Lessons from the Ketoverse
Welcome to "Lessons from the Ketoverse" In this dynamic podcast, hosts Stephen and Graham dive deep into the world of ketogenic and carnivore diets, exploring how these lifestyle choices can revolutionize your physical and mental health.
Stephen, a seasoned health enthusiast with a knack for simplifying complex nutritional science, and Graham, a former confused foodie turned informed advocate, bring you a blend of personal anecdotes, scientific insights, and expert interviews. Each episode, they unpack the myths and truths about low-carb, high-fat diets, discussing everything from weight loss and energy levels to mental clarity and emotional well-being. Both Stephen and Graham independently navigated the confusing world of food nutrition and came out the other side of that journey with some lessons from the Ketoverse.
It doesn't matter if you're a curious beginner or a seasoned follower of keto or carnivore lifestyles, "Lessons from the Ketoverse" offers something for everyone. Expect engaging conversations, practical tips, and a dash of humour as Stephen and Graham navigate the meaty (and sometimes controversial) aspects of these diets.
Whether you're looking to optimize your physical performance, improve mental clarity, or take control of your health, this podcast is your guide to unlocking the benefits of low-carb, high-fat living. With expert insights, real-world tips, and candid conversations with everyone from those that are just starting out, to experts in their fields as well as exploring the unique benefits of Keto for those who serve in the military. Stephen and Graham explore how these powerful dietary approaches can transform your life. Join us as we chew over the benefits, tackle the challenges, and share the transformative power of embracing a diet that might just be as old as humanity itself. Fuel your primal instincts and maybe, just maybe, get inspired to try a steak or two!
Lessons from the Ketoverse
Stephen Interviews Graham. The Truth About Diet That Changed Our Lives Forever
What happens when two former colleagues discover they've independently solved their health problems through the same radical diet change? In this inaugural episode of Lessons from the Ketoverse, hosts Graham and Stephen reveal how they reconnected after years apart only to find they'd both transformed their health through ketogenic living.
Graham shares his powerful story of receiving troubling blood work results that showed he was headed toward diabetes. Taking matters into his own hands, he spent countless hours researching nutrition and challenging conventional wisdom about healthy eating. The results were nothing short of remarkable—over 50 pounds lost, body fat percentage cut in half, and blood work that went from concerning to "excellent" in just over a year. His doctor's stunned reaction? This type of natural health reversal is "extremely rare."
Beyond weight loss, Graham describes unexpected benefits that transformed his entire life: mental clarity replacing brain fog, emotional resilience during major life changes, and complete freedom from constant hunger and cravings. "I don't remember the last time my stomach growled," he reveals, explaining how nutrient-dense, high-satiety foods naturally led him to intermittent fasting without effort or discomfort.
The conversation dives into controversial nutritional myths, particularly around red meat consumption, exposing how flawed research and special interests have shaped dietary guidelines for decades. Graham's meticulous approach—tracking every bite for six months to ensure proper nutrition—demonstrates the thoughtful, science-based foundation of their methods.
Both hosts share their frustration with medical professionals who showed little interest in learning how they achieved these remarkable results without medication. This experience crystallized their mission: to create a podcast where they could share their knowledge and help others find their own path to better health through ketogenic eating.
Ready to challenge everything you thought you knew about nutrition? Subscribe now and join Graham and Stephen as they continue sharing their evidence-based approach to transforming health through the power of food.
Welcome to Lessons from the Keto-Verse. Join Stephen and Graham as they explore the keto lifestyle with tips, science and stories to boost your health. This podcast isn't medical advice. Consult your healthcare advisor for any health-related issues. Get ready to fuel your primal power.
Speaker 2:Hello everybody and welcome to the first episode of Lessons from the Ketoverse, which is a podcast that my friend Stephen and I have been working on to just discuss everything related to the ketogenic diet and a little bit of our personal journey. We hope you find it interesting. One of the things that we want everyone to keep in mind is the opinions on the lessons from the Ketoverse podcast should not be considered medical advice. You should consult your medical doctors and nutritionists to find a pathway to the health care that works for you. We certainly hope that you find our opinions interesting enough to subscribe and listen to future podcasts, and I wanted to take a moment to introduce my friend Stephen. Stephen, say hello.
Speaker 3:Graham, hi everyone, thanks very much for the invite and the great introduction.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so a little background between Stephen and I. So we actually work together, side by side, literally in booths next to each other in the office of a major startup. It was actually a billion dollar startup with an excellent experience, and it was a wireless startup, so very interesting. My job was to build the contact center operations from a blank sheet of paper and Stephen's job was to design the logistics for the entire country to make sure that all of the equipment the phones and everything related to the phones would get to the right stores or get to people's homes on time. I learned a heck of a lot from Stephen, Always enjoyed a little bit of banter back and forth and we worked hard and we had a lot of fun while we were doing that. So, Stephen, do you want to let everyone know how we ended up working on this podcast?
Speaker 3:together. Yeah, sure, and again, that's a great point, graham. Launching a national telecom for the first time in over a century is no small feat, and I think part of the reason we bonded wasn't just because we were sitting adjacently, but our responsibility, our shared work ethic when it came to doing the right thing at the right time, whether anyone was looking, was kind of crafted, that bond between the two of us. And, completely independently, as you moved on and I moved on to our respective work, and I think we can both agree. At the time when I was working with you at this company, we were gaining weight, we weren't eating well, we were working extremely long hours. And then fast forward several years later, you and I reconnect and find out that we're both unwell.
