Getting Started With Keto: 12

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Heal, Nourish, Grow podcast. Today we're going to discuss how to get started with keto. So we're getting close to the beginning of a new year, and what happens every single year is people set New Year's resolutions, and quite often that revolves around getting healthier in some way, or losing weight, or changing their habits. And so I wanted to give this to you as a resource going forward. So if you're not doing keto or low carb yet, give you some more information on why it might be something to try, some of the benefits, some of the things that it can do for you. Or if you already are low carb or keto, you might start getting questions at the beginning of the new year from your friend that might want to lose a couple pounds or change some of their habits, and they might ask you how they should get started. And quite often that is a difficult position to be in because, you know, you can tell them, uh, sort of how you do it or how you think that they should approach it. Uh, but sometimes it's just easier to hear these things from somebody else that they're not as familiar with, right? So I thought I would just give you this resource so that you have it and you can share it. And so that anybody is interested in starting to live a lower carb lifestyle, they'll have a pretty good idea of how to get started. So I've talked about this subject multiple times in the past, and the one thing I think it really comes down to is there's two ways to approach it. So there is the rip it off like a Band-Aid and go all in approach and just start really restricting your, um, carbohydrates very strongly from the very beginning. And then there's a more gentle approach, and that is really the approach that I recommend more, is to approach going lower carb in a slow manner. So it gives your body some time to adjust, it gives you time to adjust your mindset, it gives you some time to, you know, make some changes in your household on how you're going to do things, the types of foods that you have in the house. So that's the two things, but either one you choose, you're basically going to approach it the same way eventually. So I'll just tell you the endgame. So there's sort of two ways that you can approach this. You can just go lower carb, which I think for most people, most people would just be so much better off if they got rid of as many processed foods as possible and started eating more whole foods. And if that still included something like up to 100 carbs a day, that would still be a much, much better diet than what most people are currently doing. And so you can consider low carb really anything up to about 100 grams of carbohydrates per day. Ideally, if you're gonna eat that many, you'd wanna spread them out throughout your meals so that you're not getting a big hit of insulin multiple times a day. You're trying to, you know, eat the carbs with protein and fat so that they're more slowly absorbed. And that's just a much healthier way to approach eating carbs either way you go. If you're going to go keto, so technically keto, ketosis, is a metabolic state. It's not a food, it's not a lifestyle, it's not any of the things that we like to call it for short. Um, but I quite often say, yeah, I'm keto, or I do keto, or something like that. That's just shorthand. Ketosis is a metabolic state. And so if your goal is to truly be in ketosis most of the time— and there are some reasons why you might want to do that, and I'll follow up with that here later in the discussion— but if you truly want to be in ketosis, then you're going to want to limit your carbohydrates to under 30 grams a day. So for most people, this is a pretty big change from what you might have been eating up to this point, and people can find it very challenging to do. And so that's how I was saying to go to rip the Band-Aid off. If you were going to cut down to that few of carbs a day, you're probably going to need to track your carbs for a little while until you start to learn more about which foods have the most carbohydrates, which ones might affect you more strongly. Um, so using a tracker— I'll put the link in the show notes— Cronometer is a great one. And you'll just start to track the food that you eat. You'll have to start paying attention to labels a lot more. Um, but here's the rundown of the things that you're basically not going to want to eat really at all if you're going to be keto. And I would say this, this is not necessarily a permanent state of affairs, right? It depends on your goals. It depends on if your goals are weight loss. It depends on if your goal is that you know that you're not quite metabolically healthy and you're working on that, or if you have prediabetes or diabetes. Those are all very different goals, and it might— your diet might look very different based on those goals. But let's just take the case, for example, of somebody that wants to lose some weight, change their habits, start eating healthier. So you're going to want to cut out the most obvious sources of carbs, which for most people are bread is the big one, pasta, rice, fruit, potatoes like french fries, all that kind of stuff. That's going to kind of be off the table. And here's where it helps to know what kind of