Carole chats with her newest Peer Support Coach, Valorie, about her keto success secrets, where she was before she found keto, what results she experienced working with Carole, the challenges she faced when trying to maintain keto on her own, her tips for success, and more.
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Table of Contents
Carole Freeman:
Hey, we’re live, everyone. Welcome to Keto Chat for Women. Keto for Women 40 plus made easy!
Today. I’m really, really, really excited. I mean, I haven’t been here in a while. I actually, I hate what podcasters say that. Sorry I’ve been absent for a while, but you know what? This is actually our first. Podcast episode of 2023.
So Valerie, I’m so excited that you’re here to talk about your keto success secrets. We’re gonna talk all about Valerie’s journey on keto and. Presenting her welcome as one of our new peer, newest peer support coaches. And don’t worry, we’ll talk about what that even means. For those of you watching that don’t know what that means or listening let me just get the medical disclaimer outta the way real quick here.
This show is for educational and entertainment purposes only. It is not meant to be medical advice. So if you have any medical concerns, please take that to your qualified functional health medical professional, your doctor. Your health provider, whoever it is. And so welcome. This is also an interactive show to, so if you’re watching us live, you can pop a comment in.
Would love to see where you’re joining us from. So I can see that we do have live people, but I don’t know that you’re here until you actually comment something. So go ahead and, and tell us where you’re joining from. Welcome to the show. Valerie, you know what I realized I should read your.
Wonderful bio that you sent me, which I didn’t have. Sure. It’s right here. It’s right here. Okay. Valerie,
Valorie’s Bio
Valorie Moses: this is going to be somewhat like when someone sings Happy Birthday to you, you feel, you know how it feels kinda awkward, but go ahead, you know, read, read my bio and, and then I’ll sit here like you’re singing Happy Birthday.
Carole Freeman: Okay. Okay. Well, it’s, I, I, I love that you share that actually, because, you know, part of the journey for my lot of my ladies is that. They’re not used to having the spotlight shined on themselves. So the ladies I work with wear a thousand hats in their life. They do so many different things and they often end up putting themselves last.
And so they feel a little bit guilty of, of spending some time on themselves and focusing on themselves and their health. And so I love that you shared that cuz that’s pretty. A, a common feeling for my, a lot of my ladies like, oh my gosh, don’t, I don’t, I don’t want, but this whole episode is about you.
So we might as well start with telling a little little bit about you. So Valerie Moses, a 44 year old hardworking woman in the. Quintessential throws up midlife. I’m lucky enough to have the endless support of my husband, three healthy kiddos and one fluffy pup to keep my me on my toes. I hadn’t read this yet.
You’re such a great writer. I, I work full-time managing a team in the IT industry in Northern Virginia. Also coach others and workplace on resilience, personal growth, and increasing their emotional intelligence. My personal life, my interests are DIY projects, craft home decor. She’s an amazing decorator.
And oh, you do have a certificate in interior decoration. Awesome. I do. That happened over the pandemic. Oh, how cool. How cool. I love seeing your pictures of decor around your home. It’s absolutely gorgeous. And adore creative writing and, Hope it’s something I can incorporate more and garden and paint and sing.
And she has the family ham. Yes. And you may have seen her as a guest participant on past episodes and she always had some of the funniest quips for the show too. So The reason I have Valerie here today to chat with you, with you all is to get to know more about her keto journey, share the success for your own motivation, and also as a way of introducing her to my clients.
And she’s one of our newest peer support coaches and peer support coach is somebody that I’ve worked with and has gone through my programs. And for whatever a variety of reasons. They’re a really great example of success and support for other clients. So they step in and as new clients come in to work with me, they partner with them as a peer.
And it’s just one more person that’s there cheering them on. That’s been in their shoes and just to help cheerlead them and somebody else to ask questions of as well too. So Valerie, I’m so excited to have you because thank you for having me, you so much that to our group. So welcome.
Valorie Moses: Thank you.
I’m very, very excited to be here too, to share my keto success secrets and especially because probably one of my favorite things to do is to help support others. I mean, you know, words of affirmations, my love language. Oh. But if there’s, what’s the opposite of. What kind of love I like to give to other people what, whatever that word is.
I, I just really enjoy being there and supporting people and I think most of the people who know me understand that about me. And so I think that that’s kind of the primary strength that I can bring to your peer support coaching team.
Carole Freeman: Yeah, it’s great. And two, just your experience with coaching, mentoring, and, you know, building emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence is something we definitely need as we’re working through changing our eating habits and maintaining a different lifestyle too. So Emotional intelligence is something that often when we remove food as a coping mechanism in our life, then a lot of times the light gets really shining onto our emotions and feelings.
And so I love that that’s something that you get to help us support with each other too.
What was Valorie’s Life Like Before She Started Keto?
Valorie Moses: So, yeah, and I’m excited to do that and I think it’s one of the most important kind of pillars of achieving any measure of success. Should I talk a little bit about the success that I did achieve following your program?
Carole Freeman: Yeah, you read in my mind. That’s the next question I was gonna ask you is, you know, take, take us back to before you ever worked with me, what were the things that were going on in your life that were, you know, frustrating that you wanted to change? You know, like right before you discovered me.
Valorie Moses: Absolutely. So I ended up, Really seeking you out for a couple of primary reasons. Reason number one is that I found that I needed someone to show me a direction to go in that would be right for me. I needed someone who was willing to actually listen and just show me the right direction so that I can even start, get, getting moving in the right way because I was in a spot in my life.
It’s sort of that grind. Where you still have small kids in the house you’re working a full-time job. You wanna make time for your interests, and you try, you try your best to fit those little moments of joy in. But sometimes it feels like you’re burning the candle at both ends. And I was in that space and making sure to take care of everyone else besides myself.
“I was clear at the bottom of my priority list.”
I was clear at the bottom of my priority list. And so that’s what was going on and I found that the thing that I was turning to instead of turning to good habits a supportive community or some of these really successful ways to sort of bolster your success and, and really, you know, get your health going on the right track.
I was instead leaning on food quite a lot and the wrong types of food, and so, What was happening was I was noticing a lot of my symptoms that I had just thought were normal, became worse and worse and worse. And then I, you know, started feeling like, well, maybe this isn’t normal and I need to do something about it.
“I am a chronic migraine sufferer…”
I am a chronic migraine sufferer and for as long as I can remember, I’ve gotten migraines, but I also get joint pain, you know, in my wrists and my hands ankles quite a lot. And then I just. In that pocket of time, I had become more and more and more overweight as well. So there were a bunch of feelings going on in my head.
I felt a little bit stressed and overworked, and I felt like I wasn’t taking care of myself and was leaning on the wrong things to try to temporarily make myself feel better. So I started doing some research and I always knew I was a little bit. Sensitive to carbohydrates. That’s just something that I was self-aware about early on, but didn’t have any education on what to do about it and needed to find someone.
Who did and who could teach me. And that’s where I found you and your fast track program and learned your keto success secrets. So a little, you know, I, I was in a little bit of a, a negative space and I really do try to be that half glass half full type of person. But I was having difficulty doing it during that time, especially because there were a couple of just personal tragedies that I experienced in my life.
That just stacked onto the crap sandwich, you know, it was not a good time. Mm.
Relief from Migraines, Joint Pain, and Fatigue with a Keto Diet
Carole Freeman: So I found you the symptoms you describe like you said, you thought they were normal and so many of us women are told. Well, honey, that’s just part of getting older, you know? Oh, that’s just like pre menopause. That’s your hormones, you know, all this stuff that we’re told, you know, the migraines, the joint pain and the fatigue.
And there’s a very long list of common symptoms that women have as they’re aging that they’re just told is a normal part. Yeah. And, and It’s amazing now, and, and this is my eighth year of experiencing this lifestyle myself and implementing my keto success secrets.
And the list of things I know what to expect for people. So when I talk to people before I work with them, we, very lengthy interview process, an hour or more I spend with each person before, I’ll ha let them come on and work with us. And So I’ve got a really good idea at this point. You know, talking to thousands of women one-on-one for that length of a time.
I know all of the things that, you know, that they’re, that they’re suffering from. And a lot of, you know, almost everybody I’m working with, their primary goal is they want weight loss. That’s the big motivator. They also have this long list of discomforts in their body and symptoms, and a lot of ’em don’t realize all those things aren’t a normal part of aging and that they can totally go away.
So I get really excited because I know I. The long list of things that get better for people. I’m trying to remember. There was one the other day I. Because I love it when, you know, there’s a long list of like the standard ones that go away for people. But I love it when there’s like a new one that crops up that somebody shares and I’m like, oh, I haven’t heard that one.
I think the one that was most unique was when somebody, their bowling score, they were like, hobby, hobby bowler. And their score jumped up like 50% or something. And I was like, that’s really amazing. So I love that.
Valorie Moses: But it makes sense, doesn’t it? When you’re supporting your body and giving it what? It needs, it kind of increases your dexterity, so why wouldn’t that translate to a higher bowling score?
Carole Freeman: Yeah, that’s a cool one though. Keto ketosis, especially the way that works in the brain, and then the brain controlling all the nerves in the body as well. You know, muscle function and all that kind of stuff. So it’s interesting, all the different things that can get better in the body.
Making the Decision to Hire a Keto Coach
Alright, so, so you, you’ve, you found me, you decided you were gonna and will you talk just a little bit about like, you know, what was that process like for you?
Cuz some of my ladies really struggle with like, oh gosh, I should, I do everything else? I’m so amazing and, and tenacious and strong and smart. They beat themselves up like, well, I should be able to figure this out too. Did you have any of that, or what was the mental process of like trying to decide whether you wanted to actually work with somebody else to learn keto success secrets or keep trying to figure it out on your own?
Valorie Moses: So I tend to be a little bit of a control freak too, and feel like I can do everything on my own. I actually had my doctor just, I was doing my regular checkup and we were talking about a few things and she actually used the word perfectionist. She said, you sound like a perfectionist that can put undue pressure on yourself.
Are you a little bit of a control freak? And I couldn’t believe those words got used. You know, at a doctor’s office. And I just felt so seen because, okay, it’s very true. Okay. So I do feel like I want to have control over everything and had tried a bunch of things and felt disappointed that I wasn’t able to figure it out on my own.
But I sort of reached a point where I let that go. And just said, all right, I’m clearly at my wit’s end here. I can’t figure out a path forward, and I know for sure I need more education. Where am I gonna get this? So I found you, I reached out to you and I was able to talk to a real human being. So we had our first conversation, and you really asked some very, I guess I can call it, thought provoking questions that made me feel encouraged that.
I could make the changes necessary. You didn’t You know, make it seem like this is going to be the absolute easiest thing you’ve ever done in your life. There were no, you know, kind of unreasonable claims or anything like that, and I remember leaving that conversation with you, so excited to join the program and feeling like, you know, this is gonna give me the toolbox that I need.
Because there, it, there wasn’t just one part to it. The toolbox has a lot of things in it, and you, you package it up and then, you know, we get to be part of this wonderful community that supports us through using all the tools to get to that, you know, goal or multiple goals that we wanna reach in life and just create a new, whole new lifestyle around it.
Carole Freeman: Yay. Excellent. Well, thank you for, thank you for that.
So you know, the, the initial portion of time that I have people get started with me is just, you know you know, initially it’s just a couple of months and mm-hmm. Do you remember back then, like what were the. Changes and, and progress and improvements that you noticed over that first initial program?
Results After 2 Months on Keto, the Carole Freeman Way
Valorie Moses: So I would say the first initial program that I went through, I believe it was, that one was eight weeks long. And the changes were, I mean the keto success secrets, they all made sense to me. And I think that. The reason I was able to institute all the changes quickly is because they were simple. So these weren’t, you know, kind of huge monumental undertakings. That doesn’t mean that they weren’t challenging. Ill say that much.
So I think everything was very clearly laid out and everything. These weren’t things that were difficult to figure out. There were simple changes, easy to institute in theory, but big changes.
Valorie’s 3 Keto Success Secrets
If you compared it to what I was really, you know, actually doing in my day to day life. So, you know, challenging in that way, and I think the. I would say the three things that really helped me through.
Keto Success Secret 1: Make a Plan
were thing number one was to make a plan, meaning simplify it even further for myself, if there were certain things that I needed to have in the house, those things needed to be there and things that didn’t support me there needed to. Be a clear out of those items.
Keto Success Secret 2: Habit Stacking for Building New Keto Habits
Thing number two was to stack my habits. And so some of the things that you laid out in the program, I thought, okay, how can I pair this with something I already religiously do? If I already take my vitamins, what can I sit next to that bottle that is part of the program that’ll help me just grab it, have it stacking, I guess is what they call it.
Keto Success Secret 3: Being Part of a Keto Community
And then being part of the community, I showed up to the coaching calls. Without fail, I always. Felt like I took something from the calls and deposited something that was valuable to someone else. So it felt really good to be able to encourage other people or tell them, Hey, you know, I went through that too.
Here’s a couple of things I did. Maybe it would help you or to ask someone what did you all do, you know, when you felt this way? And to hear, you know, several different ideas from different perspectives and to be able to. Constantly, I guess, edit the way I was doing things day over day. It, it didn’t hurt that in my first week I already had reduced the amount of migraines that I suffered from.
I was getting them four days a week and in inside of the first week they, it reduced in half By the time a month came around I hadn’t had. I think maybe there was one. I remember telling you this, Carole, I think there was one headache the whole rest of the month, and so I knew that some of the Yeah.
Oh yeah. Because it’s debilitating, you know, to have to have chronic pain like that. And so it is nice to have a couple of smaller wins right up front like that. And it is encouraging. But I think it was the community that sort of kept me chugging along because there were moments where I. Maybe felt some work stress or the kids were going through something, whatever it was that made me, it made the old habits want to bubble back up, and I think that’s a normal human.
Thing, you, you want to make the easy decision but you also sometimes want to make the bad decision and you’re self-aware mm-hmm. That it’s not right for you. And again, just simplifying and having the right things prepared and at finger fingertip reach was really what made me successful through the program.
By the time I reached the, to the end of it, I had lost weight. It was just a smidge under 20 pounds, and I could not believe it because. I had always thought that I had a very, I don’t know, I blamed my body. Mm. I said, my body’s just weight loss resistant, and I’m not gonna get through this, and I can’t live life with the level of enjoyment that other people do and just wallowed for, for a while before I found your program.
So anyway, I, I experienced. Wild success through that. Even though it was a little, you know up and down, up and down in, in terms of my level of confidence, you know, executing all the, the right habits. Some days I felt like I was on top of the world, and other days I thought, oh, you know, it’s a little of a tougher day today.
So, You know, I need to give myself some grace or do some deep breathing or something. I remember telling you, Carole, that I had to go create a new space even to read, because I would read right there by the kitchen. You know, that is, is where there’s a little, they call it the mom chair. The rest of the family does.
And I would sit in the mom chair right there in clear view of the kitchen. And it would, if one little stressful thought popped in while I was reading, I would want to. Walk right there, 10 feet away and go ahead and, and grab something like falling back on an old habit. And so I remember telling you I had just moved the reading nook.
I moved it to a whole different part of the house and just, you know, creating a new pattern there really helped me keep the right. Habits too. You can get creative, you can get as creative as you want.
Dopamine Reward for Highly-Palatable, High Carb Foods
Carole Freeman: Wow, that’s great. Well, and I just wanna go back a little bit to something you said too, cuz that’s another thing that’s really normal for people is that you talked about, there were several moments along your journey where you know, the quick, easy choice, the thing that would make you feel a bit better immediately really called to you. And it’s a normal thing, and it’s a, a thing that kind of trips people up is that so, you know, highly addictive carbie foods, you know, sugary carbie, whatever they give an immediate reward in our brain dopamine, which is a, a chemical in our brain that makes us go do that again.
And so it’s, this is where the challenge with. Healthy habit change comes in is because we, the things that get immediately reinforced or get that dopamine hit, those are the things that get repeated in our life and the things that have a delayed reward, you know? So like, okay, if you don’t eat this now, Valorie, next week you wanna have a migraine.
But if you eat it right now, you’re gonna feel, feel better right now. And that’s, you know, one of the things that makes healthy habits so difficult. So I love how you said that the things that helped you get through that was having the group support the community, knowing these, these other people were relying on you to come on and share your success and results and knowing that you were not the only person trying to do these, these changes and things like that.
So thank you for pointing out that that was one of the things that really helped you. So again, not that it’s. Easy, but having the right tools and support made, made all the difference for you too. And also the, the thing you’re describing where you moved your chair, that’s something that we talk about sometimes when people have a specific habit loop in their life of using food in a certain way.
Changing Autopilot Unhealthy Habits
And our brain, Remembers that entire process and everything that you do. So this is, you know, an evolutionarily thing. Evolutionarily it’s a new word. Yeah. Evolutionary process that designed to help us. Our brain, remember where we found the high reward foods, right? So when the berries in the fall or the end of summer are ripe, you know, without g p s or anything like that, we could actually, like remember where it was, what time of year it was, what it smelled like which trail they were on or the honey pot that maybe once a year as well, and you can remember where to go find that.
So the same thing happens in our day-to-day life is that if we’ve consumed a certain. You know, any carby food? No. The movie theater is a really challenging one for a lot of people too, is that every time they go to the movie, they get, you know, whatever snacks and soda, and they do that every time. And so that can be a challenge for people when they’re trying to no longer indulge in those foods.
When they go to the movie, as soon as they walk in the movie theater, the brain goes, oh, this is where we get all those highly rewarding foods. And the drive when you. You’ve gotten a dopamine reward for doing something. A lot of times when you walk back into that same environment, dopamine actually starts to raise and that’s the signal that.
That’s what starts the craving, the urge to do something. And when you’ve done it enough times, your, again, your brain memorizes the entire environment and everything that happens there, it can be feel overwhelming to resist that urge because your, your chemicals in your brain are working against you. So one of the tricks you can do, like you described, is that it sounds like after dinner, your relaxation pattern in the evening was to sit down and read and have some snacks probably, or some drinks or both.
And. So your brain, when you sat in that chair and we, we, I remember that we kind of worked, you know troubleshooted and worked through this. How can we change this habit loop? How do you not cue that whole autopilot thing? And so literally moving the chair to a different place is, is enough of a trick for your brain for it to go, oh wait, this is not the thing we’ve done a thousand times.
I better pay attention. And so you don’t get that dopamine rise. You maybe get a little bit of it because if you’re used to using. Food to cope with stressors, but it’s so much lower than the one that you’ve done a thousand times or maybe even more than that if it was your, your evening ritual too. So thank you for sharing that.
You know that trick that you can do that if you find that a certain time of the day, and that’s a common one for our ladies too, is that the evening, you know, that’s usually for our women that work full-time, that’s. The time they finally get to treat themselves. And they’re used to treating themselves with, you know, a glass of wine or two, some snacks.
And so that can be a hard time for people. Maybe they do really well for breakfast and lunch and then after dinner for some reason. They just feel like they can’t, they can’t not in indulge in those things too. So the good news is, like you shared, there’s a lot of tricks that we can add to your toolbox that, that help you succeed in those situations too.
So. Yeah, thank you for allowing me teachable moments as we go along here too.
Valorie Moses: So I love it. I love it. I’m happy to be part of it.
Carole Freeman: Totally here for it. And I’m just, I, I’ll just say right here too, thank you so much for. Coming on here and I’m just excited to be back and, and talking with people, interviewing and back, back on the air.
Weight Loss, Reduced Pain, Migraine Free on Keto
So great results, weight loss, and and just reduction in pain, migraine pain. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and you were with us for a while and then like a lot of ladies, you decided you were, it was time to kind of just branch off on your own and, and part several ways.
And so Can you take us, take, take us through that part of the journey of like when the paths separated and yeah. You know, so I reached, perhaps things were really good in the beginning and then, you know, what, how were you feeling at that time?
What Happened When She Tried to Go It Alone on Keto?
Valorie Moses: So I reached the, the, the old fork in the river and I decided okay, well maybe I can try to kind of branch off and keep this going on my own.
And for a short amount of time it did. Because, you know, I, I think I talked about those three little keys to my success being, you know, having a plan, you know, stacking your habits and then seeking your community. I still had two of the three, but I didn’t the one thing that spontaneously disappeared when I decided to branch out on my own was the community.
So that part of it got, It’s almost like, you know, think of a, a little round tought that Ms. Muffet sits on. It’s a little round three-legged stool. Yeah. If you take one of the legs off of a three-legged stool, guess how long it stays a usable piece of furniture. It’s really not a long time. Whatever amount of time it takes to to fall over is really what you, what you get.
So, You know, for a little while it, it worked just fine. I started to realize after a couple of months that the part that had been most valuable to me is the part that I branched off from. Mm. So and, and it was the most important pillar for me, and I didn’t necessarily realize that at the time.
So after some time passed and I felt a little bit. Isolated and sort of closed off from just, you know, like-minded women who were going through very similar things, had very similar goals and were certainly going about it such a similar way. When that was kind of peeled away and I was left simply to my own discipline as one individual person the knowledge.
Was there. So I acquired that and got to keep it and knowing which habits were healthy Yeah. That that was there, but the community to lean on when things got hard was gone. And so I began to make more and more choices that didn’t support my health. And so I kind of felt like I needed a life preserver a little bit floating out in the ocean.
I. By myself knowing what to do, but not having the right support to be able to continue to do it. It’s almost like I took the floaties off way too soon. It, it’s sort of the feeling that was behind it.
Lapsing and Falling Back Into Old Habits
Yeah. But in any case, you know, I found myself lapsing a little in back into the other habits again. And so, you know, knowing that I needed that community piece I kind of just thought.
All right, well then that’s what I need to seek again. And that was what brought me back to you again. I’ve learned so much in my journey and the, probably the biggest thing that I’ve learned is that probably we all need to let go of that, this idea that success is linear and that if it isn’t constantly going up and up and up, that we’re some kind of failure for it.
In fact, sometimes our failures teach us. The most. And it certainly if, you know, if you’re trying to find a silver lining in, in anything, you can say if you failed, at least you’ve crossed one thing off of the list that didn’t work for you. Mm-hmm. So now you know that thing and you can recover from it.
Anything is figureoutable is what I like to tell my kids. Anything’s figureoutable. Let’s talk about it. So,
Carole Freeman: Marie Forlio, right? I think that’s the name of her book actually.
Valorie Moses: So, Oh, I’ll have to look into that one because it’s clearly speaking my language. Yeah. But you know, so success isn’t linear.
You know, it can look somewhat like a kid in a bouncy house if you’re drawing that kind of line. The, the idea is to continuously seek improvement and do the things that you’re supposed to do most of the time to support that to support that, you know, kind of continual improvement. And then, you know, lean on.
People don’t feel like embarrassed to need to lean on someone and certainly, you know, be part of the community so that you can help others too, because there is such. A great feeling that comes along with giving others, you know, the information that you’ve acquired too. Hey, here’s a few tips and tricks that worked for me.
You know, Hey, I’m, you know, I’m here for you. I hear, I hear you. I understand what you’re saying. Your feelings are valid. You get so many things from the community beyond simple tips and tricks. And here’s how it went for me this week. It goes many layers deep. And it really kind of it, it, it really kind of appeals to that part of us that need togetherness and community.
I mean, it’s sort of, you know, the, one of the basic human needs almost is just to have some sort of companionship and there’s no kind of comradery like you’re gonna build when you’re tackling, you know, the, the bad habit monster and really trying to improve your health.
Why is Group Support Essential to Long-Term Keto Success?
Carole Freeman: Yeah, and, and you know, when I was in school for my psychology degree, they talked about, you know, all the reasons why group support can be so effective and helpful for people.
But over the years of doing this, I’ve researched it more to find out. You know, what is really going on, especially with dietary change with people. And so so like you shared that that was one of the things that you were missing and you found was essential to your success, and it turns out that there’s, there’s reasons why it’s success.
You mentioned some of them too, you know, having that that support not feeling alone. Right. Because when you’re going low carb, we live in a world where there’s high carb foods at every corner and most people are eating a lot of them. And if you know, Most people are not healthy. But so you, you wanna have a group of, of your peers that are doing the same weird, crazy, unsustainable thing that we’re trying to do.
Sarcasm, by the way. You know, so you’re not alone. You wanna be around other people that do that. And making it part of your identity is also really important as well. And. And being around others that are similar to you. For example, you know, CrossFitters, one of our other peer coaches is a avid CrossFitter, and that’s part of her identity, and she, one of the reasons that CrossFit works so well as a fitness you know, people feel like they belong.
There’s that community. They matter. People notice if they don’t show up and they, they care about them and and want them there. And so, you know, that’s one of the reasons why the community is so important. It’s positive peer pressure as well too, right? So if. Everybody else in the group is, is conforming and following this lifestyle that’s getting them good results.
You want to be part of that as well too. This also goes back to, you know, times when we lived in, in caves or, or tribal. It was like, if you’re like everybody else in the group that lives together, you’re gonna survive. If you’re the one who’s going off all by yourself and trying some, something that’s different than what everybody else is doing, you’re probably not gonna survive.
You’re gonna die for one reason or another. And so as humans, like you mentioned, we have this drive to be part of a community that we fit into and that we’re similar to. And the accountability of it too. So that positive peer pressure and the accountability it’s very motivating. You get excited, hearing everyone else’s success as well too.
And so it’s motivating to be part of that as well instead of try to do this on your own. You know, most the people I’m working with live in a family of people that aren’t following the same eating habits, and that is really, really challenging. Because our, again, our, we’re wired as human beings to want to be like the ones that we hang out with too.
And so if you don’t have a group or community of people, they’re doing the same thing as you. It at a core level of just human nature and behavior, it’s extremely hard to do something completely different than the rest of your, your. Your group, your family, your community that you hang out with the most.
So and then the other one that’s really cool that I’ve learned over the years is something called mirror neurons. And this, this kind of fits with this whole, like we’re we’re wired to copy the behavior of the people around as well, but it turns out there’s actually a part of the human brain that is from birth as soon as we can see other.
Human beings, we start to copy their behavior. And if anybody listening to this has the, has the I don’t know if it’s the luxury or not, or has the ability to, a newborn baby, a very young baby. Several, a couple months old cuz I can’t remember like when they’re first born, their eyesight is really close.
But basically if they can, if they can see you, if you just start sticking your tongue out at that newborn baby. Repeatedly, they will start to copy you. And it’s, it’s just fascinating to see because we think like they haven’t learned how to do that yet. How are they doing that? So there’s neurons in our brain that whatever we see somebody else doing.
We that it’s connected to the muscles, directly to the muscles. So it’s not like, Hey, we don’t even think about it. It’s not like, Hey, I wanna do what they’re doing. I wonder if I can do that. Let me try. Nope. It’s just neurons in the brain from the eye to the muscles and it makes you just do it. But this is also it.
It works. In all animals, and this is why you’ll see you know, whatever, you know, the duck that was raised by the dog or something like that. And then they will start to develop the, the, the same characteristics of dogs because that’s what they were raised around and they saw them doing that. So this is, is a pro and a con in.
Trying to change eating habits too. So the hard part is that if you’re hanging around mostly people that are eating foods that you are trying to avoid or, you know, they don’t make you feel, well, if you’re trying to avoid high carb foods, you know, this, this is something that people experience usually in the beginning of ketos.
