It is hard to do a good nutrition and health study. Add to that how many people conducting these studies have built-in biases, and we're left with a hodge-podge of bad science. Ivor Cummins (The Fat Emperor) is a professional complex problem solver. He's made it his mission to dive in and deconstruct much of this science to find the truth.
Transcript
Let's Say Hello
[00:02:50.080] – Coach Allan
Hey, Ras. How are things?
[00:02:52.050] – Coach Rachel
Good, Allan. How are you today?
[00:02:54.200] – Coach Allan
Doing good. Little tired. I told you guys this a lot. We record this a few weeks in advance. A couple of weeks in advance. And so this is a holiday here, the New Year's holiday. And so we've made the decision this year to give our staff the time off. And I know I've talked about that, but it's quite a different thing when you know you've got 13 breakfast and you got three rooms to clean and this person wants to rent bikes and that person needs this and someone needs a ride there, and some people have to be picked up there. And then you have to wait for this couple to show up, and you don't know when they're here. And so it's just one of these move move move and then you finally get that opportunity to sit down and record
[00:03:42.980] – Coach Rachel
Oh, jeez. Oh, my goodness.
[00:03:49.300] – Coach Allan
And roll it through my head. It's like, okay, I got to get a bottle of water upstairs because they're about out there. And then got to make sure that all the laundry that needs to be done, the one ends we pulled off of the beds, and all that still gets done. I've got a laundry list of about a dozen things in my head right now that Call probably won't be able to nap immediately. There probably will be a nap somewhere today.
[00:04:15.280] – Coach Rachel
That sounds good. Good plan.
[00:04:17.750] – Coach Allan
Yeah. How are things up there?
[00:04:19.890] – Coach Rachel
Good. We made it through Christmas, made through New Year's. Now it's about getting back to schedule again. I miss having routines and schedules and just getting back to normal. My sleep is disrupted too, so I just feel wonky.
[00:04:34.680] – Coach Allan
And I saw this insane, insane picture of you standing in water in Mission.
[00:04:44.440] – Coach Rachel
Yeah.
[00:04:47.400] – Coach Rachel
On New Year's Day, our Fun Run Club organizes a polar plunge, and on the lake that we use, it had a pretty good base of ice. In fact, it was kind of a struggle to chop through to make a little hole for us to do our little polar plunge.
It's exhilarating. It really is. I look forward to it every year. I get really excited in December that this is coming up, and, yes, it is super cold, and there's a lot of screaming going on, but it is really a lot of fun, and I just feel like it's like washing off the bad luck of last year and getting myself ready and prepared for the upcoming year. It's kind of a great day, and it's a lot of fun.
[00:05:44.350] – Coach Allan
I have a completely different description of it.
[00:05:51.100] – Coach Rachel
Well, truth be told, I am no stranger to ice bath, and as an endurance runner, I am known to take an ice bath with lots of ice in the bathtub after a run. So I'm no stranger to any of it. I enjoy it. It is exhilarating. It is a challenge. But yeah. It's also a lot of fun.
[00:06:14.020] – Coach Allan
Yeah. And that's why when I say there's no one way to do any of this, there's no one way, and there's no way in that world. I might have considered it. But, oh, yeah, I'm not doing that up there. Having to peck through the ice to make it happen.
[00:06:36.380] – Coach Rachel
Yes, it was a fun time.
[00:06:38.400] – Coach Allan
Ready for the conversation with Ivor?
[00:06:41.670] – Coach Rachel
Sure.
Interview
[00:07:21.240] – Coach Allan
Ivor, welcome to 40+ Fitness.
[00:07:25.020] – Ivor
Thanks a lot, Allan. Great to be here.
[00:07:27.740] – Coach Allan
I'm hyper excited. I mean, I'm like a little fanboy right here now because I've heard you speak, and it's something else. If you can get out and listen to this guy, if you can get on his YouTube channel, you've got to go meet him, because Ivor is a no nonsense, data driven individual that he doesn't just take the headline. You go in and you drill and you learn a lot of interesting things. And I've learned a lot of interesting things by listening to you.
[00:08:02.120] – Ivor
Yeah. Well, thanks, Allan. It's my background, really, I was a complex problem solver and corporate for a couple of decades, leading teams, and it's always what I specialized in, so I don't dig into everything. Some things I judged are not of huge value to understand more deeply, but it's like breadth and depth, as we used to say. Breadth on capturing the full picture of any kind of topic or arena, and then depth where necessary, based on your skill and judgment, to go into depth where there's value.
[00:08:34.640] – Coach Allan
Well, like I said, your YouTube channel is pure gold. The depth and the breadth there is just fascinating. I got caught up in that rabbit hole the other day while I was prepping for this interview, and I just one video after the other. And so, the funny thing, I was watching one of your videos and you finished the video, and I was kind of peddling with something else. And you know how YouTube will take you on to the next video, just some other video, it wasn't yours. There was some newscast and they were talking about fusion energy and how someone might have cracked fusion energy. And now I'm hooked on they knew I wanted to see this, so they got me. But that's when it hit me. It's like, we know what fusion energy is. If you know enough about science and you've studied it a little bit, you know what that is. And there's a science, a hard science, between what that is, how you define something like fusion. Why is it that when we do science around food and health, it never quite gets to that same level of science? Why is science not science when it comes to food and health?
[00:09:52.300] – Ivor
Yes. Big question. Well, I think the theoretical science and physics and mathematics have stayed pretty poor, or pure, I should say. Not poor, pure. And they've stuck with the scientific method of create a hypothesis and then seek to destroy the hypothesis, ideally not just to support us, which are cognitive or belief bias and they've just stuck to science. And they've been allowed to really, because there's no mass market, particularly in kind of fusion and theoretical physics. So they were allowed to continue, as we did for hundreds of years, stick to the science. However, health and food are the two biggest markets on the planet, basically. So the processed food industry is enormous, as you well know, and we've got this ownership model over the last 30 years where a few corporations own the whole lot and that's just the way the world is. And then the health market, well, we've got big pharma and they have enormous funds and influence on medical training, doctors training, and funding studies and funding trials. So they bring all the money to direct the science. So I think that's a high level view. They've been co opted. And you know, with the FDA the revolving door, the head of the FDA becomes the head of some pharma group and vice versa.
[00:11:18.740] – Ivor
So basically industry capitalism has been very successful over particularly the last 40 or 50 years to essentially take over. Largely the science of both food, nutrition and health. Not exercise per se, but then there's a lot of kind of grifters and exercise as well. These are all big markets and that's essentially the bottom line. They are huge markets and there's no way they're going to be let just bumble along scientifically.
[00:11:51.040] – Coach Allan
So if I see a study and the headline reads that you should be eating beets five times a day, every day, and only beets.
[00:12:02.740] – Coach Allan
Other than that just sounded absurd to say it out loud. But how would I know, when I'm looking at a study that this isn't something that was just I'm not going to say made up, but that there was a cognitive bias or there were confounders, there was something wrong with the science or the way they're describing the output.
[00:12:22.300] – Ivor
Yeah, well, the first thing is always the funding. I mean the funding and the ideology. So many times you'll find a study that seems odd and is in conflict with what you would expect. It may go back to a particular strong ideology like veganism or a university associated with that or vegetarian leaning. Or there could be a climate aspect to the funding. Or of course, there could be food industry and pharmac and be in there. So it doesn't prove that the study is bad. But if your antennae go up at all, look to the authors, look them up online, find out are they a particular extreme diet of fysionadol and indeed where the funding is coming from. The other thing then are associational studies. If it says appears that or seems that, or tracks with or all these kinds of clues and they don't actually say this is a proven thing, it's often an associational study. So that's the basic correlation versus causation thing. So I give a quick example. We pretty much know because you can never know anything for 100% in science. But we know that the factory seed oils, the vegetable oils, the heart healthy oils, we know they're not a good idea compared to real food.
[00:13:44.180] – Ivor
However, for 40 or 50 years, the population has been screamed at to eat the vegetable oils and don't eat the natural saturated fats. So what's happened is, over 50 years, the health focused people who are focused on their health tend to listen to the advice from the scientists and the health officials, right. So they tend to eat more vegetable oils. But what happens then is you've got a healthy user bias. I. E. After 40 years, you can look at the data and you can see some better health outcomes in the populations that eat a little more vegetable oils. And it's not because they're healthy. It's because for 40 years, you've kind of ruined the pitch. You've ruined the experiment. Because the healthier people who are worried about their health, who have better outcomes, well, they tended to take more of the oils. So that's just an example of confounding, extreme confounding in an associational or epidemiological study. But there are many more. People who eat more saturated fat, and it is related. They tend to not care about advice. They are shown again and again to have more smoking, more overweight, more bad habits of various sorts, lack of exercise.
[00:15:06.570] – Ivor
So you see these signals. But the author of the study is only looking for one message. In this case, healthy vegetable oils are healthy. We were right all along. Honest.
[00:15:21.060] – Coach Allan
Yeah. The way I like to think about causing correlation is that if you go to a fire, there's a lot of firemen around. So maybe it's the firemen that are starting the fire. You know that's not the case. It's just because the way we address fires, there's always going to be firemen at a fire. And so you can't get rid of the firemen to think that that's what's going to get rid of the fire. And it sounds, again, kind of silly, this, when you say that kind of stuff out loud, but sometimes when you're reading the studies, that's exactly what they're saying. We see this thing here, therefore we know there's a problem. If we get rid of this thing we won't have the problem. It's not really the cause.
[00:16:01.440] – Coach Allan
So let's talk. You dived into it a little bit. You started talking about veganism, vegetarian, and animal based foods and saturated fat. You've talked to a lot of people. You've done a lot of research in this area yourself, digging, is animal based foods good for us or bad for us or in the middle somewhere? Maybe?
[00:16:27.640] – Ivor
Yeah, well, so whole, real natural foods that would be strongly associated with our evolution as a species, they are the best foods. They are the best diet. Unless you have weird compelling data to say otherwise, it makes sense and paleo anthropologists almost to a man or a woman. Dr. Michael Eads, a good friend of mine, often has said this, and it's true. They will all acknowledge that Homo sapiens evolved by the scavenging off animal carcasses. Now, we started off scavenging organ meats and even brain, et cetera, and we cracked open bones. The tools are all there in the record, every human tribe going back to daydot. And then we moved on to hunting. We became more and more successful as hunters. And the one ancestor of humans, Dr. Eads actually sent me this before that debate I did, and it was beautiful. And it was from one of his talks I'd missed. And it showed that around a million years ago, there were these striding, kind of hominids, two legged creatures that became us, and there were various branches, and they found one dead end branch. And there was no reason for it at first, that this branch had completely died off and the other branch had gone on to become humans.
[00:17:51.240] – Ivor
Most successful species on the planet, you could say. And that branch actually was one where it stayed vegetarian. So of course it didn't have access to the nutrient density of meats and organ meats. It didn't trade off its digestive large stomach size to enable a huge brain calorie drain like we did. It just stayed more like an ape with a big stomach and the brain nothing to write home about. So even there and in everything in the paleo anthropological research and fossil records, all says again and again, this is how we got here. So there's that. And then when you look at the mechanistic, you say, okay, what's the nutrient density of meats and fish and eggs? And boom, it's got massive nutrient density and much more bioavailability of key proteins than any plant food. Doesn't mean plant foods are no good. They carry minerals and vitamins and various proteins that you can convert. But the animal foods are clearly way ahead of the game. So without going into great detail, but I give an example b Twelve. You can have severe mental illness from being low on B12, and it only comes from animal foods.
[00:19:10.950] – Ivor
I mean, there's a giveaway, come on, and you could go on and on, but all these other components that are in animal foods and the fats match the fats of what our body makes our fat out of is mono and saturated fat. That's what human bodies make for safe storage of energy. And that's what we get from animal foods, very well matched fat balance to what we are made of. So there's all of that mechanistic stuff and nutrients and bioavailability, that's a no brainer. So now you've got the ancestral evolutionary, and it's basically almost like almost a proof in itself. It's hard to argue with. And then you've got what I just mentioned, including components and DHA, EPA, or another one that are almost you can't get anywhere else, right? So then you say, wow, with these foods we evolved on, they have vastly higher nutrient density and even contain nutrients that we actually need, or we get very ill. And you put that together and then at this stage you're kind of there, right. Obviously they're the healthful foods for those reasons. But the world for ideological reasons has spent definitely the last 40 years, particularly the last ten years, and bringing in climate as well as an argument, right, climate change.
[00:20:42.560] – Ivor
But going back to the Adventist Church and the huge industries they own, it goes back to the turn of the century. And Harvey Kellogg, who perceived masturbation as sinful and quite rightly, probably said if we feed them gruel instead of meat, they'll be less active. And he actually had a point there in a sense. So carnal knowledge and even the Bible, Carna has all these negative associations. For thousands of years, kings would tell the poor people meat is bad for you. That the top strata always indicated. The Bible said it. Vegetarian churches say it. All of these reasons that meat is bad are ideological, or even worse, they're a power play of sorts, a feudalism. That's all there is against meat. As an example, the big one WHO a few years ago came out with a study and said meat is now a grade two carcinogen and processed meat is a grade one, I think. The data in that, they said, we looked at a thousand studies and they kind of did, and none of them said that, but they used associational epidemiological data within them and maybe a mouse study to come to the conclusion that meats a carcinogen, which is de facto absurd.
[00:22:14.980] – Ivor
And that's the tip of the iceberg. There's 1000 studies now, all driven by ideology, whether climate, religious, or just general dietary ideologies.
[00:22:27.660] – Coach Allan
Yeah, the debate that you were talking about, that was with Dr. Gregor. I've had him on the show when he wrote his book How Not to Die. It's actually a good book. And he goes into science in the book, as he does with his normal video, I guess it's a videocast podcast thing, well produced, put together. But you're right, most of the studies that he covers are really one sided. And I've had conversations with vegans and I say, well, we've got to talk about B12. And they're like, well, yeah, you might have to supplement with B12, but carnivores have to supplement with statins.
[00:23:13.100] – Ivor
Welcome at a false equivalence.
[00:23:17.500] – Coach Allan
Yeah, but that's the conversation. And you touched on something that I really think is important because I have had vegans on the show. I've had carnivores on the show, I've had raw paleo. I've had a vegan that was keto. So I try to get a broad view of different people on the show so at least they can present their ideas in a fair location where I'm not going to beat them up for the way that they want to live. And that they think others should, but it's whole food. If I ask a vegan, why do you feel like your diet is the best? They're like, well, it's a whole food, plant based diet. And I'm like, okay. And I ask a carnivore, why do you feel like your diet is the best? It's basically a whole food, animal based diet. And so they always go back to the this is a whole food diet. And one of the reasons why that diet is bad is because they're eating all the processed crap.
[00:24:16.960] – Coach Allan
And it's true. And so you look at some of the studies, and you're like, well, if like the 7th Avenue you brought up, if they're following the doctrine of what their religion is, they would be vegan or vegetarian. But they go through the ranks and they say, okay, here's the people that aren't doing it, and here's the ones that are. And the ones that are doing it are healthier, but they don't factor in the well, they also aren't supposed to smoke, so the ones that are doing it also aren't smoking, but those guys are. And there are other risky behaviors. So they're all caused mortality is worse, but they never really pull that out. And I think that's what I really struggle with these studies, is when they go in with that cognitive bias or worse, financial bias, it just creates wonky science, and someone will refer to that study forevermore in their study. So it was like, we know cholesterol is bad, therefore. And then they do their study, and they draw a conclusion. And sometimes you're right, they do play with the words appears as if or kind of thing. But it just seems like it's really hard for people to know what to do to be healthy.
[00:25:35.630] – Coach Allan
And it's a shame that we can't depend on the governments to step up and do a little bit of house cleaning here.
[00:25:45.660] – Ivor
Yeah, the challenge is Allan so ideology, and again, I didn't say anything negative about them. And you can get along pretty well eating vegetables because you are giving up all the processed food, which is the real poison. My only angle was it's more optimum and better to get the nutrient density off the foods we primarily evolved on. But, I mean, Homo sapiens are very adaptable, and we were able to go long periods when there was very little gain, and we evolved to be able to handle quite a lot of plant food and a lack of animal foods for periods. But evolution didn't really plan for long, long periods, and especially didn't plan for vegan. Vegetarian, especially Ovo lacto evolution well prepared us for that. But vegan, like you say, you need B12. And Dr. Joel Kahn, a good friend of mine who's a hardcore vegan, he's in his 60s, looks great, and he's got a zero calcium scan in his 60s. But one reason is, for 20 years, he's been imploring vegans to take a whole range of supplements, and he acknowledges and puts the hand up and doesn't try and pretend that the vegan diet is a complete diet.
[00:27:02.300] – Ivor
He's interested for ideological reasons, and he admits its ideology by saying, vegan guys, don't let our side down. You need to take these supplements. And that's why he's so healthy. But the funny thing is, Allan, even these like Okinawa, everyone talks about Okinawan's plant based longevity. But the people who reached 100 in Okinawa, I think it was five out of five or six out of six in one study, all of them were non vegetarian. They were the cluster that really went the distance. And the other thing is, they went to Okinawa. And this is where all this stuff came from. In the early 50s, after World War Two, half the population on the islands had been were dead. I mean, Okinawa, there was horrific stuff that went on there, as we know. But before the war, pork was highly prized. In fact, it's in their literature, their culinary literature. Pork is at the center of Okinawan dishes. It's written in some old text. And after the war, they had no pigs, for obvious reasons. And within a few years, they went up from I think they were before there were 110 pigs per thousand people.
[00:28:20.140] – Ivor
It's pretty high density. And they went up to 150 per thousand people by the late 50s and early 60s. So they went back on track, a pork based diet. But you don't hear that. You hear just when they found them starving post war, with their whole infrastructure and their animals all dead, that's when they did the study. And that's the study here quoted.
[00:28:44.890] – Coach Allan
Yeah. That's the Ansel Keys seven country study, that there were 23 countries.
[00:28:52.180] – Ivor
And he picked from 22.
[00:28:54.330] – Coach Allan
Yeah. Okay.
[00:28:54.840] – Ivor
He picked like six from 22 the first time, the six country study, which was just toilet paper. And then he created the toilet paper pseudo experiment. 12,000 men, no women, seven countries, picked from around 20. And he knew in advance, it's like an engineer who's cheating, right, to get a raise. Ansel knew the countries that would give him the outcome. I mean, he's so stupid, but he wanted the outcome because Ansel himself was in the grip of ideology. He was nowhere within a thousand miles of a scientist. He was an ideological person who had a grasp of scientific kind of stuff, and he was hugely influential, and he was an extremely capable politician, too. He weaved his way in everywhere. And he destroyed the career of Yodkin in the UK, questioned his data, and he went after Yodkin hardcore and basically destroyed his career in the sense so that's the kind of man and so keyswell. So it's not surprising that the science he produced was junk science.
[00:30:06.360] – Coach Allan
Yeah. And unfortunately, we still see that stuff happening today with different things going on in the world. Pick a side. And then fight to the death seems to be the mode of operation for this. Now, you mentioned Dr. Kahn, and I've read some of his stuff, and you've had a lot of other notable heart health doctors on your show. If someone's in their 40s, 50s or older and wants to manage their heart health so that they can live a longer, happier life, what are the things that we could be doing to improve our overall heart health?
[00:30:50.940] – Ivor
Right. Okay, then. So we start at the top. And sometimes I and others get criticized that insulin, we say, is everything. It's like the one ring to rule them all. Now, we do emphasize insulin, but in a pareto, principle way, because it's the elephant in the room. It's the biggest factor, your insulin resistance in cardiac disease and Alzheimer's, type three diabetes, it's often referred to now, and even Parkinson's has been referred to by one or two specialists as potentially type four diabetes. And then we have type two, of course, which has massive impacts on shortening your life. So that's actual diabetes. And then we have type one diabetes and type zero diabetes. I used to jokingly refer to heart disease as type zero diabetes because as Professor Joe Kraft, who I interviewed in Chicago, who tested 15,000 people for a five hour insulin glucose test, he said, let me think, if I can just think of this quote those who die of coronary disease who do not have diabetes are simply undiagnosed. And he was inferring that nearly all cardiac disease and vascular disease is essentially type two diabetes, whether diagnosed or not. Now, I don't think he's correct on that, but the massive majority is, and a great example for people is the Euro Aspire study done in Europe in 2015.
[00:32:24.130] – Ivor
And you should see the pie chart. I featured it many times. And this team went out, a large team went across 24 countries of Europe think about it. Looked at heart disease victims or patients ages 18 to 80. So looked at all ages, not just old people who tend to get it. And they basically checked their blood glucose in detail. And they found out straight away, shockingly, that around a third of them were type two diabetic on their medical record. And they thought, whoa, they didn't expect to find a full third of them. But then they looked at their glucose and post glucose load glucose readings, and they realized another quarter were full blown, type two undiagnosed, but then another quarter were high risk for type two diabetes, they called it. But they were type two diabetic. They just didn't quite reach the very high bar to be full blown. So essentially three quarters, roughly, of all the heart disease patients across Europe, 24 countries ages 18 to 80 as a huge supergroup, three quarters were type two diabetic. I mean, come on. So Kraft was very close. And if you measured their insulin and this team did not. Sadly. But if they did a craft test, myself, Dr. Gerber and Professor Noakes, and everyone in our community reckons probably 85 plus percent would be essentially physiologically diabetic. So, heart disease, first thing you do is minimize your insulin resistance, get insulin sensitive.
[00:34:05.660] – Coach Allan
And that's through diet and exercise.
[00:34:09.740] – Ivor
Diet and exercise. Diet is enormous in insulin resistance. But funny things are sleep and stress. They've done studies that if people are stressed, their insulin goes way up. Deny people's sleep for a couple of weeks, their insulin resistance can double. Smoking massively pushes up your insulin. It's one of the mechanisms of damage. And if you give up smoking, your insulin resistance falls sharply, even pollution and, of course, lack of exercise. And we would say myself and Dr. Gerber or Dr. Ted Naman or Ben Buckagio, all the people in our network, stress training, pushing to failure with weights and body weight exercise, maybe 20 minutes, twice, three times a week. A lot more bang for the book than cardiometabolic exercise, running, but that has its place, too. So exercise, food. Food, the big thing is to take out satan's triad. That's what I call it. Sugar, refined carbs, refined grains, refined wheats. All these powdered carbohydrates and vegetable oils, seed oils, inflammatory, seriously problematic. Those three things together. Devil's triad. What are most calories in ultra processed food, which makes up 80% of the supermarket made up of they're made up of the devil's triad. You don't have to look far here to see the reason for chronic disease.
[00:35:40.860] – Ivor
UK British Medical Journal. A few years ago, over 60% of all UK calories consumed now come from ultra processed foods, which are mostly the devil's triad. I mean, everyone, most everyone, is pouring large calorie quantities of kind of poisonous foods into themselves. It'd be amazing if we didn't have a tsunami of chronic disease. It would be astonishing. Cut out the devil's triad, cut out ultra processed food. And whether you're vegetable leaning or you're a carnivore or omnivore, like we said earlier, you sit down if you cut out all the ultra processed foods and just eat real foods and maybe watch some supplementation as well. Magnesium is very low in modern foods. And there's some more. You do that, you're miles ahead of the game. Add in fasting and some stress training, doesn't have to be huge. You got this synergistic. You put yourself vastly ahead of the risk of the average person today.
[00:36:45.600] – Coach Allan
Yeah, thank you for that again. It's been such a struggle. You did mention something earlier that I wanted to circle back around. When you're talking about Dr. Kahn and his calcium score, could you talk a little bit about what a calcium score is and how we would go about getting one?
[00:37:05.620] – Ivor
Right, well, that's I spent many years massively pushing the calcium score, partly because my sponsor, one of Ireland's richest men, he got a huge score and he was slim, fit, running four times a week, 52 years old, and he got a score of 1000, which is enormous. And he had three nearly fully blocked arteries, the main ones. So he got such a shock, he explored and he found out what the calcium score was all about, because that's how he found out. They told him he was super healthy for years in executive medicals. Then he got one calcium scan. He found out he was destroyed inside, and then he personally found out, unsurprisingly, a few weeks later. Not the doctors. He found out he was type two diabetic because he got a blood glucose meter. And he began to hear from William Davis, MD. And others, checked his glucose, and it was five times normal after each meal. So that was David Bobbitt great work he's done. And he made the widow maker movie. And I'll give you the link to the 1 hour version on YouTube I put up. He spent $2 million to make this movie to tell people about the calcium scan.
[00:38:15.220] – Ivor
And the bottom line, Allan, is if you get a calcium scan, the score from that scan alone, single-handedly, is much more predictive of risk than all of the blood and the risk factors put together in framing him, framing him and in the algorithms. Essentially, that score is more accurate. Predicting your future, though you can change it, get a high score, you can fix the problem. That's key to note, but it's more predictive than all the risk factors put together put together. So if you get a score of zero in middle age, your chance of a heart attack or mortality is so low, they actually call it a warranty. Now, a warranty doesn't mean 0%, it means extremely low. You got a warrant. Fridge is a warranty very seldom fails. So you might have a half a percent chance or 1.2% of a heart event in the next ten years. But the guys with the high scores, like David Bobbitts, have up on 30% chance you could have 20 plus times the risk of heart attack, even though you got the same cholesterol as the guy beside you, because you have the disease. The calcium in the arteries is unequivocal.
[00:39:32.010] – Ivor
Calcium in your arteries is the direct proof and extent of vascular disease up till the day you get the scan. It's the scars and all your arteries where your body is trying to fix your arteries from atherosclerosis the problem that causes heart attacks. So it's amazing where you get it. If you go to IHDA.Ie. So it's Irish heart disease awareness dot ie. There's the scan centers there, and we, over a year or two, developed a map of America, UK and Ireland. Hard to get Europe where all the centers are, and their phone numbers. But in the US, you can get it from as low as $69 up to $200. Sometimes insurance covers it. In Europe, it's quite a bit more expensive, maybe $350 on average.
[00:40:24.420] – Coach Allan
So, yeah, if you have a family history of heart disease or, you know that there's a likelihood you're overweight, you're over 40, you've got the risk factors that's worth having that test done. So thank you for sharing that. If someone, I'm sorry, I jumped ahead.
[00:40:45.500] – Coach Allan
I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest, and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?
[00:40:56.800] – Ivor
Okay. And we probably touched on quite a few of them, I'd have to say. Number one, and it ain't easy. And I commiserate with people, and I cheat sometimes too shocking to hear it. It's Christmas now. Maybe a little, but I'm generally pretty good. Cut out the devil's triad enormously. And that does mean if you're going to get something in the supermarket, look in the back of it. Mayonnaise. 78% of it is rapeseed oil. It's vegetable oil. Imagine 80% of your mayonnaise. I checked. You can get these meals. You look in the back, you see added wheats. And you know, on the ingredients list, the things up the top of the ingredients list, at least in Europe, are the biggest components. Yeah. So you see open the first few, you see wheat, you see vegetable oils or any kind of vegetable oil. There's 50 names for them. That's bad. But you can get ready meals, convenience meals that are essentially a dinner in a foil tray. In Ireland, it's just got meat, potatoes, carrots, and maybe a little bit of sugar. So you can get convenience food, that's okay. But the lesson is always say, is this real food?
[00:42:12.090] – Ivor
Is it nutrient dense? Is it not processed with wheats, refined grains, vegetable oils and sugars? That's the biggest thing. I put diet first. The second biggest thing, I would say, of course, exercise is important, and I've gotten pretty sloppy over lockdown. When I began to do very little exercise, I was working seven days a week in the office. I got kind of involved in a lot of challenging work, should we say, but exercise, since I've brought it back, and it's only really working on DIY and kind of house improvement, but working hard at it when I do it, even that has brought me back into a much healthier and better sleeping mode. And I got an exercise bike as well. I'm going to start using so exercise, but as Ben Picaccio and Dr. Ted Naman and all of us say, just do the body weight exercises, press ups until failure, where you just can't do another one and your arms are screaming. Do two rounds of that, two rounds of set ups, two rounds of pull ups. Always go till the muscles can't do any more. There's no danger, there's no harm to your body, but it triggers more muscle growth, and that's a glucose sink.
[00:43:26.330] – Ivor
And that is just the healthiest thing you can get. Muscle growth is your age. So exercise, particularly those resistance training exercises, third thing, then I'd say I'm more and more focused on sleep. I have a Whoop device now and it keeps me honest. So every morning if I've had a good day, I go to bed on time, I don't have a few drinks. I get this great report in the morning from my Whoop, and it keeps me on track. If I do the bad thing, I get this nasty report and it's never wrong, so I find it guides me and the joy of getting a good sleep and then looking up your results. And indeed, you had good deep sleep, you had good REM, you had highly recovery prone sleep, and you got a high green recovery. I kind of run my life by this now, so I'd say sleep quality and managing stress, I know it's not easy. Stress is a killer. Raises your cortisol, raises your insulin, eats away at your body, even undermines your immune system. So if you can get sleep stress as the third thing sorted, and good food and good exercise will actually deliver the benefits in good sleep and reduce stress. So they're very much integrated together.
[00:44:44.520] – Coach Allan
Thank you. Well, Ivor, if someone wanted to learn more about you and the work that you're doing, where would you like for me to send them?
[00:44:52.280] – Coach Allan
All right, I'd say if you just Google or search my name, Ivor Cummins. You'll quickly hit my YouTube, which is where a lot of the stuff is, and also my Twitter. I'm quite active on Twitter, and since the shadow banning stopped recently with Musk, suddenly my followers are growing again. I was perceived as questioning medical science at times, sadly, but I'm back on track, so Twitter is a good place. Often share reports, have technical arguments, and they're the main ones. And my Pin tweet at the moment, actually, and I think I'll leave it there is linked to one of our latest conferences with 14 stunning speakers and the whole packages available there of the 14 talks and the Q and A's, which I moderated for every speaker. So that package is like, I don't know, 12 hours of pure gold. And if you watch that package, I think it's 29 books or something. I don't know. It's just astonishing what all of our best guys have come out with in their talks. It's amazing. And the Q and A are revelatory as well because we brought in people and they asked their questions, and myself and the speaker in each instance had that discussion. So all of that's in there.
[00:46:08.920] – Coach Allan
Awesome. Thank you for that. And thank you for being a part of 40+ Fitness.
[00:46:14.580] – Ivor
Delighted to be here, Allan. And yeah, look forward to being back again. Great stuff.
[00:46:19.640] – Coach Allan
Thank you.
Post Show/Recap
[00:46:23.330] – Coach Allan
Welcome back, Ras.
[00:46:25.250] – Coach Rachel
Hey, Allan. That was a really fun interview. I can see why you enjoy talking with Ivor. He's got a lot of wealth of information about all of the studies that get thrown around in our community, in our health and fitness community. So it's interesting to hear him analyze them and get to the real meat of some of those studies.
[00:46:44.890] – Coach Allan
Yeah, it was funny because like I said, I was at Keto Fest and I was finishing up my talk. And it's normal when you do a talk, there are people who are going to come up after and want to ask you questions and just say hello or shake your hand, that kind of thing. And so I'm shaking hands trying to answer questions and I'm like the best I can throw out one word answer so that I can go see. And he was due to start and I was like, okay, I want to get over there. I want to get over there. They shortened mine. I got squeezed that year. And so my talk was supposed to be an hour and they ran late on the one before because they were having issues. And so I was told when I walked up to the stage, I'm like, you're really only going to have about 35 minutes. Okay, I'll get it done. But that also meant that I didn't get done early and wasn't really able to do any Q and A. That was one of the things I ended up cutting out of that talk. So I had a lot of people walking up asking questions.
[00:47:48.590] – Coach Allan
But that's cool. I got there, he wasn't too far in, but he's got this slide and diagram and I'm like, okay. And then he's talking and I'm like, it's like drinking out of a fire hose and he's just throwing on the screen and it's just so cool. If you're geek out about some of this stuff, go find his YouTube channel and prepare to spend a few hours there because it's good stuff. He does his homework, he knows what's going on. And yeah, his talk with Dr. Gregor, it was kind of a TV debate. I don't think it was exactly fair. Ivor is going to come in prepared three times to Sunday. Gregor was Dr. Gregor. I respect it as well because he has his thought beliefs and his biases and his data and he goes at it. I don't think he expected a debate. I think he just expected, and he didn't probably expect that the news anchor was going to actually sort of be almost unbiased or at least acknowledged when Ivor brought up data. That of course, Gregor, you can explain that why that doesn't make any sense. He couldn't. I mean, Ivor was right, as he mostly is, but it was great to be able to just talk to him, pick his brain a little bit.
[00:49:13.660] – Coach Allan
I'm definitely going to get him on the show again because it's just oh, good, yeah. And the people he talks to, they respect him as well because they see him on the stage and realize, okay, this is a guy who gets it. And so they're on his YouTube and on his channel and have those conversations with him, and that's who he's traveling with when he's doing the speaking circuit. And so he's got all the connections, he knows all the people, and it's just great conversation.
[00:49:41.510] – Coach Rachel
That's awesome. That is awesome. And it's nice. It was interesting to hear you point out the biases that are often behind the studies. The reason why that's interesting to me is because we don't hear that we get the news clipping or the news story that says the study just says coffee is good for you, or Animal fat is bad for you, but you don't get the behind the scenes stuff that Ivor was able to talk about. And like the Ansel Key study, we've talked about that study in the past. It's just one example of a study with some cherry pick data. Then you've got lobbyists involved that are pushing different food groups or something. And so it's hard to know. Like you had said, there's a lack of science in food science.
[00:50:29.090] – Coach Allan
The problem is that one pretty much any time they've tried to do a food study the right way, they stop the food study in a lot of other studies. Because what happens is they have one group eat one way or do one thing and they have another group something an entirely different way, and one of them starts really having problems. And then they're like, well, we can't in good conscience with ethics continue this study. We're killing people.
[00:51:03.470] – Coach Rachel
That's not good.
[00:51:07.890] – Coach Allan
So what they end up doing is they say, okay, well, tell me, Rachel, how many times did you eat meat in the last month?
[00:51:16.690] – Coach Rachel
Right?
[00:51:17.350] – Coach Allan
And they're like, okay, how many times per week do you eat meat? And then I was like, So you eat red meat and processed meat? Yes. Okay, well, they didn't ask, did you eat meat? Do you eat processed meat?
[00:51:29.270] – Coach Allan
And so am I say, I don't really eat that much processed meat. Deli slices of ham and beef, but other than that, not a lot. And I don't eat a lot of bacon, even though I'm on the keto spectrum of eating most of the time. I'm not a big bacon person. Actually, I had half a slice of bacon this morning.
[00:51:50.620] – Coach Rachel
Wow. Yeah, that's willpower.
[00:51:55.790] – Coach Allan
Well, that was the only piece, and I didn't want to cook because we just made breakfast with 13 people, and I wasn't going to throw that out or feed that to the dog.
[00:52:06.960] – Coach Rachel
Right.
[00:52:08.690] – Coach Allan
But it's just that thing of, okay, if they have a bias, they can't help the structure of the science to work the way they want it to. And even if right, there's still a likelihood that the data might not be as conclusive as they'd like it to be, which is the worst for scientists to sit there and have a hypothesis and then do the study and have zero effect to basically say they can't find even a correlation. Prove causation, necessarily, but they couldn't even find a correlation either way or the other. And so, as they're looking at it from that statistical perspective, the study is basically worthless in their minds because they had a hypothesis and they can't prove or disprove that hypothesis. And that's normally how science works. They try to prove something, either it's going to happen or not happen based on what they did. You add blue water to yellow water and you get green. That's the hypothesis.
[00:53:16.090] – Coach Allan
And then it kind of depends, right. How much blue water did you pour in and how much yellow water did you pour in? Is it still green or is it blue? So there's even some judgment in there as far as how all that's going to work. And that's a simple thing. That's pretty simple. But when you're asking people what they ate, how much they ate, going back 20 years
[00:53:42.770] – Coach Allan
And then again, of course, if someone is really not eating well, they're probably also not doing other things so well, so they're probably not exercising as much. They might be doing other things like overusing alcohol, maybe using tobacco, maybe using other things. They may be have very stressful jobs. They might not sleep very well. And so it's really hard to pull all those confounders out there, because you're not going to find that one person that eats processed meat, but exercises every day, doesn't smoke, doesn't drink, sleeps well, has no stress, but eats processed meat to find out processed meat causes colorectal cancer. You're not going to find those people to do that.
[00:54:30.660] – Coach Rachel
Right. Well, it's almost impossible to set up a study like that. But you know what we have found in real life, Allan? You and I have both seen and heard stories where people pick up a vegetarian or vegan diet and suddenly they lose a lot of weight. Or in my world, some of us have done the keto diet and we've lost a lot of weight. But even then, it's not about choosing a diet, eating plant based, eating animal based. It's the fact that we're eating real foods, foods that were obviously grown on a vine or harvested somehow in nature or a farm, and it's not processed foods. And I think that's where people find the success. So right now it's January, it's the beginning of the year, we're changing our diets and everything. And so, sure, maybe some of us have a goal to eat better. And so we're going to say, well, we're going to eat these healthier food items, but we're getting rid of the processed food. And it's really that one thing that gives us the greatest benefit is switching from the processed foods, the cereals and granola bars and things that are in a jar or a bag, like you say, and choosing an apple or a salad or a chicken or something like that. You know what I mean? Real foods.