person you are if you're going to attempt this, right? If you're the person that just likes to go in and go straight for it and cut your carbs down really low from the beginning, Uh, you can do that. And if I look back on how I did it, I really did it the very slow approach. I was low carb for almost an entire year before I went even lower carb and down to keto. So I think it's just— it's a healthier and easier adjustment if you do it that way. But you can do it the other way. And if you know your personality is something like, hey, if I just— I'm just going to go for it because that's not how I know how I am, then that's a fine approach too. It'll just be a little more challenging in the beginning because when your body is used to a very high amount of carbs and you go to a very low amount of carbs, your body will want to go into ketosis because you're restricting carbs. Like after a couple of days you'll deplete all your glycogen stores. Also, it depends on how active you are. So if you're exercising as well, your glycogen stores will be depleted more quickly. But what happens when you first get into ketosis is that your body has to take some time to upregulate all the processes that it needs to function effectively on ketones. And in the beginning, those processes that haven't been upregulated yet— so if you go into it very quickly, you might encounter something that we call the keto flu. Now, this is not a true flu. You're not sick. It— there's nothing wrong, but you might feel like crap for a few days. But the best way that you can counteract that is to really watch your electrolytes. So what happens when your body goes into ketosis and your insulin levels start to lower? Your body starts flushing salt, and so your electrolyte balance will change. And that quite often just makes people feel really run down, really tired, headachy. That's all from a lack of electrolytes. So the first thing you want to do when you decide to go keto is to get a high-quality electrolyte. Almost nothing that you can buy in a general grocery store is going to fit this bill. Things like Gatorade are not only full of sugar, number one, but they're also not that, uh, strong of an electrolyte. They barely have any sodium at all, no potassium, no magnesium. So they're not really a true electrolyte. So that is not what recommend. Anything that you can get in Kroger is probably not going to be it. Even like a Pedialyte or something, still a lot of sugar and not really the quantity of electrolytes that you're going to need to counteract keto flu. So I will list my favorite brand in the show notes. Um, there's a couple that I like. There's, um, some newer ones that have started coming out on the market that are very popular, uh, in the keto community. And so there are plenty, plenty of high-quality ones to be had. You might just need to plan ahead a little bit and order them. Ahead of time before you really get into this. Because like I said, you don't want to start feeling terrible from the beginning because that is going to make you feel like you want to give up or that you want to quit or that you will like, um, affect your willpower, right? Because you're not feeling so good, it might be more challenging to stay the course and keep making, you know, good food decisions. So that's the one scenario if you're just going straight into it. Then what will happen after several weeks, your body again starts upregulating those processes. You'll start to feel really good. The other thing that you might want to notice in the beginning, and I certainly noticed this when I first went keto, is that if you do any kind of endurance activity like running, um, even just walking or cycling, any kind of cardiovascular activity that generally would generate a need for glucose, you might find yourself— your performance suffering for just a little while. For me, that lasted about 3 months. I've heard other people say more like 8 weeks. I've heard some people say 6 months. It just depends. But in the long run, once your body is fully adapted and trained to use fat, it's actually really wonderful. Because you, you hear about endurance athletes now that have gone keto, and it frees them up because they no longer have to have all these goop packs and drinks and everything while they're exercising. They simply rely on their body fat, which an almost infinite store, even for smaller people. It's a pretty large store, uh, that you can call upon as you exercise. So those are just some things to be aware of if you're kind of going the all-in route in the beginning. And I will say, even having been significantly lower carb for a year leading up to this, I still felt some of these effects when I started going into keto. And again, this— since we're coming into 2022, if you're listening to this later, In January of 2022, I will have been practicing the ketogenic diet for 5 years and lower carb for 6 years. So I probably was going from somewhere around 100 carbs a day, and then I quickly reduced it down to 30. So I guess in a way I did do it a little more quickly because how I'd like to— how I recommend that people do it now and how I'd like to see people do to negate some of these effects from going lower carb is to really titrate it down. So for example, if you're starting at a pretty high, high