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March 9, 2020

High fiber keto with Naomi Whittel

One of the complaints about the ketogenic diet is that it lacks fiber. Naomi Whittel has solved that with her new book, High Fiber Keto.

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Allan (01:05):
Naomi, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

Naomi (01:08):
I am so excited to be here with you. Thank you. Thank you.

Allan (01:11):
Your book High Fiber Keto. Okay. First, you know, fiber and keto in the same book title right next to each other. Actually getting along, uh, a 22 day science-based plan to fix your metabolism, lose weight, and balance your hormones. So when I heard this book was out there, and like I said, keto and fiber in the same title and right up to each other and they're not fighting, they're actually getting along in this book. So I don't want to give all of the plot away, but, uh, you know, I just thought that was a very interesting concept and I was really eager to dig into the book and I'm glad I did because I learned quite a bit.

Naomi (01:45):
I'm so glad to hear that. You know, it's, um, to me, first and foremost, keto is something that I've been passionate about personally for about two and a half years. So I've been in a ketogenic nutritional ketosis state for about two and a half years. I've come out of it a couple of times, but most of that time I've been there. But I was born in Switzerland. I was born on a biodynamic farm and so whole foods and, um, clean, nutritious vegetables, meats, dairy, fruits, all of the things. And I've eaten a lot of grain over my life. Um, all of it started with this premise of whole food. And I, I really appreciate the philosophy of the concept that look, not one size fits all and it also depends a lot of times on our age. So I'm 46 years old. Nutritional ketosis is perfect for my body because I'm like 75% of the U S population, which says that they are carb or experiences Carb intolerance may not recognize that that's really what's happening, but they're carb intolerant.

Naomi (02:59):
Growing up in Europe, my mother's French eating baguettes every single morning, having a carb centric diet. It took me many years to get to the place where my autoimmune system was like, okay, I'm done. I can't take any more of this abundance of glucose. You know, my insulin was all over the map. My blood sugar was all over the map. And look, I was eating healthy foods, but it was the time in my life. And so I'm excited to sort of bring what fundamentally I believe is important for all of us. And that's fiber and what fiber does in our body, like 90% of Americans are deficient in their fiber. And then when you take, you know, there's soluble and there's insoluble fiber, some of the fibers that are out there, the soluble fibers have different types of fibers, like things like inulin that literally create the prebiotics that feed your whole microbiome. So your probiotics in your body love certain foods. And those happen to be a lot of these amazing fibers that connect with the nutritional ketosis.

Allan (04:18):
And I want to jump ahead to that. I want to talk about fiber because I think you're right. It's one of the big arguments when you go in and say, okay, I'm going to do this keto diet. And they're like, Oh well you won't get any fiber in your diet and therefore that's bad. But I know, and they're right, there's a lot of science out there that tells you that fiber is beneficial to your heart, but you got to get it from the right sources. So in the book you had the five fiber facts, could you kind of go through those facts and kind of walk us through, because one, I think it's going to show us how important fiber is in our bodies and then two, it's going to kinda dispel some of the myths of why Keto and fiber are not really against each other and they can actually work together.

Naomi (05:01):
Yeah. You know, I'll just give you a little bit of background and then we'll get into the five facts around fiber. What I would say with the five fiber facts is that when you're getting into nutritional ketosis, when you getting into nutritional ketosis, what usually happens is your body naturally in trying to sort of meet the 65 to 75% of the fat needs that you have, your body naturally just gravitates towards what's almost like a little bit easier and more simple. And so over time, what I was finding for myself in my own body is while I had always consumed a ton of fiber, I wasn't getting enough fiber when I started keto. So the five fiber facts were really like where I fell and started hurting my own health because I wasn't getting fiber. And then recognizing, okay, how do I bring these carbohydrates into my body in a way that's not going to take me out of nutritional ketosis?

