant based. And I mean it’s nothing but carbohydrates. So they can’t now suddenly turn around and say, no you can’t eat carbohydrates. And not only that, but the numbers of people that are going through this program are just unbelievable. The number of people that they’re trying to get through and have the surgery… it’s taking months and months, not just because it’s so time intensive with the appointments, but because there’s so many people that they’re trying to get through the system. The clinic is running at full speed all the time and the wait lists are phenomenal. It takes months just to get that first phone call, to start with the orientation and learning more about the program, and then getting in through the appointments.

If you try and even call the clinic if you’ve got a question, it takes a long time for them to get back to you. And after the surgery you’re supposed to go in for one week check-up. Well, sometimes you don’t get in for two weeks. Or your one month check-up will be two months later. Or your six months check-up might be a year and a half later just because they’re overwhelmed with the number of people that want to have the surgery. So unfortunately stuff like that just falls by the wayside for sheer numbers.

Absolutely. And it’s definitely a sign of the times to see how long the waiting lists are. So you went back to ask for the revision surgery and they denied that. So how did it come about then that you started looking at changing the way you were eating. How did you find out about keto? What led you down that path?

I was actually at my local public library and I happened to see Dr Fung’s book, “The Complete Guide to Fasting”, which I picked up and I started reading. I was fascinated and it was one of those lightning bolt moments where I realized, wow, it’s not my fault. I am not able to lose weight because of this whole carbohydrate insulin cycle. And what really impressed me about the book in particular was that it didn’t seem like your common diet book. Every chapter had references to studies and medical journals. And I felt, well, this is somebody I can trust that knows what they’re talking about. So after I read that, his co-author on that book was Jimmy Moore. And so I went on the internet and I was looking at Jimmy Moore, and I happened to see that he had all of these podcasts, and he had these books.

So I started listening to Jimmy Moore. And then I think from Jimmy Moore, then I found the 2 Keto Dudes. So I listened to them. And then from the 2 Keto Dudes, they had the episode that you were on, and Liz, I think, talking about weight loss surgery.

Louise and Donna, yeah.

So then that’s how I got listening to you as well. So it was sort of a chain reaction that I started with Dr Fung’s book, and I started listening to all of these podcasts, and I heard about Nina Teicholz and Gary Taubes, and I got their books and I read them. So I think at this point I’ve probably listened to hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of podcasts, and watched all of these videos and read all of these books. Immediately though, after I read The Complete Guide To Fasting, I started to go low carb.

Of course, I did this completely backwards. I don’t even think I had been doing it for a couple of weeks and I thought, oh, I’m going to do a fast. Let me do a fast. So I actually did a six day fast, which probably not even fat adapted at that point. I actually managed and I wasn’t hungry. And things that I noticed – of course I did lose weight right off the bat because you’re losing all of that water weight, not eating carbohydrates -was not being hungry was fantastic. It was just unbelievable to me that I could go so many hours without eating. Whereas before, and with the bariatric clinic, and what is kind of common, nutrition guidelines, you’re supposed to eat every three to four hours, which I probably was doing. But I wasn’t hungry and that I didn’t need sugar. Like if I was going to go and have coffee before, I had to have all of this cream and sugar in it.

And tea. I could not drink tea without sugar. So when people were talking about bulletproof coffee or putting heavy whipping cream in coffee, and I started that and I didn’t eat sugar. And that was like a revelation to me. It really was. That I did not need sugar in my coffee or my tea, which kind of sounds strange, but it just seemed so unreal that I did not need sugar and I did not need sweets. I did not need to eat dessert. I just lost all of those sugar cravings, which, you know; it was just such a relief not to have those sugar cravings. And I did lose weight. I lost about 20 pounds fairly quickly. So that was great. Unfortunately I did end up regressing and it was because I had not addressed some of those emotional things that were going on in my life, and I had a lot of stress.

I did end up gaining the 20 pounds back because I was really kind of stupid. And I thought to myself, and I remember this very clearly thinking, okay, you’re going to have stress. You’re going to want to eat. So why not go for it. Which in hindsight sounds really dumb. I should have really just tried to work through it a little bit better. But I did end up gaining the 20 pounds back, and at the beginning of the year I really recommitted back to being more strict with my keto, and I have lost almost half of that. I’ve lost 10 pounds. So that’s been great. But more importantly, I feel so much better. When I was kind of letting myself go with the stress eating, I felt like crap all the time. And I knew that I felt like crap, but I was stuck already in that – it doesn’t take long to get stuck back in that carb cycle where, even though you know you’re going to feel horrible, you still keep eating it.

I think it really kind of took me hitting the bottom of that barrel. I just feel so awful. I’m waking up every morning with a headache. I have no energy. I need to get back to doing this. And instead, I think when I had been doing my keto before; I was really trying to still eat the 20 grams of carbs. And now I’m probably closer to zero. I’m really eating more meats and dairy and eggs and very little actual carbohydrates in the way of vegetables. And I find that that works so much better for me. I am hardly hungry. There are days where I really have to push myself to eat so that my metabolism doesn’t bottom out.

Do you still employ some intermittent fasting? Because that always seems the sensible thing that, if you have days when you don’t feel like eating, instead of not eating very much is to actually harness that opportunity, and say, okay well I’m going to have a day when I don’t eat anything.

I do, I really do. Or I will have like one meal a day and trying to go along with, what is your limit of fasting? Because you’ll see some people will say nothing at all, like just water or black coffee or with a splash of whipping cream if you want, but like no substantial calories. And some people will say, oh if you have less than 500 calories, that should still be okay. I don’t know. I think the jury’s kind of still out on all of that. And then you’re kind of getting into when does autophagy kick in, and all of that.

I always go back to what Terri Lance says. I’ve seen her talk about it on quite a few posts when people ask that same question, you know, what counts as a fast, and is this a fast, and is that a fast? And the important question that she says you need to ask; is what are your goals? So if your goals are weight loss, then having a few of those things that have some calorific value aren’t necessarily a problem. If your goal is more the autophagy side, then you need to potentially be a bit stricter about what you’re having. And you know, it’s only water or maybe some coffee and things like that. So it’s really important just to figure out what your goals are, but also of what you’re capable of, what you’re happy with and, and what you feel good with. And there’s often a difference between what you do when you start out.

Megan Ramos talks about training wheels, doesn’t she? That there might be some things, like you might need a little splash of heavy whipping cream in your coffee, or some broth, or things like that. If they’re going to get you through while you’re getting used to fasting – because I think everyone agrees that its consistency is what is a good thing – is to get into that routine of fasting. Now if when you start doing that, you need a few of those things to get you through – to get you into that habit, to get that habit formed, and what you can probably find is that those things get dropped off as you get more used to doing it. It all comes down to the individual and what works for you and what your goals are, I think.

I think that’s right and you have to definitely find what works for you, and if you just want a couple of eggs and a couple of slices of bacon, then that’s good. I don’t think you need to worry too much about it. With having the weight loss surgery, I can’t eat like…I would like to have one meal a day where I ate 1200 or 1600 calories, but I physically can’t without making myself sick. So I do tend to eat twice a day, like once in the morning and once in the evening. And it’s hard though, when you’re not hungry to make those calories count because you have to balance – again, eating enough so that you’re keeping your metabolism going. Or not eating anything, so you’re keeping your metabolism going. You don’t want to consistently eat only 600 or 700 calories, and then your metabolism slows down to account for the fact that you’re not eating enough. It’s kind of a tricky spot just to find the right combination that works for you for whatever your goals are. It depends f your goal is weight loss, or if your goal is metabolic healing, or if your goal is autophagy.

Absolutely. Just going back to what you said right at the beginning, about your choice of surgery and part of what drove you to ask for the sleeve as opposed to bypass, was the fact that you suffer from migraines. Well, I’ve certainly seen a big improvement in my migraines, so I was wondering if you’ve seen a positive change in yours?

Oh absolutely. And there’s been times where I’ve almost kicked myself because I think that weight loss was definitely a part of that. I think a lot of my migraines were hormonal in nature, so getting older sort of took care of that. But if it was even just from a pure weight loss standpoint, sometimes I’ve kicked myself, like I said, I could have had the other surgery, the bypass, and maybe been more successful with it, and still not had the migraines. So it’s been kind of a catch 22 you know, like you can maybe have the surgery that you’ll lose weight faster and you still won’t have migraines, but you’re kind of taking a chance. Maybe you’ll still have the migraines and then you won’t be able to take the medication that you need for the migraines. But yes, definitely I did see an improvement almost right away that I didn’t need to take any medications for my migraines. So you don’t know what you don’t know, right?

That’s interesting then that you found an improvement just with the surgery. Interestingly enough, I did see a period of about three months when I first had the sleeve where I didn’t have problems with my migraines and I thought it was potentially just down to the operation. With hindsight actually I think it was probably because I was in ketosis without knowing it at the time. The combination of what I was eating and how much I was eating. Although I wasn’t eating ketogenically, I think just by the fact of how little I was eating probably got me down, if not in ketosis, down closer to that state, and that is what was helping. Because it only lasted for those few months and then they came back again. And it was only a couple of years later…I did start doing low carb fairly soon after that…or a moderate carb I should say, because it wasn’t low enough to impact significant change. But it was only when I dropped it down to a ketogenic level that I started seeing real success with my migraines. That’s why I was interested in knowing the difference with you, whether they improved straight away or whether it wasn’t until you switched to fasting and keto that you saw that improvement.

That’s interesting because now that you’re saying that, I’m just thinking back to the fall when I was stress eating and eating a lot more carbohydrates, and I did notice that I did have a couple of migraines where I don’t think I’ve had like a really bad migraine in a couple of years. So that’s interesting that you say that it’s probably been a combination of the weight loss and being in ketosis that has really taken care of the migraines. For anybody that suffers from migraines, you know how horrible they are.

We have kind of addressed that question. I think it’s something that we probably not only get asked by other people, but we ask ourselves. And that is, if you’d known about keto and fasting before you went for the surgery, would you still have done it?

I think if I’m really honest with myself, would I have lost weight without the surgery? If I’m really honest, I’m going to say no. because in the period leading up to the surgery, because it does take quite a while, I said to myself, I’m going to do my utmost best to lose weight and I could not shift a pound. Even if I had known about keto, would I have been able to stick to it. There’s a certain element of willpower to any change. Not just changing what you’re eating, but committing to any kind of change in your life. There’s a certain amount of willpower because instinctively I think most people don’t like change because it can be a lot of hard work and I don’t think I could have stuck to it.

I don’t know if it would have been thinking well, surgery is on the horizon, I’ve got that to fall back on. Or I just didn’t have the willpower. Or I was just too stuck into that carb addiction cycle. I don’t know. But honestly, I’ve thought about it a lot since I kind of discovered keto and when those 20 pounds dropped off last year – fairly quickly – I was really like, I wish I’d known about this before I had my surgery. But then I really thought about it and no, I really don’t think I could’ve done it. Now to kind of qualify that. If I’d had some coaching or some counseling along with the keto, then maybe. If I’d had a bit more insight into what was going on with me, maybe then. Maybe then I would have been able to do keto and lost the weight and not had the surgery.

But just by itself, it’s a nice thought. It’s a nice thought to think that you can do it. And I’m using air quotes – normally – because you’ll hear people say that, oh, why don’t you just lose weight the normal way without having surgery? I mean, it’s nice to think that you wouldn’t have to go to the lengths of having surgery to lose weight because losing weight seems like something…it sounds like it should be simple, but of course it’s not. We know it’s not. But I think it’s probably the perception of a lot of people that don’t have weight problems, that’s what they think. Weight loss is simple. I can lose five pounds tomorrow if I wanted to. But of course it’s not that easy. And if I could have done keto and lost the weight, that would have been fantastic. I really don’t think I could have, if I’m honest.

It’s a very interesting question, isn’t it? I’m not sure either. I think part of the problem certainly for me was all that interference I spoke about before – those habits of food addiction, the depression. The habits I had of eating carbs to not only numb the pain of depression, but also that would get me into this eat, sleep cycle, so that basically I just didn’t have to be awake more than I had to be because it was just not very pleasant to be awake. So I don’t know if the benefits of keto would have been able to kick in quick enough and to be strong enough to get all that interference down to a low enough level for me to be able to do it long enough to really start affecting that change. I really don’t know. And I think that’s what weight loss surgery did for me is, it forced me into that position for a certain period of time.

And I do know that if I hadn’t have found keto, I would probably be heading back towards where I was to start with. So I do know how important it has been for me, but I struggle with it. I struggle with that, and I struggle with…and I don’t know how you feel about this, both coming from yourself, but potentially from what other people have either said directly to you or about people who have weight loss surgery in general; and that is you’ve cheated. You haven’t done this the hard way like we have. You’ve taken the easy way out and you cheated. How do you feel about that? Because I bet you’ve come across that.

I haven’t. To be honest, I haven’t personally ever had anybody say that. I’m in a Facebook group for the people that have had surgery at the same hospital that I had, the same clinic, and a lot of people have said that they’ve had people that to them, and it’s really one of those things that I just kind of have to take it with a grain of salt. I tell people that’s how you should take it. Because you can’t know what it’s like to be a morbidly obese person unless you’ve walked a mile in their shoes any more than I could know what it’s like to be a person of another race, or another sexuality. Until you’ve walked a mile in that person’s shoes, you just can’t judge. And they come from a position of not being informed, not having the understanding. And it’s easy to say, oh, just let it go, because they don’t know.

But ultimately, that’s what you’ve got to do. Unless you want to try and educate the person and say, you know, this is what my life was like when I was morbidly obese and I could not for the life of me control my eating. But I don’t think you need to get that personal with a random person unless you really want to. I think people just don’t understand. You can’t. You really can’t understand. It would be like asking an alcoholic; why don’t you just stop drinking or somebody that’s addicted to any other substance. Why don’t you just stop? Or people that smoke? Why don’t you just stop smoking? I don’t smoke. I’ve never smoked a day in my life. And even I wouldn’t say that to a smoker. Why don’t you just stop? Because I know it’s not that easy. It’s not easy when you’re stuck into that behavior that’s so addictive and so compelling and so compulsive, that you’ve got no control over it.

And it’s all the same. It doesn’t matter whether its food or tobacco or alcohol, it’s just the same difficulty to stop. And I think actually food is harder, because I don’t have to smoke a cigarette. I don’t have to drink an alcoholic drink, but I do have to eat and there’s not the same level of compassion I think, for people that are obese as there are for people that smoke or people that drink. People don’t say to an alcoholic…they don’t push people. If I’ve identified myself as an alcoholic, nobody’s going to push me to have a drink or nobody’s going to push me to have a cigarette. If I tell people I just stopped smoking, nobody’s going to do that.

But people will push you to eat, you know, just have an ice cream. It’s not going to hurt you. One’s not going to hurt you. But it’s funny, if I was a vegan; people aren’t going to push me to have a burger. So I don’t know why people that if I identify myself, oh, I don’t eat carbohydrates or I’m a low carb…why would people push me to eat, or have a piece of bread, or, oh, you can have a bun with your burger. It’s kind of an interesting comparison I think, that people don’t have the same compassion for things around food and obesity. It’s interesting.

It certainly is. And complicated. And like you say, it’s not something you can ever really understand until you’ve been in that specific position yourself. And then even then you’re going to have different thoughts about it and a different reaction. So you said that your day to day keto these days is looking pretty like carnivore by the sounds of it?

It’s pretty close. Actually there are days where I am a full on carnivore. My son, he actually started doing keto not too long ago. He’s 17 and he just kind of wanted to drop a few pounds. So he was interested in doing keto. When I’m making supper, he still has some vege, and the other day I just popped a piece of broccoli in my mouth and I thought, wow, when was the last time I actually ate a vegetable? And I couldn’t really remember. Because I’ll have bacon, I’ll have eggs, I’ll have whatever meat that we’re having for dinner. I don’t usually have the vege that I’m serving with it. I have dairy. I’m terrible with cheese. I love cheese. I’m kind of glad I’m not there in France with you because I would never lose weight. I’d be eating all the cheese. Every once in a while I’ll go and buy like a really good piece of cheese and it’s like gone in a day. I just love cheese.

I think that’s the best way to do it actually. Well, it depends. And that’s where the whole addiction thing comes in. If you can…and I can do this with cheese. If I was to do it with sugar type foods…if I indulged, it would be a slippery slope, and it would just turn into a full on binge. But then there are these foods that sort of start getting closer into that addiction circle, if you like, but they’re close enough to the edge that they’re the kind of things that I can indulge in every now and then. So like you, I will buy a couple of bits of cheese and have a cheese board or something, and then I would just accept the fact that I’m going to pick at them and I’m going to indulge them and they’re going to be gone in a couple of days. But that’s okay.

It’s a great keto food. It’s very low carb – sometimes even zero with some of the cheeses I choose – and so it’s not going to do a huge amount of damage. I feel indulged. It’s not going to start some slippery slope where I turn into a cheese monster for two weeks. So it’s interesting isn’t it? There are different categories for these foods that we do find addictive that they can’t necessarily be of our daily lives, but they can be an every now and then food without causing too much damage.

I think you’re right. It’s just knowing yourself. Like am I going to be able to have a piece of cheese and maybe I eat it for a day or two and then I don’t have any for another couple of weeks or whatever. Or, am I going to go back the next day and buy another block of cheese. So it’s just knowing yourself. It’s having that self-assessment, okay, I finished this block of cheese, am I going to go get another? Nah, I’m good. I’ll be good for a couple of weeks and maybe I’ll see another block of cheese…something different in the store a couple of weeks from now and then I’ll do the same thing. So it’s just kind of doing that self-assessment piece and self-analysis, if you want to call it that, and just knowing yourself and knowing what you’re going to do with yourself.

But generally I think I kind of am a little bit more carnivore than completely keto. Kind of coining the keto carnivore phrase that’s going around where you’re just making sure that your fat macros are still on the higher side than the protein. I don’t really overly track, but I do try to eat the fattier cuts of meat. Or if I’m making something lean like a chicken breast, then I’m cooking it with some butter and maybe adding some cheese on it or something like that. I feel great.

I never cook chicken breasts, I just don’t eat chicken. But I’ve never particularly like it. I have always been someone who likes the full fat versions of things. I’ve never bought low fat mayonnaise or anything like that. And it’s the same with meat. I’ve always liked the fatty cuts. I’ve always liked the dark meat on a chicken. I’ve always loved the chicken skin. I’ve always loved the fatty bits of bacon, the fat on lamb. I’ve always loved that. So keto is just heaven. I don’t have an issue with that at all. I know some people don’t like that visible fat on meat, but I love it.

I do enjoy the dark meat on the chicken, or the turkey, or whatever. The issue is actually budgetary because I don’t know where you are, but the dark meat…if I was going to go buy a chicken thigh it’s actually more expensive than a chicken breast. And I don’t know how that works exactly.

Oh, isn’t that interesting? No, it’s the opposite here. The cheapest chicken I can buy is a kilogram tub is what I tend to buy from Lidl of chicken thighs – that is the cheapest form. So I lucked out on that. Drumsticks are more expensive for some reason. But chicken breast is the more expensive. So I have it the right way round.

I tend to buy in bulk and then portion things out and put them into freezer bags. So if I go to a market that they do their own butchering and they’ll have like big bags of giant chicken breasts, and I can buy a big bag of those when they’re on sale, and those will do for like a couple of week’s worth of meals. And to buy like the chicken thighs, I wouldn’t even get half as much.

Wow, interesting.

So when you’re watching your budget you just have to go with what you’ve got. So I’ll just try and make it a little bit more fatty by cooking it in butter or cooking it in bacon fat, because I’ve always got lots of bacon fat. Or putting some cheese on it and I find that that’s fine for me.

I don’t want anything else. I was cutting up some melon for my kids the other day…I popped a couple pieces of melon. Now before, I would have eaten like the whole thing, but I was quite happy just having one or two really nice cold juicy pieces of melon. I found that I was a little worried, because afterwards I was like, do I feel that sugar craving? And…I’m okay, I’m okay. But even that. There’s a lot of sugar in melon, but it could have spiked that sugar craving, so I feel that its better just not to even go there. If I’m going to have vegetables like broccoli, they’re not sweet, so you’re not going to have that sugar craving.

So it’s just better really not to go there in whatever way that you’re eating. If you know you’re going to be triggered by something, just don’t even go there. Like with the weight loss surgery we were talking about earlier, in the second or third week, they said that you can eat Melba toast. Well you can. Do you want to? Should you if that’s going to be a trigger food for you. If before surgery you could eat a sleeve of crackers…that used to be one of my things…I could eat a whole sleeve of crackers with cheese whiz or peanut butter. Then maybe crackers isn’t a good idea for me. Even if you want me to eat moderately, sort of pairing up the idea of what caused you to gain weight in the first place, and now that you’ve had weight loss surgery, sort of incorporating what you know about yourself and making that model work for you for maximizing your weight loss. So if carbie foods are a trigger, then you’d better not eat them. Not until maybe you’ve lost a lot of weight and you feel comfortable that you could eat them without being triggered to overeat.

And that’s the power of the Internet, I think. Because that’s certainly what I was able to tap into. Interestingly enough one of the things that was also on my meal plans was to have these…I’m trying to think what they call it here…but it basically looks like slices of mini toasts as your Melba toast type thing; that I used to have with cream cheese on. And that was something that was recommended as a snack, and it was one of the things that sent up a red flag for me is: why can I eat more than they’re saying I should have, and I’m still hungry, but then it’s just inducing these cravings that I want to keep going back. I want to go back and have some more half an hour later, and more half an hour later. And I could just be, just like you, I could just be on and on and on at that all day.

And that was one of the first things that got me thinking, hold on, something’s not right here. And that’s when I started tapping into things online and hearing about the experiences of other people and starting to question the wisdom of what I was being told by the surgical team. So sometimes we do have to go against what we’re being told to figure out what’s going to work for us. And I know a lot of people don’t necessarily want to do that, especially if it crosses paths with having to accept that they’ve got addictive type tendencies. It’s possibly a lot easier to just say, well, my team knows better, I’m going to do what they say and then deal with the problems when they arise. It’s been fascinating talking to you today and, and throwing around this topic of weight loss surgery. It’s not something that I’ve talked about with somebody else on this podcast in more depth and I’ve been looking forward to discussing this topic with you. I know there are a lot of people out there who are about to go through it or who’ve gone through it and run into problems.

And it is something that is sometimes shunned a bit in the community and people feel like they need to keep it a bit secret. But I definitely feel that keto is something that works very well as a way of eating after you’ve had surgery. It certainly has for me.

I think I have to agree with you on that. And I think I have heard in the United States there’s more bariatric clinics that are recommending the keto diet, which I find is fantastic. And I know amongst the people on my weight loss surgery Facebook group, there’s so many people that are discussing regaining and they’ve come to me and asked me about keto, and I’ve pointed them in the right direction. And that’s when I’ve heard people say, I’m so hungry all the time; even with the surgery, I am just hungry. And I’ve said, well, this has been my experience with keto, especially when I stopped the carbs; I know that I’m not hungry. And if that’s your challenge, then this is going to work for you I think. And I really hope that it does work for them. I think that a few people have already seen some good results with it. And I hope they continue on that.

And I just put myself out there and I’ve had numerous discussions with people saying, you know, our clinic says that we shouldn’t do fad diets. I try not to get into that whole argument about is it a fad diet? To me it’s a way of eating. It’s not a diet; it’s a way of eating it. Just as being a vegan is not a diet, it’s a way of eating. So is keto or low carb, or whatever, or being a carnivore, it’s a way of eating. Often too, when talking about keto, people will say it’s not sustainable. And it’s absolutely sustainable.

And people will say, I will miss this, I will miss that. And I want to say, tell me whatever it is you think you’ll miss and I will tell you a keto alternative. Because there’s so many people out there, so many people doing blogs and websites. Everybody’s developing all of these recipes that you can replace anything – crackers or breads or ice cream – there is a low carb version of it. So you’re not missing out on anything. You want on a birthday cake? You can have a low carb birthday cake. I don’t think you’re going to eat it every day, but you can have it. It’s there. You’re probably just going to find you’re not going to want to eat.

Sometimes I think there’s a fear around low carb as well. And I feel a little bit that the bariatric clinic – ours in particular – pushes that a little bit…that you still have to eat carbs; that low carb is bad. And so I don’t know if that’s the perception that anybody else has ever had with their weight loss surgery clinics? You know, being low carb is a bad thing. But I think that they still do get that. So I’ll get some argument, oh we’re not supposed to do low carb. Low carb is bad. And you try and challenge them. Why? Why is it bad? Tell me what’s your evidence? Where’s your science? And that’s the thing I absolutely love about keto, is that everybody is super knowledgeable about it. You go on to any of these websites – Diet Doctor, the Ketogenic Forum, the 2 Keto Dudes, and yourself – you all have all of this information at your fingertips. And people that do fad diets, they don’t know anything. They couldn’t answer a why question if their life depended on it. But I could ask anybody that’s serious about keto why something, and they’ll know. And if they don’t know, they’ll go and find out why. And they’ll tell you why and that’s the way I am too.

If somebody asks me a question, why this, why that? I’m pretty sure I know the answer at this point and if I don’t I can probably find out. And the second piece that I really like about keto is the self-assessment. Everybody’s very much into doing these N=1 experiments to see what works for you and what doesn’t work. Nobody is saying you have to eat this or you have to eat that. It’s like, well try this and see how it works. It might not work. You might not feel better, or maybe you will, and if that doesn’t work, then try something else. There’s no cookie cutter, one size fits all diet, the way that the weight loss clinic surgeons and dietitians would have you believe. You have to find what works for you because we’re all different. We all have different metabolisms, and all different body structures. We’re all different. You need to look outside the box. You need to experiment. So that’s what I really like about keto. Nobody is so stuck in the mud…it’s all written in stone…you have to do it this way.

Yes, exactly. I think that’s right. That’s what I was saying before about the biggest flaw I see about it is, them trying to put us all in one box, and that’s never going to work. It’s been great talking to you today. Perhaps you could round us off with a top tip.

I was thinking about that and there’s like so many things that I think would work so well, but kind of going off off…I saw one of your other interviewees was saying…they we’re talking about making a plan, and having goals, and I think that’s when you…how does the saying go? Failure to plan is a plan to fail. So if you can have a goal in mind. Somebody in the group had their action plan, and sleep was their goal. So if sleep is your goal, for example, make it measurable. So if sleep is your goal…I want to improve my sleep – that’s kind of nebulous. So how am I going to determine if I have reached that goal? If you make something measurable, and you make yourself accountable to that, I think you’ll do better. So first just using sleep for an example, I can improve my sleep when I have three hours of deep sleep according to my Fitbit or whatever. You know, or one of those nice Oura rings that people have been getting.

Then I would know my sleep will have improved. Make it measurable. Don’t have these up in the air goals or objectives. I want to lose weight is a great goal, but it’s kind of nebulous. Drill down a little bit. Like what is it that you’re really after? And make it measurable and make it attainable, and really look at what steps…like for sleep, maybe painting your room a different color or putting room darkening blinds…like there’s a lot of different things that you could do for your goals if you make it very specific. It’s much easier to research and see how you can attain that goal.

And then with that, to make it time specific – time that you’re going to work on reaching this goal. Like if you’re going to work on it for a month, then the really important piece, I don’t think people do…talking about self-awareness and self-assessment. Do that evaluation…okay, has this improved? Have I reached my goal? If I haven’t reached my goal, then what do I need to do to reach that goal? How have I not reached it? Have I completely failed? I think that person with the action boards that she hadn’t been looking at it for months probably because it wasn’t specific enough. It was too vague. It was too, you know, like unattainable. There was no timeline. So if you set yourself up something you can succeed at, you need to sort of plan it. We have your plan, you have your objective, you have your action steps, you have your evaluation. But if you make things very specific, I think it makes it easier to succeed at it.

Yes, especially if they’re nice little bite size steps that are attainable, and like you say, you can then re-evaluate when you’ve got to that point and change up that plan if you haven’t managed to achieve the goal, you set out, re-evaluate, and work out why it was difficult in this instance to get to it, and change it, and reset it, and then work towards that next step and so on. I think that’s a very good point, is taking it away from these sort of vague sweeping statements and drilling down into something really specific. It’s more actionable, isn’t it? When it’s specific?

Yeah. I think when you make things very specific, they do become much more actionable and much more attainable. One other guest said about keeping it simple, silly. So if it’s something simple, something actionable, something attainable; I think you’ll be much more successful in the long run. And doing that self-assessment piece, the self-evaluation. And don’t be afraid of it. People fail at things and you need just to learn from your mistakes. And don’t swim around in it. If you’ve had a failure, that’s okay. You can still pick yourself up and move on. Just don’t get bogged down by failure. Everybody fails at something. You just got to learn from them and move on. Get back on that horse.

Absolutely. And then it’s not a failure, is it, if you’ve learnt from it. I think you’re right. I think getting specific about something forces you to really look at it and set those goals. Because it’s very different, isn’t it? Saying I want to lose weight, to saying I want to get into that pair of jeans that’s the next size down. And being specific about your goal makes you actually figure out and work out what is a realistic target, and what is a realistic timeframe for that. So yes, I like it.

Well thank you very much for talking to me today. It’s been a pleasure.

Thanks so much for having me on Daisy. I’ve really loved this. It’s been fantastic.

Welcome Kim and Carrie to the Keto woman podcast. How are you doing today?

[Kim] Doing good.

[Carrie] I’m doing awesome.

It’s nice to be back together again even though it is only remotely.

It is, but you know what, Denver will keep me going for a few months. We had a fantastic time in Denver, the three of us all hanging out and being ridiculous and eating great Keto food and just, you know, chewing the cud and catching up and it was awesome. And that’s going to keep me going for a little while longer at least.

I think you two are going to be getting together a bit sooner, aren’t you? Are you both going to Salt Lake?

Yeah, we’ll be in Utah.

We are off to Low Carb Utah at the end of April. So we will uh, we’ll drink a toast to you. Daisy.

Thank you. With the wonderful Keto Chow people – I’m very jealous. I’m sure it’s going to be good; it’s a great looking lineup.

We shall miss you.

So I thought it would be really nice to have a go-to Beginners Episode that we can send anyone to who just wants to know all the basics of how to start Keto. But before we do that, perhaps you could just tell us a bit about yourselves in case people don’t know who you are. Kim?

Okay. Hi, I’m Kim Howerton and I am a Keto coach. I teach people the where’s, why’s and how’s of Keto. I also love food, so I do recipes and cookbooks. But my primary kind of mission in the world is bringing some ease and comfort and joy into people’s lives by making Keto less complicated because I myself can overcomplicate everything. And so I know that instinct and I want to help other people not indulge that instinct too much.

Carrie, what about you?

I am Carrie Brown and I am first and foremost a recipe developer, which means that I publish recipes for free on my blog. And then I also create cookbooks to serve the Keto and Low-Carb community. The other thing that I have a passion about, apart from showing people that Keto can be more delicious than any food they’ve ever eaten before, is how incredibly powerful Keto can be for helping people with mental health issues. I myself spent most of my life struggling with bipolar two disorder, but I have completely eradicated all my symptoms and the need for any pharmaceutical medications through use of a Keto diet and a few supplements. So those are the two things that I’m passionate about and that’s what I do to help people on their Keto journeys.

And of course your, well you have a few podcasts on the go, but you’re a regular Dude.

Yes, I am cohost on the 2 Keto Dudes podcast, which is a weekly podcast that I do with the wonderful Carl Franklin who has healed his type 2 diabetes following a ketogenic diet. I also podcast every month, the first Monday in the month with Aarn Farmer from the My Sugar Free Journey podcast. And in that one we focus on all the cooking things. So that’s a podcast where if you want to know what the best thickener is, or the best Keto sweetener or how to do cooking things, that’s the podcast for you.

And she is a featured player on the upcoming podcast that I’m producing, which is called Keto Life Support.

And I’m very excited about that because that too is going to be a lot about food and Kim and I love, love, love our food.

We do. The first episode we recorded was kind of a hoot because I don’t know that there are two people in the world that have spent an hour happier to discuss a spice. So yeah.

Which spice was it?

To be fair, it was several. There were several, but you know, there was a section in which we were just overjoyed about…

Cardamom

…the simplest. Yours was cardamom, but mine was the simple amazingness of onion salt.

Interesting. Interesting choice. So while you’ve mentioned that, just tell us a little bit more, give us a bit more of a tease about the new podcast.

So the new podcast is actually, um, my idea behind it was that I just find so many people out there in the world don’t have as much support as they want when they start Keto. So maybe their spouse isn’t into it, maybe their kids aren’t into it. Maybe everyone thinks they’re weird and their doctor told them they’re going to get lupus. You know, there’s kind of a pretty negative world sometimes and not all of us have enough soft places to go. 

And so the idea behind the podcast was – if you need some Keto besties, I have some to lend you. There’s going to be me, Carrie, who you’ve met today. Um, there’s going to be a little-known man named Ken Berry.

Who’s that? No, I’ve never heard of him!

You’ve never heard of him right? Yeah. Um, and Neisha Salas Berry, who is awesome as well. And so the four of us kind of are rotating through talking about, you know, medical thoughts, uh, food thoughts, lifestyle thoughts, how do we do this, how do we support? 

And then there’s also going to be a community right alongside it, a Facebook community so that, um, you get as much support as you need on your journey and you feel you’re just so you’re not alone. You’re not alone here.

That sounds fantastic. I’m wondering maybe if we should give a little bit of a tease, Carrie.

I Dunno. What do you think?

Release the tease? Well why not?

Go for it.

Why not? We haven’t completely decided on the name yet, so we, we won’t drop that yet, but we’re going to start a podcast too aren’t we?

We are!

I’m shocked! What’s happening? I usually know everything.

Yeah, somehow… How did we manage to spend all that time together in Denver and it never came up in conversation.

Because we thought we were dying of the plague.

Oh that’s right. Two of three of us. Two thirds of us were dying of the plague. So

You two were very poorly. I feel very, very fortunate that I managed to escape the plague.

I don’t know. We caught it. We were out.

Bad, bad.

I’d like to offer a suggestion as to why we kind of didn’t talk to Kim or most other people we know about it because it’s not really going to be Keto heavy.

That’s true.

What you mean you have other interests? That’s nuts! What’s wrong with you?

We started talking a while back. I think I was, and I was trying to remember last night who suggested it first. I think I might have originally thrown the idea of doing another sort of food podcasty type thing.

I think, as I recall, it came out of some person on YouTube that was criticizing a Keto Woman podcast that we did and we dared to talk about something other than Keto.