Speaker 3:You know, it might be appropriate to say that perhaps my health was worse off than yours in that, you know, at the age of 50, approximately seven years ago, I was diagnosed with diabetes and I believe the stress from the work environment, the food that I was consuming, again reinforcing the stress of the environment, and just having to cope with very, very long days it was not uncommon to do 13 hour days, five days a week and also cover over weekends and, yes, I too am very proud of what we accomplished. But in retrospect, you know, I put us in a position where, independent of one another, we went down a path to try to figure out what the solution was. And when we reconnected, because of our friendship and our respect for one another, neither one of us had any idea that we had found a similar path to health recovery and improving our health span completely independently, but arrived at the same conclusions, which is candidly, no surprise given how well we collaborated together in our work collaborated together in our work.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's a couple of things that are, I think, so critical that you mentioned. One is that we were both sort of generally headed in the same direction, health wise. We probably had similar eating habits and we, at the almost exactly the same time we're talking about a 18 month, two year journey we ended up sort of starting this at a very similar time and ending up where we are with very similar knowledge. The conversations that we've had over the last couple of months have been so interesting to me because I learn a heck of a lot from you.
Speaker 2:Every time I, every time we have a chat, there's always something new I hear or something new that you share that I should listen to or read, and it's just made the journey not only more fulfilling from a knowledge point of view, but also knowing that somebody else, who you admire and like very much, is sort of experiencing the same thing. It makes the journey a little less stressful, let's say, is sort of experiencing the same thing. It makes the journey a little less stressful, let's say. And so what we're going to attempt to do for our first podcast here is Stephen's going to interview me just to give people sort of a bit of a background as to who we are and how we got here.
Speaker 2:At the next podcast, I'm going to be interviewing Stephen to do a very similar sort of background, to learn about Stephen's journey and who he is as a person. I know you're going to enjoy getting to know him as well. So, stephen, why don't we start off? I know you've got a bunch of questions that you have for me and I'll do my best to answer them for you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and perhaps we begin at the end, so to speak, and perhaps my first question would be what inspired you, at the age that we both are, respectively, middle-aged Canadian men, what inspired you to go sort of tangentially to your expertise, which is globally renowned in the area of call centers, to pursuing a new career, dropping everything, taking the financial risks that are associated with that, to then become an expert in nutrition?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I don't know if I'd label myself an expert, but certainly I know a lot more today than I did a couple of years ago, and you know I've applied some of those learnings and they've certainly had a pretty profound effect on my health and the current state. So call centers, contact centers, is something that I've always been interested in, especially the customer experience side of things. I sort of always felt that I understood the balance between the needs of the customer as well as the needs of the operation, the company. And understanding that balance means that you can put in things that not only work from a customer experience point of view but also work from a bottom line point of view, and both of those things are necessary to have a successful company. You know we've left that wireless startup but it is still very successful today, 16 years later. It's always nice to see those signs and know that you had a hand in making that work.
Speaker 2:More recently, the experience that I had around going to the doctor a couple of years ago getting some blood work done and him saying you know, graham, you're headed in the wrong direction from a health point of view. My A1c triglycerides were high. You know it was clear that my blood sugar levels were not being managed properly. Insulin response was although I didn't have it checked, likely becoming insulin resistant and heading towards that diabetes. That inevitably means you end up on medication, likely for the rest of your life if you don't make any changes. And I think the big difference between past visits and this one was I actually got the blood results. I'm a bit of a techie. I like data and I got the actual blood results. So I wasn't sitting there listening to a doctor interpret those blood results. I was able to go in and see exactly what my A1C is, hdl, ldl, triglycerides and a number of other blood metrics, and then sort of dig in to that big rabbit hole around what actually causes these particular metrics to change for the worse. And the more I got into it, the more I realized that the way I was eating which I thought was a healthy way of eating, you know I'd look for the heart healthy symbol on the box before buying it wasn't a healthy way of eating. And I started to understand how to read food labels, the actual ingredient list on the back, and over time slowly but surely removed, you know, one after another, after another, different kinds of foods that I had been snacking on or eating in the past. The more changes I made, the better I felt. You know, the more pounds were dropping, the more energy I had, the more I wanted to exercise, as opposed to sort of struggling to do that in the past and the more I realized that I could make a difference in other people's lives if I was able to help even one person.
Speaker 2:My wife's a psychotherapist. She's very good at what she does and she profoundly has an impact on people's lives, whereas, you know, in business there's only so much you can do. You can be, you know, try and be a great leader. You can try and inspire people. You can try and help them learn to do whatever they want to do better, but there's a limit to what you can actually do to have an impact on people's lives. That's meaningful and I felt that with our stage in life that it may make sense to go back and go back to school, study to be a health nutrition coach both diploma and certification and see if I couldn't make a difference in other people's lives.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's absolutely great. So, in summary, your aha moment was your own blood results, which resonates with me as well, and I'll tell you more about that when we do my interview and the fact that that was very typical for us working together, because I know that the same is. Yes, it was never a sufficiently deep enough response for you. You had to go deeper and try to understand and, to that end, were there any call it? You know, as you progress towards your certifications and working as a coach full time, who were your coaches, who inspired you along the way?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the I'm not sure you know where that all starts. I know that there were people like Dr Ken Berry and Anthony Chafee, dr Baker, Georgie Eade people along the way that obviously, if you start to listen to one, they start to interview others and you start to listen to them. So you know, had somebody told me two years ago that I'd be on this sort of ketogenic journey where I'm, you know, getting rid of all the ultra processed foods and sticking to a low carb diet with, you know, fatty protein, that I would have called them crazy. But the more I eliminated food and the more I listened to people and their advice and the more that advice made sense to me, the more changes I made. The more changes I made, the more energy I had. The more energy I had, the more I wanted to listen to podcasts and go for walks. You know, I remember starting off with sort of struggling maybe two, three times a week to go for a walk, even a walk around the block, and throughout that 18 months I ended up walking sort of 18,000 steps a day. And with all that walking I was able to listen to more podcasts and there is actually a lot of content out there. Even though it's a relatively small space, there's still a lot of content for people to absorb. So the more I was able to go on those walks, the more I was able to listen to people that were smarter than me about this journey. The more I listened, the more changes I was able to make. The more changes I made, the more energy I had, the farther I would go for those walks and the more I'd listen to. So it was a self-fulfilling prophecy where, along the journey, as I'm eliminating things that aren't working for me and adding things in that are working for me, I was building a knowledge base that allowed me to sort of feel comfortable that this was something that I wanted to try, and I think one of the big aha moments along the way was the fact that I track every single thing that I ate for about six months, and I did that for a number of reasons.
