Susan is a 70-year-old woman and like a lot of the women I work with, she had tried every single diet under the sun. She had even tried hypnosis thinking that maybe this would be one thing that would help her.
In fact, Susan had been a past client of mine about 10 years ago working on hypnosis but this time around she came to me seeking help with keto.
Susan was really, really frustrated with her appearance. She just felt so much shame in how she looked. Just before we started working together Susan told me, “I’m the fattest I’ve ever been, even though I do Pilates five times a week.”
Not only had she been newly diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes but she also had hypertension and high triglycerides, putting her at risk of heart disease.
She felt hopeless.
Until she turned to me.
After just two months of working together, Susan lost 36lbs! Almost a record weight loss in that period of time for my clients.
I was really happy for her, mostly because women are often told that as they get older, that weight loss is harder. But it doesn’t have to be that way and Susan is proof of that.
At 70 years old, she was able to lose nearly 40lbs in two months.
That fantastic result for her is also a testament to show that my approach and my keto program are effective for women of ALL ages, despite what they might have been told by their doctor or friends.
Beyond the amazing weight loss, one of the best things for Susan was that she was no longer struggling with nighttime eating.
Before working with me Susan had felt helpless in trying to get her eating habits under control. She had overwhelming cravings from about 8 pm until 10 pm every night and she would just eat nonstop.
She couldn’t seem to get it under control and she had begun to doubt that there was any way to reverse that.
But she was able to overcome her cravings AND she was able to do it in just two months.
She got rid of what she said were “terrible cravings” for rice, sugar, bread, and carbs.
Working with me gave Susan the tools and the mindset she needed to stop all of that non-controllable eating and lose 36lbs.
So not only is keto fantastic and my approach for helping people lose weight, but it also helps people make dramatic habit changes as well.
Things that they once felt were completely out of their control, they now have the tools to not only manage but completely remove from their lives.
Susan said that there were three main things she learned from our keto journey together:
You’re never too old to lose weight;
You’re never too old to change bad habits,
And you’re never too old to start feeling amazing.
Susan says she just feels so much better about her body now. She went from feeling like she looked like she was nine months pregnant to “normal” and those cravings are 100% gone.
“No longer being controlled by cravings for sugar and carbs is like a miracle!”
Miracles can happen. You can make them happen, just like Susan.
Perhaps you’re in your 60s or 70s and have been told that losing weight “at your age” will be too hard. Maybe you feel like your cravings are too strong or your eating habits are too hard to kick.
Susan is here to tell you that you can do it. Get in touch with Carole today and find out if she can help you make your own miracle happen.
Join Carole, board certified ketogenic nutrition specialist, in this special episode of Keto Chat LIVE where she chats with RD Dikeman, dad to a young man living with Type 1 diabetes, who appears in The Diabetes Solution Movie.
The diabetes community has been filled with deception for the past 50 years. The typical guidelines for managing diabetes have ultimately caused suffering for millions of people with the disease. Follow a group of families and doctors as they present a solution to managing diabetes that could spare many patients from devastating complications in this seminal documentary about diabetes, The Diabetes Solution Movie.
Carole Freeman: [00:00:00] Oh, Hey, everybody we’re live. Do you have diabetes or do you have a friend family member or loved one or maybe even somebody you don’t care that much about that has diabetes. Then this episode is for you stick around. As I chat with RD, Dikeman, father, of a son with type one diabetes. Welcome to the show RD.
Carole Freeman: It’s been awhile.
RD Dikeman: Thanks for having me and it’s been a while.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. Welcome everyone. Keto chat live. I’m your host. Carole Freeman. I have master’s degree in nutrition and clinical health psychology, and I’m a board certified keto nutrition specialist. I’m so excited. We have special, very special guest today.
Carole Freeman: RD Dikeman all the way from Hawaii. Somebody is knocking on my door, I guess they’re going to. I have to know what that would be, but they’re going to have to wait. Let’s I’m going to read the medical disclaimer here, cause we gotta make sure that we we don’t want to get in trouble with anybody, but the lawyer say we need this.
Carole Freeman: Everyone, this show is meant for educational entertainment purposes. Only. It is not medical advice nor intended to diagnose, prevent, treat, or cure any condition. If [00:01:00] you have questions or concerns related to your specific medical condition please contact your personal healthcare professional.
Carole Freeman: When is the last time I saw you RD? I know the first time I met you was in San
RD Dikeman: Diego. Yeah. Maybe 2015 was
Carole Freeman: that 2015, 16, whatever. The first year of low-carb USA, you were a speaker there and just blown away by your story. And so I’m really glad, I think this is maybe our second or third interview, but or time virtually hanging out.
Carole Freeman: So I’m so glad to hear. Yeah. Oh, I can’t wait to catch up. So everyone, this is an interactive show. I can see we’ve got people watching live. So go ahead and comment. Let us know where you’re joining from. We want to know that you’re here and you’re part of the show as well too. So please join us.
Carole Freeman: I have a little quiz for you watching as well, too, just for fun. True or false people with type one and type two diabetes should eat very different diets for the best health outcomes. So let’s see what the audience says about this. Just give me a T or an F in the comments. Let’s see what everyone says.
Carole Freeman: [00:02:00] Alright RD share with us your backstory your son type one at what, nine years old, is that when he was diagnosed or was it,
RD Dikeman: yeah. Yeah, so he was a real, it was a real classic child diagnosis where we didn’t know anything about diabetes type one or type two.
RD Dikeman: And we were just eating standard, American diet, high carb, lots of processed food. Dave loved Starbucks, blueberry muffins. And just I was overweight Midwest schlub that liked to eat pizza and drink IPA beers and so on. And they’ve got progressively more and more sick under our watch.
RD Dikeman: And we didn’t, we were unable to make sense of what was happening to him. He was our first child. So there was even some thoughts that he’s just going through a phase or something like that. But he progressively lost weight, became more ill [00:03:00] and the situation became acute. And we had to rush him to the emergency room.
RD Dikeman: And it seems to me like he was within 24 hours of passing away if we had not. Yeah, there was a decision, should we go, or should we wait? And maybe we should just let him rest and get, try to get over it. And we made the right move to take him to the hospital and then we realized by the reaction of the folks who treated Dave, that he was in a serious problem, that’s a serious situation.
RD Dikeman: And it’s a long story. It always affects me emotionally because I don’t have any guilt about it because I didn’t know anything. So what could I do? But the process of. Seeing him and thinking about it, he was so ill that just reliving that moment, it was really traumatic.
RD Dikeman: And it happens all the time and it happens. It [00:04:00] happened under the watch of his pediatricians who saw him several times before it happened. So that’s one thing that the people can learn about who are watching this show is that they should do some research on detecting the signs of it because you can detect your own children or family or friends.
RD Dikeman: Because it’s it’s mysterious what happens and it happens so rapidly within a week or two. They just absolutely crash.
Carole Freeman: Wow. We’ve got Emily watching from Namibia, easy for me to say welcome Emily. Kathy is very smart viewer here. She’s saying F false for my quiz and that type ones and type two, can do the same, a low carb approach.
Carole Freeman: We’ve got Maya here as well. Welcome Maya, low carb, high protein under 30 grams of carbs for all kinds of diabetes and other metabolic syndromes. We have a very smart viewership here today. This is great. Okay. Back to your watching the movie. Okay. The diabetes [00:05:00] solution, is that the right name of the movie diabetes solution?
Carole Freeman: And so I watched that last week I don’t know how long ago it just came out. And that’s what I noticed. The story you’re sharing is so similar to all the people that were in the movie is that, they just think the kid has the flu or something like that. And it seems it’s very common then that they’re just sent home that they’re not checking.
Carole Freeman: Just if they check their blood sugar, that’s all they would have to do right. At that point.
RD Dikeman: If we would have known to check his blood sugar, we would have caught it for sure. And probably many months before he was sick, if we had happened to catch it that would have been a much different situation.
RD Dikeman: But
Carole Freeman: probably they’re just, it’s it seems like a flu. So the doctors doesn’t even think the check, the blood sugar at that point. And so by the time they’re admitted, you’re taking them to the ER, they are checking it then, but it’s pretty serious by that time. Yeah. Linda from Charleston, South Carolina.
Carole Freeman: Welcome Linda. Kathy’s in Washington, DC. Welcome. We’ve got Larry and Lakeland, Florida. Welcome everyone to the show. All [00:06:00] right, so Dave’s in the hospital, you get the news. They give you some handouts, I’m assuming, here’s how to do this and send you on your way. Is that a kind of their solution of how they told you to manage type one?
RD Dikeman: We did meet with the dietician and I don’t want to sound mean, but it did occur to us that the dietician was overweight and that we should be skeptical. I also recognized that the dietician was telling us to eat straight up food pyramid type meals, without any context of type one diabetes. And we were in we were just going through the motions at that point, but this was the appropriate moment for us to start being skeptical and we were, and I think that what happens with most people is.
RD Dikeman: You are in this situation [00:07:00] where you’re very vulnerable and your child’s health is at risk and you may not be used to dealing with authority figures, or certainly not challenging authority figures. And what they’re telling you to do is probably the worst advice possible. They’re telling you that you should eat essentially the food pyramid which has done no good for anybody over the last three decades.
RD Dikeman: Then they’re telling which is the high carb, low fat diet. And they’re doing that in the context of type one, children who have essentially no ability to efficiently process, rapid acting carbohydrate. So they send you home. And that’s it you’re cooked you follow their procedures, which are called carb, counting.
RD Dikeman: You add up the insulin necessary for each meal. [00:08:00] You inject it. There’s no discussion of why this procedure won’t work over the long-term or even the short term. And that’s the situation that people Stalin forever. They’re constantly on a blood sugar roller coaster, and there’s no way out.
RD Dikeman: I’ll tell you a quick story about a kid. We started getting involved with JDRF shortly after diagnosis and and Dave’s a real personable dude. So he quickly became a favorite of the Hawaii JDRF and he was voted. To Congress as one of the representatives from our state to petition for diabetes cure research
Carole Freeman: funds, JDRF is junior diabetes
RD Dikeman: research foundation.
RD Dikeman: Yeah. Juvenile diabetes research foundation. And so that was the first time David ever been around other type one kids. [00:09:00] And what they would do would be, we would met in this big ballroom, there were hundreds of kids from all over the country. They were fed exactly the food pyramid type meals.
RD Dikeman: And halfway through the dinner, you would hear these CGM alarms going off. It was like sirens everywhere of high blood sugars. It was the craziest damn thing. I met this kid during lunch. It was in high school. They was young. But this kid was in high school and a really sharp kid. I talked to him, I was sitting with Dave and we were sitting at a table and what classes are you taking?
RD Dikeman: And he was taking, AP bio and AP. You could tell the kid was really smart, but then I looked down at what he was eating and he was trying to do the calculation of how much insulin to take, to cover his pizza and his French fries. So he had not he had not computed that this method doesn’t work at all.
RD Dikeman: And it was just, that was just his fate to [00:10:00] constantly be on this roller coaster and do his due diligence to, to eat these high carb foods and take his insulin. And it was sad. It’s sad what’s happening to kids. No, one’s doing a damn thing about. And
Carole Freeman: except you’ve been fighting the good fight for
Carole Freeman: diagnosis. What year
RD Dikeman: Dave was diagnosed in 2013. And when we figured out that there was a way out of this mess, it was only natural to share that news and the best way to do it with social media. So we started to share Dave’s meals and his graphs and things like that in hopes of reaching people and others followed, we were talking about the movie just a second ago, Bethany and her family made this incredible documentary that’s out.
RD Dikeman: So there’s some inertia that the right solution is being realized out there.
Carole Freeman: So [00:11:00] take us through. Your transition where you started to have a light bulb or at least a big skepticism about, I know for a while that you experienced the blood sugar roller coasters with Dave, and you had awareness of wait a minute, why are we consuming this high carb and trying to chase up insulin, there’s gotta be a different way of doing this.
Carole Freeman: It’s better.
RD Dikeman: So what I, so I’m not, I’m a doctor, but not a physician. So I’m I have a PhD in physics, so it was natural for us when Dave got home and Dave was so ill that he needed to recover for a few weeks, he had lost so much weight. There was no chance of sending him back to school. And so I was like this is a perfect opportunity.
RD Dikeman: I’ll stay home from work too. And I’ll try to figure out this insulin business as we were instructed, bond endocrinologist. That if he goes too high, it’s bad. If he goes too low, it’s bad. And he drew a graph on an easel with a marker and my eyes lit up because I thought, oh, there’s some science [00:12:00] here, right?
RD Dikeman: This is going to be something that I can solve. So I tried to solve it. And we did some experiments with Dave. We gave him some high carb foods and we would give him insulin and we would graph the results. And then we would modify how much insulin we gave and when we gave it and we would give the same experiment again, and we would get a different result then I would try to get closer to just having this flat line.
RD Dikeman: And my wife would come home from work. And I’d say, I almost got it. I think we’re going to figure this out because I figured if we could just get one or two meals, then you know, and then the next day we would try it and then it would be. All whack again. And it would think why didn’t, why couldn’t I get the same result.
RD Dikeman: And I tried this for two weeks. We were trying it with one of the things we were trying it with. It was Starbucks cookies. Cause that was one of the days favorite. So we would take this cookie and we would [00:13:00] divide it up into pieces and we would give a little bit, we’ve tried all kinds of crazy things.
RD Dikeman: And Roxanne, my wife in the meantime she at some point she instinctively knew that I wasn’t going to be able to solve this because there was some days I would report good. And some days are rough. After a couple of weeks she lost confidence that we were on the right track and she was doing the the research and she found the Bernstein book and she ordered it.
RD Dikeman: Oh yeah. So the big, epiphany came for me when I realized. This was not something that was solvable. There was some, what I would call in the physics term is stochastic meaning that there’s a random process. We were getting we were keeping the experiment fixed, but the results were random.
RD Dikeman: And there’s many processes like this and physics, and they tend to occur when your physical system has some complexity [00:14:00] involved and surely there’s complexity. When you’ve got food digestion, injections, it’s a, this is not a tabletop experiment. Like you wouldn’t, you would perform in physics.
RD Dikeman: So the day I realized that it was stochastic and I was chronicling that in some math that I was doing on the computer some modeling that we were doing, we got the book in the mail and I read the book. And I opened the book to the law of small numbers, which is a famous chapter in the book.
RD Dikeman: And I realized that this dude also understood the physics of injected insulin. And that was the key and that he not only understood what I was seeing, but he understood the solution and the solution required low carb, that you would remove the random stochastic nature of the blood sugars. If you remove the carbohydrate.
RD Dikeman: And he explained how that works. And I knew he was [00:15:00] right when I read it. And I knew from looking at the way he wrote that this was a serious book. Cause we had been given like a book with the pink Panther on it and these books, and they’re not serious.
RD Dikeman: Like you can tell they’re not, this guy is a serious guy, right?
Carole Freeman: They show the pink Panther booklet in the movie, the diabetes solution. Yeah. Yeah. That’s so that’s what the hospital gave you or the nutritionist gave you, right?
RD Dikeman: Yeah. I’m sure the nutritionist loves that pink Panther, book cause they, they can understand it, but it doesn’t work.
RD Dikeman: That’s the problem.
Carole Freeman: I just I’m so I don’t know what the right word is. It was fascinating to see, especially in the last, five to 10 years, how we how we’re seeing this trend, where a lot of scientists, non nutrition, trained minds are starting to crack nutrition and figuring out things that, I been to school at two degrees in nutrition.
Carole Freeman: And while we were taught to look at research and kind of think for ourselves, we were still taught here’s the thing you do. And not really taught to [00:16:00] question all of that and figure out if maybe there’s a better way. And so I just love people like you that are coming into this space. And Helping turn things on its head and figuring out that, we don’t need to just keep doing this game of telephone, pass down the wrong information and keep it going for too long.
Carole Freeman: Let’s figure out what actually works in real humans. And let’s share that information.
RD Dikeman: It’s a weird cultural problem because as a physicist, I have to try to disprove what I’m doing every day. So if I write a theory or write some model, most of the time that I spend on writing the model is trying to come up with cases where it fails, because I have to be sure that the model is working within the guides of the approximations that I’m making and so on.
RD Dikeman: So that’s the nature of how I work on a daily basis. A physician is just the opposite, and that’s okay. But a physician [00:17:00] is taking as learning a series of protocols. It’s not a job of a physician to, to learn a protocol on how to fix a broken arm or whatever. And then to, to question that and to try to, find where that solution is bounded and so on.
RD Dikeman: And it wouldn’t work as a profession that way, but unfortunately, you’ve got a situation and then the type one diabetes world where the protocol is incorrect and the authority figures are not they’re not built to find the correct solution or admit that it’s wrong. And that’s true of most of nutrition.
RD Dikeman: If since the food pyramid has been put in place, this type one situation is an acute problem, but in general, you see it with type twos and obesity. Now it’s just a. It’s an epidemic, absolutely.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. Welcome everyone. Who’s joining us here. Go ahead and share in the chat where you’re joining us from.
Carole Freeman: And also if you want to share a [00:18:00] little personal how what’s your relationship to diabetes? Is it personal? Is it a family or friend? Share a little bit in the chat box there, the comment section we’d love to have you join in on this show. So you started, so the Dr. Bernstein’s book was the kind of a cornerstone of changing what you were doing influence your whole family.
Carole Freeman: Not just you didn’t Dave on a diet and everybody else ate whatever they wanted to around him, you all were very supportive. And tell us more about what that transition was like.
RD Dikeman: I’ll, let me start with the hard comment on that topic, which is. When I went to the community with Dave’s, before and after graphs, this is what happened when he ate oatmeal.
RD Dikeman: And this is what happened when he ate eggs. I thought that with, I couldn’t understand why the Bernstein book wasn’t more popular because of course, as a parent, you would want your child not to get the [00:19:00] complications of diabetes. And here’s the solution to that. It was pretty easy to learn the book and to solve that problem.
