Have you ever realized that we have 3 back-to-back carby sugar-filled binge-type holidays in the fall, followed by a time of lower temperatures and shorter days? Was it by accident that these all occur at this time of year? Our bodies are designed to overeat and gain weight during the fall in order to survive the winter, a time of year when food has typically been scarce. So does this mean we are doomed to gain weight this time of year and we should just give up and overeat? and do not consider to Avoid seasonal weight gain No!
In this episode, I’ll talk about the cues that signal our body to begin the process. I’ll give some practical (and a few impractical) advice as to what we can do to counteract this innate drive and Avoid seasonal weight gain And share what foods to consume (and what foods to avoid) to offset this.
In other words, check out this episode to learn how to not only survive the holidays and winter without gaining weight, but actually thrive and emerge in the spring a healthier version of yourself!
Are you struggling to stick with keto this time of year?
Have you ever realized that we have three. Back to back, sugary, carby, crappy loaded holidays this time of year.
Is this a coincidence or is there a reason for it?
Guess what? This episode is for you.
Stick around because I’m gonna tell you why my hand looks like that.
And for those of you just listening to the auto, don’t worry, I’ll describe what my hand looks like and why my hand looks like this. And I’m also gonna share with you why our bodies are designed to gain weight this time of year and what we can do about it.
I’m gonna give you, again, three practical things. I’m gonna give you one really impractical thing, but you may want to consider it anyways. And also including what foods to. This time of year and also what foods you want to eat to to make it through this time of year.
So are you ready? Are you ready?
All right. Welcome everyone to episode 56 of Keto Chat Live.
I am your host, Carole Freeman. I have a master’s in nutrition and clinical health psychology, and I also am a board certified keto nutrition specialist. I’m a keto coach and I specialize in women 40 plus that would like to follow keto for long-term, sustainable weight loss and optimal health.
Just so you know too, this show is meant for educational and entertainment purposes only. I sure hope you’re entertained when you’re joining the show. Just gimme a comment, tell me where you’re joining from. I’d love to know, get people all across the country and all around the world. It’s very fun to know where you’re joining us from.
So let me know. Yeah, again, this show is meant for educational and entertainment purposes only. It is not medical advice nor intended to diagnose, prevent, treat or cure any condition if you have questions or concerns. Related to your specific medical condition, please contact your qualified healthcare professional.
So let me know where you’re joining from. I’d love to have you join the show. I can see we’ve got people live, but I can’t see who they are until you actually comment. So I’d love to you to join the show. It’s interactive. One of the reasons I like to do this live rather than just recorded, is I wanna interact with you people.
I love the interaction. So please join the show. All right. Oh, I promise you, I was gonna tell you why my hand looks like this. So for those of you just listening to the audio, my left hand is covered with little various shades of red splotches, swatches. And maybe some of you already are guessing what it is if you are a fan or a frequenter of Ulta or Sephora or some other beauty supply place.
But one of my sisters for my birthday, oh, by the way, yesterday was my birthday. I got a year older. Everyone yesterday was my. And one of my sisters sent me a gift card to Ulta, which is super fun. There is a lip product that I like from Nyx. It’s their xxl. Lingerie lipstick. I don’t have it with me.
I don’t remember the name of it. If you wanna know, gimme a comment and I’ll look it up later and post it in the comments here. But there’s a lip product that I like and I have a couple of shades that I like. And so my sister sent me a gift card for my birthday and I went and swatched a whole bunch of shades if you’ve ever done.
It’s to try ’em. All the testers, I swear they have 20 different. Flavors, not flavors, but just different colors in this product. And so it was fun to swipe ’em all and see if I could find one that I liked. And one of the reasons why I like this product so much is because it is waterproof, it stays on, it doesn’t dry out your lips.
You can put lip gloss over the top of it, but. This sounds like it’s a commercial for this product. It’s not. I’m just, again, having fun with like why my hand looks like this. I literally, I don’t know, it’s been more than 24 hours since I’ve watched all these. Now it does sound like an ad for the product, right?
And I’ve watched my hands so many times and this doesn’t come off. So I went to dinner last night with some friends for my birthday and one of ’em said oh, it looks like you’re getting those aged liver spots on your hands. Wrong color. and it also, it was like, oh, it looks like you might have that AIDS disease or something.
So no, neither of those are true. I just, this is , this is an amazing product. It’s not a commercial for it, but I will look up the product later and put it in the comments for you on Facebook and YouTube so that you can know what it is because yeah, it’s pretty amazing that it wouldn’t even come off of my.
My hand like that. And this is the new shade I got. Don’t remember the name of it. Oh, I think it’s maxed out is the shade I got. It’s a very neutral mauve color, which I like. And I have no idea which one on my hand then it is. But anyways, that’s just a little fun personal update there. I did go up and visit family over Thanksgiving holiday in the US here.
Did you have a good holiday? Did you have a good Thanksgiving? What did you do? And all right. Speaking of Thanksgiving, that’s one of these three carby sugary holidays that we have this time of the year. Have you ever noticed that? So we’ve got Halloween, which is all about the sugar, and one month later in the US we have Thanksgiving, which I’ll tell you inside besides the Turkey and ham.
It’s carb casserole after carb casserole, followed by carb, dessert, carb, dessert, carb, dessert, right? That’s Thanksgiving tradition in the us and then one month after that, we have the Christmas holiday here in the US and that’s also just another carby holiday and typically between.
Thanksgiving I have a friend actually for Thanksgiving. She said she spent an entire week cooking for Thanksgiving. And that may be typical of your family. And then a lot of people have a lot of Christmas holiday traditions as well, where they bake a lot of stuff. They’ve got the family tradition, the recipe, the thing, they bake stuff with the kids and they decorate ’em.
And why? Have you ever stopped to wonder? Actually this just hit. Earlier this year or this season why are there three carb loaded holidays this time of the year? Have you ever stopped? Think about it. I bet you haven’t cuz I hadn’t. It is because our bodies are designed to overeat and gain as much weight as possible at this time of the year.
So it’s no coincidence that we’ve got these three high carb. Holidays this time of year because we’re wired to seek out as much of that kind of food as possible this time of year and then shove as much of it in our mouth as possible. So no wonder we’ve got these family traditions and holidays and all this where we make all of these foods.
We’re following up on how our bodies are designed. We’re we, are, we created all these holidays We structured them all close together because this is what our bodies wanna do this time of year. So does that mean it’s hopeless? We should just give up. We’re designed this way. We can’t help it.
Just pig out and gain as much weight as possible. No, guess what? Yeah, that’s why I’m here. This does not mean we’re doomed. It does not mean we’re doomed. It just means you need to be more mindful this time of the year and have some strategies in place to avoid this and offset this. So again, like I promised, I’m gonna have three strategies for you to offset this.
And one impractical thing. So three practical strategies, one impractical strategy. So you don’t have to buy bigger pants in January. There’s a reason why everybody in January decides it’s time to start a diet. I know it’s a new year, but it’s also just after these three high carbs stuff, your face as much as possible, holidays gained a lot of weight and we don’t need to survive the scarce season.
So the reason our bodies are designed this way, let me cover that. The reason our bodies are designed this way is because. For most of human existence, food was pretty scarce. And food grows in the summer and in the fall is when all these plants start to deposit their sugars in their roots. It’s when things like apples are ripe is in the fall, right?
Them you get all the squashes and the sugary parts of the plants and things like that are all ripe in the fall And. . That’s when food is most abundant in nature, and that is when we are designed to start to eat as much of that as possible. And then we went through the winter. And winter is typically when food is the most scarce for animals and humans on this planet.
Again, not now, but for the most of 200,000 years that humans have been on this planet, food has been really scarce . And so this is the way we’ve been designed over that 200,000 years is harvest the food in the fall and eat, shove as much in our pie hole as possible so we can gain as much weight and make it if we can live through the winter on the fat that we’ve accumulated on our body.
Now for animals, this works well because they don’t have McDonald’s and a Wendy’s and a Burger King on every corner and a Starbucks with 14 kinds of sugary things you can add to your drinks. Also shout out, this is just. My girlfriend, so sweetly, I love the color on this. Sent me this for my birthday, as being in a Starbucks.
She sent me this for my birthday. Cute little drink cup that has a straw on it. And what I have in here is water. And I have an element packet. So L M N T, drink LMNT. Also not sponsoring the show, I think they should though. In here with water, which is a electrolyte packet, it’s primarily salt and a tiny bit of stevia.
This is the watermelon flavor one. I don’t know where that, excuse me, picking something on my teeth. And so that’s what’s in here. But so I use my Starbucks cup for good, not for sugary drinks. Thank you Stephanie for the cup. Very sweet. And. All right, so back on track here. Where were we? Okay, so 47 kinds of sugar you can get in your Starbucks drinks.
And you can gain as much weight as possible very easily now. But unfortunately we’re still working with that. Like our body’s biology is wired this time of year to start to gain weight. How does it know? How does it know? Why is it that even though the amount of food that’s available this time of year for us is the same as it is in January and February and April, why is it that, how does our body still know that this is the time of.
There’s a couple of things that are happening out in the environment by weather and also change of the seasons that your body actually can notice. So one is that the temperatures are getting cooler. Your core temperature in your body is feeling that it’s cooling down. That’s one of the signals that your body recognizes.
And also the daylight hours in the day are getting shorter. Those are two primary reasons that your body knows, oh, this is the time where we need to pick out. And so those cue. Correlate with increased appetite more commonly over eating. And oh, it just happens to coincide with these three holidays I just mentioned as well as to why we start to overeat this time of year.
Right? Is this all starting to make sense, becoming very clear? You also might start to feel a little hopeless oh my gosh, are we doomed? Is there anything we can do? I can’t make the sun shine more hours and warmer outside. All right, , those are the two things primarily that are happening that signal to our body that this is fall and it’s time to start to eat as much as possible.
And so are you having trouble this time of year? Are you feeling like you have more cravings? Part of it is these high-carb foods are everywhere you look in the grocery store, but we’ve put them there. We’ve designed them to be there so that we can overeat them. So maybe you do feel like this is harder time of year To my tips.
Three Things You Need To Do Right Now
All right, so the three things you need to do right now if you don’t wanna buy bigger pants of January. If you want to keep strong and steady on your healthy eating plan, one thing is you want to do light therapy. Two, you wanna warm up that core of your body. And three is the foods I’m gonna mention that are gonna help nourish your body and satisfy your nourishment needs without filling up on extra calories and carbohydrates that just make you gain weight.
And then I’m gonna give you bonus number four, which is the one that’s totally impractical, but it’s the finest one, and I really think you should consider it . So number one light therapy. This is what, so I recently moved, a couple years ago, I moved from Seattle, Washington, which is Northern Latitudes have the most trouble with this.
Also, like if you’re on the bottom half of the planet as well, and you’re in the very southern latitudes, not this time of year but six months from now when your seasons are opposite of ours, you have the same challenges. And actually, I would wonder, I’m gonna reach out to. I have some business acquaintances that are in New Zealand and Australia, and I’m gonna ask them if they have springtime, really carby holidays that they struggle with.
So I’m gonna do some intelligent work, some intelligence gathering here for you all. So I. In Seattle, northern latitudes. If you live in the northern latitudes, it is much more challenging because you have more of a stark contrast between the summer and the fall and winter. And so you’re gonna have much cooler temperatures than where I moved two years ago, I moved down to Phoenix, Arizona.
We have much more temperate. I know a lot of people think that it’s like an oven down here and it’s a thousand degrees every day. It’s not true right now, this time of year. December 1st is when I’m recording this. We’re going live. It’s 70 degrees today. It’s very comfortable. I’m in short sleeves, I’m wearing pants, I’m all dressed up.
That’s Arizona. Dress up is wearing pants, and it’s very comfortable. So the farther north you are, the farther south you are, the more you’re gonna struggle with this. And Light therapy is where, and I did this when I was, I lived up in the Seattle area, so light therapy is, you wanna buy a specific type of light box.
There’s a bunch of different brands. You could just Google this, look it up on Amazon, but you wanna find one that has 10,000 lux and L U X is the brightness of the bulbs that are in there. It needs to be 10,000 lux or higher. That is the research proven brightness of light that you need in order to get this effect and the research therapy.
Shows that you wanna do this for 20 minutes first thing in the morning. However, when I was there, what I found worked best for me was to actually just have it shining in my eyes all day long at my desk. And If you have a job where you can actually, if you’re at a desk and you can have it on your desk shining into your face, that’s great.
Otherwise, if you’re something where you can’t have it shining on you, you’ll want to use it first thing in the morning, maybe in your bathroom or as you’re en enjoying your coffee in the morning, something like that. The key is that it needs to be shining straight into your eyes. It can’t be shining off to the side, it can’t be behind you.
It needs to get in your eyes. And so that’s how the. Whatever sensors in her body get stimulated that it’s bright and it’s sunny and it’s not fallen winter and it’s not time to eat as much as possible. Okay? So the number one tip is to get a light therapy, a therapy light box. And again, you want for look for 10,000 lux.
There’s countless brands that you can get that, that serve this. So again, the key is that 10,000 lux. That’s the brightness of the bulb or the bulbs in there. And again, you can do, research shows doing it 20 minutes in the morning. Prevents seasonal effective disorder, which is the depression that goes along with this.
But I found for me, for best mood, and again, experiment for yourself and see what works best for you is I had it shining in my face all day long during the fall and winter, and. The number two tip is gonna be about warming up your core. So remember I said that the outside temperatures or the other thing that’s triggering your body right now to crave and consume and eat as much as possible.
So warming up your core of your body with things like a sauna. And this is gonna be more than just taking like a hot bath. This is gonna be traditional sauna, like a steam sauna, but also infrared saunas are really good, shown to. Heat up the core of the body and you can, these are things you can buy in your house.
You can go places that have them. So I know a lot of the tanning beds in the north actually have these. You can go in and sit in them, so monthly membership and you can go use the infrared sauna a box thing that they have, and they’re very comfortable. It doesn’t get, doesn’t feel as hot on the external skin as a traditional heat or wet sauna.
And it is penetrating your skin and it’s heating up on the inside. It’s not heating as much on the outside. So if you find that a traditional sauna is just too much, you can’t take it, then the infrared sauna may be your friend. Infrared sauna is also. Been shown or it’s theorized to speed up metabolism as well.
This may be part of what’s going on, right? So our metabolism is speedier In the summer when things are warmer and perhaps infrared heating up the core of your body is also. Part of what is simulating that summertime and it’s not time to pick out and eat too much. So my number three tip is then gonna be about the types of foods you want to eat and the types of foods you want to avoid. So in general, I’m gonna recommend to most of my clients that they avoid these foods all year long.
Sticking with your low carb diet, avoiding, sugary things, pasta, bread, grains. All of those things. Tortillas, corn, that kind of stuff. Avoiding all of that stuff year round, and especially this time of year, because again, if you consume those things, your body right now is wired in primed to eat as much of those as possible.
So you’re gonna crave them, you’re gonna be obsessed with them. You’re gonna not be able to limit the amount. You’re going to overeat them, and your waistline’s going to expand and you’re gonna feel pretty uncomfortable. The other thing to go I didn’t mention this yet, but these three high carb, sugary holidays that we have back to back this time of.
Do you also notice that how rampant flu and cold and viruses are this time of year when you consume high sugar, high refined carbohydrates, it suppresses your immune function. And it’s probably no wonder then that we’ve got these three high carb, sugary holidays followed by flu season. Maybe it’s just sugar poisoning season.
I don’t know. Alright. What are the foods? Okay, so I mentioned what to avoid. You wanna avoid actually the things you’re gonna, you would crave. Now the clients I’m working with, we teach them tricks and tools to avoid cravings and so they shouldn’t be having these cravings, but these are gonna be the foods you often crave this time of year if you’re not doing the other two things I mentioned, which is heating up your core of your body and using the light therapy.
And so avoid process refined sugar carbohydrate. Those things just aren’t doing any good for anybody’s health. You wanna focus on, Protein rich foods, that should be the basis of each meal. And I’m gonna lean in. So I actually a fun fact, I used to teach at a school in Portland, Oregon. That was a really cool certification they offered.
That was in Western Nutrition and also Eastern Nutrition. So they brought in Chinese principles. to their nutrition. I taught the western side of the classes and then the other, one of the other instructors taught the eastern side. And I learned so much really cool stuff about how Eastern Nutrition looks at Chinese nutrition, looks at things that nourish your body.
And so this is actually pulling from that. So you wanna go for slow? Foods this time of year. Slow cook, slow cooked. So heat, you want those warm foods. That’s why we crave things like stews and soups and we want roasted veggies this time of year. Slow cooker or pressure cooker for your meats. So they’re soft and tender and they’re well cooked.
That’s gonna be ideal, especially leaning into the red meats as well, because those are gonna be the most nutrient dense. Your what are they called? Peter Ballerstedt.. Said, what are they called? The Ruminati. So you want like lamb and beef and buffalo. What else is in that category? Are goats ruminants?
I think goats are ruminants. Anyway, so ruminants. red meat, slow cooked or pressure cooked, instant pot, those types of meats are gonna help you get the maximum nutrition out of those. Meats right now. And when you slow cook, you instant pot cook those meats, it actually helps break down the tissues so much that it’s much easier to get the minerals out of there.
So there’s the western side of why this works. The eastern side is you want those heat cooks. So as you’re thinking about heating up the core of your body, you want to think about the foods are also gonna be heating up. The core of your body as well. So again, this is why we crave more warm foods, the time of year, and you want to do cooked veggies as well There’s a reason why salads don’t sound as good in the fall and winter as well.
Cooking Your Vegetables
Cooking your vegetables and also cooking them to death. Do you remember a time when we told people like, oh no, you wanna have raw everything. That’s the healthiest way to eat vegetables. It turns out that’s not true. Actually, the more cooked vegetables are, the more. Easily we can assimilate the minerals that are in there.
And so this is the theme of the winter. The fall and winter is maximizing nutrients and maximizing minerals that you can get from those foods. And so cooked veggies, think about roasting, tossing in some kind of oil or fat, and then roasting them, the oven even boiling them and pureeing them into soup.
Think of like mushroom soup or cauliflower or broccoli soups. Cooking them, maybe roasting them first and then peering them into a soup. Those are gonna be ways you’re gonna be able to get maximum nutrients, and that’s also gonna be that Chinese medicine approach to warming the core of your body. These are considered warming foods.
Again, I’m not gonna go totally into the depths of it, but that is the basis of how they look at cooling or warming. I forgot the other terms for foods. So that’s the secret to. The foods you want to eat this time of year want to be ones again, low carb. This is a keto show after all.
So boil ’em first. Then they cook ’em in a pan with some fat, and they cook ’em for a long time. And then you finish it with a little bit of vinegar, which also helps break ’em down and helps our body start the digestion process. So cooked greens this time of year too. And also, the other thing that’s gonna be warming to your core is gonna be spicy things.
So spicy food, add some spicy spices in there. There’s a reason. Chi tea this time of year. Sounds good. Even the pumpkin spice craze. There’s some warming spices in there. And also think about spicy things, so chili peppers, chili powder, and cayenne, whatever else. What else is spicy? Maybe a little bit of sriracha sauce, hot sauce.
Frank’s hot sauce. Have you ever made homemade buffalo sauce before? 50% Frank’s red hot, 50% butter. So easy ma. Just warm it up in a pan or the microwave. And you’ve got frank’s, you’ve got buffalo sauce. Put it on chicken, put it on anything. It’s really delicious. But also, that’s another way of heating up your core this time of year, is those spicy foods.
All right. You got some ideas of what you might make for dinner tonight or this week, or this next week. Lots and lots of new possibilities here. If you feel like you’re getting bored with food, here’s a bonus tip for you. If you’re getting bored with food, think about all the different types of proteins you like.
Think about all the different ways you can cook it, the different cuts of them. And then add one, one spice to it and one vegetable. You literally could not eat the same meal the rest of your life and have a different meal every single day. Every meal and not run out of combinations that are low carb. So there’s no reason to be bored with your food.
All right, so I promised you three practical things you could do right now to offset our body’s tendency to want to re, to gain a lot of weight this time of year. And I promised you one. One, impractical one. So here’s the impractical one. Guess what? Move . Move your entire household and your body to a warmer location.
Go closer to the equator. People that live close to the equator don’t have this tendency to gain weight in the fall. In the winter, the foods are different there. They don’t have a lot of these root vegetables and other things. Seasonal foods that are very high in starchy, sugary carbs. They maybe have a lot more fruit there, but they also don’t have this tendency to overeat at this time of the year.
the length of the day is the same all year long, and the temperatures are pretty moderate all year long. They don’t have big changes. So move. That’s one of the reasons, one of the reasons that I moved to Phoenix, Arizona, from Seattle is the climate. And so if, like I said, I promised one impractical, one totally impractical, right?
But this is also why a lot of people take a vacation this time of year to a sunny location. They and I think I see this a lot January, February, March, probably are more common that people go to those sunny locations closer to the equator because they can only take so much of this, eat as much as possible and hibernate and not move.
All right, so what do you think of that? Next episode, I’ve got a special bonus episode this week. Typically we’re live on Thursdays, 4:00 PM Pacific. That’s sixth Central, seven Eastern. If you’re listening to the recording, they live on Forever out there on the podcast world, wherever you listen to podcasts.
But this week I’ve got two episodes for you. I’m doing a bonus episode on Friday. We’ll be doing it live at, oh, what time is it? It is at 11:00 AM Pacific. That is one central. Two Eastern, and this is going to be about anxiety, food, and your weight with my good friend Katie McKenna, who is a certified nutritionist and a licensed mental health counselor in Washington State.
And we’re gonna be talking about what is anxiety? What are some ways that we can manage anxiety, reduce it, reframe it. What does it do? Why is it, why do we have anxiety? We’re gonna talk about how anxiety affects the foods that we. And vice versa. We’re gonna talk about how what you eat affects your level of anxiety that you experience.
So don’t miss that episode. And if you’re listening later on the recordings look for that releasing soon. So today’s episode, we talked about the seasonality of weight gain. Why is it that we crave and overeat? Why we put three high carb, overeat, holidays in a row, in, in the us. wire bodies are designed this way to try to help us survive the winter when food was scarce.
But guess what? We got too much food. And I gave you three practical things to do. One totally impractical thing to do. But you know what? So many people from Seattle have been moving to Phoenix over . I’m not suggesting everyone moved to Phoenix, but also a lot of people moved to Arizona and Texas over. Oh, in Florida too.
So there’s a lot of people that took the opportunity to be able to move. So that’s my impractical one. And so if you like what you heard today and you’d like to get more personalized support for your keto journey, if you’re looking for a keto coach near you, I invite you to check out my website, keto Carole.com.
Let me put that up on the screen here for you. Check it out. If you haven’t been my website yet, I’ve got my personal story on there before and after photos. People love those. I’ve got a lot of stories of my clients’ success stories and so much more. So if you wanna check out my story, it’s remarkable.
Cuz after three, three degrees, five years in school, a hundred thousand dollars in student loans. Oh, and that just keeps going up. I still didn’t figure this out until a really bad car accident. Okay? So go check out my website, KetoCarole.com. Read my story. If I work very closely with my clients and I only open up 10 client spots per month, that’s how exclusive the work is that I’m doing with my clients.
So I work with people by application. I wanna make sure that it’s the right fit, that I can help you, and that I’m the right person for you. So again, if you’re ready to stop messing around, If you’re ready for the next chapter of your life where you are the best version of yourself, I invite you to apply to work with me.
Visit my website, KetoCarole.com. Carole has an E on the end. It’s a very fancy French spelling and see if we’re a match. And remember, if you enjoyed the show, help us grow and we’ll help you shrink. So that’s all for today. Thanks. I’ll see you next time. Bye now.
Join Carole as she chats with Randy Webb, clinical psychotherapist and hypnotherapist about techniques to help ease overwhelming feelings, so that you can move away from using food as your only way of coming with emotions and stress and end emotional eating.
Randy will be teaching us about:
1. Butterfly Hug: a technique developed by therapists Ignacio “Nacho” Jarero and Lucinda Artigas to help traumatized children get reoriented right after a hurricane in Mexico.
2. Safe/Calm/Magical place: a technique developed by trauma therapist and innovator Francine Shapiro that helps you to be present with all your senses and then tapping yourself to strengthen your affirmations and gifts.
3. Emotional Freedom Technique: a method probably derived most from the first evidence-based energy therapy called Thought-Field Therapy by psychologist Roger Callahan which involves tapping at various points or energy centers or meridians in the body while making affirmations.
Carole will also share the details of her program, The Pathway to End Emotional Eating, so that you can end emotional eating, without spending years in therapy, and stay on your healthy keto eating habits.