If maybe they go to a Mexican restaurant, we all know what they put on the table as soon as you sit down. And I experienced this in the beginning where it was like, Like, I would just notice that my arm kept going towards the bowl of chips and I’m like, wait, what am I doing? Like it was not conscious. I didn’t notice it, but it was like, wait, my cuz it was like everybody else was doing it.
My brain was telling my muscles to do the same thing as well too. And so this is where it can be really challenging when you don’t have that support group. But the good news is they work for the positive as well. And so if you hang around. Again, that community like that you noticed is so important. Then your brain will go, oh, I’m like these people.
I do the, the behaviors that they do. And so I don’t know if you realize all the reasons why it’s so important to have that community is of other, you know, peers that are doing this same thing, but there’s lots and lots of well-researched reasons why it’s so important and so effective.
Valorie Moses: Absolutely. No one wants to be a barking duck anyway.
Inviting Valorie to be My Keto Peer Support Coach
Carole Freeman: So I reached out. And invited you to come back. It was do you wanna talk a little bit about h how we kind of, we each manifested each other the right time for you to come onto the peer coach and
Valorie Moses: Sure.
Well, I feel like at the same time that I was seeking my community you were seeking, you know, in addition to the. Peer support coaching team. And since you were my person, you know, who kind of saw me through the, the last time I was feeling this way, it was really natural that I gravitated back towards you.
So we had been friends on our, our social media, and I think you saw some of the things that I was saying to encourage some of my personal friends and family to be able to, you know, improve their lifestyle choices and improve their health. And I think, you know, that really kind of spurred us connecting and talking and getting really It.
I think we had a two hour conversation, didn’t we? Where Right. Where we, yeah. We really just talked everything out and, and did this really wonderful idea share session where you made me feel quite empowered to be able to influence others to seek that sense of community and really be part of a greater movement to support ourselves and, you know, to seek optimum health whatever that means for each individual person since we we’re all going through, you know, we have different symptoms and we’re going through different things, but I think that you made me feel valued and encouraged to be part of the community and to help others sort of grab the life preserver, get back on the boat and, and keep rowing forward.
I think those were your exact words.
The Keto Lifestyle Crew Meaning
Carole Freeman: You might have added the life preserver, but I love it. Yes, cuz our, our after people finish the, the Fast Track program that you mentioned, then they have the option to stay on for that community and support for long term when we call it the Keto Lifestyle Crew to keep sticking with the keto success secrets. I selected that name very carefully when I.
Started that about three years ago was when I selected the name. And it, it means, it, the name itself is very, very important because when you’re part of a, a crew on a ship, everybody’s important and you know, people are there for their own. Their own goals, but also everyone else there is relying on you to do your job as well, for their success as well too.
So everybody’s valued and important and for, for the whole ship to keep moving in in a positive direction too. So Valerie’s got some really great I ideas of how. We can help everyone continue to stay connected. Cuz I think that’s one of the, the challenge, the biggest challenges I shared with you in doing this work is that we’ve been sold alive for too long.
That when you want to you know, when you wanna lose weight, you just go on a temporary diet. Lose the weight. And then how many of you listening to this have told that lie to yourself? That like, well, once I lose the weight, I’ll, that’ll just motivate me to keep it off. But everything we talked about with that community and how that’s important and essential, there’s no amount of willpower or tenacity that you have that can overcome the, the world that we live in with all the, the the things that just light up your brain and want you to.
Go back to your old habits. And so so that’s one of the things that I need the most help with and the biggest goal I have. And the kitty hairs are all over my face now. She just sheds constantly. And, and the, one of the biggest challenges is that people wanna believe that myth, that like, oh, we just do this for a short time.
And then, We could just go jump off the ship and go swim out in the ocean by ourselves, you know? And it’s like no. Unfortunately. You know, and, and I’m so glad that you came back cuz this is an all too familiar story, is that people. I, I got this figured out. I got a plan doing my habit stacking. I got this, I can figure this out on my own.
I’m a strong, independent woman. I’m smart and tenacious, and I can figure this out. And unfortunately all too often the story is, is that people. Start to lapse and, and they’re like, oh my gosh, what am I doing? And a lot of them the good news is lot of ’em will come back for the support later, which is great.
Long-Term Commitment to Keto Success Secrets is Required for Long-Term Success
And, but also I’d much rather have people just have continuous support and get what they need and not have to you know, Be waving out in the ocean going, Hey, can you send me one of those life preservers, please? I’m getting tired of swimming out here by myself. So we’ll continue with the, the analogies of the, the nautical theme too, to help everybody.
So, yeah, so, and you know, so the short, short summary of that is that however long you’d like to keep the weight off, however long you’d like to change your eating habits, that’s how long you have to do the changes. There’s no, there’s nothing that’s a temporary. Solution for a long term problem.
You know, if people wanna be a runner and physically fit they know that they have to keep working out. You have to keep running to be a runner and you can’t just run marathons for six weeks and then lay on the couch the rest of your life and think that you’re gonna stay physically fit. We know that’s ridiculous.
So same thing with dietary change to the keto success secrets is that it also has a long-term, long-term commitment.
Valorie Moses: So, And I think one pitfall that people sort of run into is that they tell themselves that if they stick to a, you know, this new lifestyle, long term that they won’t be able to enjoy themselves. I hear that quite a lot and it’s, it’s really simply not true.
I feel like just a little bit of planning and, and new techniques added in there, plus your keto success secrets. You’ll find that you really do have a full, quite enjoyable life and that you don’t have to skip the summer backyard games of corn hole just because you’re not going to be, you know, having the same indulgences that the other people around you are having.
You know, play the corn hole and, and preplan and have the, the right indulgences there for you that support your health rather than help destroy it, if that makes sense. Yeah. The enjoyment still there. You’re still with your people. You’re still playing the game.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. One of the cool things that I looked up research wise in the last couple weeks is that, Being in ketosis actually reduces your hunger hormones.
And what happens? Unfortunately when people lose weight, our bodies don’t like that and it compensates. So on most you know, weight loss programs, you will lose weight, but your body to get you to regain the weight will increase your hunger hormone. Hormones probably. And also it slow down your metabolism.
So that’s a recipe for regaining the weight no matter what you’re doing because you’re hungrier and your body’s just burning less calories overall. And it turns out that ketosis or ketogenic diet is gonna mitigate that increase in hunger. And so when people stick with it long term, it makes it so that you’re just not.
Hungry, and that’s part of what makes it easier to resist and not feel like you’re missing out on those things that before people felt like were essential part of their happiness and their life. So the good news is that if you are able to stick with it, keep following the keto success secrets, it ends up being easier to not feel like you’re missing out.
And also, there’s so many recipes now and, and other things that you can do, that you can have the, you know, keto versions of all those things but you may find that you just don’t miss them actually, after a while of doing it.
Valorie Moses: Absolutely. There are so many resources out there for alternatives and keto success secrets out there.
Again, just like you said, sometimes you don’t even want it after, you know, after you’ve been following, you know, the plan and the keto success secrets for a little while. And also, you know, you start tuning in, I think a lot of people say this, you start tuning in to how your body really is actually feeling. Mm. And when you’re noticing the pain going away and you’re thinking, okay, goodness, that item over there on that table looks like something in my, you know, Previous experience that I would’ve gone face first into I really know that that’ll give me a migraine.
Mm-hmm. Or I really know that, you know, my joint pain’s gonna come back. If I have that, it’ll take a few days, but that’s what happens to me. And you sort of start seeing it in a little bit of a different light. If that makes sense. Mm-hmm. And, and you’re, you’re almost a little bit averse to, to even indulging.
So you know, When you’re satisfied with these kind of nutrient dense sources that you’re, that you’re getting your energy from it’s easier to look at the New York cheesecake and think, mm, I’m not gonna have that. Or if you really want it to look up an alternative and mm-hmm. You know, have a little something that does, doesn’t destroy your health.
There’s, you know, there’s a million ways around any excuse that you can sort of make for not taking care of yourself. And sometimes a little bit of a hard pill to swallow, so to speak.
Carole Freeman: You gotta do it.
Well, any, anything else in closing that you wanna share or you were hoping I would ask you about?
Valorie Moses: I, you know, I can’t think of anything that I wished that you asked me, but I do sort of have a closing, you know, thought that I would love to leave people with, and that is when, you know, seek a community.
Mm-hmm. For any reason. It doesn’t necessarily have to be because you, you need help following a ketogenic diet. That’s what we’re talking about here. But any, in any aspect of your life, finding a community of like-minded people who will support your goals and your lifestyle is going to be the key to keeping you moving forward.
It, it certainly propels you forward. There’s no shame in leaning on folks, on telling people your trials, not just your triumphs. And, and just, you know, allowing a community to support you and I say allowing a community to support you. Because some folks just really are afraid to open up that way.
And allow themselves to have that extra helping hand. And we need to give that gift to ourselves. So if I can leave anyone with a thought, it, it would be, you know, give yourself the gift of community and know that you’re worth the time spent with that community.
Carole Freeman: Oh, I love it. That’s so great. Yes. Give yourself permission.
A hundred percent. Well, thank you Valerie, for being here and sharing your keto success secrets. I’m so excited. Thank you for the introduction to you and also all the teachable moments that are part of this as well too. So, and thank you for everyone for watching and listening, and I hope to see you all again soon. Thank you.
How to Overcome Anxiety and Emotional Eating so that You Can Stick to Your Keto Diet
Join Carole in this episode as she chats with Katie McKenna, a fellow graduate and friend from Bastyr University, about her unique approach to anxiety and healthy eating and to have a discussion on Anxiety keto and emotional eating .
Do you struggle with anxiety?
Do you ever use food to cope with overwhelming feelings, anxiety or other feelings?
How does anxiety affect our food choices? How does our food choices affect anxiety?
For over a decade, Katie has helped people redefine anxiety and learn neuro-hacking techniques that give you emotional agility (AKA “ninja stress management” skills) coupled with functional nutrition, so that you can overcome anxiety and emotional eating tendencies.
Katie is a psychotherapist with a Master’s degree in Nutrition. Her full time private practice offers a unique, integrative approach that fosters change on all levels: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.
She integrates the latest research on the body mind connection, belief systems and the nervous system to guide people in clearing negative, subconscious beliefs and reactive trauma responses.
Carole Freeman: Oh, we are live. Alright we’re live. Everyone.
Do you struggle with anxiety?
Do you ever use food to cope with overwhelming feelings?
Have you ever wondered. If what you eat could affect your feelings, your mood, anxiety, guess what?
This episode is for you.
Stick around as I chat with my friend Katie McKenna, certified nutritionist, licensed mental health counselor and anxiety and nutrition expert.
You are going to learn how to redefine anxiety. You’re gonna learn some solid neurohacking strategies to minimize your feelings of anxiety and gain emotional agility.
Welcome everyone to episode 57 of Keto Chat live for joining us. I’d love you to share, just type in the comments where you’re joining us from.
Table of Contents
I always love to see where our viewers coming from, so just type in where you’re from there. Welcome to the show. I am your host, Carole Freeman. I have a master’s in nutrition and clinical health psychology. I’m also a board certified. Keto Nutrition specialist and I specialize in helping women 40 plus follow a keto diet for sustainable weight loss.
We’ve gotta give you a little medical disclaimer here to keep the lawyers happy. This show is meant for educational 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 any conditions, concerns, questions related to your specific medical condition needs, then please seek out the proper.Authorities your personal healthcare professional. And so join me in welcoming to the show. I didn’t tell her I was gonna do this, but I’m gonna bring up this banner. , my computer did an update last night, so it’s so slow. Okay, here we go. Help me welcome to this show. Round of Applause for Katie McKenna.
And I know Katie from Bastyr University, so she was predecessor in the same program that I was in several years ahead of me. And so she was a mentor to me through that program that I was in And Let’s see. So I have a bio that I’ve pulled from your website, but also tweaked a little bit for the show here.Yeah. Katie McKenna is a graduate at Bastyr University, and she’s here to talk about her unique approach to anxiety and healthy eating. And she’s a psychotherapist with a master’s degree in nutrition. Her full-time. Private practice offers a unique, integrative approach that fosters change on all levels, physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.
For over a decade, Katie has helped people redefine anxiety and learn neurohacking techniques that give you emotional agility, a k a. Ninja stress management skills. Who doesn’t want some ninja stress management skills coupled with functional nutrition so that you can overcome anxiety and emotional eating tendencies.She integrates the latest research on body mind connection, belief systems, and the neurosystem or nervous system to guide people in clearing negative subconscious beliefs and reactive trauma response. So welcome Katie to the show.
Katie McKenna: Hi Carole. I’m happy to be.
Carole Freeman: Welcome everyone who’s watching, and those of you watching the replay as well.
Welcome to the show. Go ahead and type in the comments where you’re joining us from. This is an interactive, the reason I do this live, cuz I wanna chat with you all here. So Katie, where are you joining us from? I am in Seattle. Excellent. Yeah, still snow up there.
Katie McKenna: We actually have five inches on the ground right now and more maybe to come.
We’ve we’re, we’ve, it’s white , five inches.
Carole Freeman: Oh my gosh. I haven’t got an update lately oh my gosh.
Katie McKenna: Yeah. think those in the city have much, much less if any, but I’m a little bit north, ,
Carole Freeman: I have a friend that lives in Everett, and I think it was last week she was telling me when it first hit that.
the power was out and the power lines were down. So she was actually trapped at home. . Yeah. Same here. . I lived in Seattle area for 27 years and when I first moved there in 93, you got, we got snow like every four years and it was just a dusting, maybe an inch or two, shut the city down, no school. And then by the time I left there two years ago, Snow every single year, several times a year, and many inches a lot of the time too.
Katie McKenna: So it’s changed quite a bit over the years. Yeah. Yeah. . ,
Carole Freeman: What’s your favorite thing to do on a snow day?
Katie McKenna: You know what’s funny now with the, there’s been so much change posed the pandemic where healthcare’s really turned to telehealth, at least for me. , I’ve remained in telehealth.
Like snow days don’t exist anymore. as far as like being off school or off work. In fact, if it. No power. That would’ve maybe been a day off work, but we actually have some hills around and we’ve got some really cute neighborhood kids that love to play. So I’ve definitely gone sledding with my neighbors.
Carole Freeman: Oh, how fun. Yeah. How fun. I do I’ll admit, I do miss the snow days down here since I moved to Phoenix, Arizona. But we just gotta go a couple. hours north up to Flagstaff and there’s snow up there, I can have it if I want to. That’s kinda the best. Yeah. Katie, just for people that don’t know you, if you share a little bit how, how did you get into nutrition?
How did you decide on the the degree at Bastyr? So Katie and I have the same degree. It’s a double master’s in nutrition and psychology. And what was your path that led you. To pursue that?
Katie McKenna Background
Katie McKenna: Sure. The story can always be long or short. But the medium length version is when I was actually about 19.
I was having a lot of stomach issues and I had an endoscopic and all this stuff and the doctors told me that I needed to avoid tomato sauce and go on. An acids and I started the internet was still new. I started researching and finding out there was like other ways to approach healing and that’s where I started to the other half of it is I come from a family of nurses and so I was going to nursing school and having some real.
Disharmony with that process. And I started doing some research and I discovered Basti and they had an undergrad program in nutrition. And so that’s actually where I started. I went to Basti in 2001 to do my undergrad in nutrition. And that just opened my mind in so many ways to hear about what food can really do for our bodies and how food can be medicine.
And then from there, I went to work for a Native American community out here in, in Washington on the diabetes. Grant and my time with the ults, which was just so memorable. I spent a number of years out there. People, my job was to teach diabetes related information, but people would come in with so much.
Other hardships going on traumas abuse things that they wanted to talk about. And I was supposed to be talking about diabetes and so I realized I just really didn’t have the professional tools I had, like the human empathy for sitting with people, but I wanted the tools. So that’s where I decided to go back to Bastyr because I had such a good experience in undergrad and by then Bastyr had that dual program of master’s in nutrition and a master’s in psychology. So that’s why I went to Bastyr and the the beginning of my story.
Carole Freeman: Oh, I love it. And that, so recently they changed the name of the. Program. Yeah. And I’m like, because now it’s a Master’s of Arts in Psychology and a master of Science and nutrition. Is that, do you know how they changed it or,
Katie McKenna: I actually haven’t kept track. They have changed it. And when you and I were there, that program was still relatively new. So it doesn’t surprise me that it’s gone through some changes. And you know what it, what actually, like the next piece that’s interesting is having that combination of nutrition and psychology it really landed me when I graduated I was looking for work and I found work at an eating disorder clinic, and that was such a great place to get to really practice both. and then through the years of working so much in the field of eating disorders, as I started to learn like what is even the root causes there, a lot of root causes have to do with trauma, depression, and anxiety. And so that’s how my career has, like the river has changed over time of what I specialize in and anxiety is just such a prominent thing.
All of us can relate to that. It’s it’s a big focus of my work now.
What Is Anxiety
Carole Freeman: Yeah. I was gonna ask then about, what is anxiety? Why does it seem to be so prevalent now? Is it partly that it is more common or is it just that we have a name for it? I was actually thinking before we went live here about how when I was growing up, when I was a child the. . Anxiety wasn’t thrown around, but my mom would always say, label, oh, you’re anxious. . And she used it to mean I was excited and eager for something to happen. And I know there’s an overlap of we often think of anxiety as something that’s very uncomfortable and something we don’t wanna experience.
Whereas the eager and excited for something could be something that we wanna experience. Will you share a little bit more about, what is anxiety? What’s happening in the. Sure. And I have too many questions there, so I’ll, we’ll start there.
I was a child of the, I, I was in the, grew up in the seventies and the eighties and you we might say somebody was nerve had nerves or I have nerves. Anxious is a really originally a clinical word that is now so commonplace. I think that both is true. This idea of it, do we have it more or not?
Or do we just have better language for it? Is there more acceptance around mental health? So people talk about this stuff more. These are all really good questions. I do think that in general people. I like to think of like our, hi. Historically, maybe even our ancient ancestors might have had stronger family connections, maybe stronger connections to the land and nature.
Some of these things that like help us ground and like discharge stress. And in general I really do think. Many people are really isolated. And that’s even true. Just because you’re single doesn’t mean married people are less isolated because sometimes you can be really lonely, even in a family.
So that isolation, I think, really does breed some of the anxieties that we have. And when you flip through the dsm the diagnostic criteria for anxiety, I think a lot of people would qualify and. Where I’m really arriving at after now being in the field for 10 plus years is them trying to like kinda turn things upside down.
I think the way we pathologize human emotions and say, act like it’s a problem to be fixed or diagnosed or labeled, or there’s nothing inherently wrong with taking medication, but that’s also not always the only answer. So part of my message is really getting back to understanding that we are human beings, are feeling people, and if we’re not, supported or trained or educated in how to be with our emotions, then they can become so overwhelming and we start to avoid them and distract ourselves.
We move into addiction or numbness. Things that like also relate to disordered. Food choices, but all that, then that disconnection just breeds even more anxiety in the body. Cause we start to get really scared of like our shadow selves.
Children, Feelings, and Parents
Carole Freeman: . Oh, it’s so true. I know for me growing up that.
Parents didn’t learn how to have feelings or accept them or experience them. And so as a parent, you want to help your children feel okay and good. And , the message was if you were sad or crying, be quieter. I’ll give you something to cry about. Or if you were too excited, it was calm down, sit down, be quiet.
So hundred percent all either side of the emotion spectrum was like we were, Nope, nope. Quiet. Sit down and be quiet and don’t have any feelings or emotions. Yeah,
Katie McKenna: yeah. I’ll use my brother as an example. Cause I come from family in the Midwest that I think still have a lot of that attitude.
And he’s got two sweet little girls, but he’s always saying just be normal. And what he’s doing is don’t have emotions. Don’t be sad, don’t be mad. Not entirely, but don’t do it in big ways. Be solid. And that’s a lot of the way I was raised too. And you’re right about the the excited feelings.
I think about extreme sports people like what something else might call anxiety in the body. That’s the feelings they love and go for when they’re like about to do their parachutes and squirrel suits and all of that. Just depends on how we’re wired.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. Yeah. So talk more about what is anxiety, what’s going on in the body?
What are those feelings that can feel overwhelming for some people?
Katie McKenna: Some of this is a good question because we have some research and understanding about. Feelings. But to be honest it’s pretty limited. We know things like oxytocin, a feel good chemical, and cortisol is a stress chemical.
We have endorphins released to help us have like energy. Whether or not something feels good or bad. But there’s a lot we don’t know about emotions. And emotions really do feel differently to different people’s bodies. There’s people who study a lot of biofeedback and are looking at emotions as possibly even being something akin to like radio waves, like a pulse of information that moves through us that is, wifi is invisible, but yet it’s real and we can measure it.
And that maybe emotions are something along that line. Specifically with anxiety a lot of times what people mean. , their heart’s pounding thoughts are racing. When anxiety starts to move into panic, you can even get like numbness in your face or numbness in your arms, which then ha, makes the panic accelerate.
Cause that sounds like symptoms of a heart attack. I would say I think maybe you can add to this anxiety for a lot of people is not, is a very unpleasant feeling in the body and they’re just want to distract or numb or avoid it because it
Carole Freeman: feels bad. Yeah, for sure. I’m wondering, I can see we’ve got some people watching live, but can you just let us know that you can hear us by giving us a comment?
wanna make sure that we’re coming through loud and clear. If you could say, just gimme a yes or a thumbs up in the comment section, so I know that you can actually hear us. I can see people popping in and leaving, so I just wanna make sure that on the other side that we’re coming through.
That would help us out a lot if you would give us a thumbs up if you could hear us. All right.
Let’s see. I’ve got all these questions I wanted to ask you too. So let’s talk about now. Okay, so we talked about how as children, most of us have been trained numb out or avoid feelings. We haven’t learned how to accept or feel them. What are some of the beginning steps that you have that you work with your clients in managing anxiety or overcoming it, or what are the, what, how do talk about.
How To Get Rid of Anxiety
That is it trying to get rid of anxiety? Is it minimizing it? Is it accepting it? What’s your goal when you’re helping people manage it?
Katie McKenna: You know it’s really interesting how it’s more than semantics. Like our words around anxiety can be really revealing as far as whether or not you say overcome or heal.
My perspective and where I’m like this working theory that I’m a arriving at, is that. Anxiety is worsened, the more we try to avoid it. And so there’s a lot of, I think, reverse psychology that’s required to essentially lean in, lean in’s a pretty popular topic in other forms of therapy, like in marriage therapy and things like that about how to lean together, how to move towards what’s uncomfortable. And so I think that’s the essence of what we really need to learn to do. My. Thoughts around anxiety is that there’s sometimes other things, other feelings underneath it, and it could be of feelings, beliefs, sometimes things that are just like partially subconscious or that we don’t really wanna go there.
And when we are in the habit of, I would say like numbing, avoiding, disconnecting, distracting, we can then get even more lost in our heads. We can get lost in addiction, even if it’s minor a. Like our phones are shopping or food or alcohol, bigger ones. So the work really is starting to understand that we are emotional beings.
And we’re not really given an owner’s manual for that. So like seeking out support so that you can start to understand your whole emotional palette. We’re pretty quick to Be okay with feeling happy, but we’re in general, we’re not okay with the more uncomfortable ones.
So to be able to tolerate what feels like discomfort, and that’s a mix of emotional literacy, like having words and distinctions for things, just more than like sad and mad. I even like to think, like grief versus sorrow versus longing to it. It sounds poetic, but to really draw out the. Subtleties in these words, and to start to parrot with also the sensations we’re feeling because that helps us connect in our bodies. So am I feeling jittery? Am I feeling empty? Am I feeling Butterflies is a common one or my, a pit in my stomach. We’ve got a lot of words for body sensations, like the weight of the world on my shoulders, or I feel like I got punched in the gut.
So interest we’ve got a lot of con common phrases that actually you take a minute to think about it and it really does help to start to identify. So this process of going towards naming things, being able to. What’s going on? So we’ve got emotional literacy. That’s the naming things. The witnessing, which is a bit of my favorite way to think about it is the weatherman. The weatherman can observe what’s going on and report about it, but they don’t have to be out there in the rain getting something wet. And so sometimes with our emotions, if we get too sucked into it, it’s like we’re in the rainstorm. We wanna have that healthy amount of distance where we’ll be like, okay, I am sad, I am upset.
but that’s not all of who I am. Because that’s part of it is emo emotions can be so overwhelming, we get lost in it. And then from there you can also start to learn how to shift your moods and that some has things to do with food, diet, exercise, posture the stories we tell, our belief systems, our worldview. So that’s the top level version of. taking people through the process and we a lot of times narrow it down to three things. Emotional literacy observer awareness and emotional agility as a way to make peace with what’s going on in the body.
Carole Freeman: I was just having a imagining how fun it might be for somebody to actually step into the weather reporter role.
Just the way of Hey folks, right now we’ve got a lot of storming going on inside my belly right now. Yeah. And the rain is coming down and the lightning and all that. So back to you in the studio, Katie . That’s perfect. Great.
Katie McKenna: Cause emotions are moving forces. Now emotions certainly can get stuck.
And then that’s a whole other level of like, intervention and how to work with yourself. But when a, when emotion shows up, it is like the weather. Am I feeling sunny? Am I feeling stormy? Is it rainy? Misty? Foggy? And the ability to like be with it without needing to change it. That alone is enough to usually gen.
It also will start to move on just like the weather does. This snow’s not gonna be here forever.
Depression
Carole Freeman: And I remember a mindfulness concept. in school where they talked about that. If you’re experiencing depression, it’s often because you’re focused on the past and regret of things that have happened or you’ve done, and then if you tend towards anxiety or more future focused and worried about possible things that could happen.
What do you, how do does that fit within your paradigm or.
Katie McKenna: Yeah. I’ve heard that said quite a bit and I think that makes sense. That and in general, depression is with a lot of focus on the past and anxiety can be a lot of focus on the future. Either way, the part of the solution and the intervention there is what does it mean to find presence?
To be here now in this exact moment. And that’s where things like breath work, meditation can help us find that, that present moment. Our current culture doesn’t really teach us a lot about that either. So there’s a lot to learn.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. And they’re the, I’ve never really been somebody who experienced anxiety as a primary.
Emotion until that fateful car accident in 2014. Yeah. Yeah. And I, so I, for people who don’t know, I was rear-ended by a distracted driver. It was a pretty traumatic accident. I ended up bedridden for the next three months and I developed a lot of P T S D like anxiety around driving and being in a car.And even to this day, which we’re. Oh my gosh, what’s the math? How long has it been? Almost? Eight years. Eight years Since al, almost nine. Since that accident. I still have so much anxiety in the car and, certain situations like brake lights or what my brain coded as, you are gonna die if you see brake lights.
Yeah. And I remember the therapist that I had wonderful lady like helped so much and there, but there was part of it like, okay, part of it’s true what she was telling me, but part of it was like, no, that’s not true. Okay. She would tell me that the feelings that you’re experiencing are because you’re worried about what might happen and which could be partly true. And she says, that’s not actually happening right now, though. You are what you’re experiencing. The worry of something in the future, and I was like, Partly true, right? So my brain just coded for this experience. Yeah. And it’s terrified that I’m gonna die. And so it’s, and the feelings I was having were happening in the moment, right?