RD Dikeman: And what I learned was that, of course there are the nutritionists and dieticians and the endocrinologists are teaching people the wrong things, but when exposed to the right answer, meaning the right answer to control your blood sugar. There wasn’t a lot of resonance. Oh, and people should know, if you have a type one kid you’re measuring blood sugars all day long, and one of these days, your kid’s gonna eat some eggs.
RD Dikeman: And you’re going to realize that their blood doesn’t sugars go to the moon. And what I realized was that what you just said about the parents and, what we do we eat whatever we want? Are you carbs? Whatever that was a big sacrifice for people to make for themselves and the rest of their families.
RD Dikeman: And as it turns out there, aren’t a lot of people who are willing to make that change for [00:20:00] themselves even, and even though their blood sugars for their child are going up and down. And that was an astonishing thing to learn that a real. And it turns out that as you learn the processed carbohydrate foods are extremely addictive.
RD Dikeman: People can not quit the carbohydrate, even if they’re measuring these blood sugars all day long, they can’t quit it for themselves. Or if they’re the type one it’s very hard to quit. And these foods are designed to be addictive. And if you’ve ever, if you’ve ever tried to quit eating them, you’ll know that they’re addictive because I had that experience when I quit those foods it was shocking how much of a hold they have on you.
RD Dikeman: And of course, just like any addiction once you clear becomes easier for some people becomes very easy. Other people still have a kind of a daily battle for me. I have no desire to go back. I haven’t eaten [00:21:00] any grains or starch or sugar. And since, shortly after Dave’s diagnosis, it’s not a big deal.
RD Dikeman: I’m feeling a lot better. I’ve I’m much stronger. So I’m happy with I’m actually ecstatic at the personal changes that occurred with me. I am astonished and I’m ecstatic. Because I was going down the tubes, just like a lot of people who are, hitting their late forties
Carole Freeman: when it’s this, I, my clients struggle with the similar thing where I’m working with ladies that are on.
Carole Freeman: Trajectory towards type two diabetes, they’re insulin resistant and trying to lose weight. And it’s so hard to get their whole family on board with supporting that lifestyle. So they ended up being and you’re right. Like the carbohydrates are addictive and people are in denial that they are.
Carole Freeman: They just think no, that’s your issue. I don’t have a problem. So I should be able to eat whatever I want. I wanted to highlight Danny’s here. [00:22:00] A type two diabetic from Israel on Dr. Bernstein’s low carb diet for over two years, A1C went from 11.4 to 4.7 and reversed neuropathy Danny, way to go. That’s I love that story.
Carole Freeman: Thanks for sharing. It’s happy Kathy must be a registered dietician or registered dietician nutritionist. She’s getting a lot of pushback when for doing low carb. So she shared it in one of her certified diabetes educator, Facebook groups. So we’ll see if we get anybody pop in here. And Allie, welcome to the show.
Carole Freeman: And let’s say Maya type one diabetic for over 35 years, Seattle, Washington. Oh, that’s where I used to live. Welcome Maya currently in bend Oregon. Oh, I grew up in Oregon too using Dr. Bernstein’s method for seven plus years now and last A1C 4.4%. Congratulations. That’s beautiful. Lovely. Brandy, my son was diagnosed two years ago.
Carole Freeman: We are forever grateful for RD Dikeman, Bethany, McKinsey, and Dr. Bernstein for helping us love it. Welcome here, Brandy. Yeah. So Kathy is a master science. She’s [00:23:00] an oh, registered nurse and diabetes teacher. So she’s on the right side of the teaching too, so glad you’re here, Cathy. So you, yeah, change your eating habits and support of your son and then got the surprise health and wellness blessings of a dietary change yourself.
RD Dikeman: That’s right. Yeah, I think I was definitely pre-diabetic I had not taken an A1C before I switched, which was a big mistake. Cause I would have loved to see how far I had gone, but I did have a a triglyceride to HDL ratio, which was high and that reversed.
RD Dikeman: And I lost, I think I was probably 255 pounds at my max. I’m tall. So it wasn’t a total disaster, but now I’m probably 1 95 or
Carole Freeman: 267 pounds then. Yeah.
RD Dikeman: Yeah. It just came off. I didn’t even, I didn’t even try. The weight just came off and it came off in the right way too. It wasn’t. I didn’t actually, I lost weight a little too fast and I [00:24:00] became a little bit gone, but then as I started to strength, train a little bit and focus on protein, nutrition things stabilized, but I feel I feel like I spent my whole life, like always in the fridge, looking around for stuff.
RD Dikeman: And I felt at, at night when I look back on, I felt out of control with food, like I was at the mercy of food and that sucks to be that way, and so now I don’t feel that way. What time is it? It’s nine 30 here. I woke up at five I’ve had coffee. It hasn’t occurred to me to eat yet, and when I eat, I’ll have.
RD Dikeman: I have some tuna that I’ll eat for lunch and I’ll probably have some of that. And then I’ll be fine until dinner. It’s not like this constant foraging and there’s like another voice in your head telling you to eat foods that you shouldn’t eat, like I’m 255 pounds, and I’m always hungry for food.
RD Dikeman: That was a bizarre place to be,
Carole Freeman: you get freedom of two things. [00:25:00] You’re off the blood sugar rollercoaster that constantly makes you hungry. And you’re also, you’re off of the addictive foods that just drive you to over-consume. So you’re living in the land of food freedom instead of being an obsessed and addicted.
Carole Freeman: So Cathy last A1C was 4.9. Congratulations. That’s wonderful. Let’s talk about, so you brought an article. I love to feature some kind of a news article on here. And so this is some research that was published in pediatrics, the American academy of pediatrics in 2018. I’ll share the link to the article in the chat for everyone watching.
Carole Freeman: And then you’re watching the recording later. This will be in the show notes too. Walk us through what this means. So actually I want to set this up a little bit where we’ve got the diet, most dieticians that are out there medical professionals that are helping in quote unquote, helping people with type one diabetes there, and then a lot of the parents and families out there will say things like we don’t want kids to feel left out.
Carole Freeman: We don’t want them to feel [00:26:00] deprived. We want them to be, be kids and eat whatever they want. Yeah. Is that a good setup for this article?
RD Dikeman: That’s an interesting topic and its own. Yeah. That is the overwhelming battle cry of the type one parent community that the kids should be kids first and have diabetes second.
RD Dikeman: And when I use that, when I see that term used, it’s always in the context of feeding the child cupcakes grocery pastries junk food that they shouldn’t be eating anyway. And the pressure for the kids to eat obesogenic high carb foods is too high. So the parents try to rationalize it. And so you have this situation in the non-diabetic child, community where obesity and [00:27:00] pre-diabetes.
RD Dikeman: Kids are eating about two thirds of their calorie in the form of ultra processed food, where we’re just beginning to see this tidal wave of type two diabetes in children. That’s going to hit these kids hard in their twenties. And the type one response amongst parents is I want my kids to eat the same way.
RD Dikeman: It makes no sense. And we see the results already because it’s been this way for about 10 to 15 years. What happened is it was very uncommon for a type one, especially kids to be obese. Now the type one kids are more obese than their non-diabetic counterparts, where obesity is already an epidemic.
RD Dikeman: So think about that. You have type one diabetes, which is a constant if you’re eating high carb you’re in a constant state of inflammation from hyperglycemia. Then you have type two on top of that, which is for many reasons, a [00:28:00] state of inflammation. So it’s called double diabetes. And these kids are in big trouble.
RD Dikeman: You’re, as we know now the complications of diabetes come on fast. Their children are not spared. It shortens high, these high blood sugar, shortened lifespan. So the kids are going to be in a state in the future, which is a nightmare. And that is due to this attitude that they should be eating the same junk that everybody else eats.
RD Dikeman: It’s a disaster.
Carole Freeman: I have a totally. Perspective then the kids should get to eat whatever they want, right? Wait until you’re an adult to eat healthy. You’re as a child, you’re building the body that you have to live in the rest of your life. If you’re building a house, wouldn’t you want the foundation to be the strongest, most high quality portion of the house.
Carole Freeman: So it’s backwards to think that kids should eat garbage because they’re kids and they can get [00:29:00] away with it. They’re not getting away with it. You’re actually paving the road for poor health for the rest of their life. So we should be giving our kids the healthiest foods possible so they can have the healthiest long lowest health issues, the rest of their life.
Carole Freeman: That’s my soap
RD Dikeman: box truth. You’re physical physiologically. That’s correct. When you’re in puberty and even pre-puberty your genetics are primed your growth hormone as a kid is off the charts. So when you feed a kid, Protein and feed them in a low inflammation state. They’re going to grow and they’re going to grow beautifully.
RD Dikeman: But if you corrupt that state and it’s a real advantageous state and you want to take advantage of it, and if you corrupt it by feeding garbage then they’re never going to reach their potential. And I’ll brag on my own kids. I have two boys. They both eat very strictly the Bernstein diet and I don’t like the word strict they’re dedicated because [00:30:00] strict implies that there’s some sacrifice, but it’s actually an advantage for them.
RD Dikeman: And they walk around lifting weights and doing things and they develop. Beautifully. And I wish I had, I wish I had known that when I was a kid, because I would have liked to have muscles and be lean and I was always pudgy and in the refrigerator and they’re in the weight room and they’re, they’re like 6% body fat or 8% body fat or whatever they look fantastic.
RD Dikeman: They’re excelling in sports and it’s man, if you just eat right good things happen.
Carole Freeman: Brandy’s saying that those type of people are depriving their kids of healthy life without complications later in life. Thank you Brandy for ca ring about your child enough to make that change.
Carole Freeman: And some people may say it’s a sacrifice, but when you experience the quality of health and. On low carb. I don’t think that you feel like it’s a sacrifice at that point too. So let’s let the well get to the article here in a moment, but we’ll continue on this. So let’s talk about the myth then about how people will say [00:31:00] kids need carbs to grow.
Carole Freeman: That’s also perpetuated in a nutritionist and the medical community. Like they say that kids can’t grow. So as you’re, as Dave, is he like four foot tall or something, or a,
RD Dikeman: I just saw a picture of a friend of mine. His name is Lester Hightower and his son is still in high school. And he’s, Lester’s, I think, six foot four or something like that.
RD Dikeman: And his son is taller. My son is six foot two. The reality is that if you look at the research, it’s the high blood sugars that stunt. And they they do a number of things to children, too. They actually damage the developing brain. These kids grow up a large fraction of type ones with high blood sugars have erectile dysfunction.
RD Dikeman: They’re eventually unable and as it can happen in their teens, if they’re diagnosed early, they’re unable to digest their food properly. It’s called gastro-paresis, it’s a very intensely painful condition. Then you’ve got the apathies, the retinopathy. So you develop the eye [00:32:00] problems now when we were freshly diagnosed, they told us to send Dave to the eye doctor every six months to have his retina checked.
RD Dikeman: And we started doing that. And we took him in and the doctor looked at him and he said, no, it’s all good. And I said, when did you start noticing damage? And he said, oh, we notice it. We can see it right away. Oh,
Carole Freeman: wow. And little crazy.
RD Dikeman: So we don’t go to the eye doctor anymore because his blood sugar is normal.
RD Dikeman: So I don’t worry about that. Kidney disease. So there’s there’s a hundred diabetic complications. And one thing that happens with the endocrinologist is that when you take your kid in for his checkup, they don’t really do. You can’t check that the checkups are so short, right?
RD Dikeman: It’s like a mill. So they’re not checking the kids for complications. They make you see if you have maybe the check your urine for kidney problems is protein in the urine and stuff like that, but they’re not really doing an extensive physical exam. And so people are, have a false [00:33:00] sense of security.
RD Dikeman: And they they don’t want to know if you share some information about complications, they don’t particularly want to know these things. They’re too scary and they aren’t scary. So in some sense, I don’t blame them, but they’re avoidable. That’s the thing. Yep.
Carole Freeman: Maya’s right. Kids need carbs to grow.
Carole Freeman: Where did this myth come from? No scientific data to back this claim. There’s another one too, is the brain needs 130 grams of carbs a day. There’s a lot of myths and misunderstanding out there
RD Dikeman: That’s a big myth, right? The brain myth. Yeah. Yep. The brain needs normal blood sugars and the best way to achieve that, especially if you have type one is to have a low carb diet.
RD Dikeman: The damage is caused by hyperglycemia. We know that, right? In fact, it’s so well known that the ADA has changed their guidelines recently to allow for even lower targets because their targets were so high and that the research they were setting the guidelines over here. And [00:34:00] then the research was published, showing that damage is occurring within those guidelines.
RD Dikeman: It took a couple of years to respond, but now they’ve quietly lowered their their guidelines,
Carole Freeman: oh, okay. So they love, so I was so the standard, so the average person, the standards for what’s considered normal, healthy blood sugar is one number, but then for people with type two or type one diabetes, they give you a much higher number.
Carole Freeman: And that’s the only reason is because. They don’t know a way of actually getting it down to the normal. So they allow it to be just a lot worse and say that’s good enough. That’s as good as we can do. So we might as well just call that normal for your disease when it doesn’t have to be
RD Dikeman: that’s right.
RD Dikeman: If you eat their diet and you take the insulin that they prescribe, your blood sugar fluctuations are so high, it’s so big that if you try to run normal, you’re going to have hypoglycemia. The way they solve that, and they’re still solving it is to set the guidelines so high that you can run high and [00:35:00] avoid hypoglycemia.
RD Dikeman: The Bernstein method solves both hyper and hypoglycemia. So for example, with Dave, even though he’s done sports since diagnosis, he’s never had. Situation. Whereas hypoglycemia was so bad that he needed to be helped to the nurses or something like that. If he has low blood sugar, which is going to happen with the type one.
RD Dikeman: So you’re going to have to constantly be aware of your this is not a cure. You have to constantly be aware of your blood sugar, but if he does the diligence and measures his blood sugar then fixing a trending blood sugar, which would end up as hypoglycemia is as simple as reaching in your pocket and taking a glucose tab or two you’re not in a situation where you’ve, you’re lunging at juice boxes and sucking down juice boxes and emptying the fridge of food to save your life.
RD Dikeman: It’s so the fluctuations are extremely mild with with type one. So it prevents both [00:36:00] the highs and the lows, right? If you’re high. You had take a little bit of insulin and you come right down and by high, one 20 or one 30, if you’re low, maybe in the high sixties or low seventies, then you take a few grams of glucose.
RD Dikeman: So it’s a totally different way of living. Yeah. Yeah. So here’s, Dave’s this is funny because I don’t know if you can see, let’s see. So
Carole Freeman: the white line above the red there. Yeah.
RD Dikeman: So the white line, I think that we dropped the signal. There’s a break right there, but now look over just recently you can see his blood sugar went down a little bit and it hit that while
Carole Freeman: he’s at school and you’re watching, you’re able to monitor.
RD Dikeman: Yeah. He’s old. I don’t need to I’m. This is just, cause I’m a fan at this point. Yeah. You can see his blood sugar drops and you can see it popped back up right over here. And I know enough to know that he must have seen that it dropped and then he reached in his pocket and had a glucose tab.
RD Dikeman: If he had not [00:37:00] taken a glucose tablet would have dropped over the next hour and he might’ve started to feel something and then he could have taken a glucose tab, but he wouldn’t be in a situation that was dangerous where he was potentially, sweating and unresponsive and nurses had to be called.
RD Dikeman: That’ll never happen if he does what he’s doing, the way he’s doing it.
Carole Freeman: Just quality of life. Yeah. It is
RD Dikeman: a huge quality of life improvement. And I would say that Dave, by making the choices that he has saved my life and saved my wife’s life, saved our family life because there would have been nothing more miserable than to sit and watch him go down the tubes every single day for the last 10 years.
RD Dikeman: Now we can look back on those last 10 years. They say they go fast, right? We can look back and say, No damage was done. Everything worked out, we did the work and we don’t have to lie to ourselves and say, oh, that’s just the disease. And at least he [00:38:00] had the chips and the cookies and the birthday cake and was like everybody else.
RD Dikeman: Yeah.
Carole Freeman: Wow. Oh, you’re and arguably you’re healthier. Not even arguably no, without a doubt. You’re healthier than you were 10 years ago. All of you.
RD Dikeman: I can do 50 pushups. How about that? That’s shocking to me. I couldn’t do 20 when I was 18.
Carole Freeman: Oh, that’s great. That’s great. If you’re just joining us, please share where you’re joining from welcome to the show.
Carole Freeman: And also if you’re willing to share your story of how’s diabetes related to you, how’s it personal to you? Okay. The article I’m noticing. Okay. So we have June, 2018 in the American academy of pediatrics. I posted in the comments YouTube, let me share it, but Facebook didn’t like me sharing that article.
Carole Freeman: So I put the name of it in there as well. So the name of the article is management of type one diabetes with a very low carbohydrate diet. There’s a lot of names on here that I recognize. So we’ve got Dr. [00:39:00] Bernstein David Dikeman. There’s your real name? Sarah Hallberg. I also recognize Eric Westman and David Ludwig as well.
Carole Freeman: Her name. Oh, Nancy as well, too. So lots and lots of really great doctors came together to. To publish this. So tell us about it. Why is this groundbreaking and why is,
RD Dikeman: I’ve never talked about the actual details of the paper on any podcast, but yeah, that’s interesting. The paper came about because we kept posting these flat lines on social media and there were people with what do you say?
RD Dikeman: Like pitchforks or whatever outside our door trying to kill us, but then every once in a while someone else would have the bravery to post their flat lines to people like you like Maya on who’s with us now. And anyhow there was so much value in discussing the little tips and tricks that people were doing that were serious about managing their blood glucose.