Naomi (06:07):
Because by the way, I feel amazing in nutritional ketosis. So I would say the very first thing that anyone needs to think about when it comes to these fiber facts is that if you're eating things like cruciferous vegetables, you and I are both really big fans of them. What are they? Things like a broccoli, things like, you know, the, the most delicious cauliflowers. I mean there's cabbages. Like there's so many different, uh, Brussels sprouts. I had a ton of Brussels sprouts last night. So this family of vegetables do more than just bring in the good fibers. They have so many health benefits. I mean, we could go through the sciences. It's completely mind blowing as we know it. They also activate autophagy in our body. And my first book, Glow 15 is all about the ways that we can naturally activate within our system what we have. And activating a autophagy is our natural detox system.

Naomi (07:12):
We know that the cruciferous vegetables help to naturally detoxify our body. And so in order to have this optimal health, we have to make sure that we're really bringing in the right amount of fiber. So most people need somewhere between 25 and 35 grams of fiber. But because fiber's a carbohydrate, and in my view of nutritional ketosis, I try to keep my carbohydrates to about 50 grams a day. I don't play with net carbs or I don't or you know, the, I just say 50 grams of carbohydrates. So then I'm looking at fiber as part of those carbohydrates. And fiber obviously is utilized in the body in a very different way than other carbohydrates, right? It's not going to spike the insulin, it's not going to create the blood sugar issues. So it's, it's pretty exciting to sort of think about how that can work in the body.

Naomi (08:13):
So fiber helps to balance our blood sugar and we know that this balancing act that fiber does is just one of the sort of benefits of fiber. And what I found when I brought the two together, Keto and fiber was that the ketogenic diet also helps to balance blood sugar. So you take the two and you have like a 10 X effect, so that's a really powerful thing. Again, next one. Satiety. Nutritional ketosis helps us to feel satisfied and for me one of the best benefits was being able to take control of my mind again. We have like 60,000 plus thoughts in an average day. How many of those thoughts do we spend craving some sort of sugar or some sort of food or whatever it may be. When you get into nutritional ketosis and your body's able to really use your own body fat as your fuel instead of using sugar glucose as a fuel, you become satiated, your mind is able to focus on many other things because you're not an on this hamster wheel.

Naomi (09:31):
Well, fiber also really helps us to say sheet, which again helps us to not have those cravings. So it becomes like this virtuous cycle of positivity for our health and our wellbeing. So it helps with satiety and it helps with cravings. And the beauty of fiber rich foods, you know I have artichokes on the front of my book is a fiber dense food is a nutrient dense food. The whole food aspect of fiber rich foods is so powerful. So you get like a pack of all of that, which I love very much. And you know the artichoke is a great source of fiber. It's got about, on average a mid sized artichoke has about 10 grams of fiber. It's also got all of the important electrolytes. So one of the big issues that we have when we are deficient in fiber, which again about 90% of Americans are deficient in fiber, is we also become deficient in magnesium.

Naomi (10:37):
And we know that magnesium is this core mineral that we need for recovery when we exercise. We need it for over 300 reactions in our body. And yet it's not only about it not being in the soil like it used to be, it's also because all of our crops are being sprayed heavily. So even if you're eating organic, you're still not getting the levels of magnesium that your body needs. And then you take it a step further. If you're not eating fiber when you're doing nutritional ketosis, it makes it even more difficult. And magnesium is so critically important for anyone who's doing keto. It doesn't matter what diet you're doing, it's going to be super critical. But the electrolytes that you need to take when you're doing nutritional ketosis are more so than if you're on more of a carb centric diet. So the last thing that I would just say sort of as, as the five areas of focus with fiber is the fiber helps with our digestion. It helps to improve our digestion, it helps to increase the amount of butyrate that we're producing. And butyrate, as we know, is how our ketones are produced. And ketones are the energy source. You know, Dr. Dominic D'Agostino considers them like the fourth macronutrient. Um, there's a lot of research that we're going to see around ketones and what ketones do for our brain, what they do for our different organs. But the beauty of fiber is it works synergistically, truly with nutritional ketosis and within our digestive system it also helps with the production of butyrate.

