Join Carole as she chats with Physician Assistant, Maria Shesiuk, as she shares her keto journey to health, how she first heard of Carole and how she influenced her, and how she now used keto with her patients.
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Carole Freeman: Are we ready to do this, Maria? Hey, everyone we’re live.
Do you wonder how a low carb diet can help with chronic disease?
Are you curious how a low carb diet impacts athletic performance? Ooh, easy for me to say.
Do you wish there were more keto, friendly healthcare providers out there?
This episode is for you stick around and learn how physician’s assistant Maria Shesiuk discovered a low carb diet for herself, how it impacted her health and eating habits and how she now uses it clinically with her patients.
Welcome everyone to keto chat live. I’m your host Carole Freeman masters in nutrition and clinical health psychology.
I’m also a board certified ketogenic nutrition specialist. I specialize in helping women 40 plus follow a keto diet for sustainable way. Got to plug the medical disclaimer here. The show has meant for educational and entertainment purposes only. It is not meant for medical advice nor intended to diagnose, prevent, treat, or cure anything at all.
Except for maybe boredom or curiosity. If you have questions or concerns related to your specific medical condition, please seek out your qualified healthcare professional. Welcome Maria to the show. So glad that you’re here. Everyone who is watching. Go ahead and give us a comment, share where you’re joining us from and help me welcome our guest.
Maria is a physician’s assistant personal trainer, yoga instructor, and Maria received a BS in psychology from Wayne state university in 2000 2010 and a master’s of science in physician’s assistant studies from . CCBC PA program in 2012 with hospital-based experience in medical coverage of multiple surgical specialties.
She is an N a S M certified personal trainer and a yoga Alliance, certified yoga teacher, and a competitive Olympic weightlifter. So ha that’s a mouthful. Welcome Maria to the show.
Join Carole as she chats with Physician Assistant, Maria Shesiuk
Maria Shesiuk: Thank you so much. I sound really impressive on paper.
Carole Freeman: You are impressive in person too.
Maria Shesiuk: Thank you so much for having me on Carole. Like we discussed before I have been following you for quite some time. And the lectures, one of the presentations that you gave in salt lake city really changed how I think about. Food and diet in general. And it really, it helped me and in turn to help my patients.
I really appreciate all the work that you’re doing. I think it’s really awesome and incredible.
Carole Freeman: Oh likewise, I can’t wait to get to know you even deeper on today’s show too, and share with you. I wanted to share, so you sent me the bio I just read, but you also sent me a specialized clinical interest and a personal statement, which I’m really impressed with.
And I want to share that with everyone first, before we go into some more questions for you. Let me do a little more reading and mix up some letters while I’m doing that. Maria is specialized clinical interest at IHP, which is the clinic that you work at them. So many, right? Maria focuses on functional evaluation prevention and treatment of patients with chronic medical conditions, with a particular interest in addressing them with low carbohydrate ketogenic and animal-based diets.
She also sees patients who are seeking to optimize physical and cognitive performance, her professional. Personal experience has taught her the importance of physical fitness, mindfulness practices, and self realization in alleviating symptoms of most elements, and then personal statement. I hope to help you heal by training the mind and body as one.
My desire is not to simply treat symptoms and manage illness, but to help you maximize your levels of energy and vitality so that you can truly enjoy life. We have many powerful tools to help people help help the body heal itself with an open mind and a large dose of curiosity. I’ve used nutrition, herbs, and movement practices to heal myself and to help others do the same.
I love this last line. I view you that’s her patients. I view you as the practitioner and myself as the facilitator in healing. I felt really important. I wanted to share that because it’s such a different approach than probably most people are used to with their healthcare provider. So powerful.
I got tingles all over from it. How did you get interested in healthcare in the first place?
Maria Shesiuk: It was a long and winding road. I I was working in many different degrees because I kept wandering in college. I didn’t really quite know what I wanted to do. I had an interest in art.
I had an interest in physics. I had an interest in science. I was all over the place, just constantly switching majors. And also there was also concerned about what am I going to do? Majors w what will my life look like? If I learned how to draw really well, there were a lot of uncertainties, because I, I come from a very modest family were immigrants and we never had a lot of money and I wanted to have both job satisfaction and a decent income and be of some service to society.
I wondered a lot. And also I was very sick in my twenties actually started late in high school in 11th grade. I became very ill and it continues continued through my twenties. Part of my switching majors was due to just not feeling well, mentally, spiritually, and physically.
I actually met a PA who experienced the same wandering path. And she’s the one that told me about the profession, because I didn’t know, I didn’t even know what a PA is until she told me about it. And she told me a little bit of a her story and she really inspired me to pursue this profession and I don’t remember her name so I can reach out to her and say, Hey, thanks.
And by the way, do you have any idea of the ripple effect that you had from having that really honest discussion with me? Because she didn’t have to, she was actually providing care to me at the time and she did not have to disclose any of that information. I often think about her when I talked to my patients and I do probably share more than most providers are willing to do because I think that it can have that ripple effect.
I experienced that. The interested in the profession I, at that time I was con got settled on getting a psychology degree and I actually wanted to become a clinical psychologist. But then she made me change my mind and I decided to pursue this path instead. So that’s that’s it in a nutshell, that’s how I got here, but the road to functional medicine, which is the field that I’m working in now was also very anti.
Carole Freeman: Let’s just next clarify what is a physician’s assistant?
Maria Shesiuk: So Carole it’s actually physician assistant. Okay. Assistant. It’s a pretty, a lot of people make that mistake or assumption, whatever you want to call it. We’re not really assistance. We work alongside physicians. So I, there’s no I don’t belong to a physicians per se.
And we do have quite a bit of independence when making clinical decisions in the way we work with physicians is they, the supervisory role is not that he is looking out over my shoulder every minute. Tell me what to do is just it’s more of we should probably be called physician associates rather than assistants, but that’s how the profession was born.
The name
Carole Freeman: what’s the difference between physician assistant then and a full fledged physician maybe that will help?
Maria Shesiuk: Our training is very different. Physicians go through medical school and residency and by the way nurse practitioners go through, I think they also have a residency and they are able to practice completely independently of a physician assistants go through PA school, which is, it’s a different way to learn medicine.
We do have clinical rotations, but we do not do residencies. It’s like we have a little bit more freedom to change specialties because we don’t have to do a residency all over again. So there’s a lot of freedom in this profession.
Carole Freeman: All right. Then tell us more about functional medicine.
I’m a big fan of that and It makes such a huge difference in people’s lives. And a lot of times, some of my clients are like why would I have a doctor already? Why would I need to see a functional medicine doctor? Can you share a little bit about, how that kind of health care is very different me of the benefits of why somebody may choose that?
Maria Shesiuk: Functional medicine is often times called a root cause medicine approach. But somebody in conventional medicine might disagree and say we’re looking for root causes too, but. It’s hard to defend, differentiate it by just saying it’s a root cause approach. Then I feel like if functional medicine, like we, we focus a lot on lifestyle modifications, a lot on like diet, gut health things like, perhaps like stealth infections that are often, overlooked in conventional medicine.
When a patient comes to me, I’m not thinking just in terms of relieving their symptoms, although we do that. But then on top of relieving their symptoms, I’m thinking, okay, what is the underlying cause here? And we go very deep when it comes to the underlying cause. In conventional medicine, maybe if a diabetic comes to clinic there is some discussion about diet, there’s a tremendous amount of focus on.
Medications. We might try, herbal supplements first and really focus on diet. That’s where for me, the low carb diet is, a huge benefit, right? Like how else you reduce blood sugar, rice, carbs or sugar. I want a low carb diet. I encourage, diabetic patients to do that.
And I think patients come to us with that expectation. They’re already prepared to make those changes. There’s a lot from the gut lots and lots of focus on the gut.
Carole Freeman: One of the ways I think of it differently is, like you said, in your statement of thinking of the whole person, whereas conventional medicine looks at each part as a separate thing, and you need a specialist to do the liver, the bones the eyes, the brain whereas functional medicine looks at the person as a whole and all the different aspects that go into health rather than just what medication or surgery can resolve the symptom.
I think another big difference that’s typical as well, that surprises people is how much time they get to spend with you. And do you know, your appointments are 30 or 60 minutes long,
Maria Shesiuk: the first initial appointment is usually an hour long. The followups just, it depends on what the needs of the patients is.
It could be 15 minutes, it could be 30 minutes, 40 minutes, but there are definitely much longer.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. Yeah. And what, when’s the last time you got more than five minutes with your doctor?
Maria Shesiuk: We really think in terms of systems, but that’s not to say that we don’t utilize specialties, specialists.
Sometimes we do need to send people out to a specialist yeah. And we’re also an integrative practice. That means not only do we use a functional approach, but we use other therapies as well. Like we have an energy healer here at the practice. We used to have an acupuncturist and a massage therapist, but that kind of fell apart because of COVID we’re hoping to bring some of those people back.
At some point I used to teach yoga and the practice as well, but I’m not doing that right now. And we
Carole Freeman: Where are you located again?
Maria Shesiuk: This is an Ellicott city Maryland. Near, near Baltimore, very close to Baltimore.
I actually live in both.
Carole Freeman: Tell anyone, in Maryland, you can go see Maria and at her clinic, there’s a, we’re covering each quarter and every state one by one here on the show. You’d said that you’d heard a talk that I did that, which actually you referred me a client and I reached out to interview cause I’m like, who is this person that knows me?
And I don’t know her. And you shared that you heard a talk that I did it at salt lake city, which would have been, I think it was 2019
Maria Shesiuk: 2018, maybe 19.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. How you must’ve heard about low carb before you heard the conference? Tell me more about what led you there.
Maria Shesiuk: I think it might’ve been part of the I don’t know.
I have, I used to listen to so many low carb conferences and lectures on YouTube that I can’t even tell you how I found you. But I started low carb in 2015. Okay. And it’s, I just think it’s a funny story. I had this book that I purchased, it was it’s called why we get fat by Gary Tobbs and this book sat on my shelf probably for a couple of years.
Carole Freeman: And without words, I can’t point at it. It’s right there.
Maria Shesiuk: I should have it in my office and it was sitting on my shelf and I was cleaning, cleaning up my clearing out my space and looking at all of the books and trying to figure out what I’m going to keep and what I’m going to donate, because I didn’t have a ton of high quality books that I was going to read again.
I picked up this book, I’m like, what’s this? And I started flipping through it and I must’ve flipped to the right page because I start reading this book somewhere in the middle of it. And it just really grabbed me like some something I was reading in there. I couldn’t put it down. I finished it within a couple of days.
And after reading that book, it’s all these light bulbs started going off. And prior to reading it I had all sorts of health issues that I was managing, but very poorly. And I had severe cystic acne, depression, anxiety, insomnia just endless GI problem. I actually went through two rounds of Accutane that probably even contributed to my GI problems even more.
And I just, I tried being a vegan and a vegetarian and I tried this and that and the other and nothing was really helping me. I decided to give low carb a try and it wasn’t just low carb. I wanted to try ketogenic diet. I’ve really focused on staying ketogenic, not just little card because there’s certainly a difference.
Within about two weeks of doing not a very good ketogenic diet because I didn’t know what the hell was doing. My skin completely cleared up. Then a couple of weeks did for me what two rounds of Accutane could not do. And it was so shocking to me that I actually thought I was pregnant.
I couldn’t put two and two together. I didn’t realize that dog. Can make such a big change. I kept taking pregnancy tests, thinking I must be pregnant because I’ve never had clear skin since I was maybe 10 years old. And, but then it dawned on me that the only thing that really changed was my diet. I started researching, I would just Google acne and ketogenic diet and there it was.
It turns out that could have been an option for me, but the physicians that I kept going to never offered it to me, they never said, Hey, like not even ketogenic, like maybe cut out sugar, cut out, grains, breads, pastas. Me of this might resolve, you would think that a dermatology office at a very prestigious university would know these things would know this information would offer that to me.
And let me decide. If I want to do the keto route, or if I want to do the Accutane route, but they made it sound like Accutane was the only way to go. That’s when my eyes started to open real wide. And I realized what a powerful tool diet truly is. Then of course, I started sleeping better, my energy shot through the roof.
I was no longer bloated, although that’s, that did come back because I was, I started eating way too many vegetables. I got on the vegetable craze and I, I had to get away from that. That’s how I started, but the low carb journey for me took on many different variations, but yeah, that was like, that was the start.
And I was almost I was almost addicted to listening to all of these low carb lectures because I just couldn’t get enough. Just the amount of information that physicians and PhDs and nutritionist just give away for free was just incredible. It was like, I felt like I was getting a PhD without going to school.
Carole Freeman: Oh, so true. You shared a little bit that when you heard my talk, it really changed your approach and then your approach with your clients. I’m really curious to hear how that
Maria Shesiuk: impacted you. Yeah. I know in that particular lecture, I know that you talked about the raccoons, right? The raccoons that if you feed them, they’re going to keep coming back and you were talking about sugar cravings and I don’t know why that was.
Like such earth shattering news to me that eat, if you want the cravings to go away, you actually have to stop eating that food and constantly feeding the raccoons. I continue to use that with my patients, but also you talk a lot about not I’m flipping through recipes all the time.
Like letting that food be some kind of I guess food porn is the only way I can put. And also you, you talk a lot about the behaviors, the behavior changes in order to make low-carb work. And keeping it simple and eating real food.
All of those things helped me stay on track. And then, I pass it onto my patients because it’s so easy to turn a ketogenic diet into yet another sort of junky, low carb thing.
Carole Freeman: Yeah, probably all the symptoms that you got rid of can, could come back. If you went the process food, pseudo fiber products are out there.
Maria Shesiuk: And there’s so much of that junk out there.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. Oh, I’m so glad. I it’s so touching to me to know that. Cause sometimes it feels like I’m speaking into a void of anybody realize how important this is. I’m as passionate about the psychology of this as the nutrition aspect of it.
And I’ve seen. I don’t know how to measure the hours of which I’ve studied more, but all throughout school I was learning about, from Stephan Guyenet is a very big influence on me as well as Kathleen Des Maisons, she did work. She had a PhD in addictive nutrition. That was a book I found long time ago and just really opening my eyes to I love learning about, what is it that causes cravings and how do we get rid of them in instead of just managing them and what are the things that influence appetite too?
Stephan Guyenet that’s his wheelhouse is all the different aspects that come into play of what triggers us to overeat. What I teach is really paramount and FA foundational to like, how do we actually regulate our appetite? We’re not just constantly feeling. Hungry and regaining the weight.
And it is, it’s a battle. It’s a constant, lifelong journey in this world that we live in that we’re, every other day, there’s another, probably 10, 10 foods, a day of new keto foods that are coming out. And, it keeps me busy with my clients asking what about this thing?
I saw this at Costco the other day. I said let’s look at the ingredients and see what you think. And yeah. I’m so glad that resonates with you. And it does make a difference. I’ve been doing this, I just celebrated my seven year anniversary of following this myself. We started the same year.
And it, it working with everyone that I have, it makes a huge difference in quality of life. And the sustainability of it is as long as they continue to address those things. Thank you. Thank you. Let’s see. Another question is, okay, so you had amazing results and like a lot of people really dramatic results in a very short period of time.
What was it then that kept you on the path and continue.
Maria Shesiuk: I didn’t want to go back to what I came from that was just too terrifying, that constant misery I can’t believe how long I functioned sort of function because not really in, in that state of like brain fog and chronic fatigue, and, I still managed to run marathons in that state.
And I think the reason I loved running so much is because running relieved a lot of the agitation that I had all the time I’m going to help running, helped me sleep, running, help my anxiety. Running was good in a way, because it helped me manage these symptoms, but, I’m not sure that it’s healthy to run marathons all the time just to maintain some kind of level of health.
What kept me coming back is that is the amazing results. And I didn’t want that misery anymore. But I still, I still made a lot of mistakes and I wasn’t a hundred percent. All the following years I was constantly tweaking and learning new information on doing some of the mistakes that I was making on a ketogenic diet.
Like one of which was I restricted my protein. And then I learned that duh, I’m an athlete. Why am I restricting my protein? I was so obsessed with staying in ketosis that I was afraid to eat protein. That’s not good for an athlete. That’s not good for anybody really.
Then I changed that behavior. I started eating more protein. I noticed that, all these green smoothies I was drinking and all of the salad I was eating just kept me almost as bloated as the grains did. Then I had to change that around a. And eventually I actually stumbled upon some carnivores in the community and went a little bit more down the carnivore road path.
And I’m not a strict carnivore, however, I’m definitely, I call myself carnivore ish. I, I eat a lot of animal foods, mostly animal foods with a little bit of plants. And I am pretty low carb, but probably not ketogenic at this point.
That’s my kind of story of where I started and where I am now.
But what I have to say, what the ketogenic diet did for me is it seems to have balanced out all my hormones, cure them. I left him was totally out of whack. I’m sure my insulin was probably sky high from all the carbs I was eating for the running and stuff. And it seems to have. Completely downregulated my cravings.
Now if I eat something a little bit, carby like there is a stopping point. I don’t feel like I want to keep eating and eating this stuff. Just a little bit of something like a half, an orange or a grapefruit satisfied, satisfies, whatever glucose that I’m craving and I don’t have to keep going.
Carole Freeman: Yeah that’s I like that you’re sharing that too, because I found from my clients is that there’s a wide spectrum of how metabolically unhealthy people are. Me people like you that have a very strong athletic background and worked significantly overweight. You have a lot more metabolic flexibility.
You’ve got to that point that your body’s pretty healthy. And as long as you’re sticking. Real whole foods. I’m sure that you have a lot more leeway, but you’re also able to make the choice of eating the foods that make you feel the best instead of being stuck in cravings and food obsession,
Maria Shesiuk: Right.
Yeah. For example, today was an incredibly busy day and I didn’t even have time to make lunch. I didn’t have any breakfast food because I haven’t been grocery shopping. It’s just, this week has been a little bit of a disaster. I had some coffee this morning and like I’ve been seeing patients all day and I didn’t have to eat.
I did not have to eat until two, 3:00 PM. I wasn’t even hungry. And to me that is a sign of metabolic health because my body, like I don’t get, I don’t crash. My body just reverts to burning fat for fuel. My brain is working and I don’t have to eat. Then in the afternoon I had some sardines it’s not exciting.
Whatever it’s protein, it’s fat. When I come home, I might have something a little bit more exciting than that. That’s like another thing that is a gift of the low carb lifestyle is that I don’t have these constant food cravings and addiction. Like I can eat something that maybe isn’t very exciting or, it’s not going to give me a dopamine rush.
Because I look at food as fuel instead of entertainment.
And that really came from the low carb diet from this lifestyle, from everything that I’ve learned is understanding the food is fuel first. Maybe occasionally it can be entertainment, but not every day. All the time.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. Oh, that’s so true.
We live in a world where people think they need to have dessert six times a day.
Maria Shesiuk: They get a lot of this I don’t like to eat that or don’t like to eat this. And it’s it’s okay to occasionally eat something. You don’t like very much to fuel your body properly.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. If food is your only entertainment, it’s really time to look at living a more balanced life.
A healthy, energetic, spiritual well-rounded person has more interests and things that they can turn to for entertainment.
Maria Shesiuk: Yeah. But I remember what it was like to have food as entertainment. I remember that feeling and it’s such a horrible trap to be in, to shift focus and to find other hobbies and find other things.
It doesn’t work that it’s not an overnight change. It actually takes practice. Every day I would wake up and, and practice doing those things. Eat a breakfast that’s that is full of fat and protein. Don’t get these crazy cravings and then work on finding something in my life that brings me so much joy that I stopped thinking about food.
Yeah. I’ll do things. But again, like if I didn’t stumble on the low carb diet, then I wouldn’t be doing all of that work.
Carole Freeman: How did you find that low-carb diet impacted your athletic performance? You’re a yoga instructor and Olympic weightlifter tell us how that impacted your physical things you like to do.
Maria Shesiuk: The Olympic weightlifting came a little bit later. That was two and a half years ago, actually. Prior to that, I was a long distance runner. Like I said, I did marathons and just long distance running in general, just for fun, basically. And I’m a yoga practitioner I’ve been practicing for about 10 years, a little bit less than the last two and a half years, just because of the Olympic weightlifting take up, takes up a lot of time.
For running, I basically, I didn’t need to refuel period. The only thing I had was it’s so fun because no goo and no bunking no, and no consequences of eating goo because it can never, my stomach couldn’t handle that. Yeah, I could run forever pretty much. Because even, I think even when you’re really lean, you have enough body fat to probably run a hundred miles, I’m, I wasn’t a sprinter.
Perhaps sprinters could use a little bit more glucose because it’s a highly glycolytic sport, but long distance running requires no sugar. Like you can just run on fat. Once I got fat adapted, running just became so easy, I just need a water and salt and then yoga. Yoga is not a glycolytic it’s not like I’m not gonna call a sport activity.
It’s not a glycolytic activity. You don’t need any carbs for yoga whatsoever. What I found was in my yoga practice, once I switched to low carb my focus improved. It was easier to get into that meditative state. My mind wasn’t constantly all over the place. I was way more focused and I could hold poses for a really long time, which I couldn’t actually do when I was very carved up.
And I didn’t have any cramping. I would go to these hot classes and not suffer any cramps or exhaustion or feeling like I’m going to pass out. But the in Olympic weightlifting, it’s been an interesting journey. For that, I should probably tell you for the past two and a half years, I’ve been experimenting, adding some carbs and then taking carbs away and adding some carbs.
And really, I haven’t, I can’t say that carbs have done anything magical for me in Olympic weightlifting. Sometimes if I’m training for a solid three hours and once it gets to the second half of my training session, I find that I’m getting a little bit slow. I’ll have a tablespoon of honey. Really that’s 25 grams of sugar.
But I’m still lifting for another hour and a half. By the time I’m done, there’s nothing left. I’ve tried that approach and that seems to work a little bit, but I don’t even always do that sometimes. I’m fine. Going through entire training session with that about anything. I can train that hard for three hours in a fasted state.
And that once again, that’s only because I spent so many years in this fat adapted state.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. Oh, this is great. It’s the typical story, Maria, where. Oh, boring. Everything got better. Everything’s better.
Everything got better. I just, I’m having flashbacks of when I interviewed Dr. Ted Naimin the first time. I’m originally a Seattleite and interviewed him many years ago and asked him, what do you see gets better for people when they go low carb? And he says, everything, everything you can measure gets better.
Maria Shesiuk: I actually, I listened to that interview and I’m a huge fan of his of him. He he’s very protein centric. When I started eating more protein about three years ago when I went more down carnivores ish route I. Started feeling stronger. And I had even less cravings then.
Like I, the under eating of protein I was screwing myself for a number of years doing that. I really appreciated the information that he has provided in the low-carb space about, the importance of paying attention to protein. There’s also Don layman. I don’t know if you’re familiar with his work.
He is a researcher, a protein researcher who talks a lot about equality of protein, the amount that we need that I’ve listened to quite a few interviews with him as well.
Carole Freeman: Ooh, fun. A new person for me to rabbit hole on. I hadn’t heard of him. That’s one of the changes I’ve made over my journey as well.
And this is episode 47 of my show and my last episode, 46, I did my second. keto anniversary show and talked about the things that are different than the beginning. And the same thing for me in the beginning, we all thought we had to keep protein, adequate not too high. And that’s a big shift that I’ve made myself.
And then also with all of my clients and you’re right, it makes a big difference of reducing cravings overall better hair, skin and nails. A lot of my ladies would, as they were losing weight would lose a lot of hair. I did it as well. And now when I recommend a much higher protein intake for them, they don’t have that issue of the hair falling out anymore.
Maria Shesiuk: Yep. Acids are the building blocks of life, we probably getting enough.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. And another big influence of mine is Peter Attia. And he’s been talking recently about how little protein, like when he sees middle-aged women coming in, that’s the number one issue they have is they don’t eat enough protein.
It is. Interesting how much work it is to, to gradually. I usually stair-step my ladies into higher protein. I trick them and start them on 80 grams. And then I want them like a hundred usually or more. And first they’re like, it’s so much protein and I’m like, just wait. But once they get there, once they get used to having that much, they actually prefer that they feel better.
They choose, they crave the protein more than they do other things too.
Maria Shesiuk: Yeah, it is a hard change because protein, especially animal protein it’s not very exciting to eat, it doesn’t give you that dopamine rush. It’s boring. Yeah, it’s hard to make that change and also.
Like I’ve noticed in my patients, the patients that have been eating low protein most of their life, and maybe like a heart higher carbohydrate diet, they seem to have some enzyme deficiencies. They have a really hard time adjusting the proteins. They have to slowly help them build up to a better level of protein.
Carole Freeman: And. Yeah, they have, they need the amino acids from the protein to make the enzymes to digest the protein.
Maria Shesiuk: Yeah. Yeah, but I hear the story all the time. One of, one of the questions they asked, I just, I asked my patients, I tell them, give me your typical day of eating and, it’s like over and over again, I hear I have a hard boiled egg and a piece of toast and, fruit or my personal favorite steel cut oats with fruit and honey.
Yeah. I’m like where’s the protein, oh, I eat peanut butter, stuff like that.
Carole Freeman: Or a green smoothie with yogurt.
Maria Shesiuk: Or the protein powders, the endless protein powders.
I don’t know, in a way those are the easy patients because you make a few small changes and they’re like a million times better. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. How do you use low carb or ketogenic diets clean.
And like a million different way.
Carole as she chats with Physician Assistant, Maria Shesiuk, as she shares her keto journey to health.
Carole Freeman: Everything gets better.
Maria Shesiuk: Didn’t, we already conclude that.
We have, we certainly have plenty of patients with metabolic issues and elevated A1C is, my blood sugar. We have a lot of patients with chronic pain issues inflammation low carbohydrate diets, certainly reduce inflammation. It’s just it never ceases to amaze me how, patients go on a low carb diet for a while and they’re like, oh, I forgot to tell you that this back problem I had, I don’t have it anymore.
Carole Freeman: I’ve found that my people that had to go to the chiropractors a lot before, so sorry, chiropractors, but they’re just like, oh, I haven’t had to go in 30 days or a month or two. Oh yeah, my back feels great.
Maria Shesiuk: They’re having that same realization that I did when I realized that it was in fact, the ketogenic diet that cleared up my skin, not a surprise pregnancy.
Is that, oh, it can
do that. Yeah. Yeah. Have you heard this one as well? Maria. Cause this is one of the most I haven’t seen, and there’s no, I don’t, as far as I know, there’s no research on this as well, but a lot of my ladies, everyone who has ever experienced urinary and. That goes away as well.
And it’s one of those things as a mother, we’re told like, oh, that’s just part of pregnancy. You get torn up down there, get used to it. And one time on a group call, somebody shared that. And they’re like, this is a weird thing. Is anybody else note it? And everybody on the call was like, oh yeah, me too.
Somebody would say oh, it’s just less weight on there, but it goes away much faster than the amount of weight that you’d think that would have to be taken away from you. No pressure on the bladder. Somehow it just makes all the
muscles work better. It makes the muscles work better. And think about this, they could have a cystitis, right?