Speaker 2:Obviously, I wanted to make sure that I wasn't causing any damage. I wanted to make sure that I was getting the nutrients in my body that I needed. I was starting to learn more about the fact that what we should be focused on is nutrition, not necessarily food. You know, food can come in a box and food can come from the ground, certain, are gonna be more nutritious than others, and tracking every single thing that I ate or that six months, and not only showed Me what I was taking in, it also showed me, you know, whether I was getting the right nutrients or not. If there was something that I needed to add, I was able to add it with the full knowledge that you know. If I added it, I would get that certain nutrient metric up and just understanding the macros of the micronutrients, the vitamins, the minerals. You know things like electrolytes and the importance of those to really make sure that the body is nourished in a way that it can function at its optimal level. So I think there are a number of inputs along the way.
Speaker 2:Inputs along the way, certainly, you know the medical doctors that have their own podcasts that are incredibly well versed in the subject, as well as just you know going down any rabbit hole that I could to understand the benefits of. You know, for example, a ketogenic diet and then being able to watch the actual impact over time. You know losing 50, a little over 50 pounds in call it. You know about a year, maybe a little less, and you know, the biggest satisfaction I guess for lack of a better word or the biggest satisfying moment, was when I went back to the doctor about 14 months after that first blood work visit, months after that first blood work visit, and I was pretty confident that things had turned around. You know, again down 50 pounds, tons of energy, exercising a lot, eating the nutritious requirements that my body needed, I was pretty confident that my blood work was going to come back, you know, as improved. I was really surprised that it actually came back as excellent. The doctor said whatever you're doing, keep doing it. It's working. It's a clean bill of health.
Speaker 2:And one of the really interesting things about that conversation is I asked him how often that happens. How often does somebody turn this around? And he said, you know you mean without some medical intervention or drugs. And I said yes, and he said, unfortunately it's extremely, extremely rare. And I took that to mean he may not have seen many examples at all, if any.
Speaker 2:And I remember asking him because I've known him for, you know, 15, 18 years. I remember asking him would you like me to come in and just spend, you know, 10 or 15 minutes sharing what I did? I've got some information that I picked up along the way because it might help somebody else, and he really wasn't interested in having that conversation and I was a little let down by that because I thought I'm sure doctors get into this with the feeling that they want to make a difference with people. I also understand that he's extremely busy and probably very stressed out, and I do think he's a good doctor, but I was a little taken aback that he wasn't really interested in what I had to say about how I turn things around. So it is what it is.
Speaker 3:I'm happy to talk to others who will listen, and there's plenty of those wise but you used the method of science of observation in terms of your own results, and you proved out your hypothesis that what it was that you were doing wasn't just a fact of losing 50 plus pounds which is pretty extraordinary over the course of a year, and that's healthy loss. We're talking about healthy loss of weight and not induced by stress or some other underlying condition, and as a result you ended up getting an excellent status and sadly, I'm not surprised at all. But your comment concerning the unwillingness for the medical community to embrace you is kind of a rarity, the unicorn that essentially you would be in by their definition and not take advantage of that in a positive way for the patients. Again, we'll talk about this more. I had exactly the same experience, but I tangled more with the dietician than I did the doctor. The doctor was on board. The dietician viewed that I was essentially a heretic because I wasn't taking anything for my diabetes and had the same results as you, almost down to the pound.
Speaker 3:So it's interesting that you're sharing this and it's's disappointing that these, these credentialed experts that you know we um have a tendency to to overshadow and repeat the same verbiage without actually providing a solution. They just want to put you on metformin if you have diabetes. They want to do all these things and, um, as you highlighted, you went full natural. You were managing your entire intake through an approach that was both holistic and very tactical, as it related to micro and macronutrients, and you got results and you wanted to share the results. Unfortunately, the only way we can do that now is through these kinds of forums, where we can inform people about what we did and encourage them to do their own research and follow their own evidence. Did at any point when you were speaking, you know, with the medical community, did you? Think did you have.
Speaker 3:Maybe you feel like you're being gaslighted? Did you feel like perhaps you were just lucky and that it wasn't something you were going to be able to maintain?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So obviously you know food and nutrition is an incredibly complex subject. Everybody's got an opinion about it. You know some of those opinions are going to be less informative than others and I certainly don't pretend that I have all the information. Just the opposite. I'm always open to learning and listening and I think the medical community, you know one of the challenges that doctors have is they don't have a lot of time with patients. The way the systems are set up they're sort of you know in and out in 10 minutes and obviously the quickest way to turn something around, often, whether successful or not, is through medicine and prescribing of, you know, whatever medicines might be recommended for the health challenge that you're experiencing. And also those are the board recommendations. So the doctors in a lot of cases have to follow those requirements, whether they're set up by the medical board or the government.
