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
Unexpected Outcomes of Going Keto
Two years after hearing "your results are going in the wrong direction," Graham and Stephen reflect on the astonishing health transformations they've experienced beyond simply avoiding medication. What began as desperate attempts to address specific health concerns evolved into a discovery of dozens of unexpected benefits from the ketogenic lifestyle.
Mental clarity emerged as one of the most profound changes. The brain fog that had settled like an invisible veil lifted completely, allowing both hosts to solve problems that had stumped them for years. Graham's wife, a psychotherapist, found herself able to conduct more client sessions without exhaustion, while Stephen's persistent sinus issues—previously attributed to a deviated septum—vanished entirely once inflammation decreased.
The physical transformations extended far beyond weight loss. Graham's torn rotator cuff, which had limited his range of motion for twenty years, began healing. Arthritis symptoms disappeared. Both hosts developed remarkable resilience, with energy levels so consistent that daily movement became a craving rather than a chore. Stephen rediscovered strength in the gym that had diminished during his plant-based diet experiment, while Graham progressed from struggling with a 30-minute walk to consistently logging 16,000 steps daily.
Perhaps most liberating was the freedom from food obsession. The constant hunger and cravings simply vanished, replaced by true satiety. "I looked at donuts like they were lubricants for your car," Stephen explains, describing his complete disinterest in foods that once controlled him. Other peculiar benefits emerged too—immunity to sunburns, reduced need for sunglasses, naturally whitening teeth, improved eyesight, and enhanced intimate relationships.
This episode illuminates how our standard dietary advice might be fundamentally backward. When veterinarians see sick animals, they immediately ask about diet, yet physicians rarely pose this question to metabolically ill humans. By designing personalized nutrition based on how foods actually affect your body, you unlock health transformations that conventional medicine rarely addresses or explains.
Have you noticed unexpected changes since modifying your diet? We'd love to hear your experiences with health transformations that surprised you too.
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:Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of Lessons from the Keto-Verse. Today we are with my friend, stephen Stephen and we are going to be talking about unexpected outcomes from the keto lifestyle. Stephen, would you like to say hi, hello everyone, Thanks for joining us again.
Speaker 3:Great to see you all virtually.
Speaker 2:All right. So today we're going to go back and forth. And what are we talking about here? Well, there are things that when we got into doing the research around food and how it relates to our health over the course of probably 16 months, we had an intention, we had something that we wanted to solve, and I think those are going to probably be pretty complementary between Stephen and I. So the more research we did, the more we started to realize that it was going to be. You know, we had a plan for solving or at least reducing the danger of a particular thing.
Speaker 2:In my case, it was after the doctor's visit where they did the blood test and I got the results, the doctor saying to me you know, these results are going in the wrong direction and if something doesn't change I'm going to have to put you on medication, and those words I can still hear the doctor saying those words two years later. It was impactful, to say the least, and I set out on this journey to get to the bottom of what was causing these blood results to go in the wrong direction, starting with the-wise but to you know the cost of the impact on lifestyle and, not to mention, you know how I was feeling in general. Stephen, do you want to kind of give the audience a sense for why you initially set out to make this change? So this would have been the expected outcome that you were on this adventure for.
Speaker 3:I mean the expected outcome when initially presented to me by my doctor was all negative. You can anticipate there's only one worse diagnosis, and I'm quoting that I have to give my patients and that's cancer. But you have diabetes. There is obviously with unbridled sugar running through our veins. That's one of the things that.
Speaker 3:I now know isn't attractive for cancer, so she might as well have said that because she had my undivided attention. So you know, one of the key outcomes was and I know we referenced him several times is Dr Atchia and the whole concept of healthspan. Of course, I hadn't read the book at that time, I don't even know if it was out when I was initially diagnosed. But the idea was well, what am I going to do about this? I have four kids. I'd like to be a grandfather someday.
Speaker 3:I wanted to be around for my spouse and I didn't want to be a burden either, because I had an uncle who's since passed away, who was in bad health, someone we both know, and some of the factors included, especially, in the end, just absolutely super high sugar. So, in a way, by observing others and seeing other outcomes, reading the book by Dr Fung, who is a nephrologist in Toronto, and seeing how some of his patients who were very unwell, who were actually on dialysis, were doing intermittent fasting and all these sorts of things, it seemed to me, graham, that there were potential unexpected outcomes. In one form is the disease was a wake-up call, but equally an opportunity, and that's kind of how I saw it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well said. And so the topic for today, as we said, is unexpected outcomes from the keto lifestyle. So these are things that we didn't necessarily know were going to happen. We might have heard people talk about them in passing, but these weren't. These positive health improvements were not necessarily expected by Stephen and I, so obviously we picked unique circumstances. I think a lot of these we've both experienced, but these are ones that really jumped out to me, and I'm going to start with the first one, which is improved mental clarity.
Speaker 2:They you know I'm taking some health and nutrition courses and it's interesting they used to think and this is what they're teaching, which kind of surprises me, but in a good way they used to think that if you had mental illness, depression, anxiety, it would potentially cause problems with your metabolic health, with your gut health. And they're now realizing that it's actually the other way around If your gut health is unhealthy, if you're metabolically unhealthy, you are going to experience problems with how your brain functions, and that can lead into all sorts of outcomes. And so, you know, if I think back to 2021, you know, I own my own business I was sort of forgetting to eat, and then, when I did eat, it was, you know, a sub or something with a lot of you know pretty poor ingredients inside, even though it seemed like it was healthy. The sauces and the bread and all of those things were not good for me and I found out you know how bad they actually were Snacking and all the rest. I had this brain fog, you know. I couldn't put my finger on it, but I just I knew I had it and I remember what it was like not to have it and you could, you know, chalk it up to the pandemic, and a lot of people did chalk it up to that, and there are probably situations where it actually made it worse, but the science isn't necessarily really solid on that, but I did notice it and so I just thought I'm just going to have this for the rest of my life. I just thought I'm just going to have this for the rest of my life.
