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.
Do women need a different version of keto than men? After working with 1,000s of women over the last 7 years, what are the things I’ve seen that women need to succeed on keto that differs from what men need? Join Carole as she talks about the emotional, hormonal, nutritional, and community needs of women for long-term success on keto.
Listen on Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music
Carole Freeman: Hey there. How are you doing today? We’re live everyone. Welcome to the show. I’m by myself today and solo, no guest cohost. I’m excited to be here. Hey, tell me where you’re joining from type of comment. Let me know. You’re here. The show is interactive. And you went on the shows about today. Are you a woman trying to lose weight on keto?
Have you read every blog post watched every video out there by, oh, all the male keto gurus. There’s a lot of them. And you just felt like something was off. Like they were missing the boat and you wonder if women actually need a different approach to keto than. This episode is for you. Stick around and learn the three things that I’ve seen for seven years of coaching, thousands of women, the three things that women specifically need to succeed on keto.
So welcome everyone to keto chat live. We’ve got a thumbs up already. I love all the interaction. So join the show. Let me know where you’re joining me from. I can tell I have people like watching, but I can’t see who you are until you actually comment. So let me know. You’re here. Welcome you to the show here.
Keto Coaching for Women with Carole will give you knowledge about emotional, hormonal, nutritional, and community needs of women.
Welcome to keto chat. Live everyone. I’m your host Carole Freeman. Master’s in nutrition and clinical health psychology. I’m a certified clinical hypnotherapist and also am a board certified keto nutritions specialist. I specialize in helping women 40 plus follow a keto diet for sustainable weight loss.
Now the part the lawyers want to hear the show’s meant for educational and entertainment purposes only it is not medical advice nor intended to diagnose. Prevent treat or cure any condition whatsoever. If you have any questions or concerns related to your specific medical condition, please seek out the care of your personal health.
Healthcare. Professional. Nancy is here from San Diego. Welcome Nancy. So glad you’re here. She’s one of our regulars here for the show. All right. Hey, if you feel so inclined support the show, if you’re watching on YouTube, you can do a Superchat. I’ll give you a shout out. And if you’re on a Facebook, a review of the show is really helpful too.
And you’re listening later on any of our podcast platforms, give us a review five stars if you enjoyed it. And that helps out get more get the word out to more people. Just a little. Personal note, how are y’all doing, how y’all doing? I have my next comedy show is going to be in Ahwatukee, which is an area of Phoenix, Arizona May 26th, 2022.
So if you’re in the area, come out and have some laughs. It’s a good time out there. It’s a great show. And we’ve got a lot of local comedians on the show out there. Some really great, funny people that are actually friends of mine. So I have a new little segment for the show today. I often get free product samples.
Companies want me to review they’ll give me a sample of a product for my honest review. And I’ve got a few of them I’ve been sitting on because if you’re a woman, you might appreciate the fact that oh, if I’m going to do something on video, it takes a little more effort, got to actually shower today, comb my hair, put a little bit of makeup on.
And so I thought, why don’t I actually just wrap this up in the show? So let me know if you like this segment or not. I’ve got One, one company I’m going to talk about proper goods sent me some soup to try. So I’m going to tell you about the two ones that they sent me, and I’m going to chat about salad and go.
That’s a local fast food salad restaurant. That’s here in the Phoenix area. I’m going to share with you my experiment with them for this last week. And. And then I’ll tell you what’s coming up next week. Cause I’ve got another product coming next week. So proper. Good. Let’s talk about proper. Good. Okay.
This is just the labels from the soup, cause I already ate the soup and I’ve just been procrastinating on doing the review. And so this is a new company. Proper good. They provide. So imagine hanging down from here is a kind of a plastic pouch that the product is in. And so they have a full line of products.
Most of them are not keto friendly. Okay. So I’ll just put that caveat in to start with they’re a company that they seem to be trained to, to check all the boxes for every dietary preference. So they have some soups that are vegan and some that are let me see if they’ve got it on here.
Gluten-free I don’t remember on their website, everything they’re trying to beat everybody, but basically two of them are keto friendly or potentially keto friendly and everything else on their site is not okay. So if you go and look what they’ve got going on, they’ve got carby things. They’ve got oatmeal and other soups that are not keto friendly.
So just keep that in mind. If you go look at the website, this is not a keto company, but as a company that has a couple of products that are keto friendly. So right now you only order from their website. They don’t have it. They’re not selling it in stores anywhere cause they’re brand new. And, but let me tell you about the pros.
So the two products that are keto friendly, creamy chicken soup and broccoli, cheddar soup. Now these are really high quality ingredients. So the things I liked about these were very high quality ingredients, not garbage in here. And so for example, the creamy chicken. Is chicken bone broth. So that’s one of the cool things, as well as they’re using bone broth as a basis that are just water and vegetable broth chicken heavy cream.
Okay. So that’s rare in a soup. Usually it’s going to be some fillers and starches and things like that. So actual, real cream they’ve got their onions carrots, coconut oil celery, garlic xantham. Carrot fiber. That’s just a little thickener in there and sea salt, Rosemary extract. So cool is Rosemary extract is actually a very natural preservative and Rosemary extract is very antimicrobial antibacterial.
And so they’ve done a really good job at using completely natural ingredients in here. Black pepper chives and parsley. So impressive clean list of ingredients in there. Very high quality. Probably the problem is that to scale this kind of a company, typically the ingredients get cheap. And if they ended up getting bought out by another company, they’re gonna end up having to put cheaper ingredients in there.
So right now they’ve really impressively quality ingredients that are in there. So the nutrition breakdown. Oh my gosh. I’m going to have to put these on I’m 51. Now everyone I’ve tried. Try as little as possible to read these, but that’s tiny. All right. So we’ve got 360 calories in one pouch, and that is 27 grams of fat.
This is really small 11 grams of carbs. Total three grams of that is fiber and 19 grams of protein. As a one serving this, if you’re okay. This could work as a, if you’re doing two meals a day, because the carb count in this is high enough that it wouldn’t be something that I would recommend for somebody doing three meals a day 11 grams of carbs that’s problem with any.
Product is it’s hard to keep the carbs low when you’re trying to fill up a pouch of food. And so the the carbs are a little high, so you’d have to have this as a two a day, but with only 19 grams of protein in here, you’re going to need some more protein to add in there to make a full meal. So this could be like your side dish to go with some other protein that you’re having.
And but just know that all by itself, as a single meal, it’s not going to quite fit for what I recommend for my clients or what I see working. But again, the ingredients are really quality. The taste was really great. These are really well created. I do think that the sodium intake, the sodium content in these is too low.
I definitely had to put a lot more salt in these and especially somebody who’s on keto, your taste buds want a lot more salt. And so it’s only got, let’s see what. Let’s see sodium. Oh, six 60 milligrams. So that’s about a quarter of a teaspoon in a whole, one of these. I recommend at least another quarter to a half, a teaspoon of salt in these to make them taste phenomenal.
But again, thumbs up as a good starter place. And if you’re somebody who just wants to have some soups on hand, oh, they’re also, they don’t need to be refrigerated. So just in the container, you put them in your cupboard indefinitely. You can either just pour it into a pan to heat it up.
Or you can boil the pouch in some water and also they recommend, or they suggest that you can just tear the top off of the pouch and put it in the microwave and heat it up in that container there. So that is the creamy chicken has actually much more protein in it than the broccoli cheddar.
So let me read the nutrient breakdown on this. And so this one of only 250 calories for one pouch. So it’s a hundred calories or 110 calories less than the other one. It is 20 grams of fat, 10 total grams of carbs with three grams of fiber, only seven grams of protein in this one. So the protein and this one is just coming from the cheese that’s in here because there’s no actual other protein source in here, probably some of the, from the bone broth.
So we’ve got a chicken bone broth Broccoli heavy cream onions, carrots, coconut oil, cheddar cheese, garlic xantham gum natural cheese flavor. Buttermilk protein or I’m sorry, buttermilk power, butter, natural flavors, natural cheese flavors, sea salt, Rosemary extract, white pepper, turmeric and paprika.
So again, this one’s very low protein, and so this would be a great side dish for some of the protein sources, same thing with this one, really high quality ingredients, very tasty. And I do, I would recommend. A lot more salt added to it for all the flavor blooming and a, this would be a great side dish again, with more protein added to it.
Yeah. So any questions about any questions, folks about proper? Good. So thank you proper. Good for sharing that with me again, very high quality. I really enjoyed them. Miss the brand name joined late. So the brand and this is proper good. And again, the whole company has a long line of pouched food.
So soups and things like. And but not everything that they make is keto friendly. So only two of their products are keto friendly. That’s the ones that they sent me for review very high quality ingredients very tasty. Again, I would recommend that these are a side dish with more protein and also add more salt to them.
The carb counts, Nancy, each of them, one of them is 10 grams. One of them is 11 grams total. So they would be something that you’re doing a two a day meal plan. To stick with 20 total carbs, or you could cut each of these in half and have a small portion of it and add them to some more protein. Yeah.
All right. Also I wanted to share. Experiment. I did last week with there’s a local it’s like a fast food place, but it’s only salads. That’s here in the Phoenix area. I’ve been down here two years and I had not yet tried them. And so the place is called salad and go. And so I’m pretty sure this is only a Phoenix thing, but Nancy.
Oh, actually the answer you moved from San Diego. Didn’t you let me know if there’s any of these in your area. But I did an experiment this last week. I was supposed to go grocery shopping on Saturday, set myself up for success, but it was like, you know what, I’m going to try that salad and go place and just check it out and see if this will work for a meal a year.
A year, no, a week of meal prep for me. So this place has all salads and you can completely customize them and they have some pre-made versions. You can still customize everything on those. And then they have a build your own type of salad place or salad combo. And they’re the proteins. They offer our chicken grilled chicken.
They’re grilled chicken with some Buffalo sauce on it. Tofu. No protein or avocado, literally on their menu, you can choose avocado. That’s not a protein folks and it tasty. And maybe if you want. Use this as a, just a solid basis aside and use your own protein that would work. And so what I did is I went and got five salads and they have the option to do extra protein.
So most of them I did do extra protein cause there’s their standard amount of protein on them ends up being about 19 or 20 grams of protein. And I’m typically eating two meals a day. So I need to have at least 40 grams of protein per meal. And I found that again, this is the first time trying these and I found that the amount of lettuce that they give.
Way too much, way more than I would eat in one sitting. And that’s kind what the filler is, but they’ve got a lot of different variety of toppings and things like that. So I went with five of their pre-made salad combos, made a couple of adjustments on them. Double the protein on all of them. And I found that they, most of them portion size wise, we’re about two meals for each salad I got and the standard salad without the double protein is $5 and 76 cents.
And you can get two dressings for that. It’s an unbelievable bargain. And if you do the standard lettuce amount standard salad, and then you just double the protein up, it ends up still being less than $8 for the double protein. And so it was, I ended up buying five salads and they were the equivalent of two meals, a piece.
So I got 10 meals for less than $40. It was pretty cool. And the dressings on the side, which is what you really need to have if you don’t want your lettuce, To garbage. And so I basically I’m, today is Thursday. I got these on Saturday last week, I’m down to my last salad. And so it’s done. It’s done well.
It’s served its purpose. I actually got pretty tired of just chicken though. So chicken and Buffalo chicken are the only proteins that I would have. And I got pretty tired of that. So I’ve got some other proteins that I’ve swapped in and out. And I think for next time, maybe I’ll do some. The avocado is the protein.
So actually no for the same price, you can get the chicken. So I would think I would get that, hold it on the side, maybe rotate in some other proteins for myself. So anyways, it was a hit, it was a good, a big success. And I’ll tell you, I’ve been, it’s been easy to stick with keto for the week because I set myself up for success with those meals.
Every time I opened my fridge, I’m like, oh, I’ve got these salads I can choose from that are A good dose of protein on there. And Facebook user, I don’t know who this person is because they don’t have their name on there. So the streaming platform that I use, unless you’ve given it permission to share your name, it will only show you a Facebook user.
So if you want to remain private yeah. That’s just fine. If you’d like to share who you are, what your name is. You’re welcome to type that in the chat as well, too. Sounds cool. I’ll see if they have anything like that in this state. And yeah, so the proper good is something that you can order online, delivered anywhere in the United States, I assume.
And then yeah. Salad and go is going to be a Phoenix thing as far as I know. Next week what’s Kathy. Hi, Kathy. How are you doing? Welcome to the show. Glad you’re here. So up next, I found, I, again, I’ve lived in Phoenix for two years and I just found out about this local company called the Sapiens Kitchen and they do paleo and keto meals.
They actually have a restaurant and they do meal delivery service. I only found out about this because there’s a local keto group here that said. Ask some question. And then this company said, Hey, check us out. And I was like, I’m going to go check you out. And they do this meal delivery service and the meals look really great.
Keto Coaching for Women with Carole will give you knowledge about emotional, hormonal, nutritional, and community needs of women.
I’m going to assume that the veggie portions are maybe a little too high in carbs, but they offer the option to order separate proteins all by themselves. So I ordered every single meal combo that they had as a keto option. And I think off the top of my head, that might be six of them. And I ordered all the other separate proteins that they sell as well.
And so this is going to be my experiment for next week. They deliver it to my zip code and so they come next Wednesday. So the next, our next show that we’ve got, I will have had at least a couple of the meals to be able to review for you. So that’s coming up next week, everyone. So let me know if you liked this segment where I review products that I’ve been sent for sampling and review again, if you’re just joining us.
I often get contacted by companies that say, Hey, we’ve got this thing where you try it for an honest review. And if it’s something that at least at a glance and ingredients that they’ve got is something that I would possibly recommend for my clients. I’m happy to do and I thought, why not wrap it into the show here?
Glad you all are here. All right. So you’re ready for the topic of the show. This today’s episode is about the three things that women need to succeed on keto. And again, this is my experience. Next week is my set. Oh, how many fingers? Seven year anniversary of my keto journey. Can you believe it? I can’t believe it’s been a long seven years, everyone.
And so I’ve literally worked with thousands of women. In that time. And I’ve noticed that they actually have different needs than men have. And in the very beginning of my journey, I didn’t think that was true. I was like, nah, it doesn’t matter. The same keto approach can work for men and women. You don’t need any difference.
But I found that women actually have three specific things. There’s three specific types of support that they need that is different than most men. Thank you, Kathy. I’m getting the congratulations. Thank you so much. All right. So who wants to hear the three things you want to say here? Three things I’ll give you I’ll name three of them, but I’m going to go a little bit deeper into what I mean by each of those as well.
So one thing that women need most women need that’s different than most men on keto is that they need emotional support. They also need hormonal support and they need community support. And again, this isn’t. This doesn’t apply to every single person, but in general, again, the last seven years I’ve been doing this, the thousands of women I worked with and a few men I’ve worked with a few men is that women need those three things.
And I’m going to go into a little bit deeper about what I mean by those and what that looks like, why they need that and so on. And so let’s talk about the emotional, real support. First. Now women need. For their emotions. We are a little more feeling, people, emotional people in general, and we need support for whatever comes up on this journey.
Food means a lot of different things to us. We. Our caretakers. We show love with food. We receive love with food and we put a lot of work and effort into care-taking for there. Other people around us. And a lot of our emotions and feelings are wrapped up in what we eat. And most of the ladies that I’m working with have historically put themselves last.
They always care for everyone else first and their needs come last and they prioritize all of the funds for the rest of their family and the well-being of the rest of their family. And then they also feels guilty about ever spending any money on themselves. And except for, they tend to be the primary food shoppers, the fi primary food preparers.
That’s not always the case, but that tends to be more so with women than men. They end up because they don’t want it. They feel guilty. If they spend money on themselves, they still feel guilty. If they do anything special for themselves, they’re not spending all their time to take care of their family.
They end up that food ends up being the one thing they give themselves permission to spend money on. Cause that’s just the food budget. That’s for everybody. Nobody’s going to notice that. And so we ended up using food to cope with feelings and emotions, and it can be very effective food.
Especially high carb foods can help us feel very numb, avoid or dissociate from uncomfortable feelings. And also it can be something that we use to celebrate how we express feelings. It’s how we have a good time and it works until it doesn’t work. And a lot of ladies I’m working with are okay, this isn’t working anymore.
I want to do something different. I want to learn different techniques and. So let me know. Is that something that resonates with you? Are you like a lot of the ladies that I’m working with where food ends up being the one area that you’ll allow yourself to spend more money on, and it’s the one thing that you feel less guilty about using to help yourself cope and soothe your feelings?
So women, they need to understand that’s what’s going on. So they need support for their emotions. They need empathy for how they’ve lived their lives and. When they’re at the point where they’re ready to do something different instead of using food to cope with things as they need help being able to develop their emotional intelligence and the whole set of skills that most of us never learned about how to actually have feelings, identify them, validate them and not need to numb out or avoid or sooth our feelings just.
And so this is develops over time. It takes work to develop your emotional intelligence. And so that’s what I mean by women need that emotional support. So that’s number one that women need different than what men need on keto is they need help and support for their emotions. All right.
Number two. Hormonal support. And this is two different things, actually. So one is going to be during their PMs time. So their pre-menstrual time they need I’ve found that some women, their, this isn’t true for all of them, but some women are very vulnerable at that time. And I’ll talk about why. And then the other part of hormonal support is something more recently I’ve learned from the doctor that I refer a lot of my clients to is.
Our hormones are very sensitive about feeding times and also about amount of protein that we have. And so intermittent fasting may not be the best option for women and trying to fast and try to get down to two meals or only one meal a day or fasting day or two a week or three days a week. It may not actually be the best thing for women.
So let’s talk about each of these separately too. Pre-menstrual time and. That part of our cycle, where our body is building up our uterus, it’s getting ready for a, the body hopes. It’s going to have a pregnancy it’s preparing for it every month. It doesn’t know if that’s in your cards or not, or if that’s your priority, not your body just goes through that cycle every month.
And so basically it’s a building phase, right? So your body is building up that organ, your uterus, and it needs lots and lots of nutrients to do that, especially things that are blood building. So Chinese medicine does a really good job at looking at this as that’s a building time of blood building phase.
And so things like red meat very highly nutritious foods are what your body. And often what happens during this time is that women feel some of the women I work with and I’ve noticed that not everybody struggles with this, but some people have a much more ravenous period in their pre-menstrual time than others.
And basically it’s because your body needs lots of nutrients. It needs calories, nutrients. Red meat or the oil iron and things that are in red meat. And so we get hungry or in that time, how many of you have that pre-menstrual time where you’re just like craving carbs. You want lots of food. And some of my clients ended up having really struggling during this time.
And so for them, what we want to do is actually that time when that kicks in that extra hunger that you’ve got, you want to honor your. You want to feed it? You want to nourish, you want to reassure that your going to feed it, what it needs. So focus on very nutrient rich foods. Don’t put any limitations on them.
So for example, I really recommend a lot of red meat during this time for most women, because it is something that contains all the nutrients that you need to build up a healthy uterus. And it doesn’t work to just ignore this if you’re like I don’t want it to grow. So I’m just not going to eat it.
Your appetite. Overpowering everything else. And so a Facebook user crave chocolate and red meat every month. Yeah. I’ll just say don’t fall for the traps. So there’s some people out there in the internet, that’ll say oh, you need chocolate because it has magnesium in it. No, that’s not what your body’s.
If you’re, if you were craving chocolate, you could eat pure. Unsweetened cocoa powder and that tastes terrible. It’s the sugar, your you’re craving and your body associates chocolate with the sugar. So that’s why it’s craving that red meat is great. Eat as much as you possibly can. Just know that what the sugar craving is doing is that it’s wants that insulin spike from the high carbs, the high sugar foods.
So that’s very building, it actually causes your body. Build things and build up and retain fat and fluid and things like that as well in anticipation of that, a nice, healthy, juicy uterus forming. And so I instruct my clients at that time to have on hand as much of the. Your favorite protein sources you possibly can indulge.
This is the time to indulge in, you still want to stay with keto friendly things. So keep the carbs low, but all the other foods that are your favorites have lots of them on hand don’t limit any of them and just treat it as your feast time. You need to feed your body. You need to nourish it.
And this week we’ll pass. And then you can go back to your focus with trying to reduce your intake and lose fat as a primary goal. So you’ll get three weeks out of the four of the months that you get to do that. But for the women that is, this is again, this isn’t for everybody that they struggle with this, but some of them do and that they do, we got to feed the body, we got to nourish it.