RD Dikeman: That we realize we should [00:40:00] form our own kind of safe space, a Facebook group. That was the thing that made the most sense. And so all those people that we met along the way, there was probably like 50 or a hundred people. We all made this group. And
Carole Freeman: and do you know what the URL I’ll put it in the banner here,
RD Dikeman: Of the group it’s type one grit.
RD Dikeman: If you search in Facebook, you’ll find it. Anyhow, that group grew and grew, and it became clear to some of the members who were physicians and type ones themselves that we should get some published results going from this group. There were some serious researchers who will you just saw in that author list?
RD Dikeman: Belinda Linares is the, she is the head author and David Ludwig who they. know how to do a proper research. And so we had this this form that you would fill out to to qualifying, to be in the cohort. There were very strict standards and pediatrics is the, that’s the official journal of the academy of [00:41:00] American academy of pediatrics.
RD Dikeman: So to get into that journal, that the standards have to be so high. And these folks at Harvard knew how to do that. The haters of which there are many who are still pushing high carbs and high blood sugars on children. They like to refer to this study as a survey, as if people were just responding to an online poll, nothing could be further from the truth.
RD Dikeman: The results were checked with physicians And the criteria to get into the study were, or steep. You had to really be able to prove that you were a type one. So it’s it’s a research that for the first time there was one of the results. It, the first time demonstrated that the following a very low carb diet results in unprecedented glycemic control so that if the type one community adopted this diet and the way that the people in this study were doing, which was by following the Bernstein book blood [00:42:00] sugars would drop from an average around high sevens or eights to mid fives or lower.
RD Dikeman: So it’s an A1C. It’s an astonishing difference. In and blood sugar results. And not only that the study documented a number of other important points, which are critical. So they demonstrated that cholesterol ratios, which are important, cardiovascular predictors are improved. We had in the group, we had great trig to HDL ratios.
RD Dikeman: There was a lower daily insulin dose. There was normal BMI. So all these things and what the A1C, they show that there’s some incredible cardio-metabolic improvements. And the cohort people had less hypoglycemia, they had less diabetic ketoacidosis, they have less [00:43:00] hospitalizations. And then the final thing that is most interesting is that people have.
RD Dikeman: Very reticent to discuss what they were doing, what their physicians that’s because the physicians, when they find out that you’re achieving these results, you may find yourself in a situation where you’re bullied by your dietician and your endocrinologist, which is just stunning, right?
Carole Freeman: Yeah. How long was the study?
RD Dikeman: So the study was done in 2018. It probably took two years to publish it. It was a long grueling process. It needed to be done because there are so many dark forces in this world who are publishing anti they’re seeing these these flat lines too. And so you’re seeing a lot of people who were in the traditional high carb World let’s call it.
RD Dikeman: They’re pushing research papers, which are nonsense. So we needed to come out with a really high quality study to show people that this stuff really [00:44:00] works.
Carole Freeman: Okay. Yeah. That’s wonderful. That so great that, that got published. I know from just my own experience in school and one of my professors sharing how research that he had done that he says here’s what my research found, but here’s what they allowed me to publish.
Carole Freeman: Oh yeah. Yeah. So I’m like thrilled that they actually let you publish that as well. Because
RD Dikeman: well, not everybody, not all the journals a lot. We’ve tried other journals and they. Oh, wow. Yeah,
Carole Freeman: just mind blowing. Like mind blowing that that’s that probably can’t be true. We don’t want to tell people about that instead of just making yeah.
Carole Freeman: That’s well, and so the okay, so Maya’s sharing, so we’ve got a type one. Grit is the group that that RD runs oops I’m getting my banners mixed up here. Type one grit. And then Maya shared another one parents have recently diagnosed children with type one diabetes as another Facebook group too.
Carole Freeman: Thanks for sharing those. So should we talk about the movie? I didn’t ask you if you’ve got a hard out here. So [00:45:00] do you have a time that you need to be off here? No. I want
RD Dikeman: to talk about,
Carole Freeman: okay. Yeah. So diabetes solution amazing documentary. I watched it last week. It’s about an hour long, so it’s totally a watchable for people.
Carole Freeman: So how’d that come to be? And tell us more about that.
RD Dikeman: How did you like it? Oh, I
Carole Freeman: loved it. It, there wasn’t anything in there that was surprising or shocking to me, just from my experience in the low-carb world, the last six years. But I I think probably what was the most interesting too, is just seeing how, the pattern that these families went through, where their child was sick.
Carole Freeman: And they were just told they had the flu or the cold and just sent home repeatedly. Until finally things got so bad that they were on death’s door, it’s so sad that it has to go that far before it’s being recognized. And I’m hoping that part of what we can do is just to help people advocate more to, what if part of normal child checkups were just to get an A1C every year, right?
Carole Freeman: That would catch things so much earlier, both. Metabolic dysfunction, insulin [00:46:00] resistance, type one diabetes type two diabetes. We could catch a lot of stuff really easily if that was just normal part of screening for all kids, instead of this whole myth that we talked about or this I dunno, it’s false belief that kids should just eat whatever garbage they want while they’re kids.
Carole Freeman: Let’s just get an A1C test every year for every child and every human, that, I think that then that would open people’s eyes to see that you’re not getting away with eating all that stuff. And it’s not doing you any favors for there, but yeah, that’s, I think that’s part of what, what stood out.
Carole Freeman: I just love the stories of And hopefully people can watch the movie who aren’t following Dr. Bernstein’s protocol and just get some inspiration of how that can be a normal way of living for your family. It doesn’t have to be this extreme thing. That’s, you’re sacrificing everything.
Carole Freeman: You’re actually improving your health and your family connection. I can only imagine how much it bonds a family together, brings you all together in a United front that you’re doing something together. And all of you get the benefits of [00:47:00] it. Instead of just, being something that’s so depriving and sacrificial to, for one person, but yeah, I think it’s a movie that I think everyone should watch it because even, if you don’t have somebody that has type one diabetes, Maybe you do and you don’t know it.
Carole Freeman: It’s something that should be, could, should be caught a lot earlier. And then given the message that, there is a way of managing this, that so much more effective and higher quality of life than what is being told out there.
RD Dikeman: Yeah, that’s the thing about the movie is you see these families and if the family stick with it, it ends up not being a sacrifice.
RD Dikeman: It ends up being an optimization because the, the sacrifice aspect of it is totally overblown, but the the ability for the family to thrive together and do better health wise is an underrated aspect. And because most people are just [00:48:00] on average, are like the way I was, or you’re moderately to severely overweight pre-diabetic so if the parents if the parents get the message too, it’s just a win across the whole family.
RD Dikeman: And then, the kids end up being healthier than their non-diabetic friends at school. And that’s something that we see constantly and you can see it with some of the kids in the Bethany made the movie, her son river as like this tennis champ. And everybody knows that if you’re a serious athlete your diet is going to be serious too.
RD Dikeman: And so he’s going to do really well if he continues on trying to play tennis just from a dietary aspect, my son Hayden, who’s not even diabetic. The stamina and strength this guy has in the pool. He’s a water polo. Is unmatched. But anyway, the movie itself, it came about after the study, this, there, there needed to be more done and that’s where Bethany came in and [00:49:00] she wanted to document these personal stories and what was going on.
RD Dikeman: God. There she is. She’s bragging about you, Bethany. Yeah, since she’s been a real hero because she’s put such a personal touch on this message and people are so terrified of what’s going to happen to their children. If they go down this path, because they don’t know anybody who’s done it.
RD Dikeman: And when you see her family and her son thriving, And she makes such great common sense comments on her page on a daily basis. It’s really convincing both the example that’s being set and the logic that’s being used. And I think that’s what came out in the documentary. It’s it’s an in controvertible logic that is, is set out and then all the examples [00:50:00] of the kids, even Dave is in it at the end while he’s in it, when he’s little, but at the end you can see Dave who’s all grown up now.
RD Dikeman: And the dude is just like lean strong and handsome, who doesn’t want to be that way. And it’s culture, it’s our normal. And he handles his he handles his blood sugars with such ease and he talks about that in the documentary. So to me, the documentary is like this non-stop. Just great quote after great quote.
RD Dikeman: And so I’ve watched it a number of times and I just get, it’s like a fist pump documentary I just get it’s just so damn inspiring to watch it
Carole Freeman: well in what and how empowering for the children with type one, to be able to manage it themselves, instead of feeling the victim of blood sugar rollercoaster and, chasing their blood sugar.
Carole Freeman: I, I just, I hadn’t even thought about that before, but just thinking about, you showing his monitor, but also knowing he’s got this, he knows how to handle this and manage this. And I I used to, [00:51:00] I used a data guy an adult man with type one diabetes and definitely the experience wasn’t, he didn’t feel empowered about chasing his blood sugars all the time.
RD Dikeman: Yeah, it’s miserable to be at the mercy of these these roller coaster, blood sugar. It’s a miserable existence. It feels bad. You’re doing damage, but you feel bad now. And then you get used to feeling bad and that’s what the professionals are teaching the kids. They’re teaching the kids that they should be miserable the rest of their lives, and they should embrace the high carb junk foods because everyone else does it.
RD Dikeman: And they don’t tell the parents what the consequences are going to be. And the movie does do that. The moving lays out what the consequences are and how to avoid them and shows examples of kids that are avoiding them. [00:52:00] And you see these healthy kids and they’re really thriving. So I really hope that we break through here and reach a lot of the newly diagnosed families.
RD Dikeman: Yeah.
Carole Freeman: Bethany, will you share your page RD was saying how you share some great stuff on your page. So we share that in the comments. We’d love to share that here on the screen Matthew we’ve just got a big peak of new people watching. So go ahead and share where you’re joining us from. Welcome to the show.
Carole Freeman: If you’d like to share a little bit about how diabetes is personal to you, we’d love to hear your story as well. Matthew Neiland competence breeds confidence. We know unmanageable blood glucose levels leads to depression, easy way to avoid the doom, change the food. Yeah, we haven’t even talk about how much more happy children are when they’re eating this.
Carole Freeman: They’re not deprived. They actually have more stable blood sugars and stable mood. Let’s see Bethany. Absolutely. Let me be 83, my dude with diabetes. Wait, what
RD Dikeman: page?
Carole Freeman: Oh, okay. Okay. I don’t know her. I don’t know her [00:53:00] story. Perfect.
RD Dikeman: By the way, her Facebook page is huge. So if you go onto her, it’s interesting.
RD Dikeman: If you look at the some traditional authority pages on Facebook like diabetes, daily, or children with diabetes, or even the ADA page there’s no action. No, one’s no one’s commenting. There’s hardly any shares. If you go on to Bethany’s page, there’s hundreds of shares. There’s many hundreds of likes.
RD Dikeman: There’s many hundreds of common. So there’s a real, it’s a real, why is that? There are these associations and they’re all, they’re nicely sponsored, right? They’re sponsored by the insulin makers and the device makers and they proudly show those badges. And yet there’s no action on those pages.
RD Dikeman: No one cares about what those people have to say. It’s all a bunch of jibberish, but they’re out there proudly promoting some of that stuff. And I don’t want to say diabetes daily because they push some good stuff on their page. But in general, just the establishment [00:54:00] diabetes stuff is dead on social media.
RD Dikeman: And then you go to Bethany’s page and it’s it’s like wildfire. Everybody’s interested in what she has to say. So she’s like a real hero. The type one world.
Carole Freeman: So I I want her back up to the so you’re asking me like what I thought of the movie and talking about how the kids that were featured in there and how they’re excelling in their sports and their activities and interests they’re in.
Carole Freeman: And I hadn’t thought about it. I thought wow, they just pick these rockstar kids that are doing these amazing things. But what if it’s the other way around? What if it’s their diet that makes them these rock stars, makes them be able to live to their full potential and be these rock stars in the world?
RD Dikeman: Yeah, I it’s true. And it is it’s stunning that the food is so important that a type one kid can have an advantage over a non-diabetic kid. That’s how stark the difference is. Like I think Dave has an [00:55:00] advantage when he’s playing in sports which is just bizarre think about it.
RD Dikeman: You have to inject insulin and test and do all these things. But still with the food, it’s an advantage over the non-diabetic kids. So
Carole Freeman: yeah. Maya wishes, the movie existed when she was diagnosed four years ago. Oh, at four years old. Okay. I’m like four years old, four at four years old, 1980. If only my parents knew what the movie reveals, it would’ve saved me decades of pain, agony and suffering.
Carole Freeman: Yes. Sorry. You’ve had to go through that, but so glad that you found your way here. Bethany, McKinsey, none of this would have happened without RD and his massive bravery and leadership. That’s pretty awesome. Yeah, you’re this is a good time then to talk about like the work that you’ve been doing with Dr.
Carole Freeman: Bernstein and, interviewing him and the connection you’ve got there. So will you share more. How you’re preserving his information for that’s right.
RD Dikeman: That’s a great word preserving. So that was the idea is that I thought, oh, this guy, he knows everything. I started talking to him. I [00:56:00] was a little bit shy, little nervous to call him.
RD Dikeman: Dave said, yeah, call him. And somebody called him and we became friends. And we came up with the diabetes university, YouTube channel idea. And my idea many years ago when we started it was well, he’s getting old and we gotta Chronicle everything. But now he’s 87. He just got his 75th metal from Joslin.
RD Dikeman: Meaning he’s had type one for 75 years and he’s still going strong. There’s no, as someone gets older, you start noticing little blips. Yeah. And he’s not like that. It’s he has the mind of a very sophisticated graduate student who’s on top of their game. And you have to be on top of your game when you talk to them and deal with them because he’s at a high level just interacting with them.
RD Dikeman: So anyhow we put together a series of and Dave didn’t a lot of the work and has been doing more and more. Now my son Hayden is doing a lot of the work. But they put [00:57:00] together about 200 videos, covering all aspects of type one and see that the problem is if you say I’m going to eat low carb and you just expect results, you probably do well.
RD Dikeman: If you’re obese or your type two But if you’re a type one, there’s a lot more to the management of the condition about how do you use insulin to cover protein foods? What’s the right insulins to use. There’s a million little details you have to know to be successful and Bernstein knows all of them and basically invented them all.
RD Dikeman: I’m an inventive scientist. I’ve never invented anything as far as type one goes because he’s on top of everything. So we try to record everything that the guy knows. And we’ve been successful in doing that and his messages, through the social media spread a lot.
RD Dikeman: So it’s what the documentary and then the scientific paper, and then all these people photographing their CGM results and then [00:58:00] sharing little clips or tips from Bernstein. It’s really changed the trajectory of how type one is managed over the last five years from when Dave was diagnosed, none of this stuff existed.
RD Dikeman: And now you can see these flat lines everywhere you go into any type one group. People are posting the Bernstein book, they’re posting their flat lines. They’re posting. Why did you eat regular waffles? Why don’t you eat waffles with almond flour? So that the landscape has tote. Now the doctors and the diabetes associations haven’t changed at all.
RD Dikeman: But they’re starting to see in their patients the results. So they’re becoming, a little curious, but they still don’t understand how to do what the people are doing from the book. They haven’t read the book yet, but like even Tracy brown, the ADA director CEO. She’s what it looks like to me, she reversed her type two diabetes with a low carb diet.
Carole Freeman: But she’s not telling me she’s not coming out public with it.
RD Dikeman: Yeah. [00:59:00] You have to listen very closely and she’ll whisper it or just briefly mentioned it. But we’re this, we caught it a few times. So we wrote it down and shared it well.
Carole Freeman: So the first month that I was doing my own, six and a half, almost seven years ago that I was trying my own keto, low carb experiment.
Carole Freeman: I did it secretly. I was in the closet. I knew everyone that I went to school with, even at a master’s degree in nutrition. I did it secretly because I knew that everyone w as going to shame me, tell me it’s a fad. It’s unsustainable. That’s bad for you. You shouldn’t try to you know, restrict any foods.
Carole Freeman: You’re going to give yourself an eating disorder. And so I chronicled everything secretly for an entire month. And also the other thing we can talk about this as well. This is another great topic or myth is that if you cut out all those carbohydrate foods, you’re going to be nutrient deficient.
Carole Freeman: You’re going to be, you need, massive amounts of whole grains and lots of fruits in order to be healthy. So my own side of that was, is that I knew that would be one [01:00:00] of the criticisms. From the very beginning. I tracked all my food and chronometer, and I, that shows you your vitamins and minerals, because I knew that was going to be one of the criticisms was that, oh, when you cut certain food groups out, you can’t possibly have a nutrient dense diet.
Carole Freeman: And I was pleasantly surprised to find that no, I can easily meet all the RDA by cutting out these foods. And I’ve since come to realize that actually, when we cut out high carbohydrate foods, we’re just cutting out the least nutrient dense foods like grains and fruits actually are not full of vitamins and minerals, despite what we’ve been told.
Carole Freeman: I spoiled the question, but
RD Dikeman: isn’t it amazing how everything that is pushed is like a lie. Have you seen, have you followed the Tufts food compass stuff that came out Tufts school of nutrition just published this thing called the food compass. And if you dig into it, they [01:01:00] have school. They have foods that are rated from zero to 100.
RD Dikeman: And so beef and eggs get like in the low twenties or something. And if you plug in like lucky charms or Cheerios, they’re very high scoring,
Carole Freeman: added vitamins and minerals to it. It’s like a bowl of sugar and taking a vitamin pill a hundred percent.
RD Dikeman: So lucky charms are more nutrient rich than eggs.
RD Dikeman: That’s the conclusion of the powers that be. And then it’s just it’s just the world of nutrition. It isn’t even a science. These people are not serious thinkers.
Carole Freeman: I often joke, I probably say once every day to my clients that like 90% of the work that I do is tell people to do the opposite of what you told them to do the last 16 years.
Carole Freeman: That’s right. Oh, let’s see. Let’s see, we talked about that and we covered all your talking points that you [01:02:00] sent me. What other what else would you like to share? What else have we not talked about?