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Allan (12:18):
So some of the core things that came out of that, then I want to kind of just reiterate here is one, you're getting your fiber from whole foods. This is not something where they say, okay, here's a cereal that has all this high fiber stuff, but we're still talking about real food. The other thing is, you know, for most people you can get in and stay in nutritional ketosis with 50 grams of carbs per day, particularly if a large percentage of those is coming from fiber. So if you're targeting that 25 or 30 or 35 grams of fiber and you're measuring your ketones, what you'll find is that you'll be able to get into ketosis. There's other people that will just, they'll cut out carbs entirely. They'll get down well below 20, maybe down to zero or 10 or something like that.

Allan (13:03):
And they find themselves in ketosis pretty quickly. But then they're not getting their magnesium. They're not getting their sodium, they're not getting their potassium. So they're having to supplement with those things. Whereas if they're eating a nutritionally dense fiber rich diet, that is also ketogenic they're less likely to be deficient in those minerals are going to be getting the nutrition they need. And so it's kind of like you said, it's the best of both worlds because you're going to get to eat your Brussels sprouts too. And I love Brussels sprouts by the way. We just can't find them on this Island. And often enough, every time I see him, I snatch them up. Uh, I had my wife, my wife went to David, which is a town about five hours away from here. And I told her she asked what do you want?

Allan (13:45):
I'm like cauliflower, all the cauliflower you can buy. Cause we can get rice cauliflower. But they charge like for like 16 ounces of it, they charge like seven, eight bucks. And so I was like, buy some cauliflower. So it's, you know, for $3 you buy head, she'll buy me three heads of cauliflower for nine bucks. So I made a bunch of cauliflower rice. Yes. And so you know that's kind of the cool thing about all this is that when you're giving your body what it needs it starts operating better. Your thought clarity, everything else is going better. You had a concept in the book that I just thought was awesome because I tried to tell people, you know, don't, don't feel like you have to kill yourself on a treadmill every day to get weight loss and also realize that, you know, sitting around doing nothing is also probably not the answer as well. You want to get yourself into a good basic protocol of movement and everything else. So you're finding kind of an optimal space for lifestyle. You mean the term you used in the book for that was dream metabolic engine. Take a few minutes to get into that concept because I really liked this concept.

Naomi (14:52):
Yeah. I love this concept. I'm very excited to share it with all of you. So as a woman in her mid forties, I'm always looking for ways to optimize my health. My biology, I have four children. I'm a founder and entrepreneur, you know, and an author so my time is so limited. And I also, you know, I know, but it feels like we all know what it feels like to have a body that's like really working with us and for us. And so I'm always striving to give my body what it needs at this time. And it's not static, right? We talked about different diets for different people. And I am not a dogmatic person. I've never believed like right now for my body, nutritional ketosis is what keeps giving and it's been two and a half years. But it doesn't mean in a couple of years that I'll be in a place where I can transform what it is that I'm eating.

Naomi (15:57):
It's the same thing with exercise and it all comes to, and like mindset is, is another example of it and how we leap and how much regenerative sleep we need. Um, but it all comes back to this idea of our metabolism. So just like, I fell in love with understanding how all we needed to do was activate autophagy in our body auto meaning self phagy meaning to eat as like the Greek definition of autophagy self eating, and that we could activate autophagy through the cruciferous vegetables, through different types of exercise, through a nutritional ketosis, through intermittent fasting, through, you know, tapping into your circadian rhythm, so when you sleep, you're really regenerating. I fell in love with metabolism in that same way and it was after I had interviewed over 80 experts. I did this docu series called the Real Skinny on Fat and the real skinny on fat really looks at, you know, everything around what went wrong.

Naomi (17:07):
Why did we here in the United States go from in the 50s having a 10% obesity rate and having a high fat diet to really getting to a place where there were a couple of events that occurred. Um, Eisenhower had a big heart attack. The president had a heart attack. The conclusion from his medical experts was that saturated fat was an enemy. And, um, you know, in Panama how much coconut is enjoyed and how much saturated good fat is enjoyed there. And so our country in the United States went to a place where everything became low fat, no fat. And now if we look at what has resulted from that, about 60% of our country is overweight or obese. Childhood obesity is a thing. It didn't even exist, you know, 50 years ago. And so for me personally, when I learned all of this information and I tried to think of how can I most easily affect my health, where I can enjoy my life and not have to spend, you know, 20 hours a week just trying to put the pieces together from this book or that book or whatever it might be, I felt that our metabolism was really the answer.