Like when I still have that. So I was like, okay, I believe part of what you’re saying, and I think that maybe it’s more. because she was trying to get me to talk myself out of it, right? Like in my brain, like logically go that’s not happening. However, it’s but the experience and the feelings I’m having are very real in, in the moment. How do you. I don’t know what the question there what do you think about that idea that what’s you’re only worried about the future, so it’s not real. Like it’s, it felt dismissive of me of no, but I’m actually having these feelings right now, even though I’m not dying and we’re not in a car accident right now. It’s still brings up real feelings and physical feelings and emotion.
Katie McKenna: I appreciate that you’re using a personal example because that sometimes makes it easier to talk about this kind of stuff. Otherwise, it just sounds like theory and intellectual to me it sounds like what you’re really having was a trauma response.
I don’t think I would’ve even labeled it anxiety. And trauma’s a hard thing to understand because it can be sometimes big and obvious you were in a car accident, but sometimes like negative childhood experiences, if that was your normal, you don. Not to label that trauma until much later, but in, in your case, it seems that our brain, when something dangerous happens, it is unable to like memory’s not very succinct or accurate, and things can get. I think of them that they don’t get filed away as in that happened in the past. And so for your brain, when it sees brake lights, it’s it really can be almost like it puts you back into that same thing is happening again. The accident’s happening now. That’s my understanding of essentially of like a.
Flashback and that kind of thing is your brain gets flooded with, this is happening now. So it is very real. And this is also why like traditional talk therapy really falls short because you can talk about it so you’re blue in the face and a little talking’s probably good, but really there’s all this other kind of concepts and interventions about how to work with your nervous system, your subconscious mind the part of our brain that. The magdala that like registers fear and all of that. So I would say it’s gotta be a lot more body based of working with the, those sensations that were happening to you and sometimes still happen to you. You can’t talk yourself out of it.
Carole Freeman: Okay. Yeah. And I, yeah, cuz that’s what I do now is you’re okay, you’re all right.
Techniques To Overcome Anxiety
Like just some soothing self-talk, but it’s still really prevalent. Almost nine. later. So let’s talk about that. What are some of the techniques that you use with your clients in, helping them? Again, manage sooth. Yeah. I
Katie McKenna: mean, you’re right that that part about, okay, I am fine, I am safe helping yourself know that you’re safe.
That, that’s an important tool to be able to do. And, it’s, it works somewhat, but what you’re saying, you’re like why is it still happening for me? That’s frustrating. It might even be painful. It’s yucky. To say the least my favorite intervention, honestly is things look related to EMDR.
There’s beginning research out there that things like EMDR can help our nervous system reprogrammed to the present moment. So the way I think of trauma and this does tie into anxiety because it’s all connected, is. . Ideally, at the end of the day, the brain when we’re sleeping is able to say, these are the things that happened, and it’s over. When we have continuous kind of flashbacks or emotions that don’t really go away, it’s almost like the brain saying I think this is still happening. I think this is still happening. And what we wanna be able to do is help the brain realize even if it was terrible, it is over. But again, we can’t say that to the brain.
There’s this process of being in a meditative state, being in the sensations while staying really present. And one of the things I talk about in. Oh, what’s that other I’m blanking on the other form of therapy that’s really body-based but like orienting to the room that, that kind of things that help your brain go, okay. Nope, this is, December 2nd, 2022. I’m safe in my body, but it’s not just the words, it’s about finding and resourcing safety inside and helping it to spread out. And it’s gotta be felt is, I guess what I’m saying, if you just say, I’m fine, I’m safe, but you don’t feel that way, it’s gonna fall short.
Koosh Balls for Soothing Anxiety
Carole Freeman: One of the tools that my therapist gave me she had one of those Koosh balls. Do you like? It was like a spiky, little, like soft ball, and I think she worked a lot with children, but it was really effective actually, so I would keep it. And I knew for my own training that if I even though it was so uncomfortable to be in a car to drive myself, and it was especially uncomfortable when somebody else was driving.
Yeah. I knew that if I avoided driving, it would just close my world down and it would make it worse. And so I forced myself as soon as I was able to drive again to get out there and drive as uncomfortable as it was. And then the Koosh ball was like a, Texture sensation thing that would bring me instead of being in the emotion or worry, right? Like touch, touching that little different textured thing would bring me into that, like into the present moment and almost a distraction a little bit. But also it was like a mindfulness centering thing. So that was a tool in the very beginning that really helped me. overcome the extreme version of what I experienced in the beginning.
Katie McKenna: Yeah. There’s even things like shaking the hands rubbing either kind of like playing like you’re running your feet or rubbing your feet on the floor can be really grounding, presenting things. There’s some interesting stuff with tapping as well, and even some there’s a lot of beginning research coming around, like they’re calling it poly-vagal.
Calming exercises that again, have to do with the eyes. So there’s some connection also with how our eyes are working when we’re dreaming on, and also when we are impacted by something traumatic that is like a shortcut to the nervous system. And honestly, there’s a lot of theories out there, but we don’t really know. There’s not a conclusive answer on why that’s worked, but it’s similar to EMDR or something called brain spotting. There’s some different things out there to explore.
Fidget Spinners for Anxiety
Carole Freeman: And perhaps those I don’t know what they’re called, but they’re pop it things like it’s a little plastic. Tray that you popped the little buttons in and out.
Do you know what I’m talking about? I don’t. Yeah. Oh, okay. They’re like me later. Cause fidget spinners were popular for a while where it was just like something to get you in this present moment. It’s of a texture thing or like a active thing. And then they also have all different shapes of it’s like a soft plastic again, different shapes and it’s like a little It’s of like a button, but you can pop it in and out. I don’t know what they’re called. Somebody who was watching this later, let us know what those are called. I think it’s the same concept. They didn’t have them nine years ago, but they have them now. And I see them as like a anxiety type of tool that just kind helps somebody come back into the present moment of doing something.
Textural and physical activity a little bit, a thumb physical activity.
Katie McKenna: Then, I think also some of these ideas about what an intervention is called for, it depends because when somebody’s moving more towards the extreme, where things are pretty heightened and nearing panic or in panic, the interventions there are gonna be different than if it’s just that medium level.
But that medium level, which I think a lot of people can relate. The idea of being able to close your eyes and actually just okay, what’s happening in my body? What am I noticing? And honestly, even inviting yourself to go towards what’s uncomfortable. The, people often talk about, like relaxing on vacation or something, and they’re like, oh I unwound and unwound again. So like we have some concepts around like layers of being able to go deeper. And so there’s some really interesting things that happen when we give ourselves this gift of our own attention by saying, all right, I’m really feeling this pit in my belly, or I’m really feeling. Heart racing and let’s say you’re anxiety on a scale of one to 10.
If you’re at a five, this is a good practice to be like, all right, I’m gonna just go sit with this sensation in my heart. And without any agenda, I’m just gonna be really curious about what is happening now. And oddly when we start to pay attention, it starts to shift. Like sometimes, sometimes it might feel a little worse, it might feel a little better. You might get some interesting, kind connect the dots ideas of oh, what’s really bothering me? X, Y, Z. And awareness and this kind of stems from a lot of Buddhist psychology also, that awareness itself does a lot of healing. And that’s why this whole idea of move towards lean in is part of the medicine.
Food Scarcity as a Child as an Anxiety Trigger
Carole Freeman: I’m reminded too of another example related to food that came up on a a group call with some of my clients the other day. We were talking about the like a lot, a similarities that we had in food scarcity growing up. Yeah. And how, weight loss and dieting can bring that up again.
And so for example maybe you lived in a household where there just wasn’t a lot of food readily available all the time. Or some deeper trauma. I experienced something where a babysitter was neglecting us in not making food for us because she was making out with her boyfriend, and we were too young to. Make anything for ourselves. And so these awarenesses of, food deprivation and being on a diet and not, calorie restriction and things like that, or things that I brought into my practice. So I don’t actually like to give my clients a calorie restriction, cuz I know for me personally, that was.
A trigger was that, okay I only get 1200 calories today, but I’ve eaten 1,150, I only have 50 calories left. Suddenly I was just o I was food obsessed. I was hungry. Absolutely. I was like, absolutely. I can’t get enough. And so it’s a big influence of why for my clients, I don’t give them a calorie limit. We focus on other things and then focus on. Feeling full and satisfied and getting your nutrient needs met rather than re restriction. And which is a feeling of anxiety, right? That comes up when you’re, I agree, running outta food and you’re not gonna have enough food. The other commonality that we talked about, in our group.
Was that how when there’s free food, and this also has to do, we’re recording this in December and the holidays are upon us and there’s gonna be a lot of events, right? Where there’s a buffet of food and there’s free food. And that also we talked about was a trigger for if it’s free, you wanna get as much as possible of it. And yeah, managing that. So what what tips do you have? For people around when those type of things come up.
Katie McKenna: Yeah, those are all really good points and things I, I talk about quite a bit with people. The food scarcity thing from diet mentality that comes around it. And that’s maybe if you start dieting as a teenager and adult, that could happen.
But part of what you’re saying with childhood, if you’ve got a mom that’s dieting and is then restricting the child’s food, that can create a lot of scarcity. It also creates, Sneaking it can lead to binging behaviors, that kind of thing. So the food scarcity and the, that anxiety of am I gonna get enough?
Often causes us to like overcompensate and so we eat too much because it’s I’ve gotta get it now and. So much to be said about the power of understanding that just like our body’s wired about emotions, we are wired to know when we’re hungry and when we’re full. So it’s not as simple as that because if you got all of the right amount of calories from orange juice, you’re actually still gonna get hunger cues cuz you need protein and fiber and things like that to make yourself feel full. But the idea of. Helping people get empowered with understanding their body’s cues about what hunger and full feel like, and one of my favorite phrases to say with people is I feed my body when I’m hungry, which also implies if I’m not hungry, then I wait. Because that’s the other half of what a lot of us are working with.
Like you said, the holidays we’re just inundated with the temptation and cravings and also emotional or boredom cues to want to eat. But this alignment of I feed my body when I’m hungry helps dissipate the food scarcity. Cause it’s yes, if my body’s hungry, I’m going to feed it. I think is just a really important mantra to repeat when somebody’s in that process of changing their relationship to food. I feed my body when I’m hungry.
Stock the Right Foods for Success
Carole Freeman: Yeah. Lovely. Lovely. Yeah. And, For one of the common things that seems to work for a lot of my clients too is that having plenty of go-to foods on hand in different situations.
So one of our peer support coaches, Rita shares often about how when she travels she will take, different meat sticks and yeah. Different things like that she knows she enjoys and , she’s been doing this for, two and a half years now, and she says she still like over packs when she goes because sh that calms her mind that it’s okay.I have plenty, , if I’m hungry, I will always have something to be able to go to. And she comes on with most of what she took. But that gives her that reassurance that she’s not gonna have to, eat something that she knows, won’t make her feel very well, because she’s always got plenty.
Katie McKenna: And it’s accessible. Yeah. So that’s important. There, there’s a lot of other nuances there about how other people feel about, you bringing snacks especially or to the holidays. There’s a lot of expectations sometimes of eat grandma’s favorite lasagna and it gets complicated.
There’s a lot of emotions that come up related to food and, that’s. I think about half of the work that I do with clients. I know that I really talk about the anxiety and the trauma work, but so much of it is how we relate to food in our bodies and navigate the emotional realms and honestly, other people’s emotions about food. Because, there’s this idea that if you’re coming home for the holidays, you’re supposed to eat X, Y, and Z, or this is what you ate last year. Why are you not eating it this year?
Carole Freeman: Oh, and I know for me that. walking into my mom’s house because it was always like about food. Suddenly I’m hungry as soon as I go to mom’s.
I want, and I want X, Y, and Z because that’s what I always ate when I went there. Yeah. I found myself gonna the cupboard in the fridge. It’s okay, you don’t need that right now. You’re okay. Let’s talk about the other side of this as well, because I know that from my cohort of. , the program that we did, which was the nutrition and psychology that we all felt really passionate. One of the reasons we wanted both those degrees is because we felt like we need to be able to have psychological tools to help us make healthy choices. And also we felt very strongly that our food choices influence our feelings and emotions and how well our brain and the rest of our body work. And it was interesting.
I don’t need to get into too much of the the people that were running the program didn’t really get that because they’d been trained on either psychology or nutrition, and there wasn’t a lot of unity or maybe a ton of research in both. This, going both ways, right? So let’s talk about, so definitely what’s going on in our mind can influence our food choices.
Which we mm-hmm. we’ve just been talking about. So let’s talk about the other side of that. About what is our food? How does our food influence anxiety and other emotions and
Katie McKenna: Yeah. That is such a fun topic and it’s true. I feel like you and I when we went to school, we were in the frontier of starting to even be with the research and in education about the.
That exists, that food affects your mood. And so there’s even so much more that’s come out in the last 10 to 15 years. For me personally, I am not like a really like the biochemist supplement focus of things because I do often, so often work with disordered eating and eating disorders.
That getting down to that nitty gritty part can get. triggering for people. . Whether or not to say like somebody specifically needs more glutamine or more B vitamins, like that’s not really my specialty. I come at it more from What are the stories that we have around food? So for example if you have decided that, I don’t know, ice cream is bad for you either because dairy’s bad for you, or because it’s too high fat or too sugary, and then you eat it and you feel guilty, how’s that affecting your mood? If you feel. Too full. And you’ve decided fullness is bad and that now you’re in shame or disgusted mood-wise about food. Is one of the ways I look at it, there are some real specifics that I think are generally accepted about the power of omega-3 fats. Having the right amount of healthy fats in our diet is a big component of mood regulation.
And even I think to be able to like make all those feel good chemicals. We really do need the right amount of omega3. S the funny thing is, more and more with research, like when they start to say, have more omega3 s we’re starting to find out you can’t just straight supplement that it’s gotta be the right proportion with the sixes and the nine s and the same thing, for example, with B vitamins or zinc.
You gotta make sure you have copper. , it helps really to, for me, just push people back towards a Whole Foods diet. Lots of colors, lots of vegetables, lots of fiber, plenty of protein. Because then we know they’re getting, not just the vitamin C from the supplement, but if they’re having an orange, they’re getting all the bio flavonoids and the other parts that come with it so that we can digest it and absorb it. Personally I think supplements are really useful in certain ways, but when it comes to mood regulation I really think about it more about understanding our Stories around food that the stories we’ve told ourselves and the way that for individuals to get really specific about how do I feel when I eat this way?
That’s often one of the mindfulness questions that I give people when they are. Working to change the relationship with food is to ask, am I hungry? If I eat this, how will I feel? And how will I feel either later today or tomorrow based on how I’ve eaten this so they can start to understand for them how foods make them feel. And I’ll include too while we’re at it, just because, I don’t know about you, but I think we could both talk about this till the cows come home. When we’re dealing with things like food sensitivities, food allergies, gastrointestinal issues, there’s a lot to decipher too about oh, am I gonna have stomach pains or am I gonna have some kind of need to run to the bathroom if I eat this?
So there’s a lot of checking in about food that way and how that also affects our mood. I have a client that was just recently saying she has to be so careful about what she eats. Of her intestinal issues. She doesn’t if she’s in public and has to run to the bathroom, that gives her so much anxiety. And so her food choices have gotten smaller and smaller. Cause she’s really scared about having intestinal issues out in public and not being able to find a bathroom. So there’s just so many ways that the food affects our moods.
Protein for Mood Stability
Carole Freeman: I’ll add in. Couple of things that I see the work that I do with my clients too.
Protein and then I’m gonna talk about keto. I wanted to say both of them. So I remember , I forgot to bring a pen into my podcast studio, so I normally like, we’ll take notes. So I’m like, so I’m like, here’s my own trick of, so I remember both of them. Protein and. . In general, we’re finding that we’ve been told to avoid protein for quite a while, and for my ladies especially, because like typically protein rich foods are stereotypical man foods, and so then women try to eat, a salad when they’re trying to lose weight and it’s very low protein.
I usually do baby steps to get my ladies to eat adequate protein, right? So we start out at 80 grams a day, which is still not enough for most of them. And they’re like, oh my gosh, this is so much protein. I’m like, wait till we double that. And one gram per lean of body mass, lean body mass weight pound, let’s see, one gram of protein.
Pound of lean body mass is a starting place. Proteins are made of amino acids. And amino acids actually are necessary for us to make all of our neuro chemicals in our brain. So if we’re undereating protein, our body just. , our brain can’t make all of the neurochemicals to make our brain work correctly. So this is one, one very important piece is getting adequate protein. . And the nice thing about that is that it, we were talking earlier about how food restrictions makes us. Hungrier for some people. And so for protein we get to have this free for all. Eat as much protein as you want, you wanna get at least this much.
And so we have research that shows in mice or rats. I don’t know which one they did, those cute little rodents where it increases GABA on the brain. So GABA is a neurotransmitter that is the, basically the opposite of anxiety feeling. So it’s the cool, it’s a chill, it’s all good, man. It’s that kind of chemical in our brain and. The clients that I’m working with at Introduction of Keto and typically, within a couple of months they will just notice that wow, I’m just so much more stress tolerant. My mood is so much more even keel. Like things that typically would’ve just set me off the rails. It’s like it’s not that big of a deal anymore.
So this is a researched effect that ketosis has on the brain and the body. And additionally typically people around them will. Begin to comment, right? So maybe the husband or spouse or the children like. , you’re just so much more common mal now you’re easier to get along with. And so this is the effects of, ketosis on the body and the brain. And likely there are like a thousand different mechanisms that are all happening that help promote that. Sense of calm and peace and wellbeing. Additionally, my clients all report too that, especially the way that I teach how to do keto with all the psychological stuff we’ve been talking about, is that it removes their food obsession.
How Blood Sugar Affects Mood
Yeah. And because they’re getting adequate nutrients, they’re getting proper satiety from proteins and fats and the right amount of vegetables, and they’re also. Even key of blood sugar. So one of the things that makes us food obsessed is when our blood sugar’s going up and down. And so they get that all of, all those many different benefits of, and it gives ’em so much more peace. So not only the neurochemical piece that they get from the GABA, but they just. A lot of that anxiety over will I get enough? I’m constantly hungry, and all that just really calms down and helps ’em have just improved quality of life overall. So I throw in those ways that I know that specifically keto, since this is a keto chat show Yeah.
Katie McKenna: I am not as educated on keto, so I super love what you’re sharing. And I had a client, we were doing a bit of family therapy. She’s an adult woman, and we were bringing in her mother. So two people. One was about 30, one was about 60 and doing a family therapy. And through the course of time, the person in her sixties actually went keto. And experience. I’m gonna say a drastic change in her personality. It was beautiful. And the, then the therapy work really shifted because her it’s just things really changed. She was less triggered, less stressed, more emotionally tolerant it, and so I just saw that firsthand. Over the summer I was working with those two
Carole Freeman: yeah. Yeah. And I like to think that keto. Doing something to our brain, especially the way that I teach it, it’s more moving back into eating the way that we’ve eaten for most of human existence. So while it’s called keto now, and that’s the popular term, it actually is just much more in alignment with the foods that have been available for.
200,000 years. And I talk about it being we’re drawing a line in the sand and we’re some people say oh, it’s restrictive, and that’s gonna make people more food obsessed. It’s we’re removing all the foods, so the highly processed sugar and car foods that , pretty much that’s the one thing that all nutrition experts agree. Those just aren’t healthy for us. Like they’re not doing as any favors. We’re removing those. We’re removing also, Fruits and vegetables that have been highly selectively bred over the last 40, 50 years that are really high in sugar. Yeah. But low in nutrients. So nobody’s, claiming that they’re the Red Delicious, not the Red Delicious.
What’s like the gala Apple or the Honey Crisp? Nobody’s claiming that has, 40% more vitamin C than previous versions of apples. They’re just really delicious and very sugary. . So we’re just drawing a line in the sand and we’re eating foods that are, the way that they’ve grown for a long time.
They’re nutrient rich and we’re avoiding the ones that are gonna Trigger cravings and blood sugar rollercoaster type of things too. That’s my little, so I don’t think, I feel like I’m just teaching people. We’re just going back ancestral to ancestral eating. Yes, it’s called keto right now, but it’s really not the goal. The goal isn’t to be in ketosis forever and, check your ketones and all that kind of stuff. It’s about quality of life. Yeah. Peace and moving away from anxiety actually and multiple different ways. And,
Katie McKenna: and like you said, finding what works. So when somebody comes to you and is following that keto process is and is experiencing many things including.
the gabapentin and that, that kind of, that calming effect and no longer being in that food scarcity place. Like once that you find what works for you. It’s no longer oh, I’m following a fat or a diet, or what some, anybody else is telling me. It’s, this is what nourishes me. Bo, body minded
Carole Freeman: spirit.Ah, yes. Yeah. Yes. So what kind of work are you doing now? I know we’re talking about you’re doing some classes and retreats and workshops, like what what different formats are available? People want some more help with the therapy side of. Anxiety. I’m in a
Katie McKenna: kinda creative spot. We’re trying a few different things.
Pre pandemic. I had just been starting to do some retreats and workshops and in some ways because I think the power and the wisdom that comes in groups is a really great thing to offer people. And we really enjoy those and by we so I’ve got my nutrition and mental health practice, but my husband is, A somatic executive coach, and he’s been working in the field he’s been coaching for maybe 15 or 18 years.So he’s been doing this quite a long time. We started sharing clients on occasion by just cross referrals and just finding that like they were so well supported, the kind of changes that they accelerated through was super fun and useful and real. And so we started specifically working together.
And Some things got put on hold during the pandemic and we’re just now bringing them back. What we’ve been doing lately is like once a month, free classes on Zoom. In some ways for me, just to get the practice of learning the technology and doing groups online and we’re, we don’t actually have anything.Set in Estonia, if we’re gonna do in-person work, what’s coming in January is probably gonna be every other Wednesdays at 10 30, where it’s gonna be roving topics. So we might start off with it in general, how to redefine anxiety, like that idea of leaning in towards your sensations.
But we’re gonna let each group kinda lead to the next topic, like bridge from one to the next. But literally that’s just in the works right now. The, every other Wednesday, starting in January. We do have to have a class happening this afternoon. Ok.
Carole Freeman: But that’s what’s your, what’s the website that people can find out more information?
I’ll make a banner and put it on the screen here. Oh, sure.
Katie McKenna: We call ourselves the anxiety experts, so it’s. The anxietyexperts.com. The point here is we do talk about anxiety quite a lot, but when we mean the anxiety experts is we’re really educating people to be the experts in their own bodies.
Carole Freeman: Okay. Anxiety, the anxiety experts do got it. And if you’re listening or watching to this in the future, then you can check it out and there may be some more offerings there on their website for classes and workshops and maybe some virtual or in-person retreats.
Katie McKenna: We’ll have a whole mix.
I think it’s. It’s fun for me professionally over time to just create diversity in the kind of work I do. And that’s a mix of sometimes one-on-one and sometimes groups. And it’s just, this is what I love to do. So we keep mixing it up and the offer keeps changing and , the world’s just changed so much now with our ability to also go larger with our audiences.Our Department of Health licenses require us, if we’re working as a therapist or a nutritionist to only work in the states that we’re licensed. But in the field of coaching, you have got ways to there. There’s not that limitation and so there’s just, there’s a lot of changes afoot.
Carole Freeman: Yeah, the world changed a lot in a lot of ways in the last couple of years.
Yep. Yeah. Alright. Katie, was there anything else you were hoping I would ask about or that you’d like to share as we wrap this up?
Summary:
Katie McKenna: think if we just, if I talk about what’s really most important to me as this idea that our bodies are designed really intelligently our immune system, even if you just got a scrape on your finger, there’s the subconscious mind that runs in immune system knows how to.
your hand. You don’t have to think Heel, heel heal . And we also have that, I like to think of, we do have a mental health immune system and part of what really accesses that is awareness. When we become aware of I’m hurt or I’m sad, or I’m wistful, getting into that literacy piece.So understanding that. Wired to have emotions that they bring us information about our lives. To me, I think about it as g p s, just because something hurts doesn’t mean we, we shouldn’t go there, but it is really good mapping our sonar for following what’s right for us.
And in fact I’ve got a, a client who’s trying to decide whether or not to take a job. And so we’re really like working on articulating what do I want? Because you can do all the pros and cons. , but being able to feel yourself on the inside is that little nuanced parts about how our emotions really do help guide us.And so the more we can learn to be with the things that are uncomfortable, including anxiety, it just, it brings a lot more rich information that helps us guide our own lives. And it’s really powerful to tap into these sensations that are part of us, and they’re there for a reason.
Carole Freeman: Love it. I love that reframe of not only like the pros and the cons, cuz sometimes that doesn’t make it clear, but what do you want, what do you really want your life to look like?
Yeah. Wonderful. Thank you Katie for being here today. This special episode. I’ll be live again next week, Thursday, whatever the date is. I don’t know. I should had that calendar up for you all. But if you liked what you heard today and you’d like to get some more personalized support with keto, if perhaps anxiety is overwhelming for you and you wanna get help with the nutrition side of things I’m here for that.If you’re, let’s see. So I’m gonna put my website up here. Sound like I’ve never done this before. , . So I do work very closely with my clients in getting keto. Like I’ve talked with Katie today about how it’s personalized for you. There’s no one size fits all approach, and it’s about what works. For you for long term and helping you bring that quality of life.
And so I work very closely with my clients. I only open up 10 client spots per month, and therefore I work with people by application to make sure it’s the best fit on both sides. So visit my website, keto Carole.com. Carole has an E on the end. It’s. The very fancy French spelling of Carole. If you’d like to see, you can read my story there too.I do talk about, I mentioned in this episode of the car accident that I was in. You can read my story on my website if you just wanna learn more. And so go to KetoCarole.com and thank you again to Katie for being here and We always close the show by saying if you enjoyed this, share it with somebody else.
And remember, if you help us grow the show, we’ll help you shrink , and thank you for being here. Katie. I’m gonna put your website up here one more time here. The anx, the anxiety experts.com. Thank you for being here, Katie. Thank you everyone.
Have you ever realized that we have 3 back-to-back carby sugar-filled binge-type holidays in the fall, followed by a time of lower temperatures and shorter days? Was it by accident that these all occur at this time of year? Our bodies are designed to overeat and gain weight during the fall in order to survive the winter, a time of year when food has typically been scarce. So does this mean we are doomed to gain weight this time of year and we should just give up and overeat? and do not consider to Avoid seasonal weight gain No!
In this episode, I’ll talk about the cues that signal our body to begin the process. I’ll give some practical (and a few impractical) advice as to what we can do to counteract this innate drive and Avoid seasonal weight gain And share what foods to consume (and what foods to avoid) to offset this.
In other words, check out this episode to learn how to not only survive the holidays and winter without gaining weight, but actually thrive and emerge in the spring a healthier version of yourself!
Are you struggling to stick with keto this time of year?
Have you ever realized that we have three. Back to back, sugary, carby, crappy loaded holidays this time of year.
Is this a coincidence or is there a reason for it?
Guess what? This episode is for you.
Stick around because I’m gonna tell you why my hand looks like that.
And for those of you just listening to the auto, don’t worry, I’ll describe what my hand looks like and why my hand looks like this. And I’m also gonna share with you why our bodies are designed to gain weight this time of year and what we can do about it.
I’m gonna give you, again, three practical things. I’m gonna give you one really impractical thing, but you may want to consider it anyways. And also including what foods to. This time of year and also what foods you want to eat to to make it through this time of year.
So are you ready? Are you ready?
All right. Welcome everyone to episode 56 of Keto Chat Live.