Speaker 2:Well, as I'm eliminating foods and getting into more of a keto carnivore lifestyle, all of a sudden I have all this energy, this mental clarity, brain energy. I'm not as sensitive to things, I'm more sort of. You know, my defenses are stronger, so things don't affect me. I was solving problems that I was trying to solve for years that I just couldn't. All of a sudden, it would just come to me that the brain was working more properly. And what did I find out was going on? Well, when your brain runs consistently on glucose which it can and glucose comes from sugars or any other carb that turns into sugar in order to be able to store for either fat or energy use right away your brain can't actually run at its maximum. As I understand it in my research, it would burn out if it tried to run at its, you know, highest efficiency. And so when you switch over to your brain running on ketones, your brain can run at a much more, at a faster rate, and so I noticed an unbelievable change. And my wife also noticed an unbelievable change.
Speaker 2:She has a great story about how she's a psychotherapist. She would get quite exhausted after five or six sessions with a client you know, with five or six separate clients, and understandably so. You know she's all day she's listening to problems and trying to solve those problems for her clients, and she's certainly very empathetic when it comes to listening, and so there's no question that it can take a toll. After she kind of followed me through this you know eating lifestyle journey. She turned to me one day and she said you know, I can do seven sessions now probably more, I just there's not enough time in the day, but I can do seven sessions and I hardly feel exhausted. And so she could actually. You know, mark, because she was doing the exact same thing before and after, she could actually come up with an example of how this eating lifestyle improved her mental clarity, stephen.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I have to agree with all of that you said. Such a critical negative consequence to my overall well-being in terms of quality of life, the inability at times to, either during or after a flare-up, to be able to even go out socially in any shape or form, and having to coordinate logistically where washrooms would be, especially during COVID, was a colossal challenge. So I've learned too and we did this independently about the importance of ensuring that the right nutrients are in my digestive system, and I even did try a plant-based diet for a while, and this actually ties into one of our other areas that we were going to touch on, and that is generally the level of your B vitamins theanine, b1, b6, b12. And I was highly deficient and so deficient that my naturopath had a RN give me an IV in order to get my levels, because I wasn't going to be able to do it. I would be eating an enormous amount of spinach just to get there, and then obviously over time I could have with meat, but it was so low that I went the route of therapeutic increase and I noticed my energy changed immediately and obviously in conjunction with that, I had tests done by my naturopath specifically to check, because I was in uniform and I've been to some less favorable non-travel areas in the world and often the food that we would consume there if it wasn't something that was prepackaged and it was something that was local that you may or may not have the appropriate resistance to the parasites and other things that were there.
Speaker 3:So we ruled out parasites and ultimately what it was is I had four forms of dystopic bacteria in my stomach that were causing some of these additional symptoms, so I was feeding the wrong bacteria is the bottom line, and that bacteria was actually driving sugar cravings. So I was on this mousetrap wheel of constantly trying to address the signals that were being sent, which they've now proven as well. It's not just Stephen's interpretation of what was going on, but actually some of the cravings will come and signals sent to the brain that come from the stomach, and the stomach is actually affected by the bacteria in terms of what signals it sends. So now that you and I have migrated to a healthier diet, we're finding that the foods that we're consuming and the ones that we used to consume are no longer appealing.
Speaker 3:I'm not interested in lasagna anymore. I'm not, I'm. I stood and got my coffee this morning in a in a local shop that was covered from floor to ceiling with donuts and pastries and French pastries and so forth, and I had no interest. I looked at them like they were lubricants for your car. It wasn't something I was planning on consuming Excellent.
Speaker 2:So, Stephen, do you want to pick your first unexpected outcome from the keto lifestyle?
Speaker 3:Yes, I had this systemic issue with what were described by my doctor as seasonal allergies, and especially because I live in a relatively remote wooded area and the pollen levels here can be quite significant between rainfall and the time of season, I noticed that I would have a lot of congestion and it would get serious enough.
Speaker 3:Because of my past injuries, I've had deviated septum or so, I believed, my nose broken. I thought it was because of those injuries and then the inflammation that was presenting in that area actually had nothing to do with the narrowing. I actually had a specialist look at it and he said you know, the surgery I had done was perfect. There was no deviation, it was just inflammation that was causing that congestion. So one of the unexpected outcomes from the ketogenic lifestyle for me was that, you know, I woke up a couple of years later and went hey, that's strange, I don't have those sinus headaches anymore, I don't feel that pressure in my sinuses throughout the day and I was less puffy. I used to have fairly very sinuses around my nose that indicated almost like I had a cold, but it was actually just persistent chronic inflammation and I don't have that anymore.
Speaker 2:Excellent. Yeah, it certainly would be something I expected. For me this might sound like it's related to the previous one, but I see it as two different things, and that is an increased energy consistency. So I remember, when I was probably at my sickest and blood results were going in the wrong direction, that I struggled to get off the couch and do a half hour walk in a day, and it was sort of, you know, the couch was holding me back. I just I didn't have the energy and I would go because I wanted to make sure the dog got a walk.
Speaker 2:But that's not, you know, always the greatest motivator long-term, although dogs can be a good motivator for that. And so I, you know, as I slowly eliminated the bad foods and added the good foods, the energy level was sort of an inverse compliment to those changes and I started to walk more. And I remember one day having this sort of I wouldn't call it an anxious feeling, but it was sort of this motivation that I had to go for a walk. So I had gone from I really don't want to go, I have to. It's a chore to. I don't have any choice.