Yeah, that’s certainly where it developed.

This person kind of got upset and we like, well we, we do have other like brainwaves, we have other thoughts that involve things other than Keto and, and we actually have a lot to say about life and the universe and everything and, and… but apparently we can’t talk about it on the Keto Woman podcast. 

But a lot of other people were very interested in what we had to say. So I think that’s where the idea came from that then like let’s just do a separate one about all the other things we have to say and just make it completely separate from all the Keto things we do.

Yes, exactly. So it’s separate but linked. So our thoughts were to do a much shorter form podcast but talking about, potentially the ideas we’re throwing around are, putting out two a week – one which is talking about a motivational or inspirational quote that we’ve come across that we really like and the other one was that sort of slightly old fashioned Agony Aunt type thing where somebody has an issue and I’m sure we all see it all the time in our Facebook groups when someone says, “Oh this happened and I don’t really know what to do about it.” So we’re hoping that people will send us those in and we can offer our suggestions.

What’s it called?

We don’t know yet.

We don’t know yet! My idea that I threw out there was “Afternoon Tea with Daisy and Carrie” because I just quite like, it’s sort of having a bit of a chinwag and the whole afternoon tea thing with the both of us being Brits. So that’s an idea. But we haven’t…

A cuppa

…we haven’t fully decided. A cuppa even.

“A Cuppa with Daisy and Carrie”

Yes, maybe.

I speak Brit.

You do speak Brit, you’ve told me that before cause you used to have British nannies. Is that right?

I did. I know what a boot is and a bonnet and things like that!

We have all these different words. Some of them are funny. Some of them can get you into really deep water.

Yes, especially when you’re angry and drunk or something.

I can’t remember which one I used the other day and Carrie wrote underneath for translation for Carl what it meant in American. It means very different than, I can’t remember what it was, but had a very different meaning.

Yes

Okay. So let’s get on to the topic for today.

We could do this for like three or four hours. So we might need to get onto the topic.

We’ve sort of lapsed into just…

What we do!

What we do, yes. 

Thank you very much to the KKBs for giving me a list of suggestions to structure this podcast around. I thought it would be nice just to sort of flesh out, I suppose a series of tips, top tips of what to do, how to get started, what to avoid, what to do, what not to do, all the rest of it. 

So I guess I will just kick off and we’ll go from there. The first one is about measurements and journaling. I always add journaling because I think it’s important. So it’s about the measurements that it’s really useful to take before you start and then all about what might be useful to measure and journal as you go along.

I think this kind of grows out of the number one thing when you talk to somebody who’s really gone into the deep end of Keto and you’ll say, “You know, what do you wish that you’d done before you started?” And they are all like, “Get your baseline numbers”, ” Take before pictures”, “Measure things”. Um, even get, you know, like a full blood panel – if not before your journey, like as soon as you can – because it’s really super interesting later on in your journey to have something to compare to. That being said, if that’s out of people’s budget or you know, lifestyle, you know, a simple picture in a mirror in clothes that show your body the way it is. Um, this will be the opposite of the way many of us like to take photos, which would be in clothes that make it look better than it looks.

Exactly. It’s not for public consumption.

You’re not showing it to anybody.

Just for you.

Absolutely. And to get some measurements – all you need is a tape measure – is really helpful for sort of a starting place to have those things for posterity. 

In terms of other types of tracking, are you asking about like journaling your food and things like that?

Well. So for example, I think yes, when, when you’re starting, and that’s exactly me when you said that – I did take beginning measurements. What I didn’t do so much was set like a monthly date or something to do those. And I wish I had, when I see people like Siobhan Huggins, for example, has a wonderful collage of, I think it’s probably just her face, but she sort of took the same picture every month and it’s so good to see that. And I wish I’d done that. 

But yeah, I think taking your basic weight, measurements, photographs and doing that, say once a month. But the other things that I think are useful to journal about: what’s your sleep like? what’s your mood like? your stress? what exercise do you feel able to do? And then you see, you start pulling out the non scale victories as you go, which are really important and more important than weight, which is what people often focus too much on.

So I think conceptually you’re talking about kind of two separate concepts. 

One of them is keeping track of metrics, right? So, I’m going to have a set schedule that I’m going to track my photos, my weight, my measurements, and on this date, every month I do this. It’s my routine. And with that I can use it to motivate me or to see what’s happening when, because often we only pay attention to one metric. We pay attention to what the scale says. But we didn’t notice that we are down three pants sizes. We only cared that the weight didn’t move, you know, the scale numbered and it moves. So I think having multiple measures to track and not doing it too often, you know, once a month is plenty I think is very important. 

And then there’s a second concept, which is the day to day. So, there are different approaches and I think Carrie and I have very different approaches on this specific topic, but what do you track? What data do you want? Are you a person that needs data? Is a question. So what that would look like is keeping track every day of what are you eating? Maybe potentially using some type of an app to track what we call macros. Keeping track of your exercise, keeping track of how you feel, the less technical aspects, right? The emotion, the mood. I’m cranky today, I’m tired today. So like tracking sort of your experience on a day to day basis is sort of a secondary part and for me that was really essential because I kind of look at my Keto journey as a bit of an experiment, right? 

We’re our own experiment and when I have data I can use that to reflect how my experiment is going and I can see the effects right from that first category, what are the effects? Oh look this month I gained weight or I lost weight or my right bicep grew, like what’s going on? And then I can compare that to the day to day tracking and see did something change or is something different. Maybe there’s something I need to evaluate here.

Exactly it’s the only way really you’re going to spot patterns because you forget so quickly and the only way you can really spot is, oh hold on. I remember feeling a bit like I feel today, which is rubbish, two weeks ago. What happened? And if you can actually go back in your diary and look at that and, oh this happened on that day and this day so maybe x, y or z is a potential problem that I need to consider going forward.

Right. But I think Carrie has a different perspective, which I think is important for people to know about.

Absolutely.

And I think the main reason that the way we track or don’t track and the things we do, Kim, is so very different is that I came to Keto for very different reasons. So I did not come to Keto for weight loss. I’ve always kind of just magically hovered around the ideal weight for my height. So weight loss has never really been a thing for me. I came to Keto specifically for mental health and, in my case, that was Bipolar 2 disorder. And so, for me, a lot of the things that Kim mentioned is not, I’m not gonna weigh myself, I’m not going to measure myself cause those are not metrics that I’m interested in changing. 

But what I do wish I’d done a better job of. So whatever your reasons for doing Keto, one thing I would encourage you to make note of, and actually write it down somewhere is your non scale victories or, if you’re doing it for weight loss, your scale victories. Because people ask me now we know what changes have you seen on Keto? And I’m like, they become normal. So no skin tags, right? I no longer have any skin tags, but I actually have to remember that. 

It would be super cool now to just have this laundry list of all the things that I no longer have to deal with. And I didn’t do that. And I wish I had. And I think that would have helped me as I’d have gone along to, you know, we all get those days where it’s just like, oh why am I doing this? I’m, you know, and so to be able to get out a written list and go, oh, that’s why, because I’d forgotten that I used to have skin tags because our brains are very forgetful, so, oh yeah, I forgot that I no longer have psoriasis. I forgot that I no longer have skin tags. I forgot that I no longer need to use deodorant because I have no body odor. Because those things just become a normal part of life when you’re on Keto. And so it’s easy to forget that they were irritations that you had to deal with. 

So I do wish I had done a better job of keeping a record of that as I went and I think that would have helped me in those times where we all, you know, struggle. Just being able to pull that list out and go, oh yeah, that’s why I’m doing this would have been super helpful.

It’s really true that you forget the excitement, isn’t it? See, I only have to see someone post a picture of their belt done up on an airplane and to go back and experience what that felt like. I was really naughty actually, and I never asked for a belt extender. I just always used to hide the fact that I couldn’t do it up with it draped cardigan or something over the top of it. So I never went through that. But when somebody is super, super excited and posts a picture of said belt done up, I remember that feeling and you’re right, we should have some kind of reminder that we can really remember the excitement for those things. And those are the things I think that make more difference than losing a certain amount of weight.

I mean, we don’t wear our weight. We don’t have a sign on our head with our weight. We live a life, we have experiences, it’s how we, how fit we are within those experiences, right? How well they work for us and we work for them. Those are the real changes. Not you know, what some magical number is, but I think Carrie brings up a good point, which is not everyone gets into Keto for weight loss or not only for weight loss. And so what you track really depends very much on what you’re looking to shift

And at the start, so for the first three months, I did pee on sticks and I did track how dark purple my pee sticks were every day.

You’re peetones?

My peetones. But again that was not something you really need to do if you’re doing Keto for weight loss. For someone who was having a mental health issue, keeping ketones super high can be super important. So I was just doing that just to make sure that when I got started that the things I was eating were translating into producing large amounts of ketones, which was the goal for us because we were trying to heal my brain. And I did that for three months and then I got confident with what it takes to keep me at a certain level of ketones and then I stopped. 

The other thing that I find incredibly useful is my Oura ring. So I do have an Oura ring but you can use other things to track sleep. I find tracking my sleep and my activity is incredibly useful. So that is something I track, although I don’t track a lot of the other things that Keto people do.

Assuming we are going to do some tracking. We mentioned Siobhan earlier, so I think in her honor we will just list a few things that would be a good idea if you’re going to get that baseline blood testing lab work done. And I do think, if you have any kind of sneaking suspicion that you have issues with any of your health markers in that way, it’s so useful to do. Obviously I appreciate that, you know, it might be a budget issue but if you can at all, it’s very useful isn’t it, to just have that baseline panel?

Absolutely.

So what things should we test? What’s the bare minimum that’s going to be really useful to have to start with that we can compare say a year later or something?

I think if we’re looking at metabolic markers, there are a couple that are super important. The first would be, and these are ones that aren’t, so there are ones that your doctor will probably like smile and nod about testing, like a CBC (a complete blood panel), you know, that’s a good idea to get. If you have any thyroid issues, you’ll also want to get a complete thyroid panel. Now most doctors, or if you suspect I should say you might not know you have a thyroid issue, but it’s possible. If you have any of the kind of fatigue, brain fog, unexplained weight issues, I would suggest getting a complete thyroid panel. And so often doctors will only test one thyroid test – the TSH, but there are I think seven. And if you go to stopthethyroidmadness.com (it’s a website) they list all seven of the tests.

Yeah, and it’s brilliant. That’s what I did. I was diagnosed with underactive thyroid. I had that diagnosis for 20 years before I investigated and it was that website and that’s when I got my free T3 in particular tested but other things as well and changed my treatment from that point.

Yeah, absolutely. There’s, you know, there’s thyroid is many hormones and well, I mean it’s a thyroid hormone, but it’s many interactions within that system. You know, T4 has to convert to T3. If it doesn’t convert you have this problem. Your TSH could be normal, it could be low, it could be high but, unless you’re looking at the full panel, sometimes you’re going to miss things.

In conjunction with symptoms. That’s the other thing. It’s one of those slightly tricky ones isn’t it, that you can’t diagnose simply by the numbers?

No

Any good doctor will use the symptoms as well.

Right? We are sadly, or maybe not sadly, but we are not like data input/output machines, we’re complex systems, which means that, you know, maybe if this one hormone is a little bit low, but this other one over here is a little bit high and they’re compensating… you know, so it’s not really clear cut and nothing can be looked at in a vacuum. But I would say your complete blood panel, your full thyroid panel, you definitely want to get your A1c. Now some doctors will just test your glucose, your fasting glucose. However, a lot of things can be hidden in there and they won’t test your A1c. Now there are some, none of these tests are standalone. You have to look at them together. But, for most people, A1c is a great way to look at what your average glucose looks like. In addition to that, I would say you want to get your fasting insulin, which hardly any doctors test. So you have to ask for this.

Yeah. And that’s why it’s important to get, you get the fasting glucose and the fasting insulin done at the same time. You can actually do things with that. [See HOMA-IR calculators like this one ]

Yeah, absolutely. And then the second test, which is sort of a way to backup what you see through your fasting insulin is your C-peptide (the letter “c” – peptide) because that is going to tell you how much insulin your body is producing over the day. And so your fasting insulin tells you your baseline insulin that day, but there’s some noise in there, but then when you look at also your C-peptide, you’ll get those two in conjunction. You get an idea of what your insulin is doing and those specifically (the last two I mentioned) are ones doctors generally don’t look into, but it’s super important because it can tell you years in advance of your body completely breaking down into metabolic failure what might be going on and it is a lot easier to stop the train wreck than to fix the train that is off the tracks.

And, again, I’ve got Siobhan sitting on my shoulder.

I didn’t even mention cholesterol numbers, so we’re going to go there now.

Well we’re going to have to have a basic lipid panel I think.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I was taking a breather!

HDL, LDL and trigs have got to be (triglycerides) have got to be a basic panel that are really useful to have aren’t they?

Yeah, absolutely.

You were talking about, we were having this conversation I think when we were at Denver, you were talking about CRP as well and how useful that can be.

CRP is an interesting test and I really do suggest you get a baseline on it. There are two versions. Get the one that’s called high sensitivity or hs-CRP. It stands for C-reactive protein. What does that tell you? Well, some people will say it’s a heart marker. It’s not. It can be, but what it actually is is a generalized inflammation marker, and I think any of us who pay attention in the news these days know that inflammation is a big hot topic for a very good reason. Inflammation is sort of like, it can be very useful, but it can also be a bit of a wrecking ball within your system. 

Now, if you need to tear down a building, you need a wrecking ball, so if you’re sick, if you have some real dysfunction, if you broke a bone, you need your inflammation to go up because you need that inflammation to do what it’s supposed to do. However, when we have rather than acute inflammation, we have chronic inflammation which is ongoing high levels of inflammation that’s causing a lot of issues and a lot of metabolic damage, interactive damage. 

And so getting your high sensitivity CRP as a baseline can be fabulous because when most people go Keto that inflammation goes way down due to a couple of reasons. One is the removal of inflammatory foods and then secondarily beta hydroxybutyrate which is a ketone body has in and of itself anti inflammatory properties.

That’s an interesting one. I would like to get that done and again, Siobhan, she was really excited to get her CAC done (Coronary Artery Calcium) to get that score. Now that’s one of the slightly spendy tests, you’ve got to be quite geeky and have a bit of money to spare, but certainly a very useful test to get done.

Right. I would say that they tend to recommend you get your CAC at a certain age within this, you know, Siobhan’s younger, she got her CAC done. There’s a bit of discussion around if it’s worthwhile below a certain age just because you need a certain amount of age to show this kind of damage. But ,in the US at least, you can get the CAC done for around $99 and if coronary issues are of concern for you, say they run in your family or you know, you just know that you have a lot of risk factors for those things, you know, it’s certainly not a bad thing to do.

And the other one that can cost a fair bit of money, but it’s one that a lot of people wish they had done to start with is a DEXA scan.

Absolutely. I 100% totally completely wish that everyone had a DEXA scan to start their Keto journey. What often ends up happening, so if you don’t know what a DEXA scan is, it’s essentially like an x-ray of, that’s not the technical explanation, but it gives you an image of your body and breaks down what is fat, what is muscle, what is bone? And so one, it can kind of tell you how your bones are doing – so it’s important for like osteoporosis kind of issues – but, mainly in Keto, what we like is the body fat percentage. 

And one of the things that I have noticed is a lot of people don’t get a DEXA scan to start with and then they get a DEXA scan like six months into Keto and then they have a nervous breakdown because they’re like, “I have lost 50 pounds and I am 50% body fat. How is that even possible and what’s happening?”. Because they didn’t realize that before they started Keto – OK, I will say no one thinks they’re over 50% body fat and that is wrong – they were like 75% body fat before they started and were in some denial. So I mean, DEXAs can be a little bit of a rude awakening, but you know, you will be so glad you have that starting point.

Yes, it’s another one I would have. I would have liked to have that but you can’t go back.

It can also be very helpful in figuring out your macros.

Ah, yes, very true and we will go onto that in just one second. There were a couple that I would add I think especially for women, probably all women, and probably everyone to be honest, but especially if you’ve got any inkling that you might have a problem with iron deficiency is to get an iron panel because I think that affects a lot of people and where you’re at as far as iron goes and all the things that concerned with it, ferritin and how it gets transported around your system, and different percentages, all that stuff, can have a real impact actually on everything else. So sometimes these things, if you find out there’s an issue and if you target that and fix that, it’s the same with thyroid, isn’t it? It can have such a massive effect on everything else.

The other thing I, and I do come from a bit of a different perspective just because my journey has been so different because it wasn’t for weight loss, but for me, one of the things that was super helpful because I have a lot or I did have a lot of food allergies or food sensitivities caused by leaky gut and there’s an enormous number of people who have leaky gut but have no idea and they’re not used to correlating their symptoms with what they ate. I found it incredibly useful to keep a list, not how much I ate because again I wasn’t doing this for weight loss, but a list of what I ate and then I was linking that up. 

I mean, I discovered for myself that I was allergic to eggs because I noticed that on the days I ate eggs, about two hours after I ate them, all the skin on my feet fell off, which is weird, but true. Had I not been noting that down like I ate eggs, I ate cheese, hazelnuts, I ate whatever. It’s almost impossible to keep that all in your head and make those connections about what weird symptom could be connected to what food. If you don’t keep track of that because it might be that at some point if you’re not getting the results that you think you should be on Keto, or that you think everyone else is getting, it might be that your body’s like massively inflamed because you’re actually sensitive to eggs but you keep eating them because you didn’t know it was eggs and you take eggs out and voila, everything magically gets back on track. 

So that’s why I mentioned it because there’s some foods that can cause a whole lot of issue with anything working right just because you have a sensitivity to them. If you don’t know that, then you’re not going to eliminate it. A lot of people find that they have a problem with dairy. If you’re not keeping track of your symptoms and what you ate the day before or the hour before or four days before, it’s very hard to notice, as Daisy said earlier, those patterns. You can’t correlate them if you don’t write them down. So I would also advocate tracking what you eat, even if you’re not doing it for weight loss, because you can see patterns between what you eat and how your body responds that could be super important in your overall health.

And I think to be honest, you both know, I’m not a massive fan of tracking for myself, just mainly because I’m lazy and I can’t be bothered! However, I did at the beginning and I do whenever I think there might be a problem. So I think it’s something that I would recommend to anyone who’s starting – that they do track, at least for a given time, especially if they’re not aware of how much is in different foods. You get people who are really surprised of, “Boy, I didn’t realize how many carbs were in this food or that food!” and you make assumptions and by tracking for a while you start getting to terms with what’s in what. And, and I know Kim, you’re much more of a fan of tracking food and macros so maybe, I know those are, they’re linked, but they’re kind of two different things. Perhaps we could just talk a little bit about the importance of the two.

I also want to go, just take one step back – there were a few tests I didn’t mention and so maybe what we can do is I’ll give Daisy a list and we can put them in the show notes cause that might be a little bit easier about the baseline tests. 

CMP (complete metabolic panel)

CBC (complete blood panel)

Standard Lipid Panel

HbA1C

C-peptide

Fasting insulin

Basic Thyroid (if no symptoms)

Full Thyroid (if have symptoms)

Ulta Lab has a lot of great test packages. Another direct to consumer is Direct Labs.

There are additional tests, but that depends on symptoms. 

Okay, so in terms of tracking, I definitely am a bigger fan of tracking. Now, what I always tell people is know thyself, right? If you are someone who you say, “Kim, if you make me track, I’m not even gonna go Keto. I’m not, I’m just not going to do it!” then don’t do it. I’m not the boss of you! I just tell people what tends to work and not work. Now, if you are not tracking and you’re not seeing the results you want, then I would come back to you and say, how do you know what to change? Because you don’t have any data. If what you’re doing is working, work it, do it, keep going, go, go you! And, for some people, that works and they do awesome and they’re fine and life is fabulous.

Now, if you are not experiencing the everything you ever hoped it would be about Keto, maybe you’re not losing the kind of weight you want, if weight loss is important. As Carrie mentioned, for her, gut health and mental health were crucial. And so she really pinpointed a lot of that could be tracked in terms of keeping track of ingredients she was using and or level of ketosis. 

And so what needle you’re trying to move will dictate what specifically you’re tracking, but the more data you have, the more ability you have to make those adjustments. Also, though I would like to say don’t drive yourself insane! There are boundaries here. Some people just love tracking everything and so you have to find your happy spot. But I certainly recommend tracking your macros. 

Now that is with a caveat. Macros are only so-so accurate packages are only so-so accurate. I don’t know how fat that steak was versus this steak, that cow may have been more sedentary, this cow ate more grass. And so there is just some shrug, OK, you know, kind of so-soness you have to accept. However, I will talk to people who aren’t tracking and say, you know, “How many grams of fat do you think you’re eating in a day?” And there’ll be like, “I don’t know, 60, 70?” and then we track and it’s like 240. You know, that you can definitely use to evaluate some choices you might be making because we are just (I was gonna use a bad word!) we are terrible at estimating things sometimes that we don’t actually keep track of.

The other thing I wanted to reiterate (and you mentioned it just now Kim, but maybe I’m coming from a bit of a different angle) is you, do you. I think it’s, when you’re starting Keto, it’s incredibly, there’s like, the whole world is like shouting different ways to do it and it’s very easy to get sucked into, particularly on social media, looking at someone else’s results and copying their macros. Or you know, uh, well she doesn’t eat dairy, so therefore I don’t eat dairy or she eats loads of nuts and she’s losing weight, so I’m going to eat loads of nuts. 

You have to find what works for you. And I think it’s really important to understand that you are an individual right at the get go so that you can kind of try and stop yourself getting sucked into this comparing yourself with everybody else because everything for you will be different. I mean the general parameters are going to be the same but, within that, you’re going to find that it takes you longer to reach your goals if you’re focused on looking at someone else’s results and mimicking what they do and expecting that to work for you.

And so how important are macros? Macros, macros, macros gets thrown about all over the place. Anyone’s only got to mention Keto and macros. So, you know, what are they? And do we really need them?

I think yes and no. So, macros (for people that don’t know) macro is short for macronutrients and, when people use the term macros in Keto, they’re often talking about, you know, what is the layout of how much of these three macronutrients you eat. The three macronutrients are fat, protein, and carbohydrates. I do go over macros with people. I do think macros are important. 

However, if you think you can plug your height and your weight into some calculator online and it tells you that you should eat 19 grams of carbohydrates, 72 grams of protein and 137 grams of fat, or you’re going to fail! It can’t know that! Your experience matters. 

But macros are often a good place to start, but I would rather people have a slightly more nuanced understanding of macros. What are they for? So protein is a building block. We eat protein to rebuild our bodies. They get torn down on a daily basis. We need to rebuild them. It’s useful for building. It is a structural element. It is not primarily an energy source, not primarily, notice I use the word primarily, that is not its primary job. Carbohydrates and fat are primarily energy sources, but on a ketogenic diet we’re limiting carbohydrates so then fat becomes our energy source. 

Therefore, how much carbs, protein and fat we’re eating is very dependent upon our body’s energy needs. And so I would say: one, macros are very important, two, not in the way most people use them, three, you have to actually understand what is happening in your body to properly know how to calculate your macros.

So they’re useful in a place to start. I think so so many of these things is you, you need a place to start, you have to start somewhere and you have to start with something and you have to start with some kind of guideline of how much of each of those macronutrients to eat but, like you say, there are so many nuances involved but you gotta start somewhere.

Absolutely. Macros are a starting place. Experience is what tells you how to tweak from there.

It’s also good to know at this point that you decide are your macros when you start, is going to change because, as you heal and as you lose weight (if that’s one of your goals), your requirements (what your body needs) is going to change. So what you start out with is not written in blood. You will have to reevaluate that every, I don’t know, three months, six months or if you plateau, if you stop getting the results, if things stop changing, then you will need to change your macros to match the new you. 

And so you’ll have to go through that process repeatedly as you go along. But I think it’s good to know that now because I think a lot of people think, okay, this is what I’m going to eat forever and in, in my experience, looking at the thousands of people that I’ve interacted with, that’s just not true. You actually, you will progress and your macros will change and your needs will change as you go along on your Keto journey.

And the types of foods you eat will change, though I think the way that you start is not necessarily the way you continue. Maybe you start Keto very dairy heavy and that’s totally working for you and you’re doing awesome and things are going great, and then at some point something has shifted and suddenly it seems like your body doesn’t like dairy anymore and you have to respond to that. 

I think one of the tough things that people don’t always love about Keto when some people love it, there’s like two camps, there’s always you know, two camps, but there are the people who are like, “Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it and I want success and I don’t want to think about it.” And then there’s the other group which is like, “Life is an experiment and I’m always tinkering.” I would say the first group will probably struggle with much more frustration than the second because Keto is an adventure. 

It is always interesting and it is not one size fits all so, if you’re looking for somebody else to tell you what your body will do based on the information they’re giving you, they’re guessing. Now they may have a very educated guess. I do a lot of guessing. But then you do checking, guessing and checking. And if you’re not doing the checking part you might be very sad.

And I think from the most basic point of view, whether you’re really into tracking or not, the one macro that everyone needs to focus on is carbohydrates and simply limiting them below a certain level.

Yeah.

That’s another question. Well there are two things because you see macros expressed as percentages, which I don’t think works very well, I think it’s better to look at grams. So you hear that magic number of keeping below 20 grams of carbs per day. And again, that that is different for everybody but that’s a kind of a general rule that’s going to work for everyone isn’t it? But the other thing that gets asked a lot, and I know you get this question a lot is net carbs or total carbs, which should I be going for?

I am firmly in team total!

I know!

I’m firmly on team total for some reasons. One of which is actually something you just mentioned, right? Which is some of us have a higher carb tolerance and some of us have a lower carb tolerance, but we tend to recommend, and I tend to recommend, the lowest common denominator, right? Which is 20 works for almost everybody, so let’s go with 20 right? 

In terms of if you just need a number for grams of carbs and you’re not going to test what specifically is your range for where you stay in Ketosis? Some people can get away with more carbs and, just as an analogy, some people can get away with net carbs. But I don’t go by, I don’t suggest what some people can get away with. Like I don’t suggest not wearing your seatbelt because you may not get in a car accident. I suggest doing the thing that I find most effective for most people and that is counting total.

There are a couple of reasons. One, it’s less complicated. Two, some people are affected by fiber, depending on the type of fiber. And the other thing is that food manufacturers are getting very, very sneaky.

Um, really sneaky.

And so there are a lot of foods on the market that will tell you it’s 2 net carbs but you, it’s all you ate today and your ketones went from 1.5 to 0.2. Now I’m going to say that that’s either net carbs is BS or they’re lying to you with some creative math. And so I just find if you count total carbs, you avoid that whole mess because you’re like, “No, I don’t eat Quest bars because the total carbs are far too high.” I do have some tolerance for people looking into certain types of sweeteners, like maybe you’re like, “No, you know, my body doesn’t seem to have a negative impact from erythritol so I’m going to subtract those carbs are not count those carbs in my carb count.” 

I also have tolerance. If you say, “You know what, when I eat a lot of vegetables, my ketones are great and I don’t have any issues, so I’m going to count net carbs on leafy green veggies” and I’m like, “If that works for you, great.” But I certainly would not suggest net carbs on any package products with a lot of fiber because there are metabolically active fibers that they pretend aren’t.

Yes, exactly. People can get freaked out and I think that is often with a packaged goods isn’t it? They’re like, “What? Someone recommended this and it’s millions of total carbs.” And it’s because it’s got the sugar alcohols and everything in it. That’s another thing that’s interesting that is a debate that goes on and I certainly know that I’ve changed my opinion on it as I go and that’s how many of the Keto treats types of foods and the carb substitute types of foods to include in what you’re doing. 

And, as I say, I do think it changes as you go on. When I started Keto I wanted to play around with all those kinds of recipes and make the perfect Keto bread and cookies and all the things and that can be really good to see you through that hump. I’ve come to the place now where I hardly eat those kind of things because I find that they tend to bring out cravings and things for those types of foods and I tend to overeat and so on. But have you got a go-to or is it completely flexible about whether to go there with those kinds of foods when you start?

I think this is so, so personality based. It really is knowing yourself, you know, people will talk about – apparently I’m very binary! – there are two groups. There are the people that will say don’t feed the beast, right? If you feed the cravings, they’ll just follow you around. Like don’t, don’t treat him like a stray dog. And then there are other people that say, “You know, when I have the Keto brownie, I don’t eat a regular brownie. That is a win for me and I’m going to call that a win and be good with that.” I think it depends and people tend to know. Like last year at Christmas time I was like no more sweets for awhile. Like I was just done with them and I, you know, I had a month of just kind of meat and a little bit of veg and that was great and then you know, at some point in the future, I might say, “You know, I’m kind of feel like making some Keto something or other” and I’ll do it.

My list of products that I will buy that are Keto treats is exceedingly short because, if it has ingredients that require I have some type of a lab in my house to make, I don’t want to eat them from the lab, from the, you know, the purchased product either. And I’m not trying to like say like science is bad. I’m not, I’m not saying that, I’m just saying I know how certain foods work and if I don’t understand what the food is because it’s been changed so much biochemically, I can’t trust it anymore.

Good point. What about you Carrie? You’re into all things to do with cooking. What’s your view on this for somebody who’s starting?

For package products – and I’m always going to err on the side of how it tastes – Kim’s here to give us the science about why you shouldn’t eat it and I’m just here to say…

Plus they do taste like complete crap as well!

They do. And because I’m less focused on weight loss and I know how to keep myself in my brain happy range, I will try or I’ll have a bite of all of them. And I can tell you that 95% of packaged products don’t even get on the bottom rung of the scale of tasty in my little world. So I would always suggest, for different reasons to Kim, but I would always suggest that learning how to cook some things, simple things, and using real whole foods is always going to be a million times better than any packaged products you can buy. 

There’s a few exceptions to that rule, but honestly, if you look at the recipes that Kim and I create, it doesn’t take you to have a degree in the culinary arts. It does not take a ton of time. It does not take a lot of fancy equipment or expertise. We’re really focused on helping you become brilliant in the kitchen in a way that you probably never thought possible, but in very simply and easily and quickly, being able to create delicious Keto meals that are better than anything you’ve been eating for your life so far and are light years better than any packaged product you can buy?

Yes, I must admit what I’ve found with, and I’ve got to sample a few more of these products, the ones that are the nicest are the ones that are quite close to home cooked foods.

Right.

It’s the ones that have quite a short shelf life and they are basically home-baked Keto foods that might have a bit of preservative or some kind of thing in there to extend their shelf life a bit, but they’re basically pretty much what you could do at home and they’re the nicest ones that I found.

I think whey is a problem in my experience a lot of people find whey products very difficult to lose weight on. And a lot, I would say the majority of products out there that are kind of like a baked thing or a bar or something that’s cooked, they’re going to have whey in there. So I won’t even look at products that have whey in them.

Yes, I feel that it’s a bit problematic. I know you do too as well, don’t you Kim?

Yeah, I mean I think there is a time and a place potentially for use of things like whey protein isolate in terms of are you a bodybuilder person who’s looking for a specific type of an effect? Biochemically and what it, but I don’t use it as a filler ingredient in baked goods. It’s a targeted type of isolated protein that you may or may not think is useful within a certain context. But I see a lot of people using it as a, you know like a “free flour” in a baked good because, “well it doesn’t have any carbs!” But it does have other effects and I just simply find from experience people don’t do as well when they include it for the most part. 

Now the poison is sometimes in the dose, right? Like I once saw a creamer that had what was probably an infinitesimal amount of it. That would be different say than you know, making a whey protein shake. So you know, I also want people to use common sense. But most of these packaged products: one, they don’t taste good, two, they aren’t great for you, three, I think there’s just some sort of like mental pathway that they awaken about junk food eating. It’s just bad layered on, not good, layered on sort of meh. I don’t think that’s a good layer cake. There are recipes you can make that are super easy and there are a few products that are tasty in my opinion and not so bad. So stick to that short list and or cook a little bit is probably the better way to go about things.

However, when you’re starting out, if grabbing one of these products is what’s going to keep you going, do that! Because we would rather you stay on of much of you on the Keto train as you can when you’re starting out than completely go and buy a box of Little Debbies and chow down on those.

Absolutely. I think a very important thing that we have stolen from the 12 step community is “Progress, not Perfection”. I think if you’re like, if I’m not perfect, screw it all. I’m having the Little Debbies. You might want to just reevaluate your mindset and make the best choices you can today and you can make better choices tomorrow.

But if you’re caught out, if you’re in a situation where you didn’t plan well or the day went sideways and you find yourself out and you have a Quest bar in your bag, eat the Quest bar rather than drive through McDonald’s and get a Big Mac and fries is all I’m saying.

Exactly. There are always those choices in the moment to make aren’t there? And I think what we’re talking about underlying this, and it’s an important thing to deal with are cravings. Cravings you’re getting for those old, carby foods, that’s when you’ve been doing it for a while, but it might just be those carby foods that you gave up yesterday.

Well it looks like we’re going to have way too much information for just one show, so we’re going to break it here and come back with part two next week.

Yay part two!

Yay.

Thank you very much.

This transcript is brought to you thanks to the hard work of Karen Jones.

Welcome Belinda to the Keto woman podcast. How are you doing today?

Thank you. Yeah, I’m doing very well

Enjoying the conference?

It’s a wonderful conference. I’ve had a great opportunity to meet a lot of very interesting people here.

It’s really good, isn’t it? And I’ve, I’ve noticed there are lots of people involved in the Type 1 community here.

Yes. I was excited to meet many people I’d heard of in the discussion group yesterday and to have the opportunity to exchange ideas and it was wonderful.

Fantastic. Well perhaps you could tell us a bit about you.

I’m in pediatric endocrinology at Boston Children’s Hospital and I’ve taken care of people, and children especially, with Type 1 Diabetes for several years now and worked mostly in obesity research. And we have recently come across a Facebook group called Type 1 Grit that are following a very low carbohydrate approach for Type 1 diabetes. According to a book by Doctor Bernstein called Doctor Bernstein Diabetes Solution. And I was just blown away by the success they have in managing their diabetes as it compares to my experience that I have my own practice and in seeing children with diabetes at diabetes camp who eat a standard diet with a high amount of carbohydrate. And so that got us into wanting to study this approach and into wanting to learn more about it to see if we could bring that to our patients as well.

Yes, because really logically it seems like such a good approach when you’re trying to manage blood glucose levels all the time. So it just seems the easiest way, to eat this way to keep your blood glucose within a certain range. Logically to me that that just seems that it’s going to be the easiest way to manage your insulin.