I am your host, Carole Freeman. I have a master’s in nutrition and clinical health psychology, and I also am a board certified keto nutrition specialist. I’m a keto coach and I specialize in women 40 plus that would like to follow keto for long-term, sustainable weight loss and optimal health.
Just so you know too, this show is meant for educational and entertainment purposes only. I sure hope you’re entertained when you’re joining the show. Just gimme a comment, tell me where you’re joining from. I’d love to know, get people all across the country and all around the world. It’s very fun to know where you’re joining us from.
So let me know. Yeah, again, 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 questions or concerns. Related to your specific medical condition, please contact your qualified healthcare professional.
So let me know where you’re joining from. I’d love to have you join the show. I can see we’ve got people live, but I can’t see who they are until you actually comment. So I’d love to you to join the show. It’s interactive. One of the reasons I like to do this live rather than just recorded, is I wanna interact with you people.
I love the interaction. So please join the show. All right. Oh, I promise you, I was gonna tell you why my hand looks like this. So for those of you just listening to the audio, my left hand is covered with little various shades of red splotches, swatches. And maybe some of you already are guessing what it is if you are a fan or a frequenter of Ulta or Sephora or some other beauty supply place.
But one of my sisters for my birthday, oh, by the way, yesterday was my birthday. I got a year older. Everyone yesterday was my. And one of my sisters sent me a gift card to Ulta, which is super fun. There is a lip product that I like from Nyx. It’s their xxl. Lingerie lipstick. I don’t have it with me.
I don’t remember the name of it. If you wanna know, gimme a comment and I’ll look it up later and post it in the comments here. But there’s a lip product that I like and I have a couple of shades that I like. And so my sister sent me a gift card for my birthday and I went and swatched a whole bunch of shades if you’ve ever done.
It’s to try ’em. All the testers, I swear they have 20 different. Flavors, not flavors, but just different colors in this product. And so it was fun to swipe ’em all and see if I could find one that I liked. And one of the reasons why I like this product so much is because it is waterproof, it stays on, it doesn’t dry out your lips.
You can put lip gloss over the top of it, but. This sounds like it’s a commercial for this product. It’s not. I’m just, again, having fun with like why my hand looks like this. I literally, I don’t know, it’s been more than 24 hours since I’ve watched all these. Now it does sound like an ad for the product, right?
And I’ve watched my hands so many times and this doesn’t come off. So I went to dinner last night with some friends for my birthday and one of ’em said oh, it looks like you’re getting those aged liver spots on your hands. Wrong color. and it also, it was like, oh, it looks like you might have that AIDS disease or something.
So no, neither of those are true. I just, this is , this is an amazing product. It’s not a commercial for it, but I will look up the product later and put it in the comments for you on Facebook and YouTube so that you can know what it is because yeah, it’s pretty amazing that it wouldn’t even come off of my.
My hand like that. And this is the new shade I got. Don’t remember the name of it. Oh, I think it’s maxed out is the shade I got. It’s a very neutral mauve color, which I like. And I have no idea which one on my hand then it is. But anyways, that’s just a little fun personal update there. I did go up and visit family over Thanksgiving holiday in the US here.
Did you have a good holiday? Did you have a good Thanksgiving? What did you do? And all right. Speaking of Thanksgiving, that’s one of these three carby sugary holidays that we have this time of the year. Have you ever noticed that? So we’ve got Halloween, which is all about the sugar, and one month later in the US we have Thanksgiving, which I’ll tell you inside besides the Turkey and ham.
It’s carb casserole after carb casserole, followed by carb, dessert, carb, dessert, carb, dessert, right? That’s Thanksgiving tradition in the us and then one month after that, we have the Christmas holiday here in the US and that’s also just another carby holiday and typically between.
Thanksgiving I have a friend actually for Thanksgiving. She said she spent an entire week cooking for Thanksgiving. And that may be typical of your family. And then a lot of people have a lot of Christmas holiday traditions as well, where they bake a lot of stuff. They’ve got the family tradition, the recipe, the thing, they bake stuff with the kids and they decorate ’em.
And why? Have you ever stopped to wonder? Actually this just hit. Earlier this year or this season why are there three carb loaded holidays this time of the year? Have you ever stopped? Think about it. I bet you haven’t cuz I hadn’t. It is because our bodies are designed to overeat and gain as much weight as possible at this time of the year.
So it’s no coincidence that we’ve got these three high carb. Holidays this time of year because we’re wired to seek out as much of that kind of food as possible this time of year and then shove as much of it in our mouth as possible. So no wonder we’ve got these family traditions and holidays and all this where we make all of these foods.
We’re following up on how our bodies are designed. We’re we, are, we created all these holidays We structured them all close together because this is what our bodies wanna do this time of year. So does that mean it’s hopeless? We should just give up. We’re designed this way. We can’t help it.
Just pig out and gain as much weight as possible. No, guess what? Yeah, that’s why I’m here. This does not mean we’re doomed. It does not mean we’re doomed. It just means you need to be more mindful this time of the year and have some strategies in place to avoid this and offset this. So again, like I promised, I’m gonna have three strategies for you to offset this.
And one impractical thing. So three practical strategies, one impractical strategy. So you don’t have to buy bigger pants in January. There’s a reason why everybody in January decides it’s time to start a diet. I know it’s a new year, but it’s also just after these three high carbs stuff, your face as much as possible, holidays gained a lot of weight and we don’t need to survive the scarce season.
So the reason our bodies are designed this way, let me cover that. The reason our bodies are designed this way is because. For most of human existence, food was pretty scarce. And food grows in the summer and in the fall is when all these plants start to deposit their sugars in their roots. It’s when things like apples are ripe is in the fall, right?
Them you get all the squashes and the sugary parts of the plants and things like that are all ripe in the fall And. . That’s when food is most abundant in nature, and that is when we are designed to start to eat as much of that as possible. And then we went through the winter. And winter is typically when food is the most scarce for animals and humans on this planet.
Again, not now, but for the most of 200,000 years that humans have been on this planet, food has been really scarce . And so this is the way we’ve been designed over that 200,000 years is harvest the food in the fall and eat, shove as much in our pie hole as possible so we can gain as much weight and make it if we can live through the winter on the fat that we’ve accumulated on our body.
Now for animals, this works well because they don’t have McDonald’s and a Wendy’s and a Burger King on every corner and a Starbucks with 14 kinds of sugary things you can add to your drinks. Also shout out, this is just. My girlfriend, so sweetly, I love the color on this. Sent me this for my birthday, as being in a Starbucks.
She sent me this for my birthday. Cute little drink cup that has a straw on it. And what I have in here is water. And I have an element packet. So L M N T, drink LMNT. Also not sponsoring the show, I think they should though. In here with water, which is a electrolyte packet, it’s primarily salt and a tiny bit of stevia.
This is the watermelon flavor one. I don’t know where that, excuse me, picking something on my teeth. And so that’s what’s in here. But so I use my Starbucks cup for good, not for sugary drinks. Thank you Stephanie for the cup. Very sweet. And. All right, so back on track here. Where were we? Okay, so 47 kinds of sugar you can get in your Starbucks drinks.
And you can gain as much weight as possible very easily now. But unfortunately we’re still working with that. Like our body’s biology is wired this time of year to start to gain weight. How does it know? How does it know? Why is it that even though the amount of food that’s available this time of year for us is the same as it is in January and February and April, why is it that, how does our body still know that this is the time of.
There’s a couple of things that are happening out in the environment by weather and also change of the seasons that your body actually can notice. So one is that the temperatures are getting cooler. Your core temperature in your body is feeling that it’s cooling down. That’s one of the signals that your body recognizes.
And also the daylight hours in the day are getting shorter. Those are two primary reasons that your body knows, oh, this is the time where we need to pick out. And so those cue. Correlate with increased appetite more commonly over eating. And oh, it just happens to coincide with these three holidays I just mentioned as well as to why we start to overeat this time of year.
Right? Is this all starting to make sense, becoming very clear? You also might start to feel a little hopeless oh my gosh, are we doomed? Is there anything we can do? I can’t make the sun shine more hours and warmer outside. All right, , those are the two things primarily that are happening that signal to our body that this is fall and it’s time to start to eat as much as possible.
And so are you having trouble this time of year? Are you feeling like you have more cravings? Part of it is these high-carb foods are everywhere you look in the grocery store, but we’ve put them there. We’ve designed them to be there so that we can overeat them. So maybe you do feel like this is harder time of year To my tips.
Three Things You Need To Do Right Now
All right, so the three things you need to do right now if you don’t wanna buy bigger pants of January. If you want to keep strong and steady on your healthy eating plan, one thing is you want to do light therapy. Two, you wanna warm up that core of your body. And three is the foods I’m gonna mention that are gonna help nourish your body and satisfy your nourishment needs without filling up on extra calories and carbohydrates that just make you gain weight.
And then I’m gonna give you bonus number four, which is the one that’s totally impractical, but it’s the finest one, and I really think you should consider it . So number one light therapy. This is what, so I recently moved, a couple years ago, I moved from Seattle, Washington, which is Northern Latitudes have the most trouble with this.
Also, like if you’re on the bottom half of the planet as well, and you’re in the very southern latitudes, not this time of year but six months from now when your seasons are opposite of ours, you have the same challenges. And actually, I would wonder, I’m gonna reach out to. I have some business acquaintances that are in New Zealand and Australia, and I’m gonna ask them if they have springtime, really carby holidays that they struggle with.
So I’m gonna do some intelligent work, some intelligence gathering here for you all. So I. In Seattle, northern latitudes. If you live in the northern latitudes, it is much more challenging because you have more of a stark contrast between the summer and the fall and winter. And so you’re gonna have much cooler temperatures than where I moved two years ago, I moved down to Phoenix, Arizona.
We have much more temperate. I know a lot of people think that it’s like an oven down here and it’s a thousand degrees every day. It’s not true right now, this time of year. December 1st is when I’m recording this. We’re going live. It’s 70 degrees today. It’s very comfortable. I’m in short sleeves, I’m wearing pants, I’m all dressed up.
That’s Arizona. Dress up is wearing pants, and it’s very comfortable. So the farther north you are, the farther south you are, the more you’re gonna struggle with this. And Light therapy is where, and I did this when I was, I lived up in the Seattle area, so light therapy is, you wanna buy a specific type of light box.
There’s a bunch of different brands. You could just Google this, look it up on Amazon, but you wanna find one that has 10,000 lux and L U X is the brightness of the bulbs that are in there. It needs to be 10,000 lux or higher. That is the research proven brightness of light that you need in order to get this effect and the research therapy.
Shows that you wanna do this for 20 minutes first thing in the morning. However, when I was there, what I found worked best for me was to actually just have it shining in my eyes all day long at my desk. And If you have a job where you can actually, if you’re at a desk and you can have it on your desk shining into your face, that’s great.
Otherwise, if you’re something where you can’t have it shining on you, you’ll want to use it first thing in the morning, maybe in your bathroom or as you’re en enjoying your coffee in the morning, something like that. The key is that it needs to be shining straight into your eyes. It can’t be shining off to the side, it can’t be behind you.
It needs to get in your eyes. And so that’s how the. Whatever sensors in her body get stimulated that it’s bright and it’s sunny and it’s not fallen winter and it’s not time to eat as much as possible. Okay? So the number one tip is to get a light therapy, a therapy light box. And again, you want for look for 10,000 lux.
There’s countless brands that you can get that, that serve this. So again, the key is that 10,000 lux. That’s the brightness of the bulb or the bulbs in there. And again, you can do, research shows doing it 20 minutes in the morning. Prevents seasonal effective disorder, which is the depression that goes along with this.
But I found for me, for best mood, and again, experiment for yourself and see what works best for you is I had it shining in my face all day long during the fall and winter, and. The number two tip is gonna be about warming up your core. So remember I said that the outside temperatures or the other thing that’s triggering your body right now to crave and consume and eat as much as possible.
So warming up your core of your body with things like a sauna. And this is gonna be more than just taking like a hot bath. This is gonna be traditional sauna, like a steam sauna, but also infrared saunas are really good, shown to. Heat up the core of the body and you can, these are things you can buy in your house.
You can go places that have them. So I know a lot of the tanning beds in the north actually have these. You can go in and sit in them, so monthly membership and you can go use the infrared sauna a box thing that they have, and they’re very comfortable. It doesn’t get, doesn’t feel as hot on the external skin as a traditional heat or wet sauna.
And it is penetrating your skin and it’s heating up on the inside. It’s not heating as much on the outside. So if you find that a traditional sauna is just too much, you can’t take it, then the infrared sauna may be your friend. Infrared sauna is also. Been shown or it’s theorized to speed up metabolism as well.
This may be part of what’s going on, right? So our metabolism is speedier In the summer when things are warmer and perhaps infrared heating up the core of your body is also. Part of what is simulating that summertime and it’s not time to pick out and eat too much. So my number three tip is then gonna be about the types of foods you want to eat and the types of foods you want to avoid. So in general, I’m gonna recommend to most of my clients that they avoid these foods all year long.
Sticking with your low carb diet, avoiding, sugary things, pasta, bread, grains. All of those things. Tortillas, corn, that kind of stuff. Avoiding all of that stuff year round, and especially this time of year, because again, if you consume those things, your body right now is wired in primed to eat as much of those as possible.
So you’re gonna crave them, you’re gonna be obsessed with them. You’re gonna not be able to limit the amount. You’re going to overeat them, and your waistline’s going to expand and you’re gonna feel pretty uncomfortable. The other thing to go I didn’t mention this yet, but these three high carb, sugary holidays that we have back to back this time of.
Do you also notice that how rampant flu and cold and viruses are this time of year when you consume high sugar, high refined carbohydrates, it suppresses your immune function. And it’s probably no wonder then that we’ve got these three high carb, sugary holidays followed by flu season. Maybe it’s just sugar poisoning season.
I don’t know. Alright. What are the foods? Okay, so I mentioned what to avoid. You wanna avoid actually the things you’re gonna, you would crave. Now the clients I’m working with, we teach them tricks and tools to avoid cravings and so they shouldn’t be having these cravings, but these are gonna be the foods you often crave this time of year if you’re not doing the other two things I mentioned, which is heating up your core of your body and using the light therapy.
And so avoid process refined sugar carbohydrate. Those things just aren’t doing any good for anybody’s health. You wanna focus on, Protein rich foods, that should be the basis of each meal. And I’m gonna lean in. So I actually a fun fact, I used to teach at a school in Portland, Oregon. That was a really cool certification they offered.
That was in Western Nutrition and also Eastern Nutrition. So they brought in Chinese principles. to their nutrition. I taught the western side of the classes and then the other, one of the other instructors taught the eastern side. And I learned so much really cool stuff about how Eastern Nutrition looks at Chinese nutrition, looks at things that nourish your body.
And so this is actually pulling from that. So you wanna go for slow? Foods this time of year. Slow cook, slow cooked. So heat, you want those warm foods. That’s why we crave things like stews and soups and we want roasted veggies this time of year. Slow cooker or pressure cooker for your meats. So they’re soft and tender and they’re well cooked.
That’s gonna be ideal, especially leaning into the red meats as well, because those are gonna be the most nutrient dense. Your what are they called? Peter Ballerstedt.. Said, what are they called? The Ruminati. So you want like lamb and beef and buffalo. What else is in that category? Are goats ruminants?
I think goats are ruminants. Anyway, so ruminants. red meat, slow cooked or pressure cooked, instant pot, those types of meats are gonna help you get the maximum nutrition out of those. Meats right now. And when you slow cook, you instant pot cook those meats, it actually helps break down the tissues so much that it’s much easier to get the minerals out of there.
So there’s the western side of why this works. The eastern side is you want those heat cooks. So as you’re thinking about heating up the core of your body, you want to think about the foods are also gonna be heating up. The core of your body as well. So again, this is why we crave more warm foods, the time of year, and you want to do cooked veggies as well There’s a reason why salads don’t sound as good in the fall and winter as well.
Cooking Your Vegetables
Cooking your vegetables and also cooking them to death. Do you remember a time when we told people like, oh no, you wanna have raw everything. That’s the healthiest way to eat vegetables. It turns out that’s not true. Actually, the more cooked vegetables are, the more. Easily we can assimilate the minerals that are in there.
And so this is the theme of the winter. The fall and winter is maximizing nutrients and maximizing minerals that you can get from those foods. And so cooked veggies, think about roasting, tossing in some kind of oil or fat, and then roasting them, the oven even boiling them and pureeing them into soup.
Think of like mushroom soup or cauliflower or broccoli soups. Cooking them, maybe roasting them first and then peering them into a soup. Those are gonna be ways you’re gonna be able to get maximum nutrients, and that’s also gonna be that Chinese medicine approach to warming the core of your body. These are considered warming foods.
Again, I’m not gonna go totally into the depths of it, but that is the basis of how they look at cooling or warming. I forgot the other terms for foods. So that’s the secret to. The foods you want to eat this time of year want to be ones again, low carb. This is a keto show after all.
So boil ’em first. Then they cook ’em in a pan with some fat, and they cook ’em for a long time. And then you finish it with a little bit of vinegar, which also helps break ’em down and helps our body start the digestion process. So cooked greens this time of year too. And also, the other thing that’s gonna be warming to your core is gonna be spicy things.
So spicy food, add some spicy spices in there. There’s a reason. Chi tea this time of year. Sounds good. Even the pumpkin spice craze. There’s some warming spices in there. And also think about spicy things, so chili peppers, chili powder, and cayenne, whatever else. What else is spicy? Maybe a little bit of sriracha sauce, hot sauce.
Frank’s hot sauce. Have you ever made homemade buffalo sauce before? 50% Frank’s red hot, 50% butter. So easy ma. Just warm it up in a pan or the microwave. And you’ve got frank’s, you’ve got buffalo sauce. Put it on chicken, put it on anything. It’s really delicious. But also, that’s another way of heating up your core this time of year, is those spicy foods.
All right. You got some ideas of what you might make for dinner tonight or this week, or this next week. Lots and lots of new possibilities here. If you feel like you’re getting bored with food, here’s a bonus tip for you. If you’re getting bored with food, think about all the different types of proteins you like.
Think about all the different ways you can cook it, the different cuts of them. And then add one, one spice to it and one vegetable. You literally could not eat the same meal the rest of your life and have a different meal every single day. Every meal and not run out of combinations that are low carb. So there’s no reason to be bored with your food.
All right, so I promised you three practical things you could do right now to offset our body’s tendency to want to re, to gain a lot of weight this time of year. And I promised you one. One, impractical one. So here’s the impractical one. Guess what? Move . Move your entire household and your body to a warmer location.
Go closer to the equator. People that live close to the equator don’t have this tendency to gain weight in the fall. In the winter, the foods are different there. They don’t have a lot of these root vegetables and other things. Seasonal foods that are very high in starchy, sugary carbs. They maybe have a lot more fruit there, but they also don’t have this tendency to overeat at this time of the year.
the length of the day is the same all year long, and the temperatures are pretty moderate all year long. They don’t have big changes. So move. That’s one of the reasons, one of the reasons that I moved to Phoenix, Arizona, from Seattle is the climate. And so if, like I said, I promised one impractical, one totally impractical, right?
But this is also why a lot of people take a vacation this time of year to a sunny location. They and I think I see this a lot January, February, March, probably are more common that people go to those sunny locations closer to the equator because they can only take so much of this, eat as much as possible and hibernate and not move.
All right, so what do you think of that? Next episode, I’ve got a special bonus episode this week. Typically we’re live on Thursdays, 4:00 PM Pacific. That’s sixth Central, seven Eastern. If you’re listening to the recording, they live on Forever out there on the podcast world, wherever you listen to podcasts.
But this week I’ve got two episodes for you. I’m doing a bonus episode on Friday. We’ll be doing it live at, oh, what time is it? It is at 11:00 AM Pacific. That is one central. Two Eastern, and this is going to be about anxiety, food, and your weight with my good friend Katie McKenna, who is a certified nutritionist and a licensed mental health counselor in Washington State.
And we’re gonna be talking about what is anxiety? What are some ways that we can manage anxiety, reduce it, reframe it. What does it do? Why is it, why do we have anxiety? We’re gonna talk about how anxiety affects the foods that we. And vice versa. We’re gonna talk about how what you eat affects your level of anxiety that you experience.
So don’t miss that episode. And if you’re listening later on the recordings look for that releasing soon. So today’s episode, we talked about the seasonality of weight gain. Why is it that we crave and overeat? Why we put three high carb, overeat, holidays in a row, in, in the us. wire bodies are designed this way to try to help us survive the winter when food was scarce.
But guess what? We got too much food. And I gave you three practical things to do. One totally impractical thing to do. But you know what? So many people from Seattle have been moving to Phoenix over . I’m not suggesting everyone moved to Phoenix, but also a lot of people moved to Arizona and Texas over. Oh, in Florida too.
So there’s a lot of people that took the opportunity to be able to move. So that’s my impractical one. And so if you like what you heard today and you’d like to get more personalized support for your keto journey, if you’re looking for a keto coach near you, I invite you to check out my website, keto Carole.com.
Let me put that up on the screen here for you. Check it out. If you haven’t been my website yet, I’ve got my personal story on there before and after photos. People love those. I’ve got a lot of stories of my clients’ success stories and so much more. So if you wanna check out my story, it’s remarkable.
Cuz after three, three degrees, five years in school, a hundred thousand dollars in student loans. Oh, and that just keeps going up. I still didn’t figure this out until a really bad car accident. Okay? So go check out my website, KetoCarole.com. Read my story. If I work very closely with my clients and I only open up 10 client spots per month, that’s how exclusive the work is that I’m doing with my clients.
So I work with people by application. I wanna make sure that it’s the right fit, that I can help you, and that I’m the right person for you. So again, if you’re ready to stop messing around, If you’re ready for the next chapter of your life where you are the best version of yourself, I invite you to apply to work with me.
Visit my website, KetoCarole.com. Carole has an E on the end. It’s a very fancy French spelling and see if we’re a match. And remember, if you enjoyed the show, help us grow and we’ll help you shrink. So that’s all for today. Thanks. I’ll see you next time. Bye now.
Easy Techniques to Stop Emotional Eating so that You Can Stick to Your Keto Diet
Join Carole as she chats with Randy Webb, clinical psychotherapist and hypnotherapist about techniques to help ease overwhelming feelings, so that you can move away from using food as your only way of coming with emotions and stress and end emotional eating.
Randy will be teaching us about:
1. Butterfly Hug: a technique developed by therapists Ignacio “Nacho” Jarero and Lucinda Artigas to help traumatized children get reoriented right after a hurricane in Mexico.
2. Safe/Calm/Magical place: a technique developed by trauma therapist and innovator Francine Shapiro that helps you to be present with all your senses and then tapping yourself to strengthen your affirmations and gifts.
3. Emotional Freedom Technique: a method probably derived most from the first evidence-based energy therapy called Thought-Field Therapy by psychologist Roger Callahan which involves tapping at various points or energy centers or meridians in the body while making affirmations.
Carole will also share the details of her program, The Pathway to End Emotional Eating, so that you can end emotional eating, without spending years in therapy, and stay on your healthy keto eating habits.
Do you struggle to stick with your healthy eating habits due to emotional and or stress eating? Do you wish you had a magic wand you could just wave and eliminate emotional eating? Would you like to learn about some easy ways to cope with overwhelming feelings, emotions, stress, and even trauma? Guess what? This episode you should probably turn out now. No, I’m just kidding. This episode is for you. Wouldn’t that be cruel if I’m like all those things we can’t help? No, that’s what this episode is all about. I’ve got a special guest here. Stick around. You’re gonna learn three easy techniques to release.
Overwhelming feelings, emotions, trauma in the body with our very special guest, Randy Webb, psychotherapist and hypnotist. And I was teasing the other day about how people are terrible introducers because they say the name up front, and so as you’re supposed to hype it all up, and then you say their name is the last thing.
So this is what we do in comedy, right? I’m supposed to say all these great things Randy’s, or see, I’m not supposed to say your name. I did it again. Three techniques to release trauma with my very special guest, psychotherapist and hypnotist. Randy Webb. There we go. That’s how you’re supposed to do it. Hi Carole. I guessed her already. Shelly, I’m so glad you’re here. Hi, Shelly. Yeah. Anyone else watching? Give us a hi. I can see that we do have people watching live. And go ahead and tell us hi, where you’re joining us from, join the show. This is Live and Interactive. The reason I do this live is cuz I love the interaction.
Table of Contents
I also, I like it not perfect. Okay. I wanna get information out there in an easy way for me. This is not a polished podcast, I’ll tell you right now. So again, there’s two reasons why I like to do it live is that it doesn’t have to be perfect. It takes less time and effort to do this for me cuz I love to talk. I just, I love to talk to people and and then also we get to have the interaction with the people that are watching. So we’ve got somebody else our Facebook user, Facebook group that’s for Baltimore. One of the weird things about Facebook is you have to allow us to show your name on Stream Yard.
So there’s a way you can allow that within the. Within the Facebook group or within the, whatever the comment says there. But you could also just tell us who your name is and then I’ll probably recognize you. And we’ve also got Jennifer joining. Hi Carolyn, Randy joining from Pennsylvania. Woo. I’ll look at this. We’ve got three people watching us. Love it. Love it. Okay. I know Jennifer’s always telling me, she’s like, when is your next episode coming out? I can’t wait for more. So I’m so glad she Got it here live. All right.
Join Carole as she chats with Randy Webb, clinical psychotherapist and hypnotherapist about techniques to help ease overwhelming feelings, so that you can move away from using food as your only way of coming with emotions and stress and end emotional eating.
Welcome everyone to Keto Chat Live. I am your host, Carole Freeman ,have a master’s in nutrition and clinical health psychology. I am a certified clinical hypnotherapist and a board certified keto nutrition specialist. But, More importantly, I specialize in helping women 40 plus follow a keto diet for sustainable weight loss. And the medical disclaimer here, this show is meant for educational and entertainment tongue, tire, tongue tied purposes only.
Apparently there’s the entertainment part entertainment purposes only. It is not medical advice nor intended to diagnose, prevent, treat or cure any condition whatsoever. If you have any specific questions or concerns related to your specific needs, specific medical conditions, what Try saying 10 tongue twisters. And I think cures everything. No, seek out the help of a qualified healthcare professional. And alright. Welcome Randy. Okay, let me tell, let me do a little bit more of Randy’s intro. And if you have watched us live before, this is a repeat episode, but if you’re listening to just the audio only this Future podcast, it’s fresh to you.
But the audio we did before. Frankly it was garbage. So yay, I get to have Randy back and do this again. The things that he’s gonna teach you today are just, they’re so easy, so powerful. They help with stress as well. So not just emotional eating, but just if you’re feeling overwhelmed and stressed. And it turns out that I always have him as a guest, when I personally need it. So I hope you get value, but this is what I need today. Everyone. . And I actually, I know Randy because I went to a school at Bastyr University. I graduated 10 years ago now, and I did a double master’s in nutrition and psychology at the same time.
Part of my degree was that I had to get, do an internship. And so I met Randy because he was my supervisor during my psychology internship. And we’ve been friends, I guess now for 10 years. Wow. I can’t believe it’s been that long. And finally, enough is that, I met Randy in the Seattle area. He’d moved from Phoenix, and shortly after moving to Seattle, he went back to Phoenix. But we’ve since switched places, I actually fell in love with Phoenix, going to visit Randy every year in March, getting away from the rain and depression in Seattle. And during the pandemic I decided to move to Phoenix and Randy had relocated to Portland, Oregon area at that time.