[00:55:54.640] – Coach Allan
Yeah. The basis of it is this, processed foods are made to be delicious, not made to be nutritious. They're calorie dense, nutritionally weak, whereas whole food tends to be nutritious. It tends to be nutritionally dense and calorie weak. And so you eat to satiety with whole food, you're not going to gain weight, and you'll probably lose weight if you're over. If you eat a processed food diet, you're very likely to continue to gain weight because you're just not getting the nutrition you need, and you're getting more calories than you need. And it's just the basic math of calories in, calories out. It's a pretty simple thing. But it goes down to the hormones, because once you tell your body this is real food, you're giving your body real food. Let's just be clear about that. There is no pie tree. There's no muffin tree. All of these Little Debbie cakes on the prairie, you just don't. So we're consuming those things, we're not getting nutrition. And so when they talk about the nutrition from plants, what we know is when a cow eats, he's grass fed, they have a better fat disposition than a cow who is not it's grain fed.
[00:57:27.130] – Coach Allan
The fats in the cow of a grass fed cow are healthier for us than for a grain fed cow. The grain fed cow will taste great. It's fattened up for just for that purpose. They'll get it perfect. It's a formula. That's what they do. Not that the cow is healthy, but they can make it taste great. That's what companies do. So you'll eat more, and they're able to price it at an affordable price because of the volume. So you know, it's this is what this is really about, is realizing that every guest that I've had on here, we talk about when we talk about nutrition. You, you've not heard a single one of them say that they think that the Twinkie diet or the McDonald's diet or the is okay, because now they'll acknowledge you can undereat with those diets, but you can't sustain that. So the person that loses the pounds with the Twinkie diet or what's his name, Penn Gillette, the comedian, magician guy, he did a potato diet, eat potatoes until he lost the weight, and he got sick of potatoes. He just stopped eating. That's what happened. The point being is that he just, dietitian said, just eat potatoes.
[00:58:47.320] – Coach Allan
You'll get sick of potatoes and you'll stop eating. And he did that until he lost the weight and he's off, which means he's probably also learned a couple of other things. But at the same time, what he could have done was just said, okay, I'm going to go back to eating whole food. And he probably would have the same results and been healthier for it. It's an investment, and it's an investment of time, getting to know where your food is coming from. I know no one likes to know how the sausage is made.
[00:59:17.550] – Coach Rachel
True.
[00:59:18.140] – Coach Allan
But you start looking at industrial farming, and you start looking at where you go into the grocery store and you're picking up those eggs. You're picking up the chicken. And chickens don't have three pound breasts. They're not that big. We have Dolly Parton chickens now, and it's because the hormones and they've been bred a certain way. They're not healthy, happy animals. They can't walk. They can't do anything. They're bred and grown and nurtured to do a certain thing, and it's just not the right way. You want happy, healthy animals, and they make for happy, healthy humans. Whether you choose to be plant based or animal based or a mix, know where it's coming from. Just know what you're eating and start making better choices. It doesn't have to be a big thing. Just start making little better choices, and they add up. They add up fast.
[01:00:22.770] – Coach Rachel
Yeah, that's exactly what I say. Yes. Small steps. Make some choice.
[01:00:27.000] – Coach Allan
When you see that headline that tells you something, question, question. New study says,
[01:00:38.710] – Coach Rachel
beware of those words. And look carefully into it.
[01:00:42.440] – Coach Allan
Says this. You're listening to reading it, and you're like, well, that's the exact opposite of what they told me last year. That's exactly the opposite of what I've always known. And we can look at a lot of stuff that's happened in the last few years about food and other health science, and it's like they're telling you something, and it's like, wait, that's not how I was. We talked about this in biology, and this is not how it was taught. So what's different, and somehow or another, the doctors are the experts are trying to tell us this is different. It's not. They just wanted it to be different because they wanted us to do a certain thing. So they had a bias behind why they said what they said. They had a bias behind how they planned and did the study, and they got a result. They presented the result, and then the media ran with the headline. And so just be careful when you see a headline and they say, but this is science. Just be leery that some science is not science. And that's particularly true in the health and nutrition space. So need your sit there and say, oh, I need to start taking 10,000
[01:02:01.640] – Coach Allan
I use of vitamin D every day to help my immune system. And the short answer is, you might not. You might need some, but you won't know until you go get a blood test. So just because study said people who took vitamin D were less likely to suffer from this thing, that doesn't mean that that study was even done on you. But it could have been three high school kids that they gave vitamin D to, and guess what? None of them died in three years. So vitamin D helps you live longer. And that's the reality they're control case two of them got in an automobile accident and died so of the six people in this piece, all caused mortality. Two thirds of them died not taking vitamin D. And here in this one, all cause mortality all three of them are still alive. So vitamin D keeps you from getting in car crashes is the conclusion.
[01:03:04.150] – Coach Rachel
Oh, these studies.
[01:03:05.670] – Coach Allan
But that's sometimes how this is structured and how it's interpreted. They're going to use words that are confusing, like all cause mortality. Instead of actually saying heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, instead of really getting to it, they'll use the term all cause mortality. Right? There should have bright light on that. Okay, what does that mean and how did these people pass? And the data has it. They will get into the data. And that's what Ivor does. He digs into data and says, oh, they were dying of automobile accidents. So what you found was vitamin D keeps people from having automobile accidents. I'm not saying that vitamin D doesn't. I'm just saying that if you don't set the study up right and you don't interpret the data right, and you want to change the way the conclusion is worded to give you the result that you were looking for, they do it. They do it all the time based on who they're funded by, based on what their bias was, and you just have to be careful.
[01:04:14.090] – Coach Rachel
Well, I appreciate having people like Ivor looking into stuff like that.
[01:04:19.930] – Coach Allan
If you ever get a chance to go to a conference or catch up with his YouTube, it's well worth the time and money.
Tara Garrison breaks out of the tribalism of keto forever with her motto, Do Keto. Not Forever. On this episode, we discuss her book, Short-Term Keto.
Transcript
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Let's Say Hello
[00:04:14.130] – Allan
Hey, Ras, how are things?
[00:04:15.970] – Rachel
Good. How are you today, Allan?
[00:04:17.870] – Allan
I'm doing all right. Really interesting weekend.
[00:04:21.530] – Rachel
Okay.
[00:04:24.330] – Allan
We had our Christmas parade here. So you're listening to this? It's just now past Christmas, but we're recording this a couple of weeks in advance, and we had the Christmas parade. And one of the things that kind of came about, and I was sort of side-swiped by this is my wife decided that I was going to wear a Santa suit and sit in the back of her golf cart and pass out candy and toys to the kids. And it was insane. Thousands of kids out there screaming “Santa! It's Santa!”
[00:04:59.130] – Allan
And then they're sitting on my lap and I'm taking pictures.
[00:05:02.910] – Rachel
How sweet. That's so cool.
[00:05:05.680] – Allan
It was just bizarre. I'll post a picture on the Facebook group. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/group, and you'll see a picture of me sitting in the back of a golf cart as Santa.
[00:05:20.250] – Allan
And then the parade. We were told to get there at a certain time, and they weren't even ready to near ready to start that thing until about 2 hours later. And then we're on the parade for over an hour, and I was like, okay, I've got to go to the bathroom, so I hopped out and I'm running.
[00:05:34.500] – Allan
So you got to stand on running through the streets to get to the bathroom. And then I got to go run back and find where we are in this parade to get back on the golf cart. So some funny moments. And you walk into a place that everybody knows me. Except now I'm dressed like Santa. And as soon as I get close and they start to recognize me, I say, “Don't say a word. Don't.”
[00:05:55.170] – Rachel
That's so sweet. That's Wonderful.
[00:05:58.050] – Allan
So not something I expected, but I did the best Santa I could.
[00:06:03.190] – Rachel
That's awesome. What a fun weekend.
[00:06:05.610] – Allan
So how are things with you?
[00:06:07.320] – Rachel
Good. Really good. I'm pretty excited today. I just hired a trainer to help me get through a marathon. I've got a spring marathon already scheduled, and I've been thinking about it for a while, and I thought, you know, I do want to set a goal time for this full marathon, and I think a trainer is going to help me see my training in a whole new light. So I'm pretty excited to get started with her real soon.
[00:06:32.120] – Allan
Yeah. Is this one you've run before?
[00:06:34.350] – Rachel
No, it'll be a new marathon. It's actually one of the two runcations I've already scheduled for next year, and it's the St. Louis Marathon, and that will be in early April.
[00:06:45.270] – Allan
Ok. So based on what you know, of that course, is it similar to one you've run before?
[00:06:49.840] – Rachel
Actually, I don't have a profile yet. There's not a profile on their website that I found yet, but I'm asking around, so I'm hoping to get some insight. I hear it's hilly in that area, but I don't anticipate it being crazy hilly.
[00:07:06.400] – Allan
Yeah, but that's going to help set your expectations if you go into it. And this thing's, like Big Sur. You're like that was not what I was expecting. And then you get there. So you're not really that satisfied with your training and your time. But yeah, because if you're going to run hills, you need to do a little bit of training on hills, just know that you're getting the best you can out of your training. So I'll be interested to hear how this all goes about, because having a coach, that's what a lot of people don't recognize is how beneficial having someone there that knows the ropes, that knows what's going on to just kind of push you a little harder.
[00:07:44.250] – Allan
And yes, as a coach, at times, I hire coaches and you hire coaches, and that's what we do because we want to win. We want to do better, even if winning is just winning being better at ourselves.
[00:07:56.640] – Rachel
Sure. Sometimes it's nice to have another set of eyes on what I'm doing and how I'm progressing. It'll be interesting to see I'm sure she will push me harder than what I might push myself. And I'll have some solid accountability, too. So it should be really interesting to see how this plays out.
[00:08:15.890] – Allan
Good. And I'm pretty excited. I'm launching my new program in January, Win at Weight Loss, and you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/win and get on the waitlist for that. There are going to be limited slots because I can only handle so many clients. I don't pass my clients off to anybody else. I handle each and every one of them. This is a program, a six week program that basically teaches you everything you need to know for yourself, for your body.
[00:08:49.220] – Allan
This is not a cookie cutter, here's the four things I want you to do. I've done those before, but for most people, yeah, it works. But a lot of people, they need more. They need that next step because they plateau and they stop and it doesn't work. And so when things stop working, you need tools to get through that as well. So that's what this 6-week program win. It weight loss is. Go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/win. And you can get on the list. And then we'll have a conversation to see if this program is right for you.
[00:09:21.370] – Rachel
That sounds awesome. It'll be great. Good luck to everybody who signs up. Do it quick.
[00:09:26.730] – Allan
Please. Yeah. Because once I get to a number, I'm like that's all I can handle. I will have to turn that off. And then the waitlist won't be for January. It'll likely be for April. So just realize now I'm going to do these in classes or cohorts if you will. So we'll go through with a group of people, and then I'll be done. And then I'll maybe start another one. But they're going to be points of the year where I just take time off.
[00:09:49.020] – Allan
So if you miss this one, it's going to be probably two, three, four months before I do another one. And so you want to get into this one while the iron strike while the iron is hot, if you will.
[00:09:59.060] – Rachel
That's right. Do it.
[00:10:00.250] – Rachel
All right. Tara is a coach, and she was a Keto coach until she decided that maybe keto wasn't the right way for her to manage her health long-term? Are you ready to talk about Short-Term Keto with Tara Garrison?
[00:10:16.890] – Rachel
Sure.
Interview
[00:11:12.750] – Allan
Tara, welcome to 40+ Fitness.
[00:11:15.190] – Tara
Yeah. Thanks for having me excited to be here.
[00:11:17.470] – Allan
So we're going to talk about your book, Short-Term Keto: A Four Week Plan to Find Your Unique Carb Threshold. And what I like about this. And it's what I tell a lot of people because, like, oh, you do Keto, but you don't do it all the time. Why don't you do it all the time? All the other Keto guys, they want to do it all the time, and you say I'm going to do it.
[00:11:37.590] – Allan
I told you, who's going to bark?
[00:11:40.230] – Tara
He's like, on camera. It's my time to shine.
[00:11:44.310] – Allan
Yes, it's my time to shine. So sorry about that. But I'm going to leave that in.
[00:11:51.570] – Allan
But the principle of this is that I look at and similar to you, I think look at keto as a tool.
[00:11:58.830] – Tara
Yeah, absolutely. And a powerful one. Short-term keto. I don't know if I'm jumping ahead.
[00:12:06.580] – Allan
No. Yeah. Go ahead.
[00:12:08.610] – Tara
Short-term keto. I've had a program for many years now called Keto In and Out, right? That was a precursor to this book. And really what it was born out of was seeing what a powerful tool Keto is in our day and age pretty much. I'm not going to say everybody should do keto, because I definitely have times, I just told a woman yesterday I'm like, I don't really don't think you need to do keto. I already think you're metabolically flexible, you're thin, you're healthy, you're thriving. I don't see any for it.
[00:12:39.040] – Tara
But most of us, we literally get into our car. We, like, sit down in a seat while we're still in our house. Like our garage is still our house. We sit in a seat, we drive to the grocery store and we sit in a seat, come back and we have endless access to food. And guess what happens over time at that lifestyle very sedentary and overeating. We are not forced to be in a situation in which our bodies need to run off their own body fat for fuel.
[00:13:05.340] – Tara
But if we lived in the wild and this is where it kind of gets to what you're saying here about not always being if we lived in the wild, if we lived in nature, which unless things go real bad in the next few years here, which hopefully they don't. But most likely we're not ever going to be in that situation again. We're just living out in the woods and trying to hunt for food. But that is our natural state. That is what our bodies. That's what they evolved upon over many thousands of years was not always having endless access to food and having to move even when you don't really feel like it so that you can have food. And guess what happens as a result of that, our bodies would go into ketosis naturally.
[00:13:46.740] – Tara
So what does this mean? It means when you run out of enough incoming carbohydrate to support your bodily functions, your body will turn your own body fat. Or now it's dietary fat often because we have so much food available to us. But your body will turn fat into these things called ketones. And you will run off of those as your energy source. And so many cool things happen in our bodies. As a result of that, we drop inflammation. It's more easy for us to focus. Without food, we can go longer without food without feeling hangry and angry and shaky and hypoglycemic. And all of these things.
[00:14:21.450] – Tara
Gut healing benefits. It's really powerful for the body. Our brain gets a boost. They go through our blood brain barrier. We have more mental energy, and some people hypothesize that maybe that was to help us go hunt and find more food. You know, we want to be mentally clear. So we don't do this. Why would you do this? Why would you do this? Why would you, like sit there and be uncomfortably hungry and you have everything you could ever imagine sitting in your pantry just waiting for you to eat it.
[00:14:45.710] – Tara
We're just not going to because we don't have to. Here comes keto. This intervention in which all we do is intentionally remove most of the carbohydrates from our diet, and we get this adaptation in our body. To me, the point is the adaptation and going back to this living in nature analogy, like, if you're freaking starving and you're living out in nature and you come across whatever food, whether that's potatoes or berries or whatever or animal, you're just going to eat whatever you can. Right.
[00:15:18.040] – Tara
And so a lot of people get in the mentality of carbs are bad for you. And carbs make you fat. And it's like, no, it's just an abundance and over consumption of carbohydrates all the time in which your body never, ever gets to explore this other half of its capacity, which is ketosis that can become, quote, unquote bad for you over time, because now you are kind of dependent on glucose for energy and you get hangry and shaky and all of these things if you don't have it. So keto is a powerful tool that allows us to come in and get our metabolism to be doing what it was always meant to do in the first place.
[00:15:55.770] – Allan
I do something I call Seasonal Ketosis. And so it's basically I know there's seasons of the years when I'm going to want to eat certain things or drink certain things and do certain things, usually around the holidays and football season and that kind of thing. And so I was just like, okay, I can be in ketosis. And I feel great in ketosis. But I was like, I don't want to live my life this way 24/7. So I would cycle out, and then I would cycle back in.
[00:16:24.170] – Allan
And what I found was for me, it works very well. And then I've had other people that I've worked with, and they can't necessarily bring back the carbs because the way they process carbs and the way they eat carbs just doesn't work. Can we talk a little bit about this bio-individuality I've heard used. Why are some of us wired to be fine with keto most of the time? And then others were wired more with the threshold of being able to take in more carbs?
[00:16:57.030] – Tara
Yeah, that's a great question. Any good nutrition coach, I think they're first going to want to know, where are we starting? What's going on? What's the starting point? And so if you have let's say, for example, you have type II diabetes. I'm not recommending that you bring carbs back in. Actually, the research is kind of starting to shift over the years. We used to say this is not we're not healing type II diabetes with this, we're just managing it depending on how far progressive is. We're seeing that it might be possible, at least to be able to increase the carb threshold a little bit. But we're talking years of doing keto, right.
[00:17:36.500] – Tara
So if you have prediabetes type II diabetes, you're using keto to manage something like epilepsy or some sort of therapeutic approach. It might be a long-term thing for you. For women who are perimenopausal or post menopausal, they may have higher estrogens, and that doesn't mean that they have to just live with that and be like that forever. A lot of things can be changed and shifted. But I'm saying if that's where you're starting, you might need to be keto for a long time.
[00:18:06.730] – Tara
If you're very obese, I'm just blunt with it, the more obese you are, more likely, the better keto is going to work for you, because that means you likely are not metabolically flexible. Your body has a hard time going into its own fat source and using that for fuel without you becoming extremely uncomfortable and hungry and cravings and all those things. So you do something like keto, you might do it for years. There's so many different things that could be happening in the body to cause this.
[00:18:33.920] – Tara
There's even DNA. I do DNA work with my clients. There's even predispositions that certain people have to have less normal, like impaired glucose metabolism. Right. We look at people with Alzheimer's. If you have Alzheimer's in your family, you may be possibly have some genetic predispositions to not manage glucose as well. A lot of these things can be completely changed by lifestyle, right. But it takes time.
[00:19:01.830] – Tara
And then I've had clients where they're extremely fit. They're extremely active. Their blood sugar regulation is great. They have good muscle mass. They're already quote unquote fat adapted, meaning their body can run off fat just as well as carbs. They might not even need to do keto. Everyone doesn't need to do it. And then there are some people that actually really it's probably going to be a life changing intervention for them.
[00:19:26.060] – Tara
And so I would say that the biggest hitters are if you have high blood sugar, this is going to be a winner-winner chicken dinner for you. It's just for me, people who they feel like finally, because when you have blood sugar cravings for food and your body is saying you're going to die if you don't eat like something sugary right now because it doesn't know how to go into ketosis.
[00:19:50.190] – Tara
It's pretty much it that's going to be a life changing experience for you left in your satiation hormone goes up. That's life changing for people. I've had clients that are 400 pounds plus and just lost hundreds of pounds, it's life changing for them, so it really depends on where your starting point is and for the sake of time, I won't go too far into that, but we go into detail on that of reasons you might want to try to do keto and possibly do it longer term in my book.
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[00:22:02.790] – Allan
And then the other side of it because I work with clients too, and we'll go low carb with their eating and they feel really good. They're losing the weight 40 lbs, 50 lbs gone and they feel great. And they're like, this is incredible. And then they're like, but I want to introduce carbs, but I'm afraid.
[00:22:20.020] – Tara
Yeah.
[00:22:20.830] – Allan
So what are some signs? They're like, this works so well, but they're like, I know a holiday, I know a vacation is coming. We're going to Disney. We're doing this and it's like, can I? And I'm like, Well, you need permission first, right? I know you have some signs, okay. It's probably okay for you to start reintroducing carbs.
[00:22:41.410] – Tara
Yeah. I love this question. This is one of the main reasons I even started talking about this at the time in 2018, when I started sharing this message, kind of developed this little tagline of ‘Do Keto. Not Forever.'
[00:22:52.170] – Tara
That was very rebellious of me. Very. Because I was very involved in the leaders of the keto movement, where all my friends and colleagues and this was just like an abomination at that time. In 2018, keto was like, the end. All be all. If you are a smart person, you understand that ketones are better than glucose and like that was just the mentality.
[00:23:12.780] – Tara
And I had recently gotten off of keto, so I came into it very lean, very athletic. I just qualified for the Boston Marathon, was lifting weights. Did keto. I appreciated some of the benefits that I got in terms of mental clarity. I think I needed a little more fat, so just hormonally felt better. I could go longer between meals, which was super cool without feeling hungry. I really got tapped into physiological hunger versus blood sugar hunger. And that was cool. But for me personally, I lost muscle and gained body fat.
[00:23:43.980] – Tara
And at the time I was dating one of the leaders of the keto movement, so I know I was optimizing it. I'm a trainer and nutritionist myself, but my body just wasn't loving it from a body composition or athletic performance perspective. And I had just brought carbs back in and everything was going back up for me. And I still maintained those benefits that I had received during keto. I've been able to go between meals for a long time. And so here I was like talking to all these women at conferences and they're terrified of carbohydrates, right?
[00:24:11.000] – Tara
They're terrified. They've been taught these will make you fat. These will inflame you. Even people saying they're going to kill you. There's like a lot of fear. And the clients that I've worked with. Sometimes my clients come to me and they've lost over 100 lbs on keto already. And I'm like the carb savior or something because I teach the message. They're like, Girl, are you serious? Are you telling me I can really have carbohydrates again? Because I'm terrified. And what I like to tell people is like if you've experienced a big weight loss on keto, remember that you are not in the same body right now that you started with.
[00:24:41.510] – Tara
It's hard emotionally for us to get there sometimes, right? We still see ourselves as a 200, 300, 400 pound person, but you're not. You lost 200 lbs. You lost 100 lbs. Your body is different now. The physiological processes are different. So what I say is, look, check your blood sugar management when you wake up in the morning. If you're under 90 in the morning, even if you ate some carbs the day before, that's a really good sign that you've achieved better blood sugar management. If you're starting to just gain weight back, maybe you've turned into lazy keto and you're not actually in ketosis anymore and you're gaining weight back.
[00:25:15.820] – Tara
You're just not feeling as good. You're not getting the same results because once your blood sugar management is good, you're not going to get the same drastic result from keto that you did when your blood sugar was poor. If your sleep isn't good, if you feel like you're crying a lot like that could be low serotonin. If your gut health isn't good, you just chronically have watery stools or constipation. Those are all signs that maybe it's time to just explore bringing cars back in.
[00:25:39.580] – Tara
And I just want to say one thing real quick. And that is please remember that when you first bring carbs back in, your insulin response will not be as high. And we've seen that is a rat study. But for about two weeks after getting off keto and bringing carbs back in, you may have higher blood sugar spikes than you would after those two weeks are over. Once your body gets regulated on how much insulin to produce, I say that because so many people, they're like, I try to eat one carb and my blood sugar shot through the roof.
[00:26:07.280] – Tara
I'm like, I know that's because you've been keto for so long. I've had times when I was keto and I ate carbs, and I literally fell asleep like I was in a coma. And so it's that please remember that. And the types of carbohydrates you eat are super important as well, and make a tremendous difference.
[00:26:25.080] – Allan
Yeah. Because just like, we often have that problem, they call it keto flu. I call it carb withdrawals. When you go into ketosis about a two week period of time that your body is trying to figure out. Whoa, what is this way of eating? What's going on here? Why don't I have this? It works the other way when you're trying to go back in. It's like, okay, Whoa. I've got a sugar rush just having a little bit of ice cream or a cookie,
[00:26:50.980] – Tara
Right.
[00:26:51.490] – Allan
Whoa. Where did that come from? And then your body will adapt, and we get this metabolic flexibility, where our body is able to easier go back and forth. If you said, okay, I'm going to take the weekend off or take a month off, and I'm going to go and start reintroducing carbs, and then it's not really what you want. It's not really working out. You're not feeling it. Then you just do that transition back. And it's actually not hard. It's not as hard as it was the first time.
[00:27:18.520] – Tara
Totally.
[00:27:19.070] – Speaker 1
If you get yourself into a really good state with how your insulin responses, how your pancreas is working. And like you said the other things, like Ghellin and Leptin, and just kind of making sure that you actually know what hunger is and just eating sugar for the sake of sugar.
[00:27:35.330] – Tara
I appreciate you saying that because I think you're the first person I've heard say that. I'm like, I feel like the lone wolf over here. Everyone's teaching, hey, when you go to keto, it sucks. And your gut is going to get all messed up because your enzyme regulation is off because you're not used to making that much lipase to break down fats and all these things. And it's okay. Just hang in there. But nobody's breaching that. I felt like. I've been like, I'm like, hey, also, when you bring carbs back in, some things have to get up regulated in the body to the amount of amylase you produce to break down carbohydrates in your gut, your ability to manage and process that much fiber.
[00:28:09.090] – Tara
And that's why I slowly reintroduce carbs in the book, because sometimes people are like, oh, I ate carbs, and I got really bloated. My body just hates them. I'm like, no, you're just not used to producing enough enzymes to break it down. It takes time. So I appreciate you sharing that message. It's also a transition out.
[00:28:26.760] – Allan
I actually put it in my book that I published in 2018. So in December of 2018, I had the same message that you don't have to be in keto forever. But you want to have a reason. You want to have a strategy as you go into these types of things. And so one of the most important strategies, I think, is people are looking at carbohydrates and trying to get past that fear or that phobia, which I guess carb phobia is now going to be a word if it's not, I just made it up.
[00:28:55.680] – Tara
I say it all the time.
[00:28:59.350] – Allan
Okay. Not all carbs are the same. Yeah, but we have this in our mindset. It's like I look on the label and that's mistake probably number one. But I'm looking on the label and the label says it's got this many carbs. And can you kind of go through and talk about how we can look at carbohydrates and how we can prioritize them as we begin to reintroduce?
[00:29:22.820] – Tara
Yeah. I love this question. And the reason this is one of the main reasons I wrote this book is because I noticed because I'm a keto specialist in my regular everyday life. Everyone feels the need to talk to me about keto, right? I'm sure you noticed the same. Right. And I get these people they're eating pizza and chips and whatever and fast food, and they'll say, oh, man, I know. I just got to go back to keto, and I'm like, wait a minute. That's not the only way to be healthy.
[00:29:49.390] – Tara
There's another place that's not junk food or keto that's, like, all in or all out thinking. I almost forget sometimes that when I'm telling people that it's okay to eat carbs, I don't like calling anything good or bad. It's just you're not going to get as optimal results when you're eating processed carbohydrates full of canola oil and processed white flour and sugars. And that's not going to be the same experience of what I'm talking about. And the way I like to prioritize it is non starchy vegetables.
[00:30:21.470] – Tara
So the things that we actually kind of consider vegetables, right? Broccoli asparagus cauliflower have at it, because sometimes even keto, you have to actually limit that. For some people who are really sensitive, it's like, oh, you can have carrots again. You can have any vegetable you want, and that brings us into starchy vegetables. Right. So that's kind of the next step is like potatoes, sweet potatoes. If your gut can tolerate it, it depends on the person. But some people manage beans really well. Some people have sensitivities and can't have those things.
[00:30:50.600] – Tara
But if your body processes the well, go for it. Start eating more things from nature. And then my next on my list is fruits, you know, and you could alternate that you could put fruit up there with starchy vegetables to start eating fruits again. See how your body does see how you tolerate them. There's so much fear around these foods, especially in the keto world. It's like, don't eat bananas. I just saw a share the other day and it was like, oatmeal is unhealthy. And I'm like, no for some people, maybe, but not for everyone.
[00:31:20.100] – Tara
So question some of these dogmatic beliefs that you've gotten and look at the actual research if you want to, it's not there. We're taking something that might be true for some people and trying to make it true for everyone. And so that's like, it's something to be mindful of in the nutrition world right now in our information age. And also, I am not opposed to whole grains like quinoa. And so granted, if you have leaky gut, you don't want to be eating these things, they're probably going to exacerbate it, right.
[00:31:48.180] – Tara
If you don't cook your foods like this might affect it. Right. But if you look at the actual research, there's so much in support of some of these whole grains, even oatmeal, helping with cholesterol, helping with LDL levels, helping be heart protective. And I have to go so against my programming and the keto world to say stuff like this because we've been taught for so long. Like grains are bad, like beans are horrible. Definitely don't eat those. Don't eat bananas. Those are fake foods. And I'm like, I've come to a place in my journey where I'm like, if nature is allowing it to be grown and you ask your body, how does my body actually feel when I eat these things?
[00:32:29.060] – Tara
When I eat quinoa, I feel like, amazing. My body loves quinoa as you bring these things back in, start to experiment. How do I feel? Especially after kind of that two week mark is gone. And I bet for most of you, at least it's been most of my clients experience after a phase of keto when everything's regulated in the body and they start bringing these things back in and let go of their beliefs that it's hurting them, they start to feel really good.
[00:32:51.280] – Allan
Yeah. And that's what I like with your plan is that basically it's not this. Okay, turn the switch. And now I go carb crazy. It's okay. We're going to go in and we're going to have some spinach and we're going to have some broccoli and we're going to have some cauliflower and we're going to slowly introduce these vegetables and see how our body responds.
[00:33:11.970] – Allan
It might be a little hard. At first, you might not be digesting. It the way your body needs to, and you might be gassy feel a little bloated, but give it a shot, give it a legitimate shot. And then once you kind of adapt and your body is performing well with that, you can go to the next step saying, okay, I want some sweet potato, and it's not like you eat one whole sweet potato. You have a little bit of sweet potato with dinner and see how you feel.
[00:33:34.890] – Tara
I like how your plan is kind of putting that together in a structure. So there's not a whole lot of questions of okay, do I go out for Thanksgiving dinner and that be my break, my keto thing. No, you're not going to feel well if you do that.
[00:33:49.940] – Tara
Right. And the intention is if you slam on your gut and to your blood sugar, because keto is a restrictive diet, it is. And so sometimes there's an emotional component of, oh, my gosh. I think why people get stuck in it, possibly because they're like, I like this restriction because I don't trust myself to be not, like, off the rails. Once I do eat carbs and I'm trying to show a different way of, like, honoring…
[00:34:17.640] – Tara
The way I like to put it is this imagine that you're still keto with healthy carbs as part of keto. If you kind of look at it like that instead of just like, I'm going to eat whatever the freak I want. Pizza time, soda time. That's not it. It's still eating whole foods from nature. And I'm really just trying to help people get the experience of what it can feel like when you eat carbs to support healthy functions of your body. But not so many carbs that you go into a diabetic coma being theoretical. But you know what I mean, because that deters people from understanding what it can feel like to live a balanced life again after a phase of keto.
[00:34:54.750] – Allan
Right. And once again going back to the metabolic flexibility, you might find that your carb threshold has gone up substantially. And so whereas before, when you were insulin resistant, when you were obese and when you were really struggling, 25 grams was all you could handle. And when you start looking at what, 25 grams of carbs equates to it's almost no carbs that you're eating. And then you say, okay, now I'm going to push this up. And maybe now you're eating 50, you might find yourself still in ketosis most of the day if you're doing any measurements at all.
[00:35:28.080] – Allan
Some people I've seen particularly very fit, very athletic, moving people when they're doing a lot of movement, they're doing a lot of work cleaning out their glycogen stores and doing those types of things. They can eat 100-150 and still maintain ketosis most of the day.
[00:35:45.410] – Tara
Yeah. Even Dominic Agastino shared this. I think on I believe it was on Dave Asprey's podcast or maybe Joe Rogan or something. But he was saying that he eats about 150 grams of carbs a day, and he called it more ketogenic than ketosis. And I think what he means by that is he's helping to support some probably most of you. If you're keto nerds, you've heard there's parts of your brain that really want glucose. There are certain parts of your body that do want glucose. So you're supporting those organs, you're supporting those things.
[00:36:13.160] – Tara
But you're still active enough. I mean, Dom, like, he deadlifts, like 500 lbs. It's dude strong. Right. So just like you're saying, he's using that glycogen and then intermittent fasting so that he's able to go back into ketosis easily. And I think that's become my lifestyle. I probably eat, I would say, between 100 and 200 grams of carbs. I crush it in the gym every morning. I am like, scary, almost beast mode. And that's why I can do stuff. And then I pair that with intermittent fasting.
[00:36:39.960] – Tara
It's such an easy lifestyle, and you don't have to not have any carbs, which for me, especially someone like me who's athletic. It really limits for me that kind of intensity in the gym. Right. And so it can become an easier flow of life if you're willing to add some activity into your routine as well. But the less active you are, probably the less carbs you need, I'd say across the board for human beings.
[00:37:08.430] – Allan
Yeah. And that kind of goes to the next thing. I really haven't seen anybody else that's spent a lot of time talking about this. But part of the reason that you do want to make sure you're eating those non starchy vegetables and sometimes some starchy vegetables and definitely fruits is your neurotransmitters. They're basic components. And if you're just going strict keto for a long period of time, you're probably going to have some issues with your GABA and your dopamine and serotonin and those types of things which are going to affect your sleep.
[00:37:42.900] – Allan
They're going to affect how you feel. And when your body gets stressed. Now we're talking about adrenaline and things like that. So can you talk a little bit about those neurotransmitters? Because this is a conversation that a lot of people aren't having about why carbs are actually an important component of what we eat. We got to do it right with regards to how we process. But you'll know, it because your brain will turn on when you get the formula right.
[00:38:12.410] – Tara
Right. And I love talking about this. And thank you for asking, because there's such a lack of awareness of how much nutrition impacts our mental health. And so often I see people go into these blame and shame cycles of what's wrong with me. I don't know what's wrong with me. And I'm like, actually, okay. So you had something traumatic happen and you're sleepdeprived and you're sad and you've been keto. And maybe you don't even know you have a genetic predisposition for low serotonin. And so your serotonin is in the crapper.
[00:38:40.610] – Tara
And you're feeling so just down. And guess what? Actually eating carbs is smart. Your body is probably telling you to go eat some carbs because it's like, we need to get serotonin up. So you're not so sad, friend. And then people are like, I don't know what's wrong with me. I just don't have any willpower. And I'm like, hold on on. Let's look into this. So let me give some basic information. I'd say the biggest impact that keto has on certain air transmitters would be dopamine, serotonin and GABA.
[00:39:08.020] – Tara
So when your keto, your dopamine will be higher. So when you eat a diet that's mostly fat and protein, you're going to favor dopamine production. That's because tyrosine the building block of dopamine and tryptophan the building block of serotonin, they compete to get across the blood brain barrier. So if you're eating more fats and proteins, the tyrosine is going to win. You're going to be more dopamine or making more dopamine. And then if you are eating more carbs and protein as the majority of your diet, you'll favor serotonin production.
[00:39:40.390] – Tara
So what does this mean? If you are somebody who has really low dopamine and you go, keto, you may all of a sudden start. You may have a life changing experience on your mood. You're like, all of a sudden I'm driven and I'm making my dreams come true, and I'm nice to everybody and confident and like, wow! That's where I think a lot of the zealots of keto come from these deeper biological processes they're having. They don't understand. They're like, all I know is, I got better. Things got better. Like, I felt a lot better.
[00:40:13.430] – Tara
But let's say somebody has they already have good dopamine levels, but they have low serotonin, and then they go keto, and they get higher dopamine. But they might like that a little bit, but didn't really need it that much. But they needed a little bit of serotonin that they were getting. And now all of a sudden, it's dropped. And they're in a place where they are sad and crying a lot and just feeling really emotional. And then they're likely to put more pressure on themselves.
[00:40:37.940] – Tara
Come on. Why can't you just do this thing? And it's like, you need to know that there could be a biochemistry aspect to this process for you. And so I always honor people. I'm like, Listen, if you don't feel better on keto, and you've been doing it for, like, a month and you just don't feel better. It's okay to honor that it's not the only way to be healthy. You can also eat a balanced diet and exercise and get many of similar benefits.
[00:41:02.850] – Tara
And then GABA, I really like to share about. So ketone bodies have been found to be GABAergic. So what's GABA? GABA is like, the breaks on our brain. So a lot of people who are overthinkers, they just can't stop, can't stop, can't stop, can't stop. They may like being in a ketogenic state because that overthinking is usually indicative of, well, it can also be maybe you need to meditate and work on some things like that. But glutamate is a neurotransmitter that causes it's excitatory. It's like go go in our minds. And if that conversion, it turns into GABA.
[00:41:39.470] – Tara
So if it doesn't turn into the breaks in the brain, we're just like chronically obsessing over these little things. And it makes people feel crazy. And so ketone bodies can help increase your GABA levels and help that to stop. So that can be really enjoyable experience for some people. But if you already have good GABA levels, you're not going to feel that you're not going to really need that. I like to go into this in the book of some different things you might be feeling and experiencing on keto and why.
[00:42:10.500] – Tara
And then the last one will be adrenaline. This is something that honestly concerns me. Dr Jeff Volek and Stephen Phinney did a study on this because a lot of people were concerned that keto might just be this high on ketones, might actually just be high on adrenaline, which feels great and helps you lose weight in the beginning. But over time it increases cortisol and can actually cause you to gain weight and have health problems. And so they showed that as long as you have adequate salt intake on keto, that you can offset the overproduction of adrenaline on keto.
[00:42:41.910] – Tara
But if you don't, which I say is pretty like you don't know exactly what your sodium levels are and what your needs are that day. So I get concerned about people who may not have adequate salt levels on keto, and they're going into this high adrenaline state for years on end, and that can cause problems in the long run. So just something to be aware of. I share all the details of that in the book, but the impact of our how are you feeling?