carb level for a month or two, you might just try to get it under 100 grams of carbs per day, and then the next week go down to say 80, and then, then following week 60. Once you start to get under 60, that's where you're more likely to start feeling some of the effects. So the slower you go into that last part, the better off you'll be. So maybe spend a week at 60 grams of carbs per day and then spend another week at 50 grams of carbs per day until you're finally down to that much lower level. And you will notice that it's a much easier transition if you do it that way. Now, for some people, though, they're just thinking that's going to take too long. They really want to, you know, get into weight loss mode. But I can tell you, even if you do it slow and you're making these changes that we're talking about— cutting out bread, cutting out pasta, cutting out rice, cutting out sugared soft drinks, you're still going to get a lot of the benefits of weight loss. Because here's the thing that sometimes confuses people, is that they think that being in ketosis is some kind of magical weight loss thing. And in some ways it is, and I'll go into that in a minute. But it's still, at the end of the day, it's consistency over time. You know, if you've been around my content for a while, you've heard me talk about consistency a lot. Um, I was actually thinking about this earlier as I was listening to another podcast where they were talking about exercise. I've exercised almost daily now for 30 years, which is crazy for me to think about. Um, but it's that consistency pattern that you generate. That's what's really going to do the most good. So being consistent with lowering your carbs over time and cutting them down slowly, you're still going to get a lot of effects of weight loss just by changing your diet because you're also going to start making healthier choices. You're going to start, you know, if weight loss is a goal, you probably will start, you know, watching your calories somewhat. But by the nature of cutting out those types of things, you're naturally going to start eating a little less, probably, and you're going to feel more satiated with the foods that you are eating. Because basically— and I like the way there's, um, somebody else that I listen to that always explains it this way— about carbs and fat are both just energy. Protein is the building block for your muscles, and it's the absolute thing that you should prioritize the most. You want to get your right amount of protein every single day, no matter what else you do. And then you're adding fat to satiety, and maybe a few carbs here and there, incidentally, from vegetables. And, um, really just from vegetables, because that's what you end up eating when you— once you go keto, you're pretty much eating meat and vegetables. So if you lower slowly, again, I really think that that's just going to make you be more successful. You're also more— less likely to give up. You're less likely to binge if you do it slowly. Um, so these are just the things I want you to think about as you decide to start changing your lifestyle. Again, you would benefit greatly just from going low carb, just from reducing your carbs, trying to get to around 100 a day. That is far less than the standard American diet, and that will do you a world of good. So I'm never saying everybody needs to be in ketosis all the time. It's certainly not the only way to lose weight. Plenty of people have lost weight on any number of kinds of diets. A Twinkie diet. I mean, there was actually a guy that did a study where all he ate was Twinkies. I don't know for how many weeks, but 1,200 calories of Twinkies a day, and he, he did lose weight. So there's plenty of ways to do it. Now, just to be clear, I would not recommend anybody do the Twinkie diet because you're not getting the nutrients you need, you're not getting the protein that you need. The point of— we're going to call it, you know, weight loss is what everybody's focused on, but what really everybody wants is fat loss, right? You don't want to lose lean mass. So here's where we get into some of the benefits of keto and why it might be easier over other types of diets. Now initially it might be more challenging for you because we're used to eating a lot of carbs. It's just something that people have become accustomed to in the standard American diet, even though as little as 200, 300 years ago, we were eating nothing like this amount of carbs because we didn't have drive-throughs, we didn't have huge grocery chains, we didn't have access to all of this easily accessible carbohydrate. We had things that grew in the garden, or we had our cows and our pigs, and those are the things that we ate because that's what we had. So The idea that this diet is in some way too restrictive or not healthy in some way is just kind of crazy to me, because if you look back at what we've been eating, we didn't have any of these kinds of foods that are causing everybody such trouble now. So it just, it just makes no logical sense and it's not how we evolved to eat. So when you start eating this way, and again, if you do it slowly, I think you'll just have a much easier time of it. But the things that you might experience as benefits is when you don't— so this, there was this other popular