Episode 39: The Ketogenic Diet and Intermittent Fasting 101, with Ben Azadi
5 Aug 2020 · 47 min
In this episode of the Functional Gynecologist Podcast, Dr. Tabatha Barber (a board‑certified OB‑GYN and functional medicine physician) welcomes Ben Azadi, founder of Keto Camp, as her first male guest. The conversation frames a looming menopause health crisis—over 6,000 U.S. women enter menopause daily—and positions functional approaches like ketogenic eating and intermittent fasting (IF) as tools to address hormonal imbalance, weight gain, brain fog, and overall wellbeing for mid‑life women. Ben shares his personal transformation from an obese, depressed gamer to a bestselling author and health coach, illustrating the power of mindset (“mental six‑pack”) and purpose‑driven action. The duo explains the science and practicalities of ketosis, clean versus “dirty” keto, and how to start IF (e.g., 14‑16 hour fasts, avoiding snacks, not eating within three hours of bedtime). They discuss hormonal nuances—thyroid conversion (T4 to T3), ghrelin, and the role of healthy fats for sex hormone synthesis—emphasizing that women may need to adjust fasting around menstrual cycles. Myths about frequent meals, metabolism slowdown, and food‑derived energy are debunked. Autophagy is described as the body’s natural cellular recycling activated by fasting, with analogies to a refrigerator cleaning out expired groceries. Practical tips for breaking a fast (protein‑fat focus, bone broth, eggs, steak) and cautions about alcohol (avoid beer and wine, prefer clear spirits) are offered. Throughout, Dr. Tabatha promotes her 7‑week “Renew You Sisterhood” program, which integrates keto, IF, sleep, gut health, movement, and community support, and provides resources like a fasting cheat sheet. The episode blends educational content, motivational storytelling, myth‑busting, and program promotion aimed at women navigating perimenopause and metabolic health.
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Hey beautiful, it's Dr. Tabatha. I want to share something with you that I believe God is doing right now in women's health. We're in the middle of a massive movement and most people don't even know it. Every single day, 6,000 women in the U.S. enter menopause. That's over 2 million women a year, and by 2030, that's more than 1.2 billion women worldwide. So here's the thing, most of these women feel exhausted, bloated, anxious, disconnected from themselves, and the medical system is Doctors are handing out prescriptions and quick fixes, and no one is helping women heal from the root cause of their issues. That's where Fast to Faith coaches come in. As a certified coach, you'll be equipped to help midlife women balance their hormones, heal their gut, regain their energy, and reconnect their faith, the foundation that so many of us have been missing. And from a business standpoint, woo, this is one of the most lucrative untapped opportunities in the entire health coaching world. The global health coaching industry is expected to reach over $33 billion by 2023, and midlife women are the fastest-growing, highest-spending demographic in that space. Most importantly, these women stay with their coaches. They invest deeply because they are desperate for lasting transformation— body, mind, and spirit. So if you've been feeling that pull and that whisper that you're meant to do more, This is it. Now is the time to rise, to serve, and build a purpose-driven business that not only changes other women's lives but transforms your own in the process. Because when you help one woman heal, you help her family, her marriage, her faith, and her future. That's the ripple effect that we're creating with Fast to Faith. So join me, click the link to come watch this webinar. It might be the one thing that really moves the needle for you in this next— Season. I can't wait to see you in there. Hi, I'm Dr. Tabatha, the Functional Gynecologist. I'm a board-certified OB-GYN and functional medicine physician. I've embraced the world of functional medicine and wellness through my own personal health journey, and I'm super excited to share my wisdom and unique perspective as it pertains to women's health. So if you're struggling with hormone imbalance, weight gain, period issues, anxiety, and Insomnia, you name it, then you've come to the right place. I want to be your functional gynecologist, so welcome. Okay ladies, so today's pretty awesome. I I'm having my first male guest. Yes, that's right. I have a guy on the show today. So Ben Azadi, he is the founder of Keto Camp with a K. He is a former obese man that is now a 3-time bestselling author. He's the podcast host of the Keto Camp podcast and a national speaker, and he is changing the lives of millions of people with his enthusiasm and his wisdom about intermittent fasting and the clean ketogenic diet. So today's episode is a nice introduction to the benefits of getting into ketosis with the ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting. So ketones are a way of Creating fuel for your body by burning fat. The other way we get fuel for our body is through glucose, which is, you know, a form of sugar. It comes from carbohydrates in our food or actual sugar products. In ancient times, our bodies were created to go in and out of ketosis. We were created to be able to survive a famine, go out and hunt and forage for our food and have a feast and then go through another famine. We were not created to eat every couple hours. We didn't have grocery stores on every corner with fast food restaurants and Uber Eats and all of these things. So our bodies have an amazing innate intelligence to be able to tap into our fat stores to burn ketones for Fuel and for energy, and so