#91 Metabolic Flexibility with Dr. Bonnie Nedrow

The information provided in this podcast is educational and not intended to diagnose or treat medical conditions.

Dr. Donnie Wilson struggled for decades to solve her numerous health issues and heal her body. But with focused determination, she healed herself. And in doing so, she discovered the Dr. Donnie stress recovery Protocol. On this show, you're going to hear from doctors, nutritionists, and Experts along with Dr. Donnie, who will give practical advice and wisdom to help heal your body. This is how humans heal.

Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm Dr. Dani and I have Dr. Bonnie Nedro joining me. And Bonnie has been a friend of mine since way back in naturopathic medical school at Bastyr University, and we also studied midwifery together. We even studied for our midwifery exams together way back when. And we've been living on opposite sides of the country since then. But I'm so excited to connect with her today to share what she's been up to for the past 21 years and including her new book that's coming out or it is out, based on when you're listening to this podcast. So Bonnie is going to tell us all about that and all about ketogenic diet today. Thank you so much for joining me, Bonnie.

Oh, it's so fun to be here and so fun to connect with you again. And.

Time is that funny warp. Right? But yeah, lots has happened in 21 years in both of our lives, and it's really an honor to be here and to share something with your listeners that I'm pretty excited about.

Oh, my gosh, it's so cool. That's the thing. When you get passionate about something and you've seen it helping for yourself and for your patients, then that's what I found is I want to write about it. I want to put it in a book so that more and more people can benefit from it. So tell us, first of all, like, I mean, even just what inspired you to come to naturopathic medicine, but also start to tell us what inspired you to write this book.

Yeah, yeah, Well, I went into naturopathic medicine kind of kicking and screaming and saying, you know, that's, you know, I don't really want to be a doctor. I was going to be a physical therapist, but I got this, you know, brochure from Bastyr, and I started looking through the curriculum, and I thought, oh, I love herbs and I love nutrition and I love homeopathy and all these things that were really aligned with who I was. And I found myself in medical school. And then I was like, yeah, but that doesn't mean I have to be a doctor. But then in third year, I got into clinic, and I just so connected with people, and it's just such an honor to hear people's stories and their journey and to be in that circle with people and then to gain those skills, to really help them walk a healthier life and really connect with their life. And when they start doing that and they start getting really healthy, then they're able to give their greatest gift, and that changes the world. And I'm like, I can't really do politics, but you know what? I'm kind of doing politics just by helping people who, you know, their voice might not be out there because they're not feeling great. And once they start feeling great, then they share, and everybody benefits from that. So it's just kind of that ripple effect. And I just. I love. I love naturopathic medicine for that. Just helping people wake up and be their best selves.

Oh, I love that. I agree with you. It's amazing, right? I mean, when we don't feel well, we don't feel motivated or inspired. And sometimes if we're too tired, right, or we're too in pain or not sleeping good, it's like you're just trying to get through the day. But when you start to feel better, you're like, oh, my gosh, I've got energy. I got my brain working. I can do so many things. It's true. It's really rewarding as nature Boundaries, doctor. To observe that transformation.

Yeah, yeah. It keeps you going, right? It keeps you interested in learning and learning the new thing. And so in terms of, like, how I. How did I get to writing this book? Well, when I was in school, I don't know if you remember, but the first year in school, when we were in cadaver lab and exposed to all those chemicals and we had poor ventilation because we were at the old school, I started developing migraines, and I got so sick I thought I was going to fail medical school because I couldn't even get through the day. Like, I get through class, and then I couldn't study at night. And I thought, oh, this is going to be terrible. And I dabbled in a bunch of different things that people said, oh, go to the clinic, get some craniosacral. Oh, do this, take that. And then I found detoxification. I fell in love with detox, and it cured me. I mean, that summer I did my first real cleanse. And I thought, oh, this is great. This is the tool I'm going to use with my patients in practice because it's so powerful. Indeed. I did that and really started right as my residency doing cleanses at the clinic I was working then. I ended up writing a 28 day seasonal cleanse workbook because I got tired of handouts and this and this. Then I collaborated with a chef to write a cookbook because I'm like, oh, I can't tell one more person how to cook lentils. Right.

Let me write it down instead of saying it over and over again.

Exactly. And then I realized how books are such amazing practice tools for us because we talk about these things and messages need to be layered and people learn in different ways. And so the more different ways we can get a message out there, the more our patients are going to really understand and use these tools that we know work, but they need to first hear about it and then they need help implementing. And I just love books because it's just a much more affordable way to get a bunch of knowledge out to someone than any other way I've tried in the past. And so that was great. I did cleanses with people with my patients. I'm like, I want every single patient that walks in the door to do a cleanse. And not everybody has over the years, but a lot of people have. And I started teaching classes and that got more people interested. And I really use it as a. A tool for my own health. And it really, really was a great tool, like whole foods exercise, seasonal cleanse, once or twice a year. And I was really able to keep my health really in check.