thing when I was growing up about how all the, how the bodybuilders ate and how fitness people ate. And there was this idea that you needed to eat every couple of hours to kind of quote unquote keep your metabolism going. Well, this is really complete garbage. So what you really do when you're eating every couple of hours, particularly if you are eating carbs, is you are raising your blood sugar and raising your insulin every couple of hours. And what does raising insulin do? It signals your body to store fat. So that is one of the benefits of being in ketosis, is your blood sugar and your insulin is much lower and regulated. And so your body is not getting a constant signal to store fat. Your body is also not getting a constant signal. So when you eat carbohydrates or sugar, and they're basically the same thing, right? Just to be clear on that, carbohydrates turn to glucose in your body. So it's like if you're eating table sugar or you're eating a, um, you know, a piece of bread, it's virtually the same as far as the physiological effect. So your insulin goes way up, your blood sugar goes up, and as it comes back down to baseline or normal, sometimes it actually even goes a little lower, but as it goes down, that's when hunger signals start to kick in. So you'll notice sometimes, for example, if you can think back to the times where you ate a pizza and when you're eating it, you're loving it, but you get so full because it's just all that bread and you're like thinking you can never eat again. And then meanwhile, a couple of hours later, you're actually feeling hungry again, even though you had plenty of food. Well, that's the hormones at play and your body is getting signaled that you need to eat again, even though you just ate because of that sugar crash coming back down. In addition, there's also also this idea that your body might start to have hunger signals again because what you ate, you didn't actually get the nutrients that you needed. So for example, if you take the example of pizza, when we— you eat a pizza, there might be a little meat on it, but in general it is not the amount of, of protein that you would need in a meal to feel satiated and to provide you the proper nutrients. So you get rid of that up and down signaling all the time. You start eating more nutrient-dense foods. You start eating more fat that a lot of people have accustomed to not eating as much fat. Fat is very satiating. It's wonderful for your brain. And pretty soon you'll start to see that if you've ever been a person— and this was me— that was hangry, and you know what I mean when I'm talking about hangry, right? Like, you just, you have— it's because that blood sugar crash. You're just feel like you're gonna die if you don't get food. It's really intense. And that goes away. Now I can go for not only hours and hours without feeling hungry or not eating if I don't need to or want to, but also, you know, fasting becomes much more accessible because you don't have that constant hunger. So hopefully that makes some sense. So that's one of the benefits. Another benefit of eating the way that you eat when you eat a ketogenic type diet— and here's good, here's a good place where I should make a distinction. So the traditional ketogenic diet was designed to prevent seizures in children. So if they had drug-resistant epilepsy or before we had good drugs to treat epilepsy, one of the ways that they were able to do it was with a very high-fat diet so that the body produced ketones. They— it causes the neuroinflammation to go down and can control seizures. That was what the diet was originally designed for. And so some of those early studies on these children And this is where some of the people that are kind of against keto get this data because there are plenty of studies showing some nutrient deficiencies, showing some negative effects from a ketogenic diet. But the, the kind of ketogenic diet that those kids are on to control seizures is very different from how we practice eating a ketogenic diet just for general health and weight loss. So those diets might even be 80 to 90% fat, that high, if you can imagine. Where now for a kind of a weight loss or health protocol, most people will end up being around somewhere between 55 and 75, might vary day to day. Um, but again, you're always prioritizing protein. And then because you're not eating carbs, you do eat fat to make up the rest of that. But it is nothing like the kind of ketogenic diet that's considered traditional. So I would call this kind of a modified ketogenic diet just to make that distinction. We're doing this for health, for weight loss. For other things, it's much different than these kids did for seizure control. But so that the hunger is more controlled, you're producing ketones, which is muscle sparing. And so that's a benefit. It's as you lose weight, quite often if you do calorie restriction or a lot of these other methods, you can tend to lose muscle mass at the same time you're losing fat. And we don't want to lose muscle. In fact, the older you get, the more focused you have to be on actively trying to maintain your muscle. And there's two ways to do that. It's eating the proper amount of protein every single day, stimulating muscle protein synthesis to the extent that it makes sense if