Lessons from the Ketoverse

Fuel Your Primal Power: Keto and Carnivore Meal Strategies

• Graham

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The quest for optimal health often leads us to rethink our relationship with food, particularly what and when we eat. In this practical exploration of keto and carnivore meal strategies, Graham and Stephen share their hard-won insights about crafting satisfying, nutrient-dense meals that sustain energy without triggering the blood sugar rollercoaster.

Breaking free from conventional eating patterns doesn't happen overnight. We dive into the transition period where strategic snacking can bridge the gap as your body adapts to metabolizing fat rather than sugar. From sardines with mustard to high-quality dark chocolate with natural peanut butter, we outline snack options that deliver satiation without inflammation. But the true revelation comes when you discover how proper fat and protein consumption can eliminate hunger signals altogether, allowing your body to focus on repair rather than constant digestion.

The continuous glucose monitor emerges as a powerful tool for personalized nutrition, providing immediate feedback on how specific foods affect your metabolism. Stephen shares his perspective as someone managing diabetes: "What I recommend is giving your body a chance to focus on digestion as opposed to just consumption and ingestion." This data-driven approach helps identify which foods serve your health and which trigger inflammation, even those marketed as "healthy."

For families navigating mixed dietary preferences, we offer practical strategies for creating meals that satisfy everyone without compromising nutritional integrity. From Italian-made pasta with natural ingredients to high-quality ground beef tacos, small upgrades in sourcing can transform family favorites into genuinely nourishing options. The conversation extends to eating while traveling, where sometimes fasting becomes preferable to consuming inflammatory airport food.

Ready to transform your relationship with food? Subscribe to Lessons from the Keto-Verse for more practical wisdom on fueling your body optimally while navigating real-world challenges. Your journey to metabolic health starts with understanding what truly nourishes your unique physiology.

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.

Graham:

And welcome everybody to another episode of Lessons from the Keto-Verse. I'm here with my friend, stephen, and today we are talking about keto meal ideas, keto and carnivore meal ideas. We're going to cover some of our experiences around snacks in between meals. We're going to talk a little bit about our favorite meals. What is a sort of typical week look like? What are some of the things that we are eating? What are we helping prepare for our families? We've got a little bit of a different scenario between the two of us, so we're going to get a different perspective there. And then we're also going to talk about what happens when you're on the road and you can't bring the foods that you want to eat, and how does that? How do you plan those things out? I know Stephen's got a lot of experience in with his business travel, which adds another element of difficulty to keeping with the food lifestyle. So welcome, stephen. Thank you for joining.

Stephen:

Oh, thank you.

Graham:

All right, here we go. So let's start off with snacks. Earlier on, when I was sort of reducing the number of types of foods that I was eating getting rid of carbs, cutting out junk food, cutting out ultra-processed food, cutting out ultra-processed food as I was slowly but surely moving towards a keto Mediterranean-type diet, I did find that having healthy snacks at home sort of could get me from one meal to another, and I think one of the reasons for that is I didn't have a good. The reasons for that is I didn't have a good understanding because I had no history of how much fat and protein do I need to have at every meal in order to not feel hungry until the next meal. I generally eat two meals a day late morning and then sort of early dinner. Late morning and then sort of early dinner Try not to eat too late and so there were a few snack foods that came in really handy earlier on that I'm going to share.

Graham:

I'm going to list the 10 of them that were kind of my favorites. What I found with these was you didn't need to eat a lot in order to feel full. There were a couple of examples like sardines and I always ate sardines with mustard because I didn't love the taste, but I knew that they were super good for me and actually super cheap. As well as olives, I tried to find the best sourced olives, so I stayed away from the ones in the plastic container that are $2.99 or $0.99 and went with the ones that are hand-picked. It just made me appreciate them more. They tasted better and I wanted to eat them. Yes, it was a little more expensive, but I didn't need to eat a lot of food, so I'll start off with those two. Stephen, I know your experience early on was a little different, and how are you doing with snacks when you started and snacks today?

Stephen:

It's an area that is constantly evolving. To my taste Like, for instance, for someone who didn't really eat a lot of desserts later in life, I still enjoyed you, um, the, the occasional piece of chocolate or what have you. So I did some research on it and found out there were some bioflavonoids that are in higher quality chocolates. Uh, so the lint? There's a lint version that has no added sugars. So my approach to all of these things in essence is around what does it do to my blood sugar? That's kind of my my starting point, because I want to avoid these spikes as much as possible and still get the benefit you had highlighted in terms of protein.

Stephen:

So I make poor man's peanut butter cups. I'll take 100% dark chocolate or 95% and pile all natural peanut butter to the point where I've got the full attention of all three dogs in the house and I'll have a couple of squares of that and it doesn't seem to have much effect on my glucose. And that just gives me that opportunity, after I've stacked a meal, to eat a snack which is part of my strategy at the end of a meal rather than grazing an hour and a half after I've had dinner. At the end of a meal, rather than grazing an hour and a half after I've had dinner, because that's a habit that I followed my wife into. Where she would, she would graze.

Stephen:

She would have four or five meals a day, so her entire day is just a series, series of snacks. So that's one of the key points of disparity between how she eats and I eat. She's also a vegetarian, so you have to adapt and that's where the challenge is. Avoid triggers like sitting at the television and watching television. Get on the elliptical, use the elliptical, watch the show that you want to watch and that'll keep you on lemon water and other things that are really really hard to do at the same time as those arms are going back and forth on the elliptical. So you don't really have a free appendage to use the stuff in snacks. So that's kind of the Machiavellian approach I've taken to snacks overall, graham.

Graham:

Love it, love it. A couple other ones that I had on my list For those that can't avoid snacking in front of the TV. I'm not generally a TV snacker, but pork rinds can be a really healthy alternative to a bag of chips or whatever else you grab from the fridge that seems to last 20 years. Pork rinds can be an excellent source. Just read the ingredients. I always recommend pick up the bag, turn it around, read the ingredients. If there's anything in there other than pork or ingredients you don't recognize, put it down. There's definitely another solution and part of the fun, I think, of this journey is picking up you know the foods that you are thinking about buying. Picking up you know the foods that you are thinking about buying. You know learning how to read food labels on the back, not on the front, and then putting the stuff back on the shelf where you don't recognize the ingredients.

Graham:

Beef jerky an excellent option, very filling. You can take that on the road with you. You can take that on the road with you. I've just found that it's really hard to find all-natural beef jerky without a lot of ingredients that I don't want in there. There are ones out of the US that I have ordered and tried. They're expensive, so drying your own beef jerky is something that I've thought about doing for a while. Might get into it this summer, but if you can find a good source of beef jerky, that is very, very filling and it'll definitely tie you over to the next meal and you can eat as much as you want until you're full.