Do you struggle to stick with your healthy eating habits due to emotional and or stress eating? Do you wish you had a magic wand you could just wave and eliminate emotional eating? Would you like to learn about some easy ways to cope with overwhelming feelings, emotions, stress, and even trauma? Guess what? This episode you should probably turn out now. No, I’m just kidding. This episode is for you. Wouldn’t that be cruel if I’m like all those things we can’t help? No, that’s what this episode is all about. I’ve got a special guest here. Stick around. You’re gonna learn three easy techniques to release.
Overwhelming feelings, emotions, trauma in the body with our very special guest, Randy Webb, psychotherapist and hypnotist. And I was teasing the other day about how people are terrible introducers because they say the name up front, and so as you’re supposed to hype it all up, and then you say their name is the last thing.
So this is what we do in comedy, right? I’m supposed to say all these great things Randy’s, or see, I’m not supposed to say your name. I did it again. Three techniques to release trauma with my very special guest, psychotherapist and hypnotist. Randy Webb. There we go. That’s how you’re supposed to do it. Hi Carole. I guessed her already. Shelly, I’m so glad you’re here. Hi, Shelly. Yeah. Anyone else watching? Give us a hi. I can see that we do have people watching live. And go ahead and tell us hi, where you’re joining us from, join the show. This is Live and Interactive. The reason I do this live is cuz I love the interaction.
Table of Contents
I also, I like it not perfect. Okay. I wanna get information out there in an easy way for me. This is not a polished podcast, I’ll tell you right now. So again, there’s two reasons why I like to do it live is that it doesn’t have to be perfect. It takes less time and effort to do this for me cuz I love to talk. I just, I love to talk to people and and then also we get to have the interaction with the people that are watching. So we’ve got somebody else our Facebook user, Facebook group that’s for Baltimore. One of the weird things about Facebook is you have to allow us to show your name on Stream Yard.
So there’s a way you can allow that within the. Within the Facebook group or within the, whatever the comment says there. But you could also just tell us who your name is and then I’ll probably recognize you. And we’ve also got Jennifer joining. Hi Carolyn, Randy joining from Pennsylvania. Woo. I’ll look at this. We’ve got three people watching us. Love it. Love it. Okay. I know Jennifer’s always telling me, she’s like, when is your next episode coming out? I can’t wait for more. So I’m so glad she Got it here live. All right.
Join Carole as she chats with Randy Webb, clinical psychotherapist and hypnotherapist about techniques to help ease overwhelming feelings, so that you can move away from using food as your only way of coming with emotions and stress and end emotional eating.
Welcome everyone to Keto Chat Live. I am your host, Carole Freeman ,have a master’s in nutrition and clinical health psychology. I am a certified clinical hypnotherapist and a board certified keto nutrition specialist. But, More importantly, I specialize in helping women 40 plus follow a keto diet for sustainable weight loss. And the medical disclaimer here, this show is meant for educational and entertainment tongue, tire, tongue tied purposes only.
Apparently there’s the entertainment part entertainment purposes only. It is not medical advice nor intended to diagnose, prevent, treat or cure any condition whatsoever. If you have any specific questions or concerns related to your specific needs, specific medical conditions, what Try saying 10 tongue twisters. And I think cures everything. No, seek out the help of a qualified healthcare professional. And alright. Welcome Randy. Okay, let me tell, let me do a little bit more of Randy’s intro. And if you have watched us live before, this is a repeat episode, but if you’re listening to just the audio only this Future podcast, it’s fresh to you.
But the audio we did before. Frankly it was garbage. So yay, I get to have Randy back and do this again. The things that he’s gonna teach you today are just, they’re so easy, so powerful. They help with stress as well. So not just emotional eating, but just if you’re feeling overwhelmed and stressed. And it turns out that I always have him as a guest, when I personally need it. So I hope you get value, but this is what I need today. Everyone. . And I actually, I know Randy because I went to a school at Bastyr University. I graduated 10 years ago now, and I did a double master’s in nutrition and psychology at the same time.
Part of my degree was that I had to get, do an internship. And so I met Randy because he was my supervisor during my psychology internship. And we’ve been friends, I guess now for 10 years. Wow. I can’t believe it’s been that long. And finally, enough is that, I met Randy in the Seattle area. He’d moved from Phoenix, and shortly after moving to Seattle, he went back to Phoenix. But we’ve since switched places, I actually fell in love with Phoenix, going to visit Randy every year in March, getting away from the rain and depression in Seattle. And during the pandemic I decided to move to Phoenix and Randy had relocated to Portland, Oregon area at that time.
So we joke now about how our weather has switched. So you’re getting how many days of no rain and 90 degrees this weekend in Portland?
Randy Webb: Yes. It’s been pretty dry, just a little rain since mid-June. And it’s supposed to be nearly 90 again, 90 again this weekend. And they’re wildfires and it’s smoky and it’s super dry. It’s very strange looking. Oh,
Carole Freeman: so instead of the haboob, you get the smoke. And then let me look at the weather here. So we should. , oh, you’ll, oh, you’ll get a kick out of this Sunday. Our high is supposed to be 78 in Phoenix and 37% chance of rain, which means it’s gonna rain . And we’re having apparently record rainfall in Phoenix this year, and the northwest is drier than ever. Apparently pretty soon we’re just gonna swap climates, , it’ll be, and ironically, Randy loves rain, and you move someplace that doesn’t have rain. And I moved away from the rain, and that’s all I’m getting right now. .
Randy Webb: Strange things happening. Oh, alright. Very topsy turvy .
Carole Freeman: Alright. I should get back to the written stuff I’m supposed to be reading now. Randy Webb has a lot of initials after his name. M a m c l M H C. He’s a psychotherapist of 26 years trained by the Milton h Erickson Foundation in clinical Hypnosis and strategic therapy. A master trainer in neural sequential model in caregiving and has worked as a volunteer trainer of EMDR therapy is a certified Adobe captivate, activate captivate. I didn’t bring my glasses. Captivate specialist and currently works for both Shion Consulting LLC of Phoenix and as a technical trainer. specialist Technical training specialist for Washington State Department of Health in Olympia, Washington. So welcome Randy to the show officially.
Randy Webb: It’s a delight to be here again, Carole.
Carole Freeman: It’s fantastic.
Wonderful. Thank you for our viewers here. Alright, so we’re gonna go over three different techniques and I love this last time cuz I immediately went and taught it to my To my ladies. I went over coaching calls and it was, it’s all the synchronicities I love, right? Like I said, how I forget all of these in my own life have a lot of stress. And then I’m like, oh, that’s right. How did I forget these? And then they literally, these are so easy to learn and immediately implement that you all can go and teach this to somebody else immediately with no training besides just watching us here. That’s how easy they are. Extremely effective. I promise if you do them along with us today, you’re gonna feel, oh, just so much more peace and ease and calm.
Just thinking about them. I already feel, calm and easy. So we’re gonna do something called the butterfly hug. A the second one is a safe, calm, magical place. Number three is an emotional freedom technique. Let’s see, as far as like the third one is the more complicated of them, but still very doable as well. And the nice thing is that, If you’re listening to the podcast of this, you can save this recording and listen to it and do it along in the future. So listen to this as needed.
And if you’re watching the video of this, you can just bookmark this as well. Like it. And if you’re on YouTube, go ahead and subscribe to future notifications and that way you can refer to this in the future. So very easy. But if you forget them put a reminder on your calendar for about a week from now and put this episode in there and, because I guarantee you’re gonna need it again and you’re gonna forget. Alright, so Randy, tell us a little bit about, so let’s start with a butterfly hug.
Tell us about the, how it was developed and how it came to be.
Butterfly Hug:
Randy Webb: The butterfly hug, like all three techniques we’re gonna show you were the result of one of those situations where, Difficulties are kinda like the mother of invention, so to speak. And in the case of the butterfly hug, some trauma therapists who actually were trained in a number of different methodologies, including EMDR therapy, were helping families and individuals in me near in Mexico and after a hurricane Pauline, in the eighties, I wanna say was the late eighties. These two practitioners who were based in Mexico saw these children who were separated from their families.
They were disoriented people, in a really serious hurricane, people can get disconnected from each other and get lost. And based on the learning they had about the beauty of helping people get still and applying some sort of stimulation like we do in EMDR therapy, they gathered the children together and to help them feel centered and relatively less traumatized or to, or maybe a better way to put it, is just help them cope better with this very disorienting experience of all this destruction and people being disconnected and lost from each other, even if temporarily Lucinda Aga and Ignacio Jdo, or Nacho Jdo, as they call ’em, both of them psychologists, gathered the children together and they said, we wanna show you something.
So first, as we oftentimes do with a lot of these techniques we use and all these trauma therapies, the these very simple to use techniques oftentimes start with breathing. So where they started is they ask the children to just. Gathering together, think we’re getting that kind of support from being in a group. And so that’s where it came from. And so that’s the origins of it. But there are many techniques like that used in all the trauma therapies to help people just start to get centered. So if you would like, I’ll go ahead and demonstrate the two parts of it.
Carole Freeman: Sounds great. Please do.
Parts of Butterfly Hug:
Randy Webb: Outstanding. Now, the purpose of this, besides what I’ve already mentioned, like a lot of these techniques, if you ever do any kind of trauma therapy or any kind of trauma work, you’ll see that oftentimes the idea behind this is we have some idea neurologically, is that when you help people get in touch with themselves and get in touch with their bodies, start to notice their breathing, notice their emotions, be the observers of their thoughts, it increases the chance that this most human part of the brain.
The prefrontal cortex is, Bruce Perry says, for example, is open for business. It increases the chance that you’ll gain some clarity. You can do some problem solving. And so in the case of the butterfly hook, the first part is to breathe by moving your diaphragm. And there are all kinds of different breathing practices aren’t there, whether you’re practicing Tai chi or yoga or meditation or chigong or any number of other practices.
You can do all kinds of things and I’m gonna show you some variations with that. But the first piece is to fill the belly full of air in such a way that you’re making the diaphragm move. So you’re not, when you’re anxious, you might notice that you’re breathing in a shallow way, , you may not, you may or may not be aware of it, but you may tend to do that. And what this is doing is actually choosing, there’s something very powerful and therapeutic about you choosing something. Isn’t that interesting? So the choosing to fill the belly full of air and you can do things like count the number of seconds you’re breathing in and then holding and then counting the number of sec seconds you’re breathing out, you know you’re exhaling.
You can breathe in through the nose and out the mouths. You can put your tongue behind your top teeth when you’re breathing in behind your bottom teeth. When you’re exhaling, all of these are designed to do something similar. You increase the oxygen flow, you’re giving that nervous system of yours, a chance to be still to the power of the pause, increases the chance that you’ll gain clarity about what is needed.
There are all these incredible benefits besides just simply getting more oxygen. For example, you might breathe in. And you can do all those other things if you want to. The counting, the putting your tongue behind the top teeth, behind the bottom teeth when you excel. You can do all those things if you want to. But that’s the first piece. And then what Lucinda and Nacho did is they asked the children to employ the butterfly hug.
This one part breathing and one part, dual alternating stimulation is the technical term for it, or bilateral stimulation. There’s something beautiful about bilateral stimulation. So whether you’re walking or dancing or playing an instrument or playing drums or cycling or jogging or hiking, dancing, we believe, seem to have similar therapeutic effects. In this case, what they ask the children to do is to make a butterfly with their hands. Just have your hands going towards each other until the thumbs meet, until it makes a butterfly. Then place that butterfly. Roughly here on either side of your sternum, know where your collarbone might be. And slowly while doing that diaphragmatic breathing, that deep breathing, slowly tapping.
There is no limit as to how long you can do that if you prefer, because for any number of different reasons, this may seem like it’s getting in the way . And so instead, if you feel more comfortable, just place your hands over your shoulders like this or over your upper arms. And hopefully the air is cleaner where you are than it is here in western Oregon and western Washington.
Carole Freeman: I’m as you’re going through this motion too, I’m noticing that it parallels, a parent’s natural. When you wanna calm somebody you do this slow pat. So there’s something innate about that, that we do know as calming and soothing to pat them rhythmically.
Randy Webb: There’s something beautiful about rhythm and we are seeing Bruce Perry and other people who study child development, who study attachment who, and I work with caregivers.
I educate caregivers and foster adoptive parents. And we are seeing some of the effects of the pandemic where people weren’t getting enough of that rhythm that helping them co-regulating. And it’s very powerful, that touch that proximity. The offering rhythm is a very healing and powerful thing. And one thing that we find is that when people don’t get enough of that, they’re more likely to be impulsive and attempt to self-regulate in ways that are not quite so healthy. They’re more impulsive.
Carole Freeman: like overeating, highly processed foods.
Randy Webb: Exactly. And we see evidence that when people are not present, they’re not mindful, they’re not getting enough of that rhythm, they’re not giving themselves enough of that rhythm, enough of that mindfulness.
The power of the pause, the prefrontal cortex doesn’t work as well. And it’s the executive function. It helps you delay gratification, helps you see the bigger picture and helps you plan. It helps you follow through. And if you have anything that’s overly stressful and is not resolved, you’re much more likely to go to a quick fix on multiple fronts than of course that would obviously, I’m not a nutritionist, but I would very well suspect that a person’s much more likely to engage in eating patterns that are not healthy.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. Who feels better? Just already give me a thumbs up emoji. Give me the heart one, the reaction, or just give me a yes in the comments of you feel it already and we’ve just begun. That’s just number one .
Randy Webb: And there’s so many, oh, there’s so many you can use.
Carole Freeman: Next let’s let’s go to the safe, calm, magical place.
And I, during my graduate program, during one of the summers, I did take training in hypnosis. And so this was one of the techniques that we learned in helping people get into that hypnotic state of deep relaxation was going to this safe, calm, magical place. I have. Experience with leading people through this one. But this is Randy’s time to shine. So I’ll let him him walk through. So Shelly’s reporting that she’s feeling very, it’s very calming. Oh, wonderful.
Randy Webb: Yeah. That’s outstanding. Safe, calm place. Safe, calm state. Uh, Safe, calm, magical place. Happy place. Gets called a lot of, and people make, you’ll hear it in pop psychology and in pop culture.
I think he went to his happy place. You’ll hear these references to it. And it really is used in so many different approaches and therapeutic approaches where the goal is like the butterfly hug is to increase the chance that the person will focus well, will get centered, get mindful. We’ll have a pause, we’ll have a break long enough to give whoever is in the role of the facilitator, the operator, the therapist. The helper the coach, whatever that role that person may have is to increase the chance that the person start to encounter strengths and values and motivations to be elicited and used in that person’s life, to help that person gain a sense of power, in your circumstances, and you’re more likely to grow and to learn and to be open to newness.
When we help you be in the present, we meet you where you are, we respect your background, your values, your culture, what your motivations are, we’re just simply more likely to find out what those things are, and we can do it pretty efficiently if we can engage in some sort of exchange of information or communication that helps you focus and it may involve relaxation. We’re hoping that you’ll feel safe more than anything else. We’re trying to, we find, and there’s some varis philosophy behind it, but. Safe, calm place is one of those wonderful techniques that kind of embody so much of what Carole’s talking about. And and you can do that great breathing as you do it.
I’m going to I’m gonna give an example of what that sounds like. And there are many beautiful variations based on how each person shows up. You each have a unique nervous system with unique memories and unique experiences. And the job of the helper is to customize it for you. So you, each one of you, even though what I’ll say we’ll see how, what you think about it, you, there’ll be certain pieces of what you’ll That sounds familiar to me somehow. And what if it works really well? Not only does it help you focus and help you get really centered and. But if it works really well, it can help you get in touch with some things that really matter to you and some of your goals and your dreams and your motivations and indications of your values.
So that’s what makes it so among so many things, something that we use in so many different approaches. So what do you think?
Carole Freeman: I’m ready. Outstanding. Let’s go to this magical place. I wanna go to my happy place.
Randy Webb: All right. Okay. So here’s how we’ll start, and there are a lot of different ways we can begin, but I’ll go adding some pieces to it as we go along.
So with your eyes open, or with your eyes closed, or somewhere in between, and invite you to think of a place it can be real or it can be imaginary. Or a combination of the two, and you can think of this place where it feels so good to just be. And as you think of that place where it feels so good to just be, it can let yourself breathe. And as you’re there, you can notice, begin to notice the time of day or the time of year. You can be aware if you’re alone or if there are other people there. And because you’re doing that, you can begin to notice certain colors and shades and the way the light is reflected off certain shapes and textures.
And as you take another breath, you may notice that something invites you to become aware of the sound, and you can hear that sound or those sounds. Some of them nearby, some of them far away, or maybe just some in between the two there for a moment, some of them go away. And new ones may appear. And as you’re noticing the sound or sounds in this place where it feels so good to just be, it can take a breath and notice that something seems to be inviting you to be aware of the smell since you are there observing the fragrances, hints of one kind of smell. Some others, oh, that can feel so good to just notice and observe.
And the more that you notice, , the more you just observe, just letting whatever emotions or thoughts do whatever they’re going to do, it becomes easier and easier to be aware of. Tastes. You can savor those tastes, some of them reminding you of such wonderful tastes of the past. Others, perhaps something you anticipate tasting, or you can just be in the present. Just notice.
Noticing that more and more, feeling the invitation to notice other sensations, some on the surface, some of them underneath. And as some parts of the body are in movement, others are still adjusting, cycling the way they do as your system and systems are observing, doing things with information or just being all of that perfectly in time with everything else you’re experiencing in this place that feels so good to just be. Thoughts of what to do and where to be can be as present to the side, in front or behind with as much or as little as you choose in this moment. And as you’re letting yourself just observe and feel the just wonderful, eternal present of this place, a gift, I invite you to think, to be aware of a word or a phrase.
That would remind you if you were to see it or hear it or write it or to say it. You could remember how good it feels to be in this place. And when you’re ready and you have a sense of the wonderful connection between this word or phrase and this place. Then just allow yourself to tap yourself. You can use the butterfly hug. You can tap yourself on the legs, on the arms, or anywhere you like. If you want to open your eyes and watch me, you can, but you don’t have to. You can rock from one side to the other. You can tap your shoulders just very slowly while breathing and filling the belly full of air. Thinking of that place and that word or phrase that reminds you of how good it feels to just be, just tapping slowly.
Now we’re going to test if a it a little bit. Let’s try it out. Let’s try out your new technique of safe, calm place. Invite you to think of something that might be just a little bit irritating, maybe on a zero to 10 scale, like a one or a two. Something just maybe something that’s been on your mind is mildly irritating or has you worried a little bit perhaps concerned. Allow yourself to just notice that irritating thing that might be mildly stressful. Just notice it.
And then when you have a good idea of what that looks like, feels then think of that word or phrase that reminds you of that place, or it feels so good to just be and just breathe through it now. When you’re ready, you can come back to your present. I’ll count to five. For those of you who might benefit from that, I. Five each time more aware who you are, where you are, and what’s happening. Four more aware. Feeling, the connections between you and that wonderful, safe, magical, happy place. Three.
Allowing more connections while feeling more and more in the here and now and what’s going on. Two, perhaps feeling refreshed, renewed, experiencing more clarity. Maybe a sense of commitment. One. Welcome.
Carole Freeman: It took me on vacation there. Thank you.
How was that? For those of you listening, viewing. If you feel comfortable, share your word or phrase that came up for you. Maybe a little more details of what your safe, calm place looked like for you.
It’s hard to be worked up and high energy after that.
we go into our It reminds me of the Saturday Night Live skit where they’re doing their NPR skits, where they’re like, and up next . Up next. Randy Webb will be leading us through one more relaxation technique. Oh, we, our viewership just ticked up a little bit. Maybe I should use my soothing, calming hypnotic voice more often on this show. If you enjoy this right now,I
Carole Freeman: actually I recorded quite a few hypnosis recordings when I was doing a lot more of that in my work that I was doing with clients and I really enjoyed it. It was really easy for me to get into that voice and that rhythm. And so maybe I should do more of that.
Randy Webb: Wow. Yeah, you sound great.
You sound great. Like a natural,
Carole Freeman: that’s my radio voice. Yes. It was interesting cuz going through the training, it was 12 hour days. I think it was 10, 10, 10 days straight. I can’t even remember now. 10 days, six days straight, something like that. And it was so easy for me to just get in that it was very intuitive to lead people through that.
And the hypnotic rhythm of how you speak to people and, Your eyes open or closed, whatever is most comfortable to you. It was so easy. And then other people were so stilted with the open eyes or closed, whatever you want to do is fine. And I was like, oh, Oh yeah, that happens. Oh, go ahead. Oh, sorry, Jennifer sharing. So relaxed, my safe, calm place was looking up in the sunny sky through the trees. Oh, sounds like bliss.
Randy Webb: Oh, that’s delightful, Jennifer. That’s great.
Carole Freeman: My, my phrase was beachy bliss. And every time I do this, it’s a little bit different, but this time it was taking me back to a beach.
February of this year, I met my friend down in La Paz, Mexico, and she took us to a beach down there. I don’t even remember what the name of it was, but it was just very few people there, not touristy at all, and just so relaxing, perfect temperature. And we put our chairs halfway out into the. Ocean Bay inlet, I don’t know what it’s technically called there and just sat like literally in the ocean, just enjoying it. So that’s where my safe, calm place was today.
Milton Erickson as Teacher:
Randy Webb: Oh, that’s just a delightful, it reminds me this beautiful story that Milton Erickson told when he was teaching his students. And there are wonderful stories about him doing something like that where he would invite couples to think about where they first met, and you’d hear these stories about them being on this lake at the break of dawn, and this just sun reflected off the water, as if it were a sheet of eyes.
It just that sense of the infinity, of something limited like a lake, but it can seem like it’s infinite. So just a wonderful idea just sitting in the ocean.
Carole Freeman: Did one of the couple remember it like that and the other one was like, no, it was rainy and cold and choppy water. It was the worst thing ever.
The sandwiches were soggy.
Randy Webb: was, it Turns out this one story is kinda like that, where the one person remembered. Oh yeah. It was so still and serene and everything. And the other saying, are you kidding me? I was standing on the, when we first met, I was standing on the side of the lake beating the water with a fishing pole cuz they didn’t wanna be there.
Carole Freeman: You’re like, that’s where the end began
Randy Webb: and there it is. That’s where the end began. .
Carole Freeman: Oh wow. They say there’s they say there’s three sides to every story, but there’s actually probably infinite sides to every story depending on how you’re feeling when you recall it.
Randy Webb: I think that’s very fair that we get reminded.
All these therapies we’re talking about in all these practices turns out the power of memory is quite remarkable. And so the no doubt Carole, in your own clinical work, you’re working with people. Working with families or couples and you get reminded of the power of memory. Different versions of how things happen. We have more evidence than ever that there’s something pretty powerful about memories informing your expression of your strengths and expression, of your qualities, your internal resources, all those beautiful strengths and qualities you may not have known that you had.
And so exercises like these really wonderful to help you remind, remind you of what those are, and give you a chance to resolve those memories that may be related. You’re not feeling like you have much power over your own life, so it’s really wonderful to do these things.
Carole Freeman: So true. All right as wonderful as that was, we do have one more technique that we wanted to present today, which is the EFT or emotional freedom technique.
Tapping Randy, will you give us a little bit of background on that technique,
EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique):
Randy Webb: Absolutely. So a number of really brilliant people had a lot to do with the creation of what is known as thought field therapy. And so Callahan, Roger Callahan, being one of those people, develop what is now known as thought-field therapy.
Thoughtful therapy is an evidence-based practice, actually recognized by the substance abuse mental health services administration at the federal level as an evidence-based practice. EMDR is one of them too. Trauma focused, cognitive behavioral therapies. Another, there are these wonderful trauma therapies, brain spotting and somatic experiencing and thoughtful therapy is really quite interesting because it has a distinction of being the first energy based, evidence based psychotherapy.
And you say energy based, what does that mean? Some of the ideas behind this, If you’ve ever had any exposure to things like traditional Chinese medicine and thinking in terms of meridians and energy centers, or maybe some of you’re interested in Eastern notions about health and balance the chakras, and so maybe you’re interested in that as well. What’s interesting about thoughtful therapy is it spawned a number of practices that are similar. An emotional freedom technique is one of those, and it’s considered one of the original. Thoughtful therapy really is the original tapping solution as it’s sometimes called, and so it’d be a delight to show you a basic protocol that’s very easy to apply to yourself and like butterfly hug and safe, calm place you can help other people learn them.
It’s perfectly safe, especially since the stimulation itself is so slow and designed to help you be mindful, not necessarily designed to drag a lot of stuff up for us to have to resolve use other techniques. So it’s a very safe, this particular protocol or recipe or set of steps, really very safe to use.
But that’s some of the background around it.
Carole Freeman: Wonderful. And then after Randy shows us this next technique, I’m gonna talk about how do you use these, what are applications for helping end emotional eating? So beautiful. Lead us through the absolutely.
