Lessons from the Ketoverse

Graham Interviews Stephen. The Truth About Diet That Changed Our Lives Forever (pt 2)

• Graham • Season 1 • Episode 2

Share episode

What happens when a former military officer who thought he was the epitome of health receives a devastating Type 2 diabetes diagnosis while standing in a gym? Stephen's powerful story reveals the shocking moment his doctor told him he had "the second worst diagnosis possible" that would cut 13-17 years off his life expectancy.

Despite working out 5-6 days a week, Stephen's health was failing him. His journey from denial to determination unfolds as he shares how traditional medications left him with debilitating side effects—spending 20 hours a day in constant pain and contemplating whether life was worth living under those conditions.

The turning point came through extensive personal research and self-experimentation with the ketogenic and carnivore approaches. Stephen reveals his most profound discoveries: how stress alone can spike blood glucose levels even during fasting, the remarkable effectiveness of a simple 10-minute walk in normalizing blood sugar, and why his previous vegetarian and vegan diets were actually worsening his condition.

Through continuous glucose monitoring, Stephen gained unprecedented insights into his body's responses. He shares the exact moments of clarity that transformed his understanding of nutrition—discovering that starch is fundamentally sugar, that his afternoon energy crashes weren't inevitable signs of aging, and that mental clarity could return after years of brain fog.

For anyone struggling with metabolic health issues or seeking to optimize their wellness, this episode offers practical strategies backed by both science and lived experience. From navigating social situations to building an effective health support system, Stephen's military-honed discipline combines with compassionate wisdom to provide a roadmap for sustainable health transformation.

Listen now to discover how one man reclaimed his health against seemingly impossible odds, and what advice he would give his younger self if he could travel back in time with the knowledge he has today.

Speaker 1:

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:

And welcome to another episode of Lessons from the Keto-Verse. I am here with my friend Stephen In the last episode of Lessons from the Keto-Verse. I am here with my friend Stephen. In the last episode of Lessons from the Keto-Verse, stephen actually asked me a series of questions just to get to know your hosts. This time I am fortunate enough to be able to ask Stephen some questions about his background, how he was able to get to where he is today, the achievements and a little bit of background as to how he started that journey, stephen welcome.

Speaker 3:

Thanks very much, Graham. Thanks for having me on.

Speaker 2:

All right, let's jump into the first question. So general question for you, stephen. Tell us a little bit about your background.

Speaker 3:

Sure, so let's begin at the end as opposed to the beginning. I'm a 58-year-old male and I am a type 2 diabetic, and so how that came about was approximately seven, seven, eight years ago Actually on my birthday I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, and the remarkable thing at the time, graham, was I was actually at the gym when I took the call and the nurse said could you perhaps add some additional training? You're going to need to get more exercise. And my response was did they add an extra day to the week? Because it was clearly impossible. I was already working out five, six days a week. So I was kind of in shock.

Speaker 3:

I had precursors, like the progression of the illness initially was pre-diabetic. I didn't think anything of it. I just thought that, well, you know what I'm stressed, it's just a bad blood result, and I kind of dismissed it. But when I was a full diabetic, I believe at the time, my A1C came back and I was in the high nines or tens, I think my initial one was about 9.3 or 9.5. So as a consequence, they put me on metformin gram and the journey really from the progression of the illness and realizing how serious it was Because you can imagine sitting with your doctor and your doctor informing you Stephen, you have the second worst diagnosis I can give any of my patients, second only to cancer. This is the situation you can expect to cut in your life expectancy between 13 and 17 years, which was a shock At the time.

Speaker 3:

Cut in your life expectancy between 13 and 17 years, which was a shock At the time. I could hear the words coming out of her mouth but I wasn't really processing. So from that, graham, we go back in time when I was always very active in sports, always very engaged in my corporate career, was a single father raising three kids, and so this was all really a shock to me. Candidly, and as a former military officer in the Canadian Forces, which is where my career began, I always had a can-do, must-do attitude and did spend a lot of time focusing on me. It was know your people and promote their welfare. So I was always looking out for other people without understanding that I had to cultivate and care for myself the same way as I was expected to for others, and I didn't do a particularly good job of that or I wouldn't have got that diagnosis.

Speaker 2:

Excellent, and one of the many things I admire about you, stephen, is your service, your military service, something that we've talked a lot about and I know is a big part of your life. So thank you very much for your service. Thank you, I know it's a big part of your life.

Speaker 2:

So, thank you very much for your service. Thank you, you know and I think we mentioned in the last episode that you and I worked very closely together at a startup, a billion dollar startup, building a wireless company, and it was go, go, go, work your butt off and have some fun in between. And you were always there to keep me a bit insane, keep me sane from the insanity as well as give me a laugh often. And one of the things I remember about you is you were always the healthy guy you were. You know if you weren't at the gym, you were looking after your health, and you know a lot of people out there are. You know they feel healthy. They certainly work towards maintaining or keeping and maintaining their health. How did it make you feel, knowing that you were one of those people that other people looked up to as a healthy individual, but inside you were realizing that that wasn't the case?

Speaker 3:

That's. You know, it's kind of like having imposter syndrome in a way, because I didn't know people perceived me that way. I saw pictures that you know my brother had taken for family and went you know who's the guy with the pot belly. You know, meanwhile I was probably going in the gym wearing clothing that most people would have said why is that guy wearing that? Because I thought I was in better shape than I actually was. I believed it didn't really matter what I ate, I'm in the gym, I'll burn it off at the gym. I look gym, I'll burn it off at the gym. I look great, I feel great.