The thing I struggle with, and I think so many people struggle and you know so much about is blood sugar imbalances and then how that leads to the state of stress and anxiety and mood instability.

Insomnia.

And sometimes it's like minor blood sugar imbalances. Right. It doesn't even have. I think sometimes people think, well, I don't have diabetes, so it's not a problem, but. Right. Even a little bit of blood sugar imbalance can definitely cause the symptoms that you're mentioning.

Yeah, the hangries. Right. The hungry angries, where that irritability is just your trigger. And so when I was younger, I was able to manage that. I realized, oh, this is me. And so I ate every two to three hours and I exercised a lot and my metabolism was in great shape. And then I went to medical school and I was still pretty busy and I learned detox. That helped a lot. And that was a really good tool that also kind of kept that inflammation down and that tendency towards gaining weight when you are more sedentary. As a doctor, we spent a lot of time studying and on the computer and sitting with our patients and not as active as earlier years, But I was able to keep it all in check and really in balance until probably my mid-40s.

What I notice is I was just having a harder time keeping my blood sugar in balance. It was a joke, but not a joke that if I was late, stayed at the office too long, and I was maybe a half hour late for dinner, that my husband would have one of my kids bring me an appetizer.

Don't let her get too hungry.

Meet her at the door with an appetizer, and don't talk to her for the next 15 minutes while her blood sugar balances, because I would just like that whole day of stress would come bubbling up because I was just in that state of emotional moodiness.

And our family members do pick up on those things. They're like, okay, we want to try to. Well, they're trying to protect themselves a little bit from a grumpy person, but they also trying to help you, you know.

Yeah, they're trying to manage it.

Yeah, she's been working all day. She needs to eat already.

Right. So, you know, that was okay. But then the other thing I started to recognize is that, boy, I'm gaining a couple pounds a year and starting in my mid-40s. And by the time I was in my mid-50s, I suddenly had this extra 20 pounds, which I had never struggled with my whole life. And, you know, I managed it, and I exercise a lot, and I ate really well and I did my cleansing. So I managed it, but now I wasn't able to manage it with those tools.

I see. And that's common too, by the way. Like, right. When sort of postmenopausal, our insulin doesn't work as well. So then. Right. The blood sugar is even more likely to be higher.

Right. So if you've been bumpy that whole time, then you start getting a little bit older and you're not able to compensate. And yes, I was seeing that my practice, you know, people gaining weight but being exhausted and starting to develop diabetes or heart disease or having that pre, like, their labs not looking great and concerns about, you know, oh, my mom had diabetes, and I'm just following in her footsteps, and I'm trying to do a great job. And so I was struggling as a doctor to help my patients. I thought, oh, there has to be a better way. There just has to be a better way. This is just not sustainable. And so that's when I decided to keto adapt and train my body to burn fat. And I had no idea what was going to happen. And it was like, whoa, this is amazing. I was like, okay, I wanted to lose that belly fat, right? That belly fat was causing a lot of inflammation. I was having some joint pain. I wanted to treat my insomnia. You know, I wanted to do something about all of that. And so that happened. I mean, it took, you know, I would say, a year for all of that. Like, it's not an overnight process.

But what was amazing is that I didn't even realize, like. Like you said, about the blood sugar imbalance and the kind of moodiness. Like, I didn't realize how bad it was. Like, I had this, like, chronic veil of anxiety all the time. Like, where's my next meal? How am I going to feed myself? How am I going to keep my mood in check? What if I'm cranky in the afternoon with my afternoon patients? What if. What if I can't do this? And it was just kind of back there as this little.

Well, that's the thing. It becomes so normal. And I think that a lot of people experience it. They start to go, I just thought this was my normal existence. Who knew that it didn't have to be?

Right? Right. And yeah, compared to what it's like, same thing. Like, somebody's anemic. They don't even realize what breathing would really feel like if they had good blood. Right?

Yes.

And you get so used to just by your grit getting through it that you don't realize how out of balance your system really is.

Wow, that gives me goosebumps. It's so true. Really? Yeah. Just to be like, wait a minute. And this is why it's so cool what you're about to tell us about with a ketogenic diet. Sometimes it is a diet change that can shift things, right? Where all of a sudden you get this whole new perspective and you're like, wait a minute, my body's behaving completely differently. Like, I think sometimes, too, we almost anticipate that our bodies are almost like, just set the way they are. This is just the way it is. It's stuck this way. It's always going to be this way. But lo and behold, if we make a few tweaks, our bodies are actually going to respond completely differently.

Yeah. That is so magical. And we read about it and we hear about genetics, and I think in the past, really, that being Stuck with our genetic picture. Oh, my parents or my grandparents experienced these things. So that I'm going to, as I age, it's just going to happen to me. Then we started really understanding 20 years ago that the epigenetics, which is our lifestyle, how that changes our genetic expression and how we don't have to express that diabetic gene or whatever it is that is in our family history. And by living differently, once we figure out that key. Right. You don't always know what living differently means. And you have to do some intelligent experimentation.