We got to honor what it’s telling you. And then the other three weeks of the month that we can go forward with with the. Facilitating fat loss in your body. And so Facebook user, and I can’t tell if this is still all Kathy, cause all it shows is just Facebook user. So this might be Kathy or might be somebody else, but what are your post-menopausal recommendations?
Yeah. So that kind of fits with the next one. I’ve got the next one for hormonal support is both for women that are still menstruating, but also post-menopausal women as well. Is that intermittent fasting? May not actually be the best thing for women’s hormones. And so again, these are the three different types of support that I found that women need in order to succeed on keto.
The we’re on the second one here, which is hormonal support. So intermittent fasting. So it turns out that women’s hormones are much more sensitive nutrient wise than men are. So for example, men can eat one meal a day, skip a day of eating and their hormones don’t get tanked. For the most part, women are much more sensitive and they need to eat not all day long, but regular intervals.
So for most of the women that I’ve worked with two or three meals a day ends up being optimal, but. Not going to be a benefit to trying to eat less times during the day, cut down to one meal a day. And it actually may cause disruption to. Thyroid and other hormone production. And so prioritizing, so this is again, recommended for post-menopausal as well.
Number one, prioritize protein. You need to get at least 80 grams of protein a day, and that’s on the baby minimum side for women. Most women that I’ve worked with need a lot more than that. A hundred, 120 grams a day is going to be more optimum. So be protein centric in your meals. That this is a hormonal support.
Okay. So protein, rich foods, especially natural ones. The ones that they, as they grow in nature, they actually tend to come with the most vitamins and minerals that our body needs and in the form that we need. So protein centric and eat that first at each of your meals. If you can’t. That much protein in and two meals.
You need to have three meals a day. So this is again, recommendation for post-menopausal and for pre premenopausal women. And this is ends up being our first step in, in meal planning is how am I going to get enough protein in each of my meals per day, and however many meals a day. You need to have that in order to achieve that goal.
So again, intermittent fasting for women may not be the best thing for their hormones. And so we’re looking at when I’m working with my clients, we’re looking at different labs and things like that in conjunction with the doctor that I have them work with and to optimize hormonal health. So that’s number two thing that I found that women need in order to succeed.
So you down keto and the number three thing that I’ve found that women need to succeed on cue. Is community support. And again, this is two layers. So each of my three points have two things underneath them. And so the community support part of this is like I talked about a little bit earlier is that women are the caretakers, the organizers, the feeders in our community.
They need somebody that recognizes that, and that can support them in that role on an ongoing basis, instead of saying, Nope, you just need to stop being who you are. You need to stop being the community hub of your family. How can we help them do keto in a way that they can still honor that role that is meaningful?
And the other part of the community support is not only helping honor what the women’s role is in their own community is that they need community support of other successful keto people. And so they need loving, compassionate sisters that are on their keto journey, cheering them on for success.
And part of this as well is going to be that mirror neuron support. So if you’re a follower of the show, you’ve heard me talk about that before. Humans actually all animals copy the behavior of other animals that they hang out with. And our brains are wired this way. We have specific neurons in our brain called mirror neurons that copy the behavior of other things that we see.
And so this is how, birds can all fly in a flock together. They just copy the behavior of the bird in front of them. This is if you’ve ever seen those adorable videos where one animal gets raised by another type of animal, and then they adopt their behavior. That’s what’s happening is that their brain sees that and it just copies up behavior.
I saw, when did I see the other day? It was a a goat that had been raised by a dog. And so then it had these dog like jumping around anyways. It was very cute. It was adorable. So if we want to be successful on keto in our regular community of people is not keto. And you keep falling off in social situations.
Guess what, there’s a way to offset that is to, by having a community of successful keto people, keto sisters, that you’re hanging out with so that your brain can copy their behavior. So this is why. For when I work with my clients. So we have group support, we have zoom calls where people can see each other, they get motivated, they can hear the success, but they get that mirror neuron activation as well.
That helps their brain go, oh, I’m copying the behavior of these ducks, these geese, these lemmings, these these sheep or. People there they’re keto sisters in there. Copying that. So again, just to recap, I’ve found that women need three things different than men. And again, some of the men that I worked with, actually, they end up their personality type is one that does well with this type of support as well.
So these are the three things that I found that the women that I’ve worked with needed that are different than what men need. So they need emotional support, both just for empathy and support of their emotions. Help with developing their emotional intelligence so that they can learn other ways of coping with life, rather than using food to cope and Sue their emotions and feelings.
They need hormonal support, both those for premenopausal women for PMs support, but also then exploring how many times a day is going to be best nourishing their body to not hormonally signaled their body. That. They’re starving and they don’t have enough nutrients to be healthy. And then the third part again, is the community support.
So both support for their lifestyle and honoring their role in their own community in their lives. And also then having a community of supportive keto, successful sisters that are cheering them on and activating their mirror neurons in a positive way. All right. How are y’all doing? Questions.
Which, which were those resonates with you? Have you been trying keto on your own and are you getting all three of those met in your life? Is it something that’s, you’ve got a big aha where you’re like, ah, that’s, what’s missing. That’s what I haven’t been getting. Correct.
Now’s the time the show. I want you to share your aha with me about what you’ve learned so far on the show. Give me a comment I can see. We’ve got quite a few people watching this live here, so please join us. Let me know. What’s your aha. What’s your takeaway from what I’ve taught you here today? So I’m up next, next week show.
I’m very excited about it. So it’s going to be episode number 46 46 is my seven year keto anniversary show. You don’t want to miss that. I’m going to go over my journey for seven years. Results. I’ve seen lots of client, examples of success, all the things that I’ve seen, not get better for other people.
And also I’m going to share the things that I’ve changed my mind on. So what’s different now about how I teach keto, how I live keto myself and how I bring it to my clients than I did seven years ago when I started this crazy, awesome journey. So that’s next week. So tune in next week. Show is going to be on May 19th, 2022.
Join us live on YouTube or on Facebook. If you can’t join us live, we’re going to have it up on the website and also on all the podcast platforms as well. Very soon after that. Today’s show we covered the three things that women need to succeed on keto. So again, we need the emotional hormonal and community support to be successful.
And so that wraps up our show for today. So if you’re struggling on. You’re missing one or two or three of those things in your life. I’m here to help. I work with my clients by application only. So check out my website, ketocarole.com. And let me put that up here. Carole is the very fancy French spelling.
It has an E on the end. So ketocarole.com. Check that out. If, what you’ve see there resonates with you. I have a couple of spots open for clients, and again, I work with my clients on the application and work very closely with them to get them the results that they’ve been striving to get on their own.
And so it does support the show. If you’ve enjoyed this content share with a friend also, I’d appreciate leave us a review on iTunes or on Spotify. And remember. So we’ve got one more comment here. Oh, here we go. Okay. So Stephanie “prioritizing protein resonates with me. I have to have three meals a day struggling and getting 70 grams a day”.
Appreciate reinforcing this. Yes. Actually in our client group call last night. That was actually one of the things that we were talking about is how do you get that protein in Stephanie Lynn? It’s women historically, we under eat protein. And especially when we’re trying to diet lose weight, that we eat very tiny portions and we try to eat as little as possible.
So part of that, we have to overcome that. And once I find the ones, my clients actually are getting enough protein, their protein appetite increases, and that it’s much easier, but there’s a lot of tricks that we talked about too, that can help you get more protein into and. It’s Kathy again. Great show.
So good to see you, Kathy. What a nice surprise. All right. That does it for the show. Everyone. Thanks again for watching. And again, if you need help or support on keto, check out my website, ketocarole.com and remember, help us grow the show and we’ll help you shrink. Thanks for watching. We’ll see you all next time.
Join me in celebrating 7 years on my keto journey! Hear my story of how it all started, the improvements I’ve experienced over the years, personal struggles, and the things I’ve changed my mind about along the way.
Listen on Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music
Carole Freeman: oh, Hey, every one. How are ya? How you doing? Welcome to my seven year keto anniversary show. All the lessons I’ve learned. Things have I’ve changed my mind about a we’re live everyone. Are you curious what happens after seven years following a keto diet? You wonder what? My results, my struggles things I’ve changed my mind about over that time.
Join me in celebrating 7 years on my keto journey! Hear my story of how it all started, the improvements I’ve experienced over the years, personal struggles, and the things I’ve changed my mind about along the way.
This episode is for you. I’m so glad you’re here. Welcome. Welcome to the show. Join in, let me know where you’re watching from, where you’re joining from. I am doing a little digital nomad life. So you might notice if you’re a regular viewer of the show, I’m in a different location, doing a little bit of a digital nomad for a few months before I go up to Seattle area, my son lives in.
In August and September, I’m going to be spending some time up there. So I’m doing a little Airbnb jaunt down here in the Phoenix area for a few months before then. I’m getting the light settled and everything in here. It’s a little different. So welcome to the show, everyone. Again, welcome to keto chat.
Live my special seven year anniversary episode. I’m your host Carole Freeman. I have a master’s degree in nutrition, clinical health psychology. I am a certified clinical hypnotherapist. I’m a board certified keto genic nutrition specialist. That is a mouthful.
Now I specialize in helping women 40 plus follow a keto diet for sustainable weight. Let me give you a quick little medical disclaimer here about this show is meant for educational and entertainment purposes. Only. It is not medical advice, nor is it intended to diagnose, prevent, treat, or cure any condition whatsoever.
If you have questions or concerns related to your specific medical conditions, please seek out advice from your personal health healthcare professionals. So welcome. Welcome everyone. How y’all doing? How’s it going today? All right. Personal update. Check in here. I’m heading out tonight to do some comedy in Awahtukee, which is a Southern part of Phoenix, Arizona.
If you didn’t know, you can actually get all of my events and updates of events, comedy, and show events at TheCaroleFreeman.com. Just remember that Carole is that very fancy French spelling that has an E on the end.
If you want to stay updated on all my comedy shows and upcoming keto Chat Lives. That’s where to go. All the events are updated on there. So the Carole freeman.com again, Carole has an E on the end of it. Our podcast really exciting. Our podcast has been charting the nutrition charts all over the world and Canada, Norway recently, currently we’re number 51 in Saudi Arabia. Hello to everyone listening from there and number 148 in South Africa. So thank you for our listeners all around the world.
It’s been really exciting to see this grow. So we’re just heading in, this is our second year of doing this podcast, it’s really exciting to see where people are getting information from. Another update here is that on June 6th, 2022, I’m going to be running by popular demand. I’m going to be running my.
Pathway to end emotional eating program. So this is a program that’s specifically designed to teach you how to cope with your feelings and emotions in healthy ways, instead of turning to food to some, to numb out sooth or avoid your feelings. If you want more information about that, I’ll tell you at the end of the show about how to get more information and.
But popular demand. It’s a diet agnostic. So if you’re just struggling to stick with keto, the, because you turn to food for comfort, stress relief all of that, this program is specifically designed for that. All right, up next, I’m going to give a proper review. So I started this, the last couple of episodes featuring a product that.
Sapiens kitchen. I discovered them a few weeks ago. I, they commented on something in a local Arizona keto Facebook group here, and I didn’t even know they existed. They were I got a chat with the owner of the company, actually, when he came and delivered my food, he told me more of their story.
They were a paleo kitchen, a paleo restaurant, like a higher end paleo restaurant in the Scottsdale Arizona, which is a suburb of Phoenix. They were a very high end paleo restaurant. Then unfortunately, during the pandemic, like a lot of restaurants, they really struggled to stay open. So then that’s when they decided they would try to do some meal delivery service.
They do both paleo and keto friendly meals. About a week and a half ago, I ordered. 10 different meals. I ordered basically every meal that they had available that they said was keto. They had some standalone proteins. I know that most dishes are light on the protein.
I ordered every single solo protein that they had available as well. I’m still working my way through. I’ll tell you what, like absolutely delicious food, like really high quality. The owner, it turns out one of the owners was the one that delivered the food right to my door. We chatted for quite a while.
He said that everything is organic fresh and I can taste like I have all this culinary training. I used to teach cooking classes. On that basically there was a very high quality. Ingredients, but very high quality crafting of the dishes as well. Most of the dishes were veggies and protein, and then they had some kind of, a little dish of sauce.
Roman that the one of the owners had explained to me that the sauce is part of the keto mix on that. So there’s some, health. It’s in there and they do primarily a paleo keto. So there was no dairy in anything that they gave me, which, good or bad. I love dairy, but that’s their focus that they do.
Again, I’ll say the portions were good. The protein portion. It varied from dish to dish, but it was a pretty good protein portion. I’ll admit I, I should have actually weighed them out so I could have given some macro breakdowns, but the protein I’m guessing for each dish was probably around 40 grams of protein, just for my experience.
The veggie portion is probably more than what would be. So for my clients, I recommend 20 total carbs in the beginning. The veggie portion that they provide. Probably more in alignment with it, like 10 to 14 carbs per dish, or maybe even a little bit more. They had summer squash some of the dishes had some spaghetti squash in there, just a small portion of that and green beans.
Trying to remember some other ones bell peppers. The dishes that they came in. Little individual containers. There was a delicious I think it was probably like a not a flank steak, but a skirt steak some cauliflower and broccoli with that and delicious, savory sauce that went with that.
Some sautéed mushrooms. There was one that was Cod. That was really delicious. It had a lemon caper sauce that came with it. Some other veggies pork, I haven’t eaten that one. There were so many that I up putting something in my freezer. So there’s a big bone in pork chop.
That thing is, looks like it’s about a 10 ounce piece of pork. There was a chicken one that had a little bit of a sauce that had apples in it and I’ll got a stuffed bell pepper that was stuffed brimming filled with. Grass fed organic beef and some other things in there.
It was a giant portion that was definitely two portions worth. Overall really high quality, very delicious reasonably priced. Like each of the meals were 12 to $14 each very affordable very reasonable price for what you’re doing. Again, the veggie portion I’ve ended up for most of the meals, like cutting the veggies in half and I’ve got lots of veggies left over more of more veggie serving than I would want normally for a meal.
But so if you’re in the Phoenix area, check them out, highly recommended. The owner wanted to do some kind of a co-lab. So hopefully in the future, we’ll be able to do some kind of a live interview with him on the show and perhaps some live. In the Phoenix area them doing some kind of a dinner at the restaurant for keto folks.
If you’re in the Phoenix area, lucky for you. Linda the name of the company is sapiens kitchen. So like homo sapiens, sapiens kitchen. You’ll be able to find them if you search on Google. But again, they’re just in the, they’re in the suburb of Phoenix, Arizona there, they don’t ship nationwide.
They actually, hand deliver the food themselves. From what I understand was on Wednesdays to most of the Phoenix area. Their website has information. Y you order directly on the website, anything and fill out your shipping information. Then they deliver every Wednesday is what I understand.
That’s my product review of the week. Sapiens kitchen.
Let’s get to the juicy goodness of me recapping the last seven years on my keto journey. I really. I can’t believe it’s been that long. But just like anything else in your life, like time passes really quickly.
If you’ve been thinking about making a dietary change, but you just keep putting it off seven years can go by in the blink of an eye, keep getting unhealthy. More overweight or you could just work your way through continuing to do it. Okay. Paul’s here. Welcome Paul. He’s saying I’ve been keto for five years, went from a hundred, three kg to 64 kg and have been quite weight stable since resolved high blood pressure and the ulcerative colitis.
Wonderful. That’s excellent. Paul, congrats on your success. You started by saying question, but it looks like it’s a statement. So congrats on your success. Celebrate here. I’ve got a fun little so let’s do this. Let’s round of applause for Paul success on keto there everyone. Yay, Paul.
Paul’s asking a medical question here. He’s asking you, you had lots of kidney stones in the past two years. Any ideas or thoughts of related to keto? I can’t give any personal medical advice like that. I’d recommend checking out Don’t have a keto friendly doctor yourself. I can recommend that you talk to this person here.
atgohealth.com is the virtual functional medicine doctor that I refer a lot of my clients to. At that website, that URL, if you go there, you can get a free 15 minute consult with Dr. Ruiz. He’s amazing. That’s what I would recommend for you there, Paul. That figured out what’s going on for you.
Yeah, so I’m glad you’re here. Congrats on all your success. Tell tell Dr. Ruiz that I sent you. He gives all my referrals a very special rate too. Check him out. He’s fantastic. All I’m going to talk about my journey. Now, my, my assistant gave me an idea.
She’s what about having some of your successful clients on your show for your seven year anniversary? First I was like, oh, that’s brilliant. I was like, no, this shows about me. This shows about me. We talked a lot about my client success on a lot of my shows, but. My journey and not to be selfish or anything like that, but people want an update and seven years is a long time to do anything.
Let’s talk about my journey and pre keto. My anniversary date is May 18th, 2015. Previous to that in 2007, through 2011, I went to Bastyr university. I was getting, working towards my dream degrees and I got a undergrad in nutrition. Then I moved on to a double master’s program.
I got a master’s degree in nutrition and clinical health psychology simultaneously. I’ll tell you what, if you haven’t been to grad school, try doing two of them at the same time. That was a stressor come into my life. But I have always been passionate about helping, especially women feel physically and mentally good as healthy as possible, but not only feeling healthy, but just mentally, really healthy as well too.
The degree that Bastyr offers, as far as I know, they still offer it. When I saw that nutrition and psychology together, dream degree, I was like, this is what I want. I want to know. The psychological support to give people, to help them be able to make these dietary changes. But I want to learn how does diet influence our mental health and wellbeing.
To me, it was my dream degree and I worked my behind off in getting it some Facebook user happy anniversary. Thank you so much. Facebook group, it won’t show your name unless you actually give it permission. So you can either there should be a link there that lets you give permission to share.
Your name and image, or you can actually just type it in as a comment and let me know that’s you and I can then I’ll know who’s watching from Facebook and okay. Stay, there are world renowned school. It’s where most naturopathic doctors are trained in in the world and a really high quality education.
Science-based whole food nutrition. We learned, don’t fear fat, and however, The approach that we were taught to helping people make dietary change. Weight loss was really, you shouldn’t try to help people lose weight. That, we learned something called the health and every size model that the research shows that when people try to lose weight, typically they just gain it back and they gain even more back.
Therefore it’s just better to help people accept their body the way that it is and follows things like intuitive, eating and mindful. While I think these have a lot of value. What I’ve found in my approach is that it’s not a fruitless endeavor to try to help people lose weight. It just takes sustained effort and a comprehensive approach.
First for reasons, I’ll talk about here in a minute but that, using mindful eating and intuitive eating in the context of. A whole foods, diet that in the words of Dr. Ken Berry would say the proper human diet, you can intuitively eat and mindfully eat, but you can’t do that with things like cake and cookies and fast food.
That’s I was using everything. I was taught at school about mindful eating and not trying to worry about my weight or anything like that and intuitive eating. Every evening I would ask myself what are you craving? What do you need right now? Nine times out of 10, the answer was cake like chocolate cake or cookies or something like that.
I’ll tell you what I gained weight. I by the time I graduated in the years after that, following that advice, I developed metabolic syndrome. If you’re not familiar with metabolic syndrome, it’s a there are five different signs that you have this. If you have three of the five, any three of the five.
Then you have what’s considered metabolic syndrome. This is a an issue where basically means you’re pre-diabetic, but it means that your body’s in a place where you’re headed towards pretty much every chronic disease that’s out there. If you don’t do something to turn it around. This approach, it doesn’t work without some other parameters of changing what your what you do eat and what you don’t eat.
Let’s see if I can do the five things that mean you have metabolic syndrome. So one is a waist measurement above 35 inches for women above 40 inches for men high blood pressure, high fasting, blood glucose, high triglycerides. What’s the other one low HDL cholesterol that what’s considered your good cholesterol.
Those are the signs. I had probably almost all of those. Okay, how did I find keto though? I didn’t learn. I learned about this much in, in, in my degrees, but it was taught to us about here’s a therapy that’s for epilepsy and that’s about all it was at that time. So again, remember, this was 2007 through 2011.
This was not when keto was very popular, we were not being taught it as a weight loss protocol. In March of 2014, That was a turning point in my life that led to me discovering the power of keto. I was in a horrible car accident. I was rear-ended by a distracted driver. She was going approximately 35 miles an hour, and didn’t even tap on her brakes distracted for some reason, we know it was probably Instagram or Facebook.