Speaker 3:

And the reality was that just simply wasn't true. Because if you looked at what was going on in my life at the time, I had persistent, uncontrolled IBS. That was obviously a result of my elevated sugar. Unfortunately, with the military I also have PTSD that exacerbated that stress that you so well and eloquently described, that both of us experienced at work. I thrived on that, so I thought, but perhaps the adrenaline of that, the excitement of being able to build the first telecom company in decades where we live, I guess in some way overshadowed the effects it was having on my body, the negative effects and these symptoms I think for a lot of people sneak up on you All of a sudden. You're like oh you know, maybe I'm just not feeling well today.

Speaker 3:

Oh, I had stopped on the way to work and find a public washroom because I felt so unwell. Oh, I'm breaking out into cold sweat driving. I must be stressed out from the traffic and meanwhile I'm literally having a diabetic reaction to extremely high sugar, which at the time I wasn't wearing a CGM. They didn't even exist, at least not as pervasively as they are now. So, graham, I was just flat out in denial and unaware. I just assumed well, I'm. I'm just one of those guys that you know. I react to certain foods. So I tried going on a diet and not eating any bread, thinking that perhaps I was celiac. My tests came back. They were negative. I was really kind of lost and again, because I was so focused, like you, on our respective careers and making sure other people were taken care of and we're always the last in the line to worry about how do I take care of Graham, how do I take care of Stephen? So I just got more and more ill, to the point where it was very clear that there was something wrong.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and I want to elaborate on something you just talked about, which is the relationship with food. You get this diagnosis from the doctor. Obviously, it's very scary. A lot of things are going through your mind, no doubt how you know maybe you can talk about from the moment you left that doctor's office. How did your relationship with food change over the journey and I know it's likely been about two years now or so how has your relationship with food changed from the moment you left the doctor's office to a much healthier version of yourself today?

Speaker 3:

Well, first of all, I think everyone's journey is unique to them and I'm happy to share my experience. But I do want to point out that I'm not a doctor. The advice that I was given by the doctor at one point, when my blood results returned to normal they were unaware that I came off metformin because I was so sick on metformin my quality of life was literally making me contemplate suicide. I don't say that lightly. That's how sick I was. I spent 20 hours a day in constant abdominal pain. I couldn't leave the house. My life was an absolute disaster, so I had no recourse. I could either succumb to the symptoms and be angry all the time. I was angry at the kids. I was short-tempered because I was in so much pain. The metformin made me feel like I ate glass and I believe it must have stacked on top of already the inflammation that was in my body, the irritable bowel syndrome that I clearly had and there is some history of that in the family the anxiety I was beginning to feel like I couldn't even travel to work without worrying about am I going to need to find a washroom? And I'm sure there's a lot of people out there with IBS. It's not a joke. It's a very degrading, demoralizing feeling. You just get out and you're like, oh my God, I just left the house, I'm going to have to return to the house, and that happened numerous times to me.

Speaker 3:

So instead of just saying this is how it's going to be, I started doing research, and that research started to give me hope. And that hope directed me to even more research where people who were further along the path than me whether they were type 1 or type 2, whether they had IBS, PTSD, all of the above there was strong indicators that there was a path that wasn't just strictly to be on pharmaceuticals. So what I started doing in that research is discovering the power of eating the right food at the right time. I discovered Dr Fung's work around intermittent fasting. He's a Toronto nephrologist that struggled with his patients who were unable to recover from the consequences of stage four diabetes, which is they're starting to have renal failure, and it was very frustrating for him. So he discovered, in essence, from his own research how effective intermittent fasting could even be for people who were literally on dialysis to at least extend their life. They weren't necessarily going to get their kidneys back. So that gave me hope, Graham, because I didn't have at that time any strong indicators for my kidneys being out of whack. I likely had something that we now know as non-alcoholic fatty liver, so I started researching that. I started consuming a lot of water with lemons In that period.

Speaker 3:

What inspired me to do that was, for the very first time in my life, I ended up having kidney stones, and as a person of 58 years, that is definitely one of the most painful experiences of my life. I've had plenty of injuries, but that one was certainly one of the worst. So I have not had in the last eight years any kidney stone recurrence whatsoever. Regimen of beginning, just as you said, this continuous improvement process where you know, I initially started doing research and then I tried even being vegan vegetarian for a while. After vegan vegetarian didn't work as well as I had hoped, I tried to find other methods and methodologies, which in turn, led you and I in the same place, as you said from our previous discussion, which was directly into keto, carnivore and let's dive into the idea of keto carnivore.

Speaker 2:

So the ketogenic diet is something where our macros are carbs, protein and fat. All foods can be put into one of those categories. The ketogenic diet puts an emphasis on protein and fat and a de-emphasis on carbs. If you think about your journey as it relates to the nutritional science that you investigated by yourself, you took things into your own hands. You wanted to do your own investigation. You were, I think, like me, tired of relying on the sort of standard American diet advice or the advice that you might see in a magazine, and to getting more granular. Were there some surprising things that you uncovered as you got into the macros around carbs, protein and fat?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it's amazing when you find out that starch is a sugar. Sugar is starch. They're the same thing. There's no such thing as good sugar. We only have, I believe, a matter of like three grams.

