Kellie Logsdon:
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Carole Freeman:
Oh, my pleasure. Well, just to start out with, will you share what is your keto journey? How did you hear about it? I read in your bio here that you had some gut issues and stuff like that, but just tell us a little more about what the journey’s been for you?

Kellie Logsdon:
Sure. So I grew up in the 70s, where the dietary guidelines came out in 1977. And being from a family that was into health and into nutrition, we decided that as a family that we were going to get on board and be as healthy as we possibly could. I was a Division I intercollegiate athlete for the volleyball player for the University of San Diego. I was a junior national paddle tennis champion. So our family was very active and very into health. But when those dietary guidelines came out, every ounce of fat and every ounce of flavor left the house.

Kellie Logsdon:
And so for decades, we were on this journey of a whole grain, low fat, mostly vegetarian sort of diet. But throughout those years, my weight fluctuated a lot. And I never really could get into a mode or a system of anything that felt like it was a lifestyle for me. It was just always a struggle. And I ranged in weight, it was a pretty big spectrum. The lowest end was about 125 and the highest end was about 204. Now, I know that’s a pretty big spectrum there. But I typically sat in the middle there. I currently am 135 pounds, and I’m 5’9″, and once I found keto, I have effortlessly been this way for three years.

Kellie Logsdon:
So for me, it has become a lifestyle. But how I got there is that in my early 30s, I had two small children, a husband, I was living in the northeast, I was a stay at home mom, and I got really sick. I developed diverticulitis, and if those of you who don’t know what that is, it’s an infection in your lower sigmoid colon. And it’s not a typical thing for people that are in their early 30s but it was incredibly painful. Luckily, I was able to treat it with antibiotics and figured that I would just sort of be on my way and be healthy again. I went on for the next decade to have diverticulitis seven more times.

Carole Freeman:
Wow.

Kellie Logsdon:
So yeah, just wreaked havoc on my gut flora. My stomach was distended or not for about a decade. And the disconcerting thing is that nobody could really tell me what to eat. While I was going through this, I thought to myself, “Well, I need to go to school because I’m going to figure this thing out.” And I’m going to take the classes and go to the Institute of Integrative Nutrition to learn how to take care of myself, because clearly, I wasn’t connecting with what was being taught to me from my doctors’ offices.

Kellie Logsdon:
After I graduated from IIN, I got sick for the seventh time and I said, “This has got to end.” I was still doing what I thought I was supposed to be doing, calories in, calories out, eating all my whole grains, calorie restriction, beating the crap out of myself in the gym, running half marathons and triathlons and spinning and all that sort of stuff. So I went on about three years ago to have about a foot of my colon removed. It was a pretty expensive and extensive and painful surgery. But it didn’t end there. Because after I got out of the hospital, I got an infection, I got another infection, I got C. diff, which I’m not going to go into that but it’s a really awful infection. And I was on eight rounds of antibiotics in about 12 weeks. And again, nobody could tell me what to eat other than continue eating your rainbow jello and mashed potatoes with some sort of a mystery gravy on them and everything I was served in the hospitals four times in 12 weeks.

Kellie Logsdon:
They would serve it to me, and I’m like, “This is healthy?” And late 2016, I came across a book by Dr. Jason Fung and the Obesity Code, it made a lot of sense to me. But the interesting part that I found was that nobody could really tell me what to eat. And then I read this book that’s telling me not to eat anything. For those of you who haven’t read the book, and I highly recommend it, it’s called the Obesity Code by Dr. Jason Fung. It talks a lot about fasting and autophagy and healing yourself from the inside and giving your body the opportunity to self correct and heal itself.

Kellie Logsdon:
If you’re not spending a whole lot of time digesting food, your body’s got to feed on something. So I started with intermittent fasting and I didn’t even really dive into my diet. I was still eating my whole grains. But I was still having chronic urinary tract infections and chronic yeast infections. And I was like, “Okay, from everything that I know, I know that sugar feeds all that stuff. So let’s start looking at like taking the sugar out of my diet.” And Dr. Jason Fung’s books and other books that I sort of dove into at that point, they talked a lot about the ketogenic diet and the low carb diet. And within a month of going on those diets, I knew I was on the track to pure health. So even though when I started this, I wasn’t overweight. I was actually underweight. Even though I started it all of a sudden, now I’m healthy. But now for three years, I have maintained the weight, which for decades plagued me, decades of rollercoaster up and down. So that is kind of how I got started on the ketogenic and intermittent fasting journey. And it’s been a lifesaver and a game changer for me. So I love it.