Speaker 2:I have to go because I've got energy that I need to burn off and I want to go outside and I want to be in the sun or whatever the weather is as I walk every single day.
Speaker 2:It doesn't matter whether it's hailing, raining or you know 100 degrees Fahrenheit outside or 30, what? 5 degrees Celsius, and so the increased energy was absolutely noticeable and I managed to get myself up to a pretty consistent 16,000 steps a day, which I think is around 11 kilometers or probably what? Seven miles, I'm not exactly sure, but that 16,000 steps is pretty consistent every single day, and if I don't go I notice it. And there are very few days where I don't go I probably can count them on one hand in the last two years and it's only because I might have some family commitment and it doesn't allow for a walk. But that's been a priority for me, and a really nice outcome is I have significantly more energy to do whatever I need to do in a day, and so stuff gets done much quicker than it used to, and it's certainly a noticeable difference from I don't want to go for that walk to I have to go for that walk. So huge unexpected change for me. Stephen Sure.
Speaker 3:So for me, the decreased food obsession that I had that's one of the key things that I noticed was in consuming high fat meals, which increases satiety. I was reducing the constant hunger and cravings which, as we both would agree, are quite liberating. I mean, I just experienced this today because I was busy with client work in our nation's capital and I went for an extended period of time without eating. I ate at eight o'clock this morning and then did not eat again until 6 pm and I ate extremely light. Last night and I noticed my sugar in the afternoon because I only had that one meal and I extended into an evening and didn't eat until probably 8 pm, and very, very light. I probably only consumed about 500 calories and it was almost all protein. And it was interesting because, unfortunately, my CGM I did not take an extra one with me, graham, I was running solo. I don't normally put them on myself, but mine essentially went past its two-week period, so I don't know how my sugar was this morning, but it's interesting. I went all day, came home and I could not eat the full steak that I just cooked prior to this call because I felt satiated after eating approximately 50 or 60 percent, and I know one of the keys to this food obsession thing too, that I've read and you likely have as well, is to eat to 80 percent of fullness, because the fullness will feel more than 80 percent, probably 15 or 20 minutes after you eat, especially when you're not eating foods that are high in sugar. You won't get the crash, you won't get the drop. So that's one of the big issues with an overeating of starches is what happens is your blood sugar will go really high. I've seen this. I was. I think we talked about this for a family thing.
Speaker 3:I was at a very large franchised Chinese restaurant. I was very selective in what I ate, but I still got a big spike and I had to work through the hunger pains. Today was the same, because I hadn't really eaten very much over a 48 hour period. I had those cravings. I wanted to stop because it was I was doing some other grocery shopping and get something quick to eat, which normally I would have grabbed a bag of chips which is full of maltodextrin, which is essentially sugar, and the potatoes would be turned into sugar because they're starch, and I avoided that. I thought it was better to go through 15 minutes of added discomfort, where you know I wasn't lightheaded or anything like that, I could drive safely. But I had that sense of hey, you should probably get something to eat. And I just worked through it, just kept drinking water and I was fine. And when I got home and had my actual first meal in roughly 15, we'll be saying sorry about 10 and a half hours I still didn't eat very much and that's still going to work towards staying lean and staying at the kind of weight that I want to, because this time of year for us, often in the winter, we tend to add a little bit of weight because we're maybe not exercising as much.
Speaker 3:It's harder to go for those walks. So it doesn't hurt to keep that metabolic resilience going by decreasing the consumption of food from time to time and testing your system to your lifestyle. So I'm not trying to drive with all this food in my system, needing to pay attention to the drive, not getting sleepy. I mean there's a whole bunch of additional benefits that come from just that simple example unexpected outcomes of intermittent fasting because you're traveling, you're giving your body a rest in a stressful situation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, probably should have had this on my list, but the idea of never feeling hungry was so foreign to me before this lifestyle change. And you know, I would regularly have a growling stomach reminding me I got to eat. You know, and when your stomach's growling, it's sending a signal that we need to eat or we're going to die. It's sort of a you know it's telling you to go get food as quickly as possible. The food that's quick as possible might be, you know, the bread and the butter and the peanut butter and whatever you know, or some kind of easy snack, which are almost always not great for you. The one time that my tummy grumbled in the last two years that I can remember was when I was. We had some friends over and we were just chatting and my wife put out some crackers and we ended up finding out that nobody at the table actually wanted the crackers because everybody was sort of eating. Similarly, we didn't even know that about them, because we just met them a couple of weeks before and I had one cracker. So I'm like I'll have one cracker and about 15 minutes later my tummy's growling and I'm like, oh, that's what it feels like. It's been literally years since I felt that. So the idea of not being hungry is certainly something that I didn't expect either. So let's go with the next one on my list, which is reduced joint pain not something that I would have expected. I've come to understand sort of the metabolic and physiological reasons for it that you know, carbs that turn into sugar, spike insulin, which develops insulin resistance over time when the cells just can't take any more glucose. And you know, because the cells can't take any more glucose and get it out of the bloodstream, it ends up staying in the bloodstream and this, along with other contributions, is going to end up with you having something-itis.
Speaker 2:And I was getting a little bit of joint pain in my hands. It wasn't too bad. It'd come and go, but it certainly was coming and going more often the older I got. And I also tore my rotator cuff in baseball, the last play after a 31-year career. I thought I was good enough to still throw from the fence to home plate and it turns out my body disagreed and so really painful tear.
Speaker 2:It took quite a while to even be able to use it, but I still really couldn't lift my arm past sort of midway up my arm. So you know, maybe a little bit above the elbow, but it would hurt a lot to try and do that. And you know, I wanted to see if there were any operations, but the downside seemed to outweigh the upsides and I had ripped another part of the same arm because everything was a bit weaker. So I was afraid of, you know, doing anything in the gym that was going to further damage it.