Speaker 2:The interesting thing my wife had some blood work done very recently. Interesting thing that my wife had some blood work done very recently and she had mentioned to the doctor when she went back and sorry, she had the blood work results. The blood work results came back as excellent. She's eating very, very similar to me and she's been sort of very supportive in my journey and as she saw changes happening, she was sort of you know, a month or two behind and a certain caught up to me pretty quickly, and so I wasn't surprised that her blood work had come back the way it did. And the doctor said whatever you're doing, keep doing it. And my wife said you know, I am on sort of this ketogenic carnivore diet. And the doctor said oh, yes, yes, yes, so you're getting, you know, high fat, high, high protein, you're running on ketones. And she was very encouraging and I thought that was you know. Now, this is a young doctor, she may be open to new ideas. You know, we all get set in our ways the older we get. But I was really encouraged that this doctor actually was not only not shocked at what I'd done but also knew about it and also had suggested that she keep going it and also had suggested that she keep going.
Speaker 2:A second story that gives me some hope is I had a torn rotator cuff from a baseball injury. I, you know, in my late 30s, thought I could still throw a baseball from the fence all the way to home plate, like I used to be able to do, and of course, tore my rotator cuff and that was the last time I played Recently and now that everything else is feeling better and my rotator cuff feels significantly, that was the last time I played recently. And now that everything else is feeling better and my rotator cuffs feel significantly better after changing the diet, I've got almost full range of motion now. And this, uh uh.
Speaker 2:The surgeon that I met had consulted with me, looked at my MRI. Um, I had let him know that everything was feeling significantly better than it was two years ago, where I couldn't really lift my arm very high. And he said what have you done differently? And I said well, I've tried not to put a lot of pressure on it or strain it because I don't want to make it worse. That's why I wanted to get the MRI done to see how far I could push it.
Speaker 2:But the main difference is moving to a more ketogenic diet. And his response was yeah, that's the right thing to do to repair the muscles and give the protein that the body needs to repair itself. And he said it's extremely hard to get anyone else to actually switch to that kind of diet. So those two things give me some encouragement that you know slowly but surely, and sometimes these things can take a decade. But once you start to see the results that people are getting overwhelmingly I mean you know if there's enough anecdotes at some point you have to say this is a thing that the medical community will catch up and maybe that bodes well for the future for people who are looking for a more natural way to heal.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no that's great, absolutely a great response. So, as opposed to just simply giving up and taking the results as a final outcome, you obviously changed your entire lifestyle and stuck with it, so that's great, since we're both 90s era students. So what was the biggest thing that surprised you the most when you returned, to call it classical style classroom setting in the area of nutrition? What so far has surprised you the most, graham?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I think I'll start with something that didn't surprise me. The recommended carbs for both, I believe, the US and Canada are very similar 45 to 65, 50 plus pounds that I had lost, or would go back to my you know original weight and feel 20 years older and have no energy left. So I wasn't surprised that you know they were pushing plant based diets. I wasn't surprised that they were telling us that red meat's bad for you, even though I'd done enough investigating to understand that. You know there was no actual randomized control study trials to back that up. It was all epidemiological results from studies over the years and there were some studies that actually were buried, like the Minnesota Heart Health Study, that showed that actually a ketogenic diet can be very much a part of a healthy lifestyle.
Speaker 2:The two things that I was kind of surprised about was that they were finally admitting that saturated fat doesn't cause heart disease. So this is in the actual course. I was surprised because most people think saturated fat is harmful to us and causes heart disease because we've been told that for 50 years. I think it was only in 2015 that the American Heart Association I could be wrong with the year, but the American Heart Association finally admitted that saturated fat does not cause heart disease and actually is quite necessary, Learned that saturated fat was not only not bad for you but also necessary. That was number one. And number two was the fact that in the past people felt that mental illness could and would cause some kind of metabolic disease, so problems with the gut and the metabolism and the gut microbiome. In this course what I've learned, or at least what they're teaching, is that it's turning out to be the other way around, that actually a poor metabolic health can contribute to mental health issues. Georgia Ede has a fantastic book called Curb your Mind Absolutely fantastic book, highly recommended for anybody who's interested in understanding how food connects to mental health and how changes in what you eat can actually improve mental health. Obviously, everybody's different, but to me that's well worth a try. And, if I'm not mistaken, the ketogenic diet was originally put together to try and treat Parkinson's and I think they had actually had some success with Parkinson's up until a drug was found and then the drug was actually the recommended way to treat Parkinson's. So I think there's growing bodies of evidence. There's a lot of studies that are being done these days about the impact of a ketogenic diet.
Speaker 2:On mental health, there seems to be a ton of anecdotes from people who are feeling mentally much healthier than they were in the past with a standard American diet, and I've certainly noticed that as well that you know I had terrible brain fog a couple of years ago. Wasn't sure what it was, you know, was it the virus that was causing that? Was it something else? Hard to say.
Speaker 2:But one of the biggest surprises of going to this way of eating is the mental clarity. My brain works better. I'm sure it's because it's running on ketones, not glucose. It's able to run more efficiently. In my experience, I'm able to think more clearly, certainly much more energy, and the other thing that I've found is I'm much more resilient. I'm less stressed than I used to be. Things don't bother me nearly as much as they have in the past. I've gone through a house move and a change in career and things that would normally stress people out, and I just found that it didn't affect me nearly as much as it did in the past. So knowing that the schools are now teaching that food can actually impact mental health conditions to me is very, very encouraging. Not something we probably would have heard a couple of years ago.
Speaker 3:And by chance you had mentioned earlier that your wife is a psychotherapist. Has she taken any of those methodologies or approaches to sustained health, including suggesting an improvement in DIVE for people that suffer from anxiety and depression? And I pick on those two because the latest studies that I've read strongly corroborate they may even be the same ones that you looked at that certain forms of anxiety and depression can be directly attributed to, or at least causal from, a poor diet. Has your wife employed that, perhaps in her practice, in any way?