Speaker 3:

I heard from one expert of sugar in our entire bloodstream. So when you look at a can of soda and I'm not going to name any, but a can of soda and you find 31 grams of sugar in just that one can, I mean that's pretty easy to research. That's usually where most of us start. But the aha moments come later, when you start realizing that that spaghetti you had is also turning into sugar. For me, that was incredible, and so the progression of understanding what my body was doing and I mean you've highlighted this before is stay out of the middle of the grocery, stay to the ends, where you'll find the keto carnivore foods, the fresh produce if you're keto and obviously high select meats and the other sections. We're not talking about ultra processed foods at all and I achieved a certain level of A1C. It started to decline. I'd lost 50 pounds over the course of a few years. I got back down to the weight I was, and for our folks at home.

Speaker 2:

A1c is the sugar level in your body.

Speaker 3:

That's right. So the A1C is an average of what your sugar has done over the last 90 days, and some people may say well, why is it 90 days? The reason is that our red blood cells refresh approximately every 90 days, so in that 90-day period you're getting a nice graph of exactly where your sugar is sitting. It's not absolute, and I do think it's unfortunate that we don't measure insulin to start testing for insulin resistance, because by the time your sugar's out of whack, people also have insulin resistance to address and we could probably pick that up in a future podcast. We can talk a bit more tactically about the strategies, but again, these were all things that you and I learned in the process of our research and, with the added benefit of seeing the results, with the CGM, I could dial in right away and go okay, well, that strategy didn't work for me. Were there other underlying factors? Yeah, I was trying to eat that when I was stressed, while I was taking my kids to some activity, which caused a hyper state where my body really wasn't interested in food. But I just ate it, as you said, because we've been told, as part of this industrialized revolution, that we must eat three times a day when our forefathers did not. So if you don't feel like eating, you're not going to perish from skipping lunch or skipping dinner. So if your body's under duress, it's already trying to deal with a certain level of stress. It's not unreasonable to perhaps stick to a broth, a nice beef broth, something very healthy, lots of nutrients, and your body won't be craving potassium and sodium because you're putting it in there. And what's remarkable about that? As we talk about what we consume. Going back to your earlier question, what I was amazed is all my cravings went away, and those cravings disappeared because I wasn't consuming these addictive sugars that were unbeknownst to me. I didn't know at the time. This came in my later research and you now see this is very common now in news briefs that not only will some of the foods we consume raise our level of depression and anxiety, but it'll actually create an addiction similar to other things like cigarettes and alcohol.

Speaker 3:

Where we will, our body will crave that sugar after a meal. And the reason for that and you and I've discussed this before is because you're not eating a satiating meal where you feel full. Your brain's sending a signal to the body, body's back to the brain saying hey, tell this guy to eat some more, because you know it's 20 minutes after his Chinese food and he's hungry again. Why? Because there's rice in it. The rice turns to sugar Sugar and again, whether it's cane sugar or sugar that your body turns starches into, is still sugar.

Speaker 3:

So what that does is cause a massive elevation, or what they call a spike, in your sugar. That's your spot glucose measure, not your A1c. But you get enough of those and that trend line that you're having daily with those spikes and those valleys are going to raise your A1c over the 90 days. The valleys and those spikes are what creates hunger. That's why sometimes, when we weren't eating well, you know you eat a bagel. That's all sugar. It's. Basically you might as well just eat cake. It's going to have the same consequence in terms of your sugar. Two hours after you eat it, you're as hungry as a bear again, whereas if you eat a keto carnivore diet, like you and I do, I can eat three or four eggs in the morning with healthy bacon with no nitrites in it, and I really honestly don't need to eat again until the evening you mentioned three really important letters there.

Speaker 2:

Cgm, which is a continuous glucose monitor, something that interestingly, I believe in the US has. They're now making it available to people, I believe over the counter, but certainly through insurance companies. Canada has been a little bit further along as far as allowing people to take some control over their body's response to certain foods. You've had a CGM for quite some time now. Are there some things that really surprised you about wearing a CGM, being able to get that instant feedback on the impact certain foods have on your body in particular and how that has changed the way you eat over time?

Speaker 3:

First of all, I'm so grateful for these wearable technologies. I really am, and I have no affiliation whatsoever with the particular model that I wear. I've had great success with it. So the success is really derived from watching it and realizing okay, I just had a meal and everything looks good. I had because I know that it's heart healthy, 90% cocoa chocolate, with a huge pound of natural peanut butter that's on top of it and it will cause a spike, a slight spike, because there's microns of sugar that's in that. That's on top of the steak that I just had, which in turn, is on top of the salad which they call stacking.

Speaker 3:

So I'd have my salad and if I'm doing keto, I'd have my salad and then my meat, and then I would add something that's that's still full of fats, like, for instance, yogurt with a few blueberries or that sort of thing on it. So I'm getting the um, the phtonutrients, lacing it with flaxseed, chia seed and all these other things, so that I can address the other issue which I had had, obviously exacerbated by a high sodium, high ultra processed diet, which was I started to have endometriosis forming in my colon, and that's basically for those and that's, I guess, extremely bad for most people it's just a series of malformities in the colon that kind of look like wrinkles, and that type of diet can also cause polyps, which I also had. So I was looking at ways, obviously at the time, to understand what's going on with my IBS.