Oh, I like that term, intelligent experimentation. On yourself.

On yourself. It's like we talk a lot about nutrition and how amazing it is, but in truth, there's no perfect diet for every person at every stage of their life. It takes that intelligent experimentation to say, well, what's going to fit for me in this piece? I think the ketogenic diet. I'm like, really? A ketogenic diet? I'm a farm girl and grew up with a big garden and lots of vegetables. And then I married a Latino and we beans and grain, you know, basic diet. And, and so I just love that diet. And I always felt like, oh, that whole food, you know, fruits, roots, grains, legumes would be like the perfect diet. And it was really for a long time. But then what I noticed in my seasonal cleanse, which is based on that whole food diet, that's a vegan diet, is that all these people started to suffer from grains. It wasn't just gluten anymore. Gluten's always been an issue for so many people, but all of a sudden it was grains. Like any grains, people were getting inflammation, they were getting brain fog.

They're just like rice and corn. You mean like gluten free grains?

Yeah, millet and quinoa even.

Millet and quinoa. Wow.

Yes.

You're like, wait a minute, there's something.

Going on here, there's something going on here. And because I was doing these big cleanse classes, I was starting to see about 20% of my class couldn't do that basic nutrition and needed to find another way to get protein in. And so that was kind of an eye opening thing for me. And then at first I would see that people would do really well in terms of balancing their weight. You know, just get off of processed foods. I mean, how powerful is that? Yeah, definitely so powerful. And I saw that a lot, like people would clean up their diet and just go back to the whole foods and they would get healthy. But then my experiences and my Blood sugar. I'm like, ooh, carbohydrate dependence. That's where I'm stuck. I have to eat carbohydrates and I have to eat them every two to three hours to balance my blood sugar. But I don't think my body was designed this way.

If we think about grocery stores are fairly new invention in the human race, right? This abundance that we have and constant access to any kind of food, maybe it's not really the best thing for our bodies all the time. Maybe there's something to say about.

Lean times, winter times. And certainly we see a lot of really interesting studies about religious fasting where people are eating less. They're not necessarily fasting for 40 days, but they're eating a lot less food and simplifying for a period of time. The heart disease risk drop in that if you're doing that annually, it's like, oh, there's these times when maybe we should have less food. And our bodies are actually designed for that. What happens when people eat those carbohydrates, like I was eating carbohydrates all day long, is you never get to fat burning. And your body's like, oh, I've always got carbohydrates. And so it kind of shuts down.

It gets used to that.

Yeah, it gets used to that. And it's just like, well, if I eat too many carbohydrates, the only way I can store them is as fat. So we make those triglycerides out of the carbohydrates and we put them in our fat stores. So if we don't burn it, then we store it. And that's designed for when we don't have any to burn that stored fat.

But then we never do.

But we never do. We never burn that stored fat. Cause then we eat again. Because our bodies don't really know how to do that. And so for me, the magic of a ketogenic diet isn't that I think a high fat diet is an ideal diet for people, but it is an ideal tool to retrain the body to burn fat.

I love that. Say that again. Like explain that piece just again. Because I think it's so key.

It's so key. And I think that people get stuck on the magic of a diet. It's like, okay, keto adapting is different than a ketogenic diet. Ketogenic diet is a very low carb, relatively high fat, moderate protein diet. Keto adapting is training the body to make ketones. The liver makes those ketones. And for the cells in the body, our muscle cells, our brain cells in particular, to burn those ketones as fuel as we would burn glucose. So that's what keto adapting is and what's really fun. We have this background in midwifery. Breast milk is very high in ketones.

Cool, right?

So we were keto adapted at birth. This isn't some weird thing out there, and it's for survival because, of course, in February, if you live in a cold area, you might have some turnips, but maybe you don't have much else. Right. Our bodies are designed to access that extra stores that in abundant times in the summer, when. In the fall, when there's so much produce we're able to eat, so that if there's a lean time, we can access that. That's metabolic flexibility, which, simply put, is the ability to burn carbohydrates or to burn fat and switch effortlessly back and forth between carbohydrate and fat as the main fuel sources based on what you eat and how you live.

This is why your book is called Metabolic Flexibility.

Exactly. It took me a while when I keto adapted. I'm like, how does this fit into detox? Which we should talk about. How does this fit into metabolism? How do I align this, what I don't think of as a naturopathic diet with whole foods and all these beautiful, abundant foods that mother nature is supplying us? Then it became really clear. It's like, oh, if I eat carbohydrates, my body will eat carbohydrates because I can't store them except as fat. If I don't eat carbohydrates, I want to have energy, and I have energy. I have so much energy stored in my body. I want to be able to easily access that stored body fat so that I don't have those blood sugar dips. And I never have blood sugar dips anymore. And it doesn't matter if I'm late for a meal, if I skip a meal altogether, or if I fast for a day or two, it doesn't matter.