Carole Freeman:
Oh, that’s so amazing. And I mean, I love hearing everybody’s story, because there’s so many people that have had to go deep into sickness in order to find this way of living and healing. And everybody’s got a different journey and it’s sad that we have to get that sick before we’re so desperate to be able to figure this out. But the good news is because of social media and things like this video that we’re doing right here, allow us to share with so many more people to get the word out that you don’t have to wait until you’re that sick to follow this way of eating. So I’m sorry what you’ve been through. And thank you so much for sharing your story in order to help other people. And so I’m curious, so from there, lead us into how did Kellie’s Kitchen come about.

Kellie Logsdon:
So the Kellie Kitchen started almost right after I started a ketogenic lifestyle. And when I knew that I couldn’t easily go grab a takeout or go grab, and that I was going to have to start cooking for myself, I decided that I was going to try and recreate a lot of things that I used to eat in my daily life. Well, how can I do that now? So one of the messages that I try to impart, and it goes hand in hand with how the Kellie Kitchen started is that when I started, I had little kids, I had babies, I lived in a crappy little tiny apartment in Santa Monica with my angry husband and a box of meat helper.

Carole Freeman:
I mean it’s a funny way of like disguising the real name of it.

Kellie Logsdon:
Yes, so the meat helper, it was my way to get dinner on the table fast. And that was 20 years ago. There was just a lot of trial and error of how am I going to feed my family fast and how am I going to get some nutrition in them, and do it on a budget as well. And so over 20 years, it’s been a lot of trial and error in the kitchen, a lot of garbage can worthy meals that my children and my ex-husband will attest to. But it became a love of cooking, but also taking care of myself.

Kellie Logsdon:
And so three years ago, when I started cooking, I was creating meals at home and I would sort of start thinking about, “Okay, well, if I’m going to take what most restaurants use as a base, whether it’s a potato skin or a bowl of pasta, or like a French roll or bread or whatever it may be, when you take all those things out and you’re left with your protein and your fat and your vegetable, how can we enhance those things?” And so it grew from there and I started posting pictures about it. I started sharing with friends. And my boyfriend at the time was like, “What are we doing in the Kellie Kitchen today?”

Kellie Logsdon:
And so that’s how the Kellie Kitchen got started. I taught myself how to do the website. I built the entire website by myself. I taught myself how to take all the pictures. I have such a passion and drive to be able to share with people that this is just real food. There’s nothing fancy about it. There’s nothing… keto, I think a lot of people here that. I mean, it’s just been my experience, maybe you can tell me differently. It’s been my experience that when people hear keto, they think, “Oh my God, this is super scientific. I’m going to have to really devote a ton of time and calculation to figuring all this out.”

Kellie Logsdon:
And basically, to me, it’s just real food and we’re taking out actually the fake food or taking out the box food, we’re taking out the processed food. But we’ve been in a society where they have made it so easy for us, they’ve made it so easy that you don’t even really have to think about it. You just go into the freezer and pull out your dinner. So that’s how the Kellie Kitchen got started, with my learning how to make all these foods and create these foods, but also trying to share with other people that this is just real food. And we don’t have to rely on packaged, big companies to provide our food for us. And I have two daughters, they’re both teen… well, one’s a teenager, one’s 20, and they’ve always seen me cooking. But I think one of the greatest gifts that we can give to our children, instead of saying, “I hate cooking.”, it’s, “This is how I can take care of myself.”, and it doesn’t have to be that hard. So that’s how it started. And it fuels my flames and I have so much food in my kitchen, in my freezer, in my fridge, that if anybody is driving by and wants to stop by for lunch or dinner, please call me because I’m always looking for people to feed.

Carole Freeman:
Oh, nice. So would you say you love to cook or it’s just grown out of necessity and you enjoy sharing the keto message and cooking with people?