Speaker 3:

Well, I've since had another test, and I'm completely clear of that, which is all a result of the keto diet yes, thank you, after going out on the keto carnivore diet and adding when I'm on the keto and when I say keto it's not like I'm saying I do three months of keto, I just want to clarify or three months of carnivore, I mix them to what I know my body wants. So, for instance, tonight I had a dental procedure that was quite traumatic. It was surgery and I didn't feel like trying to chew anything. That was too too hard. So I had a steak. But I buy the steak graham that is grass fed and grain finished from my butcher that literally I don't even need a knife, it just pulls apart. I could sufficiently eat that without causing a migraine from this severe root canal. That was done. So, consequently, I listened to what my body does. I looked at my sugar after I ate that and actually I want to footnote what I just said too, because I think it's important for the audience to understand.

Speaker 3:

After the procedure, I was under enormous duress in that procedure. It started to trigger my PTSD because I was starting to choke and I literally got up from the chair after an hour and 15 minutes, when I walked into the dental office, my sugar showed 6.1 and that was fasted. I hadn't eaten anything and this was approximately 10, 10 AM in the morning. What happened was after my procedure. It's now well into my intermittent fasting period where I would normally, if I am going to skip breakfast, I would start thinking about eating between 12 and 2 pm. Well, the sugar, which was not normal, was in the nines, like I had. My sugar was like 9.5. That was my spot glucose. So what that meant is the duress and the stress that was on my body from that procedure and I'm no longer insulin resistant. I'm technically no longer diabetic. I've reversed. My symptoms still showed a very strong diabetic response in the absence of the context.

Speaker 3:

So that's what I love about the CGM is because you can look at it and go right now. Is this a physiological reaction from working out in the gym? If you work out in the gym and you're raising your blood pressure and you're putting exertion on your muscles, you're working your muscles. You're going to see an elevation. That's a physiological reaction to the actual training, the same way as stress is. There's no problem with that. The issue is when it's systemic, inflammatory and constantly, constantly a part of your everyday, where your sugar is always up there. Not because of exercise, not for any other reason, but just pure, unadulterated stress.

Speaker 3:

And what I want to highlight is here's a perfect example where I was my own guinea pig in the hands of my dentist and seeing the net result to my body, which I could not obviously know if I wasn't wearing a CGM. So what did I do? I went for a walk for five to 10 minutes before I was picked up, on a cold day. Everything normalized because I was relaxed. It was a stressful situation. So that shows my metabolic flexibility, to quote Dave Asbury, my metabolic flexibility to go out of that situation.

Speaker 3:

Much like a gazelle will get chased by a lion in the safari it it's an amazing thing. After it gets chased and gets away from the lion, it'll stop starting to eat grass right, because it knows how to go flip between the sympathetic, parasympathetic, parasympathetic to sympathetic. Now we live our lives like we're being chased by lions all the time and, as a consequence, our bodies are in a constant state, inflammatory state. So what happens? And this is an interesting aspect of IBS and what was happening with me?

Speaker 3:

I get triggered because somebody cut me off on my way to work. That would cause my elevation in cortisol. So what happens then is my body goes there must be a lion chasing us and it pulls all that blood away from the digestive process into the muscles and the body will naturally go hey, whatever was there, we don't need it right now. We got more serious stuff going on. You're about to be eaten by a lion. Obviously, that's a metaphor that gives you some idea of the cycle that we get into. Then add on top of that frankenfoods that are consumed because they're quick, they're easy, you're on your way to work oh, I'll grab a bagel, I'll grab this, we'll grab that, and you're setting yourself up for failure. It's like that poor gazelle that's in the savannah having two of its legs tied together and still expected to run and to make it. It's not going to make it and that's eventually the compounding effect of this inflammation that we're absorbing.

Speaker 2:

And I think this is such a critical point and I think will be a surprise for a lot of people. You were in a fasted state. You also were well aware of, you know, the impact that foods had on your glucose levels. You were in a fasted state at the dentist and your blood glucose shot through the roof because of stress, not because of the food you ate and I think we will explore this in future podcasts. But I think this will be a surprise for a lot of people that it's not just about the food you eat, certainly in the moment, over time, but it's also your stress levels that can actually contribute to eventually ending up being a diabetic or some other health-related issues 100%.

Speaker 3:

I mean just using the military as a baseline. So let's go beyond me for a moment and take those of us who have served, who have seen terrible things, and that's certainly been a catalyst or fully attributed to PTSD or other issues, including IBS in my case. Well, it stands to reason that any form of stress, whether you're a first responder that would be firefighters, ambulance attendants, even doctors working in the merge you don't know what you're going to get when you're in those situations. So to your point. A great parallelism is I was up at 530 in the morning doing my meditation, practicing a form of hypnosis that's specifically engineered for PTSD and, ironically, a couple hours later, it didn't save me from the reality of what my body was experiencing in that moment. I'm not going to tell you that it wasn't painful, it was quite painful. The process itself was very unpleasant and I was in the hands of a 30-year veteran of doing exactly that kind of oral surgery. So she was excellent. It's just how my body reacted to it, and no amount in that moment of mindfulness, which I practice constantly, no amount of meditation, which I used to teach, was going to save my glucose from rising. So why is that important? It's because with the CGM, I can see it and I can create a resolution to cut the spike off by going for a walk, and I really want to zone in on that for a second.