Freedom now from your freedom to, like, be feeling good without being tied to this meal.

Yeah, I mean, just like traveling across the country. Like, how much good food can you really get in an airport?

Not that much.

Yeah, not much. And so I just choose that as a fasting day. I just drink the water, stay hydrated. I feel better from the stresses of travel. And I'm like, I don't need to buy any of those expensive, unhealthy food choices. In the past. I'D be like, okay, well I'm going to get a Subway sandwich because that's the best I can find.

And eat that because if I don't eat that, I'm going to crash. And now I'm free from that.

Yeah, it is like a real sense of freedom and it's. And I love to the idea that because sometimes, you know, people will hear about a keto diet, but maybe not from a naturopathic perspective and like what you're. And sometimes when we hear about a diet or a diet trend, it feels almost like all or nothing. Like people feel like they have to be all in with the keto or. Or not. Like it's too black and white. And I hear you also saying it's not about being all 100% keto. It's about how to learn your body and how to help it do fat burning, but also have the ability to be not in fat burning sometimes and just understand what to eat in order to create a better flow back and forth. Am I hearing you correctly?

Exactly. I mean, it's basically what we want to do with nutrition is we want to discover for ourselves what is the best food for me that will give me my best health and best energy and that I enjoy and that matches my culture and my religion and my family structure. So it's complicated, but we want to eat the best food for us. If you are not keto adapted, you can't even intelligently experiment with food.

You feel stuck?

Yeah, you're stuck. It really narrows and then that causes inflammation. You start getting food sensitivities and all of a sudden you can't eat X, Y and Z that you used to be able to eat in your night and it narrows and you don't feel great anyway and you get stuck. And so we need to expand this. And so the subtitle of my book, it's Metabolic flexibility how to heal your metabolism with a ketogenic diet. So it's about healing that metabolism, training the body to burn fat and then putting the body through different paces.

You want variety. It's these mono diets, as you know, that we get stuck in this inflammatory food process. So we want to be able to have as broad a diet as we can.

Because that's the other thing is like even if you were previously on a, say more processed food diet or even a highly restricted food sensitivity diet, but then you go right into a highly restricted keto diet, it's all in that same spectrum of very restricted diets. So you're saying, no, we Want to be able to eat lots of different foods but still have. Have it be healthy for us. And, and I love that because you're in your book telling us how to. How to still be able to eat, I'm assuming fruits and vegetables but still be able to be ketogenic. I don't know. Tell us more about that. Like, is it possible to be ketogenic and eat.

Absolutely.

I like to say I only eat worthy food, which means it either has to be nutritious or delicious.

Oh, nice.

Awesome. If it's both. But it's okay. You know, flourless chocolate cake is, you know, So I think the bigger question is, can you have your cake and eat it too?

Yeah, sounds good.

And so that's what that metabolic flexibility is about, is about, you know, having days of feasting where you actually eat more than you're going to burn that day. And normally we'd go, oh, you know, what is it? A minute, a moment on the lips and the rest of your life on your hips.

It doesn't have to be that way because, of course, you're eating more calories than you need and you're storing them. And then you have some other day where you fast or you eat a very ketogenic. Maybe you do intermittent fasting and do two meals instead of three. Or I love going backpacking. And now I get to cut down the weight of my pack because I hardly take any food. And so I hike and hike and hike and hike. And I have, you know, I do bring some coffee because I love coffee. So I have coffee with some fat in the morning, and then I'll have some miso soup and some fresh vegetables. That's where I'll splurge on my food for, you know, in the evening when you're sitting around with friends and everybody's eating their food. And so because my body is carrying my extra food as body fat, and.

You'Re teaching it how to burn it while you're on your walk.

Right. And so I'm deepening. It's kind of like, you know, you go through. I call my. When I do this work with people, I call it keto boot camp when they keto adapt.

Okay.

And I ask people to, like, put aside three months because it's not like this overnight thing. And during that time, you do a ketogenic diet to train your body to burn fat. You have to do a ketogenic diet to keto adapt. So you're keto adapting in that moment. Right.

Gotcha. Yes.

And then once you do that your body knows how to burn fat. Then you go into a rotation diet. And whether that's a 2 and 5 is a popular rotation diet or whether that's keto until six is another one that people do. And then they'll eat some carbohydrates at six o' clock in the evening or it's.

One day of fasting and three days of keto and three days of a whole food carbohydrate based or. I have a woman, I've had some vegans go through my program and I have a woman who after shikido adapted. She's a vegan and she does six days a week just like how she always used to eat and then she fasts one day a week. It's like you'd go through boot camp, but then you have to do something to continue to keep your edge. You wouldn't go through an exercise boot camp and get strong and then just stop, sit on the couch for the.

Next six months because then you know you're going to go backwards. Yeah.

And then I like to do things like after the holidays when I'm eating more.