So we joke now about how our weather has switched. So you’re getting how many days of no rain and 90 degrees this weekend in Portland?
Randy Webb: Yes. It’s been pretty dry, just a little rain since mid-June. And it’s supposed to be nearly 90 again, 90 again this weekend. And they’re wildfires and it’s smoky and it’s super dry. It’s very strange looking. Oh,
Carole Freeman: so instead of the haboob, you get the smoke. And then let me look at the weather here. So we should. , oh, you’ll, oh, you’ll get a kick out of this Sunday. Our high is supposed to be 78 in Phoenix and 37% chance of rain, which means it’s gonna rain . And we’re having apparently record rainfall in Phoenix this year, and the northwest is drier than ever. Apparently pretty soon we’re just gonna swap climates, , it’ll be, and ironically, Randy loves rain, and you move someplace that doesn’t have rain. And I moved away from the rain, and that’s all I’m getting right now. .
Randy Webb: Strange things happening. Oh, alright. Very topsy turvy .
Carole Freeman: Alright. I should get back to the written stuff I’m supposed to be reading now. Randy Webb has a lot of initials after his name. M a m c l M H C. He’s a psychotherapist of 26 years trained by the Milton h Erickson Foundation in clinical Hypnosis and strategic therapy. A master trainer in neural sequential model in caregiving and has worked as a volunteer trainer of EMDR therapy is a certified Adobe captivate, activate captivate. I didn’t bring my glasses. Captivate specialist and currently works for both Shion Consulting LLC of Phoenix and as a technical trainer. specialist Technical training specialist for Washington State Department of Health in Olympia, Washington. So welcome Randy to the show officially.
Randy Webb: It’s a delight to be here again, Carole.
Carole Freeman: It’s fantastic.
Wonderful. Thank you for our viewers here. Alright, so we’re gonna go over three different techniques and I love this last time cuz I immediately went and taught it to my To my ladies. I went over coaching calls and it was, it’s all the synchronicities I love, right? Like I said, how I forget all of these in my own life have a lot of stress. And then I’m like, oh, that’s right. How did I forget these? And then they literally, these are so easy to learn and immediately implement that you all can go and teach this to somebody else immediately with no training besides just watching us here. That’s how easy they are. Extremely effective. I promise if you do them along with us today, you’re gonna feel, oh, just so much more peace and ease and calm.
Just thinking about them. I already feel, calm and easy. So we’re gonna do something called the butterfly hug. A the second one is a safe, calm, magical place. Number three is an emotional freedom technique. Let’s see, as far as like the third one is the more complicated of them, but still very doable as well. And the nice thing is that, If you’re listening to the podcast of this, you can save this recording and listen to it and do it along in the future. So listen to this as needed.
And if you’re watching the video of this, you can just bookmark this as well. Like it. And if you’re on YouTube, go ahead and subscribe to future notifications and that way you can refer to this in the future. So very easy. But if you forget them put a reminder on your calendar for about a week from now and put this episode in there and, because I guarantee you’re gonna need it again and you’re gonna forget. Alright, so Randy, tell us a little bit about, so let’s start with a butterfly hug.
Tell us about the, how it was developed and how it came to be.
Butterfly Hug:
Randy Webb: The butterfly hug, like all three techniques we’re gonna show you were the result of one of those situations where, Difficulties are kinda like the mother of invention, so to speak. And in the case of the butterfly hug, some trauma therapists who actually were trained in a number of different methodologies, including EMDR therapy, were helping families and individuals in me near in Mexico and after a hurricane Pauline, in the eighties, I wanna say was the late eighties. These two practitioners who were based in Mexico saw these children who were separated from their families.
They were disoriented people, in a really serious hurricane, people can get disconnected from each other and get lost. And based on the learning they had about the beauty of helping people get still and applying some sort of stimulation like we do in EMDR therapy, they gathered the children together and to help them feel centered and relatively less traumatized or to, or maybe a better way to put it, is just help them cope better with this very disorienting experience of all this destruction and people being disconnected and lost from each other, even if temporarily Lucinda Aga and Ignacio Jdo, or Nacho Jdo, as they call ’em, both of them psychologists, gathered the children together and they said, we wanna show you something.
So first, as we oftentimes do with a lot of these techniques we use and all these trauma therapies, the these very simple to use techniques oftentimes start with breathing. So where they started is they ask the children to just. Gathering together, think we’re getting that kind of support from being in a group. And so that’s where it came from. And so that’s the origins of it. But there are many techniques like that used in all the trauma therapies to help people just start to get centered. So if you would like, I’ll go ahead and demonstrate the two parts of it.
Carole Freeman: Sounds great. Please do.
Parts of Butterfly Hug:
Randy Webb: Outstanding. Now, the purpose of this, besides what I’ve already mentioned, like a lot of these techniques, if you ever do any kind of trauma therapy or any kind of trauma work, you’ll see that oftentimes the idea behind this is we have some idea neurologically, is that when you help people get in touch with themselves and get in touch with their bodies, start to notice their breathing, notice their emotions, be the observers of their thoughts, it increases the chance that this most human part of the brain.
The prefrontal cortex is, Bruce Perry says, for example, is open for business. It increases the chance that you’ll gain some clarity. You can do some problem solving. And so in the case of the butterfly hook, the first part is to breathe by moving your diaphragm. And there are all kinds of different breathing practices aren’t there, whether you’re practicing Tai chi or yoga or meditation or chigong or any number of other practices.
You can do all kinds of things and I’m gonna show you some variations with that. But the first piece is to fill the belly full of air in such a way that you’re making the diaphragm move. So you’re not, when you’re anxious, you might notice that you’re breathing in a shallow way, , you may not, you may or may not be aware of it, but you may tend to do that. And what this is doing is actually choosing, there’s something very powerful and therapeutic about you choosing something. Isn’t that interesting? So the choosing to fill the belly full of air and you can do things like count the number of seconds you’re breathing in and then holding and then counting the number of sec seconds you’re breathing out, you know you’re exhaling.
You can breathe in through the nose and out the mouths. You can put your tongue behind your top teeth when you’re breathing in behind your bottom teeth. When you’re exhaling, all of these are designed to do something similar. You increase the oxygen flow, you’re giving that nervous system of yours, a chance to be still to the power of the pause, increases the chance that you’ll gain clarity about what is needed.
There are all these incredible benefits besides just simply getting more oxygen. For example, you might breathe in. And you can do all those other things if you want to. The counting, the putting your tongue behind the top teeth, behind the bottom teeth when you excel. You can do all those things if you want to. But that’s the first piece. And then what Lucinda and Nacho did is they asked the children to employ the butterfly hug.
This one part breathing and one part, dual alternating stimulation is the technical term for it, or bilateral stimulation. There’s something beautiful about bilateral stimulation. So whether you’re walking or dancing or playing an instrument or playing drums or cycling or jogging or hiking, dancing, we believe, seem to have similar therapeutic effects. In this case, what they ask the children to do is to make a butterfly with their hands. Just have your hands going towards each other until the thumbs meet, until it makes a butterfly. Then place that butterfly. Roughly here on either side of your sternum, know where your collarbone might be. And slowly while doing that diaphragmatic breathing, that deep breathing, slowly tapping.
There is no limit as to how long you can do that if you prefer, because for any number of different reasons, this may seem like it’s getting in the way . And so instead, if you feel more comfortable, just place your hands over your shoulders like this or over your upper arms. And hopefully the air is cleaner where you are than it is here in western Oregon and western Washington.
Carole Freeman: I’m as you’re going through this motion too, I’m noticing that it parallels, a parent’s natural. When you wanna calm somebody you do this slow pat. So there’s something innate about that, that we do know as calming and soothing to pat them rhythmically.
Randy Webb: There’s something beautiful about rhythm and we are seeing Bruce Perry and other people who study child development, who study attachment who, and I work with caregivers.
I educate caregivers and foster adoptive parents. And we are seeing some of the effects of the pandemic where people weren’t getting enough of that rhythm that helping them co-regulating. And it’s very powerful, that touch that proximity. The offering rhythm is a very healing and powerful thing. And one thing that we find is that when people don’t get enough of that, they’re more likely to be impulsive and attempt to self-regulate in ways that are not quite so healthy. They’re more impulsive.
Carole Freeman: like overeating, highly processed foods.
Randy Webb: Exactly. And we see evidence that when people are not present, they’re not mindful, they’re not getting enough of that rhythm, they’re not giving themselves enough of that rhythm, enough of that mindfulness.
The power of the pause, the prefrontal cortex doesn’t work as well. And it’s the executive function. It helps you delay gratification, helps you see the bigger picture and helps you plan. It helps you follow through. And if you have anything that’s overly stressful and is not resolved, you’re much more likely to go to a quick fix on multiple fronts than of course that would obviously, I’m not a nutritionist, but I would very well suspect that a person’s much more likely to engage in eating patterns that are not healthy.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. Who feels better? Just already give me a thumbs up emoji. Give me the heart one, the reaction, or just give me a yes in the comments of you feel it already and we’ve just begun. That’s just number one .
Randy Webb: And there’s so many, oh, there’s so many you can use.
Carole Freeman: Next let’s let’s go to the safe, calm, magical place.
And I, during my graduate program, during one of the summers, I did take training in hypnosis. And so this was one of the techniques that we learned in helping people get into that hypnotic state of deep relaxation was going to this safe, calm, magical place. I have. Experience with leading people through this one. But this is Randy’s time to shine. So I’ll let him him walk through. So Shelly’s reporting that she’s feeling very, it’s very calming. Oh, wonderful.
Randy Webb: Yeah. That’s outstanding. Safe, calm place. Safe, calm state. Uh, Safe, calm, magical place. Happy place. Gets called a lot of, and people make, you’ll hear it in pop psychology and in pop culture.
I think he went to his happy place. You’ll hear these references to it. And it really is used in so many different approaches and therapeutic approaches where the goal is like the butterfly hug is to increase the chance that the person will focus well, will get centered, get mindful. We’ll have a pause, we’ll have a break long enough to give whoever is in the role of the facilitator, the operator, the therapist. The helper the coach, whatever that role that person may have is to increase the chance that the person start to encounter strengths and values and motivations to be elicited and used in that person’s life, to help that person gain a sense of power, in your circumstances, and you’re more likely to grow and to learn and to be open to newness.
When we help you be in the present, we meet you where you are, we respect your background, your values, your culture, what your motivations are, we’re just simply more likely to find out what those things are, and we can do it pretty efficiently if we can engage in some sort of exchange of information or communication that helps you focus and it may involve relaxation. We’re hoping that you’ll feel safe more than anything else. We’re trying to, we find, and there’s some varis philosophy behind it, but. Safe, calm place is one of those wonderful techniques that kind of embody so much of what Carole’s talking about. And and you can do that great breathing as you do it.
I’m going to I’m gonna give an example of what that sounds like. And there are many beautiful variations based on how each person shows up. You each have a unique nervous system with unique memories and unique experiences. And the job of the helper is to customize it for you. So you, each one of you, even though what I’ll say we’ll see how, what you think about it, you, there’ll be certain pieces of what you’ll That sounds familiar to me somehow. And what if it works really well? Not only does it help you focus and help you get really centered and. But if it works really well, it can help you get in touch with some things that really matter to you and some of your goals and your dreams and your motivations and indications of your values.
So that’s what makes it so among so many things, something that we use in so many different approaches. So what do you think?
Carole Freeman: I’m ready. Outstanding. Let’s go to this magical place. I wanna go to my happy place.
Randy Webb: All right. Okay. So here’s how we’ll start, and there are a lot of different ways we can begin, but I’ll go adding some pieces to it as we go along.
So with your eyes open, or with your eyes closed, or somewhere in between, and invite you to think of a place it can be real or it can be imaginary. Or a combination of the two, and you can think of this place where it feels so good to just be. And as you think of that place where it feels so good to just be, it can let yourself breathe. And as you’re there, you can notice, begin to notice the time of day or the time of year. You can be aware if you’re alone or if there are other people there. And because you’re doing that, you can begin to notice certain colors and shades and the way the light is reflected off certain shapes and textures.
And as you take another breath, you may notice that something invites you to become aware of the sound, and you can hear that sound or those sounds. Some of them nearby, some of them far away, or maybe just some in between the two there for a moment, some of them go away. And new ones may appear. And as you’re noticing the sound or sounds in this place where it feels so good to just be, it can take a breath and notice that something seems to be inviting you to be aware of the smell since you are there observing the fragrances, hints of one kind of smell. Some others, oh, that can feel so good to just notice and observe.
And the more that you notice, , the more you just observe, just letting whatever emotions or thoughts do whatever they’re going to do, it becomes easier and easier to be aware of. Tastes. You can savor those tastes, some of them reminding you of such wonderful tastes of the past. Others, perhaps something you anticipate tasting, or you can just be in the present. Just notice.
Noticing that more and more, feeling the invitation to notice other sensations, some on the surface, some of them underneath. And as some parts of the body are in movement, others are still adjusting, cycling the way they do as your system and systems are observing, doing things with information or just being all of that perfectly in time with everything else you’re experiencing in this place that feels so good to just be. Thoughts of what to do and where to be can be as present to the side, in front or behind with as much or as little as you choose in this moment. And as you’re letting yourself just observe and feel the just wonderful, eternal present of this place, a gift, I invite you to think, to be aware of a word or a phrase.
That would remind you if you were to see it or hear it or write it or to say it. You could remember how good it feels to be in this place. And when you’re ready and you have a sense of the wonderful connection between this word or phrase and this place. Then just allow yourself to tap yourself. You can use the butterfly hug. You can tap yourself on the legs, on the arms, or anywhere you like. If you want to open your eyes and watch me, you can, but you don’t have to. You can rock from one side to the other. You can tap your shoulders just very slowly while breathing and filling the belly full of air. Thinking of that place and that word or phrase that reminds you of how good it feels to just be, just tapping slowly.
Now we’re going to test if a it a little bit. Let’s try it out. Let’s try out your new technique of safe, calm place. Invite you to think of something that might be just a little bit irritating, maybe on a zero to 10 scale, like a one or a two. Something just maybe something that’s been on your mind is mildly irritating or has you worried a little bit perhaps concerned. Allow yourself to just notice that irritating thing that might be mildly stressful. Just notice it.
And then when you have a good idea of what that looks like, feels then think of that word or phrase that reminds you of that place, or it feels so good to just be and just breathe through it now. When you’re ready, you can come back to your present. I’ll count to five. For those of you who might benefit from that, I. Five each time more aware who you are, where you are, and what’s happening. Four more aware. Feeling, the connections between you and that wonderful, safe, magical, happy place. Three.
Allowing more connections while feeling more and more in the here and now and what’s going on. Two, perhaps feeling refreshed, renewed, experiencing more clarity. Maybe a sense of commitment. One. Welcome.
Carole Freeman: It took me on vacation there. Thank you.
How was that? For those of you listening, viewing. If you feel comfortable, share your word or phrase that came up for you. Maybe a little more details of what your safe, calm place looked like for you.
It’s hard to be worked up and high energy after that.
we go into our It reminds me of the Saturday Night Live skit where they’re doing their NPR skits, where they’re like, and up next . Up next. Randy Webb will be leading us through one more relaxation technique. Oh, we, our viewership just ticked up a little bit. Maybe I should use my soothing, calming hypnotic voice more often on this show. If you enjoy this right now,I
Carole Freeman: actually I recorded quite a few hypnosis recordings when I was doing a lot more of that in my work that I was doing with clients and I really enjoyed it. It was really easy for me to get into that voice and that rhythm. And so maybe I should do more of that.
Randy Webb: Wow. Yeah, you sound great.
You sound great. Like a natural,
Carole Freeman: that’s my radio voice. Yes. It was interesting cuz going through the training, it was 12 hour days. I think it was 10, 10, 10 days straight. I can’t even remember now. 10 days, six days straight, something like that. And it was so easy for me to just get in that it was very intuitive to lead people through that.
And the hypnotic rhythm of how you speak to people and, Your eyes open or closed, whatever is most comfortable to you. It was so easy. And then other people were so stilted with the open eyes or closed, whatever you want to do is fine. And I was like, oh, Oh yeah, that happens. Oh, go ahead. Oh, sorry, Jennifer sharing. So relaxed, my safe, calm place was looking up in the sunny sky through the trees. Oh, sounds like bliss.
Randy Webb: Oh, that’s delightful, Jennifer. That’s great.
Carole Freeman: My, my phrase was beachy bliss. And every time I do this, it’s a little bit different, but this time it was taking me back to a beach.
February of this year, I met my friend down in La Paz, Mexico, and she took us to a beach down there. I don’t even remember what the name of it was, but it was just very few people there, not touristy at all, and just so relaxing, perfect temperature. And we put our chairs halfway out into the. Ocean Bay inlet, I don’t know what it’s technically called there and just sat like literally in the ocean, just enjoying it. So that’s where my safe, calm place was today.
Milton Erickson as Teacher:
Randy Webb: Oh, that’s just a delightful, it reminds me this beautiful story that Milton Erickson told when he was teaching his students. And there are wonderful stories about him doing something like that where he would invite couples to think about where they first met, and you’d hear these stories about them being on this lake at the break of dawn, and this just sun reflected off the water, as if it were a sheet of eyes.
It just that sense of the infinity, of something limited like a lake, but it can seem like it’s infinite. So just a wonderful idea just sitting in the ocean.
Carole Freeman: Did one of the couple remember it like that and the other one was like, no, it was rainy and cold and choppy water. It was the worst thing ever.
The sandwiches were soggy.
Randy Webb: was, it Turns out this one story is kinda like that, where the one person remembered. Oh yeah. It was so still and serene and everything. And the other saying, are you kidding me? I was standing on the, when we first met, I was standing on the side of the lake beating the water with a fishing pole cuz they didn’t wanna be there.
Carole Freeman: You’re like, that’s where the end began
Randy Webb: and there it is. That’s where the end began. .
Carole Freeman: Oh wow. They say there’s they say there’s three sides to every story, but there’s actually probably infinite sides to every story depending on how you’re feeling when you recall it.
Randy Webb: I think that’s very fair that we get reminded.
All these therapies we’re talking about in all these practices turns out the power of memory is quite remarkable. And so the no doubt Carole, in your own clinical work, you’re working with people. Working with families or couples and you get reminded of the power of memory. Different versions of how things happen. We have more evidence than ever that there’s something pretty powerful about memories informing your expression of your strengths and expression, of your qualities, your internal resources, all those beautiful strengths and qualities you may not have known that you had.
And so exercises like these really wonderful to help you remind, remind you of what those are, and give you a chance to resolve those memories that may be related. You’re not feeling like you have much power over your own life, so it’s really wonderful to do these things.
Carole Freeman: So true. All right as wonderful as that was, we do have one more technique that we wanted to present today, which is the EFT or emotional freedom technique.
Tapping Randy, will you give us a little bit of background on that technique,
EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique):
Randy Webb: Absolutely. So a number of really brilliant people had a lot to do with the creation of what is known as thought field therapy. And so Callahan, Roger Callahan, being one of those people, develop what is now known as thought-field therapy.
Thoughtful therapy is an evidence-based practice, actually recognized by the substance abuse mental health services administration at the federal level as an evidence-based practice. EMDR is one of them too. Trauma focused, cognitive behavioral therapies. Another, there are these wonderful trauma therapies, brain spotting and somatic experiencing and thoughtful therapy is really quite interesting because it has a distinction of being the first energy based, evidence based psychotherapy.
And you say energy based, what does that mean? Some of the ideas behind this, If you’ve ever had any exposure to things like traditional Chinese medicine and thinking in terms of meridians and energy centers, or maybe some of you’re interested in Eastern notions about health and balance the chakras, and so maybe you’re interested in that as well. What’s interesting about thoughtful therapy is it spawned a number of practices that are similar. An emotional freedom technique is one of those, and it’s considered one of the original. Thoughtful therapy really is the original tapping solution as it’s sometimes called, and so it’d be a delight to show you a basic protocol that’s very easy to apply to yourself and like butterfly hug and safe, calm place you can help other people learn them.
It’s perfectly safe, especially since the stimulation itself is so slow and designed to help you be mindful, not necessarily designed to drag a lot of stuff up for us to have to resolve use other techniques. So it’s a very safe, this particular protocol or recipe or set of steps, really very safe to use.
But that’s some of the background around it.
Carole Freeman: Wonderful. And then after Randy shows us this next technique, I’m gonna talk about how do you use these, what are applications for helping end emotional eating? So beautiful. Lead us through the absolutely.
Randy Webb: Routine or the recipe. Absolutely. So emotional freedom, technique, the basic recipe consists of four parts and it’s really has, one part has to do with affirmation and it has to do with tapping.
Apply for Help End Emotional Eating
So just to practice, you might think about massaging here, right around your collarbone like we did with the butterfly hook, where the tips of your middle fingers would probably. You can practice this to start with. Just get used to that and make sure that it feels safe and that you’re okay with it.
You’re not making yourself feel worse. We’re not interested in that. We don’t wanna do any harm. And the other place is you can with either hand tap, what’s called a percussion end of your hand is if you were doing a karate chop, you’d be tapping on that edge of your hand. So you can practice either one of those to start with, cuz that’s, we’re gonna use either one of them. You get to use whichever one you want to start with. And here’s how it works. You start with an affirmation that goes like this as you’re tapping or massaging what are called the sore points. You can do either one. I’ll just use the tapping here for right now and the basic protocol, even though I have this, whatever, and you can think about it, you don’t have to.
Make this affirmation, even though I have this concern or problem or this stressful situation or this challenge, it might even be an opportunity. It might be a good thing, but you’re not feeling quite all right about it. So think about that and say this, even though I have this, whatever the concern is, I deeply and completely accept myself just tapping on this.
You can do this one piece as much as you want, even though I have this concern. You can think it or say it, I deeply and completely accept myself. Then repeat that affirmation. You can be thinking it as you’re saying it. I’m gonna show you, and you’ll get to play this over and over again. You’re gonna tap at the edge of your eyebrow.
Could be on either side with either hand. Heck, you can do both of them if you want. Either way is fine thinking that affirmation or saying it, even though I have this concern. Problem or issue, I deeply and completely accept myself. Then what you do, you go to the edge of the eye, right where the bony part of the edge of the eye is making that affirmation.
Again, just tapping. You can five times it’d be fine, but if you wanna tap more, it’s not gonna hurt you. Even though I have this concern, I deeply and completely accept myself, then go to this bony little crease here under your eye socket. Don’t, we’re not asking you to poke your eye just right at the edge of it, at the bottom.
Even though I have this concern, I deeply and completely accept myself. Then here, even though I have this concern, I deeply and completely accept myself and then here, even though I have this concern, I deeply and completely accept myself and then right at the collarbone, even though I have this concern.
I deeply and completely accept myself. And then right over the side, right about here or so for some of you, that’d be where you might have a bra strap, for example. It’d be about that far down or that far up. Even though I have this concern, I deeply in completely accept myself. And then you’re gonna keep doing it with your fingers.
So you start I’m gonna see . It’s funny to do this backwards. It’s fun. You can start the thumb, even though just tapping at the crease where your nail meets the fleshy part of your thumb on the top side. Even though I have this concerned, I deeply and completely accept myself. And then
Carole Freeman: here, can you, that one again on the, oh, on the side.
Randy Webb: on the side at the edge of the nail. Okay. Uhhuh, even though I have this concern, I deeply and completely accept myself at the edge of the nail on your index finger, even though I have this concern. I deeply and completely accept myself and the middle finger. Even though I have this concern, I deeply and completely accept myself.
Skip the ring finger and go to the pinky. Even though I have this concern, I deeply and completely accept myself. And now for the third part, it’s called the gamut point. Here we’re gonna go between the ring finger, this crease down here, between the ring finger and the pinky and tap, right? So just tap that.
Okay. Close your eyes. Open your eyes. Look hard down to the right, to the floor. Continue to tap. Look hard left down to the floor. Okay? So you’re not necessarily af affirming. Roll your eyes in a circle in one direction. Roll your eyes in the opposite direction, all while tapping this point here. Hum. Five seconds of the song
continue tapping. Count from one to five Uno, dos, I’m thinking in Spanish. Uno, dos, tres, quatro,
hum. Five seconds of that song again,
it could be any song.
Carole Freeman: We’re gonna have to pay royalties to Michael Jackson
Randy Webb: Then take a breath
and see how you feel. For those of you who love numbers, maybe on a zero to 10 scale, you think, okay, we’re zero. As I feel neutral, or I don’t feel any disturbance, I feel okay. I feel very centered. Zero all the way up to 10 if you’re still feeling stressful. Repeat, wash, rinse, repeat. You go back to where you were before.
Even back to step one, even though I still have this concern, I deeply and completely accept myself. So as you’re watching this video, again, you can practice, you can go through that cycle, that pro, that protocol, or that routine as many times as you need until it feels like, whew, now I’m centered.
That’s emotional freedom technique, the basic recipe.
Carole Freeman: Okay. I remember reading about this probably in the nineties and being. In a book back before we had the YouTubes that we could look up stuff, how to do it. And I was just like, I was so worried. I was like, I don’t know if it’s here or it’s here, or it’s here or there.
And I was just like, all right, I guess I can’t do this. , how important is it to get the exact right spot?
Randy Webb: No, I don’t think it’s critical. Okay. If you’re doing acupuncture, it’s really important, but if you’re doing this, yeah, probably. Yeah. You don’t have to be perfectionistic yet. .
Carole Freeman: Oh yeah. If you’re doing acupuncture, those people are trained to know the body points.
Exactly. So Shelly sharing that this made made her feel sleepy, I wonder if that means maybe Shelly needs rest.
Polyvagal Theory:
Randy Webb: Shelly. That is such a beautiful insight because Steven POEs, who’s the person credited with the development, what’s called the polyvagal theory, has said, that when your parasympathetic nervous system kicks in, maybe you’ve been getting some clarity, you’re resolving some stuff, and people will oftentimes kinda, they’ll get they’ll describe feeling really sleepy.
And one thing we get with all of these techniques related to, especially certainly related to trauma, is you likely gain a lot of clarity as to what the body is trying to tell you. Beso Vander is right? The body keeps the score, body has the last word, and it starts telling you, Hey, maybe you need some rest, maybe you need something.
Maybe you’re thirsty. Maybe you’re not getting proper nutrition. So oh yeah, you’ll get lots of clarity doing these things.
Carole Freeman: And whatever phrase I’m guessing comes up for you, you can use any kind of alternate affirmation. Correct. You don’t have to say that specific thing.
Randy Webb: Oh, no. You don’t have to. In fact any affirmation is really powerful.
It could be, I’m gaining clarity, I’m expressing self-love. Little by little. I feel a greater sense of my power. More and more I honor my body. I will give my body who it needs, and oh, absolutely. Your affirmation could be anything you need.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. I am a worthy person.
Randy Webb: I’m a worthy person. I deserve love.
I can give myself happiness. Oh yeah.
Carole Freeman: Absolutely. Shelly says, cool with three exclamation points. I think with three. That’s excellent. Awesome. Permission to sleep granted Shelly . Oh. And so you talked about that being a what’s the phrase that’s valid, considered research, not research based.
Forgot the phrase, evidence based. It’s practice. Evidence based practice. So can you talk a little bit about, cuz you said it was an energy field technique. How much of it is, energy? Woo. Chinese medicine to some people seems like it’s woo even though it’s been around for I don’t know how many million years.