Stephen:

I like your comment about pork rinds, graham, because I, accidentally, I go, as we've talked about previously to to my local butcher and I buy sections of half pounds of bacon at a time because and they're thick cut and they're quite delicious Delicious, but for a period I was, because it's so busy at the butcher shop I was going and going into the freezers and grabbing what was there, not realizing that it was. I was actually purchasing pork belly. It wasn't actually bacon, it was. It was basically pork bellies and the first thing that you notice with pork bellies is they don't have any flavor. And buyer beware, because I have cracked a tooth actually on pork rind and uh so that was very expensive uh bacon.

Stephen:

but the point is, is that where you were going with what you were talking about? Making your own beef jerky? One of the big concerns with these, um, these um, even organic, uh managed uh bacon sources or pork sources, is the nitrites that they put in to to season the bacon, and everything's a matter of degree. If you're cutting out everything, pork bellies are an interesting place to start because you can season it yourself and cook it yourself and, yes, it comes out as a very hard crispy bacon, but you can back off on how long you cook it and you can also do other methods of cooking where it's almost like a dry roast, and you'll end up with the same thing that you're paying for in a bag that's sealed and in microplastics, and it's probably a better option, so I think that's a good idea.

Graham:

Excellent. I also had on here hard boiled eggs. My wife loves to make them. I'm very happy that she does. You know, when you're hungry it's amazing how one or two hard boiled eggs will fill you up, give you all the healthy proteins you need.

Graham:

Some people have a hard time making hard boiled eggs so that they're easy to crack and actually get into. Lots of information online about tips and tricks. If you're really struggling. They make some super cheap hard-boiled egg makers that. If you're invested in this kind of lifestyle, it may be worthwhile having some of those tools around where you can make a dozen hard-boiled eggs at the beginning of the week and now you've got an instant snack that you can take with you on the road. If you're bored of the hard-boiled egg, then open it up, mush it up, add some real bacon, you know, even add some butter or whatever seasoning you want on it and all of a sudden it becomes a different meal For me, you know.

Graham:

The rest on this list are things like cheese, cottage cheese. Try and get the healthy kind. I generally try and buy European cheese. They don't pasteurize it. I prefer it that way. You know there are. You know all natural cheeses that just have milk as the ingredient, and then you can find cheeses that have a lot of you know unrecognizable ingredients. Obviously, we recommend staying away from those, but you know, things like cheese, cottage cheese, have always been, you know, a snack that people have eaten for hundreds of years, if not thousands of years. And then the last two on the list, easy to throw into the oven or into the microwave if that's your style, would be things like hot dogs and hamburger patties. So when I say hot dog, I mean, you know, without the bun, without the sugary ketchup, without the relish, and hamburger patties by themselves. Throw some butter on there, a little bit of salt if you need to. Those can be excellent tie-overs until the next meal. Any other snack ideas, stephen, before we move on to meals?

Stephen:

Actually, it's a couple of ones that you introduced reminded me of just this past week and I went to a First Nations restaurant in a small town, ontario, and the owner is not only First Nations, she's actually a dietician and she uses her knowledge of food to help manage her lupus. We talk quite a bit about my diabetes and her lupus and targeting non-inflammatory type foods, so avoiding the seed oils, and that's kind of a segue into the one challenge that you were talking about earlier about. You know what do you do when you travel. It becomes the you're looking for a specific gravity of food that's on that menu will cause the least amount of harm as opposed to the most. So sometimes it is accepting, especially if it's an intermittent thing. You're not doing it all the time. As you alluded to, I've spent weeks and even months and over a year on the road. So you have to be really conscientious about what you're eating and where you're eating and making sure that the source of foods that you're consuming are not full with all kinds of additives that would elevate your inflammation. And obviously clearest sign of that is what is your body doing with it. Are you processing it in a normal way or are you having, you know, a bowel centric reaction. You know, shortly after eating it that's usually a very strong sign. That combination of stress in the food is for some reason your body's saying let's get rid of this. So you're not getting any nutrition from it. So you really have to listen to your body and see what works for you.

Stephen:

It's hard to go wrong to your point with eggs. It's hard to screw up eggs, even in what we would call colloquially as a greasy spoon. You can ask them not to do it in a particular fashion. That might result in maybe things being added to that you don't need. So, for instance, you know scrambled eggs, add some cheese to it, add some salsa if it's good salsa. But again, the more you add, the more likelihood you're introducing things to it that are not as good.

Stephen:

So your suggestion of hard-boiled eggs, that's seven grams of protein right there. And you know, frankly, they're now saying they used to say we needed 0.8 grams of protein each day. They're now upping that to two grams. So when you only have seven grams in an egg and I typically eat four eggs to satiate me in the morning with usually somewhere between a quarter and a half a pound of bacon and that gets me through until my evening so that I don't require a snack. So that's part of my strategy is to up the amount of protein, especially for someone like me who is going to the gym all the time, is trying to avoid sarcopenia by lifting weights. You and I, at our age, we need that protein by lifting weights.

Graham:

You and I, at our age, we need that protein. Yeah, really well said, and there's a couple of things that you mentioned there that I wanted to touch on. So the main thing is, early on, when you are changing your food lifestyle. One of the things that I've noticed, and I've heard others that have, you know, gone through a similar journey talk about, is when you change your diet, the body is going to feel stress because it's used to you know, in my case, packaged foods, ultra processed foods. It doesn't like it, but it's used to it. As soon as you start eliminating those processed foods and taking the sugar, out of your diet and the high starch foods.

Graham:

The body is going to react and when it reacts it's going to be under stress, and every body reacts differently to that kind of stress. Every body reacts differently to that kind of stress, knowing in the back of your mind that you're eating good quality, best sourced, you know, protein and fat meals. Sometimes you do have to stick with it for a little while. I have talked to people who have tried this and they've found that it, you know, it's causing bowel movements or whatever else because of the stress that they're under, or they're dumping a lot of water, they're dumping electrolytes and they're not replacing those electrolytes and others. Those same people, when they go back and they say, okay, I'm going to give it a try again, they find that when they stick with it longer, they come up the other side in really good shape. So that is one thing to keep in mind. Obviously you want to be under a doctor's health advice and making sure that all of your blood work results are where they need to be and you're keeping up on the vitamins and minerals that your body needs or is short of. But that was one thing to keep in mind. And then your other point about eggs, I think, and the fact that that's your main meal. Every day, same here. So now we're getting into meals.