Kellie Logsdon:
That’s a great question. I know I’m probably a little bit in the minority, but I really love cooking. But let me tell you also why, because I can take care of myself. But one of the greatest parts of me cooking is that it’s a family affair. Now, no one else in my family cooks but they all eat whatever I make. If I had to do everything, then it would be my journey and they would just be sort of hopping on. At the beginning of the week, I ask everybody what their schedules are and what they feel like eating for this week. I happen to love grocery shopping. I know that’s kind of a little strange, too but I love grocery shopping. It’s a creative outlet for me to sort of think about what I can create.

Kellie Logsdon:
If nobody’s going to be home that week, I don’t have to do any cooking or planning or whatever. But if they are going to be home, I go and do all the grocery shopping. But guess what, they empty the car, they put it all away. I cook it all. I have another… my boyfriend does all of the dishes. My daughter empties the dishwasher. I never empty the dishwasher. That’s the job I hate to do. But I think the part that it is a family affair and we’re all in this together, if I were just doing it for myself, that would be fine too, because I could cook whatever I wanted to and I could eat leftovers when I wanted to or I could skip a meal if I wanted to. But when you have everybody involved, and everybody says, “Yeah, I feel like eating tacos tonight.”, it’s deflating to me when I was a young mom to bring a meal to the table and you have two kids that are like, “I don’t want to eat that.” And then somebody else in the house is saying, “Yeah, let’s just go out for pizza.” And I’m like, “Oh my God, I’ve got to clean it all up.” I’ve got to, whatever. So a family affair or having some input in that has been really helpful and a driver for me.

Carole Freeman:
Oh, that’s great. Yeah. And I love that we teach our kids in our family how to eat based on what we’re eating. And so many people think that like, “Well, Cheetos are good for me. I got to let my kids have all those kid foods.”

Kellie Logsdon:
Right.

Carole Freeman:
But my opinion is, is that it’s more important for kids to eat really healthy foods, because they’re building the foundation of their health for the rest of their lives. If you were building a house, would you just like to cut corners on the foundation and be like, “Yeah, we’ll just fix it later when we build the rest of the house.”

Kellie Logsdon:
Right, right. And what’s the saying? If you teach it, “If you give them a fish, they’ll eat for a day, if you teach them to fish, they will eat for life.” And so my girls actually, they do pretty well. They’re not fully keto. But they really try and it’s a progression for them as well when I’m not around to cook for them.

Carole Freeman:
Yeah, yeah, well, and it’s empowering for the kids to see you doing that, but also just making that choice themselves. When they notice how much better they feel, I find the kids are like, “It tastes good and I feel better when I eat this way.” So they can make that choice for themselves instead of being forced to eat anything. So I forgot to ask you, once you started adopting a keto, low carb way of living, what happened to your health?

Kellie Logsdon:
So pretty much immediately, again, I mentioned that I was a little bit underweight and I wasn’t necessarily sleeping the best. So besides that I actually gained a little bit of weight, which I needed to, which it almost sounds kind of weird to me, because I was a yo-yo dieter, but I gained a little bit of weight. And it was sort of like a good thing for me. I filled out and I felt strong. But the other part of keto and intermittent fasting is that I just had this level of freedom and clarity, in my mind, in my work focus, I just sort of… I always have a skip in my step.

Kellie Logsdon:
My boyfriend and I have this thing about, we really guard our sleep very, very, very closely. And he’s away right now. And I’ve said to him, “Oh, I didn’t sleep very well last night.” And he was like, “When did you turn off your devices or whatever?” And I was like, “Well, I got out of my rhythm.” But when I’m in my rhythm, I mean, I can get a solid seven to nine hours of sleep a night, and that just drives my whole day the next day. I think that there’s so many kids and people that part of their… I mean, I think maybe the first level is if they could just get a full night’s sleep, what could happen with this world? What can we create with this world if people just actually slept?

Kellie Logsdon:
So my sleep improved. I actually started taking some collagen so that I could help with the thickness of my hair and my skin and that has really changed. I just add a little scoop of that. It’s nothing special. Just some collagen hydrolysate into my morning coffee. And yeah, it’s just, I’m like a little Energizer Bunny, that I’m just constantly going.

Carole Freeman:
Well, and you mentioned too, so you came from a place of chronic UTIs and yeast infections and the diverticulitis and the chronic infections. What’s happened that ways for you?