There was no way to know. She told the cops that she was reaching for her smoothie, but the length of time that she accelerated into me. Before the crash it was 10 seconds. That’s a really long time to reach for a smoothie, especially when cars, these days have about 10 cup holders within reach. So maybe she was making a smoothie while she was driving.
I don’t know. But anyways, I sustained a traumatic brain injury crush injuries to my legs, and I was a bad sheep. I spent about the next three months in bed, unable to walk. Progressively. I was able to get back out of bed after about three months, but my health declined over the next year and a half.
Just things got worse and worse. Continued to gain a lot of weight and the list of health problems. would take two pages. I finally figured out that I’d had an undiagnosed traumatic brain injury and imaging census has proved this. I developed what’s called post-traumatic hypopituitarism, which basically the little pituitary gland in my brain wreck havoc and was making everything in my body, misfire and miss work.
Went to countless doctors appointments. I did so much research on my own, trying to figure out how to solve this. I finally out of sheer desperation. I’m like, I know that if I can feed my body correctly, I believe that it can heal. What can I feed my body to help it heal? What does it missing right now?
I stumbled upon, I actually, I remembered. We learned about keto diet as a treatment for epilepsy in grad school. I reasoned that epilepsy is something that’s not going right in the brain. Perhaps keto might help my brain cause it’s not working right now. I started researching Googling.
At that time, Dr. Peter Attia was doing his keto experiments and he is a science nerd. His blog is at that time, I think it’s different now, but at that time it was so specific detailed. Research-based, I felt really confident that this could be a healthy and safe thing for me to take on.
Whereas what everyone else at that time thought was that it was dangerous. Not only from a standpoint of trying to get into ketosis. But just the, a diet mentality that I’ve been taught was such a bad thing. Like you don’t restrict foods that causes eating disorders, you’re going to do more harm than you do.
So I secretly started my experiment and I was so desperate to not be bedridden and disabled anymore. I’ll tell you what, when I was four, when I first started keto, I was getting my food for my son and I at the food bank because I couldn’t work. My son was working two jobs to pay our rent. I was in a bad place and I was seriously desperate.
When people say they can’t afford to do keto that’s not true. You can do it with food that is gifted to you if you do it correctly. That’s. How we started it, things change really quickly very quickly. I chronicled the whole thing in a monthly blog series and all links to that.
That’s my old blog. I did a monthly update of how things were going and how all the improvements in my body. I’m linking in the comments here. What’s. Okay. So I put her on YouTube and in Facebook, I’ll put it in the show notes as well. If you were listening to this podcast later on and not watching live I’ll put a link to my blog in the, my old blog, in the show notes as well.
So this is. When I’ve linked is a month one, this is my I started this experiment in secret and here’s all the change and it’s pretty dramatic actually, as you go through. So I’ve got one blog post for each month of the first year that I was on keto and I cataloged how things were changing, what all I was improving and what I was up to at that time.
After. Four or five months, I started speaking and I spoke in an epilepsy conference. I spoke at a Toastmasters conference. I started speaking in the keto world.
In short, the in summary and the first six months of doing this, I lost 60 pounds and 10 inches off my waist. The health improvements. I no longer had high blood pressure. I no longer had metabolic syndrome. I no longer was pre-diabetic. Inflammation was sky high. When I started, that was down in the normal range.
I dropped my heart rate by 20 points. I know that switching over from being a carb burner to a fat burner, you get a dramatic reduction in your heart rate, which is an indicator of a metabolic health as well, but just cardiovascular health too. I had dramatic improvements in my skin.
Anti-aging effects. A lot of people accused me of having Botox. I still have not had Botox. I was pain-free. So I had developed what’s called chronic regional pain syndrome and my legs from the car accident. That was something when I started keto that I had any idea that would improve.
It was something that I had two aunts that had developed in their life. It’s a chronic pain syndrome that gets worse. It’s spreads and it’s disabling. It ends up causing your legs where wherever the injury is, you can get it any limb in your body, but it just starts to disable it, that it starts to just curl in the muscles, curl up.
It’s bad news stuff. That went into remission very quickly. Which is unheard of, but doing this for seven years. Now, I have story after story of clients with some kind of a chronic pain issue that goes away, people that had previous car accidents that were far more severe than what I had been through that 10 years, they were taking pain killers and icing their leg still.
That was no longer an issue. Ladies that were scheduled for knee replacement surgery that canceled their surgery because their knees felt so great. Those are just a couple of examples of chronic pain that people have that has gone away or gone into remission with keto. What else?
Mental clarity incontinence. So this was another interesting one. I only knew this was a common thing that happened for people on keto because of all the women I’ve worked with. I noticed it was something for me that went away. We’re told as women that after we have a child that having urinary incontinence is just part of life mama.
So just get used to it. But I started noticing in my group coaching with my clients, that was something that people started to report after a few months is that they no longer have. Stress incontinence. So if you cough and a little pee comes out, or if you sneeze or something like that’s stress incontinence.
That actually went away for people. I still haven’t seen this report is in the literature anywhere, but I have seen it so many times with my clients that it’s the thing. It doesn’t have to be a part of mama’s life. Tons of energy, physical stamina, waking up in the morning with the same amount of energy that I go to bed with.
Helping thousands of women and a few men along the way on this journey have been, really the results that I’ve I’ve experienced over these seven years. I’m gonna share with you , where am I currently on my seven year keto? What are some struggles that I faced on this journey?
What’s changed about my approach from the very beginning versus what I teach my clients now. Where am I? I’ve maintained not having metabolic syndrome and not having diabetes. My family history, we’ve got diabetes on one side and the other side we’ve got well and actually even more things.
Diabetes gastrointestinal issues or diverticulitis runs in my family. On the other side, we’ve got heart attacks, stroke, both sides. We’ve got dementia. The people in my family that have those things, it started in their forties and I’m 51 now. I don’t have any of those things. Pre keto years before.
So in my, probably my late twenties, I had really severe digestive issues that that was long before keto, but that was something that I was, they were contemplating surgery to remove that for me. So this runs in my family as well. So for my not perfect that I’ve been doing on keto. I’ve been able to avoid all of these issues that run in my family, that I was having pre keto as well.
Full confession time I’m up 20 pounds over my lowest weight that I achieved on keto. But that’s just living proof that you don’t have to be perfect at this. You just have to not give up. So even though I’m not perfect I don’t it hasn’t been seven years of me eating everything perfectly keto during that time that doing what I have done has been far more successful than anything I’ve ever tried.
I’ve never been able to maintain any dietary change for seven years. I’ve never been able to avoid. The medical history, fate of what my genetics lead me to with any other dietary change even not being perfect. All right. I’m living proof that don’t give up. You don’t have to be perfect.
Join me in celebrating 7 years on my keto journey! Hear my story of how it all started, the improvements I’ve experienced over the years, personal struggles, and the things I’ve changed my mind about along the way.
You’re going to be so much better off than you were had you given up and just gone back to your old eating habits why have I had struggles? Why can’t I be perfect? Why, if I’ve got this figured out, why is it. So easy just to be perfect and never gained weight. The truth is I’ve covered this in past episodes and I’ve got some more episodes planned about this as well, but our bodies, they really want to regain the weight.
We’re designed to overeat and gain as much weight as possible. This is just from most of human existence, living in an environment where food was scarce. Those of us that survived were the ones that our body was really good at seeking out food, eating as much as possible, and then gaining that as weight.
We’re designed that way. We have to be diligent against that. lot of people, the criticism of keto, what’s not sustainable, but guess what? The only thing that’s sustainable in our current food environment is continuing to gain weight. Overeating and developing chronic disease. That’s sustainable.
It takes hard work and diligence to maintain something that’s different than what most of the food on our environment is, but it’s worth it. If you want to be physically fit you, that takes a concerted effort to do it most days of the week, going to the gym or walking or riding a bike or whatever it is you’re into, you have to do that most days overnight.
Nobody tells somebody that like, who just gets a gym membership that’s not sustainable. You shouldn’t even try. That’s just ridiculous that we’re told, trying to maintain healthy eating habits, even not being perfect, that it’s not sustainable. With the right support, the right approach, it can be, and you can avoid the faith that you would have otherwise.
Cause I’ll tell you what if I just been eating the way that I had been pre keto, intuitive eating and just eating, whatever I wanted, hoping I would maintain moderation. Tell you what right now I’d probably be about twice the weight that I am right now, in all honesty. I, and I would be on several medications for diseases and I would.
Be a very typical 51 year old where I would have aches and pains and taking a lot of painkillers and things like that. I’m in a far better place than I would be had I not been on this journey. We live in an obesogenic environment. I think I mentioned that we live in a world where food is abundant.
It’s everywhere. You don’t even have to leave your chair to order food to your house and eat it. Overeat it. You can drive through in a car and get mountains of food. It’s how people show love and how people caretake and having a dessert three times a day is the norm. Whereas it used to be the desserts were for special occasions, right?
The food manufacturers, what they conspire against us. They want us to overeat because we’ve reached a point where most people have enough calories in a day. To keep maintaining increasing profits and selling more food, what do they got to do? They got to design these foods to be craveable and to make us over eat them, have no satiety and to buy them repeatedly.
All that works against us and I’m not perfect. Or immune to that. Carbs are very comforting. They’re easy to use to cope with stress and emotions and just like my clients, we’re all a work in progress. So this is part of why we call it the keto journey. It’s not some people say keto lifestyle.
The keto journey is more about like when you started it to where you are now and you still got the journey. That goes on the rest of our lives. This isn’t something we just do for awhile and then we quit and everything’s fine. Perfect. It’s a journey still on the journey.
I’m not getting off this journey. That’s my, my struggles have been what everybody struggles are when they live this as a lifestyle. So part of why I want to share that is that I want you to alternate. You don’t have to be perfect if you’ve struggled, you’re not alone.
That’s why I provide long-term support for my clients because you know what if people weren’t watching what I was doing, if I didn’t have my team of coaches that we meet every week if I didn’t have my clients looking to me as an example and role model of how to maintain this sustainably, I would probably have not been able to.
Avoid regaining all the weight myself. My support system is putting this podcast out for you all and having this, the clients that I connect with daily, and we all support each other. That’s one of the most important parts of making it sustainable is having other people around you that you’re connected with, that are successful in maintaining your keto journey.
What’s changed about my approach since seven years ago. One of the biggest changes is more protein, very protein centric now. In the beginning a lot of us thought that if you ate too much protein, it kicked you out of ketosis. It raised your blood sugar and it was anti ketogenic.
One of the things we’ve had to recognize is that a medical therapeutic keto diet, for example, for little kids where we want them. Or somebody who has brain cancer, something like that. They’re doing keto for medical reasons, not for weight loss. That’s a very different diet than a weight loss or a sustainable weight.
Eating plan. That’s very different. One of the things that we found is that having protein as your first priority and more protein. In the beginning, I recommended that women have between, around 60 grams of protein a day and 60 to 80. Men a little bit more than that. But what I found is that most women actually do much better, closer to double that around a hundred, 120 grams, or maybe even more a protein a day.
That’s a big difference from when I first started out. what I found with a more protein. Things that were common side effects of keto are no longer an issue. I’ll notice when my clients, their protein intake is really low, their cravings are much higher.
Protein foods are actually rich in vitamins and minerals. You’re going to get more, a nutrient dense diet when you’re getting more protein than you are fat and. The hair loss issues that some women have a protein centric. So very protein forward, focusing on protein as the highest priority each day they don’t lose their hair.
I’ve had some ladies recently year over year getting DEXA scans. They’re not one of them works out a lot five days a week or more. Then the other one doesn’t work out at all and they both not only maintain their lean mass but they increased it. That is because of the protein centric focus.
Most women under eat protein, they eat very little protein, eat lots of carbs. They nibble and snack all day long and a lot of carby stuff and they under eat protein. Protein is a nutrient. We need the amino acids from proteins, and then the minerals that are attached to those amino acids all are necessary to have a optimally healthy body.
Is there some of the summary of why we much higher protein intake is the focus now, as opposed to when I started out one of the other changes to what’s different in seven years of me doing this is that there’s less focus on. In the beginning I was teaching it, you needed a ratio, one-to-one protein to fat and more, more fat was better.
Now it’s in the very beginning, people getting used to having a higher fat intake cause that’s where some of the satiety comes from. This definitely is not a low fat diet and it’s it’s an adequate fat diet. People are getting the nutrients that they’ve been missing for a long time.
Soluble vitamins. While we’re not, force-feeding fat, we’re not doing Bulletproof coffee. We’re not putting tons of butter and coconut oil in our coffee and on everything else like that. We’re in the beginning, I had, more of an emphasis on, oh, let’s get some MCT oil, let’s get some coconut oil.
Let’s try to increase your fat intake. Much less of a focus on that now. I teach people differently about how to moderate fat, how much fat to add to their diet. , I’ve let go of having a ratio of protein to fat. Some people out there one-to-one or two to one fat to protein I don’t do any of that.
Another big difference now is that I’m working with a functional medicine doctor. I’m doing regular lab reviews with my clients or metabolic health panel. We get that at the beginning of their journey, and then we check it at several points during there. There’s some stuff that have come up in the labs, just general health labs that.
That, not my area of expertise. I’ve got a functional medicine doctor that I refer people to when they need a little more help with that. Some of the things are that are turns out, were things that came up in my client’s labs for years that their regular doctor just never noticed or didn’t follow up on.
We’ve had some really dramatic things we found that were otherwise just getting swept under the rug or ignored that lifesaving things for people actually that have changed for them. That’s I’m really grateful to be able to work with the functional medicine doctor that I have and have that as part of our team so that people can get, the goal is optimal health not just not dead care.
Another thing that’s changed as well over my seven-year journey is that I have multiple different programs. I’ve I fine tuned my approach with all the experience that I’ve had personally, and everyone that I’ve worked with over that time. I’ve got several different programs that are all designed to help women, a few men, but mostly women just be able to sustain this as a lifestyle that’s healthy and optimizing.
Their body, their mind, their spirits. I’ve got a starter program that all my clients go through initially. Then we’ve got an annual membership that people can join after that, to stay connected and keep learning and being supported on their journey. The other change too, that I should have put earlier than mentioning that was just just.
Intermittent fasting. Skipping meals for women or promoting fasting and women probably isn’t the best thing for their hormones. So this is something more newer in the, in this year that I’ve been learning about and exploring. I did an interview with Dr. Ruiz, one of my past podcast episodes.
Dr. Ruiz specializes in thyroid. On our interview, we talked about how women’s hormones are much more sensitive to, in frequencies of feeding and. Women’s hormones. Ideally what it’s designed for is reproduction and when nutrients or food is scarce in an environment, that’s not the ideal time to reproduce.
While that’s not everybody’s goal, that’s what being mindful of that as. Circumstances is going to help us be optimally healthy. He’s the one that’s kind kinda talking to me about the intermittent fasting, so skipping breakfast, or promoting fasting and women is going to likely cause wreck more havoc in the body, maybe affect thyroid function, just overall hormone production and function in the woman’s body, more so than it would have been.
That’s another thing that. Not encouraging women to go down to one meal a day, maybe for some of them not even doing two meals a day and not encouraging. I used to do a lot of fasting challenges and things like that. I no longer do that with my female clients to. But let go of egg fasting.
That used to be something that I would teach people is how to accelerate fat loss by doing egg fasting, which is a very high fat version of keto, eggs and butter, basically. I no longer include that in, in my teachings. Where am I going next?
This is how I see myself continuing to eat the rest of my life. This isn’t something where, you need to always be 20 grams of carbs or less. I work with my clients on looking at those metabolic health labs. When you’ve gotten to the point of metabolic health, then that may be a time when.
You can have more carbs. It shows that your body can tolerate a higher carbon take. Not everybody needs to be keto level carbs, indefinitely. That’s a very individualized personalized thing. One of the things that I work with my clients on is, so not only looking at the labs, when are you metabolically healthy?
When could your body tolerate a higher carb intake? But we’re looking at that psychology side of things. We, what foods trigger you to overeat? What foods trigger you to be food obsessed again? Cause my clients really enjoy. Not having any cravings, not being food obsessed and being able to eat mindfully and intuitively.
There’s certain foods, certain types of carbs or certain amounts of carbs, or both that turn all that back on. So we’re looking at quality of relationship with the food you’re eating. What turns the craving back on what triggers, overeating and binges. Avoiding that. Again, this journey model of let’s figure out what is sustainable for you.
Long-term. That’s really, the focus is how do we actually make this sustainable, despite whatever, when tells us about it being not sustainable. So that’s, where I see my future doing, continuing these live shows and producing the podcast, continuing to prioritize. Protein real whole foods in my life and low carb keto, occasionally, and putting out my practitioner training program.
I did a few years. I ran a alpha version of a practitioner training where I taught other healthcare providers, how to build out a program in their clinic or their practice and how to basically promote and market that. My plans in the next year or two, is to launch that on a larger scale.
I see myself perhaps doing some teaching at local schools, colleges, and. Going more between Phoenix area and Seattle area and more of this, a snowbird life perhaps, and continuing to spread the word and working with with clients and improving their health, teaching them how to do keto in a way that is psychologically sustainable, as well as physiological sustainable for them.
That is a summary of my seven year journey and where we’re going next. Next week’s show is going to be about the secrets to ending emotional eating. As I mentioned at the beginning of the show, I’m relaunching my pathway to end emotional eating program, which is focused on how do we learn to identify our feelings?
How do we have them and cope with them in healthy ways, instead of using food to numb sooth, or avoid things so that you can stay on your keto journey more easily. We’ve got an info session coming up about that. If you’re interested, if you’re struggling to stay on keto because of emotional or stress eating I encourage you to send an email to support.
KetoCarole.com. We’ve got this email here, support@KetoCarole.com. Just say, I want info about ending emotional eating.
Again next week’s show is going to be on that topic. We’ll be having an info session coming up soon as well. All right. All right.
This show has been about my seven year journey on keto, happy anniversary, seven years, everyone.
Please support the show. Give us a review on your podcast platform. If you’re apple iTunes out there, give me a review. I would love to have my first review out there.
Remember, if you help us grow the show, we’ll help you shrink!.
Thank you everyone for being here today, that’s all had planned for this topic we’ll see you all next time. Thanks for being here. We’ll see you soon.
Do you hate counting calories and wish there were an easier way to lose weight? Learn the secrets behind how I coach my keto clients to lose up to 80 lbs in a year without counting a single calorie!
[00:00:00] Hello there. Are you ready? Are you ready for the show? Thanks for being here so glad to see you. Welcome. Welcome to our show.
Are you tired of counting calories to lose weight? Do you want to know how you can easily. Lose weight on a keto diet without counting a single calorie. We’ll hang on. This show is for you. Stick around. I’ve got lots of stuff planned for you. I’m actually going to be sharing a big giveaway that’s happening as well.
So welcome. Welcome everyone. Keto chat live.
If you don’t know me, I’m your host Carole Freeman. I am a board certified keto nutrition specialist. I specialize in helping women 40 plus follow a keto diet for long-term sustainable weight loss. I also am a behavior change eating habit, change psychology expert as well. More importantly, I can teach you how to Lose Weight Without Counting Calories.
So glad you’re here. Let’s just get the legal disclaimer out of the way as well. So we don’t get in trouble. 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 [00:01:00] or concerns related to your specific medical condition, please contact your professional healthcare provider.
All right, check that box, everyone. Welcome. Welcome. I got a little quiz for you.
Can you guess the city that I’ll be speaking at in may? So I’ve got a conference I’m going to in may and let’s see if you can actually guess yes, let’s make this fun and interactive. So give me your best guesses as to where I’m going to be performing. I’ll tell you later in the show, so hang on, but I’d love to see you guessing.
Also, if you want to support the show with the super chat, we really appreciate that. And so on YouTube super chat feature or on Facebook you can give us awards in the Facebook group. That’s a fun little feature now. And also if you’re listening on one of your audio podcast platforms, if you give me a review that really helps out as well too.
And announcements. I’m really excited to share with everybody I’ve been selected as a speaker for pod Fest. And again, I got the quiz going [00:02:00] on, so I’m not going to tell you where yet. Don’t cheat. Don’t look it up. Just try to guess where you think that pod Fest is going to be.
And again in may, so if you live in this city will be fun to come and see you out there. Glad you’re here, Melissa. Really excited be my first time attending pod Fest.
But I started this podcast March of 2021 and learned a lot along the way about live broadcasting a podcast. And so that’s what I’m going to be speaking about at the conference. So really excited. Melissa give me your best guess where do you think I’m going to be? Speaking what city in this fine world.