the problem is we have become so accustomed to eating every few hours because that is what the snack industry brainwashed us into thinking was needed that our bodies forgot how to burn fat for fuel. And so now we're all walking around carrying extra weight, getting hangry if we don't eat every couple hours, and wondering. where our next meal is all day long. That is no way to live. Once I figured that out, it was freedom. Freedom from food, freedom from this crazy sugar roller coaster. So what we're going to talk about today is how to get off the sugar roller coaster, how to tap into your fat stores and lose that extra weight for good, how to create autophagy, which is an amazing way that your body goes about cleaning up Bad stem cells, bad cells from the body and cellular debris and broken DNA, all the bad stuff that leads to disease and cancer. We're going to talk about the clean ketogenic diet because getting into ketosis is a way of eating more fats and healthy proteins to burn fat for fuel as opposed to sugar. Once you become fat adapted and your body is reminded of its ability to do this, then you can start doing intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting, which creates ketones by tapping into your fat stores for fuel. So then you don't even have to eat the fat or the proteins. You can just fast and get that benefit. And that is how you lose weight. You become metabolically flexible and you get rid of your brain fog because ketones burn cleaner than sugar. So many benefits. So I'm really excited to talk to Ben Azadi today because he has this whole keto camp dialed in. He knows how to do keto in a clean way, how to incorporate intermittent fasting for amazing results that are lasting. Here's the one caveat. We are women, right? And so because we, most of us, have cycling hormones, our—
Hormones.
Metabolic needs change every week of the month. And so it's super important to acknowledge that and respect our cycle and use intermittent fasting and ketosis as a way to take us to the next level, not impede things and make things worse. So I've actually created a program called the Renew You Sisterhood. I want you to join. It's going to be life-changing. You are going to finally lose that weight. You're going to get rid of your brain fog. You're going to have amazing energy, and you're finally going to get off that sugar roller coaster. So I want you to join this program. It's 7 weeks. I'm going to teach you how to get into ketosis when appropriate. I'm going to teach you how to do intermittent fasting and get freedom from food. I'm also going to dive into other areas that need to be addressed so that this is a long-lasting result for you in your life, body, mind, and spirit. We're going to talk about your sleep, your gut health, your liver, the way you're moving your body, your relationships with your coworkers and your friends and your family. So many important aspects of this are going into the Renew You Sisterhood program. So I want you to sign up and do this 7-week program as a community, as a sisterhood. We're going to lift each other up and support each other because that's what it's about. It's about being in community and changing together and living in love and not in fear, right? So let's listen to this episode with Ben. Let's learn about intermittent fasting 101 and get started. Let's get our toes wet so that you are ready for the Renew You Sisterhood. I'm excited for you. Here we go. Well, welcome, Ben. Thanks for being on the Functional Gynecologist Podcast.
I'm so excited to be here. And you told me I'm the first male guest on your show. I'm super excited about that. Thank you for letting me be that male.
I know, it's pretty, pretty cool. I think that You know, sometimes men have a better perspective on things or they see it from a different viewpoint. So I just, I've loved what you've done with your Keto Camp world and all the amazing positive change you've created. And I just want that to spill over into my community a little bit. So thanks for being here.
Yeah, absolutely, Dr. Tabatha. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to chat with your audience and You're going to love it, even though I'm a guy and you're not used to that. You're still going to love it.
Yes. Just so you guys all know, I listen to Ben's podcast all the time, Keto Camp, and he's just a great guy to follow. You can watch him on YouTube. So I'll have all those links in my show notes later. But I really want you to share your story with my listeners, Ben, because I think it's so inspiring to hear that you Completely shifted your life. You know, you were a totally different person at one time, and now you're out influencing the masses and creating such amazing change. So how did that even happen?
Yeah, so I'm somebody who was, uh, as I say, tiptoeing my way through life hoping to make it safely to death, which a lot of people are. A lot of people are not living a life on purpose with their purpose, and hey, that was me. For the first 24 years of my life growing up here in Miami, Florida. I had parents that immigrated here from Iran back in the 1970s, and they did the best they can with what they had. I was really left to my own devices growing up, so I hung out with the wrong crowd. I ate the wrong food. I was addicted to video games and drugs. It was just a bad, unhealthy lifestyle which trickled into my adulthood, and I found myself being 24 years old back in 2008. I was 24 years old and I was both physically obese and mentally obese. I weighed 250 pounds and I was lost in life. I never worked out a day in my life, didn't know what health was and nutrition was, and my biggest goal was just scoring the highest stats on a video game called Call of Duty.