RD Dikeman: Yeah, so that’s a good question. Off the top of my head, I’m trying to think. Let’s one thing that is happening, at least with my crew here is that Dave, as he’s, Dave’s, he’s 18 now are going to be 18 in a week or two.
RD Dikeman: And he’s starting to do more of this stuff on his own. So initially when he was like 9, 10, 11, he was super gung ho and then he, he retracted a little bit and he said, you stay on Facebook. I’m on Instagram. Don’t come on Instagram. I said okay. But keep, keep sending me your graphs and your quotes and stuff like that.
RD Dikeman: He said, that’s cool. Keep doing it, but I don’t want to do, I don’t want to push it myself. I said, great. Now he’s 18 or 17, 18. Now he’s starting to do some of it. So he started going out and giving talks. So initially he was invited to give a talk at Harvard, by [01:03:00] Belinda who, who authored the cur Lee was the lead author of the paper and give it to that community at Harvard who never met a child who had been doing what he’s doing.
RD Dikeman: So they had a lot of questions like, what are you doing? Your friends are eating Cheetos, Dave, and he says I don’t eat them. And they said what about potato chips? And he said, no, I don’t eat those either. Nobody cares. So there was a lot of questions like that, but he also had to instruct them how he uses it.
RD Dikeman: Because there’s a lot of details that people they get caught in the low carb thing, but they don’t understand how to actually use insulin in the low carb context. So he taught those people and based on that, he was invited to give other talks and eventually we recorded his talk and put it on YouTube.
RD Dikeman: So it’s it’s at, low-carb down under, if you search for that on YouTube, his videos up there. And so he, and then he wrote a paper with Westman and that’s an interesting little developmental. Give me two minutes on that because the low carb stuff is intriguing to some of the [01:04:00] researchers you’re going to see these more and more studies done.
RD Dikeman: And the problem is that the researchers themselves don’t understand how to implement a low carb diet. And they don’t understand really what low carb means in the context of type one. They don’t understand how to use insulin in that context. Like for example, they don’t know how to cover protein. Like it’s almost like they’re shocked that protein requires insulin is a basic fact of physiology that they don’t even understand that.
RD Dikeman: So what’s going to happen is a lot of these low carb studies aren’t going to do well. And really they’re trying to test the method, the low carb, but really what we’re going to learn about is whether the researchers themselves understand it. So Dave and Westman anticipated this problem. And so they wrote a paper that they just published on how to do a proper, low carb study.
Carole Freeman: Oh, that’s great. Yeah, it’s really it’s a little oh gosh, what’s the word I’m looking for? A phrase that kind of is like [01:05:00] little condescending, maybe but also necessary needed, like here, let me tell you about how to actually do this correctly so that you don’t mess it up
RD Dikeman: but that’s, and social media then when these people publish the papers that show that the, the low carb, meaning, under 200 grams a day or some crazy stuff like that.
RD Dikeman: And then we’ll be able to go, ah, you didn’t read the paper on how to do the proper, low carb study. So it’s an important little, so we’re trying to make all these little, like the documentary and then the paper and then the social media and we’re trying to combat this.
RD Dikeman: The situation is as best we can.
Carole Freeman: David’s a rockstar. So I see all the blue hearts. Is that a code in the type one community for type one, grit, love.
RD Dikeman: I thought, you know what? That, I think that’s a diabetes. The blue is a diamond
Carole Freeman: heart. I think. I don’t know the code, so
RD Dikeman: yeah, I’m not sure. I feel a lot of those blue
Carole Freeman: hearts.
Carole Freeman: We want to get a little controversial and [01:06:00] touch on the idea that there’s a lot of money and keeping everybody on a lot of insulin or,
RD Dikeman: You can do the math and you can show that you’re going to use less insulin. So if they was using a high carb diet, he would be using less insulin. He still has to use insulin.
RD Dikeman: Of course. There’s no way around that. So that, that’s interesting, right? I think. That, when I raised these questions with Dr. Bernstein he points to some things in the past, which are alarming. If you looked at the ADA’s magazine diabetes they have a monthly magazine.
RD Dikeman: There’s a lot of high carb advertisements in there in the past. And he has clips of those and you would think why would you do that? Why would you advertise these foods? Or recipes that they have are high carb. So there a lot of when you’re studying this problem, a lot of things do not add up.
RD Dikeman: And, when I ask him he’s, he says, the situation stinks in every [01:07:00] direction. And I don’t understand why the same diabetes associations or charities just go on and on here’s an example, every halloween you go to these diabetes charities or these associations with these weird fake groups.
RD Dikeman: And they’ll be posting these pictures of the carb counts of all these candies. As if all we had to do was add up the number of carbs for, a mini Snickers bar and some jujubees or whatever, and then give the appropriate dose of insulin. So they pretend every year that, that this list will help you get through your Halloween.
RD Dikeman: And then the next day you look at the parents posting their CGM graphs, and the kids are up at 400. Then they’re down in the middle of the night to 40 all night long. I see the same thing every year. And then they never now they must know this. They [01:08:00] must know that the th at they’re putting out a strategy and it doesn’t work
RD Dikeman: and I’d have no idea why they’re so emphatic on letting or telling people that this is the way to have a normal Halloween, because why would you want to do that to your child who wants to have their child go to a blood sugar of 400, or have that be a possibility for some garbage candy?
RD Dikeman: This situation is bizarre, right?
Carole Freeman: Yes. Yeah. I we’re past Halloween here, but people are going to be watching this in the future. So for a future Halloween, For those of you parents out there that think that you’re depriving your child about letting them go out trick or treating in the first place.
Carole Freeman: A friend of mine that I went to school with had this brilliant strategy. So she, her kids weren’t diabetic, but also she truly believed that children shouldn’t just eat a pile of candy all the time. So she came up with the strategy that I loved. So she Santa or Easter [01:09:00] bunny or something like that, she had a Halloween witch or something that would come right.
Carole Freeman: Okay. Is this a thing you guys do? So you, do you tell it then,
RD Dikeman: Lots of the smart parents, do they, you trade in the candy for a, some cash or some, a board game or a book or a video game in case? Yeah, because the fun is in just putting on a costume and acting crazy and going around and, knocking on doors and stuff.
RD Dikeman: And you come home and you empty your pillow case. And then my kids, when they did it, they would make piles of candy and then they would count it up and then they would go, you owe me, $18. And then we would go to game, stop the next day. And they would buy a video game or something like that.
RD Dikeman: And then they know they can’t eat the candy or else it will hurt him. Like the food hurts. You that’s, it, that’s all the logic the kids need.
Carole Freeman: And how much more enjoyment they get out of that video game for months and years [01:10:00] versus, moments of poisonous stuff being put in their body.
Carole Freeman: So that’s great. Yeah. A little story of, one of my dietician friends doing an internship at a clinic and working with people with type two diabetes that are on multiple medications. And my friend is shadowing. Dietician and the trainer was telling my friend about here’s how you manage this.
Carole Freeman: And here’s how you teach them how to do carb counting. And my friend said why don’t you instruct them on how to do a low carb diet? And then they could probably get off these medications and the training dietician said why would we want to get them off their medications? And so she, my friend realized like, this is insane that they’re trying, they’re training everyone to keep them on their medications.
Carole Freeman: Here’s how to eat in a way that you can stay on your medications. Now with type one, you need to stay on insulin. Like you said that’s not like you’re gonna ever get off of that. But just the general idea that the only way to manage these diseases is to stay on lots of medications. And don’t [01:11:00] try to change your diet in a way that could minimize the amount of medications you have.
RD Dikeman: You could look at insulin and type ones as a hormone replacement. So is it some kind of medication? You could, of course it’s a medication, it’s a medicine, but it’s also replacing the body’s natural hormones. It’s not like this situation where people are going on routinely going on statins while not addressing their fundamental metabolic condition, Statens and many other medications.
RD Dikeman: So how many medications are people on a lot? How many of those are due to their poor dietary and nutrition? Approaches a lot, right?
Carole Freeman: So most men, yeah. All right. Blue is for diabetes, blue, heart for diabetes. Now, you learn something today, you guessed, you knew it. You knew it. All right.
Carole Freeman: What else did we share? What else? Anything else you’d like to cover? Talk about, share.
RD Dikeman: I’ll give [01:12:00] a final piece of advice to parents. And I see this problem all the time with newly diagnosed parents because I’m in some of those social media groups. And I think that it’s not fully appreciated how much self learning is required to manage this condition properly.
RD Dikeman: And especially if you go the route of caring about your child’s blood sugars and trying to avoid the complications of high blood sugars, which are what happened. All kids who are following the standard approach, because all kids are running high or elevated blood sugars. And what we know is that the complications of diabetes both micro and macro vascular complications are caused by elevated blood sugars.
RD Dikeman: And there’s what I would call it. Continuous risk factors for elevated blood sugars, meaning that the research [01:13:00] shows that as the blood sugars go up from normal, the complications start. Your strategy should be such that you can safely normalize your child’s blood sugars with a healthy nutrient replete diet, and the solutions are out there, but you’re going to have to piece together information on your own most likely and You if you’re lucky or if you work at it you’re going to be able to find a team that supports you a medical team and doctor are because that situation is changing a little bit.
RD Dikeman: There are people out there that will support you, but there’s a lot of learning to do. Learn what you can learn from people who are having success. And and you’re going to have to change how you function with food as a whole family, yourself included.
Carole Freeman: So is anybody put together a starter kit is so would you recommend getting Dr.
Carole Freeman: Bernstein’s book as the first [01:14:00] place? I would recommend joining one of the two Facebook groups or both of them that we mentioned too. So the, a type one grit and the other one that parents of recently diagnosed children with type one diabetes. What. What else is there like a starter pack of information?
RD Dikeman: Yeah. And there,
RD Dikeman: There was a type one mom who put together, Bernstein’s book is very technical and then his lectures are very deep so that she put together a series of clips and videos in a playlist, YouTube has playlists. So you go to the Bernstein diabetes, university, YouTube page, and you click on playlists.
RD Dikeman: There’s a parent’s playlist and it’s really shouldn’t be called parents. Cause it could be any newly diagnosed person or any person that’s interested in changing their approach to normalize their blood sugar. And there’s about 20 videos in there that cover all aspects of our 95% not all.
RD Dikeman: The most important aspects of normalizing your [01:15:00] blood sugar. So that’s a great place to go on his YouTube page if you’re more open to learning from videos rather than reading. But yeah, it makes sense to, to make buddies with people who are doing well really become a student of the Bernstein stuff.
RD Dikeman: And like we were talking a little bit around the edges that there’s a lot of myths out there, and you have to, and you have to understand them all the myth that protein foods are bad for kidneys, all of this kind of stuff. You have to learn that stuff or else you’re going to feel a little bit insecure.
RD Dikeman: So that’s, what’s in that parent’s playlist is and addresses the myths it addresses the nuts and bolts it’s for it’s for people that are just getting started.
Carole Freeman: Yeah, I think. I’m going to call that maybe the most important part of what you’re talking about is finding community of people that are healthy and doing well with this.
Carole Freeman: We live in a world where addictive carbohydrates are abundant in everywhere and that’s the norm. And in order to sustain something that’s different than the norm, you need to [01:16:00] find your own group, community of people that are doing what you want to do. And just with like financial stuff and any kind of success is that you’ve got to make friends with the people that are having the type of success that you’d like to have.
Carole Freeman: Find your true grit. That’s a different show. You’re a type one grit community. You find people that are doing what you want to do, and that’s going to be a really big you don’t want to feel alone and you want to feel like you belong. And you’re part of something that is working and successful.
Carole Freeman: Yeah, excellent. Love it so much good stuff. And I love that it’s all out there too. Here’s, Maya’s you can’t soar with Eagles. If you’re hanging with the turkeys, what let’s, you can’t soar with the the Eagles, if you’re hanging with the marshmallow peeps, right?
RD Dikeman: Maya is she’s a real hero. She runs a big Israel group and she really knows her stuff.
RD Dikeman: And I see her so actively trying there are so many people once, once you figure out how to manage this condition, you feel [01:17:00] compelled to help other people, because it’s such a miserable thing to be on that blood sugar roller coaster. And you want to help people find their way off of it. And Maya’s one of those heroic people.
RD Dikeman: That I just see constantly helping other people, providing people with correct information. And I can only imagine how many lives that she’s changed for the better. And we all have the same story, who did you meet? Who helped you first? And, there’s this network of people that are growing now, and now you see people who you don’t know, who are doing it.
RD Dikeman: You say, oh, I need to control my blood sugars better. And in the group you’ll see someone post the Bernstein thing and go, I don’t even know that person. So
Carole Freeman: Bethany McKinsey is saying this just in the JDRF, which is the juvenile diabetes research foundation will not, I think it’s mostly, nah, not allow, right?
Carole Freeman: Not allow for screenings of the film because the national JDRF office doesn’t approve of the [01:18:00] message.
RD Dikeman: What is the message of the movie? The message in the movie is that it’s possible for a type one diabetic. To manage their condition in a way that normalizes their blood sugars so that they don’t suffer from the consequences of diabetes, the complications of diabetes and the shortened lifespan by eating healthy food.
RD Dikeman: So what exactly is what is exactly as JDRF against and why is JDRF constantly publishing this Halloween candy meme that they put out every year? That’s my question. Are they interested in children running high blood sugars? I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t be interested in and type one diabetics doing better.
RD Dikeman: Can’t imagine it.
Carole Freeman: Yeah, it is unbelievable that there’s no logic there at all. Besides.
Carole Freeman: Everybody who’s who knows this is important is going to get the word out anyways. I’m sorry, JDRF. We don’t need you. Oh, that’s sad. But also, everyone watching here share this anyone that, that’s been touched by [01:19:00] diabetes, anyone you care about please share the movie.
Carole Freeman: How can people watch the movie? Cause I know it’s not on Netflix or anything like that, but Vimeo I think is where I watched it. Is that correct?
RD Dikeman: Yeah. It’s first, it’s cost a couple of bucks to rent it or buy it. If you’re international, Vimeo is the place to go.
RD Dikeman: So you go to Vimeo and you searched for diabetes solution documentary and you’ll find it. That’s a great way to do it. Yep. Bethany is on the case here, iTunes, apple TV. You can find it. It’s out there.
Carole Freeman: I bet it’s all the Vimeo worldwide. Google play YouTube. So if you can’t find us put a comment in down here and we’ll share the link, Amazon Barnes and noble, best buy all the places.
Carole Freeman: Most of the places. All right. So even on eBay. Oh that’s is it handcrafted on eBay? You like okay, so Maya’s got a link. If you’re on Facebook watching Maya just posted the [01:20:00] YouTube and the Vimeo links there oh actually she put all of them in there. So go over to my page on Facebook ketocarole.com
Carole Freeman: all the links are there to everything. Thank you so much. Maya had that ready to go. She was. Who’s charging $40 for oh, to the highest bidder. That’s cute. Maybe it comes in like a hand. You get a handcrafted note, like a card made with it too. I don’t know. That’s
RD Dikeman: My mom lives in Ohio and she hasn’t seen it yet.
RD Dikeman: Cause she’s not on the internet. Oh, she’s old school man. So my cousin is going over with it today. I think he’s going to show her cause she wants to see me in it. You know how funny? And my son
Carole Freeman: too. What is the rest of your family? Think about this, a crazy low-carb thing that you guys do.
RD Dikeman: What, in what context you mean in the context of the movie?
Carole Freeman: Not the movie, but just in general. Does your family think that’s good for you guys, but I’m still gonna eat whatever I want. Have the larger
RD Dikeman: family.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. [01:21:00] The bigger family, right? Family.
RD Dikeman: Yeah. That’s a good question.
RD Dikeman: And yeah, you can’t, so you can expect if you’re the parents, you need to eat a low carb diet. If you’re the sibling, like I told Hayden a long time ago, the worst thing that can happen to you in your life will be to watch your brother slowly decay. And so the most important thing you can do for him and yourself is to eat a low carb diet because you’re the little brother.
RD Dikeman: If you’re doing it, then he’ll do it too, because he’ll have too much pride. So that’s one reason he does it. Now what about the LAR the aunties and uncles, grandparents? If you’re out for a holiday dinner you’re going to have. The aunties and uncles, they’re going to order dessert.
RD Dikeman: And we don’t, but that’s okay. Like Dave should not have any expectation that other people in his life should follow his diet. Other than his parents it’s enough if the parents follow [01:22:00] it. So you, there’s a line where you don’t want to rub his face in it. If he’s out with his grandma, she’s not going to bust out a banana in front of his face and start eating it or something that’s rude.
RD Dikeman: But you can’t expect everybody he shouldn’t expect his friends to eat low carb. If he’s on the football team and they get pizza too bad, man, like just strip some toppings, strip the cheese and the pepperoni off, but you can’t be, you can’t be have these expectations that no one else is gonna eat carbohydrates because.
RD Dikeman: And Dave puts it. He puts it best. He says, everybody, I know, seems like these days has their own special diet. Those kids that are vegetarian, he knows kids with with food allergies. So it’s, everyone’s doing their own thing anyway. So in the end of the, at the end of the day, nobody really cares his friends don’t care if he throws the bun in the trash, it that’s an overblown consequence of the high carb thinking is thinking that, he’s going to be mocked or something like that.
RD Dikeman: It doesn’t happen.
Carole Freeman: [01:23:00] Yeah. Any random family members that have been influenced and changed their eating?
RD Dikeman: Not, I think the best example is mom and dad. That’s those are the best examples. I think that I’ve had random friends and cousins call me and uncles call me my A1C is 5.7. Is that bad? Yes. It’s bad.
RD Dikeman: What do I do? I like a piece of cake now and then, okay. You got to get over that. The cake, that’s always the problem, right? It’s the yummy foods. You gotta change your palette. Yeah.