I’ll reveal it at the very end. The topic today, I’m going to be sharing with you how to lose weight without counting calories. The seven years that I’ve been doing this and helping thousands of women lose weight and keep it off not one single calorie has been counted that entire time.
So I’m going to share with you how it is. I teach my clients to do that and how I’ve done that myself as well. But before we get into the topic of the day, I just want to announce, okay. Maybe it doesn’t look like very much, but this isn’t, [00:03:00] this box is filled keynote. Ciao sent me all of these. I think there’s literally a hundred of these in here.
We’re partnering too for a giveaway. And this box of a hundred of these I’m, this has taken me a long time to consume all these. Have you guys ever tried keto chow? What’s your flavor? Favorite flavor? Look at all of these. Okay. I won’t be able to consume all of these. So what I’m going to do is for the ones that they sent me.
So the three ways that you can win one, in-person come and see me at one of my comedy shows. I will give you. Five. How about five? I’ll give you five of your choice of these. If you see me in person. So I’m in Phoenix. I actually have a show tonight at Tempe improv 8:00 PM. Hang out after the show, let me know that you saw me on live and I will bring these with me.
I’ll be handing them out. Also I will be passing these out in person. As long as I have some left. Any of my shows coming up as well, so come and see me there. [00:04:00] If you’re not in the Phoenix area you can’t make it out. You can actually win. You have to have a us address. So I’m giving away two different places, Instagram and on TikTok
I’m going to give 10 winners. So total of 20 winners are going to get 10 packets a piece. So 10 winners will be announced on Instagram and ten on TikTok. And just as a disclaimer Instagram, TikTok Facebook, are not sponsored this.
They’re not involved. They’re not affiliated at all. So the way to enter is find my post. I just posted it on Instagram before we went live here and find it, posted it on January 27th, 2022. Winners will be announced in one week. So on February 3rd, 2022, we’ll announce the winners on both platforms.
Way to enter, I put the details on the post, on the Instagram post and I’ll be posting it on TikTok soon. But basically tag two friends in your post, you can do it on Instagram and or TikTok. So both places give you a better chance of winning and tag two friends. [00:05:00] Follow me on that platform that you’re tagging people on and then text me, oh, let me put my texting number up here.
For those of you watching this live text me a screenshot that you tagged your friends. So that’s where I’m going to see that you actually did it. So those of you watch listening audio only a text number is 6 0 2 7 0 4. 5 3 0 9. Your deadline for this is going to be February 3rd, 2020 2, 20 22. In the morning, I’ll announce the winners by the end of the day.
So that’s going to be your deadline. So actually let’s make the deadline the day before, just so that Deadline is February 2nd, 2022. There we go. So that yeah, so text me at 6 0 2 7 0 4 5 3 0 9. Send me screenshots that you’ve actually tag two friends on the platform and then that will be your entry into winning.
So again, Keto, chat giveaway, you guys. So many of these are really delicious. Sugar-free. High protein meal replacement shake in case you didn’t know what they are. So let me know if you’ve actually ever tried [00:06:00] these and can’t wait to give them all away. All right. Welcome to the show. Let me know if you’re joining us where you’re joining from.
I have a quiz going on for the whole show, which is what city can you guess? What city I’m actually going to be speaking at a conference in. May of this year, I will reveal it later. So place your bets now. What’s not bets, just guesses. All right. Y’all ready to hear now how I coach my clients to lose weight.
Let me give you some examples. So for example Karen, one of my clients she’s been with me for years. She’s lost over 70 pounds. Not counted a single calorie, a penny she’s lost 45 pounds and maintained it. Kept it off for four years. Also not counting a single calorie Rita in just over a year’s time has lost 76 pounds.
Notice the theme here, not a single calorie she’s counted. Annie reached her goal weight and has [00:07:00] maintained it for a year and also no calorie counting. And Cheryl another example just over a year, she’s lost over 70 pounds as well, 72 and also no calorie counting. Those are just a few examples of how I taught people to Lose Weight Without Counting Calories.
Some client, oh, I’ve got another note here, clients from this morning, for example Wendy’s new client. She in three weeks has lost 12 pounds and also not counting a single calorie. Yeah, so those are just some examples of the success that people have had without counting calories. So who wants to know how the heck do you do that? How to Lose Weight Without Counting Calories.
Because I know that most of the. Programs, keto coaches out there they’re having you count calories and telling you, you have to be hungry in order to lose weight. But these ladies, not only are they not counting calories, but also they’re not actually going hungry when they’re hungry, they get to eat and they eat a meal until they’re satisfied. They Lose Weight Without Counting Calories.
First of all. Why have we been told to count calories for so long? One it’s because we eat too much. And the last, what? 50, 60 years, we were told that if you need, if you’re going to lose calorie or you’re gonna lose calories, if you’re gonna lose weight, it’s [00:08:00] all about the calorie equation, right?
Like you have to eat less and exercise more. And so that you have a net calorie deficit. Okay. This is because we live in an environment where food is plentiful and it’s very tasty and food is designed to make us overeat it as much as possible. And so the truth is that I’m studying. The psychology of eating appetite, cravings behavior change.
I’ve studied that as long as I’ve studied nutrition, which, it goes back to my first diet when I was 19 years old, I’m fresh out of high school trying to figure out how to lose 10 pounds. And I’ve been studying all this. And I that’s the approach that I bring to my clients for keto is how to do this in a way where we’re actually working with the way that our brain is designed to eat and regulate our appetite without counting calories. Okay. So I always use the example of like wild animals, right?
Why are most wild animals not overrule? Why do [00:09:00] they not have not having somebody tell them how many, like deer don’t have a nutritionist that tell them you only get 27 leaves today and three blades of grass. Don’t go over that. Make sure you keep her calories low. Like the lions in the savannas are told that they can only have 5,000 calories a day of antelope meat.
Like this. Isn’t a natural state that we have to have limits. In order to have a healthy body weight. It’s only our food environment that we live in and a current diet. That’s a mismatch for the way that our body and brain have are designed that causes us to overeat and gain weight. I talked to ladies every day, that feels like there’s something wrong with them that they maybe have a binge eating disorder or they just can’t control themselves.
Or why is it that if I lose weight, I always gain it back. Like, why can’t I control myself? What’s wrong with me? The problem is that we’re living in a again, we’re all the food that’s available. 90% of the food that’s available as highly processed combinations that are designed to make us crave it and [00:10:00] overeat it and gain weight.
Continue to crave it and continue to overeat it and it’ll read it more. And so one of the secrets is just to go back and eat foods that are in alignment with how our appetite normally can be regulated eat foods that are designed, that we would enjoy them. We like them. They taste good. They’re satisfying satiating to us, but we don’t crave them.
So what if I told you that cravings are not a natural state of. Being craving is a sign that we’ve been eating addictive foods. Do CRA so think about things that are healthy for you. You maybe want to do them, you enjoy do them, but you don’t crave them so much that you’re obsessed about it and need to go.
Valerie’s here. Valerie says currently having trouble envisioning overweight lion. Think of all the wild animals out there that are living in the the environment that there is their native land, they don’t get overweight because they’re eating. That’s just [00:11:00] naturally wild available. That’s meant to be their food.
We don’t have overweight deer. We don’t have overweight lions. We don’t have overweight pelicans. How about penguins? I don’t know, flamingos, what else are crocodiles? They just eat, let’s see. CRA craving is not a natural state. If you’re struggling with cravings, it means that you convinced consuming foods that have an addictive quality to them.
If you’re new to the show, the podcast, you can go back and listen to episodes. One through 10, where I go over my 10 rules that I have my clients follow. When they follow those rules, they don’t have to count any calories. Today I’m going to, in this show, I’m going to give you more details about like, why is it that certain things help. What you need to do to Lose Weight Without Counting Calories.
Eat in a way that we can trust our hunger. We can trust our appetite and we’ll be able to stop eating when we’re actually full and satiated and be able to have a normal body weight. One of the, one of the big keys is that I teach my clients how to get adequate nutrition and we’re actually [00:12:00] eliminating the food.
That are very low in nutrition. So one of the things that helps us regulate our appetite naturally is when we get enough protein, when we get enough fat. And when we get enough vitamins and minerals, our bodies, actually that wise, if you’ve ever watched a deer, I’m from the Northwest originally. So I have lots of experience of watching deers nibbling on various things.
And if you’ve ever watched a deer in the wild. They go and chew on this leaf and they think about it and chew on it. Maybe we’ll have another one or maybe they’ll walk away and they’ll go eat some grass, but what’s going on is that their sensory taste buds, their mouth, all the things in their mouth are actually recognizing the nutrients and our bodies are so complex and wonderful.
You can actually tell Ooh, this is good for me. It tastes good because there’s nutrients in that I need something else may not taste good to that deer at that moment. And that’s that deer signal to go, oh, that doesn’t taste good. There’s something in there [00:13:00] either. That’s bad for me or. I don’t need there’s nutrients in there that I don’t need right now.
I’ve got plenty of those. Now, if we could peel back all of the processed foods and remove them from our world and just go back to the way that we ate we gotta go back a ways, but humans have been on this planet for 200,000 years. So if we could go back, let’s say a couple hundred years to the point where we didn’t have these processed refined foods.
We mostly were either growing our own food or hunting for our food that we’re eating. We wouldn’t need to have to count calories. We wouldn’t need to have nutritionists. I would be out of a job because all the food would just be nutritious for us. And we wouldn’t need anybody to tell us how much of what we could eat. You’d just Lose Weight Without Counting Calories.
And so again, the need to count calories to lose weight is a sign that we’re eating foods that are not actually very nutritious for us. They’re out of alignment with how our bodies and appetite are designed same thing with craving. I hope you are all having aha, maybe your head is spinning around a little bit of just the concept of thinking that cravings aren’t normal.That eliminating cravings I essential for you to Lose Weight Without Counting Calories
That’s a sign something’s out of whack. You overeating until you gain [00:14:00] weight is actually not normal either. That’s not the way that our body’s designed. It’s assigned, you’re eating foods that have been specifically designed to make you crave them and over eat them, not your fault, but once you have the information, then do something about it.
Okay. So first of all again, so how I help. Achieved normal body weights without counting calories is that we’re getting adequate nutrition. So number one, adequate protein. And I’ve found that for most of my clients, at least 80 grams of protein a day is ideal. More is often better. A lot of my clients, the ones that I’ve mentioned to Karen Rita, penny. They know how to Lose Weight Without Counting Calories.
They’ve all found that a hundred grams or more per day is actually better. I myself find that a hundred grams or more protein every single day helps with more satiety it eliminate. Cravings for sugars and carbs. And it also maintains a healthy metabolic rates. So things don’t slow down. Another another key, this adequate nutrition actually is that we need some fat. It may sound counterintuitive but fat is necessary to Lose Weight Without Counting Calories.
It turns out that we have a fat [00:15:00] appetite. We think we just have an appetite for food in general, but we actually have a need for a certain amount of fat. Now the amount of. Is debatable. When people are trying to lose a lot of body fat, they don’t necessarily need a lot of fat. But somewhere between, 60 to a hundred grams of fat per day is often amount that is will be satiating for people as well as provide the nutrients that are in fat.
So it turns out that not only is certain kinds of fat essential for our human existence on our health, but also there are four vitamins that we can. Only from fact. So vitamin a D E and K, guess what? They don’t exist in foods without any fat in them. So that’s part of why we also, why we have a fat appetite. That’s why they are needed when you want to Lose Weight Without Counting Calories.
So remember that deer example about the deer chewing on the different leaves and the body is wise enough to know how much of each one it needs. It turns out that we have that as well, that we have a certain amount of fat that we need that our body can recognize. Now. Now this isn’t to say that you need lots and lots of fat, right? As with all things, too much of everything is bad especially when you want to Lose Weight Without Counting Calories.
We have a [00:16:00] Mount that is satiating. So this is part of, so if anybody’s listening and watching, that’s never followed keto. This is one of the blessings of Keto and that most people will find that they have a level of satiety from eating this way that they never experienced when they were eating a high carb diet. It’s that satiety that allows you to Lose Weight Without Counting Calories.
That’s because they’re getting adequate fat, the carbs aren’t stimulant overstimulating appetite with that. And the satiety that you get when you are. The right amount of fat for your body is like nothing you’ve ever experienced. Another part as well of this adequate nutrition piece of the puzzle of I’m teaching my clients and probably a lot of them didn’t even know this might be news to them, but this is my the method to the madness that I teach my clients is what I’m teaching you here today. This is how to Lose Weight Without Counting Calories.
Keto diet the way that I teach it, especially we’re eating real whole foods as close as the way that they grow in nature as possible. We’re actually now next week’s episode, I’m going to be talking about the myths about how isn’t keto low in nutrients. Aren’t you missing a lot of things by cutting out lots of fruits and vegetables?
Here’s the condensed version of that right now [00:17:00] is that it turns out that when we follow keto, especially the way that I teach my clients. All we’re eliminating are the foods that are the lowest in vitamins and minerals. Does that sound like a shocking shock to you? I’ll say that again. The way that I teach my clients, when we’re following keto, low carb, keto, whole foods, diet, we’re eliminating the foods that have the lowest nutrients. Foods ith low nutrients should be avoided if you want to Lose Weight Without Counting Calories.
So we’re cutting out sugar. Nobody here would argue that sugar is low in nutrients. We’re also cutting. Grains are very high in starch. They’re actually very low in vitamins and minerals, especially when they’re refined, but even whole grains are very low in vitamins and minerals. We’re cutting a fruits.
Now, a lot of you might be like, oh, fruits are super healthy for you. Aren’t suits fruits full of vitamins, minerals and nutrients and antioxidants. I got some bad news for you. Fruits really aren’t full of vitamins and minerals. Fruits. I haven’t been around really that long either. So in my lifetime, I remember that there were three kinds of [00:18:00] apples and none of them tasted that great fast forward, 50 years later.
And we’ve got these apples that are the size of a small child’s head and they’re super sweet. They taste really good. But did you know that 200 years ago, apples weren’t sweet. They were they were brought over from England. They were a little tiny crab. Who here has ever had a crab, apple, they taste terrible.
They’re Amelie. They’re not sweet. They’re very bitter. They’re very tart and. They were just grown as a crop as something that could be fermented and made a very low alcohol drink that you could have. That was a way of purifying water. They didn’t have water purification techniques back then. And so if you fermented some kind of fruit in the water, that was a way of actually killing all the bacteria that would otherwise be in there.
Apples okay. So they’re big now. They’re very sweet. They taste good. People love it. How did we get from little crab apples that didn’t taste good and work sweet to these big giant small child head size apples? We selectively bred them. We picked out the ones that [00:19:00] were bigger and sweeter, but no one, I didn’t say that nobody was slightly really breeding them for which ones had more vitamins and minerals in them.
All they did was they was sweeter. They tasted better and they were bigger. Is that’s it. I hate to burst your bubble, but fruit, apple is just one example I can walk you through, but it’s true of all the fruits that we have available right now. They’re giant size. They’re very sweet. They’ve been selectively bred to be higher in sugar, and nobody was looking at the vitamins and minerals in.
That was not of concern. Fruits are not full of vitamins and minerals. And so what the tracking software that I use with my clients for their food intake it actually is extremely accurate. It tracks vitamins and minerals. So we’re actually seeing this I create meal plans for my clients to use.
And in the process, I’m entering this all into this tracking software that shows me vitamins and minerals. And I’ll tell you that they meet the RDA of nutrients. And we’re not having any fruits at all. We’re not having any grains. We’re not having any [00:20:00] lagoons. Okay. So these are all things, again, that the line we’re drawing in the sand is that we’re eating the foods that are the most nutritious and also.
Ones that we can eat in amounts that align with the healthy body weight. It’s so freeing. It’s so freeing. All right. What else is in my notes here about how I help my clients lose weight without counting calories. Oh, we got to talk about, okay. So again, we’re cutting out refined grains and sugars.
Those don’t have any nutrients in them. We’re cutting all the processed and refined foods as well. Those are very low nutrients. Nobody on here is going to argue with me and say like that frozen pizza or those pop tarts are super healthy. We’re cutting out all of those foods that are not nutritious.
And then also we’re mindful of something that’s called. Highly palatable foods. So this is a combination. I learned this concept from Stephan DNA, a researcher up in the Seattle area. He studies what basically how people eat that makes them [00:21:00] gain weight and. Low old episode ago on my keto chat interview series on YouTube.
I interviewed him and really, I just learned so much from him, big influence on my life about how I teach my clients to eat in a way that’s not obesogenic. So obesogenic just means eating in a way that makes you gain weight. And Stephen co taught me this concept of a highly palatable food combination.
So here’s the short version of this is basically. Any food that has sweetness to it and fat that’s a combination that’s makes our brain go crazy for it. It makes us want to overeat. So anytime those things are combined together in one food. It bypasses that a nice natural amount of food regulation that we can eat without gaining weight.
And it actually moves into the category of stimulating appetite to the point where we will overeat and start to gain weight. So in nature, there [00:22:00] really aren’t, there’s only, I can only think of three examples of things that exist in nature that have fat and carbs together in them. So mother’s milk. And what is mother’s milk designed to do?
It’s designed to make a human baby cow, baby. It’s high in carbs and in fat naturally. And it’s designed to make the baby consume as much as possible so they can gain weight and grow as much as possible. So this is where this wiring in our brain comes from is because we’re designed as a baby to consume as much as possible and grow as fast as possible.
Now. If you’ve ever had a baby that you fed them if they’ve had some mother’s milk or even formula has that fat and carbs in it together, and baby gets milk drunk, right? They consume as much as they can. And then they pass out from the the coma of the numbing feeling of the carbs and that together.
And speaking of numbing, feeling every comfort food that you ever have had, or you crave is also [00:23:00] this combination of fat and carbs. Okay, I’m sure you can think of your favorite car, your comfort food. It doesn’t exist in nature in that combo. So let me go back to this three things that exist in nature that are high in carbs and fat together.
Coconut as well as one of those it’s a little bit harder though, because it has so much fiber in it that it’s not it’s not the type of carbs are very low, so it’s very hard to overeat coconut especially. W raw, mature coconut that’s hard, but Rob Wolf was the one that pointed out to me that coconut is one of those that has fat and carbs together.
The other thing that exists in nature that has naturally has fat and carbs in it. And again, this is, it is nuts nuts and seeds and. But the way that nature prevents us from overeat, those is that they’re extremely hard to get to, and it takes a lot of work to cut off the husk and the shell and the whatever else is protecting that little tiny nut inside of there.
And so if you buy nuts in their original shell where you’ve got to pick them out and cut them out and chop them up yourself, [00:24:00] it’s really hard to overeat that. But how do we get them in? We go to Costco, we get a 10 pound bag and they’re roasted and salted. And oftentimes now they have added sugar on them on top of that.
So easy to overeat. So those are the only things in nature that exists that way.
Mother’s milk, we’re limited in when we consume that too, in our growing years the coconut, again, that’s not really an issue of over eating that because it’s, most of us don’t live in that climate and there’s so much fiber in the mature coconut that it’s really hard to overeat that.
And then the nuts, if we get them in the way that they’re grown in nature, it’s also extremely hard to overeat. But everything else, that’s a junk food, a snack food comfort food. We’ve as humans, we’ve engineered things to have the fat and the sugar together, and it doesn’t even need to be sugar per se, just high carbs.
So I don’t want to I’ll name a couple of examples, but also I don’t want to trigger the cravings for these, that some of you, it may trigger. Cause that’s one of the other things I’ll talk about here in just a moment is avoiding craving. Triggers for my [00:25:00] clients too. So highly palatable combo again is this high carb, high fat and the same thing, and it really doesn’t exist in nature.
And so these are so we’re for how I’m teaching my clients, how to eat again without having to count calories so they can lose weight is a we’re avoiding this combo. We’re avoiding fat and sweet fat and carbs together now by eating low carb that’s one way we’re already re removing.
The carbs. So we eliminate that issue. The other thing that can happen though, is that the sweet and fat together. Which if it’s artificial sweetener, if it’s no calorie sweetener, if it’s those keto friendly sweeteners out there, if you add that to fat, you still get that same combination that makes you crave it and overeat it.
So this is a pitfall that a lot of people fall into when they’re trying to do keto on their own is that they follow, they make keto. keto fat bombs that are sweet. They CA they try to keep the sweeteners into their life. And the problem with this [00:26:00] is that’s still stimulates your appetite above and beyond what would be conducive to a normal, healthy body.