An inflamed gallbladder will not feel better. What am I saying? An inflamed bladder. And if you put them on a low carb diet, the inflammation is reduced. They don’t have that urgency. They don’t have the spasm anymore. It makes sense. I can’t say that personally have had clients where patients with that particular issue, but it makes sense when you think about the physiology of at all.
Yeah, absolutely. We also utilize it and I say low carb because, sometimes it’s ketogenic, sometimes it’s just low carb. We have, we offer mistletoe therapy here in the office and I don’t know if you’re familiar with mistletoe, but it is a like a supportive therapy for patients with cancer.
We do get patients coming here for various therapies that have cancer and we’re trying to add something to their conventional therapies. Oftentimes they do go on ketogenic diets to starve the cancer. That’s another application and I feel so, so honored fortunate that I can help.
Get, guide them through it. Like I have I’ve had two or three cancer patients that I’ve worked with remission, nutrition, which is it’s a service for ketogenic diets for cancer. But in addition to that, they have me as a resource, so they don’t have to go to that service every time they can just come to me and say, what do you think about this?
What do you think about that? When I can guide them through that. And I think that’s
Really cool.
Carole Freeman: Do you
Maria Shesiuk: with memory problems dementia, right? Yeah. Yeah. We’ve had that too. That’s a little bit more difficult because the memory problems, the dementia itself can make following ketogenic diet very difficult.
Carole Freeman: Yeah, once so many powerful applications of it. What kind of reception do you get from your your patients when you talk about this?
Maria Shesiuk: Oh, it’s all over the place. If I’m talking about low carb and that’s the term I’m using, then most patients are fine with it. They’re at least open-minded about it.
If I start going more towards a carnivorous diet, like a carnivore diet, not even calling it a carnivore, like a meat-based diet, they’re like, oh, wait a minute. It doesn’t meet cause cancer and, on and on. I get a lot of skepticism.
Carole Freeman: There’s all these terms. We have to come up with a light plant diet.
Maybe they’d accept that a little bit more a reduced plant diet versus a meat centric diet,
Maria Shesiuk: right? Yeah. Plant, animal-based. Yeah. Yeah, so the reception is all over the place and the word is getting out into the public sphere. People are a little bit more open-minded and certainly people that come here are very open-minded about all sorts of alternative therapies.
Carole Freeman: Do you do any work with like CGMs
Maria Shesiuk: Yes. Okay. CGMs are still very expensive. The one that I’ve been recommending, I probably shouldn’t be name-dropping. They’re expensive. I think that unless you were actually a diabetic or a type one diabetic insurance companies, don’t always cover them.
It has to be the right patient, basically patient with disposable income.
Carole Freeman: Mentioned it maybe they’ll sponsor the show
Maria Shesiuk: is the one that, yeah. But there, I can’t even afford it. I wanted to do it, but I don’t have that kind of cash. But yeah, I think it’s an incredible device.
It’s very useful. Because you do get immediate feedback on how you respond to certain foods instead of guessing, or having to prick your finger and the blood sugar meters are not very accurate. I remember that when I used to prick myself for for ketones and blood sugar, it was all over the place and I tried multiple eaters and I love the idea of using a CGM.
Carole Freeman: And you do the same. You do the stick a couple of times. The ten points. Yeah. Yeah.
Maria Shesiuk: And I think to myself, how did diabetics deal with this? Cause they can overdo the insulin. Yeah.
Carole Freeman: When those people that can afford the CGM, how do you recommend they try it out?
Maria Shesiuk: I usually recommend three months. I think three months is a really good timeframe.
Carole Freeman: Is that something that you find that is a helpful tool in getting people to convert to low carb? Like they can see I’ve seen this in some friends of mine online that they aren’t keto. But they’ve got the CGM and they’re like, oh my gosh, these foods, I don’t want to eat that anymore. Cause I had no idea what it was doing inside my body. Do you find that it helps people that are a little hesitant to go low carb?
Maria Shesiuk: Definitely. But I can’t say that my patients are the patients that agree to these things are not really super hesitant to begin with already on the path. But it’s just a great learning.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. More of a bio-hacker type of person.
Maria Shesiuk: That’s exactly right. Yeah.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. I think they’re great for, especially once you get to that point where you’re metabolically healthy and determining which foods work for you, which ones don’t and then what quantity of those another thing that comes up too is just how stress affects your blood sugar too.
One of my ladies that was finding out every time I go into this meeting at work, my blood sugar goes up 30 points, just thinking about going into it.
Maria Shesiuk: Yeah. That’s very interesting. Yeah. And I wonder about like my coffee consumption. I am a bit of a caffeine addict. How much my blood sugar is affected by.
I guess I’ll never find out because I can’t afford the CGM.
Carole Freeman: Come on Nutrisense, send Maria and a sample one. Maybe those there’ll be a I don’t want lower quality ones, but you know how there’s all the different companies now that put out like the glucose monitors and the ketone meters.
I get contacted all the time by Hey, you want to try this one out? And I’m thinking like, they’re probably not very accurate. Why would I want to waste my time on that? But maybe someday we’ll have some more affordable CGM monitors on the market. Yeah. I just think that for any style of eating a CGM is going to be pretty powerful.
Maria Shesiuk: 100%.
Carole Freeman: When you figure out what foods work for you in general,
Maria Shesiuk: 100%. Yeah, absolutely.
Carole Freeman: Yep. What is your current diet look like? You gave us some examples. Do you want to share, a typical day of, I guess you told us today but like maybe. Typical day of,
Maria Shesiuk: There’s a typical day of what I’m at home and there’s a typical day of when I’m at work.
I have been recently starting my mornings with actually raw eggs. I found that I digest, I tolerate raw eggs, much better than cooked eggs. I haven’t found the explanation for this phenomenon yet. I get my eggs from a local farm
Carole Freeman: are you doing, can I just this is a little area that I’ve studied a lot on.
Are you only doing the yolk?
Maria Shesiuk: No, I’m doing the yolk and the whites.
Carole Freeman: The white has a compound in there. Avidin, do you know about that and how it binds with biotin?
Maria Shesiuk: Yes, but I also talked to another nutritionist and he said that if you’re eating the yolk and the white together, and you have other sources of biotin, that it shouldn’t be.
Carole Freeman: I well, so I would challenge that because the avidin has a binding capacity for more biotin than in the yolk, of a typical egg, and it will bind with other biotin in your body. And over time it can start to cause a biotin deficiency. Yeah. This is why a cook, but cooking the white inactivates it but also maybe just toss out the white and just do the yolk part.
Maria Shesiuk: I need the protein. More yolks. Yeah, I just, the thought of throwing food out makes me sick to my stomach. I’m just so I can’t.
Carole Freeman: Yeah, maybe it’s so separate them and cook the yolk just a little bit. This is something I’ve I researched a lot. I used to teach nutrition classes too.
It’s it’s something I find is not really well known. Like for awhile there was people recommending. You put raw eggs in coffee. And that also it’s just not enough heat on the white inactivate that avidin that’s in there.
Maria Shesiuk: It’s really easy for me.
We actually have a LabCorp in the building, so it will be really easy for me to order a biotin test and take a look. Yeah, and then that was a concern of mine, but it’s like, there’s this back and forth on this issue. I’m like, all right, let me just do this for a while and see what happens.
Carole Freeman: Continue on raw….
Maria Shesiuk: What’s interesting. If I cook the eight eggs, I feel really sick. I just feel like I ate too much, but if I drink and this brings up an excellent point. This is why drinking your calories. When you’re trying to lose weight is a really bad idea. I’m not trying to lose weight.
I’m actually trying to maintain my weight because it’s so hard to maintain my muscle mass on my weight, doing what I’m doing in the Olympic weightlifting. That’s why I started drinking the eggs and I find that it doesn’t make me feel very full and I feel good. Like I just, I feel I’m not hungry, but I’m not stuffed.
And I’m getting this tremendous amount of super high quality nutrients and protein and fat soluble vitamins. That’s been my favorite breakfast recently. Sometimes I make a little smoothie with eggs and heavy cream. I know that sounds gross, but sorry.
Carole Freeman: I’ve had it taste amazing. It’s like eggnog, right?
Maria Shesiuk: It pretty much. Yeah. You add a little Stevia to, it tastes like eggnog, lunch. Sometimes they eat lunch sometimes I don’t. If I’m at work I’ll keep it simple and just either bring some leftover it’s a hamburger or brought worse, whatever we grilled the night before. And I love pickles.
I can’t live without my pickles. Pickles with everything. And then dinner is usually whatever we remember to defrost out of the freezer, buy whole animal. We buy a whole pig and a whole cow from a farm. And whatever’s at the top is what we pull out and defrost and it’s there on the grill. And then as far as like the plants go in and by the way so I do try to split up my protein intake throughout the day.
Like for example, I might not have a formal lunch, but I will have a can of tuna, which is like 40 grams of protein, or I’ll have a can of sardines something easy and quick to get in that extra protein. And then for dinner, I might have two or three burgers with cheese, with some pickles in a glass of milk.
Sometimes we grill bratwurst. We have lots of pork because we buy the whole animal. Ground pork with a little bit of vegetables just for flavor. My, my meals are very most people would say they’re boring, right? Because it’s just cook some meat with some salt and maybe a little vegetable here and there.
It’s just really simple.
Carole Freeman: It’s such an ancestral way of eating though. And for most of human existence, we ate very simply and we were much healthier,
Maria Shesiuk: The vegetable, now, like my, I’m growing cucumbers, so my cucumbers are gonna start coming up soon. But do you love cucumber?
The cucumber pickle thing, I have an obsession with cucumbers and pickles. I do like olives. I love so I have some arugula growing. I might load up on that. During the growing season and eat a little bit less of that in the winter time. Very simple. And like my salad dressing is really high quality olive oil and red wine vinegar.
That’s it. That’s all, it doesn’t need to be more than that. Yeah. Yeah.
If I really, if it really wants something sweet, I might have a little cup of yogurt with a few blueberries and like a teaspoon of honey and maybe some pecans. Like my go tos are occasional pecans, occasional blueberries.
Carole Freeman: What’s your favorite brand of olive oil?
Maria Shesiuk: This is almost embarrassing Kirkland brand. Extra-virgin. Organic extra-virgin olive oil. Oh. Because it tastes great. I think it won some awards for purity in the past, and that’s good to know. That’s why I started buying it in the first place.
Okay. And it’s, it has the bitterness and like that peppery taste of really high quality olive oil. Oh yeah. And it’s inexpensive.
Carole Freeman: I personally, I like to order Bariani, which they press their own and you’re right. When you get that real olive oil, it is so different than what most fake olive oil,
Maria Shesiuk: Most olive oils are really soybean oil.
Carole Freeman: You know that. Yeah.
Yeah. I assumed it was canola, which I don’t know if is any better or not, but
Maria Shesiuk: probably just as bad,
Carole Freeman: oh,
Maria Shesiuk: canola making process.
Carole Freeman: I have not, I can only, I remember. Google is going through like a chart of the 7,500 steps and all that kind of stuff.
Maria Shesiuk: Look up the videos on YouTube.
Oh, pretty disturbing.
Carole Freeman: I can only imagine. Yeah. Yeah. Was there anything else you were hoping I would ask about or anything else you want to share before we wrap this up?
Maria Shesiuk: I’m sure as soon as we’re done, I’m going to think of a million things that I should have said, but that’s how it goes.
I really appreciate you reaching out and doing this. And I’m so glad that we connected and now I have yet another resource for my patients. Oh, this is really great.
Carole Freeman: Now people can work with you in person. Did you figure out whether you can do any virtual consults or anything? We really can’t.
Maria Shesiuk: The first visit has to be in person, but the follow-up visits can be virtual.
Carole Freeman: Okay. If you can make your way to Maryland and go see Maria in person, then she could be your healthcare provider. But tell anyone that, that lives in Maryland or nearby there. If we need to spread the word about people that are doing the good work out there and helping people actually change their health for the better.
And let’s see. Next week’s episode is going to be the secrets of ending emotional eating. I’m relaunching my I have a program called the pathway to end emotional eating. It is a hundred percent of the psychology it’s based on a DBT dialectical behavioral therapy. And by popular demand, I’ve had a bunch of people reaching out and saying Hey, I kinda need something else here.
Next week’s episode is going to be all about information about. Why we emotional eat what it is? Why are, why we have feelings in the first place? Oh my gosh, they’re so annoying. Why do we even have to have feelings how we learn to use food, to cope with that, and the other ways that we do, and then how to begin to unravel that habit that we have and begin to address our true needs so that we can have healthy relationship with our emotions.
That’s going to be next week’s episode. So come back. Thank you again, Maria, for being here, if you’re out there also, how can they get in touch with you? Is there a website for your clinic?
Maria Shesiuk: Yeah, so it’s IntegrativeHealthPractices.org.
Carole Freeman: Check out Maria’s work and consult with her.
Maria Shesiuk: I also have an Instagram account. If anybody is interested in following me where I occasionally post what I eat and what I’m doing athletically
I go by Meeeaaty Maria.
This is funny. It’s Meeeaaty Maria and Keto Carole.
Carole Freeman: Okay. Oh my gosh. I love that Meeeaaty Maria. Okay.
Three E’s two A’s Meeeaaty Maria on Instagram.
How fun this has been. So fun.
Thank you so much, Maria, for being here and sharing the work that you do, your transformation, inspiring other people to do the same. Go check out her. On Instagram. And if you live in the Maryland area or you can get yourself out to Maryland, go check out IntegrativeHealthPractices.Org.
If you’re a struggling on keto and maybe you’re struggling with emotional eating come back next week, but also check out my website, KetoCarole.com.
And if you enjoyed the show, tell a friend, cause remember if you help us grow the show, we’ll help you shrink. And thanks again, Maria, for being here. Thank you. All the viewers and listeners, and we’ll see you next week. Thank you.
Why do most people who try keto fail? Carole breaks down the top reasons people aren’t successful, from inaccurate info, to not doing things correctly, to the top side effects that throw people off, you don’t want to miss this episode if you’ve been struggling!
Listen on Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music
Hello there everyone. How’s your day going? I’m flying solo today and we’re live. We’re live. We’re live. Hey, have you tried keto and you didn’t get the results. The, you see everyone else getting, let me get my notes up here. Do you wonder what you’re doing wrong? Do you wonder if maybe it just won’t work for you?
You wonder how you can get better results? Guess what this episode is for you stick around and learn the top five reasons why people fail on keto. Welcome everyone. Keto chat live. I’m your host Carole Freeman. I have a master’s degree in nutrition and clinical health psychology. I’m also a board certified keto nutrition specialist.
I specialize in helping women 40 plus follow keto diet for sustainable weight, loss, and health, and the thing to make my lawyers happy. Lawyers like I’ve got lots of them. This show is meant for educational and entertainment purposes. Only. It is not medical advice nor intended to diagnose, prevent, treat, or cure any position, any condition position, either not going to cure any positions either.
If you have questions or concerns related to your specific medical condition, please contact a qualified health provider. Preferably an integrated functional medicine doctor. How y’all doing today? Welcome. Welcome to the show. Are all my fans gone? Cause it’s a draft day in the NFL. Oh my beloved Seahawks lost a Russell Wilson and let’s see what we get.
Instead, he went to Colorado. News about the podcast. A couple things really cool is that my Sally K Norton episode about oxalate toxicity was charting last week and then nutrition, charts and podcasts in Canada. So that’s really cool. And that’s the third time I’ve interviewed her. And every time I do, it’s one of the most popular episodes I’ve got way back when I just did YouTube interviews.
And now that I’ve got a podcast very popular also you may be watching this on Spotify. So Spotify just launched video podcasts on there. And so we’re going to start uploading all of those there. So you can watch me live Thursdays 4:00 PM Pacific on Facebook and YouTube. You can also listen and he plays, you listened to podcasts and you can also watch replay on Spotify as well.
Top 5 reasons people fail on keto
So if you’re watching there, Hey, hello. Glad you’re with us. All right. Hey, let’s just get into the teachings today. I could rant about my day. Do you want to hear that? Is that funny? I actually may want to try this thing this life. I I heard this technique for writing comedy is that you take something that you think is bad and then you rant about it being good.
Or vice versa, something that you think is a good thing or people generally think is good. And then you rant about being bad. So maybe I could just try this about the water service that I had today. So out here in Phoenix you don’t drink the tap water just doesn’t taste good. It’s very hard water.
And so either go to store and buy water, have a service that delivers it. I’ve had a service, has been delivering it and there’s an issue. I needed updates. Credit card and their website just wouldn’t work. I kept trying to kept trying over the last few weeks and wouldn’t work. And so I tried calling their customer service number.
Literally the first time I called it said, no agents are available. Please call back later click. I was like what is this? Like 1992 or something? And so today, again, I’m trying to resolve this issue and. The chat box on their website doesn’t even work. I’m trying to update payment any which number of ways.
And so I’m like, how can I get ahold of these people so I can get some more water? I just said, oh, I’m gonna message him on Facebook. I finally got a real person on there. They told me, oh, here’s how you update it on the website. I said, I’ve tried that. And then they told me to call phone number. I call it.
First, I get a message that says your call did not go through. Then I call and it’s a busy signal. When is the last time you ever called anything? I get a busy signal. I called four times in a row.
so I’m telling this person whoever on Facebook and they’re like, oh wow. We should report this to our Texas. Yeah, how’s nobody let you know that in a month or more your phone doesn’t work. Like how the call center, people just sitting there going wow. Another slow day. Again, no phone calls coming in.
This is school. Let’s just go chat in the break room. Can I rant about this being like a great thing? It’s so great that I couldn’t get any water service because most people drink too much anyways. And I’ve got a big pool here, actually two pools at my apartment complex. So what do I need to have people delivering water to me for?
I could just go old fashioned style with a bucket to the pool. Strain it through an old t-shirt or something like that. So it’s really good. It was a waste of money for me to have people bring it to me. Like I could have gone to the grocery store and carted five gallons at a time up and down the stairs.
Like I use some exercise that would have been good for me. What else is good about not being able to get the water? Oh, it actually, it stretched my brain. The normal routes of customer service didn’t work. And so I had to be resourceful. I had to think of another way to contact these companies.
And they’re also going to charge a $50 fee when I returned the water disappeared. And they’re like, it was in the contract you signed when you signed up, we charge a $50 refurbishing fee because we care about sanitation. And in these challenging times we need to thoroughly sanitize it before we send it out to somebody else.
And you knew that when you signed up, I was like, oh, so basically you’re charging me a $50 fee to cancel my service. Clever, very clever. Another reason not to like this company. Should I name them? Should I name this company? Is anybody want to know who it is? All right. We’ve got some people watching you, everyone watches from all over water services, only its thing in the south.
All right. Anyways, that was fun. Those are fun exercise to try to argue the opposite of how I feel about something. Yeah. Tell me your latest, fun customer service jury. See if you can argue for the positives of when something didn’t go, it’s it actually makes it fun. I grew up in a family where the way we told stories, we just vent about stuff and you know, complaining humorously.
And so I like this new challenge of. Twisting it into the positives of it. And I actually feel lighter about it. And we’re just coming off the retreat for my clients for this last weekend. And so my long-term membership, people call it the keto lifestyle crew and their crew members. And twice a year, we do a virtual retreat.
And so this last weekend, we’re just coming off of that and everyone loved it. We had such a great time. One of the exercises I had people do is it paired them up in twos and had them do a feelings, validation, exercise. And we talked about emotional intelligence and how often we don’t learn how to have feelings or acknowledge them well, or allow ourselves to have feelings, whether they’re good or bad.
And a lot of people end up learning to use food, to cope with life and to numb out their feelings. And so we did a short little exercise. Validating feelings for people. And w we did it a little breakout sessions on zoom. You can actually go and private little breakout sessions and then come back to the big session.
And I’ll say we had some tears after that, just being able to acknowledge feelings and have somebody witness and hear what it is. Acknowledge a feeling. And it was really powerful. It was really moving. And for a lot of the ladies that might’ve been one of the first times that they actually had somebody really just listen.
Cause we have a tendency when people are having an issue or a challenge or complaining venting about something we don’t like when people don’t feel comfortable. And so we often want to just fix it for them. Okay. Instead of actively listening, just listening, we, oh, did you try this? And how about that?
Should you try this and that actually feels invalidating. And so I challenge you it later today, tonight, whenever in the world time, it is for you that if you have somebody that’s telling you something, just listen, reflect back. Wow. That made you really frustrated. I hear you saying. That you were really sad.
I hear you saying that, that made you feel left out. Just repeat back, summarize what you heard and then just name a feeling forum who usually it moves things in a very surprising way. And often when we’re having those kinds of challenges or venting about something, we just need to be validated. We just need somebody to hear us and say, yes, you had that feeling and it’s okay that you have that feeling.
Of course you have that feeling. Try that with your partner next time. If they’re upset about something, just listen, validate the feeling don’t fix anything. Don’t suggest any fixes. Ah, it’s a challenge for yourself to be able to just sit with the feeling of somebody else’s well, without trying to fix it.
And it’s a good. That person feeling heard and validated, and it really goes a long way at removing the desire to use food, to numb out for something just by naming your own feelings and having your feelings validated in general. So a bonus little story tip there. All right. Our topic for today, I’m like, are we getting messages from our viewers?
Not yet. So I can see we’ve got people here live, go ahead and join the show. Like I love I’m here by myself. I don’t have a co-host today or a guest interview or anything. So join me, keep me company and let me know where you’re joining from. I can’t see who you are until you actually comment. If you’re on, I can see we’ve got a couple of people on YouTube watching.
And so join the conversation, let me know where you’re joining from and let’s get into my teaching segment for today. So the top five reasons that people fail on keto now coming up next month, may of 2022, it’s going to be my seven year anniversary of following keto of starting my keto journey. And I’m going to have a very special episode for.
Correlating for that. I don’t know what I’m going to do yet, but it’s going to be great. Just a couple of weeks, two or three weeks. I don’t know. And so I’ve worked with a lot of ladies, like I said, I specialize in helping people 40 plus follow keto for sustainable weight loss and optimal health. And I’ve learned so much along the way actually.
That’s what I’m going to talk about on my anniversary. I’m going to talk about the things that are different now than what I thought when I first started and things I’ve changed my mind on and things of that I’ve learned, surprising things I’ve learned along the way. That’s what’s going to be on my anniversary show in a few weeks.
All right. And so anyways, this top five reasons that people fail in keto is all the experience I’ve had. So I work a hundred percent of my practice is working with real people. And that’s all I’ve done is keto implementation. The last. Six and a half years that I’ve been doing this work. So I started keto myself.
Years ago. And it was about six months later than that. I started actually working six or eight months after that, that I started working with people and helping them implement it. So that’s why I say six and a half years of doing this and I’ve lost count, but probably somewhere around a thousand people that I’ve talked to and help support with this.
And so I’ve learned a lot along the way. So today I’m just going to give you the top five reasons. I see why people fail on keto. So I have people that reach out to me. I work with my clients by application only. I spend at least an hour with them on a zoom call, getting to know them, their challenges, their goals why it’s so important.
And I would say more than half of them have already tried keto on their own. They got some results, but it didn’t really work as well as they thought it should. Or maybe they got some results and then they started gaining the weight back. Some of the people I’m also working with have never tried keto on their own.
But they just get so overwhelmed. They’re spending a lot of time watching every video and they’ve got all the books and the cookbooks and try to read everything you can on the internet. And they’re just overwhelmed and confused about how to even get started. And there they’ve read some horror stories online, so they’re afraid to do it wrong.
And so today that’s what I’m going to share with you is what I’ve seen as the top five reasons why people fail on keto and by fail. Didn’t get it to work that they wanted the way they want it to. Okay.
Number 1 Reasons People Fail on Keto: Cravings
And these are in no particular order. I can’t say that one is more common than the other.
And typically when people fail, try and keto on their own, it’s multiple of these, all of these, probably not just one thing was their saboteur. So one of them is cravings, right? When you’re trying to go low carb, you’re trying to. Sugar and most high carb foods and starches cravings can be really overwhelming.
I work with a lot of people that are self-proclaimed sugar addicts and they think it’s impossible that they’ll never be free of those sugar cravings, but my approach gets some craving free. One of the ways the mistakes that people are making is that they’re going for sugar-free sweeteners.
They’re going for low calorie sweeteners, they’re keto friendly sweeteners, right? They think that’s how you cope with cravings. However, that is the wrong way to go about it, because if you crave sweet and then you have something sweet, you’ve actually just told your brain to reinforce the craving you craved, you gave it what it was.
And basically it’s like saying good job. Do that again and do it more. So I, I have the story. Some of you maybe have seen me. And when I do talks at conferences, I tell this story about raccoons. And this is a really good example of how cravings show up in our lives. So I approximately 10 years ago, or so I My first condo all by myself and I moved in and was enjoying the evening standing out on my balcony.
It was a two story building. I was on the top floor and I’m looking out on a shared courtyard among my neighbors and it’s dusk. And I see a pack of beady, little eyes running across the little shared grassy courtyard. That catches my attention. Oh no, what’s going on here? What did I get myself into? What wild animals are running loose down there.
And then I noticed that my neighbor bill directly below me, slides her slider open and puts out two baking sheets full of what looks like cat food and packs. I don’t know. I’m probably 50, maybe a hundred raccoon. Raccoons. Is it raccoons? Come running. And it’s obvious, this is not the first time this has happened.
This lady didn’t just put out two trays of cat food one night. Cause she thought, it’d be fun just to see who comes and feeds. So I asked her, I’m like, what are you doing? Cause I know it’s crazy. It’s crazy to put out food and feed wild animals because they just tell their friends to come back.
I’m like, what are you doing? Crazy lady. And she told me, she says It’s one night, I was just really hungry raccoon scratching to my door, and I just felt so bad for it. So I put out some cat food for it. And the next day, at the same time it came back, but it brought a friend and the next day three more came.
And now you see what happens, how many come. I was like, what are you why you keep feeding them? And she says I tried to stop, but they scratched off. They literally scratched off my screen door and the scratch up the glass on my door. I have to feed them now because they will ruin my door if I don’t do it.
And I realized, this is the story of how cravings work. When you have a little tiny cream, just one little craving and you feed it, you give the craving what it was. It tells us it’s friends and they come back exactly the same time. But with reinforcements, this is how cravings work. This is why people get to the point where they’re sugar addicted is that they have a little sugar craving.
They have some sweet, and the thing is your brain. Can’t tell the difference between what’s real sugar and. Is fake sugar. Okay. So all it knows is I need sweet and then you give it sweet and it goes, yay. I’m going to tell my friends to come back tomorrow. That’s what cravings are. So the way out. Yeah. So Linda says, so you feed it, it will come back a hundred percent and worse.
Okay. So this is my cravings. Get out of control. Is that people think that I need to have a dessert. I need to have a keto dessert. I need to have diet soda. I need to have some kind of sweet thing I need to have treat. That’s how I cope with my cravings, but actually what they’re doing. What you’re doing is you’re reinforcing that craving.
You’re telling it to come back stronger and exactly at the same time. And so this is how people ended up being this, sugar addict. So the solution is don’t feed the raccoons. You have to go. I recommend at least 30 days, no sweeteners at all. So this is diet soda, anything you put in your coffee, that’s sweet.