Logically, it does make a lot of sense, right? And in fact, before insulin was discovered, that’s how diabetes was managed. And then when insulin came about, carbohydrate restrictions were just loosened gradually over the years to the point where now we recommend a fairly high carbohydrate diet for people with Type 1 diabetes. And surprisingly, I don’t think that anyone has really done the studies to show that that’s the way to go. So I’m really looking forward to hopefully contribute a bit to that.

Yeah, exactly. So tell us a bit about the study you’ve been doing.

So this study, this is really a first effort to look at what people are doing and to describe their success. So what we did for this as studies, we just posted a fairly simple online survey to the Type 1 Grit community. At the time of the survey there was about a thousand people following the low carb diet recommended by doctor Bernstein. Now it’s over 3000 the last time I checked yesterday. 

And so we ask people, you know, what do you do? Like, what’s your typical diet, how much carbohydrate do you eat, what’s your hemoglobin A1c? We ask them to download some of their meter reads, look at their day to day variations in blood glucose levels. We ask for complication rates because a lot of people are worried that low carbohydrate diets may increase risk for ketoacidosis and hypoglycemia, poor growth, etc. 

So we did ask about those things as well. I think what’s special about our study is that we actually also ask people for permission to talk to their medical doctors and providers so that we could get some objective information from those people as well to validate what participants had reported. Because one of the largest concerns with surveys is that you never know what people report or recall correlates with what’s actually happening. And so having information from two independent sources really increases the confidence in your findings. 

We were able to survey over 300 adults and parents of children with Type 1 diabetes and found remarkable glycemic control in that group with an average hemoglobin A1c of 5.67%. And that is really something that’s thought impossible to achieve for people with Type 1 diabetes. Because if you want to control your blood sugar to a certain degree, at some point you’re going to risk having too low of a blood sugar. Because what, especially when you eat carbohydrates, your blood sugar goes up and down a lot, right? Every time you eat carbohydrate and cover it with insulin, you will inevitably see a peak followed by a drop in blood sugar. So if you, as you’re trying to bring that peak down, you’re going to risk or have a low sugar reading later. And of course that has to be prevented almost at all costs because that kid cause coma, a seizure, a severe problems down the road.

That seems to be the biggest fear in the community of the Hypo.

That’s a huge, you know, because it’s a huge immediate threat, right? And people experience that, you know, some people have lows every week or every day and so you know, you constantly have to mitigate how low can you go without being in trouble?

And is it true that the, again, my logic, the higher peaks, the lower and the more potential you’re going to have to dip into that hypo zone or does it not necessarily work that way?

Well, it’s likely because a lot of the highs and the lows result from a mismatch between insulin action and carbohydrate uptake. And the larger that dose of insulin that you take, the higher the risk for a big mismatch, right? If you eat a very small amount of carbohydrate and you take a small dose of insulin, you might have a mismatch, but it’s not gonna be as massive as if you ate 10 or 40 times more carbohydrate and you would have taken 10 or 40 times more insulin for that.

Absolutely. How long was this study? The participants, how long were they reporting?

So this was just an observational study so it was a survey that was posted at one time point. And so we had asked people to report on their experience. So the study itself has cross sectionals, but we had people reporting being on the diet anywhere between three months and 60 years.

Wow. Really?

Yeah. Average time on the diet was right around three years. Most people between maybe two and five years.

So I’d be really interested to hear some of the details with those people who had been on it for such a long time.

Right. At this point we just asked everyone the same questions, so I don’t have a way to know much specific about the people who’ve been on it for a long time. But we do hope to do some followup work. I actually just got funding for a randomized controlled trial for a very low carbohydrate diet for people with Type 1 diabetes compared to a standard diet where we’re going to deliver meals to them and then measure their blood sugar control in our research unit, have them on continuous glucose monitors so we can track their readings very closely. 

And so in order to make this a meaningful intervention, I plan to reach back out to some people off the Type 1 Grit community and other people who are following low carb. So I think in that setting, I’ll be able to tease out more details about what do they really do on a day to day basis, what’s their diet, what’s their macros, do they eat plant based or animal base. You know, all those questions are fascinating and unanswered yet.

And so what was the scope of the study and the questions you were asking? And so the results, the feedback you got.

When we heard about this group, you know, first of all that was a phenomenon like achieving such good glycemic control that’s unheard of in people with diabetes. So really our first point was setting out to make sure they actually had Type 1 diabetes and not maybe Modi or Type 2. So we had a lot of questions to ask for diabetes antibodies and age at diagnosis and those kind of things and it really appears that almost all people who participated in the survey do have Type 1 diabetes. 

And then we wanted to know their overall blood sugar control, which was very, as I said. We had asked for hospitalizations and hypoglycemia rates, ketosis rates, use of Glucagon. And so all of those possible complications that people think maybe associated with a low carb diet, they were very low in this group when you compare it to other studies that survey people with diabetes and who follow standard protocols. There were low rates for Ketoacidosis, low rates for diabetes hospitalizations, low rates for hypoglycemia. 

We had looked at growth in children or height I should say, because if you want to look at growth, that’s difficult, right? You have to look over a period of time. And because this was just a single time point, we could only look at height and we had asked some of the physicians to provide growth data from when they’re diagnosed. So a subset of kids, we actually have growth rates over over a two year period and about 30 to 40 kids. And they appear to have grown normally as far as I can say. And then everyone was above average or even above average tall. So we didn’t see any impacts on growth even though that would not be the right study to perfectly answer that question. 

We found that people have a very satisfied with their diabetes control and strategies. They were less satisfied with the medical care that they received. And that was a big concern that study raised for me because at least 30% had said they didn’t feel comfortable sharing with their diabetes care provider that they were on this diet. And, even the people who felt comfortable sharing that, a large proportion of them felt like the physician wasn’t supportive and wasn’t helpful in managing their diabetes in that setting. And so that made me as a physician very uncomfortable because I think that an honest relationship between physician and patient is paramount, especially if it comes to something so physiologically influential as a diet because you have to have a whole different set of considerations – as we heard at the conference, your lab tests will look different; you may have different risks for complications; and when you get sick, you may need different management advice – you may not be managed the same as someone who’s eating a high carb diet. 

So I felt that was a very sad finding to see that those people who are so tremendously successful and dedicated are so unsupported or feel so unsupported. And I think there was a real lack of information about this approach and it is very important to do more research, to educate the medical community and to help enhance and make resources available so that there could be better communication hopefully.

Yeah. Because the potential feedback for the advantage of the physicians, I can see so much potential there as well. It’s not just the patient thats missing out, but it’s their physician that’s missing out gaining valuable knowledge for perhaps a potentially better way to manage this problem.

I think it’s a mess all around because diabetes, Type 1 Diabetes especially, is an incredibly challenging, dangerous disease to manage, it’s very high risk, it’s a lot of work. You really need a team, you should be working together. Y you shouldn’t have to start out trying to do this on your own.

No, and that just heightens the fear and anxiety that’s so closely bound with having the condition, I imagine. And perhaps you could talk a little bit about Ketoacidosis in this situation and the potential concern. Whenever anyone starts talking about ketones in the community as a whole, there’s a real misunderstanding between being in Ketosis and Ketoacidosis – it’s cited as you shouldn’t do Keto because of this. And most of us are well schooled in the fact that for the majority of people, it’s not an issue unless you’re a Type 1 Diabetic. And so I can imagine that for people potentially using this way of eating to help manage their Type 1, that must be a red flag that comes up, that is going to be something that they’re concerned about happening.

Yes. I’ll start by saying that there is really no research and no literature to actually know the right answer in this and that’s what makes it scary. The concern with eating a very low carbohydrate diet is that most likely, depending on how low you go, you might be in nutritional ketosis, and in fact, I know that some people specifically aim to be in nutritional ketosis to have health benefits. 

As we’ve heard at this conference, if you don’t have Type 1 Diabetes, if you have Type 2 Diabetes or if you don’t have diabetes at all, your ketone levels almost cannot exceed a certain level because if your ketone levels rise to an unsafe threshold, your body will actually make insulin triggered by the ketones themselves to bring them back down, so it’s a calibrated system. It’s stable. 

If you have Type 1 Diabetes, you do not have that opportunity, so if your ketones could go incredibly high without your body having the ability to intervene because you cannot make insulin. And so that’s why people with Type 1 Diabetes, no matter what diet they’re on, they’re at risk for having ketoacidosis if they don’t get sufficient insulin by injection or by insulin pump. So that’s always a risk. 

When people who eat a standard carbohydrate diet, when their insulin delivery is interrupted or when they get sick and become so insulin resistant that whatever insulin they get doesn’t work, the first thing you see is their blood sugar will go very high and then you’ll know to check for ketones and then you’ll know that you’re in Ketoacidosis, and you could usually, if you’re vigilant, you could treat it before it becomes real dangerous, so it’s preventable. 

If you eat a low carb diet, your insulin delivery may be interrupted or you may be insulin resistant from an illness and your blood sugar may still not rise very quickly because you don’t have any carbs on board, right? You don’t have carbs in your gut and you could still have a very low blood sugar event in the setting of insulin deficiency and you may go into ketosis or ketoacidosis even without having the typical warning signs of it, and I think that that’s one of the concerns people have. 

I’ve heard people be worried about potentially even having a lower threshold for ketoacidosis because your ketones are already elevated and you’re kind of closer to it, again, there isn’t really any good studies to support this. I wanted to point out that even though the Type 1 Grit community showed that they really didn’t have a lot of Ketoacidosis, hospitalizations, or ED (emergency department) visits or episodes at all, this is a special group – they are very highly motivated, vigilant, incredibly engaged people that are very in tune with their diabetes care. 

There might be other people who don’t pay as much attention for whom I think the risk is probably substantially larger than this group that I had the opportunity to work with. I think what I want to say, in my opinion, again, without having a lot of research behind it, it’s probably important to measure your ketones, especially if you’re on a low carb diet to know what your baseline level is, and if you see deviation, if you feel sick or if you feel unwell to check it then and if you see any increase from what you usually run to be careful and to know that you could be at risk for having ketoacidosis.

Yes, I think Cushner mentioned that yesterday. He was showing us the difference, with the constant glucose monitor, the difference in the graphs just in general between people eating the standard diet and a Keto or low carb diet, and that variance was incredible. But he mentioned about a particular time of risk, if something like an insulin pump problem or something happened during the night and you weren’t aware of it and you woke up and maybe the ketones could be going up then. But then he spoke about that relative difference. Just as you said, knowing what your standard baseline is and what its increased to, it’s more important – that difference between the two – than having a specific number that everyone should be concerned when their ketones get to that certain amount. It’s very specific to you and what the differential is for you.

Right? Because I think there is a huge gray zone. For example, if you’re on a high carb diet and your ketones are 1 and 1.5, that’s not normal. So you at that point, you would want to start troubleshooting and looking for problems with your equipment or your insulin or to see if you’re sick. You may want to take extra insulin to cover for that because that’s not normal on a standard diet. 

If you’re on a low carb diet, you may habitually be at 1.5 you may even be at 2 or 3, depending on your constitution and what you do on your diet. But then going from maybe 2 to 3, that could be a warning sign, right?. We know that when you’re at 10 you’re in trouble. But when you were at 4 or 5, could that still be diet, could that already be Ketoacidosis? And the truth is you don’t want to go to 10 before you intervene because that’s when you’re really in fairly severe ketoacidosis. 

I think the key about ketoacidosis and successfully treating it is to catch it early. And so the early warning signs may be subtle. If your ketone levels are always elevated and knowing your levels will help you recognize a small increase and may help you treat early if you if you have to, because that’s when you can still get a handle on it at home and be fine in a few hours versus having to go to the hospital and putting yourself at risk.

Yes. Again, it’s this empowerment of the self knowledge and the knowledge of the environment in which you’re working in. And again, the slightly sad aspect is if you have this mismatch with your medical team, because again, it’s another example of where it’s so important to be working closely with them.

Right. I know Jack Kushner, and myself certainly as well, we were trying to help inform the medical community about this approach, and also specifically help to provide research that may support a meaningful way to handle this.

And I know you did a presentation last night here at the conference, a special presentation, probably predominantly for Type 1s, but I know there were other people there as well. Was there anything you know of particular interest that came up in the Q&A that you’d like to share?

You know, I think it’s, it’s a lot of the same questions. People are very interested about the ketoacidosis question. I get a lot of questions about hypoglycemia, and specifically asking is is actually safe to be hypoglycemic when you’re on a ketogenic diet? I think there is a notion that if you have high enough ketone levels and your brain can run on ketones, maybe it’s not as dangerous to be in hypoglycemia and maybe you’d be relatively protected. 

People say that they don’t feel the lows as much, that they feel fine, they’re fully functional. Why should I worry, right? I think again, that’s a little bit of a dangerous territory because even if you feel fine, you’re incredibly close to a threshold where you may not be fine. And to be truthful, there isn’t any study or there isn’t a lot of data to show you that you’d be fine solely on ketones, there are a few experiments, there are some animal studies. 

And we’re not going to be able to study that either because you can’t really deplete someone in an experimental setting to the point where you could show, yes, I’m totally safe and fine without it, right? And who would want to risk their own brain? The brain is very vulnerable, it needs fuel and has no stories, right? If it’s not fueled properly, you could have a seizure, you could go into coma, you could have brain damage. And I do think that ketones are protective to a degree, and I do think that the brain can use them as a fuel, but do you really want to press your limits to test that? I think that maybe not.

I guess that’s where the anecdotal feedback really becomes important. So if people have got the data from their monitors and they can also feedback, well this is where relatively speaking I was quite low and that might be something that would affect somebody differently who was on a standard diet to me. And they can just feedback where you were saying that potentially some people were saying that they felt maybe they didn’t experience hypos in the same way. So I suppose that’s where the only thing that you say because you can’t test it, is to just collect that anecdotal evidence.

And I also think that that’s a double sided sword (is that what you say in English?). Because you’re low and don’t feel it, people think, okay, I can be low, I’m safe. But if you’re low and you don’t feel it, that’s also a genuinely unsafe situation because feeling a low as a warning sign that helps you intervene. So if you’re losing that warning sign, you could potentially go a while without knowing, and you could go severely, really low without having a proper warning. 

If someone who eats a standard carb diet and who generally runs high, they’d feel terrible when they have a 70. At 70 you’re miles away from a dangerous zone so you have a lot of time and you get a lot of warning to intervene. If you feel fine at 50 or even 40 even as I’ve heard from some people, you’re really close to a zone where it may be potentially a little more dangerous and that we don’t know enough about. I can’t dismiss a hypoglycemia just because you don’t feel it, because the feeling is also a warning sign.

How much feedback did you have? Was it part of the study with how people were feeling? How much improvement they were seeing from switching to this way of eating in their general wellbeing and lifestyle? I know it’s something that can really impact that day to day living and cause a lot of anxiety. And the potential of a way of eating to diminish that and really improve your overall wellbeing seems like probably the biggest benefit, in a way, to just being able to live a “normal life”.

So we had asked questions and had provided some scales to see how do you feel, how is your general health? And we’d also ask some open ended question, what would you like to tell us about this approach, and we got very positive responses. People reported that they’re feeling great, that they had been able to put aside a lot of their concerns about diabetes and about highs and lows, that they feel that they’re able to focus better and that they are just healthier because they don’t have to go through those ups and downs, that it takes a lot of anxiety, especially off the parents’ backs. 

A piece of caution though is that obviously these are people who’ve adapted this approach successfully and who are enthusiastically behind it. So you will get the positive answers, right? If a person had tried it and had hated it or had been miserable or had maybe even been noncommittal, they would probably have not continued on this approach and they would not have ended up in this study.

So there is that bias inherent, right?

So there is inherent bias to this, but you know, those people who are successfully doing it love it.

Fantastic. And how have you found this influences your practice?

I’ve been supportive of patients who’ve chosen to be low carb. I’ve tried to learn as much as possible as I can. Even before I did this study, I did read the book that Dr Bernstein had written and I actually went to visit with him for a week to learn from his practice. While I’ve been supportive, I don’t feel like I’m in a position where I can teach people that approach yet.

I was going to ask you if it’s something you’re actually at the level where you recommend or whether you’re just supportive of people who’ve decided to do it.

Again, I’m still being supportive and I’m still trying to explore structures. I haven’t at this point met a dietician who can actively support it, I don’t have a diabetes nurse educator that can actively support it. We’re in the process of trying to build those structures because I’m intrigued, but I do think to offer actual teaching and education as a medical team, it’s a high responsibility and I want to do it right. I don’t want to do half finished things and then end up with patients who are not optimally cared for.

Absolutely. Yeah. Good. Good approach.

So we support it. If someone comes to me and says this is what I’m doing, I’m eager to help them and learn with them. But I haven’t, I’m not yet offering it.

So people aren’t finding that mismatch that we mentioned before,.

That’s paramount, right? To keep the lines of communication open.

It kind of seems obvious to me but whatever approach your patient is taking, it’s always going to be paramount to work closely with them to give them the best care you can. Yes. And you, you already mentioned there were some more studies that are going to follow on the back of this.

Yeah, I’m right now in the process of planning a randomized controlled trial, which is as you’ve heard a million times at this meeting, is considered the gold standard. It’s really what we need to show ff this could be successfully brought to a wider audience, right? There is always going to be motivated people that can do certain things and that need to be supported. But my question as a physician, is there something that I can do to bring this to other people? And I feel like once I do that trial, I’ll have learned a lot from my own practice and hopefully can provide information for other providers who might be interested in promoting this. So this is going to be a smaller trial, about 40 people, and if it’s successful, the next step might be larger and maybe multicenter studies and hopefully informing diabetes care.

I usually ask my guests at this point, and I appreciate that I’m springing it on you, for a general top tip for our listeners.

I think “Keep an open mind and be supportive and try to work together as a team”.

Perfect. And that certainly fits in with what you’ve been talking about. It’s been a great pleasure talking to you today. Thank you so much and I wish you all the best for your future trials and studies and your practice.

Thank you.

This transcript is brought to you thanks to the hard work of Cheryl Meyers.

Welcome Mikhaila to the Keto Woman podcast. How are you doing today?

I’m doing very well. Thanks for having me.

I really enjoyed watching your presentation. Perhaps you could share with the viewers a bit about yourself.

Well, we’re at the carnivore conference and I was put up first, which was a little bit nerve-wracking.

Yeah. You handled yourself well.

Thank you. There were a couple of technical difficulties, but we got through it. Yeah, it was fun. I can’t believe I almost started crying. That never happens. But, so yeah, I think I was nervous, but it was good.

I think it adds to it though–adds authenticity.

It does, I know. I’ve watched my dad and he does that on stage and I’m like, Ah, dad, come on. It’s real. But like, anyway, that’s never happened before. So it was good though. And there are a lot of people here.

Yeah. It’s fabulous, isn’t it though? The first carnivore conference.

It’s fun though. It’ll be bigger next year, I think.

Absolutely. It’s going to go from strength to strength. Yeah. So tell us about you. You’ve got a fascinating story.

I’m 27 and I was super ill since I was two. I had symptoms since I was two, but I was formally diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis when I was seven. I was on immune suppressants–Enbrel, methotrexate, naproxin and then, it was just like one thing after another worsening health up to 22 when I started looking at diet. So I was put on SSRIs for really severe depression when I was in grade five. I ended up with chronic fatigue when I was 14 and that wasn’t diagnosed formally until I was 22. When I was 17, even on all the medications I was on, I needed a hip and ankle replacement. So I spent a year on oxycontin getting the hip and ankle replacements done because there’s a waiting list in Canada. So I had to wait for it.

And then I had to take an extra year of high school because of all the school I missed. And I eventually went to university and then I started just eating like a university student does, which was just terrible looking back on it. But I was like, I was finally free of my parents and there was like, well, do I want to eat like eggs for breakfast or do I want to survive off of Cinnamon Toast Crunch? I was like, Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Ginger Ale and noodles. And I got, like, my mental health deteriorated really quickly. It was already really bad to begin with, but it got so much worse–just like, the first month of changing my diet that dramatically.

And I didn’t know that that’s what it was. So I had just moved out. I was living with a roommate who was a crazy person, probably not as crazy as I was at that time, but he was, I thought, hey, he was my issue because he was just making me so angry. And then I was like in relationships that were upsetting. School was stressful, so I thought it was just from the change. But now looking back on it, I know it was because I was just eating terribly. So for the next two years I kind of continued to eat like that. And I started gaining weight, which had never happened before. And then it started hitting my skin. I started getting rashes and my skin was breaking out and it was kind of like acne, but it wasn’t. And I went to doctors and they tried to figure out if it was bacterial and it wasn’t. And then they suggested it was me just doing it to myself from anxiety.

Oh great.

Yeah.

That’s often the fallback, isn’t it? Especially this sort of area of issues, because they’re so hard to pin down. It quite often just gets put on you.

Yeah. Well, anything they don’t know. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I was called at one point, I was called a hypochondriac because I got, this was like in my early, early twenties and I started getting really tiny, itchy blisters on my fingers and I was like, this is bad. Hey, this shouldn’t happen to a person. Itchy blisters are a bad sign of something. They’re like, oh no, you’re being a hypochondriac. I was like, what? I physically have blisters on my fingers. This is a bad sign. Um, but yeah, there was a lot of, especially with the chronic fatigue, um, I got a lot of hell and my parents feel bad about it now, especially once I was diagnosed, but for a solid six, seven, I’d say eight years, it was, you know, pull yourself together and get out of bed.

And I was like, well maybe everyone just experiences this level of fatigue and they’re just stronger people than me. But then I was diagnosed with idiopathic hypersomnia and put on Adderall. But when I was 22, I decided–this was after going through every doctor I could find to deal with this skin problem. Cause that was the one that was really–like, now that I look back, I know my anxiety was worsening, too, but the skin is what I was obsessing over because it was affecting how people saw me on the outside and everything else before that was kind of invisible. So I had gone through every medical route I could go through and it was getting worse and worse and worse. And so I figured I had to figure out what was going on myself. So, at that point I had moved in back with my parents. I switched schools, I switched programs and went into biomedical science. And it was like, if this takes me 10 years, I’m just going to study and figure out what’s wrong.

Seems to be quite a common thread with people who have issues that they’re struggling either to get diagnoses for or to get fixed. They start trying to figure it out themselves. Study when necessary and do whatever they can to just figure it out themselves and find their own solutions.

Yeah. Well at a certain point, like if you go, you know, you’re told go to the doctor if something’s wrong and if you go to the doctor and they don’t help you and then you go to like 20 other doctors and none of them help you at some point, you’re like, okay, if I’ve done this the right way 20 times and it hasn’t worked, then I have to do something different. So yeah, I figured that out when I was about 20 and had lost, I had already kind of lost faith in the medical community a number of times. When I was 17, I really, really needed painkillers for the hip and ankle replacement. I couldn’t sleep. The pain was so bad and I couldn’t put my hip in a position that didn’t hurt.

That was a pretty young age to have such a big operation.

Seventeen.

It sounds like your whole childhood was plagued with all sorts of medical interventions. It must have been difficult to deal with.

Well, looking back. Yeah it was. But when you’re a kid and you’re sick, it’s not as hard as when you’re an adult and you’re sick. Like it’s just, and looking back, I know I was sick. Like I went to see the rheumatologist. I guess I wanted to see her every six months. I got blood tests monthly, I gave myself injections weekly, multiple injections weekly. And I saw my family doctor probably once a week, I was in the medical system, but it was normal. I had never experienced anything different. And then when I got older it was like, oh, this is annoying. In a lot of ways it was easier as a kid, which is something–like I wrote a blog post about it and it was about, you know if you have a sick kid and how hard is that for a parent and like when we used to go to the rheumatologist, my mum needs to cry every time we went and I’d bring my stuffed animal and she’d hold it and cry and I’d be sitting on the table and be like, yeah, she’s just like poking around in my joints. Yep. That one hurts. That one hurts. That one hurts. But mom would be like crying.

I know what you mean–kids are actually pretty resilient and just go with what’s happening without overthinking it, as we do when we get older.

Understanding the ramifications.

Apparently when I was first diagnosed, I was diagnosed and my parents were told rheumatoid arthritis, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, this means multiple joint replacements at a young age. And I had no idea what that meant at all. And like 30 because they, they suggested the joint replacements would happen when I was around 30–30 when you’re in grade two is like a really old person. So it didn’t bother me. But when you’re an adult and you understand what that means and like how much suffering that actually is, it’s harder. So I didn’t have–I had a hard time as a teenager because my mental health, even with the antidepressants, it was pretty hard–it deteriorated. But it wasn’t really until I grew up more in my twenties that I understood how bad this was and that it was like really starting to kill me.

You were saying you were having a lot of pain with it and you needed to get painkillers.

With the hip and ankle replacement? Yeah. The first time I really lost faith in the medical community was, I stopped being able to sleep because of the hip pain. And I was on the waiting list for a hip replacement. And I went to my rheumatologist who I’d been seeing since I was in grade two and I said, I need some painkillers, my parents were like, she needs painkillers. And my, grandpa had come and he had been taking Tylenol 3, like daily for back pain and he was like, Oh man, she can’t sleep. So he’d given me Tylenol 3 and I could actually sleep.

So we went to the rheumatologists and said, you know, she needs pain medication. And my rheumatologists said, have you tried Ibuprofen? And it was like, I have no cartilage in my hip and I need a hip replacement like yesterday and I can’t sleep. And you’re asking me if I popped an Ibuprofen??

It’s not going to cut it.

I tried the Ibuprofen. It just doesn’t do anything. She said she had had a bad experience putting somebody on pain medication, and he hadn’t been able to get off of it very well, so she just didn’t prescribe it anymore. And I was like, that year before that pretty much, well for like at least a six month period I was suicidal with pain. It was so awful. So we ended up going to a walk in clinic and they don’t normally prescribe pain medication and that walk in doctor thank God took me in as a patient and he gave me pain medication.

And you have to be a pretty brave doctor to prescribe like the amount of pain medication I needed that year to a 17 year old. And he did it and that probably saved my life. And it was horrible getting off of it because I’d taken it for a whole year, but I did it. So it was fine. But that was the first time I think where I went to a doctor and they were like, you know, we can’t help you. She had referred me to the pain clinic at the Sick Kids hospital [sickkids.ca] and it was an eight week period, waiting time period, to get to the pain clinic. It’s like, what am I supposed to do for eight weeks, not sleep? So that was like the first step. So by the time I was 22, I had been told this was all in my head and enough times, which is shocking considering I had like joints replaced. I had lost a lot of faith in the medical community. So yeah, I decided to start researching myself.

So you were at college and you got all these other things that start going on. I know from watching interviews that you’ve done online–I’ve watched on YouTube and things–you started trying to experiment with your diet and how that was going to help.

Yeah, first I was looking up skin disorders to try and see what was going on with my skin and I came across a, it’s called dermatitis herpetiformis and it’s Itchy, blistering rash you can get when you have celiac disease. So I did genetic testing, it was like I came up with the gene and in order to be tested in the medical community for Celiac disease, they do biopsies. And I was like, well I’ll just

That is because the blood test isn’t very reliable is it?

Well, no, the blood tests test for the gene so you can rule it out, but you can’t really say somebody has it. Uh, and I thought, well, I don’t want the, the biopsies have a very high false negative rate because you have to actually biopsy a sample that is diseased. And I was like, I don’t want to do a bunch of biopsies. I’ll just out the gluten and maybe all my problems will go away. That was 2015 and maybe it helped a little bit, but not really.

And then yeah, I went on an elimination diet. So it wasn’t actually a Keto diet really. It was like root vegetables without potatoes because I cut out nightshades. I basically just cut out. I came up with this diet and cut out everything that I thought people would be allergic to. So I was eating rice, because I thought everyone can eat rice, everyone can eat meat and fish and everyone can eat root vegetables and apples. That seems pretty safe.

Seems pretty logical, yeah.

That was me not knowing anything about Paleo or Keto or anything. And it, I did it for a week and nothing really obvious happened, and I don’t know why I thought a week was a good cutoff point. But, I tried to reintroduce something and I had gluten free, dairy free, sugar free banana, almond muffins, and two days later my knees were in so much pain I couldn’t walk. So I was in bed for a couple of days after that. And I thought, oh my God, that never happens. I never had flare-ups like that. Oh. And at this point too, when I cut out gluten, I stopped taking my arthritis medication because I was in pain on the medication. Like I was taking Tylenol 3 to sleep because of my shoulder pain and I never really felt it was working. 

And I had had my joints replaced on the medications. I was like, you know what, in order to give this gluten free thing a real shot, I’m just going to stop the medication. I didn’t tell my rheumatologist, I just quit everything. I was still taking Adderall and an SSRI and birth control and Tylenol 3, but I stopped the arthritis medication. So when I had that flare up, where I couldn’t walk for a couple days, it was pretty abnormal. That hadn’t happened before. So I really dove into diet off for that. And that month, I went down three pants sizes and I lost five pounds, which confused me. And my skin started to heal and my joints were pretty good. But mostly it was like my skin started to heal and I lost, like, mass. I was like, that was bloating? Like what? And then for the next while, and then a couple of months later, my depression lifted, which I hadn’t even thought was possible. I thought, okay, arthritis, skin issues, okay. But no, the depression is like a, that’s a chemical thing and I’m stuck with that forever. My Dad has it, my grandpa has it. That’s not diet related.

Yeah, just the way your brain’s wired.

Yeah. Right. And, and it had like run in my family, so we’re like, oh, some genetic, like something’s genetically wrong. And that’s just how I’m stuck on this medication forever. And a couple of months into this lower carb than what I’d been doing before, I was still eating rice. But I mean I was eating a lot of meat and a lot of vegetables and a little bit of rice. My depression started to lift and I went off of my antidepressants and when I went of my antidepressants, I went off of all my medication. At the same time as my depression started to lift, my fatigue went away and my itching stopped. So all my symptoms and symptoms I hadn’t even considered were symptoms didn’t take very long. 

But six months into this diet, well, first I went off of the antidepressants and I stopped eating rice because I noticed rice was upsetting my digestion. I didn’t notice anything other than that just, I was just making me feel overly full. So I stopped the rice and then I started to try to reintroduce foods. And at first I went to what I was craving and missing and what I had been eating before a lot. And I went to soy and I ate so much soy–it was like tofu, miso soup, as much soy as I could eat. And I had like a terrible, it was like 15 minutes and I got bloated and my body was just like, I’m not having any of this. And I was like, okay, no more soy I guess. And then about five hours later, my entire body got itchy and the next morning the depression was back and it was worse than I had ever experienced.

And it got worse for about four days and it stuck around for three weeks. And it was so bad that I woke up the next morning and I got into the shower and I just like bawled. How could I be so stupid to think that something as serious as depression was caused by food? How could I be so naive? And then I was like, no, no, it was gone yesterday. Then I had a whole bunch of this and then I like, I had a stomach ache and then I got itchy and now I’m upset. I don’t like upset is putting, putting it very lightly. I was distraught. I was like, it’s definitely, it’s definitely a reaction, but it’s hard when you’re depressed because you just get all those negative thoughts spiraling.

It’s like you’ve got two sides isn’t it? You’ve got the emotional stuff is overtaking, but then you had that little logic voice was still strong enough to tell you.

It was kind of like–I kept really extensive notes on my phone, so I was just rereading the notes. Like, no, this is the pattern that happened. But for three weeks after that, it got so bad like a couple of days later, so the depression had me crying and it’s just getting worse. I’m like, well maybe it’ll go away in a couple of days. The day after that, so two days after I had soy, I momentarily hallucinated.

Ah, I was trying to remember which was the food, it was the soy that did that.

That was really scary. That was probably, like the scariest thing that’s ever happened to me. It was like nighttime and I couldn’t, I was doing really badly and I said, Julian, can you drive me back to my –Julian’s my brother–can you drive me back to my apartment? I don’t think I can drive. I’m like, I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m too–I couldn’t see very well, things were very weird.

And he dropped me off and I walked to my door and I turned around to wave goodbye. And he looked at me and his face turned into like a demon face and it was long enough that he looked at me and then he looked back and started driving away. And then it was my brother again and I was standing at my door and I was like, okay. So I’m looking in my purse hoping, like, I hope my keys are in here. Um, and I went upstairs into my bedroom and I turned on all the lights and I hid under my blankets and I smoked a bunch of weed because I was having like, panicking and it was–I don’t know, I stayed under my blankets all night and then I, I don’t even know what I thought about. The next week my skin broke out. I was itchy for about two weeks.

This is a real snowball effect it seems. And you know, you had these symptoms but within a few hours and you must’ve thought, okay, well that’s the extent of it. Then how you to know that all these other things, we’re going to stop knocking out. What did you think at that time? See, I assume you, she’s still got that no logical voice. What was that voice telling you when you got these couple of seconds, when you saw a demon, was there something that was enough to tell you?

For sure. Oh, for sure.

What did you think? I mean it must’ve been terrible.

I thought, okay, I just saw a demon face. It’s like, I hope my keys are in here because I want to go to my bedroom now. And I was walking up the stairs. I was like, that just happened. That just like that wasn’t real and that just happened. And that was it. Like I knew I, I knew it was a hallucination, but it’s like something is wrong was like, now I’m crazy. Whatever I’ve done with Diet has now made me insane. Like, great, now I’m having hallucinations. Um, but I refuse to take my medication again. And it was, it was an SSRI–an SSRI at a high dose. It was like, no, I managed to get rid of it once, which has never happened. I’m going to get back there. I just have to wait. So I just waited. And then over the next week, the depression didn’t lift, but I didn’t hallucinate again. But it was, other things started happening. Like I said, a week later my skin broke out and then my arthritis came back. So that was really delayed–skin breaking out in the arthritis coming back didn’t happen right away.

The itching happened right away, my mood happened right away. And then I wrote down my symptoms every day, and just waited and it was like three and a half weeks and it finally started lifting. It started lifting around 18 days after and then at about day 24 was gone again. I was like, oh my God. And then for the next year I just repeated that. So as soon as the depression would go away, I reintroduce something else. And then it would just be just like this. It was a couple of times that were almost as bad as the soy time, but I learned pretty quickly not to introduce like a pile of the bad food. It took me about six months, and at six months after that I was only having a teaspoon of it and about eight months I was having less than a teaspoon when I reintroduced things. But it took a long time to realize how much really small quantities of things bothered me.

So what was your core safe diet at this point?