you're trying to gain muscle, and, um, resistance training. So those are the ways you're going to work on getting more muscle. And the reason you want more muscle is not that we want to look like bodybuilders or Arnold Schwarzenegger or anything like that. It's all about function. As we get older, being able to do the things that we want to do. Plus, muscle is an expensive tissue, so it uses more energy and more calories to maintain. So the more muscle mass you have, the more calories you're burning while you're at rest. So another benefit, again, of the ketogenic diet is that it's muscle sparing. There's also this idea, and there is at least one piece of research to back this up, that there might be a slight metabolic advantage to being in ketosis, up to the tune of 300 calories a day. Now, I've heard different people talk about it in different ways. Part of that might be because you're eating more protein. There's this thermic effect of food when you eat protein, and it's about a 30% difference. So for example, if you eat 100 calories of protein, what you're netting from that is only about 70 calories. Because it takes the body that much energy to break down protein, to extract the amino acids, to do all the things that it needs to do to process protein. Just takes more calories to do that. So, okay, so you're not hungry all the time, you're not hangry, you're not feeling these wild energy swings. You're feeling the effects of ketones on your brain, which makes you think more clearly. Like everybody always says that They get rid of the brain fog when they're on ketosis and they get rid of the carbs. So there are a vast number of benefits to practicing this way of eating outside of just weight loss. The brain effects are wonderful. The effect that it can have on body composition is wonderful. Even if you're not trying to, quote unquote, lose weight, you do want to focus on your body composition like we were talking about with the muscle mass. So, for example, you could be What do they call it? Toffee. Thin on the, thin on the outside, fat on the inside. That has a number of metabolic health problems in long term. So if you are like looking thin, but meanwhile you're 40% body fat, it's not a very healthy state to be in just for metabolic health. Not only that, but just again, that idea of, you know, we continue to lose muscle mass as we get older. Sarcopenia, which is basically just loss of muscle mass, has become a real epidemic in the aging population and just makes people frail. It makes you more prone to accidents. It has a lot of long-term health implications outside of just how you look. So for all of those reasons, it's a really wonderful way of eating to try. I don't think— now let's get to the point where do you need to do it forever? This is a question, because I think a lot of people, especially when they come to this for weight loss, they think, okay, well, I'll lose the weight and then I'll just go back to eating carbs. Well, if you think about all the things I just said, I'm not really sure why anybody would do that, because I think for long-term health it is really critical to restrict your carbs in some way. I'm not saying you have to restrict them all the way down to ketosis, but I do think you want to make the amount of carbs that you're eating match your metabolic health and match your activity level. So the more active you are, the your body can tolerate carbs because the activity not only burns calories, it, you know, the muscles are a glucose eater basically. So whenever you're active, you're getting kind of a double bang for your buck as far as burning off some calories and having your muscles dispose of glycogen. That's one reason it's really good to take a little walk after you eat so that you can kind of help circulate some of that glucose out of your blood. But if you are pre-diabetic or diabetic, you might need to be more strict for a much longer amount of time. When you are metabolically healthy again, you might consider selectively including some other carbs, whole foods-based carbs back into your diet or the occasional treat if there's just something that you really, really love. But again, I think this comes back to knowing yourself. Are you the kind of person that can literally have just 1 chip or 10 chips, or do you have to eat the whole bag? Are you the kind of person that if you eat a piece of cake on a Monday, you think, well, I already screwed up, maybe I'll have some pizza for dinner and then I'll start again tomorrow. But then tomorrow comes, you're like, I already did that, I'll start again Monday. And the next thing you know, it's a year later and you've been down that slippery slope and you never got back to your healthy eating habits. So I think it's really, you know, knowing yourself. And this could be some trial and error. You might experiment sometimes with, okay, if I have this carb again and I know I'm going to have cravings after that, I know I'm going to be hungrier for a couple of days after that. Those kind of things you'll learn and then you'll just be able to decide, is it worth it to you? Is that something that you want to include on your day-to-day way of eating? I hate to call it a diet because that implies that always seems to imply weight loss, but it's just a way of eating, a