Speaker 2:Yeah, great question. She's a psychotherapist and not a nutritionist. She's unable to give nutrition advice, but she certainly has sort of tried to point people in the direction of understanding, you know, the link between the mental health issues that her clients are experiencing and understanding how food could be impacting that. So she is a big believer. She also thinks Change your Diet, change your Mind by Dr Georgia Ede is one of the best books of the year to read. There's a ton of evidence in there as to the link between mental illness, stress, anxiety, depression and the foods we eat. But she also recognizes that there is a need for this.
Speaker 2:So she has on a number of occasions and she's very busy, her practice is usually booked three or four weeks out that she doesn't have the time to go back and add that to her repertoire. We've talked about perhaps me adding that to the repertoire of the company that we built together. She certainly did all the heavy lifting. I just did the stuff in the background to make things work as smoothly as possible for her, and so she's certainly recognizing that that is something that is going to be a major part of psychotherapy, psychology, psychiatry practices in the future, anything that's sort of trying to help people improve their mental health, and so she's a big believer that that is an area that is going to have to, in one way or another, be combined with, you know, psychotherapy practices that have been proven in the past.
Speaker 2:All of a sudden, now diet can be added to that repertoire, so she certainly understands the importance of it. She's got a bit of an anecdote where when she was on her standard American diet, she would struggle to get through five sessions with people, which is a lot in a day, you know 50 minutes each and she's able to do six or seven without any stress now. So she's personally seen the major improvements in the way she eats, to her mental clarity and her strength and her resilience, which has actually, you know, actually benefited the practice too, and in turn she's able to see more people and, as I said, she's very good at what she does, and so she's able to see more people and help more people. That can only be a good thing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, if you think back, that's a very good point. If you think back to when you and I were working in telecom together, we didn't realize at the time, because we were so focused on work If we had improved our diet we might have been able to avoid some of these outcomes, but certainly within the period in which we had made better food choices, we would have had more energy, we would have had more clarity and we would have been able to handle the stress better. We would not have got the same stress response, the cortisol increase in our bloodstream, et cetera, and once again, that would have shown up in our blood results. But clearly it did not. You and I both, probably around the same time, got the same uncomfortable results.
Speaker 3:So I think it's a great thing that she's recognized it, that you both are talking about something I think is pretty unique. I mean, you started this conversation by saying your doctor wasn't interested in doing anything, and this was before you were trained. You know, with your training you're still the same person. You just have validation and verification of data that you were looking at previously. So I think that's a great start and in that practice of what you were doing previously, did you explore at any time the impacts of intermittent fasting, for instance, as an approach? Because so far we've talked about keto carnivore, we've talked about you getting exercise, so did you look into that at all?
Speaker 2:Yes, so this may just be an inevitable place to end up when changing the diet. So I think people have a general understanding about sugar and insulin. Carbs turn into sugar in the body, glucose and fructose, and some turn into sugar quicker than others. Ultra-processed foods are going to be quicker than vegetables or fruits, for example, in most cases, and so one of the problems with this and this is the thing that I try to explain to people who are going through health issues is when you do have a high carb diet whether that comes in the form of ultra processed foods or just carbs in general rice potatoes or the box in the middle of the grocery store your body is going to have to deal with that sugar. We haven't got a lot of sugar in our body, and if we have another teaspoon of sugar, it can be potentially deadly, and so the body has to be very good at dealing with that sugar. And so my understanding of the process is when sugar levels go up in the body, whether that's through direct sugar intake or carbs converted into glucose through direct sugar intake or carbs converted into glucose, the body needs to store that glucose. It can't have that glucose running through the bloodstream, and so what insulin does is it knocks on the cell wall and says, hey, let this glucose in so it can be stored as energy. Well, of course, if you do that too many times, not only are those cells going to get larger, and that's where you know gaining weight. That 50 pounds that I lost, almost all of it was fat. I've got to scale the difference between water, fat and muscle, and so the vast majority was fat. I think I went from 27% body fat to something like 13% over that sort of 12 to 16 months, and so what happens is, over time, your cells get insulin resistant. They just don't have the ability to store that glucose anymore, and so what happens is that glucose ends up in the bloodstream, which is not good for us.
Speaker 2:Inevitable end result to that is potentially being diagnosed with diabetes, but certainly a number of other autoimmune disorders. It's not limited to diabetes. There's all sorts of autoimmune disorders that can be caused by excess glucose, and I'm certainly not here to give any medical advice, but one of the things that I do know is when I have a high carb diet, I have an insulin spike. It certainly is stressful, both hyperglycemia, which is too much sugar in the body, hypoglycemia, which is not enough. You're all of a sudden hungry.
Speaker 2:I would get hungry two hours later. And so you know, you eat the chips and you're quote unquote full. You're not actually full because you didn't have any actual food that your body needs. And your body says two hours later I'm starving, you got to get out there, and that's a stressor. It's, you know, releasing stressors like cortisol into the body to say you need, essentially, to say you need to go hunt, because that's the way people ate for hundreds of thousands of years before you know our new sort of standard American diet, and so it's sending stresses to the body that the body is in trouble, it needs to eat, and so this becomes a vicious cycle where you're eating food that's not nutritious, the body doesn't have the nutrition that it needs to repair itself and to feel satiated, and so two hours later you're eating more, and oftentimes that comes from a box or a bag or something very quick. My go-to is peanut butter sandwiches or whatever else I can get my hands on when I switch to more high satiety foods.