Graham:

I for some reason well over a year of doing this have had anywhere between four and six eggs. It's generally scrambled, because I'm really a big loser when it comes to coming up with some other option. I just know how to scramble my eggs. My go-to every morning is I use Redmond salt. Any sort of Himalayan or natural salt is going to be just fine for you. I add sour cream to it and I try and go out and get the best sour cream that I can buy. If you read my store at least, there's got to be five, six different kinds of sour cream, all from the same company, and they call it different things. The one that I pick is the one that you know. When I read the ingredients, there's one or two ingredients. I know exactly what those are, and when I go back to the cheap sour creams that seem to you know they add a bunch of ingredients because they've removed all the good ones. It doesn't taste anywhere near as good.

Graham:

So for me, my go-to meal, the first meal of the day, whenever that is is going to be scrambled eggs, salt, sour cream, and then I'm always adding some kind of beef to it. That could be hamburger patties, and again trying to find the hamburger patties with the least amount of added garbage ingredients. The other day I was looking at two boxes. I had to choose between the first box the last ingredient was sugar and the second box of hamburgers. The last ingredient was canola oil, which I have no idea why they needed to put that in there, but they did. I chose the one with sugar because it was the last ingredient. It's going to be a very, very small percentage of the overall ingredient list that I'm eating if you're mixing that up with the scrambled eggs, and I don't even think about food until dinnertime. Sometimes I have to be reminded that I better eat if I want to eat before I go to bed. So that fills me up quite a bit. What is your kind of go-to first?

Stephen:

meal of the day, stephen, it really depends on whether I'm doing a late breakfast or if I am doing a lunch, so I tend to mix it up. So my lunch is my breakfast and my breakfast is my lunch. So you know, going back to when I travel, depending on my schedule, especially if it's in a different time zone, you have that additional implication for your body because your body's going OK, so we still think it's 6 am and it's actually 3 am here. How do we manage this? So often, what I would do and I found remarkable results with my glucose I think it was building metabolic resilience. It's changing things around a little bit so your body doesn't go into a call it a melodic stasis where it's like just singing along and everything is perfectly fine is you're actually switching it up and getting the body to adjust and be proactive in terms of how it processes.

Stephen:

Because even in stressful situations and the kind of work that you and I do, I found my sugar was lower when I was traveling, as long as I was careful about what I ate, and typically I probably spent more money than the average person, because, one, it's restaurants and two, I insisted on eating a healthy steak for dinner and, really ensuring that I was fully satiated, avoided any unnecessary carbs from potatoes or starches.

Stephen:

So I essentially cut out as much of the potential ultra-processed components that might bleed into the menu at a restaurant and had a good old-fashioned Caesar salad or a nice healthy salad, first to do the stacking, to make sure my stomach had lots of cellulose in it before I introduced anything. It might've had some sugar snuck into it and I had extraordinary results my sugars dropped by, I would say 20 to 25%. So people who think that they're on the road, that they can't eat healthy, actually I think it was healthier because I was not given. Actually I think it was healthier because I was not given. I did not allow myself any option beyond a handful of macadamias, of having anything to eat from call it six in the morning until 6 pm at night. So I literally was doing like a 12-12 fast.

Graham:

Yeah, and you mentioned macadamia nuts another fantastic choice. Uh, as far as nuts go, I you know from what I gather from the research that I've done. Uh, it has the most benefit and the least negative results of any of the nuts out there. So we can add that to our list of snack recommendations. Stephen, I know you had mentioned that your wife is a vegetarian. Definitely that's going to cause some challenges around what kind of meals you have as a couple. Obviously, what kind of ingredients you're buying at the stores. You've figured out a happy medium, and so what would you tell the audience? Is, you know your best experience advice for getting to where you got to?

Stephen:

So in our particular case, we've kind of taken an approach of detente I don't bother her about her eating habits and she doesn't bother me about mine. So she lives the lifestyle that she chooses to live, and I do as well. And in the absence of our four kids, there's not as much pressure to run our household like a restaurant where we're catering to, you know, multiple dietary restrictions and limitations and, candidly, in those early days when I had to, I was suffering from IBS. I was either recently diagnosed or an undiagnosed diabetic I was having. I was at a stage, as we alluded to in an earlier podcast, where literally it didn't matter what I ate. I was getting sick. I had severe IBS.

Stephen:

So just the and this is the interesting part just the pleasure of cooking for myself and making my own meal slows down my metabolism, drops my cortisol and puts me in a state of mind to go okay, I'm getting ready to feed my body, I'm preparing these eggs, I'm preparing this bacon, you know, I'm enjoying a nice decaffeinated coffee, and so I've been kind of leaning into getting ready to eat, as opposed to the machine gun approach of launching into, you know, a fast food outlet and grabbing something, looking at everyone else, making sure they didn't get served ahead of you because you were there first, and all the other tension and stress that comes with that ultimately I avoid.

Stephen:

We don't actually eat out at restaurants very much at all. I will skip a meal quite easily and quite regularly as part of my intermittent fasting. I'll just take it and go. I guess I'm doing extended fast for 24 hours. I don't really feel like eating in a restaurant, so there's always that option as well. And again, that builds metabolic resilience, teaches a little bit of discipline and it keeps your body on its toes when it comes to how it manages insulin, cortisol and metabolizes sugar in your body.

Graham:

Yeah, excellent and I think we'll probably expand on that in future episodes about the fact that you have figured out how to have a two-eating lifestyle family and figured out how to be happy and healthy at the same time. Getting into other kinds of meals Again. For me it's basically egg, sour cream and some kind of beef every single day. Are you pretty consistent with eggs and something else for that first meal or do you stick with eggs?

Stephen:

Well, I think I typically do for that first meal and I'll sometimes pile in the additional fat by having the Greek yogurt with fennel seed, because I'm leaning more heavily towards keto than I am carnivore, and sometimes I'll just go pure carnivore for a meal too, meaning just eggs and bacon, for instance. And I found just for those out there with a similar condition, I found that the fat Greek yogurt with just a few berries for a diabetic not the cup and a half that Graham and my wife would get away with is just back off. On the fruit, make sure it's blueberries, blackberries, something with a very low glycemic index, with lots of dense fiber, and add fennel seed, chia seeds. I put three different varieties and I also have a digestive yeast they call it baker's yeast that I pile on there as well just to build up my microbiome and ensure that I've got some biodiversity in my stomach. That's a key part of my strategy that has particularly worked well for me because I don't have IBS symptoms anymore. Worked well for me because I don't have IBS symptoms anymore.