This is a gift I give my clients. So a lot of them come to me. They’ve been trying to keep it on their own. Like, why am I not losing any weight? I’m keeping my carbs low, what’s wrong. And it’s because they’re actually there. They want to keep the sweeteners in. They think of a zero carbs. It must be okay, but they’re actually eating in a way that.
Over there overeating again, you add sweeteners to fact so you have cream in your coffee and you add some kind of a sweetener to it. How much of that cream can you consume? A fat bomb is something that is either butter or coconut oil and yet a sweet year to it. And those are so tastes.
Do you want to eat them all? Any kind of keto dessert as well, very tasty. It’s always going to be excess of calories than you would have eaten if you didn’t add that dessert in. So here’s a way again, of eating. That we’re not counting calories, but we’re eating. We’re avoiding excessive calories naturally because we’re eating in a way that aligns with our natural appetite and satiety.
So [00:27:00] avoiding highly palatable food combinations hyper palatable, maybe what you may think of them as well. S stop the sugar, stop the sweeteners. If you’re not losing weight, this is a way of, and again, this is the way we’re not counting calories. We’re cutting out a sweetener, even if it has no carbs and no calories in it.
And this will actually help you eat less. Another cue. This is the last part of this secret of how I teach my clients to. Eat in a way that they’re not having to counting calories and they can lose weight very easily is we’re avoiding cues that cause craving triggers. So you may have noticed that I, like I said, I’m going to avoid naming specific comfort foods and that’s because just me saying a certain word, a certain food that can be all that it takes to start to make your brain create.
You get an image of that thing in your brain, and then you can’t get it out and your brain ruminates on it and it, that card monster and your brain, it wants to eat those [00:28:00] carbs. It wants to overeat. It wants to find as much food as possible. That’s another way we’re designed is that because for most of human existence, food was pretty scarce.
And so we’re wired to eat as much as possible. If we can find it. And just thinking about a food, your brain is going to start to ruminate on it and crave it. So I recommend for our clients in the beginning that avoid recipes altogether. Now, this is something that people think is oh, I got to follow all these cookbooks and recipes to be on keto and be really successful.
But guess what happens? There’s many pitfalls with recipes in the beginning. I’m not saying you can never have a keto recipe ever, but let’s get you a clean slate to start with so that you can start to get in this fat burning mode without counting calories. And what are all the problems with bringing in recipes in the beginning?
One is that you’re going to spend all day on Pinterest and you’re going to be looking at pictures of food. And you’re going to actually stimulate your appetite. So looking at pictures of food makes you hungry, or you will eat more, having seen [00:29:00] videos and pictures and looking at recipes all day long.
Okay. So that’s one thing, a second thing. This isn’t an overriding thing, but it just makes it complicated. How many times have you tried to fit different recipes into your macros for the day? I feel like you want to pull your hair out. That’s another one. That’s not about appetite regulation, but that’s another reason why I have them avoid recipes in the beginning.
Another one, when you make a recipe, it’s a more complex flavors that will make you eat more calories than if you kept it really. A meat, a vegetable, and add some butter on it. You’re going to eat an amount that actually tastes good is satiating, but it’s not going to trigger overeating. So we get this clean slate of no recipes for the beginning, because again, all these multiple reasons why it triggers over eating.
Additionally, when you make a recipe, it takes more time than just a quick meal. All that time that you’re in the kitchens, let’s say 30, 40, 60 minutes that you’re cooking, preparing, chopping. You might be nibbling the whole time, which would be more food intake, but you’re also seeing the food and you’re [00:30:00] anticipating it.
And you’re just building up an appetite the entire time that you’re looking at that too. So you will end up eating more for that reason as well. So these are all the things that I’ve studied for a long time about how to actually help people. Eat in a way they don’t have to count calories and you can let the weight peel off.
Some of you might not admit this at the beginning, but I’ve got examples. Like Karen that’s been with me for four years has lost 70 pounds. Penny lost 45 pounds and she’s kept it off for four years. Annie has been with me for over a year. She’s reached her weight loss goal and been able to maintain it all these ladies without counting a single calorie.
Cheryl has been with me for over a year and lost 72 pounds. Now, again, these are all examples of how you can be very successful on this, my secrets to helping them do this in a way that they get to eat. When they’re hungry, they feel satisfied and they’re not having to count calories and feel hungry. Yeah, Valerie says ain’t nobody got time to enter 46 ingredients into a tracker anyways. Yes. So true. It’s so much easier and faster this [00:31:00] way. Along the lines, more of this, avoiding craving cues, craving crews caving, craving cues. Say that three times fast. Also being mindful of what you’re watching.
I stopped watching all the cooking video shows that I used to watch. Avoiding certain sections of the grocery store too. You might avoid walking through the bakery or the sections of the store that have these highly palatable combos, the high-fat, the high carb foods. And the other thing you want to be mindful of too, some people struggle with certain places, events or feelings or times of the day that start to cause some craving triggers.
Again, I’ve got a master’s degree in clinic. Health psychology. And so this is something that I work with my clients on and helping them navigate these things too, because you may be doing all these other things correctly to minimize cravings, regulate your appetite, normally lose weight, but you might still struggle with these things of when I go to the movies, I always ate that one thing.
Or every day at five o’clock I always poured a glass of wine and had some nibbles or after dinner. I always sat down to have a bowl of XYZ. Those things can take a little bit [00:32:00] more time to unravel, but there, there are things that we at least become mindful of. And then we can create some new habits, new behaviors, new rituals that take the place of that former thing that you did before.
So that’s another part of how I can help people lose weight easily without. Counting any calories. So what questions you all have? If you’re just joining to the quiz I’m going to reveal here. I was challenging people to guess. I’m speaking at a podcasting conference in in may and I’ll give you a hint.
It’s in Florida. So see if you can guess which city that I’ll be in, in may speaking. I announced the big Keto chow giveaway as well too. So if you want to go back we’re nearing the end of my live stream here. And then if you want to go back and listen, I revealed how you can enter to win. One of 20 different giveaway packs of keto chow, either in person, Instagram, or on TikTok.
Next week, the episode is going to be about the myth about how people think that keto is unhealthy.
We got a glimpse of that today, but people always think that. [00:33:00] He knows unhealthy, cause we’re cutting out a whole food group. How could it be possibly healthy? So I’m going to dive into that a lot more next week’s episode. And literally Erica, thanks for being here. She’s always learned so much from you.
Yay. Oh, that makes me happy. I trying to get the, trying to get the word out, trying to get the right information out there. Oh, Nancy. Oh, actually wait. Yeah. Is that right? According to my going Nancy you’d guessed correctly. I’m speaking at PodFest, a conference conferences going to be in Orlando, Florida in may.
Nancy is such a good, she’s always got the right information. So thank you. Congratulations, Nancy. Go Nancy, go, if, go, find me on Instagram enter the the thing so that I can make you a, one of the winners. Give you this I want to give you one of the prizes that I’m giving away.
So Instagram I’m guessing is probably easier for you there. So, KetoCarole on Instagram is how you can find me and the most recent posts that I put on there. I’ve got all the details about how you can win. So Nancy I’m awarding you, one of them just because you guessed the quiz correctly today. The.
The [00:34:00] giveaway winners will be announced on February 3rd, 2022. So you’ve got a week to go enter. if you’re having any questions about how to enter, how to, anything like that, you can go ahead and comment on this stream as well. And yeah, so today we talked all about how I help my clients lose a ton of.
Keep it off, maintain their weight loss without counting any calories, not a single calorie. I’m so glad you’ve all been here. so if you’re struggling with keto, I’m here to help visit my website. If you’d like to know more about what it looks like to work with me.
It’s ketocarole.com. Carole has an E on the end. It’s the very fancy French spelling of Carole. And so go there to check out more about the work that I do and. if you’re listening on podcast app, if you’d give us a review, I’d really appreciate that helps me a lot help more people Erica said too, being able to get more of this right information out to the right people.
Thank you everyone for being here today.
Remember, help us grow the show and we’ll help you shrink and I’ll see you all next time, everyone.
Our newest Peer Support Coach, Raquel, shares her story of healing multiple medical issues on her keto journey. Despite having a doctorate in nursing, and the best medical care available, Raquel had a long list of troubling medical issues: type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, constant fatigue, plantar fasciitis, thrombocytosis, high blood pressure, bursitis, and seborrheic dermatitis. But that was BEFORE she found my keto support. Fast forward one year, and Raquel is a whole new person! Listen to all the improvements she’s experienced and get her top tips for success.
Raquel Branom lives with her husband Kelvin on a 1.5 acre piece of heaven in central Texas. They have 2 grown sons who live nearby with her parents. Raquel is an advanced practice registered nurse and is currently the ICU educator for a large healthcare system in Waco, Texas.
Carole Freeman:[00:00:00] Guess what Raquel we’re live. Everybody. Welcome. Welcome to keto chat live. I’m your host Carole Freeman. I have a master’s degree in nutrition and clinical health psychology. I’m a board certified. Nutrition specialist. I specialize in helping women 40 plus follow a keto diet for sustainable weight loss.
Carole Freeman: And today I have a very special guest Raquel. She is one of our newest peer support coaches. So part of the tradition of welcoming them on board is to do a little interview and get to know them. You interview so welcome
Raquel Branom: Raquel. Hi, thanks for asking me. I’m so excited. This Plaza pause
Carole Freeman: backwards.
Carole Freeman: So I was after. I have to point where I, the opposite of where it’s like, Raquel, do you remember like learning to curl your hair in the mirror or you’re on,
Raquel Branom: I still don’t have, I’m still not good at it.
Carole Freeman: I’m always like you poke yourself in the [00:01:00] eye and it was always backwards, but then eventually your brain figures it out.
Carole Freeman: So I’ve been doing this long enough now that I know that. Oh, what I think is a way from me, like my brain goes, that’s how it looks like I’m pointing at you.
Raquel Branom: Yeah. We’re looking at my opposite hand at where I am. So that’s
Carole Freeman: yeah. It’s tricky. All right. Let’s get to know you. So tell us a little bit more about who you are, what you’re up to, who tells your little bit about your personal life, whatever you feel like sharing, but not too
Raquel Branom: much, we’ll be circumspect in how I’m sharing.
Raquel Branom: Actually I was. I was born in the Philippines, but raised in California. We moved here when I was about moved to California with us. So that’s six years old. So I’m a California girl that is now transplanted to Texas.
Carole Freeman: This last
Raquel Branom: year. Yeah. And we moved that here. Last year we’ve been in our home now for a year, as of the oh three days from now, the 26, 20, [00:02:00] 20 ninth. It will be one year anniversary and our house here in Texas, we moved here after I retired. And my husband retired from our jobs and came out and came out just before the big.
Raquel Branom: And that the experience of having no electricity, it was an adventure. And then I have two grown sons. My eldest Camera. And he just got out of the Marine Corps is a cap as a captain and my youngest my, my Cody, he he works for a big box store over here.
Raquel Branom: He manages the customer service area, which he loves to do. My husband is retired law enforcement. And maybe. And then when we got here, I was teaching online, but then my contract was done and I thought, Ooh, what am I going to do? I did not want to be bored. So I went back to work and and I really enjoy it.
Raquel Branom: And it’s keeping me a lot busier and a lot more engaged and working with with nurses [00:03:00] again, which I really enjoy. So I am a clinical nurse specialist with a doctoral degree now. And think of this. Oh, I love I’m a crafter. Papercrafts. I make lots of cool things that my husband thinks I should sell on Etsy, but then that makes it a business, which means it’s no longer an enjoyment.
Raquel Branom: It’s a philosophical thing with me. So I haven’t decided yet. But yeah, that’s something I enjoy is hanging out in my craft room and just making things
Carole Freeman: and that’s great. May I ask how old you are?
Raquel Branom: Raquel I’m 63.
Carole Freeman: Okay. Yeah. Excellent. Just so that people are watching, some of them will be like, oh, she’s just like me.
Carole Freeman: So
Raquel Branom: I got all this white hair. I decided to embrace the silver and stopped coloring my hair last year, last December, 2020. I said, ah, that’s it. No more. That,
Carole Freeman: I’ve seen that as a trend ladies, couldn’t get their hair done. And so then they’re like, what, if we all just band [00:04:00] together and make this popular, then we can do it.
Carole Freeman: So it’s great.
Raquel Branom: People pay thousands of dollars to get this color. Yes.
Carole Freeman: Plus maintenance. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. You’re.
Carole Freeman: Well, Raquel, let’s talk a little bit about your, not a little bit, but a lot about your keto journey. You were one of my clients you’ve been with me for a while now. But let’s go back to before you started working with me what was life like for you then? What were your fears? What were the painful things like?
Carole Freeman: What was it that made you finally seek out keto as a solution?
Raquel Branom: Painful things. First things first being diagnosed with diabetes, hypertension, hyperlipidemia thrombocytosis, which is too many red blood platelets in my blood cells, fatigue, the brain fog. Oh, sore feet.
Raquel Branom: I forgot to mention that. At what point is the pleasure of fasciitis that went [00:05:00] wrong with the excess weight that I was carrying? I was up I was up quite a few pounds. I was about 50 pounds over what I needed to be for my size. And I’m little I’m for just under four foot 11. And that, and then not being able to find clothes to wear that I liked it was, I didn’t want to go into the size sixteens, but I was wearing a size 16.
Raquel Branom: It was quite a bit. And I said, oh no that just won’t do, but I think also feeling as crummy as I did. Being there unhealthy and having to really monitor everything, including my diabetes, really. I was scared because my mother’s diabetic and see she’s in, she’s a type two, but insulin-dependent and has heart failure and has a pacemaker.
Raquel Branom: And I didn’t want to go down that same route and it frightened me. And then what really happened after that was that character. It was my age died. So she’s my why. Okay. A big why for me, because I [00:06:00] grew up watching her, I grew up with her group was, and to see that happened to her, to somebody I really admire greatly because of her grit and everything, but she lived a hard life.
Raquel Branom: I know she took, lot of other things that I did. I never. But just the fact that she’s a contemporary dying at the age that she did really was a big why for me. So that’s, that was that. And then I started reading about Ketoand watching videos and watching a few people. And then I saw Carole in a on what was it?
Raquel Branom: Was it a keto show or a conference that you were doing? And I was watching and I said, huh, Because I liked what you had to say and what you were telling us was so scientifically sound and I thought, I need to call her. So I looked down at the show notes and there’s your contact information? I went on your website and I made an appointment to talk to you about this program. In essence, that’s how I started my Keto Journey. That’s how a Filipino Nurse Gets Healthy with Keto
Carole Freeman: And that was two here
Raquel Branom: two years ago. [00:07:00] Yeah. Yeah.
Carole Freeman: Excellent. So then what happened? I initially, when I work with people, it’s about a couple of month period. So we do a really intensive, comprehensive starter program. Do you remember back then, like what all improved, where you, what changes you saw?
Raquel Branom: Immediately it was, I was looking at, going through the rules. Which, those rules are so vitally important. It was like, oh boy. And it was so different than anything I’ve ever said and never said anything about calories or depriving myself of anything. It just meant that I would need to shift the way I thought about food and following the rules was really important. Rules are important so a Filipino Nurse Gets Healthy with Keto.
Raquel Branom: And what I noticed right away, which is some small things first. First thing’s first is my blood sugar stabilized. I wasn’t having the peaks and valleys. Second thing I noticed was that I dropped the weight pretty quickly at the very beginning. And then the third thing I noticed was that my vision cleared up, cause it was getting a little more fuzzy and I was having to [00:08:00] go up higher on my reading.
Raquel Branom: And it all has to do with, how much glucose you’ve got in your system. Your vision just goes. And so that was a big piece for me, because I love to read that as a, somebody that looks closely at crafting and I’m painting and things like that. My vision’s really important. So that was one of the things that said, okay, you’re on the right track towards your goal of a Filipino Nurse Gets Healthy with Keto.
Raquel Branom: And then the second thing. Being able to buy. I think I said that I came down one bra size or something like that at one of our top, one of our coaching calls and stuff. I said, oh yeah, I can put down a whole bra size was cool.
Carole Freeman: Those little things and non-scale victories. That was the big,
Raquel Branom: yeah.
Raquel Branom: And that was a big thing too. And I think also putting my scale away in the other bathroom and only getting on there once a week really gave a boost. It didn’t tie me to the scale, which shifted the way I thought about the wins that I was getting. It was. Without that scale can constantly be there by worrying about the weight itself.That shift in mindset really helps a Filipino Nurse Gets Healthy with Keto.
Raquel Branom: I could focus in on a really good wins or the other ones. The non-scale, [00:09:00] the non number wins that I was getting, which was feeling better, sleeping better. I wasn’t having night sweats. My blood sugar was more consistent. My blood pressure was going down and it really, yeah. Not having the scale there and then getting on the scale once a week or maybe even every other week.
Raquel Branom: It was like a nice surprise. It’s oh, look at that. And, but it was mostly the other things that really helped. So cause that number will go up and down depending on how much fluid you got on and all kinds of other things.
Carole Freeman: Welcome to a live viewer. I can see that we’ve got somebody watching in the keto chat lifestyle group.The show is about a Filipino Nurse Gets Healthy with Keto.
Carole Freeman: So please join us. Tell us you’re here, where you’re watching from. We love having you part of the show. I can tell there’s somebody here. I can’t see who it is though until you actually leave a comment. So that’s why I’m joint. Let us know you’re here. Welcome. We’re so glad you’re here to hear Raquel’s success story.
Carole Freeman: Oh, they just left. Oh, no. It’s oh. I called somebody and they hung up on you. Oh no. There’s two people now. So welcome to [00:10:00] it. Mary’s there. These people are on YouTube. So welcome to the show. Give us a comment, let us know where you’re joining from. We’re exploring Raquel’s keto journey. It’s about a Filipino Nurse Gets Healthy with Keto. She’s been with us for a couple of years and had some remarkable changes and she’s just come on board as one of our new peer support coaches too.
Carole Freeman: So I wanted to introduce her to everyone officially. So w so you’ve been with us a couple of years. You’ve had tremendous success in the sustainability of this lifestyle. What was it that really made you stay on with us? Sometimes people just do a diet for a couple of months and then they just are like, damn done with this.
Carole Freeman: So like what are your, I guess I should ask it this way? What are your secrets to being able to stick with it for this long?
Raquel Branom: I think it’s paying attention to what my body is doing and. Seeing the difference and there’s subtle. But I think it’s also putting myself first on those and I have the advantage of having grown children and I have to worry about them.
Raquel Branom: My husband’s pretty independent. My parents are independent and side or [00:11:00] have, but I, so I can focus on my own development, my own growth and everything. But I think the biggest thing for me was all the physical changes that I was having. It was. That’s what really did it. And then also keeping my why always in the forefront.
Raquel Branom: That’s what really helps. And I have to admit that yes, I’m human. There were times when I would drift away and then I would catch myself and I go not good. And then and then get back on it again. So I’ve done a few things, like being on the crew and then also doing the the get on stuck program.
Raquel Branom: Just to get back on to remind me of why I’m doing this and remind my body of why I’m doing this because our bodies, they adapt to very strange things that occur to us, and what we do to it, it will start to habituate to certain things that. Oh, no, we really want to go back to the other thing.
Raquel Branom: That’s even better for our bodies, but I think the other thing that really convinced me that above and beyond my own diabetes, being under control and re and slowly changing [00:12:00] and reversing and lowering my A1C. Was the platelets that the one that probably surprises and freaks me out a little bit, because how amazing it was because I was really high.
Raquel Branom: I was way above normal for my, for the number of platelets. And those are the little cells that cause blood clotting, which it’s a very it can be a scary thing to think that, oh, blood clots strokes, those kinds of. But I think probably I was about a year into my keto journey that I went in and I had my quarterly appointment with my hematologist.
Raquel Branom: I actually had a hematologist because of this condition. I was not on any medication. He was watching it. We couldn’t find anything wrong where it was coming from. There was no genetic, nothing. I went through all kinds of tests. It was crazy. And he had gotten my blood tests before, before my appointment.
Raquel Branom: And he came in the [00:13:00] room with this really puzzle block at his space. And he goes, what are you doing? I said, What do you mean? What am I doing?
Carole Freeman: Is there a moment where you’re a little nervous? Because
Raquel Branom: the way his face looked at that God I’m in trouble. Something’s wrong with me? I’ll know, my blood counts are bad or something, but he said, you’re normal. I realized that a Filipino Nurse Gets Healthy with Keto.