Naomi (18:26):
So our heart has a metabolic rate, you know, our brain, we have a whole body metabolism just like there's whole food. And so getting your metabolism to really work with you in the same way that autophagy can is, is essentially the premise of this book. It's the passion behind this book. And so a metabolic engine that's the stream is based on a couple of different principles. It's based on the idea first and foremost that the number on the scale is not the number that you should be thinking about. Right? The number on the scale is just a number. What you really need to be thinking about is the ratio and the ratio between the amount of lean muscle that your body has and is producing and the amount of body fat. And so for any woman, like when you hear that throw away the scale, we're going to get in the gym or we're going to learn about NEAT, which is non exercise activity thermogenesis, or we're going to, you know, increase our cardiovascular activity, whatever it may be, we're going to focus on strengthening and building our muscles and that's going to improve our metabolism so that we can live our most beautiful and healthy life. It's like a very empowering thought. So that's one of the principles around metabolic health.

Allan (20:03):
Yeah. So kind of from that, what we're basically saying is when you get to a good metabolic state, you're going to be lean, you're going to have plenty of energy. And you know, you're basically going to be able to live a very good energetic cause, you know, obviously, and you've said this in the book, energy is life. When we talk about feeling really good, uh, and those days when, when just like everything's happening for us and it's like our energy levels up and where it all comes back to it. I woke up, I rested well, um, I was refreshed, I got good nutrition and my energy was great and I had a great workout and I'm ready to attack day. So I think that's what we're really getting to here is when that stuff starts for you more and more and more, that's you getting leaner. So yeah, the scale is going to probably go down for most of us that are overweight, but that's not the end number. That's a piece of data in all the other data that you can be looking at because there's also, you know, they'll look at BMI, they'll look at waist to hip ratios and there's, there's some value in each piece of that data. But that's just kind of an outlying symptom of the metabolism being primed for you to have the energy and just really feel good.

Naomi (21:17):
yeah. And, and there's other very simple ways to optimize your metabolism. I mean, if you are not doing nutritional ketosis, okay, but start your day. If you're not someone who's sensitive to carbohydrates, but you make sure that you start your day with fat first, carbs last, that's going to support your metabolism. If you want to do an intermittent fast until noon in the day and you stop eating at 8:00 PM, that's going to support your metabolism as well. And we know, you know, to your point, this sense of energy and how our metabolic health really energizes our entire wellbeing, all of our organs. It's pretty phenomenal. There are so many misconceptions about our metabolism. You know, we always think a fast metabolism is what we need. But it's really an optimized metabolism. There are times in our life when our metabolism will slow down and that's appropriate.

Naomi (22:19):
There are foods that we can eat that can help to optimize it. So in the first chapter of high-fiber keto, it's all about metabolism and really starting to understand it from a fundamental level. And we built this assessment that you can do. I built it with a metabolic world renowned expert, and it's about, I think it's about 50 questions, but at the end of it, it's going to tell you what the true age of your metabolism is today. So I'm 46 I want my metabolism to be younger than my chronological age. And if it happens to be older, that's okay too. You can learn the simple steps that you need to take. Like for example, for a woman in their forties you know, us thinking about balancing our hormones. Well, it's something we need to be thinking about all along. But once you get into your forties your progesterone has gone down.

Naomi (23:20):
You know, your estrogen is starting to go down. Your testosterone could be at a very low level. Like that's really the time period when you know these sex hormones are going down. Most women hit menopause by the time they're 51 so understanding how your metabolism is affected by your thyroid and balancing your hormones and eating right for your body at this point in your life is critical. And maybe, you know , I firmly believe in um, in, in taking bioidentical hormones and it's not just about this idea of, okay, I'm going to have more energy or my skin's going to be better. It's also for example, like let's just take testosterone when we're in our forties and for most women it's really going down significantly. It affects our joints, it affects the way our body feels, it affects our ability to make good decisions and to even make decisions. So balancing the hormones and understanding how metabolism can have such a big part of that through the different exercises is really just so key.