Carole Freeman: RD it’s been an honor and a privilege to have you here today. I know everyone.
Carole Freeman: Give it up for R D for being here. Everyone. Thank you everyone for watching. I gotta give a shout out to we have a transcript sponsor of the show. So keto-space.com. It’s keto-space.com. They provide all of the transcripts for Keto chat live. And so thank you to [01:24:00] them for doing that. And so diabetes solution, movie diabetes solution book Dr. Bernstein grab that over and join the Facebook groups that we’ve mentioned as well. Any what’s the name of your YouTube channel again? Diabetes, university, diabetes, university. Go check that out as well. And anything else that people should go check out? See watching movies
RD Dikeman: go watch the movie diabetes solution movie.
RD Dikeman: Tonight, make sure you watch it immediately.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. Let’s crash. Their servers watch too many people watching it at once. So that’ll be great. On Thursday this week, come back again for the show I’ve got Siara and Kristen they’re hosts of the fiercely holistic podcast. We’re going to be talking about nutrient dense whole foods on low carb.
Carole Freeman: So join me here. Thank you everyone for showing up today. Thank you for being here for the show. Sharing is caring. Share this episode with your friends. There’s somebody out there that, that needs to know the power of how healthy you can be following low carb for both kinds of [01:25:00] diabetes.
Carole Freeman: And also, what is it? I don’t know. 80% of the 80 to 90% of the population right now is on the train to diabetes. So this is information that’s helpful for so many people out
RD Dikeman: there. So eat like a healthy type one diabetic and
Carole Freeman: be a superstar in life like RD’s son. Great. Everyone.
Carole Freeman: Thanks for watching. Thanks for being here RD. So good to see you virtually take care, everyone. See you next time.
For years, Lori battled what she described as an “obsession with food,” including an all-consuming sugar addiction.
(Of all the challenges I see in my work this one’s a biggie. It’s so common, so powerful, and it’s one of THE primary pitfalls that knock people off the keto wagon, over and over again.)
She was terrified of turning into her mother—aren’t we all?—who struggled with obesity and a myriad of other health issues.
“I had a few friends who were doing keto and seemed to be getting results. One of them recommended a book for me to try, but the farthest I got with it was giving up sugar and flour.”
After a few unsuccessful attempts at a self-guided keto plan, Lori found a super-restrictive diet and tried to force herself into submission: Overeaters Anonymous.
“Honestly, that only made things worse. There were so many strict rules and regulations around what NOT to do, that you end up obsessing about food nonstop.”
On the surface, Lori’s primary goal was weight-related; she wanted to achieve and maintain a healthy weight, like we all do.
“I literally hated myself when the scale would tip 170.”
But there was something deeper at work than just the numbers on a scale.
Lori wanted to be free of her constant obsession with food, and she needed relief from those intense sugar cravings. She was also concerned with her focus and overall brain function, and eager to prevent things like Alzheimer’s Disease, which ran in her family.
But even more than that, she wanted to love herself. She wanted her self-esteem back.
As the primary chef and meal provider for her non-keto family, she found it impossible to maintain the keto lifestyle. She kept starting and stopping, and after a few years of this, she finally decided it was time to enlist some help.
Spoiler alert: it was me! 😉
After two months on the program, Lori had lost 20 pounds, and 8 inches off her waist (which is pretty remarkable, considering she’s only 5’3”).
But—as so often happens with the keto diet—she also noticed improvements in areas she never expected…
Her gums were no longer inflamed and/or bleeding. Her rosacea went away completely. Her arthritis pain improved significantly, as did her sleep; and her gas, bloating, and stomach cramps went away for good.
She even stopped having hot flashes!
And as for her sugar addiction?
Gone-zo.
This is one of my favorite things to help people overcome, and here’s why:
A lot of popular keto approaches try to recreate your favorite high-carb foods with “keto friendly” versions, so you don’t feel deprived or left out.
It’s a nice sentiment, but that approach actually keeps you addicted. It’s like putting a band-aid on the craving, instead of getting RID of it altogether.
When you “satisfy” a craving with something that tastes sweet (even if it’s technically keto-approved), you reinforce the craving.
That’s why my program is designed to get rid of cravings, not just postpone them, nor invite them to come back again the next day. I taught Lori what triggers cravings, so that they never happen in the first place.
And THAT’S how you untangle yourself from a lifelong sugar addiction.
“I am THRILLED. If I could go back in time and tell myself, ‘Pay this woman this money, and you’ll love yourself and be really happy!’ I totally would—but I also know, I wouldn’t have believed in myself enough to follow my own advice.”
—Lori D.
High five, Lori! 🙌
Do you have a story (or a question) about food obsession and/or sugar addiction? Tell me all about it in the comments below!
My journey to Keto and Carole began after many years of low carb, low fat, and liquid diets. All with some modicum of success; albeit only temporary.
After a year of stress and five rounds of antibiotics, I developed a digestive disorder called SIBO; small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. The treatment options include a no sugar and low carb diet along with herbal supplements. I was successful to a point but still suffered. I had heard about Keto and logically it made sense. Very low carb, intermittent fasting, and eating more fat were all ways to eradicate the bacteria. I was smart enough to know however, that if I wanted to change my life and make the transition to eating the Keto way, I needed professional help. I found Carole and loved the program, embracing the simplicity and my new way of eating. I have had great success. My stomach is flat after 2 years of misery.
Most people gage their success by the number on the scale, and while I have had success with the scale, it is really the smalls ways my body has improved that are more important to my success. I feel an inner joy and peace and happiness that I haven’t felt in a long time. My strength, stamina and balance have improved as well. I have more energy to enjoy the beautiful Pacific Northwest; a place I love exploring with my husband.
Transcript:
Hey everyone I’m so excited to be here today with Robin and sharing her secrets to success. Keto Robin, welcome, welcome Robin.
Thank you it’s very nice to be with you this afternoon and I’m looking forward to our conversation.
Yeah, wonderful. So share with people watching like what are you, introduce yourself please.
My name is Robin. I live in the southern part of Washington. I’m 63-years-old. I’m married. I have a husband. I have one daughter whose 29, lives in Denver. And I have been struggling with my weight my whole life. I mean the first diet my mom ever put me on I was 8-years-old. And ever since I’ve done liquid protein, the shakes, the Atkins … I’ve done it all.
[inaudible 00:01:18] but they were always short lived. Nothing ever felt permanent. So I developed a digestive disorder and logically, I thought well, to cure this digestive disorder I need to eat no sugar and low carb because the bacteria doesn’t like it. I did that and I needed to go farther and I found your Carole. It’s like one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself. Find you and embrace the keto way of eating. I will never change. It’s been a miracle for me. I wish … If I could shout from a mountaintop to all those [inaudible 00:02:06] suffering women and people out there.
There is a cure. There is way to combat it. Just come and join the keto community. Do that I would because it’s been a life changing experience for me.
Wonderful. I’m so excited that we found each other. That you found me too. So kind of paint a picture. So you’ve had fantastic results and that’s part of why you’re here is to help inspire others. Tell me, kind of paint a picture, what were your big struggles before because you were dabbling in keto low carb before we started working together. What were the lingering problems and symptoms. Like I call it the “why” list. Like why was this important for you to solve it.
My energy level was very low. I didn’t have any stamina. I couldn’t get the last 20 pounds off. I think I suffered from a little bit of depression. My [cebo 00:03:10] never really went away. I would have periodic bouts with it. A lot of abdominal discomfort and I just wasn’t getting to the place that I knew I could get physically, mentally I wanted to have mental clarity, be able to focus, have the inner feeling of peace and joy inside. I just wanted to feel better and that and yes, I wanted to try to get into a size 10 and I lowered my body fat content and all which now, believe it or not, I’m getting into some size eights, which I’ve even surpassed myself, which is really amazing.
But that’s basically what led me, what I was suffering from is the feeling of general malaise and just not feeling myself.
Okay and those are kind of the symptoms, the things that were uncomfortable in your life that you wanted to resolve. What were your big obstacles in just doing this all on your own? What was standing in your way? What was it that … I think I …
What was standing in my way was a framework of how to do this. There is so much information out on the internet. [inaudible 00:04:42], opinions, what to eat, how to eat, how much to eat. [inaudible 00:04:48] I mean it’s all so confusing. Logically that if I wanted to create a framework for myself for better health and wellness, I needed to find someone to help me and that’s what led me to you and that’s why I really believe that if you want to be successful at this program you need to find someone, like you Carole to help because you set the framework, the guidelines, the diet in the beginning.
It’s simple, it’s easy, it’s quick. You just follow it. You get on track. You start feeling better. It just is a natural progression to better health and wellness. You just can’t do it on your own. You get frustrated. You hear too many opinions. It’s confusing. Your friends and your family are poo pooing it. They don’t want you to do it. So I know I needed to backbone and the framework from your program.
And you’ve followed the structure of my program to a “T” and you put in the hard work and you’ve gotten fantastic results. So over several months of working together what are the results that you’ve experienced?
Well, I’ve lost about 25 pound and I’ve been on the program since August of 2018. I don’t know if I mentioned that. I’ve lost about 25 pounds. I have lost a total of 16 and 3/4 inches all over my body. I mean it’s amazing. I [inaudible 00:06:25] my body fat content from 28% done to 26%. Besides those numbers I feel so happy inside. I feel joyful and peaceful inside and I’m sleeping better. I just I feel like I did in my 40s. I think it’s given me 20 years.
That’s amazing. That’s awesome.
I really feel 20 years younger.
And what are some of the surprise improvements. Everyone has a list of things they hope would happen. You said that things far exceeded what you expected. What were some of the surprises you got?
My stamina. I used to live in Colorado and you deal with the altitude in Colorado and we go back and visit our daughter and new son-in-law periodically. I went in for Labor Day and I was just getting into the program and I was going through a transitional phase and I was wiped out. I had no … I mean it was a struggle for me to be at 10,000 feet, 9,000-10,000 feet. And after Thanksgiving, what an incredible transformation. I mean I hadn’t even been on it that long but my stamina, my energy, my hiking. I just … I was just like a different person. It was as good as night and day.
And I continued that in my workouts. I have a trainer that I work with three times a week and my strength, my balance, my ability to perform the moves that she asked me to do. Which she’s ramping up the workout because I can do it now. Which I love the challenge. So that to me … one of my goals was to improve the way my body moved through space. Which I know that sounds kind of weird but when you always had … at one point I was over 53% body fat. So that dictates how your body moves through space. Now, I love … I feel my body moving through space. I love the way it moves. My posture. My balance. My strength. My stamina. Everything has been improved tremendously.
I didn’t realize what a dramatic change it would be.
That’s wonderful and Robin I talk to a lot of ladies that are concerned about, well, I don’t think keto will work for me because I’m post menopause and so I haven’t had a challenge with anyone yet regardless of their age. But you’re a great example of that. So did you have those doubts coming into this. The well, I’m postmenopausal and everybody says it’s really hard to lose weight.
You know that is such a good point Carole because oh, you just 63-years-old. You’re middle aged. You can’t move like you were supposed to. You can’t move like you used to. You just give it up. And my motto is, I want to be able to say, “I’ve fallen and I can get up.” Not that I’ve fallen and I can’t get up. I want to say, “I can get up.” And so for me I felt like I was stuck with my weight loss. I had no idea that doing this program that at 63, I could lose 20+ pounds in such a short period of time and enjoy the food and feel amazing.
And it has been amazing. I mean my daughter is trying to do it. She’s 29 and I’ve had better results than she has. And she’s 29-years-old. I mean come on. I encourage all you ladies out there if you’re post menopausal. Just jump in and do it. You’re going to feel amazing.
Wonderful. So what are some of the things, the keys to your success and us working together. Of the … You mentioned the framework of what I bring to my clients but there’s a lot of different components of it. So what are the parts that you feel like were really essential for your success?
I think in the beginning don’t think about it. Just follow the simple menu plans that you provide. Keeping it simple. Keeping it quick. And really the hardest thing for a lot of people is listening to your body. When you’re hungry. It’s okay not to eat. We’ve been raised with three meals a day. I did one program in Denver where I had to eat six times a day. I mean this is such a change, but you just follow the simple recipes in the beginning. That is part of the framework for your overall success because then you’ve got the basics down. Then you can expand on it later on down the road.
You can change things up. Alter things a little bit. Expand your food but just following, just giving it up in the beginning and following the plan. Let Carole do the thinking for you and you’ll have success.
Wonderful. Well anything else that you want to share? You were hoping I would ask about?
Just … I think I’ve pretty much said it all. Just have such a zest for life and when I [inaudible 00:12:21] works. I just really do want to shout it from the mountain top and I just encourage. I think my hormones were better. I had a hysterectomy in 1997. So I’ve been on hormones for many years and I truly believe this has helped smooth everything out. I had all my blood work done recently. My cholesterol, my HDL, LDL are all great. My hormones are great.
I mean I’m [inaudible 00:12:50] my protein is low. All those things that measure our aging process are all really good. So I’m … this is permanent for me. This isn’t a diet. This is a way of living for me and I really encourage everyone to embrace it because it really will change your life.
Wonderful. Robin, I can’t thank you enough for being here and sharing your story and being so open. You’re going to be a huge inspiration for so many people out there too and excited to have you joining our team. Robin’s had such great success she gets to be a mentor and coach to others as well. So excited to have you. Welcome Robin. And again, thank you so much for being here and sharing your story.
Thank you Carole. Thank you for being out there for us. For being a guiding light for a transformational process. I really appreciate all the work you’ve put into it and all the help you’ve given me and I look forward to paying it forward with people in the future.
Wonderful, well thank you so much. Thank you everyone for watching. And until next time we’ll see you later. Bye.
Jimmy Moore catapulted onto the health scene in 2004 after a phenomenal 180-pound weight loss enabled him to come off prescription drugs for high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and respiratory problems. He is the energetic personality behind the uber-popular blog Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb and the host of the longest-running and top-ranked iTunes health podcast, The Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb Show, as well as Low-Carb Conversations and Keto Talk. He has interviewed well over 1,000 of the world’s top health experts and has dedicated his life to helping people get the best information possible about nutrition so they can make the right decisions for their health. He’s the international bestselling author of The Ketogenic Cookbook, Keto Clarity, and Cholesterol Clarity. Learn more about Jimmy and his work at www.livinlavidalowcarb.com.
Christine Moore is a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner who specializes in real food–based low-carb, high-fat, ketogenic nutrition. She helps clients around the globe via Skype through her Rebooting Your Nutrition business (www.rebootingyournutrition.com) and is passionate about customizing the diet to the individual. Christine and her husband, international bestselling keto author, podcaster, and speaker Jimmy Moore, are the cohosts of The Nutritional Pearls Podcast (,www.nutritionalpearlspodcast.com). She works diligently to get to the underlying issues in digestion, gut health, and blood sugar and insulin levels to optimize health nutritionally in the most natural way possible. Christine and Jimmy reside in Spartanburg, South Carolina, with their four cats and fifteen backyard chickens.
Transcript:
Welcome everyone to another episode of Keto Chat. I am your host, Carole Freeman, certified nutritionist and keto diet implementation person. I am so excited. I am here today with the world renowned Jimmy Moore and Christine Moore. World renowned. Yeah, and oh my gosh, this is the first time I’ve gotten to do a video interview. I’ve been bugging Jimmy for a video interview for a long time and so he’s excited enough about this new book collaboration with Christine that he’s finally willing to do it.
So let me just … If you don’t know who he is, let me just read this bio. You should know. So Jimmy Moore catapulted onto the health scene in 2004 after a phenomenal 180 pound weight loss enabled him to come off prescription drugs for high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and respiratory problems. He is the energetic personality behind the uber popular blog Living La Vida Low-Carb and the host of the longest running … Yes, you heard that right, the longest running top ranked iTunes health podcast, the Living La Vida Low-Carb Show as well as Low Carb Conversations and Keto Talk. He’s interviewed well over a thousand of the world’s top health experts and has dedicated his life to helping people get the best information possible about nutrition so they can make the right decisions for their health. He’s an international best selling author of “The Ketogenic Cookbook,” “Keto Clarity,” and “Cholesterol Clarity.” You can read more about him … Well, we’ll put some links in the show notes here about how to get in touch.
And then Christine is here as well. She is a nutritional therapy practitioner who specializes in real food based low-carb, high-fat ketogenic nutrition. She helps clients around the globe via Skype through her Rebooting Your Nutrition business and is passion about customizing the diet to the individual.
Christine and her husband, internationally best selling author … Oh we heard about him already. They both have a podcast together too, so Nutritional Pearls Podcast. She works diligently to get to the underlying issues of digestion, gut health, and blood sugar and insulin levels to optimize health nutritionally in the most natural way possible. Christine and Jimmy, they’re actually joining us from Spartanburg, South Carolina today. And outside the studio, you’ve got your four cats and 15 backyard chickens. Is it still 15?
Six now.
Six? Oh no.
Twenty six.
Oh 26. Okay. Hey, well, welcome. Welcome you guys. You guys are here to talk about your brand new book. So yeah, real food keto applying nutritional therapy to your low-carb, high-fat diet. So tell us how did that come to be?
Yeah, so Christine went through this program last year and you were telling us before you came on the air that you kind of went through a little bit of the principles with Gray Graham in the early days before you went to Ram in the early days before you went to Bastyr. Well, if you choose not to go the natural medicine route, this is a really good program and what was funny was they offered me a scholarship to go through the program, the MTA did, and I’m like, really? I have five books and five podcasts a week, I just didn’t have time, but I said, “How about this? I wonder if my wife would be interested?” So I said, “Christine, do you wanna go back to school?” And it had been years since she’d been in school. And so … oh, hello kitty. So many years since she’d been in school, but she was like, “Well, I’ve always been wanting to go and get more education. Why not do it in the nutritional realm?”
