The Truth About the Keto / Ketogenic Diet with Dr. Sarah Ballantyne

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Welcome to the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show with celebrity nutrition expert, Fitness hall of Famer and four time New York Times best selling author JJ Virginia. JJ is a warrior mom whose knowledge and expertise have helped change hundreds of thousands of lives. With over 3.5 million podcast downloads and appearances on Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, the Today Show, Rachael Ray, Larry King Love Whoa, whoa, whoa.

This show is about you, not about me. I want to help you find practical, real world ways to dial in your health and mindset so you can finally lose that weight and feel strong and energized. Stop settling for less than your personal best. It's time to find out how to look and feel better than ever. And I'll be right here with you the whole way. Ketogenic diets. I get asked about them all the time and I was at a cool event last year called Paleo Effects. I'll be going again so you can get to Austin. Come hang out with me in April and I met this gal, Dr. Sarah Ballantyne. She's a New York Times bestselling author of four books and she's also the creator of the paleomom.com awesome site. And she's the latest book Paleo Principles. The Science behind the Paleo Template, Step by step guides, meal plans, and 200 plus healthy and delicious recipes for real life. So she's like a crazy science geek. Amazing. She has her PhD in medical biophysics, but she also has this incredible personal story where she lost over 120 pounds and she just digs into the science and research on every single thing. Which I just love because just like Dr. Alan Christensen and Dr. Tom O', Brien, I can go to her with my go to questions and so so much has come up lately with ketosis and ketogenic diets. And you know, it's something I use with my son with his traumatic brain injury and there's definitely applications for it, but I think it's getting applied to places it shouldn't be and that's why I wanted to bring Dr. Sarah Ballantine on the show today. We were at this event and I heard her talking about it. I go, wow, this would be awesome to have you on board. So I'm going to be bringing on Dr. Sarah Ballantine and we are going to be talking ketosis. What are the optimal things you can do to lose weight? Great insight here. All right, Dr. Sarah Ballantyne, welcome to the show. I'm super excited to be with you. I know I'm like going to attempt to extract as much out of that brilliant brain of yours as possible here. And I'm really excited to dive into the subject of keto with you because there's so much swirling in and around about it and I feel like we've kind of destroyed what it was originally intended for and turned it into a fad. When you the reality, it's like kind of like calling Paleo fad. It's like these things aren't fads, just understanding principles and when things should be used. So if that's cool, let's deep dive. What do you think?

I think we should do a download.

Yep. All right. All right. And just for everybody listening, I was on a panel with Sarah. I don't know if I even said anything on the panel except some Kim Kardashian comment. But you like, I was like looking over, going, all right, you just keep talking over there. I'm just going to take as many notes as possible because it was a question came up about keto. And then I went, that's it. You must come on the show because we get asked about this every single day. So first thing I would love to start with is what is the ketogenic diet?

