Beyond Weight Loss: Ketosis for Longevity and Brain Health with Dr. Annette Bosworth

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I'm JJ Virgin, PhD dropout. Sorry, mom turned four time New York Times bestselling author. Yes, I'm a certified Nutrition specialist, fitness hall of Fam. Speak at health conferences and trainings around the globe. But I'm driven by my insatiable curiosity and love of science to keep asking questions, digging for answers and sharing the information I uncover with as many people as I can. And that's why I created the well Beyond 40 podcast to synthesize and simplify the science of health into actionable strategies to help you thrive. In each episode, we'll talk about what's working in the world of wellness, from personalized nutrition and healing your metabolism to healthy aging and prescriptive fitness. Join me on the journey to better health so you can love how you look and feel right now and have the energy to play full out at 100. Imagine a diet that could not only help you lose weight, but potentially reverse chronic diseases, boost your brain power, and even extend your lifespan. Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, that's exactly what proponents of the keto diet claim it can do. But with all the conflicting information out there, it's hard to separate fact from fiction. Today, we're cutting through the noise and diving deep into the world of ketosis. We're going to explore how this metabolic state might be the key to unlocking optimal health and peak performance well beyond 40. Here's the deal. When you shift your body into ketosis, you're essentially focused. Flipping a metabolic switch. Your body starts burning fat instead of carbs for fuel, which can have far reaching effects on your health. From boosting energy and mental clarity to potentially reversing chronic diseases, the implications are staggering. But what if I told you that the keto diet isn't just about weight loss or managing diabetes? What if it could also be the key to unlocking peak brain performance and combating a whole host of of chronic health issues? To guide us through this conversation, we have the incredible Dr. Annette Bosworth. As an internist, author and assistant professor, Dr. Boz has been at the forefront of using nutrition to combat chronic diseases for years, her books Any Way youy Can and Keto Continuum have captured readers with powerful stories of health transformation through the ketogenic diet. Dr. Baz will share insights from her own journey, including including how she used this approach to help her mother regain her health and combat cancer. We'll explore how ketosis can impact everything from obesity and diabetes to depression and autoimmune disorders. We'll be challenging conventional wisdom about nutrition and health and explore why the typical one size fits all approaches often fall short. I'd say always fall short, and we're going to arm you with practical, actionable strategies you can start implementing today to harness the power of communities. Ketosis for your own health Whether you're dealing with a chronic health condition, looking to boost your cognitive performance, or just curious about cutting edge nutritional science, this episode is your roadmap to understanding the transformative potential of the ketogenic diet. Let's dive into this fascinating conversation with the phenomenal Dr. Annette Bosworth. Hey jj, Virgin here. Okay, real talk. So often the holidays sneak up on me. Travel, gifts, hosting, you know, all the things, and suddenly it's like, wait, who spent what and where? And I know I'm not the only one who's looked at a bill in January and thought, wow, that escalated quickly. If you want to keep your finances under control this holiday season, you need to be using Monarch. If you it's rated the Wall Street Journal's best budgeting app of 2025. Monarch is the all in one personal finance tool that brings your entire financial life together in one clean interface on your laptop or on your phone. Monarch lets you link everything and gives you real time visibility so you're not shocked later. Right now, I've been checking the holiday spending category so I don't accidentally start the new year with that dreaded debt hangover. And honestly, just seeing everything laid out is already helping me stay more aware. This season, Monarch does the heavy lifting. It links your accounts in minutes, gives you smart categorization and super clear visuals. Yes, that end of your reset could be a real goal this time. Don't let financial opportunity slip through the cracks. Use the code virgin@monarch.com in your browser for half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year@monarch.com with the code Virgin. When the holidays start to feel a bit repetitive, reach for a Sprite Winter Spiced Cranberry and put your twist on tradition. A bold cranberry and winter Spice Flavor Fusion Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry is a Refreshing way to shake things up this sipping season, and only for a limited time.

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First of all, how fun is it that we are neighbors and live and.

In person in 3D?

So, Dr. Annette Bosworth, aka Dr. Boz. Let's dive in, because I think it's so unusual that a medical doctor has been into nutrition for 30 years. So you're a little bit of a outlier. How did that happen?

Well, I think when you enter into a profession like medicine, the tradition is someone's coaxed you in that direction. There's been a lineage of, you know, family members that have been in healthcare, and I didn't enter that way at all. I come from a dynasty of hog farmers and hog farmers, and I didn't want that. I did not want that. So as I entered into medicine, really, I'm from a rural town of 800 people in my hometown. 21 kids in my class for K through 12 in one building stay with the same 21 kids.

Wow. Do people get married there and stay there forever?

You know, what's interesting is if you don't get out, you're stuck for life. But, you know, I spent all these years of my life thinking, there's gotta be something better. There's gotta be something better. I'm gonna get out of here. And I remember the day where I said I told my parents I was gonna be a doctor. And I had been to a school assembly, seventh grade. That means the whole school's there and these two kids.

Oh, what? Hundred of you?

Yeah, it was. And there were two kids who had gone to college, and they were giving their college experience. This is what college is like. This is how you pick clubs and blah, blah, blah. And how do you pick a college? I'm in seventh grade, and they get done talking. They were the Adams children, and I knew them from my church. And I raised my hand at the end when they said, is there anyone with questions? What's your job? And they kind of looked at each other, and they said, well, I majored in trombone, and I majored in some other kind of musical instrument. And it was like the biggest disappointment in my life at the moment was, oh, my God. You get done with college and you don't have a job, you're gonna end up back in Plankington, South Dakota.

Oh, no.

So I was riding my bike home from school. It's about, I don't know, three miles to our farm. And I get the mail at the end of the driveway. The drive is about a half a mile Long. And I remember reading Time magazine with no hands, riding my bike, because the article on the outside said, if you get educated in this profession, what's the likelihood of high job satisfaction and having a job? And at the top of the list, now, this was in 1985, you could go to the top of the list. If you went to medical school, you had a really high job satisfaction and a very high job rate. You had a job.

Right.

You still have a job. The job satisfaction's gone out the window.