Randy Webb: Routine or the recipe. Absolutely. So emotional freedom, technique, the basic recipe consists of four parts and it’s really has, one part has to do with affirmation and it has to do with tapping.
Apply for Help End Emotional Eating
So just to practice, you might think about massaging here, right around your collarbone like we did with the butterfly hook, where the tips of your middle fingers would probably. You can practice this to start with. Just get used to that and make sure that it feels safe and that you’re okay with it.
You’re not making yourself feel worse. We’re not interested in that. We don’t wanna do any harm. And the other place is you can with either hand tap, what’s called a percussion end of your hand is if you were doing a karate chop, you’d be tapping on that edge of your hand. So you can practice either one of those to start with, cuz that’s, we’re gonna use either one of them. You get to use whichever one you want to start with. And here’s how it works. You start with an affirmation that goes like this as you’re tapping or massaging what are called the sore points. You can do either one. I’ll just use the tapping here for right now and the basic protocol, even though I have this, whatever, and you can think about it, you don’t have to.
Make this affirmation, even though I have this concern or problem or this stressful situation or this challenge, it might even be an opportunity. It might be a good thing, but you’re not feeling quite all right about it. So think about that and say this, even though I have this, whatever the concern is, I deeply and completely accept myself just tapping on this.
You can do this one piece as much as you want, even though I have this concern. You can think it or say it, I deeply and completely accept myself. Then repeat that affirmation. You can be thinking it as you’re saying it. I’m gonna show you, and you’ll get to play this over and over again. You’re gonna tap at the edge of your eyebrow.
Could be on either side with either hand. Heck, you can do both of them if you want. Either way is fine thinking that affirmation or saying it, even though I have this concern. Problem or issue, I deeply and completely accept myself. Then what you do, you go to the edge of the eye, right where the bony part of the edge of the eye is making that affirmation.
Again, just tapping. You can five times it’d be fine, but if you wanna tap more, it’s not gonna hurt you. Even though I have this concern, I deeply and completely accept myself, then go to this bony little crease here under your eye socket. Don’t, we’re not asking you to poke your eye just right at the edge of it, at the bottom.
Even though I have this concern, I deeply and completely accept myself. Then here, even though I have this concern, I deeply and completely accept myself and then here, even though I have this concern, I deeply and completely accept myself and then right at the collarbone, even though I have this concern.
I deeply and completely accept myself. And then right over the side, right about here or so for some of you, that’d be where you might have a bra strap, for example. It’d be about that far down or that far up. Even though I have this concern, I deeply in completely accept myself. And then you’re gonna keep doing it with your fingers.
So you start I’m gonna see . It’s funny to do this backwards. It’s fun. You can start the thumb, even though just tapping at the crease where your nail meets the fleshy part of your thumb on the top side. Even though I have this concerned, I deeply and completely accept myself. And then
Carole Freeman: here, can you, that one again on the, oh, on the side.
Randy Webb: on the side at the edge of the nail. Okay. Uhhuh, even though I have this concern, I deeply and completely accept myself at the edge of the nail on your index finger, even though I have this concern. I deeply and completely accept myself and the middle finger. Even though I have this concern, I deeply and completely accept myself.
Skip the ring finger and go to the pinky. Even though I have this concern, I deeply and completely accept myself. And now for the third part, it’s called the gamut point. Here we’re gonna go between the ring finger, this crease down here, between the ring finger and the pinky and tap, right? So just tap that.
Okay. Close your eyes. Open your eyes. Look hard down to the right, to the floor. Continue to tap. Look hard left down to the floor. Okay? So you’re not necessarily af affirming. Roll your eyes in a circle in one direction. Roll your eyes in the opposite direction, all while tapping this point here. Hum. Five seconds of the song
continue tapping. Count from one to five Uno, dos, I’m thinking in Spanish. Uno, dos, tres, quatro,
hum. Five seconds of that song again,
it could be any song.
Carole Freeman: We’re gonna have to pay royalties to Michael Jackson
Randy Webb: Then take a breath
and see how you feel. For those of you who love numbers, maybe on a zero to 10 scale, you think, okay, we’re zero. As I feel neutral, or I don’t feel any disturbance, I feel okay. I feel very centered. Zero all the way up to 10 if you’re still feeling stressful. Repeat, wash, rinse, repeat. You go back to where you were before.
Even back to step one, even though I still have this concern, I deeply and completely accept myself. So as you’re watching this video, again, you can practice, you can go through that cycle, that pro, that protocol, or that routine as many times as you need until it feels like, whew, now I’m centered.
That’s emotional freedom technique, the basic recipe.
Carole Freeman: Okay. I remember reading about this probably in the nineties and being. In a book back before we had the YouTubes that we could look up stuff, how to do it. And I was just like, I was so worried. I was like, I don’t know if it’s here or it’s here, or it’s here or there.
And I was just like, all right, I guess I can’t do this. , how important is it to get the exact right spot?
Randy Webb: No, I don’t think it’s critical. Okay. If you’re doing acupuncture, it’s really important, but if you’re doing this, yeah, probably. Yeah. You don’t have to be perfectionistic yet. .
Carole Freeman: Oh yeah. If you’re doing acupuncture, those people are trained to know the body points.
Exactly. So Shelly sharing that this made made her feel sleepy, I wonder if that means maybe Shelly needs rest.
Polyvagal Theory:
Randy Webb: Shelly. That is such a beautiful insight because Steven POEs, who’s the person credited with the development, what’s called the polyvagal theory, has said, that when your parasympathetic nervous system kicks in, maybe you’ve been getting some clarity, you’re resolving some stuff, and people will oftentimes kinda, they’ll get they’ll describe feeling really sleepy.
And one thing we get with all of these techniques related to, especially certainly related to trauma, is you likely gain a lot of clarity as to what the body is trying to tell you. Beso Vander is right? The body keeps the score, body has the last word, and it starts telling you, Hey, maybe you need some rest, maybe you need something.
Maybe you’re thirsty. Maybe you’re not getting proper nutrition. So oh yeah, you’ll get lots of clarity doing these things.
Carole Freeman: And whatever phrase I’m guessing comes up for you, you can use any kind of alternate affirmation. Correct. You don’t have to say that specific thing.
Randy Webb: Oh, no. You don’t have to. In fact any affirmation is really powerful.
It could be, I’m gaining clarity, I’m expressing self-love. Little by little. I feel a greater sense of my power. More and more I honor my body. I will give my body who it needs, and oh, absolutely. Your affirmation could be anything you need.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. I am a worthy person.
Randy Webb: I’m a worthy person. I deserve love.
I can give myself happiness. Oh yeah.
Carole Freeman: Absolutely. Shelly says, cool with three exclamation points. I think with three. That’s excellent. Awesome. Permission to sleep granted Shelly . Oh. And so you talked about that being a what’s the phrase that’s valid, considered research, not research based.
Forgot the phrase, evidence based. It’s practice. Evidence based practice. So can you talk a little bit about, cuz you said it was an energy field technique. How much of it is, energy? Woo. Chinese medicine to some people seems like it’s woo even though it’s been around for I don’t know how many million years.
How much. It’s something they validated as energy field versus just a distraction technique. And even if it’s just a distraction technique and it works, that’s great. Do you have information to share about that? Is it all placebo? there something more to the specific points that we’re tapping?
Randy Webb: It’s a really good point. It is interesting. It looks like one factor is what does the person who’s practicing believe about it. So if you have a sense that is helping you notice the energy in your body or you’re noticing your own sensations and what emotions go with them, or you have a sense that.
It’s mainly distraction or if you have a sense that maybe what’s making this whole thing work so well is you concentrating really well or giving yourself a pause. There’s so many different pieces to it. And in fairness to SAMSA, the Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration and their National Registry of Evidence Based Programs and practices, when they were researching these things, they were really looking at outcomes, maybe more about the outcomes than the process itself.
And you say why is that important? Because even though it was the first energy methodology that was considered evidence based by that research group Maybe for them it’s not necessarily so important as to whether a person even believes in all of that or those potential associations they make.
It’s more like some sort of eastern way of healing, but it seemed to get really good outcomes and as it is with a number of other practices we see is that some of these things, frankly, like even with EMDR therapy, we have a set, it’s a very robust, very strong evidence based practice with 35, 34, 35 random controlled trials showing that it’s very effective and yet the model of it, the adaptive information processing model really is a number of hypotheses.
It’s kinda like you’re nervous system, even the neuro sequential. That Bruce Perry talks about. Incredibly beautiful model, but it’s a model. And so I think that’s a really great point, and it really of comes down to, is it working for you? , and you may or may not say, oh, that seems really woo to me.
Okay, whatever. That doesn’t really fit my worldview. But if you find that the practice is helping you get the results you want, then you get to be the final judge as to how much of the model or the philosophy behind it really matters to you. Is it really working for you? Ultimately I think would be fair to a lot of people.
Carole Freeman: It reminds me of an answer one of my professors gave me when I was getting my psychology degree, where I said how exactly does this work? Like, how does it help people get better? And he says yeah that’s a really good question. There you go. And that was his answer.
Randy Webb: it’s two things come to mind, Carole.
One of them is if all of you, and maybe some of you have familiarity with this, and this is not to, I’m not trying to play a physician anyway. I’m not trying to be a psychiatrist. I’m just saying if you look in the physician’s desk reference, if you look in there and you look at the explanation of the mechanisms of how any number of very commonly prescribed medications work, you are going to oftentimes find the following phrase, Carole knows this as well as anybody is you’re gonna find the following phrase used a lot.
The mechanism by which this particular molecule or substance or medication works is not well known.
Carole Freeman: yeah. You’re gonna find a lot of that. That’s such a great point, right? If most of the medications were prescribed, we don’t know how they work. Why do we need to know why these other techniques work either?
Randy Webb: Yeah. It’s something to remember. We have a, your nervous system and everything connected to it is far more complex than even our best models. They’re informed by a lot of data, a lot of tendencies and a lot of statistics. And there are going to be times when something looks like it should work for you and it doesn’t seem to work like the way you intended to, and you get side effects.
And there are other things that don’t. You would say we don’t really quite know why that’s working so well, . So you get to be, you get to be informed and you get to be a decider of what’s going to work for you, what’s gonna, so it may be a little solace, but we know there’s a lot to that.
Carole Freeman: Yeah.
Wonderful. And as promised, now I’m gonna talk about how do, that’s all great and wonderful, but how do we actually use these, integrate these into, reducing or eliminating emotional eating and so I lump emotional and stress eating. They’re the same category. So basically it’s like something comes up that gives us an urge to eat.
To soothe ourselves for a reason other than hunger. So stress eating falls in this category. Emotional eating falls in this category. And couple of very quick things come to my mind is one is that you could just integrate one of these, all three of them, whatever, your choice just daily as a way of calming your nervous system, relaxing yourself, center your.
and just overall calming. It doesn’t have to be in conjunction with an urge or anything like that. So it can just be something you do as soon as you wake up or right before you fall asleep. Or one of the best things to try to develop a new habit is something called habit stacking. And so add it onto something else you already do every day. So perhaps you do it. Maybe you do the safe, magical place while you’re brushing your teeth. Maybe you do the butterfly hug while your coffee is brewing.
Doing it while you’re doing something else. That can be one application to this. Another application can be when you’ve got an urge to eat, to calm or soothe yourself. Eating in any eating something that is not out of. Hunger choose one of these to do in that moment. On demand and, promise yourself I will just do one of these for one minute. If I still have the urge to eat that thing, I still can afterwards, but I’m going to choose to do this first.
That’s another application of it. Those are some quick little easy ideas. Randy, do you have any other ideas about how these may come into something, how they can be used as needed to reduce the urge to self? What’d you call it? Self-regulate?
Randy Webb: Self-regulate, self-medicate. Yeah. Absolutely.
And the thanks you mentioned Carole, are wonderful because to the extent that you can make them habitual and make ’em where they’re less intrusive. So that’s just a beautiful way to think about it is maybe you get into the habit, you’ll hear dentist say, get in the habit while watching tv.
You’re flossing yourself or whatever, right? You’re flossing your teeth. You could certainly do that. I’ve heard folks do things like that where they’re making it, where maybe they’re standing in line at a grocery store or something, and they don’t wanna be standing there doing this. Maybe they, it doesn’t feel safe to them, but maybe they’re just rocking back and forth a little bit, or standing a little bit on one foot and then a little bit on another that you can be doing in between so many other things that you can be doing, like you’re saying, Carole, and that way it of feels less intrusive and you get some of the really positive effects of that bilateral stimulation.
You, you’re getting some of the effects of that tapping and the affirmations and by themselves are just delightful. So in those times when you might. In fact, I’ve heard people say, even while taking a shower, for example, they’ll go into a safe, magical place while taking a shower. And imagine it’s a little bit like a light string technique that we use in clinical hypnosis, right Carole?
So you might think of the light, feels like it’s the water coming and is coming through the top of your head. And as it works its way down like a spiral, pushing out any unwanted energies and stress that you don’t want to feel and that you’re feeling it pushing and moving it as the water slides down the body all through and out the pores at the tips of your fingers, down through the tips of your feet, through the toes and into the drain, or through the walls and into the trees where it can be purified.
Anything like that and it, you might do that for a minute. And you really get a lot of that beautiful fact we’re talking about of that mindfulness and getting your prefrontal cortex open for business.
EMDR:
Carole Freeman: Ooh, open for business. Shelly’s asking, I have a question regarding EMDR . Can it help people with overeating?
So first, for people who don’t know what EMDR was, you explained that part and then please answer Shelly’s question after that. Absolutely.
Randy Webb: So Francine Shapiro was a psychologist who had been diagnosed with breast cancer in the late eighties. And one day while she was walking in a park in San Francisco, she just happened to notice that her eyes were going back and forth.
And as she did that, her anxiety went down. That led to all kinds of discoveries and research with all kinds of people who had really bad things happen to them. And in research, which she found out. Is that if she could get people to move their eyes and then later tapping or later hearing alternating sound, but some kind of bilateral stimulation as they were accessing memories of suffering, not necessarily major trauma, not necessarily really nasty things we think about that happen to people, but maybe long ongoing stress or unsatisfactory relationships are not feeling very good attachment.
So over the course of her research, she found out that if in a safe, respectful, centered environment, you have a place where you can tell your truth, tell your story, access the memories where you suffered, not necessarily like hurricanes and tsunami. Or massive experiences of abuse or neglect, but maybe ongoing stressors too.
And once they identify the memories, what the therapist does in that safe, respectful environment, access the memories and apply the, it’s just like second nature to apply this, asking you to move your eyes to follow my hand, but some form or multiple forms of that kind of stimulation.
And they found, just like Francine Shapiro saw in herself, the influence of those memories of suffering go down and the symptoms go with them. For those of us, like Carole and I, who are trained in clinical hypnosis, there’s a lot about EMDR therapy that for us, feels like hypnosis, right? There’s a lot to it that’s involved focusing and re and recalling memory.
So can it help people with overeating Actually, very much and it’s very well indicated for many conditions. Including anxiety and depression and addictions and difficulty with relationships. Cause according to the system, the theory behind the EMDR therapy, the therapist would be treating your memories so to help you with whatever.
So the memories according to that system, that model are informing your overeating. It’s the overeating is just the manifestation of it. It’s the memories that didn’t get resolved according to that system that are informing the symptom of overeating and on all kinds of other potential things. So to, so how’s that for a long answer to a question?
You better believe it can. absolutely. And I could have just said that to begin with.
Carole Freeman: Oh no, that was perfect. Cuz there are gonna be people watching or listening that have no idea what EMDR is.
Randy Webb: Eye Movement desensitization and reprocessing.
Carole Freeman: All right. We covered our three techniques. We covered applications of how you can use these to and reduce, eliminate emotional eating or stress eating or eating for any reason other than for true hunger or nutrient needs.
And Randy, was there anything else that you were hoping I would ask about or that you would like to share?
Randy Webb: If you’re interested in, there’s so much of this, but I would certainly recommend that you watch this podcast over and over again, to practice the techniques. And if you have an interest in any of these really beautiful approaches too you can reach out to Carole and I can share some resources.
And but yeah, you might start by watching this thing and getting real, make it second nature. Make it your habit to, to practice these.
Carole Freeman: Yeah, like I said earlier in this episode is book bookmark This. Put this on your calendar a week from now or maybe tomorrow. Put a link to this, whether that’s audio episode you’re listening to or on YouTube or Facebook.
Just literally copy the link, put it in your calendar, put it a reminder, later tonight, tomorrow, next week, wherever you feel like is when you’re gonna forget about it. And then when it pops up, you’ll have the link here to go back and listen again. Because this is something that you will likely want to use again.
So Shelly says, this was amazing. Thank you both so much. I’m so glad you were here, Shelly. That was wonderful. I’m glad you got a lot out of it. And alright and then when you listen again, come back in the comments and tell us that you’re here again, listening and how much more insights and calm that you have too.
This is a toolbox for you. You’ve got three tools now that you can use at will and to. Help you feel better in all kinds of ways.
Again, help me thank Randy for being here. Our our I closed up my, my notes on my iPad was the battery was dying, so I had to close it up. So I’m like, what did I say? Wonderful qualified psychotherapist and trainer.
Thank you so much for being here. If you’ve enjoyed this video on , if you are somebody who’s not already one of my clients, I encourage you to where’s my banners at? Oh. It should open here. All right, there we go. . If you are looking for some more help, if you are somebody who’s struggling to achieve sustainable weight loss, you’re trying to follow keto long term especially if you’re a woman 40 plus and you’ve tried all the diets and this is something that you’re interested in reach out.
Check out my website, KetoCarole.com. I do currently we’ve been offering some guest spots, so if you’re somebody who’s been considering getting a keto coach to get your success and be able to have long term success check out my website. Send us an email as well. At. Here it is here, Support@KetoCarole.com, and I’ll open up a guest spot on one of my coaching calls so you can actually experience what it’s like to be one of my clients.
And you can see then for sure if it’s gonna be a match for you. Jennifer’s given us the clappy hands. So glad you were here to thank you everyone for watching. And definitely my energy on this one is normally I’m like, ah, and I’m like, thank you all for being here today, to this episode of Keto Chat Live.
We look forward to having you again soon. Come back. If you enjoyed this video on how to end emotional eating, give me a thumbs up. If you’re on YouTube, subscribe, hit that notification so you can get all the notifications. We do this pretty much every week, and we’ve got a whole catalog of episodes. This is episode number 55. I know Jennifer’s watched and listened to all of them, but if you haven’t, go back and listen to the rest of us.
Let me know which one’s your favorite. And again, thank you Randy, for being here. The delight. That’s all for now, folks. We’ll see you next time. Bye now. Thank you.
Have you ever noticed that your sleep changed after starting keto? Have you ever noticed how you’re hungrier after a night of inadequate sleep? How important is sleep for weight loss? Those questions and so many more we’re gonna answer today. This episode is for you, so stick around and learn about how a ketogenic diet impacts sleep and over overlaps. This is live you ever Once so I don’t have to do it perfectly.
How the ketogenic diet impacts sleep and the overlaps of sleep, obesity and satiety in so much more. My very special guest co-host today, Amber O’Hearn and everyone welcome, welcome, welcome to Keto Chat Live. I am your host, Carolee Freeman. I have a masters in nutrition and clinical health psychology. I’m a board certified keto nutrition specialist and I specialize in helping women 40 plus follow a keto diet for sustainable weight loss. And the thing that the lawyers like us to say this show is meant for educational and entertainment purposes only.
If, oh, it is not meant for medical advice nor intended to diagnose, treat, prevent, or cure any condition, not even including a wart on your thumb. If you have any questions or concerns related to your specific conditions, please contact a qualified healthcare professional. Everyone help me welcome Amber. All right, Amber I’m gonna talk a lot at the beginning, and then you get to talk a bunch after that. I met Amber at a health conference, one of the health conferences.
We met up at several of them, but I don’t remember if we met originally at a low carb USA conference or Ancestral Health Symposium or somewhere else. But immediately I was so impressed with her. She’s so intelligent and her depth of analysis. I met Amber and probably heard her talk and was so impressed. And just the depth of analysis and re research that she does in her talks.
And also she’s talking about things that nobody else is talking about and just something about the way that she thinks about things. She’s always looking for different angles and I just, so many of talks have always been like, oh my gosh, that’s really cool. I quote them all the time. But her official bio is she has an eclectic background with academic publications in several fields, including theoretical mathematics, cognitive psychology, computational linguistics, and more recently evolutionary nutrition and biology.
Table of Contents
She has been studying in experimenting with low carb ketogenic diet since 1997 and is particularly interested in evolutionary constraints and inter species differences. EM’S been eating a nearly plant free diet since 2009, so there we go. Welcome, welcome Amber to the show. Thank you so much. It’s great to be here. Vir virtually. Yes. Virtually great . It’s great to hear Before we started the live button here, we were trying to figure out the last time we saw each other. It was probably like March of 2018, I think, in Bozeman, Montana at an ancestral health symposium. I think thats our best guess.
Keto Diet, Sleep, and Satiety with Amber O’Hearn
Amber O’Hearn: Incredibly too long ago. Too long. Too long.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. Yeah.
Just for our viewers that don’t know who you are, would you mind just starting out with how your diet has evolved over the years? And how it’s impacted your health. So way going back to 1997 or even before, wherever you wanna start. Sure.
Introduction Of Amber O’Hearn:
Amber O’Hearn: Yeah. I did start a low carb diet in 1997. Before that, I was brought up vegetarian.
I was born in 73. So basically I’ve been on a low carb diet of one form or another for half my life for two dozen years. And then the last half of it has been on a carnivore diet in particular. So it’s been a very strange evolution. My mother thinks I’m rebelling. I’m sure. Yeah, so I, I was on a vegetarian diet growing up.
It wasn’t super strict. Like we would occasionally have some chicken or fish. And I was allowed to have meat if I went out somewhere. But basically our household was largely vegetarian and so I grew up with that kind of Nor that was normal to me. And so when I first started having trouble with my weight, which is when I first went to university, I, my first thought was I should go back to eating vegetarian like I was brought up to.
And I read lots of books at the time that’s totally supported that like they were saying, if you’re having health problems or weight problems, you should cut the animal products and cut the fat and. So that didn’t work for me at all. But I tried it for a really long time and I even doubled down and became vegan for a while.
In fact, I lost some weight while traveling ,that made me think alright, obviously this isn’t the thing that’s preventing me from losing weight, so maybe I should go look into that crazy low carb thing that I heard about one time , that was the beginning of a really something has affected me for the rest of my life.
And I, when I first started a low carb diet if you’ve heard me speak before, I say this every time, but, the first book that I found was Mike and Mary Dan Eades’ book, Protein Power. And they had a lot of, science in it that. Blew my mind cuz it was completely opposite to anything I’d ever heard.
But they had references and so I went to the local medical library and looked them up and was like, wow, this is legit. And this sort of started a lifelong pursuit of looking at nutritional literature, which I, over time gut familiar with the different ways that people argue and how things aren’t always the way that they seem.
A recurring pattern that I see is that the authors will present data and will present their interpretation and I don’t always agree with their interpretation of their own data, which is a little bit maybe obnoxious of me since I didn’t do the experiment, but I get…
Carole Freeman: oh, so you started looking at nutrition research back when you had to go through a card catalog to find
Amber O’Hearn: Oh yeah, I used microfiche.
Carole Freeman: Oh yeah. I’m very old. Wow. So I you sent me the link to your talk which I’m gonna asked you what do you wanna talk about? Cuz there’s so much stuff that you could talk about.
And one of the things I remember most, and I don’t remember where this was, that you did this talk about how when you looked at research on Inuit populations at how they didn’t show ketones in their blood. That’s the ones I, one of the ones I talk about frequently to people about how we adapt to that state.
And you’re not gonna be able to, which blows my mind. That was, cuz that was back in what, in the thirties or something And they were actually even able to take blood samples back then. But anyways, there was a ton of topics that Amber could talk about, so I let her pick. There was a talk that she did in January in Boca Briton at Low Carb usa.
It’s about sleep and keto diet and satiety. And originally I saw that and I was like, these are three random words. How do they fit together? So I listen to the talk and so I, I’ve got some questions, based on that, for you to present the information to our to our viewers, our listeners, and anyone in the future.
Sleep Stages:
Amber O’Hearn: Yeah, so there, there are a lot of different ways that we could talk about what sleep is and sleep stages are something that happened.
It’s something that you can’t see, right? So you go to sleep and it just all basically looks the same. The person is inert , but there’s more going on if you measure actual brain waves. And it turns out that there are patterns happening and that we can identify and the patterns they alternate.