Raquel Branom: I said, what? You said your platelets are normal. What are you doing? And I told him, I said he goes, what did you do differently? What have you done differently? What? And I said and I racked my brain a little bit and I said I’ve been eating the keto lifestyle, the keto diet. And he goes, what?
Raquel Branom: What’s that? So I got to do it to Toria Lakita, and he just went. So he’s going to do more research on that one. See if that was something that he would want to see about it, because really when you think about. And then it abnormalities and blood. It all [00:14:00] goes back to inflammation.
Carole Freeman: No.
Raquel Branom: Maybe my bone marrow was making too much of this stuff because it wasn’t.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. I just want to, pause her and reiterate this for our viewers, that listeners that, I remember that day when you came on the coaching call and got to report that your blood was normal. So this was, she went from, they didn’t know what was going on, but basically very high platelets, which put her out of high.
Carole Freeman: Having a heart attack or stroke, basically. So they were watching it. They didn’t know what else to do. And just following a keto, low carb lifestyle, it went to normal. And I just want to pause here because so many people, there are so many myths out there about keto being dangerous and being bad for your heart. But as you can see a Filipino Nurse Gets Healthy with Keto.
Carole Freeman: And we’ve got several cardiologists actually. Put their patients on low carb, lifestyle. So just, one more piece of evidence that when I interviewed Dr. Ted Naiman out of the Seattle area, when I asked him like what gets better? When you put people on a low carb or keto diet, he says everything you can measure gets better. That’s how a Filipino Nurse Gets Healthy with Keto.
Carole Freeman: So [00:15:00] I’m just trying, part of the work that I’m doing here is this dispelling. That are out there about this being not helpful or a dangerous or bad for your health type of thing. And it’s not. So for those of us clinicians that are doing this, people like me and Raquel that are helping people follow this, we just see all of these things.We see, in Raquel’s case, a Filipino Nurse Gets Healthy with Keto.
Carole Freeman: Get better. I forgot to read my medical disclaimer, so I’ll just do that now, just so that we don’t get in trouble here, but this show is meant for educational entertainment purposes only. It’s not medical advice nor intended to diagnose, prevent, treat, or cure any condition. If you have any questions or concerns related to your spec, special medical condition maybe try Syria or something.
Carole Freeman: I dunno, but no seriously consult your professional healthcare. Oh, your personal healthcare professional. I’m like, what did I type there? All right. We’re covered now. So
Raquel Branom: I
Carole Freeman: was chatting with the one of my clients earlier today who was just like but what about this? And isn’t this? And I’m like, no, that’s actually, those are good changes you’re seeing there.
Carole Freeman: So thank you for sharing that. And I still [00:16:00] remember that day that you got to report that. And everybody I work with gets their own unit. Experience of surprises, the things, again, better most ladies are working with weight. Loss is one of their top things, but then like you, we get all these other oh, and that got better too.
Carole Freeman: That’s
Raquel Branom: amazing. So many cool gifts that I’ve gotten from being on keto and it’s, to me, it’s It’s beyond anything else. It’s like this gift that I’ve given to myself and I’m putting myself as a priority for this, that I can be around for my family. And and then for me to continue the work that I do and it’s a wow. I can’t believe that a Filipino Nurse Gets Healthy with Keto.
Raquel Branom: I it’s, yeah. It’s been a really great experience. Yeah. Yeah. There’s times when we were human. I’m human. I think sometimes people think I’m not human, but I am human that And I slip, we all do. It’s called drift, or our minds can only do so many things at a time. And but it’s, it is again what you do with [00:17:00] that.
Raquel Branom: The risk, the responsibility that I take for myself, when that does happen is to get back on and do this. And the other thing is do this with grace and without blame and without beating myself up. Over it because my goodness, this is a journey. It’s not a one and done thing. This to me, this is how things are going to be.
Raquel Branom: And this is how I’ve structured my life to be. I’ll just say the F saved a lot of money by bringing my own lunch to work because the cafe, the cafeteria here. Oh my stars. I love the hospital and everything, but, and dieticians are wonderful, but what they put in that cafeteria for the employees.
Carole Freeman: Oh, yes, I can. I can only imagine I’ve seen inside too many hospital cafeteria, so it
Raquel Branom: just is not. And Bible and yeah, we’ve saved for my not buying [00:18:00] lunches and things quite a bit by bringing my lunch and pre-planning everything. And, oh, Carol, I’ve been tracking in criminal.
Raquel Branom: That’s another win for me because I used to struggle with that. I would just go days when I go and then, but now what I do now is I flipped my switch a little bit here. I use it to preplan my day. So it’s already recorded on there for breakfast. I have an, a. I have some, maybe, a slice of cheese and I have my coffee and I plan all my entire day and that’s what I eat and that’s why I stick to, and it’s it.
Raquel Branom: Doesn’t allow me. To cut it to send what I think. Oh, maybe I can now it’s not here in chronometer it’s I put it there. I got to commit to that. That’s what I’m eating. So I’ve been able to track which, which has been, always been my, my, my challenge is tracking and
Carole Freeman: that’s great. Thanks for sharing [00:19:00] that tip.
Carole Freeman: Cause I know that works there. Several of our ladies that find that really helpful if they preplan their day. You already know that’s going to be perfect macros for you. And if you try to deviate from that, it’s gonna, you’re gonna make yourself more work for yourself. So it’s easier for that. So thanks for that.
Carole Freeman: Yep. Another thing you mentioned too, you mentioned a couple of internal phrases that I’ll just explain to our viewers and our openers too. So you you mentioned that, some of your, the things that have helped you get back on track when you straight a little bit or the crew, which is what our annual membership is. It certainly helped a Filipino Nurse Gets Healthy with Keto.
Carole Freeman: Our initial short-term really comprehensive program. Then we have a longterm support membership that inevitably in Dubai, probably the people that are in that are the ones that are able to stick with it longer. You mentioned another program. We do occasionally to the get unstuck program, which is a high-protein protocol that helps people accelerate things, too.
Carole Freeman: So it sounds like one of your other. Tips or secrets for long-term sustainability is just engaging with other people that are doing, want to do. It’s how a Filipino Nurse Gets Healthy with Keto.
Raquel Branom:[00:20:00] exactly and staying within the community and and sharing those back and those ideas back and forth with each other. But it is a kid it’s a principles of everything.
Raquel Branom: And just keeping the basic principles of keto in mind, always. And And making it work. I think what’s really nice about, about what we do at the fast track and everything else is there’s enough variety ability to vary some things within the 10 rules that for me, I wasn’t, I’m never bored with the food because there’s ways of making things really different and putting a little variety and things.
Raquel Branom: And then it really helps to have a supportive family. It helps a Filipino Nurse Gets Healthy with Keto/ And my husband is super supportive. In fact, he. Last night. Cause we, he, he could, he’s the one that cooks cause he’s retired. So he gets to be, he gets to be the househusband. So when I get home I opened the door and I say, Lucy, I’m home. [00:21:00] That’s cute.
Raquel Branom: He’s funny. And then he comes, oh, there was one day he came out wearing an apron. It was a stairwell. I fell out laughing so hard. He was wearing one of my aprons. But last night he. Big chicken for dinner. And we finished it because I was hungry. I said, I need a new proteins. I said, he goes what do you want for dinner said, I want a big piece of chicken breasts because that’s the biggest, I said, I don’t need protein.
Raquel Branom: So he did. And then he said, oh honey, we don’t have anything for your lunch tomorrow. What do you want? I’m so I don’t do we have a hamburger? Patty frozen. So he cooked for my lunch for today. So I had a burger and cheese for. A hamburger, Patty with cheese and some grilled onions and mushrooms on top of it.
Raquel Branom: So that was my lunch today. I know.
Carole Freeman: Oh, I love it. And haven’t, you also influence some of your son’s too.
Raquel Branom: Yeah. So [00:22:00] my youngest son is doing his own keto also not as consistent, he’s 29. He’ll do what he wants to, but he knows that he knows the principal to be. And my older one now there’s my, this is he while he was overseas and doing a lot of working out and everything like that he he.
Raquel Branom: Basically carnivore on his food and that, and the kids like a brick wall. I can’t find any loose skin to pinch, so I try, but there’s no there’s, I can’t find one anywhere. And then my parents, my mother is also doing keto and so she’s been able to drop her A1C to 6.0. She’s dropped her insulin.
Raquel Branom: I think oh my gosh. It’s way down on her pub. It’s wait, her basal rate is really low. Oh, great. Oh my gosh. And so she’s 89. And go on strong. My dad is [00:23:00] 99 and doing well, the only thing in there last, and they both eat a low carb, high, fat, moderate protein. The only thing that’s a little is the cholesterol is a little high and their blood pressures are a little high.
Raquel Branom: The 89 and 99, I’m not going to fuss at him for that. So
Carole Freeman: doing pretty good. They are. They’re
Raquel Branom: doing really well. They’re both pretty straight.
Carole Freeman: Now Raquel, we’ve never talked about this and we’ve never mentioned your, upbringing the Philippines before. So I’m curious, were there any struggles as you started keto with foods that were your cultural favorites from your childhood and a lot of those are very hard, high carb foods.
Carole Freeman: What was that like? And how did you navigate that
Raquel Branom: rice? Was that, was it, eating those high carb foods, the starchy. It’s very common in the Philippines. That was at the very beginning. It was just almost in order for me to make, to be able to do that. I just had to [00:24:00] completely knock it out of my kitchen.
Raquel Branom: It went out the door and went elsewhere. And knowing that, and we’ve talked about things like there’s certain triggers that we avoid in order for us not to have those flashbacks or cravings and things to stuff. So anything that looked like that was out the door. Okay.
Carole Freeman: So are you saying.
Carole Freeman: Cauliflower rice didn’t work for you at that point.
Raquel Branom: Now, in fact, now it still doesn’t work well for me to have cauliflower rice because, but I can do mashed cauliflower. Okay. Because it doesn’t work the same new, it doesn’t work the same. I don’t have the same relationship with the.
Carole Freeman: This is. So I love this, that I asked you about this Raquel, because it really that’s a lot of what I lecture or teach people about is that your brain can’t really tell the difference.
Carole Freeman: Like it just knows that race gives you a big dopamine endorphin [00:25:00] rush in your brain. Spikes your blood sugar makes you feel happy and don’t be for a little while, but but the cauliflower rice like look similar enough that your brain just thinks, no, I want the real thing. And so thank you for sharing that experience too, because, and that’s one of the things I, like to teach people is like anything that caused you to crave something.
Carole Freeman: You’re going to have less challenges of fighting cravings if they have the craving of the first place. Okay. That’s interesting. I see how that helped a Filipino Nurse Gets Healthy with Keto.
Raquel Branom: And the all, and it could be visual or textural because the taste is so different, but it’s that visual a terror. The textural thing that, that usually gets me just yeah, I think that’s my, that’s one of the biggest things for me.
Raquel Branom: And then other things
Carole Freeman: can I add for me to, I’m just having myself about texture too, because in the beginning I was trying to make these sometimes people will say these like chia seed pudding things. That kind of to me, it’s the same texture as like a tapioca pudding. And I just I would have the same thing.
Carole Freeman: I can’t eat those things because it just makes me feel like I want to shove it in my [00:26:00] mouth. Same thing. It’s a texture thing. My brain’s no, I think this is real pudding. So it’s I don’t like, I don’t like that feeling of feeling insatiable in a food.
Raquel Branom: I know it’s really a very weird thing.
Raquel Branom: It’s about what our brains remember and what relates it to, because there’s always that either that emotional or situational thing that we relate things to, and then they’re tied to them. Food is tied to events in our lives that way. And. And so that comes with the cravings and things like that.
Raquel Branom: Now, certain triggers and things. And and I just blessed the day that I discovered salt and having salt in my water that I can sip on all day really helps with, I’m sorry, I’m moving the camera. My, when I’m on my cell phone. So yeah, having this big, old thing with salt in it, it’s been really.
Raquel Branom: A big lifesaver for me regarding because it really cuts the craving [00:27:00] for sweets. I never would have thought it that way, but that’s really a very interesting phenomenon.
Carole Freeman: So one more question. Fantasy world, where you never found our supports. You never discovered Keno. Where would you be right now?
Carole Freeman: This isn’t fun.
Raquel Branom: I probably would be on insulin with a higher blood pressure medication than I, I have not changed my blood pressure medication and dose for the last, since I was 45 probably have a lot more aches and pains than I do have I had. During my, during the, a period where I did a little bit of a drift away, I started having bursitis in my right hip.
Raquel Branom: Since probably over the last six, four months since really getting back. And then now since this is like my second week of the fast track reboot, I haven’t had fat. It’s gone, no aches on my hip. The other thing too, that I so I probably would not be [00:28:00] able to walk as well as I do. I’d be having, I’d have to wear all kinds of orthotics for my plantar fasciitis.
Raquel Branom: And if anybody’s ever had that pain, it radiates all the way up through your body and they probably would be in a lot more pain. Oh, I would probably have seborrheic dermatitis or psoriasis and my skin cleared up. Okay. Because, and I find that found out that I’m allergic to soy, which I don’t have on the keto.
Raquel Branom: And so now I don’t have it. There’s so many cool
Carole Freeman: things that happened.
Raquel Branom: Amazing.
Carole Freeman: Yeah. What are your what are your colleagues? I know you’re re retired from where you were working before, but what did they think about this crazy diet that you followed and all the changes?
Raquel Branom: This is Texas. I work with nursing ed, nurse educators down here and in Texas it’s I’m in a [00:29:00] totally different environment.
Raquel Branom: So one of my cousins. Oh, my gosh. Do you mean to tell me you’re going into ketoacidosis? And I said, oh my goodness. When we educate you, it’s not that. And then of course they all go out to lunch and they all get cans, everything that’s so high carb and. Looking at the food and my stomach is making, crappies and stuff and I’m go, okay.
Raquel Branom: I just need something with protein and me. So I usually will get something with a high protein and then salad based or vegetable or something like that. And somebody else will eat the chips. Cause I.
Carole Freeman: Do you have some good barbecue locations around you?
Raquel Branom: Tens? Really a lot of good barbecue places and many of the places we’ll barbecue, the stuff without the sauce for you.
Raquel Branom: So there’s two ways that you can get your, and right here, it’s brisket is king. Yeah. Yeah. I love brisket. And I’ll eat a lot of that because that’s good protein right [00:30:00] there. And we have my husband and I have three favorite places we like to go to. And then also there’s a a pokey place here too.
Raquel Branom: So I get the pokey bowl without the rice greens on and then good salmon and all the proteins that go on. Oh, yeah. Yeah, really delicious. And they, and this place has non soy sauces to Portland. They have aminos. Oh, nice. I know that was a surprise. So that was nice.
Carole Freeman: All right. Anything else that you want to leave everyone with?
Carole Freeman: Any tips you have for success, anyone considering keto or anyone struggling with keto?
Raquel Branom: Like with any kind of change, if you’re, if you haven’t done this before, you’re new to this, it takes attention. And I think and we, and especially women are not used to putting the attention on our stuff.
Raquel Branom: And putting ourselves as a [00:31:00] priority, but I always used to think of, if I don’t take care of myself, who’s going to take care of my family if something happens to me. And that was a big thing for me. And I think my best advice is to just disappear. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done for myself.
Raquel Branom: And as why I’ve stuck with it, as long as I have, even though through all the peaks and valleys of things, but again it’s knowing what’s happening in my body. I’m happy where I am. Yeah. Could I, drop a few more pounds? Yes. It’s that pesky 10 pounds. I can’t seem to get rid of. But it’ll come at some point.
Raquel Branom: My body will just decide it doesn’t need it anymore. But all the other things that I have going is the fact that my A1C puts me at a pre-diabetic state. My insulin level is normal at 12, which is nice and everything else is normal. So to me, that, that means a lot. And that will keep me. Doing [00:32:00] this, because I just think that I want to live to a hundred.That’s how a Filipino Nurse Gets Healthy with Keto.
Raquel Branom: That would be cool. My dad, I think, is going to live to a hundred and beyond, so I figure, I
Carole Freeman: should know. Yeah. Thank you so much for being here and all your soul, all your support and welcome aboard as one of our brand new peer support coach. So that role for our clients is that Raquel’s one of the ladies that get to mentor people as they come in and start keto.
Carole Freeman: So if you’re somebody who would like to have Raquel as a mentor, as you started. keto check out my website, KetoCarole.com. Carole has an E on the end. It’s the very fancy French spelling. You can read all about my journey and check out more about Raquel and see if it might be a fit if you’d like that support on your own journey as well.
Carole Freeman: And yeah. Thank you everyone for watching. We’re going to wrap this up and we’ll see you on the next show. We’ve got another episode coming on. This was a bonus episode, an unplanned or unscheduled, but we’ve got one tomorrow. January 27th, I’m going to be, [00:33:00] what am I talking about? I’ve got on my list here.
Carole Freeman: Oh, I’m going to be talking about how to lose weight, how to lose weight on keto without counting calories. So calories. I’m talking about that. Our next episodes. So come back and we’ll see you again next time. Thanks Raquel for being here. Thanks for everyone for watching and listening. We’ll see you next time.
Benjamin Bikman earned his Ph.D. in Bioenergetics and was a postdoctoral fellow with the Duke-National University of Singapore in metabolic disorders. Currently, his professional focus as a scientist and associate professor (Brigham Young University) is to better understand the role of elevated insulin in regulating obesity and diabetes, including the relevance of ketones in mitochondrial function.
Purchase Dr. Bikman’s Book: Why We Get Sick: The Hidden Epidemic at the Root of Most Chronic Disease―and How to Fight It here.
Disclosure: Please note that some of the links above are affiliate links, and at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you decide to make a purchase after clicking through the link. Please understand that I have experienced all of these companies, and I recommend them because they are helpful and useful, not because of the small commissions I make if you decide to buy something through my links. Please do not spend any money on these products unless you feel you need them or that they will help you achieve your goals.
Carole Freeman:
Hey, welcome everyone to our live guest expert interview today for our keto lifestyle crew. Hey, it’s Carole. You know who I am, but I am… Oh my gosh, you guys, I’m so excited about our guest this month, Dr. Benjamin Bikman. Oh my god, I’m going to read your bio off the back of your book. By the way, he wrote a book. When we get sick, I’ve recommended it to all of you. Pretty much everyone in our membership has bought the book, so they’ve done their homework here. I’m just going to read your bio off the back of the book because I think it’s a perfect place to start.
Carole Freeman:
Benjamin Bikman earned his PhD in bio engineer. Every time I read it in my head, I can say it, and then I can’t say it out loud, bioenergetics, and was a postdoctoral fellow with the Duke National University of Singapore studying metabolic disorders. Currently, his professional focus as a scientist and professor at BYU is to better understand the origins and consequences of metabolic disorders, including obesity, diabetes, with a particular emphasis on the role of insulin. He frequently publishes his research in peer reviewed journals and presents at international science meetings. Welcome, Dr. Bikman.
Dr. Bikman:
Carole, thank you so much, delighted to have the time with you to talk about anything human metabolism.
Carole Freeman:
Excellent. I’m so thankful that you’re taking the time. I know you’re on your whirlwind stay at home book tour right now. I can’t imagine how busy you are, but this is… I can’t tell you how excited I was when I found out that this book came out because this is the book that we need. This is the book that everyone in this world needs to read. I’m not even joking about that, because, oh my gosh, the whole keto world that I’ve been in, this is the underlying piece, and a lot of people really miss it. I appreciate you being here. Thank you so much.
Dr. Bikman:
Well, my pleasure. In fact, thanks for pointing out the book. Really, to me, that book is the reason for keto. Whether people know it or not, at least to me, keto is used because of how effectively and how rapidly it improves insulin sensitivity, fighting insulin resistance, which itself is so fundamental to so many chronic diseases. That’s why so many things get better on keto. It’s because you’ve controlled your insulin.
Carole Freeman:
Wonderful. Wonderful. Well, let’s start out with the basics, if you don’t mind, because I know you speak a lot of professional conferences, but we’ve got just average people here. Let’s start out with some basics so that we can… These are things that we talked about and needs to be refreshed constantly, because they’re just not topics that people are used to hearing about in school. Let’s start with the basics. What is insulin?