Yeah. So I think the origin into medicine was probably selfish. I wanted to not be a hog farmer's wife. But in the discovery of that, I was really groomed by a small town, very intimately involved with the people in my community. And there's this part of medicine where they pretend to know you. The questions that the doctor asks is supposed to be because they understand you. But when you come from a place where it's a small town, you know, who's. If somebody says their name, I can tell you who their grandmother is, how many kids were in there, parents, family and their mother's family. You know the family tree instantly. And now you enter into medicine where that information is required to really thoroughly understand risks and what's going on in your genetics or even in your environment. And now the answers are superficial to me. Like, wait a minute, you have one disease in mom and one disease in dad, and they're alive? You don't know anything about this patient. So I think that desire to really unpack the life, I mean, intimately understand the patient, was always at this root level for me, and I. I enjoy that part of it. That's the. That's where, how can you stay in medicine for 30 years, period? And it is when you like that intimate connection with people, you're going to be fine. Getting them healthy is obviously, internal medicine is meant to be this very deep dive into the hardest of problems. You know, internal medicine has a very poor marketing team because it's like, do you take care of the inside of you? Is it internal? But what it really means is if you have symptoms and problems that an internist can't figure out, you're going to die. They are the end. They are the puzzle solvers of what's going on and how do we put this together. And so it's a really complex, deep dive of medicine, which I found satisfying. And then when you went to match it up with human beings, they reduced it down to symptom. Equals labs equals prescription equals diagnosis, code, symptoms equals labs equals prescription equals diagnosis Code over and over. It's like it's a matching game. Like, well, this is boring.

How long were you able to do that before you got bored and frustrated?

I was in corporate medicine thinking I could make a difference. I did.

I was like, oh, even worse.

Let's just go right.

Really get trapped.

What I think corporate medicine stands for, and maybe there's a different definition for you, but it means you're in this ivory tower of go to the monstropolis of in this town probably is Tampa General or Advent Health, where, yes, training happens. So you have that connection when you're coming out of medical school and residency. But then there's the. There's this silly game that's being played, which is if you're an academic and you go from, you know, volunteer assistant's assistant professor to associate professor to, you know, full. There's this weird game, and they are playing a game of. Of nuance. When the impact to actually help patients is. Is a far different game. It is not a, you know, the resume that builds you this academic career. But that was like, who's who in the world of one of those ivory towers as you walk in and who's published and who's got a research plan going on and who's got the most patients waiting in line for them. It's a weird game, and it's like a high school popularity contest in many ways, but you're playing with the marbles of how do you answer a question that gets you funded by some research team? And I hated it. I hated it. I didn't play that game. But as you look at corporate medicine, the dangerous part was when you could see something in front of you that needed to change. It was 50 people's permission, and then they had to all agree. And now you're four years down the road and you're saying, why can't you just screen for urinary tract infections without seeing me? It's not that hard. Deliver the urine. Is there an infection? We can get to the answer without making her wait four days or go to the emergency room. That is the stupidest thing to do to this woman who's hurting when she pees. Like, stop that.

Like, stop it now. But I'm sure you ran the risk, too, in bringing that up of being.

Oh, I was considered disruptive.

Troublemaker.

Yeah, I was labeled officially disruptive. You're excommunicated from the tribe. So the season that I got, I just couldn't fight anymore. It's an awful story, actually, of what goes on behind the scenes in corporate medicine. So my first job was with this really altruistic. I believe they were really altruistic. They wanted physicians to be in leadership roles because you're seeing patients and you can help make decisions. And they really groomed you in how to make effective leaders. It was in Salt Lake City, Utah. So the Stephen Covey leadership teams were very heavily influenced for those hospitals.

And.

And I'd never learned any of that. I'd learned biology. And so this was very interesting to watch how you could really form a leadership team. And as I graduated in that system, I got rewarded for trying and really try to innovate. And then I went back home to South Dakota, and that's not the culture there. The culture was, who's been around the longest? Does everything you're doing have a bottom line that makes the company money? If it doesn't, Are you trying to steal patients from another practice? I never heard that word before. Like, what do you mean, steal patients? You're trying to steal patients. I'm like, I'm doing an osteoporosis lecture after hours. It's. The PR team. Said it was a good idea to educate the public. Well, my patients are leaving practice, and they want to come to your practice. That's called stealing patients. And I'm like, I think we're miscommunicating. That's not what I'm doing. But so there's this game, and you don't learn this in medical school or residency. You're trying to learn the information. Now you're in this politics game. And in the original company, there were. There were incentives to improve your outcome. So I can remember I took over the practice of a really old Mormon male. It was a Mormon practice. I was a female. And so I was the outlier then. But they were super great teachers, saying, here, here's this practice panel of practice panel of patients that you will be practicing with. And there's a quarterly report that comes out that says, how well are you managing your blood pressure patients? How well are you managing your diabetics? And they're using metrics to measure you against your colleagues. And it was brilliant because they would pass out this report and you would see where you plotted out on the answer. And I get this report probably four weeks into my practice, and I'm at the bottom of, like, 180 physicians. I mean, I'm at the bottom like, well, we have room to improve. It's obviously not just me. He's been managing these patients before me, right? The patients I'm getting.

Obviously you'd been there a month. You hadn't seen all these patients.

No, no.

You inherited this mess.

Right? So then. But it was awesome because it incentivizes what motivates somebody to go to medical school and stay the course. Well, you have to be competitive. There has to be something that drives you to be great. And what they were using is really honest outcomes for improving us. I'm like, all right, team, this is what we're doing. We're gonna get. We're gonna print out handouts, and we are gonna write handwritten letters to these little old ladies saying, get your butt in here. We need to talk about blood pressure. We're gonna have. So I did all kinds of innovative things to improve these numbers for this population of people, and I think it took four quarters before I'm in the top five, and it was just brilliant. I loved it. I loved the reward. I loved the notice of when you can move the needle that hard. And when you're the first person on the team, when you're the youngest one, you get the Medicare Medicaid. You get the ones with the lowest resources, which can often mean they have the worst outcomes. But I don't think that's necessary if you can find the right energy. So here I was, really loving this, and I. I get a couple of awards. My home state sees those awards and starts recruiting me, and it recruits me back to a company that doesn't have any of these cultures built in. And, of course, I don't know that I enter into a new world where within a month of just offering an osteoporosis conversation about, bring your DEXA scans, We'll talk about your numbers.

You're in trouble.

I have other. She's stealing my patients. I'm like, I don't know what you're. You know, it was really weird. Like, I didn't get that.

And.

About a year and a half later, so I'm finding my way through figuring it out, saying, okay, I can get along. I'm not doing that. We can make sure your patients don't come to see me or something. I don't know. And they roll out this incentive, and they call it pay per provider. Oh, pay per performance. Anyway, it was an acronym that said, we're going to pay the physicians better if they improve things. And I thought, oh, this is exactly what they hired me to do. This is what we did several years. I was about a decade into practicing that improved performance for the physician outcomes, and I was really excited to Play, right? So now this new company is going to do this. And we get to the place where they roll it out. And it wasn't an academic or a physician that came in the room. It was a drug rep. And the drug rep said, or it was the representative for medications for an insurance company. That's what it was. Who said, here's the performance of your five physicians here at the table. And it shows you what percentage of generic prescriptions vs non generic prescriptions you're writing. We will reward you with an incentive of $5,000 when you hit, I think it was 70% generic prescriptions. I'm the newbie on the team and I don't know any of these rules. I'm using what I think the medications should be. And I'm something. I'm like, I think I'm upside down. Like 30% of my prescriptions were generic and the other ones were branded. And, you know, they pass it out.