This is Stevia or worth total. I don’t care how natural or anything. It is anything sweet needs to go. Bye-bye for at least 30 days. This is how you get rid of cravings. And again, I’ve worked with people so severe that they are self-proclaimed sugar addicts and they think they can never get over it because the cravings are so severe for them.
They are craving free. So my clients get the gift of no cravings. Okay. And so that’s one of the keys is no sweeteners. Now, just if you stop beating the pack of raccoons the first couple of days, they’re not going to be happy. They’re going to scratch at the door, but you have to stay strong, but up some buffers on your door and they will go away eventually.
A couple of days, two, three days is all that you have to get through. But we’ve got other strategies that I help people with that make it a lot easier. It’s a lot easier than they think it is. Because of what they’ve been doing is just reinforcing them. And so that’s number one, the other thing you want to do to avoid cravings is avoid sensory input.
So what do I mean by sensory input? Like you want to not look at sweet things. Don’t go spend all your days online, looking at Pinterest and YouTube videos of cooking, videos and recipes. Cause all that’s gonna do is make you crave. Don’t don’t think about your fantasize about your former Kirby foods that were your favorite.
Don’t mention them the sound of it, we’ll cue a craving in your brain as well. You don’t want to hear them. Some carby foods like have a sound, a specific sound with them. So you want to avoid that as well. And so do all you can to avoid queuing a craving. So sensory input is what, so you don’t want even just a taste of it.
So I’ve had some people that are like, oh, I just put it in my mouth and chew it up and spit it back out. No, the taste of it, cues the craving as well. So avoid all sensory input and don’t even go down the aisle of the grocery store. I still to this day, like if there’s the clearance section after the holiday of all the.
I don’t even, I don’t even look at that. Don’t look at that table. Those cravings can get turned back on at any time. That’s number one reason why people fail on keto is that they don’t know how to manage cravings. They don’t know how to get rid of cravings. They just know how to reinforce them.
Number 2 Reasons People Fail on Keto: Not Losing
Number two, again, these are in no particular order is that they aren’t losing weight. They eat. Don’t lose weight or they stop losing weight and then they lose their motivation. They be sad. It’s not worth it. And the truth is that keto is not a one size fits all diet. There’s no one approach that works for every single person and it’s not.
You just get your calorie limit online and the news follow that it needs to be individualized from the amount of protein and how, how much fat and how much salt, how much water and you need adjustments to those numbers along the way. There may be medications you have that need some support all kinds of things that make things different for every single person.
And so what I found for my clients is one thing is you need multiple measures of success everywhere. Got their eyes trained on the scale and all they want to see is the number go down every single week, every single day. And if it doesn’t, they give up really quickly and easily. So sometimes the scale does not go down every single week.
So you need to have multiple measures of success. What does that mean? I want to see some labs at the start and we’re going to check those again at the end, and we’re going to be able to see improvements on the inside of your body, your waist measurement, take photos, your skin may change and clear up it will.
Your face will get slimmer that you won’t even see them looking in the mirror every day. We want to measure all the other non-scale things as well. Your energy, your mental clarity got rid of headaches and aches and pains. Any number of other things that have issues gas and bloating and constipation and all kinds of things like that.
So you want to keep a journal of these things, keep track of them, measure all the things that are getting better, your blood pressure your blood glucose numbers, and on. And. One thing you need multiple measures of exp success. You also need to have an expert that has experienced in this and how to coach you through those times when the scale is not moving, how to adjust your macros.
A lot of people also under eat protein. This is something that we’ve learned that most of us got it wrong in the beginning. You don’t need to limit protein. In fact, most people I’m working with are grossly under eating protein and they have their whole life. You also want to avoid things that are easy to overeat.
So I teach an intuitive type of keto that you’re able to eat foods when you’re hungry and you can stop when you’re full and we don’t have to count calories. You can do that if you avoid things like recipes, because when you make a recipe. The food is tastier and you will eat more of it sweeteners again, like I said before, but also anything that has sweetener in it, you will eat more of it than if it had no sweetener in it desserts!
Always extra calories. Those are always things you’re going to eat more of and you won’t be able to have an off switch with those also avoid liquid calories. That’s another pitfall that people fall into is they do tons and tons of fat in their coffee or other liquids. And they think that fat is a free food.
So that’s actually a number. Number four is about fat. I’ll talk about that more in a moment. You really want to avoid liquid fats because it bypasses also tidy and you can get in thousands of calories in liquid form. So there’s lots of reasons why people aren’t losing those are some highlights snapshots of things that I’ve seen and recommendations that I have for my clients.
Number 3 Reasons People Fail on Keto: Side Effects
All right. Number three reason why people fail on keto is the side effects. Of doing it wrong. Okay. So people may be say like, oh, I tried keto and I had blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Happen. People get side effects when they don’t do it correctly. This is another reason why for people that have any symptoms that come up or any side effects that come up, you need an expert to guide you through that.
A lot of the side effects that people have on keto of doing keto wrong are because they’re not getting the salt. Episode. Let’s see, what episode do we talk about salt episode four. So if you’re new to the show, go back and listen to episode four that I talk all about salt, that whole episode, about why you need so much, how to know if you need.
And so on and so forth, but it’s something pretty much every single coaching call I have with my clients where talking about salts and most people need way more than they think they do or that they’re doing currently. And so again, most of the side effects that people are having are because they’re not getting the salt, right?
So constipation, muscle cramps, lightheaded, dizziness, sleep, disturbances, her palpitations, even all of those are going to. Things that are going to come up. If you’re under eating salt also hunger, not enough protein doing the wrong kind of fat. And, or not enough salt as well, people will feel hungry.
They’re like, where is this magic keto, no appetite that people talk about. Oxalate detox can come up for some people as well. So go back and listen to my episode with Sally K Norton, if you want to know more about oxalates, but. keto for the most part for most foods is very low oxalate. And then the body starts doing a better job at detoxification.
And so sometimes when people have a buildup of oxalates in their body starts detoxing them and they can have some symptoms like kidney stones or maybe some back pain, which is the kid, the kidneys, trying to release oxalates, other random aches and pains and joints and other areas and tissues and things like that as well.
Some people need a little more support with oxalate detox if that’s happening. And if people are on any medications at all, there are going to be some adjustments needed. So you need to have a doctor that’s knowledgeable and can supervise and adjust medication. So you can have things like potential potentiation effects, meaning that the dose you had before just is too much.
Yeah. Also sometimes the other alternate happens too, because your liver actually up-regulates detoxification routes on keto. And so sometimes your medication gets detoxed like turns into the inactive form much faster. And so sometimes people need a higher dose than what they were on before.
How do you deal with this? For one, if you’re somebody that has tried keto and you are like, oh man, the side effects, I can’t even deal with it again. If you’ve got somebody who knows what they’re doing, you don’t have to have any of these issues. They should be non-issues, but you’re going to need an expert.
You don’t need somebody. Who’s had a lot of experience working with a lot of different people to know how to deal with this. Oh, the other one I’m going to add too, is that for some people they get lit Lim. Yeah. So some people, their lymphatic system is not very healthy and they may get some swelling as the body starts trying to move fluid and fats through the lymphatic system.
And that’s also something. Can I help my clients with, we do have them do self lymphatic massage, and then it’s no longer issue. But for some people that may cause like swelling in their neck and their head, they may have swelling in their hands and their feet. And so if you were somebody that tried keto and have that you don’t have to have that issue, but you’d need some support.
You need somebody who knows how to deal with that. I look at it as a good sign that your lymphatic systems finally getting fluids moving through it like it should, but the fact that it’s having a sluggishness and some swelling means that it needs some support. It’s not as healthy as it could be. And so having an expert that can support you with that too.
Why do most people who try keto fail?
So adequate salt expert guide, having a doctor supervise any medications that. Those are the things you need to avoid any side effects. So that was number three.
Number 4 Reasons People Fail on Keto: Too Much Fat
And so number four reason that people fail on keto is too much fat. Now, back when I started this that, just a little sneak peek of my seven year anniversary show.
Where I’m going to talk about things that I’ve learned and changed my mind about is a, we didn’t think you could get too much fat. We thought that fat was free. We thought this was all about insulin. And as long as insulin was low, you could eat as much fat as you wanted. We thought you had to limit protein.
Fat was a free food and just limit. So it turns out that fat is not a free food. Our cells, your fat cells can easily take up fat. And in fact, when you consume a high fat meal, some of it gets burned immediately, but most of it just goes into your fat cells for storage until they need, it needs to come out and for you to burn it.
And despite what may many people. That is not a free food. It readily goes into your fat cells. And if there’s more of it going in than coming out, getting burnt that yields either no weight loss or weight gain, you literally can gain weight on a keto diet and some of the pitfalls of. Consuming too much fat is that they’re drinking liquid fat.
Like I talked about before, they’re putting, they’re doing like the the fatty coffees or the Bulletproof coffee, where you just put tons and tons of fat in your coffee. Again, liquid calories bypass all of her satiety cues. And so you literally can consume thousands of calories and not feel any difference in satiety from that.
So avoid liquid fat, avoid drinking your. You only need fat to fill. And by that, I that’s a phrase that Dr. Jeffrey Gerber uses that fat to fill is a couple of things. So one fat to fill your appetite. So a little bit of fat, the right kind of fat, especially saturated fat is going to activate satiety hormones.
So we’ve got gut hormones that turn on are released when we have saturated fat in a meal. And that actually will slows down. Digestion. And it also turns off our appetite. It makes us feel completely satiated. So you only need as much as needed to get that. And also we’ve got nutrients that are, in fact, we’ve got four fat-soluble vitamins, vitamin A, D, E, and K that they exist in naturally occurring fats and food.
And then they also need to be digested, absorbed and transported in our body with fat there, along with it. So that’s the fat is too. Fill up our appetite satisfy our appetite and also nourish our body. But it’s not as much as you don’t need hundreds of grams of fat depending on how active you are or what your overall body mass is to start with.
But you don’t need as much as you think you do. And if you over consume fat, you will gain weight. You will not be losing weight. You can gain weight.
All right. How’s everybody doin?
Number 5 Reasons People Fail on Keto: No Mirror Neuron Support
Ready for number five. All right. Number five reason why see that people fail on keto is they don’t get their mirror neurons supported. What is this? So the truth is we live in an obesogenic world. What does that mean? That sounds terrible. It means that everything in the world, outside of what we carefully choose to put in her mouth, everything out there is conspiring to get us to eat as much as possible, buy as much food as possible to crave it, consume it uncontrollably, and to move as little as possible.
All the food manufacturers drive-throughs bending machines. Parties at work birthday parties and all kinds of events, restaurants that are convenient. All of that is designed to just get us to eat as much as possible gain as much weight as possible and not move and keep craving and eating more.
We’re designed to overeat, highly palatable foods. So highly palatable. Are things that have fat and carbs together in them. So they’re, they can be either sweet and fat or real carbs and fat. So that combination is accuse our brain to just eat it uncontrollably. So all snack foods, most junk food, fast food is this combination, all desserts and everything that we call comfort food.
All of that is that combo of fat and sweet or fat and carbs together. All of it. That’s why we feel like, oh my gosh, I can’t stop eating this. Almost all foods that Thanksgiving, American Thanksgiving, almost all those foods are that combo of fat and carbs together. Our brains are wired to crave that and overeat it.
And the interesting thing is that whatever the ingredients in those things are, if you separate them out and you had to eat them individually, you would not eat as much as the mixed together. Okay. So like plain potato. All by itself and a stick of butter. Okay. If you had to eat them separately, you had to eat the dry plain potato, and then you had to eat a stick of butter.
You wouldn’t eat very much of either of those, but when you bake that potato and then you lather it up with butter, turn it into mashed potatoes, or just a baked potato with a butter on it, then you eat the whole thing very easily, all of it. And when. So that’s an example of the highly palatable combination.
Again, just the same exact foods, separate eating one first and then eating the other. You won’t eat hardly very much of that at all, but when you mix them together, our brains go on the nom. I can’t stop. So we’re designed for that. We’re wired to eat that way. And we also, our brains are wired to mirror the behavior.
Anyone we hang out with, this is true of all animals on this planet. It’s what makes any like birds be able to fly in a V formation with other birds. They’re just there, the mirror neurons connect directly to our muscles. And we just copy, literally copy the behavior of the person that we’re looking at.
So this is the phenomenon. If you’ve ever been to like a Mexican restaurant and they bring the chips and stuff. And other people start to grab and eat it. And then you’re like, oh, I’m doing keto. I’m not going to have this. But every once in a while, you’ll notice that your arm just goes and reaches for it.
And you’re like, what am I doing? I’m not even consciously doing this, but I just, my arm just keeps doing it. That’s weird. This is the mirror neurons that are copying the behavior of the people around you. Food manufacturers know about mirror neurons, too. That’s why in food commercials, they show somebody eating or drinking.
The thing that they want you to. Because you see a human doing that and you instantly will want it as well. So back up to number one with the cravings avoiding sensory input is that if you’re watching a movie and they’ve got a scene like that, or they’ve got a commercial someplace video coming up, look away, turn turn the channel, go do something else.
Don’t watch that because that’s going to turn on cravings for you. Empower yourself. If we’re it in most of the people I’m working with, most of the people that are trying to do keto on their own, they’re the only person they know their family’s eating carbs. The rest of their friends are eating carbs and it won’t be long until they fall off the wagon and they’re eating what the rest of the people are.
And this is mostly due to mirror neurons. And so is it hopeless? Do we just give up now it turns out that we can. Fortify your willpower by creating a group of people that you hang out with that do follow keto. So your habits are the average of your five closest friends that you hang out with. So think about this.
This is true. Who do you spend the most time with? What lifestyle do they have? And I bet yours is very similar and you need to hang out with, you need to visibly see, right? Because your mirror neurons are what others that have the habits that you want. So that’s one of the things I’ve found in the six and a half years of doing this work with my clients.
Now, in the very beginning, I would work with people one-on-one like most nutritionists, right? Where, all right, good job today, Susie, I’ll see you next week for your appointment next week. And we’ll check in on your results. Th Susie would come. And tell me how she couldn’t stick with it. And she cheated and I’m too nice.
And I didn’t get mad. I was, but I felt so frustrated. I thought, what am I, how am I not helping her? How can I help her stay on track? If she could just do it, she’s going to feel so much better, but I can’t control what doesn’t happen when she’s not here and or what happens when she’s not here. And I found out I started having group coaching and then.
Such a big difference at that time, I called it positive peer pressure. So people show up, they report their results for the week and you don’t want to be the one person that’s going to say oh, I just didn’t stick with it. So you want to be belong. You want to be part of the group.
You want to also be able to report your success. We copy the behaviors of those people that were around. And so I noticed that the people that showed up. At least once a week for a group meeting, they were able to stay on track. So that, or something about that amount of time, it doesn’t take a ton of time for most people, but being able to hang out with the part of the group of people you belong.
So this is part of why my long-term membership is called the keto lifestyle crew. You’re a crew member hanging out with your crew of keto people four to five is your mirror neurons. I call it. Recharges or willpower battery. So if you struggle with staying on track because of the rest of the world, I feel like it’s conspiring against you with all the carbs and the obesogenic nature of it.
If you struggle with that, you’ve got to find an expert to work with that has that built into their program. That they’ve got a group of people that are very successful, that you can copy their behavior as well. So that’s my number five reason that people fail on. That was fun. It was that fun. All right.
Upcoming shows. Just little teasers for you. We’ve got a show coming up next. It’s going to be keto coaching for women talking about what women need. Maybe a little bit differently than what men need. And on May 12th, if you’re watching live, or if you’re just listening to the recordings, this will be coming out in a couple of episodes, but.
Join me live will be my special episode. My seven year keto anniversary. I can’t believe it’s been that long. And I’m going to share with you things that are different than when I started and what I’ve changed my mind about and what’s, what I see coming up in the future too. All right. So again, today’s episode, we talked about the top five reasons.
I’ve seen that people fail on keto, cravings, not losing weight. The side effects of doing it wrong too much fat and not supporting those mirror neurons. All right. So if you’re struggling with keto and you’re looking for that expert in your life to help you with this, I’m here to help. I work by application only with my clients.
So visit my website. Let me put that on the screen. We’ve got keto Carole.com. Carole is spelled the very, very fancy French spelling with an E on the end. So that’s K E T O. Carole is C a R O L e.com. Visit my website, read what’s there. If that resonates with you, fill out the application and we’ll see if it’s a match to work together and I can help you bypass all of these failure things.
Support the show. I’d love to see a review on one of the podcasts platforms. Make a comment below as well. If you’re watching on YouTube or on Facebook, leave a comment about what you enjoyed about the show and share with your friends. Remember help us grow the show and we’ll help you shrink. So that’s all for this time.
Thank you so much for being here, Stephanie. Glad you enjoyed it. All right, everyone have a wonderful rest of your day until next time. We’ll see you. Bye.
After years of chronic pain and fatigue, licensed mental health therapist Nicole Laurent discovered the power of a ketogenic diet to get her off all her medications and free of chronic pain and gain boundless energy. And now she helps her clients discover the healing power, too, for mental health and neurological conditions.
Listen on Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music
Carole Freeman: Hey everybody. Are you wondering if there’s something more you could do for anxiety, depression, pain?
Do you wonder if your diet could actually improve your mental health? We’ll stick around because this episode is for you. I’m so excited. We’re talking with Nicole Laurent, licensed mental health counselor about the keto diet for mental health. So welcome, welcome everyone to keto chat live. I’m your host Carole Freeman.
I have a master’s in nutrition and clinical health psychology as well as a board certification in keto nutrition specialists. I specialize in helping women 40 plus follow a keto diet for sustainable weight loss. And let me share the bio of our guest today.
I’m very excited to have Nicole. She completed her master’s in clinical psychology from Argosy university in 2007, and has worked in private practice working with a variety of populations for over 15 years using evidence-based behavioral practices, such as behavioral therapies CBD EMDR and DBT.
And a little bit more, more about Nicole after having her own profound health experience with dietary change involving therapeutic carbs. Boy, I think I haven’t used my mouth enough today. It’s not warmed up yet. I should have done like the exercises that singers do or something. Let’s say involving therapeutic carbohydrate restriction, she began to become interested in nutritional therapy for neurological disorders and mental illness.
She began to talk about food choices with patients and use therapy skills to help clients remove resistance to behavioral change and learn how to use nutrition, to feed and heal their brains. She has since received additional training in the use of nutritional and integrative therapies to treat mental illness.
And neurological disorders and has begun to pivot her practice to helping people use these therapies exclusively. She finds using these methods with therapy to be powerful and transformative for the people she has the honor to work with. And so welcome, Nicole Laurent.
Nicole Laurent: Hi, thank you for having
Carole Freeman: me. Oh, my pleasure. My pleasure. Gosh, where should we begin? So let’s start, let’s see. I want to go back before you discovered keto. So what got you into mental health counseling?
Nicole Laurent: Ah, so I, what got me into mental health counseling let’s see. I realized that all the books around me were about relationships and that maybe that was an interest for me.
So that’s what that’s what set me up to go to clinical school for clinical psychology. And yeah, that’s, I’ve always been interested. I know that when it comes to. Relationships that are not healthy, that there is a profound amount of suffering that comes along with that. And so I think that is probably what drew me to it was that there’s a lot of pain in that area.
And yeah, that’s what I, that’s where I started.
Carole Freeman: All right. Let’s then go into your discovery of a therapeutic carbohydrate restriction, which some may call a keto diet. That’s the trendy term for it right now, but yeah. How did you even get on your own journey?
Keto for Mental Health. After years of chronic pain and fatigue, licensed mental health therapist Nicole Laurent discovered the power of a ketogenic diet to get her off all her medications and free of chronic pain and gain boundless energy.
Nicole Laurent: Discovering this? I developed a chronic pain disorder in graduate school. I had spondylosis and I got some trigeminal neuralgia, which is a nerve pain in the face. That’s pretty severe. And it also, I got chronic migraines every single day, and I was desperate and going to doctors and trying to figure it out while going to graduate school.
Ended up getting, later it got fixed with a with a neurostimulator of all things lay after many years of suffering, I got a a neurostimulator implanted in, and it reprogrammed that area where the pain was coming from. And that was fantastic. But by then I had been talked into pain medications and I remember the conversations.
I remember being in tears when I finally gave in to get on those beds, I was like, you’re sure you promise we can get me off these, there’s not going to be a problem. And they swore up and down and they promised, and they said, this is really the only treatment for what’s going on for you.
No one had mentioned that there was like a $40,000 surgery that could be done to fix it. Let’s put them on pain meds first. And I just happened to be one of those people that every time they tried to detox me off of it, after the. Fixed it wouldn’t stick. So there’s these bridge medications that they use, Suboxone Subutex.
My liver wouldn’t handle one. I would detox really painful process with it still and then be back on it. So I was stuck on the bridge medication for years and years. And the bridge medications and pain medications disrupt your hormones, disrupt your neuro-transmitters deplete, your nutrition, right?
Drug induced, nutrient depletion is a thing. And so by the time I finally had a successful detox I was completely debilitated for a good month. Like I could barely get off the couch and my brain was mush. Like my brain was mush, whatever came through my mind, it just came out of my mouth.
I had no frontal lobe left. I just really did it. And that eventually got a little bit better, it was like two years after my detoxification. And I was still like, my brain was not the way I wanted it. My brain was not quite where I was like, when I was in graduate school, I was one of those people they’d say, tell me about this.
And I could see a book page and the page number and actually see some of the paragraphs that I had read. And I was not there anymore. I w I had stopped reading because it’s such a high cognitive load to read, but I was still curious and I was still listening to podcasts. And so I came across, I think I was listening to a lot of Jimmy Dore and I think low-carbon D was out then, different podcasts.
And I heard something about the ketogenic diet and they talked about all the health benefits and they talked about. How was great for your brain. And I was like, oh, because I had been seeing a functional medicine person. So I had been eating really clean all those years still had a ton of inflammation in my body.
Cause you know so I was eating clean. I was eating whole foods already. So I was like, oh, this isn’t that big of a change for me. I’m just going to take out these particular foods and add some more of these. And after, listening to 50 podcasts, I got my gumption up. And I did it and.
But that is my fuel source. I was never supposed to run on carbs. My brain just completely blossomed. I still had some cognitive issues, but the brain energy I had was amazing. I had a ton of energy. Like I was always chronically fatigued and just barely making it. And three months after going keto, I joined a CrossFit gym.
You know what I mean? So I didn’t do great at it. Nobody does at first, but I still don’t do great at it, but I, but the point is I had the energy to like, I’m going to work out. Like I feel good and so my brain just continued to heal and continue to get better. And I started to do better and better work with my.
And you get a lot of clients and yeah anyway, so I was going to say, you get a lot of clients that are suffering. There’s a lot of people that are not getting better on meds, and we’re not allowed to talk about it. And there are a lot of people that really work hard in therapy and try to do the therapy work with their brain is just not functioning very well.
That takes a lot of energy to do really good therapy work and to provide very good therapy work. And so I feel like it really leveled me up as a therapist.
Carole Freeman: What it sounds like you didn’t even know that your brain was in a fog that once you experienced the clarity, you’re like, oh, this is the way things should be.
Nicole Laurent: Yeah, that’s so true. And until people actually experience it themselves, they can’t imagine that there’s much difference. And
in fact, most people think without carbs that you should have very low energy and you’re going to be lethargic and fuzzy brained. And yeah, we got news for you. It’s not that way.
Yeah, absolutely. So that’s what started me on it. And then, I hate seeing people suffer unnecessarily, especially if I know something that’s going to help. And I’d get clients that had diabetes and I’d like mention, yeah. This works for that. And anyways, I just would quietly encourage people to do it for a while.
And then I decided that I wanted, I had a client she’s still my client, but she’s, I started, she’s a, she was a younger. And I started to give her nutrition advice and she looked at me, she said, do you even have any training in that? And I was like, no, I guess I don’t. And then I went back to school and I got the training, which was great where I went to Maryland university of integrative health and got a post-graduate certificate in it, but, but yeah but then I was like, yeah, I can give this advice. This is within my realm of practice, and then I went to finally, I went to a training with Georgia II, Georgia aid has an amazing training. Anybody who’s a mental health professional, or a psychiatrist or an MD or a nurse practitioner or whatever you should absolutely take Georgia aids training.
Because she goes on about how to do it specifically for people with mental illness or neurological issues. She gives lots of information about medications and potentiation effects and all the stuff we need to consider. When we do this, we’ll do this for people who have mental illness.
Carole Freeman: Oh that’s, I’m so glad you mentioned that too, because medications and different mental health conditions require expertise and additional training in that.
So it’s great that Georgia is putting that out and very important that somebody, I screen all my clients that medications and certain metal, most medical diagnoses for mental health things. I’m like, let me refer you to somebody. That’s actually got the expertise in that too.
Yeah. All right. Valerie’s here so good to see you. Haven’t seen you in a while. Good. Good evening, ladies. I’ve been looking forward to this discussion. Excellent. Valerie, she does some questions. If you’ve got specific topics or questions that you’d like us to cover too so glad you’re here.
And so as you started to bring this to your clients, then you call them clients, right?
Nicole Laurent: People, my peoples.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. What did you know what was in store? Did you think it might help a little bit, or, share with us some kind of, some of the stories of things you’ve seen?
Nicole Laurent: Yeah I knew I suspected, that it was good for anxiety and depression and mental illness because, Chris Palmer has been all over the podcast talking about his experience, Georgia.
He has been all over. Talking about her. So I knew that there was people who had experienced with this, that found that people got better and felt much better. And so I didn’t have any hesitation. And my expectation was that if they were able to do it semi consistently that they were going to see benefits and that’s exactly what I see what I’ve seen.
I use it or, I don’t push it on everybody that comes in my office. I’m at, I’m a licensed mental health counselor in Washington state. So I get a little bit of everybody in while I have this particular niche that I’m, that I really enjoy working in. I see all kinds of people and some people just not having it.
No, thank you. I want my med and my therapy. You bringing this up as weird, I’m uncomfortable, and then I have people that are what there’s a thing I can do that might actually help me, please tell me more. I’ll do it. And they do it. It’s amazing. They’re like, okay. Much better at it in the beginning than I was cause they’re just highly motivated.
And so I get, I get people with anxiety just general run of the mill kind of anxiety, and some sadness and depression and feeling overwhelmed in their life all the way to bipolar disorder. I have people using it too. I have some people with bipolar disorder on medication that stay on medication often at a lower dose.
And then I have people who are who are bipolar that only use the ketogenic diet to regulate their symptoms and to further disease. So yeah, I don’t work with anybody with schizophrenia and I don’t get that in private practice or anything, but it really works well for so many. Illnesses. When I say anxiety disorders, I’m talking about OCD, panic disorder PTSD.
Oh, my cats back there. Sorry.
Carole Freeman: I could see cat was contemplating. I’m going to jump on the top of that chair here goes.
Nicole Laurent: Yeah. I just want you to fall on me. Sometimes it happens during sessions, a little stressful. So yeah, so panic disorder, PTSD. I’ve really seen, I bought that when I was a little bit surprised by, but it makes perfect sense.