Speaker 2:Take a steak, for example, because that's an easy one. When I ate a steak, I wouldn't feel hungry for a long time. My buddies and I would go to a Korean barbecue, for example, and they were very interested in my journey. They thought I was a bit weird, but they were interested in kind of what I'd learned and I said well, you know, here's an example we're having Korean barbecue, which is, you know, you sort of cook the meat that they bring to the table in a fire in the middle of the table, and it's a great way to have a conversation and be able to sort of cook around the campfire, for lack of a better description. And so I said you know, one of the things that's going to happen is we're going to eat a lot of this beef or meat and we will likely not be hungry until maybe noon tomorrow. And you know they're the ones that would get up in the morning and, you know, be starving and want to eat right away, and often that would be a breakfast cereal or something like that. And I said so you know, pay attention to your gut and your brain. Your brain is going to, you know, want those carbs because it craves it, and maybe because the gut microbiome is communicating from the vagus nerve that that's what they want. But your body has actually got the nutrients that it needs from that meal, and not only the nutrients but the building blocks to fixing the, repairing the body. And the secret here is, then, because you can intermittent fast. So I'll eat at 6 pm and I won't eat until maybe noon the next day. That's an 18-hour fast. And so with that 18-hour fast my body has time to repair itself. It's got all the nutrition it needs. It's not telling me that I'm hungry, it's not telling me to go, you know, eat that peanut butter sandwich or anything else I can get my hands on. And so the intermittent fasting just comes naturally. So now I might eat late morning. I'll eat sort of an early dinner, 5 to 6 pm, and those are the only two meals that I eat a day.
Speaker 2:And, stephen, one of the biggest things that has been a surprise to me is I'm never hungry anymore. You know, the tummy growling was a common thing for me. I don't remember the last time my stomach growled. I just I feel I don't feel hungry. Oftentimes, when it's mealaltime I sort of will almost forget and go. Okay, maybe I should have some dinner. There have been days where I just haven't been hungry and skipped dinner and have felt totally fine. Most days I don't. Most days I'll eat enough to get the nutrients that I need and the macros that I need to keep going. But the fact that I don't feel hungry also means that I don't have those stressor signals and because I don't have those stressor signals, my body's not screaming to me to go do something, to go feed itself, and because of that I think I've been significantly calmer than I have in the past. So the intermittent fasting thing has come naturally, but it is something that I have practiced daily for the last 18 months or so.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's a great approach and that's where there's a good contrast, because Dr Fung pretty much is considered one of the pioneers, if not the pioneer, for intermittent fasting. They call him the diet doctor. But his story, graham, he talks about people coming in getting sicker and sicker with the insulin injections that they were getting. Their kidneys were failing. They were still 400 pounds. I mean, his story is amazing.
Speaker 3:His was one of the first books I read, certainly another resource to consider how you engage in dealing with the keto flu, how you start cutting your calories in a very tactical way and not unlike how you were counting calories, which in essence, he's doing through the process of restrictive eating in a particular window called the 16-8, where you fast for 16 hours. And it's interesting perhaps because you weren't focused on it, it was a consequence of your approach rather than the central theme. You didn't experience what probably I did when I employed intermittent fasting, where you do get these cravings and you're dealing with shedding the sugar in your body. That is, you know, many people call an addiction. It's a form of addiction because your body's dysbiotic bacteria will be attracted to these sugars and we know that there are plenty of content that's out there that suggests that other problems beyond metabolic syndrome cancer, in my case, type 2 diabetes these are all things that are contributing that stem back to the same point of inception, and that point of inception is the quality of food that we're consuming and the way in which we do it. And I point of inception is the quality of food that we're consuming and the way in which we do it, and I think it's really insightful that you've had this experience.
Speaker 3:Your journey is different than mine and what's super cool about that is, you know you found your way up to the peak of health and my path is somewhat different, but the main ingredients are there, you know the ice pick, the proper hiking shoes, the commitment to hit the summit.
Speaker 3:They're effectively the same, and I mean you really began this program by saying that. You know everyone has to find their own path and, if we use the analogy of the mountain, you have your path, I have my path. They're all valid and I think you would probably agree that one of the challenges that our listeners may find and maybe you can answer this yourself from your own perspective but how difficult did you find determining what was true and what was either a misrepresentation or a misunderstanding, either based on antiquated mindsets. Like you know, just as a footnote, in Canada we were still using the same food guide from the Second World War up until a few years ago, so they were still telling you how big your plate needed to be with potatoes and other starches. So, with that in mind, how did you I think you touched on earlier that you know you've employed these methods and then seen the results through your blood work and other factors but when you were initially running into, as I did, contradictory information, how did you determine what was right and what was wrong?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that is part of why this is so difficult is the amount of time that's required to do the research to you know, to end up with the truth, or at least what I believe the truth to be. And so, for example, I remember Googling is red meat bad for you? So, for example, I remember Googling is red meat bad for you? And I'm listening to people say it's not, and I've always believed that it can cause problems. I don't know to the extent, but we've certainly been told for a long time, ever since I was a kid, not to eat red meat. So I Googled this and, sure enough, it comes up saying red meat can cause heart disease. And so I actually clicked on the link. And then I clicked on the study, and then I read the study, which is not something that I would have done in the past. I just would have believed whatever the Google doctor told me. And so, as I'm reading the study, I get to the conclusions, and the conclusions say processed meat, not red meat, may cause heart disease. And this was an eye-opener for me, because the Google results said it did cause heart disease. Now the results may have changed. I haven't checked them in the last you know 18 months or so, but at the time the results said yes, red meat was bad for you. When I read the study, it said it wasn't. And I thought, okay, what's going on?
Speaker 2:And the more I listened, the more I was able to separate what was science-based, based on actual studies. And when I say actual studies, I mean randomized control studies, not the epidemiological studies where you're asked you know what have you eaten for the last year? And you can see all sorts of flaws with these epidemiological studies based on opinions. You know healthy user bias. Most people don't remember what they did eat, you know a week ago, much less six months ago, and what they were associating. So they would call pizza meat or they would call a hamburger meat versus the French fries, the pop, the condiments which are full of sugar and the bun. Um, you know, maybe it wasn't the red meat, maybe it was everything else that, uh, that they were packing me in on on that meal.