Thinking, is this even legal anymore? It's not, right? It is, yes.

This happens all the time. And it's just, I mean, it's so hidden that you. I was disheartened for sure. But the story gets worse when you realize where the worst play came from. So these prescriptions reports go out and they think you're not going to share. I'm like, we work together. I'm 30%. What are you? And then, so we all tell each other, they have everybody else blinded. I'm like, there's five of us. It's not like we're going to figure this out. And so they see that I'm the outlier. I've got the furthest to go to get this. And what they don't tell us at that meeting, but is in the, you know, some sort of agreement that we are asked to sign in somewhere in the short order was we get paid this incentive if we hit this goal, okay, $5,000 to each doctor. I look at this and think, not worth it, not doing this. And what they don't tell you is that the team doesn't get paid unless everybody reaches the incentive. And there's an office manager who's in charge of us, and her salary per year is probably $55,000 a year. She gets 10 grand per physician if we hit our metrics and she gets nothing if one of us doesn't. So it's essentially a doubling of her paycheck if we did this prescribing behavior. And I think this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. I am not playing this game and I don't sign it, and whether or not that I don't know what the story goes on. And one night she comes in after hours, goes to the sample closet where I sign to have samples so I can give them to people. And I specifically remember signing for the long acting insulin injection, because this is when the donut hole was a big deal and you would have prescription drugs for a certain time, and then Medicare wouldn't cover it. You'd get out of the donut hole and then it would cover everything again. So it was a place where you would cover the doughnut hole for people who had these really expensive medications. So I had this rheumatoid arthritis patient whose fingers are off to the left and she can't pull up the insulin and inject. So she's a type 2 diabetic, but is on insulin injection at the time. And she can run the pen, but she can't pull up and inject the. So I've been saving this insulin for her. She gets to the donut hole. It's been the week before that the woman came in and wiped out the samples without my permission, without anybody's awareness. Just took a garbage bag and left them. I was like, what? Yeah, she came in and took the samples because the samples are where you put a seed down to say, does this prescription work for you? Before we pay for it, let's have you sample it. But that's also where the branded drugs come from. So she thought she was going to change the behavior by removing the samples for which she didn't own. My prescribing license is what you have to sign for those samples. You're responsible for them. You got to count them, keep track of them. And so when all of them disappear from the closet, that's my problem. But the most important one was when this happens on like a Tuesday or something. And on Thursday, this old woman, old lady comes in for her checkup and I'm gonna give her her sample insulin. And I go to the fridge and it's gone. And I go to get the office manager and I bring her to the room and said, you know, Mrs. Jones, this is the office manager and I don't know how you're gonna get your prescription medication, but I'm sure this woman will figure it out. And I left and I got written up for that as disruptive. But again, it's just some of the hidden things that go on behind the scenes of the Incentive to Improve. Physicians for Outcome is a really good idea. You can Find behavior changes when people, when you get at the core of what they're at, physicians are going to be competitive. They do not want to be the laziest one on the team. It's kind of built into medical school and residency that you do your part and when you get to the front lines and now they're saying, you do the prescription that is the quickest, fastest and cheapest, and then we'll incentivize you for that.

And for those listening that may not understand the ramifications of that, having a son with a traumatic brain injury, there are very specific times when he's getting prescriptions where they say, do not let this be generic because it does not work the same. So there's some situations where it's fine and there's some situations where it's not fine. It's a life and death thing. And just to share with you that, you know, as I'm listening to the story, I'm thinking to my husband who retired from sure Scripts and they used to celebrate new prescriptions. They celebrated them. So, yes, it's interesting when I think of most people who've gotten into more the integrative functional space who are doing nutrition, generally, it's because they, or a family member or close friend had a problem and they couldn't solve it in the traditional system. So they ended up outside of it and used the best of all worlds, which is what I think is the smartest thing to do. But I never heard the story where you were handcuffed to be able to use and rewarded.

Yeah. So the disgruntledness in medicine was present, and I still was. So I left corporate medicine. I set up my own private practice. Our focus was.

Was this. South Dakota.

Yep. In South Dakota.

Risk.

Oh, totally. Because the whole state, there's only 2,000 doctors in the state. The ones who had independent practices were in the single digits, maybe a dozen of physicians with private practice. So it's really hard to live outside the space. You refer to people within the system. And I focused on peak brain performance. So it was kind of a niche. But.

And this was how long ago?

2010 is when I started that practice. And. And I loved it. Honestly, it was not anything close to the money you could make in corporate medicine. And I had to learn a lot about running a business and hiring and firing and trusting and not. Oh, God, yeah. Anyway, I feel your pain. I did not sign up for all that. But you had to. If you're gonna make it, you gotta know how to do these things. You can't afford a specialist for each. An IT specialist and a billing specialist. No, no. You need jack of all trades. Come and see if you can live outside the system.

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Don't with me. But we did great work. When we look at peak brain performance for internal medicine, it was from Parkinson's to brain injuries to bipolar to addiction. And what we learned was the addiction had the place where most people didn't want their information inside the corporate world. And so that became quite a commodity for us to say, we'll treat you. It's a six month plan. Here's what's gonna happen. And it doesn't get billed to insurance. Cause they don't pay for that. So that became this unspoken word. If you wanted your brain to work right after addiction or if you're trying to reverse addiction, this was the place to land. And again, I didn't ask for that. But it is a huge learning curve for me. So now I'm in. In 2013. 14. 2014, I got it right. 2015. I have a patient who's 71 years old and she has had CLL, chronic lymphocytic leukemia. For 10 years we've had traditional medicine to take care of her. And she has made that cancer go up and down and up and down with our chemotherapy. She walks into the practice and you don't need to be a doctor to see that. That gray look on her face and the kind of zombie glazed eyes is, something's bad, something's wrong. Go to the. The oncology numbers are terrible. She's got about 1 in 5,000 of her white blood cells that are not deformed that actually could fight an infection. The chart's showing that she's been on antibiotics 50 of the last 52 weeks. And at the rate these cancers grow, if they double in six weeks, they have a six month life expectancy if you don't do chemo again. So the numbers are bad. She needs to have chemo again. And she says, no, the last time you did that, my brain didn't work for six months. She's a seamstress. She's like, I didn't even know what a sewing machine was. I didn't even know what a sewing machine was until six months after that treatment. And you're like, okay, I remember that. You're right. That was terrible. But you're going to die otherwise. And during this time, I had had some learning in my life that I. I was trying to be the best at brain repair, and I did a lot of things right. But I had listened to a podcast between Tim Ferriss and Dom d' Agostino in November of the previous year where they were talking about the brain injuries and the peak brain performance for Navy SEALs and NASA astronauts. And they were doing almost everything. Hyperbaric oxygen and doing all these. It was great. I'm like, I'm on track. Until they got to the word ketosis, that they were doing all of this on a bed of ketones. And I had to rewind what. And then the outcomes that they were getting were so much faster. What would take me 18 months? It was taking them six months. And I'm like, well, I gotta figure. So I'm looking around to try and find this. I have to go to the medical school library. I actually closed my practice to say, I can't get my head around this. I need to just slow down, shut everything off for a hot minute to see what this is about. And during that time, I'm looking at all the different ways a ketogenic diet is used and how seizures and. Okay, obviously there's a chapter in medicine I missed somehow. I don't know why. I don't know about this. And the peak healing in brains was really impressive that I had missed the update. That's real. And then there was a few articles on cancer, and it was interesting. And I read them and kind of put them to the side. But now this woman is sitting in front of me, and she is 71 years old, and she's got the best Western medicine can offer. I've been delivering it, and now she said, I'd rather die than do it your way. And she asked me a question that sometimes I lie through. It's a question that's very exhausting. If you're in a busy day, if you've got to the end of your day and you're looking at getting home fast, and the patient says, doc, what would you do? And you'd like to tell them the truth. And I try very hard to get to the moment of truth, get the noise out of your brain, find the moment. Get in this right now moment. But sometimes you just tell them the guidelines because, you know, we're sinners. We do things that aren't perfect. But the woman asking me this question was my mother. What would you do? And I said, mom, do you. Do you trust me? And here's her pigtail. Farm girl, right? She says, with my whole life.