So when she went through this whole program, at the end of it I was like, “Wow. There’s so much really good knowledge in this program that nobody’s talking about and keto.” So I pitched my publisher and I said, “Hey, I’ve got this idea. Let’s mix the best concepts of nutritional therapy with the best concepts of keto and see if we can make a book out of it.” So that’s how “Real Food Keto” was born.
That is fantastic. What was the process like as husband and wife writing a book together?
Oh, let me tell you, it was interesting at times.
She’s still speaking to me, so that’s awesome.
My job in the beginning was just to brain dump. I didn’t need to worry about anything else, just get all the information in there and Jimmy would come behind me, and as you know, he’s good at making things understandable for just about anybody to understand. He went in behind me, he focused more on the beginning and he wrote about the ketogenic diet principles and he covered that sort of stuff and I handled more of the nutritional therapy principles. But when it came time for him to come behind me, he sat down at my computer and started going through it, doing really good, and then when it came to the nutritional therapy principles-
Part three.
Part three, yeah. He’s like, “Whoa. Okay.”
I was like, “Come here.”
Can you come explain this?
What the heck is a prostaglandin one? I’m not getting it. Help me understand and so …
It was like in and out, in and out, in and out of the room.
Well, at one point she just plopped her butt down right next to me on the floor and said, “All right. I know you’re gonna ask me in about three minutes another question, so I’ll be here when you need me.”
Yeah, but it was an interesting process because I knew how to explain it in my head, but I had to make sure that I was explaining it to him so he could understand it. So even I had to look up some stuff, some terms that maybe I didn’t get in going through the program. It was very interesting. It was very aggravating at times I guess, but it was fun.
Aggravatingly fun.
That’s a bonding marriage exercise then right.
Yeah.
[inaudible 00:06:16], yes.
Yeah. For people that aren’t familiar with nutritional therapy, tell us … what’s it bringing to the space that we’ve been missing? How is it different than just following a keto diet?
When you hear about a ketogenic diet, this is where it gets kind of confusing too because people’s definition of ketogenic is so many different things, but at the base of it ketogenic is low-carb, moderate protein, high fat. You hear a lot about that but you don’t hear a lot about these other principles that we cover in part three, like vitamins and minerals. You don’t hear a lot about digestion and how that works. You don’t hear about detoxification. You don’t hear about the endocrine system and other things. We talk a little bit about the immune system in there. You can eat the most perfect diet but if these other things are not in order, you’re still gonna struggle with weight and health.
And Carole, one thing that drew me to this book, other than getting to write one with my wife, that was way cool, was it’s been on my heart and mind for years that there’s so many people eating keto that don’t add the real food aspect. Even some of the doctor … one of our speakers on the low-carb cruise and you were with us, and some of those doctors would say, “Oh, don’t worry about the food quality, it’s all about keeping the carbs down. If they do that, everybody will get into ketosis and everybody’s happy,” and I’m going, “That’s an incomplete story that you’re giving there.” I think if we tell people it’s all about macronutrients, we don’t eat macronutrients, we eat food. Don’t you want them to fuel their bodies with the best possible fuel, and that would be real food.
I didn’t see it as being an emphasis in the community enough, which was my impetus for wanting to marry these two seemingly perfect combinations of real food and keto into one book.
Nice. So Christine, I’m curious, after you went through the training, did anything change for you as far as what you were eating or supplementation or anything like that?
Yeah, it did. I pretty much ate the same thing. I definitely then understood the importance of staying away from diuretics, carbonated beverages because the carbonation, those diet sodas and even carbonated water, has phosphoric acid in it which interferes with stomach acid production and your body’s ability to absorb calcium, so I cut drastically back on the diet sodas.
She loved her Diet Dr. Pepper and I don’t think you’ve had one in a long time now.
Yeah, I’ve had a little bit today just because since my shoulder surgery I haven’t slept well, so I’m really dragging. But, so I needed a little bit of caffeine. That was one thing-
See you choked up Carole on that one.
I know, right? Cutting back on the diet sodas and even carbonated water. I started supplementation. I realized going through the program we practiced on each other going through the program, the functional evaluation where we looked at HCL production, and so if you press on a certain spot, if it’s really tender then it’s probably an indication that you’re not producing enough stomach acid so for me that was one of my hot spots. Two things that are needed for stomach acid production are B6 and zinc, and so I knew, because I was getting sick often, zinc is also good for the immune system, so I started supplementing with zinc and then just to make sure that I have a good multivitamin that includes methylated folate because I have the MTHFR gene mutation from-
What’d you call me?
From both sides of the family so I have to take a methylated folate, because my body can’t convert folic acid into folate. I really learned that it basically all starts with digestion, and if you are in a sympathetic state, meaning a stressful state, then even smelling food, digestion starts in the brain. If that is stressed from the beginning, everything else is going to get messed up. So absolutely supplements, I learned that. I learned the importance of proper digestion, so I take these measures. I make sure that I sit down and am chewing my food, not doing any other activity so that will give my stomach the best chance to digest the foods properly.
And you do digestive enzymes and things that you didn’t take before with the beta … whatever it’s called.
Beta TCP, or I do beta plus. It’s a combination of supplements that are good for digestion, beet root and other things. I also learned that warm lemon water, if you drink that with your meal that’s good because that aids in the bile flow as well.
Otherwise her hair goes “Ah.”
Oh that was perfect. We’re recording this on Halloween actually so that was perfect.
Ah.
Oh man. That’s giving me flashbacks. Do you guys remember years ago where it was like the stare at this thing and try to tell the difference between the images and it was like a scary … Oh, I was afraid to open it and look at any photos after that forever.
Ah.
Yeah, the first time that happened to me, oh my goodness. I nearly pooped in my pants.
Crapped your pants.
Yep.
It happens.
I don’t trust people sending me anything. Like, “Yes, that’s a pretty picture. I don’t want to look at it.” Anyway. Okay, so what kind of changes have you seen for people that you’ve been working with and yourself? What health improvements and other things are people noticing when they apply these principles?
It’s tough because a lot of times people come to me and they think they’re doing things right and sometimes they are very hesitant to implement the things that I-
Tell her about the one client.
I have one particular client, bless her heart. She’s had some major health challenges and she did a low-fat diet for a long time and that was just ingrained in her so much so one of the first things I suggested that she do, I looked at her food journal, I said, “You need to be eating more calories.” She was only consuming maybe 800 to 1000 calories a day, if that. I said, “You need to add more calories. I know that it goes against everything that you were taught, but you need to do it.” Still, she has a problem with it. She just … it’s something that she still struggles with, but there was one person … actually a couple people in particular that came to me with poop problems and one of them was my dad.
La-la-la-la-la-la.
Part of digestion, Jimmy. We’ve got to talk about it.
It is. One of them had diarrhea, chronic diarrhea, and I made suggestions for her to try and she came to me a couple months later and said, “Wow. Thank you. You fixed my chronic diarrhea issue.” Then my dad, this was so funny. You know you have a good relationship with your dad when you can talk to him about his poop.
I ain’t talking to your dad about poop.
He had been having some issues with diarrhea, well, actually, he wouldn’t go but like every three days and then when he went it was like he couldn’t get to the bathroom fast enough because he would have the diarrhea. So I suggested for him to go on a probiotic. So he does that for about a month and he calls me up one day, he goes, “I just need to ask you is it normal to go to the bathroom every day?” I’m like, “Well, are you having diarrhea?” He goes, “No, I’m not having diarrhea. I’m just going every day. Is that normal?” I’m like, “Yes. That’s normal.” Just changes like that really make me feel good that I could help people fix some of their gut problems.
Wonderful. That’s fantastic. So, I got an advanced copy of the book here and it’s four parts. The beginning is like the intro, so what’s the point? Why real food keto. Part two is the macros, so diving into the basics of a well-formulated ketogenic diet. Then part three is what you were talking about, the applying nutritional therapy, so that’s the part that’s all these things that we were just talking about, things people need to worry about. Then, of course we’ve got part four where you include some recipes. What do you want to say about the content of the book? What are your favorite parts?
We thought it was important to lay the basis for what we’re talking about here and who we’re trying to talk to. I mentioned earlier there is a lot of controversy within keto, should it be just about the macronutrients or should it be based on food quality and so we’re trying to reach the real food community as well and not just the keto community. So there’s a lot of people that eat real food and they think that’s their life saver and that that’s really all they have to do. They can have all the real foods they want and there’s no ramifications in their health from doing that.
A lot of people do have really good results doing that, but some people need keto, especially those with the insulin resistance and it’s a lot of us that have insulin resistance. So we’re trying to get them to pay attention to keto, we’re trying to get the keto people to pay attention to real food, and then you’ve got a whole segment of the population that doesn’t give a crap about either one of those things and so we’re trying to reach all of those.Then NTPs and other people like yourself who are trying to help people understand their health a little bit better, we’ve given them a resource that they can use with their patients and clients so that they can optimize their health.
We put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into this to make it unique enough, because I know what happens when a new keto book comes out. I interview a lot of people, Carole, and I’m like, “Ugh. Another keto book, really? How many of these do we need?” But I think we’ve struck the right balance of giving enough new information that people hadn’t heard.
Yep, and I would have to say just because of the information, my favorite aspect is part three, the nutritional therapy principles, because you don’t hear a lot about that, and so many people are still struggling with their weight and they have no idea why. They’re doing exactly what they read to do and yet they’re still struggling and no one’s really … I mean, you can find some of this information on various websites, but you have to go from website to website to find it. We wanted a resource where they could find it all in one book and we hope that we’ve done that with “Real Food Keto.”
So the goal then it sounds like is to help the average person be able to implement these principles to just optimize their health and weight loss and ketogenic diet and/or their real food diet.
Yeah, they definitely need to … if they’re struggling with something, they definitely need to seek out somebody that can help them, because some of these things, they may not necessarily know that that’s why they’re struggling, so a functional medicine doctor or a nutritional therapy practitioner or consultant, somebody, a naturopathy, they could help their client determine where they’re struggling and I think for me … I think in my opinion it all starts with digestion and blood sugar regulation. Those are the first two things that I look at. If their digestion is off, they’re not gonna be able to absorb nutrients properly. If their blood sugar is off, if they’re having these swings, their endocrine system is gonna be off. So we have what’s called the foundations and then the consequences. We get the foundations in order, the consequences will come in line most often.
Excellent. Awesome. Anything different, unique, and special? You’ve got recipes in the book from Maria Emmerich, our beloved, oh my gosh. That lady turns out … I can’t believe what a powerhouse she is with her recipes that she can come up with.
She came up with the 50 recipes for our book in about a week.
Well, actually there were two from me, but …
Well 48 recipes.
Forty eight.
In about a week, she had basically cranked those out. I’m like, “I barely have turned on the stove in a week, much less cranked out 48 recipes.” She did an amazing job and we gave her very specific guidelines. Okay, this is about real food so we’re trying to stick to real whole foods as much as possible, get people interested in how to make bone broth, how to make a very low sugar kombucha because gut health is such a big emphasis in the book, so we wanted fermented foods. She is just an amazing resource for people and we were very honored to have her a part of the book.
Excellent. You kind of hinted there a little bit about … I was gonna ask what’s different about the recipes in this book versus some of the other recipes? You’ve got some fermented foods and things like that?
Yeah, absolutely. That’s the real main difference because all of Maria’s recipes-
Have real food.
Yeah, have real food, so the main difference is the bone broth and the fermented foods because gut health is a very important thing. We’re still learning so much about that. It’s so brand new. Then the bone broth, when Weston A. Price visited the traditional cultures, he found that all of them ate [inaudible 00:20:25], all of them included bone broth in their diet, all of them included salt, fermented foods and things like this so we felt that absolutely necessary to get a few recipes that included the bone broth and the fermented foods in there. It’s just so important.
Nice. Well, I’m excited to try some. Just kind of wrapping up, was there anything else that you were hoping I would ask about? Anything else that you want to share about this book or anything else?
Well, Christine and I actually read the audio book version of this and so I’m in my podcast recording studio and I was like, “Hey, I read all my books.” Hint, hint, hint. She’s like, “What? You need me to read?” I was like, “Yeah, yeah, I think it would be kind of cool,” especially the introduction, Carole. Read that one slowly. Christine shares her health story and if it doesn’t grip people right away, you have no heartbeat because she’s been through hell and back, literally, in her health which has made her so passionate now to talk about a lot of these things. But we read the audio book together and she thought, “Oh, well that sounds easy.” Was it easy?
No. It’s not easy. There were some times I was trying to read something and I kept messing over it just saying a word over and over. I’m like, “I can’t talk. Man. This is hard.”
I had to [crosstalk 00:21:47]. It’s a lot harder reading words on the page without sounding like Mr. Roboto.
Yeah, because the brain automatically … if you’re reading a sentence, your brain will kind of change words up or add something in there or take something away that’s not really there, and so nope. I would do something like that. He would stop me.
Nope.
Say it again.
I would go, “Nope.” What’s funny is you have to change the tone of your voice a little bit, so on “Keto Clarity,” moment of clarity quote, Dr. David [inaudible 00:22:18],” so you’d have to kind of get into a little bit of a voice. She got there at the end, but it was just … it was fun watching her after I’ve done, what, five audio books. Trying to bust through it.
Nice. Cool. Yeah, it’s a challenge and it’s a new skill set you’ve got now. Well, what’s to come next? Are you starting to write the next one already or are you gonna …
No, I don’t know if another one’s gonna be in me, but the moment you say that you’ll probably end up writing another one.
Yeah.
We’re working with our publisher on a book tour. Usually book stores don’t do book tours in November and December, so it’s probably going to be in the new year sometime. We’re hoping to get that finalized. I know Jimmy’s got several new book projects.
Oh I have four coming in the next year and a half after this one, so, yeah. Then we do our show, Nutritional Pearls Podcast, so we try to talk about a lot of these concepts. If you want to get a flavor for some of what we write about in “Real Food Keto,” go listen to the Nutritional Pearls Podcast. It’s on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. Yeah, so we talk about a lot of these in great detail if you want to nerd out a little bit more on it.
Excellent. Nice. All right, so I just have one final closing question. The meteor’s coming at us today, we’re all gonna be wiped out on the planet. What’s gonna be your final meal?
Oh that’s a good question.
Each of you.
If I’m gonna die today, my final meal?
Yeah.
Oh my. Not low-carb, I’ll tell you that.
Okay. I love when people are actually honest and say something like that.
Mine, probably yeah, not low-carb. It would be chocolate molten cake.
Okay. Like a giant … the flaming ball is coming at us and you’re having a flaming lava cake.
Exactly.
Every bit of it. I guess a big plate of pasta. I don’t know. We’re dying, it doesn’t matter, I suppose, what ketone levels are when it hits.
Right. Maybe just be numb when it hits, that’s fine. Yeah. Well thank you. Congratulations you guys on your book and thank you so much for being here. We’re gonna have all the links down below. “Real Food Keto” available wherever you get books, online, bookstores, all that stuff. What’s the actual release date?
The release date is November 6th, but we just found out it’s gonna be in all US Costco stores the week of Black Friday, so how cool is that?
Oh wow. So November 6, 2018, look for it in Costco and also wherever you get books. Thank you guys again for being here. This has been wonderful and best wishes with the launch of this book and everything else you guys have going on.
Thank you.
Thanks so much.
Thank you guys for watching. If you’ve enjoyed this, give us a thumbs up. Also, hit subscribe if you want to see more and then hit that little bell thing as well if you want to get notifications of your subscription. That’s all for now. We’ll see you next time. Bye.
Marty is an engineer who developed an interest in nutrition to better manage his wife’s Type 1 diabetes.
He runs the blog OptimisingNutrition.com and has recently launched NutrientOptimiser.com to automate his approach to nutrition which revolves around optimising nutrient density, insulin load and satiety to suit an individual’s situation and goals.
Transcript:
Welcome everyone to Keto and beyond. My name is Carole Freeman, I’m here with Andre as well and we’ve got Marty Kendall.
You can call me Keto tutor.
Keto tutor, yes. Andre is known as Keto tutor online. Today, our special guest is Marty Kendall, way down in Australia. He is the amazing author, data gatherer at Optimising Nutrition, a fantastic blog. So welcome, welcome Marty.
Thank you Carole, thanks so much for having us on and good to meet you Andre.
Good to meet you too.
Marty, tell us a little bit about yourself.
I’m an engineer by day and I suppose I stumbled into the world of nutrition. My wife is a type one diabetic, and just an ongoing experience of trying to live an optimized life with diabetes. Just seeing her day to day fluctuations and how much food mattered to her, and how it affected her energy levels and her mood and her quality of life. So that’s been an ongoing journey of trying to learn how to improve that and optimize it. About three years ago, I stumbled across the food insulin index data, which was a bit unorganized. I downloaded it and played with it, and reorganized it to really optimize insulin dosing for people with diabetes. So if you’re injecting insulin, we found that it’s not just carbohydrates but also protein has an impact on insulin and the short terminals of fiber has a negative impact on insulin.
So for those people, the food insulin index helps us to prioritize foods that have a lower insulin response over the short term, and also help stabilize blood sugars. So that’s really handy, it’s basically ketogenic in a formula. So that was where I started out. I started sharing that and then stumbled into a whole bunch of other things. I continue to share and learn and blog, and it’s been a really fantastic journey. I made a lot of amazing friends like yourselves and yeah, it’s really, really fascinating and really, really important just because people really struggle. I try to bring a quantitative engineering precision to nutrition to help fine tune, and eek out those challenges for a lot of people finding their nutritional journey.
Excellent, excellent. So insulin, when you said the insulin index is really fascinating. Like you said it’s the key to this whole Keto thing that our people are [inaudible 00:03:03] right? So can you explain a little bit more about why insulin is so important on a ketogenic diet, and in general for weight loss which is what a lot of our listeners are interested in.