REM Sleep:
So the main two stages that we identify would be REM sleep, which stands for rapid eye movement because during that stage of sleep, there’s a characteristic kind of back and forth eye movement that’s happening. And REM. It’s actually physiologically a lot like being awake. So your mind is very active.
Your brain is very active in a way that is paradoxical. And sometimes it’s actually called paradoxical sleep in the older literature, although REM is the more modern term and and the other main kind of sleep stage is slow wave sleep. And what’s happening during slow wave sleep is really amazing.
All your neurons turn off at the same time. It’s called coordinated neuron silencing. And actually even when you’re awake, it turns out that there’s actually a very small percentage of neurons that are firing at the same time. Something like 3%, or it’s definitely less than 10%. It’s very surprising that, but what’s happening while you’re in slow wave sleep is that they’re all going off at the same time.
In this pulsing thing that creates this delta wave that shows up on your electrodes. So slow wave sleep can be, it can be lighter or deeper, and it depends. We just have these arbitrary cutoffs of how big that the wave is. And what happens is the stages alternate throughout the night.
So it’s usually, slow wave sleep and REM and slow of sleep and REM with little, there might be wakings in between that are very brief. You might, you’re probably not even aware of them. But one thing that happens is that the slow wave sleep is, takes up more proportion of the time during the first half of the night.
And REM takes up more proportion of the time during the second half of the night, and they have different functions. We’re not necessarily clear on what the functions of the different parts of sleep are, what sleep does at all. There, there are lots of good theories, and I’m not saying that we don’t know anything or have good ideas about it, but it’s really a developing field and it’s been a misery for a really long time.
An analogy I made in the talk was if we talk about food and how we need food we know what we need food for. We have a pretty good idea about how the different nutrients are used as enzymes or used as building blocks or used as energy. We don’t have to guess as much.
Whereas when you talk about sleep, we don’t, we can talk about these things that sleep does, but most of what we know about that comes from depriving animals of sleep and seeing what, what breaks. And we can correlate that to the different stages too. So that’s your basic rundown of sleep stages.
Carole Freeman: Oh, it’s, it was so fascinating when you said that in your talk about how there, there’s mostly, we don’t know what sleep even does. It’s just mind boggling to think about the fact that we don’t know. We know we need it. And a lot of pe all animals need it. I don’t know, we’re getting off topic there, but so one of the next points you had too was there’s a lot of scientific articles on the web, on ketogenic diets that and sleep.
Let’s see. The sleep stages, drama is taken, conclusions what really happens to deep or slow? Labors slow. I can’t even like slow wave sleep and REM on a keto diet. So what’s the truth? Basically there’s myths out there, so if you wanna tell us like what is, what are the articles saying and then what the truth is.
Amber O’Hearn: Yeah. It’s really interesting whenever somebody who doesn’t really have a very big background in ketogenic diets, tries to write an article about what a ketogenic diet might do related to something that they do have expertise on. There a couple of pitfalls that they might make, and one of them is to talk about what is, what happens if you have high fat, right?
And there may be some things. Where that makes sense to, we all know that a high fat diet, that’s a high carb diet has a completely different effect on metabolism than a high fat diet in the context of very low carb. Some people will look at say, what’s the effect of having high fat on sleep stages or sleep duration or sleep quality in some way?
And it may actually have no correspondence to what happens in the ketogenic conditions. So we can dismiss those right away. Another problem that often comes up with, go ahead.
Carole Freeman: Oh, I was gonna say to, to clarify, that’s often the phrase, high fat diet is used in nutrition research, but it really is referring to also what we call like the standard American diet, high fat, high carb, but they’ll just see high fat.
And so then like you’re explaining, people will mistakenly apply that. Article to then a keto high fat diet. So in research, they’re gonna specify either a ketogenic diet or a low carb, high fat, or a carb restricted diet. They’re gonna specifically mention the carb part of that. I was looking through that on a lot of different stuff as well, where they’re saying things about gut health.
Well, a high fat diet is shown to do this, but you have to go in and look at that. So anyway, so the clarity is on, when it’s called the high fat diet that generally equates to high fat, high carb, not a high fat, low carb diet. Yes.
Amber O’Hearn: And it’s a completely different metabolic state. And then a second kind of pitfall that can happen when people are looking at ketogenic diets is to not take the adaptation phase into account.
So it takes three or four days sometimes depending. What exactly you do to switch your metabolism to ketogenic metabolism. Not for sleep. I haven’t really seen this so much for sleep, but I’ve seen things on cognition and other things where, you know they put someone on a ketogenic diet and it, at day two they say, oh look, their brain isn’t working as well.
And it’s yeah , they haven’t keto adapted and they’re not getting enough glucose. So that’s a bad time to be measuring. But a third way is a lot of the studies that are done on ketogenic diets are specifically looking at people who have some kind of medical problem, like obesity or like epilepsy in particular, or some other thing that requires intervention.
Ketogenic Diet:
And so if you just look at. What people, what happens to people when they go on a ketogenic diet in the context of having some metabolic or some medical issue, it might not give the same result as if you just put a basically healthy person on a ketogenic diet. So that’s something to watch out for.
And that is something that I did see in some of the literature, or at least in some of the summaries or reviews that I saw on the web when people are looking at what does a ketogenic diet do to sleep stages in particular. So it happens that there are some evidence that in people with epilepsy, and I think there was another case with obesity where REM sleep was increased and so the conclusion was, oh, a ketogenic di increases REM.
But in those particular cases It seemed to me that REM was disrupted and what was happening is that REM was being brought back to a normal level. And the reason that I’m so confident about that is that I looked at other studies where the context was fasting. So one way of trying to look at what would happen on an ketogenic diet that I think is a bad way, is to say, oh, what happens when you look are on a high fat diet that’s also high carb.
And another way that’s not quite looking at a ketogenic diet, but and so is not exact either is fasting, but at least fasting does put you in a ketogenic state, right? . So I’m gonna trust something that I read about fasting more than I trust something that’s a high carb. Diet. And the fasting studies in humans have shown an increase in slow wave sleep and a decrease in REM not a drastic decrease, but like from 25% to say 20% of your night’s sleep.
And so I’m fairly confident that’s representative of ketogenic diets, whereas the increase in REM that you see in patients in epilepsy who had compromised REM sleep is more of a normalization effect.
Carole Freeman: One of the things you mentioned too in your talk was how a lot of people with obesity tend to be also oversleep.
Oversleeping:
Amber O’Hearn: Yes. Yeah. And so that, that’s a really complicated thing. There, there is, where am I gonna start with this? So there. There can be oversleeping in obesity. And there can be unders sleeping in obesity, . In fact if you’re looking just observationally at people who are at different, if you’re just comparing weight with sleep duration, you get this U curve.
So people who are overweight sleep too much and people who are. Overweight or , people who sleep too much are overweight, and people who sleep too little are overweight and the like, best weight corresponds to like this, six or seven to eight hours of sleep, which is part of why that’s the recommendation because it’s like a correlation, causation kind of idea.
This is where that people are the healthiest, so we’re gonna recommend you get that amount of sleep. And, there’s some logic to that. It’s not completely crazy. But I think that the reason that sometimes people oversleep when they’re over when they’re overweight has to do with their, it could have to do with a couple different things.
One, one is this kind of phenotype of a very depressed, overweight person that sleeps too much. And those things often go together. And. The other thing is the whole connection between energy and sleep duration, which will hopefully get into a lot more. On the other side of it though, with not sleeping enough, it’s more of a mystery because you would think if they’re if they’re getting so much energy that they’re getting weight, then why wouldn’t they be sleeping longer?
And that puzzle to unravel it, I think we have to talk about the difference between short sleep in an acute sense and short sleep in the sort of chronic long term sense. So if. If you just get a short night of sleep, say you only get five or six hours of sleep that’s gonna have effects on like immediate effects on your cognitive ability and on your metabolism.
And if you do it for several days in a row, those are gonna accumulate and get worse and worse or more acute, let’s say to be less judgmental about it. I guess I’m fairly comfortable with saying that cognitive deficits are worse, but the other thing that happens is that metabolically your fat tissue becomes more insulin resistant, and that is generally medically in the mainstream medical world held to be a bad thing.
I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing because for your fat tissue to be insulin sensitive, that means that it stores fat easily. And that’s not necessarily what you want if you’re trying to lose weight. But it’s very confusing because insulin resistance is a broad term and associated with having high levels of insulin. Your tissue’s becoming insulin resistant as a sort of consequence of this chronic situation where you have so much insulin going around that your tissues just can’t take anymore.
But if you’re, if you just have an acute responsive insulin resistance that doesn’t necessarily correspond to that diabetic insulin resistance state. But nonetheless, if we have we have this one set of data that’s showing us that if. Sleep deprives someone in the acute sense, they’ll get insulin resistance.
And then we also have this long-term observational data that people who have short sleep are also tend to be obese. Then it’s e it’s tempting to draw this picture to say the, what’s happening is that as you continue to be chronically sleep deprived, this causes insulin resistance, which then causes obesity.
And I don’t actually think that’s true. And one of the reasons that I don’t think it’s true is because of what happens to animals when you completely sleep deprive them. So you wanna talk about that?
Acute Insulin Resistance:
Carole Freeman: Yeah. Yeah. And I’m, I just had a thought too about that acute insulin resistance that happens at the cellular level.
Is that it would make sense that short term, that it’s gonna keep more that glucose in the blood rather than storing it so that you have energy supply readily available when you haven’t had adequate sleep. There’s probably something there. I’m thinking that, physiologically your body’s doing that.
Amber O’Hearn: Yeah. And the interesting thing about that I don’t know if you’ve been following Peter Dubinsky’s work on the proton theory and it’s also been talked about by Brad Marshall and by Mike Eades about this idea that
how do I make this simple , it’s complex but satiety is related to insulin resistance. So when your fat cells are full, If they stop taking in glucose, they become insulin resistant. And that’s a good thing because you don’t want them to keep growing. And if your cells were more insulin sensitive, then they would just suck up that glucose and then you’d be hungry again because you don’t have all this energy in your bloodstream.
So what, so a ketogenic guy actually induces. Insulin resistance in a positive wave, it’s completely reversible. If you go off, like if you un keto adapt for a couple of days by eating high levels of glucose, your insulin sensitivity will immediately return. So that’s a physiological difference.
And this is something that shows up. For example, in pregnant women who have to take a glucose tolerance test, or anybody who has to take a glucose tolerance test you might notice if you’re on a ketogenic diet, you will fail that glucose tolerance test because you’re in a cellularly insulin resistant state.
Your cells are taking up fat. They’re not taking up glucose. They’re they’re actually glucose intolerant. So what people are advised to do is if they have to take this glucose tolerance test to go off a ketogenic diet for at least three days, eat 300 grams of carbs a day and get your body back into glucose mode so that you can pass that test if that’s what you need to do but obviously a ketogenic diet isn’t causing diabetes. Some people might have that bizarre idea, but because it’s reversible, it’s not, that’s not what’s happening and you’re, it’s not causing obesity. It’s actually causing me to lose weight. So the whole insulin resistance piece becomes very tricky because it’s so contextually dependent.
And so when I see, oh, a sleep deprivation causes or sleep restriction causes insulin resistance in the fat tissues, my immediate thought is, wait a minute. Maybe that’s adaptive. Maybe that’s not a bad thing, but if you’re on a high carb diet, then maybe you’ve got two discordant things going on. So another thing that does happen with people and nobody ever studies ketogenic people generally, so we’re just talking about people on regular high carb diets, and you’re looking at this, these sleep restriction studies, what happens is they have glu more glucose intolerance.
You give them a meal and their glucose and their insulin will shoot up way more than normal for them, and they will typically eat more and, have metabolism. That’s leading to weight gain. But my immediate question is, What would happen if you had that same study, but they were on a ketogenic diet so that insulin resistance is actually important with the metabolic state that you’re in, and it’s going in the same direction rather than going in the opposite direction.
So if you just gave them very high fat and some protein rather than some carbs, would that actually enhance weight loss? I don’t know. I, that would be very interesting to look into.
Carole Freeman: Maybe we need to have different terms then, right? So the glucose intolerance versus insulin resistant define the what, the context of each thing that’s going on.
Yeah.
Amber O’Hearn: Yeah. I like that suggestion.
Carole Freeman: May maybe in a thousand years we’ll have all this nutritions go figured out. . Now you had something you wanted to go to next, and now I’ve been so in the moment I’m like, I forgot what point you wanted to go to next. So do you remember what that was?
Amber O’Hearn: Oh yeah, I was gonna talk about different species given Oh yeah.
Sleep Deprivation:
Carole Freeman: Yeah. Yeah, that was fascinating. If in, yeah, go ahead. I’ll let you go ahead, .
Amber O’Hearn: Okay. But stop me at any point. Okay. So in humans, we know that if you give them, if you sleep, restrict them, they’ll have glucose intolerance, they’ll get hungry, they’ll actually eat a lot more, and they’ll have other markers of hunger and they’ll gain weight.
But if you take other animals and you completely sleep, deprive them, so total sleep deprivation what happens to all of them eventually is that they die. And that’s why we don’t do that experiment in humans. At least not for very long because we don’t wanna take it to that point. But it’s been done a lot in other animals.
Specifically some old studies, a lot of studies in rats. And what happens when you completely sleep deprive rats is it takes about two to three weeks for them to die. But what happens to them as like before they die, is that first of all, their fir their body temperature decreases and their cells start burning a lot of energy because they’ll start having mitochondrial uncoupling, which is this phenomenon where the cell is burning energy without creating atp.
It’s just wasting it basically, and it makes heat. And It could be functionally, partly that they’re trying to make heat to make up for the lower body temperature, but I’m not actually sure what the lower body temperature is from. So I don’t wanna state causality when I’m not sure. But those two things happen.
But the, they’re burning so much energy that they are basically ravenous and they’re eating so much, they’re eating as much as they possibly can, but they can’t keep up with the energy deficit that this is creating. And They burn but before they get to the point where they die, they’re burning like twice much calories as normal and still dropping weight.
Carole Freeman: You’ve got people right now going, sign me up. I’d love to have that problem. No, you wouldn’t.
Amber O’Hearn: Actually there’s this thing called dnp. It’s was a weight loss drug. It’s now you can’t get it because it kills you.
Carole Freeman: Imagine that,
Amber O’Hearn: And it works through causing uncoupling.
It’s, and it’s it’s like the holy grail. Like you cannot eat enough to make it not work, but the effective dose is too close to the toxic dose. And. People like bodybuilders and people have died, and I can just imagine like them thinking I’ll just keep it, right at the level and I’m just gonna do just enough and it’s really tragic. Yeah. But it’s the same kind of effect. And people are working now trying to find a better uncer that will do the same thing, but not be so dangerous. And I don’t know where progress is on that right now, but like any day now, someone might have something like that on the market.
I know it’s being worked on. Or it might be that anything that’s effective has that same problem. I don’t know.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. And I wonder if it’s irreversible too. If you do it too long, the cell adapt to that state and it might be too late to reverse it.
Amber O’Hearn: Yeah. I don’t know. It could kill the cell if you push it too far, but I don’t know.
But so we’ve got this contrasting effect, right? We’ve got these lab animals who you sleep deprive them and it causes weight loss and, ravenous hunger. And in humans it seems to cause the ravenous hunger but not the weight loss. So that’s a bummer, right? . And one wonders if it has to do with just the fact that it’s that humans are only getting partial sleep deprivation and maybe you need much more sleep deprivation.
But I think There, there may be possibly a way to get around it. And to talk about that, I wanna talk about the uncoupling just a little bit more without getting too technical. There are proteins involved called uncoupling proteins, and they get activated and they do diff slightly different things.
And there are three main ones that we study and the most famous one is called uncoupling protein one, UCP one named Cuz it was the first one I guess, but it’s probably not the, it seems like evolutionarily, it’s a more recent one and it’s the one that really drives up uncoupled in brown fat tissue, which brown fat tissue is also holy grail.
We know that a ketogenic state causes fat tissue to become more brown, but humans don’t seem to have as much brown fat. As say rats do at all. And some people think that’s completely a species difference, and it may well be. So one hypothesis about why rats would have this weight loss effect and humans don’t is that U C P one is just much lower in humans than in, in rats.
And so they may not have, we may not have as much uncoupling ability. I don’t think that’s probably strictly true because ketogenic diets and other things that we do cold exposure and stuff can ramp up uncoupling proteins in fat and in muscle. And and because, uncoupling works,
Brown Fat and White and Fat:
Carole Freeman: So can you, Amber, can you explain a little bit about brown fat and white and fat?
Amber O’Hearn: Yeah. It basically, it has to do with the density of mi mitochondria in the fat tissue. And the more mitochondria there are the more the uncoupling can waste extra energy and create heat.
And so with the UCP one, it’s thought to be actually that’s the purpose of it, is to create heat. So in cold temperatures, that’s why cold exposure will upregulate it. So rats, babies have more than adults do. And so it’s thought to have this thermo thermogenic function. But there are other uncoupling proteins that do other things they uncouple, but to a lesser extent than U CCP one.
So U C P two causes glucose intolerance at the level of the cell by preventing py vate from getting into the Creb cycle. So that’s interesting because now we have another thing where uncoupling is related to glucose intolerance.
All of those things are going together to this picture of burning more fat and generating more heat and wasting more energy. And all of those things seem to be upregulated. In the human case with sleep deprivation, we don’t see an upregulation of mitochondrial and cut pilling.
And so this is part of the mystery. And what I am guessing is that because we’re eating high carb diets, and this is a hypothesis of mine, and it may turn out to be false, I would really love to see it tested. But I’m guessing that when you have sleep deprivation, but you’re coupling it with a high carb diet, Which is not really very concordant with human evolutionary history.
We didn’t have a lot of access to carbohydrate. And probably in a case where you have sleep deprivation, it might be going along with food or glucose deprivation as well. But one could imagine that in the low carb context, maybe sleep deprivation, even partial sleep deprivation would encourage mitochondrial encoupling more than sleep deprivation plus glucose, which kind of puts the breaks on the mitochondrial coupling.
So my hypothesis is that the reason that humans are having are gaining weight when they have. Sleep deprivation that causes glucose intolerance is that they’re eating glucose . And that if you’re in a ketogenic state, maybe sleep deprivation would actually enhance weight loss. And I don’t know if that’s true or not, but now everyone’s, oh my gonna try it and tell me,
Carole Freeman: that’s gonna be the next weight loss wave. Sleep deprivation.
Amber O’Hearn: Oh, I’m gonna get in so much trouble. I’m encouraging people to lose sleep. ,
Carole Freeman: somebody’s gonna write that book right now. . Oh the Sleepy Keto, the, yeah. I’m so tired. And diet. Yeah. People didn’t feel deprived enough on a keto diet now they can’t even have sleep.
Amber O’Hearn: Yeah. I’m gonna be lambasted for this one. Cause sleep deprivation is not really very good for you. And the reason it’s not very good for you. Again, we don’t really know, but one, one theory. One theory about. What causes a need for sleep has to do with reactive oxygen species. So oxidative stress oxidative stress builds up in the body in response to making energy.
Byproduct of Making Energy:
It’s a byproduct of making energy and it turns out that it accumulates over time and sleep lowers it. So there is, there are some groups of scientists who think that this is the primary or a primary regulator in sleep. And one of the main functions of sleep is just to deal with that ongoing oxidative stress.
And one really cool study from a couple years ago that confirms that, or supports that theory is they took I think it was fruit flies. I think they also looked at rats, but I think it was fruit flies that were the ones where they gave some antioxidants to the animals and it cut, it extended their survival time under total sleep deprivation by a factor of two, which is really like huge.
So that really supports the idea that the need for sleep is being driven, at least in part by this buildup of oxidation. So
if you can address that oxidation if you don’t address that oxidation that’s one of the things that’s gonna be a problem with sleep deprivation. So sleep deprivation does have Other benefits. Actually, one of the benefits of sleep deprivation is that it is an antidepressant a very strong antidepressant.
You take people and who are depressed and give them four hours of sleep a night, and for many of them it will treat their depression, but it’s completely unsustainable. ? Yeah. Because one really bad thing that it does is it puts your cognition in the toilet, your reaction time, you’re like a drunk person, basically.
It’s very bad. It’s the cause of accidents. So we’re in this conundrum where there’s, there are some definite benefits to sleep deprivation, some tantalizing potential hypothetical benefits to sleep deprivation, and yet really bad problems with sleep deprivation. And so how do you How do you manage that?
One thing that is really interesting about ketogenic diets is that they increase sleep. I mentioned that they increase slow wave sleep, but I, what I think is true is that they increase the intensity of slow wave sleep. So remember we were talking about how the first half of the night you get more slow wave sleep in the second half of the night you get more rim.
That’s because your sleep drive is driven. It’s driven by this need to get slow wave sleep for whatever reason, for a variety of reasons. It does all kinds of things. All kinds of things happen. You clear, you get a clearance of metabolites and oxidative metabolites in the brain. It’s good for cognition.
There’s, there are correlations between you, if you have a. Diseases, like Alzheimer’s or something there, there’s at least a correlation between better sleep and better cognitive, like less cognitive deficit. Anything that increases energy in rain, energy use in the brain during the day will then increase the intensity of sil wave sleep.
So that means the waves are that we were talking about are higher amplitude or there’s more of them in a shorter period of time. It makes your sleep more efficient. And one thing that might be happening with a ketogenic diet is that because of that increase in sleep intensity and slow wave sleep you’re getting more bang for your buck , like you’re getting more of the benefits of slow wave sleep crunched into the same amount of time, or you might even decrease the amount of time needed by a bit.
Carole Freeman: Yeah, that’s definitely what I’ve noticed for my clients. They report that they sleep less hours and they just feel so much more refreshed when they do wake up and more energy. And some of them actually are very concerned cuz they’re like, I. They, they think something’s wrong because, oh, I just, I can’t fall asleep for a couple hours.
And I said how do you feel when you wake up? Like you’re, I’m only sleeping six hours a night. And they’re very worried. I’m like how do you feel when you wake up? I feel great. I’m like you get two more hours in your day now, I guess so .
Amber O’Hearn: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Sleep quality and sleep duration are different things and and it, the time, the amount of time you spend in bed doesn’t, you can, one person can have seven hours in bed and getting really high quality sleep and another person could just be having a lot of wakings or not getting very deep or so yeah, if it, insofar as a ketogenic diet improves sleep quality, which I think it does you’re likely to need less
Another thing that is related to that, that we didn’t talk about at all, but I went into the talk is these two neurotransmitter neuropeptide chemicals. Without getting too technical about it there’s a wakefulness one called rein and a sleepiness one called Adenine.
They both go up on a ketogenic diet and which is really fascinating because they have opposite effects. So one of the things that I was speculating in my paper and in my talk is that because they’re both going up, what happens is that, adenine in the sleepiness one, like sleep deprivation.
In fact it’s believed that the reason that sleep deprivation gives these antidepressant effects is because of the increase in adenine, but adenine makes you sleepy. But it and a ketogenic diet, it doesn’t seem to make you more sleepy. And maybe that’s because the erection is balancing it out.
They they mutually inhibit each other. So
I tend to think, and of course, I’m a little bit biased toward ketogenic diets because of all the wonderful things that they do. But I think that maybe what a ketogenic diet is allowing to happen is that you’re getting more of adenine the sleepiness without getting the normal sleepiness that would accompany it.
And therefore you’re able to get those benefits without the detriments. And insofar as that is true, we may be able to at least slightly reduce our sleep deliberately on a ketogenic diet and still maintain benefits. But it’s empirical question.
Carole Freeman: So fascinating. Ah let’s talk about the satiety part then.
How does this all, how does this all take, tie together with the satiety? We covered it a little bit where Sleep de deprivation makes you hungrier. Is that the summary ?
Amber O’Hearn: There’s a lot. So satiety should be directly related to your energy availability, which some people have shown to be tied to metabolic rate.
So if you’re making a lot of energy, your metabolic rate is high, you’re turning a lot of material into energy and then using it
Metabolic rate also seems to be directly tied to probably, I believe, causely to hunger, which would make sense, right? Because you should be hungry exactly. When you feel like you’re not getting enough energy. So if your metabolic rate is low, your energy output is low, and if your brain senses that somehow, then that should tell you to eat.
Whereas if your metabolic rate is high, you’re producing all kinds of energy. There should be energy in the blood and the metabolic kind of metabolites or byproducts of making energy should be in the blood, which your brain can pick up on. And then, so your body your organism yourself should say, okay, I’ve got lots of energy.
I’m not hungry. That would make perfect sense, right? But the interesting thing is that the. High rates of energy use also correlate to sleepiness and sleep duration. So if you have a lot of, if it’s like when you’re using a lot of energy in the brain and it causes a lot of good intense sleep.