Speaker 2:And so, lo and behold, this lifestyle is something that I get on and you know, within, I would say, the first year, I started to notice that not only did I not have any more of the arthritis there's the itis but the inflammation in my shoulder had gotten so significantly better that I could lift my arm all the way up and around almost with no pain. So this is not something that I expected, but the arthritis has all but disappeared and I can use my throwing arm again for the first time in probably 20 years since the injury. So that's how long I was living with the pain, and now that pain is significantly, significantly better. So not something I expected, but something that I really appreciate, stephen.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think I could focus in on the physical resilience side. I weight train. I'm not a bodybuilder, but I've been weight training since I was 16 years of age and one of the things that was interesting, as I reverted back to a ancestral diet, away from a plant-based diet, I noticed a big change in the gym in terms of my strength. I was struggling actually with relatively low weight for me in terms of bench pressing in particular, and I had been somewhat resistant to do squats because of back injury. But I started with a little coaching and guidance from one of the experts in the gym, belt up the confidence and I noticed a big difference in my skiing is I'm a pretty competitive skier, downhill skier. I used to be an instructor, so I ski hard and even for where we live, the hills are relatively small, but I still ski hard and it's not uncommon for me to break a sweat. So what I did notice is I wasn't breaking a sweat. I didn't feel that lactic acid burn in my legs to the same extent. I was walking a lot more. So some of these additional side effects or consequences of the ketogenic lifestyle I noted I had more endurance and the endurance allowed me to push myself even further allowed me to regain strength, particularly in bench, pressing back up to a level where I was previously and I noticed about a 30% roughly 40% drop at times with my strength as a result of being on a strict plant diet.
Speaker 3:I wasn't getting enough proteins that were plant based in order to build muscle and I was struggling with my workout schedule of doing you know four days a week or five days a week at the gym was just becoming just way too much.
Speaker 3:I didn't have enough time to recover, graham, from that and I was starting to get injured. Like you, I would start having rotator cuff issues when I was trying to bench more weight, so I would just lay off and do lighter weight and I would still feel pain or discomfort even with lighter weights. I had to stretch a lot more, had to do a lot of that kind of stuff, and now I still warm up, I'm careful, but do a lot of that kind of stuff. And now I still warm up. I'm careful, but I can push substantially more weights as it relates to that in the gym and, like I said for this past season in skiing, the season prior to that I was struggling a bit to get to the level that I previously was at and I did take a hiatus from skiing for a while, but I was right back to where I was probably when I was 16 or 18 when I first got my level one instructors. So I was quite happy about that and didn't expect that.
Speaker 2:Amazing Stephen. I can't remember if you had shared your next one already, or do you want me to go back to my list?
Speaker 3:You can go ahead on your list if you like.
Speaker 2:Okay. So the next one? Definitely not something I expected improved dental health. So I noticed when I was, you know, eating a standard American diet, if I went to floss, you know, it wasn't uncommon for there to be a little bit of blood and I always had pretty good teeth. I don't remember the last time I had a cavity. It's been quite some time. So pretty decent health overall.
Speaker 2:But my teeth weren't terribly white and every now and then, if I knew I had something coming up where I wanted whiter teeth, I would get the white strips, always knowing it probably wasn't doing anything good to my teeth, but it certainly would make them look whiter. And since going on this lifestyle change, my teeth are as white as they've ever been and I haven't used a tooth whitener in a couple of years now. The teeth just kept getting whiter and whiter and whiter. And, as I understand it, the more your health improves, it also improves other things, like how your teeth look, how they feel, you know your eyes.
Speaker 2:There's a number of things that can give away, um, a metabolic imbalance, and so the, the, the white, the, also elimination of any blood when I um, when I uh, floss. I don't remember the last time I had any blood and just my teeth in general being significantly more healthy overall. And I think a lot of that is the fact that on a carnivore or ketovore diet you're eating a lot less carbs and as I understand it because I did a little bit of digging into this there's this for lack of a better word fermentation process that happens with carbs and glucose on the teeth and if you don't get that off with brushing, that can lead to problems and weaker teeth and when you eliminate those things, it's less likely that those things are going to happen. So improved dental health is not something I expected, siva.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's absolutely fascinating, I concur. I had the same results and the one I'm going to touch on is actually one that's going to be sensitive for some that may be listening that are diabetics and are working towards it. But one of the things is libido. When a diabetic has an inability to metabolize the sugar properly, one of the common traits to that, that will often indicate and it was my case I didn't actually feel substantially different as a diabetic because I got so conditioned to focus on my IBS and other symptoms, not realizing those were in fact symptoms of diabetes. You know, at least in part, not completely causal, but definitely complementary to what I was experiencing.
Speaker 3:But one of the common effects and you can actually differentiate that in the urine of a diabetic there's a particular odor that comes from an increase in uric acid and one of the consequences of uric acid is neuropathy. So you can have peripheral neuropathy in your fingers, more often than not in your feet, and I was starting to get that Now there's tiny little blood vessels also in your eyes, so sometimes I would even feel pressure there. And how this links to libido is also ED is not that uncommon with diabetics Because, again, you've got similar to the eyes and similar to the feet. You're at the end of capillaries that are very, very tiny and uric acid essentially blocks those and that's where the discomfort, pain, comes. It sends a signal to your brain saying, hey, something's wrong, and it fires up your pain centers.
Speaker 3:So one of the things that you discover is that when you clean up your diet, the uric acid disappears and not only does your libido increase, but you actually are capable of having a more appropriate level of interaction with your spouse because you're not experiencing any forms of ED. And you know, especially for us middle-aged men, it's pretty common and more often than not we assume it's something psychological or, oh, you know, you're stressed from work, you're not really focused, but in my particular case it was literally down to my diet and the fact that I was a diabetic and this was prior to me being diagnosed and I was at my heaviest at 235, at 6'2" and with added muscle mass. I'm now under 190 and much leaner, obviously. So that was one of the surprises for me was that my spouse was much happier and I was obviously much happier that, you know, we could continue to have a satisfying sexual life and that it wasn't heading down the cliff of being entirely in a state of erectile dysfunction.