Dr. Bikman:
Insulin is a little hormone that is… It is in fact quite small, that is flowing through… I mean, quite small compared to other hormones, even. It’s flowing through our blood. It comes from the pancreas, and then moves all through the body, and literally tells every cell in the body to do something. Every cell in the body has insulin receptors. That is not that common among hormones, where every single cell is affected. There are others, but insulin is one of them. The general theme of insulin is telling cells to store things, take in energy and store it and make something with it.
Dr. Bikman:
It’s anabolic. It’s building things up, so if all of us have insulin flowing through our blood right now, unless the person is a type one diabetic, that is a disease of no or too little insulin because the cells in the pancreas that make the insulin are getting destroyed. That’s the autoimmune disease. But other than that, it’s a hormone flowing through our blood. We most typically identify it or recognize it with its effects on glucose. The most common effect of insulin is to lower glucose, but that’s not fair to insulin. It does a lot more than that.
Carole Freeman:
It’s a much bigger player. A silly question, is insulin bad? Should we get rid of all of our insulin?
Dr. Bikman:
It is not bad. When people don’t have it, like untreated type one diabetes, it is lethal. Within weeks to months, you’ll die, so you must have this hormone. It is simply in our environment. We have too much, and so the hero becomes the villain.
Carole Freeman:
Well, I fear that insulin may go down the same path that cholesterol did for a while, right? Like, “Cholesterol is bad. We should get rid of all of it,” and the same thing is [crosstalk 00:04:58] insulin.
Dr. Bikman:
That’s right. We want to make sure that we’re being… I want to make sure I’m being nuanced in how I talk about this. It is not just an outright villain. Like, people, there’s more dimensions to this character here. Like I said, in normal levels, insulin is our friend. In the levels most people have it, it is not their friend. It’s gone beyond.
Carole Freeman:
Those of you that are watching right now, go ahead and put your comments or your questions for Dr. Bikman in the comments. I’m going to get to those very shortly. I just wanted to set some foundational things here with him first for you. Go ahead. I know some of you have to leave early, too, so go ahead and put your questions in there. Heather, I’ve grabbed your question already as well too. Don’t worry, we’ll get to that. The next logical step here then is what is insulin resistance? That’s also a concept that’s a little tricky for people to understand.
Dr. Bikman:
I’m thrilled you’re asking, because it is so necessary to understand insulin resistance to then appreciate its role in other diseases. Insulin resistance is really two things together, well, in every case. It is that insulin isn’t working the same way it used to throughout the body, so some of the body cells aren’t responding to insulin like it normally does, like they used to. Then second, this phenomenon of not working well is coupled with too much insulin being in the blood, so what’s called hyperinsulinemia, so hyperinsulinemia, too much insulin and insulin not working the same way before throughout the body, those are the two sides of the coin, which is insulin resistance itself.
Carole Freeman:
Nice. Do you mind if I indulge you in my analogy I use for explaining what insulin resistance is?
Dr. Bikman:
Lay it on me.
Carole Freeman:
I want to see if you’ll love it. I equate it to a fire alarm. When blood sugar gets too high, insulin is that fire alarm telling the cells, “Quickly do something. Take this [inaudible 00:07:01] to get it down to normal levels.”
Dr. Bikman:
Yes.
Carole Freeman:
But just like if we heard a fire alarm right now, both of us, the first time we heard it, we would take it very seriously. We would evacuate the building. But if we came back, and then two hours after that we heard another fire alarm, okay, maybe the second time again we’d take it seriously. But if every two hours or maybe every 30 minutes, we started to hear another fire alarm, we just get to like, “This is getting ridiculous.” We’d start to ignore it. We just go about our work. But what if there really was a fire every 30 to 60 minutes? The fire department would have to get more creative. They would have to come up with a louder fire alarm.
Carole Freeman:
They would have to have bells. They would have to have lights, and maybe go so far as having glittered cannons coming out like, “No, no, really, really, it’s another fire, I promise. Take it seriously.” That’s the analogy I use to explain what happens is the cells just start to… They get overwhelmed with this constant fire alarm signal, and they just start to ignore it because they got work to do otherwise.
Dr. Bikman:
That’s perfect. In fact, what I like about your analogy is that you’re also touching on the causes of insulin resistance. The main cause, as I identify it, is too much insulin. It’s funny because someone just heard me describe too much insulin as being part of insulin resistance. It is, but too much insulin, just along with your analogy, is one of the causal factors. It is a fundamental feature of biology. Too much of a stimulus will result in a resistance to that stimulus. The cell or the body will start to… Just like what you said, it will start to stop listening.
Dr. Bikman:
It won’t hear it as well as before. That’s almost a survival mechanism. “There’s too much of this. I have to stop responding to it.” Some cells do stop responding. Some don’t. They now then suffer just because there’s too much insulin telling them what to do. I like your analogy because it highlights the cause, but it also therein highlights the solution. If too much insulin is what’s driving insulin resistance, one of the key solutions is then lowering insulin.
Carole Freeman:
Yes, so we need to stop setting our metabolism on fire or trying to set it on fire.
Dr. Bikman:
Yes, that’s right.
Carole Freeman:
How do we know if we’re insulin resistant?
Dr. Bikman:
I like to joke that there’s an at-home test that you can take, and that is just, “Are you a little overweight, and do you have high blood pressure?” If someone has hypertension and they’re overweight, it’s very likely they have insulin resistance. I say that with some degree of confidence simply because hypertension is almost always a result of insulin resistance. It isn’t always, but almost always, and so if we couple the hypertension along with someone who’s a little overweight, it’s very likely to be insulin resistance. That’s the easiest way.
Dr. Bikman:
The most definitive way, of course, is actually getting a blood test. You can measure your insulin, or you combine your insulin, your glucose into the HOMA, H-O-M-A, equation. There are other ways. In fact, another one that’s convenient for people, if anyone has had a recent blood lipid test, take the triglyceride number divided by your HDL number. The triglycerides divided by HDL, if it’s less than 1.5, it’s a very good sign that you’re very likely insulin sensitive. If it’s higher than that number, if it’s getting up into the twos and beyond, then you’re very likely insulin resistant. Those are the best ways.
Carole Freeman:
I love this tip, actually, because a lot of my clients, they actually have to fight their doctor to do an insulin test. It’s crazy making that there’s a very simple test, and they get met with things like, “Oh, your insurance isn’t going to cover it,” but it’s not even that expensive of a test.
Dr. Bikman:
No.
Carole Freeman:
It’s like $26. This is a good one, because pretty much every doctor would be willing to run a lipid panel, and so we can use this as a proxy. That’s so great. I love that. Probably everyone already has that one, so optimal numbers, so one of the things… As I was listening to your books, I listened to it, and then I read it. One of the notes I wrote down that blew me away was that one point higher in insulin makes you 20% more insulin resistant. Can you break that down a little bit, and let us know what does that really mean?
Dr. Bikman:
Yes. If someone is coming in for regular checkups, let’s say, and the physician is friendly enough to this idea and measuring insulin, if you detect consistent rises in insulin, even modest, it’s that much more correlated. It is correlation with insulin resistance. The likelihood of you developing full blown insulin resistance just starts to magnify. It starts to grow. But still touching back on your analogy, insulin resistance is in a way, aptly defined as a disease of too much insulin. That is what type two diabetes is in actuality.
Dr. Bikman:
Type one diabetes is a disease of too little insulin. Type two diabetes is a disease of too much. What they have in common is that neither disease can control blood glucose very well. They’re both very intolerant. They cannot metabolize this molecule particularly well. In one hand, it’s because there’s not enough insulin to clear it. On the other, it’s because insulin isn’t working well enough to clear it.
Carole Freeman:
I love one of the things in your book. You came up with a really cool, succinct way of covering your dietary recommendations for reversing insulin resistance. Number one is control carbs. Number two is prioritize protein. I love the alliteration with these.
Dr. Bikman:
Yes, thank you. That was very deliberate.
Carole Freeman:
Number three is filled with fat, meaning the rest of your calories come from fat.
Dr. Bikman:
Yep. I’m very fat friendly just because it is the macronutrient with the least and often no effect on insulin. If we can appreciate the paradigm you and I just outlined that too much insulin is causing insulin resistance and the solution is to lower it, well, then the obvious way to lower it is just don’t eat anything, but that can’t… I mean, that’s not totally sustainable. Of course, you got to eat something at some point, so why not focus on the macronutrients, especially fat but also protein that have little or no effect on insulin? Eat those two together the way God intended, and just keep the carbohydrates in check.
Carole Freeman:
Now, I want to stop here and point out that your number two recommendation here is to prioritize protein. It’s not filled with fat first, prioritize protein. Would you agree that one of the biggest mistakes that people in the low carb and keto sphere do is that they restrict protein in trying to reverse insulin resistance that they go too far, and protein gets the…
Dr. Bikman:
Get the shaft?
Carole Freeman:
Yeah.
Dr. Bikman:
In fact, that was part of the reason I laid it out the way I did. I didn’t like what I was seeing where there were people who were getting a lot of their calories from just MCT oil. I thought, “We have gone too far when we’re drinking fat to get our calories because that wouldn’t happen in nature.” Fat comes with protein. That’s how these foods come. The best protein sources come with fat. Positioning it the way I did, it was basically my way of saying when you put together a real meal, focus on the protein, but acknowledge that this is going to come with fat.
Dr. Bikman:
I may add fat to it. I may be putting butter on my steak or on my chicken or whatever. Good. Do it that way. Don’t say, “I’m going to have a bowl of butter, and I’m going to add protein into my butter.” I just didn’t want to… which is almost how some people look at it. I just didn’t quite like what I would see from time to time, and so that’s why I put it the way I did.
Carole Freeman:
Well, just like everything, all things in balance, and so we’ve got people that have just taken this message too far that we need to minimize insulin altogether. Do you have any comments on the idea that some people really think that fat is just this free food, and since it doesn’t have an insulin response, that it’s fine, and we can eat as much as we want of it? [inaudible 00:15:53].
Dr. Bikman:
Well, I do think that we can be pretty liberal with it. I really do. I say that just because I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it work with people, where they don’t fear fat. They eat it very liberally, and they are just shedding pounds. Part of that is quite simply that if you’re keeping insulin low, you have a higher metabolic rate, and so if the person’s getting all that calorie from the fat, they are clearly getting it out. They’re clearly burning it. The energy has gone up. We have two ways that the body deals with those states of almost pure fat consumption, which again, I don’t think is natural, and I don’t encourage it.
Dr. Bikman:
But fine, let’s just go with it. One is what I just mentioned. If you’re keeping insulin low, metabolic rate is higher, even to the point of it being almost 300 calories a day higher than if you’re spiking insulin. That is a meaningful amount of calorie difference. But second, if you’re eating fat, and you’re keeping insulin low, you’re making a lot of ketones. Ketones are in one form eliminated from the body. When we convert ketones to acetone, which we do, we are breathing it out, or we’re urinating it out. Just appreciate then what a ketone is.
Dr. Bikman:
A ketone is a piece of metabolized fat. This was a fat molecule that we either had to store, or we had to burn. Well, we just wasted it. We just dumped it from the body, and that is energy. Ketones have an actual caloric value, and so we’re just pushing these calories back out into the universe, and we didn’t have to store them or burn them based on our metabolic rate. We just wasted them.
Carole Freeman:
I think I caught a key that you said there that maybe makes a big difference is that when your insulin is low optimal levels, then the fat amount is not something you have to worry about. Whereas perhaps when somebody still has pretty high insulin level, you’d go out to get that down lower.
Dr. Bikman:
Well said. Well said. Even still, I wouldn’t want someone to misinterpret. I am not advocating just eat fat anytime as much as you want. No, I just think that is unnatural. Eat fat with protein the way that they’re supposed to come together.
Carole Freeman:
I love that. I was listening to your keto connect interview today, the last couple of days. I just really love that, using an ancestral template of how does food come in nature. It was a big aha. Proteins and fats come together naturally in foods. Protein generally doesn’t come with the high amount of carbohydrates in food.
Dr. Bikman:
That’s right. That’s right.
Carole Freeman:
All of you out there listening, trying to think of a food that’s high protein and high in carbs, it just doesn’t exist, or maybe somebody is going to come up with some bizarre something, but-
Dr. Bikman:
It’s not common. It’s not common.
Carole Freeman:
Yes. Pam is actually asking here… Let me put this one on the screen here. Pam is asking, “How do we know when our insulin levels are just right?”
Dr. Bikman:
Pam, if you go get an insulin test and your insulin levels are at six micro units per mil or lower, then that’s perfect. Now, I will say there is some variability. Every hormone, there is a pattern to insulin. Again, every hormone has a cyclical pattern throughout the day, and insulin is no exception. If you see that it is even double that, if it’s in the low teens, it could still be okay. You might have just caught it at the peak. But if you get a low number like six and below, then you’re great.
Carole Freeman:
We also already got the proxy measurement too, the triglycerides divided by HDL, and you have that below 1.5.
Dr. Bikman:
I’d like to joke that’s the poor man’s method, but it’s very accurate.
Carole Freeman:
That’s great. Let’s see. Where are my leave offs and my questions here? Let’s see. Here’s a fun one. What are some of the mistakes, or what should people not do when they’re trying to reverse their insulin resistance?
Dr. Bikman:
I would say don’t drink smoothies. That’s something. I know that we love smoothies. I get it, but that is a terrible way to take food. Not that drinking food is inherently a problem. It’s just when you’re making a smoothie out of fruits and vegetables, you’re thinking you’re getting all this wonderful stuff, but you’re not. Don’t make smoothies. When it comes to fruits and vegetables, which I do consider is generally fine, with my first rule of control carbs, I basically just say, “Fruits and vegetables are fine, although there’s some nuance there, but eat them don’t drink them.”
Dr. Bikman:
Too many people just want to drink them. Don’t do that. Don’t do it that way. Don’t try to… I guess a second piece of advice, let protein and fat come together. They’re supposed to come together. Eat them together.
Carole Freeman:
The only smoothie we’ve designed to have in our life is mother’s milk, and that’s [crosstalk 00:21:07] early in life.
Dr. Bikman:
Yes.
Carole Freeman:
Otherwise, we should be eating our food the rest of our life.
Dr. Bikman:
Yep.
Carole Freeman:
Mother’s Milk is the original smoothie.
Dr. Bikman:
It sure is. It’s the perfect thing for growth. It is high in all three macros.
Carole Freeman:
Oh my gosh, I had a total tangent here that’s related, but there’s this new series on Netflix called Unwell. One of the segments is about these people that are consuming breast milk as a cure-all is the next thing.
Dr. Bikman:
Oh my goodness.
Carole Freeman:
It’s the next thing.
Dr. Bikman:
Oh my goodness. I saw once there was a place that they made ice cream from human breast milk.
Carole Freeman:
It’s weird that we think that’s gross, but [crosstalk 00:21:47].
Dr. Bikman:
I know. I know.
Carole Freeman:
Let’s see. I had a question come in on Instagram earlier yesterday, too. Colt Milton at SuperSet your life is asking what types of protein cause the biggest insulin release?
Dr. Bikman:
That is a good question. It does depend on the amino acid profile. Us talking about how protein can have an insulin spike, it would be more accurately stated as various amino acids have higher insulin spike. I can’t exactly remember that is a good question. If I remember correctly, it’s going to be dairy protein, and then I think chicken or something like that. But if you’re eating that protein, even still, in the context of low carb, the insulin effect is less.
Carole Freeman:
Well, and I remember Dr. Michael Eades talking about as well some research probably at Low Carb Denver last year about how the more refined and processed a protein is, the more effect it has on influence and other ingredients too.
Dr. Bikman:
Yes, that’s exactly right.
Carole Freeman:
All right. Well, shout out to Dr. Eades’ protein power.
Dr. Bikman:
He’s awesome.
Carole Freeman:
Heather, let’s see. I grabbed her question here. Her question is at the end of this. She says that, “I’m very curious. Does insulin resistant… Does it have any genetic component, or are we all equally susceptible?”
Dr. Bikman:
No, it absolutely has a genetic component. Absolutely. In fact, people don’t really know this, but type two diabetes, which is insulin resistance, is much more genetic than type one is. It’s much more likely that if a parent is type two diabetic, that they will have a sibling or a child or a parent, whereas type one just pops up, and typically has nothing to do with any kind of familial inheritance. Yes, there’s absolutely a genetic component. I would say much of that genetic proclivity or tendency to become insulin resistant is probably fundamentally a difference of people’s fat cells.
Dr. Bikman:
In other words, how do your fat cells grow? Do your fat cells grow through just getting big, which is hypertrophy of the fat cell, or do they only get modestly big, and then they start to multiply, which is hyperplasia of the fat tissue or fat cells? If you genetically are more inclined towards hypertrophy, and many people are, then you will become more insulin resistant than otherwise. We see this in ethnicities like Indians, Asian, Indians. They have a profound tendency to become insulin resistant, and there is much more adipocyte hypertrophy, for example.
Dr. Bikman:
There is no doubt a genetic component, but I would hate to say this and have Heather or anyone else be discouraged by it. No, even if you have a genetic tendency, we know this is something you can fight extremely well by changing diet. I do mean extremely well. These are changes where people can have profound improvements in insulin sensitivity in just days, including to the point that they start getting off medications. Don’t let that discourage you. There’s very much a genetic component, but that doesn’t mean you can’t fight it.
Carole Freeman:
Excellent. I want to back up and talk a little bit more about protein, because early in the keto days, everyone was super worried about protein. I know that there are still a group of people out there that are really worried about protein. But can you share with us why is it that we don’t have to worry about protein intake so much on low carb or keto to reverse insulin resistance like we thought we did?
Dr. Bikman:
Yes. I mentioned this a moment ago. It really is dependent on the underlying glucose levels, that if you take in these amino acids in the midst of high glucose, it will amplify the insulin spike from the glucose alone. It’ll bump it up even higher than before. In contrast, if there’s no influx of glucose, and glucose is at base levels, then there’s a modest insulin spike from the amino acids alone, but it is in fact significantly more modest, but it’s there it happens. It’s really just dependent on whether the body needs to make new glucose.
Dr. Bikman:
If you’re eating protein, and you’re not eating glucose, the liver has to be turning on gluconeogenesis or making glucose from scratch basically. If insulin spiked, that process stopped. Insulin inhibits gluconeogenesis, and so it’s just the cleverly designed system which basically tells the body, “Look, I’m eating protein. I can have some modest insulin spike just letting my body know where to put the amino acids, but it can’t go too high, because if it does, I can’t keep making glucose from gluconeogenesis.”
Carole Freeman:
It sounds like it’s part of the wisdom of the way the body was designed is that, again, we pointed out the fact that protein and sugar or carbs don’t exist in foods together. It’s not a natural state to eat high carb, high protein food [crosstalk 00:27:22].
Dr. Bikman:
That’s right.
Carole Freeman:
It would make sense that our body starts to dysregulate, and it doesn’t like that combination together.
Dr. Bikman:
A lot of people will think that they’re being clever by stacking protein and insulin together, or protein and carbohydrate. They’ll say, “Well, I’m getting more of an anabolic effect. I’m going to get bigger muscles because of this.” It doesn’t happen. There’s human studies to show that if you eat protein, you’ll get a particular rise in muscle growth. If you eat protein with glucose, it doesn’t get any bigger than the protein alone, but that stands in contrast to what you see with protein and fat. When protein and fat are consumed together, you do get an additive anabolic effect compared to just the protein alone, so once again, pointing the finger at just nature doing it best, which is protein and fat.
Carole Freeman:
Well, I know that Colt Milton at SuperSet your life is going to be really interested in that last point because he’s into bodybuilding. I know that he’s going to be really interested in that part.
Dr. Bikman:
Good.
Carole Freeman:
I loved also that you cover in your book, I’ll just show it again here, why we get sick. I love that you talked about the role of salt in insulin resistance.
Dr. Bikman:
Yes.
Carole Freeman:
Can you touch on that a little bit for us?
Dr. Bikman:
Well, isn’t that an unexpected aspect of it all? We’ve been told for so long that salt is one of the enemies. Like saturated fat, we need to avoid it at all costs. It is interesting to note that insulin plays a role in telling the kidneys what to do with what they filter, including salt. On the flip side of this, elevated insulin stimulates the kidneys to hold on to too much salt and water, and so blood pressure starts to climb and the person has hypertension. In contrast, if a person stops eating salt, because it is such an essential molecule in the body, then the kidneys start to do everything they can to hold on to whatever salt they can.