Celebratory foods, then I'll do a two week keto reboot in January and that's just kind of getting my body back into burning the ketones, getting my metabolism back in check, maybe losing those three pounds I gained over the holidays and just having that balance and then I can participate in those celebratory foods that are worthy and that are part of my culture and part of my family life. And I don't have to be that special person at the table who's watching everything because I know I'm going to be able to then burn those extra calories at another time. That's that metabolic flexibility. It gives you that freedom to eat carbs, burn carbs, don't eat carbs, burn fat. And if you're fasting, you're going to be burning your body fat.

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And is when you're say in your your reboot, as you're teaching people, do you suggest using testing to, to help them learn how to do, to know their, you know.

Absolutely, absolutely. I think, you know, a lot of people will come to work with me because they've got some weight to lose and whether that's that 10, 20 pounds or if it's 50 plus pounds that they're showing up. And if people are in that position, they've usually spent many years doing different diets and they get emotionally triggered by calorie counting. It's just like triggering. And so I like to say, hey, here's the food list. Don't eat anything that's not on this food list. It's not there. Don't eat it. Then I'd like to do blood testing. I like to use a ketometer and test the blood because it's the most accurate. Urine testing is not helpful at all.

Breath testing blade, right?

Yeah. It's not the right kind of ketones. And especially as people keto adapt, they stop spilling their ketones into their urine. And so those tests don't show up positive anymore. It's very hard to use that as a monitoring system. The breathalyzers can work. They're a little tricky and sometimes they're not as accurate. The blood is. If people are okay with poking their finger, it's like a glucometer, but you're testing ketones instead and then you're looking to get in a ketogenic zone. And then it's fascinating because if you're just like, say you just pick up a book like the Atkins, everybody knows Atkins and say a couple.

Follows those recommendations and then she's doing great, has tons of energy, has lost the extra weight and he's sluggish and nothing's happening. And they're doing exactly the same thing. They're living together, they're eating the same foods.

I hear this so often. Yeah, they're like, I was like, well.

Ketogenic diet didn't work for me. But that's what we find with testing is some people need to have a very, very low like under 20 grams of carbohydrates a day and other people can eat some beans and root vegetables.

And they're still ketogenic and they're still.

In that ketogenic zone. That helps people refine their nutrition plan without having to micromanage. And it also helps them adjust back to that intelligent experimentation. It gives them something to measure their experimentation with what food is going to work for them during that adaptation. Because you want to stay in that ketogenic zone for several weeks. I think we see a lot of things online about keto and then you see this 25 year old male athlete I keto adopted in 10 days and now blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah blah. And everybody's looking at that and I'm like, I just like to tell the women in my practice who are primarily perimenopause and menopausal women, it's like, well, what about your metabolism resembles a 25 year old male athlete, right?

It's a totally different thing.

It's a totally different thing. They're just not comparable.

We all know metabolism changes. Really it's interesting because metabolism changes in a woman's life with every major hormonal transition, adolescence, also with puberty, there's a big shift and ketogenesis goes down. Kids are fairly ketogenic, active kids who eat good food. But then with puberty, because the body's designed to store what is a woman, she's moving into childbearing, she needs that extra fat. The metabolism changes. That's one place that it shifts. And a lot of people experience their first kind of challenges with metabolism with that shift if they don't go through that in a healthy way. And then of course there's pregnancy and postpartum huge shifts if you're breastfeeding, moving from breastfeeding to no longer feeding a baby is another big metabolic shift for us. And then of course with menopause, this is this big shift. And.

With menopause, when people keto adapt before menopause, they go through it much better because the adrenal glands are in much better shape. They take that stress off. The adrenal glands love fat and they're supposed to make all of our estrogens and progesterone right when we hit menopause. And so.

If we're stressed, if we have blood sugar imbalances.

If our minerals are low, all of those things going into menopause, then we're going to have a lot harder time with that transition.

I'm so glad you're mentioning this because it makes me, you know, brings Me to thinking like, is there scenarios when a person should really like, you know, that they might need to address something else about their health before they try to keto adapt or what are situations where maybe, yeah, maybe this isn't the right path for them or. And I, and I do think from my experience that cortisol has such an influence, you know, and so if the adrenal glands, which of course make cortisol, if there's imbalance there.

Tell us what you think. Do we need to address that first?

Yeah, the adrenal one is interesting in that for people who have problems like insomnia and anxiety.

And blood sugar problems, some insulin resistance because of adrenal health issues, the ketogenic adapting and be able to burn fat definitely helps tremendously.

It's going to help them.

Eventually it's going to help them. But to be successful at it is another thing altogether. Because if you're not sleeping well and you're in that state of cortisol, that's gluconeogenesis and that's going to shut down making ketones and so they have a much harder time making the ketones. I didn't realize I'd have a hard time. I'm like, I'm going to do this great. I'm athletic, this is going to be fine. I'm like, I'm not making ketones. And it's because I had adrenal issues that I had to address. And so I don't know so much with adrenal health that it's, there's any risks. There are other risks that I want to talk about, but with adrenal health it's just harder. And so sometimes really working on a good adrenal rhythm, getting to bed early, exercising in the morning, having your meals really at set times, getting some restorative.