way of eating healthy that is a lifestyle change, in my opinion. I think that it's great if people want to get healthier and as part of getting healthier, they are just want to feel better in their body, that they want to make weight loss part of that. But there is— you can be metabolically healthy and not be at the quote unquote perfect weight, whatever we want to call that. Everybody probably has their own personal perfect weight. But there is no question that if by most standards on a height-weight chart you are overweight, in particular if you get into the obese category, that comes with a whole lot of health problems. So I definitely understand the desire for people to want to lose weight, but I think approach it in a way of making this change to eating this way as a permanent lifestyle change. And if that means you can't go you know, down to 30 carbs a day, you can only go to 100, and that's how you can, you know, make it sustainable in the short term. I think that's fine. And I think, you know, again, giving yourself that time for your body to adjust, for your mindset to adjust to it, just becomes what you do. And I think that that is also if you're looking to change some of your habits and start eating a different way or start creating any kind of habit, is to just kind of ask yourself, any time you go into this or any time you're having trouble with making this change or just struggling because you're craving carbs or there's just something you really want, even though it's not very healthy for you, to just ask yourself, what would a healthy person do? And then it becomes your way of being, your way of thinking. You are then that healthy person. And that makes making some of those decisions and challenges a little easier. So it makes the decisions like, say, your coworkers bring in some donuts to the office. It would be really easy to just, you know, grab one without giving it much thought and think, oh, it's just one. It's not a problem. For a lot of people, that just becomes a very slippery slope. Or if you are diabetic or borderline diabetic, that one donut is really doing nothing but deteriorating your health every time you eat it. So until you've done this process long enough to get some of your metabolic health back, then I would not do that. If you're a generally healthy person, you're just trying to lose some weight, you know yourself, you know that you can literally eat one piece of pizza once a month and get right back on it and not worry about it, then I think that's wonderful. I think it's just a process of learning yourself. And I certainly think also that the longer term you do this, the more metabolic flexibility you have, the more ability that you have to make some higher carb choices on occasion and not have it affect your health or your weight. So hopefully this is a little bit rambling. I didn't write down a bunch of bullet points about this, but I just want you to start thinking in a way, if you're really going to make these changes, I hate for people to approach it as just a way to lose weight quickly. And that's what people will think. Where in reality, what I've seen over the years and what I've observed is is in the beginning, people will lose a lot of weight, particularly if they go all the way down to keto macros, because every— you get rid of all the glycogen in your body. Every molecule of glycogen that's being stored in your muscle is also storing along with it 3 grams of water. So when you make that initial thing, clear out that glycogen, you get a big whoosh of weight loss in general. And by the way, if you start it and you don't get that, don't be worried. Maybe you're just hydrating properly. Maybe your electrolytes are just still a little off. If that doesn't happen, that doesn't mean anything's wrong. I'm just saying that quite often a lot of people do experience that, and that can be kind of good in a way because it's very encouraging. So you at least see the scale move quickly in the beginning, and then, you know, a few weeks later, kind of things stabilize out, and it generally comes to a healthy weight loss, which is— this is true of any diet. If you're highly calorie-restricting or you're exercising a bunch or you're doing this whole traditional calories in, calories out thing, then it stabilizes to somewhere like 1 to 2 pounds a week for people that are smaller. People that are— have got a lot, a lot of weight to lose can kind of sustain that really high weight loss rate for longer. But if you're kind of like, you know, let's just use myself as an example, middle-aged, particularly woman that's got like 20 or 30 pounds to lose, you're probably going to see, you know, 6, 7 pounds go off pretty quickly and then you're going to be back to that slog where you're thinking keto doesn't work, keto doesn't work for me. And it's not that it doesn't work for you, it's because your expectations of weight loss are distorted by the media or distorted by these headlines. You'll see like, I lost 150 pounds on keto. Well, meanwhile, the person started out at 400. That's a very different scenario. A person that's 400 pounds losing 150 pounds in 9 months versus a person that is 150 pounds and their ideal weight's 130, that last 20, 30, 40 pounds for most people goes far slower. So I, I hate for people to