Oh yes.
That was my video game of choice. So I actually had to hit rock bottom. to wake up, you know, to change my life. And my rock bottom came because my ex-girlfriend at the time, she broke up with me. We were together for over 3 years, and I was devastated. At this time in my life is when I was obese, and I worked at a job that I hated, and I hated my body, I hated my life. And I was actually so depressed that anytime I was in a room by myself, I would think of ways to hurt myself. I would go on the internet and look for ways to kill myself and end my life and end this suffering because it was, it was just so unbearable. And I suffered with that for many, many months. And anytime that I went on the internet to find ways to end my life, I would think about my mom and it would stop me from pursuing that because she's, she's my hero and I never wanted to do that to her and leave her with that devastation.
Right.
So it stopped me. And thank God that I had my mom in my life because I don't know, I believe I would have pursued that if I didn't have those thoughts of my mom and what she had to deal with. So this is the point in my life where books entered my life for the first time. Being somebody who hated reading growing up, I only read the bare minimum just to pass high school. I started to get to authors like Wayne Dyer and Bob Proctor and Jim Rohn and incredible people, authors who have gone through their own rock bottom and gone on to create greatness in their life. It really just opened up a whole new world to me for the first time in my life and helped me understand that I'm actually responsible for being obese. I'm responsible for not having any purpose in life. I took full responsibility right then and there. Fast forward 9 months from that moment, I went from 250 pounds down to 170 pounds. I went from 34% body fat down to 6% body fat. I finally carved out the physical six-pack that I always dreamed of. Dr. Tabatha, more importantly, I carved out a mental six-pack. I believe that's more important than a physical one any day of the week. That's where it all started for me. I became a personal trainer here in Miami, Florida. I opened up a CrossFit gym, sold the CrossFit gym, became a certified health coach. Started to work with Dr. Pompa, and now I work with you, as well as the other Platinum Doctors in the program, and that's where I am today.
That's so amazing. Oh my gosh. Kudos to you. So I really want you to talk about this mental 6-pack because I have so many patients who are just, you know, the way you describe your life, that is them. They are stuck. They're stuck in their unhappiness, the body that they don't want, the job they don't want, poor relationships or lack of relationships. And it's like, how do you get your mind to make that shift? And I love that you started reading books because I think it's key. We need to learn from each other's stories, right? We need to try to get some wisdom from other people who've gone through it. So that's why it's so important that you're sharing your story.
But I want you to talk about this mental 6 Yeah, yeah, you're right, because once when you start reading books or listening to audios or going on YouTube University, I mean, whatever it is, you could take decades of learning and experience and turn that into days, essentially. So that's what I did. So it's important because as you embark, as your audience embarks on a new health goal, whether it is keto or fasting or paleo or vegetarian, I mean, whatever goal you have, once your why becomes strong, the how becomes easier. So it's always reasons before results.
Hmm.
Reasons before results. Why do you want to get healthy? And a lot of people, as you know, you know, they're going to say, I want to be healthy. Oh, I want to have more energy. Oh, I want to lose, you know, 20 pounds. But that's not their why. Their why is layers, layers peeled back from that, right? Their why is probably, oh, you know, I have grandkids, and when I, you Have my grandkids visit me, I can only spend 20 minutes before I'm just so exhausted. I don't have the energy, and I just want to spend more time with my grandkids. That's a why. Or it's when I go on vacation with my husband, my husband wants to go walking all across the town, this new town that we're visiting, and I'm just so tired and I'm hurting, and I just want to go back to the hotel and take a nap, and I can't even enjoy my vacation. I can't enjoy my family. That's a why. So once you get your why Clear. Put it everywhere. Put it on your fridge, put it on your desk, put it in your bathroom mirror, because it's going to remind you why you should stay disciplined. Because there's 2 types of pains in life: the pain of regret or the pain of discipline. So we go to the kitchen and we know that we want to do keto, we want to do fasting, and we're committed to it, and we see donuts and chips and whatever your family buys, put in the pantry. Then you look at your why, or you think about your why. It's going to help you make the right decision there and keep you on course. So for me, I developed my why. I got really strong and clear on my highest values, and then I matched my daily activity and my daily actions to my why. And your why, by the way, is different than anybody else's why. Your highest values are different than anybody else's highest values. So then I started to embark on my goals, and like you're all going to embark on your goals, and it's going to suck.
Mm-hmm.