The biochemists or what I would think was the biochemistry underlying those improvements. But yeah, PTSD is good. Social anxiety disorder. I’ve seen it work really well with and of course depression. So yeah it’s fun. It’s, I’ve been doing this for 15 years.
And I think I’ve been doing ketogenic diets specifically, probably four years, three, maybe five years at the most, I didn’t really mark the time or whatever. Oh, excuse me, kidney. But that, it really, this is what the medical doctors say, I’ve been treating diabetes for, 10 years or 20 years and was feeling burned out.
And then I whip this out and people are getting better and it feels good to be a practitioner again. And so that’s what I’m experiencing.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. Let’s talk about that. The myth of well diet in your brain, those are separate things. Like
Nicole Laurent: even we need five podcasts for that really, but I’ll do my best.
Yeah.
Carole Freeman: And even in my training, so I have a very special degree that is, a double master’s, it’s a nutrition and psychology degree bastard. Th the school is amazing and it’s, as far as I know, it’s the one and only program that does this, and, the students all get it. Like everyone was going through that, understand that what you, what goes on in your brain influences how you eat and what you eat, influences your whole body and your brain is part of your body.
And, yeah, but it was still interesting though, is even in that program, we had two separate advisors. We have the dietician side of it, and then we have the psychology side of it, and they really didn’t because of their training. They didn’t really see that they were really interrelated. So let’s talk about that as isn’t the brain like detached from our head, how does our food influence how our brain works?
Nicole Laurent: Oh my gosh. It’s everything like, I can’t even begin. So first of all we, I’ll start with my blog because the blog was really my attempt. So I have a little blog it’s called mental health, keto.com. And the reason I started it was that I wanted to be able to intelligently explain to clients why the keto diet might help this or that disorder.
And I first I found I can’t remember where I found it, but I, it had identified what ketones do. What are the, what do ketones do at least in animal studies and some human, some human studies and those underlying mechanisms, what do we know that ketones do? And what do we know that stable blood sugars do?
And so then what I would do, so in, in those were the underlying factors to. Most mental illnesses. I was like, oh, keto, ketones help those. Oh, interesting. So let’s see exactly what those factors are and these different disease processes or illnesses. And so it was brain hypometabolism, so fuel.
So brains need lots of fuel. And ketones, as we know, are beautiful fuels for the brain brains, love them, neurons love them. And they, they do great things. And brain hypometabolism oxidative stress, there tends to be levels high levels of oxidative stress and ketones help.
Those neuroinflammation is also another factor that we see in different mental illnesses. And of course, neurotransmitter imbalances and ketogenic diets, ketones ketones, specifically they’d hydroxybutyrate in particular. Have effects on those four factors. And then I would look up, I’d be like, okay, I want to know what those four, if those four factors I have a, are an influence in PTSD, for example.
So I would look at the literature and I would do a look of the literature and sure enough, neuro-transmitter imbalances areas of brain hypometabolism. It’s often different parts of the brain. And oxidative stress would come up consistently. Inflammation would come up consistently and then I would write a blog post that kind of would talk about, okay, so this, these disease processes, these particular underlying disease processes are an influence or a factor in this disease.
And so here’s what, how ketones might affect those. And here’s what we know. And so that’s one way right there. And the piece that I think that I’m most excited about other than the. And the way that they heal brains, and balance neuro-transmitters is also the micronutrient piece.
So a well-formulated ketogenic diet is a very micronutrient, rich diet, for sure. I don’t know what they’re talking about with all those nutrient deficiencies, but any diet.
Carole Freeman: Yeah that’s so surprising. I’m glad you said that too, because the original ketogenic diets for little kids in the 1920s was, a cup of corn oil, soybean oil, and this, they didn’t know what they were doing and now you can just eat real whole foods.
You’re right. It’s actually, it can be so much more nutrient dense than the standard
Nicole Laurent: American diet and micronutrient sparing. So a key well-formulated ketogenic diets spares, magnesium. You don’t burn through it trying to turn glucose into usable fuel. It’s the, I am in sparing, right? I am in vitamin B, one sparing.
So there’s that piece and what a lot of people don’t understand is those micro eat, like in order to and amino acids, right? Like you need tryptofan to make serotonin and you need serotonin to make. Melatonin. And if you don’t have enough IRN and B6 and zinc, I don’t care how much serotonin re-uptake inhibitor use you are going to down.
You’re not making enough serotonin even hanging out into, out in the synapse to do good work, right? Like it should always start with the nutrition. We should never be trying to change these neurotransmitter balances without making sure that the basic precursors are there in order to make the things that the brain needs.
And so yeah, nutrition is intimately connected to your mental health in way in, in ways we know in ways we haven’t discovered.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. Oh, wow. I, and I bet there are a lot of people listening, watching to this right now that are going to be really surprised to know that there is a lot of research on ketones and how it’s beneficial in the body and the brain.
So all the things you’re mentioning that we know, Hey, there is research on this. This is not some fad thing. Nicole, would you agree that, okay, so some people might be listening and hearing oh, this ketosis magic diet, it’s going to do all these things, or would you agree that no, it’s actually just returning us to a diet.
That’s more than aligned with the way we should be eating. And instead of the 50 years of high carbohydrate processed refined sugars and oils and low protein, low nutrient dense foods,
Nicole Laurent: Yeah. Yeah. I think that, sorry, I’m trying to get out of this Sunbeam. I dunno. I love the sun is out, but it’s messing with my cameras, so I can’t see.
So I think that I think that when you have a body that doesn’t want a lot of blood sugar floating around, like it has it stores, it a little bit in the liver, teeny bit in the kidney, a little bit in the muscles, right? In case you get attacked by a lion and you need to run really fast.
But other than that, it wants, it doesn’t want more than a teaspoon worth of glucose in your bloodstream at any time. And it really works very hard in a desperate way to get any extra out of your bloodstream. I think that might be a no brainer that maybe. Once in a while was okay. Like fruit season, I don’t know, but not today’s fruits.
That’s a very different fruit, I little bit is fine and your body can handle it. But when you’re, when your body is screaming, when your pancreas is screaming and your insulin is high and it’s desperate, just shove it out of your bloodstream. I don’t know. Maybe that’s a clue that was not meant to be our primary.
Carole Freeman: So logical, I love listening to you explain these things because it’s stuff that I know. And then I’m like, oh, I never thought about that way. So this is already fun for me, Nicole. I hope everyone else is enjoying it, but I’m having a great time. Oh yeah. Okay. Lots of research and it just makes logical sense that this is just feeding our brain, the things that it needs.
It’s a full of micronutrients and it’s micronutrient sparing. That’s really cool that you talked about that. Cause I, I never heard that about the magnesium. I thought about it with the thiamine, right? Cause Diamond’s primary goal is in, turning carbohydrates into fuel. So funny, I’m learning so much.
This is great. I love it. Your, the program sounds amazing that Georgia has put together and and yeah w where should we go next? Valerie? What questions do you have? Anyone else watching? What questions do you have for Nicole? Oh, I also want to ask you that about, it just seems like there is a epidemic of anxiety, right?
Like it wasn’t something that was such a common thing, when I was in school or in my twenties and now it just seems like everyone has anxiety and they can’t go do all of these things. So do you want to speak to,
Nicole Laurent: yeah. So let’s talk about that a little bit. So yeah, one is everybody’s super magnesium.
Unless you’re supplementing your magnesium deficient and that, that causes a lot of imbalances and neurotransmitters, but even more so there, there’s it depends on the diet really, again, we’re back to how the diet affects mental health. So if you are eating a height, I always say high sugar, highly processed carbohydrate.
If you’re eating more and it doesn’t even have to be that it can just be more carbs than your current level of incident insulin resistance can handle. Like for some people that’s one cookie, or a bag of figs, even though it’s a whole food, like everybody’s got a different level of insulin resistance going on.
And this is important sometimes are often I will have someone get their basic blood work done and their insulin resistance score is great. It’s five or four, but they’re bipolar. And I put them on a ketogenic diet and they still have. And so just because your fasting insulin is low, don’t think that a ketogenic diet won’t help your mental illness or your anxiety or your depression.
Eh, there’s still metabolic issues that are potentially going on in the brain that are contributing to a mental illness that is not measured in a fasting insulin score. So just, FYI, because when I first started, I was like, oh their fasting insulin is low. They’re very insulin sensitive.
Maybe this won’t work, but Nope, sure enough. So it’s so why is everybody so anxious? Okay. So there’s a lot of different reasons. Now my brain is flooded with 12 different, 12 different things that it can be. But the one that the one that I find when I explain to clients makes the most sense is the one where.
They have neuroinflammation. So people are starting to understand what neuroinflammation is. They understand that it contributes to brain fog. They understand that it contributes to not feeling good, but they don’t quite understand why that would make them anxious. So let’s talk about that. So when you have neuroinflammation, it changes the environment in which your body is trying to make your brain is trying to make neuro-transmitters okay.
And when there is a lot of inflammation going on, your body goes to make something called glutamate. Okay. And unique. Glutamate, glutamate is an excitatory neurotransmitter, and everybody needs it, but you only need a certain amount and what your brain is supposed to do when you don’t have a bunch of inflammation throwing this off is it will make glutamate.
And then it will make a whole bunch of this beautiful neuro-transmitter called gal. And Gabby is an inhibitory neurotransmitter. It’s the chill one. It’s the one where you’re like sitting there and you feel like you got all this, you’re not overwhelmed. That’s Gabba. So when you have a lot of neuroinflammation and that could be because you’ve got like a, you’re not taking good care of yourself.
You’re not sleeping. You’re not, you’re eating high sugar, food, you’re going to Starbucks getting the caffeine and the, all the goods, all the sugar, the hit that causes neuroinflammation. Like I said, your body does not want that glucose at that level. It is a stressor in the brain to have that much sugar.
Okay. It causes early neurodegenerate. And it causes inflammation. It’s inflammatory. So you sitting there with this high blood sugar, your brain’s just stewing in it, trying to get rid of it, trying to use it. And this inflammatory process makes us so that you just make glutamate and you don’t just make, you don’t make any Gabba.
You don’t make hardly any Gabba. You don’t have any of the feel-good one. You don’t have any of the chill. I’m not overwhelmed. I’ve got this. I’m on top of the world. One, you don’t get it. You just get glutamate, you get the excitatory one. And I remember Georgia talking about this in one of her talks.
She’s I worked at this college and these college students would come in and they she said it was like the freak out moment, right? That is high glutamate. That is you. Your neuro-transmitters are imbalanced. That is not how you’re normally supposed to feel. And so there’s that, and it doesn’t just it keeps making glutamate, glutamate, it’s stressed out your brain.
Doesn’t want to have all that sugar around it, and it continues to make excitatory. You can get up to a hundred times more glutamate than you’re supposed to, and at those levels it is neurotoxic.
Carole Freeman: And so
Nicole Laurent: maybe is that maybe, yeah. That’s panic attack. That’s, that’s, that contributes to that, for sure.
For sure. These excitatory these excitatory neurotransmitters that are out of balance. Again, you’re supposed to have some, but your brain and your body knows how to balance them and how to balance them with all the other neurotransmitter systems. And yeah that’s a big. That’s why people are anxious.
And then, I, I have clients, they’ll be like I have a very stressful life. I have a lot going on. I’m very overwhelmed. I have I have maybe I’m going through a divorce or, all these other things, or I have these mean people at work, whatever.
And I totally get that, but I want to know, I want to know what’s getting in the way of your resiliency. Why are you not very resilient? Why is this feel like, because it is, there’s lots of people have lots of stressors in their life and lots of people are very anxious and overwhelmed and stressed out about it, but there’s also a lot of people who are resilient to it.
And I think it’s nutrition. I think it’s nutrition that is missing that is, is making people have daily stressors, just daily, normal stress. That they feel like they can’t handle
Carole Freeman: anxiety rates and the standard American diet rates follow a similar path, right? Yeah. Yeah. There’s one of my kiddies there too, so
And so what is it like when you broached that subject with somebody, like what you said already, some examples, like sometimes people are, Nope. I don’t want to talk about that while you were talking to me about my nutrition. Other people are very excited about, oh my gosh, there’s more I can do.
W, how do you decide who’s a good candidate to bring that up with? Do you bring it up with everyone? How does, what’s your decision?
Nicole Laurent: I I don’t usually bring it up. Sometimes I do just bring it up right away where I’ll be like, yeah, I think this could really help you. Other times it’s stuff like we put our foot in the door, because again, this information is all very new to a lot of people.
It’s, someone has anxiety and Hey, maybe you should supplement some signs that magnesium is really, good for anxiety. And then we talk about why their diet might be depleting them even further of magnesium. That’s hard to get in the diet. And and then that starts a conversation or, yeah, your anxiety is really high or your depression is flared up.
Tell me what you ate the last three days. And then that kind of will start a conversation about.
Keto for Mental Health. Carole interviews Nicole Laurent, licensed mental health counselor about keto for a healthy body and mind.
Carole Freeman: You mentioned the excitability too. And I’m curious then, do you know him, how much much about caffeine and specifically these energy drinks that are really popular right now? One of my clients this morning was talking about, oh, my son wanted this energy drink and it didn’t have any carbs in it.
Didn’t have any 0, 0, 0 calories. So it must be okay. And we talked a lot about the, how much caffeine is in there and how addictive that can be. How does, like, how does excessive and also I pointed out the fact that those energy drinks have the equivalent of four shots of espresso.
And how she wouldn’t think it was okay to stop at Starbucks and get her son a quad, latte. But the energy drinks, how that thought it was. Okay. So does excessive caffeine intake, does that influence. Nutrient deficiencies, how does that play into, does it play into it?
Nicole Laurent: I know that even someone who is not trained in ketogenic diets has that’s a therapist hopefully knows to ask their anxious client about their coffee, drinking habits. Sometimes we literally just say, don’t do that. And then their anxiety goes down to, less, less or, so there’s that obvious piece.
And I, I don’t, I know that we talked about for caffeine, I don’t know all the biochemistry around caffeine to that degree. I do know that when we use stimulants for ADHD and add those stimulants are famous in the literature for being nutrient dense. So I think anytime you take a pathway and you just try to speed it up.
So somehow I think that there’s an issue potentially with that. And I would be way more interested in knowing why your client’s young person is tired to begin with.
Carole Freeman: And I don’t think it was fatigue is just that those are really popular. They’re marketed towards, teens and twenties, and this was something that they get a high off of it when you consume, when you’re not used to that level of caffeine and you consume that, it’s like super exciting, right?
And so my son is 26 and he’s gone through that where we’ll have a lot of those. That’s very exciting. And then he’ll crash and have chronic headaches, really bad headaches. And so we, we discussed that as well as that may be more of a concern. Th, introducing 300 milligrams of caffeine in a teen is a drug level dose of that.
It is a drug, but it’s a addictive level dose of that type of drug.
Nicole Laurent: So there’s a dopamine chase that kind of happens with that.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. So we talked a w once I told her the equivalent of how many shots of Starbucks that was, she was like, oh, I would never let him have that. Yeah.
So Valerie’s commenting that she’s got both anxiety and migraines and the magnesium part was really interesting to her. And she’s wondering about magnesium supplementation to augment a keto diet. Do you find that. People do well if they, supplement with magnesium or is keto on its own since it’s so sparing for magnesium.
Nicole Laurent: Oh no. I even all my clients that I put on keto always, I tell them to take magnesium. And the thing about migraines. Oh, Angela, her name’s Angela stamps, Stanton, S T a N T O N. I hope I’m doing that. She is a migraine specialist that teaches some of the neurological CMIOs at nutrition network. And she did a specific one about migraines.
So you might want to check out her work, but yes. So magnesium for people who get migraines, magnesium is super impatient. And you want to, don’t be stingy with it. We say 200 to 400 supplement, but I, for people who are trying to heal their brain, I say 600 to 800 milligrams of magnesium.
If you get the poops back off a pill, no big deal, but the other thing that if you have migraines that you have to know that I think would be really helpful is you earn through minerals like a race car, you need salt, you need a lot of salt. You might need up to 13 grams of salt a day. You might need to take an eighth of a teaspoon of salt every two hours and chase it down with some water.
You need electrolytes at a much higher rate than anybody else. And I wish I had known that when I had my migraines cause probably would have helped me a great deal. But but yeah, so magnesium is super important and. Potassium is also important, but I’m not familiar with her exact protocol about how much potassium to add in and under what conditions.
But salt will often salt will often keep a migraine from happening if you get it in there fast enough. So definitely check her workout.
Carole Freeman: That might be you. So I do a ton of salt work with my clients and we’re, titrating that up for a lot of people too. And that may be a big part of why almost everyone that I’ve ever worked with that had a history of migraines when they’re consistent with their keto diet, their migraines go in remission, they completely stopped.
Haven’t needed the mag magnesium supplementation for most of them. And, but we do tons and tons of salt for everybody. So
Nicole Laurent: yeah,
Carole Freeman: absolutely a big part that’s missing. So yeah. All right. And okay. And great question. Thanks Valerie, for participating and being here today. And if anyone else watching has any questions for Nicole, please go ahead and put them in the chat, the word where I’m I’m speaking for her, but I’m sure she’ll be happy to answer questions here.
And oh, you know what, and I’m going to add this in which I skipped over is that this show is meant for educational and entertainment purpose only. And this is not medical advice. It’s not tended to diagnose, prevent, treat, or cure any condition. So a discussion we’re having today is for educational purposes only.
So please seek out care of your own personal healthcare professional. If you have any your own diagnoses and Nicole, do you, are you able to work remotely or are you only with people that live in the state of Washington or I don’t know what your license
Nicole Laurent: is, but, so I do consultation work outside of Washington.
And then in Washington I work as a licensed mental health counselor. So yeah, either way. And and I’m actually starting to, this is helping a lot of people and so I’m actually. Starting to maybe move away from so much individual work. And cause as a lot of your first few conversations about someone moving into keto is you’re saying the same thing over and over again, right?
Yeah. So I’m looking to streamline that a little bit. So I’m currently working specifically on program research and I’m looking for women specifically because they are quite underrepresented in when they go for help with, in the medical system. I’m looking for women who have brains.
And symptoms of brain fog better recurrent or chronic in a way that it either impairs their life or they’re worried it’s going to impair their life. Or they’re like, oh, wait a minute. I used to be way smarter. What’s happening here. Regardless of reason. So regardless of why you think you have your brain fog, whether it’s ADHD or an auto-immune condition or a head injury, or early dementia or whatever I’m wanting to talk to women too, to figure out what their biggest frustrations are about getting treatment, because I want to offer something that uses nutritional and functional psychiatry alongside social supports to make those changes eventually.
Carole Freeman: And we’ll put your contact info up at the end, as well as in the show notes. If anybody’s interested in talking with Nicole and inner you, so you’re just doing some interviews with.
Nicole Laurent: Yeah, like 30 minutes, I’d hop on a zoom or a phone call. And just kinda hearing, because I have my, I know from working with my clients, what I think, but anytime you are a practitioner, you only get a small subset of society, no matter how hard you try to, and so I want hear what some of that is. And I’ve heard some stuff I’ve heard before. I can’t make dietary changes because the people in my household aren’t supportive or I can’t make dietary changes because I don’t know how to cook two dinners. I can’t make dietary changes because they don’t say this, but this is it.
My part of my identity is being a rebel and getting, and that’s how I rebel is I, eat all the things or whatever. And so we got to do some therapy around that kind of thing. There’s other ways to rebel, I promise that feel just as self validating, that don’t harm your health or your.
So there’s all these different kind of factors. And I just want to do a good job of kind of making sure I’m thinking about them all and considering them all when I wrap them in my program.
Carole Freeman: Oh, wow. And that’s really cool. So you’re saying instead of a dietary rebel, why don’t you get some more tattoos and piercings,
Nicole Laurent: maybe I’d rather, yeah.
I’d rather have your brain functioning and got to enjoy the rest of your life than to look like the cool lady who made the suites at the potluck. Or I can’t make dietary changes because I go to these potlucks and all these school events, and there was nothing but pure sugar. And if someone bakes something, I feel bad saying no.
Even though I know that in order to keep my cognitive function and in order to feel good and have good energy, I need to not eat that. And so what is going on that you’re sacrificing your own health for someone else’s interpretation of what it means that you say, no, thank you.
Carole Freeman: Your points there.
Spurred another question from Valerie. She says, what advice do you give your clients? Then I use some of those excuses or reasons you listed for not making changes.
Nicole Laurent: Yeah, so I use some different cognitive behavioral techniques that kind of help help them either clarify their why, which is often really important.
And also they become very active in, so it’s actually called externalization of resistance. It’s a cognitive behavioral therapy technique. I have found by the way, all my mental health stuff, super helpful in helping people transition and stick to things. So externalization of resistance is where.
The clients as well, I don’t want to do this or I need to say, thank you. I really need to try that. And then I will play devil’s advocate and I’ll say out loud Mary, you know that Judy made those brownies and she probably made them for you and you really need to eat them.
And then the client has to argue that down. No, she actually made them for everybody. And I really doubt that she’s made them just for me and well, Mary, you know that she’s going to hate you if you don’t eat that brownie. She’s no, Mary likes me, so like they they there’s different techniques that we use.
That’s one of many
Carole Freeman: really great because the normal thing people want to do. Would be then as a coach, or maybe somebody who’s not as skilled as you in therapy would start to argue with them about why they could write and so much more effective is to get the client, to argue for themselves about the reasons why, and it makes it a little easier to do that when you’re pointing out the obvious, black and white thinking that we do where we think, oh no, they’re going to hate me forever.
And she made these for me and I have to do all those things. So that’s really
great.
Nicole Laurent: Yeah. And also, there is that therapy component of what is going on for you that you feel like you need to sacrifice your health for approval. What is going on for you that you just can’t take up space to say, this is what I need, and I’m going to put that first.
It’s all connected. And that’s why I really like combining it and not just because I think that. I know standard of care is meds and everybody who wants meds, please go get meds. And if meds have helped you, I am so grateful that beds have helped you meds have saved your life. I am so grateful. But in my experience with patients and I’m not a psychiatrist, so I’m not, I’m probably not working with the population whose lives were saved by meds, absolutely. I’m I’m a private practice, pretty high functioning set of people usually to some, with some exceptions here and there. But I have found the ketogenic diet to be more effective than medications. And before I started my blog, I didn’t know why I couldn’t like figure out, like, why would that be?
But then what I’ve learned is that ketogenic diets, because the ketones are signaling molecules and because they have effects in multiple systems, not just neurotransmitter systems, but the inflammation system, like they’re turning off inflammatory pathways on the genetic level as the gene is expressing, right?
And they upregulate glutathione production, like literally adding a well-formulated ketogenic diet to that, where you have all the precursors to make more glutathione that reduces oxidative stress. And they are providing an alternative fuel for a brain that is starving and into distress. That is a multi-level intervention.
That is a multilevel psychiatric intervention. And I am sorry, but I challenge big pharma to create a pill. That’s going to do all of those things. And so in my personal experience, I see it as much more effective than medications. And when I pair it with psychotherapy, I it’s so much easier for people to do their work.
Their brain is working better. They feel better. And when I do challenging cognitive behavioral things, or dialectical behavior challenges or whatever they respond, they just, they flourish. And that’s what I see.
Carole Freeman: As Robb Wolf says, like people have to eat, and so it’s actually one of the least expensive interventions is just to change the food that they’re eating anyways.
Yeah. Yeah. I love your. The therapy techniques of the disconnect when people think they can’t thrive in these situations, the social situations ended up being some of the most challenging. So what would you say about the disconnect? I have a lot of moms that, and grandmothers that they believe that I’m on this special diet, but I don’t want to make my, my kids, my teens, my grandkids, like I want them to have all these special foods.
So I have to have those in the house for them. What kind of techniques or discussions do you have with clients that kind of have that kind of reasoning that disconnect that if it’s poison for them, that it would be poisoned for younger people too?
Nicole Laurent: Yeah. You have to decide if you want to make it a power struggle in your home.
It depends on the ages of your children, for sure. And there’s always the piece where, I have I have adult children who eat the way they want to eat and they don’t restrict carbohydrates or sugar. And I sometimes worry about them for sure. But then I remind myself that if they become chronically ill, they know how to change it.
I’ve modeled it for them. They know they can come to me, they know they can, they know they can heal. And so if, and when they’re ready to make those changes to heal, their body they’ll do that, but they are on their own journey. They came here with their own agenda and their own, their own journey.
And so I have to honor that journey and I’m not willing to turn that into a power struggle or to have them feel judged around that. Now there’s plenty of moms with young children who do have some control over that. I didn’t know about this when my, I had my babies, we were eating fruit roll-ups and juice and I didn’t know did the best I could.
I have taken them through, McDonald’s no clue, all the time. But for some moms who are on the up and know about this and I think it’s a fine time to do great habits. Sometimes I have had sessions where the husband or the wife came to a session and we talked about what was at stake because a lot of times they just don’t understand what’s at stake.
I get, you love your wife and you need your wife to stop the mild cognitive impairment. That’s that is showed up. Now that’s going to turn into dementia, very likely. So if you want to keep your wife and have her be present for you in the marriage, we got to that’s what’s at stake. I don’t think you knew that.
So let me explain why this diet needs to happen. And often having that kind of converse or even debilitating anxiety or debilitating depression or agoraphobia, and they can’t leave the house or they have OCD. Like I know that you want to help your husband. Like I know that you love them and that you are committed.
Let me explain to you why this could be the most important intervention of their life and why, and here’s how you can support you want Twinkies, keep them in your. Eden before you come in the house, don’t bring them in the house. And a lot of more yeah, that’ll work. I’ll just put my junk food at work, so I just really, I think when people are encounter unsupportive environments, they just, they, the people in the family don’t understand what’s at stake. And once you really frame it for them in that way, some of them were like, yeah, I’ll just eat keto with them when I’m home. And yeah. So I think that people don’t necessarily know. And also it depends on the level of carbohydrate addiction. If I have someone who has a really bad carb processed carbohydrate addiction we’ll talk about that. Like it’s an addiction and you wouldn’t keep bourbon in the house for you.
Drinking husband, if you’re trying to finish, stop drinking. Okay. What can you do? So we do it from that, from the trigger standpoint and it just depends what’s going on. Not everybody is at that level of addiction. And they can have some stuff in the house and feel, okay.
Carole Freeman: So true. I found some of my moms want to stay in denial that they’re using it as an excuse. I have to keep those things in the house and then they keep struggling with eating them. And then it turns out when they actually had the discussion with the kids, the teens, the husband, they’re like, oh yeah, no problem.
We don’t need that in the house. And you’re identifying why is that the reason you want to have those there? Yeah.
Nicole Laurent: Yeah. And the other thing that again, it all comes back to the psychology and the taking up space and the healthy boundaries, like I had I had a parent who was wanting to change the diet in the household, around, across the board.
And when we go to the store, they’re gonna want the cocoa puffs or whatever. And I’m like, who’s money is being spent at the store, is that their money, like you are not money. You are the manager and stewardess of that money. You determine what you are going to spend your money on.
You’re the adult of the household. And when that child grows up and becomes an adult, they can certainly buy their own food, or choose what they’re going to, what they’re going to spend their money on. But as the adult, you absolutely have the right to decide what you will buy and not buy. And you have the wisdom to decide what is best to bring him into the house and what isn’t.