Speaker 3:

So if you were to say, pick one thing, you could only do one thing. I will only allow you to do one thing to address the spike in your sugar. What would you pick? Would it be meds? Would it be a particular food? Would it be a particular supplement, like berberine? What would you do? Hands down.

Speaker 3:

I see it every single day because I do it as I jump on my elliptical. If the weather is nice enough I'm blessed to have a woodland property I'll go for a walk, either by myself or with the dogs, practicing mindfulness, grounding with nature, and immediately, within 25 minutes, my sugar will go down. Now what's interesting is it's starting to go down already anyway, almost immediately to your earlier point. But a CGM has a 15 minute delay, so you don't see the results of what it is you're doing until 15 minutes in, and it's remarkable. You can take anywhere from 50 to 75% of that spike out just by catching it before it goes up beyond what normally here is considered high, which is anything over 10. So typically after I do that, my sugar normalizes. It may go up a little bit after I've finished exercising because there is a physiological component. And keep in mind I'm not sprinting, I'm just doing a light walk or I'm just lightly walking an elliptical low impact I save just doing a light walk or I'm just lightly walking an elliptical low impact.

Speaker 3:

I save the high impact stuff for the gym, the low impact when I'm walking or doing that sort of thing, and it works wonders, better than metformin, better than any other even supplement that I've tried, because the impact is so obvious. And that even includes apple cider vinegar. A lot of people use apple cider vinegar. I use it every day, to the chagrin of my dentist. I do dilute it. Please make sure you do that with lemon and apple cider vinegar. Make sure you dilute it with enough water or you will start damaging your teeth. But the effects of that as well is quite significant.

Speaker 3:

I learned that actually from the glucose goddess, who is a I would call a celebrity of sorts on YouTube that speaks about stacking and the importance of ACV and she's a, I believe, a PhD microbiologist. So very, very smart lady and she's been on a lot of programs and I really admire her insights. Along with Dr Berg I also follow, and Dr Stan, who used to be an Olympian. He's a great resource for me, very matter-of-fact about things. So, again, it is a continuous improvement process. Graham, I always look at new research. You and I talk about it and then I get a chance to be my I guess my own scientific experiment. Because I'm willing to test. As long as it's not harmful to me physically, I'm willing to test to see how my body reacts to me physically. I'm willing to test to see how my body reacts Because, like David Asbury said, I want that metabolic flexibility, that responsiveness Fantastic.

Speaker 2:

And yeah, I love, when I'm listening to podcasts, being able to take something away and try it that day or the next day, and I certainly do the same thing.

Speaker 2:

I've dedicated myself to walking 10 kilometers a day.

Speaker 2:

The same thing, I've dedicated myself to walking 10 kilometers a day. It has been a huge benefit in me controlling my blood sugar as well. And, you know, right after a meal, going for a walk not only is fantastic for us, you know in general, but knowing that it actually has a fairly quick impact on our blood sugar can mean just walking if you change nothing else and obviously we encourage people to get rid of things like ultra-processed foods you can quite literally change the course of your health by doing something like a 20-minute, 25-minute walk after a meal, even if it's, you know, walking up and down the stairs, whatever it is getting on the elliptical, some kind of sustained, low-impact exercise is going to do wonders for our long-term blood sugar levels. I wanted to talk to you about the ketogenic carnivore diet and its impact on your mental health, and maybe you can relate this to your extensive military experience and why you think the ketogenic carnivore diet might benefit military personnel not only from a physical benefit, but also from a mental benefit. Maybe you can elaborate on your experience.

Speaker 3:

Sure. So, first of all, what I did notice when I was still eating ultra-processed foods and thinking I was healthy because I was on a vegetarian and vegan diet was brain fog. I had massive issues with brain fog. That clarity is so critical. When you're deployed in an environment hostile environment the last thing you want to have is any form of physical or mental impairment, because you need to be at your very best, because there's people on the other side that may not necessarily have your best interests in mind. If you don't mind me saying so, one of the key things that I believe would be helpful for the military, particularly on deployments.

Speaker 3:

Currently, what we typically consume is what in the US is called MREs and in Canada called IMPs, which stand for individual meal packs, and MREs are meals ready to eat. They're full of sodium, they have lots and lots of preservatives in them, naturally, because they can last for five or 10 years, and I think there's an application for that. Obviously, in the absence of eating anything, when you're in a particularly hostile situation and you may not get a chance to eat Otherwise, you're certainly not necessarily going to have access to fresh food. But it begs the question with all that you and I've learned from intermittent fasting. Perhaps it's not in their best interest to consume that the way that they do, particularly before an operation. Perhaps it's better.

Speaker 3:

I've noticed my mental acuity is much higher after having fasted all night in the mornings and I also know also as a military person is I would have rather preferred to wait for a good meal than consequences of either being on a plane or in the field and all of a sudden IBS or something else hits you. It could literally cost you your life, because you're now in a situation where you've got another factor that's contributing to your level of stress, which is your body's reaction. So certainly I wouldn't wish my post-military career these things set in for me the PTSD and the IBS in a much more significant way. I'm grateful at least that it didn't earlier, because that could have been quite risky for my well-being had it occurred in situations where there were hostilities.