Allan (24:31):
Now, one of the concepts that you've got into the book that I think it was again, another great thing to have in this book. There's so many little things buried in there. So we're talking just about the surface of this. And so this book is something that you can go through and I think read five times and you're going to pull something good out of it each and every time. Cause there was all these little tidbits woven in there. But, um, you made a, I think from an advice perspective, a mistake that a lot of people make is they will step in and they'll say, okay, I'm going to go on this elimination diet. They call keto. I'm going to get rid of all my carbs. Uh, and then I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to quit coffee. I'm gonna quit smoking and I'm going to start running five miles a day.

Allan (25:11):
And, um, I'm gonna make sure I call my mom at least once a week. You know, they try to change so many things at one time. Uh, and in particular it's the diet and exercise. And I want to kind of specifically get into, because so many people will go, you know, when, when it was new year's Eve, it's like, okay, tomorrow I'm in the gym and I'm also going on this diet. Uh, and their bodies are really not equipped to deal with that much change. So you introduced a concept in the book, you called me time. Ah, and, and I think I really liked that. It's kind of this gentle understanding that movement is still key, but it's not that you have to go spend, you know, an hour on the elliptical Monday through Friday. Can you talk about me time?

Naomi (25:57):
Absolutely. So me time is all about what stands for sort of like the metabolic edge time. So again, it's giving your chance yourself a chance to optimize and not have to like grind. I'm a firm believer that what makes us happy will also make us healthy. And that's, you know, fundamental and philosophical in my world. And I also firmly believe that every day is a new day and it's a daily renewal. So when we wake up in the morning, it's a fresh day. And what we do today is going to impact the way the day is experienced. So from the nutrition that we take, the movement that we do, the foods that we eat, the mindset that we have, this is a daily renewal and we have to constantly be renewing. Um, and it's also a very positive thought and me time goes right into that. So what I did with high fiber keto is I started with those 80 interviews that I did for the Real Skinny on Fat for the docu series.

Naomi (27:01):
Then I myself got into nutritional ketosis and went through all of the challenges. And about a year and a half after I was in nutritional ketosis is what I said, I want to get this concept of metabolic health out there into the world. Like this whole body metabolism concept. And I know that people will benefit tremendously because metabolic syndrome is such a big issue and most people don't even fully understand what it is and that it's affecting their health or that they may have two of the five, you know, or three of the different five factors around metabolic syndrome. So I was really, really passionate about that. But what I wanted to do is I wanted to do a clinical study to prove out the concept of keto and fiber. And so I did a clinical study at Jacksonville University and I did it only on women, not because we didn't want it also to work for men.

Naomi (28:04):
But because there's so much of a lack of science on women right now, we need more science on women in order to understand, because we're different obviously than men and our hormones play a big part in the way that we live in the health that we have. And so we studied these 25 women and the professors, the experts, the PhDs that created this study with me, what they said is that when a body is getting into nutritional ketosis, it doesn't matter if it's an athlete, it doesn't matter if it's my great grandmother, it doesn't matter if it's my eight year old son who by the way does keto. Um, and he does it, you know, to prevent seizures and he's done it for quite some time. It doesn't matter who you are, when your body is adjusting from using sugar as your fuel source to becoming a body fat burner, you need to focus entirely on that.

Naomi (29:07):
So the program that we did was 22 days and every single participant benefited. And so I thought, okay, we're going to put together an exercise program, but I was absolutely mistaken and the professors told me we're going to put together a movement program. And this movement program is all about NEAT, which is a new area of science. Meat is an acronym for, as I mentioned before, non exercise activity thermogenesis. And this a way that we can just simply move around. I'm going to give you some examples every day and actually burn up to 500 calories. So right now as we're doing this podcast together, I'm standing up, my body is activated, my glutes are activated, my core is activated and I'm, I'm moving my hands around a lot because that's my nature. Anyone who likes to Twitch or tap their knee, keep up the good work, right?