Speaker 2:So that definitely is something that was certainly important but not expected Unless you have a very well-aware doctor that if you're suffering from AD, then the doctor's not going to ask you what you're eating. Yeah, you're right, you're going to be prescribed some drugs, and enough of them to try and solve the problem enough of them to try and solve the problem For those that are experiencing it. It's very worthwhile considering the lifestyle that we're talking about here to see if that might solve what can be a debilitating problem for a lot of reasons. Next on my list is increased confidence in cooking.
Speaker 2:Up until a couple of years ago, I would say that I was very good at warming things up after reading the instructions on whatever I was about to eat you know, 350 for 14 minutes or whatever in the microwave, just like everybody else. I was really good at reading and then punching those numbers into whatever I was cooking it in, and it would come out the other side, you know, almost always being exactly what you wanted. But the food itself, in my opinion, was junk and it was contributing to my negative health outcomes. And so I started to get this weird sort of joy of cooking that I had never experienced before, and I think it was down to okay. You know, I might eat 150 different things, and now I've got it down to like 20 different things. So, my, you know my choice. Going to the grocery store is a lot easier, but it's also you're not following any instructions if you're buying a rib-like steak and getting a really good mobile thermometer so that it can tell you when to take the steak off even before it's reached temperature, so that it continues to cook even though you've taken it off the barbecue or whatever. Now you get this perfect medium, rare or rare or whatever it is you're going after, and so I started to get have some fun with different meals.
Speaker 2:We've talked about meal ideas on past podcasts, but, but I started to have a lot more fun. So getting the very best sourced item and then having to relearn how to cook was something that I didn't ever see myself doing, but it turned into a great hobby. My wife's always been very creative when it comes to making meals, and I think she would say she's even better even you know she's much better than me at sort of putting together these really fantastic meals with healthy ingredients that she's found new recipes for, and she should be proud of it, and she does an amazing job. I'm very lucky. I'm always very, very thankful when somebody else makes a meal for me, especially one that you know is something that I want to eat. So increased confidence in cooking is not something that I ever expected would happen, but really happy with that outcome as well, steven.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'll build on that from a shopping perspective. So I'll go upstream one to the grocery store and build on what you just described. So even today, for instance, I was at a major grocery store. I talked to my wife en route because I was about to lose cell coverage for the area in which I was traveling, and I said what do we need? What do we need at home? And it took less than a minute. We need cottage cheese, we need to. You got one full Greek yogurt, blueberries, and her words were looking a bit sad. So pick up some more fruit, grab some salad. And I said please take out one of my butcher steaks for me so that I can have it when I get home. So literally I get laughed at when I'm in the grocery store because more often than not I don't grab a bag, because I only grab the four or five things that I normally grab that I require, and I'm in and out in a matter of minutes.
Speaker 3:I'm not dazzled by the sparkly stuff in the center that's unhealthy, and sometimes look at other people's carts and say, as I know you do, we've talked about this offline and sometimes suggest that people ask well, why are you eating this? Why? What's kombucha? What's kombucha? What's that do? Well, it has no sugar in it because it's a fermented process that's similar to what they do with beer. It doesn't have any alcohol in it but it actually, like the alcohol process, consumes the sugars and you end up with this net neutral product that's fizzy, that has the same fizziness of soda or pop or beer, but it's not alcoholic and it's not horrible for your digestive tract. In fact it has. It has the opposite effect. So that kind of nuanced I'm the smartest guy in the grocery store kind of impression for me is inspiring.
Speaker 3:Like you, I also cook for myself, and what's crazy about that is one of the things that I was told repeatedly is your cholesterol is high, your triglycerides are off, all the things that are indicative of metabolic syndrome and I would guarantee that 80% of that was coming from the dystopia in my stomach for the bacterias which I was feeding with these horrible foods taking over the good bacteria. And I'm due for blood work and I'll be happy to share some of those results in the coming week or so. But I imagine my triglycerides will be way down because I'm not eating anything that's processed really anymore, so there's no reason for it to be elevated. It has started to come down anyway. So I've got the good cholesterol, less of the bad cholesterol and of course, my fasting glucose is way better. I don't have insulin resistance I was tested for that and my sugars have been back to either pre-diabetic or absolutely healthy, which means four to six.
Speaker 3:For Canada. Between four and six is normal. So, yeah, these are interesting outcomes that I didn't anticipate. That all relate to the lifestyle of how you shop and, as you said, cooking for yourself. I cooked my steak tonight because I know how I want to prepare it, and every once in a while I'll call my wife into pulling together a nice fresh salad because she's way more patient at putting cool things in it, like blueberries and cashews and things like that that I probably wouldn't have taken the time to do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well said, and it's interesting. You know, when I'm at the grocery store now I'm like you. I used to bring these five foldable bins, now I bring two, and you know I buy more expensive versions of the items just because the more expensive items tend to be healthier not in all cases, but if you read the ingredients, that certainly is the tell the metabolic health of the person buying the foods and the metabolic health of their kids, just by looking at the grocery cart. And that doesn't come from a place of judgment, that's not what I mean. Who haven't gone down the journey that we have because they see the heart-healthy symbol on the front of the cereal box and they think, well, it must be fine, when in my opinion it's not. And so you know, I can generally tell if I see the cart first and then I see the person second, I can generally tell who's going to be metabolically unhealthy and who isn't. And that's a sad state of affairs that keeps getting worse. I wish it wasn't the case, but it certainly opened my eyes to the messages that people receive and believe. And the fact is they believe them so much that they'll look at you and I and think you know, we have two heads and we're nuts. Meanwhile, we're the ones that are metabolically healthy and they're not. So it's a wild thing to be on the other side of I guess. So for me, the next second to last unexpected outcome these are both related to the sun Did not see these coming.