Kellie Logsdon:
Oh, they’re all gone.

Carole Freeman:
I know to you it’s like obvious, but we didn’t get to talk about it.

Kellie Logsdon:
Interestingly enough, my last cold, like sore throat cough that lasted for probably four days was in November of 2017. I mean, think about that. I used to get like a huge cold, sinus infections. I haven’t been on antibiotics since 2016. And hat was sort of a regular thing. It was like, “Yeah, just give her a prescription for Amoxicillin or Keflex or whatever. So I haven’t had to be on any medication at all. And I haven’t had a urinary tract infection or a yeast infection. I will say that something that sort of happens, because I’m baking all the time, I don’t eat everything that I bake. But I am sort of eating a lot more carbs. And you sort of get that carb creep when you’re tasting all these things that are keto friendly, but they still have carbs, I do tend to feel like, “Oh, I feel like I might have a little something going on here, I better knock that off.”

Kellie Logsdon:
And I do. I cut it out and kind of reset my back to baseline of how I eat and bring down my carb, or I should say not bring it down, but just get a little tighter on my carb count. Because in general, I’m pretty loose, I’m pretty liberal with my carb counting. I sort of keep it in my head. And when I feel myself sort of slipping or getting off track, I will tighten that thing up and get back to normal. So I haven’t had any urinary tract infections, bladder infections, kidney infections. And I know that there’s a whole community of people that have C. diff, and I won’t go into C. diff too much because it’s sort of a devastating sickness. And there’s not a whole lot, I mean, well, let’s just leave it at that. But the number one fear that I had after having C. diff is that you really can’t go on antibiotics anymore. Because if you do, you’ll have a reoccurring C. diff bout, and it’s incredibly painful, really tough to get rid of.

Kellie Logsdon:
And so, in these three years, being on keto, I haven’t had to go on any antibiotics for anything, for sinus infection or bladder infection or any of those sorts of things. So it sort of has kept me away from having to take antibiotics, which could make me get C. diff again. So it sort of kind of goes all circle. So if I don’t have to do, if I don’t eat this, I don’t have to go on antibiotics, if I don’t go on antibiotics, then I don’t get C. diff. And it’s sort of this circle. And so it’s been three years of, I would say, the best health that I’ve ever been in my life.

Carole Freeman:
Oh, that’s fantastic. Yeah. So it’s not a surprise to me that all the immune stuff gets better. I just had to actually get you to share it because there’s a lot of other people out there struggling with that too. And similar for me, like I don’t get cold and the flu anymore. And I was somebody that several times a year would get just a flu that would knock me out 10 days or whatever. It’s like, no, everyone else around me is getting sick. And they all say this and that and the other and it’s like it just doesn’t even doesn’t even hit.

Kellie Logsdon:
Well, and the immediacy of running to the doctor to get a prescription for an antibiotic, that needs to be changed. Because there’s a lot of things that we get that if we just take care of ourselves and eat better, that we will heal ourselves and we don’t need to immediately pop a pill because it might not even fix the problem. You might even strip your gut even more.

Carole Freeman:
Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. So how do you measure success now in your health and even in your kitchen?

Kellie Logsdon:
Yes. Well, I would be lying if I said I didn’t weigh myself or that I didn’t check the fit of my clothing. I really check in with myself about my energy levels, how much I’m sleeping. I do loosely track my scale weight, I loosely track how my clothes are feeling. And so on a fitness level and a sort of I guess a vanity level, those are some of the things that I do.

Kellie Logsdon:
Health wise, I check in with how am I feeling if my energy is low, or I’m feeling down or I’m not sleeping well, then I’m in tune with I know how great it feels to feel really good. And when I don’t feel that way, I’m going to do everything I can to get back there. So that’s one thing.