It was sweet potatoes, parsnips, carrots. So like those root vegetables, meats, fish, lettuce, spinach, arugula, apples and pears seemed fine. Turmeric, salt, pepper, and then some other spices. I wasn’t using like curry powders because they had legumes in them. And I had such a bad experience with soy that I wasn’t going to do that again. So it was basically that. It was like–honey as well. It was a very, very limited autoimmune Paleo type diet, which I came across after I found my list of safe foods and I was like, oh, there’s definitely something to this because there’s so much overlap. There were things on the autoimmune Paleo that I couldn’t tolerate, but, ginger was fine too. Yeah, it was a list of 27 foods, but I couldn’t seem to introduce anything over that. And I tried hard for like a year.

That’s kind of an obvious question. Why did you bother trying, if you’ve got this group of safe foods, what led you to keep experimenting, to try different foods to see if you could add to that? Just purely because you wanted to increase the variety? You’re a natural experimenter? What made you put yourself through that?

Again, it was horrible. A couple of things, one, it was really, really hard to believe that I had somehow just come across a list of 27 foods and those were the only 27 foods I could eat. I was like, that’s weird. That can’t be right. So there was that. I put my dad on the diet pretty quickly after my depression lifted because he has the same depression and he was really desperate to get food back and he was really bad at testing things out. He didn’t know when, he wasn’t able to like listen to his body as well as I could …

Because you were doing it for him as well?

Yeah, like there was one point in the summer and he’d probably was still having carb, like a lot of carb cravings so he was like, I’ll eat quinoa, because quinoa’s a health food, and I was like, don’t eat anything that I don’t tell you to eat.

And he was eating quinoa and he was eating quinoa all the time and he was doing really badly, really badly. He wasn’t like there when you were talking to him very well and I was like, okay, got to test out the quinoa. So I had like a teaspoon of quinoa and I had a horrible reaction to quinoa. And I was like, you got to get rid of the quinoa. And he can see me when I’m like, when he got sick from these foods, you couldn’t see it as much. Like he does get really pale, but that’s it. Everything else you can’t see. Whereas for me, my skin breaks out and my face got puffy. You could see it happening to me. So yeah, a lot of it was for dad. But by September, so a year, I thought no, no more.

And could you limit those reactions? You saying you just tried a tiny little bit. 

Yeah, like a teaspoon.

By doing that you could just have a small reaction?

Not really. No. I mean, nothing was like–that’s not true. I had a couple that were bad, like soy, but the quinoa was still horrible. Like I got down to, you know, where, like, if I’m stuck like this, I want to die, but I know it will pass. So no, even a small amount seemed really, really problematic. Now I know if it’s a really tiny amount, depending on what it is, then it’ll be okay. The reactions are smaller, but it has to be a really small amount. Even a teaspoon of quinoa was too much. I year after, I thought, I’m not introducing anything for a while because this is exhausting and I can’t keep having arthritis. I don’t want to destroy my joints and I had a great September. Everything was totally fine.

Then I tried to reintroduce sauerkraut because I was like, I was still going along the replenish gut microbiome, trying to heal things. So I tried to reintroduce sauerkraut and I had horrible reaction to sauerkraut. And then I got pregnant and I immediately went back to my safe foods and they didn’t work anymore. It was like as soon as I was pregnant they didn’t work anymore. And I was like, oh no.

Do you think that was why?

The pregnancy?

It messed around with the balance of it.

Yeah. I’ve read a little bit about microbiome changes during pregnancy and it does happen. You get, apparently you get a depletion in the biodiversity and the diversity of your microbiome, so I think that must’ve been what happened. But it happened really fast. It was like as soon as I was pregnant I couldn’t get better. I got itchy again and I was itchy. And then you Google these things and it’s like, oh those are all normal signs of pregnancy. So like okay well maybe pregnancy’s just miserable. I was arthritic again. My face was puffy. Maybe that’s just what being pregnant is like. So I waited, I cut out carbier things. I cut out the apples, I cut out the sweet potatoes, cut out the parsnips because I noticed that would make me feel a little bit worse. So halfway through the pregnancy I was just eating salad and meat and my dad switched to salad and meat too, because he noticed that if he ate a whole bunch of sweet potatoes it would be worse. So then it’s salad and meat. And I was doing vitamin infusions just to make sure I was getting everything I needed, but I was still having symptoms.

So I gave birth to my daughter and then my symptoms didn’t go away. I was like, okay. So it wasn’t the pregnancy. So I’m still itchy and still arthritic. And being arthritic with baby is the worst. You’re waking up all the time at night. I couldn’t push myself up on the bed with my wrist because my wrist hurt and picking up the baby was like, my wrist hurts, especially in the early morning. And it was so frustrating to get rid of all the symptoms and then to have them come back. And they didn’t come back as bad. I was still not on any medication so it wasn’t like before when I was in my early twenties but it was there and I was

There is always that fear though, isn’t there, that it is going to go back to being as bad. And you’re just going to be stuck with it again.

Going to be stuck with it. And I wasn’t happy. I was depressed but not depressed enough to take medication. But I wasn’t happy and I was like, I used to be happy. I got to a point where I was happy. So how do I get back to that? And I came across Shawn Baker [Instagram], who’s like popularized the Carnivore Diet and decided that day just to go to meat. And I had been putting off going just to meat because I was breastfeeding and because I was getting a lot of hell from my in-laws, mostly. So I’d been putting it off, but I saw his Joe Rogan [YouTube] and thought, okay, I’ll just do that. And a week later, it really didn’t take very long. But um, the itching and the arthritis went away. It’s like a week. And my digestion was just distraught with this new diet. I was having diarrhea, I was getting bloated when I ate and I’d never been bloated doing meat and salad.

But now with just meat, I was getting bloated, which didn’t make any sense because I didn’t have a beef sensitivity. I was like, what is happening? So I quit after a week and it was like, this is obviously stupid. And I reintroduced, I had a big salad. And the next morning I woke up and I was weepy and I was itchy and my wrists hurt. And I was like, really?

Well, what can you eat then?

Yeah, exactly. And like I have to deal with arthritis or diarrhea, can I have nothing? So I just stuck with it and things improved after about six weeks. It took about six weeks and then my digestion improved.

A lot of people seem to have those transition issues.

Yeah, it’s very normal. Now I know it’s super normal for about two to three weeks. If you’re really sick it can last longer. I think my mom switched over and hers was about four weeks. My Dad switched over eventually he had no transition symptoms. He just dropped salad and then everything improved. So it depends. But it looks like maybe like 60-ish percent of people, um, get diarrhea when they switch over–get bloating cravings. I didn’t really get cravings because I had only dropped salad, so it was a pretty easy transition. But yeah, so I’ve been eating only meat for like 15 months now and I don’t seem to have any symptoms.

Wow.

Yeah, so it fixed it.

The whole list of everything and your arthritic pain and everything–all good?

All good. All good. I tried to reintroduce about three months into the diet, I tried to reintroduce organic olives–I thought olive oil is pretty safe. And I had quite a few of those over a period of two days. And I had a reaction to them. I was like, if I can’t eat olives–I don’t know why I thought that was the safe one, because of olive oil. If I can’t eat that I’d give up. And then in the last year, there’ve been a couple times I’ve been hit at restaurants just with minute quantities of foods and I do get very minor reactions when that happens. So quantity does matter.

You said that in your presentation that it can just be simply from being cooked on a grill that has something on it. It’s going to impact you.

Yeah, I had an experience a couple of months ago and I went to a really high end steak house and told them, you know, just the steak, nothing on it, scrubbed the grill and everything. But, at one point I could taste garlic, but I was like, is it in my head or is that garlic? It was very minor amount. I was like, whatever, that’ll probably be, you know, I can barely taste it, it’ll probably be fine. And the next day I couldn’t think at all. Like my head was full of cotton balls, but the depression wasn’t back. It was just severe brain fog and I was bloated like four or five months pregnant, bloated for like a week. My wrists were kind of sore, my skin was a little irritated, but that was the extent of the reaction, which was really scary at the beginning because like I couldn’t think and I was like, oh my God, is the depression going to come back? But it didn’t. But yeah, that was just from whatever was on the grill. So I asked them, what do you usually put on your steak? Because I was like, if there’s, I was worried right about what it could be. And they said, well, usually, it’s olive oil, salt and garlic. And I was like, you know, that’s hardly anything. Right? And they did clean the grill. So yeah, I’m still ridiculously sensitive and trying to figure out how to reduce that.

And so what is your diet composed of now? All meat, meat fats. Do you eat fish? You don’t have dairy, do you?

No. So it’s not the popularized carnivore diet. That’s eggs, dairy and all meat. I’m just eating ruminant meat. Beef, lamb sometimes, although I don’t really like lamb. High fat beef. I don’t eat lean cuts. I mostly eat ribs. Ribeye, about a pound and a half, I’m like 5’6 [168 cm]. It seems to depend on how tall you are. I eat about a pound and a half, maybe two a day. I eat twice a day and that just kind of naturally happened. Sometimes I eat once a day and I’ll eat more if I eat once a day.

But I’m not as good at that. I still get hungry. Yeah. That’s what I’ve been doing for a year. And salt. So beef and lamb and salt and I can do bison and elk. But I started–this is another strange thing that I’ve had a really hard time believing–about a month into the carnivore diet, sometimes I was feeling pretty bad after I ate and I was still eating beef and chicken. And throughout my pregnancy, I’d eaten chicken wings like every day. And for some reason when I switched over to this carnivore diet, I couldn’t tolerate chicken anymore. So I was getting brain fog really quickly, like this weird drunken feeling after I had chicken. Chicken! And I was like chicken’s my favorite, chicken wings. That’s all I want to eat. I like steak but I really like chicken wings and I tested out five times because I was like I can’t be–no one has this from chicken.

It’s got to be a coincidence, I’m going to keep trying.

Yeah. And I tried turkey and the same thing happened. And the other thing is this weird brain fog drunk feeling? I also got it from sweet potatoes and apples and I was associating it with glucose. Well, why is it happening with chicken? There’s nothing in chicken. So yeah, just beef, bison, ruminant meat.

Obviously, you enjoy your food. Do you find it restrictive or is it now just so associated with feeling well, all good?

Mostly it’s all good. Like all my cravings went away when I was doing low carb. The problem like, you know, autoimmune Paleo type, low carb, I still had cravings, so I’d still be like, Oh hey, angel food cake. That was like my main craving, Angel food cake. When I went to meat, my cravings went away completely, which is really nice and I don’t overeat ever. I’m just like full and I’ll stop. And I think I was probably still overeating a little bit when I was eating plants and apples and things. It’s definitely, if I could incorporate in other foods, I probably wouldn’t really bother. Maybe like an apple now and then. But I actually like eating this way. It is very simple. Grocery shopping is very easy. Cooking’s really easy. I don’t spend any time cooking. I really like steak. You don’t really get tired of steak. So, no, I like it a lot. The only problem is I’m so sensitive I can’t eat out. So if I could go out to a steak house with everyone and have a steak, then life would be great. But whatever the underlying problem here that’s making me so sensitive–if that could go away and then I could still do this diet, that would be good. That’s the goal is to stick with the diet, but to reduce the sensitivities for when I accidentally get hit.

Yeah. And maybe it will, you do it for long enough. Your sensitivities increased, the reactions, increased to certain things, but also with the healing that goes on, that might be that little flexibility that is the goal that you’re after.

Yeah. And then the other thing I should mention, which was, has been really interesting, is I was diagnosed with C. difficile. You’ve heard of C. difficile? Yeah. I was diagnosed with that in the fall. And I don’t know how long. I never, so normally you get that if you’re immunosuppressed–it’s like really common in nursing homes, it is common in hospitals, especially for like older immunosuppressed people who’ve been on a lengthy antibiotics. I hadn’t taken antibiotics in years. I’m not immunosuppressed anymore, so I have no idea how it happened. I didn’t have a hospital stay and I’ve treated it now.

I went and did microbiome transplants in The Bahamas– that was really recent. So that should be gone but the interesting thing about having a bacterial infection in your gut is it creates gut permeability issues. So I had that tested and I had my gut permeability tested and they looked at something called zonulin, which is the protein that modulates tight junctions in the gut. So it keeps your cells together in the gut. And my zonulin levels are 12 times as high as they should be. So even though I’ve been on this high fat meat diet, which has been shown to basically eliminate leaky gut, my gut is ridiculously leaky. And, I got this tested through my naturopath and he said the clinic had never seen anyone with zonulin levels this high.

So I figure maybe I contracted the C diff at some point–I’m not sure when–and maybe the reason I’m so sensitive, like even the garlic on the grill. That’s insane. That’s insane. Right? I could barely taste it. I think maybe part of the reason I’m so sensitive was this infection was increasing my gut permeability to a ridiculous amount to anything I eat. For some reason beef is just that like the safe one and anything else is just like getting into my body. So I’m hoping like what my goals are or what my plan is, is to wait because I just did this microbiome transplant treatment. I’m going to wait a couple of weeks, I’m going to retest my zonulin levels and when my zonulin levels get back to zero, which is where they should be on this diet, I’m going to introduce really small quantities of some sort of plant to see if I can reduce my sensitivity levels. So I’m talking like a pill sized amount of sweet potato, like nothing. I’m hoping that if I do that and give my body a little bit of the plant toxins, it will have some sort of buffer. So if I do get hit with something, I’ll have some sort of–I think it’ll be better. But I have to wait for the zonulin level to go down.

You need to have that gut flora to digest things. And that’s part of one of the reasons you get reactions, isn’t it? Because if you, if you’ve been on elimination diet, you just don’t have the flora to deal with things as well.

Yeah. Yeah, supposedly. I mean it changes. Like right now I’ll have a carnivorous microbiome, right? So I went and did this microbiome transplant and they’re giving me microbiome from people who can theoretically tolerate a whole bunch of foods. And then I’m on this really limited diet. So they’ll stay, apparently they stay alive for a couple months, but then it’ll go back to being a carnivorous diet. So what I’m doing is I have a number of samples that I took home with me. So I’m waiting. I still need to wait for the zonulin levels to go down before I’m willing to introduce anything. But I’m going to keep giving myself these transplants weekly until my zonulin levels go back down to like zero. And then I’m going to reintroduce. So that’s my plan over the next month and I’m updating people because people are curious to see if you can change. A lot of people go on this all beef diet and then they’re stuck on it. So I’m seeing if there’s a way to become less sensitive, but I have no idea. And if I can’t become less sensitive, I’d still be happy with where I’m at.

Yeah. But you’d just like that bit more flexibility if possible.

Yeah. Right. And especially my dad, he eats out a lot more than I do and so he kind of gets hit all the time. So he’s never, you know, I’m probably like nine out of 10 feeling and he’s probably seven out of 10, maybe seven and a half because restaurants just can’t cater to something this insanely restrictive, which is understandable. So I’m hoping we can do something to figure out how to make ourselves less sensitive.

So again, it’s coming back to that theme of you’re not only doing it for yourself, you are doing it for your dad, and by the sounds of it you’re doing it for other people out there who are in similar situations. So where can people follow you? Find out about what you’re doing?

I have a blog, it’s called Don’t Eat That at mikhailapeterson.com. I have a YouTube channel, so same thing–Mikhaila Peterson. Instagram and Mikhaila Peterson.

Perfect. Well it’s been wonderful talking to you.

Thanks for having me on.

Especially face to face. This is a new thing for me, right? With somebody there right in front of me. It’s really good.

I’m used to it on a screen too, which is different.

Which is good and it’s way past not being able to do it without seeing somebody at all. But it’s a whole different level having you right here in front of me, it’s great. I’m enjoying it. Perhaps you could leave us with a top tip?

A top tip? I would say, trust your body–that’s my top tip. And that was really hard for me to learn. And I mentioned that in my talk today, and it was, if you think something’s wrong, you’re probably right. That’s what I realized because I’d reintroduce foods and be like, oh my stomach’s like a bit bloated. Like it’s probably fine. No, listen to your body and if you really listen to your body and practice that and don’t doubt yourself, you can listen to it enough to figure things out as long as you clean up your diet enough to let you get there.

Great. Well thank you so much. It’s been a great pleasure.

Thank you.

This transcript is brought to you thanks to the hard work of Trish Roberts.

Welcome Peter to the Keto Woman podcast. How are you doing today?

I’m doing well. Thank you very much for the invitation.

Enjoying the conference?

Oh, it’s brilliant. Huge success from what I can see. We just finished the morning session and learned so much…and I’m thinking about my presentation and how things fit in, so I’m really quite happy to be here.

First ever CarnivoryCon. I’m sure there are going to be plenty more, aren’t there by the popularity out there?

I hope so. I could understand why somebody wouldn’t want to do it again. It must be a lot of work, but I’m really encouraged by the response.

Absolutely. Tell me a bit about you.

I’m a forage agronomist. By training, ruminant nutritionist, so things to do with pasture, hay, silage crops, grazing management. Ruminants would be cows, sheep, goats, deer, lots of wild ruminants, but those would be the domesticated ones people would recognize. I’ve had my own personal experience where chronic conditions were reversed as a result of first low-carb and then increasing restriction through keto. And now I’m largely carnivorous, not exclusively, although I’ve given up plant matter for Lent.

Perfect. Why not? Good excuse.

Except for coffee.

Yeah. That’s most people’s exception, isn’t it? Got to just take coffee out of the picture altogether. So what kind of conditions?

In 2007 I was a 51 year old balding, obese, prediabetic. And today I’m just balding. In 2002 my wife Nancy had begun doing her own journey into low-carb. And if you’ve been around the community a while you can imagine, or remember what that was like in terms of resources. There was certainly nothing like what we have today. She was studying and finding out what to do for herself and then it took me five years to get serious myself. And then that was almost the time that Good Calories, Bad Calories came out. And I read that book and I started getting angry. I had been out of agriculture for a number of years working in high tech, and I just started looking at what had been done to demonize the product of ruminant animal agriculture. And then I started showing up at metabolism conferences and the beginning low-carb conferences. And I’ve been stalking some of these people ever since by showing up at these things.

A lot of people mention, and I ask, what got them into low-carb/keto/carnivore, whatever and Gary Taubes has got be…that book has got to be one of the top three cited reasons.

Any of his books – the three nutrition books – are books that I recommend, depending on how deep and geeky people want to get at it. I’ve gone through Good Calories, Bad Calories a number of times. I have a physical copy, I have a kindle copy, I have an audible copy. So yeah, I’m that guy. But certainly The Case Against Sugar is one to give people to just give them a sense of that nutrition story, as well as the politics and manipulation. Because frequently I’ll have people ask me, how could we have gotten to this point? Well, that would be a good place to start reading. Just like Nina Teicholz, whose book, The Big Fat Surprise, would be another one. And I don’t mean to slight others. Those are just ones that, for example, there were a string of Forage and Grassland Council meetings in one state and I was part of that program for meetings and they sold several cartons of that book – The Big Fat Surprise – once we got done, I think it was four cartons. So it’s good news for people in agriculture because they’ve lived under this cloud for so long and those books certainly are ones that I direct people to read.

And you’re right. You tend to get a bit angry reading them, don’t you? I certainly did.

Initially. And then hopefully that passes and we try to get to something more productive.

Do something about it.

Yeah.

Tell me, this is something I struggle with, and I would like to know the arguments and the comebacks for one of the biggest criticisms, and the questions that come my way, about eating a fair amount of meat on keto – although quite often you don’t eat any more protein than you would on a standard American diet, for example – but obviously if you’re moving towards carnivore, you’re going to be consuming a fair amount of meat daily. And we’re told that eating all this meat is destroying the planet. It’s destroying the land. All the methane produced is killing the environment. What’s my comeback on that? You know, I have some sort of vague senses and gut feelings for what it is, but I need that expert opinion to slam back at them.

Fair enough, and that’s the topic that in a couple hours I’ll be talking about. So first of all, I just want to put a marker on the table because the best evidence is that most Americans aren’t getting enough protein. Also, we really don’t understand protein nutrition in the human diet. People talk about it in incorrect ways, so we should put that off to the side, maybe come back to it, but at least acknowledge it as a reality. But certainly as we eat more animal products, we’re not only eating more protein, but we’re eating a higher quality protein. So we’re getting more of the indispensable amino acids that we need, their more digestible, so our plane of nutrition increases and improves. So there’s that. To the specific issue of the impacts on the environment…

My one point is that chronic disease epidemic has an environmental impact, and right now that’s unsustainable. The levels are shocking. 50+% of adult Americans have diabetes or prediabetes. 60% of adult Americans have one or more chronic conditions. 88% of adult Americans don’t enjoy optimal metabolic health, and less than a third of normal weight adult Americans enjoy optimal metabolic health. So all of that has a cost – it has a fiscal cost, it has a personal cost, and it’s important for people to recognize that that has not yet been factored into the conversations about societal cost and benefit, or sustainability. If health comes in, it’s wholly informed by the standard version of what’s a healthy diet, so that’s critical to know. The cost is unsustainable in the United States. The cost, the fiscal cost, is equivalent to 9.3% of GDP for obesity and related diseases. That may in fact be an underestimate, but it’s big enough. We need to make sure that we’re looking at those because generally we’re not good at weighing complex issues and costs and benefits. We tend to go to the simplistic.

Yeah, just much too of a narrow vision on things.

And oftentimes it’s in service of a pre-existing belief.

Right.

Now I could be guilty of that, so I try to cite sources and things. If we just look at methane for example, the complaint about ruminant animal agriculture is that they produce all this greater amount of greenhouse gases than other forms of agriculture. We need to remember or recognize that methane is very short-lived in the atmosphere – on the order of about 10 years before it’s oxidized back to CO2. With ruminant animal agriculture most of the carbon that they’re going to ingest in their feed is coming from CO2 in the atmosphere that was fixed in photosynthesis, and now is being recycled back to the atmosphere. So it’s a cycling of carbon – CO2 to CH4 back to CO2 ultimately – not an enrichment. The enrichment would come as we burn fossil fuels because that’s adding carbon that wasn’t previously cycled. So it’s a different thing.

Also, we need to recognize that the amounts that have been frequently stated are frequently inflated – I’m sorry I couldn’t help myself – so we have inaccurate numbers being used. We have a misunderstanding, or an oversimplification of that process.

We very much have these visions of these clouds of methane being produced above fields of cows, and I’ve probably even actually seen those images somewhere.

Exactly. Methane is produced from a number of sources, natural and anthropogenic. Then another argument is that well, look at all this agricultural land that’s used for livestock and – consciously or unconsciously – they are conflating agricultural land with arable or cropland, and treating them as if you could grow crops on all agricultural land. And you in fact cannot. So the vast majority of the Earth’s surface – in total, or if you were just looking at dry land – is not suitable for cultivation. If I look at the entire Earth’s surface, it’s about 4%. And that’s probably an overestimation, and we’re losing that. We’re losing that land through degradation for a number of reasons. Plus when cities expand, they convert crop land into suburbia. And so we’re losing that land, and virtually all of the world’s arable land is currently in production of some level. So, in fact, we have far more land available for ruminant animal agriculture than we have for crop agriculture.

Then we also need to recognize that it’s not either or. That livestock agriculture is integrated into all of agriculture. If I’m producing a grain crop, or a fruit crop, or some other commodity, there’s going to be a substantial amount that’s produced that’s not human edible. And so that waste or bi-product can be fed through livestock, and produce high quality animal protein and animal fat. And in fact, increase the value of the ingredients going in. The livestock agriculture, and specifically ruminant animal agriculture, is essential to food security globally. And in fact, if we’re going to meet the needs of mid-century, we have to improve the productivity and efficiency of agricultural systems worldwide.

I think that’s part of the problem when you said about it’s not an either or thing. I think especially the more moving towards extremes someone’s belief are, they make those arguments based on, it’s either your way or my way. And of course the majority of the world is going to be somewhere in between. It seems to me no-one at this conference – so at this end, towards that kind of extreme, the meat eating extreme – is saying that the whole of the world should eat that way. Whereas it seems when you go to the other end, that they say we could save the environment by just going plant-based. There seems to be that mismatch. I would assume that you would probably say, that it wouldn’t be sustainable to have the whole world on a carnivore diet. You couldn’t do it.

I’ve heard that argument and you can do some calculations and figure that you could get pretty close. Now part of this is a matter of improving animal husbandry, improving genetics, agronomy – 101 kind of stuff – but a lot of it’s got to do with political stability and social progress in many parts of the world where currently they’re beset with unrepresentative forms of government, frequent transitions that lead to major upheavals. They don’t have the infrastructure. They don’t have reliable main line power distribution systems, and so they can’t have the reliable food supply that we enjoy in other parts of the world. Those are things that people need to work for, just as much as we need to work for safe drinking water, for example, the impact of having illumination inside your home at night, and the difference that that makes.

There’re lots of things that we should be working on. Part of what I want people to do is stop worrying about the things that people so loudly talk about, and focus on those things that would make a real difference in people’s lives. But no, I don’t think one-size-fits-all doesn’t work very well, does it? Hasn’t so far. I would much rather have people understand what some meaningful metrics of health are. How to measure, monitor, follow. And what I might do to adjust those if I choose to. That would be much better than telling people you need to eat five servings a day of this, that, or the other thing. But if I look at North America…well actually, I think it may be the United States, I’m a little fuzzy, but I’ll say the United States…we have less than 10% of the world’s beef cattle, but we produce 20% of the world’s beef.

Okay. How could we leverage that more appropriately? Brazil has, for example, enormous resources, but their level of husbandry – for a number of reasons – is not approaching that. The beef that they produce tends to be much leaner, tends to be of a lower grade than the beef that the United States produces. One of the ironies is, we have people in the United States saying not to eat beef to have some impact on the world, and yet the beef that they’re eating in the United States is not coming from those parts of the world where the impact environmentally is greater, far greater, than it is in the United States. You’re not going to move the needle by not eating American beef as part of the answer. But again, that’s a complicated conversation to have with people.

Is there a good and bad, or somewhere in between, method of producing that beef? When you’re talking about it being a better approach, a better thing for someone to include in their diet, is that a specific way that livestock is farmed? You know, the grass fed with the nice fields. Is the mass production element still a problem?

I don’t think so because I think that’s misperceived. So for the vast majority of a steer’s life in North America, it’s on grass. It will spend three or four months in a feed yard – most are going that way. Even there, they’re still eating forage, and they’re going to eat a variety of commodities to provide a higher level of energy so that they can finish their growth period and reach that desired carcass grade, or qualities. People assume that, for example, there’re lower methane emissions when animals are grazing, than when they’re in the feed lot, and in fact, it’s just the opposite. But, we should also say that when properly managed under appropriate environments – and that’s a thing too, North America’s a big place and tremendously varied environments – and beef is in every state. And so the system has to reflect the reality of where they are.

One-size-fits-all doesn’t work there either. Recently a paper showing that beef finishing systems in the upper Midwest, they looked at soil carbon sequestration under an appropriate grazing management regime, and they compared that to a feed yard in the same region. What they saw was greater emissions during the grazing than in the feed yard. But during that grazing period, the soil sequestration more than offset it. How do we balance that and talk about it? Then we have to talk about everything else that goes into it as well, so just to try to unravel the rope and consider each strand; because one of the benefits of the system that we have, is that high quality animal protein and animal fat with all the vitamins and minerals in their most bio-active form, is incredibly affordable in North America.

Part of the message is if you’re metabolically ill, one of the first things you ought to be introduced to is going to the supermarket and figuring out what you can buy – from the supermarket you can get to – and how you’re going to be able to prepare that, and eat that, and what’s appropriate to your economic condition and your cultural background, and all those sorts of things are important; but basically I want people to feel comfortable going to the supermarket and buying what’s available there, rather than feeling guilty because they’re not buying some special brand, special label claim – those sorts of things. I’m all for anyone who is trying to make a living in primary industry like agriculture. It’s hard. Margins are small. You ask what would be an inappropriate way? Well, if we see long-term degradation of the resource, that’s inappropriate.

Coincidentally that’s coming from commodity agriculture. It’s not coming from beef production. The vast majority of the grain that’s produced worldwide is already going to human consumption. It’s not going to livestock production. Even a grain fed steer in the United States, over 90% of its lifetime feed is human inedible, and a lot of that grain that gets fed, may be of an inferior grade for human use. So you have that kind of complexity that’s adding into this as well. The shorter version that I have is that the problem is not the grain fed cattle. The problem is the grain fed people.

Yeah. Cattle are much better at turning that into something way more nutritious, aren’t they? They’re designed for it.

Oh, there’re all kinds of ecological advantages to ruminant animals. They have this wondrous anaerobic pre-gastric digestive system where essentially they’ve got this large fermentation vat where this high fiber, low fat, poor protein quality diet – bulky, low quality – gets broken down mechanically through rechewing – that’s rumination, chewing a cud – but also this teaming multitude of microorganisms that degrade fiber. Cellulose is chemically the same thing, essentially as starch. The glucose units are just linked together differently. And because of that linkage, no vertebrate animal can directly utilize cellulose as an energy source, but it’s the most abundant carbohydrate in the biosphere. Ruminants, because of these rumen microorganisms can utilize that as a feed resource.

You can’t feed a ruminant animal much more than 5 or 6% crude fat in her diet without hurting rumen health. But through that fermentation of the fiber, they’re producing short chain volatile fatty acids, and so 5 or 6% crude fat goes in, the cow ends up absorbing 70 to 80% of her energy coming from fat. That’s remarkable. We just heard that fat is a scarce element in the environment. The other very important niche that they fill is, because of this system, the non-protein nitrogen that’s part of the feed that they eat, is converted into microbial protein and then the cow essentially harvests all those microbes. So there is no such thing as an essential amino acid in a cow’s diet. And so that’s a really important function in the whole ecosystem as well. There’s some others of course, but those are not well appreciated.

What about the land itself? I couldn’t find the study that my mother was talking about, but she mentioned somewhere in Scotland I think, they were doing an experiment. She was talking about how…it must’ve been the wild animals grazing were somehow destroying the environment, and they were having areas where they were planting various different new trees or shrubs or things, just to see which was more beneficial for the environment. I mean that’s completely different when you’re raising cattle because it’s managed. But what are your feelings about the impact on the soil of raising one food stuff versus another?

Well, it’s an important point. We have to produce food to eat. We can’t photosynthesize. We can’t eat the soil, so we’ve got to have some form of agriculture. It’s very clear that cultivation degrades soil quality and soil health.

You had some great slides at your presentation at Ketofest showing the difference. Yeah, cows put stuff back in, don’t they?

And grassland, which is one of the largest biomes, doesn’t stay healthy and productive unless it’s grazed or burnt. Grass is essentially developed under that kind of an environmental pressure. If we exclude grazing for long periods of time, bad things happen. We build up fuel. We now have vicious wildfires. We have encroachment of woody species in what would maybe otherwise be a grassland and maybe be more productive long term. Those are issues, but the soil health I think is an enormous one. Then you have to look at the watershed health as well because if you have intact healthy sods in the watershed, you’re going to have less runoff. You’re going to have less erosion. More of that water is going to get a chance to infiltrate into the soil, so you’re going to have less sediment, less nutrient, and other potential contaminants ending up in surface waters.

So that’s all beneficial. There’s good evidence that this increase in the organic matter that happens under long-term, well-managed grassland relative to conventional tillage. So when I till a soil I’m introducing oxygen, I’m going to increase the oxidation of the organic matter in the soil. Organic matter is tremendously valuable for holding moisture as well as nutrients. And the more of the organic matter I can have, the more water I can hold in that soil and increase the drought resistance or tolerance of that soil. So I think the figure is like every 1% in organic matter, I can increase it. That’s an additional acre inch of water that can be held in the soil made available for plant growth. So we have those advantages. I think that there are advantages as well in terms of forage livestock systems, which is ruminant animal agriculture is actually less susceptible to some of the climate shifts.

If I get a drought during exactly the right time in a crop’s development cycle, I’ve just eliminated the grain, or severely restricted the grain yield from that crop – it’s a very specific time of development, and you can’t make that up – but we could still utilize that. Even that crop still has produced biomass that we could graze, or we could move the animal somewhere else, which you can’t do with the crop once it’s planted. Or even if it’s a hay crop and I’ve lost a cutting, if the crop hasn’t died, then maybe we get moisture later, we get more growth, we could come back and utilize that. So I see forage agriculture actually being more resilient than some of the alternatives people would like to rely on.

Another point just to make is that grasslands are based on perennial species and crops are annuals. It’s the nature of the beast that a perennial is going to put more organic matter into the soil – we call it roots, than the annual crop is because the perennial crop wants to survive for more than one year. So it will make seed, but it’s also going to try to live itself so it needs to have a good root system and all that. The annual crop, it’s just making seed so that at the end of the cycle it can then carry on through its progeny, not itself. That means we’re putting much more organic matter into the soil that could then increase soil health.

And there are plants often that are mixed into those pastures, things like clover and things that fix nitrogen into the soil as well, aren’t there?

Oh yeah. That’s critical. The whole use of biological nitrogen fixation is…I think it’s fair to say that the forage legumes would be a significant source of that, but we keep discovering more and more organisms that live in the soil that do that as well. So the whole area of soil health and soil biology is a fascinating one that we’re really having, I think, a bit of a renaissance in, in terms of new ways of looking at things that we hadn’t looked at before. Some people say actually that if you look at a well-managed high stocking rate, low duration grazing system where you could have tens of thousands of pounds of live weight per acre on for a short period of time – that kind of a system – you actually have more animal biology weight under the soil, than you have above the soil – the bacteria, the actinomycetes, the protozoa, the fungi, the earthworms, the insects – and then of course we’ve got some rodents of some kind that would live. So we’ve got this very complex system in a grassland community. And of course as soon as we till that, we’re going to significantly disrupt that. There are people who suggest that the principle of least harm, which is one that frequently gets used, might actually indicate that we should be eating large herbivores because we do less harm by doing that, than by eating the grain-based, or the grain and pulse-based diet that some would advocate as an alternative. Again, everything we do has an impact, and we’re not always good at seeing all those impacts.

Any green rolling hills that we see wouldn’t be possible without ruminants grazing it and maintaining it for us. I’ve heard the argument that perhaps we should be doing without those grasslands and letting other kind of plant life come in. But the point you made earlier about there are potential issues…with potential for fire, and all sorts of other things that can happen.

There are consequences, but again, we need food so if it’s not going to come from those green rolling hills, where are we going to import it from? What’s that impact? Certainly we can’t till those hills or then they erode and they degrade. On the other hand, there’s a lot of people doing work looking at agroforestry systems. Takes a while to grow a tree, and if we can grow trees and grass at the same time in the same area…yeah, we’ve got to figure out how to do that where the trees aren’t impacting…but people are working on those systems – some parts of the world far more than in North America. But the idea that I could plant a couple rows of trees relatively closely spaced, and then have a relatively large open area before the next one, and that area could grow grass for a while, and then maybe I could come in and grow some other crop in that space.