Stephen:

And, what's crazy for those of you out there that have IBS symptoms, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the second you start feeling like, oh my God, I don't feel so good. And then you're driving, and then you're thinking well, what if I can't make this hour and a half? Which causes a further inflection of cortisol and insulin. And then all of a sudden, the body's pulling all of that digestive process away from the stomach and digestive system and it's ending up in your muscles, where you don't need it, because you're not running from a dinosaur, you're not being chased, but your body doesn't know. And then you end up exacerbating the symptoms of IBS and it becomes a constant loop. So one of the key things is, once you get out of the inflammatory foods and you stay away from as you said so eloquently last time stay out of the center of the grocery store. All that stuff is you know my words, not yours, but all that stuff is essentially poison. It's not good for you, it will cause your body harm, and moderation doesn't mean having just a little bit every day. That's not moderation. So what you and I are really trying to goalpost here is what are you doing today to ensure that you're living a consistent lifestyle that not only suits your values, lifestyle that not only suits your values but provides the nutrition that your body requires in order to not have a relapse, either in my case, with glucose or IBS or, in your case, other metabolic conditions that are making you feel much older and very much unwell. So use your body as the referee.

Stephen:

It's the budgie in in in the opening of the coal mine to say, okay, what did I eat last night that has caused me to have brain fog this morning and not feel well, and sometimes it can be a little overindulgence with snacks, like, as you said. You're talking about snacks that are, candidly, highly nutritious, full of protein. We're not talking about kibble, you know, cereal kibble or something to that effect. It's probably about as good as the kibble that we feed our animals. So it's the stuff that you should be avoiding and just manage outcomes Because, again, if you get sick, your sugar is going to go up.

Stephen:

So the last thing you want to do is feed in an environment that's got higher sugar in it when you're under duress and add another form of stress, which would be the food that you're consuming. There's a very good reason why we don't tend to want to eat when we feel sick. It's because our body's ultimately engineered to say hey, can't deal with this virus or can't deal with this bacterial infection and processing your Big Mac Like it's just too much. Sorry, big Mac's got to go. And when people are in a constant state of inflammation, as I was, every day is a Big Mac rejection day, because everything to my body at that point was as healthy as a Big Mac. I couldn't absorb any of the nutrition because I was in a constant state of inflammation. I would have been far better to fast for an extended period and allow my body to develop a new level of homeostasis that was more healthy, and I credit my naturopath for helping me through that process and ensuring my biome was correct, etc.

Stephen:

But I'm still sensitive and so when I eat something that you know I overindulge have too many blueberries, even though I got polyphenols and there's lots of fiber there, I see it in my sugar, and so that ends up leading me to the elliptical. I go for a walk, do whatever I need to. Most nights, folks, especially if you're having a snack before you go to bed, don't just eat it and sit there. Go for a walk, do something and if it's dark, maybe consider investing in an elliptical. Because it's amazing, graham, how much if you're not wearing a CGM, how much your body benefits from that light exercise before bed, even though it's counterintuitive. We were told. You know, don't exercise before bed because you won't be able to settle. I'm not talking about doing a marathon. I'm talking about a very easy pace on the elliptical where you can hold a full conversation, like we're doing right now, and you don't sound like you're speaking in staccato. That's more than enough of a pace to bring down your sugar by, so I brought my sugar down as much as 50 percent.

Graham:

Amazing, well said, the CGM that Stephen mentioned is the continuous glucose monitor and the reason why that's so important. And you know people that are eating ultra processed foods and snacking all the time. They don't realize how many meals they have in a day and metabolically what's happening is you're eating high starch foods. The healthy version of that, or the healthier version of that, could be potatoes or rice, but the more likely source these days is something that comes in a box with maltodextrin and a number of other sugars and starches which the body converts into glucose. When it does that, your glucose shoots up. The body sees that increase in glucose as a poison, as an attack on the body. It needs to mitigate the potential negative impact of that sugar by releasing insulin potential negative impact of that sugar by releasing insulin.

Graham:

When it releases insulin, you are going from. You're sort of going through this journey of hyperglycemia, so your sugar levels are too high. And then we all know the hangry. They even have ads for junk food talking about hangry. When you go below your threshold that your body wants to be in now you're hypoglycemic. When you're hypoglycemic, your gut is telling your body you've got to eat something quick, and the problem with eating something quick is we often go and grab a peanut butter sandwich, as I have done in the past, or a bag of chips or a chocolate bar. We've all got our you know our junk food weaknesses and we now start the process again where we our blood sugar has increased, our insulin levels have to compensate for that Over time.

Graham:

You're going through this roller coaster ride. At the end of that roller coaster ride is insulin resistance, and when your body has insulin resistance, you are inviting a host of major health problems into your life and each body is going to react differently. But certainly you know anything with an itis on the end, which means inflammation in the body arthritis, for example, which I experienced. So the body is going to manifest itself in that inflammation heart disease, metabolic sickness All of these things can come from this roller coaster ride. What we're trying to do here is show you how to avoid that roller coaster ride by eating foods that don't spike your blood glucose and Stephen's an expert at this because he sees what every single food impacts because of a CGM. So I thought maybe we'd just do a little review of why that CGM is so valuable and why it can be such an important piece of data in, you know, finding the lifestyle that fits for your body. That's really really well said, graham.

Stephen:

I mean the thing that we've talked about this before. I'm a huge advocate. I do not receive any endorsement whatsoever from the company, but I wear a Libra 2 and there are some challenges with them, namely because I work out, I don't have a lot of body fat. I actually wear mine in a really awkward spot behind my shoulder blade because I don't have any fat on my biceps triceps, where they typically well, they don't go on your bicep but typically they go on your tricep. Stomach is a non-starter because, one, I don't have a lot of fat and two, just because of the nature of how my body's configured. I'm tall upper body with shorter legs, so every time I sit I rip it off. It comes out of the stomach. Bending the needles is a bit like a fishhook in those. It's not fun so and they're very expensive. So my experience has been that that's where I wear it. Am I getting a true, 100% accurate glucose rating? No, but I'm trending a baseline that shows up in my HA1C. That's relatively close, I would say within 5% of true blood testing. But what's most important for people like ourselves and there's a lot of type 2 diabetics out there and you kind of alluded to it is this information, this data is informing. And even if you're pre-diabetic, I recommend everyone to wear one for a couple weeks because you don't know what the food is doing to you that you're eating until you monitor it. Even for myself, where I thought I was eating well and I thought I was doing the right things, it was actually a whole series of things that we've sort of touched on before. How often are you eating? So if you don't eat enough, if you go to one meal a day, there's a risk for certain people with your body and your mental state of mind. I certainly don't recommend it for military people that have PTSD like me, but going to one meal a day, your cortisol is going to rise because your body's reacting to the absence of food.