Kellie Logsdon:
Measuring success in the kitchen, well, there’s a couple things. So my boyfriend is very sweet. And anything I feed him, he’s like, “That’s amazing.” One time I made, I just sauteed some zucchini with a little bit of feta and some butter and some garlic. And I went to sprinkle some pepper and the lid fell off the pepper. And so it was a very peppery zucchini dish. He ate the whole thing anyway. I tried to scoop as much pepper out as I possibly could. But he ate the whole thing anyways and he was like, “That was great. It was a little spicy.”, but I love making things that people that are not keto, they eat it. I don’t tell them. And I’m like, and they’re like, “This is amazing. This is delicious.”, whether it’s a dessert, or even when I smoke a rack of barbecue ribs, and then I have a low sugar barbecue sauce. And I have a big party over or I make a big platter of tacos or whatever it may be. People don’t even know, and that to me is like I made something that doesn’t taste like diet food. Because it is just real food.

Kellie Logsdon:
And then once they sort of taste that, they think, “This isn’t so hard. This isn’t so weird. This isn’t so science-y.” And so that’s a huge win for me. And that’s also how I measure success. Yeah, so I mean, I have a lot of friends that want to start keto. And I help, I hold their hand a little bit. And I share with them everything that I possibly can. And so when I have friends that have started the keto journey and they lose weight or they’re feeling better, that’s also a little bit of a win for me. I do think that some of my friends are afraid to tell me that they have gone keto, even though I know that they have. I think they’re a little bit afraid because I am so passionate about the food that at 6 a.m. in the morning, I’m texting them like, “What do you think of, if I were to make buffalo chicken in zucchini boats? Does that sound like something?”, and I’ll send them pictures of popsicles or pictures of a cheesecake or pictures of a casserole and they’re like, “Enough with the food.”

Kellie Logsdon:
I think that some people hold off and don’t tell me that they’re doing keto. But that’s also another win if I can share with friends how to live this way and that it’s not so, so difficult.

Carole Freeman:
Oh, that’s cool, yeah. It’s fun to see those ripples and waves of impact we have on other people in the world.

Kellie Logsdon:
Absolutely.

Carole Freeman:
What are some of the common mistakes that you see or missteps that people do when they’re first starting out?

Kellie Logsdon:
So I mentioned this a little bit before. The carb creep, that’s a real thing. And what I mean when I say the carb creep is that there are carbs and things that you wouldn’t necessarily know that there are carbs in. And just because it’s a keto friendly food doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have any carbs in it. Broccoli has carbs in it and cauliflower has carbs in it, and nuts have carbs in it. I had no idea in the beginning, like I just thought, “Oh nuts are friendly.” So my favorite nut is cashews. So I’d have a serving of cashews. And I’d be like, “Oh my gosh, there’s 10 carbs in one serving.”

Kellie Logsdon:
So that was a little bit of a wake up call. And I think that there’s a lot of what happens or the mistake that happens is that they’ll go to a restaurant and they’ll order something and then they won’t realize that it was dipped in flour, or that maybe they added flour to the soup, or that they added some sugar. They think, “Oh, I got the salad with the chicken and with the avocado and with the slivered almonds and with the greens and it was a great keto thing. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.” And I say to them, “What was the dressing that you used?” And they’re like, “Oh, I used a poppy seed vinaigrette.” I was like, “Was it sweet?” They’re like, “Yeah.” I think those hidden carbs, we really need to be diligent about, especially when other people are serving us, because those carbs add up. And so those are the two things that I see the most is the carb creep, thinking that everything is a free food or because it’s keto friendly, and we can eat whatever we want of it. And then the other is the hidden carbs and the hidden sugars.

Carole Freeman:
Yeah, a lot of people are surprised to find out that vegetables are not all you can eat on a keto diet because every other diet that we follow is, the vegetables are one thing you can eat so you try to fill up on those so my clients start out and they find out that they actually have to limit their servings of vegetables. That makes their head spin a little bit sometimes.

Kellie Logsdon:
Right, right. Well and for me, I try to sort of say to anybody that I’m talking to is that, “Look, I would rather that you eat, if you’re going to overeat anything, I’d rather that you ovary broccoli than ding dongs or Doritos or whatever it may be, croissants or donuts. I’d rather that you overeat broccoli, but let’s keep it all in check because broccoli still does have carbs.”

Carole Freeman:
Yeah. Yeah, well, that’s a good point. Broccolis win over-

Kellie Logsdon:
Yes.

Carole Freeman:
So let’s talk about kitchen tips. So what tips do you have for people in their kitchen?