I.

Said, mom, if we go down that hallway, we could make your appointment for chemotherapy. But if we walk out that front door, we could drive to the farm, and I could start you on something called a ketogenic diet. And I have no evidence that this is going to work. It's going to be hard, but I'll do it with you. And she goes, I want that one. And the farm's 100 miles away. So we get in the same car, leave the car at the hospital, drive to the farm. As I explained to my mom about a ketone, and her brain wasn't working very well at the time, so it was very simple. And we got to the farm, we threw out more carbs than I think were necessary in the whole county. And she began a ketogenic diet. And this is 2015, where she had. It was a very messy ketogenic diet. We did not lose any weight, but within a couple of weeks, we would call each other on the phone at the end of the day. There was no text or there was texting, but we didn't have video chatting. So I couldn't see her, but I could hear in her voice that she just sounded like she had better energy. And I'm like, do I want her to have better energy? Is that what I'm hearing? But six weeks go by, and neither of us lose any weight. But we definitely. I felt better. And she walks through the door of the hospital, where we're gonna go see this oncologist. And he's my friend. He knows this story very well, but he knows my mother very well, but doesn't know what we're doing. Like, we were supposed to go for chemotherapy. We didn't tell him we weren't gonna go. It's rural South Dakota. You get chemotherapy done way away from where the doctor lives. So we walk in and shifts close. She just looks amazing. Like, this is the woman I remember from my childhood. I used to call her Mary Poppins. She was from this small town, and if you wanted something done magically, she'd make it happen. She's one of those women, and it's like Mary Poppins magic was right back inside her soul. And we get into the oncologist, and she gets her blood drawn right before they comes in. And we can hear this rumbling outside the door, and it's taking them too long to come in, and. And they come in and redraw the blood. And I said, it's either really Good or really bad, mom, because we have no evidence for what I'm doing to her. And if the chemotherapy would have been used, we were hoping it would reduce the cancer by 50%. That was the goal of the chemo. Or reduce the growth by 50. So it would only double by. It would take twice as long to double. And then the next round of chemo, it should take twice as long to double. But when we look at that numbers that came back on that report, I had no space in my brain for what happens when you reduce her numbers by 70%. Like, not stop the doubling. That was my hoping. Just don't let it double be south of double. And we're gonna be. Better not reduce the numbers by 70%, which chemotherapy didn't have. That's nowhere close to what chemotherapy could have done. Like, no, we don't have any projections like that at all. So it outperformed chemotherapy by so much that the doctor's like, what did you do? And right before the doctor walks in, I get really nervous, and I say, mom, all right, if he asks you anything about what's going on, just shut up. Because I don't know what to tell him. And she's like, okay. So he walks in, he's holding the silence. What are you doing? And we both are like. And he finally breaks the silence and says, all right, keep doing it. Whatever you're doing, it's working. I'll see you in six weeks.

Please tell me you told him at some point.

Oh, eventually, yeah.

I know. There's this whole thing, like, you tell them, and then they go, well, it just must be some kind of, like, you know, we used a ketogenic diet for my son Grant, when he had traumatic brain injury and, you know, seizure activity. I mean, here's the funny part about ketogenic diets. I think I look at diets as therapeutic tools. I think we've got a mistake in the way we name them. We've got the way we eat, and then we've got a therapeutic tool. And sometimes you need to use a therapeutic tool forever, and sometimes you need to use it for a month. And, you know, I'm using the Carnivore diet right now on someone because we needed to do it to get, you know, about £100 off and reverse any decision. He couldn't have any decisions. So, like, you always have to look at their behavior, psychology, you know, their health, but it's not a forever. It's a tool. Some of the times these need to be tools forever. You know, it Just depends. But I think that it got hijacked by the diet industry.

Oh my goodness.

And I love that you said, you know, we didn't lose weight. I don't look at a ketogenic diet as a weight loss diet. I look at it as a therapeutic diet especially. And when I first started looking at it, I go, why wouldn't this be the way we approach cancer? Why are we approaching cancer with a vegan high glucose feed? The cancer diet? What am I missing here?

Oh, my word. And the amount of time that I have spent trying to speak to that language like, okay, so here's what your vegan diet's doing. Here's what's happening inside your cells, here's what's happening inside your cytokines and your receptors. And that cancer talk, it's exhausting. I mean, I think the examples of my mom's story has been amazing. I lost a bet with my husband and I self published a book. It sold a million copies. Thanks be to God for that, but also for losing a bet to my husband. And the story is her journey. And my at the beginning, true skepticism of, jeez, this is, I can't find any evidence of this. That was 2015. We now have much better resources in the space now.

Well, the ketogenic diet's been around thousands of years. That's why I was like, this isn't 20 years ago, right?

Well, yeah. And I think when you, I remember that deep dive was, I just missed this. I mean, I don't like to admit that I must have missed this in medical school.

But you weren't taught that in medical school.

That's exactly right. They skipped right over it. They went specifically to ketoacidosis. They did not. I, I didn't know there was such a thing as ketosis. This therapeutic place, this anti seizure place. And I think it is a very big injustice that much like anything that has to do with nutrition in medical school, you learn about severe pathology, severe malnourishment, and it's gotta be extreme for it to make the tests and then we move on to the next pathology.