How much. It’s something they validated as energy field versus just a distraction technique. And even if it’s just a distraction technique and it works, that’s great. Do you have information to share about that? Is it all placebo? there something more to the specific points that we’re tapping?
Randy Webb: It’s a really good point. It is interesting. It looks like one factor is what does the person who’s practicing believe about it. So if you have a sense that is helping you notice the energy in your body or you’re noticing your own sensations and what emotions go with them, or you have a sense that.
It’s mainly distraction or if you have a sense that maybe what’s making this whole thing work so well is you concentrating really well or giving yourself a pause. There’s so many different pieces to it. And in fairness to SAMSA, the Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration and their National Registry of Evidence Based Programs and practices, when they were researching these things, they were really looking at outcomes, maybe more about the outcomes than the process itself.
And you say why is that important? Because even though it was the first energy methodology that was considered evidence based by that research group Maybe for them it’s not necessarily so important as to whether a person even believes in all of that or those potential associations they make.
It’s more like some sort of eastern way of healing, but it seemed to get really good outcomes and as it is with a number of other practices we see is that some of these things, frankly, like even with EMDR therapy, we have a set, it’s a very robust, very strong evidence based practice with 35, 34, 35 random controlled trials showing that it’s very effective and yet the model of it, the adaptive information processing model really is a number of hypotheses.
It’s kinda like you’re nervous system, even the neuro sequential. That Bruce Perry talks about. Incredibly beautiful model, but it’s a model. And so I think that’s a really great point, and it really of comes down to, is it working for you? , and you may or may not say, oh, that seems really woo to me.
Okay, whatever. That doesn’t really fit my worldview. But if you find that the practice is helping you get the results you want, then you get to be the final judge as to how much of the model or the philosophy behind it really matters to you. Is it really working for you? Ultimately I think would be fair to a lot of people.
Carole Freeman: It reminds me of an answer one of my professors gave me when I was getting my psychology degree, where I said how exactly does this work? Like, how does it help people get better? And he says yeah that’s a really good question. There you go. And that was his answer.
Randy Webb: it’s two things come to mind, Carole.
One of them is if all of you, and maybe some of you have familiarity with this, and this is not to, I’m not trying to play a physician anyway. I’m not trying to be a psychiatrist. I’m just saying if you look in the physician’s desk reference, if you look in there and you look at the explanation of the mechanisms of how any number of very commonly prescribed medications work, you are going to oftentimes find the following phrase, Carole knows this as well as anybody is you’re gonna find the following phrase used a lot.
The mechanism by which this particular molecule or substance or medication works is not well known.
Carole Freeman: yeah. You’re gonna find a lot of that. That’s such a great point, right? If most of the medications were prescribed, we don’t know how they work. Why do we need to know why these other techniques work either?
Randy Webb: Yeah. It’s something to remember. We have a, your nervous system and everything connected to it is far more complex than even our best models. They’re informed by a lot of data, a lot of tendencies and a lot of statistics. And there are going to be times when something looks like it should work for you and it doesn’t seem to work like the way you intended to, and you get side effects.
And there are other things that don’t. You would say we don’t really quite know why that’s working so well, . So you get to be, you get to be informed and you get to be a decider of what’s going to work for you, what’s gonna, so it may be a little solace, but we know there’s a lot to that.
Carole Freeman: Yeah.
Wonderful. And as promised, now I’m gonna talk about how do, that’s all great and wonderful, but how do we actually use these, integrate these into, reducing or eliminating emotional eating and so I lump emotional and stress eating. They’re the same category. So basically it’s like something comes up that gives us an urge to eat.
To soothe ourselves for a reason other than hunger. So stress eating falls in this category. Emotional eating falls in this category. And couple of very quick things come to my mind is one is that you could just integrate one of these, all three of them, whatever, your choice just daily as a way of calming your nervous system, relaxing yourself, center your.
and just overall calming. It doesn’t have to be in conjunction with an urge or anything like that. So it can just be something you do as soon as you wake up or right before you fall asleep. Or one of the best things to try to develop a new habit is something called habit stacking. And so add it onto something else you already do every day. So perhaps you do it. Maybe you do the safe, magical place while you’re brushing your teeth. Maybe you do the butterfly hug while your coffee is brewing.
Doing it while you’re doing something else. That can be one application to this. Another application can be when you’ve got an urge to eat, to calm or soothe yourself. Eating in any eating something that is not out of. Hunger choose one of these to do in that moment. On demand and, promise yourself I will just do one of these for one minute. If I still have the urge to eat that thing, I still can afterwards, but I’m going to choose to do this first.
That’s another application of it. Those are some quick little easy ideas. Randy, do you have any other ideas about how these may come into something, how they can be used as needed to reduce the urge to self? What’d you call it? Self-regulate?
Randy Webb: Self-regulate, self-medicate. Yeah. Absolutely.
And the thanks you mentioned Carole, are wonderful because to the extent that you can make them habitual and make ’em where they’re less intrusive. So that’s just a beautiful way to think about it is maybe you get into the habit, you’ll hear dentist say, get in the habit while watching tv.
You’re flossing yourself or whatever, right? You’re flossing your teeth. You could certainly do that. I’ve heard folks do things like that where they’re making it, where maybe they’re standing in line at a grocery store or something, and they don’t wanna be standing there doing this. Maybe they, it doesn’t feel safe to them, but maybe they’re just rocking back and forth a little bit, or standing a little bit on one foot and then a little bit on another that you can be doing in between so many other things that you can be doing, like you’re saying, Carole, and that way it of feels less intrusive and you get some of the really positive effects of that bilateral stimulation.
You, you’re getting some of the effects of that tapping and the affirmations and by themselves are just delightful. So in those times when you might. In fact, I’ve heard people say, even while taking a shower, for example, they’ll go into a safe, magical place while taking a shower. And imagine it’s a little bit like a light string technique that we use in clinical hypnosis, right Carole?
So you might think of the light, feels like it’s the water coming and is coming through the top of your head. And as it works its way down like a spiral, pushing out any unwanted energies and stress that you don’t want to feel and that you’re feeling it pushing and moving it as the water slides down the body all through and out the pores at the tips of your fingers, down through the tips of your feet, through the toes and into the drain, or through the walls and into the trees where it can be purified.
Anything like that and it, you might do that for a minute. And you really get a lot of that beautiful fact we’re talking about of that mindfulness and getting your prefrontal cortex open for business.
EMDR:
Carole Freeman: Ooh, open for business. Shelly’s asking, I have a question regarding EMDR . Can it help people with overeating?
So first, for people who don’t know what EMDR was, you explained that part and then please answer Shelly’s question after that. Absolutely.
Randy Webb: So Francine Shapiro was a psychologist who had been diagnosed with breast cancer in the late eighties. And one day while she was walking in a park in San Francisco, she just happened to notice that her eyes were going back and forth.
And as she did that, her anxiety went down. That led to all kinds of discoveries and research with all kinds of people who had really bad things happen to them. And in research, which she found out. Is that if she could get people to move their eyes and then later tapping or later hearing alternating sound, but some kind of bilateral stimulation as they were accessing memories of suffering, not necessarily major trauma, not necessarily really nasty things we think about that happen to people, but maybe long ongoing stress or unsatisfactory relationships are not feeling very good attachment.
So over the course of her research, she found out that if in a safe, respectful, centered environment, you have a place where you can tell your truth, tell your story, access the memories where you suffered, not necessarily like hurricanes and tsunami. Or massive experiences of abuse or neglect, but maybe ongoing stressors too.
And once they identify the memories, what the therapist does in that safe, respectful environment, access the memories and apply the, it’s just like second nature to apply this, asking you to move your eyes to follow my hand, but some form or multiple forms of that kind of stimulation.
And they found, just like Francine Shapiro saw in herself, the influence of those memories of suffering go down and the symptoms go with them. For those of us, like Carole and I, who are trained in clinical hypnosis, there’s a lot about EMDR therapy that for us, feels like hypnosis, right? There’s a lot to it that’s involved focusing and re and recalling memory.
So can it help people with overeating Actually, very much and it’s very well indicated for many conditions. Including anxiety and depression and addictions and difficulty with relationships. Cause according to the system, the theory behind the EMDR therapy, the therapist would be treating your memories so to help you with whatever.
So the memories according to that system, that model are informing your overeating. It’s the overeating is just the manifestation of it. It’s the memories that didn’t get resolved according to that system that are informing the symptom of overeating and on all kinds of other potential things. So to, so how’s that for a long answer to a question?
You better believe it can. absolutely. And I could have just said that to begin with.
Carole Freeman: Oh no, that was perfect. Cuz there are gonna be people watching or listening that have no idea what EMDR is.
Randy Webb: Eye Movement desensitization and reprocessing.
Carole Freeman: All right. We covered our three techniques. We covered applications of how you can use these to and reduce, eliminate emotional eating or stress eating or eating for any reason other than for true hunger or nutrient needs.
And Randy, was there anything else that you were hoping I would ask about or that you would like to share?
Randy Webb: If you’re interested in, there’s so much of this, but I would certainly recommend that you watch this podcast over and over again, to practice the techniques. And if you have an interest in any of these really beautiful approaches too you can reach out to Carole and I can share some resources.
And but yeah, you might start by watching this thing and getting real, make it second nature. Make it your habit to, to practice these.
Carole Freeman: Yeah, like I said earlier in this episode is book bookmark This. Put this on your calendar a week from now or maybe tomorrow. Put a link to this, whether that’s audio episode you’re listening to or on YouTube or Facebook.
Just literally copy the link, put it in your calendar, put it a reminder, later tonight, tomorrow, next week, wherever you feel like is when you’re gonna forget about it. And then when it pops up, you’ll have the link here to go back and listen again. Because this is something that you will likely want to use again.
So Shelly says, this was amazing. Thank you both so much. I’m so glad you were here, Shelly. That was wonderful. I’m glad you got a lot out of it. And alright and then when you listen again, come back in the comments and tell us that you’re here again, listening and how much more insights and calm that you have too.
This is a toolbox for you. You’ve got three tools now that you can use at will and to. Help you feel better in all kinds of ways.
Again, help me thank Randy for being here. Our our I closed up my, my notes on my iPad was the battery was dying, so I had to close it up. So I’m like, what did I say? Wonderful qualified psychotherapist and trainer.
Thank you so much for being here. If you’ve enjoyed this video on , if you are somebody who’s not already one of my clients, I encourage you to where’s my banners at? Oh. It should open here. All right, there we go. . If you are looking for some more help, if you are somebody who’s struggling to achieve sustainable weight loss, you’re trying to follow keto long term especially if you’re a woman 40 plus and you’ve tried all the diets and this is something that you’re interested in reach out.
Check out my website, KetoCarole.com. I do currently we’ve been offering some guest spots, so if you’re somebody who’s been considering getting a keto coach to get your success and be able to have long term success check out my website. Send us an email as well. At. Here it is here, Support@KetoCarole.com, and I’ll open up a guest spot on one of my coaching calls so you can actually experience what it’s like to be one of my clients.
And you can see then for sure if it’s gonna be a match for you. Jennifer’s given us the clappy hands. So glad you were here to thank you everyone for watching. And definitely my energy on this one is normally I’m like, ah, and I’m like, thank you all for being here today, to this episode of Keto Chat Live.
We look forward to having you again soon. Come back. If you enjoyed this video on how to end emotional eating, give me a thumbs up. If you’re on YouTube, subscribe, hit that notification so you can get all the notifications. We do this pretty much every week, and we’ve got a whole catalog of episodes. This is episode number 55. I know Jennifer’s watched and listened to all of them, but if you haven’t, go back and listen to the rest of us.
Let me know which one’s your favorite. And again, thank you Randy, for being here. The delight. That’s all for now, folks. We’ll see you next time. Bye now. Thank you.
Those questions and so many more we’re gonna answer today. This episode is for you, so stick around and learn about how a ketogenic diet impacts sleep and over overlaps.
How the ketogenic diet impacts sleep and the overlaps of sleep, obesity and satiety in so much more. My very special guest co-host today, Amber O’Hearn and everyone welcome, welcome, welcome to Keto Chat Live.
I am your host, Carole Freeman. I have a masters in nutrition and clinical health psychology. I’m a board certified keto nutrition specialist and I specialize in helping women 40 plus follow a keto diet for sustainable weight loss. And the thing that the lawyers like us to say this show is meant for educational and entertainment purposes only.
If, oh, it is not meant for medical advice nor intended to diagnose, treat, prevent, or cure any condition, not even including a wart on your thumb. If you have any questions or concerns related to your specific conditions, please contact a qualified healthcare professional. Everyone help me welcome Amber. All right, Amber I’m gonna talk a lot at the beginning, and then you get to talk a bunch after that. I met Amber at a health conference, one of the health conferences.
We met up at several of them, but I don’t remember if we met originally at a low carb USA conference or Ancestral Health Symposium or somewhere else. But immediately I was so impressed with her. She’s so intelligent and her depth of analysis. I met Amber and probably heard her talk and was so impressed. And just the depth of analysis and re research that she does in her talks.
And also she’s talking about things that nobody else is talking about and just something about the way that she thinks about things. She’s always looking for different angles and I just, so many of talks have always been like, oh my gosh, that’s really cool. I quote them all the time. But her official bio is she has an eclectic background with academic publications in several fields, including theoretical mathematics, cognitive psychology, computational linguistics, and more recently evolutionary nutrition and biology.
Table of Contents
She has been studying in experimenting with low carb ketogenic diet since 1997 and is particularly interested in evolutionary constraints and inter species differences. EM’S been eating a nearly plant free diet since 2009, so there we go. Welcome, welcome Amber to the show. Thank you so much. It’s great to be here. Vir virtually. Yes. Virtually great . It’s great to hear Before we started the live button here, we were trying to figure out the last time we saw each other. It was probably like March of 2018, I think, in Bozeman, Montana at an ancestral health symposium. I think thats our best guess.
Keto Diet, Sleep, and Satiety with Amber O’Hearn
Amber O’Hearn: Incredibly too long ago. Too long. Too long.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. Yeah.
Just for our viewers that don’t know who you are, would you mind just starting out with how your diet has evolved over the years? And how it’s impacted your health. So way going back to 1997 or even before, wherever you wanna start. Sure.
Introduction Of Amber O’Hearn:
Amber O’Hearn: Yeah. I did start a low carb diet in 1997. Before that, I was brought up vegetarian.
I was born in 73. So basically I’ve been on a low carb diet of one form or another for half my life for two dozen years. And then the last half of it has been on a carnivore diet in particular. So it’s been a very strange evolution. My mother thinks I’m rebelling. I’m sure. Yeah, so I, I was on a vegetarian diet growing up.
It wasn’t super strict. Like we would occasionally have some chicken or fish. And I was allowed to have meat if I went out somewhere. But basically our household was largely vegetarian and so I grew up with that kind of Nor that was normal to me. And so when I first started having trouble with my weight, which is when I first went to university, I, my first thought was I should go back to eating vegetarian like I was brought up to.
And I read lots of books at the time that’s totally supported that like they were saying, if you’re having health problems or weight problems, you should cut the animal products and cut the fat and. So that didn’t work for me at all. But I tried it for a really long time and I even doubled down and became vegan for a while.
In fact, I lost some weight while traveling ,that made me think alright, obviously this isn’t the thing that’s preventing me from losing weight, so maybe I should go look into that crazy low carb thing that I heard about one time , that was the beginning of a really something has affected me for the rest of my life.
And I, when I first started a low carb diet if you’ve heard me speak before, I say this every time, but, the first book that I found was Mike and Mary Dan Eades’ book, Protein Power. And they had a lot of, science in it that. Blew my mind cuz it was completely opposite to anything I’d ever heard.
But they had references and so I went to the local medical library and looked them up and was like, wow, this is legit. And this sort of started a lifelong pursuit of looking at nutritional literature, which I, over time gut familiar with the different ways that people argue and how things aren’t always the way that they seem.
A recurring pattern that I see is that the authors will present data and will present their interpretation and I don’t always agree with their interpretation of their own data, which is a little bit maybe obnoxious of me since I didn’t do the experiment, but I get…
Carole Freeman: oh, so you started looking at nutrition research back when you had to go through a card catalog to find
Amber O’Hearn: Oh yeah, I used microfiche.
Carole Freeman: Oh yeah. I’m very old. Wow. So I you sent me the link to your talk which I’m gonna asked you what do you wanna talk about? Cuz there’s so much stuff that you could talk about.
And one of the things I remember most, and I don’t remember where this was, that you did this talk about how when you looked at research on Inuit populations at how they didn’t show ketones in their blood. That’s the ones I, one of the ones I talk about frequently to people about how we adapt to that state.
And you’re not gonna be able to, which blows my mind. That was, cuz that was back in what, in the thirties or something And they were actually even able to take blood samples back then. But anyways, there was a ton of topics that Amber could talk about, so I let her pick. There was a talk that she did in January in Boca Briton at Low Carb usa.
It’s about sleep and keto diet and satiety. And originally I saw that and I was like, these are three random words. How do they fit together? So I listen to the talk and so I, I’ve got some questions, based on that, for you to present the information to our to our viewers, our listeners, and anyone in the future.
Sleep Stages:
Amber O’Hearn: Yeah, so there, there are a lot of different ways that we could talk about what sleep is and sleep stages are something that happened.
It’s something that you can’t see, right? So you go to sleep and it just all basically looks the same. The person is inert , but there’s more going on if you measure actual brain waves. And it turns out that there are patterns happening and that we can identify and the patterns they alternate.
REM Sleep:
So the main two stages that we identify would be REM sleep, which stands for rapid eye movement because during that stage of sleep, there’s a characteristic kind of back and forth eye movement that’s happening. And REM. It’s actually physiologically a lot like being awake. So your mind is very active.
Your brain is very active in a way that is paradoxical. And sometimes it’s actually called paradoxical sleep in the older literature, although REM is the more modern term and and the other main kind of sleep stage is slow wave sleep. And what’s happening during slow wave sleep is really amazing.
All your neurons turn off at the same time. It’s called coordinated neuron silencing. And actually even when you’re awake, it turns out that there’s actually a very small percentage of neurons that are firing at the same time. Something like 3%, or it’s definitely less than 10%. It’s very surprising that, but what’s happening while you’re in slow wave sleep is that they’re all going off at the same time.
In this pulsing thing that creates this delta wave that shows up on your electrodes. So slow wave sleep can be, it can be lighter or deeper, and it depends. We just have these arbitrary cutoffs of how big that the wave is. And what happens is the stages alternate throughout the night.
So it’s usually, slow wave sleep and REM and slow of sleep and REM with little, there might be wakings in between that are very brief. You might, you’re probably not even aware of them. But one thing that happens is that the slow wave sleep is, takes up more proportion of the time during the first half of the night.
And REM takes up more proportion of the time during the second half of the night, and they have different functions. We’re not necessarily clear on what the functions of the different parts of sleep are, what sleep does at all. There, there are lots of good theories, and I’m not saying that we don’t know anything or have good ideas about it, but it’s really a developing field and it’s been a misery for a really long time.
An analogy I made in the talk was if we talk about food and how we need food we know what we need food for. We have a pretty good idea about how the different nutrients are used as enzymes or used as building blocks or used as energy. We don’t have to guess as much.
Whereas when you talk about sleep, we don’t, we can talk about these things that sleep does, but most of what we know about that comes from depriving animals of sleep and seeing what, what breaks. And we can correlate that to the different stages too. So that’s your basic rundown of sleep stages.
Carole Freeman: Oh, it’s, it was so fascinating when you said that in your talk about how there, there’s mostly, we don’t know what sleep even does. It’s just mind boggling to think about the fact that we don’t know. We know we need it. And a lot of pe all animals need it. I don’t know, we’re getting off topic there, but so one of the next points you had too was there’s a lot of scientific articles on the web, on ketogenic diets that and sleep.
Let’s see. The sleep stages, drama is taken, conclusions what really happens to deep or slow? Labors slow. I can’t even like slow wave sleep and REM on a keto diet. So what’s the truth? Basically there’s myths out there, so if you wanna tell us like what is, what are the articles saying and then what the truth is.
Amber O’Hearn: Yeah. It’s really interesting whenever somebody who doesn’t really have a very big background in ketogenic diets, tries to write an article about what a ketogenic diet might do related to something that they do have expertise on. There a couple of pitfalls that they might make, and one of them is to talk about what is, what happens if you have high fat, right?
And there may be some things. Where that makes sense to, we all know that a high fat diet, that’s a high carb diet has a completely different effect on metabolism than a high fat diet in the context of very low carb. Some people will look at say, what’s the effect of having high fat on sleep stages or sleep duration or sleep quality in some way?
And it may actually have no correspondence to what happens in the ketogenic conditions. So we can dismiss those right away. Another problem that often comes up with, go ahead.
Carole Freeman: Oh, I was gonna say to, to clarify, that’s often the phrase, high fat diet is used in nutrition research, but it really is referring to also what we call like the standard American diet, high fat, high carb, but they’ll just see high fat.
And so then like you’re explaining, people will mistakenly apply that. Article to then a keto high fat diet. So in research, they’re gonna specify either a ketogenic diet or a low carb, high fat, or a carb restricted diet. They’re gonna specifically mention the carb part of that. I was looking through that on a lot of different stuff as well, where they’re saying things about gut health.
Well, a high fat diet is shown to do this, but you have to go in and look at that. So anyway, so the clarity is on, when it’s called the high fat diet that generally equates to high fat, high carb, not a high fat, low carb diet. Yes.
Amber O’Hearn: And it’s a completely different metabolic state. And then a second kind of pitfall that can happen when people are looking at ketogenic diets is to not take the adaptation phase into account.
So it takes three or four days sometimes depending. What exactly you do to switch your metabolism to ketogenic metabolism. Not for sleep. I haven’t really seen this so much for sleep, but I’ve seen things on cognition and other things where, you know they put someone on a ketogenic diet and it, at day two they say, oh look, their brain isn’t working as well.
And it’s yeah , they haven’t keto adapted and they’re not getting enough glucose. So that’s a bad time to be measuring. But a third way is a lot of the studies that are done on ketogenic diets are specifically looking at people who have some kind of medical problem, like obesity or like epilepsy in particular, or some other thing that requires intervention.
Ketogenic Diet:
And so if you just look at. What people, what happens to people when they go on a ketogenic diet in the context of having some metabolic or some medical issue, it might not give the same result as if you just put a basically healthy person on a ketogenic diet. So that’s something to watch out for.
And that is something that I did see in some of the literature, or at least in some of the summaries or reviews that I saw on the web when people are looking at what does a ketogenic diet do to sleep stages in particular. So it happens that there are some evidence that in people with epilepsy, and I think there was another case with obesity where REM sleep was increased and so the conclusion was, oh, a ketogenic di increases REM.
But in those particular cases It seemed to me that REM was disrupted and what was happening is that REM was being brought back to a normal level. And the reason that I’m so confident about that is that I looked at other studies where the context was fasting. So one way of trying to look at what would happen on an ketogenic diet that I think is a bad way, is to say, oh, what happens when you look are on a high fat diet that’s also high carb.
And another way that’s not quite looking at a ketogenic diet, but and so is not exact either is fasting, but at least fasting does put you in a ketogenic state, right? . So I’m gonna trust something that I read about fasting more than I trust something that’s a high carb. Diet. And the fasting studies in humans have shown an increase in slow wave sleep and a decrease in REM not a drastic decrease, but like from 25% to say 20% of your night’s sleep.
And so I’m fairly confident that’s representative of ketogenic diets, whereas the increase in REM that you see in patients in epilepsy who had compromised REM sleep is more of a normalization effect.
Carole Freeman: One of the things you mentioned too in your talk was how a lot of people with obesity tend to be also oversleep.
Oversleeping:
Amber O’Hearn: Yes. Yeah. And so that, that’s a really complicated thing. There, there is, where am I gonna start with this? So there. There can be oversleeping in obesity. And there can be unders sleeping in obesity, . In fact if you’re looking just observationally at people who are at different, if you’re just comparing weight with sleep duration, you get this U curve.
So people who are overweight sleep too much and people who are. Overweight or , people who sleep too much are overweight, and people who sleep too little are overweight and the like, best weight corresponds to like this, six or seven to eight hours of sleep, which is part of why that’s the recommendation because it’s like a correlation, causation kind of idea.
This is where that people are the healthiest, so we’re gonna recommend you get that amount of sleep. And, there’s some logic to that. It’s not completely crazy. But I think that the reason that sometimes people oversleep when they’re over when they’re overweight has to do with their, it could have to do with a couple different things.
One, one is this kind of phenotype of a very depressed, overweight person that sleeps too much. And those things often go together. And. The other thing is the whole connection between energy and sleep duration, which will hopefully get into a lot more. On the other side of it though, with not sleeping enough, it’s more of a mystery because you would think if they’re if they’re getting so much energy that they’re getting weight, then why wouldn’t they be sleeping longer?
And that puzzle to unravel it, I think we have to talk about the difference between short sleep in an acute sense and short sleep in the sort of chronic long term sense. So if. If you just get a short night of sleep, say you only get five or six hours of sleep that’s gonna have effects on like immediate effects on your cognitive ability and on your metabolism.
And if you do it for several days in a row, those are gonna accumulate and get worse and worse or more acute, let’s say to be less judgmental about it. I guess I’m fairly comfortable with saying that cognitive deficits are worse, but the other thing that happens is that metabolically your fat tissue becomes more insulin resistant, and that is generally medically in the mainstream medical world held to be a bad thing.
I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing because for your fat tissue to be insulin sensitive, that means that it stores fat easily. And that’s not necessarily what you want if you’re trying to lose weight. But it’s very confusing because insulin resistance is a broad term and associated with having high levels of insulin. Your tissue’s becoming insulin resistant as a sort of consequence of this chronic situation where you have so much insulin going around that your tissues just can’t take anymore.
But if you’re, if you just have an acute responsive insulin resistance that doesn’t necessarily correspond to that diabetic insulin resistance state. But nonetheless, if we have we have this one set of data that’s showing us that if. Sleep deprives someone in the acute sense, they’ll get insulin resistance.
And then we also have this long-term observational data that people who have short sleep are also tend to be obese. Then it’s e it’s tempting to draw this picture to say the, what’s happening is that as you continue to be chronically sleep deprived, this causes insulin resistance, which then causes obesity.
And I don’t actually think that’s true. And one of the reasons that I don’t think it’s true is because of what happens to animals when you completely sleep deprive them. So you wanna talk about that?
Acute Insulin Resistance:
Carole Freeman: Yeah. Yeah. And I’m, I just had a thought too about that acute insulin resistance that happens at the cellular level.
Is that it would make sense that short term, that it’s gonna keep more that glucose in the blood rather than storing it so that you have energy supply readily available when you haven’t had adequate sleep. There’s probably something there. I’m thinking that, physiologically your body’s doing that.
Amber O’Hearn: Yeah. And the interesting thing about that I don’t know if you’ve been following Peter Dubinsky’s work on the proton theory and it’s also been talked about by Brad Marshall and by Mike Eades about this idea that
how do I make this simple , it’s complex but satiety is related to insulin resistance. So when your fat cells are full, If they stop taking in glucose, they become insulin resistant. And that’s a good thing because you don’t want them to keep growing. And if your cells were more insulin sensitive, then they would just suck up that glucose and then you’d be hungry again because you don’t have all this energy in your bloodstream.