Naomi (30:11):
If your mother said, don't do that, don't, you know, bang your fingers on the table or whatever. All of that is NEAT. All of that is activating your metabolism and it's, and it's helping to burn these calories and it's a form of movement that's really useful. So in the book we show you a very simple plan of adding up to 7,500 steps a day. So you're going to get to that place. You're going to never sit for more than 30 minutes at any point, right? Like I want you just to get up and move around. You're going to engage in, you know, tapping your fingers, shaking your hands, moving around, just this physical movement, wherever, whenever, if it's, you know, we always here park your car away from the grocery store, do more walking. Growing up in Europe, we didn't really use cars in the same way.

Naomi (31:04):
And you know, for you in Panama you have more of a luxury of being on your feet more than we do here in the U S you know, it's, it's more difficult, but there's lots and lots of ways. I mean, even simply using a manual toothbrush like a couple of times a week or just doing physical things and then trying to get outside as much as possible because movement outside is so beneficial to your overall wellbeing. And I consider all that really great. So I don't want you to be exercising when you start this program in the 22 days while you're allowing your body to get into nutritional ketosis. Instead, I want you to be doing this, you know, me time or this metabolic edge time to really activate thermogenesis naturally with movement.

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Allan (31:54):
Yeah. So this is not a time to start. If you're going to start a nutrition program, focus on that. You still need movement, your body needs movement. Even if it's just something as simple as like you said, walking around, standing when you were sitting for awhile, tapping hands, uh, doing a little dance while you're brushing your teeth, whatever it is. Um, enjoying that time of movement. Our bodies were designed to move. In fact, our lymphatic system, uh, which is responsible for moving toxins out of our body, which if you're burning body fat, there's toxins being released in your body right now is a really good time for your lymphatic system to be optimized and movement optimizes your lymphatic system. So this is really good. And so it's not the time to start an exercise program, but what's going to happen is once you get into ketosis and your energy level starts optimizing, you're almost naturally going to want to start moving more.

Allan (32:46):
And so it's going to kind of be this self-fulfilling prophecy. As your metabolism gets better, you want to move more. As you move more, your metabolism gets better. And it just, it just builds on itself. So just recognize the exercise will come, the exercise program will come because you'll just have so much energy. At some point you'd be like, I've got to do something with this. Um, so that's going to come. But another thing that I really liked to do, you said it was 22 days for your program, which was, you know, I think it's a really good opportunity for someone to see if something is going to work for them. Too many people quit keto in the first week and say, no, it's unsustainable. If you make it through these 22 days, which you make pretty simple because you tell us exactly what to eat, what to do each day, but you don't just start with day one. Its like, you know, go in and eat all the carbohydrates in my house and run in and start this thing. You kind of have this little prefix prep period to get ready to get started and then the 22 days. Could you kind of just walk us through the program that gives someone an idea of how this all works?

Naomi (33:43):
Yeah. You know, changing our mindset is like the most difficult thing ever, right? I've been doing this for two and a half years. I grew up enjoying whole fats. I never ate low fat or no fat and I still have to work on my mindset because you know, nutritional ketosis is only enjoyed by a very small fraction of the population. And look, there are parts of the world, like when I'm in Alaska, the Inuits have been doing it for a very, very long time. And when I sat down and spoke with a number of the women over there and I said, okay, tell me about your favorite foods. Where do you get your energy from? They were talking about things like blubber, like whale blubber and a lot of the foods that they eat from the ocean, um, and all of the fats. And they never look at coffee as an energy source for them.

Naomi (34:38):
They always look at fat as it, but, but for most of us, education and learning and hearing this counter to what you may be hearing in the media is a challenge in and of itself. So the setup before you get into this is first helping to work with the mindset because otherwise, you know, it's like you'll self sabotage and then you'll be frustrated and you won't get the kind of results that your body wants to give you. Um, so I go into this concept of, you know, making sure that what's in your home, the foods in your fridge and your pantry are the right ones. Getting the mindset going, understanding that the first pitfall that most people experience is from a lack of hydration or, or going from, you know, having all of the hydration that's found in a carbohydrate to the lesser hydration that's found in a fat.