Well, to be fair, because I was looking at the same with exercise. I'm an exercise physiologist and I was like, man, okay. They talk about doctors having an hour of nutrition, but they have 0 of exercise. And I was actually talking to Dr. Andy Galpin, he goes, well, to be fair, think about it. I mean, I've got a PhD, he not me in exercise science. And it's a lot of. And I know A smidgen of the whole world of exercise. So you look and go, you can't learn everything. So I think that the bigger challenge is there's this idea that that medical care should encompass all of these things, and it's just impossible.

I think the other unspoken message is when it doesn't get covered, the message is, it's not important. And so I think that how can you shift to say, all right, you have to partner around the cadaver in engross anatomy. You have physical therapists. You have other. At least in South Dakota, we did. So you learned. This was the team you lean on when you need that. This is their training, so you understand what they know. They go off and learn things that I'm not gonna learn, but I'm gonna have to rely on their proficiency if we're gonna be a medical community.

It's like, you need to know. I always say, I need to know that there's a light and a switch. Now, I'm not gonna know how to wire the light or do any of this stuff. I can change light bulb. But beyond that, I need an expert. And you think about, like, my son in the hospital. We had a. You know, we had the psychiatrist, we had the neurologist, we had the occupational therapist, we had the speech therapist, we had the physical therap. Everybody in there working together on a team. That's really the way these things need to be approached.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that. So that understanding of how do I partner with somebody with nutrition, when I'm referring to a diabetic nutritionist, that's the number one thing that was in my. And they're all 100 pounds overweight.

I'm like, well, look at the. So long ago, I was a spokesperson for Subway, and I tried to make sense. I was trying to use the. Because they go, use the American Diabetic association guidelines to help us with our food. And I go, I can't. I can't make sense of this. So let's back it up. Because you threw out ketones. Ketogenic. And I do think even in the general population, there's a complete confusion. First of all, when most people think ketogenic, they think high fat. And diets, they think losing weight. They don't know about all the therapeutic effects, and they don't really know what a. I remember way back when, when I first learned about a ketogenic diet, it was like tab and pork rinds. You know.

That'S fantastic. But it must have been the ketogenic diet. Yeah.

I mean, you could eat pork rinds and have tab and you'd be on a. And tab, for those of you, well, everyone's well beyond 40, they know what tab is.

Yeah, right. Yeah. So the part that I used in that book, so I'm trying to explain it to my mom, whose brain isn't working right. And the part that I really latched onto that I think is the first message I like people to hear about a ketogenic diet is your system is swollen from the intracellular gunk in every one of your cells because you've been living in a high insulin state for probably since she had babies. So my sister at the time was probably in her mid-30s. So for 35 years, mom, you've had a high insulin state. You've never got out of that since you had kids. And that was that high insulin state is what allowed you to have kids. You needed that for the gestation. But then the off switch is something you were never taught. You stayed in this zone. And every cell that's been turning over for 35 years is filled with, and I hate this word, but it's really the best word, inflammation. It's an excess amount of fluid around the suborganelles, in the organelles and the cells and in the fascial space. If every layer of their body has excess fluid in the wrong spots. And people say, so what? So what? So what? I'm like, but that's where the diseases connect. That's where when you get into the anti inflammatory state of what it means to be in persistent ketosis, like why does it work for a seizure? When I look at the, the teachings I would go for middle school and teach about alcohol and marijuana. I was that mom. I would bring brain scans in about. Here's what alcohol looks like when it's infused into a brain of a teenager. This is how much of the brain gets swollen. That alcohol crosses the blood brain barrier and pulls along with it a bunch of water. That swelling in the brain changes how that neuron can conduct messages. That's the same thing that's happening in a concussion. But a concussion is trauma in this area and it can spread. But when you have alcohol everywhere in the brain, it doesn't go to one spot. It goes to any cell that's willing to take it up as fuel. And with it comes this wave of fluid that is the swelling, the hangover, the problem that happens inside a brain when you add a ketogenic state, that excess fluid evaporates. It is the opposite of a pendulum. That is a Very swollen cell filled with glucose only metabolism and the waste that comes with constantly burning only sugar to the other side of the pendulum where you only have a ketogenic state and the waste is less. There are some prices you pay when only burning ketones. And that pendulum, if you're trying to repair, you want to push that patient as close as you can to most cells burn ketones for a good season of time until we can get that repair to happen. And yes, somewhere along the line, people lose weight. But that is not the point of this diet. That is not the point of this chemistry set where you're saying, I need you to undo something that you've been doing for 30 years. And you did it subconsciously. It's happening at every cell level, and to reverse it. It's everything to do with what's going in your mouth right now. And so, like, how can it be that simple? Like, it's really that simple. Until you're like on week three and you say, no, I know you think you want to be done now, but this. We're just about to repair the hippocampus. We're just about to get to the deeper layers of your body reversing this problem. And then they're human and they screw it up and they go off the diet and they have a binge and think, okay, it's just a day off. Like, yeah, but your brain practiced swelling for the better part of 20 years. And when you rushed in all that sugar because you took a day off, you just, you swelled it up again. That's why you felt so terrible for three days. And it's going to take us at least a week to get back to where we were. So if you binge again in that next week, we're not getting anywhere.

It's like you just picked a scab.

Yeah, exactly. So the mechanisms behind all that, I think the hardest part of it is the internists are known for managing chronic disease. And if we prevent it, you don't even notice what we did. That's very unrewarding.

And you didn't get any rewarding with the generic versus the.

Exactly. Why did I pick this one? My husband wanted me to be a dermatologist. That's boring. That the reversal of disease is chronic. And it is the long game. It is the how can you help a behavior not to return. And, you know, one of the places that I think is super powerful, that I attribute a lot of the place that I hang out now is because I grew up in a small town and I really love community. I like to know who my neighbors are and be a part of a community. When you look at where was I.

Going with this, something about behavior.

So the where was I going?

You said I like community. But I think the question within that is because what you are having people do, I mean, the reason that we're not seeing that we have what now it's 93% of the population is metabolically unhealthy. And we see these big challenges is you have to change your behavior.

Oh yes, there you go.

Right. And it didn't happen overnight. So you don't change your behavior for a week. There's no 10 day detox coming to save you.

Exactly. So when I look at the behavior changes that you try to get a patient to make and you watch what's normal for them in their origin story, their family of origin. Well, there's specific nerves in your brain where you learn behavior. They are only found in primates and humans and they're called mirror neurons. When you watch somebody have a behavior, you will do that. It's not like a strange thing that I don't want to grow up and be my mom. But you grow up and be your mom, you know that behavior is in your brain and at a subconscious level you learn to remember and you're comforted by being what they were, you know, by using those patterns of behavior in your adult life. And when you look at the disaster of addiction it is they got through that developmental years and the person who was supposed to imprint on them how to make a different choice, either was absent, the behavior wasn't shown, or it wasn't ever present in the the behavior was never present in the person they were learning from. So now you've got these 20 somethings with a major addiction or major brain injury and you're trying to teach them a behavior they've never seen. And when you study whose brain got better, a ketogenic state will decrease the inflammation, it will make the learning faster, it will wire that brain faster. But you still need to show them in real time, human to human, a behavior that they've never seen before. And this is one of the biggest imprints that when people say, how do you stay on a ketogenic diet for life? And should you?