So what, so a ketogenic guy actually induces. Insulin resistance in a positive wave, it’s completely reversible. If you go off, like if you un keto adapt for a couple of days by eating high levels of glucose, your insulin sensitivity will immediately return. So that’s a physiological difference.
And this is something that shows up. For example, in pregnant women who have to take a glucose tolerance test, or anybody who has to take a glucose tolerance test you might notice if you’re on a ketogenic diet, you will fail that glucose tolerance test because you’re in a cellularly insulin resistant state.
Your cells are taking up fat. They’re not taking up glucose. They’re they’re actually glucose intolerant. So what people are advised to do is if they have to take this glucose tolerance test to go off a ketogenic diet for at least three days, eat 300 grams of carbs a day and get your body back into glucose mode so that you can pass that test if that’s what you need to do but obviously a ketogenic diet isn’t causing diabetes. Some people might have that bizarre idea, but because it’s reversible, it’s not, that’s not what’s happening and you’re, it’s not causing obesity. It’s actually causing me to lose weight. So the whole insulin resistance piece becomes very tricky because it’s so contextually dependent.
And so when I see, oh, a sleep deprivation causes or sleep restriction causes insulin resistance in the fat tissues, my immediate thought is, wait a minute. Maybe that’s adaptive. Maybe that’s not a bad thing, but if you’re on a high carb diet, then maybe you’ve got two discordant things going on. So another thing that does happen with people and nobody ever studies ketogenic people generally, so we’re just talking about people on regular high carb diets, and you’re looking at this, these sleep restriction studies, what happens is they have glu more glucose intolerance.
You give them a meal and their glucose and their insulin will shoot up way more than normal for them, and they will typically eat more and, have metabolism. That’s leading to weight gain. But my immediate question is, What would happen if you had that same study, but they were on a ketogenic diet so that insulin resistance is actually important with the metabolic state that you’re in, and it’s going in the same direction rather than going in the opposite direction.
So if you just gave them very high fat and some protein rather than some carbs, would that actually enhance weight loss? I don’t know. I, that would be very interesting to look into.
Carole Freeman: Maybe we need to have different terms then, right? So the glucose intolerance versus insulin resistant define the what, the context of each thing that’s going on.
Yeah.
Amber O’Hearn: Yeah. I like that suggestion.
Carole Freeman: May maybe in a thousand years we’ll have all this nutritions go figured out. . Now you had something you wanted to go to next, and now I’ve been so in the moment I’m like, I forgot what point you wanted to go to next. So do you remember what that was?
Amber O’Hearn: Oh yeah, I was gonna talk about different species given Oh yeah.
Sleep Deprivation:
Carole Freeman: Yeah. Yeah, that was fascinating. If in, yeah, go ahead. I’ll let you go ahead, .
Amber O’Hearn: Okay. But stop me at any point. Okay. So in humans, we know that if you give them, if you sleep, restrict them, they’ll have glucose intolerance, they’ll get hungry, they’ll actually eat a lot more, and they’ll have other markers of hunger and they’ll gain weight.
But if you take other animals and you completely sleep, deprive them, so total sleep deprivation what happens to all of them eventually is that they die. And that’s why we don’t do that experiment in humans. At least not for very long because we don’t wanna take it to that point. But it’s been done a lot in other animals.
Specifically some old studies, a lot of studies in rats. And what happens when you completely sleep deprive rats is it takes about two to three weeks for them to die. But what happens to them as like before they die, is that first of all, their fir their body temperature decreases and their cells start burning a lot of energy because they’ll start having mitochondrial uncoupling, which is this phenomenon where the cell is burning energy without creating atp.
It’s just wasting it basically, and it makes heat. And It could be functionally, partly that they’re trying to make heat to make up for the lower body temperature, but I’m not actually sure what the lower body temperature is from. So I don’t wanna state causality when I’m not sure. But those two things happen.
But the, they’re burning so much energy that they are basically ravenous and they’re eating so much, they’re eating as much as they possibly can, but they can’t keep up with the energy deficit that this is creating. And They burn but before they get to the point where they die, they’re burning like twice much calories as normal and still dropping weight.
Carole Freeman: You’ve got people right now going, sign me up. I’d love to have that problem. No, you wouldn’t.
Amber O’Hearn: Actually there’s this thing called dnp. It’s was a weight loss drug. It’s now you can’t get it because it kills you.
Carole Freeman: Imagine that,
Amber O’Hearn: And it works through causing uncoupling.
It’s, and it’s it’s like the holy grail. Like you cannot eat enough to make it not work, but the effective dose is too close to the toxic dose. And. People like bodybuilders and people have died, and I can just imagine like them thinking I’ll just keep it, right at the level and I’m just gonna do just enough and it’s really tragic. Yeah. But it’s the same kind of effect. And people are working now trying to find a better uncer that will do the same thing, but not be so dangerous. And I don’t know where progress is on that right now, but like any day now, someone might have something like that on the market.
I know it’s being worked on. Or it might be that anything that’s effective has that same problem. I don’t know.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. And I wonder if it’s irreversible too. If you do it too long, the cell adapt to that state and it might be too late to reverse it.
Amber O’Hearn: Yeah. I don’t know. It could kill the cell if you push it too far, but I don’t know.
But so we’ve got this contrasting effect, right? We’ve got these lab animals who you sleep deprive them and it causes weight loss and, ravenous hunger. And in humans it seems to cause the ravenous hunger but not the weight loss. So that’s a bummer, right? . And one wonders if it has to do with just the fact that it’s that humans are only getting partial sleep deprivation and maybe you need much more sleep deprivation.
But I think There, there may be possibly a way to get around it. And to talk about that, I wanna talk about the uncoupling just a little bit more without getting too technical. There are proteins involved called uncoupling proteins, and they get activated and they do diff slightly different things.
And there are three main ones that we study and the most famous one is called uncoupling protein one, UCP one named Cuz it was the first one I guess, but it’s probably not the, it seems like evolutionarily, it’s a more recent one and it’s the one that really drives up uncoupled in brown fat tissue, which brown fat tissue is also holy grail.
We know that a ketogenic state causes fat tissue to become more brown, but humans don’t seem to have as much brown fat. As say rats do at all. And some people think that’s completely a species difference, and it may well be. So one hypothesis about why rats would have this weight loss effect and humans don’t is that U C P one is just much lower in humans than in, in rats.
And so they may not have, we may not have as much uncoupling ability. I don’t think that’s probably strictly true because ketogenic diets and other things that we do cold exposure and stuff can ramp up uncoupling proteins in fat and in muscle. And and because, uncoupling works,
Brown Fat and White and Fat:
Carole Freeman: So can you, Amber, can you explain a little bit about brown fat and white and fat?
Amber O’Hearn: Yeah. It basically, it has to do with the density of mi mitochondria in the fat tissue. And the more mitochondria there are the more the uncoupling can waste extra energy and create heat.
And so with the UCP one, it’s thought to be actually that’s the purpose of it, is to create heat. So in cold temperatures, that’s why cold exposure will upregulate it. So rats, babies have more than adults do. And so it’s thought to have this thermo thermogenic function. But there are other uncoupling proteins that do other things they uncouple, but to a lesser extent than U CCP one.
So U C P two causes glucose intolerance at the level of the cell by preventing py vate from getting into the Creb cycle. So that’s interesting because now we have another thing where uncoupling is related to glucose intolerance.
All of those things are going together to this picture of burning more fat and generating more heat and wasting more energy. And all of those things seem to be upregulated. In the human case with sleep deprivation, we don’t see an upregulation of mitochondrial and cut pilling.
And so this is part of the mystery. And what I am guessing is that because we’re eating high carb diets, and this is a hypothesis of mine, and it may turn out to be false, I would really love to see it tested. But I’m guessing that when you have sleep deprivation, but you’re coupling it with a high carb diet, Which is not really very concordant with human evolutionary history.
We didn’t have a lot of access to carbohydrate. And probably in a case where you have sleep deprivation, it might be going along with food or glucose deprivation as well. But one could imagine that in the low carb context, maybe sleep deprivation, even partial sleep deprivation would encourage mitochondrial encoupling more than sleep deprivation plus glucose, which kind of puts the breaks on the mitochondrial coupling.
So my hypothesis is that the reason that humans are having are gaining weight when they have. Sleep deprivation that causes glucose intolerance is that they’re eating glucose . And that if you’re in a ketogenic state, maybe sleep deprivation would actually enhance weight loss. And I don’t know if that’s true or not, but now everyone’s, oh my gonna try it and tell me,
Carole Freeman: that’s gonna be the next weight loss wave. Sleep deprivation.
Amber O’Hearn: Oh, I’m gonna get in so much trouble. I’m encouraging people to lose sleep. ,
Carole Freeman: somebody’s gonna write that book right now. . Oh the Sleepy Keto, the, yeah. I’m so tired. And diet. Yeah. People didn’t feel deprived enough on a keto diet now they can’t even have sleep.
Amber O’Hearn: Yeah. I’m gonna be lambasted for this one. Cause sleep deprivation is not really very good for you. And the reason it’s not very good for you. Again, we don’t really know, but one, one theory. One theory about. What causes a need for sleep has to do with reactive oxygen species. So oxidative stress oxidative stress builds up in the body in response to making energy.
Byproduct of Making Energy:
It’s a byproduct of making energy and it turns out that it accumulates over time and sleep lowers it. So there is, there are some groups of scientists who think that this is the primary or a primary regulator in sleep. And one of the main functions of sleep is just to deal with that ongoing oxidative stress.
And one really cool study from a couple years ago that confirms that, or supports that theory is they took I think it was fruit flies. I think they also looked at rats, but I think it was fruit flies that were the ones where they gave some antioxidants to the animals and it cut, it extended their survival time under total sleep deprivation by a factor of two, which is really like huge.
So that really supports the idea that the need for sleep is being driven, at least in part by this buildup of oxidation. So
if you can address that oxidation if you don’t address that oxidation that’s one of the things that’s gonna be a problem with sleep deprivation. So sleep deprivation does have Other benefits. Actually, one of the benefits of sleep deprivation is that it is an antidepressant a very strong antidepressant.
You take people and who are depressed and give them four hours of sleep a night, and for many of them it will treat their depression, but it’s completely unsustainable. ? Yeah. Because one really bad thing that it does is it puts your cognition in the toilet, your reaction time, you’re like a drunk person, basically.
It’s very bad. It’s the cause of accidents. So we’re in this conundrum where there’s, there are some definite benefits to sleep deprivation, some tantalizing potential hypothetical benefits to sleep deprivation, and yet really bad problems with sleep deprivation. And so how do you How do you manage that?
One thing that is really interesting about ketogenic diets is that they increase sleep. I mentioned that they increase slow wave sleep, but I, what I think is true is that they increase the intensity of slow wave sleep. So remember we were talking about how the first half of the night you get more slow wave sleep in the second half of the night you get more rim.
That’s because your sleep drive is driven. It’s driven by this need to get slow wave sleep for whatever reason, for a variety of reasons. It does all kinds of things. All kinds of things happen. You clear, you get a clearance of metabolites and oxidative metabolites in the brain. It’s good for cognition.
There’s, there are correlations between you, if you have a. Diseases, like Alzheimer’s or something there, there’s at least a correlation between better sleep and better cognitive, like less cognitive deficit. Anything that increases energy in rain, energy use in the brain during the day will then increase the intensity of sil wave sleep.
So that means the waves are that we were talking about are higher amplitude or there’s more of them in a shorter period of time. It makes your sleep more efficient. And one thing that might be happening with a ketogenic diet is that because of that increase in sleep intensity and slow wave sleep you’re getting more bang for your buck , like you’re getting more of the benefits of slow wave sleep crunched into the same amount of time, or you might even decrease the amount of time needed by a bit.
Carole Freeman: Yeah, that’s definitely what I’ve noticed for my clients. They report that they sleep less hours and they just feel so much more refreshed when they do wake up and more energy. And some of them actually are very concerned cuz they’re like, I. They, they think something’s wrong because, oh, I just, I can’t fall asleep for a couple hours.
And I said how do you feel when you wake up? Like you’re, I’m only sleeping six hours a night. And they’re very worried. I’m like how do you feel when you wake up? I feel great. I’m like you get two more hours in your day now, I guess so .
Amber O’Hearn: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Sleep quality and sleep duration are different things and and it, the time, the amount of time you spend in bed doesn’t, you can, one person can have seven hours in bed and getting really high quality sleep and another person could just be having a lot of wakings or not getting very deep or so yeah, if it, insofar as a ketogenic diet improves sleep quality, which I think it does you’re likely to need less
Another thing that is related to that, that we didn’t talk about at all, but I went into the talk is these two neurotransmitter neuropeptide chemicals. Without getting too technical about it there’s a wakefulness one called rein and a sleepiness one called Adenine.
They both go up on a ketogenic diet and which is really fascinating because they have opposite effects. So one of the things that I was speculating in my paper and in my talk is that because they’re both going up, what happens is that, adenine in the sleepiness one, like sleep deprivation.
In fact it’s believed that the reason that sleep deprivation gives these antidepressant effects is because of the increase in adenine, but adenine makes you sleepy. But it and a ketogenic diet, it doesn’t seem to make you more sleepy. And maybe that’s because the erection is balancing it out.
They they mutually inhibit each other. So
I tend to think, and of course, I’m a little bit biased toward ketogenic diets because of all the wonderful things that they do. But I think that maybe what a ketogenic diet is allowing to happen is that you’re getting more of adenine the sleepiness without getting the normal sleepiness that would accompany it.
And therefore you’re able to get those benefits without the detriments. And insofar as that is true, we may be able to at least slightly reduce our sleep deliberately on a ketogenic diet and still maintain benefits. But it’s empirical question.
Carole Freeman: So fascinating. Ah let’s talk about the satiety part then.
How does this all, how does this all take, tie together with the satiety? We covered it a little bit where Sleep de deprivation makes you hungrier. Is that the summary ?
Amber O’Hearn: There’s a lot. So satiety should be directly related to your energy availability, which some people have shown to be tied to metabolic rate.
So if you’re making a lot of energy, your metabolic rate is high, you’re turning a lot of material into energy and then using it
Metabolic rate also seems to be directly tied to probably, I believe, causely to hunger, which would make sense, right? Because you should be hungry exactly. When you feel like you’re not getting enough energy. So if your metabolic rate is low, your energy output is low, and if your brain senses that somehow, then that should tell you to eat.
Whereas if your metabolic rate is high, you’re producing all kinds of energy. There should be energy in the blood and the metabolic kind of metabolites or byproducts of making energy should be in the blood, which your brain can pick up on. And then, so your body your organism yourself should say, okay, I’ve got lots of energy.
I’m not hungry. That would make perfect sense, right? But the interesting thing is that the. High rates of energy use also correlate to sleepiness and sleep duration. So if you have a lot of, if it’s like when you’re using a lot of energy in the brain and it causes a lot of good intense sleep.
Similarly, when you have a lot of energy your sleep duration is more and you actually get more REM sleep. Whereas if you are if you’re energy deprived, for example, in anorexia, you will often not be able to sleep in the second half of the night, which is when most of your rim is happening. So sleep duration seems to be quite tied to energy availability in a similar way to The way appetite is.
And it also ties into the reactive oxygen species, the ox stress that we were talking about because we’re already talked about how high levels of Ross are instigating sleep. And high levels of Ross are also tied into satiety, which is part of the theory that I mentioned from Peter Dubinski about how cell will recognize that it’s had enough because reactive oxygen species that are created by generating atp tell the cell, oh, we’ve got lots of energy.
Now we can become more insulin resistant. Now we can demonstrate satiety at the cellular level. And so That’s concordant with the need for sleep and getting lots of sleep. And then on the opposite end of that I mentioned orexin as one of these things that causes wakefulness.
It also causes hunger. So like the word anorexia means not hungry. Anorexia is this thing that drives wakefulness and hunger. So we, there are actually a lot of common pathways in both in the periphery and the brain for for detecting having enough energy and. Sleeping. And so often I see people who are on a ketogenic diet if they’re not getting enough to eat such that the ideal case right when you’re fasting, say, is that you’re your cell, your fat cells will give up.
And you’ll just use that for energy. That’s the that’s what’s supposed to happen you faster when you’re on some, any kind of a diet is that whatever deficit you deliberately create by not eating your fat cells will just make up. And if that worked, then we probably wouldn’t be here. , for a lot of people it doesn’t work.
And even in the ketogenic case, sometimes if you cut calories too much or if you fast, yes, you might be able to get some fat flowing out of your fat cells, but it might still not be enough to make your body feel like it’s got enough energy and that can cause wakefulness. Whereas if you add some fat back through intake it’s really not gonna disrupt the fat coming off your body because if you’re in this situation where supposedly just compare fasting and you’ve got a certain amount of fat that’s coming off your body at a certain rate, But it’s not enough to meet all your energy needs.
Then adding some fat intake can’t possibly make you not lose weight as fast, right? Because you’re already maximally giving as much fat as your body is willing to give. So now add some fat to give your body and your brain energy that it needs and you will feel better and you’ll sleep better and you’re not losing any less weight, cuz your body wasn’t gonna give up more anyway.
Carole Freeman: If that makes sense. Oh it, yeah, it, I’ve seen it just anecdotally where, people that hell have gastric bypass surgery, right? And they’re, they, because of that restriction, they end up eating very little per day, maybe six or 800 calories. And I’ve seen though that the rate of weight loss for them is very similar to what my clients experience when they’re eating You.
Whatever they want to eat, which ends up being, somewhere between 1500, 1800 calories a day. And like the calories in, calories out model is that doesn’t make any sense. It can’t be possible. But what you’re talking about could be part of the explanation of what’s going on there.
And the body is, there’s way more complicated than a math equation . So Mallory’s saying that anecdotally I also find it easier to adhere to a ketogenic diet when I’ve gotten enough sleep. Oh,
Amber O’Hearn: ah, yeah. So maybe yeah. So there is this idea that when you’re sleep deprived, not only are you hungry, but you can be hungry specifically for carbs because carbs are a fast energy.
My suggestion in that case to try is if you end up in a position where you’ve had less sleep, either deliberately or or accidentally, and you’re feeling those car cravings, give yourself more fat and see if that energy will put, toss the cravings because that was what they were for, is for energy.
And they just appeared to be for glucose.
Carole Freeman: Especially if you’re already keto to adapted, your body should be able to easily take that fat and create energy from it. Yeah. If
Amber O’Hearn: you’re not keto adapted, all bets are off
Carole Freeman: Oh, that’s, oh, that’s really cool. The other thing I thought was really interesting, one of the. After your top questions that was in that recording you were talking about cortisol and how it’s called a stress hormone, but, and so it, it gets labeled as the bad hormone. That’s, doing bad stuff during stress.
But you talked about how it’s actually a really good thing. So can you talk a talk about that? Cuz we’re always like, oh, minimize your cortisol, you gotta get rid of it just like everything else. That’s good or bad. There’s a reason our body’s making it obviously, so it’s doing something.
Amber O’Hearn: Yeah.
Cortisol, the Stress Hormone:
There’s one sense in which it’s two sides of the same coin, right? So if you, cortisol is the, it’s called the stress hormone because it’s a response. It can be a response to stress and it actually but what it actually does in its response, the reason it’s a response is because it reduces stress.
Cortisol goes up, for example, if you look at animals who are, that are studied in the context of dietary restriction for longevity. So you do this like caloric restriction to try to induce longevity in different animals, and sometimes in some animals it works. So they live longer and they also have mildly elevated cortisol.
And if you look at the many different papers where they discuss this, what they say is, oh yeah this mildly increased cortisol. It’s probably probably part of what’s giving them longevity because it’s a, it’s an anti-inflammatory. It’s a, it’s an anti-stress hormone. And then, but then
Researchers. You turn around and look at the literature on ketogenic diets where they’re in some cases, in some experiments, a similar thing is shown where there’s this mild increase in cortisol and everyone says, oh, that’s bad. That shows stress. And we don’t get to see if the person lived longer like we did, cuz they can’t say that in the rats, right?
If you can’t say, oh, their cortisol went up and they lived longer, so the cortisol had to be bad. No, everything that happened, now you have to say that might have been good. Or at least it wasn’t so bad that it prevented the good thing. But when, when you’re looking at a ketogenic diet and everybody wants to hate on them, they’ll just pick on anything.
But yet cortisol it could be in certain situations, if you just see it being raised all the time, you could say that indicates that something underlying. Going on is bad because why would you need so much anti-inflammation all the time? So that’s another way of looking at it in which someone might wanna say, yeah, you need to lower your cortisol, not because cortisol itself is bad, but because whatever it is that’s causing you to need that cortisol, you need to fix.
And that’s maybe a more valid way to think about it, although I don’t think that the, it depends on the levels that we’re talking about. And then cortisol has different effects in different situations. So if you have a high insulin and high cortisol, the net effect of both of those is fat gain because of the way that they interact at the cell in terms of fat uptake and fat release.
But if you have low insulin and high cortisol, it should result in a fat loss. So it’s really highly contextually dependent.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. Oh, I’m just like thinking of all the, gotta lower your cortisol. So then what do you think of then herbs that people take? Cortisol is high. What are those doing? Are those just addressing the inflammation? Are they actually just suppressing cortisol? Do you know much about herbs that reduce cortisol?
Amber O’Hearn: I don’t know. I can imagine there might be both types. Yeah. Yeah.
Carole Freeman: What else? And those of you listening, watching, please give us some questions and then comments. We’ll hang out and answer some questions if you have any here. Was there anything else that you were hoping I would ask about or along these lines that you feel like is important to share or,
Amber O’Hearn: I don’t think so.
We covered a lot.
Carole Freeman: Yes. Yes. I know there’s a bit of a delay for people. So go ahead and put your questions in the comment box there too. If you have any questions about sleep about satiety, about obesity and a ketogenic diet.
Or anything else really? Yeah. Or anything just, we’ll pick and choose whether we answer it or not, yeah. It just really has me thinking a lot about the fat intake and how you can leverage that too, because we’ve gone from, the early days of a ketogenic diet for weight loss specifically was lots and lots of fat.
We’ve moved through a period of time of oh no, no protein don’t eat so much fat , the more fat you eat, the less is gonna come off your body. I have found with my clients that moving toward a more protein pot, protein centric approach where they’re getting adequate protein, which is a lot more than what originally. I’d have them doing does seem to facilitate more rapid weight loss. Even though, higher energy intake too. But I know that the experiments that I done if it’s experiment, but the approach that Chevon has found for herself a much higher fat intake actually has been a way at releasing more fat.
Are you, would you like to share a little bit about that?
Ketogenic Diet High Protein vs Low Protein:
Amber O’Hearn: Yeah, let’s talk about that at least briefly. So there, there have been some pendulum swings over the course of time that I’ve been hanging around ketogenic diet forms and stuff with high protein versus low protein. And there, going too low in protein is gonna be detrimental.
And a lot of people, especially if they’re not on a carnivore diet, where they might eat a whole lot of plants which aren’t a very high source of protein, they could end up having protein that’s actually so low that it’s not meeting your needs and it could be causing it. If your body needs to be in repair and it can’t do that can actually cause your insulin to go up as insulin is part of the inflammatory and repair response.
So getting too low protein chronically can have, can cause all kinds of problems. And then the consensus on what is enough protein, I think has been too low for a really long time. So there’s this 0.8 gram per kilogram of ideal weight, which I think is way too low. I think people actually need like 1.4 to 1.6 at least grams per kilogram of ideal weight of protein.
So when you say higher protein, if you’re moving from something that’s more like 0.8 to something that’s more like 1.5, then that could really be like a game changer for someone to get healthier. Once you get healthier, it’s easier to lose weight. And then If your fat is willing you’re not too metabolically unhealthy, your insulin is fairly low and you don’t have certain types of say, tissue damage problems that you might see in, say, lipedema or autoimmune disorders.
Then there is a, there seems to be a, or, and you don’t have a history of type two diabetes. Then there seems to be quite actually a large range of protein. That you can eat and still stay healthy. Access your fat and lose weight fairly effectively. So for a lot of people as long as they’re meeting that minimum. You could go you could go up to.
Maybe 150, 200 grams of protein and still lose weight. But then for other people for whom the fat is not as accessible for any of a variety of reasons. Lowering protein so that it’s much closer to that adequate level and not very much higher. And then adding a lot of fat for energy is, can actually be a lot more effective.
So it depends. Both approaches can work . But I think in both approaches you have to make sure , you really are getting enough protein. It’s not so low that it’s a detriment.
Carole Freeman: Oh, fascinating. Oh, so there’s not one size fits all way of eating for every single person on this planet
Amber O’Hearn: if they’re all healthy, it’s like that to story, right? That tol story quote. All fam, all happy families are happy in the same way. And all unhappy families are unhappy in their own individual.
Carole Freeman: Here’s a good question, but we are not gonna have time to cover this. So we’ve got kay STAs ask, asking how to heal the gut. And you know what, that’s, I should have that as a future future topic. And anything you wanna say real quick on that? Amber?
Amber O’Hearn: Yeah, I used to think that antibiotics were neutral and not a big deal. I had a bad experience with antibiotics that I think. I believe made me prone to infection and gave me a lot of gut trouble.
I’m still in the process of fixing it and I don’t know the answer, but I don’t know. That was a side note,
Carole Freeman: And I think we’ve got Dr. Ellen Schaeffer here. So many folks who are overweight will have sleep apnea, which will fragment their sleep, continue contributing to insulin resistance. Usually my patients see me for sleep. Oh yeah.
Amber O’Hearn: It’s a big vicious circle because the sleep apnea will wake you. Then you’re getting like inherently bad sleep quality cuz it’s disrupting all of the processes in including the duration.
And then you’ve got insulin resistance. If you’re not on a ketogenic diet, that’s gonna worsen glucose tolerance and affect your ability to eat food well. That can cause obesity and can contribute to sleep apnea , because it can like physically make the passages less free.
So yeah, it’s a terrible endemic problem.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. Here’s a question from Jennifer. How important is it to adhere to a sleep schedule? Is it helpful to get my seven to eight hours of sleep at approximately the same time each night?
Amber O’Hearn: Yes. You will sleep better if you sleep at the same time . I think waking time more than going to sleep time.
And I don’t remember why I think that , so maybe I’m wrong. I’ll have to get back to you. But yeah, if you’re, if you have sleep consistency, that tends to contribute to better sleep quality.
Carole Freeman: Thank you for the question, Jennifer. And then, Dr. Shaffer follow up. I treat their apnea first, then work on carb restriction, weight loss, diabetes reversal, et cetera. So I think sleep apnea needs to be discussed even if they aren’t particularly symptomatic. I’m assuming it means treats it with probably a C P A P machine or some kind of airflow, right?
Amber O’Hearn: So I think what you’re saying Alan if you have an patient presents with diabetes or overweight. Then even if they don’t think that they’re having apnea. It should be looked into because you can address that right away. That should start to have a positive feedback loop.
Maybe that’s what you’re saying
Carole Freeman: and yes is the answer,
I know the history of me getting into a ketogenic personally after a car accident and undiagnosed traumatic brain injury. Every symptom that I had from that developed post-traumatic hypo pituitary. Which basically my whole body was just like, oh, a wreck. Everything that was going wrong got fixed by going on a ketogenic diet.
All the symptoms went away, except for I ended up having this residual essential sleep apnea. So I was still experiencing that a couple years afterwards. And I couldn’t find anybody that could explain to me what was really going on. Why that was happening, except for my brain had been injured.