Similarly, when you have a lot of energy your sleep duration is more and you actually get more REM sleep. Whereas if you are if you’re energy deprived, for example, in anorexia, you will often not be able to sleep in the second half of the night, which is when most of your rim is happening. So sleep duration seems to be quite tied to energy availability in a similar way to The way appetite is.
And it also ties into the reactive oxygen species, the ox stress that we were talking about because we’re already talked about how high levels of Ross are instigating sleep. And high levels of Ross are also tied into satiety, which is part of the theory that I mentioned from Peter Dubinski about how cell will recognize that it’s had enough because reactive oxygen species that are created by generating atp tell the cell, oh, we’ve got lots of energy.
Now we can become more insulin resistant. Now we can demonstrate satiety at the cellular level. And so That’s concordant with the need for sleep and getting lots of sleep. And then on the opposite end of that I mentioned orexin as one of these things that causes wakefulness.
It also causes hunger. So like the word anorexia means not hungry. Anorexia is this thing that drives wakefulness and hunger. So we, there are actually a lot of common pathways in both in the periphery and the brain for for detecting having enough energy and. Sleeping. And so often I see people who are on a ketogenic diet if they’re not getting enough to eat such that the ideal case right when you’re fasting, say, is that you’re your cell, your fat cells will give up.
And you’ll just use that for energy. That’s the that’s what’s supposed to happen you faster when you’re on some, any kind of a diet is that whatever deficit you deliberately create by not eating your fat cells will just make up. And if that worked, then we probably wouldn’t be here. , for a lot of people it doesn’t work.
And even in the ketogenic case, sometimes if you cut calories too much or if you fast, yes, you might be able to get some fat flowing out of your fat cells, but it might still not be enough to make your body feel like it’s got enough energy and that can cause wakefulness. Whereas if you add some fat back through intake it’s really not gonna disrupt the fat coming off your body because if you’re in this situation where supposedly just compare fasting and you’ve got a certain amount of fat that’s coming off your body at a certain rate, But it’s not enough to meet all your energy needs.
Then adding some fat intake can’t possibly make you not lose weight as fast, right? Because you’re already maximally giving as much fat as your body is willing to give. So now add some fat to give your body and your brain energy that it needs and you will feel better and you’ll sleep better and you’re not losing any less weight, cuz your body wasn’t gonna give up more anyway.
Carole Freeman: If that makes sense. Oh it, yeah, it, I’ve seen it just anecdotally where, people that hell have gastric bypass surgery, right? And they’re, they, because of that restriction, they end up eating very little per day, maybe six or 800 calories. And I’ve seen though that the rate of weight loss for them is very similar to what my clients experience when they’re eating You.
Whatever they want to eat, which ends up being, somewhere between 1500, 1800 calories a day. And like the calories in, calories out model is that doesn’t make any sense. It can’t be possible. But what you’re talking about could be part of the explanation of what’s going on there.
And the body is, there’s way more complicated than a math equation . So Mallory’s saying that anecdotally I also find it easier to adhere to a ketogenic diet when I’ve gotten enough sleep. Oh,
Amber O’Hearn: ah, yeah. So maybe yeah. So there is this idea that when you’re sleep deprived, not only are you hungry, but you can be hungry specifically for carbs because carbs are a fast energy.
My suggestion in that case to try is if you end up in a position where you’ve had less sleep, either deliberately or or accidentally, and you’re feeling those car cravings, give yourself more fat and see if that energy will put, toss the cravings because that was what they were for, is for energy.
And they just appeared to be for glucose.
Carole Freeman: Especially if you’re already keto to adapted, your body should be able to easily take that fat and create energy from it. Yeah. If
Amber O’Hearn: you’re not keto adapted, all bets are off
Carole Freeman: Oh, that’s, oh, that’s really cool. The other thing I thought was really interesting, one of the. After your top questions that was in that recording you were talking about cortisol and how it’s called a stress hormone, but, and so it, it gets labeled as the bad hormone. That’s, doing bad stuff during stress.
But you talked about how it’s actually a really good thing. So can you talk a talk about that? Cuz we’re always like, oh, minimize your cortisol, you gotta get rid of it just like everything else. That’s good or bad. There’s a reason our body’s making it obviously, so it’s doing something.
Amber O’Hearn: Yeah.
Cortisol, the Stress Hormone:
There’s one sense in which it’s two sides of the same coin, right? So if you, cortisol is the, it’s called the stress hormone because it’s a response. It can be a response to stress and it actually but what it actually does in its response, the reason it’s a response is because it reduces stress.
Cortisol goes up, for example, if you look at animals who are, that are studied in the context of dietary restriction for longevity. So you do this like caloric restriction to try to induce longevity in different animals, and sometimes in some animals it works. So they live longer and they also have mildly elevated cortisol.
And if you look at the many different papers where they discuss this, what they say is, oh yeah this mildly increased cortisol. It’s probably probably part of what’s giving them longevity because it’s a, it’s an anti-inflammatory. It’s a, it’s an anti-stress hormone. And then, but then
Researchers. You turn around and look at the literature on ketogenic diets where they’re in some cases, in some experiments, a similar thing is shown where there’s this mild increase in cortisol and everyone says, oh, that’s bad. That shows stress. And we don’t get to see if the person lived longer like we did, cuz they can’t say that in the rats, right?
If you can’t say, oh, their cortisol went up and they lived longer, so the cortisol had to be bad. No, everything that happened, now you have to say that might have been good. Or at least it wasn’t so bad that it prevented the good thing. But when, when you’re looking at a ketogenic diet and everybody wants to hate on them, they’ll just pick on anything.
But yet cortisol it could be in certain situations, if you just see it being raised all the time, you could say that indicates that something underlying. Going on is bad because why would you need so much anti-inflammation all the time? So that’s another way of looking at it in which someone might wanna say, yeah, you need to lower your cortisol, not because cortisol itself is bad, but because whatever it is that’s causing you to need that cortisol, you need to fix.
And that’s maybe a more valid way to think about it, although I don’t think that the, it depends on the levels that we’re talking about. And then cortisol has different effects in different situations. So if you have a high insulin and high cortisol, the net effect of both of those is fat gain because of the way that they interact at the cell in terms of fat uptake and fat release.
But if you have low insulin and high cortisol, it should result in a fat loss. So it’s really highly contextually dependent.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. Oh, I’m just like thinking of all the, gotta lower your cortisol. So then what do you think of then herbs that people take? Cortisol is high. What are those doing? Are those just addressing the inflammation? Are they actually just suppressing cortisol? Do you know much about herbs that reduce cortisol?
Amber O’Hearn: I don’t know. I can imagine there might be both types. Yeah. Yeah.
Carole Freeman: What else? And those of you listening, watching, please give us some questions and then comments. We’ll hang out and answer some questions if you have any here. Was there anything else that you were hoping I would ask about or along these lines that you feel like is important to share or,
Amber O’Hearn: I don’t think so.
We covered a lot.
Carole Freeman: Yes. Yes. I know there’s a bit of a delay for people. So go ahead and put your questions in the comment box there too. If you have any questions about sleep about satiety, about obesity and a ketogenic diet.
Or anything else really? Yeah. Or anything just, we’ll pick and choose whether we answer it or not, yeah. It just really has me thinking a lot about the fat intake and how you can leverage that too, because we’ve gone from, the early days of a ketogenic diet for weight loss specifically was lots and lots of fat.
We’ve moved through a period of time of oh no, no protein don’t eat so much fat , the more fat you eat, the less is gonna come off your body. I have found with my clients that moving toward a more protein pot, protein centric approach where they’re getting adequate protein, which is a lot more than what originally. I’d have them doing does seem to facilitate more rapid weight loss. Even though, higher energy intake too. But I know that the experiments that I done if it’s experiment, but the approach that Chevon has found for herself a much higher fat intake actually has been a way at releasing more fat.
Are you, would you like to share a little bit about that?
Ketogenic Diet High Protein vs Low Protein:
Amber O’Hearn: Yeah, let’s talk about that at least briefly. So there, there have been some pendulum swings over the course of time that I’ve been hanging around ketogenic diet forms and stuff with high protein versus low protein. And there, going too low in protein is gonna be detrimental.
And a lot of people, especially if they’re not on a carnivore diet, where they might eat a whole lot of plants which aren’t a very high source of protein, they could end up having protein that’s actually so low that it’s not meeting your needs and it could be causing it. If your body needs to be in repair and it can’t do that can actually cause your insulin to go up as insulin is part of the inflammatory and repair response.
So getting too low protein chronically can have, can cause all kinds of problems. And then the consensus on what is enough protein, I think has been too low for a really long time. So there’s this 0.8 gram per kilogram of ideal weight, which I think is way too low. I think people actually need like 1.4 to 1.6 at least grams per kilogram of ideal weight of protein.
So when you say higher protein, if you’re moving from something that’s more like 0.8 to something that’s more like 1.5, then that could really be like a game changer for someone to get healthier. Once you get healthier, it’s easier to lose weight. And then If your fat is willing you’re not too metabolically unhealthy, your insulin is fairly low and you don’t have certain types of say, tissue damage problems that you might see in, say, lipedema or autoimmune disorders.
Then there is a, there seems to be a, or, and you don’t have a history of type two diabetes. Then there seems to be quite actually a large range of protein. That you can eat and still stay healthy. Access your fat and lose weight fairly effectively. So for a lot of people as long as they’re meeting that minimum. You could go you could go up to.
Maybe 150, 200 grams of protein and still lose weight. But then for other people for whom the fat is not as accessible for any of a variety of reasons. Lowering protein so that it’s much closer to that adequate level and not very much higher. And then adding a lot of fat for energy is, can actually be a lot more effective.
So it depends. Both approaches can work . But I think in both approaches you have to make sure , you really are getting enough protein. It’s not so low that it’s a detriment.
Carole Freeman: Oh, fascinating. Oh, so there’s not one size fits all way of eating for every single person on this planet
Amber O’Hearn: if they’re all healthy, it’s like that to story, right? That tol story quote. All fam, all happy families are happy in the same way. And all unhappy families are unhappy in their own individual.
Carole Freeman: Here’s a good question, but we are not gonna have time to cover this. So we’ve got kay STAs ask, asking how to heal the gut. And you know what, that’s, I should have that as a future future topic. And anything you wanna say real quick on that? Amber?
Amber O’Hearn: Yeah, I used to think that antibiotics were neutral and not a big deal. I had a bad experience with antibiotics that I think. I believe made me prone to infection and gave me a lot of gut trouble.
I’m still in the process of fixing it and I don’t know the answer, but I don’t know. That was a side note,
Carole Freeman: And I think we’ve got Dr. Ellen Schaeffer here. So many folks who are overweight will have sleep apnea, which will fragment their sleep, continue contributing to insulin resistance. Usually my patients see me for sleep. Oh yeah.
Amber O’Hearn: It’s a big vicious circle because the sleep apnea will wake you. Then you’re getting like inherently bad sleep quality cuz it’s disrupting all of the processes in including the duration.
And then you’ve got insulin resistance. If you’re not on a ketogenic diet, that’s gonna worsen glucose tolerance and affect your ability to eat food well. That can cause obesity and can contribute to sleep apnea , because it can like physically make the passages less free.
So yeah, it’s a terrible endemic problem.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. Here’s a question from Jennifer. How important is it to adhere to a sleep schedule? Is it helpful to get my seven to eight hours of sleep at approximately the same time each night?
Amber O’Hearn: Yes. You will sleep better if you sleep at the same time . I think waking time more than going to sleep time.
And I don’t remember why I think that , so maybe I’m wrong. I’ll have to get back to you. But yeah, if you’re, if you have sleep consistency, that tends to contribute to better sleep quality.
Carole Freeman: Thank you for the question, Jennifer. And then, Dr. Shaffer follow up. I treat their apnea first, then work on carb restriction, weight loss, diabetes reversal, et cetera. So I think sleep apnea needs to be discussed even if they aren’t particularly symptomatic. I’m assuming it means treats it with probably a C P A P machine or some kind of airflow, right?
Amber O’Hearn: So I think what you’re saying Alan if you have an patient presents with diabetes or overweight. Then even if they don’t think that they’re having apnea. It should be looked into because you can address that right away. That should start to have a positive feedback loop.
Maybe that’s what you’re saying
Carole Freeman: and yes is the answer,
I know the history of me getting into a ketogenic personally after a car accident and undiagnosed traumatic brain injury. Every symptom that I had from that developed post-traumatic hypo pituitary. Which basically my whole body was just like, oh, a wreck. Everything that was going wrong got fixed by going on a ketogenic diet.
All the symptoms went away, except for I ended up having this residual essential sleep apnea. So I was still experiencing that a couple years afterwards. And I couldn’t find anybody that could explain to me what was really going on. Why that was happening, except for my brain had been injured.
And the therapy that I finally found that worked for that was, it was really frustrating going. The sleep clinic diagnosis and all that kind of stuff because. I’d already lost 60 pounds at that point and their answer was, you should lose some weight. And I’m like, how much more should I lose. And so they didn’t have, they didn’t have any treatment for the central sleep apnea basically. Because the C pap machine wouldn’t, override that set central? . Yeah, where the brain just stops remembering to tell your body to breathe. So it’s not obstructive like the sleep apnea that Dr.
Shaver’s talking about. So what I ended up doing that, that seemed to work, was doing some hyperbaric oxygen therapy treatments. And so I seem to be normal now. I don’t know. Normal , I
Amber O’Hearn: won’t grant you that. Carole right?
Carole Freeman: She knows me well enough. So Alan saying especially after they have trouble losing weight and so that’s Say more.
Are you getting that? And I think it, addressing the sleep apnea and finding. If that’s an issue first, can then help with the weight loss. I’m suspecting. All right, great discussion here everyone. Thank you all for being here today. Give it up for Amber for being here. Everyone too.
Amber O’Hearn: Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me on.
Carole Freeman: Great so much to think about here. And yeah, so next week, join me next week I’m gonna have Randy Webb here. We’re gonna be doing some easy techniques to release stress and trauma from the body.
He’s my former supervisor during my grade school degree in psychology. We did the episode a few months back, but there were some audio issues. So we’re gonna redo that episode. So come back next week. And so today we talked about keto diet. And satiety and obesity with Amber O’Hearn. Thank you again for being here, everyone.
If you like what you heard today, support this show. Leave us some more comments share this episode with a friend. Leave us a review. If you’re listening on one of your podcast platforms, would appreciate you leaving us a review. It really would mean a lot. It helps more people find out about the show. And we can get more people this information that could also change their health and their life.
So everyone, thank you again for being here. Thanks to Amber and remember, help us grow the show and we’ll help you shrink . Bye for now, everyone. We’ll see you next time.
Hey, we’re live everyone. This episode is gonna be controversial, I promise you!
Are you conflicted about body positivity.
Is it wrong to want to lose weight?
Can you truly be healthy at any weight, in any body size?
This episode is for you. It’s gonna be controversial, and let’s do this!
All right, welcome everyone to Keto Chat Live. I’m your host, Carole Freeman. I have a master’s in nutrition and clinical health psychology a certified clinical hypnotherapist and also a board certified ketogenic nutrition specialist. And I specialize in helping women 40 plus follow a keto diet for sustainable weight loss.
Now let’s give you the little medical disclaimer so that lawyers are happy. This show is meant for educational and entertainment purposes only. Is not medical advice nor intended to diagnose, prevent, treat, or cure any condition. If you have questions, concerns about your specific medical condition, please seek out a qualified medical professional your doctor. Thanks for joining the show.
Personal Update
What’s going on in my life? I got a comedy show tonight out in Ahwatukee, which is an area of South Phoenix, and so excited about that. Got some friends coming out. Should be a really great show. It’s gonna be really fun.
Last weekend I went, or last week I went to a wedding and then took a spontaneous trip to San Francisco for the weekend, and I just, I’m so grateful for the way that I’ve designed my business that I can serve my clients at a very deep level, get them results, provide them with support. That, as I understand it, is next to none. There’s no other keto coaching support program out there that has the as much support that we have, but I still go and travel and make spontaneous trips to wherever I want to go.
Also I moved into a new co-working space in Phoenix. And with this dedicated pod podcast studio, which I’m still learning, how to set up the equipment in. And so let me know what you think of the sound. This episode and our last episode are recorded in this or broadcast live from this new podcasting studio. So let us know what you think of the sound.
Keto Membership Updates
One other thing we’re working on right now is that we’re, I’m making preparations for our membership’s virtual retreat. This will be the fourth one that we’ve done, and for people that are in my long term keto membership, which again, if you want us make changes long term.
You have to have long term support. So these ladies are very smart that they’ve joined and stayed on with me for long term. So we have our virtual retreat coming up, our fall one coming up October 15th and 16th. And today it was putting together the outline for the two days. And this is the fourth one we’ve done.
People absolutely love these. It’s meant to help us connect as a community and just uplevel our keto game. And take things to the next level and just feel really connected, motivated, and excited to keep going with things. We do not record the session. So they are in Zoom. They are virtual people can join all over across the country.
You have to be one of our members to be able to participate in this and we don’t record them. And this is the way of getting people to show up live and not say, Oh, I’ll just watch the recordings later. Also helps people be able to share in really authentic and honest way knowing that nobody else is gonna be watching it later and it’s only happening their lives.
So it creates a very safe space for people. We’ve got some, just some teaser topics that we’re. We’ve got, If I can move my page without ripping the cord out here. One of our peer support coaches, Dr. Cindy Ryan, is always a very popular speaker. She speaks all over the country and so we get to the privilege of having her on our virtual retreats.
Table of Contents
We always do a cooking class and. Get to cook together. It’s really cool. We’ve brainstormed some topics as well too. So we’re gonna be doing our top keto hacks for foods and coping and travel and meal and restaurants, and also some traps and pitfalls. I’m gonna be doing a label reading class as part of this as well, so help people figure out, are those foods at this store really?
Keto friendly. And one of our other peer support coaches is an avid CrossFitter, and so she’s gonna teach some couple of movement sessions for us. So not as intense as CrossFit, but the title, working title, the zip that comes with movement, and working towards. Holiday mindset. So we plan our fall retreat right before we head into the holiday season, which for a lot of people, can be really tricky of avoiding all of those high sugar, high carb foods that come along with the holidays.
And so much more. If you are listening to this and you were one of our. Keto lifestyle crew members, guess what? You get to attend for free. And on the first of the month when your email comes out, you’ll get the registration link to join us there. If you are a former client and feel like you’re missing out and having a little bit of fomo send me a message and I’ll let you have some information about how you can join us as well.
And if you’re somebody. It’s one of our have never worked with us. Also get in touch with us and let me I will let you know how you can actually participate in this as well. And finally, the other news information, new newness, new stuff here is that I did an experiment last week where we invited a few people to come as a guest under our group coaching calls.
Would You Like a Keto Coaching Guest Spots?
People that were considering working with us, considering, wanted to know what it was like to work with a keto coach. And it was a huge success. All three of the people that came as guests are now clients for us. And so it’s very exciting because they got to see what it was like to be immersed in our group of ladies that are all very successful on keto and that are continuing this as a long term journey and If you are somebody that would be curious, maybe you wanna be able to participate in our virtual keto retreat that’s coming up.
Or if you’re just somebody who’s stuck and maybe you’ve had some success on keto, can’t figure out how to get to the next level, or you did it in the past and it worked and now you can’t figure out how to get back on track. Reach out to us and will give you some information about coming on as a guest in one of our keto coaching calls.
Let me put the email that I would love for you to send a message to. I will put it on the screen here. Here we go, you can send an email to: Support@KetoCarole.com. Carole has an e on the end. Don’t forget that. And just let my assistant will be answering those emails and let her know that you would like to information about being a guest on our group coaching calls, or if you’d like some more information about how to participate in the virtual retreat or any other questions you’ve got, please send them right over there.
All right, let’s get back to, let me see the comments all of you have. All right, so again, welcome to the show. So glad you’re here. Those of you watching live, just pop a comment out there and let me know where you’re watching from, where you’re joining. I can see we’ve got some viewers on YouTube, so participate in the chat there.
And so glad that you’re here. But today’s topic, I’m gonna be talk, talking about the body positivity. Movement, trend, whatever you want to call it, trend or theme. And so I’m gonna talk about the training that I had in this. How I lived this and tried to teach it to my clients, what that did to my health and what it did to what it was like living in that body.
I’m gonna talk about how it’s affecting the people that are coming to work with me now and their mindset and how ashamed they are. And then I’m gonna, I’m gonna break it down and say what is wrong? Oh, this is the controversial part. What is wrong with the body? Positivity. Okay. So buckle up.
This should be. I have, I feel like I have one of the best nutrition educations that is available, especially for doing the work in the weight loss space because I have a master’s in nutrition and a master’s in clinical health psychology. It is a very unique degree that I’ve got. Two master degrees simultaneously.
Oh my gosh. I lived through it. It was very stressful and a lot of hard work. But I wouldn’t trade that education for anything because it exposed me to so many different really important topics and. I did learn during school about the, about intuitive eating, mindful eating, and the health at every size movement and research that’s out there.
Is Intuitive Eating Effective for Weight Loss?
So let me tell you what those things are and they have a lot of value, but also there’s a lot of things that they get wrong, and I’m gonna break those down for you here today. Intuitive eating, this is the concept that. That if we just slow down and we really tune in to what our body is telling us it wants that we will actually be able to have a healthy body weight.
We will eat foods that nourish us and meet our nutrient needs. But I’ll tell you what, , back when I was following this, I would walk through the grocery store every night. And the bakery section always called me and I would walk through all the desserts and I would be what is my body telling me it needs right now?
Often it was, pie or cake or cookies or something like that. And I’ll tell you what, none of those are meeting my nutrient needs at all. Mindful eating is a concept, and again, all of these have things that are very valuable and I use all of these. But I’m gonna tell you also that they got a lot of things wrong.
Their piece is missing, so I’m gonna say they didn’t get things wrong, but there’s big chunks that are missing that makes these, they don’t work unless you have some other things with them. Mindful eating is this concept that if we just slow down and we use the mindfulness principles, That we also will make the most healthy choices possible, and we will just eat foods at nourishes we won’t overeat.
So mindful eating involves being present here in the now. We’re paying attention to what’s happening, the food on our plate, paying attention when we eat it to the taste, textures, and sounds of it , not thinking about the past nor worrying about the future. We’re just here in this moment.
Mindful Eating Effective or Not for Weight Loss?
We only notice how it feels when we’re sitting or standing, and there’s no judgment. So another piece of mindful eating is that you’re not telling yourself you’re bad for eating something or you’re good for eating something else. There’s no judgment. It’s just food something that you’re eating.
It’s no t wrong, good or bad. You just are doing it. And so mindful eating says that poor choices come from not being present in the moment, not paying attention to how the food actually tastes in our mouth. It also says, When we judge ourselves for eating certain things or craving certain things and we say, Oh, I’m a bad person because I ate this.
That further perpetuates us making those choices. And then if we tell ourselves we’re good for doing something putting moral judgment on food is what perpetuates cravings and overeating and making those poor choices. When we feel bad about ourselves, we want food to the that. That’s not really why we make those choices Now.
It can actually have an impact on what you eat. There are some foods that we just are accustomed to eating. We shovel it in our mouth. We don’t actually pay attention to how it tastes or feels in our body. And so mindful eating, and again, there, there’s a lot good in these concepts and I use. With my clients, but without the proper context of the right foods that actually do nourish our body and moving away from things that are highly palatable and trigger us on a biochemical way to to overeat them.
These things by themselves are not enough to actually help us be a healthy body weight and make. Healthful food choices that nourish our body. And then the health at every size movement this is research based. There are a lot of practitioners out there that follow this at the end chronic dieting leads to people being food obsessed.
Maybe they can lose weight temporarily, but they always regain. And that by encouraging people to try to lose weight and to be in a leaner body, that is what makes them hate themselves. It makes their health worse, and that’s what makes people regain the weight and more. And so hell that every size says it’s much better to help people just learn to love their body as it is, and that they will be healthier, even if they’re overweight, they will be healthier than if they chronically diet and gain even more weight back and.
There’s, that’s also slightly incorrect. So they have a lot of research that backs this as well, where they say that, yes, when people go on, it is true that when people diet and then they go off the diet, they gain more back. That’s the way our body’s designed. It’s not the diet or the wanting to lose weight, hating your body that made that happen.
It’s just the way that our body’s designed. And so unless you can find a way of changing your eating habits permanently that you can stick with indefinitely, yes. If you go on a temporary diet, you will gain the weight back and more. That’s the way your body’s designed. That part is very true. The part that gets wrong with the health at every size though, is they do say that.
Does Weight Loss Cause Eating Disorders?
People can be healthy at any size that it doesn’t matter. You need to separate your health from your weight. And I’ll tell you what, like all my ladies that have lost weight, we run labs on them and they get healthier. So they were not healthier at the heavier weight. And also yeah, so let me talk about those pitfalls here in just a moment.