Like Mike Tyson said, everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face. Life is gonna punch you in the face. You're gonna have challenges. You're gonna have setbacks. But it's really not about the setback. It's about the get back. I believe that setbacks are setups for something great. And one of my favorite definitions when it comes to failure— or success, I should say— is from Winston Churchill. He said, success is going from failure to failure without any loss of enthusiasm. Meaning you're taking the punches and you're still pushing forward. And here's my formula of success that I embraced and I actually adopted going through my transformation of getting my mental six-pack. Once you embark on your goal, it's going to suck. That's just the reality of it, right? So when I was losing weight and going through my transformation, I would go to parties, Dr. Tabatha, and I remember they would offer me beer and chips and things that I knew that I shouldn't have, and I said no to it because I was Clear on my why, I said no, and they would call me a wussy, and it sucked. And then I worked out, and I was sore for days, and it sucked. The formula is as such: suck, suck, suck, cess. Embrace the suck. Get clear on your why. Keep pushing forward. And as long as you could just beat yesterday, have better thoughts today than you had yesterday, make better decisions today than you did yesterday. And just keep beating yesterday, you're going to achieve the 6-pack and you're going to achieve all the results you want in life.
Oh, that's so awesome, Ben. I couldn't agree more. I think that is exactly how you should be looking at life because all that stuff is just physical actions that you— that anybody can do, right? It's the mental stamina, the momentum that you get going, and just Sticking with knowing what your why is and finishing it out. Like, I remember you telling me frequency and consistency equals change. You know, I was feeling like I can't keep doing this, I can't keep making my podcast episodes and doing my job and all of these things. And you're like, the more you do it, the better you're gonna get. And so it really is all just a mental game. And like Getting your mental thoughts under control. And I think that is huge. That's the key for success. It, you know, I totally believe in intermittent fasting and going in and out of ketosis and all of the things that need to happen to be healthy physically, but it won't happen without the mental six-pack, right? So.
Yeah, amen.
I love that.
External To us, what really helps us or hurts us is really what's on the inside.
Yes.
Our thoughts, like you just said.
Reasons before results. I love it. So yeah, thank you for sharing your story. I want you to tell my listeners, why should they do intermittent fasting? So I'm trying to talk everybody into it. I'm trying to say, you know what, this is how we were born. We were created to feast and fast, right? Like our mentor, Dr. Pompa, tells us, and get over our sugar addiction. What would you say is the best way to even get started on that journey?
Yeah, I'm with you. I'm totally aligned. We are meant to feast, we're meant to fast, and that's just the way we're hardwired to be. So whenever somebody says, oh, fasting is a trend, it's a fad, you know, it's going to go away soon— well, it's been around since humans have been around for 2.5 million years, so I don't think it's going away anytime soon.
Right.
We're hardwired this way. The human body doesn't care that we could just go on our phone and hit the Uber Eats app and have a millennial knocking on our door in 30 minutes. It doesn't care. We're hardwired. When we're not eating food, the body starts to think, oh crap, we're in a famine. We need to go out there into the wild, into the wilderness, or whatever it is, and go hunt and kill our next meal. We're so grateful and we're so blessed to have food We have so much food readily available to us that we don't have to do that. What happens in the body next is amazing things. The body starts to raise these counter-regulatory hormones, so your body is literally pumping you full of energy during a fast. It's using your fat stores for energy, so it's burning fat. It's helping your brain turn on so you can be focused and you can hunt and kill your next meal. You're not going to do that. You're going to just use it to crush your day.
Mm-hmm.
There's so many benefits to it. The best way to start, and then I'll get into autophagy if you want me to, but the best way to start fasting, I believe, is to get somewhat keto-adapted or to just eat lower carb and more healthy fat and protein. Then you could simply start doing this by this way. Don't eat anything 3 hours before bed. Go to bed, and then don't eat anything until after 3 hours of waking up. If you go to bed at 11 PM, 8 PM is your cutoff. You go to sleep, you wake up at 7 AM, don't eat until 10 AM. That should put you in the 14 to 16-hour fasted range, and you're going to notice benefits just from doing that.
Yeah, definitely. I love to tell my ladies, just first of all, get rid of the snacks, right? We were sold a bill of goods when we were told we had to eat every 2 hours. How crazy was that? Like, we do not need to be snacking all day long. I don't care if it's almonds, you know? It's not necessary. So I usually tell my women, just stop eating all the snacks. Eat 3 meals a day and then try to squish them together a little bit. Drop off the breakfast eventually. But I really like the idea of not eating 3 hours before bed because that does interfere with our sleep so much, especially drinking alcohol and anything that's going to be broken down into sugar, right? Because then we're going to get an insulin spike. spike and our sugar's going to drop and we're going to wake up and then we're going to feel like crap, right?