Yeah, and that was the other question. Like again, some people, yes, some people, no.

The fall off the wagon is so common that people are like, oh, that's just normal, that's what you do.

But does everyone really need to be on a ketogenic diet or do they need it. Some people specifically need it. Maybe someone with a severe traumatic brain injury or bipolar disorder. And some people may not need it forever. Right.

Yeah. So when I look at the patients that come to see me, they've assist. Go back to my mom, 30 years of doing it wrong. Her ability to say no to food, to let go of the snack at 6 o', clock, 7 o', clock, 8 o', clock, whatever, to comfort herself with friends and wine. And then more carbohydrates come after the wine. That behavior was something she had to learn how to do it differently. And I contend that when people are on a ketogenic journey, if they want to get the highest outcome from it, if they have that cellular problem for 30 years, which is what most people coming to my practice have, that they have to stay in this zone of a ketogenic diet long enough to address why their behavior keeps relapsing. And that's probably the most difficult thing possible.

That's interesting because I look at it and go, all right, 30 years of poor health, you're not going to fix it overnight. But it's actually even more than that. It's all those years of behaving this way.

Now they don't even know it's wrong. They don't even know they're doing it yet.

I would throw in a dose of Dr. Joe Dispenza here because his whole thing that he teaches you is breaking the habit of being yourself.

Yeah.

And these things that we do.

And yeah, I would contend when you've. When you've got these habits where you say, this is normal. Right. And the first place you usually confront that is either a college roommate who does things completely different than you, or a marriage where you're like, what are you doing that's not normal? And you start to see behavior that you've never seen before. And the longer they're married, the more they act like each other. Those mirror neurons going on. Right. Well, if you've ever been to a recovery group, let's say AA, they talk about, you know, these 12 steps, and they talk about getting into a space and showing the journey of when people fall off and when people get back on. And it turns out, especially in that sharing of testimony for somebody's personal story, when you do a functional MRI and watch to see, did you ignite a mirror neuron? It comes from people telling their own story in a way that you say, huh, I didn't know that was an option. What do you mean? You had a drink and then you called Your sponsor or whatever, the behavior shows up in a place where it's usually the spiral. This decision comes after the next, after the next. There's no way out. So the only answer is never drink, never start the spiral. Although that's a great idea. And some people, when you're looking at behaviors where you say they keep sabotaging, they keep doing this thing, it's really not intentional. But the brain hasn't been wired to learn the new behavior, to find that place where you say, huh, that's what I've always done. Isn't that okay? There's gotta be a way around this. And I think that. So to me, when people say, should you be on a ketogenic diet for life? I want them to be on a ketogenic diet until their medical problems are gone. So, like, my goal in medicine is to stop as many prescriptions as I've started. And that's a lot. I'm an internist. So there's. Because those prescriptions aren't reversing this health problem. They put out the fire. And there are some that you. Probably, because of the damage that's happened now, you're going to have to be on for a long time. But I want them to have the chance to reverse it. And it means that the crop of cells that you've been growing in that high inflammatory state, I need several generations of cells not in an inflammatory state. And that means you can't fall off the wagon every Saturday night. You can't keep relapsing. I need ketones and circulation for this to work. It's not what goes through your mouth as much as what's going through your veins. That chemistry set, that therapeutic level of having ketones available for those mitochondria. And as the cells divide, that's what determines, will the next chapter of your health be better? And in part, that is pivotal. On how you look at yourself in the mirror. What are those behaviors that you know aren't healthy, or you kind of do it and then you fall off? Eh, it's close enough.

So it may be that for some people who say they've reversed the health condition they've repaired, they feel fantastic. However, they need to stay on it in order to stay in that behavior.

Right? So that's really where, I mean, people want it to be. This, you know, this gauntlet, like, you should never be on a ketogenic diet for life. I'm like, well, you look at the seizure patients that were the, you know, the failed Depakote kids from the 1960s. And they couldn't. You know, it didn't work on their seizures. They failed. They only got the opportunity to reverse those seizures from being on a ketogenic diet. And then they had forced compliance because every time they went out of a state of ketosis, they peed their pants and fell on the ground. That seizure haunted them. So they stayed in ketosis for 80 years.

And here's the thing we know. We can live without carbohydrates. We can't live without water, protein, or fat.

Amen.

And I don't know why we built a diet based on the one thing we can live without now. You know, do I think we're better off having some fruits and veggies? Especially veggies, non starchy fiber, et cetera. Yes. However, the person I'm working with right now might be on a carnivore diet for life, because the bumpers there, he's got bumper rails. And, you know, this is someone who was 300 and nearly 390.

Wow.

And so if that's what it takes, what's healthier? Eating the vegetables and going off on a binge or, you know, getting your fiber or getting in, eating a protein and fat and, you know, fluid rich diet, feeling great.

And look at the freedom you've given him that the boundary you had to put up is do not trigger his decisions outside of carnivore. Like keep those off of the. That's the never list. Don't do that. And in this season of life, this is the rules. But what you've allowed him to do is practice the behaviors that are within those boundaries. And. And as he gets stronger, will the temptation be easier for him in the future? Yes. Especially if he stays in this lane. It's when he keeps relapsing to the. But it's healthy when he does that. It only hurts the wiring of his brain, the wiring of his next step. And by golly, £390 for any height is gonna be.

Yeah, you can't. You'd be 10ft tall. So he's doing great. And it is. It's like you get the neurofeedback of failure. And that is a danger.

Danger, danger. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, that learned helplessness or learned this is as good as I can get. That's a boy. That's the biggest shackle that I find in patients too. And really, the only way you break it is to partner go hand in hand with somebody on a journey on an accountability of what whether it's a coach or a Physician or just a friend who says, we're gonna do this together. And when you fall off, they can say, now this is how you do the next step. And I think that's the kind of learning that I've found. You have to have real honest relationships in your life to do that. And when they're superficial, when they're not real, then you don't take care of real problems.

Well, what's the point of those? So walk. I know we've got an ebook for everybody. However, I'd love you just to give an overview of someone listening right now. You'll be able to get the ebook. I'm going to put it@jjvirgin.com DrBoz D R B O Z Walk someone through like they're ready to get started. What would they do? What are the first steps?