So those are the concepts that I learned, and again, I use. With my clients now, but we’ve gotta have them in a context that makes ’em actually work. So now I live this. I embraced this wholeheartedly. I believed everything that I learned about this, and so what happened to me and I was trying to teach it to my clients, let go of trying to lose weight that’s bad.
It causes eating disorders. It just makes you weigh even more. And so just learn to love your body just as it is. Let go of the fantasy that you can ever lose weight and keep it off. It was hard. It was a hard sell. I’ll tell you that , and what happened to me is that I ended up being. Over 220 pounds. I graduated with two master’s degrees.
My Weight Story:
Over the years following, I reached over 220 pounds. So I didn’t, I wasn’t trying to diet, I wasn’t trying to lose weight. I had zero focus on that. In fact, I was one of those people. That shamed people for trying to lose weight or ever going on a diet or ever trying to eat healthier? Not that’s wrong.
Not trying to eat healthier, but people that were actively trying to watch their intake in order to facilitate a lower body fat. And I thought that was, again, I believed everything that these concepts teach, and I believe that I was better and them. Because I was not trying to lose weight and diet, but all I was doing was continuing to gain weight and I ate whole foods.
I didn’t eat junk food, didn’t go to fast food. and ate whole Foods. But again, I would end every day night with a dessert. I was definitely overeating and overconsuming and I ended up with metabolic syndrome, which I’ll tell you what, not healthy at that size. My waist measurement was 40 inches.
I had high blood pressure, I had low HDL, I had high triglycerides. So those are the four, I’m sorry, four of the five criteria for metabolic syndrome. I also likely had blood sugar that was creeping up towards the diabetic range, so I almost had all five of those. Besides that, it was miserable living in that body.
And here’s one of the things. That I see that the hell that every size model gets wrong is they discount the fact that when people are a heavier body weight, a heavier body fat percentage than what’s optimally healthy for them, it doesn’t feel good living in that body. It says not just an extra heavy weight that you’re carrying around, but the metabolic state that’s in your body, the high insulin, the excess of inflammation.
And all the other factors that go into this. The body doesn’t feel good to live in. I had stiff ankles every time I woke up in the morning. My ankles were really stiff. It was hard to walk around. I had chronic heartburn. I had skin tags, which if you have those, I grew up in a family where everyone had them when we were just told that was a part of getting older.
It turns out it’s a sign of insulin resistance. So I had skin tags. I was constantly, I was food obsessed. All I ever thought about was what am I gonna eat next? I also would have cr blood sugar crashes, so I couldn’t leave the house without actually having some snacks. If I was gonna go meet friends for a meal, I would be obsessed with let’s go to the place that’s gonna gimme the biggest portion, because I need to eat a lot of food to feel hungry or to not feel hungry.
And even then, I probably wouldn’t be very satisfied. I felt tired after meals. I also, I had to buy bigger and bigger clothes. And it’s not, it’s uncomfortable to be walking around in that body and I was definitely headed towards type two diabetes. So it was not quality of life. And again, I was not, I was focused wholeheartedly on intuitive eating, mindful eating, and just not trying to diet or lose weight.
And all it did was making me gain more weight. So the trend that I see now is body positivity. Where. Especially the health at every size or just the concept of like your body’s size is not correlated with your health status. And I’ll tell you right now, I think that loving your body at any size is absolutely paramount.
I a hundred percent, a thousand percent agree with love yourself no matter what you look like, no matter what size you are. That’s the part of this that I a hundred percent agree with the women I’m working with. Are so ashamed of themselves. Their bodies, their attempts, they are trying to be healthier.
They are trying to be leaner. They’ve tried everything on the market, every diet, every program. And yes, they have fallen in the trap of losing the weight and gaining it back and even more. But that’s not because. They need to just give in and learn to love their bigger body and being overweight. So the part that I agree with is you are worthy, lovable.
And acceptable as you are, no matter what size you are, no matter what body percent fat you have, I a hundred percent agree with that. Body positivity is a great thing. We need to let women shake off that shame that they need to be a certain perfect thing that’s on magazine cover that’s photoshopped and totally unrealistic.
That needs to, that should stop. But what I’m seeing is, With the movement the other way of, Oh no, you can actually be whatever size and you can be healthy and you don’t need that. It’s wrong to try to lose weight because that’s bad for you. The women that are coming to me for help, they actually are often ashamed to admit that they would like to be slimmer, leaner.
They have been leaner in the past and they know that they felt better in that. And they’re ashamed to admit this because we’re living in this world now where it’s all about, nope. Just learn to love your body and let it be as big as it wants to be, and you can feel great, and there’s no negative side effects or consequences of living that way.
But these ladies know that’s not true. They have chronic headaches and low energy and food obsession. They’ve got aches, joints, and pain in everywhere in their body. They have different, some of them have disease diagnoses and autoimmune conditions. Not all of them do, but a lot of them do. They’ve, it’s just really uncomfortable living these bodies.
Should We Give Up On Weight Loss?
They know that because they’ve been slimmer in the past and they felt much better, and so it’s not necessarily the extra fat on their body. It’s about what is going on inside and the health consequences of the higher insulin and the inflammation and so on and so forth. And they’re ashamed that they want to be smaller, leaner, slimmer.
They’re ashamed to tell me this and I have to validate that. No, I get it. I get it. When you’re living in a body that’s unhealthy and has more fat on it than is healthy for you, it feel it’s a lot of burden to carry. It’s hard being tired all the time and having aches and pains and being food obsessed and then getting this message that’s bad to want to change that.
And they have a hard time facing the fact that am I supposed to just give up and settle with gaining weight each year, buying bigger clothes, adding more medications, and feeling more tired and uncomfortable in my. Is that the only option? So let’s talk more now about what those concepts got wrong and the problems I have with the.
Body positivity. Now I’m using that as a as umbrella term. And I told you at the beginning this would be a little controversial. So I, again, to clarify, I have zero problem with being positive about our bodies. In fact, I actually think that’s a wonderful thing. I want all of my women to feel amazing about themselves as a person and their body.
And you can love yourself. So what they get wrong is it’s not dichotomy. You don’t have to hate your body in order to want to lose weight. Jut love yourself just as you are and strive to feel good and get healthier. You can want to be the best version of yourself. And being a lower body fat in the healthy range actually can be part of that of loving.
So women’s bodies are generally healthiest at 22 to 29% body fat. So that’s where I help my clients set a goal to be somewhere in that range. Now, not all of ’em get there. They may not get there really quickly. But that’s what a realistic goal of a healthy women’s body fat percentage is. And in fact, puberty is actually triggered in little girls once they hit 22% body fat.
That’s the signal that tells their body it’s time to go through puberty and. This is why it’s happening younger and younger is because our children are getting heavier and heavier, more body fatted and much younger age than previously. So this is, it’s not the hormones and the milk or anything like that.
It’s the percentage of body fat. That’s what triggers puberty. And so wanting to lose weight, wanting, specifically wanting to lose fat is not inherently bad. That is not what causes eating disorders. It’s not what cause. The rebound effect of regaining the weight. Now again, for my clients, we’re checking metabolic labs at the beginning of their journey, and we’re watching that over time.
And they’re all getting better. It’s because we’re getting at the root cause of what’s causing the fatigue and the food obsession and the inflammation all of those things. And, people, they always feel better when they get their body fat. For example, one of my peer support coaches, Karen, she’s lost over 70 pounds and she figured out that her two twin grandsons holding both of them, they weigh less than that, but trying to hold them and walk around all day long.
it was a lot of extra burden on her body. It would be, of course, it would be hard to carry 70 pounds around all day long. Of course, it’s gonna feel easier to move around through life and do everything that you want to do from walking up and down stairs to putting your shoes on, to chase on your grandkids around.
Of course, it’s gonna feel easier to move through life with 70 less pounds that you’re carrying around.
Things That Do Not Cause Eating Disorders
And also losing weight itself and also food restriction is not what causes eating disorders. In fact, I’ve worked with several people on keto that have had diagnosed eating disorders and it actually improved their eating disorder. It removes the food obsession. It removes the constant hunger, it removes the blood sugar roller coaster That contributes to both those things, and we’re also The way that I teach keto, we’re removing hyper palatable foods.
So again, if you haven’t listened to any of my past episodes, hyper palatable food combo is fat and sugar together, or carbs and fat, or sweet and fat together that triggers our. To crave it, or brain to crave it, and it triggers us to overeat it. That’s the core of Binge Eating Disorder. And instead, we tell people that if you just love yourself, if you just have moderation, if you don’t feel bad about yourself while you’re eating it, and you just slowly eat it and enjoy it, you won’t struggle with binge eating disorder.
That’s bs. Our body, our brain, are specifically designed to crave those foods and overeat them. There’s no amount of self-love moderation or non-judgmental eating you can do that’s gonna make you not overeat those foods. So some food restrictions, some drawing a line in the sand. And I prefer, instead of talking about food restriction, I help my clients look at here’s all the foods that you can eat.
Focus on what you do. Like the foods that I can coach my clients to eat, I’ll tell you what, they could have unlimited food accommodations. They would never have to eat the same meal again for the rest of their lives. There is so much variety, they’re not deprived. And once they get to the point of no longer being food obsessed, no longer overeating, plenty of energy free from aches and pains, freedom moving around and feeling so much better in their body.
They don’t look at it as a restriction either. They look at it as freedom. So this is, again, this is where these concepts are getting things wrong. They have pieces missing, and the truth is you can lose weight and keep it off if you find the right approach, a way of eating that you can stick with indefinitely the rest of your life along with the right kind of support.
Because guess what? Our whole world, our food supply is all designed to make us overeat. It crave. And not be able to have moderation. So it’s not the concept of losing weight, it’s not trying to lose weight that makes these things, It’s the foods , it’s the food fault. So again, I’m a hundred percent for loving your body and yourself exactly where you are, and you don’t have.
Give up on trying to be the healthiest version of yourself, right? So when somebody wants to try to climb Mount Everest, we applaud that. Oh my gosh, what a feat of human human achievement. Good for you. Or somebody wants to do a marathon, somebody wants to be a do an Iron Man or one of those tough mutter races.
Good for you. You’re trying to see what you can achieve in your body. It’s within the parameters of what would be considered a good thing to do. We’re so proud of you for doing that. Why then, is it something that we consider to be bad, that people are trying to achieve a healthy body fat percent? Achieve the healthiest version of their body.
How Can I Help You With Your Keto Weight Loss!
Now again, I’m not helping people trying to get to that bikini body where they have a six pack on a woman’s body. That’s just not a healthy body fat percentage for women. It’s not sustainable. I’m helping people get to a body that feels good to live in their labs reflect that they’re healthy on the inside as well, and they’re free.
Of all those aches and pains and just the things that don’t feel good to live. And so while I agree with body positivity in that you should love yourself, you are lovable, your body is perfect the way that it is, and also if it doesn’t feel good, it’s okay to attempt to lose weight and to get the right support, and they’re figuring that out and not giving up on it.
What do you think about that? What do you think about that? All right. I can’t wait to see your comments. I hope that nobody has any hate messages. Again, I appreciate the messages of the health at every size, mindfully eating, intuitive being. Those are things that I do bring, but again, they’re missing.
They’re missing some really important pieces. So let me tell you about how I then bring in the health at every size. Okay. Again, I believe that you are lovable and you should be positive about your body at any size, but the piece that’s missing is that it’s okay to try to lose weight and get the right support and get that figured out.
Intuitive eating when I use this all the time with my clients, in the context of a whole Foods well formulated ketogenic diet, you can absolutely use intuitive beating. I have my clients. Eat until they’re hungry. They stop eating when they’re full. That’s intuitive eating. They select foods that they enjoy , like, and eat what sounds good within the parameters of a whole foods well formulated keto diet.
They don’t eat foods that don’t sound good to them ,maybe they’re hungry for a meal and so then they look within the refrigerator or at the grocery store. What foods sound or look good to. You can absolutely use intuitive eating, then it’s wonderful.
There’s no amount of ounces of water that I have my clients drink. When you’re thirsty, drink some water. If you’re not thirsty, you don’t need to drink a certain amount of water. Again, in the right context, these concepts are amazing. The mindful eating as well. When you’re eating a whole foods well formulated ketogenic diet, can let go of judgment
because a lot of my ladies have been told that they’d eat very little, eat lots and lots of vegetables. But if you’re eating vegetables is making you feel bloated. You aren’t enjoying it. Mindfulness in this case is gonna be about how does it taste and feel in your mouth? How does it feel in your body as you’re eating it and digesting it?
Which of those foods align with you and make you feel good? Which ones don’t make you feel good for long term? Those are, that’s how I’m using mindful eating with my clients in the right context.
All right. Looking forward to hearing,
hearing your thoughts on all this. I saw a comment the other day in a Facebook group from dieticians that were saying how there are some people out there, they’re promoting health at every size, but they also are trying to help people lose weight. And how that’s heresy. It’s the antithesis of it, but the health is, every size model does actually say that you.
Engage in movement and eat healthfully because it feels good, and I agree with that as well. That’s another thing intuitively that I have my clients do, is that when they feel like they have lots of energy and they want to go do movement or exercise or activity, whatever you wanna call it, I encourage them, do something that feels good to you, that you enjoy doing that feels good in your body, not because you need to burn a certain amount of calories.
You need to do that to lose weight, do movement because it feels good and you have the energy to do it. So that’s another example of how I bring those concepts into what I do.
All right. We’re coming, wrapping this up here. So please leave your comments, questions. Hopefully you can see how well rounded my approach is and. I’m taking the best of all these things. So really the approach that I have is very unique. It’s very common learned and mushed it all together into a wonderful, very comprehensive approach that does take count psychology about chemistry, the neurochemistry, the hormones and labs, and so much more.
Really go my ladies, be the healthiest version of themselves and feel mentally and physically as good as they can. So next episode I’m gonna have a guest on. I love her so much, Amber O’Hearn, and we’re gonna talk about the keto diet, sleep and satiety. So come back for our next episode. Today, we talked all about body positivity.
We talked about the parts that I like about it, the parts that they’re getting right. We talked about the parts that they’re getting wrong and we talked about what the whole picture looks like and. It’s actually gonna help people actually be the healthiest version of themselves. All right, So if you liked what you heard today and you’d like to get more personalized support for your keto diet, I invite you to check out my website, KetoCarole.com.
Join My Keto Program!
I do work very closely with my clients. It is the most comprehensive keto program that’s out there. It has the most support available for any weight loss program. I do only work with my clients by application. So since I’m working so closely with them, I work with people by application. We do a very thorough vetting process to make sure that it’s a match for both of us.
And so if you’re ready to stop messing around, you’re ready for a next chapter of your life where you can be the best version of yourself. If you’re somebody who’s really successful in all the area, other areas of your life, but this is just the one little piece you’re like, Why can’t I figure this out?
You probably are really good. Fit to work with me. So apply to work with me, visit my website, KetoCarole.com, see if we’re a match. And again, right now we’re offering some guest spots on our group coaching calls so you can really, thoroughly get a taste of what it’s like to work with us. And that’s all for now. Thank you so much for being here today.
Remember, share this. If you found this interesting, if you found this helpful, share it with a friend. Help us grow the show and I’ll help you shrink. Thank you all for being here today. We’ll see you next time. Bye.
Are you ashamed to tell anyone when you start a new diet? Do you hesitate even trying to change your eating habits out of fear of failing yet?
Guess what this episode is for you.
LIMITED TIME: Guest Spots in Our Group Coaching
Another update here before we get into the show topic today is that I decided to do a little experiment where I’m opening up some guest spots on my group coaching my keto coaching calls.
So normally the only people that get access to those or people that have or current members going through. Program that I work through with people. Very comprehensive program that has full training and lots and tons of support. And as part of that they get twice weekly group coaching calls with me, small groups.
And so I thought I’d just see if there’s some people out there that were. Curious about maybe what it’s like to work with a keto coach, but weren’t quite ready to take the full dive and wanted just a little taste of what it’s like to work with me. And so I currently have three people.
Yeah. So I opened up I’m just gonna do one spot per call, so I’m limiting that. Cause I want it to be, It is primarily for my current clients also. Oh. So people that have finished my front end program are welcome to stay on for the back end membership as well. So those are the only people that typically can have access to me on those calls.
And so I’m doing a little trial to give some guests spots out. I have those booked up for next week already. And I’ve got another person that. The point of trying to schedule the one spot. Potentially have two spots a week. And again, this is meant to be, it’s not meant to be like just free coaching or anything like that.
It’s meant to be you’re considering getting a keto coach. Maybe you’ve listened to a lot of my episodes in my podcast and you are curious what it would be like to actually work with me and. It’s a next step in that process of seeing what it’s like. Just get a little trial run with us.
Not only get my support, but be able to hang out with my keto members that are very successful and you get to hear their motivational stories and get tips from them as well too. So if that’s something you’re interested in I’ll give you contact info at the end of this show if that’s something you would like to just try it out and see what it’s like to hang out with us in real time live where you can actually talk to all of us.
Fear of Dieting Failure
All right, let’s go on with the show topic today. So today’s topic is about fear of failure. This came up, this idea for this topic came up because I’ve been I speak with everybody. Personally one on one on a Zoom call before they become a client with me, and they spend at least an hour with them.
Typically, sometimes it goes an hour and a half to two hours. And I really want to understand the journey that people have been on the goals, why it’s so important to them to lose weight and keep it off. Specifically why they’re looking to trying keto specific needs that they have. What are the obstacles?
What are. It about their lifestyle that makes it so that they have everybody has unique needs about how they need to have a dietary approach that will fit their lifestyle. So many dietary approaches out there make people just, oh, change everything and then it doesn’t fit your lifestyle, right?
So have you ever done those programs where you got bars and shakes and things like that? And so what if your friend’s having a birthday party and you can’t go to the restaurant for their birthday, or you just go off your diet? I spend a lot of time talking with the people before they become a client.
And this way I know that I can help them. I know what their struggles are. I know what they’re looking for, what they need, and that way I can make sure that I’m the right person to help them with all that. And because I’ve spent so much time with people, and I’ve been doing this for six, And a half plus, maybe seven years.
Now, that’s a lot of people. I’ve talked to a lot of ladies, so I really understand the ladies that I work with. I understand their struggles, what they’ve been through. And this topic idea came to me after, it’s a common one that people have that I’m afraid to try again.
I’m afraid to work with you , afraid to try keto , afraid to try to lose weight in general. A lot of people have that fear because they’ve failed so many times. The ladies I’m working with have dieted for decades, most of their adult life and name a diet. They’ve done it. , so some of them, a lot of them have that.
The percentage of how much that fear impacts them though varies from person to person. I talked to a lady recently that she was almost paralyzed with that fear of, what if I fail again? And for her, she thought it was something wrong with her. So maybe you identify with that as well. Maybe everybody’s on this, the spectrum somewhere of maybe they have tiny bit of fear that they might fail.
Gain the weight back, not be able to stick with it. Or maybe they have a hundred percent fear and they’re paralyzed. That’s where this woman was. So anywhere you’re at on that continuum, I’m gonna chat about this today hang out with me. Give me a, if you’re watching live s put a comment in the chat box here and let me know.
It looks like I can’t see who’s live on LinkedIn, so I don’t. Brand new this week is, we’re broadcasting to LinkedIn. That’s a new one. We typically do in our Facebook group, we do to my YouTube channel, and we’re doing it to LinkedIn, my LinkedIn profile this time. But that’s brand new to me. It doesn’t show me who’s watching from there.
If you’re watching live, I don’t know how that works. So anyways, if you. Watching from LinkedIn, give me a comment as well, but just tell me where you’re joining us from. I do love this to be an interactive conversation here as we’re going along. So feel free to add comments, questions in it as we go.
And yeah, so this idea for this topic came after I had chatted with this woman, and again, she was nearly paralyzed with fear of failing. And so I realized this is a really important topic. We need to talk about because it’s not actually your fault this whole thing of. You go on a diet, you lose some weight, maybe you can stick with it for two weeks.
And I’ll tell you what, I was a terrible dieter before could never stick with anything very long. I remember trying Jenny Craig, the terrible little food, the tiny little portions, and was like, I’m starving on this , can’t stick with this.
I made it a day or two, or a meal or two. ,don’t know , and couldn’t stick with anything. Maybe some of you are good at sticking with something for months and months. Part of why my approach is so comprehensive is because I know for people. It can be really hard to make those changes. It can be really hard to stick with it long term. And so when I started my approach knowing that I was a bad dieter, I wanted to throw everything I’d ever studied about behavior change, the psychology of appetite, regulation the biochemistry of that, neurochemistry of it and cravings and so on and so forth.
And I wanted to throw the kitchen sink, everything I’d ever learned. Into my approach. And so that’s what I makes what I do. So unique, and I’m just going to share so much with you all tonight. I’ve missed you so much. It’s been way too long. So and where was I going with that? All right we chat there.
Okay. The fear of failure and You can stick with a diet for a short period of time, but your body is designed to get fatigue from dieting, restricting, and losing weight for a really long period of time. And so it’s really normal then that your body wants to try to regain the weight and. Most diets out there, they have this fantasy, this fallacy that you have this, it’s a temporary thing you do, and then you get to keep the weight off.
It’s magic. It’s a quick fix. Let me just, I’ve got some out an outline here. Let me go forward with that a little more. Thoughtfully here instead of just my rambling thoughts about this. Yeah, so like I said, one of the biggest fears of the obstacles of women that I work with is fear.
Fear at failing at dieting. And they’ve tried everything under the sun. Our bodies are really designed to gain that weight back. I know that you think there’s something wrong with you, so if this is something that is a fear for you, it’s not you. I’ll tell you, everyone I talk to that they thought there’s something wrong with them.
They have the fantasy that everyone else out there is able to lose weight really easily and stick with it, and it’s never a problem again. But I’ll tell you what, almost everybody has this struggle. And so you didn’t fail the diet. The diet failed. Okay, so we’ve been totally brainwashed by the diet industry.
Now I’m gonna talk about four different things, four different things. Lies, myths brainwashing portions of the diet industry. These are the things that are failing you and not the other way around. So the diet mentality. Temporary. It’s a black and white thing. It’s something you go on and you go off.
Why Diet Mentality Set Us up for Failure
The fantasy that is a quick fix and there’s something wrong with your body, that is why you’re gaining weight. And so the diet fixes that , then number four then is no long-term support. So let’s talk a little bit more in depth about each of these areas where all those diets out there that you’ve tried before, where they’ve failed you.
So the diet mentality is that. And with my clients we’re working really hard at unraveling this. Okay, so gimme a yes in the comments or a why. If you’ve ever followed a diet that had this kind of mentality where you have to eat very little and you just have to get used to the fact that you’re gonna feel hungry, you’re gonna feel deprived and.
You’re going to it, you’re going to eat in this way, that’s totally unsustainable because that’s how you have to lose weight. You’re gonna have probably shakes and bars and meal replacement things and very special unpalatable, not tasty things. And that’s just what a diet is. You need to have a shake in the morning or a smoothie or something blended up so you can just chug it cuz you’re too busy to make a real.
And that’s how you can get through it. And since you have cravings all the time, you need those sweet shakes and bars and other snacky things in order to be able to stick with it so that’s all the diet mentality. Oh, and you need to eat six times a day and you drink your. Bo body weight in ounces of water.
I could go on, You need 47 servings of fruits and vegetables every single day. You need to eat small little portions, eat a giant salad and a tiny portion of meat, eat meat like it’s a condiment. Okay? So all of that is the diet mentality is what I call it. Is what you’ve been lied to about how to diet, how to lose weight, how to eat in a way that you lose weight.
And then the number two thing that I said that. How you’ve been brainwashed by the dieting industry is that you’re taught that this is something temporary. You do, It’s terrible. It doesn’t taste good. It’s not satisfying, but that’s okay. You don’t have to stick with it very long. We’re told that it’s a black and white thing.
The Fantasy of Magical Weight Loss Transformation
You’re on your diet or you’re off your diet. The only way you can suffer through the miserable food you’re eating, and the hunger is knowing that you don’t have to do it forever. Okay, This is another lie. This is another lie that. And that you can magically then transform back into maintenance, right?
So you stick with this crazy, unsustainable way of eating to lose the weight until you lose the weight. And then your body, you will be so motivated because you hit that number on the scale. You’ll be so motivated that will. Take over everything biologically that happens in your body and overcome all of that.
Magically it’s like a wave of a wand that you’ll just keep the weight off, that you can go back to eating the foods that you were eating before. You can eat what you ate before that made you overweight. But now it’s magic. It’s magic now that once you lose the weight, you will be motivated to keep it off.