Yeah. So, so one of the worst things you can do is eat before bed or drink alcohol before bed, to your point.
Yeah. Do you usually recommend people not drink any alcohol when they're doing the ketogenic diet, or do you have a lot of people who really want to incorporate that?
There are a lot of people who want to incorporate it. I personally don't drink, but if you were, the ones to avoid, the worst offenders are beer and wine.
Yeah.
Beer and wine, if you could avoid that. Wine has a whole bunch of pesticides and herbicides, and beer is estrogenic, with the exception of something like a dry farm wine, which is a healthier wine. The clear alcohols like tequila is a safer bet. So if you're going to have alcohol, tequila, and if you could Keep active before and after, like go for a walk or do some squats before and after. It will help burn some of that up for energy instead of storing it for fat. That's what I would do. Going back to your point though, perfect for your audience, I would say if you want to age faster than anybody you know, eat every 2 to 3 hours.
Right.
That will do it, right?
Yes.
I hope it inspires you. If you want to anti-age and have better-looking Skin, hair, nails live longer. Fasting is going to help you accomplish that.
It's so true. That constant sugar intake is so inflammatory and it definitely will age you, right? So what are some other myths about fasting?
Yeah, the— that you need to eat every 2 to 3 hours to rev up your metabolism. Yeah, there's no science to prove that. The science shows opposite, that it actually could hurt you and age you faster like we just mentioned. Another myth is that you're going to go into starvation mode and you're going to slow down your metabolism when you skip a meal. Well, there was a study that showed after four days of fasting of just water for four days, the metabolism did not slow down in these participants; it sped up by 13%. Going back to what I was sharing, it's these counter-regulatory hormones that your body pumps you full of energy with, so you don't have to worry about that. By the way. The goal is not necessarily to have a super speedy, high, fast metabolism. It's to have an efficient metabolism.
Yes.
You'll get that with fasting. Then the last myth is that food gives you energy.
Yeah, yeah.
I need my snack, like you said, almonds. I need my kombucha. I need my yogurt. I need my protein bar for energy. The reason is because you're a sugar burner and your body is relying on glucose, but once You have that metabolic flexibility and you start burning fat. Food does not give you energy. It does the complete opposite. Here is how I can make my point. Think about the last time you had a big meal. Maybe it was Thanksgiving or Christmas or whenever it was. Our immediate thought right after that meal was not, I am so energized. I'm going to go get some work done.
Right.
No, that was not the thought. It is, I am just exhausted. I'm going to lay on the couch and become a couch potato.
Mm-hmm.
Going into a food coma, because it takes massive amounts of energy and resources to process food, take it from—
Right.
Going through your digestive system, taking these macronutrients, assimilating it into micronutrients. It's a big process. When you're not fasting, now you have all this energy, and it's being diverted to crush your day, to have mental clarity and focus, and just to feel good, to feel like your truest self. Yeah.
Oh, that's so awesome. And I really want my listeners to realize that ketones burn cleaner than sugar, right? They give you so much more energy and fuel, especially women who are going through hormonal changes, especially perimenopause. I get so much complaints about brain fog. I can't think, I can't concentrate, I can't remember anything. And part of it's because they're not sleeping well, but part of it's because they're constantly burning this very inflammatory sugar, right? They're just eat— they keep eating it and intaking it and burning it, and it's just producing free radicals and all this other dirty stuff. So I really want my listeners to realize, like, if you can quit snacking all day and start tapping into your fat cells to burn fuel, how amazing is that? You're going to lose weight and your brain's going to function better. Like, those are 2 huge wins for women, I think. How long have you kept the weight off?
Oh, so how long? Well, it took me nine months to lose the weight, the eighty pounds, and then that was back in two thousand and eight. So I've kept it now twelve years now.
That's amazing. Yeah. So a couple complaints I get often from women are my husband did it, but it isn't successful for me. I don't feel good with. You know, intermittent fasting or ketosis. Have you had those issues in your camp?
Yeah, everybody is different, so there's going to be a different fasting schedule for you versus your husband or your friend who does it. You know, with everything in life, whether you think it works or doesn't, you're right. It's really your mindset going into it. You have to believe it before you see it, not the other way around. A lot of people I got to see it to believe it. No, no, no. We believe it and then we see it. Fasting is a tool in the toolbox. It is not the only tool, but it is probably the most powerful tool. Like any tool, like a chainsaw, you got to know what you're doing. You got to know how to use a chainsaw. A chainsaw could get you amazing results. It could get the job done, or a chainsaw could hurt you. Fasting could get you amazing results, get the job done, or it could hurt you. That's where it's important to have a coach like Dr. Tabatha, have a coach like myself, have somebody, or watch videos and listen to more podcasts like this to understand how it works. But every human is designed to feast and to fast. Going back to what we said at the beginning of the show, we're designed this way. All 70 trillion cells in the human body are designed this way, and if we could mimic the way we were designed to be, you're going to lose weight as a side effect. You're going to have more energy as a side effect. You're going to add more years to your lifespan as a side effect of taking care of your cellular health. And you do that with this powerful tool called fasting.