Stephen:

Second issue for us at our age, particularly for men, we need more protein. It's hard to eat enough protein in a day as it is without feeling engorged from trying to get two grams per number of grams. So how are you going to eat 160 grams? If you're 80 kilos? How are you going to eat 160 grams in one meal? That's a lot of protein when one egg is seven, that's you're talking eating several dozen eggs. I don't think most people, unless you're a bodybuilder, are doing that. So we're under from a nutritional point of view. We're undernourished in terms of the protein we consume anyway. So what I recommend is that and you alluded to this earlier with snacking, is I give Dr Jason Fung, who's a nephrologist that created the whole momentum around intermittent fasting is, even when you are having a snack, try to limit the window in which you're eating to give your body a chance to focus on digestion as opposed to just consumption and ingestion.

Stephen:

Let it convert from ingestion to digestion. So when you give it more time to do that, that whole metabolic process does what. It lowers the amount of cortisol that's in your system because you've just fed yourself. Your insulin will start to come down and you can see all this on a CGM. If your sugar is not going down after two hours of eating, like if you don't see a substantial drop on the CGM, that means you ate something that spiked your sugar. That was definitely not good for you, and that's even looking outside the bands that they recommend.

Stephen:

There are Canadian standards and US standards and it's difficult, unless you're a Canadian, to understand the Canadian ones, the way in which it's measured in the US. So just stick to wherever you're from and look at what your bands are supposed to be. For us Canadians what's normal is four to six and it's expected to go as high as 10 after a meal. But again, it should come down after two hours and if it doesn't, what I do is jump on the elliptical If it starts to go up, and I don't like the curve that's being created. I certainly don't eat a snack and I get on the elliptical right away. Bring it down.

Stephen:

Drink some water. Why are you drinking water? Because drinking water is going to trigger releasing the sugar through your urine and your sugar will naturally drop down because your bladder's full. It'll absorb the sugar as well, and the exercise, of course, will burn up the sugar, the glucose that's in your system, because your, your muscles, are metabolizing it and using it through the light exercise. So that's kind of the holistic approach that I take. I just monitor my body.

Stephen:

I probably have an absurd number of observations that I make daily on the CGM where I've tested, sometimes because it gives you the data and one session of two weeks I'll have 1,449 checks on my glucose. You know where I go in and I look at the app and that's the beauty of this and it sets you up for success. Because I'll tell you, graham, one of the toughest things is when you go to the doctor's office and you get a surprise of what your A1C is and you think you're doing everything right. It's already too late. You've done damage to yourself for a minimum of 90 days without knowing it.

Stephen:

With the CGM, you can know that day oh gosh, you know Graham makes the best jerk chicken in the world, but I must have eaten something else that you know threw me off and I, you know, my sugar was really, really high and you make a mental note of that and you start cutting out the foods or the snacks that you're consuming that cause it.

Stephen:

So that brings full circle back to how you eat and I eat. So I have four or five central meats that I eat. I'll eat ribs, I'll eat steak, I'll eat chicken breasts, I'll eat chicken thighs and I eat turkey and I eat salmon. And the salmon that I prefer, candidly, is the smoked salmon, which again, is got nitrites in it. So I minimize that to not more than once a week, but I'm getting a lot of high quality, non-farm but actually fresh salmon. So there's ways in which you can enjoy it in moderation and still get a high quality protein into your body, get your DHA, your EPA, in balance as well. So the whole point is and we talked about this in early days what are you consuming that's healing you or what are you consuming that's harming you? And I found that the CGM was a great, great, great indicator of what food was doing to my body.

Graham:

Yeah, instant results and a historical set of data results where you can start to make decisions really quickly. If they're on this journey of, you know, contemplating a change and there are different stages to people changing their habits the contemplation stage is okay. I'm sort of I understand there might be a problem here and I don't know what to do. They're going to think the same thing about their family because, you know, oftentimes if the parents aren't eating healthy, then the kids probably aren't eating healthy. Right, that could be a combination of unhealthy foods in the household and that's what my parents are eating. I'm going to copy them because they're my heroes, heroes. There's a story that really impacted me that I learned during this journey, and it kind of ties into the responsibility of parenting and what food we can give our kids. So, after the Vietnam War and I don't have all of the specific details, but the details aren't the point the end result was the point there was a mandate from the government saying that shrimp was no longer healthy for children. I don't know what the age was, but let's say children under 18. And so parents, obviously listening to the government and their recommendations, stopped feeding their kids shrimp. Well, shrimp is, you know sort of a top five source of food and an excellent source of protein, Very, very cheap in Vietnam, and so obviously you know this.

Graham:

This had an impact on on the way people eat, on the way parents fed their kids Over the next couple of years. What they realized was these children were becoming emaciated. In some cases they were being hospitalized and they couldn't figure out what was going on. They hadn't made the connection on this rule, and so what they noticed were there were some kids out there that were healthy, and what was going on with these kids that were healthy versus the ones that weren't? They actually visited the homes of the kids that were healthy, and what they realized was that the parents had ignored the advice about shrimp, and what they'd done is they'd ground it up into the rice so that it was sort of hidden. The kids were still getting the shrimp, but they didn't know it, and the reason I mentioned this is we were sort of you know, I would say the kids were eating very similar to us not super, super unhealthy, but definitely not as healthy as we're eating today and there were a couple of meals that we started to make and we were really surprised by the results.

Graham:

So the first one was spaghetti, something that the vast majority of kids like. It's almost always on the. You know the kid's menu at the store and a child like you know some of my kids will not have a steak, but they will eat ground beef. I think they know where the ground beef comes from, they know where the steak comes from, but they're okay with one and not the other, and that's perfectly fine. Obviously, if your kid loves steak, you've done something right.

Graham:

But a good percentage of kids just don't want to eat that way, and so what we ended up doing is we sort of sourced our ingredients and we ended up buying Italian made pasta. So if you go to your store, oftentimes you're going to have the cheap 99 cent pasta and you might have to go and read the labels and it might be at the top shelf or the bottom shelf because most people aren't buying it. But you can make a pasta that's made in Italy. The reason why I chose that is because it doesn't have glyphosates in it. In the US they use glyphosates. In Europe they don't use glyphosates, to my knowledge, for their pasta. So I felt like you know, even though it was pasta and that is a high glycemic food that if we were going to mix it with the additional ingredients that I talked about or I'm going to talk about, then you are going to mitigate the impact of that pasta on your insulin levels, on your sugar levels and insulin levels.