And so again, it comes back to healthy boundaries. Healthy sense of self, the ability to take up space, the ability to handle someone being displeased with you for a little while, while they are adjusting. And the other thing is if a mom is going to make that change in the house, those kids are still going to get plenty of processed carbohydrates at school, at sports, at their friend’s house, all that.
It’s not like the child’s going to be denied of all the things, certainly. So it’s really, it’s not a big deal for parents to behave in their integrity and just decide what they’re going to spend their money on and their grocery budget and what that looks like. And hopefully it’s nutrient dense
Carole Freeman: foods.
Yeah. Oh, I love that. I love that. And I love the phrase you said, that are not afraid, but a question you ask about, what’s going on for you that you’re willing to sacrifice your health for approval of others. And that. Not only goes on with adults, but it happens with children, because a lot of moms are afraid that my, my child’s going to be really unhappy with me. They’re going to hate me if I don’t buy the cocoa puffs forum. So therefore I’m willing to sacrifice. I’m willing to make this really hard for myself, a food that I can’t resist. So that’s a great question that I’m going to borrow from you and the other one too, about the taking up space.
So advocating for yourself, we mean by that, right? Like when you say what’s going on that you’re afraid to take up space. So talk about that. What do you see is some of the things that make people afraid to advocate for themselves?
Nicole Laurent: Yeah. Or, yeah, and that, think about turning it into a psychology show.
Sorry. But think about where we first learned that, in order to keep a parent happy, we don’t take up space. We don’t ask for things we don’t. Or punishment for taking up too much space. I want this, I want you shouldn’t want that. You, whatever you think you want is incorrect.
However, you think, oh, your feeling is incorrect. You shouldn’t feel that way. So that invalidation piece. So all of this, all of this goes back to that and they just work beautifully together. The lifestyle changes with the psychological component are really powerful.
Work.
Carole Freeman: Love it. Valerie says a comprehensive and helpful answer. Thank you, Nicole. Anything else? We could probably talk for seven hours. We could do a juror Rogan style podcast and go on and on. But yeah. Anything else that you were hoping I would ask about or anything you’d like to share or anything else you want to touch on before we wrap this up?
At least for this episode, I’d love to have you back
Nicole Laurent: again. I want to T so when you talk about keto genic diets, as a treatment for mental illness, you unavoidably, get people who have mental illness who are already on medications, psychiatric medications, or other medications, but I’m speaking mostly about the psychiatric ones.
We all know about the diabetic and the blood pressure medications, and that those need to be carefully monitored by a prescriber and all that. But that’s, I’m not a medical doctor, but, and I’m also not a prescriber in any way, shape or form. But I do want people who are thinking about doing a ketogenic diet to treat their mental illness and are, who are on medications to make sure that they understand something called potentiation effects and potentiation effects are really important because what happens on a ketogenic diet is your brain starts to heal and it starts to work.
And what that means is that whatever your current dosage is of some medications will suddenly be too high and you will start to get weird side effects and you will think, oh my God, it’s this ketogenic diet it’s messing with my brain. But really what is most likely is either your electrolytes are not on, you feel poopy, but more Mo but quite likely as you are developing potentiation effects, which means that you need to go to your prescriber and evaluate your prescriptions with them and possibly discuss titrating down.
Once you titrate down, usually that is better in a couple of days, you’ll be like, oh, that kind of extra anxiety that I had, or that whatever is better. Or w and so if you are going to do this with your, a ketogenic diet for mental illness, before you go in to see your psychiatrist or your prescriber, I want you to Google the side effects of your medications.
I want you to stick them on the fridge. I want you to check for them every day. And usually, within three to six weeks is when we start to see potentiation effects. If they’re maybe going to happen, they might not, but it’s just something I want on people’s radar. I don’t want you doing a ketogenic diet for mental health with if you’re on prescriptions, without the help of a prescriber.
Also there are S sometimes there becomes energy deficits in the brain for whatever reason, there’s tricks and trays, there’s MCT oil, there’s eating extra butter. There’s, we got to keep those ketones nice and high or you can get energy deficits in the brain and you can get an exacerbation of symptoms.
And for some people that just means their anxiety is a little high for other people. And so if you are already on medications and you want to try a ketogenic diet for mental health, you must have a prescriber who is going to work with you and take good care of you because you deserve good medical treatment.
And that is a piece of it. And if you don’t have a prescriber that’s willing to do that, you need to find a low carbon formed prescriber. There’s lots of different provider directories, but have that in place before you go, willy-nilly cutting your carbohydrates all the way down.
Carole Freeman: Love it. So important.
Glad you sh you shared that. So get the right support in place before you endeavor to do this. So well, Nicole, thank you so much for being here. I’ve learned so much. I hope everyone is enjoying this and learned as much as well. And let’s see. So today we’ve been talking with Nicole Laurent, licensed mental health counselor who specializes in.
Ketogenic wait, I got to get the right phrase and therapeutic carbohydrate restriction for mental health. No,
I got to sound fancy
and okay. So how can people get ahold of you? They’d like more information if they’d like to participate in the interviews that you’re doing now, again, that’s women that are experiencing some kind of brain fog.
That’s interfering with the quality of your life. Nicole would love to chat with you. So how can they reach out for that?
Nicole Laurent: So the easiest way to contact me is the contact form at MentalHealthKeto.com. That’s easiest. And then if you want to participate in my program research, I would be so grateful.
I’m trying to get 50 calls. I have 21, the sooner I get those 50 calls done, the sooner I can create something to help people. And yeah, and I’ll send you my Calendly.
Carole Freeman: Wonderful. Thank you again for being here. Thank you everyone for watching the show. And we’ve got another episode coming up next week.
And so if you’re struggling with keto, we’re here to help. If you want help with mental health keto, please visit mental health keto.com. That’s perfect. Naming there. If you’re a lady who’s struggling on keto to get the results that you want and weight loss is your primary goal with that, I’m here to help as well.
So KetoCarole.com and support the show. We’d love to see you leave a review on your podcast platform. If you’re listening on any podcast platform right now, or if you’re on YouTube or Facebook, go ahead and leave a comment. If you’re listening to this in the future and remember help us grow the show and we’ll help you shrink and a different kind of shrink over there and in different kind of shrink here.
Thank you everyone for watching. We’ll see you next time. Bye.
What would you do if your health was restored by doing the opposite of everything you were taught?
After years on a high carbohydrate diet, intense running sessions, struggling with an eating disorder, and feeling the throes of anxiety & depression, Registered Dietitian Michelle Hurn knew she needed to make a change. Does the “One size fits all” food pyramid work for everyone? Are there other options, such as a low carbohydrate or ketogenic diet that may mitigate our risk for metabolic illness and restore us to health? Could this way of eating reverse diabetes, alleviate depression, pave the way to heal eating disorders, allow us to age gracefully, and prevent heart disease? Why as a nation is our health failing, and why aren’t the nutrition guidelines updating with the science?
Listen on Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music
Carole Freeman: [00:00:00] Hey, we’re live everyone. Are you trying to follow keto, but your doctor, nurse and nutritionist told you that it’s unhealthy dangerous or unsustainable.
Are you a healthcare provider that’s maybe said or thought any of those things I just said about your patients or clients, would you like to hear the story of how one dietitian buck the current and even getting in a little bit of trouble along the way we started doing the opposite of what she’d been doing.
Because it was so effective. Hey, this episode is for you. Stick around. I have the amazing guest of Michelle Hurn you all. But first off I got to do our little medical disclaimer. Welcome. Welcome over one to keto chat live. I’m your host Carole Freeman. And. I have a master’s degree in nutrition and clinical health psychology.
I’m a board certified keto nutrition specialist and also a certified clinical hypnotherapist. I specialize in helping women 40 plus follow a keto diet for sustainable health. And as our lawyers like me to say, this show is meant for educational [00:01:00] entertainment purposes only. It is not meant to be medical advice nor intended to diagnose, prevent, treat, or cure any condition whatsoever.
If you have questions or concerns about your specific medical conditions, please seek out a qualified personal health care professional. And everyone helped me and join me in welcoming our special guest today. Michelle Hurn registered dietitian and author of the dietitian’s dilemma. Let us know you’re here.
Tell us your joint, where you’re joining from as we welcome Michelle.
Michelle Hurn: Thank you. Thank you, for the. introduction. That was a really awesome introduction. I like your displaying references.
Carole Freeman: I’m gonna read your little bio too, that you said, let’s give it a little more background about who is Michelle.
I’m so glad you were here. I heard about y’all just give a shout out to Siobhan Huggins is how I heard about you. Cause she posted about your book that you wrote and how helpful it was to her. And so I reached out and I was like, oh my gosh, I got to meet this Michelle person. And it’s just been great.
Michelle is a registered and licensed dietitian with 11 years of experience as a clinical acute care dietitian. [00:02:00] Lead dietitian in psychiatric care and outpatient dietitian while practicing inpatient and outpatient care. And the in the hospital setting, Michelle discovered a discerning connection between the high carbohydrate, low fat sugar in moderation, nutrition guidelines.
She was required to teach and the rapidly declining health of her. Michelle is an endurance athlete and she has competed in 12 marathons. Congratulations. In 2019, Michelle decided to follow a low carb, high, fat, high animal protein diet to see if it would alleviate severe muscle pain.
Keto Leads to Dietitian’s Dilemma with Michelle Hurn
Michelle Hurn: I started having severe muscle aches and pains and I ended up adopting a low carbohydrate, high, fat animal based diet just with the goal.
I thought maybe all this extra protein could actually help my muscles. And what I found was my anxiety, I had suffered from life altering anxiety, crippling anxiety from the time I was a teenager. Improved significantly. Within weeks, that was one of the biggest changes.
And of course, my muscles healed, I felt a zillion times better. So yeah, I’m super grateful, I’m struggling being able to run it all to know I can be an ultra marathons [00:03:00] and ultra marathon is any distance over the traditional marathon distance of 26.2 miles. So yeah, I’m just going to hang out and wait for her.
My goal was to talk a little bit about my journey. What is it like to be an acute care dietitian? What does it currently and what was it like for me when I first got my health back, because, you get really excited. I’d be like, oh my gosh, I’m going to be able to help so much more people with this information.
But unfortunately, in the acute care setting, you’re just not allowed to teach a low-carb high-fat diet. So we’ll see if Carole, if not, they will just say the Michelle show. And I’ll just say, I’ll just talk about and share my stories. So we’ll give it a few minutes. Thank you guys. If you’re watching this live, thank you for your. I started to lose my health in 2019.
And I ended up adopting a low carbohydrate high-fat animal-based diet, purely with the goal to help my muscles. My muscles were hurting. My body was hurting. And what I found was not only my muscles heal. within weeks my lifelong anxiety was significantly better. And, I was very excited. I was like, oh my gosh, [00:04:00] I can’t wait to talk about this, teach this or research this.
And if you’re a dietitian in the acute care setting, you’re not allowed to teach low carbohydrate nutrition. And yeah that’s where I left off.
Carole Freeman: So I’m curious. Do you remember how you even heard of low carb we’ll base first? What made you decide that may be an answer?
Michelle Hurn: Yeah. I had been familiar with ketogenic diets and low carbohydrate diets. Like I was along under the impression that blood sugar stability was very important. Like no matter what your diet life disease state was, but, as a dietitian, I was just constantly indoctrinated with you need carbohydrates.
Everybody needs carbohydrates. It doesn’t matter. What if you’re type two diabetic underweight, overweight, everybody needs carbs. And ketogenic diets were talked and mentioned, but they weren’t. They were really like, oh, it’s a dangerous diet. It’s a very high, fat diet. It should only be used maybe with epilepsy in certain cases.
And I’d always followed a lot of the fitness world and I was very curious about a low carbohydrate diet and, I intuitively knew, and I imagine many people watching this [00:05:00] know this carbohydrates didn’t make me feel well. When I was running, when I was a high carbohydrate athlete, I was eating about 350 grams of carbohydrates a day.
And then when I turned 36, my performance started to suffer. I was having all kinds of muscles. Two sports dietitians told me I just needed more carbs. So I started eating 400, 500 grams of carbs a day, and things went from bad to worse. Like my anxiety went from, I couldn’t even leave the house.
I was having panic attacks, my whole body hurt. And I just, you deep down know, like this just doesn’t feel good. This doesn’t make me feel good. I was constantly hungry. I had, a lot of digestive issues and oh, the moment that I, decided I’m not gonna run anymore.
This is not working. My, my life is flying. I thought like, why not just give it a try, give it a try for a few days. Like I was just going to adopt a purely ketogenic. And then I heard about the carnivore diet and I remember literally like laughing like that. I think this is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard of.
Once again you’re very indoctrinated, not only with the need for grains, but also oh, fruits and vegetables. It’s so good for you. Unfortunately that’s where most people stop. Most people just are like, that’s crazy and [00:06:00] move on. But I, it was like, you know what, that’s crazy.
But all these people I’m seeing on Instagram and it’s an incarnate. They all look pretty happy and healthy. And I was not, I was a mess. And so really I said what I’m doing is not working. So I’m very grateful. Yeah. I reached out to a few people in the community. Just ask some basic questions and everybody was very gracious with just, this is what I’m doing.
This is what’s working for me. And I thought my only goal is like what if I just go very low carb carnivore for 30 days, maybe that all this protein will help my muscles. And I knew that like meat and Liver and things have iron, but I just, I was not, this is something we don’t teach in nutrition.
We don’t teach by the availability. We don’t teach about, the potential for, carbs and fight a gap, for anti-nutrients to block the absorption. And yeah. So I just, I remember that moment that I decided to do it honestly was scared. I’m like, oh my God, am I going to have enough energy?
I’m not going to be able to get through my day. It’s so funny. Cause I, I tell people too, like how we’re so far removed. From how humans are supposed to [00:07:00] eat. If you just take a step back, nothing about science, all, if you just say humans evolved eating meat and fat, like that’s how we evolve.
That’s how humans thrive. When I see things that are like ketos dangerous or meat causes cancer. It’s if that was true, human species wouldn’t exist. Like this evolved, we were completely free of chronic diseases until, processed carbohydrates and a lot of this.
Carole Freeman: Oh, so true. I remember so much of your story reminds me of various phases of my ignorance of keto, and then learning more. So I used to teach nutrition classes at a little school up in Portland, Oregon. I remember teaching all this stuff, and then showing an article of this family that was a hundred percent carnivore and laughing at it.
And all the students were laughing and the same question of like, how do they have any energy during the day? They must be just completely exhausted all day long and fast forward now. And I’m like, oh, now they had something figured out a long time ago. And I remember after [00:08:00] learning about. Where, carbohydrates are arm one non-essential macronutrients.
So we need protein. We need fat, but carbohydrates have no. Function in the body. And I remember telling him that yeah, posting it online and fellow dietitians that I went to school with was like that’s not true. The brain needs 130 carbs a day. And he’s that’s not true. And that’s what we’re taught.
But it turned out, but it can make them, it doesn’t have to. So I would say level your stories are so much of yeah we’re just taught the wrong thing and you’re right. If you logically go by. What did we eat before? We’d had farming, that’s only been the last 10,000 years.
What did we eat before?
Michelle Hurn: Yeah. And what’s interesting is sometimes, you have different experiences in your life and I just feel so grateful for, this journey started for me in late 2019 and continues and I still am. I still see things that make me go, wow. Oh my goodness. I was recently, I just got back from visiting my sister in California and I was in a hotel for a couple of days that had a continental.
And I’m not a parent, so my [00:09:00] non-existent children are perfect, but I was shocked. I was like to disclaim that how many not, and not just like little chubby kids, but these children there were, and I’m watching them eating, that is the waffles and the frosted flakes. But the issue is when we feed, when we eat all these carbohydrates, when we follow this food pyramid, when we construct our diets to have these, quote, unquote, healthy, whole grains and rices and breads, they set us up to be hungry.
You either have to like a lot of carbs or a lot of fat. And as we’ve shifted eating a lot of carbs on a lot of processed sugar, those are getting stored as fat. And then, they’re making us hungry and unhealthy, and I’m seeing that I don’t the fastest growing obese demographic is children ages two to five.
And I was just, I was struck because it wasn’t just oh, there’s this one or two chubby kids. It was like, holy. Cause this is our next generation.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. That’s always strikes me too, because you’re setting the foundation for the rest of their life, for their health. Whereas, lot of [00:10:00] parents, think, oh, they’re young.
Let’s just let them live. Their kids. They’re only young ones, but you’re really building their house. You’re building the foundation, the house, they have to live in the rest of their lives. I say good nutrition is even more important in childhood. Don’t wait until you’re an adult to fight your weight and your health.
Like why not have good health your whole
Michelle Hurn: life? Yeah. And you’re also establishing habits you’re establishing hopefully utilizing healthy coping, coping mechanisms, versus oh, you’re sad. Let me give you sugar. Or you’re happy. Let me give you sugar. Oh, you’re out of bad debt, yeah.
Yeah. It’s really it’s really interesting. And I constantly am disappointed. I see lots of dietitians that think that everything in moderation is fine. We need all these carbohydrates, but once again, it really comes down to our education is just poor. The academy of nutrition, which used to be the governing board of dietitians.
When I was a dietitian, when I became a dietitian in 2001, the number one sponsors were Coca-Cola Pepsi, co Frito-Lay, general mills. Kellogg’s Hershey’s. As of today, or sponsored by Barilla pasta the national confectionery association. That’s my [00:11:00] favorite where I literally sponsored my candy.
And that obviously impacts you know what, we’re what we’re going to teach people.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. Speaking of the. The re restrictions of the diet. So you’d shared with me before about how history of eating disorders and I was taught. If you put some on someone on a diet and you’re restricted food groups, the whole everything in moderation thing we were taught that’s what caused eating disorders.
And so the way to cure them was it let people eat whatever they wanted. So will you share with us a little bit more about what was that like with your past history of eating disorders and going on this primarily meat only.
Michelle Hurn: Absolutely. And yeah, you know what I mean to really flashback quickly when I was 12, I was diagnosed with anorexia.
I was a five feet tall and 57 pounds. So I was immediately inpatient hospitalization. The doctor told my parents, I had a 10% chance to survive. And I, I wasn’t supposed to hear that they went across the hall in a room and I was told to wait, I’m 12, so you don’t do what [00:12:00] you’re supposed to do.
But yeah, so it was very, it was pretty bad. And, I was immediately put on a 24 hour, two feeding system. That’s another interesting thing to feed ingredients are the same today. I mean that they were when I was 12. So over 25 years, two feeding back then I was fed maltodextrin, soy protein, foreign surface.
Exact same stuff today. It’s pretty terrible. Yeah. And that’s the dogma is that you’re going to be fed the standard American guidelines. You need to be able to eat all foods to heal. That’s one thing like you will know you are well when you can eat all foods and be okay with it. When you can eat a cookie, when you can eat, chicken, whatever, and you’re going to be okay.
And I realized that I’ve Val validate that. That sounds good in theory, but that completely ignored. Human physiology, how humans are designed to eat, metabolize that also completely ignores what certain foods do to our hormones and our brain. And I, when I decided, I had struggled when I left inpatient treatment I was still 12, about certain 13.
I was told you will have lifelong anxiety. You [00:13:00] will probably have racing thoughts with food and panic attacks. You will likely relapse. This is your cross to bear. That’s a lot for young human and they weren’t wrong. I struggled with food and, worrying and thinking and all kinds of things.
And when I decided, fast forward to I’m 36, I’m going to try this, all meat, all fat diet I’m married. And my wife was like, no, you can not do this eating disorder. This will set you back. This is terrible. And I don’t know, I can’t tell you why exactly, but I was like, I just feel like I need to do this.
And we thought about it, argued about it. Finally. She was like, all right, whatever, you’ll quit. And then, of course the first few days are rough. You’re transitioning from very high carb to low carbs. Like, how’s that going? It’s great. Your head is like electrolytes.
Everybody felt like there was announcement. I wish I didn’t know what I was doing. Within three weeks, the first after the first week, my muscles stopped hurting, but I was like I’m not running. And then I remember it was like 11 to 12 days into Integrating just meat and fat.
I was still working at the hospital at the time. And one of we were in a meeting and one of my [00:14:00] dietitians coworkers was like shaky. And she was like, Michelle, I got to get a snack. Do you need a snack? And I was like, we’re gonna, we’re going to eat lunch. And like at noon. And she goes, Michelle, it’s almost two.
And I was like, whoa, because I used to have to eat every few hours. I would get angry. Even like I said, those cold sweats. My, body was finally leveling out my foremost or leveling out. And then I got home almost exactly the third week mark, my wife was sitting there and was like, Hey, will you sit with me?
And you’re like, oh yeah, what’s going on? And she just said, I don’t know what’s going on. This is the best anxiety has been in the 11 years that I’ve known you. And that’s great. We need to find out why what is going on. And so we go down the rabbit hole. I did not know there was so much research.
Like we have so many clinical trials specifically on blood sugar stability. We can we’re type two diabetes. We can reverse type two diabetes with a ketogenic diet. We can start to reverse it within 14 days. I had patients who were diabetic for decades, I saw amputations and rotting, teeth and [00:15:00] hair falling out slash all this kinds of stuff.
Yeah, and I was just blown away. I was like, and then the mental aspect, depression leads. Our nation is the number one cause of disability. More people will not go to work because of depression versus anything, accidents, tumor, anything. And it’s not getting better. Bipolar disorder in our children has increased 4000% in the last two weeks.
This is not good. And it was Dr. Georgia. He who first talk to me about the impact of all these process carbohydrates and seed oils on our brain. We are literally shifting that the narrow transplant. Obviously you’re getting a dompamine response, but we’re shifting the neurotransmitters, that teacher.
How to, or allow our body to cope with stress and learn to behavior in GABA, in the brain. So high that our brain can no longer cope with stress. We find high levels of GABA and suicide victims and people, a lot of illicit substances. It’s it’s not good. So
Carole Freeman: yeah. So yeah, [00:16:00] we have the knowledge that we don’t have to be suffering from these things. So I’m glad that you’re here again, helping get the word out. Hopefully just one more person hears this information and can take control of their health back. And there’s no, and
Michelle Hurn: It can be hard specifically with anorexia.
I wanted to, I did a presentation on anorexia. I wanted to make sure there was enough science for it. And like you said, there’s this okay, you have somebody who’s severely underweight. Who’s terrified of food. How in the world, can you feed them a diet that doesn’t include lots of carbohydrates or sugar or.
And here’s why it says what I’ll tell you that I found in that I believe we started Michelle’s at the center for healing people in our anorexia. When you have starved yourself or you have been bingeing and purging, you have damaged your intestinal epithelium. What does that mean? You’ve damaged your GI system.
Your GI system is incredibly important for you to absorb nutrition. If you cannot absorb. Then you they’re effectively useless to you. It doesn’t matter how many vitamins, whatever I give. If you can’t absorb, you need to be able to [00:17:00] absorb things, to build, for your hormones to work, to build neurotransmitters in your brain.
And you also so many people with anorexia, including myself report, incredibly high levels of GI pain, stomach constipation, diarrhea. And when I was in treatment, I was told the top on your head, you’re making this up. Nobody hurt. You’re feeding us, you’re making us hurt. And so by, by following a very high fat, high meat, potentially ketogenic or.
What you’re doing is you’re providing the most bioavailable nutrition. And once again, we don’t teach this and via TEDx, what does this mean? That nutrition and meat is much, much more absorbable than the nutrition. For example, once again, if you can’t absorb it, it is effectively useless to you.
I like to use the example of like iron and spinach versus steak, steak, you can absorb at 20% where iron is like 1.7%. I always say that would be like, I wrote you a check for a thousand dollars and you get super excited and you’re like, oh, I’m Michelle, I’m going to go cash it. And they’re like, yeah, she’s had $17 in her bank account and you’re like, [00:18:00] it matters.
Can you access the funds? Can you. Yeah. And when you don’t have all the fiber, you don’t have all the fight like acid, you don’t have things that are going to potentially block you from using that nutrition. Look, how different would it be to? And when you get the meat and fat, you stabilize blips, or just that alone, we know reduces anxiety, but how we feel and treatment for eating disorders is we give you, all of these carbs, all this processed sugars say energy, blood sugar, cause you crashed and you feel sad.
And then you’re, have all the side effects and your stomach hurts. And then we do it again and again. And we’re like, man, I don’t know why they’re I was 27 different medications, so anyway, my, my theory and my thought, and I’ve seen this in several individuals is what you need.
This is not a low calorie diet. If you’re underweight, four to 5,000, I’ve talked to one individual to 8,000 calories. Jaime high-fat there’s not to be no carbohydrate, but minimal carbohydrates for a set period of time to let your system heal. And then we built into it. And then for bulemia or, binge-eating disorder, [00:19:00] you don’t have to eat all foods to be well, that’s the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard in my life.
That is the company you’re telling, trying to sell their stuff. Nobody needs, that’s like telling an alcoholic. If you can’t drink one, then you’re not that’s nobody.
Carole Freeman: If you can’t get moderation you are not healed of your alcoholism, right?
Michelle Hurn: Yeah. And I’ve known
Carole Freeman: yeah. Michelle, that analogy, but that’s so true.
We don’t tell alcoholics that your cured when you can drink in moderation. No we know that those foods cue up the brain too much and they can’t control it. Why are we trying to tell people? Any kind of eating disorder that like somehow you’re going to be able to achieve moderation with these highly addictive foods that hijack your brain
Michelle Hurn: chemistry.
Our society thinks there is something wrong with you or you are missing out, or you’re somehow not having fun or whatever. If you don’t want to eat pasta and Oreos I can tell you how many times I, my wife and I have been out or whatever oh, you’re a runner. You must want these pancakes in this.
It’s no, I brought my beef. [00:20:00] And it’s like why wouldn’t you do that? You were spending all this energy, doing all this. You look so lean and my whole life I’ve been relatively lean. I did not have, a metabolic disorder per se. I wasn’t type two diabetic or obese, but my.
Crippling, everybody experiences, symptoms potentially differently, but yeah, we don’t if somebody says, yeah, Hey, I’m not drinking. I’m a recovering alcoholic. Everyone would be like, oh yeah, cool, man. No worries. But if you’re like, you know what, I’m going to pass on the cake.
I just, I really struggle with sugar. They’d be like, oh good, come on and have some fun, we just have a great different attitude about it. Unfortunately it takes a very strong person. It’s hard because there’s so much societal. And, when I think about like a recovering, maybe addict you don’t drive down the street and see ads for methamphetamines.
Sometimes you do obviously for alcohol, but we’ve even regulated cigarettes. We don’t even allow cigarettes to, to be advertised. In like big billboards or in magazines. But the food it’s everywhere. I think I shared with you, like you literally, I was trying to check the sports news and there’s an ad and there’s [00:21:00] everywhere you go.
There’s processed food. I want my dogs at the vet. They have a free mochaccino machine. Like you press a button and you can get a sugary cappuccino, like it’s we have to rise above if we’re going to be metabolically healthy. And we also.
Carole Freeman: Wait. So getting the humans addicted to the sugar, wasn’t enough, they’re going to, they gotta get the dogs addicted as well.