focus on if they're just about weight loss that they don't see it come off quickly, or they give up because they say it doesn't work for them. Because in the meantime, all these health things that you should be focused on, like your metabolic health and your blood pressure and your insulin sensitivity and all of these other wonderful things that are happening in your body and improving, which by the way, I should have said this at the very beginning. If you are thinking about getting started with eating lower carb or eating keto or making healthier food choices in general, it's good to get a baseline, get a baseline weight. Even though weight is not very useful, it would be much better if you can get an accurate, body composition. So the most accurate one you can get is hydrostatic weighing. It's— you submerge yourself in the water. It's difficult to find. Some big cities with universities that do a lot of, um, like metabolic studies will have them. But hydrostatic weighing is really the gold standard. The second is a DEXA scan. Most cities will have that, but not all of them focus on using a DEXA for body composition. They're generally used for assessing bone mass. So you have to make sure that you ask for a body composition DEXA and make sure that the facility that you're going to actually does that before you schedule it. And then the third best one would be a Bod Pod. And we're in— where I'm in Cincinnati, you know, it's a larger city, but not a huge city. And we, we do have a Bod Pod and we have plenty of DEXAs. The last one would be like skin calipers. Those are the most inaccurate. But if you get somebody that's been doing it for a long time, that that's really good at it, it can give you at least a pretty good ballpark and you'll see a trend. If you see a downward trend over time, then you know that you're doing well with that. Same thing with body fat scales. They use bioelectrical impedance, which is not very accurate, but it can show you a trend over time. But the reason I say get these markers in the beginning, because you also want to maybe get your cholesterol, uh, get an insulin test, and not a lot of doctors will run that, but luckily they're very inexpensive. I have a great source for that. It's called Life Extension, I believe. I'll put the link in the show notes, but you can get an A1C, which is your 3-month average of your blood sugar, your fasting glucose, and your insulin number for like $30 or $40. It's pretty inexpensive. And I can guarantee you, I wish I would have gotten my insulin tested before I did this because it would be very interesting to see if I was actually healthy in that way before. I started this or not, but I didn't. Now I've gotten my most recently got my insulin test and I believe it was like 3.8 or 4.2, something like that. Basically, the lower the better. That shows you how much insulin is circulating your body. If it's low, it's a really excellent marker of metabolic health. If it's high, you need to start worrying. And when I say start worrying, I mean like start worrying about prediabetes or diabetes. Because if you really look at the outcomes long-term for diabetes and what the incidence is in this country now in the US of people having that, and people, I think, forget the really severe outcomes from diabetes. You can end up having limbs amputated, you can go blind, you can have heart disease. It's like some serious implications of letting your diabetes or prediabetes go uncontrolled. So I would say those are some really important things that you want to measure before you start this. And it can be very helpful because if they happen to be bad— and I hope that they aren't— but if they happen to be bad, then it can serve as motivation really to stay consistent with a new way of eating and a new way of living and a new way of choosing your health every day. Because if you see that they're bad, that might be more motivating. If they're good, that's also something to consider because maybe it means You don't need to make significant changes in your diet, but maybe it means that you make healthier, even healthier choices just to get it that much better or to just feel better or to feel that mental clarity. I can tell you, as like a person that writes all of the time, like for me, that's one of the biggest benefits of eating in this way. And particularly when I fast, I just— my brain is just lit up and it it makes everything so much easier and you just feel better on a day-to-day basis. And oh, by the way, if I forgot to mention one of the other benefits, the keto diet is an anti-inflammatory diet. So if you happen to be like all of these other group of people that have all these autoimmune diseases and high levels of inflammation in the body that are starting to cause, you know, artery damage and joint pain and all of those things, That is another reason to eat like this, because a very anti-inflammatory diet— and too much, you know, inflammation serves a purpose. It is a good thing in the body when it's doing its job, but when it's in overdrive and there's too much, it's like too much is too much. That's inflammation. So if you can get that under control, it just, it just really has any number of benefits. And I think that people that focus on looking at the diet as a weight loss diet really