Rest, support your adrenals and then know that it may take you a little longer.

Yeah, but doing some of that adrenal work and feeding the adrenal glands before you adapt can make it an easier, more successful type of process. But what I do want to talk about is weight loss and detox because it's really critical and so many people are missing this.

So we have so many chemicals in our environment that are fat soluble.

And we know that as people have excess body weight, they actually carry a higher body burden of those fat soluble chemicals in our environment that we're just exposed to. And it's, you know, it doesn't have to be occupational. There's about 3,000 everyday chemicals that we're all exposed to just breathing and eating and putting anything on our body and just being on the planet.

Careful, we still get exposed.

Even if we're really careful, we are still exposed. There's no perfect, we live on the planet. It comes down to that. Some of these are fat soluble and so they'll store in fat. You could think about, let's say you have five pounds of extra fat in that five pounds of fat. There are some fat soluble chemicals. When you get rid of that container, all of those chemicals go to the bloodstream and they don't get burned as fuel because they're not fuel, they're chemical compounds. Now they're in your bloodstream and they can go off to your brain or your kidneys or delicate tissues and cause some problems. I think we see this in our community with people who do the HCG diet where they're losing fat really quickly and we can see their liver enzymes just.

Going way up as they're basically retoxing. By moving these chemicals from a relatively safe storage in fat cells. We need to include detoxification with any weight loss program. I certainly do it with keto. Keto also is very low fiber. You have to do additional fibers to help bind some of these chemicals and to help prevent constipation which can happen. And we know how toxic constipation is for people. And so it has to, that has to be addressed. And if not, one of the things that can happen is a lot of those chemicals are what we, they're endocrine disruptive and are classified as obesogens.

They're actually making everything worse.

So they can actually signal to fat cells to store more fat hormonally. Here we are moving these out into and then we have that yo yo and that's really the worst thing that we can do for people's health is to have them lose the weight and have them gain the weight back. It's actually safer just to stay overweight. We know there's risk of being overweight and certainly a higher risk of diabetes and heart disease with excess weight. But that yo yo is even more damaging to health. So that's where I say, you know, keto adapt once in your lifetime. Be prepared. And so I do like to do some detox with people before they adapt if that's, you know, if that, if they're willing. Some people are just want to go. And I'm like, well we're going to have to really work on detox as you're adapting, as you mobilize this fat but how about we do like a month long cleanse or at least a short fat flush and do some detoxification practices to make it safe but also make it permanent.

Is this in your book? Do you include that how to detox safely?

I talk about it and I don't have my 28 day cleanse in that. That's a separate book. But it's your standard naturopathic cleansing diet and practices. I do have the fat flush in there to help people really decrease that liver buildup that happens.

Oh good. And so that's in the book you're going to start. You start to teach them about how to do it. But also like here's some options and here's where to learn more.

Exactly, exactly. So yeah, I just think it's critical and that we have to take that health piece in there and maybe that's also why some people haven't done well on keto. Is the weight loss leading to other problems?

Well, and I think it's such a good point. I mean I think that I hardly ever hear other people who are talking about keto talk about the need to support detoxification and being aware that hey, we're moving this fat where all the toxins are stored. We better be prepared to help with the toxins too and.

Help you be really successfully not only burning fat but detoxifying your whole body at the same time.

Yeah, yeah, I think it is really critical and we have our naturopathic oath. Right. And that first do no harm. And I think we always have to keep that in mind as we're doing our work, that it's the bigger picture. We shouldn't be going after something without looking at the bigger picture of that person's health and their, their lifelong health and avoid these things that are quick fixes. And that's where I say it's three months to keto adapt, keep working it for a year and then use that as a tool. It's a health tool that can help you meet your health goals.

Well, I want to definitely have you say to people where they can find you and where they can find the book. Then I want to also cover a little more of like, yeah, like if people have little questions about like anything, any other ways this could help or things that people that shouldn't do it. But this book is available at Amazon, right?

Yeah, yeah, the book launch is happening as we speak. Super exciting. So yeah, you'll be able to find it on Amazon. You can certainly like all my socials, including my website, just looking at my name. So Dr. Bonnie Nedro for Instagram, Facebook and for my website. Those are places that you can learn more and I share more information that you may find helpful.

Awesome. And I'll definitely put that down below so people can just click on it and find you. But yeah, Nedro is Nedro W, right?

Correct. Yes.

B O N N I E N E D R O W with a doctor at the beginning for Dr.

Exactly.

And.

It'S just so cool what you're doing and sharing a ketogenic diet from a naturopathic perspective. But even then, I mean, right, there's some people where maybe they need to be careful about this. I don't know. Talk me through what are some of the potential contraindications, if any.