And the therapy that I finally found that worked for that was, it was really frustrating going. The sleep clinic diagnosis and all that kind of stuff because. I’d already lost 60 pounds at that point and their answer was, you should lose some weight. And I’m like, how much more should I lose. And so they didn’t have, they didn’t have any treatment for the central sleep apnea basically. Because the C pap machine wouldn’t, override that set central? . Yeah, where the brain just stops remembering to tell your body to breathe. So it’s not obstructive like the sleep apnea that Dr.
Shaver’s talking about. So what I ended up doing that, that seemed to work, was doing some hyperbaric oxygen therapy treatments. And so I seem to be normal now. I don’t know. Normal , I
Amber O’Hearn: won’t grant you that. Carole right?
Carole Freeman: She knows me well enough. So Alan saying especially after they have trouble losing weight and so that’s Say more.
Are you getting that? And I think it, addressing the sleep apnea and finding. If that’s an issue first, can then help with the weight loss. I’m suspecting. All right, great discussion here everyone. Thank you all for being here today. Give it up for Amber for being here. Everyone too.
Amber O’Hearn: Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me on.
Carole Freeman: Great so much to think about here. And yeah, so next week, join me next week I’m gonna have Randy Webb here. We’re gonna be doing some easy techniques to release stress and trauma from the body.
He’s my former supervisor during my grade school degree in psychology. We did the episode a few months back, but there were some audio issues. So we’re gonna redo that episode. So come back next week. And so today we talked about keto diet. And satiety and obesity with Amber O’Hearn. Thank you again for being here, everyone.
If you like what you heard today, support this show. Leave us some more comments share this episode with a friend. Leave us a review. If you’re listening on one of your podcast platforms, would appreciate you leaving us a review. It really would mean a lot. It helps more people find out about the show. And we can get more people this information that could also change their health and their life.
So everyone, thank you again for being here. Thanks to Amber and remember, help us grow the show and we’ll help you shrink . Bye for now, everyone. We’ll see you next time.
Hey, we’re live everyone. This episode is gonna be controversial, I promise you!
Are you conflicted about body positivity.
Is it wrong to want to lose weight?
Can you truly be healthy at any weight, in any body size?
This episode is for you. It’s gonna be controversial, and let’s do this!
All right, welcome everyone to Keto Chat Live. I’m your host, Carole Freeman. I have a master’s in nutrition and clinical health psychology a certified clinical hypnotherapist and also a board certified ketogenic nutrition specialist. And I specialize in helping women 40 plus follow a keto diet for sustainable weight loss.
Now let’s give you the little medical disclaimer so that lawyers are happy. This show is meant for educational and entertainment purposes only. Is not medical advice nor intended to diagnose, prevent, treat, or cure any condition. If you have questions, concerns about your specific medical condition, please seek out a qualified medical professional your doctor. Thanks for joining the show.
Personal Update
What’s going on in my life? I got a comedy show tonight out in Ahwatukee, which is an area of South Phoenix, and so excited about that. Got some friends coming out. Should be a really great show. It’s gonna be really fun.
Last weekend I went, or last week I went to a wedding and then took a spontaneous trip to San Francisco for the weekend, and I just, I’m so grateful for the way that I’ve designed my business that I can serve my clients at a very deep level, get them results, provide them with support. That, as I understand it, is next to none. There’s no other keto coaching support program out there that has the as much support that we have, but I still go and travel and make spontaneous trips to wherever I want to go.
Also I moved into a new co-working space in Phoenix. And with this dedicated pod podcast studio, which I’m still learning, how to set up the equipment in. And so let me know what you think of the sound. This episode and our last episode are recorded in this or broadcast live from this new podcasting studio. So let us know what you think of the sound.
Keto Membership Updates
One other thing we’re working on right now is that we’re, I’m making preparations for our membership’s virtual retreat. This will be the fourth one that we’ve done, and for people that are in my long term keto membership, which again, if you want us make changes long term.
You have to have long term support. So these ladies are very smart that they’ve joined and stayed on with me for long term. So we have our virtual retreat coming up, our fall one coming up October 15th and 16th. And today it was putting together the outline for the two days. And this is the fourth one we’ve done.
People absolutely love these. It’s meant to help us connect as a community and just uplevel our keto game. And take things to the next level and just feel really connected, motivated, and excited to keep going with things. We do not record the session. So they are in Zoom. They are virtual people can join all over across the country.
You have to be one of our members to be able to participate in this and we don’t record them. And this is the way of getting people to show up live and not say, Oh, I’ll just watch the recordings later. Also helps people be able to share in really authentic and honest way knowing that nobody else is gonna be watching it later and it’s only happening their lives.
So it creates a very safe space for people. We’ve got some, just some teaser topics that we’re. We’ve got, If I can move my page without ripping the cord out here. One of our peer support coaches, Dr. Cindy Ryan, is always a very popular speaker. She speaks all over the country and so we get to the privilege of having her on our virtual retreats.
Table of Contents
We always do a cooking class and. Get to cook together. It’s really cool. We’ve brainstormed some topics as well too. So we’re gonna be doing our top keto hacks for foods and coping and travel and meal and restaurants, and also some traps and pitfalls. I’m gonna be doing a label reading class as part of this as well, so help people figure out, are those foods at this store really?
Keto friendly. And one of our other peer support coaches is an avid CrossFitter, and so she’s gonna teach some couple of movement sessions for us. So not as intense as CrossFit, but the title, working title, the zip that comes with movement, and working towards. Holiday mindset. So we plan our fall retreat right before we head into the holiday season, which for a lot of people, can be really tricky of avoiding all of those high sugar, high carb foods that come along with the holidays.
And so much more. If you are listening to this and you were one of our. Keto lifestyle crew members, guess what? You get to attend for free. And on the first of the month when your email comes out, you’ll get the registration link to join us there. If you are a former client and feel like you’re missing out and having a little bit of fomo send me a message and I’ll let you have some information about how you can join us as well.
And if you’re somebody. It’s one of our have never worked with us. Also get in touch with us and let me I will let you know how you can actually participate in this as well. And finally, the other news information, new newness, new stuff here is that I did an experiment last week where we invited a few people to come as a guest under our group coaching calls.
Would You Like a Keto Coaching Guest Spots?
People that were considering working with us, considering, wanted to know what it was like to work with a keto coach. And it was a huge success. All three of the people that came as guests are now clients for us. And so it’s very exciting because they got to see what it was like to be immersed in our group of ladies that are all very successful on keto and that are continuing this as a long term journey and If you are somebody that would be curious, maybe you wanna be able to participate in our virtual keto retreat that’s coming up.
Or if you’re just somebody who’s stuck and maybe you’ve had some success on keto, can’t figure out how to get to the next level, or you did it in the past and it worked and now you can’t figure out how to get back on track. Reach out to us and will give you some information about coming on as a guest in one of our keto coaching calls.
Let me put the email that I would love for you to send a message to. I will put it on the screen here. Here we go, you can send an email to: Support@KetoCarole.com. Carole has an e on the end. Don’t forget that. And just let my assistant will be answering those emails and let her know that you would like to information about being a guest on our group coaching calls, or if you’d like some more information about how to participate in the virtual retreat or any other questions you’ve got, please send them right over there.
All right, let’s get back to, let me see the comments all of you have. All right, so again, welcome to the show. So glad you’re here. Those of you watching live, just pop a comment out there and let me know where you’re watching from, where you’re joining. I can see we’ve got some viewers on YouTube, so participate in the chat there.
And so glad that you’re here. But today’s topic, I’m gonna be talk, talking about the body positivity. Movement, trend, whatever you want to call it, trend or theme. And so I’m gonna talk about the training that I had in this. How I lived this and tried to teach it to my clients, what that did to my health and what it did to what it was like living in that body.
I’m gonna talk about how it’s affecting the people that are coming to work with me now and their mindset and how ashamed they are. And then I’m gonna, I’m gonna break it down and say what is wrong? Oh, this is the controversial part. What is wrong with the body? Positivity. Okay. So buckle up.
This should be. I have, I feel like I have one of the best nutrition educations that is available, especially for doing the work in the weight loss space because I have a master’s in nutrition and a master’s in clinical health psychology. It is a very unique degree that I’ve got. Two master degrees simultaneously.
Oh my gosh. I lived through it. It was very stressful and a lot of hard work. But I wouldn’t trade that education for anything because it exposed me to so many different really important topics and. I did learn during school about the, about intuitive eating, mindful eating, and the health at every size movement and research that’s out there.
Is Intuitive Eating Effective for Weight Loss?
So let me tell you what those things are and they have a lot of value, but also there’s a lot of things that they get wrong, and I’m gonna break those down for you here today. Intuitive eating, this is the concept that. That if we just slow down and we really tune in to what our body is telling us it wants that we will actually be able to have a healthy body weight.
We will eat foods that nourish us and meet our nutrient needs. But I’ll tell you what, , back when I was following this, I would walk through the grocery store every night. And the bakery section always called me and I would walk through all the desserts and I would be what is my body telling me it needs right now?
Often it was, pie or cake or cookies or something like that. And I’ll tell you what, none of those are meeting my nutrient needs at all. Mindful eating is a concept, and again, all of these have things that are very valuable and I use all of these. But I’m gonna tell you also that they got a lot of things wrong.
Their piece is missing, so I’m gonna say they didn’t get things wrong, but there’s big chunks that are missing that makes these, they don’t work unless you have some other things with them. Mindful eating is this concept that if we just slow down and we use the mindfulness principles, That we also will make the most healthy choices possible, and we will just eat foods at nourishes we won’t overeat.
So mindful eating involves being present here in the now. We’re paying attention to what’s happening, the food on our plate, paying attention when we eat it to the taste, textures, and sounds of it , not thinking about the past nor worrying about the future. We’re just here in this moment.
Mindful Eating Effective or Not for Weight Loss?
We only notice how it feels when we’re sitting or standing, and there’s no judgment. So another piece of mindful eating is that you’re not telling yourself you’re bad for eating something or you’re good for eating something else. There’s no judgment. It’s just food something that you’re eating.
It’s no t wrong, good or bad. You just are doing it. And so mindful eating says that poor choices come from not being present in the moment, not paying attention to how the food actually tastes in our mouth. It also says, When we judge ourselves for eating certain things or craving certain things and we say, Oh, I’m a bad person because I ate this.
That further perpetuates us making those choices. And then if we tell ourselves we’re good for doing something putting moral judgment on food is what perpetuates cravings and overeating and making those poor choices. When we feel bad about ourselves, we want food to the that. That’s not really why we make those choices Now.
It can actually have an impact on what you eat. There are some foods that we just are accustomed to eating. We shovel it in our mouth. We don’t actually pay attention to how it tastes or feels in our body. And so mindful eating, and again, there, there’s a lot good in these concepts and I use. With my clients, but without the proper context of the right foods that actually do nourish our body and moving away from things that are highly palatable and trigger us on a biochemical way to to overeat them.
These things by themselves are not enough to actually help us be a healthy body weight and make. Healthful food choices that nourish our body. And then the health at every size movement this is research based. There are a lot of practitioners out there that follow this at the end chronic dieting leads to people being food obsessed.
Maybe they can lose weight temporarily, but they always regain. And that by encouraging people to try to lose weight and to be in a leaner body, that is what makes them hate themselves. It makes their health worse, and that’s what makes people regain the weight and more. And so hell that every size says it’s much better to help people just learn to love their body as it is, and that they will be healthier, even if they’re overweight, they will be healthier than if they chronically diet and gain even more weight back and.
There’s, that’s also slightly incorrect. So they have a lot of research that backs this as well, where they say that, yes, when people go on, it is true that when people diet and then they go off the diet, they gain more back. That’s the way our body’s designed. It’s not the diet or the wanting to lose weight, hating your body that made that happen.
It’s just the way that our body’s designed. And so unless you can find a way of changing your eating habits permanently that you can stick with indefinitely, yes. If you go on a temporary diet, you will gain the weight back and more. That’s the way your body’s designed. That part is very true. The part that gets wrong with the health at every size though, is they do say that.
Does Weight Loss Cause Eating Disorders?
People can be healthy at any size that it doesn’t matter. You need to separate your health from your weight. And I’ll tell you what, like all my ladies that have lost weight, we run labs on them and they get healthier. So they were not healthier at the heavier weight. And also yeah, so let me talk about those pitfalls here in just a moment.
So those are the concepts that I learned, and again, I use. With my clients now, but we’ve gotta have them in a context that makes ’em actually work. So now I live this. I embraced this wholeheartedly. I believed everything that I learned about this, and so what happened to me and I was trying to teach it to my clients, let go of trying to lose weight that’s bad.
It causes eating disorders. It just makes you weigh even more. And so just learn to love your body just as it is. Let go of the fantasy that you can ever lose weight and keep it off. It was hard. It was a hard sell. I’ll tell you that , and what happened to me is that I ended up being. Over 220 pounds. I graduated with two master’s degrees.
My Weight Story:
Over the years following, I reached over 220 pounds. So I didn’t, I wasn’t trying to diet, I wasn’t trying to lose weight. I had zero focus on that. In fact, I was one of those people. That shamed people for trying to lose weight or ever going on a diet or ever trying to eat healthier? Not that’s wrong.
Not trying to eat healthier, but people that were actively trying to watch their intake in order to facilitate a lower body fat. And I thought that was, again, I believed everything that these concepts teach, and I believe that I was better and them. Because I was not trying to lose weight and diet, but all I was doing was continuing to gain weight and I ate whole foods.
I didn’t eat junk food, didn’t go to fast food. and ate whole Foods. But again, I would end every day night with a dessert. I was definitely overeating and overconsuming and I ended up with metabolic syndrome, which I’ll tell you what, not healthy at that size. My waist measurement was 40 inches.
I had high blood pressure, I had low HDL, I had high triglycerides. So those are the four, I’m sorry, four of the five criteria for metabolic syndrome. I also likely had blood sugar that was creeping up towards the diabetic range, so I almost had all five of those. Besides that, it was miserable living in that body.
And here’s one of the things. That I see that the hell that every size model gets wrong is they discount the fact that when people are a heavier body weight, a heavier body fat percentage than what’s optimally healthy for them, it doesn’t feel good living in that body. It says not just an extra heavy weight that you’re carrying around, but the metabolic state that’s in your body, the high insulin, the excess of inflammation.
And all the other factors that go into this. The body doesn’t feel good to live in. I had stiff ankles every time I woke up in the morning. My ankles were really stiff. It was hard to walk around. I had chronic heartburn. I had skin tags, which if you have those, I grew up in a family where everyone had them when we were just told that was a part of getting older.
It turns out it’s a sign of insulin resistance. So I had skin tags. I was constantly, I was food obsessed. All I ever thought about was what am I gonna eat next? I also would have cr blood sugar crashes, so I couldn’t leave the house without actually having some snacks. If I was gonna go meet friends for a meal, I would be obsessed with let’s go to the place that’s gonna gimme the biggest portion, because I need to eat a lot of food to feel hungry or to not feel hungry.
And even then, I probably wouldn’t be very satisfied. I felt tired after meals. I also, I had to buy bigger and bigger clothes. And it’s not, it’s uncomfortable to be walking around in that body and I was definitely headed towards type two diabetes. So it was not quality of life. And again, I was not, I was focused wholeheartedly on intuitive eating, mindful eating, and just not trying to diet or lose weight.
And all it did was making me gain more weight. So the trend that I see now is body positivity. Where. Especially the health at every size or just the concept of like your body’s size is not correlated with your health status. And I’ll tell you right now, I think that loving your body at any size is absolutely paramount.
I a hundred percent, a thousand percent agree with love yourself no matter what you look like, no matter what size you are. That’s the part of this that I a hundred percent agree with the women I’m working with. Are so ashamed of themselves. Their bodies, their attempts, they are trying to be healthier.
They are trying to be leaner. They’ve tried everything on the market, every diet, every program. And yes, they have fallen in the trap of losing the weight and gaining it back and even more. But that’s not because. They need to just give in and learn to love their bigger body and being overweight. So the part that I agree with is you are worthy, lovable.
And acceptable as you are, no matter what size you are, no matter what body percent fat you have, I a hundred percent agree with that. Body positivity is a great thing. We need to let women shake off that shame that they need to be a certain perfect thing that’s on magazine cover that’s photoshopped and totally unrealistic.
That needs to, that should stop. But what I’m seeing is, With the movement the other way of, Oh no, you can actually be whatever size and you can be healthy and you don’t need that. It’s wrong to try to lose weight because that’s bad for you. The women that are coming to me for help, they actually are often ashamed to admit that they would like to be slimmer, leaner.
They have been leaner in the past and they know that they felt better in that. And they’re ashamed to admit this because we’re living in this world now where it’s all about, nope. Just learn to love your body and let it be as big as it wants to be, and you can feel great, and there’s no negative side effects or consequences of living that way.
But these ladies know that’s not true. They have chronic headaches and low energy and food obsession. They’ve got aches, joints, and pain in everywhere in their body. They have different, some of them have disease diagnoses and autoimmune conditions. Not all of them do, but a lot of them do. They’ve, it’s just really uncomfortable living these bodies.
Should We Give Up On Weight Loss?
They know that because they’ve been slimmer in the past and they felt much better, and so it’s not necessarily the extra fat on their body. It’s about what is going on inside and the health consequences of the higher insulin and the inflammation and so on and so forth. And they’re ashamed that they want to be smaller, leaner, slimmer.
They’re ashamed to tell me this and I have to validate that. No, I get it. I get it. When you’re living in a body that’s unhealthy and has more fat on it than is healthy for you, it feel it’s a lot of burden to carry. It’s hard being tired all the time and having aches and pains and being food obsessed and then getting this message that’s bad to want to change that.
And they have a hard time facing the fact that am I supposed to just give up and settle with gaining weight each year, buying bigger clothes, adding more medications, and feeling more tired and uncomfortable in my. Is that the only option? So let’s talk more now about what those concepts got wrong and the problems I have with the.
Body positivity. Now I’m using that as a as umbrella term. And I told you at the beginning this would be a little controversial. So I, again, to clarify, I have zero problem with being positive about our bodies. In fact, I actually think that’s a wonderful thing. I want all of my women to feel amazing about themselves as a person and their body.
And you can love yourself. So what they get wrong is it’s not dichotomy. You don’t have to hate your body in order to want to lose weight. Jut love yourself just as you are and strive to feel good and get healthier. You can want to be the best version of yourself. And being a lower body fat in the healthy range actually can be part of that of loving.
So women’s bodies are generally healthiest at 22 to 29% body fat. So that’s where I help my clients set a goal to be somewhere in that range. Now, not all of ’em get there. They may not get there really quickly. But that’s what a realistic goal of a healthy women’s body fat percentage is. And in fact, puberty is actually triggered in little girls once they hit 22% body fat.
That’s the signal that tells their body it’s time to go through puberty and. This is why it’s happening younger and younger is because our children are getting heavier and heavier, more body fatted and much younger age than previously. So this is, it’s not the hormones and the milk or anything like that.
It’s the percentage of body fat. That’s what triggers puberty. And so wanting to lose weight, wanting, specifically wanting to lose fat is not inherently bad. That is not what causes eating disorders. It’s not what cause. The rebound effect of regaining the weight. Now again, for my clients, we’re checking metabolic labs at the beginning of their journey, and we’re watching that over time.
And they’re all getting better. It’s because we’re getting at the root cause of what’s causing the fatigue and the food obsession and the inflammation all of those things. And, people, they always feel better when they get their body fat. For example, one of my peer support coaches, Karen, she’s lost over 70 pounds and she figured out that her two twin grandsons holding both of them, they weigh less than that, but trying to hold them and walk around all day long.
it was a lot of extra burden on her body. It would be, of course, it would be hard to carry 70 pounds around all day long. Of course, it’s gonna feel easier to move around through life and do everything that you want to do from walking up and down stairs to putting your shoes on, to chase on your grandkids around.
Of course, it’s gonna feel easier to move through life with 70 less pounds that you’re carrying around.
Things That Do Not Cause Eating Disorders
And also losing weight itself and also food restriction is not what causes eating disorders. In fact, I’ve worked with several people on keto that have had diagnosed eating disorders and it actually improved their eating disorder. It removes the food obsession. It removes the constant hunger, it removes the blood sugar roller coaster That contributes to both those things, and we’re also The way that I teach keto, we’re removing hyper palatable foods.
So again, if you haven’t listened to any of my past episodes, hyper palatable food combo is fat and sugar together, or carbs and fat, or sweet and fat together that triggers our. To crave it, or brain to crave it, and it triggers us to overeat it. That’s the core of Binge Eating Disorder. And instead, we tell people that if you just love yourself, if you just have moderation, if you don’t feel bad about yourself while you’re eating it, and you just slowly eat it and enjoy it, you won’t struggle with binge eating disorder.
That’s bs. Our body, our brain, are specifically designed to crave those foods and overeat them. There’s no amount of self-love moderation or non-judgmental eating you can do that’s gonna make you not overeat those foods. So some food restrictions, some drawing a line in the sand. And I prefer, instead of talking about food restriction, I help my clients look at here’s all the foods that you can eat.
Focus on what you do. Like the foods that I can coach my clients to eat, I’ll tell you what, they could have unlimited food accommodations. They would never have to eat the same meal again for the rest of their lives. There is so much variety, they’re not deprived. And once they get to the point of no longer being food obsessed, no longer overeating, plenty of energy free from aches and pains, freedom moving around and feeling so much better in their body.
They don’t look at it as a restriction either. They look at it as freedom. So this is, again, this is where these concepts are getting things wrong. They have pieces missing, and the truth is you can lose weight and keep it off if you find the right approach, a way of eating that you can stick with indefinitely the rest of your life along with the right kind of support.
Because guess what? Our whole world, our food supply is all designed to make us overeat. It crave. And not be able to have moderation. So it’s not the concept of losing weight, it’s not trying to lose weight that makes these things, It’s the foods , it’s the food fault. So again, I’m a hundred percent for loving your body and yourself exactly where you are, and you don’t have.
Give up on trying to be the healthiest version of yourself, right? So when somebody wants to try to climb Mount Everest, we applaud that. Oh my gosh, what a feat of human human achievement. Good for you. Or somebody wants to do a marathon, somebody wants to be a do an Iron Man or one of those tough mutter races.
Good for you. You’re trying to see what you can achieve in your body. It’s within the parameters of what would be considered a good thing to do. We’re so proud of you for doing that. Why then, is it something that we consider to be bad, that people are trying to achieve a healthy body fat percent? Achieve the healthiest version of their body.
How Can I Help You With Your Keto Weight Loss!
Now again, I’m not helping people trying to get to that bikini body where they have a six pack on a woman’s body. That’s just not a healthy body fat percentage for women. It’s not sustainable. I’m helping people get to a body that feels good to live in their labs reflect that they’re healthy on the inside as well, and they’re free.
Of all those aches and pains and just the things that don’t feel good to live. And so while I agree with body positivity in that you should love yourself, you are lovable, your body is perfect the way that it is, and also if it doesn’t feel good, it’s okay to attempt to lose weight and to get the right support, and they’re figuring that out and not giving up on it.
What do you think about that? What do you think about that? All right. I can’t wait to see your comments. I hope that nobody has any hate messages. Again, I appreciate the messages of the health at every size, mindfully eating, intuitive being. Those are things that I do bring, but again, they’re missing.
They’re missing some really important pieces. So let me tell you about how I then bring in the health at every size. Okay. Again, I believe that you are lovable and you should be positive about your body at any size, but the piece that’s missing is that it’s okay to try to lose weight and get the right support and get that figured out.
Intuitive eating when I use this all the time with my clients, in the context of a whole Foods well formulated ketogenic diet, you can absolutely use intuitive beating. I have my clients. Eat until they’re hungry. They stop eating when they’re full. That’s intuitive eating. They select foods that they enjoy , like, and eat what sounds good within the parameters of a whole foods well formulated keto diet.
They don’t eat foods that don’t sound good to them ,maybe they’re hungry for a meal and so then they look within the refrigerator or at the grocery store. What foods sound or look good to. You can absolutely use intuitive eating, then it’s wonderful.
There’s no amount of ounces of water that I have my clients drink. When you’re thirsty, drink some water. If you’re not thirsty, you don’t need to drink a certain amount of water. Again, in the right context, these concepts are amazing. The mindful eating as well. When you’re eating a whole foods well formulated ketogenic diet, can let go of judgment
because a lot of my ladies have been told that they’d eat very little, eat lots and lots of vegetables. But if you’re eating vegetables is making you feel bloated. You aren’t enjoying it. Mindfulness in this case is gonna be about how does it taste and feel in your mouth? How does it feel in your body as you’re eating it and digesting it?
Which of those foods align with you and make you feel good? Which ones don’t make you feel good for long term? Those are, that’s how I’m using mindful eating with my clients in the right context.
All right. Looking forward to hearing,
hearing your thoughts on all this. I saw a comment the other day in a Facebook group from dieticians that were saying how there are some people out there, they’re promoting health at every size, but they also are trying to help people lose weight. And how that’s heresy. It’s the antithesis of it, but the health is, every size model does actually say that you.
Engage in movement and eat healthfully because it feels good, and I agree with that as well. That’s another thing intuitively that I have my clients do, is that when they feel like they have lots of energy and they want to go do movement or exercise or activity, whatever you wanna call it, I encourage them, do something that feels good to you, that you enjoy doing that feels good in your body, not because you need to burn a certain amount of calories.
You need to do that to lose weight, do movement because it feels good and you have the energy to do it. So that’s another example of how I bring those concepts into what I do.
All right. We’re coming, wrapping this up here. So please leave your comments, questions. Hopefully you can see how well rounded my approach is and. I’m taking the best of all these things. So really the approach that I have is very unique. It’s very common learned and mushed it all together into a wonderful, very comprehensive approach that does take count psychology about chemistry, the neurochemistry, the hormones and labs, and so much more.
Really go my ladies, be the healthiest version of themselves and feel mentally and physically as good as they can. So next episode I’m gonna have a guest on. I love her so much, Amber O’Hearn, and we’re gonna talk about the keto diet, sleep and satiety. So come back for our next episode. Today, we talked all about body positivity.
We talked about the parts that I like about it, the parts that they’re getting right. We talked about the parts that they’re getting wrong and we talked about what the whole picture looks like and. It’s actually gonna help people actually be the healthiest version of themselves. All right, So if you liked what you heard today and you’d like to get more personalized support for your keto diet, I invite you to check out my website, KetoCarole.com.
Join My Keto Program!
I do work very closely with my clients. It is the most comprehensive keto program that’s out there. It has the most support available for any weight loss program. I do only work with my clients by application. So since I’m working so closely with them, I work with people by application. We do a very thorough vetting process to make sure that it’s a match for both of us.
And so if you’re ready to stop messing around, you’re ready for a next chapter of your life where you can be the best version of yourself. If you’re somebody who’s really successful in all the area, other areas of your life, but this is just the one little piece you’re like, Why can’t I figure this out?
You probably are really good. Fit to work with me. So apply to work with me, visit my website, KetoCarole.com, see if we’re a match. And again, right now we’re offering some guest spots on our group coaching calls so you can really, thoroughly get a taste of what it’s like to work with us. And that’s all for now. Thank you so much for being here today.
Remember, share this. If you found this interesting, if you found this helpful, share it with a friend. Help us grow the show and I’ll help you shrink. Thank you all for being here today. We’ll see you next time. Bye.