Yeah, exactly. And I think it's important for women to understand that, you know, our sex hormones are made from a cholesterol backbone. So we do need healthy fats in our diet to make our sex hormones. And then sometimes You know, we need a little bit of extra carbohydrates, especially right before our period. So maybe we shouldn't be fasting that week before, but it's a powerful tool that you should be able to utilize when needed. And the bigger issue I see is so many people do keto dirty, right? Like they are going to McDonald's and taking the bun off and thinking eating that cheeseburger is going to be a healthy way to lose weight. And so it's super important that you do keto clean and you get your healthy probiotics and prebiotics and your fiber and all of that, right?
Totally. Too many people do keto the dirty way, and it might get you in ketosis, but it's not going to get you healthy and it's not going to get you the results you want. So it's important to understand the difference between clean keto And the dirty keto.
Yeah, I think that's where a lot of women get frustrated because their husbands are just eating like platefuls of cheap meat or something, or lots of cheese, and that can be very inflammatory and get you unbalanced. And so you might initially lose some weight, but all that inflammation is just going to make everything come back with a vengeance, right? So I—
Yeah. Exactly.
Yeah, I love that you are walking people through it. You're showing them exactly how to be clean about it. I think that's so important. What would you say is the best way to break a fast?
Yeah, good question. So there is— let's talk about the worst way to break a fast.
Okay.
The worst way to break a fast is Yeah. So that would be like avocado toast, right? Bread with avocado. That's— bread has the carbs, avocado has the fat. That would be a bad idea. Or let's say like a piece of fatty steak with rice. That would be a bad idea. This is why. Because when you break a fast, your hormones are sensitive, which is great. We want sensitive hormones, meaning insulin, which is your fat storage hormone, and glucose-regulating hormone, it's going to be very efficient at doing its job. So if you have carbohydrates to break a fat— fast, excuse me, you're going to raise glucose, and then insulin is going to be called, the insulin troops is going to be called to go grab that glucose and start driving into your cells. Insulin will unlock the cell and then drive that glucose into the cell so your blood glucose levels could go back to an optimal range or a normal range. Well, the problem is this, if you have fat With the carbohydrates, now that insulin has opened up that cell for the glucose to go into, the fat comes along for the ride and it'll slow down your fat burning and it could even cause you to gain weight if you do it the wrong way. So how you break the fast is just as important as the fast itself. So that's the wrong way. The right way, the best way to break your fast is with mostly protein and some healthy fats. So some examples for your audience is going to be high-quality bone broth. I love a high-quality bone broth. bone broth. It also has amino acids in it, glutamine, things that actually help with your gut. It helps with cellulite, it helps with your skin and your hair and your nails. And it's mostly protein with a little bit of fat. And here's a little bonus tip: if you're gonna have bone broth, sprinkle in some lemon, some, some limes or lemon in the bone broth. It'll help you get more benefits. And then also like a fatty keto protein shake with some healthy fats and some maybe collagen protein powder. That's a good way to break the fast, or some eggs and avocado, or a piece of steak and eggs. Those are much better ways to break your fast. So protein, fat, those should be your go-to when you're breaking your fast.
Yeah, that makes total sense because you've pushed your body into fat-burning mode, right? Your ketones are elevated, your glucose is down. You can check that with a meter. And then when you start eating, you want that trend to continue. So you want to eat healthy fats and protein and keep the carbs, which get digested into glucose, So I like that. That's a good way to break a fast. Cool. So my listeners often have thyroid issues or they want to blame everything on their thyroid. So it is true that the thyroid is affected, right? You have your inactive T4 and your more active T3 being affected. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Yeah, it's so common to have underactive thyroid, even though there's some hyperactive ones out there. But yeah, if you do keto and fasting the right way, you'll benefit from it. It's— these are powerful tools for underactive thyroid. So yeah, the problem with keto and underactive thyroid is when you do too much keto and too much fasting too, because you're not going to get that conversion like we said from For T4, which is the inactive form of thyroid, to convert to T3, and the liver does it. So if you have a toxic liver, that could be an issue. Hopefully your doctor is checking your liver. And if you are not getting— if you have chronically low levels of insulin because you're doing too much keto and fasting, that could also not allow that conversion to happen efficiently. So that's where keto flexing comes into play. So Dr. Pompa calls it diet variation. I call it keto flexing. That's going in and out of ketosis, having different fasting schedules, different things that you speak about all the time where you could get the benefit of feasting and activating this pathway called mTOR, which is growth. It's a nutrient-sensing pathway. Think of mTOR as anabolic growth, like a bodybuilder. We want spurts of that. You get that when you feast and eat healthy food. Then you have periods of fasting where you start doing more catabolic repair, like Autophagy, which is your body's way of recycling and cleaning out the cells. If you do it the right way, you have proper balance of feasting and fasting, you're going to get a huge release, and I should say reduction in inflammation, and that could only help with your thyroid function. It's all about inflammation.