If I’m growing the grass, I’m going to graze it. Meanwhile, the trees are growing. Those are compelling stories to me. And again, part of this…I think just like Amber talked about in her talk…so much of what our targets are are built on previous assumptions. And part of what I want people to understand is that if the species appropriate diet for humans is higher in animal products, how are we going to produce those? Because currently we’re having these conversations that are assuming somehow that it should be no more than four ounces a meal a couple times a week, or whatever that is. And for some people that might be okay – I would argue it isn’t, but we look around the world and humanities diet is already plant based, and frankly I think that’s a shame and a scandal. Now it’s better than starvation but once you get sufficient calories to avoid famine, now the quality of those calories matter, and the majority of protein in humanities diet is coming from plant sources, and it’s miserable quality protein. It’s not sufficient to support human flourishing.

One of the ironies that people need to understand is that if your primary motivation, or primary value, is to limit…you can have one of two. You can be most concerned with limiting human impact, or you can be most concerned with maximizing human flourishing. If you pursue maximizing human flourishing, you will get to minimizing human impact. But if you start with the minimizing human impact, you won’t get to maximizing human flourish. We’ve seen major improvements in the living conditions of humanity worldwide – not to minimize what still needs to be done – but if your interest is in bringing down birth rate, for example, the best way to do that is to increase human flourishing. It’s only prosperous societies that can afford to worry about conservation. If you’re starving you have one problem, just one. And it doesn’t matter…wildlife, you bet that’ll do…if I have to denude the hill lands to get something to cook with…so I’m going to strip off all the green bits. That’s going to have an impact. It’s also going to produce a lot of particulate pollution inside the home, so now we’ve got respiratory problems.

All of these things are interlinked and we should be working towards improving the conditions of our brothers and sisters worldwide. So part of my vision, that I hope I can get people to see, is the need to pursue what I call a ruminant revolution. Just as we needed the green revolution when that action averted famine and starvation for a billion people, when that was a quarter of the world’s humanity. Today we need a ruminant revolution to enable the prosperity and the flourishing for humanity. And I think we’re hearing all the news about ruminant animal products are fundamental to properly nourished brains.

And whatever problems we’re going to face have to be solved by well-nourished brains that are communicating with each other. And the more brains we have communicating, that’s a good thing. I want people to have a sense of hope. I want people to not listen to the voices that want to make them feel guilty; understand where those voices are coming from – that might help; understand some of the contradictory information or alternative information to what we frequently hear. But most of all, I want people to pursue improving their own health because I’m convinced that when we improve our own health, we are improving the world. And that, in the end, may be the thing that we can do. Certainly we have our own personal experience and we see what that does with our families, with our acquaintances, then we start thinking of how we can do this within our communities. We start thinking bigger. Then we start thinking how can this be applied to what I do, and those sorts of things. I see that as what’s going to produce the sorts of change that we need.

Yeah. Getting ourselves well so that we can give back, and make those changes that we really need. Yeah, I love that holistic approach that you take. Where can we read more? Find out more about you, your website, et cetera?

You can find me all over social media. Look for grassbased – one word on Twitter and Instagram. Grass Based Health is a Facebook page. You can find me on YouTube just by looking for Peter Ballerstedt. You can feel free to contact me through those or email me through peter.ballerstedt@gmail.com.

Well thank you very much for talking to me today. Perhaps you could leave us with a top tip.

Top tip? The secret to enlightenment is to lighten up. So a steak a day keeps the doctor away.

And that’s from the Sod Father himself. I see how you’ve earnt that monicker now.

Join the Ruminati. Join me in the Ruminati. Help forward the Ruminant Revolution!

Absolutely. Well, thank you so much. It’s been a great pleasure.

Likewise.

This transcript is brought to you thanks to the hard work of Trish Roberts.

Welcome Shawn to the Keto Woman podcast. How are you doing today?

I’m doing great. Thanks for having me on.

Enjoying the conference?

It’s wonderful. I’m really excited to see it happening. I think it’s the culmination of several years of all kinds of people coming together and making this happen and Amber’s done a tremendous job. Very exciting.

Absolutely. I interviewed her a couple of weeks ago and was commending her on what a great job she’s done, and she in her usual fashion said, it was just one of those things that would have happened anyway…which maybe, maybe not. Like she was saying, and you’ve just said, it’s something that needed to happen. The time is right for it.

Yeah. I have no doubt Amber is making a big difference on this. I have a lot of respect for Amber. She’s done some great stuff.

Yeah, me too. So tell me a bit about you.

About me. So I am a 52 year old lifelong athlete. My background is in orthopedic surgery. I’ve kind of, for better or worse, been associated with the carnivore diet as I guess, sort of figurehead for the movement I suppose, if you want to use that term. I have been doing this for almost two and a half years. I’m trying to learn as much as…we’re all learning at this point where there’s a lot of stuff that’s evolving. I’ve been seeing the benefit it seems to have with people. In addition to things like ketogenic diets, which I had done for a couple of years prior to this, and my evolution in diet is common to what most people do; is they get sick and then they want to get better and they use that to get better, and that’s what happened to me.

I wasn’t dramatically ill, but I just noted that despite being an athlete my whole life and training extremely hard and still even competing at the highest levels, my health was declining, and I couldn’t out-exercise or out-train what was going on, until I figured out what happens with diet. And so I went through a progression of about five or six years of doing what I thought initially was the right thing, which was, a lower calorie, low fat, high fiber diet, which in fact did work. I lost a lot of weight on that, but I just didn’t feel particularly good and I didn’t feel it was sustainable. And then I transitioned into a more Paleoesque, primal type of approach. Did that for a while. And then as I started being influenced by people like Gary Taubes and Nina Teicholz, some of the other people we all know – reading some of their stuff and trying to dig into the literature and apply it in my own life – I kind of drifted more towards the low carb and ketogenic diets. Then ultimately I just continued on the journey and ended up on this crazy carnivore path. And so that’s where I am now.

And it doesn’t make much sense logically, for someone like yourself who’s expending so many calories. You’re thinking, how can there possibly be an issue if the standard model that we’re all told works – the old calories in, calories out works – how come you were having problems?

Well, I’m not one that completely dismisses calories. I still think they’re useful and they do have an impact. That is to say I probably couldn’t eat…I could probably, if I force myself past satiety regularly, I would gain body fat even on a carnivorous diet. But at the same time we have to recognize that we do have appetites. We do have satiety signals. We do have differential effects of different macronutrients and more importantly, different foods in general. There’s different carbohydrates, there’s different proteins, here’s different fats. And so, corn oil is not the same as lard. Those things all impact our body in numerous ways and that goes outside of the calories, in calories out model. I think there’s people that will tell you it doesn’t matter as long as you keep the calories at a certain level and get enough protein, everything’s going to be fine. I think that tends not to hold up over the long term.

Yeah. It’s just what I mean most by that, I guess is it’s just not as straightforward linear equation. That it’s much more complicated.

Not at all. Like I said, I don’t think you can totally disregard calories. I think somebody said it very nicely – I can’t remember who it was – they said, it’s not that calories aren’t important, it’s just that they’re not the only thing. And I think that’s a pretty fair statement.

And it really seems to depend on the context that it’s in, the kind of diet that you’re eating, as to the impact it has.

Yeah. We heard Amber’s excellent talk on that today and I’ve echoed this for quite a while – I think our expectations or knowledge regarding how macronutrients and micronutrients and calories impact, this is going to depend upon a number of things, one of which is what our diet is. Our diet plays a huge role in driving nutrient requirements, probably drives calorie requirements. We certainly know that just the simple fact that protein, the thermic effect of protein, and the fact that it raises something called NEAT, or non-exercise activity – thermogenesis – and the difficulty it has to converting from amino acids into actual fat. That fact alone makes it show that it’s not all about calories. And then we can argue about do carbohydrates and fat have a differential role? I think they clearly do, although it’s probably going to be some time before that’s fully fleshed out.

And so what was it that led you into making that leap from keto to carnivore?

Yeah. Certainly keto had helped me in a number of “health issues”, mainly with regards to things like, quality of sleep, blood pressure, musculoskeletal health and those types of things. But as an athlete, I was looking for a competitive athletic edge. And I started reading about the fact that a lot of athletes from days gone by would heavily utilized meat-based diets for performance. And as somebody who was always looking to try to do as good as I can, I just started to experiment with that. Then I explored some of the groups of people that were doing at the time on Facebook. A lot of people gave me criticism for, but I’m like, that’s where the data was. Once you look at that, and it’s…in my view, observing a group of people online is no different than an anthropologic study.

If I were to fly out to Africa and observe those people, even though I can’t speak their language, and there’s all those barriers there and I can only get a glimpse, I can do the same thing online and just ask 5,000 people what works for them. And I think it’s a valid observation. Seeing that people were having success with that I said, well, I’m going to…I had been doing it off and on over about a year – I did it for a week, three or four days here, two weeks there. And then at one point I said, well, I’m going to do it for 30 days. Just kind of do a real trial. And I didn’t die. Nothing bad happened to me. In fact, I felt really, really good. Even better than I had on a ketogenic diet.

When the 30 days were over, I said, well, that was a fun experiment, I’m going to go back to the regular diet. And so I brought back in some of the foods, some of the plant foods that I’d eating – the salads and the fruits and some of the other things that I enjoyed on a ketogenic diet. And I honestly just didn’t feel as good and I thought all things being equal, I would rather feel good and that 30 days now turned into basically two and a half years, and I continue to not die.

And as an athlete, I’d be interested to hear your experience of how your performance changed from the original standard American – or however closer you were to that originally, probably more healthy than that as an athlete – and then moving into the Paleo, then into keto, and now carnivore. I’d be really interested to see what kind of changes you’ve seen with that progression.

Yeah, when I was eating a “standard American diet” – and I wasn’t eating a lot of junk – I was still eating what most people would consider a relatively healthy diet. I did eat some desserts here and there, and I ate a little bit of junk, but I wasn’t living on potato chips and Coca Cola. I ate a lot of real food, real healthy food, all through my life. I trained hard as an athlete up until my late thirties, mid-forties, early forties, when I started to notice, just aches and pains, it was more difficult to train, my energy wasn’t good, and I wasn’t sleeping as well. I had more…I would never have been accused of being obese, but no-one would say I was super lean. That would never be the case.

Right now I’m 245 pounds. Back then I was closer to 300, but I was competing in very different sports. I was competing in sports, where at 6’5″, 300 pounds, I was still relatively small in the sports I was competing in. In those cases, having all that muscle mass was very beneficial to me. As I decided that involved me in not sleeping well, probably developing sleep apnea, having blood pressure – it was creeping up – likely having metabolic syndrome. Those things to me started to get my attention that, I don’t want to be 300 pounds anymore. That’s when I went into this dietary change and again, I tried a low fat thing for a while. I got weaker doing that, which was to be expected – losing 50 / 60 pounds – as a strength athlete, you’re going to get weaker.

I can’t say I felt tremendously better, as far as the way I felt overall with regards to energy or joint health. When I went Paleo, I think it was more sustainable. I had better energy. But it wasn’t until I went keto that I started really noticing that I don’t have these aches and pains that I would normally associate with someone in their late forties or fifties, that has been an athlete their whole life. I’ve played high level professional rugby and you get beat up.

A lot of concussion on your joints.

A lot of collisions. I was a Highland Games athlete throwing big telephone poles and 56 pound weights. That beats up your body. I was a power lifter. I had a national record in powerlifting. All of those things take a toll on the body. By the time you get to late forties, early fifties, you really notice it. And when you hurt, it’s hard to train. But when I went on a ketogenic diet I felt that, hey, I don’t hurt as much, and my energy is pretty good, and I can train more, and I feel better, and I was leaner, and I was happier. I had enough fat, I wasn’t starving my body of fat. When I went onto a carnivorous diet, I just noticed things kicked up just another gear for me. It was possibly that the little higher amount of protein – because classically on a ketogenic diet we often restrict protein because of the fear of being kicked out of ketosis.

Although quite honestly I was never…even though I ate a ketogenic-style diet and I knew I was 80% fat or something like that, I wasn’t really constantly measuring my ketones because I wasn’t really that concerned about it. But when I went on a carnivorous diet I got stronger. I noticed…and this is something I measured actually. At that point I had just set a US record on the rowing machine. It’s a very objective way to measure your power output. And I did that right before I turned 50, and I had a number – a time for a 500 meter row. And then when I turned 50, and I had just adopted this carnivorous diet, about three months later, I had not only broken that US record, but then I broke the world record. And I broke it by about 8% which is a huge increase when you’re already at a national record level. Going from 8% when you’re a beginner is no big deal.

People break records by tiny amounts.

Typically records are broken by less than 1% and I had broken the world record. Just to give you some perspective, the time for a 500 meter row was one minute 18.3 seconds, and I brought it down to one minute 14.6 seconds, so I took almost four seconds off the world record. It was just a huge improvement for me. My recovery got better. Certainly as an athlete, we talk about adequate recovery, we talk about overtraining, and at the end of the day results are based upon what your training is like, how intense you can train, and how frequently you can do that. If you train intensely and then you can do that repeatedly, your ultimate performance is going to get better. But that’s going to depend on your recovery capacity.

What I find on this diet is recovery is excellent, and part of that has to do with the fact that when you’re training, you’re breaking down muscle tissue. And the best way to build muscle tissue back up is with protein. And the best way to get protein, the most bioavailable – and closely resembling the ratios that we need – are basically getting it through meat. A cow’s muscle is not qualitatively very much different than you and I. I’ve operated on thousands of people and we are red meat animals. And so by eating a lot of red meat, I think it helps to restore that stuff, and I’m not alone in that, and I think literally hundreds upon hundreds of people that do this no will note that their recovery for exercise is very good.

So true. Every athlete I’ve interviewed has said the same thing. That it’s been absolute common thread that’s run through. They all comment on the difference they’ve seen is in the recovery. Whether they run marathons, iron man, triathletes, CrossFit trainers, all these people, the recovery they really notice a difference.

Yeah, I think there’s two things. There’s probably many things but I mean certainly we know that the oxidative stress level is lower than compared to being on a high-carb diet and Volek and Phinney have done studies on that. My podcast partner, Zack Bitter, was part of one of the studies, and they took a bunch of ultra-marathon distance guys and they checked their oxidation levels after a marathon and the high-carb guys, it was through the roof and low-carb guys, it was relatively low. So they weren’t beating themselves up as much, but I’m thinking then if you combine that with the proper nutrition to also rebuild that torn down lost muscle…we turnover about 1 -2% of our muscle every day. You’ve got to get that building material from somewhere. And so if you’re eating it, it works pretty well.

Yeah. And what foods do you – well obviously meat – but what do you prefer? I know you’re famous for eating a lot of rib eyes, but it seems to be a lot of people – at least when they’ve been carnivore for a while – tend to favor beef.

Yeah.

Is that the same for you?

Yeah, it is. When I started I was much more into variety. It was fish, it was eggs, bacon, a little bit of poultry, more dairy. And I think that helps with the transition process because you’re going to, let’s be honest, you’re going to a fairly restrictive menu. And if that bothers you, you’re not going to be able to do it. And so initially I was very much including as much as I possibly could and I enjoyed it. But as time went by, I found what I was craving more and more, and what actually gave me the most satiety, tended to be some sort of red meat, typically beef just because it’s so ubiquitous. Lamb is also very good source. I still do from time to time go through phases where fish seems like it’s good for a while, so I’ll eat some salmon, or I’ll cook up some shrimp, and eggs every once in a while. A little bit of dairy. I don’t tend to do much on the dairy, but that’s more or less my diet. But I would say if you were to slice my diet up over a year, I would say probably 97% of it would come from red meat.

Are you a one-meal-a-day guy? Two meals?

Most days it’s two meals a day, but some days I’ll drop into one meal a day. It just depends if I can get a meal in early in the morning then it’s usually two meals a day. I’ll usually do a relatively early morning breakfast and then an early dinner. I end up with something like 14, 16 hours of a fasting period. Although I don’t intentionally set a stopwatch to say I need…I know there’s a lot of benefit that people receive from having these eating windows. I think with a carnivorous-style diet, it just happens naturally anyway. I think when there’s a point where if I’m really hungry, I think there’s a reason for that. I think we have an appetite for a reason, particularly if we’re only eating one thing. What else could your body to be telling you other than, hey, dummy, you need some structure, you need some energy.

So I think there’s a reason for that. It’s going to be different for certain people. There’s people that are very metabolically in a different position. They have a lot of body fat, they have other issues that are going on where fasting may make more sense for them. But for me as someone who’s relatively healthy and a relatively, normal body composition, I just eat when I’m hungry and it works pretty well. There are plenty of days that I’ll go one meal a day. Sometimes I’ll eat through four meals a day. It just depends on what’s going on. And I don’t worry about it. The nice thing about it, it’s a restrictive diet when you look at the menu. But at the same time, it’s very freeing and liberating when you don’t have to worry about things. You don’t have to calculate…for most people. There’s some people that still end up doing that or they can’t let go that.

For me, I look at it – and maybe some people think this is too simplistic – but I look at any other animal out in the wild in nature and they just eat when they’re hungry and when they’re not hungry, they don’t. I’ve been to Africa and I go in the Serengeti and you look at the lions and if they’ve got blood on their face, the zebras will walk right by him.

Yeah.

Because they know these guys are good, they’re not going to mess with them. But if they look hungry, you better watch out. And I think that’s how we are probably designed too. There’s a period of time when you’re either hungry or you’re not, and if you’re not hungry…I don’t know if you had the meal…we just had a great meal here.

Yeah, really good.

I’m good for probably, maybe until tomorrow. Or I don’t know, maybe I’ll eat dinner tonight and maybe just socially I might eat. But there’s the other thing, I think even if I eat beyond my appetite, like say today I’m pretty full from the beef ribs I had, and the eggs and the whatever else we had there, the porchetta…I’ll eat again tonight just to be social maybe, just for fun, and then tomorrow I’ll be like, I’m not really hungry. I probably might eat one meal a day or something like that. I think it always works out in the end, with the way this diet tends to work.

And you just mentioned seeing sometimes quite a big change in your hunger levels. Have you seen a pattern with that? Like I’m thinking logically that potentially you’d have that real increased hunger after you’d been doing a lot of training, for example. That would seem a natural time that your hunger would increase?

Absolutely, and part of this is…over time there’s an intuitive process that I know I need to eat. I kind of know I need to eat x amount to fuel my day. But I do notice it when I ramp up my intensity, like when I’m getting ready to compete or I’m really pushing PRs – getting ready to try to break a world record – my appetite goes up to respond to that. Whereas most days – and I’ll put this in context, I’m a big guy – four pounds of meat a day, is kind of typical for me. But when I’m really pushing hard, and I notice that I’m hitting these real high intensities, that may go up to five or six pounds and that’ll last for a week or two, and then I’m back down to kind of my maintenance mode. Certainly I think your appetite responds to the demands that are placed upon it. And I think that’s how it’s supposed to work.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think what you were saying about the menu looks restrictive, but it is very freeing from a lot of the other factors that can influence how much you eat. Like I have a very addictive tendency toward certain foods and I get very snacky with things, and I certainly eat a lot of the time, not through hunger, just through boredom, or emotional eating, or whatever it is. The more you restrict that down – and that’s one of the big things I noticed with restricting down to keto – is that a lot of those cravings and things started going away. And taking it down to that extra level must almost remove those entirely.

Yeah, I think there’s a lot of things in there. There’s a psychological component of eating as we’re well aware. There’s some people that don’t think there’s such thing as a sugar addiction. I totally disagree with that. I think that’s totally there.

Me too. I have one.

Yeah, I do too. If you were to ask me what would I want to eat, if I could eat something outside of a carnivore…and I can’t if I want to. I will if I want to. It’s not like I’m strapped to some dogma or leaving some church group, I would eat something sweet. I would eat some fruit, or a piece of chocolate or something. That’s what I would do just because that’s…I don’t really miss much in the way of vegetables. I don’t really miss bread or pastas. I just don’t really have that. But I think part of that is, if you become very restrictive for a while, and this is the one thing that some people benefit from going from keto to carnivore, because a lot of people on a ketogenic diet, they heavily use artificial sweeteners, and they make their keto desserts. And I did that too. When I was on a ketogenic diet, I would eat all the salads and do my penance to get my…I thought I was doing the right thing, but then I would always look for…I’m going to make this neat dessert. I’m going to use this coconut flour, and almond flour, and make these wonderful baked goods with the Stevia and the Swerve and all that stuff…I’d put that in there.

But that was always in the back of my mind. Once I just went all meat for a period time – and it took probably, I don’t know, two months, three months – and then all of a sudden those things didn’t really even occur to me. Now the only time at this point where those things even remotely get in the back of my mind is if I’m really hungry. Like if I can’t eat for whatever reason, like if I missed a meal, or I’m in a place where I don’t have access to food, and then I’m like, I’m getting hungry, I need to eat something. Then you start looking around what’s available. Generally, fortunately, it’s not that hard – at least in the US – to find some place that’ll sell you a hamburger or a steak or something like that. Or if you’re at home, obviously we’ve got that everywhere.

But yeah, I think it helps people because you have to fight both the physiological battle to get off carbs, and you have to fight a psychological battle. And there’s two things. I think you can’t win the psychological battle if the physiology isn’t lined up. The physiology…if you’re still adapted to eating a lot of glucose or using glucose as your fuel…hungry people just don’t do well and you’re going to cave. You’re going to eat the cookies, or the cupcake, or order the pizza, or whatever it is. That’s what’s just going to happen. Until you get the physiology in place…

A lot of people get on a carnivore diet and they’re like, well, I just want to lose x amount of weight. And I say, you shouldn’t worry about that initially because you’ve got to change your relationship with food. You’ve got to beat these addictions. And the way to do that is to maintain your satiety at all times. And that may mean even gaining weight initially. Beat those addictions, change that metabolism, change that relationship with food. And then once you get to a point where you can walk by that chocolate cake and it doesn’t bother you, then you can say, okay, now I’m going to gently restrict things a little bit so I can hit my body composition goals. I see too many people that always ask me how much should I eat if I want to lose x amount of weight, and I always tell them, don’t make that your goal initially. If you’re coming to diet, you’ve got to… There’s a guy named Chris Donahue, a guy who started at 540 pounds and has lost well over 200 pounds, and he said, you don’t lose weight to get healthy. You get healthy to lose weight. I think that’s pretty wise.

Yeah. Getting it the right way round. And you’re so right about sorting out the physiology, sorting out those physical cravings that can then help you with all those, emotional triggers that come up. When I’m feeling down or I’ve been triggered by something, I literally get images of cake or ice cream or whatever in my head. And before it would be almost impossible to ignore those. I’m not saying I don’t still get those, and I don’t still get the cravings, but they’re a lot easier to deal with when you’re feeling physically and emotionally stronger.

Yeah. We’ve gotten so far away from the original purpose of eating. Originally it was intended to nourish us – it’s nutrition – and now it’s entertainment, it’s boredom, it’s socialization, it’s cultural overlays, and all that stuff. It’s pleasing other people sometimes. And it doesn’t help that we have an industry that drives that message 24/7. This whole thing about this snack food culture, which…when I was a kid and maybe the same thing with you, there was such thing as, your mom would say, don’t eat that, you’re going to spoil your appetite for dinner.

Totally.

And now it’s like, the kid’s hungry, give him a juice box, give him a granola bar.

Yeah, got to carry snacks around all the time. No, it was the opposite of that.

Yeah, exactly. It’s like, good you’ll eat more at dinner. And then I think the French have a nice saying – I think it’s, hunger is the best sauce, because food tastes better when you’re hungry. That is probably, as much as anything, is driving some of our metabolic disease processes that we’ve got this. Not to mention that the snacks are garbage anyway, but the fact that we are compelled. And when it starts with kids…my kids are in school. It always used to frustrate me that you’ve got to have two or three snacks a day. And I’m like, I didn’t get that when I was a kid and I didn’t die. But now we have this mentality that we literally see kids starting at three, four years old, they’ve got to have snacks. And now it’s some kind of supplement – probiotic, prebiotic, all these pills that we’re giving our kids, and we’re getting them primed to be consumers of supplements and pills. And it’s very sad to see that happening.

They were just starting to come in when I was a young kid, the whole idea of snacks and how I think the Milky Way ad went against that. I think every mum would say, no, don’t have that, don’t ruin your dinner. And the whole thing was it was small and light and it wouldn’t ruin your dinner. With hindsight, looking back, seeing what was this new thing and this constant push with the advertising and in the supermarkets and all the rest of it, to where it is now, where it is just assumed that you need to snack and that kids need to be fueled every couple of hours. And to a certain extent, the kind of foods you’re often giving them, they do to a degree. Certainly you get those mood swings – the hyper activity followed by the grumpiness, and then you need to put something in them to boost them up again.

I think we’re reaching a sort of a boiling point or crux where so many people are sick, and maybe things like continuous glucose monitors where people are clued into that. Also we’re seeing – and it’s not even hidden anymore, it’s almost blatantly in the open – how much backlash against things like ketogenic diets, or carnivore diets, or low-carb diets that are out there that, it’s not even like they’re trying to hide it anymore. It’s like you can see these industries are threatened by the fact that people are not wanting to…I like to call it human pet food…because that’s kind of basically what it is. So we’re not wanting to eat your human pet food anymore and take all your pills. We’re seeing this very aggressive push back, and I think it’s so obvious that people are looking at, and saying, of course. Hopefully with events like this, and podcasts. and the fact that we have social media…it’s going to hopefully change things for the good. I think if we leave it up to these big corporations…our health is not in their interest at all.

And people are much more interested – with everything being out there on social media and the great resources online – with experimenting a bit more on themselves and potentially, going against that general advice that’s been given, the statutory guidelines, dietary guidelines, and all those kinds of things. They’re more willing to start experimenting. I think the low-carb/carnivore, that community, we’re experimenters aren’t we? You’re obviously very keen on self-experimentation, and you have your N=many. You must have had a lot of feedback.

Yeah, in fact I’ll be talking about that in this talk here in just a bit. But yeah, coming at this from a medical background as a physician, I think physicians have kind of – not intentionally – but I think just because of the way medical practices evolve into a business where it’s throughput – how many patients can you see? Keep turning the wheels over because there’s financial reasons for that, but we don’t have the time to be curious anymore. We’ve got this paradigm, and some of these paradigms are built by pharmaceutical companies, and these guidelines are heavily influenced by that. And so we don’t take the time to sit there and we just don’t have the time to spend an hour with a patient talking to them about all these other things that may be maybe going on.

Now that we’ve got physicians – because there’s a bunch of physicians in this audience today – that are waking up to this stuff, I honestly think there’s enough good people in medicine. And of course, the patients are going to want it too that this is going to evolve. It doesn’t take people too long to see that I’m tired of taking all these pills and I’m not getting better. Let me go look at Sally down the street who just said she got off all of her pills and she tried this diet. They can’t keep that a secret forever. You can see it’s almost like a little propaganda war that’s happening out there, and it’s going to continue to happen.

It’s turning, isn’t it? It’s like this great ship has started, but it started that turn now and really can see that change starting to gain the kind of momentum that you can’t stop.

Yeah, and I agree. I don’t know if you know Gary Fettke from Australia? He’s an orthopedic surgeon like myself that got in trouble for telling patients not to eat sugar. Ridiculous, as we all think, but we talked about it – and I can’t remember the exact term he used, but it was basically talking about a school of fish and what it takes to turn a school of fish. It’s about 3%. So if you get 3% of those guys turning, then you can actually make a difference. And I think we’re…I would say, how many people in the world are on a low-carb or a ketogenic diet? I say we’re probably close to that or maybe we’re there. But I think we’re going to see a definite continued turn in that direction. I don’t think it’s going to stop despite the best efforts.

Me neither. I feel really hopeful.

Yeah. It’s fun. It’s exciting.

It’s going to change a lot. It is. Yes, it’s exciting to be part of it.

It is. I’ll tell you it’s exciting to be part of this very first carnivore conference.

Oh, it really is.

I think looking back in 15 years from now, it’s going to be maybe a place where we…

Great to be able to say, I was there.

And that’s the thing, I’m fully supportive of any kind of diet, quite honestly. I think people have the right to do that. But I think the one unique thing about a carnivore diet is it’s so much against everything else you’ve been taught. The fact that everybody’s not dropping dead of scurvy, and dying, and getting sick but rather, they’re getting healthier – is so in your face, that it’s causing a lot of thought to change. And I think that’s a fun thing to see.

So where can people find out a bit more about you and the experiments you do online?

On social media, it’s @shawnbaker1967 on Instagram. I’ve got 66,000 people on that. And Twitter, @SBakerMD – I think we’ve got about 35,000 / 37,000 something like that. I’ve got a YouTube channel, just Shawn Baker. I’ve got meatheals.com is a great website- we’re just collecting all these different stories. One of the problems I’ve got when I go to these Facebook groups, I can never find the things again.

Oh yes.

It was very difficult to manage it. So I wanted to collect all these different anecdotal stories and we’ve started to catalog those by arthritis, obesity, mental health issues. So anybody can go in there and say, I’ve got psoriasis. Well let me look, how many people got their psoriasis improved by this type of diet. So mealsheals.com. We’ve got the World Carnivore Tribe on Facebook. It’s the largest carnivore tribe currently. There’s almost 27,000 members on that one. We just started a year ago, so we’re growing pretty rapidly. Let’s see, there’s shawn-baker.com. I’ve got a little bit of writing in there and some interesting links for people that might want to do that. And then of course, I’ve got a book coming out – “The Carnivore Diet” – should be out later this year. That’s available for pre-order now on Amazon and whatnot.

Well, your timing couldn’t be better. It’s the absolute buzz word and buzz thing – that new diet that people are trying. Its popularity surge has been incredible over the few years.

Yeah. Hopefully it will reach a wider audience and if it sells a lot of books, I’ll be a happy guy.

I’m sure you will and I’m sure you will.

Thank you.

Well, thank you very much. Have you got a top tip to round us off with?

I think probably the most common tip I tell people at the beginning is if you’re going to transition into a carnivore diet, if you’re going to just jump straight into it – and some people may need to transition, they may need to slowly taper off through things like a ketogenic diet, taper out fiber, taper off things like oxalates are potentially…that’s another topic. But once you get there, don’t feel like you have to restrict, don’t cut your calories. Don’t worry about micromanaging every little detail. Enjoy it. Enjoy the food. Learn how to cook and be decadent about it.

Cooking’s a big part of it, isn’t it?

Yeah. Learn how to make a nice steak. Enjoy these. There’s lots of animal cuts out there. There are thousands of different ways you can enjoy different types of meat. And don’t be shy about using eggs, and even dairy in the beginning. Just get into it and then you can start to sort of shift and change.

And it seems to be a natural progression. Like you say, you started out with a much larger variety, but you just ended up falling into predominantly beef just because that’s what satiated you. That’s what your hunger signals were telling you wanted.

Right, and I sometimes like variety still. I still have it. If it’s there, I’ll still eat. I still enjoy it. It’s just when I’m just cooking for myself, which I often do….it’s like when I feed my dogs, they’re happy. They’re there. They’re jumping around excited. They just get a bunch of meat. They’re happy every day.

So they’re carnivore too, are they?

Yeah, they’re carnivore too. They’re happy dogs.

Yeah, mine are. Not completely, but mostly they found a balance. They actually do better with a bit of kibble as well for some reason. But yeah, they get their meat and they love it. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for taking the time out to talk to me. It’s been a pleasure.

My pleasure too. Thank you.

This transcript is brought to you thanks to the hard work of Karen Jones.

Welcome back Taffy to the Ketowoman podcast. It’s been way too long. How are you doing today?

I’m pretty well, thank you. 

It has been way too long. 

It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?

It very much has. Why don’t you catch us up a little bit on what you’ve been up to,

Boy. Oh boy. Well, let’s see. I’ve been busy as always, still running the pizzeria full time and I’ve also been doing some other things which have been fun, so that’s good. I’ve been developing some Keto recipes, a few of them are out there in the world, and working on some projects.

Yes. I remember seeing you had you had a recipe out on Have Butter Will Travel’s website.

Yeah, that’s right. We did a recipe exchange. That was a lot of fun. They did a really nice recipe with my granola, and this was before the holidays, so I did a sort of Christmas themed recipe, dessert recipe with them. That was awesome. They’re always a lot of fun.

They are. And you had a spread in a magazine too, I seem to remember. I shared that on social media. That was very exciting.

That was neat. That was fun because it’s a sort of health-oriented magazine that they distribute in grocery stores so it’s free, which was nice. And it’s a resource that the average shopper might just pick up and be thumbing through.

Good coverage.

Yeah. And interesting that they decided to do a Keto feature. Keto has definitely gone much more mainstream since the last time we talked to each other, that much I know

It has, yes, and a lot has changed. I should have looked up before we started to see how long it’s been. I don’t think it has been as much as a year, but maybe. But a lot has changed in that time hasn’t it? Yeah, it really has.

Yeah, it really has. And, so I did that and that’s still out there. They do it quarterly so if you happen to be near a Kroger store or they have some other store, I can’t remember. It’s called, uh oh, now I’m going to murder the name of the magazine – Nature? Natural Living?

Yeah. Sounds familiar. Yeah.

Maybe we could share a link or something because it’s also available as a digital download for free. The entire magazine is not Keto, but the feature is Keto. I shared four recipes with them. So that was a lot of fun. And I’ve been developing recipes for Chris and Miriam at Keto Chow.

Yes. What was that for? Some new flavored shakes or something.

Yeah. So, they have a wide variety of flavors in there.

Hmm, huge, I can’t remember how many but it’s like a hundred million or something

You’re right. It’s a billion.

I think it’s it at least 20. It’s more than that I think

Just for some different ideas what to do besides having a shake, I’ve just been working with that, which has been very interesting. So, I’ve got all sorts of different recipes that I’ve sent over to them. They keep sending me new flavors and I keep sending them new recipes, so that’s been good. Just things along those lines, just been doing some recipe work and I’m still out there on Instagram and around on the worldwide web. Probably some other things I can’t remember right now, but you know, always busy, busy, busy.

Well I’m not surprised you’re busy then all of that on top of your regular, full time job

My regular 100 hour a week job

Which running restaurant is more than your typical sort of full-time weekly hour load, isn’t it?

About 80 to 90 hours a week, each of us,  both of us. So yeah, that’s crazy. 80 is a good week.