Speaker 2:And just over time I started to listen to things that made sense, that I was finally able to understand the, that the full-backed science was very different than the belief system that we have out there. And I remember there was a moment where I heard the story or the background to why we believe that red meat is bad for us. And this was the story of two people Ellen G White and Ansel Keys. Ellen G White I believe this was in the late 1800s. She was a Seventh-day Adventist. Certainly I don't know a lot about the Seventh-day Adventists, but she had an epiphany, I believe, when she was 18, where she was told by somebody perhaps God that red meat caused lust in men and it was her responsibility to stop men from consuming or people from consuming red meat. And so she wrote a book about this, and her typesetter the person who actually put the letters on the printing press, was a young man named Kellogg. I believe he was 12 years old at the time, so of course, he understood this book extremely well because he was one of the people who had actually got it into print. Well, he ended up being Dr Kellogg, who had an interesting career, and certainly is a big reason why people eat breakfast cereals today. Graham was another person, graham Cracker, who had recommended that we don't eat red meat anymore. Even to this day, the Seventh-day Adventists are one of the biggest funders of food research and, coincidentally, their food research always tells us that red meat's bad for us without any basis for making that claim. The second person, ansel Keyes, was, and of course, battle Creek, michigan, is where a huge majority of the breakfast cereals come out today, and I personally don't believe that breakfast cereals are healthy for me, but it's certainly a major part of people's diets today.
Speaker 2:With Ansel Keys, I started to look into him. This was in the 50s and 60s. He was sort of had a very similar role to Anthony Fauci does today, or at least he did until he retired and he came up with. His theory was that red meat causes heart disease and he looked at countries that had rising rates of heart disease and rising rates of red meat consumption and he was absolutely convinced that red meat causes heart disease and he wanted to prove this. He set out to prove it, so he came out with something called the Seven Country Study. That Seven Country Study showed a correlation between red meat consumption and heart disease, between red meat consumption and heart disease. The problem was there were actually around 21 countries that he studied and he left 14 or 15 of those countries off the list and only showed the countries that showed a correlation. And again, just a correlation, no study for causation.
Speaker 2:He went to the National Institute of Health or a similar body to that at the time and he said we should be recommending that we ban red meat. And there was a lot of reluctance, is my understanding, with the scientists and doctors around this panel saying we need to study this first. Well, shortly after that, eisenhower had a heart attack and Ancel Keys said see, you know it is causing heart disease and very quickly people moved to recommend that they don't eat red meat anymore. So there was no basis for making this claim, other than somebody wanted to show this. Now my understanding is, interestingly, when Ancel Keys was in his 90s, so you know, many, many, many years later he finally admitted that it does not cause heart disease. But the so-called damage was done.
Speaker 2:So people absolutely believe that it did. Red meat consumption has been for my entire life, has been on the decline and health problems have increased over that same amount of time. And so you know, there was that moment I guess that's a long way of saying there was that moment where I realized that what I believed about food was no longer true and at the same time I was very frustrated with what I'd been told in the past, whether it's through messaging from recommended guidelines or whether it's messaging on the front of the box with the Heart Healthy logo. I was realizing the whole time I was believing something that wasn't true and I had to find my own truth out. And once I had that clarity where I wasn't going to listen to the sort of public domain of education and I was going to do my own research and I was going to figure out what worked for me, it was at that moment where I realized I can do this, I can take responsibility for this, I can take a leadership role in my own health. I don't need to listen to anybody else. I'm going to get to the bottom of it.
Speaker 2:And sure it took well over a thousand hours of research, reading reports, reading research articles, getting to the bottom of some of these truths or lack of truths and getting to a point where I was totally satisfied that red meat is not only not bad for us but actually has probably the most nutritious food that we can ingest in our bodies the perfect nutrition to not only keep us satiated, give us all the building blocks that we need to be healthy. And I think the journey really started to become more fun from there, when I was able to find my own truths about these different foods and the fact that you know eggs are not only not bad for us but an excellent source of nutrients. Once you get to the bottom of the nutrients and you start to track them and you're satisfied that what you're ingesting gives you everything that you need, I think that's the point where you start to feel like you're in control again. No-transcript on.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think that's very interesting and there's a few things I'd like to highlight from your comments, and I'm really glad that you spoke to the fact that you know, this is an era when people smoke to relax.
Speaker 3:I mean the commercials, even in that period suggested as such. So when you're doing these epidemiological studies, which are essentially opinions of what people may or may not remember they're not double blind studies, so not particularly valid and you're using, or they could be questionable, they may be valid, but that's probably more coincidence than it is anything else. But when you look at that era, they would not have taken those factors under consideration. And you know, years later we learned that there was lead in the water. There was other factors that contributed to the decline in their health that could have caused the same medical outcome. So that's one Number two.
Speaker 3:What's interesting too is it clearly highlights something that you and I talked about offline before, is it clearly highlights something that you and I talked about offline before, and that is you know, you can't say, well, I'm going to eat a little bit of this and only a little bit of that, and that little thing that's not so good for me, it's not a big deal because I'm eating mostly this, and those kinds of comparisons don't work because you just, as you pointed out, they're having the hamburger, which the hamburger in and of itself is not an issue.