Kellie Logsdon:
So, I like to batch cook. Again, I sort of assess what everyone in my house is doing. If it’s just me, I know how, I can sort of in general know what I’m going to do for the week. One of my favorite things to do is to shop my fridge. I shop my freezer and I shop my fridge and I think to myself, “Okay, what needs to be eaten this week? What do I have on hand?” If I have some New York strip steaks in my freezer, and I think to myself, “I think I want to have like steak tacos this week.” Okay, great. I’ve got the frozen, I use ButcherBox. I don’t know if you have any of that but ButcherBox has been through sort of my savior. I always have ground beef in there. So I shop my fridge and my freezer.

Carole Freeman:
I have never thought about that before, but I love that term. And I usually do that as well. And I never even thought of it being a thing. I love that. Shop your fridge to see what you’ve got in there already as a base for meals. I love that.

Kellie Logsdon:
Absolutely. So I think one of my greatest recipes came from shopping my fridge. I said to my family, “What do you feel like eating this week?”, and obviously pizza’s pretty much on the menu. People love it. But I opened up the fridge and I was like, “Wow, I’ve got Portobello pizzas in here.” Somebody else threw out in the family that they wanted to have something with pesto, and I was like, “Oh, this could be interesting. Let’s make Portobello pesto pizzas in the oven and it has become one of our staples.” And so I kind of ask people what they want to eat. And then I shop my fridge and then I go to the supermarket and I batch cook. So that’s sort of one of my number one tips. Another thing that I do that if you are a mayonnaise eater, I know that there are some non mayonnaise eaters.

Carole Freeman:
My son is a mayonnaise freak. I don’t know where he got it, actually I know where he got it. He got it from my mom, but the kid will literally eat out of the mayonnaise jar like spoonfuls.

Kellie Logsdon:
And I love mayonnaise too, not that much. I love mayonnaise, too, and I’ve also become a huge fan of the Instant Pot . As much cooking as I’ve done, I was a little afraid of it. But I just kept practicing at it and doing some really basic things. When I started the keto journey, I made chicken salad, like a scoop of chicken salad. That has always been one of my go to things. So first, I would just buy the chicken salad already made. Then I was like I was at Costco, and I bought a rotisserie chicken there. They’re huge, they’re $5. They’re filled with a bunch of stuff that you probably should not be eating. I don’t know if they tell you the carb count of any of the fillers on the Costco.

Kellie Logsdon:
But at the time, it fit my budget and it worked well. And I would bring that Costco chicken home and I would make chicken salad that I would put celery and a little bit of scallions and mayonnaise, cracked pepper. And I would keep that in my fridge. And I did the same thing with tuna salad and with egg salad. But the thing about my Instant Pot is that every Sunday or Monday, I go to the store and I get a pallet of hormone free organic rib in skin on chicken breasts. And they typically are less expensive when they’ve got the ribs on and the skin on. And I need those things for the future flavor.

Kellie Logsdon:
And in my Instant Pot, I can make about five pounds of chicken, rotisserie chicken a week. And it only takes about an hour and a half And I don’t even really have to do anything with it. And I take that chicken and I make my chicken salad And I also use it for other things that I’m going to have during the week. And if I don’t use it for other things that I’m going to have in the week, I freeze it so that I can. I can add it to soups. If I keep some fresh not chicken salad with the mayonnaise, I’ll add it to other salads. One of my greatest recipes is chicken enchiladas, which I made this week and I use my keto tortillas.

Kellie Logsdon:
They are labor intensive, but they only have one gram net carb, and they’re made with coconut flour and egg whites. And they’re not egg-y, I promise. But I use that chicken to make my chicken enchiladas. I have a very small kitchen. And I’m pointing that way because it’s right there. I have a very small kitchen, but you don’t need a big kitchen. If you know where everything is in your kitchen, you know how you can grab these things and when my children are emptying the dishwasher, they know to put it back in that area. So it speeds up the process that I always know where this slicer is or I always know where this knife is, or I always know where these spices are. And it just speeds up the process. So I have more tips too, I can keep going. But those are my staples that I use.

Carole Freeman:
Oh, excellent, excellent, too. All right, what else? Let’s talk about there’s a lot of people out there blogging about keto. Who do you look for for inspiration? And how have you weeded out the… what is that phrase about the wheat from the chaff? Is that what it is?