Speaker 2:

And I think that's something that we are going to explore further in future podcasts. Absolutely, I, for one, know exactly what you're talking about when it comes to this sort of brain fog, the extent of that brain fog until you've gotten rid of it. That's when you really know how impactful that was to your day-to-day and that is certainly a major benefit of going down the path of a ketogenic or carnivore diet. I wanted to ask you, stephen, about staying on track. So you know you certainly tried a number of eating lifestyles, diets, whatever you want to call it. You settled on the ketogenic carnivore diet at this point. It has been working for you seemingly longer than any other type of lifestyle eating lifestyle that you've tried in the past.

Speaker 2:

How do you stay on track when it comes to the keto carnivore diet? You're going to have peer pressure. You're going to have holidays, which we just went through. You're going to have travel where, all of a sudden, you may be in less control over the foods that are in front of you. What are some of the things that you recommend our audience think about as it relates to staying on track when it comes to fixing your health? Yeah, that's something our audience think about as it relates to staying on track when it comes to fixing your health.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that's something that I think most of us will have to acknowledge can be a challenge, and the reason why it's a challenge is because the realities creep in. Your favorite aunt with the best cake on the planet shows up. It's her birthday. She wants to have a piece of cake. Well, have the piece of cake, or a very, very small piece of it, and say, look, I'd love to have more. Perhaps I'll save my extra half for you and kind of leave it at that.

Speaker 3:

When it comes to your question concerning travel, I simply fast. I don't go into airport situations with a full stomach. I just don't take the risk because I don't know how I'm going to react when I'm there, because they tend to be stressful situations in trouble these days, particularly post-COVID. So really, it fundamentally comes down to manage expectations around yourself and what your levels of tolerance are in the environment you're in Meaning. If you have a three-hour drive somewhere, it's probably not the best time to reintroduce foods that are candidly, demonstrably not good for you and just simply take a pass. I doubt that there's circumstances that warrant, as I would say, where you can be continuously pushed to eat certain foods, because in those circumstances it's been very rare People have said hey, you know, your nickname when you were a kid was Cake Face.

Speaker 3:

You always ate desserts. What's wrong with you? I said well, you know, you're absolutely correct. I love, love, love cake and pie and all those things, but I love my toes and my eyesight way more. So that's just the reality.

Speaker 3:

And I want to say something. I'm not superhuman. I'm human like everyone else, and there's always a certain amount of hubris in this process where you're like oh yeah, I read three research papers from longitudinal studies or metadata studies cross-sectioning a whack of different people that have contributed all respected researchers. This is great. I've reversed my diabetes, so I must be cured. So I'm going to go ahead and have that fast food burger somewhere and think everything's rosy. It is not.

Speaker 3:

I can tell you from personal experience with my CGM getting up in the middle of dinner with my wife and partner and saying I'm sorry, but you're going to have to ask the guy to hold that main meal because I've just had a beer my favorite beer and my sugar's gone to 15 and normal is four to six. So I've literally had to get up in a suit with dress shoes and walk around a big city around several blocks to try to get my sugar under control. So it's, candidly, just not worth it.

Speaker 3:

Because when we come back to the comment about brain fog, if you've experienced that and, as you said, you won't know necessarily what it's like until you don't have it anymore so when you feel it creeping back in because your sugar's too high, as an example, it's scary. It's really scary because you start thinking I don't want to feel this way again. It'd be the same thing as if you, graham, or me, just got over a stomach flu and then a week later I bring you over to my house and I say hey, you know what, graham, I made this perfect dish for you, but it is probably going to give you your stomach flu back. You'd say, no way, no how. So that's kind of how I look at it. It's not worth me putting a smile on your face when I'll be in a grimace for the next two hours.

Speaker 2:

Very well said. One of the things that I've certainly experienced I think a lot of people experience, and I know you and I have talked about this is this can be a lonely journey at times, because we are. Although the percentage of people that are going to the ketogenic carnivore diet is increasing exponentially, it is still a fairly small percentage of people that are actually embarking on this adventure. One of the things that I know you and I have talked about is there are enlightening influencers out there. They may be farther along in the journey or they may have had a positive impact on your journey. Maybe you want to talk about somebody in particular, or maybe you just want to talk about a story that helped guide you.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I would say it's probably appropriate for me to begin by explaining my approach to this. So there's kind of layers of approach in my particular circumstance because it's not just a physiological thing, it's also a mental thing because of my severe PTSD. So I sort of came at it a bunch of different ways and I'm blessed with a team of not just influencers online, but I have a psychotherapist who is excellent. I have a nutritionist slash naturopath who is outstanding, just recently finished school, so he's up on all of this stuff. I have a proactive attitude, a supportive spouse. Even my children, who are quite older adults now in their 30s, applaud the changes in my body and reinforce the positive feedback loop on how I look, because, keep in mind, I'm six foot two.

Speaker 3:

At my worst I was 235 pounds. I looked great until I tried to put my tuck shirt on and my son at the time he was only 15 back then was laughing because I couldn't get the buttons closed on it and still took a picture of me anyway. I literally looked like a well-dressed Humpty, dumpty. And of course I was going to a military event, so anybody who's in the military will understand that showing up with your buttons undone is worthy of ridicule Getting myself in a condition where I wasn't embarrassed by family photos, where I was taking better care of myself and making sure that I felt better. I mean, consequently, the loss of weight, graham, was secondary to how well I felt, where I didn't have to catalog in my mind where every washroom was when I was traveling, in the event that I needed it, and that was critical to quality of life. In fact, I even said that to my spouse today on my way to my oral surgeon for my dental procedure. How nice it was to drive for an hour and 15 minutes and not worry once about whether or not I would need to use a washer. So it's not just one thing and every single person will have to find what dynamics work for them. So, by way of example, I use self-hypnosis from Paul McKenna. I'm a member of the Mindvalley and I thank the founder of Mindvalley for creating it. It's basically the equivalent of Netflix for mindfulness, meditation and self-awareness and self-development. That helped me immensely.