[00:43:07.020] – Tara
Are you really feeling better? Are you feeling kind of crazy? Are you feeling kind of like manic and overly busy or uber-confident? Too confident, like you don't care about anybody anymore. Maybe your dopamine is through the roof. I just like to create awareness of these things so people don't have this shame and stigma of what's wrong with me, and they actually have some understanding behind it.
[00:43:26.560] – Allan
And I think this speaks to when we say food is information. Movement is information. This is how it happens. It's the neurotransmitters. It's the hormones. All those things have to balance out. All those things have to work for you. And if you're out of balance because the food you're taking in isn't serving you or your movement patterns aren't serving you, then you're giving yourself bad information and your body is responding the only way it can.
[00:43:55.880] – Tara
Right
[00:43:56.810] – Allan
Doing these experiments getting out there and experiment of one. You know, you're the most important sample size there is. And just saying, I'm going to try this four-week plan and I'm going to find my carb-lite, keto and I'm going to get into keto. And then when I'm ready to come out, I'll follow this four week plan to reintroduce and really Journal and pay attention to your mood, pay attention to how your skin looks, how you feel, how your workouts. Like you said, if you start going beast mode in the gym, something good is happening.
[00:44:26.470] – Tara
Yeah. And sleep and digestion and all those things. I love that those are the questions I have as you go through that process. And ideally, it's a four-week plan. I'd love for you to make it like twelve weeks and do one week for a whole month. But be aware. And one of the cool things. And I'm sure you're aware of this with you all the time is you might not need as many carbohydrates after doing a phase of keto to give you that get up and go, which is kind of cool.
[00:44:54.440] – Tara
So you're exactly right. Please honor your body and what your body is asking for and give things time, though. One day you ate cupcakes yesterday. My body hates carbs. No. All right. Give yourself a little bit more time to experiment than that.
[00:45:09.900] – Allan
Tara, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest, and happiest you can be what are three strategies or tactics to get well?
[00:45:18.190] – Tara
Yes. Number one, sleep so big. I don't know how to say it, but you guys know you're worthy of sleep, right? Remember that. Nothing is more important than that. Everything in the body goes up when you have adequate sleep. And I think so many people are depressed and anxious because they literally just need sleep. And all those neurotransmitters I talked about the production all goes down if you don't have enough sleep, so biochemically, you're in a bad mood and that's hard to get out of. So sleep is, I'd say the core the key stone of wellness. It's the healer.
[00:45:50.950] – Tara
Next is having a consistent routine for success. Have a consistent routine. So it's not so hard all the time. Like, I got to get to the gym some time today. I got to figure out something healthy to eat at some point like that's very stressful. So you can eliminate this decision fatigue by having I have a morning routine. I have a consistent gym time with actual times on it. I have my clutch, go to meals and I have an evening routine. I have boundaries for myself. Right. And that is like it makes it so easy. Your body knows what to expect and you know what to expect, and then you just get in flow that gets you results.
[00:46:22.090] – Tara
And I'd say the last thing is showing up for yourself and having boundaries, saying no to things that you don't want to do, doing things that bring you joy, saying no to relationships that drag you down, spending time in relationships that nourish you. Like that. It's having happiness, like prioritizing kind of that inner child saying, I'm here for you and continuing to show up for yourself in a way that you need. I'd say between that having a flow of a fit, healthy lifestyle that you can stick with with ease, sleeping and nourishing your soul, it's good stuff.
[00:46:57.250] – Allan
Thank you for that. Tara, if someone wanted to learn more about the book, Short-Term Keto or the things you're doing, where would you like for me to send them?
[00:47:06.310] – Tara
You know what I would say? Go to my website, Taragarrison.com and you can click on the book link there because I am giving away my Top 100 Keto recipes for free with anybody who orders the books. So all the info for that is just right there. It's quick, easy, instant download because I want to make sure if you read the first chapter and you're like, wow, keto sounds really cool, and I actually want to try it and use Tara's recipes. I wanted to make sure people were supported on that. So my favorite Top 100 Keto recipes that I've used with clients and boot camps and all these things over the years are all condensed into that.
[00:47:35.460] – Tara
And then you can find links to Amazon and Barnes and Noble and all these websites where you can purchase the book.
[00:47:40.260] – Allan
Okay, you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/518 and I'll be sure to have the links there. So, Tara, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.
[00:47:50.190] – Tara
Thanks so much for having me.
Post Show/Recap
[00:47:56.270] – Allan
Hey, Ras, welcome back.
[00:47:57.990] – Rachel
Hey, Allan, what a great interview. There's a lot I'd like to talk about, but why don't we start with the idea of using keto as a short term fix?
[00:48:06.410] – Allan
Yeah, most of the people in the keto space love keto and then therefore, it's the only way to eat. And the short of it is. And anyone that's listening to this podcast more than a week knows that I don't buy into that. I'm not into the dogma of there's only one way for you to eat. There's an optimal way for you to eat where you are right now, and there are certain things you probably want to accomplish that eating the right way for that is going to serve you better.
[00:48:40.910] – Allan
I can tell you from my experience, keto is the best way for me to drop body fat. If I try to do it any other way, I tend to overeat. I don't feel satiated, and I don't enjoy myself enough to stick with it. And then there's just shortcuts. I can't say, okay, I'm going to lose weight and continue to consume beer or bread or those types of things because my body just puffs up. Now. I love beer. Don't get me wrong. And I really am kind of fond of bread, but they don't serve my body, particularly if I'm trying to lose weight.
[00:49:16.550] – Allan
And so if I'm looking to try to lose body fat, I have to go rather strict with keto, but I also have in the back of my mind. Yes, it's not permanent, but it could be if it needed to be. And so the flipping back and forth, which I do as a part of what I call seasonal ketosis is really just that thing to say. Okay, if it's a good time for me to start cutting body fat, which I'll tell you right now, it is. I'm looking for that Tough Mudder in August, so I would love to be 25 lbs less when I do that run because it's that much less weight I have to carry.
[00:49:52.940] – Allan
Now, the weight service me well right now. And if I want to lift heavy and do the things I'm doing, walk and lift heavy, I'm fine. It doesn't cause me any issues at all. But if I want to do something intense and long like the Tough Mudder, I'm going to need to do make some changes to me physically, which includes losing some body fat to perform the way I want to perform for that. So keto is a great way to improve your health. It's an elimination diet, so strictly you're eliminating whole food groups. Yeah, you are.
[00:50:26.990] – Allan
But same thing. If you're a vegan, same thing, you're vegetarian, same thing. If you're a carnivore, all those ways of eating, you're eliminating something. Even if you do the FODMAP diet, even if you do the Mediterranean diet, you're eliminating certain foods. And so elimination is what diets are. Almost none of them are just eat what you're normally eating and just eat less of it, because everybody knows that doesn't work, right? I'm starving all the time and I'm craving foods. So the eating less and moving more by itself doesn't work.
[00:51:00.990] – Allan
You've got to find a structure to how you're eating that helps you feel satiated. That lets you eat less and have the energy to move more. But you can't start with the eat less move more model. You have to think about the foods that are serving you and then go from there.
[00:51:20.030] – Rachel
Absolutely. I thought that was the greatest part about this being a short-term fix is that it's just one test, really. It's one experiment to see how your body responds when you take certain foods out of your diet and add other foods back into it and see how you feel in response. And it's pretty quick that you'll see some changes. But just like she said, you don't have to live on it forever. Once you reach maybe your body composition goal that you're trying to get through, or once you get through your Tough Mudder, maybe you can reassess your relationship with carbs.
[00:51:56.690] – Rachel
which brought me to the next point was that let's talk about carbs because carbs are not all created equal. And like I've mentioned in the past, if anybody says carbs, I instantly think of a giant baguette of bread or the pastries we eat at breakfast. I always default to bread, but that's not all the carbs. That's not it.
[00:52:17.280] – Allan
No, because carbs are going to range everywhere from the leafy greens that have almost no real usable carb. It's fiber and water. Mostly you look at celery, and everybody will say, Well, that's almost a negative in the calories, because there's so much fiber to digest that and get it to chew it, you're almost burning more calories than you are eating. That's not entirely true, but it is full of water. And so from that perspective, to say that celery is the equivalent of potatoes is the equivalent of bread is the equivalent of Twinkies. It's just not true.
[00:53:00.040] – Allan
There's a whole range of them and how your body utilizes them. That's so different. And we talked to Dr. Yeo a week or so ago, and the basic principle is that fiber is not going to be digested by you. It's going to get all the way down deep into your small intestine before bacteria are going to start hitting at it. And then it gets into your large intestine. And that's where they're going to start doing their breakdowns and stuff. So the fiber is going to go all the way through you, and you're not technically going to get any calorie load from it.
[00:53:33.060] – Allan
You're going to feel full or longer because it's not being taken up. Whereas bread and sugar and the Coca Cola and stuff that you want to drink, those things are hitting your bloodstream almost immediately. They've been almost completely digested in some cases again, if they're processed, they've been digested before you even put them in your mouth because of the processing. And so when it hits your digestive tract, they become sugar in your system. And then there's an insulin response. And there's all the other things that go along with that.
[00:54:06.390] – Allan
Different carbs are going to work differently for you. And there was an Israeli study a few years back, and they put the long-term monitors and continuous monitoring of blood glucose that you see people with typically with type II diabetes and type I diabetes. They wear this so they can constantly be monitoring their blood sugar. And they had this thing set up to basically just continually just check their glucose, check their glucose, check their glucose. And then they said, when you get ready to eat something, whatever you want to eat, a banana, a baguette, as you said or anything like that, a donut.
[00:54:46.410] – Allan
Then you go ahead and just log what you ate when you ate it, and they would say, okay, well, one person's blood sugar would just shoot up when they ate a banana, and someone else's wouldn't. And then there's the other aspects of this. If you eat a green banana, like, really green, like, hard to open. It doesn't peel, you basically cut it. That's almost entirely non-digestible starch. It's almost all fiber, and it's basically a prebiotic that's going to feed your intestinal flora, your microbes in your intestine, because you're not going to digest that as sugar.
[00:55:26.920] – Allan
Now, if you let it get ripe, and now it's a yellow or slightly browning, it's a high dose of sugar. It's changed. Same thing with a potato. If you eat a raw potato, it's almost all nondigestible-fiber. If you thecook it and eat it, it's now something that's going to boost up your blood sugar relatively quickly. If you then refrigerate it and eat it later, you've now turned it into a resistant starch. So that's all with the potato.
[00:56:01.780] – Allan
So there's a lot of variation there in the foods that we eat. And there's a lot of variation in individuals. And really, the only way, you'll know, if the food is serving you or not is trial and error. And that's what's great about keto is keto is that elimination diet that takes you off of all of that. And the other thing that at least it was great with keto was that it was all whole foods, because before the keto was really a big thing, they didn't have all the keto snacks and the keto fake recipe stuff. I still want my pizza. So make a keto pizza, which is fine. Except now you're introducing some processed foods, even with the almond flour and the coconut flour and eating a lot of cheese. So if you have a dairy problem, that's just another thing where it might not serve you to be doing this.
[00:56:57.830] – Allan
That stuff didn't exist early on in this whole drive to keto. And I approached it from a paleo perspective. And I'm like well, my ancestors would not have eaten keto pizza. And so it's just those kind of things of saying, think about food as nourishment for your body. And if the food isn't serving you towards the goals that you have for your health and fitness, then it's not the right food for you.
[00:57:27.050] – Allan
And that's kind of the message that Tara came into this was she was a fit young person trying to be competitive and athletic and get stronger and have a certain body fat percentage. And those things were really important to her. And keto was a tool that got her to a point. And then she's like, well, I'm not getting there. And I know I'm doing it right because I have the right resources there's just something about keto that's not working for me right now. And she transitioned off of keto.
[00:57:57.010] – Allan
And then she got to her body composition level. She got stronger. And that's Tara, that's perfect for her. And if you're struggling with something, consider trying keto and see how it goes. You don't have to think of it as, oh, well, once I go on it, then I'm locked in for the rest of my life but you might get there like you have Rachel and say, this does actually serve me very well. This way of eating serves me very well.
[00:58:24.920] – Allan
And if I want a beer after a race, I'll have a beer. That works perfect for you. And for Mike.
[00:58:33.830] – Rachel
Yes, it does. That's our Mo. Mike has an iron gut, so he's able to eat more non keto foods, and I'm able to eat. But that's just it is that we do enjoy certain foods when we feel like we can do that. So a beer every now and then. That's fine. I'm actually going to be experimenting with the sweet potatoes. You had mentioned this to me before about baking them and refrigerating them and baking them again to make them more insulin resistant. That's something I'll be experimenting with as I get ready for my marathon coming up.
[00:59:10.300] – Allan
And I've heard it done mostly with white potatoes. So you might want to do a little bit of reading on that. I'm not sure if it's the sweet potatoes that do that same way because they are slightly different. They're a little less starchy than the white potatoes. So I haven't looked into the sweet potatoes. But if you do that, then report back what you learn about it, because that would be very interesting.
[00:59:31.250] – Rachel
Well, you know, I'd like to choose foods that have a little bit more punch, nutrient wise. And I feel like a sweet potato might have a few extra nutrients that I could probably use in my diet, whereas a plain white potato may not. But I'll definitely try both experiments.
[00:59:46.120] – Allan
You might be surprised if you start really looking into what's in the potato. Besides the insulin response for standard potato, there's still some good nutrients in the potato, so give it a shot.
[00:59:57.940] – Rachel
Yeah, I'll check into that and let you know.
[00:59:59.990] – Allan
All right, Ras, I guess I'll talk to you again next week, then.
[01:00:03.060] – Rachel
Sure. Take care.
[01:00:04.350] – Allan
You too.
[01:00:05.220] – Rachel
Thanks.
Patreons
The following listeners have sponsored this show by pledging on our Patreon Page:
In her book, The Energy Equation, Dr. Sarah Myhill shows us why finding the right energy balance is critical for a long, healthy life.
Transcript
Let's Say Hello
[00:01:57.390] – Allan Raz, how's your week going?
[00:02:00.390] – Rachel Good, Allan. How are you today?
[00:02:02.460] – Allan I'm doing all right. In the 80s during the day and 70s at night. My wife and I are starting to try to do our transition, move over to the bed and breakfast she bought. Our rent runs out at the end of March for the apartment. So she pretty much wants to be moved over there. And here you can't really leave a property unattended overnight. People will break in and steal things. So we have to stay there. I go by the apartment every once while just to see it's still there. But because I'm paying rent. But yeah. So we're doing kind of a move right now.
[00:02:41.340] – Allan And then of course, I did get the gym open February 1st. Trying to run the gym and slow grow and we've got people coming in. But it's nice to have, you know, that back going again. So it's it's good times. How about you?
[00:02:56.640] – Rachel Sounds exciting. Well, we're the exact opposite of you right now. We have some Arctic air coming in, so we're in the single digits and sometimes those have a negative in front of them as well. So I am avoiding the outside while we are in those single digits and spending some time in my gym. So I just did a spin bike for about an hour this morning and doing some drills and just trying to keep warm as best I can.
[00:03:27.250] – Allan I'm going to tell you this. This morning I think it got down to… it might have got down all the way to 70.
[00:03:35.460] – Rachel Oh, gosh, I would love right now.
[00:03:38.550] – Allan Yes, I would say it was like probably for the folks that are doing Celsius, about 22 degrees Celsius. And I was cold. I was like, I'm going to have to put a sweatshirt on.
[00:03:53.700] – Rachel Oh, my gosh, I need three layers of clothing. If I even go outside to get the mail.
[00:03:59.710] – Allan You'll lose toes.
[00:04:01.220] – Rachel Right? Yeah.
[00:04:03.560] – Allan But I did see on Facebook that I guess Holland or New Holland, I forget the city name.
[00:04:09.710] – Rachel Holland
[00:04:10.940] – Allan Holland has heated sidewalks, so that's cool. So tell us a little bit about that.
[00:04:17.180] – Rachel I don't know a ton about it, but I believe that there's a wastewater treatment plant downtown or a plant of some sort where they need to recirculate their water. And when it comes out all nice and hot, it needs to go somewhere. So why not underneath the sidewalks of the downtown? So this heated water goes through all these coils underneath these beautiful brick sidewalks. They've got about almost five miles at this point of sidewalks that are heated for this treatment plant's hot water.
[00:04:47.300] – Rachel And it's amazing because it can melt snow at such a rate. So even when it's snowing full blown snow like we get in Michigan, it is able to keep up with certain inches per hour, a couple of inches per hour of snow, which is quite a bit. So when we got there the other day to run the heated sidewalks, there was dry brick pavement to run and no slipping and sliding, not even slush. And it is a stark contrast because the roads are totally full of snow. We actually got probably about seven inches of snow over the weekend. So it's amazing to see these perfectly dry sidewalks in stark contrast to the snowy roads. It was it's pretty amazing.
[00:05:30.770] – Allan So when are you going to make Michael do that with your running path?
[00:05:33.800] – Rachel We are so close. That'll be that'll be our summer projects. Maybe because there there's houses that have these sidewalks that go along the side of their house so they literally don't have to shovel that portion of their sidewalk, which I'm telling you would just be heaven. It's pretty amazing.
[00:05:53.330] – Allan Shoveling is good exercise, too.
[00:05:55.340] – Rachel It is. It is a good workout for sure.
[00:05:59.300] – Allan All right. So today we have on Dr. Sarah Myhill and she did the PK Cookbook, which is a Paleo Keto cookbook. And today we're going to talk about her book, The Energy Equation. So are you ready to get into that?
[00:06:14.590] – Rachel Let's go.
Interview
Text
[00:06:38.180] – Allan Dr. Myhill. Welcome back to 40+ Fitness.
[00:06:41.150] – Dr. Myhill Thank you for inviting me, Allan. You're always a very good questioner.
[00:06:45.470] – Allan Well, good. Now, the last time we had you on, we were talking about thePK Cookbook, which was the paleo ketogenic cookbook. Very good cookbook, by the way. Very good approach towards nutrition. And now your new book is The Energy Equation: From the Naked Ape to the Knackered Ape. And you did in the book, you explain that knackered for you americans out there just means tired or exhausted.
[00:07:13.370] – Allan When I have a conversation with someone when they want to go in and get into personal training, I'll be like, Okay, what's what's going on? And of course, there's the weight gain and there's the other things that they're they're worried about. But I hear fatigue in just about every single one of those conversations.
[00:07:36.920] – Dr. Myhill Yeah. Fatigue is the commonest symptom that presents in Western medicine and the worst treated.
[00:07:44.240] – Allan I agree, because in many cases we we don't know what we don't know. You get you get tired and most people will say, that's and that's just getting old. You know, you're just getting old. You got to slow down.
[00:08:00.540] – Dr. Myhill Yeah, but age doesn't cause anything. Age is not a mechanism. Age is a clinical picture. Age doesn't cause. You say we have to ask what is it about age that causes fatigue? And I think that age is great. You blame for fatigue when there are other eminently treatable aspects.
[00:08:20.660] – Allan Right. Now, we're not talking about the, I didn't get enough sleep last night, I sleep well every other night, so I'm just a little tired or I went out and did a four hour walk or run, and now I'm really knackered. So we're talking about the chronic fatigue syndrome and myalgic encephalitis. Kind of these deep-rooted conditions that we could be going through.
[00:08:51.040] – Dr. Myhill Well, that's one part of the spectrum. Now, I learned so much about treating the symptoms of fatigue through my work with patients with ME and chronic fatigue syndrome. But what I find is that exactly the same principles applied to people who are otherwise well will improve their energy levels and improve their level of functioning. And even more importantly, when you apply these techniques to athletes, you improve their level of functioning as well.
[00:09:21.160] – Dr. Myhill So the techniques we're going to talk about today are common to everybody. It doesn't matter if you've got chronic fatigue syndrome. If you're old, if you're young, if you're well, if you're a top athlete, we can all improve our energy mechanisms. Well, attention to these details.
[00:09:34.370] – Allan And I think the deeper concept here is kind of hit me in the gut a little bit was that if you feel like you're suffering from fatigue, the root causes of it are kind of the same metabolic problems that we have that cause cancers, coronaries, diabetes, dementia, just everything that we equate to getting old.
[00:09:58.460] – Dr. Myhill Absolutely. Absolutely, 100 percent. And not only do you improve how you feel now, but by putting in place these interventions, you greatly protect yourself from the risk of those nasty diseases that you describe. And that's why it's so important. We should all do it now. Don't wait for something nasty to happen. Really grasp the nettle now.
[00:10:21.190] – Allan Now you use the title, The Energy Equation. And I love that because it's a conversation that comes up all the time when we're talking about weight loss. It's energy in energy out and calories, in calories out. I try to explain to people that it's not that thermodynamics doesn't work in the human body. It does. But we've got it backwards, I think. We have it backwards. The trying to burn out the calories and do more and get more done. And just the modern lifestyles we have and the approaches we have towards energy. It's kind of backwards, isn't it?
[00:10:57.790] – Dr. Myhill Yes. What we know for absolutely for sure is that part that you describe, i.e. it's calories in and calories out. There's no relationship to effective weight loss because if you reduce the calories that you are eating, then the body thinks, oh, we're in starvation. Right. There's a famine and it shuts down energy burning and it's the body shuts down energy buring that makes you fatigued, it makes the foggy brain. You can't think clearly. It makes you depressed, it makes you anxious. Everything slows down. And that is no fun at all. The body just balances up energy burning or calories burnt to the calories consumed. So there's much more effective ways of losing weight which we can come onto, which do not involve calorie restriction.
[00:11:46.410] – Allan I think one of the keys here as I was getting into it and you quoted someone I can't remember the exact quote, because it was in English, but it was kind of an older English. And it was old called currency. The basic premise was that the opposite of fatigue is effectively having a slight energy surplus where we have just a little more energy than we need to function well. And then that extra energy gives us the energy to decide, hey, I feel good. I think I'll go for a run or a bike ride or hike or something. Talk a little bit about how we should view the energy in part of this equation.
[00:12:30.500] – Dr. Myhill OK, well, the point is we all have a certain bucket of energy that we can spend in the day. Now, if we spend more energy than we have available to us, then we die because we haven't got the energy for the heart to work, for the brain to work, for the gut to work, then the body will simply die. Now, the brain of the body cannot therefore permit you to spend more energy than you have available to you.
[00:12:57.470] – Dr. Myhill And so what it does is it gives you symptoms that which warn you that your energy is starting to empty. And in the book, The Energy Equation in detail, those symptoms, the symptoms we all know about fatigue, no stamina, short of breath, foggy brain, can't think clearly. And then the brain gives the symptoms that stop the spending energy, like depression, like anxiety. The symptoms are very important. They guide us. They tell us about the energy gap.
[00:13:25.130] – Dr. Myhill But if you've got plenty of energy, if you've got an abundance of energy, for all the reasons we can talk about, then then you have the ability to spend it and then you can yes, you can get training and not pay for it the next day. Yes, get physically fit. Yes. You can take on mental projects, new businesses, new horizons, new hobbies, because you have the mental energy to deal with that.
[00:13:47.930] – Dr. Myhill So what that means is there's two sides of the energy equation. First of all, I have to advise you how to make your energy bucket as large as is possible. You've got plenty of energy spend in a day, and then we have to look at how the body is spending energy and may be wasting energy. Because the gap between the two gives us the energy to have a life with and spending energy mentally and physically is having fun. It's called living life, though the techniques they make, as I call it, the holes in the empty bucket smaller and would improve the mechanisms by which we generate energy. So we have plenty to go at.
[00:14:28.350] – Dr. Myhill I think of energy is money and without money we can't live. And if you've got an abundance of money, you can have a lot of fun and have a jolly good time. If you're wasting money, then you haven't got the money to spend on the things you like doing. It's exactly the same with energy.
[00:14:45.250] – Allan Now, you mentioned something that is really, really important is the kind of the leakage, the holes in the bucket, if you will. Most people when you start talking about energy, they're thinking in terms of, oh, I need to exercise to burn energy. And that is one way that we would use some of the energy that's available to us. But it's actually a very small percentage of what we would actually use in a day. Can you talk about some of the energy outs and why it's critical for us to make sure that we have an abundance of energy coming in to be able to handle these functions?
[00:15:18.970] – Dr. Myhill Well, an astonishing statistic in my mind, is that about two-thirds of all the energy that the body generates just goes to staying alive. That's called basal metabolism and keeping warm the heart beating efficiently as a pump, the brain working efficiently. I mean, at rest, although the brain weighs just two percent of body weight, it consumes 20 percent of all the energy that the body generates. So the brain is using an enormous amount.
[00:15:47.980] – Dr. Myhill But the organ that uses the most energy of all is the liver. And the liver at rest uses twenty-seven percent of all the energy that the body generates. And the reason for that is the liver has to deal with what comes from the gut. The liver is there to mop up the toxic products that come from the gut. And although we think food is good for us and of course it's essential for life, food is actually a potentially toxic soup. And if you eat poor-quality food, you will end up with a fermenting gut. And when you've got a fermenting gut, you will be fermenting those sugars and carbohydrates to alcohol, to the lactate, to hydrogen sulfide. You will be producing lots of bacteria and fungi with bacterial endotoxin and fungal mycotoxins. And that all gets absorbed and it goes in via the portal vein to the liver. And the liver has to deal with that toxic soup. And that requires a lot of raw materials and a lot of energy. So the liver is the most energy-consuming part of the body.
[00:16:55.600] – Dr. Myhill So what that tells us is simply by improving our diet and you mentioned the Paleo-Ketogenic diet. Simply by getting onto a low carbohydrate paleo ketogenic diet, you greatly reduce the work that the liver has to do. And if the liver is not using energy, then it's there for you to use. And so many people, just by doing the diet, turn round to me and say within a couple, three weeks, my energy back I've suddenly got my spark again. I feel 20 years younger. I now know this is how I should be. So the diet is absolutely central to energy delivery mechanisms for that one simple reason. It just reduces the work we have to spend on the liver for just basal metabolism.
[00:17:40.600] – Allan And to take that one level deeper, there'll be there's things that will come out on the market, raise your metabolism so you can lose weight. And every time I see one of those, I just cringe because that's the exact opposite of what we should be trying to do. Our metabolism is going to be what it's going to be. We can improve it just with the quality of our food and some exercise and other basic functional things we can just do for ourselves. But people will try to take these stimulants basically and they're like bashing a big hole in their bucket.
[00:18:20.640] – Dr. Myhill I call it flogging a dead horse. That's the saying we have in this country. Yes, you can beat them. They'll do a bit more work. But it's counterproductive in the long term. The supplements that stimulate metabolism does not work. And the most important thing is the first one. We have to improve energy delivery mechanisms. And then, as I call it, look how we are wasting energy. And the gap between the two gives us energy to spend on having a jolly life.
[00:18:48.910] – Dr. Myhill So the energy equation is all about making that gap as wide as possible.
[00:18:53.850] – Allan And there's study after study that the lower your metabolism, the longer you live. And that's all part of making it a lot easier to balance this equation. If you're basically doing the right things for your body and your body is optimized. The mitochondria are firing and they're doing what they're supposed to do. You're turning the ATP around and everything's just kind of working for you. The energy just blows out because you stored all this body fat and now your body can say, hey, we don't need this anymore.
[00:19:29.250] – Allan The liver can get busy because it's got all the energy it needs. And it's like, Okay, now we can do the cleaning up that we need to do as we get rid of this body fat. And it just really kind of is this self-fulfilling prophecy that's backwards in our head. It's not about getting your metabolism to work faster. It's about optimizing your health. So you have an optimized metabolism.
[00:19:52.380] – Dr. Myhill It's all about efficiency. And the other thing to remember that is so important is we spend energy even during sleep, and it's during sleep that the immune system heals and repairs. So, you can't work, you can't generate energy, you can't do physical exercise. You can't do brain exercise without generating, creating some damage in the body and with good quality sleep and energy and of course, raw materials, the immune system then heals and repairs.
[00:20:20.100] – Dr. Myhill So this diet and these infections stop you degenerating and ending a degenerative disease is now a major cause of morbidity in people as they get older. So it's just good all round. You can't go wrong with these regimes.
[00:20:37.380] – Allan Now, since we're talking about optimizing and efficiency and trying to keep our basically say keep our energy out in balance with our energy and and all that, why is it still important to exercise? Because that's burning energy. Why would we still want to exercise?
[00:20:52.440] – Dr. Myhill Well, first of all, we are functional animals. And primitive man, if he didn't exercise, if he couldn't use his body, then he would simply die from starvation. So we have had millions of years where for optimum health, optimal function, we have to use our bodies. One example of this is if you send astronauts up into space where there's no gravity, moving around, it's very easy. They don't need to use their muscles. They get roaring osteoporosis and they get terrible muscle wastage. And you see also, if you don't use it, you lose it.
[00:21:29.880] – Dr. Myhill And to be well, we have to have good structure. We have to have strong bones, strong connective tissue. And to maintain that, we need a certain amount of energy and of course, our exercise techniques, which will optimize that so we can do that most efficiently. But the primary thing is to say make the energy bucket as large as possible. And the analogy that I give to my patients is the car analogy. And I like that analogy because I get it in my patients, get it out of your car to go, there are four important players. You've got to have the right fuel in the tank. And we talk about that in the book. It's got to be low carbohydrate because modern that's are far too high in carbs. And we get addicted to them when we crave them and they ferment. And that makes us fatty. So the priority is low carbohydrate.
[00:22:22.440] – Dr. Myhill And then we have to have, as I call it, the mitochondrial engine and all mammal cells, in fact, all cells in nature pretty much that you look at, except yeast. So plant cells, three cells, mammal cells, insect cells, they are all powered by mitochondria. It's like we have an engine that is common to all to all cells. And every living cell will be powered by those mitochondria. And I think those are the engines because they take fuel from the bloodstream which should be ketones. That is the preferred fuel for mitochondria, not sugars. Ketones in the bloodstream, which they burn in the presence of oxygen to generate the energy molecule ATP.
[00:23:04.880] – Dr. Myhill So there are some supplements which are very commonly deficient, and as you may not know, I've now published three papers about mitochondria functioning patients with fatigue syndromes. And the bottom line is the more fatigued you are, the worse your mitochondria function and vice versa.
[00:23:24.090] – Dr. Myhill And there are very common rate limiting step. It's like there are common reasons why your car engine might fail. It might fail because I'm learning about all things, but the spark plugs don't work. The fuel filter is blocked and the timing isn't correct. It's the same with mitochondria. Common things are common. And the the five deficiencies, the time and time again which make mitochondria go slow. Coenzyme Q10, Acetyl Carnitine, Vitamin B3, magnesium, and D Ribose. Those five supplements come up time and time again. I reckon takes about a full month of those supplements and your mitochondria function has a very good chance of improving. That works reliably well.
[00:24:11.320] – Dr. Myhill Then we have to ask you about mitochondria blocks by something so you could have a first-class engine, but if you throw some sand into it, it's going to lock the engine up in unpredictable ways. It might block the fuel supply, might block the air filters or whatever. And we live in a toxic, polluted world so we can go slow because we have been poisoned by something. I have to say probably the number one cause of poisoning products of the upper fermenting gut.
[00:24:44.050] – Dr. Myhill If you're eating a diet which is high in sugars and carbohydrates, then there's a great risk that you start to ferment. And what you ferment those sugars and carbohydrates to alcohol, D Lactate, and other compounds. Bacterial endotoxin is produced. Fungal mycotoxins is produced. And all those things poison the mitochondria. So again, your diet is so important in this respect.
[00:25:06.730] – Dr. Myhill But I learned so much of my stuff from seeing veterans of the Gulf War who have been poisoned by organophosphates, SSIs and organophosphates inhibit oxidative phosphorylation of this vast biochemical reasons. I saw firemen with 9/11 syndrome who had been poisoned. I see people with sick building syndrome who had been poisoned and their mitochondria are going slow. So the detox regimes are often very helpful to improve mitochondria function in those people.
[00:25:38.470] – Dr. Myhill And then for your car to go, you've got to have a thyroid accelerator pedal. And that's how baselines and set how fast mitochondria can go. And then you need the adrenal gearbox, and that allows us to gear up the stress. If you know when I get to work, then that's stressful. I have to gear up my energy production so I can be an effective doctor. But I can't do that 24 hours a day. I can run in overdrive for some hours a day. But in the evening I have to get back down to the second gear, first gear. Put my feet up, do a crossword, read a book, watching telly or whatever, and that ability to gear up and down and match energy delivery to energy demands very closely is an essential part of using energy efficiently.
[00:26:26.530] – Dr. Myhill I mean, one example of this, is if you had a patient with an abnormal state of the thyroid gland, when their accelerator pedal is stuck at one hundred miles an hour, they burn loads of energy, OK, they might feel wonderful for a short time because they have this apparent excess of energy. But the weight drops off them, the heart goes too fast and eventually they end up with pathology.
[00:26:52.590] – Dr. Myhill So balancing that all up of those four big players together, of course, with sleep and exercises, as you mentioned before, of how we saw energy delivery mechanism, and there's no reason why your energy bucket can't be as full as you get older as it was when you were younger.
[00:27:12.480] – Allan One of the things I think that's important when we're talking about exercise, one of the benefits is most if you do exercise the right way, you're not overstressed and you're able to recover. One of the cool things about our body is that it adds mitochondria.
[00:27:27.480] – Dr. Myhill Absolutely.
[00:27:28.440] – Allan And more my mitochondria means more engines. So you're going from a, you know, eight horsepower vehicle to a 12 horsepower vehicle. And that's kind of one of the cool things about exercise, is that it helps us be more efficient and actually have more energy output for those times when we need it.
[00:27:48.180] – Dr. Myhill And a very good test, a very good clinical test that anybody can do, which determines how many mitochondria they've got. Is that pulse rate at rest? And we all know that the top athletes, as they get fitter, their pulse rate gets slower and slower and slower a rest. And that's because they pack their heart with mitochondria. So when the heart beats, it's a very powerful beat. And Steve Redgrave, for example, who was our Olympic athlete who won four gold medals at rowing when he was in full training, his heart rate at rest was about 40 beats per minute because his heart was so big and beating so powerfully that he can maintain circulation with just 40 beats per minute.
[00:28:34.040] Now, this is a feature of my patients with chronic fatigue syndrome that they don't have the numbers or the mitochondria, and they don't work well. And their resting pulse is often quite high, 85, 90, maybe 95 beats per minute. And that is a measure of how powerful the heart is and therefore how many mitochondria it has and how effectively they are working. The resting pulse is a very good clinical clue for anybody who's listening in to this.
[00:29:04.430] – Allan And we improve that by increasing our cardiovascular fitness through those types of exercises cardio and by doing weightlifting, getting more mitrocondria going.
[00:29:17.990] – Dr. Myhill Absolutely. And what stimulates more mitochondria is lactic acid burn (i.e. we have to push our muscles so much that we switch into anaerobic metabolism). And that, of course, is that that makes your muscles painful. It makes them ache. Is the old story no pain, no gain, because it's lactic acid that stimulates more mitochondria. So if you want to get your muscles bigger, you have to do anaerobic exercise. If you want to have more efficiently, then more aerobic exercise.
[00:29:48.470] – Dr. Myhill But if you think about the long distance runners who run great distances, they don't have big muscles. They've trained the muscles to be, they're light, they're swift on their feet, but their mitochondria working very efficiently. But by contrast, those sprinters, the weightlifters with the big muscles, they have to have a lot of mitochondria and the heart is about twenty-five percent by weight. Mitochondria and muscles also about 20 percent by weight mitochondria. So the engines form a large part of our muscle bulk.
[00:30:20.510] – Allan And so for most of us, the performance that we're looking for in our day-to-day lives, a little bit of both goes a long way.
[00:30:26.840] – Dr. Myhill Exactly. And so my view is we should all be doing a bit of anaerobic and a bit of aerobic exercise every day. And that should be part of your daily routine. And once you know, you're doing a little bit of exercise, it doesn't have to be drastic. It becomes a pleasurable part of your day. And guess what? We all have a deep biological need for a view, and that's called being out in nature, being out of the countryside. And we all know that just getting out there, getting outside and having a view whether it's the local park or the lake, seaside or whatever, is very good for it makes us feel good mentally and physically.
[00:31:02.180] – Allan And we get some sunshine, which is also very good for us and our energy equation.
[00:31:07.800] – Dr. Myhill Indeed.
[00:31:07.800] – Allan Now, one of the things that our body does to protect us is it will take pollutants. It'll take things that are not supposed to be there in it. It likes to try to get them out of us or it likes to put them away where they won't bother us for a while. And so in the book, you talked about persistent organic pollutants, POPs. So I want to kinda get into that because I think, you know, one of the things I tell my clients is that if they if they start losing weight, they might feel a little bad at first because they basically have created a toxic environment inside their body while their liver now is struggling to catch up. So can you talk a little bit about what POPs are and how we should manage those?
[00:31:50.120] – Dr. Myhill Absolutely. I learned so much about this because especially when I was treating those poison patients I mentioned earlier, I used to do a lot of fat biopsies. That's a very easy test to do. And it means we could measure the POPs, which in fat directly. And the fascinating thing was I never had a normal result. Everybody that I did a fat biopsy on were carrying POPs. So these days, I rarely do that test on my patients because I know what the results are going to be.