Speaker 2:I still don't fully understand why. I wish I did. I can certainly take some guesses, but that is, I don't get sunburns ever. Last year I heard from somebody who was speaking to a lot of carnivores and he's got a podcast called Homestead Howe Very good, very good person. He's doing a carnivore documentary as well, which I can't wait to see, and he talked about not getting sunburned and this was the first time I heard it. But I heard it from a bunch of people on this podcast and I'm thinking I wonder if there's something to that. And I just I gave up suntan lotion Again. This is not a medical podcast and this is some, in my opinion, the right thing to do. We'll see long-term if it is, but for some reason I can go for a five hour walk in the hottest sun of the year and I never get a sunburn.
Speaker 2:And, like I said, I don't know why. I heard somebody contemplating about whether it was cutting back on plants which have chlorophyll could reduce, you know, some kind of photosynthesis issue. Again, I am not suggesting this is true. This is just what I heard. That basically makes your skin less sensitive to the sun. It's possibly that, I really don't know. I wish I could speak to an expert who understood this outcome and why it is that there are so many people that are not experiencing sunburns. To get to the bottom of this, because it does seem to be carnivores in a big way.
Speaker 2:So, reduction in the ability to sunburn, and also how quick I tan, I don't know if these are related or it's just that I've been you know I'm outside a lot more than most people who don't work outside, but I remember in early April and in early April it's raining a lot, it's cloudy, it's still cold I was getting a super tan.
Speaker 2:I looked like I'd gone to Florida or Mexico for a week and people kept asking me where did I travel to, where did I travel to? And I just say, oh no, it's from walking. And they looked at me like you can get a tan from walking. So I don't know if they, because they don't do much walking. If they had never thought of that because the sun's the sun or whether it was the time of year and they didn't think it was possible to get a tan that early. But I did notice that I had a like mid-summer tan, you know, a couple of weeks after the last snowfall. So another unexpected outcome no sunburn tan very quickly and I keep that tan all the way through the summer without seemingly any further impacts, and I don't have to put suntan lotion on, which I believe is a good thing, stephen.
Speaker 3:Yeah, on that list too, we had referred to sunglasses and I just wanted to highlight because you're building on the fact that you don't require sunglasses because you don't seem to have the same sensitivity For the diabetics out there who are getting probably every six months their eyes checked, and I strongly recommend you do what the doctor prescribes with respect to that because of the pressure behind the eyes. I have a good friend that's had extremely high sugar, like 35. When he was diagnosed Mine was 9.2. So this is so high that they were not even sure how he was standing. And one of the consequences of this, in order to save his eyes, he gets injections every month, even though he's brought sugar down to normal and he's taking meds to help control it and doing some of the things that we're talking about here, which I'm sure is aiding him more than he realizes. But the consequence to his eyes is so significant.
Speaker 3:Again, I'm going back to how small these tiny little vessels are in the eye and what I noticed was I went to see the ophthalmologist when I was having trouble seeing and I was having trouble focusing and I was getting kind of frustrated because my glasses that I'd had for just maybe two or three years didn't seem to be working that well. And when I went to see the ophthalmologist so this is kind of the inverse of what we're talking about, in a way is my eyes had actually got much, much worse because my sugar was out of control again and I wasn't at that time wearing the CGM. And she said I can tell just by looking at your eyes she was an amazing doctor that have you checked your sugar lately? And I'm like, ah no, you know, if I stick myself one more time, I'm probably confident my finger is going to fall off right, and nobody's going to like me with short fingers. And she said well, joking aside, you should check. And I checked and it was 15. So it was really high and so I was doing damage to my eyes. So that scared me because I literally was having trouble focusing when I was driving.
Speaker 3:And as I got it back under control, the doctor even said to me at the time she said, stephen, I'm not going to prescribe glasses for you. Because she said, right now your eyes to me look like a squished egg. So they're from the pressure, from the uric acid being in these tiny little veins, and the back pressure that it's creating was literally bulging my eyes. So she said when that simmers down, that'll obviously affect the lens of your eye and how it focuses, and without that pressure you may find that you're fine and actually my eyes are better. Now I put on my old glasses, and they're too strong now as opposed to being too weak, which is not an expected outcome. And the sad part about that story is I found some really cool glasses that had actually made, in my opinion, me look like a nice, distinguished gentleman. But I'm not buying them because I don't need them and I'm not just going to put straight glass in them. So I'm going with the glasses as long as I can, yeah amazing.
Speaker 2:I have heard a number of carnivores talk about the fact that their eyes have improved, which is mind-blowing and amazing at the same time. On my list, as you sort of hinted there, does also relate to glasses, and that is sunglasses. So before I went down this lifestyle a food lifestyle I had to have my sunglasses wherever I went, no matter what I was doing. If I was going to be outside, my eyes were so sensitive to the light that you know, just a glare through the windscreen could tire me out. It could cause a headache. I just was overly sensitive. I'm sure a lot of people probably have similar experiences. Who knows how to judge these things in comparison? But I know that I needed a good pair of sunglasses I mean like the ones that significantly reduce the UVB and C rays, so that I wasn't getting that glare. And all of a sudden I realized, after a week of not really thinking about it, I hadn't pulled my sunglasses out. I was sitting there, I was walking around, the sun was literally in my eyes because of the direction that I was walking and the sun glare wasn't bothering me at all. I did not notice it at all, and then I started to be a little more mindful of it. So I'm like I don't even have my sunglasses with me. None of this bothers me. I can, sort of I can't look directly into the sun because I don't think anybody can, but I can look in the sun's direction and all of a sudden it's not bothering me anymore. Again, I don't know what the cause of this is. I've heard of a number of people that have mentioned this, but even my friends who knew me to always have a pair of sunglasses close by wherever I went, with a backup pair just in case. All of a sudden I just don't need them and I can't explain why I don't need them. It's a. It's a great outcome because you know, I I break them and have to buy a new one every couple of years, whatever, and they're not cheap. So hopefully I can go a little longer without having to own them.