Michelle Hurn: Yeah. The dog food industry is even by Mars, while a lot of the bigger companies are owned by processed food companies, they’re putting nonsense in our dogs. So yeah it’s really sad, and I’ve shared before that healthcare. If you have an acute accident, let’s say, God help you.
You’re in a Carson or something. Our healthcare system is second to none. It is amazing, big problem. They can save your life. I I was pushing down some stuff in my trash and I didn’t know there was glass in there. I ended up having eight stitches and that was great. Went in, no problem.
But if you have a chronic illness, our healthcare system. It is designed to keep you safe [00:22:00] a society. We do not live in a socialist society. This is a capitalist society. It is designed to make money. They have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, and the only way they can do that is to keep you sick.
If they heal you, you’re gone. You’re happy you and I are paying, for diabetic medication or whatever. If they kill you, then you’re gone. We got to keep you needing surgeries. We got teeth. We got to keep you amputations. That’s how it is. You guys, you have to realize you and your life. The system is designed to keep you sick.
You have to think outside the city.
Carole Freeman: Oh speaking of that system, walk us through. I bet you discovered the healing power of this for yourself. You started to feel so great. I bet you were like, oh my gosh, I’m going to go change the lives of everybody I’m working with now. So walk us through whatever.
Trying to bring this into clinical practice.
Michelle Hurn: Yeah. First of all, my dietitian coworkers thought I was totally whack. Like I think they rallied around, like maybe she’s doing this for her running. Curiously though. And I’ve shared this before, and this is not trying to be judgemental.
It’s just purely facts. [00:23:00] And I worked in three different facilities and about 60% of the dietitians I’ve worked with her. It’s not overweight, obese. But yeah, so I immediately was like, oh my gosh, I went to my boss because when you work at a facility, you generally have access to to print out full clinical trials.
Often you’ll have that memberships or something. But but yeah, I could add, and I had all this information, then I had to highlight it and I was like look at this we can literally change. We can go. And I was like, I was ready to set up meetings with doctors. I had emailed a bunch of people and she pulled me in her office and I was like, no, like this is against regulations.
We could get in trouble for. And I was like we’re not helping people. And she asked me, she said you are you’re charting. I’m like yeah, of course. She’s you’re fine then I’m not really, the message was, we’re not really trying to help people. We are trying to check bosses, get insurance reimbursement, make sure everything’s checked off and move on.
And that’s what burns had. If y’all know people like nurses, doctors, a lot of people get burnt out with this because it’s just like this rotating cycle of sickness, and so I struggled. I was like, how am I going to get through my day with not being able, I have a type two [00:24:00] diabetic that I see trying to shovel down this brown rice that they think is garbage.
And thinking that all, if they’re obese and I’m like, eh, I know I should eat. And so I struggled, and I will neither confirm nor deny that I may be said like, Hey, I’m going to chart this, but would you like what could actually help you? But yeah, I actually, that was one of the times I, a patient got excited about a low carb diet and told his nurse who told my boss and I was suspended.
Yeah,
Carole interviews Michelle Hurn, registered and licensed Dietitian, about her Keto journey.
Carole Freeman: at the beginning, a little bit of trouble along the way and trying to right the ship that’s been going the wrong direction for so long. So it’s a. It’s nice to hear that your passion, like you’re doing it because you truly cared about these people you were working with. If you didn’t care about that.
You wouldn’t have tried at all to, to change the system or anything like that. So I applaud your efforts as stuff.
Michelle Hurn: Yeah. And I definitely found in that it’s just not something we can really change from the inside. This is a very powerful system. We saw that in.
Dietary guidelines. Now they’ve published it. It’s, nobody’s surprised at 99 or [00:25:00] 95% of people in the guideline advisory board have ties to process food. It’s Nina who told us that every single member of Congress, not one, not 10, every single member is sponsored by a pharmaceutical. It’s going to be very hard to change this.
Once again, it’s a capitalist society. The only goal is to make money and we are only goes to make money. He don’t really care who you are. And I wish that if I didn’t have a soul, I could still, you can make so much money. It was very hard to leave healthcare. You have all these student loans.
So this is, this was what I wanted to do for my life. And, it got, when I, my health was restored, it was like, I can’t do this anymore. But then it was like, oh crap, what am I going to do? What do I do? That’s the dietitian’s dilemma.
Carole Freeman: And w were you required to. Based medicine. Did they use that phrase with you?
Michelle Hurn: Evidence-based medicine. So you froze for a second. The,
Carole Freeman: Did you hear that? So were you required to do evidence-based medicine or evidence-based nutrition? Did they use that phrase?
Michelle Hurn: We, didn’t not really evidence based, but [00:26:00] what it was basically the nutrition guidelines and you had to use only what the hospital had approved.
Like you couldn’t even have a separate handout that didn’t have what the hospital had on it. And we know that evidence-based you have so much epidemiology and non-sensitive. It doesn’t really make sense. It just it’s it’s like carb counting for diabetics or these recommendations where people would say, oh, you don’t need the, too much protein will cause kidney failure.
It’s we’ve already debunked all this stuff.
Carole Freeman: Okay. Where should we go next on your journey? So to always you wrote this book, how did that come about? Tell us about the dietitians dilemma.
Michelle Hurn: Yeah. In back in 2019, I wanted to qualify for the Olympic trials. I was training a bunch and then, like I said, I lost my health.
Couldn’t run it all, did the low carb diet, got my health back. And I was just so inspired. I was like, I couldn’t believe it. Like I did not know. There was so much research on a low carb diet. I was told it was nonsense. It would cause your heart failure. And I just was so super excited and like I, and I probably first thought that so would my colleagues, so would my healthcare.
So when people in the [00:27:00] system and there was so much. And I was told once again, you have to only preach this way of eating. So every free moment I had, I was like, you know what, I’m just going to start talking, making notes about disease states that I believe could be helped by a low carb diet.
And I started reaching out to anyone who would listen. I started listening to all kinds of podcasts. I talked to Dr. Chris Palmer, talked to her westbound, Dr. Beckman teach me, talk to me, share with me. I want to learn. I want to learn. And so every free moment, it almost was a joke that like, during our lunch break, Shell’s working on her book, and I’m like, no, I really am gonna write a book.
And I had actually had one dietitian, pull me aside and was like, Like you, even if you’re right, like you’ll never be able to work in a hospital. And I said we’ll see. And and then also because I was so healthy and I literally, I’m not joking. I could not run at all.
Like I was getting full sleds and about, probably about a little over a month into my low carb journey. I’m just starting to write the book. My wife just casually mentioned you should go for it. I was around more. She’s you’re annoying me. Go for a run. And I ended up [00:28:00] like, huh, you know what?
I’ll just go jog a few miles. I should be fine. And I ran eight miles, like no carbs. And that also got the wheels turning in my head. Like maybe my story isn’t over. Maybe my competitive running isn’t over, my boy, she was like, oh, fun. You could be a recreational runner. I was like, what have I run ultra marathons?
What if I forget this 26 mile? What if I run like six hours or 50 miles? And. Okay. She, wasn’t thrilled about that idea at first, but we’re like, let’s give this a minute. Let’s see how I feel. I reached out to Zach bitter who was the current world record holder of a hundred mile race who also follows the low carb diet.
And he was like yeah let’s try it. This. And so as the days went by give us to be honest, I was very angry. It was hard working in the hospital cause I saw so much sickness and you see what’s being served with the patients. What’s being taught to the patients with the nurses believe. And also I got more frustrated when I would talk to nurses and I would just hit what’s going on?
That’s a lot of carbs for a diabetic. They laugh it off. Yeah, it’s fine. We’re giving them insulin like, oh, we know it was almost just like [00:29:00] people were just resigned to the fact like. I haven’t had one doctor tell me, Hey, Michelle, we just have to assume people aren’t going to do what they’re supposed to.
And I was like, all right, that’s what, we’re, that’s the assumption we’re starting with. Like, how about we at least teach them, give them options, knowledge. Yeah. And so then I, then it was just like co then COVID happened. And so I lost a lot of my dietitian hours and I was put in the. Where patients called for eight hours a day.
I had to take calls where patients ordered food. I wasn’t allowed to give any nutrition. I just had people call with diabetes and say, I want a caramel macchiato and cake. And that was that moment. I knew okay, I gotta get outta here. I’m I can’t do this. I wasn’t allowed to tell people anything, but once people would ask what should I eat?
And I said, and then I’d get in trouble for that. And so yeah, so I, I found a there was, and then a lot of places were closing, but there was a part-time job in Portland, Oregon. Basically helping make sausage, breaking down animals, working with regenerative farms. And, we looked at it financially and it’s I’m going to be taking like, I’m going to be making.
22% of what I made [00:30:00] in the hospital and I’m going to be working 40 times harder, but I loved it. Like I was so ready to get out of there. And, it was very hard manual labor on my days, basically consisted of I’d run, 10 to 18 miles in the morning. I’d work at scrap. It’s called scratch meets from 10 to four, and then I’d come home and write until I fall asleep.
And I was just every single day, we’re going to do this until I get this book. And I’m just, I’m grateful, I’m grateful that I have a story to tell. I’m grateful that I’ve had, I’ve been so fortunate to have met and networked with so many great people. I met Dr. Ken Berry, Diana Rogers, so many fantastic.
Do you know Sean Baker? And I’m just, I just want people to know people ask me I really don’t care what people want to eat. Like I’m very happy with my life. I’m great, but I believe. If I could leave a legacy, it would be that every single person with a mental health disorder, with depression, anxiety, OCD, every single human with type two diabetes, struggling with sarcopenia who has issue, heart issues.
And certainly [00:31:00] my history, every person with an eating disorder is presented this as an option that you know what, this can do this. How do you feel about. Are you willing to try this? Because what we do in healthcare is we just throw medication at you. We let you do your same shitty diet and you don’t get mattered.
Carole Freeman: Oh yes. It’s so true. So sad and so true. But yeah. Why can’t the options be given there? Because there’s so many people that I’ve seen, I’ve worked with. Once they get keto done the right way that they just feel free for the first time, right? Like I’m not obsessed with food. I’m not constantly hungry and craving mental clarity and energy.
And like, why has this never been an option before that’s been presented?
Michelle Hurn: And isn’t that the ultimate irony is people say, oh, it’s so restrictive. I’ve never felt more free. What’s restrictive is thinking and obsessing about. If you’re overweight, restrictive is, being overweight and paying.
And then, I was literally sitting on the sideline of my own life. If you’re dealing with depression, anxiety, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Certainly an eating disorder, tendencies it’s [00:32:00] socks. And if someone had told me when I was 12, God, even when I was a teenager in my twenties Hey, you know what?
This. And I appreciate that. You said do keto the right way, because what really frustrates me is when people are like, oh, I tried keto, it doesn’t work. I’m like how long did you do it? Oh, like a few days I just ate a bunch of fat and it didn’t work. It’s you need to, nobody would do that. You and just be like, oh, the doctor prescribed an antibiotic.
I just took one. And it didn’t work. You have to do. And also we’re just such a quick fix society. I. Things delivered in two days from Jeff Bezos. And I can Google whatever I want, but you have to follow the laws of nature, like nothing in life that is worth anything. It all takes time.
It’s not sexy. It’s not fun if it doesn’t sell well, infomercials, but it’s time on task. If you have been sick for a decade, it’s going to take time. The good news is it’s not going to take a decade. I have. Rideable results in three weeks, many people, 30 days, how to give it time. And I am better today than I was six months ago than I was six months [00:33:00] before.
So you have to buy into the process.
Carole Freeman: Yeah, it and you’re oh, that’s, I’m so glad you said that too, because people want instant results. They want. The nice thing is that they do feel better pretty quickly. Now. Not everything gets healed immediately, but I’ll just brag on one of my clients recently.
So she did a year over year DEXA scan. She’s lost over 70 pounds, and I already know her labs are beautiful. Perfect. Everything is perfectly healthy in her. And she’s been with me almost a year and a half. And her DEXA scan showed that she did not lose. Any lean tissue in that 70 pounds lost. And in fact, she gained a pound of lean mass in the time that she’d done this with no exercise.
So the trainer that did the DEXA scan for her was like, Ooh, you’re your weight trainer is on point. The fact that you lost that weight and didn’t lose it. And she goes I’m not exercising. I’m not doing any weight training. It’s just my nutritionist. And so it’s just. [00:34:00] Because I was training probably were trained in school, as well as it, once you turn 30, it’s just downhill from there, from your bone mass.
And so one of the things I noticed was her bone density increased and. My theory. I don’t know if there’s any research. Maybe you can tell me if there is, but my theory is a couple things. So one is adequate salt, which is required on keto to avoid the S the symptoms, the side effects, coupled with adequate fat.
Cause you know, the physiology to get em minerals into bones. You need fat soluble vitamins in order to signal that. And we have some studies that I know of that are like keto preserves, muscle mass, better than some other diets, but this all coupled together. So anyway, so she was thrilled.
The former bodybuilder, that was the guy running the, the DEXA scan clinic that she was at was just astounded at her results. And so just, another example of cause you’re talking about sarcopenia. Sarcopenia is the muscle wasting,
Michelle Hurn: it’s just, it’s so much. And we also have people who are obese and sarcopenic, just so much fat and minimal
Carole Freeman: muscle.
And then the so then osteoporosis as [00:35:00] well while there’s some some worry that, a keto diet causes osteoporosis, but that’s not true. And I would add osteoporosis to your your
Michelle Hurn: list of things. Yeah. You certainly could, and I think you nailed it. I don’t know the salt.
That’s very interesting, but definitely you have to have fat, you need adequate fats to build bone and yeah. And, vitamins, AED, and K are there for the fat-soluble. And you also need, your hormones have to be stable. And I feel like when we’re eating a lot of those processed carbohydrates, we’re throwing, our blood sugar goes up, insulin comes in and we’re getting cortisol.
We’re getting glute, we’re getting all kinds of wacky things happening with our hormones. We stabilize our hormones. We provide adequate saturated, fat and saturated fat is. When we eat a lot of these vegetable oils that is very inflammatory, that causes a lot of oxidation and inflammation, so we remove those, we’re eating the good saturated fats. Also, you made a good point. We’re providing adequate protein, especially women. We do not eat enough protein. This two to three ounces a day. Nonsense is ridiculous. Eating one egg a day, or, I had the tiny little, a [00:36:00] handful at dinner.
No, you need adequate protein. And a lot of fats.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. I’m so glad you said that too, because this whole, like plant-based message that’s out right now and how they’re going towards like lists Mondays at schools and all this kind of stuff is you’re not doing anybody favors. In fact, you’re making them not only nutrients are missing, but the blood sugar regulation and so much more stuff.
We won’t even get into here today, but
women need lots more protein than they think. Probably I think probably every woman I’m working with is probably we’re getting her to at least double and maybe even triple the amount of protein she was used to eating to start with. Yeah.
Michelle Hurn: Yeah. The regular, the RDA is 0.08. This is ridiculous. And there’ve been lots of studies that have encouraged, recommended pleaded.
We need to go higher than this. And they just, but when you do that, you got to cut down on something and they don’t want to cut down on their process carbohydrate base there. So I don’t feel like they’re, the recommendations are going to change, but yes, meat and [00:37:00] meat, isn’t just protein. That’s another thing we have to think.
Human physiology. We H we absorb meat. It’s the vitamins. It’s the minerals. It’s the, carnitine, carnosine Taryn, all these co-factors that work perfectly and synergistically in our body. You want to try to reproduce it in this little plant-based lab created nonsense. That’s terrible.
I wouldn’t feed that to my dog or my chickens do not eat that. It’s not good for the planet as a huge carbon footprint. It’s horrible for your body. And it’s just making people in Silicon valley a lot of money. So don’t fall for the.
Carole Freeman: Yes. Oh gosh. What a, what am I the same client that had such good results on Dexascan?
Her son has been inspired by her journey and he’s gained remarkable health. So he, I think he’s about seventh grade. And not only did he lose 14 pounds. Gained five inches. The fat percentage change was remarkable. And one of his teachers is having them do research on plant-based stuff right now, but she’s clearly a plant-based person.
And so making them watch like forks over knives and research, this and that. And then th you’ll [00:38:00] this, wait til you hear this, wait until you hear this. So he had to have a diet diary and turn that into his teeth. And he was forced to take a form home to his mother and have it signed to inquire as to why he eats so much meat.
Cause that’s just so bad for him and for the planet. So we had some good discussions and thankfully he’s a very intelligent young man. Who’s this is not right, what she’s telling me. And so he’s rebelling against what the teachings are, but it’s just it’s going into our schools now and these poor kids.
Yeah.
Michelle Hurn: It’s really bad. And some of the documentaries are just so bad, but they hire people, and they have these scary voices that, music will kill you. And it’s ridiculous. It doesn’t have any basis in reality. Like I, this is not reality. Once again, with me, it was dangerous.
The human species would not exist. And obviously it’s just use your common sense. Are things created in a lab in Silicon valley? Is that better for human health? And it’s just like humans. We need calories. We need meat that we need enough [00:39:00] bioavailable nutrition that is very hard to get in plants.
Plants have lots of things called anti. Things that actually bind iron deficiency. We is the number one mineral deficiency worldwide, more than 25% of us are iron deficient kids. It’s about 50%. And it’s even if you’re eating meat and stuff, we’re eating things that bind with it.
If you’re eating grains, beans, OLEDs, peanut butter, those things bind with with iron they’re full of phytic acid, so it’s like this notion that eating more plants is better getting more fiber, It’s actually binding to a lot of the Dean can iron and removing these things and making them less bioavailable throughout history.
Humans ate very small amounts of plans. Of course, if you live close to the equator, you ate more, plants were very small. They didn’t have a lot of carbohydrates. We did eat some fruits, tubers and things, but the human species thrives off meat and fat. Once again, you can’t defy the laws of nature.
You can try. You ended up just making what is his name? The guy that the Titanic that made that maybe making me, making him a lot of lenses. He owns a lot of this plant. [00:40:00]
Carole Freeman: Oh, does he? I did some digging awhile ago about iron and, same thing. You said that it’s really hard to get enough iron.
And I find you have to have three animal Blake based meals a day to get adequate iron. Nevermind. If you can absorb it all or utilize it, right? So even just having one meal, that’s not animal food-based, you’re going to be behind in the amount of iron that you need to consume a date. So a meatless meal or a meatless day, you’re like.
Like you said, kids need so much more and don’t even knew cause they’re growing and that’s essential for that too. So went through a
Michelle Hurn: history of kids. We used to eat especially if you grew up close to a farm, you steep eggs, you’d even have bacon. You’d have skew steak, you’d have it. School you’d have meats.
And at dinner you always had some type of Emmy. And now it’s just like my God, if you look at what kids eat, it’s just like French toast and chocolate milk and a bag of chips and candy bar for lunch. And mom and dad are exhausted. So we’re getting McDonald’s or pizza for dinner. It’s like we’re getting processed junk, and so little actual.
Protein. And that’s a huge problem. And I think that’s, what’s contributing or one of the main factors [00:41:00] contributing to obesity. And then, we have kids, like I w when I was on a plane, I watched a woman give to the kid, literally pull out the lucky charm, like from the big box and give her to this kid.
And she was just eating. She had to be like four years old and halfway through the plane, she’s screaming and freaking out. And her mom’s why won’t you be quiet? I’m like call on me. I know you just gave her like 90 grams of sugar, but once again, one more time then, oh, these things are fine.
They’re good snacks. Eat them in moderation. Like we have to, as a society, come back to common sense and say, you know what we need to be. We need to be giving our kids snacks that are low or no in sugar. I’m not anti-car by I eat some carrots, I eat some berries, but if everybody had them as a rule, Low percentage of their diet.
And certainly if you’re a growing child or an athlete, you can have more, but having your foundation start with that foundation, meat, fat fish, seafood, butter, tallow, all the condos, whatever. And then, you’ll have a small amount of carbohydrates. We’d flip the. You want to heal the planet, we’d heal the planet quickly.
You’re doing that.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. So true. [00:42:00] Then I think that, the, all the big corporations that are making money off of us being sick right now, they should invest in, wellness technologies, right? Like you guys can still make money, just create, some apps for health or, some apps to a lot of moving into the the.
Yeah.
Michelle Hurn: And that’s, and that’s what you, I was actually, it’s hard though, I literally like I was on a run and I was like, man, that’s frustrating that I can’t make any money doing what I went to school to do, and processed food companies. Like it’s very cheap. Producing their food, they’re making a ton of money.
So it’s, it’s hard to do the right thing. And I’m fortunate that, my wife has a good job and I was in a position to take a huge pay. Cut. But, I’m always hopeful and I’m always hopeful that we can reach people, grassroots that we can, somebody watches this and is man, my health is crappy.
Like maybe I what would my life be like if I decided to change and I reached out and got a health coach, cause I’m just telling you I, if you had told me a few years ago, how much different my life would be health wise, I wouldn’t believe you. I was like, no, I’ve been dealing with this stuff for decades, but it’s amazing how.[00:43:00]
Eating the correct fizz and really removing some of those more inflammatory foods just changes everything.
Carole Freeman: Oh yeah. The same thing I would have. I would have totally I’m trying to add a banner for your website. I would have same thing. I would’ve been the person that was like, oh, it’s a fad.
It’s not sustainable. It’s not good for you. You can’t cut out all this whole food group. Like you needed to do moderation and
Michelle Hurn: Know, I have people I’ll ask me sometimes that are like, Hey, my, my dad, my brother and my sister, how do I change them? I’m doing so well. And my best friend is struggling.
She put, she won’t give up soda. What I do. And the tough answer is you cannot change people who are not ready to change. But you can live it because people desperately want healing. Like I’ve worked. I’ve worked in catcher care. I’ve worked on some pretty people want healing, their parents, people want to heal.
And when they see you being healthy, first they might not believe you. But if you keep just showing up being yourself, like eventually when they’re ready, cause that was my thing. I was like, okay I’m scared about this keto thing where you’ll look pretty healthy and happy and I’m not [00:44:00] healthy and happy.
So when people are ready, then you can share your story. And I always have a few talking points ready. Someone asked me like, oh, why are we know that me? And I’m like, yeah, you won’t believe me and my anxiety so much, but because people can relate to that, but had. Oh, I’m like, man, I used to be tired of the military and I have stable energy.
Oh, wow. Really, give people a couple of talking points, but do not be those, nobody likes those people that knock on your door. They want to tell you about Jesus. I’m a Jesus fan, but nobody likes those people. And you’re like, no so you can’t be that person. Like it just sets.
People are like, go away. You have to be, just show up, live it. And when they’re ready, you’re ready to share your story.
Carole Freeman: Oh, that’s such great advice. I love that you asked that question of yourself. I should have asked that too. Any thing in closing, anything you would hope I would ask you about, I’m going to put your website up on the banner here?
Michelle Hurn: No, I appreciate that. Yeah, I’m sure I could talk about a million different things, but I really appreciate the time I’m gonna if people are looking for me, I’m on Instagram at Brun, eat meats for Pete. Yeah. The dietitians dilemma.net is my website. Meet, [00:45:00] repeat, run, eat meat.
Okay. And then my book is on Amazon. You can go to the dietitians, dilemma.net. I got a paperback e-book and audible and yeah. And the next I’m going to be at keto con and Austin in July, I’ll be at a low carb USA in August. Yeah. And I’m always open to questions, feedback and yeah, I guess it’s like a.
Carole Freeman: So great, Michelle, thank you so much for being here today, sharing your story. Thank you for doing the hard work that we got to turn this whole ship around and is a lot of work. All of us rowing together, trench we’re making
Michelle Hurn: waves, and that’s a really good analogy though, because sometimes I’m sure you feel this way too.
I guess, closing that man, you feel like you’re doing all this work and you’re advocating and you’re like, oh, the world is so messed up. But it’s the ripple effect. You throw the pebble in it, like you don’t know and you, and I don’t know. If somebody might hear something today and I don’t know.
And then a few months down the road, they’re like, oh, I remember hearing that. And I understand her. So I would encourage anybody to like, keep sharing, keep advocating, keep living it, cause you, you may [00:46:00] not know you might be impacting the people around you
Carole Freeman: for sure. So such great advice. So speaking of that, share this episode with everyone.
Yeah, again, thank you so much for being here. Our next episode. And a couple of weeks, episode 42 is going to be Nicole Laurent. She is a licensed mental health counselor and uses a keto diet to help her mental health of her clients. And so I don’t know if you know her or not, but I’m gonna have her on next.
Also on a personal note, I’m headed to Vegas next week, so we won’t have a live show, but also follow me on Instagram and Facebook to see how I live my life keto, even while I’m traveling. And even in Vegas, it’s not hard folks, you can do it. So again, thanks. Thank you to our guest, Michelle for being here.
And thank you for sharing all your hard work and everyone’s support the show by leaving a review. If you listen to this podcast platform share this episode on Facebook or YouTube that you’re watching too. And remember help us grow the show and we’ll help you shrink. And thanks again everyone for being here today.
Joel Byars is a comedian, podcaster and trophy husband with over ten years experience performing comedy suitable for everyone from the grandkids to grandparents and even granddogs!
Not only has he toured the world doing stand-up, but he has also interviewed over 300 comedians like Jeff Forxworthy and Cedric the Entertainer on his award winning Hot Breath! Podcast.
Listen on Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music
Carole Freeman: Hey, we’re live everybody. Are you struggling to give up sugar? Have you ever wondered why it’s so hard? This episode is for you stick around because I’m going to be talking with comedian, Joel buyers about his stint going sugar-free Joel. Don’t tell me, I don’t even know yet.
If you’re still sugar-free, I’m going to do a quiz here for everybody, but don’t, let’s make it a surprise, even for me. Welcome everyone to Keto chat live. I’m your host Carole Freeman masters in nutrition and clinical health psychology. I’m a board certified keto nutrition specialist. I primarily specialize in helping women 40 plus follow a keto diet for sustainable weight loss.
And today I’m so lucky to have a special guest cohost Joel Byers, he’s a comedian award-winning podcaster trophy husband with over 10 years of experience performing comedy suitable for everyone, from grandkids to grandparents and even grand dogs. I am a grand dog mother myself, so I appreciate that.
Not only is he tour the world doing standup, but he’s also interviewed over 300 comedians like Jeff Foxworthy, Cedric the entertainer on his award-winning hot breath podcast. So welcome. Welcome, Joel.
Joel Byars: Thank you so much for having me, Carole. I’m so excited to be here.
Carole Freeman: You are you ready to do the medical disclaimer? I gave you a short, very short assignment. A joke, right?
Joel Byars: I’m ready. Do I read the whole thing?
Carole Freeman: yeah, read the whole thing. That’s legally. We just gotta make sure that we’re not given,
Joel Byars: oh, so you’re put, I see you’re putting this on me. So if somebody goes and tries to do that, they’re gonna be like, but Joel said it not Carole. Now it’s.
Medical disclaimer. This show is meant for educational and entertainment purposes only. It is not medical advice nor intended to diagnose, prevent, treat, or cure any condition. If you have any questions or concerns related to your specific medical condition, please contact Dr. Obvious and seriously, please contact your personal healthcare professional.