[00:32:21.710] – Dr. Myhill And even those who've done as many detox regimes as they as is possible, they still have a certain amount there. And that reflects the fact that we live in a toxic world. And however hard you try, you can never get rid of every last persistent organic pollutant. And they are pesticide residues. They are fire retardants, that is in all furnishings. Benzene compounds, that the solvents that we get from printed newspaper or from cleaning chemicals or from air pollution.
[00:32:55.010] – Dr. Myhill So we are all carrying these POPs. And my view is we all should do the best we possibly can to reduce the load. As you rightly point out, the body in the short term tries to get these POPs out of the way by dumping them into fat. Now when I do a biopsy, the result of that comes back in milligrams per kilogram, if I do, a blood test result comes back in micrograms per kilogram, that's a thousand-fold difference.
[00:33:24.550] So the concentration of POPs in fat is a thousand times higher than that in the bloodstream. And what that means is that if you lose a kilogram of fat, you're going to be mobilizing milligrams of Persistent Organic Pollutants into the bloodstream. And that gives you an acute poisoning and you can feel dreadful. And believe you me, some of my patients do. Now, one way to help mitigate this is to do some sort of heating regime.
[00:33:52.390] Now, I don't think it matters what heating regime we use because I've put my patients through all sorts. But it might be a hot bath, maybe Epsom salts in the bath. It might be sunbathing. If you're fit enough to exercise, then do exercise. Saunaing, which might be a Turkish bath or dry sauna, but get warm. And the point is that mobilizes the POPs in the subcutaneous fat onto the lipid layer on the surface of the skin. And then you shower off and the point of washing off, washing off that lipid takes the POPs with them.
[00:34:27.850] – Dr. Myhill And from years, some years of experience and doing test by a rough rule of thumb is about 50 of those regimes will halve your total body load and the levels come down exponentially. So at least once a week, we should all be doing some sort of heating regime. Now, if you've got the energy to game having a run and having a shower after perfect. You haven't got the energy and you've got sunshine, sunbathing is wonderful. If you haven't got the sunshine, then hot bath, a sauna or a infrared sauna works just as well.
[00:35:03.820] – Dr. Myhill And my view is that is now something that we should all be doing as a routine to try to keep our toxic load down. And of course, in addition to that, the very best to avoid these chemicals. As I said, you just can't avoid all of them. We're all exposed. But you just have to do your best. Start as clean as you possibly can, keep your environment as clean as you possibly.
[00:35:26.290] – Allan Yeah. The liver is just kind of a cool organ, because it's what it's doing is making its job as easy as it possibly can by storing this in the fat. So just recognize that it's not cheating you in any way. It's just basically trying to help you have the best energy balance. And so it's doing the easiest, quickest way for it to offload a lot of these chemicals which were everywhere. So, we can't avoid them, but they're there. So our liver's doing what it's supposed to do. But the opposite side is on the other side. We're mobilizing this. So it's something for us to be aware of if we go through weight loss, that we may have some other symptoms, some issues that we need to just buff through.
[00:36:09.670] – Allan And it's like my doctor says, if you want to be healthy, sweat every day, you know, just find a way to sweat every day and you'll be doing a good on your body.
[00:36:20.140] – Dr. Myhill One small thing I would just warn that is when you sweat. Sweat is blood, but minus the white cells and the red cells and the proteins. So if it's in the plasma, a lot of it comes off in the sweat. So what that means is when you sweat, you lose electrolytes. Now, that's not just sodium and potassium. That's also magnesium, copper, chromium, selenium, boron, it's the whole shebang.
[00:36:48.370] – Dr. Myhill And so if you do do a lot of sweating regimes, you must ensure that you really hydrate properly with electrolytes and all the minerals. Now, I have a preparation that I made up called Sunshine Salt, which unfortunately can't get to America. But if you are doing a lot of exercise, that's really important, you rehydrate and don't forget magnesium.
[00:37:08.110] – Dr. Myhill Now, I'll just tell you a little story about this. We have a competition in this country, the Great Northern Run, which is the half marathon, I think it's 2008 or thereabouts. Ten thousand runners ran it and it was a particularly hot day. And they were sweating a lot, and during the course, that race four runners dropped dead. When it came to post-mortem, it all looked normal. They were told that this is sudden adult death syndrome. Well, that's no diagnosis at all, it's the clinical picture. But I'm quite sure that they died of acute magnesium deficiency. Why? You need calcium for the muscles of the heart to contract and you need magnesium for the muscles of the heart to relax.
[00:37:57.350] – Dr. Myhill And when you are running a lot in that very hot weather, you are losing buckets of magnesium. And I'm quite sure they induced an acute magnesium deficiency. The heart contracted consistently with calcium and there wasn't the magnesium to allow diastolic function for it to relax. And their hearts just stopped. And that's what happened in all four cases, they were running along, just fine and then suddenly they went down and there was no other detectable pathology, hadn't had a stroke and had a heart attack. You know, I'm not quite sure that was magnesium deficiency.
[00:38:30.140] – Allan And we're talking about the ketogenic diet. And as in nature of a ketogenic diet, we also flushed some extra fluid. So we're not carrying as much. And so when we flush that fluid, we flush some electrolytes. So, yes, most people that are trying a ketogenic style diet need to look at their electrolytes very carefully and where necessary, make sure that you're supplementing potassium and sodium are the easy ones because you get the cramps and you kind of know something's going on there. But, it goes to magnesium and copper and the rest of them, if you're not getting what your body needs, the symptom of the thing you might deal with might be a lot more drastic than you want it to be. So pay attention to your electrolytes and your fluids if you're going to do ketogenic.
[00:39:16.910] – Allan And, yes, if you're out exercising in extreme heat or even the extreme cold will often help cause dehydration at some level. So staying hydrated is critical.
[00:39:28.010] – Allan Now, one of the things you got into, you called your interventions, and there's three levels of it so BAC. You called it groundhog. And one of the reasons I just I just love that, is that I was actually born on Groundhog's Day. She's talking groundhogs! All right. Now, I'm into this book now.
[00:39:51.470] – Dr. Myhill Can you talk about these interventions when each one makes the most sense and just general overview?
[00:39:58.580] – Dr. Myhill OK, well, the point is when a patient comes to see me, then they're not even on the starting block that they are that they're way behind the starting block. And there are some interventions we have to do just to get even just to get us on an evolutionary correct regime. This is where primitive man was. And these are the regimes we should all be doing all the time if we live in a Western society. And because clinically, I keep coming back to talking about these things over and over and over again. I call the groundhog because just like film, where our hero comes back to that, they want again and tries to relive the day in it all over again. It's the same principle. And Groundhog Basic is the starting point to treat all Western disease. It's the Paleo-ketogenic diet, it's a basic package supplements, its discipline about sleep, exercise, detoxing and so on. It's just what we should all be doing to maintain the status quo. And that's a Groundhog Basic now, but of course, life doesn't continue and on stressful, easy way, sooner or later we will pick up an infection.
[00:41:13.010] – Dr. Myhill Now, I wrote a book or two or three years ago called The Infection Game, and in my research in that book, I realized that all chronic pathology has an infectious driver. Dementia is often associated with herpes viruses, for example. All cancers have an infectious associate. The one that most people know about is Helicobacter pylori in the stomach bug drive, stomach cancer and other tumors. Epstein Bar virus drives many hematological malignancies. So I realize that getting an acute infection, we need to deal with it very effectively, very quickly, get rid of it in order that it doesn't get into the body, remain there and drive chronic pathology.
[00:41:56.750] – Dr. Myhill So with the next regime that everybody has to be aware of is Groundhog Acute. What do you do in the event of an acute infection? And of course, this is very pertinent now because these regimes are extremely effective in getting rid of Covid-19. And if you got the Groundhog Basic in place and then at the first sign of getting Covid-19, you take vitamin C to bowel tolerance, you will survive it perfectly well without any problems or complications whatsoever. So vitamin C to bowel tolerance is probably the most important form of Groundhog Acute.
[00:42:31.100] – Dr. Myhill Because people don't come to me well, they don't come to me saying, oh, and how can I live to 100? They come to me sick or elderly and they know they're not functioning to their full extent. And so as chronic disease comes in, whatever that chronic disease may be, and I see cancer patients, patients with advance heart disease, I see patients with early dementia, we have to put in even more regimes over and above Groundhog Acute in order to deal with those chronic pathologies.
[00:43:02.010] – Dr. Myhill You have to do all Groundhog Basic regimes, but in spades. We have to do them harder. We have to be more disciplined about the diet, maybe take a few more seconds, maybe do some more detoxing, maybe pay more attention to the adrenals and the thyroid. And so Groundhog Chronic is probably what we should all be doing as we get older. And we should certainly be putting us in place if any pathology strikes, whether that's diabetes, heart disease, cancer or whatever.
[00:43:29.260] – Allan Well, I do agree. As we went through these interventions. I was like, yeah, these are lifestyles that are not insane. They're not crazy. I can't do this for a long period of time. And granted, you might come in chronic and you do some work and you get yourself to a point where you say, OK, now I can go down to the basic level and I feel pretty good. An occasional issue comes up and you're like, OK, I've got a flu or a cold. And it's like, so I'm going to bump up my vitamin C and feel a little bit better, but a little bit more energy in the tank. Give my body what it needs to fight this illness.
[00:44:04.660] – Dr. Myhill That's correct. Our bodies are changing all the time. Our environment is changing all the time. From the seasons, with age, with the infections. So there is no one regime you have to do and that's it for life. And we have thoughts clear. We have to think about what's happening the bottom line is, if you've got plenty of physical and mental energy and emotional energy, then there's not a lot wrong. The best guide to health is symptoms, how you feel, what you can achieve, what you can do. And fatigue is as almost become the norm because Western people eat these very high carbohydrate diet.
[00:44:44.110] – Dr. Myhill And at the beginning of the book, I detail all the symptoms that I commonly hear from my patients, which tell me that the energy balance is beginning to narrow. Either the energy bucket is getting smaller or they are wasting energy on basal metabolism, chronic infection, allergy, autoimmunity or whatever, and the gap gives us the symptoms.
[00:45:10.210] – Dr. Myhill And just one little aside here, very often the first thing people do when their energy gap starts now is the use addiction to mask the symptoms. That is very dangerous medicine, because as I mentioned before, if you spend more energy than you have available to you, you die. And I some sometimes you hear on the radio about some young person who's gone to a disco dance and taken ecstasy and alcohol and and dance all night and go mad and probably felt wonderful. And then they drop dead and you never hear about the mechanism of death. But my guess is that those drugs have a narrowed and masked that symptom that says you've got to stop, you've got to rest, must be so much that they've overspent and they haven't got the energy for the heart to work and bang down they go.
[00:46:03.670] – Allan That's that's deep stuff, because I think I think people see it. If you've if you've ever seen an animal at the end die, you see the energy leave. I mean, quite literally, you're sitting there and one minute it's got energy and the next it doesn't. And, you know, we had to put down our Chihuahua Joe Joe last year. And I was you know, that was one of the things we had to deal with was, you know, he was suffering and it was time. It;s just like one moment there's energy and then the next there's not. And so energy is extremely important to the way we feel. And as you said in the book, energy is life.
[00:46:44.410] – Dr. Myhill Yes. Energy is life. And I now see the whole of life from the energy perspective, I mean, even human relationships. And if you have a human reaction, if both parties are putting the same amount of energy into that relationship, it works incredibly well. But if you get a major disparity and there's not a lot of love between them to maybe the smooth that over. You get one person is constantly putting energy in and the other is constantly taking, then that will result in discord. And then I see that in so many human relations.
[00:47:20.410] – Allan Dr. Myhill, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest, and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?
[00:47:29.530] – Dr. Myhill Well, the one biggest and most important is the diet, because food causes fatigue in so many different ways. Food, if you have a lot of refined junk food and carbohydrates is just toxic, just directly poisons the body. As we've described, sugars and carbohydrates are not good fuel for the mitochondria. And putting it into the body is like, I mean, I've got an old car out there that runs on diesel and if I put petrol in the tank, it'll chunder on for a bit. But it doesn't like it will eventually pack up and start working on.
[00:48:05.170] – Dr. Myhill The third point is allergy. We're now seeing epidemics of allergy. And allergy means you're reacting allergic to foods and that means the immune system is activated with inflammation. And if the immune system is active with inflammation, that is taking energy because the immune system demands a lot of energy and worse than that it's causing symptoms as well. Migraine, irritable bowel, arthritis or whatever. So it's diet, diet, diet.
[00:48:32.650] – Dr. Myhill And that really is the starting point. And the problem with giving people a list of these three things is they will cherry pick the easy things. They'll say, oh, that she said she said supplements and she said take some adrenal support. The supplement needs support. That sounds easy. I'll do that. And they don't bother with the diet. So the diet is the most difficult thing, but it's also the most important thing. When you've got that in place, everything else falls into place.
[00:49:04.930] – Dr. Myhill And it's not a difficult diet, it's very doable. I do it all the time and so do my patients. And and without that, the other interventions downstream simply don't work. And if you have a Formula One engine in pole position, but if you put the wrong fuel in the tank, it's not going to make the first lap. So the diet is critical.
[00:49:28.040] – Allan All right, thank you. Dr. Myhill, If someone wanted to learn more about you or the book The Energy Equation: From Naked Ape to Knackered Ape, where would you like for me to send them?
[00:49:38.780] – Dr. Myhill Well, I have my website where all my information is available free for nothing. My books are available there. But these days, what is very popular is I do Zoom Workshops because the basic work up to treating absolutely everything is the same. I can treat 20 people at a time and they have proved very popular. And we and so I have 20 people that I start to 9:30am in the morning. I finish at 4:00pm in the afternoon. Anytime, anybody can just wave at me. I don't understand this. What do you mean what can I eat? And I stop and talk from that and I feel I can do 20 people at a time because the basic work of the Groundhog Regimes are now so standard. And sometimes you just need a little bit of enthusiasm from somebody like you, from somebody like me, to really be a wake up call and make people think, you know what, I'm going to do that.
[00:50:36.580] – Dr. Myhill And these people do love these interactive regimes, because if I say something that they don't get or they don't believe, they can challenge me straight away and I can come back with what I think is a good and a coherent response. But all the answers are in the books. But say some people that there are videos of me online on YouTube. If you Google, Life the Basic Manual, there are various vignettes of me doing video stuff. Or join a workshop and we can have some fun there.
[00:51:07.500] – Allan OK, the address for that website is?
[00:51:10.760] – Dr. Myhill Just drmyhill.co.uk. If you put Myhill in, my website had lots of hits that usually comes up fairly, fairly high up.
[00:51:19.010] – Allan OK, well I'll have this in the show notes so you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/474 and I'll have the link there. Dr. Myhill, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.
[00:51:30.910] – Dr. Myhill Allan, my absolute pleasure. You ask all the right questions and that makes my life very easy.
[00:51:35.620] – Allan Thank you.
Post Show/Recap
[00:51:41.100] – Allan Raz, welcome back.
[00:51:42.960] – Rachel Hey, Allan. Wow, what an amazing interview. I mean, who isn't fatigued at this age of our lives?
[00:51:51.000] – Allan Yeah, sometimes you don't even know what you don't even know because you're so in it, that you don't even have a concept that you are fatigued. It's like people just expect, Okay, I'm a little older, I'm going to be tired. That's going to be a normal state and it doesn't have to be a normal state all the time. Some people are dealing with issues and just don't know it because that's their normal.
[00:52:19.280] – Allan They wake up that way. They're that way every day. You notice things when there's a drastic change from what you're doing. But and I've said this before and someone said it's kind of morbid and you shouldn't say that. But anyway, I've got to say it again. Is this the boiling the frog? You know, if you try to toss a frog into boiling water, it'll hop right back out. It'll it'll get out of there pretty quick because the water's hot and it senses that it's hot. It's a drastic difference from not hot. And then but if you put the frog in regular water and you slowly bring it to a boil, the frog doesn't recognize that the water is beginning to get too hot and you'll actually boil the frog. I don't condone boiling frogs. So don't try boiling frogs. I've never done this. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it doesn't work that way. But that's what I've been told.
[00:53:08.130] – Allan Anyway, if we don't have something to compare and contrast to, then we really don't know what's what. And for a lot of people, when they do try ketosis, obviously. They'll go through potentially a keto flu or I call it carb withdrawals, where they're struggling, there's their energy levels are dropping dramatically and they feel really, really bad, almost like flu-like symptoms. And then their body starts using ketones and they feel great. And that's an awesome feeling when you get into ketosis. And for that little bit of time, you're feeling great. The thing is then great becomes your normal and then great is normal. So people kind of feel like maybe they've lost a little bit of that. But now you're still feeling great.
[00:53:57.130] – Allan The whole fatigue side in the whole thing is just realize that if you're not having drastic swings, you might not recognize which side of the fence you're on. So trying some nutritional therapies, different things can be a way to at least recognize when things are working well, when they're not. But if you know that you're struggling with fatigue, then this might be an approach that would be advantageous to you to help you get past that. It's always worth trying something just to see how your body responds. See how you feel.
[00:54:34.670] – Allan And if you're going to do those types of things, I always encourage folks to do a journal because sometimes we kind of just forget what something felt like because it was then and we might not think it was this drastic change as it was. But if you sit down and write down symptoms, you're going through and then you go through a protocol like this or an elimination diet or something like that, at least at that point you've got some baseline to go back and read and say, oh, I forgot I was only sleeping three hours a night. Now I'm sleeping through the night. That's new. But you might not have thought about sleep because that wasn't why you were changing or doing your intervention.
[00:55:12.560] – Rachel That is interesting. Sleep is one of the one of those things that we just put in the back of our head, not even thinking that it's something that we could change. You know, when I came to keto, I did it for the very reason you just said I was feeling not right. I was not feeling energetic. I was definitely getting fatigued. And I have struggled with fatigue, usually iron deficiencies. So about three years ago, I thought, well, I'll do the same experiment. We'll try keto. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But I did have the exact same thing you just mentioned. I went through the keto flu and then once I got my energy back, once I switched over to burning fat for fuel and I felt like a million bucks. And t really worked really well for me. And it is an experiment worth trying for sure.
[00:56:03.380] – Allan Yeah. Now, I, I fell into ketosis the first time kind of on accident, and I've told this story before, but I was worried about my health. I wanted I was at this point I kind of reached that stage of commitment. And so I went to a doctor and I said, OK, look,I've got to fix me. I'm broken. I'm just broken. And I've been broken for a long time.
[00:56:28.220] – Allan And everything I've tried hasn't worked. So I'm going to ask for help. And, you know, sometimes it's just that, you know, hiring someone, bringing someone else in to get other perspectives, to get some guidance, to get some support and maybe even some accountability. Those are valuable things. And so I invested in a doctor and he had a nutritionist on board. So I met with him and he talked about exercise and other things. And he was built. He was muscular and 10 years older, 15 years older than me, and I'm like, okay, I got to listen to this guy. Anyway, I get in with a nutritionist and she's like, do you know what Paleo is? And I was like, No, not really. And she said, Okay, it's this. I'm like, oh, so food.
[00:57:14.610] – Allan Yeah. Actually eat things that were actually meant to be food, which is plants and animals and eggs and seeds. And that's pretty much it. And you know, that was the answer. That was, that was actually the answer. And so I started eating paleo and just my basic eating habits. I like meat. And once I was off of bread and pasta and rice and at that point even beans, potatoes, I felt great. And I just, you know, for one reason or another, kept kind of pushing more meat in because I was lifting and I wanted the protein.
[00:57:51.270] – Allan And, you know, you just end up eating more protein. And when you eat protein and your full and there's not as much room for other carbs. So the carbs went down and then suddenly I noticed my energy level is like through the roof and I'm feeling really good and my breath kind of smells funny. And so I started doing some research and that's when I found out about ketosis. And so I'm at this point, you know, looking up podcasts and looking up articles to just figure out what the heck's going on. And, you know, that's when I started learning what ketosis was in the first place. So it wasn't someone telling me you should try the keto diet. It was just a happy accident.
[00:58:33.540] – Allan And to kind of give you an idea of what that can mean and realized, I wasn't just changing what I ate. I was working on my sleep. I was working on my stress, and I was exercising like a beast, lifting weights, making sure I had plenty of protein, doing some cardio work, working grip strength, because I had in my heart I was going to do a Tough Mudder with my daughter. And I put the money up and I signed up for it. I had like nine months or eight months to prepare for it.
[00:59:03.690] – Allan And so I was training for that. It kind of became an obsession at that point that I was going to be ready for that race. Just on paleo, I lost about 25 pounds. Going from roughly, I'd say December or starting December and then getting into late December and then getting into by March, when I did a warrior dash with some friends and my daughter, I had lost about 25 pounds.
[00:59:34.560] – Allan And but it wasn't really showing. I couldn't really see it. I couldn't see that I'd lost that weight. I still in my mind looked huge. And then I ended up in ketosis and I dropped another 40. Wow. And because I was lifting weights I then also I mean that was all fat. So I lost 65 pounds or 66 pounds of fat and I gained 11 pounds of muscle. And I know that because the doctor I went to, he did a DEXAscan when he saw me the first time.
[01:00:02.910] – Allan And then I went back to his office 11 months later after I finished the Tough Mudder and I had lost that weight, I'd gone from 37% body fat down to 19%.
[01:00:14.400] – Rachel Wow.
[01:00:15.210] – Allan So the PK Diet can be really, really effective for weight loss. But as we learned in this interview, it has a lot of other benefits. We talked about fatigue. But, you know, even the other issues, cancers, heart disease, diabetes, maybe even some forms of dementia. So there's a lot of benefits to this way of eating. And so I encourage anyone who's suffering and struggling. And you haven't tried Keto the paleo-keto is, in my mind, kind of an optimal diet for most people for periods of time. You don't have to stay in ketosis, but just recognize that you probably still want to generally eat paleo all the time or at least eat whole foods. You know, it wasn't alive at some point, crawling around or growing on the ground. You probably don't want to eat it.
[01:01:13.710] – Rachel Right. Yeah. And that's worth mentioning, too, that we are talking about whole foods, real foods, plants and animals. People harp on the diet for the bacon part of it, but and people have a hard time giving up breads. But sugar is also the other enemy that it is worth giving up for sure. You don't need to bring that back.
[01:01:37.170] – Allan Yeah, and that's true. I mean, you know, only sugars I would condone if I'm going to condone sugars at all is if you like fruit, have some fruit. But I do know my body well enough to know that I can't really tolerate tropical fruits very well. My blood sugar is going to spike and that's not going to be in my best interest over time for my blood sugar to spike when I'm eating fruit, so I eat very limited tropical fruits, so I may occasionally have a banana, I might occasionally have a little bit of mango like this breakfast bar. And there's some mango I might have a little bit and maybe a little bit of pineapple here and there. But for the most part, if I'm going to have fruit, it's going to be berries, apples, pears. That's going to be the bulk of it. And, you know, it works for me. I can still have my pears and apples and berries and still be in ketosis.
[01:02:34.270] – Rachel Well, for sure. I mean, unless there's something you're intolerant to or even allergic to, there's nothing wrong with having and enjoying a fruit or something every now and then, as long as it agrees with you, it's not something you have to totally eliminate forever.
[01:02:49.340] – Allan Yeah, and that's kind of one of the core things, is be willing to experiment, try something see how it works. Something as simple as having a blood glucose meter and having a piece of fruit, having a piece of mango or having a bit of apple or a bit of berries and just seeing what it actually does. I've been periods of time where I was checking my ketones all the time. I was using a breath meter so it was not that expensive. I paid for the meter. But I could see if I ate some fruit in particular tropical fruit, my ketones went away and went away for about as long as I figure it took my body to burn that extra sugar off. And then once it was done, you know, I was able to get back into ketosis.
[01:03:39.800] – Allan Just realize that it's worth experimenting with different things. Don't poo poo things. Everybody likes to say keto is a fad diet. It's only a fad diet that's been around since, like the 1800s because it's just had different names over time. But there's texts that go all the way back to the early 1800s where they're talking about if you want to lose some pounds, cut your carbs. It's, it's been an idea that's been out there for centuries. And so for people to poo poo it and say it's just another fad and it's just like Atkins, just like South Beach, those are just names for branding to brand something that people wanted to sell something and make some money with an idea that's been around for a long, long time.
[01:04:28.360] – Allan And our ancestors knew that if you're eating carbs, you're going to be putting on weight, which, you know, if you're living in caveman times, not a bad plan, you know, to be putting on a little bit of body fat. Because as you if you listen to the episode I had with Dr. Fedewa and Dr. Esco, I mean, that was the cycle. You you have access to fruit and those things you put on a little bit of weight that's going to help keep you warm in the winter. That's going to give you some excess energy when food os a little bit scarce. Then in the winter there's no fruit. So now you're hunting animals and getting fat and protein and now you're burning through some of those carbs you ate during the Summer and Spring.
[01:05:09.010] – Allan And that's a good thing. That's how our body was designed. We weren't designed for having ready access to food all the time. We weren't developed around the process that we would have so much food available. And then the carbs, just you walk in the grocery store, your great grandparents walked into one of our grocery stores right now. They would not recognize 99% of what's in there as actual food.
[01:05:35.260] – Rachel Right.
[01:05:35.920] – Allan They would walk around the outside and say, Okay, this is the grocery store. What do they sell in there? Well, they sell in the middle because they wouldn't they wouldn't know most of that. He said, oh, well, these are these are cheese puffs.
[01:05:48.910] – Rachel So weird.
[01:05:53.290] – Allan These are good. Yeah, but they're not food. They're foodstuff that started with stuff that was in food and then it went horribly, horribly wrong. And yeah, if you want to eat some of that stuff, is it going to kill you overall? Probably not. But if that's the core of what you're subsisting on and trying to live like a teenager college kid on pizza and cheese puffs and Dr. Pepper or soda or whatever. No, you're not going to you're not going to live long. You're not you're making choices that are not going to serve you and it won't take you long to figure it out. Spend spend a month eating that way and just you see it. It's called the Covid 15.
[01:06:33.280] – Allan you've got to you've got to try something to know if it's going to work and you've got to try something to know what it's going to do if it's not going to work.
[01:06:40.150] – Rachel Right. And the other half of that equation, of course, I am the runner. And so you need to move. You need to exercise. And when you eat foods like that, you don't feel so good when you exercise, it doesn't give you the energy that you need, no matter how much sugar or energy drinks you can shove down. It's not going to feel good. Your body's going to feel tired later anyway. And all of the work that you're doing in the gym or running around like I do, it's going to backfire altogether.
[01:07:09.370] – Rachel I'm pretty particular about what I like to eat because I know how my body responds to food. I've mentioned in the past that my body likes red meat better than white meat. I could eat steaks all day long and chicken meat just does not do it for me. And I can tell and my runs. You'll get to feeling better when you clean up the diet a little bit better.
[01:07:31.450] – Allan Absolutely. All right. Raz, I guess I'll Isee you next week.
[01:07:36.580] You bet. Sounds great. Take care.
Patreons
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Few people put in the amount of research journalist Gary Taubes does when he's writing a book. In his new book, The Case for Keto, Gary really dives deep into the nutrition science to walk us point-by-point through determining if the ketogenic diet is the right way to eat.
Transcript
Let's Say Hello
[00:01:48.020] – Allan Raz, how are things going?
[00:01:50.540] – Rachel Good, how are you today, Allan?
[00:01:52.340] – Allan I'm doing okay. Working on getting the gym open. We got some space next door, so we've been able to spread the equipment out a little bit more, which should help when we go to the health department. And my goal is before the end of this month to have the gym open and now it's just some final cleanups and put together and things like that to get it all ready. And then I've got a crew scheduled to come in and help me do some deep cleaning. So we're going to get everything set up. And I had to pull everything apart and clean it all up and then put it all back in.
[00:02:24.830] – Rachel Wow.
[00:02:25.940] Yeah, it's a lot of work. I've done it a few times myself over the years. And one of the things that I've come to understand is that you can't go 11 months without significant training. You know, I'm doing some training, but it's not like I was before. My strength has dropped. I'm not as strong. So I actually had to hire some people to help me move a piece of equipment today.
[00:02:49.940] – Rachel Oh, boy.
[00:02:52.160] – Allan I moved it all over the gym before, but it is really, really heavy. It probably weighs about 400 pounds. So it's not a light piece of equipment. But I used to be able to just drag it all over the gym. Not a problem that wasn't happening for me today. I gave it a tug. It moved about four inches. And I'm like, okay, I really have to move this about 20 feet. So, little four inch increments. That was a lot of polling. So I went out and I asked a couple of local guys that work at the water taxi across the street, and I said, you guys wanna help me out? And I said, I think I will need about two of you. And two of them came in. One of them came in and he's like, he was going to get underneath and lift it up. And I'm like, it's kind of heavy. He says “I'm really strong.” I said, “I am, too.”
[00:03:33.470] – Allan And he went to make the tug and it didn't move at all. And his friends laughed at him. And then they went and got another guy in there to help us as three guys and myself. We got it. We got it moved.
[00:03:41.930] – Rachel Oh, how wonderful. Gosh, how crazy!
[00:03:47.420] – Allan It is. But it was fun. It was fun. And I'm getting things in. It's lining up. And so I'm hopeful we can get the health department here in Bocas to see it as a good place for people to be and exercise. We'll have a clean up plan, have everything going. So a lot of moving and shaking there. And then, of course, started kind of launching a twelve-week program for my for my online trainee's and, you know, for people over 40.
[00:04:13.070] – Allan And it's. Yeah. That's going really well. I'm super excited about the folks that are coming in. They're energized. You know, our private Facebook group is there where we're checking and everybody's everybody's getting really excited and doing some things here. So, you know, and even just the first couple check ins of folks coming through, I'm like, wow, you guys are just you're just flooringme. I've got some awesome people in there and it just everyday seems to be getting better and better.
[00:04:39.410] – Rachel Isn't that exciting? I love to see when people get excited about trying something new, a new training program or something and really taking the reins on what they want out of their health and fitness. I love that.
[00:04:51.950] – Allan Yeah, well, of course. Me too. That's why I'm doing this.
[00:04:54.800] – Rachel For sure.
[00:04:56.070] – Allan So what have you been up to?
[00:04:58.130] – Rachel Actually, something similar myself. I love resolutions. I love making plans at the beginning of the year. I, I love the idea of settling in on a goal and I have some big running goals for myself this year. But in order to reach those goals, I know I need to branch out and do some other things besides running. So I've been putting together a body weight routine that I call the runner's workout. I'm putting the final touches on it and I hope to have it ready to share pretty soon.
[00:05:30.170] – Rachel Cool. I'm looking forward to seeing that's going to be really good. That's really good. All right. So today our guest is Gary Taubes. And Gary, Gary is one of my favorite people because he thinks like a journalist, but he also understands health really, really well. And so he gets into these concepts of keto. So the book is called The Case for Keto. And I've had him on before The Case Against Sugar. And he sold me on that one for sure, because now, you know, I'm as against sugar as ever.
[00:06:06.200] – Allan But his book The Case for Keto is really, really good. I was really excited to have him on the podcast again. So I guess let's go ahead and have that conversation with Gary.
Interview
[00:06:36.920] – Allan Gary, welcome to 40+ Fitness.
[00:06:39.860] – Gary Thank you for having me.
[00:06:42.080] – Allan This is the second time you've been on the show. We had you on for The Case Against Sugar, which was episode 224, that was 245 episodes ago, and I still recommend people go read the book The Case Against Sugar. It's as relevant, if not more relevant today than it was then in 2017. And the book we're going to talk about today is called The Case for Keto: Rethinking Weight Control and the Science of Low-Carb High-Fat Eating.
[00:07:11.570] – Allan And the thing I like, Gary, about the way that you approach these topics is that you put together a case which is what you're doing, and you're thinking in terms of how do I build up a body of evidence that really proves this. And it's not just you're going to go across and say, well, everybody knows and then stop and just use that as your anchor. You have no anchors. But the fact that you've done more research then probably anyone else in the field of nutrition, which is actually kind of sad considering you're a journalist and not a scientist, but you've done you've done more work in the nutrition field to understand why we think the way we do, why we do the things we do and why things work the way they do inside our bodies than maybe any any other human being on Earth. And it's just fascinating to read your stuff.
[00:08:07.470] – Gary Thank you. You know, it's funny, as a journalist, you just keep asking questions until, well, I would like to say until there are no questions to be asked, but basically eventually you will reach a point of diminishing returns where your mathematicians are saying you're asymptotically approaching the endpoint. And yeah, I when I started this 20, almost 25 years ago, I had no biases. I was believe what we all believed about a low fat diet and then red meat being deadly.
[00:08:49.180] – Gary And and then I but I was an investigative journalist with a science background. So I stumbled into this field. I wanted to know what the truth was. I just kept asking questions. I also hate writing. So research is a great procrastination tool as long as you keep doing research, you don't actually have to sit down and do the hard work of synthesizing it, making it reasonable.
[00:09:12.730] – Allan Well, you did. And thank you for that, because you went through an entire history. And that's another thing. I mean, as we're talking about why we are where we are. We have to kind of understand some of the history, it's not if we try to put that anchor point in, this is the ultimate truth and we don't go back and at least understand where that truth came from and question that truth, which you as a journalist do, then there's a lot of things that can go wrong.
[00:09:48.320] – Allan In a way, I kind of think about this is in terms of geometry. You know, you work as a kid, you work in the geometry problem and they make you show you work. And so you sit down, you prove that first thing and then therefore you can prove the second thing and therefore you can prove the third thing. And you have to do all three of those in that order or it doesn't work. And a lot of the science we have right now skipped through the first two proofs and now we're at the third proof.
[00:10:16.010] – Allan This book doesn't do that. Why are we where we are? And what happened? What went wrong?
[00:10:22.460] – Gary So this is what's happened to me. So my obsession has always been good science and bad science, more so than nutrition. It's just, the themes and bad science play out so well in nutrition and so continuously and obesity and diabetes research also. But one of the things that fascinated me is I grew up in the physics world and in physics. You learn the science, the history attached. Right. In part because as the history as you move forward in time, the science gets more complicated to start with, like Newton's laws. And you learn about Newton and you learn about the laws. And every law has a name attached to it. Every discovery has someone's name attached or whether it's, the variables, the units being teslas and gauses and ohms are people's names to learn who did the work, what they did, what they saw, what the alternative hypotheses were. You get to Einstein's theory of relativity. It's only when you get to quantum physics in the twentieth century that we tend to start using the name, leaving the names behind.
[00:11:28.250] – Gary But any student of physics knows who did the work and what they did and what experiments were done to test it and what those experiments on. And I don't know, in medicine, you don't do that. The textbooks don't talk about the history. There's too much to learn. There's too much you have to digest in order to the theory goes to diagnose and treat patients. So maybe the ideas don't have time to learn it.
[00:11:52.830] – Gary So as a journalist, when I got into this, I wanted to learn the evidence-based first behind the idea that salt causes high blood pressure. And that led me to the evidence behind dietary fat and heart disease, and that led me to the obesity story. So as a journalist, you start going back in time because we've accepted certain facts, dogma or consensus. So you go back in time to find out when they were still up for grabs, when there was still a controversy and no consensus formed over what we believe and see what the evidence was and what forged the controversy? Was it compelling evidence or was it political or sociological forces? And in nutrition, obesity was always the latter.
[00:12:44.460] – Gary Go all the way back to the early 20th century for obesity and again, when we think of the obesity research community today, we think of hundreds, thousands of research around the world studying animals. Back then, obesity research constituted oh, I don't know, a dozen positions around the world, the German and Austrian clinicians with their schools of thinking and they had institutes with research physician, researcher in them. And these dozen people would write articles about obesity every few years.And in those articles, they might speculate as to what the cause was.
[00:13:21.910] – Gary And there were two ideas of what the cause of obesity was. One is people eat too much: The gluttony idea. Sloth wasn't that much of an explanation back then, but you had Falstaff. A big, heavy set guy with a zest for living, sitting in a bar and he's got a leg of lamb with one hand and the tankard of ale in the other. And the reason he's fat is good. He's a glutton. And that was sort of the general thinking.
[00:13:49.950] – Gary And then the other hypothesis was that obesity is a hormonal disorder that some people just put on weight no matter how little they eat. Okay? So some of us are predisposed to get fat, others aren't. The Germans and Austrians tend to embrace this hormonal predisposition idea, even though they didn't know how hormones regulated fat accumulation.
[00:14:13.110] – Gary And in 1930, an American researcher named Lewis Newberg comes along the University of Michigan and he claims for the first time ever to have actually tested these two hypotheses experimentally. No one has ever done that before. And he claimed that the overrating hypothesis won, based on basically what he did, is he put some lean people on a semi-starvation diet and some obese people on a semi-starvation diet. And he said they kind of lost weight equally. It didn't matter whether they were obese. Therefore, the obese people didn't have some hormonal predisposition to make them trap fat. And nobody had ever done this so Newberg and the United States particularly has kind of embraced as getting it right.
[00:14:59.860] – Gary And it fit preconceptions, right? Because lean physicians, because if you're lean it's easy to think fat people get fat because they too much. The Europeans, the Germans and Austrians kind of made fun of this energy balance idea, didn't explain anything. So if you want to explain like for instance, whether or not someone's obese or not, but why men and women fat differently, men put on fat above the waist, women tend to put on fat below the waist. So clearly hormones are involved, like why are there certain areas in our bodies we accumulate fat and other areas we don't? Why? There are things like lipomas, fatty tumors. All of these are independent of energy balance.