Quick but Temporary Fix
Okay. Give me a yes if this is a lie that you’ve told yourself before. We all have my ladies think, before they work with me they think that as well. The number three lie, brainwashing lie that you’ve believed is that it’s a quick fix. There was something wrong with you. That’s why you are overweight.
Why everyone else out in the world can just eat whatever they want and they don’t have to be conscientious of what they’re eating, but there’s something wrong with your body and you need to fix it. And by losing weight, that will fix your body. It will fix what’s broken, and then you won’t lo won’t gain the weight.
Have you thought this too? Give me, gimme a yes. If that’s one of the ones that you tend to fall a trap you fall into too, you think of yeah. No, I just it I can’t wait to go back to eating X, Y, Z again. I can’t wait to have my cupcakes and fries again. Because, Once I lose the weight, my body will be fixed.
Long Term Keto Diet Support from Carole Freeman
It won’t gain the weight. And the number four brainwashing lie of the diet industry is there’s no long term support. And this kind of, they all kind of overlap, right? So it’s a temporary thing, it’s a quick fix. It’s not something you need to do forever. This is all fantasy world. Again. This is how diets have failed you.
It’s not your fault. The truth is however long you want to keep the weight off, that’s how long you have to make a dietary change. So we have to face the fact that whatever you were eating before is the culprit. Your poor eating habits, the highly processed, refined foods, the overeating, the wrong combinations for your body, that’s what caused the weight gain and.
You have to change, have to eat something different than you what you’ve been eating, and you can’t just do something temporarily and then it fixes everything magically. You can’t, You have to have a permanent change. So I don’t care what way of eating that you want to do, that’s your number one step is find a way of eating.
It’s different than what you’re doing that’s gaining the weight. Find a way of eating that you can sustain that you would like to Maybe that maybe you feel like you don’t know how to sustain it, but the food tastes good and the satisfying you enjoy it and you could see yourself eating that way indefinitely.
Okay, so that’s step one. How you have to get away from this. Moving out of the fear of failing is identify a way of eating for you that is something that you could see yourself sticking with indefinitely. For the most part. Maybe there’s some occasional breaks in there. But for example, I’ve got I’ve got a lady on my email list.
I don’t know if she listens to my podcast or not, but she’s on my email list and every once in a while she checks in with me. Interestingly, so our sons were in Boy Scouts together and my son is now 27, so I’m sure her son is somewhere around that age. And I knew her from, oh, I went, 20 plus years ago is when I knew her.
And so she updates me every once in a while that she’s been following. She doesn’t want to, she doesn’t wanna do keto. She says I like my carbs. And so she’s been following She’s been following nom and that’s more of a psychological, it’s like calorie counting plus a little bit of psychology in there portion awareness and things like that.
And she’s lost 98 pounds, and I think at this point it, maybe it’s been a year or so, and she’s in the maintenance phase of the program and I think that’s great. She identified that she didn’t want to do something where she had to restrict carby foods. And so I told her that something that where you’re due calorie counting, so if you don’t.
Find a Way of Eating That Fits You
Follow certain foods that you overeat and to overeat you’re gonna have to count calories. And so for her, that seemed like a better choice for her lifestyle, and it’s working for her. So I’m so happy. So that’s your number one step of the fear of failure is finding a way of eating that fits that you can see yourself.
Indefinitely because guess what? However long you wanna keep the weight off, that’s how long you have to change your diet. Okay. So we gotta get rid of the ideas temporary? Nope. From day one, when my clients are working with me, we’re actually figuring out what is their baseline way of eating that they can stick with because we’re eating in a way that we’re getting rid of cravings, we’re using natural appetite regulation by certain parameters of what we’re eating.
So they get. As much as they want of certain foods because they’re naturally satisfying. They taste good, feel fill them up and want to stop eating when they’re done. They don’t have hunger and appetite all day long. We’re looking at different cues that cause us to have cravings and things like that.
So we’ve got a full parameter here that teaches you how to eat in a way that kind of takes us back. Before we had all these industrialized, highly processed, highly palatable food combinations and. While we call it keto, it’s more of just going back to an ancestral way of eating that is in alignment with how our bodies are designed to work.
And that ends up being really individual for each person. And so again, number one, we gotta get rid of this temporary quick fix thing. Diet mentality. Let’s see. Let me just go through all four of these and bust these down into what you really need to focus on. So diet mentality. This is one for my ladies.
I’ve gotta break this, right? So we’re not doing bars and shakes. All of those things actually just encourage overeating. How many of you done Slim Fast Diet where you do two shakes and a sensible meal? I tried that too. Those shakes were not filling at all. In fact, I ate, I drank one, and then I wanted a full meal.
There was nothing about those that were satisfying. It was just like, okay, that tasted like chocolate milk. Now where’s my food? Never worked for me. I have to break them of that. For some of them they’re used to. That’s what a diet is. If I’m losing weight, I have to have bars and shakes, and I have to be hungry and I have to drink a ton of water, and I gotta eat all these vegetables.
How To Make Keto Quick and Easy
We gotta scrap that, throw it in the garbage. We’re done with that. So we’re gonna eat real food. I teach them how to eat in a way that’s make it so fast and easy and simple. That it’s just as fast as making one of those shakes. It could be as easy as grabbing a bar because you’re just grabbing food.
For example, for me, I have hard boiled eggs in my fridge and I have sliced cheese, and I have sliced deli meat all the time. Those are stables, and so anytime I want a quick and easy breakfast, my first meal of the day, I can grab some hard build eggs and some sliced. Or even mozzarella string cheese.
Okay, meal is done. That’s faster than making a smoothie. That’s faster than making a shake. It’s just as fast as grabbing a bar and you can eat it on the go to if you don’t even wanna stop and eat. So we’re getting rid of the diet mentality. We’re switching to eating real food. Real whole foods simple.
Real whole foods. And if you don’t like meal prep, I’m teaching my clients let’s make this fit your lifestyle. Do you do me a prep? Now, if you don’t, let’s make it so that when you go grocery shopping, you’re buying things that are already prepped for you. Somebody else has done the prep, they’ve sliced the cheese, they have hard welded eggs for you.
They’ve sliced the deli meat. On and on. Make it just as easy as that. But we’re gonna have to switch to real foods because that’s what’s gonna help bring in natural appetite regulation. Anytime we’re eating these highly processed things, like I mentioned the slim fast shake, highly processed, sweetened, all those things trigger eating more, not less.
So we’re gonna undo the diet mentality. We’re gonna let go. . The next thing we’re gonna do is you gotta do is get rid of the idea that it’s temporary. So I talked about this one already. This was the first thing I was giving you a reality check on is that, However long you want to lose weight, keep the weight off.
How Long Do You Have To Maintain Your Keto Eating Habits?
That’s how long you need to stick with your new eating habits. Okay. A again, this is the brainwashing of the diet industry is that they say no. Just a temporary thing. You just do this crazy restricted thing. A very dear friend of mine, I love her to death. And I don’t really like to work with my close friends and family.
They do what they want to do. If they wanna work on keto, I’m here to help them, but I’m not going to try to convert anybody. But she’s working out with a personal trainer and they gave her this crazy diet plan, which is I don’t remember Nine cups of vegetables a day, and they have to all be raw and meats, but no fats at all.
And so it’s basically like meat and raw vegetables. And I’m like, Oh girl, she’s gonna have so much gas . But and, but also I’m sure that she’s going into it as well. It’s just a temporary thing. I don’t have to do this forever. It’s not gonna taste good and I’m gonna crave all the stuff I normally eat But it’s just temporary and she’s also going to it as well as I gotta start it next week.
So I’m gonna eat all the bread and carbs this entire week cuz I won’t be able to eat them on my temporary diet. All right? So get rid of that idea. If you wanna lose weight and keep it off. If you wanna not fail at weight loss, you have to make a permanent. You have to find something you can change indefinitely.
And I often use on the show, I talk about the I with a gym membership, right? If you wanna be fit, that you have to go workout regularly, you have to do cardio, weight training, whatever it is. You wanna do your Zoom classes, you have to do that all the time. If you wanna stay fit, we know that if you go work out for six weeks, It isn’t Oh, I don’t have to ever work out again.
Temporary Weight Loss Diet
I’m so fit now the rest of my life, my muscles will just stay this way. My cardiovascular training will stay this way. We know fitness-wise that we have to do it as long as we wanna stay fit. Why have we bought this lie with the dieting world that you do a temporary diet. That’s how you lose weight and keep it off.
Why have we bought this lie? Why have we bought this lie? So you need a permanent change. Find a way of eating that you enjoy. Now, all my ladies that work with me, they choose keto. I’m not trying to convince them of that. I’m working with people that are seeking that out because they get the satiety from the protein focus.
We’ve got adequate fat that triggers different hormones as well, that triggers satiety and all the other things that we’re doing to make it tasty and satisfy. And turn off the cravings and lower the appetite. So it’s so easy to stick with. So find whatever it is that you wanna stick with. And the next one.
So number three then, is that quick fix thing. We gotta stop the idea that the short term crazy diet is what fixes why you’ve gained weight. That’s not true at all. So the reason, the reasons that. Gain weight are, they’re multiple, but we live in an obesogenic society, basically. Is the ground floor reason for this is that all the foods around us, and I was looking, listening to a podcast today, that the guy was saying that 60%, the average US citizen, 60% of their calories come.
Highly processed, ultra processed foods. So 90% of the grocery store, right? So not the perimeter where the vegetables and the meats and the natural fats are, but everything in the middle. It’s all the highly processed foods. 60% of people’s calories are coming from those things and all those ultra processed foods, q overeating, they have low satiety, meaning when you eat.
They don’t ever make you feel full. You don’t wanna stop eating them, and they’re also hyper palatable. So it’s two things. They don’t make you feel like you wanna stop eating and they make you feel like you wanna keep eating them. Those are actually two different things, but they couple together, so you overeat them.
High in calories, so they’re carbs and fat together. That highly palatable combination that cues you to overeat it. We also do very little expenditure of energy or muscles or anything like that. You literally can sit in your bed and order food or shopping. You can work from your bed. Now you don’t even ever have to leave to your bed except to go to the bathroom maybe.
And so we don’t have. Exercise that we’re doing. That’s a small portion of it,
but mostly it’s the food environment. There’s, there’s multiple other factors, but that’s most of it is the food choices we’re making. And Also our bodies are wired. Our brain is wired to seek out food. Never stop after one bag of Doritos. All right. Is this my kid or just somebody else who happens to
Yeah. Get the bigger bags than you then you don’t ever have to stop. Yeah, there’s a reason why, the Lays slogan is. I bet you can’t just eat one. Maybe they change that slogan. I don’t know if they still have that anymore. So highly palatable food environment that we live in and our bodies, our brains are wired to seek out food, especially high calorie density foods, and to eat as much as possible.
Our bodies for most people are designed to gain fat as much as possible, cuz most of human exist. Food was pretty scarce, and so our bodies have been designed, evolved over time to. Eat as much food as possible, move as little as possible, and to gain weight for the times when we wouldn’t even have any food.
Ah, now, fast forward to today, when we have so much food that’s so cheap and available in excessive quantities, that’s why you gained weight. It’s not that you didn’t go on a temporary diet to fix it, so this idea that it’s gonna fix what’s wrong with your body, no. Your body’s doing exactly what. Meant to do.
It’s supposed to do, it’s wired to do, to eat lots of food and gain it. So there’s no diet that’s gonna fix how your body is designed and wired to do it. So you have to eat in a way that is going to be able to be sustainable, not a quick fix. All right, And then the fourth one is also probably one of the most important ones, is no long term support.
Again, because they’re temporary, you do it short term. Again, using the gym analogy, however long you wanna be fit is how long you have to work out. However long you want to lose weight and keep it off. That’s how long you need support for. And because our bodies are designed our brains and our bodies are designed to overeat and gain weight and we live in a world where there’s that food is just to reach away.
How are you gonna manage that? How are you gonna stick with it? Most people say, Oh, I can’t, ketos too hard to stick with. It’s not sustainable. Guess what? Every way of eating that’s healthy is too hard. Unless you have the right things in place, you need that support. Now. When I looked at, I need to make that noise, stop.
Let’s see if I close it. If it will stop making those noises. I don’t know if you can hear that or not. Hopefully not. And Two years ago when I developed my long term support membership for my clients, I looked at the research and research shows that one of the most important things that people get when they are able to lose weight for a year or longer keep it off, is that they get that support for a year or longer.
And so this is because you have to have that community, you have to train your brain that you behave like these people and not like all the other people in the world that are overeating, highly processed. So the support is really important. One, it’s gonna help you break through plateaus. So having the support not only of an expert that can help you know what to do and how to find the way that’s sustainable for you, your personality, your lifestyle, your specific body needs, but also having a community of people that are successful as well, that are doing it, that are fighting the current and they’re going against the trend of overeating.
80% of the population is . So the support that I’m talking about then is two things. An expert guide, a coach, but also a community of people that are successful that you can lean into and that you can. Copy their behavior. Have you ever heard the phrase that your income is the average of five closest friends?
Guess what? Your eating habits are the average of your five closest friends. So make your closest friends people that are successful. So whether you work with a keto coach like me, or whether you find that community yourself that you can hang out with make sure that is part of your equation.
Again, these were the four things that need to happen. That, No, the four reasons why you failed at diets in the past. It’s again, it’s not that you failed, the diets failed you, and then basically we swap those around and those are the four things you have to do differently in order to succeed. All right, so
let’s see. Okay, covered that. Let me look at this. All right, so again, let me just recap. You’ve been brainwashed by the diet. Industry into thinking that it was your fault that you failed a diet, but it’s not true. There are four things that they lied to you about that you need to do the opposite of. So ditch to the diet mentality.
Stop doing shakes and bars and sweets and things like that. Eat real food. Get rid of the idea. That’s a temporary thing. That’s crazy. Doesn’t taste good. Find a way of eating that you. That’s conducive to weight loss and health that you could potentially see yourself sticking with indefinitely. Get rid of the idea that a diet fixes what’s wrong with your body.
Your body’s doing what it’s designed to by seeking out food and overeating it and get some long term support. And just another little plug for the experiment I’m doing, I said at the beginning of the top of the. I’m doing a little experiment where I’m inviting guests to come on my coaching calls. So we’re allowing one person per call.
I’ve got them booked up already this week. And but if it’s something you’re interested in, if you’re thinking about, maybe that’s what’s caused the failure in the past for you, is you didn’t get the right support supporting expert that can help you navigate. The water’s a finding a way of eating that fits for you, but also a community of people that are successful that you can make your five closest friends.
Professional Keto Coaching Support
And so fear of failing at weight loss. Again, it’s not your fault. The diet failed you, so get the right things in place. So if you like what you’ve heard here today you’d like to get a little more personalized support for your keto diet. Again, if you’d like to try out what it would be like to have a keto coach by being a guest on one of my small group coaching calls reach out.
So send an email to support@ketocarole.com. Carole has an E on the end. It’s the very fancy French spelling of Carole, send an email. Let us know that you’d like to try it out. You’d like to see what it would be like to have your five closest friends as successful keto people that are sticking with it and not failing at weight loss again.
All right, so if you are one of the people that are ready to stop messing around and get ready for the next chapter of your life where you’re the best version of yourself. Send us an email, come check out what it’s like to work with us and all the other successful keto people. Alright, that’s the wrap everyone.
Today’s topic of fear of failure at dieting and the four things you need to flip on your head in order to get the success that you want so you can get a diet that works for you. You’re not the reason that it didn’t work. Thank you all for being here. I will see you again next time. That’s all for now.
Carole Freeman: Hey everyone. We are live. Are you a fan of satirical comedy? Like The Onion? Do you get inspired by stories of successful people and the lifestyle factors that play into their success? Guess what this episode is for you stick around because my guest today is the one, the only Scott Dikkers. Oh my gosh.
I’m so excited that I have him coming on today. He’s an American comedy writer, speaker entrepreneur. He’s the founding editor of The Onion. You’ve all seen the goals, the headlines and. He’s also gonna share how a life changing health diagnosis led to a radical diet change and share how that impacted his life.
So welcome everyone to keto chat live. I’m your host, Carole Freeman master’s degree in nutrition and clinical health psychology. I’m a board certified ketogenic nutrition specialist on the side. I do some standup comedy. And so I love when I can have a guest come on that merges both of those things together, health and.
Comedy together. And so I specialize in helping women plus follow a keto diet for sustainable weight loss, and we gotta plug in the medical disclaimer here real quick. And this show is meant for educational and entertainment purposes only. It is not meant to be medical advice, no intended to diagnose, prevent, treat, or cure any condition.
Even though they say, laughter is the best medicine. We can’t treat you today. And so if you have any questions or concerns related to your specific medical condition, Seek out your primary care healthcare practitioner to take care of that for you. As you’re joining the show, go ahead and leave us a comment.
Let us know where you’re joining from. Join the show. And first up I’m gonna do a news segment. There is really big breaking news in the keto low carb world. And. I’m gonna share it. I’m gonna address it. I debated last week. I decided not to bring it up, but some people don’t know some people maybe have heard and some rumors and things like that.
So I’m gonna share with you all the sad shocking news of Jimmy Moore. So he is the 50 year old, former host of LivinLaVida low carb and other podcasts, plus he’s author or co-author of. Keto books such as keto clarity. And if you haven’t heard the news he was arrested on June 23rd, 2022 as a fugitive from justice in South Carolina.
Then he was transferred to Virginia and charged with this is the part that’s really shocking is seven counts of carnal knowledge. Of a 13 slash 14 year old, where the perpetrator is three plus years older than the victim. And so the carnal knowledge, it’s Southern legal euphemism for sexual contact.
So AKA, this is their statutory rape law that’s there. And he scheduled for his arraignment hearing on June 8th, 2022. And if you’re not familiar with who Jimmy is, he originally lost 180 pounds on low carb. 10 plus maybe 10, 15 years ago. And unfortunately he’d appeared to regain the weight.
In recent years, he did claim to be a carnivore recently on his Instagram and Facebook. And oh, I’m gonna make some bad jokes about he’d. To carnivore to the carnal degree. That’s alright. That’s gross everyone. And this year, 2022, he was publicizing that he was doing a 365 day ice bath challenge on Instagram, where he would go live every single day taking an ice bath.
And he was trying to show that it was gonna promote weight loss. And that experiment has come to an end now. Fortunately, because he is in jail, he’s no longer able to continue that. He went on a six month sabbatical. He very publicly went on a six month sabbatical in 2019, taking a break from all social media.
And he emerged at the end of that sabbatical announcing that he and his wife were divorcing and that he was rebranding himself as the man of real. Which was weird. And even though he had clearly gone the, just for men look where he’d dyed his beard and his hair, it was eyebrows even it was pretty stark.
And so unfortunately the seven counts of carnal knowledge, the dates of those incidences overlap with this medical dates. And so that is great news in the keto low carb world. And they’re, we’re seeing some of the, his authors and co-authors are asking the publisher to take the books off the shelf.
So it’s been pretty shocking news hitting the low carb community. This is not anything. I excited and I’m quite shocked. And I’m gonna go ahead and bring on my guest now, Scott Dikkers and I gave him the option. He can comment on this story if he likes or. He can pass him. We’ll just go onto his interview.
Everyone welcome Scott Dikkers
How does a low-carb diet change the life of comedy writer Scott Dikkers? Join us as we talked about Life Changing Low Carb!
Scott Dikkers: thanks for having me on Carole.
Carole Freeman: Thank you so much. And any comments or would we rather just go into the interview?
Scott Dikkers: Well, I just wanna say I’m horrified. I don’t know that person, but every time I hear stories in the news and it happens so much where somebody had sex with a child, I’m just like, I wonder, like what kind of world do I live in?
What, who are these people? It’s just insanity and it happens way too much. So horrifying, horrific, and very sorry to hear it. What can we do? We’ve got all these Q Andon idiots out there. Who think that Tom Hanks is raping children and meanwhile, there’s actual child rapists out there that nobody stops.
Carole Freeman: Yes. Yes.
Scott Dikkers: If we could redirect all that stupid energy somehow and actually stop real pedophiles, we should do that.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. Yeah. I, it looked like he I think as a midlife crisis, he should have just got a Corvette instead of these terrible decisions.
Scott Dikkers: Don’t abuse a child.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. Yeah. Prayers go out to the victim and family.
I hope that justice is served and this is the. One and only time that this happens, that he does this. So
Scott Dikkers: yeah. The tragedy is that, kids don’t recover from that. That’s a life sentence. And it’s just horrific. But on that hilarious note.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. Yeah.
Scott Dikkers: Let’s talk about comedy.
No, we don’t have to talk about comedy. We can talk about food.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. I wanna talk I didn’t give you any pre notes, but I wanna talk about how you got into comedy writing, as just sharing who you are and kids on that. And then, the other half of it, we can talk about your dietary change.
So I connected with you watching Joel Byer podcast live. And he came on as a guest on my show in the past, talking about him, giving up sugar, giving up on sugar, giving up sugar. And you two mentioned that you’d had a significant dietary change and had gone primarily lower car blow carb. We can talk about that more too.
And so I was like, oh my gosh, the perfect. I always want to find how do we fit comedy and dietary change together. So anytime I can have a guest that can talk about both of those I’ve. I’m excited and I’m a huge fan too, so I feel so lucky to be talking to you. And I have one of your books here. I’ve read all how to write funny series and just fantastic books.
So thank you. Thank you. Yeah. So thank you so much for being here. And I’m so sorry that the news of the day is not a funny topic.
Scott Dikkers: Yeah. When you do news parody and news comedy, and this is, was always my experience at The Onion. Was, we would look at talk shows like late night talk shows whenever there was some horrific tragedy in the news.
All those guys could go on their talk show and they’re all guys. And they would say, oh, I can’t be funny tonight because this terrible tragedy happen. But at The Onion, we couldn’t do that because we didn’t have a personality that would come out. It was a fake newspaper. Or a fake news website.
And we had to put something funny in there. Otherwise we wouldn’t have wouldn’t have a product that week. So it was always a real challenge when something like that happened and mass shootings were this thing that dogged us every time there was a new mass shooting, we’d have to do the really painful and horrific task of what can we come up with?
That’s like funny. That, that’s at least taps into people’s rage and provides some sort of outlet for their emotions. Cuz sometimes that’s all comedy is just like a way to cope. Yeah. And we understood our role in that. And then this writer, Jason Rotor came up with this great headline that The Onion has used repeatedly every time there’s a mass shooting now.
I don’t know the exact wording, but it’s something like, “‘No way to prevent this,’ says only nation where this regularly happens.” And we just reinsert new details. Every time there’s a shooting. And every time that story runs, it like hits the point home further. And after the Aldi shooting, The Onion ran that story everywhere on its whole website.
Every story was that story with a different set of details in there, cuz there’s a mass shooting. At least once a day now in America. So that, that not only was a real great cheat for The Onion real great way to not have to think of new jokes, whenever something tragic happens, but it allows us to communicate this satirical point, perhaps in a more meaningful way.
By just showing the maddening repetition of this problem. So it’s just something we have to deal with in the comedy business, especially comedy that responds to current events, a space I’m used to and. my job could be a lot harder. I’m not a brain surgeon, nobody gets hurt when I do it wrong or do something that’s not funny,
Carole Freeman: the finding the absurdity and the fact that it’s happening
is what you’re for.
Scott Dikkers: Yeah. There’s always some kind of target for humor. No matter what’s happening now, sometimes people aren’t ready to laugh. It’s too soon for them or whatever, but eventually laughter is gonna get you out of the tragedy and it’s gonna allow you to move on. So whenever people are ready, that’s when I try to be there with a few jokes,
Carole Freeman: yeah. And that’s an that an ongoing theme in standup comedy is some standup comedians will say it’s my therapy. I go on stage and I can process stuff. That’s happened in my life. I certain a lot of the things of my jokes are been things emotional and jokes out of them process. Feel more empowered, the situations that I didn’t have any power over.
And then there’s other comedian like no standup should not be therapy. You need to go get therapy and leave the stage for humor. Where do you stand on that whole debate?
Scott Dikkers: I think it’s a little bit of a cross between the two and it depends on your comedy persona. I generally am more the latter where I just want to do entertainment but in the process of me entertaining people.
I think I’m also like helping myself. It’s a great type of healing to share your trauma and have an audience connect with you about it. But that’s the key ingredient the audience has to connect with you. They have to think. It’s funny. I have seen some comedians, especially comedians starting out who are just up there doing therapy.
And it’s really not that funny. And that’s the greatest sin. If you can do therapy and have it be funny, wonderful. Like you. Go nuts. And I think almost any comic is getting some kind of therapy out of doing comedy. Even if it’s not directly talking about their problems, just that connection that love they feel from the audience.