Graham:

We switch to a supernatural tomato sauce. The one that we pick is Rao's. If you're a Costco member, you know you can buy two bottles of this for $16.99. Otherwise it seems really expensive. And why don't I just buy the $5 one? Because then I save $10. Well, read the ingredients on the back of the $5 tomato sauce and read the ingredients on the back of something like a Rao's tomato sauce. You can recognize every single ingredient in the Rao's tomato sauce. I would pick the fattiest ground beef I could find and then I would add bone broth. I wouldn't tell the kids that I'd added bone broth, not that I'm trying to hide anything, but they wouldn't know the difference anyway.

Graham:

And then the last thing was adding real Parmesan cheese. So going out and buying the block of cheese again. Yes, I understand it's a little more expensive than the green bottle or green container of Parmesan cheese, but once the kids started to eat this type of pasta and I have made this for, you know, an unbelievable number of people, whether they're coming over, whether it's family parties, whether it's my family, you know, once a week I have made this for so many people and they have said it's the best pasta or spaghetti that they've ever had. And I think it's because, you know, not only is it all natural ingredients, but the really interesting thing is they can't eat the green container of Parmesan cheese anymore because it tastes so much worse than the real cheese. So that's an idea for a meal.

Graham:

And the second idea and I'll throw it over to you, stephen is we used to eat the yellow box tacos. I can't remember the name of it off the top of my head, but it's a yellow box. All you need to do is add ground beef. Well, one day we decided well, the parents are going to have romaine lettuce tacos, the kids might want shells, they might want wraps, or they might join us for the romaine lettuce, and they have actually joined us with the romaine lettuce more often than not these days. I'll go out and buy some ground beef, I'll buy some taco seasoning I found one that's very carnivore friendly with, you know, excellent sourced ingredients and I'll mix all that together, obviously, add whatever toppings you want, and the kids will not go back to the yellow box taco mix anymore because I was able to make them, you know, a taco that they preferred.

Graham:

There's two ideas. There's lots of ideas out there, but two ideas on. You know, thinking back to that Vietnam story, how do you, you know, in a sort of covert way, provide your kids with really high satiating meals? Even if it's twice a week, you're still doing significant benefits over, you know, giving them the regular junk food that we tend to give, because life's short, it's a fast and it's difficult to figure out how to feed your kids, uh, in a healthy way. Any experiences on your end, steven.

Stephen:

I've always been upfront with my kids as I learn things, because probably, like you, I had not only the challenge for a period where I was a vegetarian and my wife was actually vegan and then headed me in that direction. As a divorced and remarried dad, I had the challenge of the dietary variety that my kids were being offered by their mom versus what we had in our household. So there was always this pressure or expectation that we would buy the same stuff that their mom was buying and sometimes the stuff that she was buying we deemed as quite unhealthy, and so there was always this tension. And I've actually talked to other nuclear families, the spouses, nuclear families, the spouses where there's a general disparity in how the child is fed in one house versus the other. So I think it's a huge challenge and it's remarkable.

Stephen:

Your shrimp story is an amazing story Because you know, we were told I just saw this today, actually, and I'm glad you kind of opened the door for us to talk about this. But this is why you have, in my opinion, the opportunity to be your own self-advocate is, see what your body does with what you consume and cut out the things that we now know are bad, but for a time. When they first launched high fructose corn syrup, they actually said it was far healthier than table sugar, and it is. It's listed as a carcinogen uh, type 2 carcinogen it's. It's worse than cigarettes.

Stephen:

I've recently learned that french fries, because the way they're prepared, are like for every cigarette.

Stephen:

For every cigarette you consume, it's equivalent to a french fry.

Stephen:

So as we learn more and more about about these, these sorts of things, I think we have to put our foot down and say you know, in the best interest of the kids, based on the information we have today, I'm not going to let my kids consume that stuff, because when you and I were young, we were still getting an enormous amount of, you know, food that was coming from, oh, from the local farmer's market, or even from neighbors, in my case, and of course, that stuff was in fertilizer and the soil was nutrient rich and the meats we often in my day, because we were not particularly well off is the family would split on a cow. So sections of the cow would be sent and our freezer would be full for almost a year and we would eat whatever was in there and we would complain when we got to the bottom and the organ meats were there and we had to eat liver and other things, not realizing, of course, that that was probably the healthiest cuts that we could consume.

Stephen:

So I think ultimately it comes down to educating the kids. I was never a fan of trying to cater to with the expectations as a parent getting them to their events and et cetera of running a restaurant in my house where the kids got whatever they wanted and we ate what we needed. But sometimes you have no choice, especially when you have circumstances like I just described.

Graham:

Yeah, I think that's a really good point and I should mention, because you brought up a really good point there about am I hiding things from the kids?

Graham:

The younger they were, the less I was telling them, the less they cared of their own meals. And we're talking six months a year, a year and a half. We're not talking about a huge amount of time. I would start to explain to them about the ingredients and why it tastes so much better, and showing them the ingredient lists and saying, hey, read the back of this tomato sauce ingredient list, read the back of this tomato sauce ingredient list. And, of course, the good one. They could actually read all the words and it's just sort of teaching them about how to eat a little more healthy.

Graham:

And now, you know, I've got a middle child in university who every now and then will send me a text with what she's eating that night. She is choosing some really healthy foods because she understands the impact of those foods on her health, on her, you know, mental well-being as well as physical well-being, and it, you know, it definitely makes for a proud papa when I see that she's taken that knowledge and that information and turned it into a habit for herself as well, my go-to. Yeah, sorry, stephen, go ahead.

Stephen:

Yeah, I was just going to ask you a question because that's really interesting, because my kids do the same, particularly in my case, because I have a son that has CPT2, which is one of the rarest diseases in the world. So he has a genetic deformity where he can't metabolize certain proteins. So he's on literally the inverse diet to me and so he has to be particularly careful because he is to consume high starch items and limited amount of protein. So literally our diets couldn't be more different for in his case, for genetic reasons. So my youngest is in law school, still under an enormous amount of stress, and she eats extremely well. Now I wonder if there's a crossover for how we mentored our kids, you and I, because my kids are also very low consumers of alcohol. They weren't ones to go out and get you know in quotes wasted in parties and stuff like that, and I have a?