Carole Freeman: Oh, thank you so much for being game for that on the spot joke, writing challenge. Oh, I’m so excited right here. I’ve got a, I’ve got a quiz to engage our list, our viewers or listeners right now. Joining us. I see. We’ve got people live. Here’s your quiz for this show is how many days did Joel give up sugar recently?
How many days? So put your guesses in the chat now and we’ll reveal it in a bit. Joel, where do you, where are you joining us from?
Joel Byars: I am in a ATL. Atlanta.
Carole Freeman: Are you at the airport? Is that ATL? The airport I’m in PHX.
Joel Byars: Phoenix?
Carole Freeman: Yes.
Joel Byars: Oh, no. I’m near the airport. I’m not far from the airport. Yeah.
Carole Freeman: I’m an SCA transplant. Let’s see. Test your chair. Yes.
Joel Byars: Nice.
Carole Freeman: That’s an easy one. Yeah. 27 years in Seattle and just been here almost two years and I love it.
Joel Byars: Yeah. I’ve been in Atlanta. Most of I’ve lived in Georgia, majority of my life, and then been in Atlanta for several years now with my wife.
Carole Freeman: I don’t have you worked hard to get rid of the accent? I don’t really hear.
Joel Byars: Oh, I worked real hard. I made a private school and she took me to liberal arts school to not sound like this right here.
Carole Freeman: Now I believe
Joel Byars: I call that’s my redneck Tourette’s. I definitely have an accent in there, but
Carole Freeman: I grew up in Oregon. Can you hear that redneck accent in me? We talked about getting a worse rag to clean your face. And
is it, my mom always did the come here, let me clean your face off.
Joel Byars: Oh yeah. My dad would do that for sure. My dad would do that.
Carole Freeman: Oh, my gosh. Joel, I didn’t give you the overview, what we’re going to do. I figured I’d just give, a personal interview first about how you got into comedy and how you got into quitting sugar and I’m going to use, so this may be different than what you’re used to, but I’m going to use your quitting sugar as a teaching moment on the show here.
So I’m going to talk about, symptoms. How would people know they may have problem with sugar? Why it’s so hard to give up? I really nerd out on the brain chemistry of addiction stuff and then I’m going to give my top tips for how people can get off sugar without cravings. And yeah. And then we’ll tell everybody how to, how they can connect with you.
Let’s talk about you first.
Why giving up sugar is hard? Carole interviews comedian Joel Byars about his experiment of quitting sugar and provides tips and strategies for making it easier to quit.
Joel Byars: I’m with it, bring it on for anything. No question too personal. I want to it’s this health journey is definitely something like, as I’ve gotten in my thirties, I’m taking more and more seriously, but yeah, no. Yeah, please don’t hesitate to ask anything. You won’t offend me.
I want to talk vulnerably to hopefully help other people, cause it’s very it’s. I can just see the difference physically, mentally, emotionally, just based on what I am eating. So I’m excited to talk to you about this as well. But I didn’t mean to derail your interview. I just wanted to put that little asterisk to please ask away because I’m learning right along with everyone here, listening.
Carole Freeman: The the show titles, Keto chat live, so it’s less, it’s not totally formal. It’s more of a chat format. I have some things I want to ask about, but also we can go any which way we want during this. Also, I have a note to myself because when I do my transcripts for the show, I start every sentence with and or so, and so remember to try not to say so many of those so’s and and’s I don’t know if it’s working or not, but, how did you get into comedy, Joel? You’ve been doing about 11, 12 years.
Joel Byars: Yeah, February 1st 2010 was my first time doing it. So I’ve been doing it a little over 12 years now. I’d always wanted to be a comedian and do comedy. I loved watching comedy growing up. I was always the funny kid, but I didn’t actually decide to pursue comedy until my senior year of college.
I was about to graduate. And I was like I have nothing to lose. Sallie Mae took it all. So might as well try this little comedy dream. And then as soon as I did it, it was like taking the blue pill in the matrix. I was immediately, as soon as I did it, everything in my life immediately became revolved around getting as good at this as possible and making this my full-time career, which I’m fortunate enough to say is now the case.
Carole Freeman: Oh, after college, how’d your parents take that news then?
Joel Byars: My mom has always instilled like that growth mindset within me and always was sure. I was aware that I I had a special gift that I would be sharing with the world. And so she was always supportive for it, and always not like what took you so long, but yeah, I’ve known this your whole life type deal. So there was no, no reservations when I had to move back in with her to be a dishwasher with a college degree and things like that. You know what I mean?
Carole Freeman: Wait, I’m going to guess you’re an only child.
Joel Byars: I have two older sisters.
Carole Freeman: Oh, the baby. Okay. That was the other
Joel Byars: for sure. The baby
Carole Freeman: you’re the sweet, innocent one that can do no wrong probably.
Joel Byars: Yeah. Especially if you asked my sisters. Yeah. I’m sure they would say that. Yeah.
Carole Freeman: Makes sense. I’m following.
Joel Byars: Yeah. But it’s all been supportive. I feel very fortunate that I haven’t really had anyone in my career who was like, are you sure? Or when are you going to quit this comedy silliness and get a real job, so fortunately I’ve had a lot of supportive people around me in this journey because when you’re on stage, it’s usually the opposite when you’re bombing or comedians being competitive. So it’s good to have that those family members in your corner.
Carole Freeman: And how did you maintain your drive to keep going? Because a lot of times comedians have to suffer through career that they hate. And then they’re like, oh my God, this comedy thing is what I really want to do. And it, the contrast is much more motivating. And when you don’t have a safety net, you’ve got to work a little harder. I know there’s both ways can be equally hard, right?
So you have the cushion of being able to live at home and the support of your family. Especially being as young as you were at that time. What, what drove you to be as successful as you are?
Joel Byars: I think it was always just part of the process. I never lost the perspective of like, me, okay. Working at enterprise all day and then being out all night at open mikes and then being up again at six to work at enterprise again, write jokes on my lunch break and then do open mics at night and doing that for like over a year, saving up a nest egg to then move into a studio apartment in the hood of Atlanta where I’m waiting tables and washing dishes and refilling many bars.
Like all of those sacrifices were in service of the bigger picture and in service of just what I knew was going to happen. So when I did bomb and beat myself up, I would have to remind myself that this is all part of it. Everyone struggles. If it was easy, everyone would do it. But just maintaining that, it’s just what I wanted to do.
I wouldn’t want to do anything else. Like I would rather be out at an open mic at 1:00 AM bombing. Then having to be up early, to go rent cars and things like, it’s just, it was always just like in hindsight, it’s I used to play like sports and I played football and we would have three a day practices for like team camp or whatever.
And the summers in hindsight, I’m like, I don’t know how, why I would ever do that and could never do it again. But when you’re in it, it’s just part of that process. And when you’re working towards a bigger vision, I think it always helps to have that reminder that you’re working towards something bigger than just this immediate moment of discomfort.
Carole Freeman: So it sounds like you did have that contrast of a day job that you knew you didn’t want to make your career. So you had that as a motivator to keep going with the bombing at night,
Joel Byars: for sure. Yeah. Yeah. You need that. Yeah.
Carole Freeman: And you have a successful podcast. How long that’s been going in? When did you get started with that?
Joel Byars: Yeah, that’s been going on. I think almost six years now. I think this summer it’ll be six years and it started as a way for me to interview Atlanta comedians. I’ve always been a fan and champion of Atlanta comedy. That’s why I still live here and never decided to move to an LA or New York, even though I could have, but I really wanted to create a grassroots foundation self-made opportunities from here in Atlanta.
And I wanted to showcase Atlanta comedians that were on last comic standing NBC’s in a competition. So I set a goal to interview all 10 or 11, all 11 of the Atlanta comics on last comic standing. And then from there it just kinda kept going, I’ve already started. I took a little bit of a break to figure out what I wanted to do.
And then I had a friend just be like just keep going, just keep doing it. And it’s, it became the show I wish existed, which is how I make a lot of decisions of do I wish this existed? So my favorite moments of any comedy podcast were when they were nerding out about how to write a joke or how to negotiate a contract or how to book a late night set and things like that.
I always, those were my favorite moments. So I made a show that was just that’s like inside the actors studio for comedians. And it turns out other people enjoy that as well. I’ve seen other shows come up that are like similar to that vein as well of just comedians, really like getting into the process and everything.
But it all started with me just creating a show I wish existed, and now it’s just become so much more.
Carole Freeman: I think that comedians that are listening right now, listen to what he’s saying. Because I think there’s a lot of comedians that think that, newer comedians that think oh, I want to start a podcast.
And they just want to, trash talk with their friends all day long, but think about what who’s going to want to listen to that. I I think some people think, oh, that’s what you do as a comedian and you start a podcast and I’m hilarious. So people will just want to listen. But if you’re a big name and you have a following, people will listen to you talk garbage with your friends.
But if you’re just starting out think about what Joel was talking about what would you like to hear? What would be a value to you? What would you take your time out of your day to listen to that would help you improve as a comedian? Think about starting that podcast rather than you just want to talk into a microphone with your friends for an hour or two.
Joel Byars: Exactly. And there’s so many, I think it’s like, gosh, it’s like like 70 or 80% of podcasts on iTunes have less than like 10 episodes. It’s like belligerent, how like just the turnover rate and churn of people wanting to start a podcast. So yeah, you want to make sure it’s centered around something you’re super interested in something you’re super passionate about because there’s going to be moments like anything you’re pursuing.
There’s going to be moments where, you’re up at 6:00 AM editing to get it out by 8:00 AM, because that’s what you promised your four listeners. So you got to do those things, and it’s making sure that you’re creating a show that you would listen to, regardless of whether or not other people were listening to it.
So it, it is it’s true with everyone wants to start a podcast, it’s, it’s work.
Carole Freeman: The a hundred percent. Yeah. I’m one year into this and this is episode 40, so thank you for being here.
Joel Byars: Oh my gosh. That’s so exciting.
Carole Freeman: And I, this is where I can plug in. I’m actually speaking at a podcasting conference in may, in Orlando, Florida, and yeah.
Pod Fest. Yeah.
Joel Byars: Oh yeah. I’m good friends with them. Chris pre pandemic. Okay. You’re gonna have a great time. I met so many great people there. It’s going to be awesome.
Carole Freeman: This is their, they took whatever year or two off, right? A lot of things did and. They’re anticipating having over 2000 people in attendance.
So it should be pretty darn big, but yeah. I have you can use my discount code, ketocarole to get I think it’s 20% off tickets. I think that’s what it is. So come hang out in Orlando.
Joel Byars: It’s worth it. Yeah. For anyone listening that conference is well worth it, that you just get access to so many people and learn so much from the best in the game. Yeah, it’s totally worth going.
Carole Freeman: I’m going to be speaking about a live video podcasting, so awesome. Yeah. Can’t wait. I’ve never been to Orlando, so I’m sure in may, it’ll be nice and miserable.
I’ve been to, I’ve been to Austin, Texas during June and July. So I can’t imagine may and Orlando’s much worse, right?
Joel Byars: Yeah, you’ll be fine. You’ll be fine.
Carole Freeman: They taught me last time. I was in Austin that they talk about how many short day it is. Do they do that in Georgia? Atlanta
Joel Byars: Shirt day.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. So oh, what’s a three shirt day. Like you sweat through three shirts. Like how humid it is.
Joel Byars: Oh, no, I haven’t heard that.
Carole Freeman: Oh, Ooh. It’s a three shirt day today. Oh, it’s a hot one.
Joel Byars: Nobody in Georgia wear shirts. That’s probably why
Carole Freeman: It’s a three wife beater day
three NFL Jersey day.
Joel Byars: Maybe just body tats. It’s probably just body tats.
Carole Freeman: That’s what I expect Florida is too. I’ve been to Miami beach. I’ve never been to Orlando though. Oh, your different areas? I can’t wait. Okay. Let’s talk about your sugar journey. When did it start? When did, when, when did you start to think maybe it’s a problem.
Joel Byars: When did it start? What was rock bottom. What’s interesting is. Sugar is so fascinating to me, just because of how everywhere it is and how poisonous it is at the same time and just politics, the business behind it. But that’s all things I got into, I think, as I’ve gone into the journey more, but I think where it started is really growing up.
My mom was always mindful of sugar intake. Like we never really had sugary cereals, like Crispix was an edgy day, which they used to advertise that help kids focus. And then I think ended up getting sued about that, but it’s incredible. The advertising. She was always very mindful of like our sugar intake and just, she was a teacher.
So she was probably around a bunch of kids who are on sugar a lot. And just she had the foresight to realize, oh, this probably isn’t great. As a, as an upcoming football player, you do life hacks, like bullet cornflakes, and then you glaze it in a pound of table sugar until it’s like a sugar fondue in, like I did all that, so honestly never saw it as a problem until maybe I started tracking as I’ve gotten older.
I’m 34 now, but like probably late twenties. I started keeping track of just day to day tracking my time. What am I eating? How is my sleep affecting what I’m eating? What am I drinking affecting? Like I quit alcohol. Like I’m sober now. Like I quit completely. I quit for last year and then started drinking again in January and was like, I just don’t want to, I just, it, when I noticed the direct connection between me drinking and then anxiety, depression, and then also sugar cravings on top of that.
Carole Freeman: Yeah.
Joel Byars: So, I can’t think of a moment where I was like, I need to get my life together because there’s just, there’s been several. I don’t know if, I don’t know, cause I’ve never been diagnosed or gone for therapy. So I don’t know if I would say I have a binge-eating disorder, but I’ll def, I’ve definitely gone through stages or like phase of like deprivation and then just bingeing or like I’ve been driving and eating cereal before.
Carole Freeman: We’ll talk about that as one of the symptoms of addiction. Yeah.
Joel Byars: I don’t know what that says or going to a movie theater and just have a bunch of like terrible food and just eat it in there. So I would catch myself doing this and then try to retrace maybe the cause and effect and things. So I don’t think there’s a singular moment. I think it’s like an accumulation of oh, I’m doing this again after literally saying I’m never going to do this again. And then as I’m doing it, like saying, I’m never doing this again, so
Carole Freeman: yeah.
Joel Byars: I don’t. Yeah.
Carole Freeman: Your perspective is more of a biohacker like, you’re just trying to figure out how to feel the best possible in your human exterior experience. So you noticed alcohol made you feel better avoiding it. And so the sugar is along those lines as well, too.
Joel Byars: Sugar, for sure. Directly connected to yeah. Anxiety and depression and all. And then just physically, I probably have some sort of body dysmorphia too, where, like I eat something bad and then immediately see in the mirror, like a different person, I don’t, I haven’t gone to therapy for any of that, but these are just things I’ve observed and like I’m aware of at least,
Carole Freeman: I have a master’s degree in psychology trained to be a clinical diagnosis, all that stuff.
I have a different perspective though, on binge eating disorder and it gets labeled as like a mental health problem, but it’s really. Our brain and our body reacting to hyper palatable foods in the way that we’re designed. So it’s a mismatch of human evolution. We’ve been on this planet for 200,000 years and we’re designed to seek out high reward foods, but they were rare.
And so food manufacturers have figured out a way of, engineering, these foods that are very high reward that make us crave them and over eat them. And so our body’s just doing what it should do in when those foods are in our presence, but we get, but we’re taught that oh no, you should just all foods fit and you should have moderation.
Joel just control yourself. And if you can’t, you have a mental illness so even though I am at, trained in that field, I have a totally different perspective on that. I don’t think that actually should be a mental illness. It’s more of a. It’s unrecognized that’s just the way our bodies are, our brains are wired. We’re wired to eat those foods. And then we feel guilty, because we’re told, oh, that must be something wrong with you. Cause you can’t control yourself around those things. But I’ll tell you most people can’t control them selves around that. It’s more rare that the person, that they can eat one handful of candy and then they’re like, oh, I’m good. I don’t need any more for a few days. That’s somethings that’s mental illness.
Joel Byars: I think that’s what helped me is like realizing that I’m not alone in doing this and I’m not I think the step one, everything is so gradual. It’s you want everything overnight, but it takes years of like consistency, but of just like trying it for a little while and then maybe falling back and then trying for a little while and fall, like it’s just constantly just going back and forth.
But I think what helped me keep positive momentum is just not beating myself up, but if I did do something where I was like, I’ll never eat a box of cereal alone again. And then I do, I stopped beating my, I stopped beating myself up. I didn’t say I’m stopping this. It’s I’m just, if I do this, I’m just not going to beat myself up.
And that was probably the first step in my life. Long journey of getting more, just like control and mindful about my eating is just if I’m not a hundred percent perfect or whatever, I’m not beating myself up about it. And that’s really helped me and realizing other people, this trillion dollar industry, designing food to exploit our biology yeah, you may want to eat an entire box of cereal because they spent good money. To make sure that you want, so
Carole Freeman: there’s a, there’s a fun book. If you haven’t read it the Dorito effect explains a lot of this, that, how they manufacture these foods to make us crave them and over eat them. And it’s interesting though, because mental health professionals, aren’t trained this way.
Most dieticians and nutritionists are trained to know this and doctors aren’t. And so they’re out there telling you just exercise more and just have portion control, eat less calories and move more. But all the, while the mood food manufacturers, like we make more money, just keep yes. Portion control, wink, wink
Joel Byars: Low. Yeah. It’s low fat and then high sugar. Yeah.
Carole Freeman: And Joel you’ve figured out something too. Somebody I’ve learned a lot from is her name is Joan and she is a process food addiction. She has a PhD in process food addiction. She literally wrote a textbook on this.
And so she says, one of the keys to not going into relapse is to focus on the physical pain of eating sugar or whatever substance you’re trying to stay away from and not getting stuck in the guilt of it. She says, the guilt will keep you in relapse. It will keep you using that substance because it makes you it numbs out the guilt.
But if you focus on like how physically bad it made you feel that will help you avoid a future relapse.
Joel Byars: Oh, wow.
Carole Freeman: Yeah.
Joel Byars: Yeah.
Carole Freeman: We tend to want to get stuck in the ruminating, like beating ourselves up and then we just need another box of cereal to make ourselves feel better. Cause we feel so bad about ourselves, right?
Joel Byars: Yes cereal, that’s mine.
Carole Freeman: So are you still sugar-free how many days?
Joel Byars: I’m mostly sugar-free cause I’m mindful of like me going feast or famine to where I’ve done challenges before or whatever, and white knuckling it and then just fall off the rails. So it’s each time I do something I get better and just more mindful and mindful.
So I mowed, I did. So I did sugar free for 30 days and then
Carole Freeman: good for you.
Joel Byars: My in-laws. Thank you. And then I took a before, this was my first time taking a before and after photo. Okay. And not a photo every day, but like I took a photo on day one and then day 30 that, that was a game changer to see in 30 days, the effect of not having.
I was fairly blown away and I’m going to keep that photo forever. It’s like motivation of it’s more than just like me trying to deprive myself. There’s so many benefits and anytime I’ve gone off sugar, so many amazing things have just happened and I’ve just been happier than ever. So I definitely want to make this part of my lifestyle, but I say that to say on day 30, my in-laws came into town and they brought like a homemade cake.
So on the next day I had some with them, but I didn’t. Since then, like my wife has brought home ice cream. I didn’t have any, she made granola, which I would normally be all over. So I’m not, but I’m not approaching it from the way of like I’m depriving myself. I’m trying to have a healthier mentality around.
It’s just, I just don’t really want it. I think sometimes I would eat it because I felt like I should. Or something like that, like when in Rome type deal, but I’m just trying to be more mindful about listening to what do I really want? And I think once you get away from that pull of sugar long enough and being mindful around consumption of it and seeing the cause and effect of when you do it and when you don’t, I think that’s just a big motivator for me now is I do have a lot of things I want to do.
And it’s a lot of work that I’ll need to do. And if I’m half the time having anxiety or depression or worried about my brain going everywhere because of just the neurochemistry of consuming sugar. There is there’s the laundry list of things that sugar does for us. That’s bad is infinite, but so I’ve had it a little bit, but it’s honestly not even something that like, oh, when it gets to Friday, I’m going to get to have my cake or like something like that.
It’s just, I’m trying to have a mindful balance and it’s, it’s a daily. A daily thing. I’m taking it one day at a time but I’m just trying to maintain mindfulness and thinking of the bigger picture of that piece of cake looks like a panic attack tomorrow. That’s I’m trying to just think of it more in those terms.
Carole Freeman: That’s a great technique. First my stack of post-it notes, I don’t have them handy, but I’ll recommend for my clients that struggle with, certain, on keto, we’re avoiding sugar, we’re avoiding processed, refined, grain products and things.
And so sometimes things that are maybe something that they’re very attached to I’ll have them write. The name of that thing on a piece of paper, a note card, or post-it note, and on the other side, focus on all the pain that brings you, right? So for you, that’s what you’re doing already. You’re oh that box of cereal is a panic attack.
And so you’re associating those within your brain and that’s a really powerful way at creating an aversion to it. Your so have you ever had food poisoning from anything you ate?
Joel Byars: I don’t think so. No.
Carole Freeman: So you’ve ever heard of people though that they had shrimp that one time and now they can never even look at it because you can create a powerful aversion to something if you associate that thing with the pain of it. And if you immediately think of the pain of it. So for food poisoning for people, their body like violently creates that aversion to that food. And so that’s one of the tricks you’re figuring these out very smartly associate that food with the pain.
Whereas often when we are stuck in a craving cycle, our brain keeps fantasizing about the pleasure it brings us. And when you’re stuck in the fantasy about the pleasure of it, that increases cravings and it makes it harder for that’s where you feel deprived. But what you’re focusing on is oh, that equals a panic attack.
I’m not deprived. I’m choosing not to have that,
Joel Byars: get the crash, then I’ll just want to nap and then be worthless the rest of the day or week or whatnot, why do we want. I won’t say we, I do this. I tend to want to, self-sabotage like be on a roll and then, but even it’s like through the day, it’s oh, really healthy today.
I better have five tablespoons of peanut butter. Oh seven o’clock to completely cancel out any positive momentum. And I’ve caught myself doing that several times in several instances with food of ending up self-sabotaging
Carole Freeman: well, I just, I have you heard of the book, you are the mountain. Oh, it just, I was popping up all over my tick talk and I just got a copy of it. And it’s all about self-sabotage and how, there’s not a mountain in our way. We’re the ones that are, is creating the obstacle for us. So I’m just a couple of chapters into it, but basically it talks a lot about when we have things that we do that we self-sabotage it’s because we have conflicting values or things that we want to have happen.
So what you, on the one hand you want all that mental clarity, you want to feel awesome and amazing and be productive and accelerate your career. And on the other hand, there’s something else that you’re using that sugar, maybe the peanut butter, because it does the same thing too, to soothe yourself for.
So it’s like identifying, what am I using that for? What am I, using it to avoid? Or, so basically you’ve got two different needs that one need is to be clear and not anxious and not depressed. And the other need is to soothe yourself from something. And so the part of the, the work is then figuring out, so why am I using the peanut butter?
What is it doing for me and what is my real need? So it, not that it immediately is clear, but taking some steps, what happened before you had to have the peanut butter? And we’ll talk about, so that Or is it? So our addiction and our brain is an, I think of it as an autopilot program.
And so foods that we can become addicted to, there are things that, in nature, they were rare and valuable, right? So honey, for example, or fruit historically has been, very seasonal, hard to find and fruit even historically has been little tiny things. So have you ever seen natural berries on a trail versus the one you can, strawberries in the store, this big.
We, we seek them out and we’re trying to eat as much as possible, but they were self-limiting nuts as well. So nuts. Have you ever seen, real nuts where you’ve got to crack the shell and pick them out with the picker and takes you half an hour, by the time you get it? You’re like, that’s not that good.
Now. Now we can buy five pound bags in Costco and they’re roasted and they’re sugared and salted and you can eat them by the handful, right? Nuts. If we get them the way that they were existing in nature, they’re hard to overeat. Like almost everything was that way, but we’re still wired to try to get as much as possible.
So our brain memorizes, right? Try to find the honey every year, the brain would memorize, oh, this time of the year, the temperature, the time of the day where you walked on the trail to find the honey in the first place. So our brains still do that. And so every time you’ve used sugar or maybe, the sugar in the peanut butter, cause what’s even more rewarding to our brain is sugar and fat together.
So peanut butter is the perfect sugar. In fact, together, like that’s even more rewarding to our brain. And so every time you’ve used that your brain memorizes, everything about that, like how you were feeling, what time of the day where it is, right? So you might have a habit loop going on that like the end of a stressful day after you’ve had dinner, after you sit in this chair, you get this beverage and then your brain goes, now it’s peanut butter time.
So figuring out, so those there, they can be like a hardwire groove in the brain that it’s just, you cue the first part of that autopilot series. And it’s almost impossible to turn it off once it gets queued. And so the trick of that then is if you find every night, you’re like, oh gosh, why do I want this so bad?
Like one thing is you can just not have it in the house, then it makes it impossible to have it. But sometimes it’s figuring out what’s the first cue that tells your brain that we’re going to have peanut butter. So it could be, you’ve finished dinner and you did the dishes or something, or for some of my ladies, a struggle with giving up wine in the evening, it’s like how they relax. And they always went and sat in this chair and they, so figuring out what is the whole autopilot series. And doing something before the first cue of that. So it’s basically an instruction manual in your brain.
That’s like these things all happen in this order. You got to figure out what number one is. And before number one’s gets queued, do something different. So create a whole new routine in the evening for yourself. And then your brain will actually be awake and alert and going, oh, what are we doing? This? Isn’t the peanut butter autopilot. This is something new. I need to pay attention because we’re learning something new here. So that’s one, one, that may be what’s going on of why it’s hard in the evening to not have that one thing.
Joel Byars: Oh, that’s gold. Yeah. Thank you so much. I love that.
Carole Freeman: Let me, so let me just give people, I’ve got the like eight signs that you may have a sugar addiction, but these can also be any other foodstuffs substance. So one is, this is a fun fact, I think is cravings. So most people don’t realize that cravings are not normal. Cravings only go with addictive substances. You may have a hankering for a steak or something like that, but you’re not craving it so much that you’re obsessed that you will eat it while you’re driving in your car. Or spend your last penny on getting a steak, like having an urge or desiring, or the appetite for healthy food is one thing. But anything you crave is a sign of addiction. We’re a weird thing cause we’re so used to having cravings.
Number two is tolerance. So it’s when you use it you find yourself using larger and larger quantities over time. That appears for most people sugar. And I’ll tell you too, I grew up. I sugar addict. Okay. Like my dad’s love language was candy. And he would, he was a police officer and he worked night shift. And so to get him through his night shift, he packed his pockets full of candy that he ate all day long.
And yes, he does have diabetes now. And whatever was left over. So when we got up in the morning, we could go into his police coat and pull out whatever candy was left in his pockets as dad cared about us type of thing. And I remember going over to my friend’s house and they had a big bowl of m&ms on their dining room table.
And it was just sitting there. It was just sitting there. Nobody was, I was like how have you not five minutes? Why is it just there? Exactly. And then we worked at, you talked about the cereal growing up too. We were so poor. We couldn’t buy any brand name cereals, no sugared cereals. But. Bag of sugar on the counter.