Mm-hmm.
That's what it's about. Healthy keto, healthy fasting variations will be amazing tools for your thyroid.
Yes, thank you. Oh my goodness. And how about ghrelin? That's another important hormone that we need to talk about, right? I hear women all the time say, but I'm hungry, but I'm hungry every 2 hours, I can't go without eating. So explain what ghrelin does.
Yeah, everybody hates ghrelin. I call ghrelin the gremlin of hormones. So ghrelin is, is your hunger hormone. It's when your stomach starts to making these hunger pangs. It's like a gremlin that makes noise. We don't like it when it's around. So first of all, it's important, like I said early on, to get somewhat keto-adapted, low-carb adapted, higher fat and protein even before you start fasting. Fasting is a muscle you develop over time, but what helps strengthen that muscle right from the beginning is eating more fat and protein. Protein especially has, uh, will signal these satiety hormones in your body to help you feel full. So as you increase your fat and protein, then you do keto— excuse me, then you do fasting— you're still going to get those hunger pangs. It's normal, even happens to me. But understanding this one fact would help— will help you overcome this. All hormones are pulsatile, meaning they spike and go back down, they spike and go back down. No, not one hormone just continuously increases and increases and increases.
Mm-hmm.
So this is the same thing with ghrelin, which is a hunger hormone. It'll spike, you'll feel hungry, and then if you could just ride that hunger wave, it'll go away. So go for a walk, get on a phone call, go work out, do something to distract yourself, and that'll go away. Now let's say it's not going away, it's been 20 minutes. You could grab a tablespoon of coconut oil Grab, drink some water with some sea salt. Sometimes when you're deficient in electrolytes, these signals get crossed and you actually think you're hungry, but you actually are dehydrated. So have some sea salt with water. These are things you can do, but ride that wave. On the opposite side of that wave is staying fasted and getting the amazing benefits of fasting.
Yeah. Oh, I love that. That's so good. It's super important to realize that It is passing. It will go away. You know, you're not truly hungry. You do have fat stores that you can tap into to give you energy. It's just a feeling and it will pass. So I think that's super important. Good deal. Oh my gosh, you're such a wealth of knowledge. You have so much good information. Is there anything else that you can think of that I just— women need to hear from you?
Yeah, thank you, and you're amazing yourself. Autophagy. I said what it was a little bit while ago.
Yeah, yeah, talk about that.
So autophagy is a process that is activated during a fast. Your body is the world's greatest healer. You have access to that world's greatest healer, world's greatest physician, right now, 24 hours a day. There's not a pill, not a surgery, Not a supplement that could replace what the body can do for you already, as long as you could identify the interference, remove the interference, and let this great healer do its thing. I believe that we're all masterpieces. I believe that you are a masterpiece because you are a piece of the master, as I like to say. Once we start allowing this masterpiece to do its job, it'll heal. How do we do that? Well, fasting activates this innate intelligence, the human body, to start looking for damaged cells and proteins and things in the body that have gone bad.
Right.
So the analogy is this. Think of a refrigerator that we all have inside of our kitchen. So picture a refrigerator opening up right now and we see all these groceries with expiration dates. What is going to happen if we let all of the groceries expire inside of our refrigerator and we push it towards the back of the fridge, and then we go to the grocery store, we buy fresh groceries, come back home, open up that fridge, put the fresh groceries in front of the damaged recycled— or damaged expired groceries and close that door. It's going to be disgusting.
Yeah.