[00:15:44.500] – Gary And you want a theory of obesity should be a theory of fat accumulation. So all of that is argued out in a few papers that go back and forth, the Austrian clinical investigator named Julius Bauer, the one of the leading figures in the field of endocrinology, says the energy balance thing is nonsense. The overeating hypothesis doesn't tell you anything. Newberg responds that the hormonal hypothesis doesn't tell you anything. World War II comes along. The European, German, Austrian schools evaporate. And post-World War Two, Newberg's overeating energy balance hypothesis is just embrace this fact.
[00:16:31.430] – Gary Clearly fat people overeat and then for whatever reason, people start invoking the laws of thermodynamics as somehow relevant to this. And by the 1960s, you've got obesity research dominated by psychologists and psychiatrists who are trying to get fat people eat less.
[00:16:53.640] – Gary And at the same time, you've got beginning in the 1930s, through the mid 1960s, a series of metabolism researchers, physiologists, PHds mostly rather than MDs to actually work out in the lab what regulates fat accumulation and the role different hormones play in regulating fat accumulation. And by the mid 1960s, it's clear that insulin dominates fat storage. The hormone insulin, it orchestrates partitioning in the body. When we burn fuels versus when we store them, use them for repair and regeneration. But it's the hormone that puts fat tissue and keeps it there. And so by the mid 1960s, you should have a hypothesis that obesity is a hormonal regulatory disorder, just like the Germans and Austrians had always said, where insulin dominates the length of diet.
[00:17:50.040] – Gary And so all of this was just ignored, just ignored, because the obesity community has decided that fat people eat too much. Even when you look at the research in the field, they're not trying to explain fat accumulation. If you look at, for instance, the discovery of leptin, which is seen as a satiety hormone. The researchers are trying to explain appetite and hunger and why fat people might eat too much rather than why fat people might accumulate too much fat, which is an entirely different question.
[00:18:26.130] – Gary So the latter is answered pretty much by elevated insulin and keep it elevated as it is in insulin resistance, and you're going to accumulate too much fat. But that's not even what we've been studying. And then the dietary implications, of course, are a disaster for 80 years, 90 years. Physicians tell their patients to eat less and exercise more because they think they're eating too much. And that's why they're getting fat.
[00:18:56.850] – Allan When I was in high school, I thought I was going to be an NFL football player and offensive lineman, thought I was going to be this big, huge dude. I stopped growing in the 10th grade and couldn't put on any weight. I could eat and eat and eat and eat and in fact, really strongly believe that it was those eating habits that I developed when I was a teenager that set me up for having metabolic problems later because it was the type of food I was drinking a lot of milk, like a gallon of milk a day. I was eating loaves of bread because those were the things that put some weight on me. And so when I was younger, I was one of those folks that you would call just naturally lean. He can eat anything and everything and stay naturally.
[00:19:45.480] That changed drastically after I turned 30, which again, is about the same time that certain hormones like testosterone. I was obviously I was working in corporate so my cortisol levels. I wasn't the carefree teenager anymore. My cortisol levels were obviously a lot higher. So I moved into that category in the book that you call fat and easily. And I think people who see this and they know this intrinsically. I'll have male clients and female clients and the male clients, if they really start working on the right things and do the things that are improving their overall health, they bounce back and they start losing weight a lot faster than females do. So a woman moves into menopause. And because her hormones change the structure of how and where she stores fat changes. So to sit there and completely poo poo hormones as having any involvement in this. I don't quite get it.
[00:20:49.010] – Gary And this is what's so fascinating. On one hand, I mean, it's an interesting dynamic where. So Newberg did this. Because he had to answer questions after he said, as always, eating too much obesity always caused by eating too much. And so people said, what about menopause? You know, if you look at and I did and even into the literature on animal literature in the 1920s, you can find and endocrinologies saying, well, you know, animals get when you remove the ovaries and a female animal, that animal got fatter. And so clearly what we're doing is removing it's not secreting estrogen anymore and estrogen inhibiting fat accumulation.
[00:21:26.100] – Gary And I think it was in the case against sugar. I had a reference from 1927 making that point. And I mean endocrinology as the term has barely even been coined by that time. They're still calling glands ductless glands and the researchers studying animals know that female animals will get fat or if you remove their ovaries. But still what's happening in humans in Newberg's says, well it's got nothing to do with hormones, even in women going through menopause.
[00:21:56.790] – Gary They're saying what happens is they their kids are grown, they're out there, they're bored with their husbands. I'm an incredibly sexist discussions going on and they don't really care how they look anymore. And they're playing bridge with their lady friends all day long and eating bonbons. So it's still overeating. And they said, well, what about children of obese parents? Because he, you know, Julius Bauer had done some of the first research showing that, you know, we had 500 obese patients and 400 of them had at least one obese parent. I forget the exact number. So clearly it's genetic. And why wouldn't you expect it to be genetics? No, it's not genetic. And, you know, children with obesity learn to overeat from their parents with obesity. The groaning board, they called it, they just put too much food out on the table and they don't learn to control their appetites.
[00:22:50.010] – Gary So they had an argument that everything. Nothing could be hormonal, and when Bauer attacks Newberg and you see this today with bloggers and everywhere and politicians, rather than ease off the argument a little, Newberg hardened it. Nothing can be hormonal because of anything, could be hormonal. Perhaps it could all be hormonal.
[00:23:17.630] – Gary And then the idea of hormones were easily accepted as an excuse when that's what fat people was trying to understand. The AtMe movement or even the Black Lives Matter movement, because as a older white male, I'm being told that I can fundamentally cannot understand their perspective. And they're right. Okay, they're just right. I can't. And then it struck me that what we've got is lean people who are giving us diet advice, right?
[00:23:47.140] – Gary The idea is if it's eating too much, the difference between if you take two 18-year-olds, say. A good example, my brother and I, when we graduated from high school, he was two years older. But his senior year, he played football. He was six feet tall and 190 pounds, six foot five and 190. And I was six foot two and 190 or 195. We both played football. We were both pretty good. He never got over 195 pounds and I went up to 240.
[00:24:17.450] – Gary He couldn't. And he had more than I did. We would both accept that the difference was the idea the reason I went to 240 is I ate too much. And the reason he never went over 195 is he didn't, even though he ate far more than I did. So you've got these lean people giving this advice and they don't know what it means. They don't understand what it's like to slowly get fatter year in and year out no matter what you do. Right?
[00:24:48.680] – Gary So we've all been through this. You restrict what you eat, you give up sweets, you do your calorie counting and no matter what you do and this is why I use that phrase fat and easily. It's like 1950s diet book terminology, but some of us fatten easily. And if you're not one of us, you can't understand what that's like. And you can't just say, well, you got to eat less, dude, or get out and run around the track, because that doesn't stop our bodies from wanting to fatten easily.
[00:25:21.610] – Gary And we have to understand why our bodies are doing that. You're lucky your body doesn't do that. Just like somebody who wants to play basketball is lucky if they grow to six foot eight rather than six feet tall. And we know that's hormonal.
[00:25:35.960] – Allan Yeah.
[00:25:36.380] – Gary Right?
[00:25:38.480] – Allan Because they too much.
[00:25:39.890] – Gary Not because they eat more than the six foot guy. And it's funny. That's what the first guy, a German, Gustaf von Burgmann, who sort of wrote up this hormonal idea and made fun of this eating balance/energy balance idea said you know, a growing child is hungry all the time. That's not why it's growing. And you would never tell the child, look, if you would just eat less, you won't get so tall because we know they're not related.
[00:26:12.260] – Gary And yet they turn this into obesity. They're growing outward instead of upward. And suddenly you flip all the causality in telling them to eat less is somehow a solution. And it's just not.
[00:26:24.770] – Allan You said something in the book that just kind of resonated with me, probably something I should just actually just have posted somewhere for people to read whenever we're talking, particularly when they're dealing with hunger, is that you indicated in the book hunger is a response, not a cause.
[00:26:45.380] – Gary Right. If you look at any biological system other than obesity, hunger is a response to a calorie deficit. Basically, you burn more calories, you're growing. You're going to be hungry because your body needs is building is in positive energy balance. It's building bones and muscles and connective tissue. And it needs the energy to do that and it needs the resources to create that that new growth and the response is you're hungrier than you are if your body isn't growing.
[00:27:18.170] – Gary The examples I used and why we get fat. My second book was, you know, an elephant eats more than an armadillo because it's and it eats and several orders of magnitude more food because it's several orders of magnitude bigger. We never have a system where the amount consumed drives the growth of the system. It's always the growth process that determines the amount consumed. And what's fascinating is in nutrition. So remember, we've got these lean people. Newburg, by the way, was pencil thin. We've got them saying, look, fat people get fat because they eat too much, so they should eat less. And if they eat less, they'll lose the weight and everything will be fine, but we actually had an experiment to look at what happens when lean people eat less. And that was his famous experiment, Ancel Keyes, who in the early 1940s was a relatively young, ambitious nutrition researcher at the University of Minnesota.
[00:28:20.830] – Gary This was before his dietary fat work. And he did an experiment, a famous experiment on starvation. And he published two books, two volumes of the biology of human semi-starvation. And this was a it was a semi-starvation experiment. So we got thirty two or thirty four conscientious objectors. And the idea was to understand the physical and psychological consequences of semi-starvation because when we won the war in Europe, the assumption was we would be confronted with famine conditions and particularly Eastern Europe, and we would have to know how to treat these people. We'd have to understand medically what they're going through.
[00:29:08.200] – Gary So the diet that Keyes fed these conscientious objectors was similar to what they expected they would see in Eastern Europe. So it's tubulars like potatoes and turnips and little green vegetables and some very lean, small portions of meat. So it's a low-fat, low calories, about 1600 calories a day, even though it's referred to as a semi-starvation diet. That's what men are told to eat if they want to lose weight at the rate of a pound or two a week. So 1600 calories a day of a low fat, mostly plant diet, a very healthy diet by today's standards and the obvious consequence of this diet, not surprisingly, if you feed someone a semi-starvation diet, they get exceedingly hungry because they're only eating half the calories that they need.
[00:30:07.150] They thought about food constantly. They obsessed about food. They wrote about food in their diaries. Tf they had gum, they chew gum constantly. They dreamt about food at night. They weren't allowed out of the lab to walk around town without a buddy system because they couldn't be trusted not to cheat if they were allowed out of the confined area where the study was going on. Several of the subjects suffered what Keyes and his colleagues called, I think they call it semi-starvation neurosis or psychosis, they had mental breakdowns. One of them tried to mutilate himself, actually successfully cut off several fingers with an axe, claiming that an accident so he could get out of the study.
[00:30:57.540] – Gary The assumption is a lean person can tell a person who suffers from obesity to eat less and maybe 1600 calories a day, and that person won't be able to just lose weight, that's all. The fat tissue will get about the excess calories and they'll be fine. But the reality is, we know that if a lean person were to eat 1600 calories a day, they'd be starving and unable to sustain it.
[00:31:21.810] – Gary By the way, the other thing that happened at the end of this trial, they lost 15 pounds in the first three months and then weight loss slowed down and sort of ground to a halt. So eventually their weight loss was not all that meaningful. They didn't have a lot of extra fat to lose. Then they start refeeding them. Okay, so now you're feeding semi-starved individuals and they're voraciously hungry and they had to slow down the feeding so they wouldn't get sick, but they still could eat like 10000 calories a day and they ended up all putting on more fat than they lost, which Keyes and company called post-starvation obesity.
[00:32:05.100] – Gary The comment in the book, because we've all been there, right? We've all tried to starve ourselves, lose the weight, and then eventually you end up with binge behavior because you can't sustain it and you end up fatter than you started. All of this had been documented in lean people, and yet that's still the advice. And then lean people, conceivably the most famous nutrition experiment in history. And yet the lean people who tell us to eat less don't pay attention to that, because if they did, they would have to figure out something else to tell us.
[00:32:38.730] – Allan When I was in the army, in the infantry, and so we're training and the way they would work is they had these meals ready to eat, MREs. That they would give us. And each one was 1000 calories and we were allotted three of them in a day. So, you know, I'm a young, healthy male, too, you know, 20 years old, 21, 22, and they're giving me three thousand calories a day and I'm losing a pound a day, so if I went out for two weeks, I'd lose 14 pounds and I didn't really have that much extra body fat to lose at that point in time, because I was at the time, I was about 185 pounds, maybe one 195 relatively lean.
[00:33:22.830] – Allan But I would lose a pound a day if I was out and I was doing everything I could to find calories. So there were people who liked coffee at the time. I wasn't interested in coffee. I would trade my coffees for their cocoas. I would say, are you eating your creamer and your sugar? And if they weren't going to use their creamer and sugar, I would barter for that and I would take those to make little sugar cookies.
[00:33:47.880] – Allan And so I was learning all of these little tricks on how I could get more food. And in fact, we were going in an exercise and this other group came in and our job was just to disrupt them. And when they came in and drop their packs off, we ran them off with their packs. When we came back through, we realized they had food in their packs, so we stole all their food.
[00:34:11.070] – Gary This is a funny thing because you were lean, right? It's not funny. It's tragic because you were lean. Nobody judged you.
[00:34:19.170] – Allan Yeah.
[00:34:19.830] – Gary As though you are a glutton or a sloth or you lacked willpower or anything like that. You were just hungry and you were doing what you needed to do to get the food you wanted. But had you been overweight or obese and someone had seen you stealing that food, they blame your lack of willpower for being overweight or obese. I had a conversation with excuse me, the nutritionist at NYU recently through email has been arguing for decades that it's all about calories and she told me that her father had been obese and he definitely had a voracious appetite. And I said, but look I've eaten dinner with her over the years. I once took her out to a wonderful, amazing Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village to thank her for being a source for one of my very first article on dietary fat. And I said, you've seen me eat right. I am twice your size. I eat more than twice the amount of food you eat and I will leave the table hungry. But you don't judge it because I'm not obese, right?
[00:35:33.390] – Gary The reason they twice as much as you do is because I'm twice as big as you are. It's that simple. And if my body was trying to get bigger still by putting on fat, I'd be hungrier still. And she may have actually gotten that. Again, in this world, people very common phenomena, when you can when you try to get people to shift paradigms literally from this energy balance, thinking and gluttony and sloth to hormonal regulatory thinking and insulin and carbohydrates. You can get them to shift momentarily, but inevitably they snap back to the way they always believed.
[00:36:15.860] – Allan There's a little bit of data there and, when you're when you get into a study where they'll do a well, they'll do a low-carb versus a high-carb switch but typically when they do that, they're really not going low-carb. They're they're going more of a moderate-carb kind of thing. And what they typically will show is for the first six weeks or so, these individuals that are on a low-carb diet lose more weight, but then they'll say six months later everything's pretty much even.
[00:36:47.420] – Allan And I'm like, well, most of them weren't trained. That's how they were supposed to keep eating. So they went back to their old way of eating. And basically all you did was really. Yeah. Gave them a short term thing. And then you didn't pay attention to the fact that if they'd continue doing that thing for six months, it probably would have made quite a bit of difference.
[00:37:07.940] – Gary The nutrition community has all kinds of excuses for why they can do bad experiments. So when they do those experiments, they don't test, for instance, whether a ketogenic diet leads to more weight loss than a low-fat or mostly plant diet. When the diets are sustained, they test the intervention. So they say, well, we've told people eat a low-fat diet and we told people to eat the ketogenic diet. And we gave them, you know, Atkins' book and Ornish's book or something like that. And then, you know, we just had them come in. We wanted to they they won't write it up like this. So they'll assume that they'll write it up as other people stayed on the diets. And then if you criticize and say, well, clearly from the data that people and stay on the diet and they say, then we know the diet to unsustainable. I co-founded a not for profit to try and improve the quality of nutrition science. We did some interesting experiments, but we did not succeed at improving the quality of nutrition science.
[00:38:18.690] – Allan I guess the point I'm trying to get to is we're responsible for ourselves. And if we really want to get to the bottom of rather than most of us, I think we're listening to this and thinking we need to lose some weight. We probably fatten easily. We're probably not naturally lean. So we need to do something different than what is there, something different than what we've done? And if you've been concerned about the keto diet, just try and experiment.
[00:38:47.460] – Allan And the experiment is to work with your hormones, looking at your carbs and your protein and your fat. And so, Gary, if someone was going to sit down and say, okay, I'm going to do an experiment, the subject is one. So my N=q and I'm going to do this experiment, how should they structure their experiment?
[00:39:06.720] – Gary OK, so and this is why I wrote the book, by the way, among other things. So people know that they can do this. It's not going to kill them. Twenty years ago, you would have when I first did this as an experiment, I kept waiting for my heart attack. And then they have to understand how to do a right. Like any experiment, you have to get the methodology correct. So what we're doing with a low-carb, high-fat ketogenic diet. So remember, we broach this idea, the hormone insulin regulates fat accumulation. Insulin goes up, we store fat, insulin comes down, you start to mobilize and oxidize it. What's often not discussed is when insulin comes down, there's a threshold effect. So when I interviewed the researchers who studied fat metabolism, a phrase they often used was that fat cells are exquisitely sensitive to insulin. So if you're secreting even a little bit of insulin, your fat cells are detecting that. And that insulin is inhibiting what's called lipolisis, which is mobilization of fat from the fat cells.
[00:40:11.090] – Gary So when you want to do if you're overweight or obese, you want to get fat out of your fat cell. So the fat cells, lipolisize fat, it's stored so it can come out and then you want to burn it for fuel. And what to do that you have to minimize your insulin levels, probably.
[00:40:29.310] – Gary So ketogenic diet minimizes insulin. That's what it does. And it does that by replacing the carbohydrates, you consume all the carbohydrate rich foods. So everything other than green leafy vegetables and so on. It's a high-fat diet. So you're not eating grains, sweets, starches, legumes, because they're all carb, relatively carb rich. You're eating green leafy vegetables, eggs, meat, fish, fowl, butter. Animal sources of fat. In practice, it's actually very easy to do, it sounds complicated, but breakfast, if you eat breakfast and most of us in this world are many of us are now doing the intermittent fasting as well as our time-restricted eating. We just don't eat breakfast anymore. But if you do, instead of your usual carbs sources, toast, cereal, juice, skim milk, fruit, you're eating eggs and bacon.
[00:41:34.680] – Gary It's the hardest thing to get over is the belief that eggs and bacon are going to kill you or eggs and sausage or kippers and sour cream, trout, leftover food from dinner. And then your lunches. I don't know. I lived in New York when I first came to L.A. when I first did this as an experiment. And I was a writer and I was unmarrieds. You tend to eat out every meal and inexpensive restaurants. And so I'd go out and instead of getting half a roast chicken with French fries and broccoli, I would order that roast chicken, say, hold the fries, give me a double or broccoli or, you know, hold the fries or the baked potato, give me an extra order of salad. And so you end up eating more green leafy vegetables than you ever did. Some vitamin deficiencies are not an issue.
[00:42:28.450] – Gary Same for dinner. Dinner was instead of steak and potatoes and broccoli, it was steak and broccoli. You're just not eating the starches, the grains and the sugar, basically. and most people who do this and do it right. So the idea I remember is also so insulin dominates fat accumulation, carbohydrates dominate insulin regulation. So the simplest way to think of this is carbohydrates are fattening. That's what our parents generation grew up believing anyway. And so if carbohydrates are fattening and you don't eat them. Because at any time and what you eat them, they will work to make you fat or and if you try to prevent yourself from getting fat, it just make you hungry.
[00:43:21.640] – Gary So you abstain from carbs. You replace it with fatty sources of food. You don't worry about the fat content as long as it's coming from sort of naturally occurring foods and people get healthier, they just they do. In the book, I describe this sort of cognitive dissonance between two conflicting definitions of a healthy diet. One is what we're told to eat fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, lean meat in moderation.
[00:43:57.610] – Gary And the other is what actually makes people like you and me healthier, which is green, leafy vegetables and meat, fish and pound dairy and eggs.
[00:44:09.370] – Allan Yeah, it was interesting because someone posted on my Facebook group. They were looking they were struggling with keto. They had some struggles with keto diet and they wanted a balanced diet. And then, of course, there was another person that responded. Isn't that an oxymoron? And I had to respond and say, absolutely not. I mean, I probably eat. I would say ounce for ounce more vegetables because they're leafy green than I do eat meat when it's all said and done.
[00:44:40.390] – Allan And yeah, there's some fat in there to make it actually taste delicious. But, you know, is just because everybody wants to nitpick and, you know, they're like, oh, it's the bacon diet. I'm like, well, they have a little bit of bacon. It's condiment. It's it's an aside, you know, it's like that's not their main protein. We're not all sitting around running around eating pounds and pounds of bacon. Now, yes, there are some people that are doing that, but in a general sense, you can have a balanced, fully nutritious diet. You have to have the understandings of what your body needs with regards to vitamins, minerals and particularly electrolytes. If we're going to go into ketosis because we're going to flush some water and just understanding those basic things is just a function of knowing how your body responds to food and eating appropriately.
[00:45:30.880] – Gary And that's it. It's unlearning a lot of the simplistic crap we were taught. And then basing thinking about your diet in terms of human physiology instead of some, you know, like we're thermodynamic experiments. My favorite part, so part of what I did in this book, I interviewed over 120 odd physicians who had converted to this way of thinking. I estimate there are tens of thousands now worldwide at least to do this, but who now eat this way themselves and prescribe it to their patients. And by interviewing all these physicians, I could understand the challenges to them and to their patients and how they overcame those challenges. And at the end of the book, I give advice based on and ways to both think about this and do this, so that the eating a low-carb, high-fat ketogenic regime is something they can do for a lifetime.
[00:46:31.800] – Gary But my I think my favorite chapter is. I start with the quote from a woman named Doctor named Carrie Doulos, who's a spine surgeon in Ohio. And Carrie comes from a family with a history of obesity and says without understanding her diet, she'd be 300 pounds. She's also a type one, has type one diabetes now, and she's a vegan. And she used to be a ketogenic diet. And she does so because she can tolerate animal products. So she would have she always had some ethical issues with them and she grew up ethically opposed to eating them. But she would do it if her body tolerated.
[00:47:13.260] – Gary It just doesn't seem to do it. And she said it's it's not a religion. It's just about the way I feel, about how I feel. And to me, ultimately, that's kind of what we're doing here. And I play Carrie Doulos off against Georgia Edes, who's a psychologist, psychiatrist in western Massachusetts whose body doesn't seem to tolerate plant foods. And so Georgia is now a carnivore. All she eats exclusively is meat. And that's what makes her feel healthy and able to achieve a healthy weight. And as long as you know that you don't have any vitamin and mineral deficiencies and that you know your lipids are not insane, whatever that means is.
[00:47:58.220] – Gary Of self-experiments until you found dumping crap food on us. And so we didn't really have to think about what we ate anymore. So you could give your kids sugary crap for breakfast and they'll eat it because it's full of sugar. And then you can give them take them to McDonald's or fast food restaurants and buy them a Coca-Cola and get them crap for lunch. And they'll eat that because the food industry did such a good job of making it palatable and the same for dinner and nobody had to think about it anymore. But there are people who think about it all the time or that the vegetarians and vegans have to think deeply about what they're eating and daily about making a healthy diet.
[00:48:38.210] – Gary And anyone who is a foodie does it naturally and there's nothing more important to us. That's the fascinating thing. It's at least tied for being the single most important thing we can do in our lives, which is eat healthy. And it just requires some thought and practice to do it right? Nobody gets good at anything with that practice. The longer you do it, the easier it becomes. And meanwhile, we've been getting these messages from the nutrition community, don't even think about doing it. If you abstain from a if you don't eat the entire food group, that's an eating disorder. If it's unsustainable, don't try it anyway. Nobody can eat this way.
[00:49:20.600] Even though it'll make you healthier, we're not going to tell you to do it because we don't believe you'll sustain it. I mean, sort of insane logic from the nutrition community. Whereas what they should be saying is being healthy takes work, you know, and so eat a diet that's designed physiologically to make you healthy, which this is, and then work at it so it gets easier. And now, of course, the food industry has settled. And so there are sort of you know, you can go on Amazon and buy a gazillion, you know, keto-friendly snacks and drink and God knows what they're doing for us.
[00:49:59.270] – Gary But there they are. I was confronted yesterday with keto macaroons, I was always a big macaroon fan, I said I'm staring at the Amazon and blowing up the nutrition profile so I could see it going, wait a minute, wait a minute. They say it's keto-friendly. It's still like 14 grams of carbs.
[00:50:21.330] – Allan You could probably tolerate two, maybe three of those.
[00:50:27.660] – Gary You know, I mean, I could probably be very happy eating them, but I'm also very happy without eating them.
[00:50:32.740] – Allan Yeah. Yeah.
[00:50:34.050] – Gary And so ultimately, I passed.
[00:50:37.200] – Allan Good for you, Gary. I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest, and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?
[00:50:47.340] – Gary OK, well, I'm a big fan of telling people what not to eat, okay? I know other people don't like negative messages, but don't eat sugar, starches, and grains.
[00:50:58.860] – Gary Wear a mask.
[00:51:01.410] – Gary And, you know, I don't know if I got a third. I'm a writer. We're tortured. Right. So telling people how to be happy, I feel like I'm not sure I'm certified to do that. But, get outside.
[00:51:17.340] – Gary And one of the things that we used to be so part of the logic of the nutrition world is do you tell people to exercise? Because if you exercise, maybe they'll burn off calories. And I think of this as like a greyhound, the greyhounds of the world figuring if they can just get the bastard hounds to run around the track enough, they could turn the basset hounds into greyhounds. And what they end up doing is torturing the basset hound. And you end up with emaciated, starving, exhausted basset hounds.
[00:51:43.980] – Gary But if you can make those basset hounds healthy with the right diet, if that diet sort of reregulates their fat metabolism such that they're mobilizing fat from their fat tissue and burning it rather than storing it to excess, they'll have energy. And if they have energy, they want to exercise and they want to burn that energy off, which lean people do naturally. And then they'll want to go for walks and go for hikes and go to the gym and all those great things and get outside because of the energy to do it.
[00:52:15.850] – Gary And so you don't exercise or get physically active to lose weight, if you fix your fat accumulation problem, you will want to be physically active. So do the former and then enjoy the latter.
[00:52:32.350] – Allan Excellent. Gary, if someone wanted to learn more about you and or the book The Case for Keto, where would you like for me to send them?
[00:52:41.080] – Gary OK, my website is garytaubes.com. I don't keep up with blogging, but it's there. Twitter is @garytaubes. The book is available. If you have an independent bookstore in your neighborhood that's still open, please buy it there. If not, Amazon will deliver.
[00:53:00.460] – Allan Absolutely. Well, Gary, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.
[00:53:04.750] – Gary Allan, thank you for having me.
Post Show/Recap
[00:53:11.150] – Allan Rachel, welcome back.
[00:53:13.010] – Rachel Hey, Allan, wow, that was a really fascinating interview. There's so much to talk about.
[00:53:17.990] – Allan Yeah, like I said, I really like Gary and I like his approach in his books predominantly because he doesn't take anything as fact. At first, you know, it's not like he's going to follow and say, okay here's here's our belief system. So I'm going to rest all of my argument on that thing. And a lot of people will do that. They'll say you don't need to do keto because it'll raise your cholesterol.
[00:53:41.630] – Allan Some people get on keto and it lowers their cholesterol. Keto definitely lowers the triglycerides. It does a lot of other things that are really, really good for you. But it's not for everybody as Gary mentioned in the podcast. But, you know, if you're thinking about going to your doctor and you're thinking about doing keto or you're doing keto and you go to your doctor, your doctor says, oh, my God, get off that, you're going to die.
[00:54:03.410] – Allan just realize that doctors are not infallible. And I don't mean for you to completely question your doctor, but realize at one point doctors were recommending cigarettes. You had advertisements, nine out of 10 doctors prefer a particular brand of cigarette.
[00:54:19.700] – Allan Now, they didn't know they were not told in medical school that the tobacco was bad for them. And in fact, the tobacco companies went out of their way to make sure that that information was not available to your doctor. So doctors were recommending cigarettes. Now they're recommending different things. But some of our doctors went to medical school 15, 20, 25, 30 years ago. And a lot of them are still relying on the same things they were taught then, or they're relying on the things that they get at their conferences.
[00:54:52.370] – Allan They have to do their continuing education. I don't know what they call it. You know, we call it CEUs use in a personal training space. We used to call it CPE when I was an accountant. But they have to get they have to go back and get education. Now, these educations are typically conferences and these conferences are typically sponsored and run by drug companies. So most of the science, most of the things they're hearing are not food can make you healthy. It's you need this medicine to be healthy and we don't have a deficiency of medicine. We have a problem with our food and Gary does an excellent job of kind of walking us through step by step, the Case for Keto. And so if your doctor is saying maybe you shouldn't be on that on that diet, highlight his objections, highlight them in your book, take the book to your doctor and have him read that section. You know, you need to do some stuff.
[00:55:49.620] – Allan I remember when I was going through my first divorce. It sounds terrible, doesn't it. I was going through the process of the settlement and everything that happens. And, you know, she was going to get half of my 401k. And so it happened at that point in time to be reading a lot of things about divorce and about, 401ks and all that other stuff. And it said, you need this document called a QDRO, it's qualified something, something, something. Basically, it's where you're redeeming your 401k, but you're not taking the cash. So you do the form. And that way for your taxes, you don't have to pay taxes on the money you withdrew. Otherwise you do. And then the story was about a doctor who took a million dollars out of his 401k and basically had to pay five hundred thousand dollars in taxes because he didn't do this one document. So I went to my attorney and I said, well, have you drawn up a QDRO?
[00:56:46.200] – Allan And he's like, What's that? So I showed him my research and I went to another law firm, a friend at another law firm, and requested a boilerplate for one and gave it to my attorney and he charged me my hourly rate for his time to read my research and do the form, which I thought was really, really not cool. But at least I saved myself a ton in taxes because I was aware of the situation. And I was a part of my own legal team.
[00:57:17.340] – Allan I didn't just depend on the opinions and requirements that are put forward by my attorney. I made sure I understood the process as well as I could. So that I could be a part of the team and you really kind of have to do the same thing with your medical, because doctors are not infallible. They're human beings just like us. They're very intelligent human beings and they're fairly diligent because they did go through medical school. But at the same time, they're not doing the research specific to you every single day. You have to do that research.
[00:57:51.340] – Rachel That's right. And you need to take your own reins of your own nutritional choices. And it's good to ask questions. It's good to question the doctor and help them or they can help you better once they know what you're trying to find out. But yeah nutritional guidance has changed so much. But the problem is that it hasn't been reflected in our country for anyway, in our guidelines, the food pyramid, as as we knew it growing up, was like that for probably 15 years and know that there were changes in the food pyramid. If it wasn't, last year was the year before, and it had been literally ten years in between. Any additional changes to what we know and it's only one dietary example to live by and it's not the right dietary example for everybody.
[00:58:42.610] – Allan Yeah, well, one of the things is realized, that's a very politicized environment, Nina Teicholz wrote, The Big Fat Surpise, I believe, is the book she wrote. And she's been an activist on this thing the whole time. And the reality of it is when they get the people together in the room, the scientists, they're supposed to go through these studies. They sit down and they look at all the studies and then they start throwing some of them out as irrelevant or not valid. And all of the high-fat, low-carb diets, every single one of them was excluded from the study. And so, she's part of an organization that's out there trying to fight this, but they're moving forward with nutrition guidance.
[00:59:27.700] – Allan And, basically probably for a generally healthy person that doesn't need that doesn't have metabolic problems, is not obese or overweight, those guidelines might work just fine. But for a lot of us that are I guess what I was with was is easily fat, I think was one of the terms I heard recently in an interview that that interview is coming up, guys, but easily fattened us easily fat and people. We can't eat that way. We can't feel that way. And unfortunately, that's not going to be a part of the guidelines. I was talking to a nutritionist out of Canada and she'll be on the show soon. And it was kind of the same thing. We were talking about the nutrition guidelines. She says, yeah, Canada has changed their guidelines. They don't have all of the grains and all that stuff anymore. They've lowered that down and they've got it a little bit more balance.
[01:00:16.450] – Allan And I said United States is still charging forward with 11 servings of grain. She's like she's like, that's insane. And like, it's politics. And so, again, your doctor doing the best he can with his standard of care and his education. So just recognize you have to be a part of these decisions. You know, if you know that you need to go in for surgery and they're going to put a magic marker mark on the leg they're supposed to operate on, you check that mark.
[01:00:46.700] – Rachel Yes.
[01:00:47.470] – Allan Don't just assume that they marked the right leg, you know, and when it was maybe it was supposed to be the left leg. Make sure that they marked the right leg. Make sure that the information your doctors giving you now, you do need your doctor to be involved. And here's one of the core reasons. If you're on metformin, some other blood sugar lowering medication or you're on insulin, your medication is very likely going to change if you change what you eat.
[01:01:14.860] – Rachel That's true.
[01:01:16.150] – Allan So a significant change in your diet is something you do need to talk to your doctor about. Like I said, he or she may object on the grounds that they don't believe that's a healthy, sustainable way of eating. But if you went in there and said, I'm going to go vegan or vegetarian. They'll be like okay, that's great. And it's like and keto.
[01:01:41.950] – Rachel Silence.
[01:01:42.230] – Allan Yeah, crickets, but it's possible. And we've had we've had them on, too. So, you know, I think I think the key of this is of this whole thing is if you really want some support, when you're talking to family members, you want some support when you're talking to doctors. The only thing that I wish Gary was a doctor, he's a journalist, but he did take the time to get to the root cause he did go take the time to put together the history, to put together the case. And so to me, this book is is like gold. If you're trying to explain to someone why you're doing what you're doing.
[01:02:20.590] – Rachel I think it's worth reading and experimenting. After listening to your podcast for a couple of years, you talked about keto for quite a bit, and I wasn't ready to accept that keto was a healthy diet to follow or lifestyle to follow. I had a hard time unlearning all of the things that I knew for a fact that that was bad for you. I mean, really, I had to really come off of all of those things that I had just tooken for a true science.
[01:02:50.410] – Rachel But so much has changed. And and but I knew that if I didn't do something different, that I wasn't going to get where I wanted to be. And so I just like Gary had mentioned, like, I just did an experiment and I I told Mike,my husband I said, okay,I'm going to try this and see how it works. If it doesn't work, I'll try something else. But two years, almost three years later, I'm still basically following the keto lifestyle because it is working for me. Everybody needs to try that. Something different.
[01:03:23.140] – Allan Yes. If what you're doing is not working, you've got to do something different if you expect a different outcome.
[01:03:29.630] – Rachel Yep. And I know some people can be vegan or vegetarian. I know, like Gary had mentioned, he's got a friend who is a vegan, keto, and another friend who's Carnivore. It really is such an individual thing. And I respect anybody who can be vegan just as much as I respect anybody that can be keto. The fact is, is that they found something that works with the way that their body works and that's exciting.
[01:03:55.720] So in the show notes, I'm going to make a point to I've had a carnivore on me, I've had a vegan keto on and I've had Dr. Will Cole on where he was pretty much somewhere in the lines between vegan and pescatarian. And so I'm going to link to those. So those are ways of eating that you're wanting to do. And then you're also want to consider trying keto or at least a low-carb version of those diets. I'll put the links in there for you to check those out, because there's a lot of good information in those episodes to just kind of give you an idea of what's possible.
[01:04:32.290] – Rachel Perfect, I think that be so helpful.
[01:04:35.230] – Allan All right, Rachel, I'll talk to you next week.
[01:04:37.840] – Rachel Great. Take care.
Patreons
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[00:02:48.040] – Allan Raz, how are you doing?
[00:02:50.050] – Rachel Great. Allan. How are you today?
[00:02:52.570] – Allan I'm doing well. You know, we're prerecording these intro and outro thing conversations now because we want to take a break at the end of the year. And so actually, while I'm recording this, I'm in a town in Panama called Boquete. It's in the mountains. So it's moderate temperatures. A lot of expats that want to come down here and live. They like this region because it's really cool and comfortable and it doesn't get too hot.
[00:03:21.430] – Allan And you're about an hour or two away from beaches. If you want to go see some Pacific beaches. So a lot of people like living here. And so we've been talking to a lot of expats and they call themselves expats. We're immigrants. But I won't let that definitional term really bother me too much. So we've been spending some time here.
[00:03:41.590] – Allan We went to a coffee farm yesterday and went through the whole process of how they make coffee from start to finish to picking beans to all the way to grinding them when you're done toasting them. It's pretty cool.
[00:03:56.650] – Rachel So are you a coffee drinker?
[00:03:58.270] – Allan Oh, I am.
[00:03:59.230] – Rachel Yeah. Nice. How does it taste?
[00:04:01.000] – Allan As soon as we get off this call, I'm going to go back to the dining table because we're recording this around breakfast time. Tammy is having breakfast right now. I'm going to get some more coffee because it's so wonderful around here.
[00:04:11.060] – Rachel Oh, that sounds so wonderful. I'm a big coffee drinker, too. I love trying different types of coffees. And that would be really neat to see it all in action like you just did.