Speaker 2:But not needing sunglasses was definitely not something that I expected and, stephen, I'm going to throw in a bonus unexpected outcome for the audience and it's probably so obvious to you and I, but maybe not to others and certainly not something that we expected when we started, I don't think is having to buy a new wardrobe, not one clothing item, except for socks and underwear, fit after I lost 50 pounds Not one. They all looked like I was, you know, in a rap song in the 90s with the what do you call them? The parachute pants and all the rest. Everything was way too big on me. Luckily I was able to donate a lot of it or give it to friends, and luckily I have a daughter who works at a high-end used clothing store, so I'm able to get like $150 shirt for $7.
Speaker 2:So I was able to replace my whole wardrobe very inexpensively. I was lucky enough to be able to do that, but that was certainly I did not expect to lose 50 pounds. I didn't even know I had the ability to lose 50 pounds. Having to buy a brand new wardrobe probably is the only negative situation in this scenario, but I wouldn't trade it for a million bucks. I would much rather buy the new wardrobe and feel the way I feel. Stephen, yeah, I wouldn't trade it for a million bucks. I would much rather buy the new wardrobe and feel the way I feel.
Speaker 3:Stephen, yeah, I couldn't agree more. I still have a pile of fat clothes and occasionally they intermix. I don't know how that happens while I'm sleeping at night and I'll go throw on one of my old pair of pants probably just drawn subconsciously because I commonly wore them and my wife will get an absolute laugh out of the fact that either I have to take my belt into my work area and drill three new holes in my belt or continuously either wear suspenders or surprise all the neighbors and the people in town when I walk around and my pants continuously fall to my ankles. So there was that much of a change in my waist. I went from a 36 and I can comfortably wear a 32.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, the same. I think I might've been pushing a 38 at one point Uh, not for long, cause I did, uh, that was sort of the uh around the same time as we had the blood work and I started to lose the weight. Uh, man, you go and put that belt on. Uh, it, just it, it, just it. It is astounding how many inches you can take off your waist with a lifestyle like this and how great does it feel, even though you got a shallow a couple of bucks for new clothes. Steven, did you want to go with your last? Either one or two items?
Speaker 3:whatever you want to pick. Yeah, I'm just going to pick up on the whole fat loss, because that's brown fat that we're losing and that's extremely toxic fat. That's not good. Hey, you might need it someday. Fat, that's fatty liver, that's hanging on your organs and sometimes, yeah, that brown fat or visceral fat, is so toxic for the body it's like a fatty form of poison. It's in stasis and it's hard on your organs to continue to stabilize that in your system Certainly one of the things that I'm sure contributed to all the things we're describing. And the last one I'll touch on and this will be a little public service thing for the men out there that are on the keto carnivore diet but I've had people comment about my skin and I'm actually using full-on beef tallow on my face every day and I did some research. There's products out there that they sell a tiny little jar for $60 for men. I went to the butchers and got organic beef tallow, uh, and it's probably two kilograms and I paid 17 or 14 for two kilograms.
Speaker 3:Uh, there's probably they would have to pay to get rid of anyway yeah, exactly and so I'm getting this that's right, exactly At the butcher store. They certainly do, but someone else put a fancy label on the same stuff and made it one fiftieth of the size for six times the cost. So for those of you that are out there, if you go and see your butcher and ask them if they have beef tallow, I've been using it now for several weeks because I'm 58. I was starting to get issues with my skin, showing lines that were pretty deep and pretty extensive in terms of aging, and that comes back to collagen and elasticity, and the composition of beef tallow is such that it's actually improving the elasticity and the collagen in my face. And I did some research because I listened to the marketing and then dropped my head and went and did research because they were claiming that, you know, men used to do this a hundred years ago and that's why they look so good.
Speaker 3:My big concern was I didn't want to smell like a steak. I didn't want to walk around and people go hmm, I'm, you know, thinking or dreaming of a ribeye right now store, but I can assure you there's none of that. There's no smell. My wife's a vegetarian. I probably would get kicked out of the house if my face smelled like a steak, so that hasn't happened, but I encourage people to give that a shot. What do you think of that, graham?
Speaker 2:I love it. I think it's amazing you're making your own. I've watched a ton of videos online. There's lots of them showing you how to get like a really high quality sort of clean version that you can use on your skin and even take it further with you know lavender or whatever kind of smells that you want to add to it. I probably would stay away from that and that's the only thing I put on my face.
Speaker 2:Interestingly, one of my daughters is I don't think she's, she's not fully vegetarian, but she has, you know, very, very sort of specific tastes around certain kinds of meats. I think a lot of teenagers would like that, and she loves her face cream made from beef tallow. She just asked me to get another one for her. She absolutely loves it. So my next step is to go do the exact same thing as you did and go make my own, because I've been guilty of buying the stuff that's, you know, more expensive than it should be and really you can make it for cents on the dollar in comparison if you make it at home. So good for you.
Speaker 2:You're ahead of me on that one, and I'm definitely going to follow in your footsteps.