Speaker 3:It's the bun that causes the sugar spike, with the condiments that are full of sugar, that exceed the entire amount of sugar that's in your body in that tiny little packet that your body doesn't require. That ends up with a net result in statistics saying well, the guy had a hamburger or the gal and they ate red meat, so ergo, red meat's bad. It doesn't cover the fact that that person may be chain smoking, may be consuming large amounts of alcohol, etc. And that's really, I think, an important distinction that you were able to graph from that analysis is that there's comparison bias there. You know they're assuming that let's go prove that meat is bad and you know any number of important factors are being outright ignored because it doesn't fit the hypothesis and that's not a standard scientific approach.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's interesting you bring up the smoking. I believe Eisenhower was a two or three pack a day smoker, but of course they didn't blame the heart attack on smoking, but they found another reason to blame.
Speaker 3:Same with FDR. Same with FDR. I mean, as you know, he was a prolific smoker. I mean they even show movies to this day, when he always had a cigarette in his hand and had all kinds of pulmonary issues.
Speaker 2:Right, you know, I think we're about the age where we can last remember the doctors recommending a certain kind of cigarette brand on TV, and that was quickly scrapped. What's interesting and I highly recommend people look into this is those cigarette companies realized that the gig was up and their business model was. You know, their product was actually causing health concerns. Their business model was at risk, and what did these cigarette companies do? They bought up the big food companies, and so you can do the math from there.
Speaker 2:We now are as sick as we've ever been with the foods we eat, and, of course, the same companies are claiming that it's not their food. It must be something else, like red meat, when red meat has never been consumed less. And so I wonder if the food companies are now looking at this, saying there's a limited amount of time before people understand that carbs are causing the problems that people are experiencing. Most of the people that I know that have gone to low-carb diets have all seen improvements in their health At some point. You just can't ignore those, and no question, one of the biggest problems is they are addictive.
Speaker 2:Sugars, you know, some claim more addictive than cigarettes. I have no doubt that that is the case for some or for many, and so you're not only dealing with an addiction like sugar, but you're dealing with an issue, unlike cigarettes, where people need food. They don't need cigarettes or alcohol. So in many cases it's going to be more difficult for people to give up their food habits, because not only is food required for us to live, but most of the center of the grocery store is going to feed that addiction.
Speaker 3:That's a really good point because you know, as you and I've learned and we talked about this offline as well is when you go to the grocery store and you see what people have in their cars, it's soul crushing because you know that they would probably make the same choices you're making if they were better informed and had the opportunity to do their own research. And I mean, I really think that's where you and I decided to do this podcast is to get the word out and say, hey, this is what's working for us. You might want to try it.
Speaker 3:We don't have any bias.
Speaker 3:We don't have any representations that are coming through purveyors of red meat or poultry or dairy products at all.
Speaker 3:It's just two guys that found themselves where a lot of Canadians and Americans are finding themselves quite sick and going, okay, what do I do? And when they turn to their doctor in some cases not all, because we pointed to some that were quite good it's worthy to point out that a doctor goes to school for four years of medical training and only here in Canada at least only gets one week of nutritional training. And now you're focusing entirely on nutritional training in order to generate better outcomes and help people maneuver around the quality of the food that they're consuming, not just the type, and I think that's an important distinction we need to make is are you comparing, as you said, ultra-processed meat? That's very different than a grass-fed, grain-finished steak that's coming from your local butcher as opposed to an industrial farm. So these are certainly things that we can get into and we're going to continue to talk about you and I over the coming weeks and months, and I think we're at 60 minutes and I don't know, graham, if you wanted to stop it there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll just say one last thing, because you brought up such an excellent point. I was sitting around with some friends I'm lucky enough to have some good friends that I've known for, you know, 35 plus years, in one case 42 years, and I was sitting around with five of them and of course, you know, we rib each other, we know each other better than anybody. And I remember eating the hamburger patties, just the hamburger patties, and everyone else was eating, you know, fries, whatever, and I don't care what people eat. But of course somebody said you know, graham, that is a really weird way to eat. And you know, tongue in cheek, I had to remind them that two of them were diabetic and on Ozempic, one was pre-diabetic on Ozempic and one was. The other one was having real autoimmune disorder, like a really experiencing an autoimmune disorder, and I pointed this out and I said, guys, my blood work is excellent, I just got it, had it done, you know, a month or two ago at the time. And what was interesting is they all knew that the food they ate was causing the problems. But they all said I couldn't give up this or I couldn't give up that, whatever it is ice cream, some particular food.
Speaker 2:And I think one of the things that is eye-opening to me is, in the past, if there was a bag of chips in front of me, I would eat them, almost any flavor and you name it. Whatever snack it was, if it was sitting in front of me, I would eat it. And the difference today is, with a change in the way that I eat, I don't actually consider those foods food anymore. When I look at it, I don't think of it as food and it's a very strange thing to explain to people. I'm sure a bit of it is. You know, the gut's not craving that stuff anymore. It's craving high satiety foods.
Speaker 2:But one of the things about this journey is by adjusting the way you eat, it can actually change the cravings. And if you can change the cravings, then that thing that you thought you can't give up you don't need to give up anymore or you've given up. You know most of the foods that can be a problem and you just haven't given up that one thing. And keto is all about keeping your carbs down to a certain amount. It doesn't mean eliminating the carbs altogether. Just wanted to touch on that because it certainly was an eye-opener to me that now if somebody's eating a bag of chips next to me. I don't even want one. It's just not something that I think about and that's not something that I expected. So, yes, let's wrap it up there, stephen, always a pleasure. We will see you in the next episode, where you are going to be the one interviewing, and I can't wait.
Speaker 3:That sounds great. Yeah, thank you, all right.
Speaker 2:Thanks everybody.
Speaker 1:Thanks for tuning into Lessons from the Ketoverse. Join Stephen and Graham next time for more keto tips and stories to fuel your health. Subscribe, share and let's keep the keto vibes going.