[00:04:20.350] – Allan Yeah, I bought a bag a pound of this what they call double roasted, which is basically where when you roasted I guess it's similar like make popcorn I guess is the analogy she uses. It pops the beans as you're roasting the beans pop. And so what you want to do to get to a medium roast is literally just get to the point where all the beans are popped once. And that's the kind of I like the medium roast. And so what you can do is you go to a point right before they crack and then you let them cool off and then you go and roast them again. So that's a double roast to get to that medium. And so I'm interested to get back and grind some of that up and try that tomorrow or next week. But so, yeah, I bought that. She said after you have this, you won't like any other coffee again.
[00:05:07.660] – Rachel So that's so awesome.
[00:05:10.280] – Allan She's like, you'll be calling me asking you to ship this stuff to you.
[00:05:13.990] – Rachel Wonderful. That sounds wonderful.
[00:05:16.750] – Allan Yeah. So it's good. Tammy's recovering from her surgery, so everything's good on this side and we'll spend about another four or five days here. In fact, as we're recording this, Tammy goes back to see her doctor for her follow up and have her stitches removed. So she's on the mend. And then we're going to get back to Bocas and I guess try to open up a bed and breakfast and a gym.
[00:05:37.330] – Rachel That's exciting. For sure. Sounds like great plans for the next year.
[00:05:42.550] – Allan How are you doing?
[00:05:43.780] – Rachel Good. Getting ready for winter up here. We haven't seen any substantial snow quite yet, but I know it's coming. So just getting out my yak tracks and my studs for my shoes and all my winter gear, it's going to be fun.
[00:05:59.730] – Allan Fun.
[00:06:02.720] – Rachel Yeah.
[00:06:03.340] – Allan I'll, I'll be walking the beaches in Bocas about the time you're running with your studs through ice and snow.
[00:06:10.240] – Rachel That's right.
[00:06:10.900] – Allan OK, I guess each person has to have their own and love that they have.
[00:06:14.920] – Rachel Got to love it.
[00:06:16.300] – Allan Oh bless your little heart.
[00:06:19.570] – Rachel Thanks. I need it.
[00:06:21.970] – Allan OK, well it's interesting because the podcast now has been going on for over five years and I've never covered one aspect of dieting that's called the OMAD Diet, which is basically a form of intermittent fasting. I would call it intermittent fasting 2.0. It's a little bit more extreme than than just standard intermittent fasting with one meal per day. And so let's go ahead and start this conversation with Alyssa.
Interview
Text
[00:07:20.920] – Allan Alyssa, welcome to 40+ Fitness.
[00:07:23.170] – Alyssa Thank you so much for having me.
[00:07:25.360] – Allan So, you know, it's weird. I've had this podcast for five years, over five years now, and I've talked about every kind of topic I thought I could talk about. And then I realized, oh, here's a book on OMAD, and I've never covered a book on OMAD. Wow! It's called The OMAD Diet: Intermittent Fasting with One Meal a Day to Burn Fat and Lose Weight.
[00:07:48.860] – Allan And just general admission: I do intermittent fasting all the time. I do. I'm in keto most of the time and intermittent fasting just becomes natural. There have been a few times where I found that I did only eat one meal. It was never a planned, I'm going to go do an OMAD thing. It was a I got stuck. You know, one situation. My truck got stuck in my front yard of my property. I was at a property doing some work, and then my truck got stuck. And when the tow truck came, the tow truck broke. So it's three more hours for the tow truck to fix and get me finally get me out.
[00:08:26.150] – Allan And so I ate. You know, I had eaten the night before. I skipped breakfast and went out, worked for a few hours. And then here I was now driving home at six o'clock. And I'm like, oh, it's been 23 hours since I even ate. I might ought to eat something. So I wasn't you know, I wasn't hungry.
[00:08:43.940] – Allan I wasn't starving myself. And then I did have a pretty good meal. So can you take just a minute to talk about what OMAD is? Because I think a lot of people get confused and think it's just a way to really restrict calories or trick your body or can you talk about it?
[00:09:02.090] – Alyssa Certainly. So, first of all, I'm honored that the first person you had on to talk about OMAD. And I think that a lot of people have had similar experiences to you in that the kind of you have to eat three meals a day has been so ingrained. And even with some diet programs that have been popular over the last 20 years, it's more like you have to eat six times a day or you have to eat every two hours or something like this.
[00:09:32.840] – Alyssa And people don't realize that eating one meal a day an option and can be a kind of sustainable and nutritious approach when in fact it can be. So kind of the basic idea behind OMAD, which stands for one meal, is just as it sounds in that it's really you're only sitting down to eat once a day. But for that reason, it kind of gets rid of all of those different possible restrictions on eating. If you're kind of like calorie counting or things like that, there are people who approach, OMAD as because I'm only eating once, I can eat whatever I want, which is an approach you can take and because you are still fasting for twenty-three hours, you will still get some benefits from that approach.
[00:10:35.510] – Alyssa But the approach that I tried to take in the book was to kind of figure out how I could create really balanced, well-rounded meals for the one meal a day that we're going to make the fast sustainable. So you wouldn't be starving and also kind of give you a wide array of macro and micronutrients that will support your health overall.
[00:11:03.920] – Allan Yeah, that was one of the critical things that was in there that I thought was really important is you're not just talking keto, which is why I ended up in that situation where, I basically went OMAD without expecting to. And it didn't bother me because I was already really comfortable with ketosis. But you have vegan recipes and you have vegetarian recipes and you have things that are keto-friendly. You have really a good mix in there. So it's not just keto, is this keto is that, there's this OMAD is this or OMAD is that. Quite literally, whatever your approache and nutritional needs are, you're still meeting those with OMAD.
[00:11:43.590] – Alyssa Yeah, it's incredibly adaptable in a lot of ways. One way is that you can adapt it if you are following keto or if you are on a plant-based or a gluten-free diet, you can do any number of those things. But it's also really adaptable to your lifestyle. So going back to that, like folks who felt like they needed to eat multiple times a day, that can be incredibly stressful on a person with a busy kind of full life, like trying to fit that in.
[00:12:15.570] – Alyssa And then if they don't get their second of six meals and they think, oh, well, now today is a wash, like, I'll have to start again tomorrow. Whereas with OMAD you really you only have to find that time to sit down and eat a healthy meal once a day. And that was one of the things that actually surprised me a little as I was working on the book and speaking to people who have done OMAD. Was that the fact that it was really easy and kind of didn't put any added stress on their lifestyle was one of the things that they loved most about it?
[00:12:53.880] – Allan Yeah, there are a lot of benefits. I mean, for me, it's the food freedom of not having to have food everywhere because I tried I tried some other eating styles after keto. I was trying some eating styles and I was like, OK, so I've got to have a snack of nuts now and have a snack of fruit now. OK, now here's my meal. And now here's this other snack and here's the other snack and then a meal and then another snack. And I had food in my truck, had foodin my office. I had at food all around me so that I would always have this available food. And it was just it was difficult. You know, if I'd got stuck in the mud and I was eating six meals a day, well, I would have just missed five of them.
[00:13:41.370] – Allan What are some of the other benefits besides the time savings and the and then kind of having that freedom? What are some of the other benefits we could see with OMAD?
[00:13:50.430] – Alyssa Sure, you already you mentioned ketosis a little bit. That is kind of one of the primary methods through which if you're doing OMAD to lose weight, that is definitely going to help. So that is the process where when you're eating on a regular basis and getting carbohydrates into your body, your body is first going to use up all of those carbohydrates for energy before it starts using anything else. But when you are on an extended fast, your body will work its way through all of that glucose, all of those carbohydrates, and switch to burning fat. And then the longer you go after that switch occurs, just the more fat you're going to burn. So that's one of the big ones.
[00:14:38.700] – Alyssa Another big way that it can help with weight loss is through its effect on hormones. So the first hormone that it has a big effect on is insulin. So, going back to eating regularly throughout the day, when you're doing that, your pancreas is constantly producing insulin so that the insulin can then go in and take the sugar out of your bloodstream and bring it to your cells to be used as energy.
[00:15:07.170] – Alyssa But if you're constantly putting in carbohydrates, insulin is constantly being produced. And a lot of people get to the point where the pancreas just gets tired of producing insulin and it can't produce anymore. And so that production starts to slow down. And that slow down is what leads to problems like Type 2 diabetes and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which are big contributors to weight gain, especially in America, with the number of people that are type 2 diabetics few days.
[00:15:42.030] – Alyssa But when you're only eating one today, insulin does not need to constantly being be produced. So your pancreas shoots out insulin when you eat and then when you're not eating, the pancreas is like, oh, I can take a break. It gets to rest and relax and recharge. And then the next time you eat, it's ready to produce the insulin that you need.
[00:16:07.560] – Alyssa And then the other hormone that is impacted is HGH, which has a big impact on exercise as well, which I mentioned later. HGH, human growth hormone, it plays a big role in maintaining lean muscle mass and a steady metabolism. But for a lot of people, the levels of HGH that the body produces is pretty erratic. And it's also one of the hormones that decline significantly with age. But there have been studies that show that extended fasts with things like OMAD really rapidly increase HGH levels, and so that's kind of maintaining muscle mass, especially as you get older, plays such a key role in not only maintaining a healthy metabolism and a healthy weight, but also like keeping your body strong, your joints strong, protecting against all sorts of all sorts of different things.
[00:17:07.870] – Alyssa And then and then, yeah, there are tons of additional studies that have been done on how it can be beneficial for heart health, for brain health, how it helps people who are going through cancer treatment. There's very new research now into how it affects this process called autophagy, which is like allowing old and debilitated cells in your body to be replaced by newer, younger, healthier cells. And the idea is that the more young, healthy cells you have in your body compared to these old ones that aren't working as well, the better everything is going to run. And the more recent research into fasting is showing that it allows your body to do this cell turn over more quickly. And that is proving to have lots of different benefits as well.
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[00:19:21.130] – Allan Now, a lot of people when you say, OK, well, what I want you to do is I want you to have your dinner or have your breakfast and then I want you to wait twenty four hours to eat again. I think a lot of people look at that and say, well, oh my God, my blood sugar is going to drop down to zero and I'm going to be jonesing. How how would you recommend that someone go through and basically get to OMAD? Because I think it's a process. I don't really think it's just OK, today I'm eating and I'm not going to eat again for some. Some people can. Don't get me wrong. There's people who can. But for a lot of people, it's a little scary to kind of go off that cliff and say, I'm going to do this. What are some recommendations you have on on a good general approach to that?
[00:20:04.810] – Alyssa Well, first off, you mentioned like, oh, my blood sugar is going to get too low. Like, there are a couple, like couple kind of groups of people for whom OMAD isn't the best idea. Like, if you do have low blood sugar and that's a health concern of yours, then it like it might not be best. But for the majority of healthy people, if you get the OK from your doctor, it's definitely it's not going to hurt you to give it a shot.
[00:20:33.880] – Alyssa I think as far as a good approach, you can definitely kind of work towards it. So maybe if you're eating three meals a day, switch to just two and see how you feel then then the other big thing is that, as you just mentioned, it really doesn't matter what time of day you eat your one meal. So when you're just getting started, mix it up and you can have your one meal around breakfast. And like, I actually I have a whole chapter in my book of breakfast style meals. If you are someone who likes to eat in the day, maybe try that for two days and then switch to a midday meal. Try that for a little bit of time. And so you can really play with it to determine what what is best for you, what kind of what timing keeps keeps your energy up the best.
[00:21:35.110] – Alyssa And then the other another key part is that you are only eating once a day. But that doesn't mean you can't put anything else in your body during the other twenty three hours. So drinking fluids throughout the day can have a huge impact on how full you feel. So that's water, that's black coffee and tea. That's like chicken broth or beef broth, like bone bone broth, those kinds of things. A lot of the time in general, if you feel like you need a snack or something, if you feel hungry a lot of the time, you might just be thirsty.
[00:22:14.050] – Alyssa And so kind of keeping I know you were talking about earlier, kind of always having a snack of nuts or something on you, I think, with, oh, you always want to have a bottle of water or a mug of something to keep you going. And again, to the last thing which I touched on briefly earlier is to kind of really think about creating meals that are really well-balanced and have a variety of nutrients.
[00:22:48.370] – Alyssa So a lot of the in creating the recipes for my book, I put a lot of focus on protein and fiber because these are the ones that are going to give you energy, keep you full throughout the day. Also a lot of vegetables because those are going to increase portion sizes. Vegetables take longer to chew. Like the longer it takes you to eat, the more full and satisfied you're going to feel. I also talked a little bit about mindful eating. I'm sure a lot of listeners are familiar with mindfulness or like mindfulness meditation.
[00:23:28.060] – Alyssa And so this is kind of applying that idea to cooking and eating. So really being in the present, like smelling the smells, kind of feeling the textures of your food and really being there with your meal and not watching TV or eating while you're driving, because hopefully, like it's only one meal, you haven't had to carve out a bunch of different times in your day. So hopefully you're able to commit that like 20 to 30 minutes just to enjoying your meal. And that can make a huge difference as well. And kind of how satisfied you then feel going into your fast?
[00:24:12.930] – Allan I think it's really important to emphasize we brought this up at the beginning just to talk to your doctor. And if you're on any kind of blood sugar lowering meds like metformin or you're taking insulin or anything like that, recognize that when you change the way you eat, you change the formula of how your body is going to work. And so if you're on those and using those, your dosages are probably going to have to change to adapt to what you're doing now. As you get into this, this is not something to just jump in to have the conversation with your doctor, be prepared to change your meds as needed so that you can manage through that. But this is particularly for diabetes and obesity.
[00:24:53.400] – Allan This is a hugely popular and good approach to eating well and keeping your blood sugar and insulin levels stable. So, you know, this is something you really want to look into. One thing I think a lot of people would be surprised with is like, oh, well, if I'm going to do this, I'm just going to be losing weight. I just I don't need to exercise. But I'll tell you, as a personal trainer. Yeah, you do need to exercise?
[00:25:20.880] – Allan So there's little concern. And I you know, I had a I hired a personal trainer. I want to get stronger for a Spartan. So I hired a personal trainer, Coach Dave and I meet him every morning. And I told him, I said, you know, I don't care how early we meet. I don't you know, he says, I want you to have time to eat, wake up and eat. And like, no, I don't need to worry about eating before I can do things like, yeah, you need those carbs, you need that, you know, that protein and carbs. So you have the energy to make it through a workout.
[00:25:48.390] – Allan And I'm like, no, Dave, I'll be fine through the workout. But it was only because I knew my body well enough. I'd been training long enough to know that I can exercise without food in my system. Can you talk a little bit about exercising when you're on OMAD? Considerations and things to do.
[00:26:06.660] – Alyssa Yeah. So just like you can play around with the timing of your one meal, I definitely recommend playing around with the timing of your workout in relation to your meal, because like you said, some people do feel comfortable and energized and strong exercising on an empty stomach. And there have been studies that do show like some benefits to that, but other people that might make them feel nauseous or weak or things like that. And so you can definitely see if you want to do your workout before your meal, after your meal
[00:26:47.250] – Alyssa Something else I discuss in the book as the only thing you can kind of quote unquote eat during your fast are fat bombs, which I'm sure you're familiar with as it comes comes out of the keto world. So these are like little treats that you make using healthy fats like coconut oil or coconut butter, and then add a little bit of flavoring like maybe like a drop or two of liquid stevia and some cocoa powder. And then you mix it up and you freeze them and you have really indulgent little snacks, the fat that can be kind of an instant hit of energy if you do feel like you need just that little something before or after a workout.
[00:27:34.860] – Alyssa But, yeah, it's very personal. And there are certainly benefits to exercising during while you're fasting, while you're on OMAD, as I mentioned earlier, insulin and HGH, those are really the benefits you get from fasting as they affect those hormones. And the benefits that you get from exercising are really complementary to one another. So, like, if fasting is kind of keeping your insulin production low and steady, exercise has been shown to improve insulin sensitivity, which means that the body doesn't need as much insulin to begin with to kind of move the glucose out of your bloodstream. So the way that both fasting and exercise impact insulin is incredibly good for your good for your overall health.
[00:28:35.460] – Alyssa And then obviously with HGH as well, if your HGH levels are high there, that's kind of allowing you to build that lead muscle mass that you're trying to build through exercise, and then just as the time of day that you exercise is very personal. So is the form of exercise you choose. I think one of the most important things about exercise is that you have to be doing something that you enjoy because if you don't like doing it, then you're not going to stick with it and then you're going to feel bad about not sticking with it.
[00:29:16.830] – Alyssa And then it's just going to be this cycle of. Not maintaining your healthy habits, and so I think that any form of movement, whether that's walking, running, biking, dancing, strength training, interval training, really anything, anything that you enjoy and that you feel good afterwards is a good strategy to take while you're also doing all that.
[00:29:49.670] – Allan Alyssa, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be, what are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well.
[00:30:00.140] – Alyssa My first one is one that I just started talking about, which is find activities that are good for you that also make you happy. So the biggest way to find, maintain healthy habits are to find habits that you actually enjoy doing and that you get up every morning wanting to do, excited to do, because you're much more likely to do those things on a regular basis. You're much more likely to keep them in your in your life for longer.
[00:30:41.440] – Alyssa I'm not a huge fan of, like, doing something that just because you think it's good for you, but you don't feel great afterwards or you kind of are the second you finish your dreading the next time you have to do it. Because like you said, happiness is such an enormous part of fitness and wellness that I really don't think these things are worth doing unless you enjoy them. And there are so many ways you can impact your health in a positive way that you're bound to find at least one that that makes you happy while you do it.
[00:31:24.580] – Alyssa My second strategy is to be kind to yourself. So life is busy. It's unpredictable. You could have this set plan of like you're going to do X workout, you're going to make X dinner, but then your car breaks down and you have to wait for triple A for three hours and then you end up pizza and really like these are things that are not going to derail all of your efforts. They're not things that mean you have to erase any progress you've made so far and kind of go back to start. And so just giving yourself that leeway to deal with those kinds of twists and turns when when they arrive and really just do what you can, when you can and be proud of what you've accomplished is really, really important.
[00:32:27.640] – Alyssa And then my last strategy is to just be outside as much as possible. I know personally, I just I always feel better about life when I'm when I'm outside and whether that can be something of like walking your dog every day, going on hikes on the weekends or even just kind of sitting outside for a couple of minutes in the morning while you drink your coffee. I feel like the kind of being connected to nature, even if you live in a city or something like that, just kind of feeling the fresh air or the sun or like seeing grass or trees just has such a kind of calming, stress reducing effect that really can just take you out of your head, even if it's just for a couple of minutes and give you that moment of feeling refreshed and renewed and also empowered to tackle anything that might come your way.
[00:33:40.070] – Allan Thank you. Alyssa. If someone wanted to learn more about you and the things that you're doing, including your book, The OMAD Diet, where would you like for me to send them?
[00:33:50.160] – Alyssa Sure. When this goes live, the the diet will be available for purchase wherever books are sold. It's on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, a lot of different places. So if you search for it there, you should be able to find it. You can also find it. And a lot of the other work I do on my website, which is alyssasybertz.com. And there you'll find information and links to the book, as well as to a lot of the other writing and stuff that I do.
[00:34:37.100] – Allan All right. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/466. And I'll be sure to have the links there. Alyssa, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.
[00:34:47.840] – Alyssa Thank you so much for having me. It was a lot of fun.
Post Show/Recap
[00:34:57.130] – Allan Welcome back, Ras.
[00:34:58.570] – Rachel Hey, Allan, wow, that was a really, really interesting interview about a whole new way of eating. It's really an interesting concept to just choose one meal per day. There's a lot of things I like about it, but I also have a few questions.
[00:35:12.940] – Allan Yeah, it's you know, I've done it before on accident only because, you know, like, my truck got stuck in the mud. I think I've told this story on here. My truck gets stuck in the mud. I was gone working on a yard area I owned on some property, worked for the morning pretty hard. And then as I was trying to pull out, my truck got stuck. So I had to call AAA to pull me out of my own property and their truck broke. And so three hours later, waiting for a part, getting that fixed.
[00:35:42.350] – Allan I went fishing because that's why I own the land in the first place. So I'm over there fishing and taking my you know, I'm I'm fine. I'm not worried about it, but I'm driving back and realizing it's been 24 hours since I had any food whatsoever.
[00:35:53.500] – Rachel Wow.
[00:35:53.950] – Allan Because when I do my fasting, which I do intermittent fasting almost consistently when I'm in full ketosis because I'm just not hungry that often. And my goal in ketosis, particularly at the very beginning of it, is to reduce some body fat. So I will skip a breakfast. I still eat breakfast foods when I break my fast, maybe lunch time or later. I'm not going to get stuck in the whole thing of eggs and bacon and have to be in the morning. I'll eat them whenever I want to. But so I've I've been to a point where I had one meal a day. But I think a lot of people that get into intermittent fasting and OMAD just they struggle initially because it is not something you just do. You don't just sit there and say, I had dinner last night, I'm going to wait until dinner to eat.
[00:36:40.450] – Allan If you're not conditioned, I'm ready for it. You're going to see blood sugar spikes and plummets. And it's not it's not going be a fun experience. And I think the other thing that a lot of people do wrong with OMAD or with any kind of intermittent fasting is they just don't eat enough food.
[00:36:57.430] – Rachel Mm hmm.
[00:36:58.900] – Allan You know, food is its energy, but it's also nutrition. And so it's not just it's not just about calories. When you get into OMAD, you know, you've got to make sure you're getting your nutrition in that one meal. So if you're going to try the OMAD diet, you're probably going to have to supplement with some vitamins and minerals because you're probably going to find it hard to get all of that nutrition in one meal unless you really, really focus on it.
[00:37:27.460] – Allan Now, Alyssa in in her book, has laid out some pretty good plans and some one approach to it. So if you're interested in it, I think you do want to do a little bit of research first.
[00:37:39.580] – Rachel Yeah, that was my biggest question was how do you pack all of the nutrients you need to have into one meal? Like how how can you get a full day's worth of nutrients and into one simple meal?
[00:37:52.990] – Allan It's it's really about nutritional density. OK, so you're not going to have white bread? That's going to be something you eat. White potatoes, you might you might occasionally have that, but you're going to be really looking for the vegetables that are really high in the vitamins and minerals that you're going to want.
[00:38:16.300] – Allan You may, you know, do salt and you may have some potassium with your so you're looking at what are the foods I can have that are going to give me my potassium? What are the foods that are going to give me my zinc and then iodine and the whole bit. And that's what I was saying, is there's a there's a nutritional density limit there. So you're you're eating a lot of food. That one meal is a lot of food, but you want to look for the most nutritionally dense foods you can have so that you know that you're getting a balanced diet because it's still in the end you need that nutrition. Your body needs that nutrition. Short run.
[00:38:50.530] – Allan You know, you can you can go with fewer calories, but that's not that's not sustainable. And if you're just doing this as a diet, meaning a fixed period of time, and then you're going to go back to eating normal, you're going to yo yo like crazy.
[00:39:05.000] – Rachel Yeah, it sounds really challenging to not to mention that we have so many habits, you know, the morning coffee and an afternoon snack and a dessert after dinner or something or an evening snack. It's like there's so many habits that are built around our meals that it would be really a big foreign concept just to stick with one meal and not have anything else throughout the day.
[00:39:27.940] – Allan Yeah, well, my thoughts would be, OK, start with a step away approach, you know, so like with intermittent fasting, if I were coaching someone on intermittent fasting, I'd say, OK, look, you had your dinner at seven o'clock, so from seven or seven thirty you were eating OK.
[00:39:44.140] – Allan And then you wake up in the morning and maybe normally you would have your breakfast at seven o'clock. And so you're saying, OK, that's about a 12 hour gap. So that's a fast. We have break-fast, so we break our fast. Well, if you can push your breakfast to 8:00. OK, it's one extra hour and you might feel a little hungry. Mm hmm. That's actually good.
[00:40:06.610] – Rachel Yeah.
[00:40:07.840] – Allan It's it's not a bad thing to feel a little hungry. You're actually not going to starve. And being a little hungry is good because you feel that you actually now are listening to the leptin ghrelin conversation in your body, which is how we know we've eaten enough food. So you push it off an hour and you see how you feel and then you get used to that eight o'clock breakfast time and then when you're ready, you push it off to nine o'clock and it gets easier as you practice this. But the other side of it is, no, you can't you can't be eating a lot of high glycemic index foods for those meals, because if you eat high glycemic breakfast, yeah, at eight o'clock by 10, 30, 11 o'clock, you're going to be starving again as your blood sugar plummets and you're going to want that morning snack or second breakfast, as they call it.
[00:41:01.630] – Allan So you want to avoid that in the best way to avoid that is eating nutritionally dense foods with their protein and some fat. And I would say particularly in the morning, moderate or low carbohydrate. Most of my breakfast, I have no carbohydrates, because you don't you actually don't need the carbohydrates at all, your body will turn to protein and fat into energy if it needs to. If it can, it'll also use body fat. So if you tend to be towards low carb, it's going to make intermittent fasting much easier. In fact, it might just accidentally happen. You wake up, it's like I'm not hungry.
[00:41:38.710] – Rachel Right.
[00:41:39.080] – Allan I'm gonna go ahead and go. And you find at 1:00 or 2:00 o'clock, you're like, well, I probably should eat and I usually do. And that's one of the things when I'm doing my intermittent fasting, as I sometimes even force myself to have a meal at two o'clock in the afternoon, because I know having just one meal at six o'clock is going to make it very difficult for me to get enough nutrition in. So I'll say, OK, I'm going to have, you know, a good salad. And so it's going to have a good mix of vegetables in it and a protein source.
[00:42:05.500] – Allan So maybe I'm going to make a tuna fish salad. You know, I put that on an actual garden salad and I might sprinkle some bacon on there for just, you know, fairy dust and, you know, and maybe even cut up a little bit of an avocado and say, I'll have the rest of that for dinner. So that's a good, solid meal. Give me a good base of nutrition. Sure. It's it's generally light, so it's not going to be overfilling. And I have at about two o'clock and then I can have a reasonable good dinner with some, you know, a good protein source and some vegetables to round out my dinner.
[00:42:42.040] – Allan And if I feel like I'm not getting the nutrition I need because, you know, maybe I'm saying, OK, I am eating some vegetables that have vitamin C, but I'm not eating a lot of fruit. So maybe I say I need to go ahead while I'm doing this. I need to take a vitamin C supplement. And so I might supplement with vitamin C, I might supplement with vitamin D. It's really just going to depend on how I feel I'm getting the nutrients I need based on how I'm eating.
[00:43:07.990] – Rachel Yeah. Two meals a day. A day seems a lot more manageable than maybe one meal a day.
[00:43:15.520] – Allan In general I would agree. But there's, there are there is a lot to be said. You know, the science, the science isn't really there to say yay or nay. At least that's what I heard going through all these, all these readings and talkings and all that is that when our body doesn't have to focus on dealing with food, you can do a lot of other things. That energy gets used somewhere else. It was a kind of a we were going through the coffee plantation I talked about.
[00:43:42.730] – Allan He was saying, OK, if a plant gets too many berries on it, it can't keep up with all the berries. So some of the berries just die off because the plants a plant knows I only have a certain amount of energy, I can only ripen so many fruits and then while it's got fruit, it can't grow. So no more leaves. It needs the leaves for energy. So it's this trade off balance of what with the energy I have, what can I do?
[00:44:12.610] – Allan And in our bodies are the same way. If we're not if we're using our energy or not giving our body enough energy, it turns off functions that we would like to be doing. So share in thinking about what you eat, how often you eat. You know, those types of decisions that we're making. We're making those energy decisions for our body because we're setting that mold in place.
[00:44:36.610] – Allan And so, you know, it's that how much rain or how much sun a plant gets, how rich the soil is. We're creating our own soil. We're creating our own rain and our own sun. So if we're not drinking enough water, if we're not feeding ourselves right to give us the energy, and if we're not grounding ourselves and doing the good things for our lifestyle, we're not creating an environment that allows our body to flourish.
[00:45:03.310] – Rachel It's interesting, you mentioned and similarly, I think it gives our brain a little bit of time away because how much time do we spend all day thinking about our next meal or what we need to do? And every day I get the question from the family, what's for dinner? Even though I'm the one that cooks it, it's Mike. But, you know, we spend a lot of time planning grocery shopping. What are we going to do for us? What are we going to cook if if that's the attractive thing about one meal a day is that I only have to answer that question once. Then plan it out once, then I've got all those extra free time. I can do other things with my brain.
[00:45:39.250] – Allan And I think, as you go into that, you can go even a step further. And if you did some batch cooking, can you imagine the leverage you have. If you go through on a Saturday, Sunday and you cook four or five big meals.
[00:45:54.370] – Rachel Yeah.
[00:45:54.910] – Allan And you have those ready through the week, your whole workweek could basically be taken care of and you wouldn't even have to think about food. You just know, OK, on Monday we're having steak. On Tuesday, we're having roast, you know, maybe a roast Saturday or Sunday we're having this this vegan lasagna. And, you know, when you get through your week, you're like by the time you get to Friday, it's like, wow, you know, I didn't have to actually do any cooking and I can hit the farmer's market tomorrow and do it all again.
[00:46:24.010] – Rachel I love that. That is a great idea. We need to do more of that.
[00:46:28.480] – Allan Support your local farmers, you know.
[00:46:30.050] – Rachel That's right.
[00:46:30.500] – Allan So that's why I bought the the coffee from from this place. And if you find yourself in Boquete, please message me and let me know and I'll I'll hook you up with these guys. They've got a little they brought a container down with their stuff, you know, we did it, we high, we hired someone and it's their container. But they actually bought a container up in the States and brought it down and then they turned the container into an apartment.
[00:46:55.900] – Rachel Oh, wow.
[00:46:56.540] – Allan Yeah. So they rent out this container on a on a coffee farm. Oh, my God. You want good coffee every morning when you wake up, this is the place to stay. But anyway…
[00:47:07.990] – Rachel That sounds great.
[00:47:08.920] – Allan And you can have coffee. Coffee is not really breaking a fast or a couple calories maybe in a coffee. But for the most part, the black coffee is not a violation of OMAD. You're not going to go to OMAD jail for having your coffee.
[00:47:22.390] – Rachel Good. It's a good thing.
[00:47:24.910] – Allan Yeah. All right, Rachel, this is a really good conversation.
[00:47:28.300] – Rachel It was.
[00:47:28.300] – Allan I'll talk to you next week.
[00:47:29.680] – Rachel Thanks. Take care.
Patreons
The following listeners have sponsored this show by pledging on our Patreon Page:
If you ask people who watch their carbohydrates how many you can eat, you'll get dozens of answers. Dr. Eric Westman and Amy Berger help you end your carb confusion.
Dr. Westman is an associate professor of medicine at Duke University. He is board-certified in obesity medicine and internal medicine and founded the Duke Keto Medicine Clinic in 2006 after eight years of clinical research regarding low carbohydrate ketogenic diets
Amy Berger is an Air Force veteran and certified nutrition specialist who specializes in helping people do keto without the crazy. She has a master's degree in human nutrition and writes about a wide range of health nutrition-related topics such as insulin, metabolism, weight loss, diabetes, thyroid function, and more.
Transcript
Let's Say Hello
[00:00:50.270] – Allan Raz, how are you doing?
[00:00:54.250] – Rachel Good, Allan. How are you today?
[00:00:56.020] – Allan I'm doing well. We made it back down to Panama in one piece. Travel issues all the way along, running away from/dodging Covid, as I talked about earlier, because it just seemed like the caseloads that were really picking up. And we're seeing that now with the reporting on the news and all. But, you know, we're back here, case loads on the island and across most of Panama are reasonable. But, it just it's going to be here till it's not.
[00:01:22.900] – Rachel Right.
[00:01:23.330] – Allan We've got to take one day. And I know they're doing, you know, shutdowns again. And as we're going through this. And so I know it's really hard on folks right now. But, keep your chin up. Keep focused on New Year's coming. You can get through this where you've gotten this far. You can get through this. I just, you know, put your sights on what's important to you, your family, your health. And if it's your fitness, find ways to do it at home.
[00:01:47.750] – Rachel Mm hmm. That's right. We didn't come this far to come this far. So we can just keep it up and we'll get through the holidays and into next year. It'll be great.
[00:01:56.650] – Allan So how are things up in Michigan?
[00:01:58.630] – Rachel Cold, like, if I could, we haven't seen a ton of snow quite yet, but I know some places around us are getting it. So I'm I'm looking forward to the snow because if it's going to be cold, it might as well be pretty. And running in the snow is pretty entertaining for me as well. So I'm looking forward to that.
[00:02:18.810] – Allan Just watch for the ice. Particularly early in the season and late in the season where you get that melt and then refreeze and then snow on top. Just mind your footing.
[00:02:29.980] – Rachel That's right.
[00:02:31.900] – Allan Our guests today are actually pretty cool. I've met both of them at Ketofest and talked to both of them at Ketofest. And I've had both of them on the podcast before, Dr. Eric Westman and Amy Berger. So why don't we go give them a chat?
Interview
[00:03:28.840] – Allan Amy, Dr. Westman, welcome to 40+ Fitness.
[00:03:32.080] – Dr. Westman Thank you.
[00:03:32.920] – Amy Thanks. Thanks for having us.
[00:03:34.180] – Allan Well, Amy and I have to say welcome back because I have had you on before, so it's really good to see you two again and to be talking to you. You know, we've met at Ketofest and spent a little bit of time talking, so I'm very familiar with your work. And I was really excited to see the new book, End Your Carb Confusion: A Simple Guide to Customize Your Carb Intake for Optimal Health.
[00:03:55.000] – Allan And it's kind of a it's a keto book obviously, when we talk low carb, most people are going to get into ketosis at some level. But this is this is something I think that makes it simple. So many carbs. They want simple rules. But you actually took the process and said, hey, we're not going to give you a cookbook, we're not going to do it. We're just going to say, look, here's how you understand what carbs are doing to you.
[00:04:18.580] – Allan And here's a layout of a plan. And I think having that plan walks them through. It's like these are the foods you can eat. These are the foods you stay away from and you give the reasons why. I just think that is so very well put together. Book to end carb confusion.
[00:04:34.300] – Dr. Westman Thank you. You know, we have been working in the low carb space and yes, I'm known as the keto Guy. As a researcher, I helped to validate the low carb diets over the last twenty years. And but I also realized there are a lot of other ways to go about things. And I'm in a clinic treating people grounded. And I think that's helped me understand that there are a lot of ways, there are a lot of carbs that some people can eat.
[00:05:03.010] – Dr. Westman But in fact, I have a brother who can eat all of these carbs and he's never gained weight. So using kito diet in the clinic and the book, I would say it's keto and more. And we never say you have to do keto and we help you find out whether you do need it or not. And I have tried to bring in really the science not just from my own research, but the science on low glycemic diets, the science on just the lower carb types of diets that have come out well over the last twenty years.
[00:05:36.580] – Dr. Westman But yes, I am an author on the new Atkins for a new You and keto clarity. And but this is my first solo venture. I'm trying to bring in all of the information I've learned from other researchers as well. I look to Christopher Gardner at Stanford, David Ludwig at Harvard, and the common theme is sugar is the bad guy, not fat.
[00:06:03.490] – Dr. Westman And so knowing that I'm in a clinic still and busy, I teamed up with Amy Berger, who is a professional writer, I'm not. I'm a researcher and a scientific writer. And so Amy had a way of articulating the same ideas in a very readable format. So you're not going to be reading a lot of my words. They're also Amy's and she's been in this space for just about as long as me, not in the research world. But so I'm really trying to bring the knowledge that I've gained into a readable form.
[00:06:38.560] – Dr. Westman And this, I hope, is for the general public to read. It's not, you know, low carb. Or I'm going to lock you up in a low carb prison. It's understanding how can my brother eat one hundred and fifty carbs a day and still be healthy? You know, it's understanding that.
[00:06:57.460] – Allan Yeah. And Amy and Dr. Westman. Yes. That's the one thing I would say about this book is it didn't bury me in the science because a lot of books do. It was very clear. And I think, you know, for someone who's looking at this space and has just gotten scared or confused and again, don't they don't understand why can my significant other eat that way and not gain a pound? But I look at a donut and, you know, so it's very well done. I really appreciate it.
[00:07:29.440] – Allan Let's take that conversation about sugar a little bit further, because for decades, just stay away from fat, stay away from fat, stay away from fat. And the food companies were really nice about making the food taste good by just replacing the fat with sugar. And that's been horrific on our help. Can you explain what exactly is going on in our body when we're ingesting too much sugar?
[00:07:53.590] – Dr. Westman Sure. You know, we really rediscovered or gone back to one hundred years ago when this was all well understood. It's like we came through a period of time where it all got messed up, the focus on fat and the food. And so the understanding, of course, is deeper now. But it's been known for a long time that if you eat or drink sugar, you raise the blood sugar or glucose more specifically, and then that causes an insulin response in the body.
[00:08:24.070] – Dr. Westman And it's glucose insulin response, we now understand, is the root cause for the atherosclerosis or the heart disease, the stroke, the kidney disease and diabetes. Of course, diabetes is defined as an elevated blood sugar. So patients again, I teach this in a clinic in North Carolina where I have to have a lot of different people understand what we're talking about. And they understand that if you drink sugar, like sweet tea, it raises the blood sugar. And why we've forgotten that is a whole other story.