miss out out on all of that kind of stuff. So anyway, again, I hope— I know that this was— maybe I should have made some bullet points so that I stayed on track, but I really prefer to, you know, I talk about this stuff all the time, I think about it all the time, so I know if I keep going, anything I forgot will eventually come out, right? But if I did happen to forget anything, or if you need clarification on any of this, now let me just give you to wrap this up, a couple of practical tips if you are looking at starting a lower carb diet. One of the best things that you can do, regardless of if you're doing that more slow move down or the more abrupt move down to lower carbs, is to clear your house of anything that you find particularly, uh, you know, that's going to tempt you, right? So if it's, if it's bread, if it's Cokes, if cookies, whatever it is that you have on hand that you know is going to tempt you, get rid of it. Donate it, throw it away. Maybe don't even donate it because I don't even know if we should be encouraging others to make those kind of choices either, right? But do whatever you need to do with it. If you live with other people in your house, if they're adults, you might consider— they may not get on board with you. You'll just have to serve as an example over time. But what I found useful in the beginning was I cleaned out the pantry and I kind of made sections. We had young kids at the time and I basically like took the section of the pantry that I wanted to have the stuff that was kind of just for me or things that I knew that others wouldn't eat or that they weren't interested in that yet. And I kind of made myself my own little cabinet. And so particularly if you have any, like your electrolyte supplements or your little things that you're using to help you transition for any kind of like keto-friendly treats or snacks or something like that. Put those in one place so that you just have one place that you go. So if you get a little snacky or you're getting tempted, you go to that cabinet and you have what's in there, what you've kind of set that is acceptable for whatever you're doing. Have that in one section and then have everybody else's food somewhere else. If you live alone, this becomes much easier because then you really can clear out everything. And when it's not around— and this has been the truth over the years, no matter how I've eaten— if it's something that's too tempting to me, or if it's just there, I am much more likely to eat it. If it's right there in the cabinet or right there in the refrigerator, I will go, you know, I'll eventually go get it at some point. However, if I just never let it come in the house, if I don't buy it at the store, I might have one of those days or one of those times where I had this inkling like, oh, I wish I just had whatever it is. But if it's not there, I'm probably going to be too lazy to go get it. And if I'm not too lazy to go get it, then maybe it's one of those times where you do just, you know, have your one thing that you're craving and then move on with your life. That's okay too. That's— but these make the— try to make as much as possible these decisions to be intentional. And so that's how I've talked in the past about, you know, finding your why for doing these kinds of changes, making these big health changes in your life. Will make those decisions so much easier. If it's just— and I don't want to say just weight loss because weight loss is really important to a lot of people and it could be very important for health as well— but if you're just— if your reason why is weight loss, that's a very different reason why than some more serious health issues or wanting to be around for your grandkids or, you know, wanting to have a different goal like maybe running a marathon or whatever it is. Finding some of those goals and reasons why in your life that are kind of more of a big overarching life goal than just like a short-term weight goal, I think you'll find that that will make it a little bit easier for you. So, okay. So I think that was— oh, the last thing, I promise this really is the last thing. So I actually created a guide that's a written guide, Getting Started with Keto Guide over the website. So if you go to gettingstarted.healnourishgrow.com, you can download the guide and it gives you some more of these practical tips. It kind of lays it out in a more, you know, I was talking about like I didn't make bullet points for this conversation, but when I wrote the guide, I did lay it all out for you. And there's also our Beginner's Guide to Keto that's just on the site, on the web page. It's not a download. You can just go there and read it any time that you want. So, yeah. So hopefully that helps. If you need any clarification, if you have any questions, always feel free to reach out.. And in the meantime, uh, if you do decide to make some of these changes and implement some of the things I suggested, or if you just want somebody to share it with that will appreciate it, always reach out to me and let me know. I would love to hear your successes. I would love to hear your struggles. Any way I can help, I will try my best. So anyway, have a great rest of your day or evening or whatever time it is wherever you are, and I will see you again next time.