Yeah. So in a ketogenic diet, this was keep it simple. The only thing I want them counting, especially if they've had brain injury or chronic illnesses, is I want 20 total carbohydrates per day or less, period. 20 total carbohydrates per day or less, period. Now, in that I want them eating high fat. The fear of fat is where you'll find them falling off the wagon and saying, I just can't do that. Where keeping the rules simple are that 20 total grams of fat. It's really close to Carnivore when you get down to it. Because every time you have.

I mean, Carnivore would just have more protein.

Yes, exactly. And, and at the beginning, I tell them, I don't care about that. I don't care about that. When they are. When I've got that swollen brain in mind or I've got that diabetic or 390 pound person, the number one hormone that is our enemy is insulin. And every carbohydrate, whether it's fibrous, not fibrous soluble insulin, that's what's stimulating the insulin. And you have learned behavior in your pancreas cells, your beta cells are producing insulin at a rate of that you've been practicing for so long that it won't even take carbohydrates to stimulate insulin. You're gonna have insulin from the stress of the day or not sleeping well. I mean, all the other reasons.

Seeing bread at the bakery.

Yes, exactly. A smell will do it. And so when I look at the 20 total carbohydrates per day, I want that. I want them peeing ketones. So I do push them to go get the ketone urine Strips and say, just prove you're peeing ketones. Prove that there's ketones flowing through your circulation. And that in the first two weeks is 90% of it.

So what types of things are they eating?

You know, my first meal that I push people to do, I try to make it as satiating and, you know, yummy as possible. And I tell them to go eat buffalo wings. I want you to eat with the skin on. You can have some hot sauce, as long as it's not sugary. You can have rubs. You can dip it in blue cheese dressing, meaning putting fat with protein, especially in a way. The other kind of side effect of buffalo wings is that, you know, you have to eat them slowly.

The side effect of buffalo wings. I like chicken thighs, but I'm not a big buffalo wings person. But I will tell you, I think it is very hard to pig out on fat and protein.

Oh, yeah.

You get full, right? You get full.

So in that. In this, if you go out and you order these and you're at a restaurant, or even if you make them at home, the time it takes you to eat them is slower. So I still want them eating the skin. I want them getting that fat in there. And they feel good when eating that. I tell them, wake up the next day and it should be some eggs and bacon is a perfect way to begin the day. And I mean, I push them to do things like, you know, salami, Spam, even. I mean, the quantity of ingredients in the. In the product is really important. And Spam really only has a couple.

It's so funny. I. During the. During 2020, my husband. Turns out he's a prepper.

Oh.

Now, back when I owned a gym and wellness center, I actually had the CEO of Hormel. Was my. Was one of my clients. He goes, want me to bring the Spammobile? I go, no, I don't want you to bring the spammobile to. Outside the gym, he would bring it to parties. But Tim. I know Tim. I look and I go, what have you gotten? Because we literally could live in our house for a year. And I'm like, you bought Spam? I go, honey, if it gets to the point where that's my option, I'm out. I'm out. Done.

First time I ever ate Spam, I was in Haiti. I grew up on a hog farm, so I should have eaten Spam. Right?

But you didn't have to eat Spam.

No, I pork chops. So I'm in Haiti. And there is something I'm super hungry. We're dehydrated. I'm hungry, and there is something frying over there that smells amazing. And I could have cared less what it was because I was so hungry. And we're eating it, and it's this crispy something with meat in it. I didn't ask do.

I was like, don't ask, don't ask, don't ask.

It was amazing. And I said, what is that? And he pulls out it is American words. Spam.

Wow. And I'm like, all right. Well, I mean, we've got some at home. Maybe we'll serve it when you come.

Over, fry it up.

I just know it's a big thing in Maui, and I've always managed to dodge that dish.

Yeah, it's like. It's a huge thing there. It's like a delicacy, like stateful food or something.

Okay, so if someone didn't want to eat Spam, what would be some other options?

Yeah, making it easy. Like pepperonis are another thing where what you're looking for is ease of use, where the prep time of making people advanced chefs on the first few days of a ketogenic diet is dangerous forever.

Thank God for air fryers.

But I know I can look at an air fryer. Right where you do it is very carnivore based. When I look at the places that I use vegetables in the first few weeks, it would be. It's a carrying unit to get fat to your gut.

Maybe a lot of arugula or romaine with a lot of olive oil.

Yeah. The other one I have people catch onto is creamed spinach. You can get it when you go out to eat, like it's an hors d'. Oeuvre. Sometimes this artichoke spinach dip is very heavy and fat, and it's got some vegetables in it. But it's along those lines where you're saying, I'm looking for that. You put fat on it to deliver it to your gut. Because if you watch a ketogenic state, the fat inside the person is locked behind layers of high insulin. So really, the only access to fat they have in the first couple of weeks, until I get them fat adapted to that insulin down, is the fat they're swallowing. So I need them to consume fat enough to make free fatty acids, to burn fatty acids, and to burn ketones. And the beautiful part is if you can keep them in that lane for that four days, adding salt as they get to that third or fourth day, really being careful about bowels can shut down. Pretty quickly. If they're.

So what do you do about that?

Yeah, most people's bowels move because of a stretch reflex. There are two ways your bowels move. One is the peristalsis. That is a natural motion forward. You can trigger that with pressure. Usually the pressure comes from stretching on the inside.

And.

And there is a natural rhythm as long as you've not had any major scars throughout your colon. So if they get to day four and they are not, they're having trouble. I do something called a chia seed protocol, and that is they have a tablespoon of chia seeds every hour until they have a bowel movement.

Oh, interesting.

And it's dry seeds solemn down. It'll expand once they have a bowel movement. I then say, add up those tablespoons for what you had today. Eat those same tablespoons. You don't have to do them every hour anymore. You can kind of clump them in the first part of the day.

So they make a coconut milk chia pudding.

Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. So what you're trying to do is consume the foods that will stretch without really raising insulin. Other seeds can do a little bit better job. But I've just found chia seeds you don't get a lot of pushback for. People are like, oh, yeah, I can make it taste good. It's not terrible. And it really does deliver on the stretch reflex. So stretch reflex you can reverse out of a colon if you just don't stop cold turkey, like I did, like they would have at the beginning. So you take those tablespoons, cut them by two or three tablespoons every day over the next two weeks, and they taper off. And the bowels really often do great. Bowels will respond in a normal fat. I mean, we've gone years without fiber people.

I interviewed Dr. Sean Baker. He's like. I was like, okay, TMI, but let's go.

Yeah, no, it's exactly this where he and I both had. I remember the best conversations with him are all about, yeah, people forget that the gut is adaptable. I mean, if you put it in a low fiber state, it's going to figure it out.

Well, and again, because I think diets are tools. I think that for a ketogenic diet, a carnivore diet, a protein sparing modified fast, these things that don't use fiber, that for someone who's got gut issues, you want to fix a gut issue fast and get everything calmed down, that's the fastest way to do it. You don't throw more fiber at it. That just makes you scream.