[00:08:59.590] – Dr. Westman But we start the book by talking about how things aren't perfect now. The focus on fat does not solve our problems. And the real reason is what sugar does in the body, sugar and insulin, glucose and insulin.
[00:09:15.050] – Allan You know Amy, as I was into the book and we got into we got into the discussion of glycation, I think that's that was some of the, I guess, a wake up word for me. You know, when your blood gets sticky, bad things are going to happen.
[00:09:27.640] – Amy Yeah, that's it's kind of an oversimplification, although kind of like you said, I mean, the subtitle of our book is A Simple Guide to Customising. You know, Eric and I both are frankly stunned at how complicated a very simple way of eating has been made out to be the last few years. So we we purposely wrote this book to appeal to a very broad audience, you know, maybe to be appealing to the people on Twitter and Facebook and Reddit that eat, sleep and breathe keto and low carb all the time.
[00:10:03.430] – Amy But also, this is the book to give to your mother or your cousin, the one that has obesity or has diabetes. But they're never going to do a keto diet. They're never going to learn about Amthor and Autophagy and all this stuff. They just want to feel a little better. And anyway, with the with the glycation, you know, we we try to explain everything without the scientific jargon and the gobbledygook. It's all written in plain English.
[00:10:29.290] – Amy And we explain why glycation is basically for people that don't realize that diabetes is really a vascular disease. It's a blood vessel disease. Cardiovascular disease is the number one actual cause of death in people with Type two diabetes. And this is why people with diabetes have so many problems with the eyes and the kidneys, because these organs or these tissues have tiny tiny, very, very fragile blood vessels, and when your blood is, for lack of a better word, very sticky with sugar and viscose, think of it like instead of water flowing through your veins.
[00:11:04.350] – Amy Now you've got molasses trying to flow through your veins. Your heart's trying to pump this sticky sugar. And not only is a blood sticky, the blood vessels are mocked up and gonked up with sugar. The whole system is just more fragile. And this this is the root of many of the problems that people with diabetes have. But something that we really harp on in the book that is like a huge mission for me to help educate people about is that even when your blood sugar is normal so you don't have diabetes or prediabetes, your blood sugar can be totally normal.
[00:11:40.050] – Amy But you might have a lot of these problems because you have really high insulin. The reason your blood sugar is normal is because that insulin is keeping it in check. So whether or not your blood sugar is normal, you still might be living with this long list of issues that come from these metabolic problems driven by by consuming too much carbohydrate.
[00:12:01.590] – Allan Now, there's a phrase you used in the book, and I've used it and I've heard it before. Some of us can tolerate more carbohydrates than others. And you use the term carbohydrate threshold. Can you talk through that and why that's important for us to understand for ourselves so we can actually have a plan. Because I think so many people go in and say, well, you know, initially this was always advertised as the bacon diet because everybody was all excited they were going to get to eat bacon again.
[00:12:28.920] – Allan And then, you know, then it was the butter in your coffee diet and then it was the MCT oil and now it's exogenous ketones and it's, you know, but simplifying it. We've got to take it back down and understand this is going to be somewhat of an experiment of N = 1 where you're the subject and it's what you can eat, what you can tolerate. That's going to be the most important thing. So can you talk about that concept of carbohydrate threshold and how it affects how we would approach the adapt your life way of eating?
[00:12:58.170] – Dr. Westman This is a scientific genetic predisposition that we're talking about and we can put people in the right direction. So we have a questionnaire you complete to see if you're going to be someone who has more carbohydrate intolerance or a lower carb threshold to achieve good health or you have a higher carb threshold. And so we have a checklist of items to look at, but it's not perfect. There is some trial and error there. And we've explained that. And this is what I do in my clinic.
[00:13:30.610] – Dr. Westman I'll start people out at if they're trying to lose weight at a very low carb level and then help people to introduce carbs, if they want to find their threshold. And we are shying away from the high tech use of ketones and blood measurements and breath. And you know, the watches, the digital watches that are non-invasive and you get ketones then, I think it would be reasonable but we don't ask anyone to do high tech measurements.
[00:14:02.250] – Dr. Westman It's predicting what direction you should be in and then monitoring how you do. And so it's a genetic predisposition. I mean, it's as if what helped us survive in famines when there was no food around is now a liability so that those who are good storers of the extra energy are the ones who have the lower threshold of carbs. So you're going to hold on to it more. Of course, the more active you are, the more carbs you can have.
[00:14:31.800] – Dr. Westman That's the the family member I have who is very active, can eat more carbs and is very healthy. But the threshold is really important in terms of the metabolic health and we help people find that out. And when I kind of step back, this is one of the first books to embrace a wide range of carbohydrates in the diet, acknowledging and recommending a wide range. But it's a lot lower than has been recommended if you're doing high carb types of diets in the past. But the carb threshold is really important and we are not using high tech ways for you to figure that out.
[00:15:11.200] – Amy If I could just chime in quickly. I think we do have a range, but even our highest recommendation compared to a standard type Western diet is lower. But I think the reason, Dr. Westman, is an obesity medicine specialist and I think we talk a lot about weight, but in that checklist we have where people can help and determine what level they should be starting at. Weight is only a tiny piece of this. There is so many issues that you can be dealing with, even if you're at a quote unquote normal weight.
[00:15:42.390] – Amy I hate that phrase, but a normal weight if you're not carrying excess body fat. But we do start depending on your medical situation, we start most people out at the very lowest level. Because when your carb intake is that low, like Dr. Wiseman was saying you don't have to measure your ketones, you don't have to measure your blood glucose. You're going to be in ketosis. You're going to be fat burning at that level. Everybody will. And then who can also be fat burning and be healthy at a higher level is variable.
[00:16:15.650] – Amy But the reason we tend to start most people out at the lowest level is because it's the easiest way to do it. There's not a lot of guess work. You will be either ketogenic or burning fat at that point without weighing and measuring your food and calculating the macro. I mean, I love food. I love to eat. I refuse to turn my meals. I'm never going to open a spreadsheet when I sit down to the dinner table. Other people love to do that. And if you want to, great. But the plan that we've designed is designed so that you don't have to do any of that.
[00:16:48.410] – Allan Yeah, it's it's funny because some of the science that would come out in the past, they would say we're gonna have a low carb group and a high carb group and then, you know, a lot of people in keto space would argue and say, oh, well, that's that's not keto, that's not low carb. And I'm thinking, well, if they were eating two hundred and fifty grams of sugar per day before, one hundred grams of sugar actually feels pretty darn low.
[00:17:13.820] – Amy It's all relative. Yeah.
[00:17:15.360] – Allan Yeah. So and then one of the funny things would come out of a lot of those studies would be, well it's unsustainable. You know, so they're thinking, OK, no one can go down to twenty five grams and stay there for the rest of their lives. But there's people who've been doing it for decades. So yes, you can. Can you talk about the three levels of the adapt your life eating style so people can have a general idea of what each of those entails?
[00:17:40.110] – Dr. Westman Yeah, maybe I'll talk about the levels that you give, the detail on the different foods. I mean, that's that's another great thing about having a nutrition expert as a co-author on the book we make a good team. So again, it's kind of a rough these are cut points of numbers that are not written in stone. I can't imagine that there's an equation like Einstein that says this number represents this for everyone. But there's a phenomenon that we repeatedly see, and that is the lower the carbs, the more percentage of people will be in ketosis or have the metabolic effects of the ketosis.
[00:18:25.790] – Dr. Westman And so we have kind of, the other main point is we use total carbs, not net carbs, because it's more precise. It's it's more scientific. The net carb is a whole other kind of distraction. So we start at about a 20 total carb per day sort of approach. And actually, it is very sustainable, as you say, if you learn how to do it right. And then we found that in other studies have used carbs up to about 50 per day.
[00:18:53.520] – Dr. Westman And again, this is kind of a general rule of thumb. And then we have stories of people who are using these different levels in the books, in the book. And then for those who are very active, they're younger they might be cyclists doing competitive cycling. They are able to be healthy at a much higher carb level. And we again, the numbers not important is just a higher level, but with sugar being the bad guy now, not fat and the food, we have estimated that from clinical experience and studies, some people can have up to one hundred, one hundred and fifty grams of carbs per day and be healthy.
[00:19:34.580] – Dr. Westman I mean this and so this kind of explains the person that you see, how can they eat all that and why you don't see what they're doing in terms of other lifestyle things and the metabolic flexibility or the carbohydrate tolerance is the big factor now. It's not fat anymore. In fact, I would just want to comment. We don't really make any comment on fat being bad. And so you can eat bacon on this kind of diet, too, even if you're not.
[00:20:03.260] – Dr. Westman OK, so all we've got to sanitize the the idea that fat is is bad, then you're not going to read that. So we're resetting what someone should understand about food without even paying much attention to the old stuff that got us off track.
[00:20:22.430] – Amy I think something that's unique about our book, though, is that we also don't demonize carbohydrate. I mean, look look around the world, there are quite literally billions of people that eat rice they eat beans, they eat food, they eat potatoes, and they're healthy. They're lean, they live well into old age. And so for us to say that cantaloupe is poison or black beans are killing you is kind of ridiculous.
[00:20:46.880] – Amy And so but it depends on your health situation. You know, certain foods that might be perfectly suitable for one person are not suitable for the other person who has PCOS or diabetes or hypertension or whatever. But I think that's that's unique in that we acknowledge that you can actually eat carbohydrate, you know, and we also other than just recommending, OK, depending on where you're starting from, here's the carbohydrate level we recommend.
[00:21:17.300] – Amy I think, something that's also different and that hopefully people are hungry for, no pun intended, is that we explain how to gradually increase your carbohydrate intake if you choose to. Like we were saying, you can live at twenty or thirty grams of carbs for your whole life if you want to. But let's say you you do a strict ketogenic diet. You lose two hundred pounds, you reverse your type two diabetes, you reverse that, everything's great.
[00:21:45.500] – Amy Now what do you need to stay super strict keto forever or can you have that occasional sweet potato, can you have the occasional piece of fruit? And the answer is for most people probably, yes. And we we walk you through how to reintroduce that stuff slowly and systematically so that you don't regain the weight and you don't trigger a recurrence of all those health issues. But we're very clear that you don't have to increase the carbs. But if you want to, here's how to do it in a way that is most likely to work for you long term.
[00:22:18.980] – Allan Well, I practice a thing I call seasonal ketosis where I do get strict keto for a period of time, usually starting in February after my birthday. And I'll go pretty much until August in more of a strict keto way of eating. I call that my famine season and then rolls around football season and, you know, Thanksgiving, Christmas and my birthday, like I said, and then I go into my feasting season. So, you know, if I had to give it a classification, I would say I'm in level one for much of the year.
[00:22:49.250] – Allan And then when I'm ready to let loose, I'm in level three, but I'm still generally low carb at level three. But, you know, that's that's why I liked what you were offering there, because it does kind of give us that that flexibility to say if I'm meeting my goals, my health is good, I can I can let a little bit more carbs in and I can check and see how that's working for you, because you can always step back down to that level one if you need to. So, again, I really appreciated the way you put that forward.
[00:23:21.840] – Allan This episode of the 40 Plus Fitness podcast is brought to you by Thrive Market. I love shopping on Thrive Market. They have the best organic products and brands at awesome prices. Thrive Market is a membership program that allows you to shop online and have healthy food and personal care products shipped right to your home with CarbonNeutral shipping and 100 percent recyclable packaging free shipping for orders over forty nine dollars. You should also check out the Thrive Market branded products to save even more.
[00:23:51.480] – Allan I always save more than my membership fee on my first one or two orders, over the course of a year. The savings can really add up. When you join Thrive Market, you do more than just unlock your own savings. You also sponsor membership and shopping credit for low income families, students, teachers, veterans and first responders. Go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/thrive. For a limited time, thrive Market is offering a selection of free gifts valued at up to 24 dollars just for joining learn more at 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/thrive.
[00:24:31.030] – Allan Now, whenever anything gets cool, there's a profit to be made, companies are going to step in. So when fat became a problem, they start advertising low fat. When sugar became a problem, they started advertising low sugar. And when keto came along, paleo did it now, keto, they're suddenly going to be coming out with these keto friendly products and they're everywhere and they they have the right macros. So it's like, OK, this should be good. What one of the problems that we really have when you start looking at these commercialized keto products?
[00:25:03.850] – Dr. Westman Amy, you want to take this one on first?
[00:25:06.490] – Amy Well, yeah. So it's like you were saying earlier or I don't know if this is maybe before we started recording. Those things are great as a transition step. If you're not prepared to give up your cookies and your cake and your pie and your ice cream, better to have the keto version made with almond flour and arithmetical and coconut flour. And for some people, that'll work perfectly long term. For other people, because it's keto, it tends to be very high in fat, like it's made with coconut butter and oils and cream cheese.
[00:25:38.350] – Amy But it also a lot of these products contain a lot of sugar, alcohol and a lot of added fiber, not intrinsic fiber, but fiber that they add for bulk or texture. And so these products are allowed to be labeled as either keto or very low in net carbs. And the problem is that some people's bodies react to sugar alcohols, these sort of non sugar sweeteners almost as if they're sugar, not not quite as extreme as regular sugar, but they're still having a blood glucose and insulin response.
[00:26:09.100] – Amy And so not only are you having that response, but you're combining it with an item that's very, very high on fat. So these sort of, quote unquote, ice creams and keto cakes and stuff are one of the biggest reasons we see for fat loss not happening the way people want it to or for just things not progressing the way someone would want to. And I'm not opposed to these things, but you have to go by a result. If these things are a regular part of your diet and you're not happy with the results you're getting, that's one of the areas you would look to to maybe cut those things out.
[00:26:44.690] – Amy It's kind of like let me put it this way, when you were saying, like in the 80s when everything was low fat and it was loaded with sugar. Oh, I can eat the whole box because it's low in fat. People are doing that now with the heat. Oh, it's low carb. So I can eat the whole pint of ice cream. It's low carb. I can eat the whole box of cookies. Low carb does not mean low calorie.
[00:27:04.340] – Amy And I know we hate the C word in our community, but just because something's low in calories, you still have to deal with that food, just because it's low in carbs, that food, energy, those calories still have to be put somewhere.
[00:27:18.080] – Allan Yeah, and I appreciate you mentioning sugar alcohols because I've never been a huge fan of those. I think when you are you're trying to go low carb and you want to make it something that's generally sustainable. We don't allow our bodies to reset our palate. You know, we're used to eating all the sugar. And so we like things sweet. You know, ketchup has a lot of sugar in it. People don't recognize that because you barely taste that sweetness, because we've been, you know, I guess for like, we were programmed. You know, they put more sugar in and we eat more and they put more sugar and we eat more.
[00:27:49.130] – Allan Sugar alcohols, in my opinion, don't really give us that opportunity to really begin to taste the sweetness in Standard Foods. But that being said, I was I was standing in line with you, Dr. Westman, at keto Fest, and you said we need to do something, something we don't have to be perfect, but we just need to do something. And it's like, again, I take that back and say, you know, if you need a bridge, you know, these commercialized products or the sugar alcohols might be OK.
[00:28:17.150] – Allan But you need to put that in context of where you where your instate is, where you want to go. So thank you for that, because that was that was pretty profound standing at a dinner line with you, Dr. Westman.
[00:28:27.470] – Dr. Westman Well, you know, progress, not perfection, is kind of a general theme when you're helping someone that has a long journey and not only the sugar alcohols, I need them for the true carb addict to keep them away from sugar, sugar addiction being the most common carb that people are addicted to. But the other thing that I see in these products is they'll add the oils or to make the macros right. But then you well, at least when I drink them, I get stomach trouble.
[00:29:04.490] – Dr. Westman So I don't think these have been well tested. And certainly they haven't been in the clinical trials of keto so we're trying to go back to the real food idea. Don't add in these other products. And certainly if you're drinking something that gives you a stomach issue, that's not keto, that's the product.
[00:29:25.790] – Allan Yeah, well its a big thing. I tell people you know, one of the big tips for weight loss is don't drink your calories. So if you're adding fat to your coffee, you might like it that way. But in a general sense, you're adding calories to, you're drinking them. So it's not filling you up as much as you would think it would.
[00:29:43.730] – Dr. Westman There are all these new things new that have not been tested. You know, the idea of putting oils in the coffee and in medium chain triglyceride, it will raise your ketone level momentarily. But if you have then five of those over the course of the day, you're going to be stopping your endogenous fat burning. So, and you want ketones to come from your body fat if you're trying to lose weight. And so we explain that in the book that the way you look at these things is different, depending on what you're trying to accomplish.
[00:30:20.990] – Dr. Westman And I see a lot of people who really don't need the keto metabolism, but they're doing it because it's fashionable and then, you know, six months later, well, what do I do now? Well, they didn't need it in the first place or maybe one month later. And so that's how we can help you figure out with this book what carb threshold still is going to be healthy for you. So, you know, let's say you drank the keto Kool-Aid, but you really don't need it.
[00:30:48.530] – Dr. Westman We're going to help you figure that out. And on the other hand, if you're scared about keto, that's OK, we may actually end up convincing you or reassuring you that you can eat carbs, you can have fruit, you can have some bread and still be healthy. So we're trying to demystify it and also take the fear away of it. This the end of carb confusion and it might be able to end your carb fear or keto fear as well as a title.
[00:31:18.050] – Allan And one of the things you had in level one that I understood is, you know, we're going to have to if we're going to be less than 20 grams of carbs, that's pretty much going to negate fruit from that level. But what was interesting was you also negated nuts and cheese. And I was like, oh, well, you know, fat head pizza, you've got it. You know, it's just a cheese bomb. So, you know, everybody in keto eats cheese, right?
[00:31:43.160] – Allan That's the big thing we take away is the bacon and the cheese, but you also say we probably should be cutting back on the nuts or eliminating the nuts and the cheese while we're in this phase one. Can you talk about that?
[00:31:55.120] – Dr. Westman Yeah, those are probably the most common reasons that the kind of casual keto you read on the Internet, learn it from a friend, why it doesn't work for people. So if you do have a carb issue a carbohydrate intolerance, insulin resistance is the same same term prediabetes, then calories will matter and trigger foods can make you eat more of them so you overcome the calorie and carb limits. So implicit in our approach and remember, this is an approach that's been used over a hundred and fifty years.
[00:32:33.390] – Dr. Westman So it's really not all that new. But a common mistake is over consuming nuts, the cheese, the cream in the coffee or tea. So we do have and explain to why those things need to be limited. Fortunately, it's not hard to limit them once your appetite is gone. So it's not as an extreme. Oh, I can't give that up because as long as we as long as we've gotten started and your appetite is down, it's easier to make those adjustments.
[00:33:02.040] – Dr. Westman But those are common mistakes that we see. I'm doing keto, but it's not working, thats too many nuts, too much cheese and cream.
[00:33:11.300] – Amy And to be clear, those foods are suitable for a ketogenic diet. It's just if your goal is fat loss, those foods are just they call a hand to mouth or hand to mouth disease. You sit down with a bag of almonds and you're supposed to have an ounce. And before you know it, the bag is gone. And and the thing is also with nuts, I personally find they don't even fill me up. I can have half a bag of nuts and still feel like I barely ate anything.
[00:33:38.010] – Amy So nuts are actually not permitted at al on the lowest level of our diet. Cheese is permitted, but the total quantity is limited. And again, it's not you know, those foods are high in fat but low in carbs, but they're just so easy to massively overdo. And that's really why they're limited. And they are reintro, nuts and seeds are reintroduced on level two. So, you know, if you're someone that is very, very sick or very, very overweight, starting out, make it your goal to get to the point where you can progress to level two and maybe reintroduce those things.
[00:34:14.220] – Amy But yeah, that's yeah, that's I mean, that's really the rationale. Just because something is low in carbs doesn't mean it's going to be the best thing for you to eat.
[00:34:25.350] – Dr. Westman My clinical experience is quite a privilege and I've been involved in research and taking care of patients. And and it's also humbling because I'll have people come back and they look me in the eye and say it's not working. So I have to figure out why and help people. Usually it's we get a lot of information at first. And there's one little thing that didn't seem that big and all that. But still, you have to understand what we're explaining and presenting is something that really works.
[00:34:57.930] – Dr. Westman And it's been hammered through years of clinical experience and people looking in the eye saying, hey, you know, fix me. So this isn't just some off the shelf kind of rearrangement of foods, which I see, again, is another theme where you could be on the bookshelf and there are 15 different books and you don't know which one to start with. We're talking about one that has been vetted through clinical and personal experience for for a long time.
[00:35:30.750] – Dr. Westman So you can have that confidence. In fact, we were discussing in writing the book. Do we include scientific references even? And finally it came down to we don't have to. We don't we don't have one scientific reference in this because it's all proven. It's all you have to have a study that shows the sun's coming up tomorrow, you know, I mean, so, again, we want to make it simple, not distractor with the glit.
[00:35:58.620] – Dr. Westman In fact, books that have hundreds of references. I think sometimes they're protesting too much. But, you know, look at all the science, but no this is practical. It really works. And it comes from our experience with real people.
[00:36:12.540] – Amy And frankly, nothing, at least in my opinion, nothing that we say in the book is all that controversial. Nothing really needs to be backed up. Oh, well, here's a study that shows this crazy thing we're saying. Nothing, we're not even demonizing some of the things that others in the larger low carbon and keto space really worry about, like artificial sweeteners, not not the sugar alcohols, but things like sucralose and aspartame and saccharin, like Splenda, Sweet'N Low, that stuff.
[00:36:42.930] – Amy Because that really doesn't have the same metabolic effect as the sugar alcohols, it's almost negligible. Those things we don't fearmonger about the what they call the seed oils. If you're on a budget and you can't spend eight dollars for a bottle of avocado oil, salad dressing, it's OK for you to get the ranch dressing with the soybean oil. You can go to the discount store and get the the ground beef for three dollars a pound. It doesn't have to be grass fed.
[00:37:08.080] – Amy All that great stuff. The food quality local farms is fabulous if you can afford it. But this plan, Dr. Weissman's patients are the entire spectrum of financial resources, of educational level of socioeconomic status. This approach has to work for every single one of them, every race, every ethnicity, whoever walks through that clinic door, this needs to work. And so we're kind of like, we take all comers, whether you're a millionaire and you have a personal chef or you're going to go to the fast food drive thru and get the boneless burger, guess what? This is going to work as long as you stay within your carb limit.
[00:37:51.060] – Allan Yeah. And so the way I looked at this, I was like, this is like if you're if you're keto curious or low carb curious. This is a this is a good book to introduce you to it because it's not super deep in science. I mean, it's backed up. I promise you. I've seen the studies that back up everything that Dr. Westman and Amy are saying in this book. So it's there. And then if you're someone who's done keto and then plateaued, I think this is going to give you a lot of answers for why what you're doing right now might not be working for you.
[00:38:22.860] – Allan And it's a lot of the things we talked about today. It's not understanding your carb threshold. It's getting into the the recipes, you know my feed and Facebook is every other every other post in my Facebook right now from keto is some kind of sweet how to make a pie, how to make a tart, how to make a cookie, how to make a cake, how to make you know. And so, yeah, if you're if you're filling up with that kind of stuff, there's probably reasons why you're getting too many calories.
[00:38:48.750] – Allan And like you said, Amy, while a lot of people in the community don't want to count calories, you don't have to. But if you're eating calorie dense food, you're eating probably eating more calories than your body really needs. And if you're not losing weight, you're definitely eating more calories than your body probably needs. And we don't like to hear that in the Keto community. But guess what? Both camps are a little bit right. And if you put them together, you have a really good plan.
[00:39:16.590] – Allan And in your book, End Your Carb Confusion, I think you do an excellent job with the experience you have putting that in there. So thank you so much again for letting me profile this book. I do have one final question for each of you. So I'll start with you, Amy. I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?
[00:39:39.210] – Amy Three strategies and tactics. It depends on how we define happiness, health and all that, I and you know, you sent this question ahead of time and I didn't give it that much thought. I because I guess I thought it was more defining them than how to do it.
[00:39:55.440] – Amy I mean, whatever you need to do to be able to participate in life the way you want to, whether it's having the mobility to go do the physical pursuits you want to do, or whether it's feeling well enough mentally and emotionally to interact with people the way you want to and enjoy the hobbies you want. I don't think six pack abs are not required for any of that. So don't let health and pursuit of some kind of optimal physique come at the expense of your mental and emotional health, because I see that all the time in our community.
[00:40:31.650] – Amy And it's what's the point of looking great if you're miserable all the time on the inside? So I would say eat and socialize and move in such a way that you are able to do all the things you want to do physically and and intellectually.
[00:40:49.660] – Allan Thank you, Dr. Westman, and I'll ask you the same question, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?
[00:41:01.550] – Dr. Westman I love that and, you know, I've often wondered what the doctor's role is, and doctor means teacher back in the root word, and I've often thought that the health side of things that the doctor really is just an adviser, and I'm trying to get people to live as long and as happy and as healthy a life as they can help to optimize that very consistent with your definition. And going beyond our book. It's mind body, spiritual wellness. And so we talk about nutrition.
[00:41:40.940] – Dr. Westman Getting nutrition right helps you in that direction. In so many ways. It just by changing the foods, I see people rediscovering all these other aspects of their lives that were thrown off just because of the food. So we start with nutrition and then I think being physically active and happy and then emotionally, spiritually community helps with that a lot, too. So it's more complicated than we can dive into in this book, but those are the principles that we use when we approach this book.
[00:42:15.290] – Allan Thank you.
[00:42:15.980] – Amy Yeah, that's if I just just real quick, if I can kind of piggy back, because I almost forgot, in the book, we do mention that. You know, once you start to feel better physically because, you know, a lot of people have brain fog and low mood and this shift in diet has this cascading effect that once you actually start feeling better and you have more energy and you're thinking a sharper, it's easier to re-engage with those other aspects of your life with the physicality and the spirituality and all that other stuff that maybe you literally weren't able to do because you were so limited by your physical health.
[00:42:53.880] – Allan Great. So, Amy, Dr. Westman, if someone wanted to learn more about the book, End Your Carb Confusion or what you guys are doing, where would you like for me to send them?
[00:43:03.170] – Dr. Westman End Your Carb Confusion is available at any any bookstore, Amazon or Barnes & Noble or any bookseller coming out very soon or this week. And then the deep dive. I've actually started a adapt to your life academy, where if you really want to get into detail beyond the book and this is a custom made simple course that we have available now. It's called AdaptYourLifeAcadem.com. And then Drwestmanonline.com is a resource to help figure out where to go based on the things that I understand are most helpful on the Internet. End Your Carb Confusion is available now.
[00:43:50.570] – Allan Amy?
[00:43:51.590] – Amy Yeah, right now my website is, we had a little glitch, so it's www.tuitnutrition.com. But you actually have to put the w w w dot if you just put tuitnutrition.com at the moment it won't come up. And I'm also on YouTube. My YouTube channel is the same tuitnutrition and that's my handle on Twitter.
[00:44:13.520] – Amy And Dr. Westman is also on Twitter. And adapt your life, look for that on YouTube as well. They have I mean, hundreds and hundreds of hours of interviews, not just with Dr. Westman, but Ken Berry and all kinds of experts and doctors and nutritionists and trainers that have been interviewed by the company. So lots of stuff there, too.
[00:44:34.100] – Allan Great. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/464 and I'll be sure to have links, all the links mentioned here today. Dr. Westman, Amy, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.
[00:44:45.650] – Amy Thank you.
[00:44:48.700] – Dr. Westman Your welcome.
Post Show/Recap
[00:44:51.940] – Allan Raz, welcome back.
[00:44:53.410] – Rachel Wow, that was a great interview, Allan. A lot of good stuff in there today.
[00:44:57.880] – Allan Yeah. You know, whenever I get to talking to someone about Keto, you know, sometimes it can get really technical. And I think a lot of people get scared away by something that sounds so, so strict, something so difficult. And a lot of times you're thinking about, well, how do I keep my carbs below 25 grams when I love bread and I love biscuits and I love potatoes and I love, you know, vegetables and fruit and ice cream and cakes and all the other stuff.
[00:45:24.280] – Allan I mean, you know, we're buried in carbs. You walk into a grocery store and quite literally, the entire middle of the grocery store is just a big stack of shelves of carbs in boxes, bags, cartons. It's insane. So, you know, what they've come up with, with their adapt approach. And, you know, it just makes it a little easier to understand what's in the food you're eating. Everybody wants an easy button.
[00:45:52.720] – Allan And, you know, it would be great if we could just, like, make it easy and just say it's it's this or it's that. A lot of times I run my challenges and we find that place, you know, or I have I have the lose a size challenge thing that we go through. It's eight weeks. Or I mean its in 28 days. And then I have my other weight loss program. It's eight weeks and we kind of just stage through there to find where people are comfortable.
[00:46:19.520] – Allan We push a little bit more and we push a little bit more. You know, it's it's sometimes easier to start with the hard part and then kind of ease back and find your place. But we all have our threshold. And I think that was a really important concept.
[00:46:32.440] – Rachel Yeah, that was really important because actually I've been playing around with my carb levels lately as well and trying to switch up my diet a little bit because I've been at a plateau. So I know it's time for a change. But it was really interesting to see how people just naturally have different levels of carbs that they can manage without feeling the bad side effects or that or messing around with the blood sugar levels. So that's a really interesting but hard to get to a point.
[00:47:01.720] – Allan Yeah. You know, self experimentation is one of those where you try something. You've got to give it time and see if it works, you know. So it's you know, it's one of those things where you're going to be investing time a lot of time. So in some cases a lot of time because you're going to say, OK, for four weeks, I'm going to eat this way and then I'm going to do some measurements. And when I look at what happened and see if it's working, if it's working, I stick with it.If not, maybe I ratchet it down a little bit more. Maybe I do something different. You can't add too many things in there or you don't know exactly what it is that's doing the good stuff or the bad.
[00:47:36.520] – Allan So finding that Mark, you know, and if you want to get technical with it, you know, you can do the glucose meters and the ketone meters. I'm a big fan of my keto mojo when I'm, you know, really trying to get down into ketosis, particularly in the early stages of it. So I'll do the keto mojo and I'm checking my blood sugar, I'm checking my ketones, and then I'm just finding that spot. I've been doing this now for eight years.
[00:48:00.970] – Rachel Wow.
[00:48:01.480] – Allan I kind of know, you know, OK, if I eat this way, this is what's going to happen to my body. And almost invariably it does. Now, that said, as I've gotten older. I've noticed that my carb tolerance has gone down, so, you know, if I try to eat more carbs just to find my line, my line has been slowly edging downward over time. And as a result, when I go into my feasting mode, I actually put on more weight faster than I did the first few years that I did this.
[00:48:30.730] – Allan So I have to still kind of I can't go completely crazy out there eating all the carbs, but I do have to pay a little bit of attention to what I'm doing or I can go a little overboard on it. But I think it's just knowing yourself, given that self-awareness is really, really important in the tools, any tool you want to use, they try to make it really simple.
[00:48:50.350] – Allan Try this than that and what you can and can't eat. But simple is good for most of us. It'll work just fine. But if you're somebody who needs a little bit more hard data, there are ways to do that.
[00:49:02.050] – Rachel Yeah, I've got one of those meters myself and I'll be getting that out pretty soon once I settle in and a couple of swaps that I want to make. You know, I've been eating similar foods. I eat a lot of eggs, brussel sprouts, a lot of beef, a lot of chicken. I feel like I'm in a rut with my food. So it's time to switch it up. And and once I do that, then I'll get out the meter and see how it how it feels or how it works.
[00:49:25.930] – Allan It's the worst tragedy in the world was the sacrifice of Brussels sprouts. We can't get them down here. And so we had two bags of them that we were going to bring down, I guess, technically smuggling, because you're not supposed to bring vegetables and fruits into the country. But we had them in our bags and bags were coming up overweight because the max weight the couple would carry is 50 pounds. We just could not get our weight right. We just couldn't get it to work. So we were like, OK, this has to go.
[00:49:57.070] – Allan And well, we let go of a lot of stuff before we let go of the Brussels sprouts. But that was kind of the last thing is, oh, I've got to leave the Brussels sprouts. It was either that or the beef jerky and deer jerky. And I'm like, no, the deer jerky is going. I'm sorry brussel sprouts.
[00:50:13.300] – Rachel Yeah.
[00:50:13.600] – Allan Yeah. So I had to make that sacrifice, but I hated leaving those in the hotel room when we checked out.
[00:50:19.210] – Rachel Such a bummer.
[00:50:22.600] – Allan And I didn't even get to eat that many Brussels sprouts when I was up in the States, which was another sad thing is that most restaurants aren't serving it. So unless you cook it for yourself, it's really again. I don't want to make I don't want to depress myself. I've got.
[00:50:36.580] – Rachel Well, that's right. That's right. You just got to make a list of all the things that you can eat and enjoy eating and then you won't miss so many other things.
[00:50:45.850] – Allan Yeah. And then I think the other thing that I just want to kind of emphasize from this conversation we had was, you know, when I was standing in the food line, at keto Fest with Dr. Westman, it was you know, it just kind of one of those moments when he said, you know, we just need to do something.
[00:51:03.160] – Rachel Right.
[00:51:03.850] – Allan The word keto, if that scares you, then it's not keto, its just low carb. I'm just lowering my carbs a little bit to see if that helps me on my weight loss journey, helps me feel and look healthier. You say you're lowering your carbs. And if that means that the way you're doing that is eating Atkin bars and, you know, canned tuna, then that's the way you're doing it. If it means that you're just looking for lower carb options ketchup and, you know, maybe even some of the fake pastas and making, you know, fake biscuits and things like that, that's fine. If that's what helps you get that start, you just have to take that first step.
[00:51:42.100] – Allan We're after progress, not perfection.
[00:51:44.560] – Rachel Right, right. You know, I like to tell people just just move that needle, just just move it slightly and make some simple swaps, you know? And, you know, if you do measure your carbs and you eat whatever one hundred grams of carbs a day or something slide that down to ninety, slide it down to eighty five, I mean, you don't have to make these huge cuts. Why make a huge cut that will make you want to binge later or that you can't live with that makes you unhappy just as long as you move that needle just slightly. I think it would make a big difference.
[00:52:15.520] – Allan Yeah. Sometimes it's as simple as saying instead of eating the banana and putting that in my morning smoothie, I'm not going to put the banana in there. I'm just gonna put the berries, you know, the protein powder and then put some ice and blend it all up. And that's going to be my breakfast. And I'm just not going to put the banana in there and try it, you know, so that cut 100 grams of calories, a hundred calories out of your meal at most, which is mostly sugar.
[00:52:43.330] – Allan You know, you're cutting that out. And so it's it can be simple stuff like that. And I'm in no way saying don't eat bananas, that they're unhealthy. But just like Amy said, you know, we're not villainizing any food. We're just saying being aware how your body reacts to it is really what this math is all about. That's how you solve this weight loss problem, is understanding food for your body. It's unique to you. People all over the world are eating rice and beans, as Amy said, but, you know, we we need to find what food fits us best for, what our particular goals are now.
[00:53:22.120] – Allan And that can change over time. You know, someone right now that's not very active probably doesn't need a lot of carbs. But if you're doing the exercise, then your body can handle that. Insulin is just a really cool thing. We demonize that a lot of times in the keto space, but we need insulin to protect our brain, to get the blood sugar out of our our body, you know, get it out of the blood and store it.
[00:53:47.290] – Allan Now, if we're burning it, which means, let's say you went outside this morning before breakfast and you ran for two or three miles. You're going to have used up leg, muscle glycogen predominantly in your leg muscles, which are larger muscles. So they hold a good bit of glycogen and the liver and you're going to keep, and that's going to keep your blood sugar, insulin and glucagon they're going to keep your blood sugar level through that whole process at that point.
[00:54:12.730] – Allan At that point, yes. You can go ahead and have a little bit more carbs with your breakfast because you've given it somewhere to go besides body fat. A lot of people try to do it on the other side with calories. And you say, well, oh, I ran three miles, I burned 400 calories. That means I can have a Snickers bar.
[00:54:31.450] – Rachel Right! Oh, no, no. Yeah, I go for the food is fuel at that point. And as a runner right now, I'm running pretty consistently four to six miles every day or for five to six days a week. And then on the weekends I'll do a longer run, maybe 10 or 13 miles. And you can tell that on those days, like my nutritional needs on a 4 mile day, is far different from my nutritional needs on a 10 or 13 mile day.
[00:54:58.990] – Rachel And that's something else to keep in mind, too. So when you do plan out whether or not you have that banana in your smoothie, just think about what your exercise has been for that day or the next day.
[00:55:09.880] – Allan Yeah. And the plan they kind of put in here, their adapt plan, they call it. It basically is a lot easier than counting calories. I can tell you, if you're just counting carbs, that's all you're doing is one number, it's very easy to count your carbs. It's very easy to look that stuff up on the Internet if it's not on the label, which, you know, you shouldn't be eating a lot of things with labels. The actual real food doesn't have labels or they don't have to market it.
[00:55:32.320] – Allan You know, chicken doesn't need a marketing. You see the chicken, you know what the chicken tastes like, you buy the chicken and that's the way it's supposed to be. Which is kind of a little funny side story. Our dog loves chicken and rice mixed in with kibble with the dog food. We've started doing that down here. But she doesn't know what a chicken looks like. So when she sees these chickens are running around the road because they're all over the place down here, I'm thinking myself, she doesn't know that that's what she's having for dinner.