Speaker 3:

The therapy helped me immensely, making sure that my diet was improved, but also taking a snapshot and I have to give full credit to my naturopath for this taking a snapshot and saying okay, because she recognized. It wasn't one thing. She recognized the mental, she recognized the physical, physiological, the stress factors that were in my life, the kind of things I was consuming that perhaps were not good. Because we did a fecal test to see what was going on in my body. Because I've done from the military and for my corporate jobs, I've done a lot of international travel, so we wondered oh okay, well, we've ruled out Crohn's and colitis, we need to find out what's going on in your gut bio. It took me seven months, graham, to get up the courage to find out if I had a 1,200-foot-long tapeworm, because I was worried about what they were going to find. I'd already been told from your colonoscopy eat more fiber. And please do that. Folks, if you're going to listen to just one thing, make sure you eat lots of fiber.

Speaker 3:

When I went through this process of trying to figure out what needed to be done, I had to surrender into that process and trust the experts that I felt represented my mindset and how I view the world. That means my psychotherapist, my naturopath, my dietician, who is dialed in, and so, as a consequence, I found out that one of the things that was working against me was something called dysbiotic bacteria, and what that means is our microbiome is full of all kinds of bacteria. You got good bacteria and you got bad bacteria, or sometimes you have the absence of bacteria and they don't show up. So dysbiotic bacteria are those bacteria that are actually driving the urge or desire to have more sugar. They're feeding, much like they say, with sugar and cancer cells. They feed off of that sugar. It causes an anabolic reaction in the body when you have this dysbiotic bacteria and all these toxins are floating around in the stomach, which is killing more of the good bacteria, and then very soon, this imbalance in your stomach makes you reactive to everything.

Speaker 3:

And I actually arrived at that point and this was all pre-PTSD in terms of not finding out that it was dysbiotic in terms of four specific bacteria, a fungus, a couple of other kind of nasty things. But just understanding that I could literally before I did all this research, graham, I could eat potatoes in front of you and get sick for no apparent reason. I could, I swear, eat one chicken wing in water and get sick because my body was so out of whack and I believed it was because of what I was eating. It was what was going on in my stomach wasn't ready really for anything and it was so inflamed from vegetable oils and other processed stuff that I was consuming that it didn't matter even if I put something healthy in there. It had to be a progression. I did the broth and I sort of moved along the continuum of healthier and healthier foods.

Speaker 3:

I practiced intermittent fasting. It gave my body a chance to go into something called entophagy, and entophagy is when the cells begin to self-cannibalize. They go after the call it worn out cells, where they have the shorter telomeres that can be salvaged and consumed and flushed out of the body. What's amazing and I want to really highlight this that's a natural process that we get from intermittent fasting.

Speaker 3:

Our forefathers didn't know anything about intermittent fasting, but they would only eat once a day, twice a day. Maybe on the weekends they would eat three times, but it would be a very, very small meal in the evening a day. Maybe on the weekends they would eat three times, but it would be a very, very small meal in the evening, no snacks. So they were constantly. It's not a surprise that we have more cancer and more diabetes in society because we were eating too much of the wrong things that don't provide the nutrition that result in dysbiotic bacteria in the stomach, that result in a person like me being always sick, always feeling miserable and having to literally change how I interact with the world in order to address IBS, ptsd and so forth.

Speaker 2:

I think you made such an important point about the fact that there are no quick fixes when it comes to sorting out our health.

Speaker 2:

For a lot of us, me included, it took decades of eating the wrong way to get to where I was, and it took many, many months, years to undo decades. The good news is it doesn't take decades to undo it, but it does take some time and some real commitment to trying to get back to that, and I think you said it better than anything that photo that you're proud of with the family, as opposed to that photo where you just look away and you can't believe where you've ended up. I certainly know that feeling very personally. I wanted to talk to you because you've got a somewhat of a unique journey where you were actually a vegan at one time, I believe a vegetarian as well, as you're going along this journey and you're ending up in more of a ketogenic, carnivore type of healthy eating lifestyle. Were there any issues with addressing the environmental or ethical concerns that some people might have about the ketogenic or carnivore aspect of these lifestyles?

Speaker 3:

So I think that's really an individualized thing. My wife actually is a practicing vegetarian, vegan and has been for the majority of her life. She's a wonderful lady and so forth, although I will say that in terms of quality, I definitely out eat her. It's one of the things that I noticed with in terms of the quality of what she consumes versus what I consume, because a lot of these vegan and vegetarian foods she's a huge fan of Beyond Meat burgers and so forth. They're absolutely full chocker block, full with all kinds of things that, as you said in our previous cast, you know you need to be a PhD chemist to understand what is in those right. And they take three lines in the ingredients because they're mono, something, something, something with all these hyphens. So clearly, if you can't read it, it's not likely your stomach can either. So you know where it's going to end up. It's either going to be embedded somewhere in your system where it's trying to deal with it almost like a poison or a neurotoxin. So I guess my answer to the question with respect to being a vegan vegetarian is I also at that time didn't realize how significantly a lot of these foods because you have a limited it's got better, but at my time it was a limited number of foods you can choose in the grocery store. That didn't break the bank right, and I noticed my grocery bill was a lot higher, certainly higher than it is now. With keto carnivore I eat the grocery in five minutes because I'm just either getting salads and meat or just salads or just meat, so it's a lot faster. I avoid all the other stuff. So that was the big epiphany for me and again I want to thank Dr Berg and others for that. Insight is just by cutting out the carbs, which most of what I was eating, I went as a vegetarian vegan, probably eating 100% carbs, because I wasn't getting the amount of protein I needed. My naturopath was not happy about that. She said are you having these symptoms or those symptoms? All those things were contributing to the growth of the wrong bacteria in my stomach and I wasn't really getting better. I was losing some weight, but I was nutritionally deficient.