Yeah, we have lots of evidence of that, too. They've studied. This is terrible for them. Look at the side effects they have. And then nothing. Well, by the third day, you've got a nice slime layer that's built up, and the next day it's better, and the next day it's better. And by a month, you're like, why didn't someone show me this years ago? Some of the saddest patients I have in my practice before entering into the ketogenic space are the ones where I end up at their funeral because my treatment didn't help them at all. And in fact, it probably made them worse. And there's nothing more devastating than the lower bowel autoimmune disorders of Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, because they just starve. And I mean, I don't mean, like, anytime you put food in them, because the foods we were using, it was awful. It was awful. And they would do better when they would fast. And I still didn't put it together.

It was like Naysha Winters story. You know, I'll just fast. I'm going to do better and get rid of the cancer because she couldn't eat. Let's flip it and do a final on a great story.

Oh, yes.

Let's move. Out of everyone dying. And that was pre you knowing this.

Yeah, yeah. So great story about a patient.

Yes.

Yeah. So let me think of, well, we can go back to Grandma Rose. That's a really good ending. Where her body was riddled with problems and I was managing all of them. Within six weeks, we get that ketogenic report back, and she's doing great. We then think it's going to be easy, which is where we got our biggest lessons. We thought, oh, we can go back to our life and we'll be kind of keto.

Kind of keto?

Yeah. There's no such thing. You're either making ketones or you're not. And it was after that that I said, mom, I think we need to do a support group, like what we do with alcoholics. And I'll do the support group here in Sioux Falls, and you can come, or we can zoom or we can figure this out. And so the support group was really to help my mom have a community of people improving her health. But what it really did is it helped her sustain through what was going to be one of the hardest seasons of life. She had a surgery coming up that I didn't agree. I didn't think was worth it. She was gonna get her hammer toe fixed. She gets into the surgical room and the toe. The surgery took way too long. When the surgeon came out, he said it was like particle board. It was just so soft. And she had a DEXA scan that wasn't that bad. So the healing was really slow. And I said, mom, we're gonna have to be in a state of ketosis to do this. I gotta get the inflammation out. We gotta be strong again. And so we get our ducks back in a row. We get back in a state of ketosis. She does really well. And she had suffered from diverticulitis in the past, had a few flares and had some infections, but we always got it to calm down. And she did really well for nine months. And then my husband took us on a trip to Peru. So I am hiking the hundred mile Peruvian trail with my kids, and she gets an infection. She gets in the hospital and she. They put sugar in her IV and she just blows up. She just blows up and she swells shut her colon, ends up with a colostomy bag. And it was devastating because it's like, I left.

It didn't have to happen.

It did not have to happen. And so we journey forward over the next three years where now she has this colostomy bag that keeps her. I mean, like, she can see what's coming in and what's coming out. You really learn about stools when you have one of those. And she becomes the healthiest version of herself because she had to stay consistently keto and really advanced ketosis. But Mary Poppins returns to her. She becomes the vibrant woman in her 70s that I remember from her 40s. And my kids are introduced almost to the grandmother that I knew as mother. But if there was ever a patient that really taught me, there's no way that story turned out without a partner going through that with her. It wasn't that I was some kind of. I wasn't her hero because I knew how to do a ketogenic diet. I was her hero because I was walking with her on this story that was hard, that had setbacks, that had words like funerals in it, and for her to reverse off of all of her medications and even her thyroid medication, which I thought was never going to be reversed. She found her way to. I think actually she was on this very low dose of thyroid in the end, but found a restoration off of every medication we were on. And the healthiest version of her, back down to her high school weight and back into the vibrancy of her life that her grandkids deserved. And I think that is what empowers me to say, gosh, if my own mother was headed to the zombie land of prescriptions and chronic inflammation and I was paying attention to her, I went to every appointment, there's no way that healthcare could have got any better. And what it really was is we were missing the whole care. And I've enjoyed taking her story and using that as not only inspiration that the fancy part of this wasn't my prescriptions. The fancy part was measure the ketones, find a community that can do it with you, stay the course. And I think those every time I have a healthy person leading a group or watching others in their family, teaching others in their family how to do a ketogenic diet, I think that's the best advertisement anybody needs is taking that. Usually there's a lot of women, there's men too. But taking that person and putting them back into the most vibrant season of their life, because that will trick the. It'll trickle to the other people that are around them. And it's been the most rewarding shift in medicine I've done.

Wow, thank you. What a story. So again, jjvirgin.com drboz Dr. Boz and you will get the ebook which I wrote down. It is 50 keto fat facts.

Yes. So fat's the thing they fear. So we put together all the reasons you shouldn't fear fat. We do link it to some YouTube videos because we think, especially when you've.

Got a killer YouTube channel, we link that in the show notes. Like everybody needs to be checking that out. So your Instagram, YouTube, you've got programs which, you know, leaning into community because again, one of the things when people ask me, how do you, how do you make sure when you've gotten to where you want to be, you know, health and fitness, you stay that way. I go, you find fitter friends.

Yeah.

But if you think about, if you go back to the situation, that that created the problem.

Right. That's the hard part. You have to be a link. Outside of that, we have, you know, that's one of my favorite parts of what we do is my office right now is next to the Pin Chasers, which is a bowling alley here in Tampa. And every Tuesday morning at 8 o' clock, we have a free support group that you can come hang out, ask me questions, and it's turned into a community of ketogenic people doing the ketogenic diet. And sometimes we're the only people in the whole week they talk to that know what a ketogenic diet is or how to answer those questions. So I think you have to have an anchor outside of your chaos if you're going to help lead people to a better life. So we would be happy to entertain all of that and I hope you like the book. It is fun.

Thank you.

Yes, well thank you for having me. We are I'm hard to get rid of so I hope I get to come back.

Be sure to join me next time for for more tools, tips and techniques you can incorporate into everyday life to ensure you look and feel great and are built to last. Check me out on Instagram, Facebook and my website jjvirgin.com and make sure to follow my podcast@subscribetoj.com so you don't miss a single episode. And hey, if you're loving what you hear, don't forget to leave a review. Your review make a big difference in helping me reach more incredible women just like you to spread the word about aging powerfully after 40. Thanks for tuning in and I'll catch you on the next episode. Hey JJ here. And just a reminder that the well Beyond 40 podcasts offers health, wellness, fitness and nutritional information that's designed for educational and entertainment purposes only. You should not rely on this information as a substitute for, nor does it replace professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. If you have any concerns or questions about your health, you should always consult with a physician or other healthcare professional. Make sure that you do not disregard, avoid or delay obtaining medical or health related advice from your healthcare professional because of something you may have heard on the show or read in our show notes. The use of any information provided on the show is solely at your own risk.

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