Dr. Bikman:
Because of the mechanism I just mentioned, which is insulin helps the kidneys hold on to salt, one of the unintended consequences of restricting salt is the insulin goes up. Then you see this real phenomenon where severe salt restriction actually starts causing insulin resistance.
Carole Freeman:
Oh my gosh, all these things, the last 50 years of nutrition, we just [inaudible 00:29:38] it all on its head.
Dr. Bikman:
We got it so wrong.
Carole Freeman:
I apologize every day to people. I mean, I wasn’t personally responsible, but I sure shared a lot of that misinformation [crosstalk 00:29:51].
Dr. Bikman:
Same. Same. I was a personal trainer during my master’s degree about 20 years ago. I hated it, by the way, but I would spelt the same kind of nonsense. I look back into, and shudder to think how much more effective I could have been had I known then what I know now, but that’s of course, the theme of life. I would have made all kinds of different decisions.
Carole Freeman:
A little bit of Microsoft investment in the early days.
Dr. Bikman:
Right.
Carole Freeman:
But then we wouldn’t have you doing this amazing work you’re doing now.
Dr. Bikman:
That’s true.
Carole Freeman:
I’m glad you didn’t invest in Microsoft early on.
Dr. Bikman:
I would retire. I would have been in a sailboat somewhere by now.
Carole Freeman:
Let’s see. Oh gosh, here’s another really great question. This is a long question here, but I’ll summarize it for you. Basically, this is somebody who has a lipedema in her lower body. From what I understand, you actually can have some of your cells genetically in your body can be different levels of insulin resistance than others. For example, people with lipedema, those cells are more insulin resistant than the other cells in their body. She has noticed that she gets water retention in that part of her body with excess of salt, with alcohol consumption.
Carole Freeman:
She’s wondering how is it… She’s already lost 40 pounds. How is it that you can continue to improve insulin resistance with lipedema?
Dr. Bikman:
Unfortunately, lipedema is pretty poorly understood. All I will add to this is this idea that this lady, she probably also has a higher expression of lipoprotein lipase in those fat cells. Very briefly, lipoprotein lipase is the actual enzyme that tells the body where to store fat. Insulin tells the body how much fat to store. LPL works with insulin, but it determines where we store fat. That is generally very genetic, not exclusively. We can manipulate it somewhat through diet, but it is genetic where women who are putting fat in some of these awkward places like ankles, lower legs, or back of the arms, that is because of a higher expression of lipoprotein lipase.
Dr. Bikman:
The sad reality is there’s nothing you can do really. I’m getting a little off topic, but in those places where the body has the selective deposition of fat, because of lipoprotein lipase expression, that will be the very first place fat goes, and that will be the very last place that comes from the person. In this lady, perhaps, if she wanted to cut that fat out, she would have to get almost to the point of having a six pack 10% body fat before she’d start to really lose the fat around her ankles.
Dr. Bikman:
The lipedema, I can’t really speak to. I don’t know too much about it, but I would say even then, it’s fat cells that just have more LPL.
Carole Freeman:
I theorized that since insulin resistance influences salt retention and fluid retention, that perhaps [inaudible 00:33:09]. I have another lady as well that has the same lipedema in her lower body. She has the same thing where she tends to be a little more salt sensitive, and it causes more fluid retention there. I’m wondering if it’s related to the fact that because those cells are more insulin resistant, they’re retaining fluid much more than other tissues in the body.
Dr. Bikman:
Yes. If someone is retaining water, that is a sign of insulin resistance in general, I would say the fact that they’re noticing it more in the limbs. That could indicate just more of a blood pressure problem or an actual limb problem. That edema is basically fluid that has left the blood and hasn’t made its way into the lymph vessels, to the lymphatic circulation. That is edema. There could be that there’s some mismatch there, including hypertension. Frankly, pushing the water out more readily than it can be pulled into the lymphatics or fat blocking lymph flow as well.
Dr. Bikman:
But yes, water retention in general is a sign of the body’s insulin resistant. The high insulin is not allowing the kidneys to let the water go.
Carole Freeman:
Another adjunctive thing we’ve had for them that’s worked well is doing lymphatic massage to help get that fluid back up to where it should be in the body, so it can be excreted too.
Dr. Bikman:
Yes.
Carole Freeman:
These are people that have been following low carb keto for several years now too, so all right. Let’s see. Here’s another one from Heather, “Regarding the discussion with too much hormones resulting in the cells stop listening, is that also what happens with adrenal fatigue?”
Dr. Bikman:
This is a tricky answer, because as a scientist, I have to say there’s no evidence to even support that adrenal fatigue is a real phenomenon. I do say that with caution, because science doesn’t always know everything. But I guess I would have to just say I don’t know how real adrenal fatigue is. As a scientist, I’m a little skeptical because I don’t know of data to fully support that idea. But let’s say it is, just if for no other reason than to be diplomatic, let’s say that adrenal fatigue is real. That is a big assumption.
Dr. Bikman:
I want everyone to know that I’m saying it that way. Then yeah, probably, it could be that these chronically elevated levels of cortisol are resulting in a reduction in the sensitivity to cortisol. But to counter that thought, even as I say it, it doesn’t happen in actual cortisol syndromes like Cushing syndrome or Cushing disease. The cortisol continues to just wreak absolute havoc on the body. Adrenal fatigue, I wish I could answer that with more optimism. I don’t know that it’s a real thing, but I do know it’s a popular thing.
Carole Freeman:
I went back to university, which is all about, “Here’s your adrenal fatigue. It’s a thing. Here’s the herbs to treat it and all that,” but there was a podcast I listened to from Rob Wolfe, where he interviewed a naturopathic doctor, and he kind of spun that whole thing on its head. He basically showed that what we think of as adrenal fatigue is actually just inflammation that’s suppressing the optimal function of the adrenal gland, and it ties right in with insulin resistance [crosstalk 00:36:55].
Dr. Bikman:
I could buy that definition. I could absolutely buy into that, that this is actually a consequence of chronic stress mixed with some inflammation. Yes, I think that would probably… I could get behind that definition. The idea of adrenal fatigue are the adrenal glands are just stopping working.
Carole Freeman:
I’ve seen that. I mean, my own past story, which I won’t get into now, I had all the symptoms of adrenal fatigue, but as soon as I started low carb keto, the symptoms went away immediately, and so we’re like, “The adrenal fatigue is a real thing.” Kemp says like, “Oh, it takes six or 12 months to heal it,” but as soon as we drop insulin down significantly, the body starts to work the way that it should, and then the adrenal fatigue evaporates. It goes away.
Dr. Bikman:
I’m interested though. This Heather Brown gal, is this a picture of Heather? Is this you running a fricking iron man?
Carole Freeman:
She does. Yes.
Dr. Bikman:
That’s incredible. You don’t have adrenal fatigue. You just have fatigue, [crosstalk 00:37:53]. I hate to break it to you.
Carole Freeman:
She says she did her math. Triglycerides and HDL are exactly the same, so it’s easy math for her. She’s at 1.0.
Dr. Bikman:
You’re sitting pretty.
Carole Freeman:
Cassie, she did get her insulin measured with her doctor.
Dr. Bikman:
That’s great. Eight is great. It really is. In fact, one of the original studies, I came to the number six that I came to, was looking at at eight was a good number from a study from the University of Arizona. That insulin with that glucose, you’re doing great.
Carole Freeman:
Cassie also has been following low carb keto for about four or five months now and has also dropped a significant amount of weight too.
Dr. Bikman:
Frankly, Cassie, I wouldn’t be surprised if very often your insulin levels are in fact six or lower. Like I said, there’s always a little bit of shifting around there.
Carole Freeman:
Dr. Bikman, I heard somebody speaking somewhere that five was good and three was optimal. Is that just going too far then or?
Dr. Bikman:
No, I’d be interested… I’m curious where you would have heard that or seen that. No, I wouldn’t disagree with that. I know lots of people that actually after being keto for a while, their insulin is one and two, and they’re perfectly healthy. That is a pretty strict cutoff, I would say that. I don’t think we need to be that extreme.
Carole Freeman:
I know for Cassie that when she got the result of eight, she said it was actually very motivating for her, because as women, we’re told the scale is king but to have this other health marker that she’s shooting towards like, “If I can get this down one or two more points,” for her, that was very motivating.
Dr. Bikman:
Good. Good. Well, that’s a good number. Cassie is doing fine.
Carole Freeman:
Good job, Cassie. Heather’s reporting back that, “Thank you for the question. You answered that very well.” Here’s somebody else asking about, “Will you have him talk about exercise?” Let’s see. I know he wrote about specific types of… Somebody’s read your book. This is great. I know he wrote about specific kinds of training being best for lowering insulin. Curious his thoughts about yoga. Is it the best to hold a pose, like a plank, until you can’t any longer, which is to failure rate?” Let’s talk about exercise.
Dr. Bikman:
I’m happy to. Yes. In fact, the older I get, and the more I am doing more calisthenics-based workouts, the more I appreciate the power in picking a pose, especially at near maximal tension, and holding it, and so including various yoga poses. When I say point of maximal tension, I mean, find… I don’t know enough about yoga to know what poses would fit with this. But let’s say, for example, I want to work my biceps, I would lay on the ground in a push-up type position, but then put my hands so that my hands are actually down by my waist, and then push myself up like that, and then hold it, so my arm, my biceps are maximal tension.
Dr. Bikman:
In contrast, I could put all my weight on my body with my arms bent like this, and then be pressing a handstand, but focus, hold the position when my muscle is at almost maximal stretch, and hold that there. As long as you go to failure, it doesn’t matter how you did it. You’ve done the single best thing you can for your muscles.
Carole Freeman:
That’s your next book is then how to get fit and toned and hillier. I think, that’s [inaudible 00:41:47]. By the way, that’s [crosstalk 00:41:47].
Dr. Bikman:
How to get swole, written by a man who’s frankly a little scrawny.
Carole Freeman:
Pam’s got another good question here. Let’s see. How do you recommend getting additional salt intake? Salt, shots, supplementation or other methods?
Dr. Bikman:
Well, this might be a boring answer. I would just say salt your food. I hate to… That’s anticlimactic, I know. Well, let me elaborate, though, a little bit. I am an advocate of salt. I love the Redmond Real Salt people. Personally, I know them. I think they’re fantastic. Boom. I would say having said that, one of the drawbacks of all these sexy salts that we have these days is that we may not be getting enough iodine. There was some wisdom behind adding iodine to salt once upon a time. It’s because the consequences of not having enough iodine are absolutely disastrous.
Dr. Bikman:
If you start to run out of iodine, then you run out of your thyroid hormone, although we do have a reservoir of thyroid hormone in our blood that we can start to call on. But if you run out of that stuff, the consequences on your brain are disastrous. As adults, we could overcome it and get out of that brain fog. If it happens in a kid, it is potentially irreversible, the brain damage, the delay, the brain delays that the kid will experience. Make sure in the midst of all these wonderful salts that we have these days that you are finding ways to get iodine.
Dr. Bikman:
If you’re eating a lot of seafood, you’re going to get iodine. Otherwise, I would say just get on to Amazon and buy a little potassium iodide dropper, and take one little drop a day, and you’ll get all you need. But if you aren’t getting iodine, good luck with normal thyroid function, and then the brain will be the first tissue to suffer once you start running out of thyroid hormone. You will if your iodine is deficient.
Carole Freeman:
Oh, great, so we don’t have to do the table salt with dextrose in it to get the iodine [crosstalk 00:43:53].
Dr. Bikman:
Good point. That’s right. Good point. Good point. Just find other ways to get iodine, and there are plenty. Again, if you eat seafood, you’re fine, but we don’t eat seafood really, so make sure you get it.
Carole Freeman:
Excellent. All right, last call for questions everyone who’s watching right now. Let’s see if I can pull out one more. Let me look through my notes of all the questions I wanted to ask you. We talked about optimal amounts. What is insulin? Let’s see. In your book, you talked about basically how insulin resistance is tied to pretty much every chronic illness and disease and condition that we’re suffering from, which makes a lot of sense, because even in our lifetime, we can remember that there weren’t this epidemic of autoimmune conditions.
Carole Freeman:
All these people weren’t allergic to every food that they ate, and all those things. Just in a snapshot, can you explain how is insulin resistance related to all these problems we’re suffering from?
Dr. Bikman:
If we remember the definition of insulin resistance, which is insulin isn’t working quite the same way, but there’s too much of it at the same time, then we start to… We can almost go from top to bottom. The brain does become insulin resistant, and it can’t get enough glucose to meet its energy needs, and so it starts to suffer. You see that not only with Alzheimer’s disease, but you actually do see the brain doesn’t get enough glucose in Alzheimer’s disease. You see it also with migraine headaches, which is why when you fill that energetic gap by giving the brain ketones, which it can use perfectly well, the brain suddenly gets better.
Dr. Bikman:
They may never have another migraine again as long as they’re in ketosis. The brain, the heart starts to suffer where the insulin resistance is promoting heart growth, so they have this cardiomyopathy or the failing heart. The blood vessels are too constricted, and we have too much blood, and so we have hypertension. The liver is constantly being inundated with this insulin signal to make more fat, and so the liver can develop fatty liver disease. The gonads, I mentioned the infertilities in women and men with PCOS and erectile dysfunction respectively.
Dr. Bikman:
Our muscles as they become insulin resistant, they can start to experience sarcopenia or muscle wasting. Same with bones, joints, and skin and on and on. It matters.
Carole Freeman:
Yes. Too much is not a good thing.
Dr. Bikman:
The nice thing about it is that once we acknowledge the role of insulin resistance behind so many of these chronic diseases, then we acknowledge that we don’t have to try to treat every disease as an individual problem. We can address the core problem, and the rest of the things will start to take care of themselves.
Carole Freeman:
It’s beautiful. It’s lovely how just this dietary change I get to help people with makes this huge difference of head to toe, everything gets better in them, so it makes sense. All right, this person is asking, “Dr. Bikman, can you explain the connection with high cholesterol, heart disease and insulin resistance?” I picked a three-second topic. Right?
Dr. Bikman:
Yeah, that’s not an easy one, but I’ll take a crack at being brief. Let’s look at it from the perspective of LDL, where LDL cholesterol may matter, emphasis on may. There are studies to show that it is correlated with heart disease. There are studies to show that it is not. Let’s say that it is, or how can we reconcile these disparate findings? It could be that looking at just LDL cholesterol number doesn’t tell us what we need to know. Maybe what we need to know is the LDL diameter. The smaller, more dense LDL particles are thought to be able to physically invade the blood vessel wall more easily than a larger, more buoyant LDL particle, because we can have the spectrum of size.
Dr. Bikman:
Insulin resistance pushes an LDL pattern B or a small dense LDL, which is thought to be more atherogenic. I guess I’ll just leave it at that.
Carole Freeman:
For those of you in the… Well, everybody here is in the membership, but I’ve got a cardiology nurse coming on next month for our guest expert so we can ask that person a lot more too. Let’s see. Cassie is asking, “Dr. Bikman, do you have any thoughts, pros, cons of dairy products?” What do you have?
Dr. Bikman:
I do of course have thoughts. I always do. I’m very thoughtful, which is a nicer way to say I’m very opinionated. I’m very thoughtful, so I have thoughts. I think in adults, I do think… Well, the evidence is actually pretty favorable that you can have adults drink more dairy, and it’s helpful for weight loss. I do think there’s something to be said for the lessons of our ancestors that we forgotten. Once upon a time, if an adult was drinking dairy, I think often, it would have been fermented. Anytime we had these foods that we were holding on to, it’s fermented.
Dr. Bikman:
What is the power of fermenting dairy is that the bacteria only eat the starches or the sugars, so it eats the lactose, and all it leaves behind is the protein and the fat. To my delight, with my palate, it leaves these tart little short chain fatty acids, which give anything that’s fermented that tart flavor. It’s because of the short chain fats that the bacteria pump out after eating the starches and the sugars. I think as adults, there’s a lot of power in fermented dairy, although normal dairy is probably also fine, but I do think dairy is, as we said, a food for growth.
Dr. Bikman:
It is a beautiful system in mammals, where mom makes this perfect cocktail of all three macronutrients, and it helps the baby grow as quickly as possible. Whole fat dairy in children, I’m absolutely in favor of. Full fat dairy in adults, I would just say, “Well, maybe you need to be careful with, and then focus more on the fermented dairy like yogurt or kefir or sour milk, those options.”
Carole Freeman:
Real sour cream, right?
Dr. Bikman:
That’s right.
Carole Freeman:
Nice. All right. Cassie’s got another one, a really good one here, too. How likely is it that we can get our mainstream medical field to start testing insulin resistance? She says that when she brought her labs back, it was normal, and the range is zero to 24.9.
Dr. Bikman:
I know. I know. That’s part of the problem. We’ve overlooked insulin for so long that we don’t even have a consensus number. I confessed this in the book very explicitly. Yes, so it is part of the problem. When do I think it’ll happen? I have no idea. But honestly, that is part of what I hope is a takeaway from the book if I am naive enough to kid myself that it’ll have some lasting impact. An impact I hope it does have is that there will be medical practitioners. There will be people in positions of power within medicine, that they will start to say, “You know what? Yep, we’re going to make this part of our routine number, a routine checkup.”
Dr. Bikman:
Then with that, just growing mountain of data, we can come closer and closer to really identifying what is a good consensus. Where do we want people to be?
Carole Freeman:
Right now, those lab range is normal. It’s just basically like, all the tests they’ve done, this is where the numbers fall between, right? We can actually have some research to look at, “Here’s healthy people. What are their numbers? Here’s people that have other things going on.” I’m curious then with your book coming out, have you had any kickbacks from the middle community, or have you had any stories of physicians that have had their eyes opened?
Dr. Bikman:
No. No. None. None, but I will say over the years that I’ve been preaching this message, I have, over the years, received good feedback. My favorite audience is actually healthcare practitioners. When I can speak to nurses and doctors or health hospital administrators, that is my favorite group of people, because when they see the data, as I outline it, just study after study, they appreciate it. They are glad to know. I think that’s an important… It’s important for me to remember but all of us, lest we look at our doctor or nurse and think, “Oh, they’re so ignorant. They’re so reluctant to change. They’re so egotistical about it.”
Dr. Bikman:
I’ve seen these seemingly egotistical, rigid, people change very, very quickly when they actually see the data. Everyone has a reluctance to admit they don’t know something. I think in medicine, maybe that’s perhaps more of a problem than elsewhere, but we only know what we’ve been taught or we’ve taught ourselves. In my experience, when these healthcare practitioners see the data, it leaves an impact on them, and then I like to think I’ve left that group… left them with a conviction to measure insulin.
Carole Freeman:
That’s great. That’s really hopeful and optimistic. That speaks to that psychology of when we believe something to be true for a long enough period of time, it takes a mountain of evidence to change that.
Dr. Bikman:
Yes.
Carole Freeman:
Thank you for putting that mountain of evidence together for us in your book, but also the work that you’re doing too. Dr. Bikman, where can people find you on social media, websites?
Dr. Bikman:
Thank you. I am fairly active on social media, not as active as I sometimes wish I were, but then I wish I weren’t active on it at all another time. People can find me at benbikmanphd. Bikman is just spelled B-I-K-M-A-N, no C, benbikmanphd. I just share research on human metabolism, nothing personal ever. It’s not my jam. Then I have a website where you guys can… I will start providing blog content and maybe even video content, and that’s gethlth.com, H-L-T-H. While you’re there, I won’t mention any more than this. You can also look into a low carb shake that a couple of my brothers and I have made.
Dr. Bikman:
The fact is I think there’s just always something to be said for something convenient. That really is the purpose. We just wanted to make a better low carb shake, and so we did. Anyway, you can learn more about it there.
Carole Freeman:
All right, I’m sure we’ll have some people checking that out. People always want to check out shakes. Thank you so much for taking the time out your busy schedule for being here.
Dr. Bikman:
My pleasure.
Carole Freeman:
Thank you for answering everyone’s questions. Really, really great stuff. I’m just so grateful to you. The work that you’re doing is really, really important in this world.
Dr. Bikman:
Well, that’s nice. Thanks so much. Thanks again for the invitation. I had a great time. Thanks [crosstalk 00:55:15]. Thanks, everybody, for the questions. Thanks, guys.
Carole Freeman:
Yeah. [crosstalk 00:55:18]. Thanks, everyone. We’ll see you again soon. Bye.