Stephen:

oh, that's amazing because I have a monumental amount of alcoholism on both sides of the family and I dodged that bullet. But I was always concerned with my kids that they would fall into that, and so you're saying that your kids too fall into that, and so you're saying that your kids, too, pretty much avoid it.

Graham:

They generally don't. They're not partiers. I think the next generation, the stats, are that they're drinking a whole lot less, partying a whole lot less. I'm hoping it's not too extreme where you know they're all hiding in the basement, but I know my kids have a pretty healthy outlook when it comes to social activities, so for the most part they stay away from that. I'm not saying all the time, but they haven't made it a regular habit, which I think is key. At the end of the day, you can have a drink every now and then. I'm not a doctor, I'm not here to give health advice.

Graham:

I'm not a doctor, I'm not here to, you know, give health advice, but I think if the worst thing you're doing is having a drink or two once a week, that's not a big deal as long as you are, you know, managing the rest of your life. It's always better to avoid that completely, and so the fact that your kids have been able to avoid it, especially when it's something that's been in the family, is a to say, two drinks per day for men and one for women.

Stephen:

And they've recently changed that to a maximum of two or three a week. So that's a. That's a substantial change.

Stephen:

You do the math on two a day times, seven times four. You know you're you're talking about, uh, you know 56 drinks. Compared to what are we talking? 10 or 12? It's, it's, it's massive, it's a. That's like a 400 percent uh cut in consumption, which they're now saying is is. Is anything more than that is unhealthy. So that comes back to our point is what is your body doing with it? How do you feel after?

Stephen:

If you're feeling like you have the booze flu or you have IBS from the food you consumed, then cut it out, because your path, your critical path to where you head, if you continue to ignore that for decades, as I did, is literally everything I ate, made me sick. And it was so depressing, graham, because even when I thought I was eating a good meal, which probably 75% of it was that extra 5% or 8% that was, you know, on the borderline and that was over processed, made me lose the nutrition of the entire meal. It was a complete waste of time and money and, worse, it was extremely hard on my body. I would go for three or four days with constant burning sensations in my abdomen from inflammation, and my inflammation markers were quite serious. My blood pressure was not good. Now my blood pressure is where you know. On a keto carnivore diet is akin to somebody that's probably in their 20s.

Graham:

Yeah, outstanding. And I think one of the challenges with the alcohol recommendations is who are you studying? What kind of diets are they on? Because I always find it a little bit funny, just knowing what I know and knowing what you know, that you'll hear all sorts of recommendations about alcohol, what should you do, how much should you drink. But we hear hardly anything about the dangers of ultra processed foods, high starch foods, you know blood sugar, that kind of thing. And if we heard a little bit more about how bad those are for us and if we heard a little bit more about how bad those are for us, you know, along with reminding us about other lifestyle interventions that can, that can make improvements, I think we would all be better off.

Graham:

I'm going to list things. I know we're coming up to the end list my go-to meal. If I'm on my own or if I'm having to eat on my own, my wife might be. She's a psychotherapist, she might be in a session. The kids might be away. My wife might be away If I'm on my own, I got to cook my own meal. My go-to is the best source fatty ground beef. I cook that up. I then add a little bit of taco seasoning, I add some butter and I do not go light on the butter, and then I add of that meal I eat till I'm full. It takes me 15 minutes to put it together and it's actually a super, super cheap meal. So when people are looking to fill themselves up, that can be an idea. Any go-to meals on your side, stephen?

Stephen:

Yeah, that's really a good question. I try to keep a degree of variety. I probably fall into the category of where I'm having steak twice a week and it's always very high quality. I always wince a little bit because I'm getting it from the butcher and it's, you know, anywhere from $28 to $35 per steak. But again, I look at what I spend at a restaurant with some highly inflamed wings that have been fried in vegetable oil and that meal is going to cost me $50, with a drink anyway. So I'd rather eat healthy. I'd rather know, from farm to fork to in my stomach, where this stuff is coming from. So I think the reality is is if you compare and put a monetary value on the quality of life that you're going to experience by not taking care of yourself which is where I got to when I turned 50 to where I am now at, just recently turning 58, there's no amount of money you could pay me to go back to the way I was, because my quality of life was hellacious. So I think- 100%.

Graham:

And Stephen just had a birthday, by the way. Happy birthday, my friend.

Stephen:

Thank you, thank you.

Graham:

And what a great segue into our last subject, which is when you're on the road, what do you do? Some of the things. I'll just share my thoughts, and I want to hear yours, stephen, because you've had a lot more experience around business travel. Well, my wife and I are picking a restaurant, and we don't often these days. We will go buy the best source ribeye and again, yep, it's, it's going to cost 60 bucks, or 65 bucks for two steaks. We haven't been able to go anywhere and eat for less than 100 able to go anywhere and eat for less than 100.

Graham:

And they probably weren't steaks, as you're reading, they probably weren't ribeyes. Well, they definitely were nowhere near as good, right? So if it costs less, the steaks don't taste very good. Why did we do this? If they taste the same, the price is going to be twice as much, so why are we do this? If it costs? You know, if they taste the same, the price is going to be twice as much, so why are we doing this? So I think we end up with why are we doing this? Why don't we just make a really nice meal at home?

Graham:

But the interesting thing to think about is when my wife and I are on the road and we want to stop at a restaurant, we're going to pick any place that has, you know, good steak or beef. If we can find a Korean barbecue or a Brazilian steakhouse, we are the happiest two kids on the planet, you know. We have a place nearby. We're lucky enough to have a place that cooks their fries in beef tallow, so those are the only fries that we actually eat. If you've never had beef tallow fries, I highly recommend, you know, finding a restaurant that has them. There's an app called Seed Oil Scout that's Seed Oil Scout SOS, and it actually has a list of restaurants in your area that prioritize, you know, cooking in tallow or cooking in olive oil or avocado oil. In other words, staying away from the seed oils and the hidden ingredients.

Graham:

If we need something quick, we'll stop at a Wendy's and just get the beef patties. It's incredibly cheap. Not all Wendy's do this, but you know we can have a meal for seven bucks each and pretty good. You know. Quality ground beef Again not going to be the best in the world, but with all the fast food choices out there, three plain beef patties from Wendy's is a good, you know way to fill up on your protein and fat without getting a lot of harmful ingredients in there. Arby's roast beef I only get the roast beef and you know I don't do that often but any restaurants that have ground beef and you just order the ground beef. It's going to be better than and I always say that but what is it better than? It's going to be better than having that Big Mac or some other heavily processed food where you don't know the ingredients. Over to you, stephen, to end us off with some recommendations on how to eat while you're on the road.