Yeah, definitely. I like people to do some blood work ahead of time because there's a couple of things that are pretty important. One is if somebody's got significant heart disease and they're symptomatic and on medications, it's really awesome for treating heart disease, but it's not something to just leap into. Certainly should be done with a physician support and monitoring. You want to look at what those labs, look at the beginning and maybe do some other work. I do find our standard naturopathic cleansing really helps the lipids pretty quickly get into a much better balance. I'll steer those people who have a lot of inflammation, high crp, their lipids just wonky. I'll steer those people towards doing some detox.

That can be true for fatty liver disease. Again, great treatment for fatty liver, really great. But you want to make sure that that person doesn't have the inflammation up to their eyebrows first. Back up a little bit, do some basic naturopathic work, support the systems, make sure the nutrients are there. It is a limited diet and so we're not getting as many of the phytonutrients. And so also someone's coming in and maybe their nutrition hasn't been great, they haven't been eating a lot of vegetables. It's like, well, a more vegetable forward phytonutrient rich diet for a while before you do this might make a lot of sense. The other real big area is kidney health.

Ketones do compete with uric acid for excretion. And so if somebody's got some built up uric acid.

That can be a problem. They can develop gout, which is no fun at all. And they can develop kidney stones.

So if you have a history of gout or kidney stones, better to work with someone to help you with that.

Right. You want to get the uric acid down. So I always want to look at a uric acid for people because you don't, you know, I always liken to pregnancy. Now we come back to this early training that we had and like when a woman's pregnant, you can't really do anything but stabilize. Like if there's a problem, it's like you got to get through this pregnancy and then we'll deal with it.

Especially when it comes to toxins. Right. Because we can't do much detox during pregnancy.

Exactly, exactly. And so.

Same thing when we're keto adapting is once we're in the thick of it, it's really hard to fix the things that were kind of suboptimal. And again, I call it boot camp. Be prepared for boot camp. Just don't leap from the couch to the exercise machine. You got to know that you're prepared, that you have enough information that you really know what you're doing. And unlike a detox, you can detox. You can do a pretty good detox and really do pretty good. Keto adapting is like, no, you're all in, you know, off the diving board into the deep end. And so you want to be prepared. You can't kind of dip your toes into keto adapted. You can't do like a high fat diet with high carbohydrates or you will gain weight. So you really have to just go for it. But pregnancy is the other pregnancy and breastfeeding is the other place where you don't want to do a ketogenic diet. Now if you've already adapted, that's different. But if you're just starting, you will be mobilizing a lot of those fat soluble compounds and definitely don't want to do that. In fact, if a woman has a high body burden and she doesn't realize and she gets pregnant, somehow it's discovered we also don't want her to really mobilize that fat during breastfeeding because that will go into the baby. And so we do need to be really careful around preconception and pregnancy and lactation with doing a ketogenic diet just for the mobilizing of those chemicals.

That's so helpful. And at the same time, we've talked about some of the benefits in terms of weight loss and all of the positives of having a healthier weight for preventing health issues. But I also know with a ketogenic diet, it's also been researched for other particular conditions. You mentioned migraines from the beginning that's one that I think I also by the way, had migraines at the same time as you. I don't think we knew that.

We both, I don't think we did. We were just trying to get through medical school, I think.

But there's studies that show ketogenic diet can help with migraines. But let's talk about some of the other health issues that this may really help.

Well, of course, the very first discovery around a ketogenic diet was using it for epilepsy.

We can take that farther, which is why I think it's helpful for migraines is it really does help the nervous system and help stabilize that overactive, over firing nervous system that can be influenced lots of different aspects. We can see that with me in my case for mood, that's nervous system as well can be involved in that.

Piece of it that's really helpful is keeping the blood sugar stable.

Since you're not dependent on blood sugar. The brain needs a certain amount of sugar. We are taught in medical school that it was totally dependent on glucose, but it is not. It is not. In fact, it really, really likes to burn fat. We're also using it in things like Alzheimer's or dementia in general. I've certainly had a lot of my older folks go, oh my gosh, my brain is so sharp. I haven't been this sharp since 20, 30 years ago.

Just having the nervous system have that access to fat in the form of ketones. Because ketones, you can look at ketones like they're the glucose of carbohydrate. Carbohydrate, you have glucose, you burn as fuel. And the ketones are the fats that you burn as fuel. When you can make it like a ketone, then your brain can access it and that changes everything neurologically working and.

It can clear up some of this inflammation and all the gunk that gets stored in there, it starts to all flow again.

Yeah. And you say inflammation. I think it's really fascinating because a lot of people don't really realize how anti inflammatory a ketogenic diet is.

We are taught like, oh, fat burns dirty, but actually it's carbohydrates create a lot more mess to clean up later than fat burning does. And so again, you want to be able to burn the carbohydrates. You know, I want to be able to eat roots and fruits and legumes and grains. So many great health benefits and so delicious. But you also want your body to be able to go into that fat burning and lower that Inflammation. So it can be really great for people like with joint pain or with.