[00:56:02.440] – Allan And if she did, what would it change her behavior? Because she just ignores them. And I'm like, thats your favorite food.
[00:56:07.450] – Allan If she only knew
[00:56:08.680] – Allan That's your favorite food in the whole world and you don't even know it. We've never fed you cat, but for some reason you instinctively want to chase the cat. But there's a funny little funny little side story there. But so, yeah, you know, you don't have to think of it as keto. They say it's somewhat of a keto book. I called it somewhat of a keto book, but I don't want you to think that. I think it's just really finding that place, though. How many carbs can I tolerate based on my activity and my biology and my genetics and going from there to find an optimal way for you to eat?
[00:56:44.260] – Rachel Yeah, that sounds like a really great book.
[00:56:47.650] – Allan All right, Rachel, anything else we need to go over before we get off the call here?
[00:56:54.460] – Rachel Now, that was a really good interview. I'd like to take a look at that book as well.
[00:56:58.720] – Allan Yeah. And this would be a good book to buy now as we as we get into, because we're coming really close to, you know, the Christmas season, Hanukkah, end of the year with New Year's and all of that. And it tends to be a time when we overindulge, particularly in the sweets. So kind of having a good idea of, you know, these levels of carbs and starting to pay some attention to it. This is a good time to do it.
[00:57:23.530] – Allan So you're not putting on pounds that you been thinking about January, trying to take off.
[00:57:29.320] – Rachel Good points.
[00:57:30.020] – Allan Don't put them on there in the first place. Then you don't have to lose them again.
[00:57:33.340] – Rachel That's right. That's great.
[00:57:36.010] – Allan Have a great week, Rachel. I'll talk to you next week.
[00:57:37.330] – Rachel Thanks. You too. Take care.
Patreons
The following listeners have sponsored this show by pledging on our Patreon Page:
Over the past eight years, I've followed a ketogenic diet (low carb diet) for much of the year in a way of eating I call, Seasonal Ketosis. It is a part of my ancestral-based lifestyle to promote health, fitness, longevity, and joy. Seasonal Ketosis is a form of cyclic ketogenic diet based on seasons, where I'll have a season of feasting and a season of famine each year.
SPONSOR
This episode of the 40+ Fitness podcast is sponsored by Let's Get Checked. Let's Get Checked makes it easy for anyone to get professional testing and consultation from the comfort of their home. Go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/LGC and use the code Allan20 to get 20% off.
Transcript
[00:02:48.920] – Allan Ras, how are you doing.
[00:02:50.130] – Ras Great Allan. How are you today?
[00:02:52.570] – Allan A little frustrated. The Panamanian government reneged on giving us our Saturdays back. So now it's the last time I thought I was going to get a Saturday off. And it appears that they decided that Bocas del Toro doesn't. And part of it is, you know, at least at this point, they're thinking in terms of states or provinces as we are. And we just happen to be associated with Bocas del Toro province, which includes the mainland. And so they are having some major outbreaks in on the mainland. But last we heard, there was less than twelve cases here on the island.
So, you know, it's under control here. But we, you know, living under more stringent rules. So they didn't open our curfew and they didn't give us the Saturday back. So,
[00:03:38.880] – Ras Wow, it's so sorry to hear that. That's awful.
[00:03:41.850] – Allan Well, it is what it is. It's just, you know, this, too, will pass.
[00:03:45.990] – Ras Yep.
[00:03:46.410] – Allan It just means I'm going to get more miles in during my five days I can walk then.
[00:03:50.690] – Ras That's true.
[00:03:51.390] – Allan Than I normally would.
[00:03:52.880] – Ras That's true.
[00:03:53.630] – Allan So how's your week been.
[00:03:55.340] – Ras Good. Good. Got a good run in this morning. Our weather's cooling off a little bit so running was great this morning and I've got a run club tonight so I'll be getting a few more miles with some friends tonight too. So that'll be fun.
[00:04:09.030] – Allan Cool. Yeah. All right. So let's go ahead and get into today's episode. I'm going to be talking about seasonal ketosis, and it's a term that, I coined the phrase and I talked about a little bit in my book, and I recognized that I've mentioned it a few times on a few podcasts and I briefly describe it. But I wanted to go into a little bit more detail because I was talking to somebody about ketosis and they're like, oh, I could never eat like that year round.
[00:04:36.420] – Allan You know, every once in a while I want some cake or bread or something like that. And so I said, well, you can have your cake and eat it too, with some stipulations. So let's go ahead and get into that episode.
Hello and thank you for being a part of 40+ Fitness Podcast, I'm really glad to have you here today. Today's show is going to be a little different. I have talked about seasonal ketosis as the way that I eat a few times on this show and on some other podcasts, but I've never really broken down how it works and why it works and what it is, specifically for me and how it fits within my overall ancestral based lifestyle.
Now, when I started this effort to go from a fat bastard to healthy and fit. I was introduced to Paleo by a dietitian and she brought up the paleo diet, explained what it was, what I could eat, what I couldn't eat, and I loved it. So I stepped away from my high carb diet and started just eating meat, fish and vegetables. I'd never heard of the ketogenic diet or the keto diet, as it's often called, but because I was on such a low carb version of the paleo diet, it actually put me into ketosis.
So I had to figure out what ketosis was because something different was happening to me and, you know, my breath and other things you hear about. But the weight loss was dramatic. So I enjoyed a lot of benefits out of the ketogenic diet. My blood sugar got steady, I had higher energy, I had less brain fog and it felt great.
Now, over the past eight years, I've continued to follow the ketogenic diet for most of the year, and I call that seasonal ketosis. Now, most people that adopt the ketogenic diet, they do it full time and they start eating low carb and they stay low carb and they try to keep their body in ketosis all the time and they see the benefits.
They would ask, why would I ever go off the keto diet if I enjoy how I feel when I'm on it? And to answer that question, for me, it's really about balance. I enjoy beer, I enjoy wine, I enjoy fruit, I enjoy yeast rolls. And occasionally I want to have a hamburger with a bun. So I pick a specific part of the year where I would allow myself to go off of ketosis. Now, I mentioned a few shows back that I had not started my famine season on time and really kind of blew it for a while. But I am back into my famine season and I've lost 25 pounds plus and still going.
But that's, that's not all this is really about. So I use seasonal ketosis as a way to stay generally healthy, to keep my health in good check, to keep my weight in a healthy body composition range. It improves my fitness, longevity, and the joy I have in my life. So I've developed an ancestral based lifestyle. And I'm not going to get into the argument about what our ancestors would or would not have eaten. I'm not going to get into the argument of, you know, how long they lived and all that. I'll talk a little bit about that. But that science doesn't interest me. I know that there were no fruits available to my ancestors in the northern part of Europe. I know that they would not have been able to transport food all around the world, so I would not have been eating nutrients from different continents all at one time.
I would not always have access to vegetables and fruits and all this other gobbledygook. I just wouldn't there'd be periods of time when I wouldn't. So but before I really get into seasonal ketosis, I do want to talk about a few key things just so we're all on the same base. When I'm talking about ancestral living, there's a few just core tenets that I'm going to throw out there. One is understanding what ketosis is now. Ketosis is when your body is burning fat.
So that can either be the fat that you're eating or it can be body fat. And in doing so, you create ketone bodies. Now, these ketone bodies are something that your brain and your body can use as fuel. Most of the time people are running on glucose. OK, there's glucose in your blood, there's glucose, you know, in the form of glycogen, in your muscles and liver. And we use that for energy most of the time.
At least that's how it's been for at least the last probably six to seven years here in the United States now. And we've also got a lot fatter. Ketones, on the other hand, can do all of that fueling. And in many cases it's more efficient and it's cleaner. It doesn't cause as many problems for us. So our bodies actually perform better, operate better and are in better health when we're in ketosis. So that's just ketosis. Now, the ketogenic diet is also called keto or the keto Diet.
It is a low carb, high fat diet that forces your body to go into nutritional ketosis. Now you can induce ketosis with exogenous ketone bodies or MCT oil, which is a medium-chain triglyceride. But that's not what I'm after here. We want healthy food. We want a healthy diet of real food that puts us into ketosis naturally. And it's not that hard to do. You just got to get the macros right and push through. Now with me, seasonal ketosis is a cyclical ketogenic diet. Now, instead of doing just a week, I do my cycles running over months, OK.
And in fact, seasons. So I'll have a season where I'll go into famine and then I'm in a strict ketogenic diet at that point. I stay in ketosis almost the whole time and then I'll have some feasting seasons when, you know, I'll go ahead and allow myself to eat what I want. I don't have any no, no's. Now I do tend to continue to eat a little bit high fat, low carb at that time, but the rules are gone. I just eat what I feel compelled to eat and enjoy the food that I have.
Now, my approach to health, a healthy ancestral lifestyle really is about health and longevity, even though we may never actually answer that question how long our ancestors would have lived. What we do know is that child mortality was much higher. We know that they didn't have the medical Know-How of modern times and they had less access to food. And we didn't have access to what, you know, most of the experts would call healthy Whole Foods. I mean, we had what was there that was all that was there. So what we didn't how we did. That's all we had.
There were no McDonald's. There was none of that stuff. And we did a lot more physical activity every day. So whatever the evidence says, you know, if people weren't living as long, it was probably for different reasons. OK, now, during those times, there would be periods, particularly in the north, where we would have feast and famine. When we would spend part of the year eating a ketogenic diet and even some periods of fasting. We didn't have food preservation. So we would have to wake up in the morning and maybe not have any food around. So we would have to go get it. We could be traveling and walking for hours and not find that.
But what we would do is if you think about it from a seasonal perspective, we would have access to more food in the spring, through the fall. So there would be fruits, there'd be vegetables, there'd be things like that. And so we would probably put on some weight between spring and fall. We'd just be a normal thing. And it was good because body fat helps protect us from the cold, keep us warmer, and it also gives us food. I mean, when we don't have food, it provides us the energy we need.
Okay, now as we go into the winter, weight loss would be the norm as we started using that fat on our bodies to keep us alive. So if we didn't have access to food, our bodies adapted to stay alive, our bodies adapted to be able to continue to do what we needed to do. I also believe that we were opportunistic eaters and we didn't have a McDonald's or a Tim Hortons or whatever it is that you have on every corner.
We didn't drink sweetened beverages. We just had water. We ate whole foods. When we killed an animal, we ate it hoof to nose. As hunter gatherers, we ate well as we could and we fasted when we had to. So we were on the land. And I think that's one of the core tenets of this is that we knew what we should eat, what we shouldn't eat, and we got that through the tribal knowledge. So, you know, I think it's really important to understand that the things that we call food today are not food. You know, groceries, as they are today, are not as nutritious as what we had been. And we've got to fix that as a people. That's got to be a priority somewhere along the lines.
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Now, another big tenant I want to talk about is fitness. Now, we were not sedentary. You cannot survive as a hunter gatherer if you're going to sit and not do anything, you just don't. So we would have to be fit. We wouldn't be able to go to a gym for cardio and strength training, but we would have regular exposure to three primary movement modalities that were really, really important for us. We would do low intensity, steady-state or LISS, as I like to call it where we had to migrate.
So, you know, food's not always where we want it to be. And the animals were moving with migration patterns. We would have to move with them if we want to be successful hunters. So this would require sometimes days of us to walk and travel, hiking, basically, and we'd have to carry our stuff with us. So if we had shelter and coats and in different clothing and blankets and all the different things, we needed tools and weapons, we would be carrying those with us. So we would go on these long, low intensity, steady state movements.
Now occasionally we would have high-intensity interval training. And you could think of that in terms of if we were hunting or we were fending off other tribes, it would require us to have some power and some skill. So working with weapons, moving for short periods of time, quickly resting, moving again, that would be normal regular activity for us. So, yes, more movement. And then finally a strength in mobility when we killed a large animal or we stumbled across a berry patch, we would feast.
Now, that would also require, in some cases, for us to lift parts of the animal and carry it back to camp, or we'd have to squat down to pick the berries that we were going to be eating. So, again, more movement. And so you can see through this, just the lifestyle of a hunter gatherer is filled with tons and tons of movement. Now, we also would have work life balance. We would be putting in long commutes. We wouldn't be doing a lot of the things we do now.
But while we're working to survive, we would also understand that we needed to rest. We would understand that, you know, we would need flow. And what I mean by flow is, you know, flow is kind of fitting in with what's there. You know, we would know that there's ways to hunt. There's ways to to move. There's there's times that we need to go. And so we would start following a natural pattern of days, months, seasons.
You watch some of the shows where they depict people and they live by the moon, the moon and the seasons give them the information they need to survive. Now, if they faced a threat and then they had a stressor, which, you know, basically what a threat would do is the stress response. It would be acute, immediate, it'd be life or death. So they would have that cortisol hit. They'd have, you know, that adrenal hit and then it would be gone. It wouldn't be this long, drawn out months and months and months of things that we do to ourselves now.
So we would have a very low stress life in a general sense, as long as we were able to successfully hunt and move and do the things we needed to do. Our stress levels were much lower. We also did risk management. And that sounds kind of weird talking about our ancestors.
But the way you stay alive, the way longevity happens, is understanding the risks associated with your life is a primal living being. We weren't worried about calories, blood sugar, vitamin C, processed meat, dietary fiber, or if we had a healthy microbiome, those concepts weren't even in our head. But what we did was we followed a path that was set by our ancestors.
My ancestors would go and they'd say, we know we go this direction. This is the way we have to go this month at the moon. And then we would go, but we would have to also understand what we're facing. If another tribe moved in to the area, we might have to change the plan, but we would do it. We had risk management. We were paying attention. So the biggest risks to us at that time was infant mortality and tribal warfare.
And the only biohacking that we would have done was just making sure that we were aware of the risks and then figuring out ways to avoid them or deal with them. And then relationship would be very important to us. We worked and moved as a tribe. And in a tribe, it works to our benefit because it helps everyone's survival. We hunted in packs and were hard coded in our DNA to be socially engaged. So that relationship, that closeness is really, really important to the nature of ancestral living.
And then finally within ancestral living. I want to talk about curiosity. You know, we did tend to follow the same basic patterns, seasonal patterns, year in and year out. But we were constantly engaged with what was going on. In the world around us, because our survival depended on it. You know, we couldn't go in and ask Google or Facebook what the weather was going to be like or if we were going to have an early summer or a late winter or whatever.
There was no groundhog to do it for us either. We looked to our elders to advise us and then the tribe had to learn and adapt, and that's how we would survive hard times. Now, I recently started a blog to dive into these issues in more detail. But full disclosure, I'm a terrible blogger. I can brag about this being episode 455 of the 40+ Fitness Podcast. But you know, I've done several blogs over the years and I don't think I've ever gotten more than maybe 15 blog posts in any one blog I've ever started.
So they blog fade pretty quickly. You know, I hope that doesn't happen with this blog. But what I plan to do with that blog is explore a lot of these topics that I've talked about so far. So if you're interested in any of those, you might want to check out the blog. I'll do the best I can, but. What's probably gonna end up happening is I'll probably end up bringing some of those topics here to the podcast, so check out the blog as I get going on it. Probably not anything else on there now. But check it out. And that's where a lot of these topics are going to be discussed in more detail. And if you have any questions, feel free to join us on the Facebook group at 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/Group. And just ask I'm there. I mean, I'm there to participate and help you in any way I can. So if you're interested in this topic, I would like to carry on that conversation.
So for today's discussion and then I'll be gone already for quite a while. But I really want to dive into seasonal ketosis and share why I do it and the reasons that it may or may not be right for you. The first question I kind of have in my mind when I'm thinking about this is seasonal ketosis. The same thing is cyclical keto diet? You know, and technically it is it's you know, you're cycling in and out of keto. So it is a cyclical keto diet. However, when you talk to most people about this cyclical keto diet, it's a six days on, one day off, and they call that a refeed day. And I'm metabolically capable of doing that kind of keto diet, but I'm not a really good moderation type person.
[00:22:02.340] – Allan You know, I'm either all on or all off. So if I took a weekly cheat day, you know, or carb up day, I just don't know what that day after that might be like. And I might just go ahead and have a second cheat day. So when I start my famine season, you know, in my ketogenic diet, I start dropping weight relatively quickly and then I'll get to my set point and I'm good, you know.
I like seeing two to five pounds come off in a week. What I wouldn't be a fan of is seeing like four pounds down, then two pounds up. And I'm pretty sure that's how the cyclical keto diet would work for me. And I don't really like that. It's progress, don't get me wrong, it's progress. But that's just not me. I'm happy knowing that I can have a few more carbs on my high activity days without going out of ketosis.
So if I'm going to have more carbs, I'm just going to work out a hell of a lot harder that week to make sure that I can keep myself in ketosis and have the carbs too. So if I want some fruit, I got to earn it from a from a carb, blood sugar, muscle and liver glycogen model. Now, there are some positives to the cyclical keto over full time keto. In many cases, athletic performance can be better and muscle growth is better.
I'm not a bodybuilder and I perform fine without the refits. I can I can do as much as I want to do. I need to do so again, cyclical keto is just not for me. But if you're someone who's looking for a way to do keto and then have that kind of that refeed that break, you might want to check that out. Now, why does seasonal ketosis make sense to me from an ancestral perspective?
And I've gone into some of this already. You know, I when I started this and I was learning about the paleo diet, I came across Mark Sissons primal blueprint. And now Mark laid out a very reasoned case for how our ancestors lived and ate. I used to character I think he named Duroc. So rather, you believe in human evolution, creationism or intelligent design, I don't think you can argue that we we're not doing things right now.
We've got to change something. The standard American diet is killing us. You know, back then we didn't eat refined grains and we didn't have junk food. You know, we were hunters and gatherers. We were, like I said, opportunistic eaters. And we ate the nutrition that our body required, essential amino acids and essential fats. They came from animals, primarily red meat and fish. That's where we got our food. Most of our food was going to come in that form.
And then based on the seasons, you know, we had short periods of the year where it was either cold or dry. We were in ketosis because there just might not be any vegetables or fruits available to us during periods of time. And then, of course, because, you know, food availability and everything, we would spend a good bit of time fasting or intermittent fasting or maybe some extended fasting, depending on the nature of what's going on in the world.
You know, if if we got a good, cold, hard freeze and all the animals are moving and there's no, you know, no vegetation at all, we got to go with the animals. We got to catch up to them. And then we got to do the hunting. So just recognize that our diet would have been very keto for much of the year. OK, now I started doing this for weight loss. That was my my core reason. And I was very much drawn to the primal paleo diet because it made intuitive sense.
Mark did a really good job, because it was maybe the first article I read, that you can't eat what you don't have access to. So you wouldn't eat processed foods at all, ever. OK, everything we would have eaten. Would have been whole food. It would have been locally and sustainably sourced and the human body was designed to be a hunter. I mean, there's no doubt whatsoever when you look at our features, look at what we can do. We were designed to be hunters, but when there are fruits and vegetables available, we're probably going to eat those. But we would not have eaten a high carbohydrate diet year-round. It's just impossible for any of our ancestors short of just some very small areas, you know, in the tropical zones where people would have eaten primarily carbohydrate diets that just wouldn't have anyone from northern Europe, anyone pretty much if you're from Northern Europe or Europe at all, your ancestors probably didn't eat a lot of fruits and vegetables.
That's just that's just part of it. Now, you can look at the current chronic diseases, obesity, heart disease, stroke, type two diabetes, cancer, neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. And the health problems are associated with our food. There's something seriously wrong. In our modern world, most people have insulin resistance or metabolic syndrome. And it's it's so epidemic that it's just weird to me that this has become politicized. That, you know, we have the food companies telling our government what to tell us what to eat is kind of crazy. It's not animal products and saturated fat that are making us sick as much as those food companies want the government to tell us that it is. It's just not true. It's the fast food. It's the processed foods.
It's high, refined carbs and sugar. We're eating too much sugar. We're eating too many refined carbs. We're not eating whole food. So if the government was in our favor doing the things that it was supposed to do, they'd be focused on food quality. They would not be telling us to eat cereal and grains and refined carbs. They would be telling us to eat meat, fruits and vegetables, Whole Foods.
Now, I've interviewed experts across all spectrums of nutrition. I've had vegans on I've had carnivores on paleo, keto, everywhere in between. The interesting thing is, is every single one of them will tell you that their way of eating is the best because it is based on high quality whole food. And they'll be able to pull out the studies that show people eating their diet. Whole Foods are crushing it. They're doing great. But what's hard is that they ignore Whole Food studies that say the exact same thing about a different type of diet, because it doesn't fit their world view, it doesn't fit their paradigm.
They have a cognitive bias. So, I just really struggle when someone tells me that the quality of your vegetable matters, but the quality of your meat doesn't. It's just all meat is bad. Or and people say the same thing you know, the other way. Is the quality of the meat matters, but all vegetables are bad. You know, that doesn't make sense to me. Our bodies were designed to eat both. Quality is what matters.
That's why the paleo diet makes sense to me. I think everybody should be trying to eat more whole food. You know, the debates out about whether we would have eaten potatoes or, you know, and I don't think we would have eaten much dairy, to be honest with you, because we didn't have cows. You know, we didn't have goats.
We hunted them or something similar to them. But we didn't we didn't have any animal product like that. We weren't domesticating the animals, so we weren't doing dairy. Beans, you know, those are a little weird because yeah, there are some issues there where we have to be careful with them. But, you know, I like the primal experience of having a big, juicy steak. I just do. I love having a cup of blueberries or blackberries and the sweetness and the tartness and just, I love that.
I'm not going to give up either one of them, I'm just not. My diet is comprised of meat, fish, vegetables and some fruit. I did try the Carnivore diet for a few weeks and I started missing vegetables. I tried the vegetarian diet and then I adapted it into the pescaterian and diet to try to get my protein. And I couldn't do it. I gained weight because I was eating too many fruits and vegetables and grains, so I just started putting on weight. So there's not something that I enjoy. And, you know, when I when I do these did these little experiments, you know, I was typically doing them during my my feasting season. So, you know, was not a period of time when I had to worry about being in ketosis. I just did what I did.
I think it's important for you to understand that whole food is the answer. However, you choose to put that in a way of eating is really about you. But I will say this. If you're going to try seasonal ketosis, you do need to think about a few things. OK, one, I don't. Have any insulin resistance or diabetes or, you know, I don't have any of the the diseases or any of the issues that that people would would be suffering from, that they might be using this as a protocol. So if you have insulin resistance or diabetes, you know, or you're using the ketogenic diet for cancer, Alzheimer's disease, PCOS, or an autoimmune auto immune issue, I wouldn't necessarily cycle off of the ketogenic diet.
Those protocols are specific about staying in keto the whole time. And so that's not something where you would want to cycle out because you're just setting yourself up. If you're way above a healthy body composition and you want to use keto to lose weight, seasonal ketosis is also probably not something for you because your weight is going to fluctuate. I fluctuate 10 to 15 pounds each year as I go through these cycles. So that is, and then, of course, if you're prone to eating disorders, you know, you need to find a way of eating that you're comfortable with.
If it's sustainable for you, the cycling in and out is probably not in your best interest, you know, except for this slip up. I had recently did a covid-19 I've been able to manage my seasons stably for the last eight years. You know, going into my feasting season in late August, early September, and then coming out of it right after the Super Bowl or my birthday at the first week of February. That's my feasting season.
And then my fasting season or famine season, as I call it, will run the rest of the year. And as I said I might put on 10 to 15 pounds during the feasting season, but I ditch that weight pretty quickly and spend my famine season at my lower, lower range of my set point. Now, I love the metabolic flexibility that I have to be able to spend part of the time in ketosis and part of the time having a little bit more carbs.
When I say more carbs, I'm talking about beer and some simple carbs. You know, it's like I'll have a hotdog, I'll have a hamburger. Someone offers me a piece of pie at a tailgate, I'll eat it. So that's kind of that thing. You know, to me, the weight loss is relatively easy. Once I'm in ketosis, my body just naturally says, OK, you don't you don't need this. And some of what I'm flushing out from a weight perspective is water.
But a lot of it is body fat and it goes pretty quickly. And I'm pretty happy with that. Now, if you're interested in diving deeper into this topic, there's two ways that you can do this. I talked about the group earlier, you know, 40+ Fitness Podcast, dotcom focus group, or you can go to the Web site – 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/455. And there's a comment section under this post.
I put a post with the transcripts each week and that's why I tell you the full show notes are there. If you go there, there's a comment section, you can leave a comment there. I'm pretty passionate about the benefits that I get and the flexibility I get and the freedom I get with seasonal ketosis and my style of ancestral living. So I love talking about it. If you want to go into more detail with this, I encourage you to go check out one of those two places and let's continue the conversation there.
[00:34:12.300] Allan All right, Ras welcome back.
[00:34:15.510] Ras This is great. A lot of good stuff in the episode.
[00:34:19.320] Allan Yeah, you know, most people that will talk about ketosis, they talk about in terms of it being a permanent lifestyle. And it can be. But I think it's it's kind of easy for people to get roped into measurements or things and not necessarily doing it for the right reason. I knew that I was going to roll up on football season and want to go tailgating. You know, since I finished my Tough Mudder, I was like having a beer and I was out of ketosis that afternoon, that evening.
[00:34:50.880] Allan So, you know, just for my life style perspective, it just didn't make sense. They're going to be periods of time that I was not. But I found a manageable way that I could spend some of the year in ketosis and get the benefits that I wanted to get, but at the same time, spent some time doing some things that I enjoy.
[00:35:11.220] Ras That sounds great, I'm glad that you found this new way to work keto into your normal lifestyle. That sounds like it's flexible enough to work with the way that you like to live.
[00:35:23.000] Allan It does. You know, of course, you know, this year I had a little bit of difficulty getting out of the beast mode just with everything that was going on. I did put on a good bit more weight than I normally would have. But I've dropped almost all of that now and I'm back down to near a low for the last five years, I've been running at about two hundred and seven pounds.
And I'm right about there right now. I think I'm going to push it down a little lower because my muscle mass is a little lower than it was five years ago. So I'm probably going to push my weight down below two hundred before I kind of level things out again. So I do see some fluctuations with my weight and I know that can be challenging for a lot of people.
[00:36:11.350] Ras Yeah. That's what I wanted to ask you about that. As you watch the scale go up and down, how does that impact mostly how you feel? Because to me a few extra pounds can feel kind of yucky and sluggish for me. But for you, how does that feel when you're in the fisting mode versus the famine mode?
[00:36:31.660] Allan Yeah, well, first off, I'm but I'm about five foot 11, so I can I think I can carry 200 pounds pretty well and I can carry up to two fifteen I would say. I don't actually worry about the scale as much. I mean occasionally I'll step on it during my fisting mode just to kind of see where I am. I can usually just guess by looking at how my pants fit.
I before we move down here to Panama, I found a pair of cargo shorts that I liked. So I bought like four or five different pair and different colors of the same cargo shorts. And so they all fit me the same way. And so I can just pretty much tell when I put those cargo shorts on how I'm doing and where I am. And as I mentioned, I eat relatively low carb during my feasting season. So I'm not crazy on carbs.
It's just I don't really worry about it. If, you know, if I'm out with folks, we want to have some beers. I don't think about it. You know, if someone offers me something that I wouldn't normally eat like a hamburger with a bun, I'm going to eat it. I'm not going to worry too much about it, but I do pay attention to my size. You know, if I didn't start noticing that I'm getting bigger, then I'll I'll tap it down a little bit.
I won't I won't go as crazy. Well, except during COVID. But…
[00:37:54.320] Ras Yes, totally different rules for covid.
[00:37:58.930] Allan And so, you know, if you're someone that's really stuck on the scale and you just know there's this weight, your magical weight you're supposed to wear, your head tells you, this is my no, you're not going to like this. You know, the interesting thing is, like, you know, like I said, I'll put on ten, fifteen pounds in a swing. So from my feasting to that, I will put on up to fifteen pounds.
You have to recognize that about about five or seven of that is water weight. And I flush that the first week I go back into ketosis. Right. You know, so I'll literally sit there and say, OK, I'm going to go in ketosis, you know, drop five to seven pounds in a week or two. And then it then it tapers down and I'll lose a few pounds a week and then one pound a week and then my body will get to that homeostasis, its happy weight and I just go by how I feel.
Now I've mentioned this before on another episode I was talking about this a little bit. I don't feel as good during the feasting season, you know, because the foods I'm eating or not is healthy. You know, the beer is not a health food.
[00:39:11.260] Ras That's true. Sadly, sadly true.
[00:39:13.260] Allan As much as they'll try to tell you it's okay. It's really good. No, it's not actually really good for you at all. That's fake science. Someone wanted that to be true. They made the hypothesis and then they just said, well, it doesn't kill you, so it's got to be good for you.
[00:39:27.730] Ras Great. Great science.
[00:39:29.450] Allan Yeah. So, you know, don't if you're someone who's going to freak out about the scale, if you're someone who has issues with your eating, this is not that kind of thing. You know, find one way that works and stick with that would be my recommendation for that. If you really worried about the scale, stay in ketosis.
But I also want to preface it. You know, I notice I do feel better in ketosis. It's just a better state for me to be in. But I'm not all that tight end up being that way all the time. You know, I'm okay to have a couple bad, you know, days where my energy level is not as high or, you know, I feel a little frumpy. I'm cool with that. It's the price I pay for the detour I took, and I just accept that.
If you're someone who's doing it as a protocol for cancer, for diabetes, insulin resistance, any other metabolic issue, then it's something you're probably going to want to stay on. It's not something that I want to cycle through.
[00:40:31.030] Ras That's a good point.
[00:40:31.030] Allan You know, even the people that do cyclical, where they're taking one day off per week, I said that that would actually drive me bonkers because I would feel like I was making all this progress dropping, like I said, seven pounds in a week, only to pick four of them back up. Yeah, it would be like that's all I'm doing is flushing water. I'm not really losing any weight.
And so I would struggle with that kind of cycle. Whereas if I'm off, I'm off. If I'm on, I'm on. And that's another thing about my personality, you know, and I talk about in the wellness chips, you've got to know yourself. You got to be self-aware. And it's one of the things I know is I don't have a dimmer switch, the light switch, maybe I'm on or I'm off.
And so it's just easier for me to say, okay, flip the switch and I just do it.
[00:41:24.010] Ras Yeah, it's a good point. I think that the cyclical, you know, one day a week where you can have a cheat day or cheat meal or whatever, it's a slippery slope because food can be a trigger. And if you have that one serving of chips, that might become the bag of chips and then it might be one more serving the next day, in the next day. And it is a slippery slope. And if you're not confident in your ability to put it away and get back to it, then that can be dangerous.
[00:41:52.180] Allan Yeah. And, you know, one of the things that I would like to mention is that, you know, we're starting to get anecdotal evidence and maybe some studies where we're looking at performance of someone who's in complete ketosis versus someone who uses carbs as a fuel along with ketones versus someone who's just a sugar burner. And, you know, I'm not going to say one fueling mechanism is best for everybody, but I would put this out there for anyone that is trying to do in terms sport, the heavier you are, the more weight you have to carry for the miles that you're traveling, the more wear and tear you have on your body.
And if you're eating refined carbs specifically and sugar, you're going to have inflammation and that inflammation is going to cause problems in your joints. And so from a health perspective, I would I would be the one that would air on the side of using ketones for for energy.
If I were doing endurance athletics, an occasional carb up here and there before a race might help your performance. But, you know, I'm not sure how much additional glycogen your body is going to be able to carry for that particular event. And you're always going to want to practice what you're going to race. So you would be eating carbs as a regular probably thing each week to carb up for your long runs if you're following the standard training protocol. So you would still be eating a good bit of carbs as a part of that.
So I'm not saying one is better than the other from a performance perspective. I'm just thinking in terms of wear and tear on your body inflammation and you just weigh a little bit less, you know, in carrying less water. So, you know, yeah. All of that's going to probably, in the end, help your performance. But I don't they don't have enough evidence right now where I would say there's one superior fueling way.
[00:43:55.510] Ras Yeah. And I think as an endurance athlete, that's what kind of attracted me to keto in the first place, was I needed to lose a few extra pounds that I was carrying around. Every time we've moved and and we've moved several times as a family, we set up the house. We have projects I can't get in the runs. I gained a few pounds and so I looked to keto for just something different, a way to just get those pounds off. And it actually worked for me.
The one or two times that I've actually ate something non kaido. It impacted me greatly. I was very sick so I can't really do too much cheating. I know I've got a limit. I probably can eat something that's bread or sugar, but not very much more than a bite of cake or something small because it will impact me. But as far as the endurance part of it, it has helped a lot in my running.
I'm not winning races or anything. I've never been fast either in the first place. But yeah, keto has been a real big help for me in the endurance field. But like we like you mentioned earlier and just a little while ago is that you really need to find what works for you as an individual and there's just a wide range of eating, I could give you a couple of names of some impressive vegan ultra runners. Scott Drake is probably one of the most famous vegan ultra runners.
And then to the exact opposite, Michael McKnight, just this summer or spring, actually ran a hundred miles and no calories, nothing, no food. One hundred miles. I want to say, he did it in 18 hours, if I remember right. But so he's he's definitely keto. But like you were mentioning, he is also carving up a little bit in the week leading up. So his body was fueled with carbs, but then he goes straight kitto so that his body is prepared with fat as well.
And I think that's probably how he survived it. But he's also a pretty famous keto ultra athlete.
[00:46:05.330] Allan Yeah, I as over the years I found I can get into keto pretty easy. I don't really do the of flu thing anymore since I go in and out, you know, each year I don't really have a kid, I feel a little less energetic for a day or two, but the switch over for me is pretty quick. So that's one of the things I like about doing it the way I do it. But that said, not everybody would you might not have the same experience that I had.
So, you know, the what's that they say in the ad is the results you see might not be your results right into it. So I'm not going to say everybody would have as easy of a time going back and forth. I don't have any insulin resistance. I don't have any blood sugar issues. You know, my awarenesses always been fine. So for me to switch back and forth seems relatively easy, you know, but like I said, most of the year, I'm eating this way anyway.
The difference is just not paying attention to my carbs, are not being worried about the carbs. And so that's why it works. And the other side of it is I don't stress about rather on that point five or point to five as far as what my ketone levels are, as long as I'm in ketosis, I'm cool. But a lot of people are like, no, I want to see that. No, I want to be one point five or better.
And I bought a Keto Mojo not long ago to replace my other ketone meter that I lost. I guess I can't find it after I moved. I'll probably find it when I go get the rest of my stuff. But anyway, so I bought it and they introduced this new where they measure your glucose and you measure your ketones at the same time. And we do that. It gives you a different measure relative so ketones relative to glucose. And so it's an index that they've created.
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And so again, it's just one of those. But again, it's that competitiveness of seeing a higher number that it seems to be pushing toward. And I'm not a big fan of that. You're either in ketosis or you're not. You're not. You know, you can say you're more in ketosis. I mean, there's just more ketones circulating in your blood. So I don't think you're in more ketosis. You just can't be more perfect.
You can't be more pregnant as you are. There are the days you might feel more pregnant than you did the day before. But you know that you're not in you know, you're not in more ketosis. You're in ketosis, you're not. And so it's for me, it's a good protocol. But I'm a little bit different in that I don't have a health issue. I do it to thin out, to lean out a bit, because if I did the feasting all year round, if I ate that way out of control, I would blow up, you know, so I know I can't do that and I have to be very cognizant of it.
I wasn't this year. I went and I stayed with it and just kind of proved my point of once I broke that that that barrier that I had my set point for my body, it said, oh, good, we'll just throw in a lot more weight. We don't have a problem with that. You gave us the fat cells years ago. We know how to use them. Just keep feeding us. And it did. So, you know, you got to turn that around.
And for me, it's when I said no dimmer switch just flipped the switch and let's go.
[00:49:25.580] Ras That's awesome. You must be very metabolically flexible then to be able to go on and off and in and out of ketosis. And your body doesn't give you the pain that a lot of people get with people it doesn't know, you know.
[00:49:38.780] Allan I'm very fortunate. I know a lot of people are not like that. They struggle to get into ketosis. And once they're there, like, I love this, I'm never going back. And, you know, that's cool. But, you know, you eat something bad like you said, you don't maybe you don't even know it has sugar in it or as many carbs in it as it does. And you eat it and you fall out of ketosis.
Now, people do that all the time and go right back into ketosis and never even know they were out of ketosis. So it's not this magical state. Where you're going to have to go through keto flu every time you go in and out, because people are going in and in some levels, most people are in a mild state of ketosis almost every morning they wake up because you've gone, you know, eight or 12 hours without eating. So your body is starting to produce ketones.
Now, is it using them efficiently as a fuel? No, because you're immediately going to put some more glucose in the system. You know, if you're very active, like you do your endurance sport and you're burning down some glycogen in your muscles and your liver. So when you do have additional carbs, some additional carbs, your body's going to use this insulin to restore that. So if you need it in the liver, if you need it in the muscles, then insulin is going to do its thing to do that.
If you didn't do any work and you're already topped up with glycogen, then it's only got one other choice and it's going to start making fat. So if that's something you're trying to avoid, you want a better body composition. I can't think of a better way to do it than keto.
[00:51:09.910] Ras Yeah, that sounds about right. That's what I've experienced as well.
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