Speaker 3:

Now, as far as the ethical thing is concerned, you're speaking to someone who I don't do it anymore, but I didn't have any issue with eating wild game, whether it was venison, whether it was moose, what have you? I don't really have an ethical issue with that. I've actually seen and been adjacent to slaughterhouses, working with a company in the US, and I'm quite aware of how that's managed ethically today, versus perhaps maybe how some people perceive it. I'm personally not a fan of large industrial farms, Graham, because I don't think that they are the best, and I think you and I, both, ethically, will search out butchers that are buying locally from farms with free range chickens that have grass fed, cattle that are free to graze, and so on and so forth.

Speaker 3:

The reality is the way my body works. I've tested it. Ethically or not, people have to make their own decisions. But I'm far healthier. And how do I know that? Because my CGM says so. How do I know it? Because the amount of weight that I can lift in the gym, how do I know it? I don't require a nap, and I really want to stress this when I was on a vegan vegetarian diet, two o'clock in the afternoon. I you know, fortunately, I've been working from home for the last few years, but if I hadn't, I was beginning to wonder what life would have been like if you and I were still working together in a corporate office. I'd probably be curled up underneath my pod trying to get a little shut eye after lunch because I I had no energy.

Speaker 2:

I just absolutely crashed because I didn't understand those starches for sure and I want to point something out that a lot of people are going to chalk that up to getting older, and certainly this is something I did, or I was guilty of doing but you don't need a nap today and you are older than you were years ago, when you did need that nap, and I think that's an important difference, and just lifestyle has meant that you actually have more energy today than you did even a couple of years ago, when you were much younger.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and I think the other really important thing that people are beginning to realize that we haven't touched on yet and that was interesting because it was in the context of dementia, the study and my father has dementia, so that's the purpose of me reading it but they were saying that generally healthy people. So we know, for instance, let's call healthy people who are consuming a meal at dinnertime but never closer than three hours before they go to bed and are not snacking in between. So their digestive system at that point has started to really deal with that meal. That's certainly a factor, because this study showed that for people who are normal, they tend8 minutes. So do the math we're talking almost three hours before they go into a REM state.

Speaker 3:

And consequently, what happens it's almost the same as endophagy for the brain to use. The mechanism or the physics of it is, their body isn't able to get rid of the plaque and the proteins, the malign proteins that are in the brain and do what they call like a neuro dump of toxins, so that exacerbates problems with the illness. So, whether you have diabetes or not, if you have a healthy brain, the same applies. You need to keep your brain in a healthy state so everything else works as it should. You know, you could have a perfectly healthy body, but if the brain is failing you, it's not really a perfectly healthy body, is it?

Speaker 2:

Very well said. Very well said. I wanted to have some fun with this last question, stephen. So think of pre-keto Stephen a number of years ago. If you were able to jump in a time machine and go back and talk to pre-keto carnivore Stephen, is there any advice you'd give to that person? Because maybe our listeners might be thinking well, I'm that person today. I'm going to be perhaps a different person in the future. What would you tell yourself so many years ago?

Speaker 3:

I'd have four words for him just to get his attention, because I know him pretty well. Look at me now. This is how I feel. So that would definitely have got my attention in my 30s and early 40s because I was so focused, like you, on the kids. Yeah, you know, piece of pizza hanging out of your face while you're driving the minivan getting one kid to soccer and the other one to ballet, you know, it was just, it was.

Speaker 3:

We were road warriors. We just, you know, we consumed that that life in the corporate office, caught public transit, got into respective vehicles, got our kids to their tasks 8, 30, 9 o'clock at night. You put them down especially if you were a single dad like me and um, then you started thinking about what you were going to eat if you hadn't already, and by then it's too late, you know. And what are you doing? You're throwing something in the microwave and warming it up, and it's too late. You know, and what are you doing? You're throwing something in the microwave and warming it up, and it's just absolute garbage. So your body doesn't even have a chance to get the proper nutrition in an environment where you're already 16, 17 hours of active, stressful activities. For those of us that have kids out there, you know it can be a lot of fun trying to get three-year-olds and five-year-olds and seven-year-olds where they need to be, and it's almost never that they're. It's a quiet transition from one task to the next.

Speaker 2:

So there we are Very well said. I can't think of a better note to end on Stephen. Thank you so much. This has been fantastic. Thanks to everybody who has listened to another episode of Lessons from the Keto-Verse. We look forward to joining you again soon. Thanks everybody. We look forward to joining you again soon. Thanks everybody.

Speaker 1:

Thanks, graham. Thanks for tuning in to Lessons from the Keto-Verse. 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.