Do you ever have time to sleep? I do a little sleeping. Not as much as I should. But you know, we get a few hours in there. The problem is I come home from the restaurant and I want to do other things so I don’t want to go to sleep. I’m trying to steal the time back and I try to work on other projects or whatever. So, right now I’m stealing time from the restaurant – I’m home doing this instead of at the restaurant even though we’re heading into the weekend which means there’s a lot to do. So, I’m always just stealing time. I’m trying to take a little from here or a little from there too, you know, make up a little extra.

Yeah. As good as you can by multitasking

Yeah. But I refuse to give up.

Are you going to manage to get away to any conferences this year? We’re going to see you at Ketofest, I believe.

Oh yeah. I’ll absolutely be at Ketofest. I should be doing a demo again this year. I am 90% sure I’ll be at Ketocon as well, in Austin. I’ve been both years to that as well. And that’s become sort of just a vacation almost, like a girl’s weekend. I just go and meet friends there and eat as much barbecue as humanly possible in the course of three days.

I have seen the pictures of the barbecue there. It does look amazing. Is that the month before Ketofest? Is it in June?

Yeah, the first year. It was actually later, it was in September. But now it’s held in June. So yeah, mid-June, I can’t remember the exact dates. I’ll be doing that, I’ll be at Ketofest, other than that, I’m not sure, I don’t have any plans. I’m not going to be able to do Low Carb Denver or I’m not going to Majorca, unfortunately.

That’s definitely on my wish list that one, it looks amazing. Closer to me as well. So, what are we going to talk about in this episode?

Well, I thought that since we are in fact on a Ketogenic podcast talking about ketogenic living, maybe it’s time we just talked about good old fats. One of my favorite topics as a chef, pre-Keto, and obviously one of my favorite topics as a keto chef. And I think still a, if not maligned, still a very misunderstood element in the kitchen. Maybe a misunderstood element as a macro too, but definitely not fully appreciated in the kitchen. Too many people have eschewed fat for too long to really understand all of its full beauty, and full applications, and how many cooking fats are out there, that almost everything comes with a fat, and ways to utilize those and enjoy them and celebrate them.

Yeah, so explain a bit more about that. Are you talking about maybe how some people may be used the wrong fats for the wrong things or just not using them enough? Where are we going with this? Where should we jump in?

Well, what I mean is that people, and of course I’m particularly talking about Americans because that’s who I work with and what I deal with, are unaware of how many edible fats are in the world. So as Americans, over the last 20 or 30 years, we probably have been mainly using vegetable oils, the “healthy vegetable oils” like canola, corn, soy. When we decide to branch out from that or try to give those up because maybe they’re not as healthy as we’ve been told they are, people oftentimes have a hard time finding other fats, or they don’t know what to look for, or what they are. They sort of get stuck in a rut or in a niche. They’re like, “okay, well, coconut oil, I can just coconut oil, or avocado oil” – and they may not know that there’s more fat out there and they may not know that fat is oftentimes kind of free. You may still have a habit of cooking meat and pouring off all the fat that comes off of it just because that’s what you’ve been doing for a long time, and not reserving it, which is what all of our ancestors would’ve done until very recently. You maybe have beautiful chicken fat, beautiful beef fat, beautiful pork fat that you’re just discarding, not realizing you could use it. You may be buying jars of expensive ghee not realizing that you have butter that you can clarify yourself. I’m talking about that – that there’s this full world of fat that’s readily available to us that we perhaps don’t even realize is right there or that we have it and we have access to it. It’s in our refrigerator and it’s in our freezer right now. And, we’re stuck on the idea that we have to go buy an expensive bottle of some sort of oil, or we’re putting MCTs in everything. Not that you can’t use MCTs, they definitely have their place, but they don’t have to be the oil or the fat that goes into everything. There’s beautiful fat that’s available to you that you may already have. So that’s what I’m talking about. Definitely from a culinary perspective because of course that’s where I’m always coming from. And then how does that apply to our ketogenic kitchen and our lifestyle

Of course. I can see, and this is something I’d certainly like more information on, the different ways to use some of the different fats. I’m sure there are things that I just haven’t thought about that would be a great way to use some of those fats. Because I’m certainly someone who drains a lot of that fat off, not all of it, I do like to keep some in there, but I don’t want to eat something that’s literally swimming in fat.  I have my different jars: I’ve got my bacon grease jar, and I’ve got a beef fat jar, and I have my chicken fat jar.  I always tend to get less from the chicken, but I have my little chicken fat jar and that for me is the one I like the most.  That’s the one I like the flavor of most, I like to put some of that on top of a steak, I think that’s a delicious, delicious flavor, you know, yummy. But like you say, these are effectively free fats and a lot of people, I see them, they spend huge amounts of money on a jar of beef tallow from somewhere or other where I’ve collected it in my fridge. Mine often actually is slightly flavored because I’ll have been cooking the beef with some spices or something, so I have this sort of beef fat that’s got some chili spices in it or something. But perhaps you could just tell us a bit about the collection of these, the storage and then what we can do with them.

Yes, absolutely. So here’s one of my favorites that I see go to a terrible waste all the time, it hurts my heart! So, if you make broth or what I would call stock from bones…

I do too. I always call it stock. I’ve always called it stock. I actually have a bone bag in my freezer. Because it’s just me, I live on my own, so I’ll eat a couple of chicken thighs or something and there’s just two tiny little bones and you think ‘well there’s nothing much I can do with that’, but I just have a bag that gradually fills up with those. It has the odd lamb bone or the bone from a pork chop. The beef bones don’t tend to find their way in there actually because I tend to cut them out before I cook the meat, which I know you’re going to wince at because I know it tastes better when it’s in there, but I tend to give that to the dogs. I buy, I don’t know what the cut is called in the States, I don’t even know what it’s called in the UK, poitrine they call it here. It’s the ribs, so I guess it’s like short rib or something. It’s very, very fatty and it has the long rib bones in. I cut those out and give them to the dogs because they love them and I don’t want to give them to them when they’re cooked. That’s their very special treat. So beef bones don’t often end up in there though I have picked up bones from the butcher for free, which is fantastic. But yes, I just save them up. So I have this bag that just gets bigger and bigger and bigger until it’s a given size. Then I cook that down in the pressure cooker until the bones are soft enough that the dogs can have the bones and I have the wonderful stock. Sorry, I’m rambling and I interrupted your stock/broth discussion.

No, no, that’s all right. Because you’re talking about what I’m talking about and technically there is a difference between broth and stock. I’m not exactly sure when the term bone broth came to be so popular, but it’s a bit of a misnomer. So stock is made from bones and is generally not seasoned. Broth is made from meat. It can be on the bone, but it should include some meat. So, if you used a whole chicken for instance, that would be a broth and broth is seasoned and flavored.

Right. I see. I knew that there must be a technical difference. So stock is really the thing that you’re making with the stuff that some people throw away, whereas a broth is making something out of the bits that I usually eat off first.

You could make a broth with a stock, you could make a stock with your bones and then you could add some vegetables and meats. And a stock does generally also have a mire poix, so it does have some vegetables, the trinity of onion, carrot and celery, but that’s it, and you’re not talking about anything else, perhaps just a tiny little bit of a salt in there or something, just to help with the minerals. Broth should be flavorful enough to eat on its own. So I kind of understand where the term bone broth came from. I’ve always been curious about that

Yeah, because you tend to consume it on its own, so it does have to be a different thing. Because, I must admit, I’ve always thought, yeah, I don’t really fancy  just drinking a cup of my chicken stock. I mean it’s okay, but I’d rather make a soup with it. I tend to put it in when I’m slow cooking some beef or something, I’ll put some stock in and you just get this wonderful end result. But the thought of just drinking it on its own is ‘meh’, you know.

No, I got that.  I don’t think anybody really enjoys that idea. So of course now we’re adding aromatics or adding flavorings in theory if it’s a broth and it also has some sort of actual flesh in it to flavor it. So, going back to the stock and going back to the bones one of my absolute favorite fats to work with is marrow bones. If you have beef bones that you’re using, these would be shanks, bones that you’re using to make your stock or your broth or whatever you choose to call it. I see that people are putting them in there whole and you know, just skimming off whatever comes out of there and keeping the broth. If you roast those bones first or if you extract the marrow first, we usually roast them, the marrow, of course, is one of life’s greatest delicacies. It’s also in theory, perhaps one of the first animal foods that humans ate. Because other animals, imagine a lion taking down a zebra or whatever would have been the animal, and once the carcass is clean, there’s one thing left that most animals can’t access that a human being with a tool can access, and that would be the marrow left in the bones. So, it may be one of our most formative foods, and of course it’s unbelievably rich in fat and nutrients. It’s the storehouse where the blood cells are being made, that might not be exactly scientifically correct, but I think you get my gist.

It’s delicious.

It’s delicious. It’s very digestible, it’s very healing and healthy. So instead of putting that into your water and cooking it where it’s going to be lost, you reserve it. So if you roast those bones first, even if you don’t want to eat the marrow, some people don’t enjoy the marrow, that’s okay. But the fat that comes from them is remarkable, it’s incredibly clean. It’s very clear. It’s very mild. It has virtually no flavor. So if you’re a person who doesn’t like the flavor of animal fat and I understand, I know you’re out there and after years of being a vegetarian, being raised vegetarian, there are certain animal flavors that I’ve still not totally come to terms with, but that fat is totally mild. It cooks beautifully and you won’t get a lot, but what you get is worth its weight in gold for something as simple as cooking an egg, sautéing a dish where you maybe don’t want a lot of flavor from the fat itself. If you want to sauté a delicate vegetable, something like that, it’s beautiful. You can get, depending on the bones, a couple of ounces, a few ounces, it’s so worth it. Then with a little coarse sea salt on the marrow, you can eat that with a spoon if you’d like, or you can use it to enrich your sauces or enrich other dishes – it will give a sort of a somewhat thickening effect, but also a very velvety, silkening effect to a sauce or a soup. It’s a traditional ingredient in a risotto Milanese. If you make that, let’s say you make a cauliflower risotto, it is a much more elegant way to add some richness to it versus a cream cheese or something like that. And then you’d make your stock – it’s the elegance of it that just moves me in the kitchen. This is where we’ve come from, that’s our origins, and that’s what food is.

We tend to forget we live in the modern Western world, most of us live in the sort of artificial bubble of food glut, there’s too much food, there’s always food, there’s lots of food. If you turn it around and you look at it from the opposite direction, you imagine being constantly in need of food and constantly working to find food and constantly on the lookout for food – that is the truth of most of our reality as human beings, as a species. Then you can see the basic usefulness of these sort of practices and the elegance of them, especially if you’re coming from a background of the sort of naturalistic way of surviving or feeding yourself from the land, and if you’re Keto. For instance something like a preserved meat like bacon, that’s fat and salt. Well, if you are in Ketosis and you’re on a ketogenic diet, what do you need? Fat and salt. So you’re preserving a food for later use, and it also happens to have this beautiful synergy that it’s exactly what you need and it’s going to preserve you as well. To me that means that it’s correct, I don’t have to guess, I don’t have to say ‘Well, is this is okay for me? Should I eat it because I don’t know? Is it canola oil? Is it this or that?”. No – people have been doing it for thousands of years. It seems to have sustained them and it seems correct. I don’t have to worry about the bacon going bad in two minutes or two days or what have you. So obviously I can go on at length about this, that elegance and that synergy.  I think if you’re confused about the food you’re eating, besides asking yourself “How do I feel when I eat this food? Does it make sense? Is it simple enough that almost anyone could do it with almost any equipment if you have a rock and a knife, for instance?”. That’s what I’m talking about when I’m talking about the fat. I have a recipe that I did for my cooking classes last year at Ketofest where we seared duck breast, and you cook it slowly the same way you would a piece of bacon – you start with a cold pan, you use low heat and you allow that fat to render off and render off and render off. From one duck breast, the amount of fat you will have afterward is almost unbelievable. It seems almost physically impossible, like there wasn’t that much and there to begin with.

It’s very giving isn’t it? Yeah.

It is! And again that fat is beautiful. And don’t forget, all fats function differently. So duck fat, even cold from the refrigerator is soft and spreadable unlike beef tallow which is, even at room temperature, very hard.  Coconut oil stays very hard. So, depending on what you’re using it for, if you’re baking something, if you’re making something that you need to mix it into, it’s going to behave differently. They all have their different uses, like you were saying, they all behave differently. But again, if you’re cooking duck breast, you’re going to just be gifted all this beautiful fat that you can use again and again. And, of course, fat also has anti-bacterial properties, anti-microbial properties, it’s a preservative. We can look at foods like confit, the duck legs preserved in the fat and see that fat has these beautiful life giving and lifesaving properties. I like to look at it that way versus, “Oh, is this the most ideal fat? Is that the most ideal fat?”. Maybe one is the most ideal today and maybe a different one is the most ideal tomorrow. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you look at it, we’re divorced from the yearly seasonal cycle of our foods. That guarantees us a lot of food security and food safety, which is wonderful. I’m not going to knock that, but it also means that sometimes we’re out of touch with the idea that there’s a best time and the best place for a specific food.

Yeah, absolutely. And I know a lot about duck confit. I’m in a duck area in France, so you see a lot of the confit jars and as you were saying. I like the way these things tie together. What I like about the kind of cooking and the kind of nutrition you have if you don’t have much money is that it forces you to get inventive. It forces you to get the very most you can out of every scrap. And, I think a lot of the most exciting recipes are actually born out of that environment. But here, yes, like I say lots and lots of duck. I’m in a duck and walnut area. It’s quite very regional in France isn’t it? And they have their different things.  And yes, you see these confit jars.  And of course they raised their ducks throughout the season, and then heading into the winter, like you say – there is a timing with these things and with the preservation of these foods, they would slaughter and butcher their ducks.  The magret – the breast – goes off, that’s the best bit, that probably gets sold to local restaurants, then they no doubt render down the carcasses and things for their broth and whatnot. But then it’s the legs and the thighs that they confit under all that fat that they’ve rendered down, just the fat that renders out of the legs and thighs itself, and then they pack them into these jars and cover with fat. And then those jars weren’t refrigerated, they were just stored. And because everything was covered in the fat and keeping cold in the winter down in the cellars and what have you, that’s the food that they can pull from when they need it during the winter months when there’s not so much food around. It’s very interesting that, just like you say, that the cycle that follows the with the time of year with what’s available and then getting inventive with how to preserve it with what you’ve got.

Right. And if you look at those duck legs, they tend to be tough and somewhat sinewy and not fatty in and of themselves, the actual meat. So that time cooked and then preserved in the fat is also making them more flavorful, more tender, more delicious.

Oh really delicious. I mean, they are just beyond delicious.,

So that goes back to that sort of elegant system that it’s all benefiting itself and in turn us. That’s what I am sort of waxing poetic about here, I’m gushing, but that’s what I’m talking about.

We like it when you gush. There was something I was going to ask you, just quickly going back to the broth. When you started talking about the bones and the marrow bones. Of course it’s very specifically bone broth that is often cited is the thing you should have. So, when you were talking about the difference between stock and broth, then what is bone broth? Is that a broth that has the marrow in it? Is it something else? Is it just one of these things that’s been fabricated?

That’s wheat I mean, the culinary terms that I know and that I understand from school and from teaching are stock and broth, so there is no product called bone broth. What I think bone broth is, is just this new way of reinventing the wheel. You know someone’s going to be upset that I’ve said this, so brace yourself, gird your loins. I’m sure you’re going to get somebody to give me a talking to.

They can try. Is it then a seasoned stock? Because if it’s bone broth, that implies that basically it’s stock because it’s just made with bones, it doesn’t have to meat in it, I hope I’ve got that right. So a stock is made with bones and if they’re saying it’s a bone broth, then so effectively it’s a stock, but do they turn it into a broth by seasoning in it, but there’s not meat to added so it’s in between the two.

Right, I think that’s what’s happening. It’s sort of this – it’s really stock bones that are now being made into seasoned stock, I think that’s what most people are referring to when they say bone broth. And I think it’s just coming to the nomenclature because so many people are not familiar with the traditional style of cooking and they weren’t making these things at home for the last 30 years or 40 years. It’s just a new name for an old thing, but it’s this kind of funny fusion of it. And don’t get me wrong, I mean, what I’m talking about when I say stock and broth, that’s from a professional culinary aspect. So it doesn’t mean people at home aren’t just lobbing everything into the pot and cooking, I mean that’s what we’ve all been doing for a long time. In the United States they also used to make something or preserve something called pot liquor – as you cooked vegetables, you just kept the cooking liquid from the vegetables and then you would use them in more vegetables or in soup or what have you.

Oh, I’ve done that when I used to make roast dinners. When I started off, I would boil the potatoes before I roasted them and then I would have a fair amount of water. Then I would drain those off and put them in the oven, but keep the water. Then I’d cook the carrots in it, and so it would then become potato-y, carrot-y water. Then I’d cook beans in it or whatever. Then what was left, which was reduced right down, went into the meat juices to make the gravy, and oh yeah, the best flavor because you’ve added it all.  You’ve pulled as much flavor as you can out of everything that you’ve cooked.

Yeah. And you’ve basically, essentially made a vegetable stock. And again, preservation of it would have been important. To conserve and utilize water as much as possible, it would have been important to utilize and conserve the nutrition and the vitamins from everything as much as possible, so none of that would go down the drain, none would go to waste – maybe possibly into the garden or to the chickens or to the pigs, but still the nutritional value is still going somewhere. And that’s what I’m talking about. When it comes to fat, that ability to both preserve and then nourish, is really profound.

As far as broth and stock goes. Like you were saying, it doesn’t matter what it’s called. It’s one of those interesting things because bone broth is a term that just gets thrown about so much, it is just kind of interesting to unpick exactly what they mean. But yeah, whatever you call it doesn’t matter, it’s just that lovely thick jelly with a bit of a fat cap at the top, that’s what we’re talking about.

That’s right. And that’s what we used to feed that to people who were ill or were weak and needed good nutrition but couldn’t chew or couldn’t eat a lot of heavy foods. It used to be understood as a very healing food, and I guess that is what people have tapped back into – that it’s healing, its soothing, that if you’re having digestive problems, it’s something that you should be able to digest and get some good nutrition out of. So I don’t mean to downplay it or demean it, its just that I find it kind of funny, like where did that term come from?

It’s okay. I think it’s interesting to unpick that. But yeah, basically what we’re saying as far as bones go, never throw a bone away before you turned it into something else first.

Americans are, have been for quite a while, very obsessed with the idea of no bones. You know, boneless wings, boneless ribs, boneless roast. You’re missing out, you’re missing out on a lot of nutrition and flavor.

But it ties in very nicely to where we started about collecting fats and some different things. Absolutely. And I mean, you can purposefully make your own tallow or lard by rendering down, large quantities of fat that you can buy from your butcher. But  , we’re talking about just collecting the fat that comes off meat naturally when you cook it. Most people that I know who Keto have a bacon grease jar. So that was the first one that everyone collects.

Yeah, it’s, it’s easiest. And basically, if you have been saving bacon fat, then you already know how to render fat. All you need is the low temperature ideally and a little time. Then you have fat and you’re going to render that off and you may have something left in there, you may have some nice scratchings or you may have some nice little tidbits in there. You may have some liquid that needs to come off of course. That’s a big thing – if you want to save your fat, you want to make sure there’s no water or anything liquid in there because that’s the opposite of fat and that’s going to encourage bad behavior from the bacteria. So you want to separate it.  But fat rises to the top, right? You can just skim it off or repour off the liquid if you have one of those funny gravy separators.

And that’s a good point actually with something like bacon. I tend to cook in the oven and the bacon comes out and then I pour what’s left in. Should we be straining the bits out or could it all just go in? From a preservation point of view, does it matter what goes into that?

From a preservation point, you want to strain out the bits, it’s going to last better if there’s nothing in there. You can just strain it through a little bit of cheese cloth, muslin, whatever you may have and just strain out the bits, that will help to preserve longer. You don’t really want something else in it. If I keep my bacon grease, I don’t worry about it. I just keep in the refrigerator, we go through it fast, it’s just the two of us. I cook beef bacon actually, which I think we’ve talked about before, it gives off quite a bit of fat, sometimes a lot, and it’s enough for me to cook our food. Because the average person probably doesn’t need a huge amount of cooking fat, you are probably getting enough cooking fat from the food you cook to continue to cook your food. There is nothing wrong with rendering out your tallow or lard, actually doing that process, if you need more. But unless you’re doing a lot of deep frying or something, you probably don’t.

Yes, that’s what I was thinking of actually, for using it for something like a deep fryer. So you strain that off and you mentioned you keep yours in the fridge.  I just keep mine next to the stove. My rule of thumb is it depends what your room temperature is. I think the thing with the solid fats is that, and that’s one of the reasons they keep, because they’re in a solid state, they don’t oxidize like oils do, so they stay stable longer, but it depends.  In the summer when it gets really hot and that’s turning to a liquid, that’s when I start worrying, that’s when it can turn rancid. I can remember my mother always kept butter in a butter dish, which generally is great. But in the heat of summer where it actually starts melting, that’s when it starts going rancid, isn’t it? And I can always remember her butter in the summer was just always rancid because she refused to put it in the fridge. And that’s nasty. It just doesn’t taste good.

Exactly. Conversely, rancid or oxidized fat is one of the least healthy things you can eat, so you don’t want that to happen. I keep everything in the refrigerator because we do all our cooking at the restaurant. So, (A) it’s always hot in there, and (B) I just can’t leave some things sitting out if the health department shows up and is like “why do you have all this bacon fat sitting all over?” – I won’t have a good explanation – “well, because I eat that!”. So I just keep everything in the refrigerator or the freezer almost without exception and I just keep it somewhere handy where I can get to it. Bacon fat from the beef bacon doesn’t get as hard as beef tallow, so I can usually just pull it out of the fridge and still use it. And again, it depends on the fat, but they do behave the same as a coconut oil. If you have coconut oil in the refrigerator, good luck to you using it anytime soon. If it’s out at room temperature, you stand a better chance. So you can just do what you’re comfortable with, but you don’t want to leave it somewhere hot. People have a tendency, they do it with spices too and spices have volatile oils in them that can go rancid, they put it above the stove, that cupboard above the stove, and their cooking oils too. And unfortunately, that’s convenient, but it’s the worst place to put it because it’s always going to be warm there when you’re cooking.

And lights as well isn’t good for spices. And you see often it’s that typical spice rack, and they look very pretty, or the different colors, but it’s really the worst possible thing you can do for spices isn’t it? Heat and light.

Yeah, exactly. And your oils obviously if you’re cooking with other oils or eating other oils, it’s the same thing. Obviously olive oil doesn’t need to be somewhere hot and it doesn’t need to be somewhere with lights. And if you have nut oils that you’re using, I love to, I don’t cook with them but I add them to my salad dressings, for instance – pressed walnut oil, hazelnut oil, pistachio oil, toasted pecan oil is amazing, or pecan oil if you prefer. Again, those I actually keep in a cool sort of pantry to keep them cool, and it’s dark. But if not, just keep them in the refrigerator.  It’s better than somewhere else because those are volatile and those will go rancid pretty quickly and then they’re awful. And it’s a big waste because they’re expensive.

They are expensive and yes, they are delicious in things like salad. Walnut oil is something I get a lot here. And quite often with the cheese course here they will serve just a very simple lettuce salad dressed with a little walnut oil, sometimes with walnuts in there as well. And that goes incredibly well with cheese. Absolutely delicious. A typical thing that it comes out with a little cabecou which is a goat’s cheese that again is from this area and the combination is just delicious. There was a restaurant I used to eat in, it was a starter they made, it was these little goat cheese round flat discs and it was coated in something like an egg wash then crushed walnuts and deep fried. And, oh, it was just delicious. This crispy walnut outside and then this lovely melty goat’s cheese in the middle on a salad, just delicious.

We’re collecting all this bacon grease and I must admit I’m bad for this. I’ve got two jars of bacon grease and I don’t use it enough. Every day I cook my scrambled eggs in butter. I have tried cooking them with bacon grease and I just don’t like the flavor as much. So I have all this bacon grease sitting around and I don’t use it enough. I mean obviously I do use it when I’m, frying something, but what are some things that we can cook where it’s really going to be beneficial to use it, where it’s really going to add some flavor? I did make the other day, and it really did enhance the flavor, I made some of my seed crackers. And towards the end before rolling them out, I mixed in some melted bacon grease. And they tasted, you could taste it in them, they didn’t really taste bacony but it just had this lovely salty, savory, extra savory flavor to them. And that was really nice and I did feel it really enhanced it. So instead of just kind of using up as this general fry thing, how can we use it to really enhance dishes?

Well, you can absolutely use it in baking of course. So whether you’re making almond flour biscuits or just about any sort of quick bread style dish, obviously in the American south you can think of things like cornbread, if you’re making your Keto cornbread, I use it in things like that all the time. I love to cook my vegetables in animal fat, bacon fat is especially delicious. One of my favorite things…when you go Keto, you struggle to have all this fat – “I have butter but I don’t have toast” or “I have fat but I don’t have rice, what am I supposed to do with this now?”. One of my favorite things to do is to sauté mushrooms in whatever it may be. With bacon fat, they absorb and they absorb a lot. And so actually, if you’re trying to figure out how to get some more fat in, eggs will take on a lot of fat like butter or whatever fat you’re using. Sometimes I do my eggs with the beef bacon fat. Sauteeing mushrooms in whatever animal fat you have is delicious and they will really absorb a lot of it. So if you’re thinking ‘where am I going to put all of this?’ – thats one of my favorite ways. Also one of my favorite ways is with a dish that normally where I would have used pasta before, if I make a roast with a sauce or chop with a sauce or something along with potatoes, rice, pasta that you don’t use anymore, a sauteed vegetable, like a mushroom will also absorb a lot of that sauce and be a vehicle for the sauce. So that would be my first thing I would say. And any vegetable that has that propensity to absorb if you’re cooking it, eggplant is another and you can sometimes get zucchini to do that if you cook it in a fat you like. that’s one of my first go to things. I just sort of throw fat into things as I cook. I don’t worry about it – I would put some in the beginning and then I’ll put some more as it’s cooking and then I’ll just throw some more in there, I’ll keep going and sort of see how much it will take on. You get a feel for it as you cook whatever it is that you like to cook. I love, I love sauteed cabbage. I always have, I love sauteed cabbage and that’s something that tastes really good.

Yes cabbage really does go well with bacon, doesn’t it?

Absolutely.

And is it something you can, since you mentioned using it in baking, is it something that you can use to replace, for example, if there is butter in a recipe, can you do a straight swap with using something like that like that? Because everybody is going to behave slightly differently because obviously the butter has those milk solids but I guess it depends a little bit on the recipe. How is it going to behave differently? Could we just do straight swaps? What do we have to sort of watch out for when using it? In some of these recipes where it calls for something like butter.

Unless you’re using butter very specifically to mount a sauce or enrich or sauce or something like that, you shouldn’t really be too much of an issue, especially in Keto cooking and baking because it’s not nearly as delicate as something with flour and sugar. So the effects of the butter would be having in something like a biscuit or a cake or   in traditional baking is not really going to apply. When you get to talking about things like coconut flour and almond flour and you may need slightly less fat than you would butter. You might need to just very slightly increase your amount of liquid, but you probably won’t. You probably could just use it one for one in Keto baking without even having to worry about it. Again, unless you’re talking about making a sauce or something. And then of course the other obvious place, oh, did you want to say something?

I was just going to say, potentially, it’s going to add quite an interesting flavor tone, especially, I’m just thinking of some of the sweet things you could add it to, that It’s just going to add that hint of ‘I can’t really tell what that flavor is in there, but…”, but you can see that it’s adding a layer without, making your shortbread taste of bacon or something. But I can see it being interesting even if you just subbed out some of the butter for a bit of bacon fat adding an interesting layer of flavor.

Yeah, absolutely. And it’s fun to experiment, it’s fun to try it and see what, what you get, how it goes. I was just looking at a recipe somewhere that was with spices, bacon fat and spices in a cookie or something like that. You know, don’t be afraid to experiment, I mean, just go for it. What the heck, try. And then of course the other place that we can use our fat is with lean meat. There’s plenty of options for making pates, making tourines, making roulettes where you just combine them. So chicken breast is kind of boring and not very flavorful, turkey breast is kind of boring and not very flavorful. They will absorb a lot of fat and a lot of liquid. So if you grind it and make patties or whatever you want or you make it into a pate, you can incorporate a lot of that animal fat in there. Not only does it taste good, but it makes it something that’s edible. I personally was never a fat bomb person. I don’t enjoy just eating fat in and of itself, unless it’s something like a piece of butter on top of an egg or something. So making it into something that feels more edible, more tasty or more substantive, helps me to sort of enjoy it more. So if you’re making like a simple pate, a couple chicken breasts that are cooked and are boring, you can throw them in the Cuisinart with some duck fat or bacon fat and little seasoning, whatever you like – if you have fresh herbs, great. Then you can eat that and it’ll be a little bit more exciting than just eating a spoonful of bacon fat, unless thats your thing! That’s cool too.

Quite good hand moisturizer as well. I was smearing some over my cast iron pan after I’ve washed it out. There was something that had actually stuck to it and I was smearing it over the pan with my hands and then rubbing it into my hands afterwards. Um, smelled a little bacony, but  , who cares? It’s Keto.

That’s right.

You did mention the beurre monte just a little while ago and perhaps you could just tell us what that is and how to make it. I do faux beurre monte, I think with when, when I have something like if I’ve made a casserole or something, something like a beef casserole and I don’t tend to thicken sauces with any kind of quote unquote flours. I’ve never been a fan of that. The French in general seem to have a jus more, which is much, much lighter isn’t it?

Yeah

And I tend to prefer things a little bit thinner like that. But if I do want to thicken it up, I tend to just reduce it until it’s thicker naturally or maybe add some cream. But what I really like and I’ve always done it with soups, adding it both for flavor and to thicken so I do it with sauces as well, is to add some butter to it. So as it’s come out, so I’m not cooking with it, when it’s come out and it’s in the bowl and it’s hot, I would just add some butter to it and stir it in and it tastes delicious. If anyone’s in any doubt, I love butter, but it also makes this thick unctuous sauce. And I think, beurre monte, that’s kind of what beurre monte is, isn’t it? But there is a process to it rather than just throwing lumps of butter in it at the end. Which is what I do.

Well, yes.

Kind of a similar end result I think, isn’t it? It’s basically thickening a sauce with butter isn’t it?

Well yeah. So there’s an actual beurre monte, which is a preparation of cooking butter with water that then you can hold it for a while and you can add that to dishes as you serve them.  , as you finish the sauce on the line. The simplest thing is what you’re saying and that’s mounting with butter or finishing with butter. And if you’re at home, this is what you are probably going to do. So when you have your sauce reduced, for example if you saute a dish in a pan and there’s a pan sauce there – there’s some drippings, there’s some juice, and you maybe add just a little bit of stock or a little bit of wine or whatever if you need to or maybe it’s good enough on its own, then at the end after you’ve pretty much pulled it from the heat, right as you’re pulling it from the heat…add your butter. Your butter has to be not melted, not too cold, but sort of room temperature butter, a little bit on the cooler side, still solid. You just put a couple pieces in there and whisk it in real quick. And what happens is it’s holding, it’s emulsified, it doesn’t completely melt and it gives a sauce, a beautiful velvety, silky richer mouthfeel. It is sort of thickening the sauce or giving it more body. It takes a little practice sometimes to get it right, that you know you’re getting it there, right timing -it’s not too hot, it’s not too cold. It’ll taste good no matter what, it’s butter. And the better your butter is, the better it’ll work. And you can just take a whack at it, just slinging some butter in. You make a chop and add a little liquid to the drippings in there, get it warm and put a couple pieces of butter in and whisk it in. You’ll have a beautiful sauce. It doesn’t hold for a long time. You eat it right away – you serve it and you eat it. But definitely that’s finishing or mounting with butter.

And it is delicious and it does make it more filling. You do get some people saying that, oh, you know, fat isn’t a fitting macro nutrient and blah, blah, blah. But I definitely find that with a sauce like that, it limits how much you can eat.

Yeah. Oh yeah. And that’s the thing. That’s what I mean. If you’re just trying to force yourself to just eat plain fat, it’s not always that pleasant. You need a way to, you need a fat delivery system to make it feel more satiating and also to make it feel like you’re eating something you made, make it taste better and be more satisfying.

Exactly. And I’m not saying to people that you’ve got to add fat. I just do it because it’s absolutely delicious. But if you like things a little bit more on the leaner side, you don’t have to add it. It’s not that you need to eat as much fat as you can because it’s Keto. We’re not saying that. It’s just that I love butter.

Yeah. If you’re using ketogenic diet for a therapeutic reason, maybe you do need to force yourself to eat fat more than you really want, and then you need to be creative with how you’re going to eat it. If you’re doing keterogenic diet for weight loss or some other health reason, it doesn’t mean you need to just force feed yourself fat. I just added to things, I add it to lean protein, I added to vegetables or I cook with it or it’s already in there, but I don’t need to eat like a lot of fat or need to force it on myself. I don’t have a need for it. I just make my food tastes good and then I’m done. I leave with that.

Yes. I think I definitely need to experiment a bit more with these meat fats that I collect. I do tend to too often just opt for butter. I need to think first before I throw the fat into the pan. Well let’s choose one of the other fats.

Yeah, it butters an easy go to and you can mix it up and try some other things and experiment. It’s good. Yeah.

And what do you find, cause we have mentioned some, some other fats. I’m not a big fan of cooking with coconut oil. I have to say I don’t really like the flavor in most things. The only time that I tend to use it is if I do want to add that flavor. So if I was making something like a carry for example, and with needing to fry the meat or some onions or whatever, then then I might use it.

Yeah, I cook with it some but not a lot. I tend to bake with more than I cook with it. Now you can get butter flavored coconut oil if you can’t do dairy and it’s pretty good actually. I think it just depends. You can force yourself to cook with coconut oil, but for one thing sometimes people overdo it and they upset their stomach right away when they first are using it. And also, yeah, it has a time and a place. So I tend to prefer in sweet preparations where the flavor sort of enhances that sweetness and if I’m making a curry or something like that. But even then I still probably rely more on coconut cream or full fat coconut milk than I do the coconut oil. But everybody’s different. Everybody has a different way of of how they like it. It does work well for frying, but it will impart a flavor. So if you want to make a coconut shrimp and fried coconut shrimp, then you’re in good to go use your coconut oil. But if you’re making something you know that you want a more neutral flavor it, might not be your favorite go to.

And all these solid fats, the ones that go solid at room temperature, they really are your best fats for for frying aren’t they? What was your feeling about olive oil? Some people say you can cook with olive oil and some people say you shouldn’t cook with olive oil.