We could have as much of that as we wanted. So I, I say that when I was growing up my mom met well, but she wasn’t that great of a cook, but there were only two flavors of food we had, it was ketchup and sugar. I don’t know.
Joel Byars: And catch up his sugar.
Carole Freeman: Yeah, exactly. Vinegar, sugar and sugar. So yeah. You do you figure out the trick, like if you put the milk on the cereal first, then more sugar will stick to the, the flakes.
Joel Byars: Whoa, I don’t know, because I guess part of me didn’t want it to stick because at the end I just have my sugar suit. I just had my own little,
Carole Freeman: One of benefit. Yeah. So I figured out the yeah, you get the, if you get the flakes wet first, then some of the sugar will stick to the flake. So
Joel Byars: I don’t know if I ever was mindful enough. I was probably in a hysteria the whole time I was doing. I just
Carole Freeman: I want to say I empathize. Empathize with everyone, struggles with sugar. And when I started keto, my keto journey I did it because I had I was in a car accident. I had a brain injury, I had crushed legs. Like I did it for medical reasons and I was so afraid I was gonna fall off the wagon with my sugar addiction that I, so everything that I’m gonna teach you here is things that I threw at my own approach.
Like everything I’d ever studied about the way that, addiction part of the brain, I use this approach so that I could give myself the best chance at healing and not falling off the wagon. I had a medical reason to do it and I was like, oh my gosh, I don’t want to sabotage myself with my own sugar issues.
I get it. I get it. So now, so we were talking about the top signs or symptoms that you may have a sugar addiction number three, Repeated attempts to quit. That’s something that you shared to Joel that you like, you’ve tried many times if something wasn’t an issue for us, we wouldn’t keep trying to quit it.
Number four, spending a lot of time thinking about it, going to buy it and, or consuming it. Number five is interesting too. So neglected roles. So we think about this in like real drug addiction, right? Like where you stop, meaning your responsibilities at work school and home, but sugar can start to bleed over into that as well.
So some of the things you’re talking about, right? If if you have a sugar hangover where you end up having to take a nap or something like that’ll interfere with your ability to have perform work in school and home life stuff as as you could, or as well as you could.
And so number six then is social and interpersonal problems. This includes isolating so that you can go eat your food and private spending less time and social things because you want to go home and eat your, whatever you want to eat. Number seven is actual withdrawal physiological withdrawal symptoms.
And so since sugar hits our opiate receptors in our brain sugar withdrawal can feel just like a hard opiate drug withdrawal. I’ve had some of my clients that have had this so severely happened to them. So it literally feels like you’re going off of heroin, like aches and shakes and shivers and fever like flu feeling, headaches like really severe joint pains and things like that.
So when people get into heavy use like that, they literally can feel like they’re withdrawing off of heroin. And I’ve had a few people that have gone on the keto journey with me, and they were such heavy sugar users to start with. Day three of their withdrawal of this are literally under their desk, like a George Costanza hiding under the desk at work.
And they’re like, what is keto doing to me? And I’m like, this is actually a sign that you really need to get off of the amount of sugar and refined processed stuff that you’re eating. If you’re having this much of a withdrawal. And then hazardous use of it. So you were talking about like eating while driving, right?
So nobody’s ever gonna, I, there may be somebody out there that does a bit, like you’re not typically going to eat like steak and broccoli while you’re driving. You can wait until you get home to eat that. Whereas sugar refined, processed stuff, even fast food that sugary stuff like eating while you’re driving can be a little dangerous.
And so that’s sign number eight, that you may have an issue with sugar.
Joel Byars: Check a lot of boxes there.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. Then I want, talk a little bit more too than about like, why is sugar so hard to give up? Part of it is then a lot of the things I’ve talked about already is that it activates addiction part of the brain it’s hyper concentrated, right?
So sugar in nature doesn’t exist the way that we consume it. Maybe there’s some in fruit you could get sugar cane, but that’s only a regional thing, right? Nobody’s got sugar canes in their kitchen or anything like that. And so we’ve just, as humans figured out ways of, purifying it and concentrating it and it creates this unnatural dose that we couldn’t get in any natural foods.
And again, like I said, it hits those opiate receptors in your brain. Here’s the, here’s a little fun fact too, is that sugar water is used as a pain reliever for infants and any little boy that’s had or a man has had a circumcision, they’re given sugar water as a pain reliever before they do that procedure.
Joel Byars: Oh my God.
Carole Freeman: So that’s how potent it is of a pain reliever for sugar. And and I talked to you about that autopilot thing that happens as well. And one of the, one of the things that influences how addictive something is how convenient and frequent we can use it. Because sugar is ubiquitous, right?
It’s easy. It’s everywhere. It’s socially acceptable. It’s just empty calories, right? It’s how we show love to each other. Oh, just, you look a little one of my best friends is her grandma always told her like, oh, you have a little sugar. She literally thought that sugar fixed everything.
She’s you’re looking a little peek at you’re not feeling well, you need a little more sugar, probably more sugar in your diet. And so the more frequent you can use something, the more situations your brain memorizes, the use pattern, the more cues you have in your environment, right?
Like it could be the time of the day, the place you are, like going to the movies. It could be, driving for me initially, my dad would always stop on a road trip and have us go to the convenience store and fill up a bag of candy. And so when I first was doing keto, it was really hard when I got in the car, I wanted to go have something sweet to eat at the same time.
So the more cues you have that you use that substance. So that’s are all the reasons why sugar is so hard to give up.
Joel Byars: And it’s ingrained in like our social lives. Anytime you get together with someone, there’s food involved. There’s like the arts involved and it’s so interesting. What I’ve noticed is it’s like, at the end of the night, they’re like, oh no, take it. I shouldn’t take any of this. I was like why do you bring it in the house? It’s and food. And people show a lot of love through food as well. And especially like family recipes and things that may not always be the healthiest.
So it’s like tough to also try to not indulge out of fear of obligation that you don’t want to someone either. But while also putting yourself first and being like, no, I’m doing this for myself and my own reasons. So I can be a better family member, coworker, whatever it is as well. But it’s the environment thing is huge, you know.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a very Southern thing too, that you don’t want to offend anybody, so you’ve got to have just a little bit of it.
Joel Byars: Yeah.
Carole Freeman: When you’re right in that, the reason it’s so associated with showing love is that they, the neurochemicals that it triggers in our brain endorphins and opiates it, that, that simulates the feeling of love. And so there’s a reason why we use those things instead of actually just showing love. We’re like, no, I want to chemically make you feel it.
Joel Byars: Yeah.
Carole Freeman: All of these items. I’ve got five tips for getting off sugar without cravings. Do you want to hear them, Joel?
Joel Byars: Oh, please let them read.
Carole Freeman: So number one is getting adequate protein, especially at breakfast. So 20 to 30 grams of protein for breakfast or more, and at every meal. So what this does is it sets, sets the stage for having stable blood sugar and so adequate and protein. We actually have a protein appetite and there’s a doctor out there right now. Dr. Ted Naiman in these talks about the protein leverage hypothesis where it’s not his theory.
He’s the one I learned it from though, where it’s like, because we have a certain amount of protein that we need. Part of the reason why we overeat is because a lot of these foods are very low in protein and we’re trying to meet our protein needs. And so we overeat them. And so if you get your protein need met first, your appetite overall will be lower.
But also having adequate protein helps your blood sugar stay nice and stable, and that re greatly reduces your sugar cravings. Another one that usually sounds insane for people, but you did this already is no sweet at all for 30 days. So not only no sugar, but I actually say nothing sweet at all.
So no sugar free sugar sugars. The reason for this is that it will actually it rewires the autopilot thing in your brain and it also reorganize your taste buds. So this is a fun fact that if you avoid anything sweet at all, you’ll actually your taste buds will create more savory ones and less sweet ones.
So did you notice, I don’t know if you kept sweet stuff in like sugar-free sweets, but did you notice that like less sweet is like almost gross now? Like things that weren’t.
Joel Byars: What I did was I did some fruit. I didn’t do like super ripe bananas or dates, or I was very mindful about just not eating much sugar in general, but I would do some natural sugars, but nothing heavy.
I really wanted to be mindful about it in general. And I can, but I can tell a difference just in how sweet, like an orange tastes now, when you’re not like dumbing down with all this processed food, like your taste buds, actually, I think the, maybe they regenerate and you like tastes like candy now. It’s pretty cool.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. Yeah. So it, it makes your existing sweet taste buds much more sensitive. And so a little goes a long way at that point. Yeah, and I actually recommended people’s struggle because a lot of people I worked with like their self-proclaimed sugar addicts when I work with them and they’ll say oh, I’ve tried to give it up so many times.
And the cravings are just too intense. I can’t even stand it. So this approach that I’m talking about actually will get rid of the cravings. So no sweet at all. So part of that, the taste buds we talked about, but also it rewires the brain. So when you crave something and you give your taste buds, what it’s craving, it reinforces it.
It says good job craving. Come back again. Tomorrow at the same time, it’s very reinforcing. And in fact, in invites its friends to come back tomorrow as well. And so even if you’re doing your body, can’t tell the difference between real sugar and artificial sugars on your taste, on your tongue, right?
Your brain, the way it processes like no. That’s all I know. And oh, I got rewarded for craving with the sweet, so I’m going to crave more. And so if you actually don’t give into the cravings by having something sweet, you make them go away. Now it’s like most things with, addiction. They say like the first three days are typically the hardest, but if you make it past that, then the cravings actually completely go away because it’s kinda if do you have kids Joel?
Joel Byars: No, I have a dog.
Carole Freeman: Okay. If you imagine a child or, a dog that’s been spoiled, that is throwing a fit because they want something. And if you, if they throw the fit and you give it to them, they’re going to throw the fit again. But if you’ve, if trying to correct poor training in the past where you’re like, okay, I gave him a bag of treats and sugar every time now I don’t want them to have it the first three days of not giving into that anymore, imagine with a child there, they would throw a tantrum like bigger than they did before the first three days. But eventually they’d stop. They’re going to stop. If they realize you are really serious, you’re not going to give them that. So I think of the, the cravings in our brain are like little kids throwing a tantrum. If you reward them, they do it more.
Joel Byars: Yeah. It could take a few. For people listening who are like, I like to do 30 days, I would honestly say. Up until they 15 or 20, like it’s hit or miss, like you may be evil, like edgy angry, almost conspiratorial in a sense of like people I don’t know, like my brain went to some dark places getting off of it, as it does every time or when I get on it, then I start to have these negative thoughts and things as well, which is so weird.
But yeah, it’s like it takes the withdrawals are very real. And I think it’s worth people doing, just to understand like what’s at stake. Like not only just your health physically, but mentally and relationships you have. Sugar affects us all in ways that are completely invisible, because it’s just become ingrained with who we are, but it’s yeah, it’s insidious like that.
Carole Freeman: Next time we do it. I’ve got a couple more tips here too, but next time, try doing all of these and see it shouldn’t be a month of misery or even 15 days, like
Joel Byars: great.
Carole Freeman: Typically following all these by the second week, it will be like, oh my gosh, this is the first time I haven’t had cravings or these thoughts.
So maybe the protein for you, I would really avoid even the fruits and things like that, too. And here’s another big one too, is avoiding sensory input to minimize the cues, the craving cues. So don’t look at or listen to, or smell any sweet things. So don’t walk through the bakery and go, oh, I wish I could have all these things, cause that just cues your brain.
And that turns on the cravings and the misery. Don’t look at. So for me, I had to stop watching, cooking shows that I watched all the time in the past stop looking up recipes on Pinterest, stop fantasizing about wow, I can’t wait until I can have blah, blah, blah again. And also not looking for substitutes for it.
So not trying to find cause your brain can’t tell the difference between a real cupcake in a, a, not a know sugar substitute cupcake, it that’s the same thing to your brain. Looks the same. It’s going to cue the same. Pathways to so avoiding any pseudo sugary foods, no sugar-free sugars.
So that’s ends up being a really big one, as well as avoiding the cues. So
Joel Byars: social media is a big one too, like following your favorite donut shop and all that long way.
Carole Freeman: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Avoid anytime you see anything like that, you basically, I thought I talked about the stop sign technique.
It’s like literally picture a stop sign. Tell yourself, stop. Think about something else. I still have to avoid like one of the thing. My favorite times of the year was always like the week after a holiday where all the candy was half price. I have to avoid grocery stores, like the big table of garbage.
They put out half off. Growing up poor. I was like, what’s a bargain. It’s so cheap. Like I had enough of those my whole life. I don’t need any Cadbury eggs anymore.
All right.
Joel Byars: Those are very helpful. Yeah. I’ll remember that for sure. Yeah. I’m glad your listeners are getting to learn this. So things I had to learn the hard way.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. You figured out some really clever stuff though on your own too. So the, associating with the negative instead of fantasizing about the pleasure of it. And what was the other one that you did given it up for 30 days, there was another one that you did as well. That was like, oh, that’s so smart.
Joel Byars: I don’t know. Brushing my teeth has helped. Brushing my teeth after a meal to get all that out of there. And then the late night thing brushing my teeth right after dinner.
Carole Freeman: Okay.
Joel Byars: Has helped me with any like late night eating and things like that, but it’s getting myself to do it. It’s I’ve had several nights where I was like, I should go brush my teeth right now because it’ll just take all the stress away. And then I don’t, and then I ended up like overeating on something, so I’m trying and learning just like everyone else.
Carole Freeman: But brushing the teeth, like it’s two things you’re doing there. So it’s a cue to your brain that we’re done eating. You brush your teeth and then you don’t eat anymore. So you cued that habit loop, but also it’s you’re doing something different than you used to. So used to eat and not brush your teeth. So the fact that you eat and then brush your teeth, like your brain’s oh, this is a new thing we’re doing. I better pay attention and learn the way that we do this. So
Joel Byars: I love that.
Carole Freeman: Do you, have you ever used any strict tracker apps or anything? Like how many days in a row you did something,
Joel Byars: but I’ve done it on like a calendar, like a 38 link calendar and I’ll X off each day that’s helped me stay consistent
Carole Freeman: your brain loves those. So things that get immediately rewarded get repeated. And so one of the reasons why it’s so hard to get off sugar also is because it gets immediate reward. And so when you don’t have sugar, there’s no immediate reward. But a cool thing is that a checkbox is an immediate reward to your brain. And and then seeing the progression of that, like how many days in a row is also an immediate reward.
So that’s a little trick that you can do as well as give yourself some kind of immediate reward, which literally the brain is that kind of silly, like it’s gamification of it. And that shows that, if you can, game-ify you give yourself a gold star, a sticker, a checkbox on there, like that literally gives you an immediate reward and it, that will get repeat.
Joel Byars: I love that. I haven’t heard that before. That’s gold. You’re dropping dimes out here. It’s like you’re an expert or something.
Carole Freeman: I just I remember I’m very skilled at Keto, but I’m nerd out at the psychology side of it. So it’s that’s what I bring to my clients I’m really passionate about because it’s not, you don’t really have a lot of people talking about both sides.
Like people are experts in little bits of this. And it’s really important if people are trying to make a long-term dietary change we need to address like what makes habits, what makes us want to keep doing the thing? That’s a bad habit versus, not eating sugar. There’s no reward in that.
So you’ve got, and then the neurochemistry of addiction, cause that’s really, so prevalent in our food world that we live in, there’s addictive foods everywhere. And like you said, it’s ubiquitous and know it’s love and it’s on every corner and it’s how we Sue them ourselves. And yeah.
I love talking about all this, so thank you so much for giving me the opportunity. So
Joel Byars: I love learning about it, seriously.
Carole Freeman: I know we’re coming up on your time. You got go do your husband like duties. Was there anything else you were hoping I would ask about anything else that you want to share about your sugar-free stint? Any comp, any questions, comments from our viewers listeners. Okay.
Joel Byars: I think for me, maybe, yeah, maybe I would say for people who are listening to this and are like, I’ve always wanted to try to quit sugar, be better at being more mindful about consumption or whatever of just taking it incrementally, like one step at a time.
Because even for me to get, to being able to fairly comfortably, go 30 days without sugar and not really. Hate myself for it. Like I’ve done in the past, like when I’ve tried to do this a lot it’s just, I’ve taken each each attempt as a lesson and just making, learning from what I’m doing and remembering what works, what doesn’t work.
So this time I knew having the calendar that I could X off every day, I knew that would help. So it’s just like making it a goal, but like how it goes and then having people in your corner, like Carol, like your environment is huge. And a lot of the times it’s like in a household, one person may have one set of dietary standards and the other is the opposite, so it’s just making sure you have people in your corner to help and support you through this. But it’s just one, one bite at a time, literally, good decision at a time will lead to another good decision. And if you don’t make the best decision, not beating yourself up, but almost celebrating it as oh, great.
Look at this lesson I learned, when I am left alone, maybe I do eat the cereal and then have to go to the grocery store and buy another one and act like nothing happened. Those things
I could I’ve confessed more on this than I probably have about any of my eating habits. But what would you say for me where I’m at now? I feel good about where I’m at with sugar. And I wanna re I wanna continue being mindful. And I don’t really like aspire to be like, oh, in June, I’ll go back to eating sugar.
I really want to I don’t want to say completely cut it out just for the sake of whatever circumstance or whatnot. But I do want to like make this, like my lifelong kind of routine now is that I don’t really eat that much sugar and I don’t really want to and things, but for an expert like you do you have any advice on how to sustain that?
Carole Freeman: Yeah. So just be mindful like you are, it sounds like you’re very self-aware that the tendency is for it to escalate. So you’ve got this 30 days sugar-free, it’s like it restarts, much less goes further now. And so that’s why you feel like, oh, I can have a little bit here and there and I don’t have crazy cravings, but just know that the tendency of the substance is that you’re you’ll want more and more over time.
And so maybe for you, you just have I don’t know, you have some kind of a hard line where you’re like, okay, when things get to this point, it’s time to do another 30 day reset or something like that. But just, knowing that where you’re at now, as long as you keep sugar in your life, it’s gonna, it’s gonna increase.
It just will like because that’s just the way that it works. Kinda like I quit heroin 30 days in once a week. I’m going to be able to keep it like this. And you’re like, like it’s like quitting smoking or quitting drinking. So I would just have decide what your lines are, right.
For drinking, maybe people do dry January, they quit. And then there, for some people they’re able to go okay, just once a week or once a month or something like that, maybe they can stay there cause they create their there’s a book called bright lines that kind of talks about like it’s for eating.
And you basically use, you draw your lines of yes and nos. I allow myself to do this, but I don’t do this. So maybe it’s for you, you set out, I’ll have sugar on my birthday or at a wedding or birthday or something like that, or just, I would encourage you to figure out where your lines in the sand are.
So that, when things have gone too far and not, it doesn’t work for everybody. So some people struggle so much that they’re just like have for me, no sugar hard no, I don’t want to mess with it anymore, but for you, it sounds like it may be something where you could just make some rules for yourself and follow that.
And, as long as they don’t get outside, you don’t start coloring outside the lines then, that can work.
Joel Byars: But even like I saw you did a giveaway with keto chow. So like even those almost like alternatives to process food can become a substitute and it not like I love cereal so
Carole Freeman: I saw you at the Catalina crunch.
Joel Byars: If it wasn’t $8 a bag, I tagged them through a brand deal. I got it on clearance. So I really enjoyed that cereal and such. So it’s like maybe making that more part of it as well and not like making that part of it. And I can be more consistent with that as opposed to like once a month or whatever.
It’s I just want to be confident and not feel like, oh my gosh, there’s a cake. If everyone left the room right now, I would have to eat it all and then bake another one before they got,
Carole Freeman: I had that rule symptom, number nine, that you’re addicted to sugar is you preplan, how are you going to replace the thing you just ate? Cause you don’t want anybody to know you ate it
Joel Byars: and you have to clock it out. Okay. She gets five. So if I do it at 11, I’ll have time.
Carole Freeman: And when like you’re fantasizing about some kind of time travel that you could just go back in time and replace it before you even it is that
Joel Byars: you’re good. You’re good.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. The bright lines is one way of looking at this where you make rules for yourself of yes and no. And another one is the concept of red light, yellow light green light foods. So for my clients, when they’re bringing things back in, I have them watch subjectively how does this affect you?
Can you eat this food without it causing you to be obsessed or to crave it? And so those end up being, green light foods, things that you can have in your house, you eat them in normal portions, you enjoy them, but they don’t call your name all night long. You don’t eat some and then fantasize about eating the rest of it.
Those will be green light foods and they can live in your house. Then maybe there’s yellow light foods. For me nuts or yellow light food. Like I don’t like to have them in the house because I want to eat all of them. But if I, go on a trip or something, or if I can pre portion them, I, have them out someplace else I’ll eat them.
But also I don’t like them living in my house because I’ll want to over eat them. Then there’s red light foods, which are the ones that like, you can’t control yourself no matter what the portion sizes, no matter what the environment is. And you’ve just decided that those are hard. No, I don’t eat those.
They don’t serve me. I’m not able to control myself. And I don’t like the misery of living in that like obsession craving place. So I, that’s another concept that you could use about deciding, like which ones work and which ones don’t for you. And you also have the the not obligation, but the the prerogative to reassess at any time, like you can change categories and change okay.
That worked for awhile and now it doesn’t. So I’m going to reassess. Re set up my parameters for myself. So
Joel Byars: I love that. Yeah. I’m excited about that. Yeah. I just love the topic more relevant. Like people are slowly getting hip to sugars and 80% of the food and grocery stores and it’s killing us.
Sugar literally kills us. It makes us dumber. So people are slowly getting onto that. So this is all going to become more relevant. So I just, yeah, and just, I want to do, I just want to do my best, Carole. I just wanted to do and be my best.
Carole Freeman: Did you find that your during your 30 day sugar-free that you like, did it affect your comedy?
Did you find your more prolific writer or sharper or anything like that or.
Joel Byars: Everything is better.
Carole Freeman: Okay.
Joel Byars: Everything
Carole Freeman: Hundred percent more subscribers on your YouTube channel during that time. And like the comedy classes,
Joel Byars: it all like, honestly, like it’s like the mindset is better and more optimistic and healthier. You feel better physically. I’m a better husband. I’m a better, I’m a better everything when I’m not on sugar, to be honest. And that’s why, like this time I’m like, I want, I just, I want to, I’ve gone on and off for a while for several years, and I just, I want to be like, I’m not aiming for the middle, with like my comedy career, I do want to be taking care of myself so I can achieve all the things I want to achieve. And I know at the heart of it, quitting drinking was a huge one for me, because that was one where it’s one is too many, a thousand is not enough, like that whole thing. So I caught myself with that and the drinkings, then I’m seeing it with sugar and I’ve seen it with sugar.
And I just, I know getting this under control just helps my life overall. It’s the mental side of it. Like physically you feel good and you look good, but like mentally I don’t know how much people understand how much sugar affects our mental health.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. There’s a book that came out. It was last year, the year before by Gary tobbs called the case against sugar.
Joel Byars: Yeah.
Carole Freeman: So basically, 50 or 60 years ago, probably about 60 years ago now. Literally Gover government officials were paid off to say, oh, it’s fat, that’s causing heart disease and everything. It’s not sugar look over there. So it’s finally like coming out that was what happened.
And but we’re still in a place where most people just think sugars, empty calories still, oh, maybe causes tooth decay, but can’t be that bad for us, but
Joel Byars: yeah,
Carole Freeman: sugars pantsers now
Joel Byars: I’m glad it’s happening at this moment though. Yeah. Eating and getting to talk to this at this moment.
And I’m hoping it helps people in general, with their own health journeys. Cause it’s, it is a journey and it’s up and down and all around, but enjoying the process. Helps me maintain just consistency and optimism on days when you just don’t feel like it or your brain, my brain will tell me it’s dumb and it doesn’t matter, oh, this one time will be fine. And then the one time all of, into one month, so
Carole Freeman: I talk, I call that the car monster and your brain. It’s always trying to talk you into oh, one won’t hurt. Like they’re one of my, one of my ladies was in a 12 step program and she shared with me the phrase they talk about is that while you’re inside getting sober, your addictions in the parking lot, doing pushups,
ready to tackle you come outside again. So
Joel Byars: that’s hilarious. You’re helping a lot of people, Carole. I appreciate you having me be a part of what you’re doing
Carole Freeman: here. Thank you, Joel. I’ve so enjoyed getting to know you like it just really cool to find that. You know how committed you are to just trying to be a better version of your yourself, and what we call them the health spaces, biohacking, like that’s what you’re doing and trying to figure out how to be better.
And all this stuff that you’re doing your podcast. I didn’t remember how I heard about you, but I think it was through your podcast. Somebody recommend your podcast probably a year or two ago now, and then just, starting to catch you on your lives and everything like that.
It’s really fun. If you guys don’t know Joel’s got classes, you do you do any coaching or is it just some online classes you do too? And you’ve got,
Joel Byars: yeah, there’s a little bit of everything for everyone. I have some shorter workshops about joke writing and storytelling and such, and then I have bigger like full length masterclasses, and I do one-on-one coaching as well and have the podcast, hot breath that’s on YouTube and all podcast platforms.
And then my own standard. My website, Joelbyerscomedy.com. I self produced my own comedy special called the trophy husband that’s available on my website. But yeah, I I think in everything I do it’s my mom was a teacher. She always taught us to be of service. She was a single mom with three kids on a teacher’s salary.
She never, we may not have the money to donate, but she always instilled us like the service mentality and always giving what we can, whether it’s time or books or whatnot. So I’ve instilled that into my entire career, whether it’s with my comedy, where I wanted to make sure people are laughing, but also learning and connecting, grandkids to grandparents.
I really just, at this point in my life and career, I’m finding service to be a big motivator for all that I’m doing. So whether you’re an aspiring comedian or just a comedy fan, I think you’ll enjoy the hot breath of verse as we call it.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. Ah, yeah. And just getting to see this other side of you too, of like how just Joel, you’re a good guy. You’re a good person I can tell through and through.
Joel Byars: Oh, thank you. I appreciate you saying that my mom will be proud. And you said that,
Carole Freeman: oh, that’s what we want in our lifes for mama to be proud of us. So how do I spell your website? Joel Byers.
Yeah. So check his website out. You can find all of his things. He mentioned again, like whether you’re a comedian, a comedy fan check it out and cheering him on in his sugar-free journey.
Joel Byars: Yeah. We’ll have to do an update and see what we’re doing and what’s goody, I’m excited.
Carole Freeman: Will you send me your before and after photos of the face that you did. So we can put that in our blog posts. We turn this into a blog post too. So that would be really good.
Joel Byars: I’ll definitely send that to you. That was a game changer. Yeah.
Carole Freeman: Thank you everyone for watching today. Keto chat live, we’re here most, every Thursday. Let’s see, share with a friend, give us a review.
Remember help us grow and we help you shrink. Thank you, Joel, for being here.
Joel Byars: Thank you, Carole. Thanks for having me.
Carole Freeman: Bye everybody. We’ll see you next time.
Episode Description:
What are skin care essentials for women 40+? Do we really need a separate eye cream? What are the scariest ingredients in skin care products? What are some drug store brand bargains? Join Carole as she learns all about skin care for women 40+ with Chris Gibson.
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