That’s, sometimes for comedy people, sometimes they’re a little weird, they’re a little reclusive or shy or antisocial or awkward or whatever. That’s the closest thing they get to. A genuine human connection in their lives.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. So therapeutic I’ve noticed a couple of different primary archetypes of people that do stand up comedy.
So there’s people that are overconfident and just like to be the center of attention. And they always think they’re funnier than they are. And there’s the type that you just mentioned that is a little more socially awkward or shy, and they can step into that persona on stage and be something that they in their regular day to day life or not comfortable being.
Scott Dikkers: Yeah. Yeah, I think you’re right. The, it runs the spectrum basically from extrovert to introvert. And the ones who are the extroverts who love the party and they love being there with all those people. They really don’t even have to be as funny because sometimes it’s just the sheer energy of being on stage and joking around with people.
Is so exciting and electrifying for everybody involved. They do a lot of crowd work, but if you read their act after the fact, you might not actually recognize any jokes. ,
Carole Freeman: I like to think that I have written, I have jokes that work, but, I’m sure there’s plenty of my non-fans out there. That would agree with you that it’s, that’s very funny.
Scott Dikkers: always how it’s. But, the winning formula is combination of those two. You love the crowd. You love being there. You love all the energy and you have good writing. You have good material. That’s that those are the best standups.
Carole Freeman: So how did you get interested in comedy? What’s your early story and influences?
Scott Dikkers: I got started really early. I was probably four years old. When I maybe earlier, when I discovered that doing, being funny was a way to get love and attention and kind of my only way. So I pursued that pretty heavily.
Carole Freeman: Talk about therapeutic .
Scott Dikkers: Yeah, exactly. I would make little cartoon books and drawings and would act silly and do silly voices and stuff.
And that continued, like that was my. Chosen personality, I guess you could say, I really went all in on that became a real class count clown in school. And when I got outta school, I knew that I really didn’t know how to do anything else. I would, I was gonna have to figure out some way to make a living out of this.
Couldn’t imagine having a job where I was sitting at a desk or doing manual labor or something, I just couldn’t imagine not doing comedy. That’s when the real challenge hit me, cuz no, nobody tells you like how to break into comedy. Nobody tells you how to make money at it. And back then when I was 18, we’re talking about the early to mid eighties, there was no internet.
You couldn’t look this stuff up. I lived in the middle of nowhere. I lived in a small town in Wisconsin. The odds were stacked pretty heavily. My family didn’t have any connections. we had no money. There was really no, no anything. So I started drawing comic strips and I sent them away to the big syndicates.
And eventually I set my sights lower. I started sending comics to actual newspapers and I got one published in college newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin. And that comic strip really took off and I was able to start making a living doing. and in tandem, I also started paring my proclivity for doing silly voices, into doing radio commercials and voices for video games and stuff like that.
So I had these two comedy careers. In my early to mid twenties, I was humming along pretty well. And that’s when these two guys who wanted to start a humor publication approached. because I was like the big man on campus with my comic strip in Madison. They wanted me involved in this new publication and I jumped right in.
I thought they were really smart, charismatic guys, loved the idea of doing a humor publication. And I thought it was gonna be a magazine, like mad or national Lampoon or something. But the only way we could affordably print this thing was on newsprint. It was the cheapest kind of paper you could print it.
which I thought was really lame. We couldn’t even do color. It was just embarrassing and, form function, followed form. So we made it a fake newspaper cuz it was on newsprint. And for many years we, oh and then those two guys left after a year and sold it to me and one other, two other people and we bought out a third.
And so it was me and my business partner who sold all the ads. And I had to fill all the pages for a few years. I built a writing staff and really didn’t know it was ever gonna go anywhere. It was basically paying for itself. We were paying for the printing by selling local ads.
Carole Freeman: So you had ads in it. I get, I’m gonna get trying to figure out where they real or were they not?
Scott Dikkers: Oh yeah, that was a big problem for us. We used to have coupons for local businesses. Local pizza places on the bottom of the paper that you could cut out and people wouldn’t use the coupons because they thought they were fake and the coupons, communicated to the advertisers that, Hey, there are people reading this, you should spend more money on advertising here.
So we had to beg readers, to actually use the coupons. We really pushed those hard and. It took a few years before people finally realized, oh, and actually one thing we did, we created the back half of the newspaper, we created the AV club, which was reviews of movies, TV shows, which legitimized and grounded the whole enterprise and made people stop asking if the coupons were fake
So the AV club was like this tool to take, get people to take us seriously. And. Then the internet came along about eight years after the, after we launched this newspaper and we’re just, we’re humming along. We’re making a little more money selling a little more advertising and the internet just, we took everything we were doing in print and we just put it on the computer on a website, low and behold, we become the world’s first humor website and everybody’s writing about us.
Wanting us on their TV shows like we were suddenly like the biggest new thing in comedy. And it was I hesitate to use the word overnight success cuz we did work for eight years tirelessly before that point but it was amazing to suddenly have this small local newspaper have a potential audience of billions of people all over the world.
It was amazing.
Carole Freeman: Did your overhead. decrease by going online or did it increase? Cause a lot of times people think oh, it’s free to put stuff on the internet.
Scott Dikkers: We had to pay $400 to get the domain, The Onion.com.
Carole Freeman: Okay. Oh, somebody already owned it. Okay. Which nobody, right? Oh, just back then.
It cost a lot more to get domain.
Okay.
Scott Dikkers: Yeah, there was no GoDaddy. There was no like website where you could go to get domain. You had to find someone who knew how to do all this. Oh, okay. And they had to set up servers for you. It was like very proto internet age. And my business partner was like $400.
What is this thing? What is a website? Nah, we’re not, I can’t justify the expense and eventually convinced him to invest the $400. And other than that, no, there was no real difference. Most of our efforts were still in the print public. For the next 10 or 15 years, the internet was really just an afterthought.
Carole Freeman: It sounds like the story of NFTs now where people are like, what is that? Do I really need it? Is it gonna be the next big thing?
Scott Dikkers: Exactly. Yeah. These new things come along, nobody understands what they are and it behooves us to at least learn enough that we. Capable of like maybe dipping our toes into it.
So I did that. I created an NFT and sold it, and that was a really interesting experience. I learned so much and I’m glad I did it. but I don’t know. I still don’t really understand much about it.
Carole Freeman: Oh, so like I mentioned this book, I’m I familiar with your, how to write funny series. So if anybody is stand up comedian, excellent resources, but also if you’re somebody who’s wanting to write for TV or online or any of the other places would be a comedy writer, excellent series of books.
But I was really pleasant. I looked at your whole biography or. What’s it called bibliography? I don’t know. What is it? List of all the books? Yeah, bio. Okay. Yeah. And my favorite title, I didn’t know this before, but here’s my favorite title of all your books. You are worthless, depressing nuggets of wisdom.
Sure. To ruin your day like that just fits with the satire that I grew up with in my family. Great. how do you do you have a list of all kinds of ideas or how did that book particularly come to be.
Scott Dikkers: I sure do boy. Talk about therapy. That book was therapy for me. I was really going through a midlife crisis.
I was really depressed and my wife left me and I was homeless and I just dumped all my darkest thoughts in this book. And sold it to a publisher who thought it was really funny. oh my gosh. And it’s one of my better selling books. Like it, it it remained in print, I think for 25 years. And crazy.
Yeah, really crazy. Oh,
Carole Freeman: I didn’t even look up. So is it one of those that like there’s copies that are like heirlooms that it’s, a hundred dollars or more? I should look it up. I
was just like…
Scott Dikkers: I don’t think it’s one of those. Okay. The, yeah the rights just reverted back to me because when you sign a publishing deal, sometimes after 10 or 25 years, you get the rights back, which is great nowadays for Amazon.
Cuz now I can put it on Amazon. And I make a hundred percent of the money. Amazon takes a small cut, like 30%, but my God with a major publisher, they take 85, 90%. There’s a reason. Amazon is a Mo monopoly. They really make it easy for authors to make money. I think I’m
Carole Freeman: gonna I, I’m gonna look it up and see if I can get a copy and send it to my dad for father’s day.
I think that will be gift.
Scott Dikkers: Yeah. And let me know how that goes.
Carole Freeman: I’ll set the context that I interviewed you first. And, but also if I just send it to him without any context, it’s probably even funnier. Oh, I,
Scott Dikkers: yeah. Cause here, so with that book, the cover like looks like a self-help book.
There’s like a beautiful flower on there. It’s very flowery lettering. You are worthless, and when it first went on sale in stores, it was in the comedy section and I always. That was the wrong section. It should be in the self-help section. . So I took it from the comedy and I always move it to the self-help section.
Cuz somebody’s depressed. They’re in self-help and they’re looking at all these books. I want ’em to laugh. I want ’em yeah. To feel good. So they see this book and they crack up and I got so many letters from people who read that book and said, oh my God. I was so depressed and your book just made me laugh till I cried.
It was like the best therapy I could have ever got. Those are letters that, every comedian dreams of, yeah. Hearing people’s depression.
Carole Freeman: Oh, that’s great. Yeah. I wish I would’ve known about it growing up. I grew up with. My grandmother gifted my dad. The, do you remember the books that truly tasteless joke books, which most of them now are canceled?
They’re totally non PC jokes.
Scott Dikkers: Oh There’s a few PC jokes in my book as well. Okay. few non PC jokes. Yeah.
Carole Freeman: The n my mom tells a story of, apparently I took those books to school for show Intel. I don’t remember this, but and she got a call from this teacher, the principal, or something about how inappropriate it was. I was bringing.
Scott Dikkers: Wonderful. Good for you.
Carole Freeman: That’s my early influences.
Scott Dikkers: I’ll tell you this. Nobody’s interested in an appropriate joke.
Carole Freeman: So you did good. So let’s see. Some of the questions I had written out you’ve already just naturally answered. So let’s talk a little bit about your diagnosis too.
When did you get this digestive news that you had something going on in your lower region that was not working correctly?
Scott Dikkers: yeah, so I was probably 40, early forties when I had a baby wife and I had made congratulations. . Thank you. And he was our pride and joy of course. And then about a year or so into his life, he stopped thriving and he started to get really sick and he lost weight and he was upset all the time and he was an early talker.
So he could tell us, that his tummy hurt, typical American story. We took him to a lot of doctors. Nobody could figure it out. Finally, somebody tests him for celiac disease, turns out that’s what he has. And we put him on a gluten-free diet. He’s fine. And he turns around.
So the doctor said you two are his parents. One of you gave it to him. You should get tested. So I got tested. My wife got test. And she didn’t have it. And I had it, so I just didn’t know it. I just thought that having an upset stomach was like part of being a living human. I thought that’s just how things went.
I thought having all sorts of bad skin and other sort of miscellaneous ailments was just normal. And so I went on a gluten free diet and nothing really changed for. I was expecting to see a night and day transformation, like my son had, but he was one and a half. And when you’re one and a half, you’re like a, you’re like the Wolverine, you just heal from everything.
Miraculously. You’re like a hundred percent collagen. But for me, because I was an old man, nothing was changing. Nothing was happen. And I did this for two or three years, basically eating the standard American diet gluten-free version. And I don’t know how I got down the rabbit hole of trying to eat healthier, but I did, and I like went online and I found people who were.
saying, look, if you wanna really take care of your body, you have to not just get rid of gluten, but you have to get rid of all this processed food, all these grains. I remember seeing a video by Dr. Cola way backwards, said, yeah. The way to clear up your skin is just give up all grains, no more rice, no more any of that stuff.
And I remember just bulking at that ho I can’t give up grains. That’s the. important staple of my diet sandwiches, pizza, hamburger, buns, brownies, cookies. How am I gonna give up grains? And low and behold, I find myself trying this and I’m just like floundering, cause they don’t teach you how to eat in America.
How does a low-carb diet change the life of comedy writer Scott Dikkers? Join us as we talked about Life Changing Low Carb!
He teaches you the proper way to eat.
Carole Freeman: The food and back then they were teaching us to eat mostly grains
Scott Dikkers: yeah. And the food pyramid is a joke created by the dairy industry and the meat industry. So I just experimented and I tried the raw food diet for a while. That was a nightmare because my stomach really hadn’t healed.
So I’m literally scraping it with all this raw vegetable fiber. It was terrible. And. Eventually I settle on this thing. And of course I tried paleo, but I settled on this thing. That’s what I call paleo. Plus it’s a very limited diet where I basically only eat vegetables, but I puree them. I steam them and puree them.
So I’m basically eating warm baby food. And then I eat clean meats cuz I went vegan for many years. And couldn’t sustain my health. I basically shrank. And I looked emaciated. Some people need meat, or if you are gonna go vegan, I think you really have to be a professional nutritionist to get all the amino acids that you’re supposed to get.
And I am not that person. I did take a nutrition class, but I was never able to do all the work necessary to get all the nutrients I need from a purely vegan diet. I decided I was only gonna eat clean meats. I was gonna buy meat from farmer’s markets where I knew the farmer. I knew that the animals were pasture raised, happy.
I didn’t wanna eat any factory farmed meat figured that was, if I was gonna eat meat, that’s how I was gonna do it. And so I was on that diet and I found my equilibrium. I found that was working for me and I really did start to feel healthier. My stomach didn’t hurt after I. My skin cleared up. I got, had more energy.
Like I just felt healthier, . And so that remains my diet to this day. I basically eat warm baby food and a little bit of meat and all I do is I puree a different vegetable. I put in some really good fat Sesame oil is my favorite. It’s like a tablespoon or so, and I make a little soup and obviously salt and pepper, all kinds of spices.
And. I have also introduced other like baked foods or semi raw foods I’ll occasionally eat a raw carrot or sweet potatoes. And as far as the vegetables go, I mix it up. I eat a lot of green vegetables, but obviously eat a lot of like purple vegetables and basically anything I can find.
There’s only a few things that are just like, so I, and then I got into obviously all the really super healthy stuff, like chlorella, Lina. And the bitters of green vegetables. And I think I took a break from sugar, even fruit, sugar for three or four months at one period. So I only ate vegetables and meat for three or four months.
And I remember coming out of that and eating a strawberry and feeling like I was eating a a banana split at dairy queen. It was the sweetest. Most amazing flavor I’d ever tasted. And then I realized, oh my God, that’s what the human body is supposed to think of a straw. , it’s supposed to be a treat
And so that’s how I operate today. I do have a little bit of fruit every couple of weeks as a treat and that works for me. And then on occasion, because I’m a human being, I have a complete cheat meal. don’t eat gluten. But I do, I will make gluten free brownies or cookies, or I’ll go out to Culvers and I’ll get the gluten free bun on a hamburger.
But I’ll tell you even to this day, like I can’t overdo it. Like I have a certain bucket. And if the bucket overflows I’m outta luck. So I do have to always come back to my baseline of puree, vegetables and clean meats and healthy fats. So yeah, that’s what I’m doing. And it’s really working for me because.
I feel healthier than I’ve ever felt in my life. And I’m nearly 60. So feeling good, feeling really good. Yeah.
Carole Freeman: Oh, that’s amazing. I love the stories, Scott it’s and it’s so similar to a lot of the people that I know in the keto space. It’s a similar story of they tried all the things myself, raw food, vegetarian, vegan food combining and similar to you.
It. I would get very sick anytime any of those came along and now I follow primarily whole foods. Extremely, low carb keto, most of the time. And similar to you. It’s you just, you feel so miserable when you go off of it. That’s is that your primary motivator? Because so many people say, oh, it’s not sustainable to change your diet.
That and I would argue that your, the way that you eat mostly is more restrictive than the way I would eat. And that’s the criticism that keto gets most of the time is, oh, it’s just too restrictive. Nobody could ever stick with that. But what is. What keeps you going? What keeps you motivated to stick with it?
Scott Dikkers: Number one, I’m just an insanely disciplined person. and if I set my mind to something, I can do it, especially if I know what the benefits are. And so I know what the benefits are of this diet. I never get sick. Everybody around me has a cold or the flu or whatever. I simply don’t get it. That’s worth it to me.
Yeah. I feel like it’s keeping cancer at bay, because I feel like I’m no doctor, I’m no scientist, but I’ve read enough about this to feel like there’s more than a causal link between all of the toxins and poisons that we eat in our food. Being a contributing factor to all the cancer that we see in the world.
Because the amount of poison that we eat has increased at pretty much the same rate as cases of cancer have increased. The liver, our livers are just way overworked trying to detoxify it from all this crap that we put into our bodies. Every time I go to the doctor and get a checkup or whatever, I don’t have cancer.
So we’ll see how long that lasts. But I’m feeling like this is kind. good insurance. In fact, I don’t have health insurance. My diet is my health insurance. So occasionally something will happen to me. I’ll get an ear infection. And over the past two or three years, I think that’s about it. I had got an ear infection.
And oh. And I had to go and get a, like a spot on my back removed cuz it was a potentially non benign. Whatever deal from me getting sunburn when I was a kid or whatever. And so I pay for those out of pocket and I’m saving so much money on health insurance. The idea that I would pay some crooked company, hundreds of dollars a month.
And this whole like Obamacare thing infuriated me so much because the Democrats had a chance to pass a. National healthcare plan, but they went with this Republican plan that was just a giveaway to the insurance companies and the medical industry where we’re forced now to pay for this insurance.
I think Trump is a fascist and I hate everything he stands for, but I’m glad he got rid of the mandate for Obamacare, because I didn’t like that. I don’t wanna have to pay money to these crooked companies. I wanna make my own decisions about my own healthcare. Wow.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. preach, preaching.
Yeah I’m big fan of functional medicine, doctors and absolutely love. My clients have to pay out of pocket for, and some of them are like, why should I have to pay for that? When I have insurance? It’s if you want a gym membership, you pay for that. If you want the best food, the healthiest and cleanest food, you gotta pay more for it.
And so it’s about what you care about. You take care of yourself and I agree our. Healthcare system is just not dead care is what I lovingly call it’s exactly what it’s. Yeah. It’s just keeping you just above, not dead or just above dead. And yeah,
Scott Dikkers: if you can walk out of the hospital, you’re fine.
Carole Freeman: Yeah.
People think that they’re protected by that, but I’ve got amazing stories of my clients that are referred to I’ve won primary. Functional medicine doctor that I refer most of my clients to and just amazing stories that people were like, oh, my doctor’s got me covered. And then he’s found these things that their doctors overlooked that were glaringly obvious in the labs that I even saw.
That’s not normal. Let’s get you checked out with him. And he digs and digs until he finds it. And just some, cancer, personal health information for my client, but like just like life changing, altering things that. The noted care was not gonna find . Yeah.
Scott Dikkers: What a wonderful concept, the idea that a doctor would be there to make sure that you have optimal health.
Yeah. That’s what I love about functional medicine. I go to this doctor and I’m basically fine, but she runs all these tests and finds all these little, vitamin deficiencies and stuff and she puts me on supplements and then retests me. Yeah, I just feel like I’m in absolutely the best health of my life.
Thanks to a good diet, a good doctor. Basically removing myself from the totally corrupt Western medical health insurance system and feeling really good about.
Carole Freeman: and you probably spend less on that care than you would on insurance, premiums and deductible
Scott Dikkers: and yeah. I’m getting off real easy.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I love it. Let’s see. So how, so it sounds like this dietary change, like the beginnings of it were close to 20 years ago or so not quite, but about,
Scott Dikkers: I would say. Yeah, it was a process, so I yeah, started probably 15 and I settled on my current diet, maybe eight to 10 years. Okay.
Carole Freeman: And how did a, that impact your mental clarity, your work, your career, your ability to think clearly?
Like what, is there a big difference between stuff you created pre finding the perfect diet for you versus after?
Scott Dikkers: Yeah. Good question. I don’t know that there’s been necessarily a change there. I do feel like I, it helps me with my energy level. So I just started this new comedy podcast and I’m on episode 14.
Now it’s a weekly show where it’s just me in front of the camera, trying to be funny. And it takes a lot of energy and a lot of work. And for the first. 12 weeks. I think maybe 11 weeks. I had to pull an all nighter once a week just to finish the show cuz I was learning how to do all the animation and the editing and everything else, the sound.
And it was a learning curve. And I used to pull all nighters in my twenties at The Onion fair amount, even did a couple of all weekenders. , which is like where you don’t sleep from Friday to Monday. Wow. When The Onion was on deadline and I used to have to recover from those, a couple of days of just like lying around sleeping.
And, but now, like I just I get right out of them, like one night’s sleep of six hours and I’m good to go again. So yeah. I feel like it’s in, it’s increased my energy, which has then increased my productivity. I can actually do more. Which is amazing and wonderful as far as mental clarity. Yeah.
I’m not sure. They always used to say that if you keep your mind active that’s like your that’s exercise for your brain. So as you get older, you’re gonna retain that mental agility. And I’ve always been writing jokes and trying to come up with jokes. And I feel like that’s really good brain exercise.
Maybe I’m sure the diet doesn’t hurt,
Carole Freeman: Maybe you started it right at the time where you otherwise would’ve had more mental decline. You caught it just in the time.
Scott Dikkers: yeah. And I do feel like I, I have a fewer memory lapses than I used to have. Like just like little oh what was I saying?
I used to do that a lot more. I still do it a fair amount, but not as much. And so hopefully that’ll improve with time and not decline.
Carole Freeman: Excellent. Oh, I’m loving this so much. And alright. We we finally got a comment. This is, I don’t know if this is a real person or not. Proverbial one says, hello.
Hello, proverbial one. Welcome to the show. You’re just in time as we’re about, about ready to wrap this up. So Scott, was there anything else that you were hoping to share or hoping I would ask about before we wrap this?
Scott Dikkers: Now it’s your show. We can talk about whatever you want. oh, and
Carole Freeman: that’s a real person.
All right. Good to know. I’m glad you’re here. Thanks for joining. Thanks for coming and where can people find you where you’ve got a lot of different places that people can find you, where would you like people to go? And I’ll add a little banner.
Scott Dikkers: Oh, thank you. I am in the computer. I’m my YouTube channel is Scott Dikkers around and that’s where my new podcast is.
I’m also around.com. No, it’s just Scott Dikkers around on YouTube. Scott Dikkers.com will find my my website. I have another website where I teach people comedy that the books that you held up that’s HowtoWriteFunny.com. And I’m on Twitter at, I think if you just Google Scott Dikkers, you’ll see it all.
Even if you spell my name wrong. Oh, that’s great. Yeah, that’s that’s one thing that the internet has gifted me is people can get my name wrong. Now. It doesn’t matter.
Carole Freeman: Just any Scott Dikkers if you’re just listening, just try search you’ll find him. He’s not hard to find pages and pages.
he’s older than the internet. I am, there is
Scott Dikkers: one other, there’s one other Scott Dikkers in the world and he’s my age and he lives in Maryland. Oh. But he he doesn’t really do much online, okay. I’m the only game in town.
Carole Freeman: There’s one other Carole Freeman that at least comes up on the internet.
She was like in parliament in Canada or something like that.
Scott Dikkers: Oh my goodness. She spell it with the E too. Yeah. Yeah.
Carole Freeman: Oh, that’s awesome. Yeah. And then of course there’s Carole Baskin, but that’s a different, last name. So
Scott Dikkers: that’s . Yeah. And you don’t wanna be associated with that person?
Carole Freeman: Proverbial one is keto for six years.
Congratulations. I just celebrated my seven year anniversary. So we’re siblings there. Recently had VSG. I don’t know what that means.
Scott Dikkers: I don’t know what that is
Carole Freeman: here. Very something good. Successfully. Good. Very successfully. Good. I think that’s what that means. oh, this has been fun. Everybody come back. So this was a special episode on Tuesday to typically we’re doing shows on Thursday. So Thursday this week on what is that June? June 9th. The episode is gonna be about the secrets to ending emotional eating.
I’ve got a program that I’m launching. And so I’m gonna share with you details of that. And I wanna, oh, weight loss surgery. Oh, okay. Weight loss surgery was that proverbial one had, I’ve got some clients that have after they’ve had. Weight loss surgery. They start to gain the weight back and then they found keto afterwards, too.
So congratulations God. You’re doing well. Proverbial one. Thanks for joining the show. Thank you to our guest Scott Dikkers. Thank you for being here. And let me put the. Just search for him online, Scott Dikkers around is his new podcast and it’s very fun. I’ve watched a couple of episodes of that too.
Check out his books. I’m gonna go now. Search for you are worthless, depressing nuggets of wisdom. Sure. To ruin your day as a father’s day gift. Perfect father’s day gift. And so everyone thank you for joining us. If you’re struggling with keto, I’m here to help visit my website. Keto Carole.com. Apply to work with me if you’re struggling and remember, help us grow the show and we’ll help you shrink.
Thank you again, Scott, for being
Scott Dikkers: here. Thank you,
Carole Freeman: Carole. Thanks for having so you all next time, everyone. Bye now.