I think extra virgin olive oil, you shouldn’t be cooking with it. It’s best used for finishing and dressings and things like that. And then the rest, there’s a long tradition of with olive oil. I mean people do that traditionally in places where they’re producing olive oil. I mean that’s just a fact. But I think to each his own, if you feel comfortable with using a lighter form of olive oil that doesn’t have as much flavor and it doesn’t have as much volatility. So olive oil is similar to butter in that way, it has some food particles in it, it has things in it that oxidize quickly and that burn quickly if you tried to cook with them. But if you’re using a second pressing oil or something like that, and again, I’m not even gonna get into that. There’s people who have very strong feelings about whether it’s poisonous or whether it’s not okay. And again, I think this has to do with industrial food complex. If you have your own olives and you’re producing your own olive oil, then you probably know what you’re getting yourself into and you can judge when you’re going to cook with it and when you’re not. If you’re buying premade olive oil, then you don’t know how it’s been processed and you don’t know how that oil has been extracted from the olives. The first pressing the oil is coming out of the olives, everything after that, it’s the sort of slurry of the pits and whatever’s left from the olives, the paumice. Whether you feel comfortable eating that or cooking with it is up to you. If you do use that paumice oil or like a light oil that doesn’t have that volatility to it, you can cook with it. Not at high temperatures. I wouldn’t say frying it, but you can saute an egg in it or something like that. It’s doable. I do some of both. I eat it. I love extra virgin olive oil and I will put it on everything and I can even drink it. I could drink a spoonful or a shot glass full of it. Um, which is said to be good for an ulcer. If you do that on an empty stomach first thing in the morning. Yeah, supposedly that will heal an ulcer. I don’t know if that’s true, but it kind of makes sense if it’s, if an ulcer is in fact bacterial, but I have a lighter olive oil that’s not an extra virgin olive oil that I will use sometimes in cooking too or where I want, not the strong flavor. I’ll use olive oil to make garlic butter. I’ll mix it with the butter so that it stays spreadable, that sort of thing.

I must admit I do use it and I have used it for frying, although not at a super high temperature. But the, the reason I pick it, if I pick it, it’s for the flavor. So if it’s the dish I’m making that I’m firing a component of it, it’s for the flavor that that is adding to it. But I’m always slightly aware that potentially I shouldn’t be frying with it. I think we’ve pretty well had quite good turn around the fat and oil cabinet. You mentioned earlier about some of the really tasty nut oils and things and I think that they’re definitely something to explore. Aren’t they really interesting to mix into dressings and finishing off foods and often I think it’s nice if you’ve got an an Asian dishes just to finish off with a bit of sesame oil or something like that. It just really lifts it, doesn’t it? And that’s, that’s like kick at the end.

I honestly think of it as a way to sort of really treat myself or really indulge myself. If I see a really beautiful, unusual oil, that might be a little pricey. It might be a nice fancy bottle, I’ll buy it for myself almost the way you would buy yourself a French perfume or something. I really feel indulgent, and that’s how I use them. Truffle oil, pistachio oil. I love toasted sesame oil. Get the best quality you can for yourself, and then you use it as this final touch of magic. It doesn’t take much. They’re very flavorful. They’re very aromatic and they add this extra layer of flavor that’s almost, it’s sort of, it elevates things, but  , he’s like, you almost get “What’s that? What’s in there?” But it just tastes so good. And  , especially if you’ve changed your way of eating and you’ve cut back on the amount of additives that are in your food and you feel like you need some flavor or excitement, just a teaspoon or a couple of drops of an oil like that will really add another whole level of flavor. And they’re just so interesting and delicious and exciting in my personal opinion.

But like you say, especially as these things are expensive, it’s just important to store them well. So if you haven’t got a cold, dark cupboard, it’s best just to keep them in the fridge.

Yeah, keep them cold. You can even keep them in the freezer.  , if you really going to keep them because of course the refrigerator is full of moisture, which isn’t always great for your oils. Um, something that you really want to keep. You could even keep it in the freezer. They will stay liquid. Even in the freezer they’ll remain semi-liquid. So just a moment or two out of the freezer and you should be able to use them. It Is not necessarily ideal, but it might be better than keeping them in a moist refrigerator that’s always being opened.  So your best bet is a cool dry, dark pantry or cellar type area.

I’d really love to live in a house that had the old fashion Pantry with the big marble slab. Lovely. Cool.

Yeah, there’s really something to be said for a pantry.

Well, it’s been wonderful after all this time we’ve missed you. I get plenty of people contacting me “When is Taffy coming back”

Oh, that’s very nice! And I’ve missed you. It’s, but it’s just nice to catch up with you.

It has. It’s been really nice. Well, perhaps you could leave it with a top tip.

Well, I think going back to what I said earlier is, my top tip for the kitchen and your Keto kitchen is don’t be afraid to experiment. And with your fat, don’t be afraid to experiment, throw it into something, go crazy.  , lighten up. And that’s, I guess it applies to life too, but as a cooking teacher and a person who’s cooked for a long time, I see a lot of people who are afraid that they’re going to have to throw something out or it’s not going to be perfect. Or they’ve learned from television that, the only food that’s worth eating is the perfect food. My husband always asks me, he’s like, why do people think everything you eat has to taste delicious?

Okay.

It’s like, food is food, eat it. I was like, that’s an interesting question. I’ve never quite, I’ve never thought of it that way. Don’t be afraid to experiment. That’s how we learn. That’s how you learn the best lessons in the kitchen – your failures. You always learn more from your failures, but you also create something new instead of being the person who just follows a recipe, you will become a cook. You will learn and you will have your own signature dish and it might be a signature dish with that almost burnt butter, or something like that. It’s okay. So just don’t be afraid.

It’s very rare, isn’t it? It’s very rare that something goes so wrong that it’s inedible. And I mean, in that situation, that’s what dogs are for anyway. Sorry, so it never goes completely to waste.

Get yourself a dog and get in the kitchen!

I’m always reminded, my mother used to make fudge a lot when I was a kid and I mean, it’s just delicious. It’s just sugar and butter and cream isn’t it? But, one year, it used to be something, she made it at Christmas. She didn’t make it all the time. It was a Christmas thing. So we made it once a year and one year something went wrong. And I’m not quite sure what, because it has that quite long process, doesn’t it, where you have it just sort of lightly bubbling away with the thermometer sticking out and till it gets to the right temperature when it makes that, what’s it called, when you can make a little ball out of it, isn’t it cool?

Soft ball consistency

Yeah, soft ball consistency, I have to get it to this soft ball consistency, but it’s a certain temperature and all the rest of it, I think probably, and then it comes out and then you have to beat it with the beaters. Essentially get a bit of air into it. And that’s your finished product, the fudge. Something went wrong. I don’t know what it was. I think probably it got a bit too hot, but somewhere between it getting too hot and then it beating it went into this weird kind of almost like blown, like honeycomb does almost like that but it wasn’t, that you put bicarb in.

Yeah, the heat probably went too high.

But it went to this like these crunchy crispy bits that were delicious. But could she repeat that? Because then because we are all, this is amazing. Make this again. But of course you couldn’t, you couldn’t recreate it because it was just this wonderful mistake that that never happened again. So sometimes that happens, occasionally it’s for the dog, but sometimes is four wonderful surprise that something completely different. No, I absolutely agree with that. I think, I think experimenting is good. And, and I’m, a shocker actually, I’m good for never following recipes. I always experiment and make something different. But that’s what I enjoy. And it it should be fun, shouldn’t it? Cooking and feeding yourself should be enjoyable.

It should be. And my students used to do things that I thought were wrong, so I wouldn’t think of doing them – no, that wasn’t right! And they would come up with these interesting new flavors or concoctions that…you know what? It wasn’t correct in theory, but the end result was really good or really interesting and yeah, so just don’t be scared. Go for it. Who Cares?

Crazy.  Well, thank you so much for giving me some of your very precious time. I really appreciate it and it’s been a great pleasure.

Thank you so much Daisy, and thanks for your technical support.

That’s a pleasure, also.

This transcript is brought to you thanks to the hard work of Trish Roberts.

Welcome Allan, to the Keto Woman podcast. How are you doing today?

I’m doing well Daisy. Thank you so much for having me.

Well, I’ve been meaning to get in touch with you and get you on the show since I met you at Ketofest. I very much enjoyed the presentation you did there.

Thank you. That was a lot of fun.

It scared me a little bit, I have to admit. You’re very good at hammering home a few scare tactics, but, we’ll talk about those later. And what we can do about them. Because you don’t just scare us, you tell us how we can fix the problem – which is always a good thing.

Yes. If you don’t take anything else away from this podcast today, I want you to have this one message: that is as long as you have a breath left in you, you can do something positive for your health or fitness. You know, our bodies are these amazing, amazing things that adapt and change, and if we put the right stimulus on, if we do the right things for us, the right food in our mouths, we get better. The good message for today is you can take control of your life. You can take control of your health and your fitness. You just have to do the right things.

Absolutely. And put some effort in, I’m sure.

A little, a little.

Why don’t you tell us a bit about you, and what led you to be doing what you’re doing now?

I was a corporate guy, I got out of college, got a job, working to make a living, make better of it than a living. You know, working my way up the corporate structure. I was quite successful at that, and I think a lot of people can relate – it was taking care of your family, or getting a job and trying to be really good at your job. Sometimes those things become like almost singular focused and you spend all of your life really focused on that one thing. Well, that was me. My career was where I was at most of my time, most of my mind, most everything I was doing. As a result, I was in a toxic relationship, my health was declining, my fitness was going away, and I found myself at the age of 39 just unfit, fat and unhealthy. I’m sitting on the beach in Mexico taking a vacation because my stress level was through the roof and I was like, they say take a vacation… but the vacation was just as stressful as the work was, because I wasn’t getting the work done and I was thinking about the work while I was sitting on the beach.

And then, I went ahead and decided that I would buy that timeshare there. So I bought the timeshare, and I’m sitting there and they have volleyball. So I was like, okay great, I get the daily activities, I get to play some sand volleyball. I started playing volleyball and I had to, I had to sub-out after about a game and a half. I was just too winded. I felt really, really dizzy. I almost thought I was going to have them take me to the hospital. I recovered, but I realized at that point that I had lost something that had been very, very important to me. Something I’d been able to do my whole life up until that point, and I hadn’t realized that I’d lost it. I was sitting there thinking about what had happened and I thought, okay, I’ve got to get myself back in shape. I think a lot of people can relate to…they’ve let themselves decline to a point and now…okay, we make that decision, that big decision to go do something special for ourselves.

I started working out and I changed my food a little bit, but not substantially. I cut down on the alcohol and I would see a little bit of gain, and then I’d lose it, and then a little bit of gain, and I’d lose it. That went on for eight years… of this ebb and flow of sometimes being a little bit less and a little bit fitter, and sometimes being a little bit more and unfit, until I finally had kind of this epiphany moment where I sat down and said, I’m losing me, and I have to look at why I want to do this, and I have to make a commitment. That’s the key word is commitment.

My daughter, at the time, she was 20 years old and she was getting into things like Crossfit and these mud obstacle runs like the Warrior Dash and the Tough Mudder. I said, I want to be spending time with her. I want that thing. I don’t have a good relationship. I broke up with my girlfriend. I went ahead and said, I’m going to start spending more time focused on my daughter, and spending time with her doing the things she likes to do. So I started training for Tough Mudder, and I started eating Paleo, and that’s when it kind of clicks, and all the clicks started to go off in my head. It’s like, I’m not able to out-exercise my diet. That became obvious. Eight years of trying and I hadn’t done it.

Yeah, there’s only so much you can do, right?

Yeah. So I said, okay, I’ll try this Paleo. It makes sense to me and it’s something I know I can do. So I started eating Paleo, and I started training for this run, and I started doing pretty well. I dropped a little bit of weight and then it kind of plateaued; and I said, okay, well I need to lose more weight if I want to do what I want to do. I need to be stronger, so I started just changing up the types of foods that I was eating. I didn’t really know what else I was doing other than saying, I’m going to get rid of these types of foods that are more starchy and I’m going to get rid of these kinds of foods that have a little bit more sugar in them. Then one day I noticed that my breath was smelling pretty bad and I brushed my teeth and it’s still not right. I’m like, I don’t know what’s going on here. I started doing some research and I came across a podcast at the time…

Did you ask Google, why does my breath stink?!

I don’t know what I exactly did that, but I was… I started saying, okay, I’m eating low carb. I started listening to Jimmy Moore. I think he was the primary guy out there doing low carb at the time. No one was really talking about ketosis a whole lot. There were some shows I ran into a little bit later, but then I realized I’m in ketosis. That’s what’s just happened here. To kind of tell you like a linear thing that happened, I dropped 25 pounds being Paleo – 25 pounds of fat. My DEXA scan from when I started this, I dropped 25 pounds of fat in like, the first four months…

Wow!

and then I got into Keto, and I dropped 30 pounds in like, a matter of two months. The difference was, my daughter had seen me in March and here we were in November, going to go do a Tough Mudder, which is a much more difficult mud run than we had done in March. She got off the plane and I met her at the gate and she’s like, Dad, you’re skinny! I had lost 65 pounds of fat and had gained 11 pounds of muscle. I’ve got the pictures in the book, if you do get the book, The Wellness Roadmap, to kind of demonstrate what I did. I got myself into condition that I, not only could complete the 12 mile mud run with obstacles with my daughter, I didn’t slow her down at all. We finished the race holding hands, hand-in-hand to finish that race. You can change yourself. You just have to make the commitment to do so.

And have the right motivation…find that why.

And that’s the why, yeah, and that’s part of the commitment. Commitment kind of has two pieces to it. It has a why. Just like if you were going to get married to someone, or you’re going to pledge yourself to Jesus or some deity. You’re just going to say, okay, I believe and this is who I am. You have this very deep emotional why – you feel it in your gut – and you know this is important to me. So if I was going to get married and make the commitment to get married, it’s my wife and I want to spend the rest of my life with her. Then you start saying, okay, well what is that life? What is that vision of who we grow old to be? What does that look like for us? What’s that vision of how we go about that? You know? It’s fun with family and, you just have all these things in her head that say, okay, that’s my vision. You can do the same thing with your wellness of saying, I’m going to get well. At the time it was for my daughter, and my vision was I want to spend time with my daughter doing the things she enjoys doing. Not as a spectator sitting in the stands watching her, but actually doing them with her. We took a trip right after we got married, and when I take these trips with my daughter, we would find CrossFits in all these different countries and cities around the world, and we would drop in and do a CrossFit workout together. That was part of my time with her, was not me taking her to a CrossFit gym and watching her workout. It was the two of us doing the workout together.

How wonderful. Yeah, I think it really is. There’s a lot of value in sitting down and spending time thinking about and refining that why, and that vision, because you’ve shown so very well the difference between the two. It’s that difference between, you sat on a beach and you thought, yeah, I’ve got out of shape and I need to lose some weight, and I need to get a bit fit. Those are good goals but you haven’t refined them. They’re just this, sort of a bit of a woolly image possibly coming from a place of, well because I should do, to fit in or, I should do because it’s what is expected of me, or whatever. But then when you refine that into this really specific vision that has a lot of clarity, it gives you that… like you say, that real emotional connection to want to do it.

Yeah. The vision doesn’t have to be clear at the very beginning because sometimes that’s very hard for someone to have expectations…

And of course it changes. It can change as well as you go.

Because I was thinking when I started, you know, it was a Warrior Dash it’s a five km run, which I felt within a reasonable amount of time I could train myself for, but I didn’t lose a lot of weight because I didn’t feel like for that distance I really had to. Once we did that and we had fun, I told my daughter, we should do something better. She said, what? I said maybe a Tough Mudder, which is at that point you’re literally talking about something that’s four times longer. Okay. But it was eight months away and I knew between March and November I could get myself in reasonable shape to be able to complete.

Did I have a vision of exactly what I looked like on that day? And the answer was no… it was a little fuzzier than that. I have other visions in my life because I want to be independent. I don’t want my family to have to take care of me or feel bad about putting me in a home. I want to be the guy who can wipe his own butt when he’s 105. Those are just things that are in my head saying, okay, I don’t feel like getting up and going to the gym today, but I want to be able to wipe my butt when I’m 105, so I go to the gym. Because I need the leg strength. I don’t need to lose that muscle. I don’t need to lose the bone density. I need to be able to sit down and get back up, and I need the mobility to do the things I got to do when I’m in there.

Just realize that your vision might not be all that clear and it will potentially change over time. I got married, so now it’s not just my daughter, it’s my wife and our kids and there’ll be grandkids at some point. We didn’t have mud runs when I was younger, so that was new. I don’t even know what the kids are going to be doing when they’re teens, but I want to be grandpa doing it with them. I don’t want to be grandpa watching from the stands.

Fantastic. When did you make the switch between careers? When did this take over and become your passion that you had to pass onto other people?

Well, just because I made the commitment, or the decision that I wanted to change myself, unfortunately my boss is not going to let me take hours away from work to go train and do this. I was still travelling – sometimes as much as 90%. I was like, I can’t really hire a personal trainer, which I knew I needed. I needed some coaching. I needed some information to help me do what I needed to do for myself because I started realizing that my movement patterns were wrong. I risked injuring myself because I didn’t know all the exercises as well as I should. I went ahead and decided I would become my own personal trainer. I went and got certified as a personal trainer. I got specialties in corrective exercise and fitness nutrition. Then I went for the functional aging certificate. I basically became my own personal trainer. I didn’t intend to train anybody else. I just wanted the information and I figured this is a group that certifies, so I’m going to do that.

Then of course, listening to podcasts and things like that, you learn a little bit here and there and you’re able to apply those tactics to your life. So that’s what I did. I basically became my own expert. One of my best friends saw me in March because he did that same Warrior Dash with us. Then he saw the picture I posted in Facebook in November. He messaged me and said, what the heck did you do? Because I want some of that. That was about the time I was thinking about doing a podcast. And so I said, well, hey, you know I’m about to do this podcast. I tended to take a client through and use them as part of the podcast, so I’d be hot training someone for the podcast, but I wasn’t going to be a personal trainer. That person quit. They didn’t stick it out. So I told him, I said, John, I’ll train you, but I will only train you if your wife trains with us – so I’ve got both of you, and you’ll come on the podcast. That’s the payment is we record a weekly call, and that becomes part of the podcast. And I did that. You can actually go listen to some of the early episodes all the way up through, I think it’s 67 and 70 were the last two episodes that they were on. John lost 39 pounds and his wife lost 28 pounds. We did most of that with just getting them close to keto. They were very low carb. I don’t know that they were in ketosis during the time, but just went very low carb with them, got them moving as much as they could. She had some issues with her back, so she was not able to train the way he was. Also, guys tend to lose weight faster than women in general.

Yeah, it’s annoying that!

But estrogen is important. They had good results and I got to thinking, there’s other people now listen to my podcast that know I do this. I can’t necessarily meet with them because I still had this full-time job, but it was like, I can do this online. I started occasionally bringing on a group of clients and working with them. I put together a couple little quick programs that’s kind of do it yourself, but I’m available through Facebook or messaging. You just call me if you have a question. Then at the same time I was going through some major stressors at work. We were doing major layoffs. In fact, my group that was 23 when I started, was laid off all the way down to zero over the course of three years. I had to let go of a lot of people that I had worked a long time with. The stress was really, really difficult, and as I got to look in where I was in my life journey, I realized that was kind of like the final piece I had to put together to get myself truly well.

I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest, happiest person you can be, and they’re all equally important. If you’re missing one of those then you’re just not quite there. I knew that the stress was kind of that last little bit that was getting me. and working in a corporate environment, people using the… you’re in a meeting, and they’re using the term headcount. Like it just doesn’t mean anything. Like it’s just another digit on their balance sheet. I’m like, no, this is not just a digit. This lady bought a house this year and she’s just now getting to a point where she feels comfortable. This guy, his kid’s sick and he’s having some issues with his daughter. They’re people.

With all the stress of all that, when they laid me off – the final guy to walk out the door, I finally just said, I don’t like this and I’m not enjoying this, but I do enjoy the training. I enjoy having the weekly conversations with folks that I’m training – be it the group call, or the one- on-ones. Hearing their wins, and being there when they slip… because we all do. Just helping them along their path and seeing the things that can happen in their lives. They’re the ones doing it. That’s what’s so funny about this is, I’m just there as a coach and a cheerleader, but they’re the ones making the substantive change.

I just decided I wasn’t going to go back to corporate. I will just downsize. I’ll simplify and I’ll make sure that I can make a living with the personal training because now it lowers my stress level to almost none. Now the most stressful thing I have to do is when I want to drive off the island to go to the grocery store. It’s about as stressful as it gets, you know? And pretty soon I won’t even be doing that because we’re about to move to Panama and I won’t even be driving there. I’m just getting myself to a perfect spot for me and I want to help other people.

Wow. I can hear that in you. I mean, what a change that must have been from being in a job where you felt like you were doing anything but helping people to the absolute reverse. I mean, that sense of fulfillment must’ve had a profound effect on your mood.

Oh yeah, it did. Part of it was, I would know that the layoff was coming and I couldn’t tell anybody. I would have to say, okay, now I’m going to have to fly all around the world to meet with all of these folks, and sit down with them and tell them that the company doesn’t want them anymore. Yeah, the stress was just not there. It was just too much, and I don’t ever want to go back to that type of situation. I know not everybody can say, I’m just going to go ahead and completely try to eliminate stress. I do talk about that in the book. If you can eliminate stress, do it. If you can’t, then put some tactics in place that are going to help you manage that stress. It could be breathing. It could be meditation. There are things you can do to help reduce the stress in your life, or at least deal with it better and it’ll help. But when you’re in that situation where you’re just chronically stressed all the time, find a way out. It’s just that stress is a very important part of the health model. If you want to be healthy, and fit, and happy, you have to be managing your stress.

Yes. Interestingly enough, I watched a television program on the BBC a few weeks ago dealing with just that and they took, I think it was three or four people with different kinds of stress and they measured their stress by monitoring them with heart monitors and things. Then they tailored an approach to each one of them that was slightly different. So, one it was exercise outdoors and they explained why there was a real difference between doing exercise outdoors, and how seeing fractals in nature was calming and all sorts of things. For someone else it was meditation. The difference in all of them was incredible because none of them could change their lives. None of them could get rid of the stress that was there, so they all had to find a way to manage it.

Yeah. That’s part of what I go into the book is my friend John asked me, how did you do this? What did you do? I could have told John all the things I did, and it may or may not have worked for him because we’re all unique. I lifted heavy weights, I started eating keto. Not everybody is going to want to do that. Finding the tactics that work for you is a part of the grand experiment. We weren’t born with a user manual, so we have to write our own. Some of that’s going to be through trial and error. Some of it will be, like you said, we see a program like that and just the working out outside. Perfect example. It’s going to work for most people just to get outside a little bit more and commune with nature.

Just realize that all these things are out there. Unfortunately, a lot of people like to start with the tactic, and they don’t put the front end of that as the commitment. The tactic is what you’re doing…how you’re going to eat – hose things. People will go on a diet and then they fall off the diet because they didn’t fix the commitment. If you have the commitment, then you do self-awareness, then you put strategies in place, then the tactics come along and then you build habits. And that’s the lifeline. That’s how we consistently improve ourselves by starting with the commitment and then putting those tactics in place, experimenting with them, giving them the time to see if they’re going to work, and then you’ll see the results. You can tweak and change as things go.

Maybe you could explain a bit to us, bring in some of those shock tactics I mentioned. I mentioned earlier, because I know for me, and I know you focus on the over forties and I’ve definitely noticed… how should we put this nicely… a slight decline in my strength. Two things that happened actually. Obviously, I’ve got older, but something that was a light bulb moment to me the other day that is obvious really, but I used to weigh twice as much as I do now. I insisted on carrying on living normally. Had a fairly active job. I was a gardener so I was actually pretty strong, and whenever I did sign up to a gym or something, they were always quite amazed with my fitness levels. I’ve always been lucky and I’ve been metabolically fairly flexible, so I always had quite good blood work.

But I’ve always been fairly strong. I used to get out of breath and all the things, but no wonder cause I was carrying another me around. What I didn’t do, I lost a lot of weight reasonably quickly over a couple of years, and what I didn’t do and what I should have done, was compensate because I am way, way less strong now than I was then. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before, but I sort of naturally thought I was going to be fitter because I weighed less. Of course I was going to be fitter because I was slim instead of being as overweight as I was, but actually the opposite has happened.

You’re touching on a couple of really, really important things. One is, when we talk about resistance training or weightlifting or whatever it’s called it, or whatever you think of it as, I like to call it resistance training rather than exercise workouts, or weightlifting because you have a specific thing you’re trying to accomplish, which is to put resistance on a muscle so you can make it better. When I say weightlifting or I say resistance training, just recognize that it doesn’t have to involve the gym. It doesn’t have to involve rusty iron bars and plates, and clanking and all of that. All that scary stuff that sometimes bothers people. It can be body weight and so the fact is you were active carrying around an extra bit of you that’s body weight, and that that was what allowed you to be that strong and then as you stopped lifting as much…

I took away that resistance.

…your muscles reacted. You took that resistance away. Here’s the good news. Your muscles, they know if you start adding resistance to them, they know they need to get stronger and here’s the core of it and another thing that’s happening in our bodies, after the age of 35 we start losing muscle mass. It’s called sarcopenia. We also start losing bone density. It’s called osteopenia, and we start losing strength. The three of those things, they’re going to go on a steady, basically 1% decline each year until we’re 65, and then that decline is going to speed up. I’m sure you’ve seen it walking around the street, you’ll see an older lady or older man, and they’re all crumpled up and feeble. That’s what that looks like. That’s osteopenia and sarcopenia over a course of a lifetime. That’s what that looks like. The good news is you can slow that and in some cases, reverse that with resistance training. It does all of those. Resistance training improves strength, it adds muscle mass and it adds bone density. It’s this triple perfect thing to help your body be better.

Another reason that it’s very important for you to focus on maintaining muscle, is the fact that one out of three people over the age of 65 falls every year. Okay? What that results in in the United States is 3 million visits to the emergency room. 800,000 hospitalizations and almost 29,000 deaths in the United States. People are falling over the age of 65 and they’re breaking their hips, breaking their arms, and they’re hurting themselves pretty badly – in many cases fatally. If they had more bone density, if they had more muscle mass, that may not have happened. They may still fall because they haven’t worked on their balance, but with the additional strength, and additional muscle mass, and additional bone density, they’re less likely to end up hospitalized.

Yes, it’s very important balance, isn’t it? Again, I think it was another BBC program. They were talking about that and they were looking at that specific, you know, those statistics about falling and how people, once they’ve fallen once, they then start losing their confidence, they’re actually more likely to fall again because of that. Having the strength, I mean literally to get back up again, but the balance is so important and they were showing people exercises to really improve that balance, so reduce the likelihood of that fall in the first place.

Yeah. If you’ve ever walked where it’s icy, you’ll notice how you kind of duck your feet. You kind of take little duck steps. You do that. It’s just a natural reaction to the fear of falling. Even when we’re younger, we’re going to do that. We’re not going to take full strides. What that actually does though, if you think about it, is you’re bringing your feet closer together, which means that you’re more top heavy and more likely to fall. And when you fall, since your feet are closer together, you’re more likely to fall sideways. That’s where the broken hips come in. What we want to work with, with clients or what we all want to do for ourselves is, work on things that will help generally improve your balance and your side-to-side mobility. One of the things I’ll tell someone, and you don’t even have to do this, this is not special, this is just something pretty simple. Each night when you’re brushing your teeth, which I hope you do and you do for about two minutes, try to stand on one foot. When that becomes easy, try closing your eyes.

Yes, it’s a lot harder when you close your eyes, isn’t it?

It is, it is. But that’s a function of balance. If you’ve got one hand close to the counter-top and once you know you’re going to have to put your foot down, you’ve got that third point, you can do that. When you’re in the kitchen and you’re washing dishes, rather than turn and walk straight to something, side-to-side, a subtle step side-to-side, and try to take wider and wider steps in different directions. Just to get comfortable and have a wider base and keep your gate as wide and long as you can. If you start losing gate, if you’re stepping shorter steps because you’re getting older and feebler, you’re creating that situation of the fall.

Yes. You mentioned this in the book that as time goes on we get more and more stuck in this linear pattern movement.

Yeah. Well, you sit down, you stand up, you walk to where you want to go. When was the last time you walked backwards? When was the last time that you did side-to-side walking? Unless you’re doing an exercise program where they’re doing side lunges or they incorporate some of those things, you’re not going to do that in the normal course of the things you do. But you can. It’s just as simple as when you’re at the sink rather than turn and walk, just step sideways. Try to do those little things to incorporate that. Then in your workouts, think about the things that you’re doing that are all linear and try to figure out some things that you can do that are side-to-side that would change things up. So, side lunges instead of just doing front lunges or back lunges, try doing side lunges.

There are exercises that I’ll do with my clients. I like this exercise called karaoke, which is where you’re basically crossing your feet with these side steps. It’s a little bit more advanced than just the side shuffle, that I’ll do a karaoke with squat. Basically, one foot in front of the other, the other foot up, the other foot back behind and then up, and then do a squat, and then do it to the other side. It’s a good balance exercise because you’re incorporating a squat. You now have some resistance training with the body weight squat. It’s a really good basic movement to get people more comfortable with the side-to-side movement.

Something like Zumba then, is a really good thing to do because it incorporates all sorts of turns.

Dancing is wonderful. I’m not much of a dancer. I would do a Zumba but I wouldn’t like it, but I would do it. If I felt like that was really kind of the core way for me to get something that I needed. Like I said earlier, you have a vision. At some point I may say I really need to be focused much more on my balance and my breathing and just doing the things for my body that it needs, which includes, like I said, balance. I could go throw heavy weights around all day long, but that’s not going to improve my balance. I need to do something specific for balance. It can be a simple, like I said, standing on one foot while I brush my teeth, putting a sock on while you’re just standing on one foot. Those little things like that can go a long way. Or I can go ahead and try a class or do something, look up a video on YouTube of balance training and just add it to your program.

What are the core pillars, if you like, of the different things we should be looking at? You’ve already mentioned balance and then I presume, strength is important and you talk in the book about how important grip strength is.

Yeah. Basically these are fitness modalities and the way I like to couch them is, these are the building blocks that are going to make you the person you want to be. Okay. Most people will come to a personal trainer and say I want to lose weight, and I’m like, you’re not ready.

Lose weight and get fit – the standard.

Yeah, I want to lose weight. I’m like, okay then that doesn’t tell me anything because after we lose the weight, are you happy? Are you healthy? Are you fit? Short answer is no. When you look at the, particularly the fitness modalities, strength is probably the most important one. Second to that, I think a lot of people do care about body composition. Let’s make sure we know that term. Body composition tells you that you have muscle and you have bone and you’re losing fat. So it’s a body fat percentage. That should be a number that’s much more important to us than weight, because I can chop off my left arm and lose 15 pounds. Am I better for it? No, I can chop off my head, and lose 11. If weight is all we’re worried about, we don’t care what we’re losing, but I don’t want to lose muscle. I don’t want to lose bone. I want to lose fat. So, make it body composition.

Beyond that, then we’re looking at cardiovascular endurance and stamina. If you want to go do something, like you’re going to take your grandkids to the zoo, and they’re running all over the zoo and you don’t want to stop them and make them walk, you want to be able to scoot along with them. That’s your cardiovascular. But you see how that relates to your life, what you want out of your life. That’s why I think each of these modalities is important, but at varying degrees to each of us. Then we’re going to have mobility. It’s how well are you able to move the way your body was designed to move? The hip problems, and the knee problems, and the neck problems that most people have, come from the fact that they have poor movement patterns. They don’t have the mobility. I’ll have someone do a squat with their arms over their head, and if your upper body wants to go forward when you try to do that squat, if you can’t basically see your chest in the mirror when your arms are over your head, you have some mobility issues. If I put weight on that, then you have the risk of damaging joints and causing some problems. So mobility is important and we get less and less. I have one client I need to keep working on him. He can’t sit with his legs crossed on the ground. When you cross them over – like kids listening to story-time will cross their legs and sit on the floor. Well, he doesn’t have the mobility in his hips to do that. So, that’s again, just another area that you want to look at. How mobile are you?

Closely related to that is flexibility. Some people will have more movement in a joint than not. I just prefer the term mobility because most of what you can do is going to be with the muscle, and getting that to relax versus actually getting more flexible in your joints. Your joints are kind of what they are.

Speed and agility. If you want to play tennis or another active sport, speed and agility could be something else that you would want to train for. All these fitness modalities that are there, are trainable. That’s what’s really cool about them, is you can improve all of them with practice.

Yes. You need all of them and you need a sort of a certain level in all, and it’s going to depend one, on the individual who they are, how much they need to do to bring them up to the sort of minimum requirement; and then depending on what they want to do, which ones you want to tweak to get more.

Yeah. A perfect example would be your gardening, you need a certain fitness level and mobility to be able to do that. But if you wanted to play sand volleyball, now that’s a different level of endurance. It’s more agility and speed versus I wanted to do the Tough Mudder which meant I needed endurance, I needed strength, and I particularly needed grip strength. Grip strength was going to be what I would need to pull myself up ropes, to climb over walls, to do all the things that I needed to do for that particular event. All of these modalities are going to matter at some level to us. It’s just you tweak them based on what you want out of your life.

You brought up grip strength earlier and I did want to talk briefly about that. A good measure of generally how strong you are, is grip strength and there have been direct correlations to reduced grip strength and mortality. If you’re losing grip strength, you can’t open the jar… one, you’re closer to the grave than you might think you are. And two, you’ve just lost your independence. If you can’t open the jar and someone else has to open that jar for you, you’ve just started down that trail of losing your independence. Like I said, I want to be the guy at 105 who can wipe my own butt. It sounds kind of funny to a lot of people, but that’s a real true thing that a lot of people end up losing their independence way too early. Whereas some training today can have you aging slowly, or slower. We’re all going to age. If you decide that you don’t want to lift weights, or don’t want to do resistance training, you’re just deciding to age faster. That’s your choice.

That’s a question that a lot of people ask, I think, which is more important – general fitness, cardio type workouts, or the resistance weight training type workouts?