It’s a fascinating controversial topic and have been through the challenges, and through the learning process with a lot of people in this ketogenic journey. As I said, what we found is that if you’re injecting insulin and if your pancreas is producing insulin, it produces more for carbohydrates, but half as much for protein and fiber which is indigestible, doesn’t really have an impact. So we subtract that and fat in the short term doesn’t have an impact but in the longer term, it still seems to have some impact whether it’s as much as carbohydrates, not sure but over the longer term, it still has some impact. So then I suppose what we’ve realized more recently is the energy balance still matters to a degree, but the people who have blood sugars that are fluctuating, and on a rollercoaster bringing that insulin load of your diet down.
We can quantitatively analyze that in your food, bringing that insulin load down and help stabilize blood sugars in your insulin. So your cravings are improved so you can then be less addicted to food, and less compulsively eating because of those blood sugar swings. So that’s really handy but I suppose then we realized that to drive it to the other end, if you’re just drinking refined fat which we’ll probably talk about later, it doesn’t provide a lot of satiety, doesn’t provide a lot of nutrients. So there’s a balance point there finding a diet that stabilizes your blood sugars, and insulin doesn’t require you to inject too much insulin, but also provides enough protein and micronutrients, vitamins and minerals to provide satiety.
Man, you’re full of information and I want to unpack more of what you said there because I think right now my head’s a little spinning, and I know everything you just said [inaudible 00:05:08]. The listeners were going like, “Oh my gosh, what at all did he just say? I don’t even know.” So maybe if we just dive into maybe some practical application of what you’re [inaudible 00:05:18]. So what have you found as far as types of foods that people should be eating that are going to provide the most satiety for one? So help people feel full and control their appetite.
Yeah. I suppose initially if you’re managing diabetes, a lot of those people who become really inflamed in a base, and get high blood sugars are doing that because they’re eating a lot of foods that are a combination of not just carbohydrates but carbohydrates and fat. A lot of food system has really, the food manufacturers have worked out that processed starch, corns and corn starch and potato starch and all those sorts of things smashed together with cheap Crisco and seed oils. Soybean oils are really cheap and cost effective, so that’s basically what is in the middle of our supermarket, and the McDonald’s and that’s what our food system consists of. So that’s what people are thinking a lot of the time are really at base because that combination is basically a doughnut, or a cake, and it’s really easy to overeat.
So at that point, those foods just drive over eating and make it very easy to eat, and don’t provide you a lot of satiation, or protein, or nutrients really. So at that point it’s really good to go, “Well, let’s not fear the fat, let’s bit more dairy, bit more cheese, bit more butter in my coffee,” whatever will help you switch and transition from a really processed carbohydrate diets, to a more satiating, more nutrient dense diet. Then I suppose more recently, I’ve been digging into the whole concept of satiety of once you get to that point. If you’ve stalled, if you want to continue your journey, how do you continue to optimize with I suppose numerically being an engineer. How do you continue that fine tuning? What we’ve found is that foods with more protein tend to make you more satiated, or tend to make you feel more full with less calories.
Foods with more fiber tend to fill you up in the short term, while foods that have got a lot of process starch and carbohydrates tend to not fill you up as much, and also refined oils don’t tend to fill you up as much. So I suppose at that point, a lot of people reach a point where they go like, “I’ve plateaued, where do I go from here? Do I just keep on, keep calm and keto on and put more butter in my coffee and be more ketogenic and drive my ketones higher.” That doesn’t work well for everybody and for some people they need to start pulling out that added fat, so that the fat can come off their body. I know that’s controversial, but that’s I suppose my conviction after looking at it a lot and seeing a lot of debate and discussion online. So yeah.
Sounds like you’re saying get adequate protein for satiety, have some fiber and that gives you that both short term and long term satiety there. Then don’t over do it on the fats if you have weight loss as a goal, is what you found?
Yeah, definitely.
Okay, [inaudible 00:08:41] there’s the answer.
It comes down to just eating real food that’s not too processed, and was recently attached to the ground as animal or a plant in some way. Those things that are just packaged and bar coded and have a long list of nutrients, and artificial flavors, they’re probably not going to be good for you, and probably not going to contain the micronutrients you need either.
Yeah. So let’s define that because when people, a lot of people are familiar on keto with macros, which are carbs, fats, and proteins, but these micronutrients, what does that mean?
Yeah, micronutrients is the vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids and amino acids which is your yeah. So generally in our diet what I found is that we tend to find it easy to get adequate protein, because without chasing too much most people are getting adequate. If they continue to chase the harder to find micronutrients, the vitamins and minerals and Omega threes, they tend to get even more protein potentially but that just comes along for the ride without having to chase it. So I suppose with my system, a segue hacker we quantify nutrition. There’s so much argument and confusion, and so much vested interest in bias, and commercial bias, and people are defending the studies that the university did 30 years ago, and they’re still basically as covering to try and cover up.
It just seems that there’s so much confusion out there. So I said, “Well, let’s try to isolate the food to harder foods that have more of the micronutrients that we find harder to find.” So you can, like you’ve talked about before, you can track your food in chronometer and those sort of apps to look at, hey which vitamins and minerals am I not getting enough of? A lot of the time people on keto are not getting enough potassium or magnesium, because they’re taking all carbs out of their diet and they’re contained in green veggies. So we can then identify the foods that contain more of those nutrients and prioritize those at the front of the line, and add more of those to our diet. So that’s part of the optimizing nutrition angle of what I’m trying to do.
Why should we care about micronutrients?
Well I think you’ve probably heard of the protein leverage hypothesis, but what I’ve seen more and more digging into micronutrients is the protein, and vitamins and minerals that intimately linked together that whenever there’s protein, there’s vitamins and minerals and vice versa. So I think a body craves those harder to find nutrients, so we continue to eat, we continue to consume more energy until we get those nutrients. So if we’re having very nutrient poor highly processed food, a body will just go, “Well I need more potassium, I need more magnesium.” While we can’t quantify it perfectly, a body just continues to pursue energy in food until we get that, to feel okay to drive our fundamental biochemistry level, and mitochondria to produce the energy we need to feel okay.
So we just built for survival and our appetite will always win out even if we try to track our food and limit it. Eventually our bodies are just going to go, “Screw you, I need more food. I need more nutrients to do what I need to do.” So it’s not just about the calories, it’s about those vitamins and minerals that you really need to thrive.
No, that’s really interesting that that’s the research of you’re finding, because I know when I was in school, that was one of the theories of why people overate when they ate a highly processed diet was that they just weren’t getting enough of those nutrients. We do actually have those nutrients sensors within it. So one of the reasons we want to focus on optimizing the nutrients in your diet is so we don’t overeat.
Totally.
Then also it optimizes our health as well, because we need all those vitamins and minerals for a lot of different processes. All the processes in our body.
Yeah, totally and what we’ve found with the nutrient optimize is that people who have tried to say, “Well, let’s try to maximize the nutrition, the micronutrients in my diet.” They always come back and say well, “I’m tracking and it’s interesting and then I’m looking at how many calories I’m eating. I’m not needing as many calories to feel satiate, to feel full and I didn’t need as much energy.” I’m really surprised and that’s a common thing people find, and it’s not fun tracking your calories and try to limit it to a certain number and rah-rah. If you put that micronutrient density first, then you tend to not overeat is what we’re finding again and again with people.
You mentioned the diabetes of your wife, right? Was it a type one diabetes or?
Yeah, she’s a type one diabetic and we just recently got a closed loop pancreas system. So my day is watching the insulin in her artificial pancreas turn on and off and moderate. So I’ve got a really interesting insight into insulin and how the body regulates insulin, and what foods affect insulin.
So for those people who listen to this and they have type one diabetes, what would you recommend first, for example, three steps to do.
Wow. For type one, I suppose stabilizing blood sugars is a really big deal which is also a matter of stabilizing insulin. If you eat high carbohydrate processed foods, you have to inject a lot of insulin and then the insulin in your blood sugars go up, and then you inject a lot of insulin, and then you have to come down and you’re never sure where they’re going to land. Even the best technology of the artificial pancreas can’t manage that, can’t match a high carbohydrate diet with the insulin dosing. So it’s really a matter of small inputs requires small actions and [inaudible 00:15:11] also the law of small numbers that if you’re not having a really high carbohydrate diet, you don’t need to have massive doses of insulin all at once. That will leave you on that blood sugar rollercoaster, which is what really makes you feel crappy and makes you … When she’s got a really low blood sugar, she needs to eat to get out of that.
I suppose to some extent, it’s the same in people living without type one diabetes, but those blood sugar rollercoaster there’s crashes, there’s highs and lows constantly drive appetite. So just balancing that but I suppose what a lot of people have found is don’t avoid protein, because protein is satiating. People who tend to avoid protein and just end up living on fat bombs and cream in the light can drive insulin resistance, and get to the point where they need more and more insulin on a daily basis, which yeah, type ones are really fascinating laboratory experiment to actually quantify insulin to see how much insulin people need. So there’s a balance point there of getting enough quality nutrition with enough protein, enough greens leafy veggies to get your micronutrients in. Yeah, she doesn’t do a lot of potato starch, because she knows that those blood sugar swings just aren’t worth it.
What her typical day looks like?
A typical day of diet, she’ll wake up and have a … I’ll make her a coffee with some cream in it, with some Stevia as sweeteners. So she finds that milk will raise her blood sugars too much. She ends up eating a lot of nuts which are high fat, and give her a reasonable of nutrition and energy but the energy dense. For dinner, we’ll often have a steak and veggies with broccoli and spinach, and beans and those sorts of things. That works pretty well. Interestingly, fish seems to give a more stable blood sugar response compared to beef, so we tried a little bit more fish and enjoy the salmon and those fatty cuts of meat. I’ve been getting into the eating kangaroo in Australia and which is really, I talked to Carole before about high protein.
High protein, lower fat foods which is good if you’re trying to potentially cut some weight, and gain some muscle but for her, we watched the blood sugars rise and need insulin and it behaves nearly similar to carbohydrate just because it’s such a low fat protein which is really fascinating. So yeah, as I said, it’s an interesting journey to watch moment to moment, blood sugars every five minutes and try to manage those swings.
You have one of the best lamb in the world coming from Australia.
What’s that? Lamb, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s great lamb, we enjoy lamb in New Zealand. Lamb, yeah. It’s very nutrient dense, it’s often just happy lambs on green pastures and that’s what [inaudible 00:18:18].
I found it really fascinating what you said about that for her, seafood and fish cause better blood sugar stability than beef. Do you have any insights into why that is? Is it the mineral acids profile or?
I’ve tried to look at it and I think there’s a difference in the different amino acid profiles. I forget a lot of stuff in my head now, I dug into it a couple of years ago but yeah, there’s different amino acids. Some of them are more ketogenic, and some are more glucogenic. Most of them can either become glucose or ketones depending on what is required at the time but yes, the beef tends to have more glucogenic aminos than the fish. It also tends to be more fatty, the salmon and the cuts of meat are nice and fatty and they give it fairly stable blood sugar. So if you watch her blood sugar overnight, we might have dinner at 6:00 and then her blood sugars might pick around 12:00. Then the insulin chases it back down till about 4:00 AM, then by 6:00 AM when she wakes up, her blood sugar is stable and ready to start the day. So they’d serve an ideal night.
Do you have a sense then if, is there a one perfect diet for everybody or are there [inaudible 00:19:42] in what works for people?
Awesome question. No, well I suppose that’s part of my journey is trying to, I was a massive low carb advocate, but then for myself chasing down a whole lot of unlimited fat, and trying to chase high ketones didn’t work for me because it just added more body fat. For my wife who’s trying to stabilize blood sugars and she doesn’t struggle with weight as much, she can prioritize the fat and not worry about added fat and that’s really advantageous for her. I suppose that’s part of my system is trying to say well some people need therapeutic ketosis for management of epilepsy, so they weren’t really high ketones. Some people who are trying to lose body fat, stimulate call it a ketogenic diet, but it’s totally different approach. So I’ve been trying to optimize the different parameters of nutrient density, insulin load, and satiety for all those different categories of people.
Yeah, it’s been working really well and building that instant nutrient optimize it to help guide people through that journey, because there’s just so much confusion. Lots of people’s say well something worked for me, so it should work for you and I think there is one absolute perfect diet and become religious about it. Really the amount of body fat you’ve got, the amount of activity you do, the amount of muscle mass you’ve got, how much activity, what you lift and all those sort of things play into how much you actually need. So it’s interesting to track. We track blood sugars, body fat and weight and say well, it’s dialing your macros to find those, we call it smart macros. To find the macronutrients that will stabilize your blood sugar, and make sure you maintain your lean body mass.
While if you want to lose body weight, you can macro on the calories to dial that in as well, but generally just prioritizing nutrient dense whole foods is a high priority that will oftentimes manage, help you manage the rest of those things.
What are-
Balance as you mentioned, right?
Sorry, what was that?
Balance as you mentioned from the very beginning.
Yeah, yeah, and balancing it at a micronutrient level which I think is fascinating. I hope a lot of people find that interesting and want to chase that. So once you look after getting enough of those micronutrients of meeting your daily requirements, then a lot of the other things work out.
Definitely.
So I’m wondering what are some of the hidden gem keto friendly foods, like powerhouses that have a lot of micronutrients in them that you just recommend. Maybe the top five foods that people should consider adding into their diet to optimize their nutrients.
Yeah. I suppose fatty fish that you’ve found to be quite good if you’re on a ketogenic diet, and trying to transition from a really highly processed diet. A lot of people don’t love fish, but then the fatty steak, anything seafood, the Mussels, oysters are going to be amazing. A lot of people don’t like organ meats, but the muscles and liver and those sort of things really help optimize your micronutrients. Any green leafy vegetables, we eat a lot of spinach and broccoli and bok choy, and those sorts of things which will help bring in the vitamins and minerals without giving a lot of carbohydrates. So for most people, they don’t need to worry too much about the carbohydrates from that. There’s plenty of fiber which basically cancels out the carbohydrates.
So you mentioned a few times fiber cancels out for satiety, but are there some types of fiber though that just aren’t really fiber?
Yeah, yeah. A lot of people with the processed packaged products, we’ll put in early two grams of net carbs. If you look at all the ingredients, the fill of fibers, which don’t really, aren’t real fiber. They’re not the fiber that comes with the green veggies, it’s inulin fiber and all the different things that are put in there to fill it up. Interestingly, type one seemed to need to dose insulin for those fibers that are on the label, but the fibers that come with those, don’t worry about the fiber in lettuce and spinach and bok choy and those sorts of things that I don’t think you need to worry about that.
So basically real food fiber is actually fiber, and processed food “fiber”, I’ll put it in quotes, is basically starch.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’d count that if you’re accounting total carbs and net carbs. There’s an ongoing debate there, but my position is you would count the added fiber but the real fiber that comes with whole food you wouldn’t count that, especially because if you take a total carbs approach to eliminate all fiber from all you minimize the green veggies and therefore, minimize all your important micronutrients.
Yeah. So you have kids?
Yeah, yeah. 12 and 13, they eat a lot and so that’s a fascinating insight into nutrition and what growing kids want.
How is balance in a family with kids?
Yeah, yeah, they eat with us and they know what good food is. My 12 year old son is in the kitchen at the moment cooking, he’s got a bunch of mints that he’s trying to cook up and be healthy. At the same time, it’s fascinating to watch particularly the son who’s just a growing little pre-pubescent machine at the moment. If he has the opportunity to see sausage rolls or donuts, he goes into this feeding frenzy and it’s just amazing. Even myself with all the knowledge, if you’re exposed to those processed foods that have combination of fat and carbohydrates together, like donuts, and cakes, and sausage rolls, we just can’t turn off. We just want more, but at home we tend to eat fairly well and we all eat similar things.
I’ll probably [inaudible 00:26:30] for the higher protein because I go to the gym fairly regularly, and want to recover from that. The kids are more, they’ll eat some potatoes and those sort of things because it’s cheap. To be honest nutrient dense, higher protein, lower prestos diet is not always the cheapest, but it’s worth it. It’s a good investment because we see when the kids eat crappy colored processed food, they just turn into different people. Yeah, it’s sad to watch say okay, it’s worth the investment in the kids.
Yeah, yeah. My son, my oldest child is 13 years old and he’s athlete too, and I’m trying to educate him and he see my world, the ketogenic lifestyle and et cetera and it’s influence him. Many people asking me this question, “Andre, how about your kids?” I had a really good experiment with them few years ago when we started in the family approaching with fitting kids as we do as I do. I had a really interesting result. So it was three years ago, I have right now six years old daughter, nine years old daughter and 13 years old son. So about three years ago, the two of them were going to the school. So I put them on really strict ketogenic diet even without feeding them breakfast. So we’re going to the school eating first meal of the day, probably three hours later without having any issues.
We didn’t feel really hungry when they’re waking up. So three weeks later, I got a call from a teacher of my son and saying, “What do you do with your son?” “What do you mean?” He’s listening, you know what he see like he’s very different. My wife was laughing, so he’s very active person. I would say hyperactive and yeah, he stabilized, he started listening. Since that time, his performance in sport in school changed completely.
So much better?
Yeah, of course as you mentioned, when he see donuts or something else, it’s so addictive. It has to do with many things in our brain. We regret this, but he understand his process in his body right now, what’s going on. He actually understand when to eat properly in a way.
Yeah, totally. Yeah, it’s interesting. We can hack the satiety index for people who are growing or athletes who need more food, by understanding what helps us to eat less and more. We can say let’s add in your case, more healthy fats from whole fat food. No need to fear the high fat food and we can increase that to help them grow and give them plenty of protein.
Totally, yeah. Cool.
I love both of your examples too, because so many times women follow a keto diet for weight loss and they think it’s a diet that is not safe for kids to follow. You’re both giving examples of how, it shows how healthy it is for them to eat lower carb and more nutrient dense foods. It’s very safe.