Speaker 3:Yeah, for the record, I'm actually purchased it from an organic farm that's produced it, and they were, and I use it actually in the instead of olive oil, instead of because olive oil there's some some research saying at high heat, which is what I typically use for my steaks to sear them, it's not the best. Beef towel is an amazing product to use on your grill and it maintains all the flavor. You don't get that sort of sometimes when they're, when you use olive oil, too hot, I found, because I'm, when we were going to talk about this, I'm very aware of changes in taste. My taste buds are more, more uh, discerning, I think, is the word I'm looking for. Yes, and and.
Speaker 3:So with the beef tallow, it doesn't spoil the flavor of any of the meats. Even if you're doing pork and for some reason, say you wanted to sear pork that's already cooked and you just wanted to put a bit of an edge on it or something, you can do that and still use beef tallow and it won't change, which makes sense because I'm putting it on my face and, as I said, there is no odor to it. So it makes sense that there wouldn't be a divergent taste when you're putting it on steaks or on roasts and what have you as a base so it doesn't burn. So yeah, I think there's an opportunity. Perhaps I have enough here. I could send you half of it and still have five years supply with my first two kilogram pail that I purchased.
Speaker 2:I might just take you up on that, because I really got to get away from buying these tiny little things that I know are super cheap. It's just I haven't gotten around to making it around. So next time we meet up I'll take you up on the offer For sure, Stephen. Excellent episode. Anything you'd like to add before we end? The unexpected outcomes from the ketogenic diet.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I would just like to add a footnote. The ketogenic diet yeah, I would just like to add a footnote. Last week we talked about the CGM and how that can give you some insights into what's spiking your food. So go one step further and now we're talking about a designer diet that's built to you so you can see how foods react with you. You can reintroduce some of those foods back into your diet. I'm not talking about stuff that's not good for you. I'm talking about if you got a reaction, say, from a particular seafood or something that tilapia, as an example. For some reason you reacted and you got a spike and you were able to determine that it wasn't anything else that was in your diet, like potatoes or rice or something that was actually the root cause.
Speaker 3:One of the interesting things about doing the designer diet and you heard it here, folks first is this designer diet that Graham and I are talking about is really articulated to what your body, some of which may be even genetic, that predispose you to things like, perhaps, dementia, as it is in my family. So all of these and I would say that's going to be an unexpected outcome that you and I will be able to show years from now, because we won't fall into that category. Oh, does somebody in your family have type 2 diabetes? And the assumption is that it's somehow genetic and it seems to follow. No, it's the eating habits that you learned as a kid from your parents, who, in turn, learned from theirs but had much healthier food to choose, that has resulted in the situation we're in. So it's a conclusion with the wrong supposition, and the supposition is clearly out of date. And if you use this designer diet mindset and use the CGM to be your scientist in the background, you can articulate this in such a way where you can predetermine. You'll know. I do it now. I've had it for a couple of years where I know what these foods are going to do.
Speaker 3:And if I do have to eat something for instance, I was at an event last night I purposely avoid foods, which is the polar opposite of the way you and I were my friend when we were unwell. As you're attracted to what your main urges and drivers are, the subconscious things that are happening within your gut flora telling you, graham, you need that sugary cereal, right? That's one thing that's working against you, and two, that you feel really awful after you eat it. And three, it's not giving you the nutrition you need. So the thing that I found that's really significant about this that I want to share as we close, is that you'll find your mindset is a major shift because you'll look at food with a high degree of suspicion possibly food label-induced Tourette's when you start reading the labels and realize what's actually what they're trying to give you and I'm using that with a degree of humor there but the reality is you become far more selective, which actually couples or builds on this whole notion of this designer diet where you already know and are thinking ahead, not to the moment of consuming that food.
Speaker 3:But how is my body going to react to this tomorrow? Am I going to see all kinds of spikes in my sugar, because I've seen it before? Can I operate with some intermittent fasting tomorrow? Is it better for me to refrain and then have a highly satiating steak, as I did today, after not eating for 10, 10 and a half hours? And I'm rewarded now sitting in front of you because I have high energy, I feel great and I don't have to worry about going to bed tonight and having IBS symptoms or feeling sick because I just had a stressful couple three days of travel, so it's almost like insurance now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what a perfectly perfect way to end the podcast. And I was just telling my daughter today. You know why do we get Toby, our dog, really good meats every day and you know why he tells me when he wants to go for a walk. It's usually I take him for two out of the three or four that I do, but he always tells me when he wants to go. So he gets about seven kilometers a day of exercise and eats really well.
Speaker 2:And I said, you know it's funny, doctors don't get much medical nutrition training at all. I think it's five hours in their entire medical degree, whereas I believe veterinarians get much more. And when you take a dog or a cat or any pet to a veterinarian and it's sick, one of the first things the veterinarian asks and I've been there, I've heard it is what are you feeding them? But if you take your own sick metabolic self to a doctor, they never ask you what you're eating. You got to ask yourself why.
Speaker 2:And so, having that lens of I know what that food does, I know what it's going to turn into and I know what I'm going to feel like when I eat, it is one of the best ways of getting off the habit of eating that bagel, thinking there's nothing wrong with it, when there's everything wrong with it in my opinion, especially if you're doing it daily lifestyle. I think Stephen and I enjoyed writing these down, mainly because they are such beneficial outcomes where you think you sort of cheated or won the lottery where you were able to undo the thing that you initially set out to undo or solve, but then all of these other benefits come with it that you weren't expecting. It just adds to the reinforcement that we went down the path that we were supposed to. So, stephen, thank you for joining again in delivering another podcast, and we hope everybody at home enjoyed the topic of unexpected outcomes from the keto lifestyle. Thanks, stephen, thank you.
Speaker 1:Take care. Thanks for tuning into Lessons from the Keto Lifestyle. Thanks, Stephen. Thank you, Take care. Thanks for tuning in to 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.