I have a bias because I am a fitness trainer. I do believe that the weightlifting, the resistance training is the most important because that’s the thing you’re going to lose the fastest. You saw it when you lost your body weight, that that just went down. Your endurance, probably even though you weren’t working out, was actually probably improved. Endurance is one of those things that you can train yourself for, but how many people need to run six miles today? They do it because they enjoy it, and a lot of people do actually lift weights because they enjoy it. That’s important too. I would not tell a client, even if we’re trying to just gain muscle mass and that’s our goal, I wouldn’t tell a client to not do the runs if they enjoy the runs. Because again, wellness is happiness, fitness and health. So that happiness, if he needs to run six miles today to get his mind right and feel good, run, enjoy it, that’s what this is all about.

Ultimately that endurance modality that you spoke about, that is quite a common thing that you want to do to be able to keep up with your kids at the zoo or whatever it is. Quite often you need to be able to be on your feet all day. Maybe your walking around the shops all day. Whatever it is, there’s that. So there is a kind of a certain level that is useful and I know some people who really focus on the weight training, who when it comes to that stamina endurance, they have none. There might be a difference in balance. There’s more importance because I suppose also, especially with what you’re saying, that’s the thing that it’s that weight training that makes the real significant change in the strength that you’re losing as you get older. That’s the thing that’s going to make more of a difference. So that’s why it’s important.

Yeah. It’s about that vision, you know? When you look out and you say, okay, this is my vision of who I want to be in five, 10, 15, 30 years. You want to think about the elements of what that person is capable of doing, and needs to do on a day to day basis. If it’s, like you said, doing the shopping, running around, taking care of grandkids, doing these other things and on your feet moving most of the day, then yes, you want to train to have the stamina to do that. If you don’t want to lose strength and you want to maintain muscle mass and bone density, you want to do the resistance training. You can do both. You know, there’s no reason that you can’t do both, you just have to figure out how you want to workout, what you enjoy doing, what you need to do, and put together a program for yourself.

Once that’s in place, those workout tactics are there. You know, this is what you’re going to do. Now you make them habits and you just keep doing them. There’s just a habit that you go to the gym each day. The reason the habit sticks is the commitment, because if you told your significant other that you were going to pick them up at the airport at five o’clock in the morning, guess where you are at five o’clock in the morning? If you love yourself as much and you make a commitment to yourself and you need to be at the gym at five o’clock in the morning, guess where you are at five o’clock in the morning? It becomes that automatic. You would not tell your significant other no, or I’ll do it tomorrow. I’m there. So, think about all the things that you need and devise a plan to help you build those core modalities.

It’s completely true about that habit thing. I mean, I walk my dogs every day. They wouldn’t put up with me not doing it. They don’t put up with me saying, it’s pouring with rain, I really don’t want to go today, thanks, I’d rather not. They’re not going to have that. It’s a habit that I have to do every day, but I do, and for the most part, unless it’s pouring with rain out, I do enjoy it. Because it’s fun and it’s in interaction and all the the rest of it, but it’s using that same habit-forming technique for other things that feel like exercise. They feel like something different. They don’t necessarily feel like part of the day, and certainly strength is something that I need to work on.

Where should someone like me start? I don’t particularly like going to the gym. That’s not my thing. And I certainly don’t have a good choice here and don’t have the budget for it. What would you suggest for someone like me with no equipment. What would be the things that I should start that would be easy to do. I will just say here because I did speak to you when we were at Ketofest, and I mentioned that I had a bad back and you did reinforce how important it was for me to get that sorted out. Which I did. I went to a physiotherapist and did a lot of work with him. So, you did make it clear it was important to fix any problems, any pain that you have before you start on an exercise program.

Anytime you’re going to change your food, or your movement, or your exercise, go talk to your doctor. Get the kinks worked out first, if there are any, and then if you can, and you can afford it and you want to go to a gym, go to a gym. But you don’t have to. Like I said, you’ve got all the weight you need right there in your body, and the only a piece of equipment I would recommend that you purchase would be a set of resistance bands with handles. They’re going to be very, very good at helping you do more exercises than you can just do with body weight, short of having a pull-up bar. You can use these bands to do a lot of different things.

But ones that won’t break. It was Yogi Parker’s post on Facebook. “I tried that with some and they broke and I ended up punching myself in the face!”

Yeah, you do invest. And that’s the other thing, when you think about health and fitness, we go to a doctor. We’re willing to pay the doctor bill because it’s for our health and wellness. Make an investment in yourself and it doesn’t have to be huge, because resistance bands are not that expensive, but buy good quality. And if you start to notice that they’re fraying or they’re getting a little old, chuck ’em and get another pair The basic workout, and again talk to your doctor before you start a program, but I would say I would do body weight squats and if your legs are strong and you don’t have problems doing body weight squats, slow down. Do them very, very slow, like a countdown of four and a count up of two.

It’s a lot harder, isn’t it?

Time under tension is what we call it in the business

You’ve got to hold it halfway. But I know I was in a Zumba class once when I was in the UK a while back, and they had you go down, and then they had you come halfway up and hold it there. Oh, it was hard.

Bodyweight squats would be one. I would do push-ups.

Now that’s something I can’t do. And I have looked online and you work down, don’t you? To being horizontal. You start against the wall.

Yes.

Because I cannot do them on the floor.

Yeah, to scale it down, you can start pushing against the wall. You can use a counter-top. Just make sure you got skid-resistant shoes so you won’t fall, and then you can be on your knees doing the push-ups and then eventually you’ll be able to do a full push-up. Then I would do side lunges. You just basically lunge out to one side, and then come back up. You can do sets of those. Then the reason I would say the resistance bands is that resistance bands are going to allow you to do some form of row. You’ll fasten the center of the bands to like a door knob or something, that’s stable and tight. Or a post. Then you can do the rows back, and work your back. Then you can stand on the bands, and go overhead with an overhead press. Basically at that point, those are five exercises that’ll work your whole body and, you can just go through them. I would do five sets of five of each. Maybe more of the squats at first, but just really slow until you get comfortable with them. For most people that’s going to be a pretty steady workout. It’s going to take you about an hour if you take a little break between each set and you’ll feel it. You’ll definitely feel it the next day if you haven’t been doing anything like this.

And you can do it anywhere. You can do it in your living room or do it outside. And when you say a set, that’s a certain number?

Oh yes. Yeah, I’m sorry. Typically what we’ll say…okay, so if I go to do an exercise, I may say I’m going to do three sets, which means I’ll do three, I’ll do it, stop, do it, stop, do it. But I’ll do five – see, three sets of 10. So maybe just say three sets of 10. So, I’ll go and I’ll do the exercise 10 times, and I’ll take a short break and then I’ll do it 10 more. Take a short break and then I’ll do the final set of 10, and then I’m done. A good strength program is going to be five by five. That’ll work for those exercises. Like I say, if anything is super, super easy, just slow it down. If the squat is real easy for you to do all five, slow those down. If the lunges or easy for you to do all five, just get down to the bottom, and kind of sit there for a second and pause, and then press up. That’ll make it a little bit more difficult. You can slow down on the push-ups. Once you get to the strength where you’re doing normal push-ups, you can do those very, very slowly. With the rows, same thing. You just add more bands. There’s several colored bands that’ll attach to that. It’ll be pretty hard, and then you can move yourself further away from the anchor point and that’ll add additional resistance.

Fantastic. And how often should we be doing this? Because I know you stress how important it is to rest in between doing them.

Most of the time you’re going to want to take at least 48 hours off between exercise sessions. So the way I like to do it is, let’s say you worked out on Monday, you could do Monday, and then Thursday, and then Sunday, and then Wednesday, and then Friday. So basically, you’re getting two and a half workouts per week, but if you just have two days off in between each set, each workout, you’ll be good. Now, as you progress, you might find that, okay, my body’s recovering, but I want to do more for each muscle group. Particularly if you’re at a gym, you’ll have the ability of access to equipment to do this type of thing, you may get to an intermediate level and want to start doing what they call splits. So, one day you’re working legs, one day you’re working your push muscles. The other day you’re working a pull. That’s more at an intermediate level, but you never have to step foot in a gym if you don’t want to. You can still build the strength and retain muscle mass at home.

There’s a case to be argued that the machines are great and you, I suppose it can be easier to get the right form on machines because they’re all set up for you. But they’re very tailored to specific movements, where if you’re using the more free weight type approach, you’re employing more muscle group,s and the balance, and all the other things that go with it. I would have thought sort of arguably in that real life strength situation, they’re potentially a bit more of an all-rounder – better for you.

Yeah. When a child walks up to you and you’re going to pick them up or your dog, you’re going to pick them up, they’re not on a rail. They’re not going to follow a straight line.

They might move around.

In some cases, they might be flailing. Yeah, so that’s a strength pattern and there are tools like kettlebells, and sandbags, and things like that that can give you more of that, but you’re right, a machine is going to be on a rail or it’s going to be on a set fixed path. That makes it very easy for someone typically, like you said, sit down and know the movements. Typically you don’t need a personal trainer to show you how to do that or you don’t have to watch a lot of YouTube because it’s right there on the machine. This is going to work your chest. Obviously you want to sit in the seat, and there’s the handles, and there’s the weight, and you push. Machines can be very safe though because the weight’s not over you at any point in time unless you put your fingers down where you’re not supposed to put them. But machines are relatively safe, but they are fixed line of pattern. If you’re recovering from an injury or just really not super comfortable with workouts, machines are okay, but I would start trying to move over to that free weights section. I know they’re scary, rusty iron bars and all of that, but you’re to get a lot more variety. You’re going to get a lot more general benefit from the other muscle groups as you said, that you’re not getting on a machine and that’s going to be more functional in the long run. So, I would always encourage people to primarily work with the free weights, but there are ways that you can work machines in.

I use machines like a leg press machine with some of my clients when they get afraid they’re under squats, and so the weight is getting to a point where they’re afraid they’ll go down and not be able to make it back up. So, they have this brain thing that’s keeping them from getting any stronger because they don’t want to put any more weight on the bar. So, we’ll shift them over to the leg press machine where they don’t feel as freaked out. They are then able to build more strength, and then when they go back to the squats, the confidence is there because they’ve moved more weight than that. So, they know their legs are stronger and they feel more comfortable.

I guess also with the days that you’re not doing the weight training, that is the ideal time to start doing some of this more general cardio endurance type. Whether it be going for a walk or a run or something that is a more gentle movement on those muscles on those rest days. I think you called it active active rest. Would that come under that category?

Yeah. Active rest. Active rest is important because one, you don’t have to just sit around and not do anything for those two days. You can go out and do things. Now, you want to make sure you’re not reworking that muscle because it needs time to recover and rebuild. But if you were working upper body or you’re doing your workout the next day, you feel generally okay and you want to go for a long walk or run, or maybe even do a high intensity interval session to just get something quick in. Those are perfectly fine. You can also use that to work on your mobility. You can work on your balance. You can do some speed and agility training. So, all the other modalities that are there, you can mix those in all around your training. I have one client right now, he works out almost twice a day each day because he’s in splits, so he can do that. Then he’ll do cardio or he’ll go for a long walk or, he’ll do some balance training. You can always add those other things in and build the program that’s going to, like I said, get you closer to your vision .

Yes, and quite often I think it’s the case when you get into one kind of fitness routine, you want to start adding to it and doing some other things anyway.

It can get somewhat addictive. Yes, but you have to be careful about over training as well. It’s very hard for a new trainee to overtrain but I have seen people that just go a little too far. I was friends with one girl, on MyFitnessPal and she’s doing a little bit of cardio in the morning and sort of thinks, “Cool”. Then I just noticed that her cardio sessions are going longer and longer and longer. So, she’s like doing two and a half, three hour cardio sessions, like intense on an elliptical machine. And I’m thinking, this is not healthy at this point. Every single day, two and a half hours. It can get a little too much. But it’s very hard to overtrain. It’s usually professional athletes that are doing the overtraining, but you just want to make sure you’re getting a good mix of work and rest, and do things with purpose. Because that’s going to make it a habit because like I said, it’s something that fits with who you want to be.

And, how do you deal with that, when you’ve, well, if you ever get to… It’s all quite exciting when it’s a new project and you’re structuring this path out in front of you and striving to get to a goal, and getting to that goal, and the journey. I know this with weight loss and gain, I was, less so now, much more getting used to the whole idea of maintenance. But it always used to be that I was either gaining weight or feeling miserable, losing weight, maybe feeling a bit better. But what happens in that zone of maintenance when you just, how do you keep it going? Is it something that….that’s where I guess it’s important that these things have just become habit so, you just carry on. But what happens if you don’t have a goal? Do you have to keep replacing and having a goal to keep you going? Or how do you sit in that maintenance zone?

That’s where I come back to the acronym I use is called C.A.R.G.O. The C stands for Celebrate. This doesn’t mean go out and have a big cake, you know, that kind of celebration. For me, the celebration was completing that Tough Mudder with my daughter holding her hands as we ran through the last obstacle. That was my celebration that day. If you see the picture in a book, you can see how happy I was on that day. That was my celebration. So do celebrate. You’ve accomplished something significant and you need to be proud of yourself for it.

The next one is the A, and that’s where you need to go and Accept who you are today because things have changed. If you changed your workouts and changed your habits, you stopped going out for drinks with the friends, and you stopped doing a lot of other things. You’ve changed, and people are going to treat you different. Like walk up and say, wow, what did you do? You know? And they’re going to treat you different. Some will be with more respect, some will be saboteurs and say, well that can’t be healthy, that can’t be healthy. You know, like that keto stuff. You’re going to have a heart attack. You might be skinny now, but you’re going to have a heart attack. You’re going to have to come to acceptance of who you are and make new friends; kind of acclimate to this new you.

The next is then for you to Reset your GPS. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a goal of I want to do – because I did the Tough Mudder round – I want to do something, bigger. I did, in fact sign up for a Spartan. But that wasn’t because… it was just something I wanted to do with some family members. Think about the things in your life that bring you joy. And so it might be that you want to go to China and see the Great Wall of China which I would highly recommend if you get an opportunity. It’s wonderful. But it’s a lot of walking if you want to walk the wall. And some of it’s pretty steep. So, you might want to say, okay, while I’ve been focused on building strength and balance, now I know I’m going to go on this trip, I’m going to go ahead and incorporate more cardiovascular training so I truly enjoy doing this trip. Okay? So, find things that are going to bring you joy and then make your training about that. Make your food about what you enjoy. SO, as you’re sitting down and you’re cooking your meals, think about, what are the types of foods that I really enjoy? What’s the variety I can add to my meals? Maybe if you’re not metabolically challenged, you could do seasonal ketosis, which is something I do. It’s just a function of me saying there’s a season of the year when I know that I’m going to want to do things like drink some beer, watch a football game, maybe have a little bit of bad food here and there. My body’s okay with that for the most part. So I’ll do that. So for me, it was developing this new lifestyle of how do I want to live and each year, and not necessarily as a function of a resolution but I kind of think of each year and say, what do I want to do this year for myself? For my well-being? For me, 2018 was deciding not to go back to corporate life. 2019 my wife and I are moving to an island in Panama. Those are things solely focused on reducing stress in my life, and I know that’s going to make me a better person. So, it’s about Resetting that GPS and saying, what’s next? It doesn’t have to be a goal. It can just be, I enjoy going to the gym three days a week, and I enjoy going on my twice a week runs, and I enjoy doing this yoga class, so I’m just going to keep doing those things.

Having taken that moment to sort of reassess.

Yeah, because you might want to… I have a friend Mike and he went on keto. His wife went on first, she was a runner and then I was talking to her a lot as her performance went down and then she slowly regained it. Now is running faster times than she ever did. Her husband then followed suit. He’s lost 60 pounds and now he’s training for an ultra-marathon. And so he is someone who is just going to want to try something a little harder, a little more. That might be your mindset. That might be your approach. It might just be that I am right where I want to be and spend time with my grandchildren without getting winded. I can pick up my own groceries. I can leap out of the way of a car in the parking lot that didn’t see me and I almost got run over. I have the agility to do that. That can be what your life is about. It’s just being who you want to be, because now you’ve given yourself that gift of having a healthy fit body. So that’s where the joy comes in. Now it’s like, okay, what can I do to have more joy in my life? Where I seek out more joy? And that might be the next thing.

And then G-O in CARGO is go. You’re the only one that can do this. You’ve got the wheel in your hand, you’ve got your foot on the gas. So you drive, and you drive you where you want to go and don’t let life’s circumstances and all that, really keep you from being the person you want to be. I tore my rotator cuff about two years ago and I could have used that as an excuse to say, okay, well my gym days are over and I won’t be able to do the Spartan like I wanted to. And I said, no, I’m going to figure out how to do those things. I want to keep working out. As a result, when I went into my physio after the surgery, he was shocked with how much mobility I still had in my shoulder after the accident because he was like, most people stop moving their arm and then they wait weeks for surgery, and then by the time they get their surgery, they’ve lost so much in their arm and shoulder that it takes us a lot longer to recover. I was doing the full exercises he wanted me to do within about two weeks. He said, normally it takes someone two months to make that kind of distance. Now, and this is me in my fifties, so I kept working out the way that I could. I modified what I was doing. So, when you have those detours or roadblocks/constructions in the way, something’s going to get you off the road that you wanted to be on; you just need to relax and say, okay, how do I get back on track? Now in the car we have a GPS that automatically reroutes. You’re going to have to do that work for yourself, but if you’ve got a pretty good idea of where your vision is and what you want it to be, now you can make another plan, get back on the route. Try to get back on that highway as quickly as you can.

That’s very true, isn’t it? If you know what your destination is, it’s much easier to work back and figure out how to get there.

Yeah, and if it was just weight loss and we’re like, well now I can’t work out, so I’m going to gain weight…one, the lifting and running and all that, that shouldn’t be a part of your model for weight loss. Your weight loss or fat loss should all be about your food. That’s going to happen in the kitchen. Exercise as a side effect can lead to additional fat loss. And of course, more muscle mass, so your body composition is better. But in general, I would say that you want to focus on the kitchen. If I couldn’t work out…let’s say I broke two legs and all I can do now is some upper body stuff, but I know that’s not going to be sufficient, I have to change my food. I have to get a little bit more serious on my keto. I may need to incorporate some intermittent fasting to help me manage my daily intake, and then just give my body what it needs to repair. So, plenty of protein, calcium, phosphorus, the types of things my bone’s are going to need to mend. Then once I’m up and about, start moving again, I know where I’m supposed to be. I know where I’m supposed to go, so I’m on this little detour. I just try to keep pushing myself down the path.

Yes, it’s so very true, isn’t it? It’s so important to have this exercise factor, but not necessarily for the reasons people are thinking. We’re told over and over, eat less, move more, and they are both seemingly equal parts of the equation when somebody is telling you how to lose weight, but it’s not, it’s very much weighted on the food side. The exercise is very important. It has all these amazing benefits, but it’s not really what you’re looking at for the weight loss.

I interviewed a guy named Todd for the podcast, and I mentioned him in the book as well. He was almost 600 pounds. And his doctors basically told him that if he didn’t change, he was not going to be around. His daughters in the hospital room would not look at him. They just kept looking at the floor and he just kept thinking to himself, what a horrible picture this is, that my daughters think I’m going to die and if I don’t do something, I will. Now, Todd had all kinds of medical problems because of his weight. He couldn’t work out, like quite literally couldn’t because his legs would bleed, and so he couldn’t work out. He got into ketosis. He lost 332 pounds over a course of five years. So again, he had to have a lot of patience, a lot of persistence. But over the course of three years, he lost over half of him.

He knows he still has a way to go to be where he wants to be, but he knows he’s not where he was. He doesn’t want to give his daughters that kind of image. He wants to be there. His vision is to not be the hospitalized dad for his daughters, and he did it all with food, because he couldn’t actually exercise. So yes, calories in, calories out is part of the equation. If we eat more calories than our bodies burn, we’re going to gain weight. If we eat less than our body burns, then we’re going to lose weight. But calories are an estimate at best. When you see a package of food and it tells you, or you’re going to eat an apple, well is this a big apple or a little apple? If I say I’m going to eat some almonds, did I eat 16 or 17 because one almond has…

How well did you chew them? All sorts. So many factors.

All these different factors, and and no one can actually know how many calories they burned in a given day, even though there’s these formulas and I see people lose their minds on, I’m eating 1850 calories per day, I should be losing two pounds a week. And I’m like, well, maybe your body is not burning that amount. There’s not like a meter on our chest that says this is how many calories you’ve burned so far today. Even if you have one of the Fitbits walking around, they’re all estimates. So trying to come up with a perfect estimate, I don’t understand why people waste a lot of time with that. What I would do is say, know the food you’re putting in your mouth by predominantly be the one who fixed it and made it yourself. So you know everything that’s in it. Watch what happens over time. So, in about a three week period of time, if I’m eating a certain way, what’s happening? And then I can tweak that.

If I’m not losing the weight or the fat that I thought I needed to lose, I’ll eat a little bit less and maybe I’ll try to move a little bit more, but I’m not going to sit down and say, I know this is going to, like MyFitnessPal will tell you when you put your daily consumption in there, it’ll tell you, you know if you eat like this, you’re going to lose six pounds in the next six weeks. That’s never been right. Never ever has it been right on what the scale is going to say six weeks later, cause I’ve actually taken snapshots of it.

Yeah, exactly. Or you’ve burnt off 200, you can eat an extra 200 or something. I mean it’s just nuts isn’t? It just doesn’t work that way.

And that’s typically what happens. Yeah. What typically happens when people get on the calories in, calories out, is they underestimate the amount they’re eating and they overestimate the amount they’re burning. Even when they’re trying to eat a lot less, they get hungry and they say, well I’ll just have a little snack. What, it’s just a 100 or 200 calories, so no big deal. They forgot to count the sugar they put in their coffee, and they had two extra cups today because they were just running out of energy, and they forget all those extra calories. Like I said, the reason I try to get my clients to at least consider keto as a way of eating… I am not… I’m agnostic for the most part, but I do tell them, I’ve never seen anyone able to overeat on keto. They might stabilize and their weight might level out and plateau.

It does happen for most of us were going, going get to a point where our body reaches its happy weight. It might not be our happy weight, but the body seems to like it. That’s homeostasis, so when the body’s there, it’s there. I’ve seen keto stabilize, but I’ve never seen anyone gain weight on keto. That was truly eating keto. Maybe someone has, but I mean, I’ve heard people eating large amounts of calories just for the sake of experimentation, and not gaining the weight based on the calorie calculation they should have. I do believe that the keto is a sustainable way of eating for fat loss. You just have to know your body. Your body’s going to react to certain way. It’s going to be different for every person. Todd was not insulin resistant, so that’s how he was able to lose 332 pounds. He didn’t have pre-diabetes, which was kind of odd considering everything else that was wrong with him. So he was able to keep going and keep losing. Some people will have insulin resistance and they’ll have to incorporate other tactics to work around that. If they truly need to lose more body fat, they’ll have to figure out those tactics and strategies that will work for them.

My biggest thing is getting away from that math equation. I can remember going through that phase, the whole calorie counting phase and making bargains the whole time. Finding out that because it was just this equation I had these 1500 calories and it didn’t really matter what I did. So, everything was weighed and it was just this bargain every day. Okay, so how can I manage to eat my Magnum ice cream every day? Okay, so I shave a bit off the amount of vegetables I have here, and a bit off the chicken breast I’ve got here. You can see how insane that is. Going away from that, and just looking at the actual foods, because you get much more in tune with how you’re feeling when you’re eating them, whether you’re feeling full, whether you’re still feeding hungry, because you’re not working to this equation you’ve got on a piece of paper.

Yeah, I’ve done that too. You know, I think everyone that goes through any kind of weight loss mindset, we’ll sit down and say, okay, I’ve got to start figuring out what this stuff is and doing the measurements.

Well if it’s all about the calories, then it makes sense, doesn’t it?

Dr Fung said it best in his book, The Obesity Code. He said, every diet works and every diet fails and that the principle of it is, if you cut your calories back and your body’s used to having say 2500 calories, and you cut it back to 1500, your body is going to react to that by using some body fat when it needs to. But it’s also going to slow down a lot of other stuff. It’s going to say, okay, well you don’t need hair or fingernails to grow. Your skin doesn’t need to be as well maintained because we need to be able to get food, and that needs to be our first priority. We don’t want to starve, but it’s not sustainable from the perspective of we’re rational creatures.

If I want my dog to lose weight, I just put a little less kibble in the bowl, And the dog over time will lose weight. The dog doesn’t have a say. The dog can’t sit there and say, well look, I’ll trade you this kibble for a magnum. So the dog is in a fixed, confined environment? We’re not. There’s food all over the place and people are opportunistic eaters. Meaning, when we were roaming and foraging…my family is from northern Europe. I had a DNA test done and they were all northern Europe. And so this time of year – we’re recording this in February – there would be no fruits to be had. Probably very little vegetables depending on what parts of which countries they’re from. So their carb intake during this period of time would be almost nil. They’d be eating fish, they’d be eating small mammals, birds, that type of thing. And then occasionally we might decide the guys, we’d all get together and say, let’s go kill an elk or a bear. But we wouldn’t do that on a daily basis because it’s just too dangerous and we don’t want to get hurt because in that day and age you break a leg, you’re maybe as good as dead. We would occasionally go out and hunt an elk. It would be a planned excursion. We’d go do it. We would feast on that elk. We’d eat every bit of it, and then we’d go back to our normal food stuff.

Now, when it rolls around to the Spring, and the blueberries come in season, the blackberries, and then the other fruits and vegetables, they all start coming up in abundance, we’re going to eat the crap out of them because they don’t fight back. They’re easier to catch than anything else. So there’d be a period of time when we would be doing that. Now, you contrast to today when there’s a McDonalds on every corner, there’s a donut shop on every corner, and every time you walk into a convenient store, they have the ice cream cooler right there by the door.

So you have to walk past it just to get into the place. As opportunistic eaters, our minds are constantly saying, I want that, I want that. And it’s so easy to get, that it’s so easy to overeat versus in the past. You may have gone a day without catching any fish and then the next day you catch a few. So our bodies were adapted to basically be able to go without food for periods of time to eat feasts at points in time. The problem is today, there’s just too much food around us. We don’t really live that way.

Exactly. Opportunistic feasting all the time.

Yeah, and that’s why again, I think keto is really a good way of eating. I talk about this in the book. I had some property and I was out there doing some work on the property and my truck got stuck in the mud so I had to call the tow truck to come tow me out of my own yard. So he comes. It takes him about an hour to get there. His truck breaks down as he’s trying to tow me out. So it’s another three hours before he gets his truck fixed. And finally gets me out. Now, I woke up that morning and I didn’t eat breakfast. I went straight out to the property. I did some pretty hard work in the morning. While he was fixing his truck I did some fishing. It wasn’t very successful, but it was a good day fishing. I’m driving home, it’s close to six o’clock and I’m realizing I haven’t eaten anything all day and I didn’t need to eat anything.

You haven’t passed out.

I haven’t yet. Whereas before when I was a sugar burner, I would have been jonesing. I would have been saying, oh my blood sugar’s down, I’ve got to go get something to eat and I probably would have walked the two and a half miles to the dollar store to pick up some kind of salty, bad for me, snack. I didn’t have to do that. So I think taking your time and finding that way of eating, making it work for your lifestyle is the most significant thing you can do for your life.

Interesting funny point actually…just quickly. When you mentioned about the dogs and if you wanted the dog to lose weight, it’s just reducing their food and there is actually a difference there. I have three dogs, very different. I have a deerhound and a lurcher, so effectively two lurchers. That kind of dog where I could leave out the whole big bowl of food way more than they eat and self-regulate. They eat what they need and they don’t eat any more. Bets, who is the French bulldog would eat until she exploded. She has no switch off mechanism and I do have to put her on a diet. I have to keep her away from the others’ food if they don’t finish it all – they sometimes leave some and go back and pick on it until it’s finished. I have to keep it up high away from her, but interestingly enough, the approach I took with another dog I had like this previously, was just to reduce the amount of food and he did lose weight, but I felt so mean because he had such a small amount.

Now, interestingly enough with Bets, it’s the same problem. It very difficult for her to lose weight, even with reducing the food. But when I changed what she ate – she now eats more food, but half of that is basically protein and quite often, quite fatty beef is what I find at the supermarket. They have off-cuts of meat when they’re butchering that they sell for for animal food. And so she has half that and half biscuit, so she’s actually eating more. But that’s how I get her to lose weight. So it’s about what she eats, not just the amount.

So you may be the only person has a keto dog.

Lots of people do. She’s not completely keto, but yes part-way there, it really does make a difference and it’s the only way I could get her to lose weight and maintain it. So, it’s dogs too.

And that’s a big part of this overall journey is kind of having that self-awareness. There’s these donuts that they had where I was working in Arkansas and it was called spud nuts. So it’s made with potato powder. Basically they make the flour out of potato. They’re delicious. Ungodly delicious. If I came to work on a Friday or any given day where they were there, I could tell as soon as I walked in because the break room was like sharks being chomped. Everybody’s going to the break room like sharks. And so I just learned that on those days I have to stay out of the break room. I go to my office., I sit down and I pull out a bag of nuts and I’d sit there and snack on the nuts and I would not go to the break room at all, even for a coffee until after lunch because I knew after a few people had lunch in there, they’d all be gone.

But it was that self-awareness of knowing that I didn’t have the discipline, the self-discipline to avoid those donuts if they were in there. I had to set up strategies and things that worked for me. And everybody’s going to have kind of their own thing, you know? That one or two things that you just can’t have or you may sit down and do a really intense cardio session. This what I find. If I do really intense cardio while I’m a sugar burner, I eat more that day. As a result, I’m hungry or most of the day and I end up eating more. So any calories that I would have burned doing that cardio session, I’m going to end up eating. There’s not really a calorie number there that’s going to matter for me.

I just know that if I’m interested in losing body fat, I need to be keto and my cardio just needs to be a little different. It can’t be that high intense, go, go, go. It needs to be slow and go, and long distance. That’s when I get really great opportunities to go for long walks outside. I live near the beach so I can just go out there and walk for an hour or so and feel really good about it. It’s just again, having that self-awareness and knowing what are the things that are going to trip you up? What are the things that are going to make you take a detour? Then you can be prepared to keep those from happening as often. It’s still probably going to happen…

And that’s the thing is to learn when they do happen, is actually just take a moment to figure out what went on so that you can then learn from that and put a strategy in for when it happens next time. Because it will.

Yeah, I will drink less coffee that day and I would have my nuts as my snack.

Avoid the spud nuts! Let everyone else eat them first.

And they would. They were always gone by the time lunch time rolled around.

You could guarantee that. Well we’ve referred to the podcast and the book a lot during the show, but perhaps you could just tell us what they’re called and where we can find them.

Sure. Well, the podcast is 40+ Fitness. You can find it pretty much everywhere, iTunes, Spotify, any of the other podcatchers that you’d like to listen to your podcasts on, you can find it out there. Again, it’s 40+ Ftness podcast. I interview guests from all over. Most of them are authors,s we’re talking about books. I’ve interviewed over 215 authors. A lot of content there. They’re not all keto. There are some vegetarians and there are some others. One of the core thing that I’ve found is whenever you have these conversations, it all comes back to whole food. They all like to pile the processed food on the other guy and say, well vegan’s not good for you because they eat all that processed stuff. And they’ll say the same thing about meat eaters. And I’m like, well no, if you actually listen to them, we’re eating the same stuff, and we’re actually eating a lot more alike than you would think.

So I have a lot of different guests on there about a lot of different concepts, predominantly focused on people over the age of 40, but if you’re not quite 40, you still might find it useful. So go check it out. The name of the book is called The Wellness Roadmap, and it’s available on Amazon, you can get it on Barnes & Noble – all of those sites. I also did the audio book for it, so there’s an audio book version if you prefer those while you’re taking your long walks on the beach. That’s The Wellness Roadmap. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/ketowoman – just one word. I’ll have links to everything there so it’s all in one quick, easy place for you to find it, and you won’t have to go bouncing all over my internet properties to see what’s there. You can find everything there on 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/keto.

Fantastic. I’ll obviously have the normal show notes as well with everything listed there too. So plenty of places we can find where to get it. And now you say you focus on the 40 plus fitness, but the books not just for 40 pluses, it’s for everyone. Right?

It’s sort of is a little bit more geared to the conversation I would have with someone over 40. I wanted to write it in a way that anyone can get benefit from it. It’s just there are some things as we get a little bit older, you know, our hormones are changing, our sleep patterns change, everything changes at some level. And so the way that a 29 year old would approach fitness and wellness is going to be different than someone who’s 49. And so I do have that delineation in there of understanding that the conversation’s predominantly with people over 40. But yes, there’s benefit for just anyone. The roadmap as I’ve written it out is appropriate for everybody. So just if nothing else, at least you’ll have the roadmap to know how to chart your course and get there. But you’re going to read a lot of conversations about the future you as you get older, which again, might be beneficial to someone kind of looking forward and trying to put together that vision to say, I’m not 40 right now, but what do I want be when I’m 40? When I grow up – 40, 50, 60, 70 and beyond.

it’s nice to have that niche, have something that’s tailored just for us.

I see a lot of people trying to go the route of the 29 year old. I did it myself. I bought the insanity workout tapes and punished myself with just doing the fitness test and then quit. And said, I can’t do this. I can’t even do the fitness test and survive. So, I’m no good. And what I didn’t do was show myself the self-compassion and self-love to know that I needed to approach training very differently. And so there is a difference in approach and it is this concept of gentle nudging that we have to do when we’re a little older. When you’re younger you can, go do something really intense and you recover quickly. Not always the case for us when we’re older, we’re often dealing with nagging injuries like your back and then my rotator cuff, those things are going to be a part of our journey and we just need to be prepared to deal with them.

Well, it’s been fantastic catching up and hearing all about your book and your podcasts and all the valuable information you’ve given us that perhaps you could add just one more top tip to that.

The top tip would be this. As you look at this, this whole paradigm of getting well, there’s four core elements that I think we should all be focused on. The biggest one is food, and then sleep, and then stress, and then exercise. I know that sounds weird coming from a fitness trainer saying that exercise is going to get you the less bang for your buck, but it’s absolutely true. If your food’s not right, you’re not right. If you’re not sleeping well, you’re not right. If your stress level’s too high, you’re not right. Exercise can only do so much for you. It is the one thing you have probably the most control over because you make the decision whether you do it or not, and what you do. There’s a lot of variety for you to approach it, but you’re going to get the most from your food. If you haven’t got that sorted out, start there. And then I think what you’ll find is with keto, you’re going to have some increased energy that you’re going to want to do something with.

That tends to happen, doesn’t it?

And then that keto energy is something that you can then turn on to your fitness regimen.

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for talking to me today Allan. It’s been a great pleasure.

I’ve loved this. Thank you very, very much.