Mold, bacteria, right? You're picturing this nasty fridge, right? So that's what's going to happen in that fridge when you let these These groceries expire and you don't get rid of them. Well, the human body is like this refrigerator. We have cells, proteins, mitochondria that all have expiration dates on them. And if we're not taking the time to recycle and remove these expired cells, disease, bacteria, and nasty things will start to develop in the body. So when we fast, our body activates autophagy. Which is getting rid of the junk. We have 70 trillion cells in the body. Well, 70 billion of cells need to be recycled every single day, and that happens during autophagy. The Greek definition for autophagy is eat thyself. Your body is so smart, it is the world's greatest physician, that when you're not eating food energy, it needs to get energy from somewhere, so it activates autophagy. to get energy from damaged cells, these expired groceries, and your body starts cleaning out house. If your body also determines if a cell cannot be recycled, it'll get rid of that cell and signal a stem cell for a healthy cell. All this is happening in our body for free. We don't have to pay for stem cells. Fasting is free, and that is what's happening with autophagy, and you get that during a fast.
Yeah. It doesn't get any more amazing than that, right? I mean, you're talking about— that is how cancer grows. Cells that have sat around too long and have gone awry and they're growing out of control. So it's super important that we stimulate autophagy. We need to get out of this sugar-burning inflammation mode where we're creating diabetes and Alzheimer's and obesity and cancer, and we got to heal ourselves, right?
Amen.
Oh my gosh, your mission is so important and you're doing amazing work. And I'm just so blessed to have you on as my first male guest. That's so awesome.
Thank you.
But I just think it's so important, like, this is not just for men. Women benefit from this too. We just have to maybe do tweak it a little bit because we have cycling hormones. So that's why I've created my program, the Renew You Sisterhood. We're going to focus on all of that, but we're really going to kick it into high gear with some intermittent fasting and getting in and out of ketosis in a healthy way. So thank you for inspiring me so I can inspire others.
I'm grateful to do so. You're, you're brilliant at what you do. So those of you who are on the fence about joining the Renew You Sisterhood, do it. Don't sit on the fence because it hurts. You're in great hands with Dr. Tabatha. She is She's part of the group that I'm in with Dr. Pompa. We work with a team of amazing doctors, and fasting is one of those tools. She's going to teach you to do it the right way.
Yeah, that's so awesome. Thank you. And for my listeners, you also have a fasting cheat sheet, right, at fastingcheatsheet.com. So I'll put that link in the show notes because I want everybody to just get started on this, get their toes wet. You know, it's something— Like you said, it's a muscle that you have to develop, right? It's not something that you just jump into. You can, but it might not feel so good, right?
Right.
It makes more sense to work into it, get fat adapted, learn how to tap into your fat cells again. I think that we've just, because of our day and age, having grocery stores on every corner and fast food everywhere, our body just forgot how to do what it normally is supposed to do and we just have to remind it. So I think that's a good place to start, and then we'll dive in and we'll go from there.
Yeah, amen, dude. Fasting is such a healer, and the body knows what to do. We just got to remove the interference and let the body do its thing.
Yeah, you said. Yeah. Well, you are awesome, and I want everybody to keep checking you out on YouTube, and I hope we can collaborate again soon.
I hope so as well. I really enjoyed it. I hope your audience. enjoyed it. Definitely go check me out on YouTube. It's youtube.com/ketokamp, kamp with a K, and then the Keto Camp Podcast as well. And it's been such a pleasure. Thank you for allowing me to be the first male guest on your show.
Thanks, Ben Azadi.
Thank you.
Wow, that was an awesome episode. I hope you got some good information from that. Like I say with every episode, I want you to take at least one golden nugget of information and start incorporating it into your life. Because if you do that with every episode, it all will add up to renewing yourself. So speaking of that, I want you to join my Renew You Sisterhood. It's going to be transformational for you. It's 7 weeks. I walk you through it week by week. We're going to get freedom from food, get off that sugar roller coaster, lose the weight, figure out our why, our purpose for each one of us, and support each other doing it. It's going to be beautiful and amazing, so I want you to be part of it. So go to drtabitha.com and get signed up for the Renew You Sisterhood. I also want you to go to drtabithapodcast.com and sign up to get my— on my email list so that you are always the first to hear about my new programs and everything else when it's coming out. So one quick note, I want to give a shout out to Jen J. She left a podcast review saying, excellent resource, 5 stars, excellent resource covering so many relevant health topics for women. Thank you! Exclamation point. Well, thank you, Jen. That's really awesome, and I really appreciate when you guys leave reviews because that lets iTunes know that you want to hear this information and we need to get it out to other women. So please take 5 minutes to hit the subscribe button and leave me a review because that really does change my ability to keep to keep doing this and keep serving other women. And then share it with your friends, share it with any women in your world that you think would benefit from these episodes. So I really appreciate you taking time out of your day to hang out with me and listen and get this new information. And I hope that you'll take one little nugget and you will incorporate it into your life. And I hope to see you in my Renew You System Till next time, go out and kick some ass, guys. Bye!
Bye!