Totally. My kids are not suffering a grain deficiency and it seems that whenever we, my daughter experiences major gut issues when she gets a big exposure to gluten, and as said my son, he just goes hyper when is anything processed or food colors. His brain like Andre’s doesn’t think as well. So it’s amazing to see, it’s worth the investment for us. So yeah, there’s definitely no grain deficiency and definitely improvements, and benefits in giving them whole food, real food, healthy food.
What do you think about the idea, some people say, “Well, I don’t want to deprive my kids of all those sugary carby foods, it’s their childhood. Let them be kids.”?
Yeah, wow. Andre, what do you think?
Well, I have one answer. I grew up in a society where we didn’t have that much of processed foods. I would say we didn’t have at all processed food to be honest with you. I’m originally from East Europe and all we had this four seasons, we didn’t eat fruits during the winter. We had like around three months when no fruits available. [inaudible 00:31:37]. All we ate was meat and fermented food, which is big part of my culture where I’m originally from. This is completely different topic to discuss. So I strongly believe what you give to kids today, it’s like building a house. If you give them a good strong foundation which is actually from the day one where they were, even when they not born yet, it’s also important with mother eating.
So this foundation is what we’re talking about right now. I think if you want to give your kids good childhood, you want to give them a good health with foundation you’re feeding them. On sometime, I do strongly believe you want to give them all tools to survive in the society. One of them is educating them. I believe you can [inaudible 00:32:40] the stone with the water when you’re consciously expressing yourself with the proper knowledge, proper information, trying to find a way for them to understand why. So this is my understanding.
Yeah, totally. Kids will come across junk food, but then they eat it and you go, “Well, how do you feel now?” They say not really good and they see why now, and they’re not tempted as much when we go down the lolly aisle of the supermarket. They just go, “Dad, I live with you guys and we understand, we get it.” So yeah.
I love both of that. I feel the same way, Andrea, that kids deserve a solid foundation. They’re building their bodies that they have to live with the rest of their lives, and so I feel like it’s even more important to give them high quality, nutrient dense foods and letting them choose what makes them feel good. Empowering them, well how do you feel after you eat that? They don’t like to feel bad, right? So they’ll make different choices based on that, just because kids are smart. So they want to feel good, they can tell the difference in the way they feel.
Definitely.
Yeah, definitely. Well, another aspect of this is modern adult people, or let’s say family people. Looks like majority of modern society don’t want to feel uncomfortable, and they are looking for more convenient way to live life and one of them is cooking. People tend to make decision, I’d rather go and spend time with my kids being in a fast food restaurant not cooking. They’re making all the time these excuses. This what I’ve found by having conversation with different families, and they ending up having different situation with kids. Of course one of them will be health issues. So when we come back to this question, I think it’s very important to educate parents also. Why it’s important to cook. Sometimes even just cooking fresh food without even ketogenic approach to be honest, people can change their life and then slightly move to the different aspects.
Yeah, totally agree.
Yeah. So I like this question to have keto orientated families. When it comes to meal frequency, Carole mentioned that you have some interesting data.
Yeah. We stumbled across a batch of data from 500,000 people, sorry 500,000 days for about 10,000 people who had recorded for more than two months in my fitness pal. My partner programming the Nutrient Optimiser sent it to me, and did a lot of number crunching and flicked it to me. We were analyzing it, trying to answer those obvious questions that a lot of people argue about what macros work for most people to help them eat less or eat more, and how many meals a day, and which meals. It’s really interesting data and I suppose what we’ve found is that two meals a day, if you’re trying to eat less seems to work well. One meal a day is good but not as good as two meals a day.
I think what happens there is that it’s when you have that one meal a day, you just tend to reward yourself, and it’s hard to limit and potentially you may overeat at that one meal a day, but you can quite reasonably get in two meals a day of a solid amount of protein without having to make it really refined energy dense food, because at that point when you’re really hungry, you just reach … I’ll reach for the peanut butter and the cream and I’m just like I’ve deprived myself for the day. I’m just going to keep on eating because I’ve been so good. For me, I found too that that approach didn’t work but I think if you’re having a couple of robust solid meals a day, that works well and tends to be eating earlier in the day seems to work better. That I think recent study from [inaudible 00:37:29] found that most people eat their required calories for maintenance by about 6:30 in the evening, but most people continue to eat as long as they’re awake.
It’s those calories eaten at night that tend to be easy to, you’ll reach for the bag of chips or the comfort food in front of Netflix. If you start the day with a robust higher protein meal, you’re more likely to not be ravenously hungry later in the day, and store that fat later in the day. I think a lot of people find it more convenient if they’re not trying to lose weight to eat later in the day with the family, and I admit a tad but it seems from the studies in my data analysis from The My Fitness Pal limitations they may have that earlier breakfast and lunch ideally. We don’t live in a perfect world but that seems to be the optimal approach I think. To be honest, it’s hard to do that.
It’s hard to not have that family meal or have a smaller final family meal, and get up in the morning and prepare something that’s got a solid amount of protein and energy to start the day, but I think that seems to be the way that tends to be more satiating, and it help our bodies to crave less food overall.
How about training in the morning? In a fasted mode? To have the meal after the training.
Yeah, that’s the protein eating after the … That’s what I tend to do because I don’t wake up feeling really hungry. So I go to the gym at 5:00 and have some protein after that. I think if you’re trying to restrict overall on a Luis from Ketogains advocates, like a protein coffee or something to start the day before you go training so that by the time you finished your training, the amino acids are available to help build your muscle when you need the repair. So it takes some time to digest and by the time you need that repair at the end of your workout, the amino acids are there. So for me, I’m not quite that finely tuned. I tend to have just naturally through habit, maybe more food at night so I’m starving hungry in the morning. I think if I was trying to restrict overall, maybe prioritizing your food around the workouts like you’re inferring is a really good idea.
Interesting.
What about beverages?
Beverages? I like coffee.
I guess I need a question about that. I’m wondering in your research and data analysis, what pitfalls do you see are common with the beverages, especially the ones that are the most popular on a keto diet. Sometimes people think they need like this high fat coffee, hight fat tea and things like that to be on a ketogenic diet. What insights do you have in your analysis of nutrients related to that?
I suppose personally, I’m not really afraid of artificially sweetened beverages for people that deal with them. Okay, I think you mentioned before that it’s best to get rid of them completely initially, as you learn to sense the real taste of real food. It’s a good thing to go okay, I can taste food, I can taste the nutrients and you’re more attracted to real whole foods. If you get rid of the artificial sweeteners, you get a better chance of letting your taste buds do what they’re meant to which is related to nutrition. A lot of people do well if they start out with a high fat bulletproof coffee introduction to keto. I think that can be helpful to transition them off a really high processed food diet. If once the blood sugar stabilize, once the insulin levels stabilized, once they hunger normalizes, then I think continuing down that path of going, okay, I’ve plateaued, I’m going to have more bulletproof coffee because that’s what drives my ketones up, and that’s what I think leads me to fat loss, doesn’t work for a lot of people, didn’t work for me.
I got to a point where I went, “Gees.” Looked in the mirror, I’m gaining weight. I’m going to know something about nutrition, but maybe if I have more bulletproof coffee, I’ll drive my ketones up and lose fat. It just didn’t work for me and I know it’s not worked for a lot of people, and I suppose I’ve had a fair bit of frustration and maybe anger about that. So I’ve put that into analysis and looking at what optimum ketone levels are, which I suppose people who are really healthy and especially who have been doing a low carb ketogenic diet, maybe athletes, tend to have lower blood sugars, lower ketones, lower triglycerides overall. So a healthy metabolism is one that doesn’t need a lot of fuel floating in the system. It can access the fat as required, and you don’t need really high ketones just like you don’t need high blood sugars all the time.
So if you’re stalled, probably adding more fat is a bad strategy. Maybe looking at ways you can reduce the added fat, so you can find ways to let the fat come from your belly and where you want it to come off is a good thing while keeping enough protein to feed your lean muscle mass, and maintain that lean muscle mass is a great idea. At least in my experience and my research, I know there’s plenty of the incidents full of conflicting ideas about that but that’s what my data has driven me to.
Yeah. It looks like what you’re saying has to do with insulin control where again, coming back to the topic we started. You want to control your insulin with every time you eat something, and the best strategy would be yeah, everything is very individually for every person in the nutrition sense, but overall general rule, we want to know how to control the insulin because this is what caused probably the problem to many people.
Yeah, definitely. Lowering your carbohydrates and having adequate protein, it’s really hard to eat too much protein I think, and having not fearing fat is a really good strategy to stabilize your overall insulin. In the end, insulin is somewhat proportional to your overall energy intake. So if fat does drive up insulin, if you’ve heard of the personal fat threshold, Roy Taylor in the UK did some fascinating research. Looking at the personal fat threshold is you get to a point where your body fat stores are full, and that’s different for different people. Some people can be quite lean but still be diabetic to the point that the fat overflows, and they get too much energy in their blood in the form of high blood glucose, and high ketones, and high triglycerides and at that point, you’ve exceeded your personal fat threshold and you’re diabetic.
Some people can store a whole lot more energy in their fat stores before they become fully blown diabetic, but you have to get to the point of reducing your overall energy intake so your fat stores aren’t over full, and the excess energy flows into your bloodstream which is diabetes and metabolic syndrome. So I think controlling insulin is really fascinating, but I think maybe controlling satiety and overall finding a way that helps you to control overall energy intake is even more important, and maybe even more upstream than focusing on blood glucose or insulin. I think satiety maybe even a higher priority and that’s why I’m a little bit amped about it at the moment.
I love that you brought up that personal fat threshold theory hypothesis, because it’s the opposite of what a lot of people are looking at. So I know it’s a little controversial or maybe a lot where most people say, “Well, insulin is too high, that’s what’s making me fat.” Whereas the personal fat threshold says that you’re too fat, that’s why your insulin is too high. [inaudible 00:46:18], it brings down your insulin. So can you speak to that a little bit?
Yeah. I suppose I was enchanted being married to a type one diabetic, I thought that if we could just eat more fat and less carbohydrates that’d be less insulin and I’d lose weight like a type one diabetic. If you don’t have insulin basically, all your body fat stores flow out into your bloodstream and you see those kids that have uncontrolled in the 20s and they become, they lose all their fat, they lose all their muscle and they die which is really awful. When they inject insulin, they quickly hold onto it and gain it back. So really insulin is like holding a net. It’s like a net that holds your fat stores on it. It’s like a control of the break of your liver that lets the energy from your fat stores flow into your bloodstream, but at the same time, we’re not all type one diabetics.
In a type one diabetic, you’re going to overdose insulin, and that rollercoaster experience really means you end up having too much insulin. The fact that you can’t control the carbohydrate insulin dose means that most, a lot of type one diabetics on a high carbohydrate diet end up overdosing, and end up gaining weight due to the excess insulin. In our body, a pancreas doesn’t, I don’t think produces more insulin that needs to hold back the energy you are consuming. I think that’s a fundamental difference that you need to, a lot of people need to keep in mind is that your pancreas won’t inject more insulin than you need to hold back the energy that’s coming in from your diet. So the fundamental primary thing, is to find a way that you’re not eating more energy than you need, that will drive you insulin high, that will leave you obese and with that excess energy flowing into bloodstream.
So yeah, it’s just a different way to look at it, but I think we need to differentiate between type one diabetics who are injecting insulin, and people who are producing enough insulin to hold back the energy coming from their diet.
Very interesting. Yeah, so maybe we can talk a little bit more about the practical applications for this conversation. How you suggest people to practically apply it.
Yeah. If you want it to break it down to just the macronutrients perspective, not getting adequate protein. I think most people tend to get adequate protein, just the appetite drives them to get adequate protein, getting foods to contain enough fiber which is basically just eating whole foods, not being afraid of vegetables. I think steering away from processed carbohydrates which is just easy to eat, especially when they’re combined with excess fat. Keep in mind like if you’re diabetic, you need to stabilize the blood sugars. Having more fat will definitely help stabilize your blood sugars and transition you away from a high carbohydrate processed diet. Once you get to that point of stabilized on a low carbohydrate diet, look at whether you maybe need to increase your protein and fiber, but decrease your added fat, refined fat to maybe let some body fat come from your body fat stores.
That’s from a macronutrient point of view, but if you want to look at it from a micronutrient point of view, just the Nutrient Optimiser is a tool we’ve developed to analyze your diet, and look at which foods you need to eat more of to get the potassium, and vitamin B, and Magnesium, and selenium, and whatever you’re currently missing from your diet. So generally if you focus on those foods, you tend to have improved satiety, adequate protein, plenty of fiber and all those things that tend to work out as I mentioned before. Then we add the overlay of insulin loads. So if you do have diabetes to some degree, we prioritize stabilizing your blood sugars with a lower insulin load diet.
Great. Anything else you wanted to ask Andre? Did we miss anything?
It’s been a bit of a brain dump, but-
Yeah, yeah but is there anything else-
[crosstalk 00:51:13].
Yeah, the only thing that-
[inaudible 00:51:16].
Yeah. I think if people who listening we touched slightly type one diabetes, what would you say for type two diabetes?
It’s a similar process of initially using a lower insulin load diet to stabilize your blood sugars. Then once you get to that point, you can then focus on that high nutrient density and decide if you need to lose weight. A lot of type twos do need to lose weight because having over full fat stores, and exceeding it personal fat threshold is very fundamental to diabetes basically. I think the cause of diabetes is having fat stores that are over full to the point that the excess energy flows into your bloodstream. So at that point, find a way to optimize your diet and refine your diet, generally eating health foods that are minimally processed to help you work within your personal fat threshold. Basically, find a way to eat a little bit less energy that’ll help stabilize your blood sugars.
I suppose that’s why I’m so motivated hanging around people like Ted Naiman and Luis and Robb Wolf and getting my head around all that. Realizing that the metabolic health is so important to how I think, and how I feel, and how I look in my long term and short term quality of life. So I’m really passionate about it, and I’m trying to put it into actual load time by I do a lot of thinking and writing about it, but putting it into action is a whole different thing. I’m trying my best and it’s a really fun journey and I think it’s really, really, really important and not just to a personal health as a community, but also our economic health and wealth. The current climate is just, food environment is just driving spiraling medical costs that are going to bankrupt us in the very short term. We can’t keep up with the spiraling obesity crisis that is very, very, very expensive in the medical system.
We can’t continue to afford to pay for people being captivated by the modern food environment that just leaves them powerless to not overeat. Like we talked about our kids, when you throw donuts in front of them, there’s a very primal urge to chow them down and they have no off switch. So I’m trying to find that off switch, or empower people with knowledge to find that off switch to enable them to eat a little bit less and control the hunger, and give them the nutrients to thrive and be empowered by food.
Yeah, totally. Another thing I’m always saying, we discussing about food, about hormone gaze, but I’m always saying move your body also. It’s so important. People are like, “Gym, I need to go to the gym. I need time.” I’m saying you know what, actually you don’t need to go to the gym. We pretty much have everything we need in our house. You just need to do a few simple things like just start implementing working every single day. Lifting, carrying, pushing, this is what we need to do in order to have a balance. We don’t need to do this very often, and also moving our bodies crucial competence into the balance game as we mentioned.
Yeah, totally. It’s once you lose your muscle mass as you get older, it’s the muscle that burns the fat and the sugar that keeps your blood sugar stable. So many people get to 70 and they’re weak, and they’re frail and they fall over and break their hip and never get up again. It’s very sad and that’s just how people tend to perish in their older age, and to invest in high level of muscle mass and manage that as a priority now is really an investment in your long term retirement fund of having a good level of muscle mass, so you can age well and live a long high quality life.
Yeah, totally. Awesome.
Lovely. Well, I think we’re ready to wrap this up, aren’t we fellows?
It’s been fun.
Yeah. Thank you so much for all your information, and all your wisdom and tips. We’ve got a lot of these engineering minds that are moving into this nutritional space, and you guys bring us new perspective and approaches to old nutrition information too. So my final question here for you is going to be, this is your final day on earth. The meteors coming at us all, we’re all going to be wiped out. What are you going to pick as your final meal?
Wow. I was going to say the donuts I’ve been holding off on, I don’t know. Just enjoy your food at that point, to do whatever you love. I do just enjoy salmon and steak and actually enjoy spinach. That makes me feel really good and I love that. So I do enjoy eating this way, and spinach mashes, salmon steak. I love it so yeah.
A big [inaudible 00:57:03] it sounds like.
I actually lost my taste for donuts.
Yeah, yeah, that’s funny because you may try it and you’re like, “That’s not even good.”
Yeah, [inaudible 00:57:15].
So where people can find your journey and read more? What is the URL of your blog?
Yeah, I’m optimisingnutrition.com, which Carole will tell you is the British spelling with an S but if you google optimizing nutrition, there’s a blog where a chronicle of my learnings over the last two or three years, a lot of words. Then there’s Nutrient Optimiser which I’ve tried to distill all those learnings into a program, where you can get some suggest meals and suggested foods. It takes you through how you can build new habits. A lot of us have this knowledge, but how do we build new habits to actually stick, starting from the fundamentals and moving from basically buy snack at a bio hacker along that journey from simple to more complex if you need it. Then there’s a Facebook group, Marty Kendall’s Nutrient Optimiser and also Optimising Nutrition is another Facebook group with about 8,000 people that are really smart and I’ve learned a lot from. So that’s where we share all the controversial new research and chat about that. So yeah, but I’d love you to check it out Nutrient Optimiser and check out the free report.
Awesome. Thank you.
Thank you so much for being here, Marty. Thank you for taking the time so early in your day. You probably have to get off to work now, don’t you?
Saturday I’ll be here, we’re ahead of you guys.
A whole day ahead, all right.
One day ahead.
You’ll never catch up.
Well, thank you again for being here. Everyone, thanks for watching/listening.