Stephen:

Yeah, and I think anytime that you're, you know when you're in a state of doubt. For me in particular, because I practice intermittent fasting and I'm very conscientious about managing my sugar, I'm not going to die if I skip a meal. If I eat a meal in a restaurant, that is a very, very low quality food. I actually have learned time and time again I would have been better off skipping the meal. So I don't eat when I go to airports, because airports are not my friend, and so I'm already charged up, my body's full of cortisol, and the quality of food in airports is hellacious, and what you're getting, you're paying.

Stephen:

I mean, recently I just you know, Graham, I just got pistachios that were the same ones that you and I would buy here locally were literally 400% more in US dollars than the same thing in Canadian, here outside at a regular store, not at the airport. So I sometimes I just look at it and go. You know what? I'm going to make sure I'm properly hydrated. I'm going to make sure that. You know, I use this as an opportunity to build that resilience and fast until I can get somewhere where I have more variety and I can sit down and enjoy a much healthier meal, so I would. That's just my take on things, because I can monitor it and I've learned over the years that any it's better to have no food than bad food.

Graham:

Yeah, really, really well said. The worst day from a food lifestyle point of view that I've had in the last two years is, on my way back from Germany had a stopover. I only had about 20 minutes between flights stopover. I only had about 20 minutes between flights and there was a lineup at basically every restaurant that you know didn't have junk food, and so I ended up not being able to eat. I hadn't eaten in like 15 hours so I was getting hungry. I ended up eating the plane food the food that they serve on the plane and felt like crap for the next 12 hours. So it was. You know, I was sort of forced to because I didn't have a choice. I really did need to eat at that point. Usually I can easily go.

Graham:

If I've eaten something satiating, I can usually go an entire day, but in this case I hadn't the night before, and I think I'll end it with this when you're hungry, we talked about hypoglycemia, high blood sugar and hyperglycemia. Sorry, hyper is high, hypo is low blood sugar. When you get into that low blood sugar phase, you're getting messages from your gut through the vagus nerve to your brain saying we need to eat, we are hungry, and what that is doing that is the body saying we're in danger. And when the body's in danger, it's releasing cortisol and I know you know a lot about this, stephen is it's releasing cortisol, and I believe the original reason for that is let's give you energy so you can go hunt, or at least go find some food. If you are able to eat high protein, high fat, good source meals and enough food in those meals to be able to carry you over.

Graham:

The thing that may be one of the most surprising things on this journey is the opposite of being hungry is not being stressed. Your body's saying I'm totally fine, we don't need any food. I can. Actually, you know, I'm not going to send you any messages saying we need to eat. I'm going to spend all my time trying to repair, trying to build muscle, all the things that I'm trying to repair. I'm trying to build muscle, all the things that the body's able to do, because we are not focused on getting more nutrition, and not being hungry is the most surprisingly satisfying part of this lifestyle. Your thoughts on that, stephen?

Stephen:

Yeah, it's really a fantastic way to sort of wrap this up. Yeah, it's really a fantastic way to sort of wrap this up. I couldn't agree more, because you know that when people start looking into hormones and you start equating them to respective bullies and you're vacillating from parasympathetic to sympathetic reaction, your body is in a state where it is assuming and you can read up on this in a book that talks about systemic inflammation or causes thereof, called the Body Keeps the Score or causes thereof, called the Body Keeps the Score that particular book and what I'm addressing here is how we react when we're in a state of stress and it's not the time to introduce food into your body. In a state of stress, you do not see on the savannah a gazelle continuing to graze for grass when it's being chased by a lion. It'll return to eating that grass pretty quick after getting away from the lion, but it's not worried about eating when it's running for its life. And it's not much different than us.

Stephen:

Because of our lifestyles and because of what we experience with stress, we're actually better off not to eat, and the reason for that is unless you're at 4% body fat or 3% and you're not properly hydrated, the reality is that we bring a lunch. We you and I did this when we were kids in school. Um, we, we went, went to school with a pack lunch. Well, the pack lunch is the fat that's already in your body, and the crazy part is when your body goes from its sugar addiction and dealing with a constant digestion. Uh, for one, you'll never see growth hormone in your body, or very limited amounts, because if your body has food in it and your cortisol is raised, the hormone growth hormone will not be secreted and you pretty well have to have a digestive tract that's free of food before that hormone will release, and certainly not have stress, because your body's not going to be in a state of repair when it thinks it's running for its life. And this is the inflammation that we live with.

Stephen:

The analogy for lunchbox I'm boring from several prolific writers in this space is that we bring a lunchbox because the lunchbox contains the food that we're going to consume. We wear a lunchbox because the fat that we have in our body is actually an extremely high quality energy source, far more so than these sugar laden foods that we're consuming. So when the body, the metabolic process, converts to consuming our body fat, which is why it's there. We actually will quickly flip the switch and then we're burning calories like crazy. And you can actually feel this in your body when you go through the process of intermittent fasting. My wife and I call it the yuck. You feel the yuck for about 15 minutes where that brain signal again from the vagus nerve is saying hey, from the brain to the vagus nerve, to your digestive system and back is telling the brain, the vagus nerve to your digestive system and back is telling the brain go, get food. But if you push through that for 15 minutes or 20 minutes it's remarkable. All of a sudden you have tons of energy.

Stephen:

I can give you a very simple example. I used to go out and cut and split wood. I heat my home with my own hands from wood that I take on my large property and I could go out when I was diabetic and uncontrolled and within an hour and a half of being out there in the cold I would sweat right through my coat. I'd feel awful. I had limited energy because my body was used to living on sugar. Once I became a controlled diabetic and my system was normalized, my wife would sometimes come out to the woods and make sure I was okay, because I'd be out there till 2 pm, having started at 8 am and just drinking water, and I was perfectly fine. I had tons of energy and endurance. And I'm not cutting balsa wood, I'm cutting oak and maple, heavy woods, lifting it, moving it with my ATV to my cutting site and back again. It's a very, very physical process that I wasn't able to do when I was addicted to sugar.

Graham:

Yeah, yeah, so well said. I could not have said it better myself, and we always remind people and always consult a healthcare professional. We hope some of the thoughts that we shared today can help in the journey and we want to thank everybody for joining us for another lesson from the Ketoverse. Stephen, thank you, have a wonderful evening.

Speaker 1:

You as well, graham. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks for tuning into Lessons from the Ketoverse. Join Stephen and Graham next time for more keto tips and stories to fuel your health. Subscribe, share and let's keep the keto vibes going.