Kellie Logsdon:
Yes.

Carole Freeman:
It’s not a keto reference.

Kellie Logsdon:
No, but I completely understand you. There is so much out there. And I don’t want to say that it’s all bad. But there are different levels. And the keto police come out in full force. And they will say, “You can’t eat carrots.”, whatever it may be. And I am a believer that it’s an individual journey, and the people that I listen to are the ones that can really cite the science. And they’re not just sort of talking in generalities. I never want to be seen as the scientific, medical expert advice. But I defer to the medical professionals that are up on all the studies. And I tell you, when I hear anybody that starts talking about how many calories is in that or talking about anything that seems so old school, I just glaze over. And I think to myself, I can’t even.

Kellie Logsdon:
A gal that I grew up, I didn’t grow up with her, but I’ve known her a very long time, she is a registered dietitian, she went to Institute of Integrative Nutrition with me. She is a health coach and a nutritionist. And she’s posting all over every social thing I can see about how horrible intermittent fasting is. And I kind of cringe because I think to myself, “Have you not seen any of the true studies that have come out?” So I try not to get too much into the technicality of it because I think that that should be left to people who can speak more eloquently than I can. I like to fashion myself as if you have bought into this lifestyle, I want to help you create the foods that are going to help you stay in this life.

Kellie Logsdon:
So that’s sort of how I differentiate myself is that I think that diet is kind of like religion and politics. There’s no way I am going to, if you are so far over there that I’m going to bring you in over here, but if you are interested, and if you want to explore this because you agree with this lifestyle, then let me show you how to stay in this lifestyle and how to make it an easy sort of effortless habit throughout your life.

Carole Freeman:
Oh, you’re so wise, I am in the same boat. It’s like if people want to know about keto, I’m here to talk about it. But I’m not out there trying to convince anyone anything different than what they already believe. And then also, I know the people that are naysayers about it are the ones that haven’t tried it themselves. And they also haven’t worked with it in their own clients.

Kellie Logsdon:
Right, right. Well, and how about this one? So somebody said to me, “Oh, I’ve tried keto. It doesn’t work for me.”

Carole Freeman:
Yeah.

Kellie Logsdon:
My favorite question is, number one, “What did you follow? Who were you following and who was giving you the advice?” And number two question, “How long did you do it for?” Because this isn’t a three week quick fix. This is a lifetime, and it is for the long haul. So I asked this to somebody the other day that said, “Keto doesn’t work for me. It causes huge problems. It doesn’t work.” I was like, “So how long did you do it for?” She was like, “Three solid weeks.” I was like, “Oh, and who did you get your information from?” She was like, “Oh, this gal that’s like a yoga instructor down in the south.” And I was like, “What? How is that even real?” So for me, it gives it a bad name because it gives keto and low carb living sort of a bad name because when they’re not really dedicated to it, or they’re not really taking it very seriously and they’re immediately discounting it, it’s disappointing. So I just try to lead by example. And the longer I keep doing this, I see my stuff going like this, and theirs are still going like this.

Carole Freeman:
Well, that’s so true. I mean, I see two groups of people that the keto doesn’t work for. And the one group is what you’re describing is that they just weren’t doing it right. And part of that is that I found working with over 400 people doing this is that it needs to be customized for each person. There’s no one size fits all approach. So most people just don’t know what they don’t know. They’re not doing it correctly, they’re not actually doing it completely. A lot of times you probe them a little bit. And then they say, “Well, I was doing keto-ish.”

Kellie Logsdon:
Keto-ish, right. I can still drink my wine.

Carole Freeman:
The other group though that I find that have a lot of problems with keto, and I think this gets mixed up in where some people out there, they’re so called experts that are saying that keto needs to be different for women, the group of women that I find that that have problems with keto are the ones that are already very low body fat, so there are the eternal health nuts, maybe they’re doing CrossFit, their body fat is already somewhere below 22%. And they’re trying to get that six pack abs look.