Digestive issues. Can be really, really great. And we see a lot of studies saying, oh, yeah, it messes up your gut flora. That is true if you don't have the phytonutrients. So really, a naturopathic ketogenic diet is going to be very high in produce.

And then doing some compensation for the phytonutrients during that time. When a long period of time can go by where you're not eating those roots and fruits, that we're really balancing the micronutrients during that window of time, the phytonutrients during that window of time. But then that's also the benefit of doing that flex diet afterwards is you can go back into eating those really healthy foods again and getting that nutrition from food and not be so reliant on supplements.

I just love how you're, you're helping people to find this middle ground, you know, where you can, you can benefit from a ketogenic diet, but it's not like you have to live there all the time. You can also benefit from all the other foods and ways of eating. And you're like, you've even said you can do this even if you're vegetarian or vegan. Like, you can do this with other dietary sort of like, philosophies and structures. Like, we don't have to feel limited. This actually can help you feel. I love, you know, this word freedom really seems to come true with. This is like freedom to eat foods you love, freedom for your metabolism to be able to use it effectively. You know, all of this just, it just feels like there's lots more space to enjoy and to be healthy.

Yeah, it is phenomenal for that. And I think that people don't think that going into it, it's like, oh, gosh, here I am on some other special limited nutrition plan where I'm going to have to be deprived and not be able to enjoy the things I love.

Well, and I've also seen patients where they saw the benefit of a ketogenic diet, which is always interesting, even from a nutritionist perspective, to be like, wait a minute, I can eat fat. First of all, fat's okay to eat, you know, like, right.

You have to get over the fat phobia.

You can actually eat fat and be healthy. And then, then to see the benefits of it. Sometimes it. But I've seen that even a ketogenic diet can go to too much of an extreme. You know, if a person too Far they. They can raise their cortisol too much. They can, right? So there's such a thing even. There's too much of a good thing.

There's too much of a good thing. I think, you know, it's. It's interesting because getting people started.

There'S, you know, you start a new thing, there's that kind of anticipatory and you have to get organized and. And then they get into it and they start feeling good and they start meeting some of their health goals and they're like, oh, this is magic. And then I'm like, okay. And now you need to purposefully get out of ketosis. What? What? I've been measuring and tracking and blah, blah. And now I'm supposed to like, on purpose, like, it's okay not to be in the ketogenic zone. I'm like, yes, yes. You need to get out. You need to eat something else and trust your body that now you are fat adapted. Now you will be able to. Just based on what you eat and how you live, you will be able to choose your fuel source and that will be there. You've done.

Can be hard. People get emotionally attached because it feels like magic. But there is no magic diet. You know, all food that's whole food on the planet is designed for us to eat.

Thank you so much. I mean, that is. That, I think is such an important and clear message and oh, my gosh, I'm so excited for people to have your book and your help and you. You help people online as well.

Yeah, I do. I have a membership program so that people can, you know, get on and talk with me. I meet with them as a group once a week. They have access to all my programs if they wanted to do the seasonal cleanse, the liver flush, and of course the keto. I have it both Evergreen and as live online courses. I do also just free standalone courses if somebody just wanted to do keto adaptation. That's all online and available.

One on one. I see people in Oregon and California.

Wonderful. Wow. So this is quite a resource that you've created. Lots of resources, all in one and helping people transform their health. Oh, my gosh. Thank you so much for coming to talk it all through with me today.

Oh, it's so much fun. I just love talking about this. It's so nice to connect and you see all the pieces and how they fit into all the fabulous work you've been doing. And it just enriches us, right, to. To have all these different ideas.

It is. And I. And I think that it's like to be able to really, you know, hear us as naturopathic doctors kind of talking it through, dissecting it and saying, right, here's how a naturopathic doctor thinks about this. And you know, because then that's, then it teaches other people this is how you can think about your food and your diet and your health.

Right.

In a more balanced way. And so then it's because we don't want to stress about. We don't want to be more. We're already stressed enough.

Yeah.

Stress about what you're eating either.

Right. Which is such a, such a beautiful thing to be able to enjoy food and feel nourished by it and really trust that what you're putting your body is nourishing you. And oh, it's delicious, it's nutritious, it's worthy. I'm enjoying this process and I am not afraid of the food that I'm eating, which I think a lot of people get to and just feel so like, oh, food is bad. And of course, food is fabulous.

I love it. Thank you so much, Bonnie. And again, anyone who's listening, you can find Bonnie at drbonninedro.com and her book Metabolic Flexibility is available to Amazon and I believe probably through your website as well.

Uh huh. Yes, absolutely.

Love it. Oh my gosh. Thank you so much. I look forward to staying in touch.

Yeah. Thank you, Donni. Likewise.

Thanks for listening to how humans heal. If you liked this episode, leave a rating and a review. And for more resources, visit drdani.com.