Naomi (35:40):
And so many people get keto flu. And how do you prevent that? So how do you get enough of the, let's say the green gel waters from cucumbers and celery and a lot of the vegetables that can penetrate more deeply into the cells than just a glass of regular water. We talk a lot about hydration in that. In that early part, I speak a lot about obviously the electrolytes and how important they are because that that change is a really big deal early on and then we get into exactly what the participants did in the clinical study and I try very, very hard to make this the most simple step by step guide. We have over 80 delicious recipes. I went back to like comfort foods to make these recipes so that your mind wasn't like, Oh my gosh, I don't want to eat these odd things that I've never heard of.

Naomi (36:37):
No. Like we have peanut butter and jelly fat bombs, we have all this good stuff. So just trying to simplify it so that when you get into the 22 days, you're going to be like the participants, you're going to benefit. Every single one of them had benefits to their health. Like some people, they lost as much as 9.7 pounds of body fat, seven pounds of weight. Um, everybody improved their blood sugar levels. Everybody you know, made changes around their circumference of their waist. Not everybody in the 22 days got into nutritional ketosis. Only 60% of them did. But everybody benefited. So you may be like the other 40%, it may take you a bit more time and I show you exactly how to go there and how to do it naturally and easily.

Allan (37:29):
Yeah. And that's what, this is a very gentle program to get you there. It's not the drastic, drop yourself to know carbs and go through all this heck, if you will for the first seven days with the keto flu and then you come out the other side feeling great. This is more of a gentle, we're going to lower our carbs to a steady state, which for a lot of people, 50 grams is, it's still, it's still a move. And so the preficts kind of gets you in the right mindset, gets you moving, and then you start going and then 22 days you see the effects of what this can do for you. And yes, there are recipes, really eager to try that Gouda cheese sandwiches that you had in there. That's on the repertoire. As soon as I can find some almond flour, I might not have it shipped in. I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest, and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

Naomi (38:24):
You're asking me my top three. I just, first of all, I love what you just said. Um, three strategies I think to stay well and to be happy. Number one is getting into understanding how much sleep and regenerative sleep you need every night. So learning what your sleep cycle is. That's a really important strategy. So once I discovered that my sleep cycle was 90 minutes, I knew that I needed five sleep cycles to feel my best. And so seven and a half hours was better than eight hours. And so that's my number one strategy. Another strategy, and it's, and it's here in the book, is all about hydration, right? I think most of us believe, okay, I have to drink eight glasses of water to be hydrated or whatever. We know that you need to be urinating six times a day in order to be flushing through and really being hydrated and what are the ways that we can get hydrated.

Naomi (39:25):
I spoke a little bit about gel water. I'm really passionate about deep hydration at a cellular level. Because when we don't have that and as we get into our forties and beyond our ceramides, you know, the lipid I layer that sort of protects our body. It's like the mortar between bricks, it starts to break down on our skin and so our skin starts to leak moisture, it starts to leak that hydration. And so I'm a really, really big fan of understanding all things hydration and I think that's a huge piece. And then of course understanding what's right for your body, what type of foods are going to energize you and make you happy and healthy and being able to be flexible enough so that you don't put yourself into a box and then four years later your doctor's like, I cannot believe you've been eating these foods because your blood levels show this. Then you're deficient in that. So it's really about flexibility and constantly customizing your life for you.

Allan (40:35):
Thank you for that. Naomi, if someone wanted to learn more about the book, it's called High Fiber Keto. Learn more about what you're doing. Where would you like for me to send them?

Naomi (40:45):
They can go to highfiberketo.com we have a website, Naomi Whittel. I have a YouTube channel and we've got tons of videos showing, you know the recipes and different activities within the book. All of my social platforms. And then our website is just naomiwhittel.com.

Allan (41:03):
You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/424 and I'll be sure to have the links there. Naomi, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

Naomi (41:13):
Allan, thank you so much for having me. I love being here with you.

Patreons

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