Carole Freeman:
And really a woman’s body hormonally works best if it’s between about 22% to 29% body fat. So we’ve got these fitness models that are showing this body type that really isn’t natural for most women’s bodies. And so when they are trying to get their body fat down to 18% or lower, and they do keto, it’s the calorie restriction at that lower body fat that causes problems. It’s not keto itself. And so keto gets blamed for their hormonal problems and thyroid issues and all this other stuff that comes up. That’s the other group. I’ll throw that out there too that that’s the other group that I find of women that have problem with doing keto, but it’s not keto that’s doing it. It’s trying to create something in their body that isn’t naturally a healthy state to be in.

Kellie Logsdon:
Right.

Carole Freeman:
let’s see. Where are you going next? What’s your future plans with keto and Kellie Kitchen?

Kellie Logsdon:
So the Kellie kitchen is, it is growing and it’s catching steam. I think people are a little amused by my antics. I’ve just started a YouTube Live channel on Monday nights. I share kitchen tips in for an hour. I’m in there cooking. And people are asking questions. I drop stuff all the time. It’s pretty funny and I’m pretty silly. So my YouTube channel is growing so that I can show people real time tips and tricks about how to get dinner on the table. The website, thekelliekitchen.com, I’m constantly posting new recipes. I am writing a cookbook. It will be out probably within the next six months. It is a labor of love and a lot of work going into that. But there’s a whole line of cookbooks that are going to be coming after that and I’m just going to continue having fun with and showing people that the keto lifestyle is it’s just real food. And I’m hoping that people can get on board with less processed and more taking care of themselves.

Carole Freeman:
Oh, that’s lovely. That’s great. So you’re doing good work, Kellie. Thanks for being out there in the world.

Kellie Logsdon:
Yes.

Carole Freeman:
So anything else, in wrapping this up, anything else that you were hoping I would ask about or you’d like to share?

Kellie Logsdon:
Well, I am so incredibly grateful that we were able to do this and being able to talk to an individual keto coach, but also for me to be in the space as well. The whole idea is that anything that I may have said that could help the people that you help, and anything that you say, I’m hoping that it can help the people that I help because I think that this is a movement of us trying to lessen medication and teach our families how to eat well and be healthy. So I don’t think I have any other questions but I am so grateful that we had this time together. And I have just so much passion for this life and I wish that nobody has to go through the pain that I, and it wasn’t just the physical pain but the decade long of rollercoaster, because that is very painful to go up and down and to not know how to do it and to be feeling like a failure. So I hope to continue on sharing that message that you don’t have to get deathly ill to start to feel better.

Carole Freeman:
Oh, that’s lovely. I have one closing question for you, and everyone who is watching, all of Kellie’s links are going to be in the show notes below, and we’ll put a link in there that you can follow so that when her book gets released, you can grab that too. But my final question for you is the meteor’s coming at us today, the last day on earth, we’re all going to be wiped out. What’s going to be your final meal?

Kellie Logsdon:
Oh my gosh, that is a great question, because I’m vacillating here. I love buffalo chicken stuff. But I made this crispy salmon with creamy… it’s stuffed with a creamy spinach over a bed of zoodles. Oh my God, it was so delicious. Quite frankly, I didn’t think that I was going to be like a salmon person. But that one I really think is, and that recipe is not up on the website yet but I’m going to scramble and get that up on the website this weekend. But yes, my creamy spinach stuffed salmon is probably the last meal that I would have.

Carole Freeman:
Any desserts, beverages to go with that?

Kellie Logsdon:
Oh my gosh, desserts, don’t get me started. So I just made and this recipe is up on the website, a mini Oreo cheesecake bites and they’re in little muffin cups, and they’re actually fairly easy to make. And then I also made a mini lava cake, which is fantastic. I mean, I’ve got so many desserts. My number one dessert right now is it’s a no bake low carb, it’s only three grams net carb, strawberry cheesecake cup. And that one got a lot of attention because anybody can make it and you don’t have to turn the oven on. And that one’s on the website also.

Carole Freeman:
Sweet. I’m going to go look now. Oh Kellie, thank you so much for being here and sharing all of your journey to health and all your tips for success on keto and in the kitchen. If you guys enjoyed this, give us a thumbs up, subscribe, hit the bell down there as well. That’s how you’re going to get notifications of future episodes. So thanks again for being here, Kellie.

Kellie Logsdon:
Thank you. Thank you so much and be well.