Yeah, so ketogenic diet is a really interesting therapeutic diet. It actually has its roots in like Hippocrates era medicine where they discovered that fasting could reduce epileptic seizures. And thousands of years ago, right, 2,500 years ago, that was cutting edge medicine for someone who had epilepsy. There was no other options. And so they would do these like month long water fasts. The seizures would go away and then the person would eat again. Gradually, the epilepsy would come back. So it was always considered sort of this like short term intervention. You could go on and off. And then in the 1920s, epilepsy patients with severe epilepsy were really institutionalized. Back then, they, they didn't live out in the general population and they experimented with on their patients. Right. That this was what medicine was like. A hundred years ago. Um, but they discovered that they could mimic the same effects of a fast with a very, very low carbohydrate, very, very high fat diet. And it took about 10 years for them to really figure out the exact formula. It had to be about 80% fat, it could be about 10% protein, protein, 5 to 10% carbohydrate. Initially they found that they, or they thought it had to be low calorie as well. And then they discovered it didn't like they, it could be isocaloric, which means the same amount of calories as the person is eating, not on a ketogenic diet. And about half of the patients with what's called refractory epilepsy, so epilepsy that does not respond to any other drug had complete, like, basically all of their seizures went away. People who were having 200 seizures a day down to zero. It was considered a miracle. And then what happened over time is every time a new anticonvulsant drug came along, the interest in the ketogenic diet would disappear. Because who wants to do this really, really hard diet that has tons of awful side effects if you can just take a pill every day? And the problem is, of course, that there's no anticonvulsant drug that works for all epileptics. So if you're diagnosed with epilepsy, you end up trying one drug, seeing if that works, trying another drug, seeing if that works. And so the interest in the ketogenic diet really, it really picked up in the 90s, basically, thanks to the Atkins diet revolution. Thanks. Thanks to the movie do no Harm. And the story behind the movie do no Harm. And it has completely exploded in recent years and gone beyond. Right. Like you could think of it as this, like, prescription, right? It's a prescription for epilepsy. And you can imagine that if there's something going on that's good for the brain, maybe there's some tangential application. So there is some really interesting science showing that it's potentially beneficial for multiple sclerosis for at least some people with Alzheimer's disease. So like neurodegenerative and neurological diseases, you can see some real therapeutic benefits to a ketogenic diet. But what's happening now is it's being used kind of off label and there's this, like, increasing number of. And this is where it goes from this therapeutic diet for a very specific situation to a fad diet, because people are using it to lose weight, they're using it as a cancer intervention. Even though the science behind showing a ketogenic diet as a therapeutic diet for cancer is incredibly weak. It's becoming this all purpose, cure all, even though the science not only doesn't support it, but there's actually some real problems with a diet that is designed to mimic starvation when it comes to overall health. So women are using a ketogenic diet to lose weight and they're basically breaking their metabolisms as a result. Because I think the conversation has it started with this enthusiasm about this therapeutic intervention for a disease in which there is no cure to.

Wow.

We must, we must be able to just treat everything with this diet and we just can't.

Yeah, here's where I'd love to like, just have the science come out so that people can understand, you know, how this actually works. Because I was reading some promotional copy about someone's keto diet plan that says you have to be in ketosis to burn fat.

No.

And I pinged my friend and I go, I don't know who's writing your copy. This is not true. So just understand, explain the biochemistry of this so people understand. Because I think there's still an idea out there that in order to burn fat you must be in ketosis, which when you really understand the biochemistry, you go, oh, that's. No, that's not the case.

It's not actually the case. And a ketogenic diet is not the only way to be in ketosis, I think is another really important part that's wrapped in here. So every cell in our body uses this molecule called adenosine triphosphate, or ATP for short. And that is the molecule that every, you know, our mitochondria make it. And then that's what our cell organelles use for energy in all of the different chemical reactions that, that require energy to propel them. So ATP is considered like the energy currency of every single cell. And we make ATP with a very, very complex chemical reaction called the citric acid cycle, or it's also called the Krebs cycle. When I, way back when I took biochemistry, it was called the Krebs cycle. And you can input into the, into the Krebs cycle different macronutrients. So the Krebs cycle, the easiest way to make ATP is with glucose, right? The, the, the dominant sugar in, in most of our food. So most of the carbohydrates we consume, starch mostly breaks down to glucose. If we're eating table sugar, that breaks down into half glucose, half fructose. So glucose is the easiest thing to kind of shove into the Krebs cycle to make ATP as energy for our cells. But we can put amino acids, the, the building blocks of proteins into this cycle to make ATP and we can put fatty acids into this cycle. So what happens in a person, like if you're just going through the day, you don't have glucose in your, a lot of glucose in your blood all the time. So your glucose in your blood goes up after you eat and then it gradually comes down as it gets shuttled into your cells and your mitochondria turn it into ATP in between meals when glucose is not as easily available. If you have a healthy, you know, flexible metabolism, your body goes, hey, we don't have a whole lot of glucose right now. Let's shuffle shuttle something else into this Kreb cycle. So most naturally you're going to take fatty acids, which is basically burning stored fat, and you're going to put that into the Kreb cycle and you're going to.

Which is what we want. That's a happy day, right?

That's a happy day. And, but this is, this is the normal fluctuation throughout the day, right? After a meal you're going to use glucose there.

Sarah was metabolic flexibility. Like the healthier the metabolism, the more you can kind of switch. You're switching around throughout the day. You're not just stuck using one fuel.

And that's what's up the problem for diabetics, right? So diabetics actually have a really hard time accessing stored fat, but they also have a hard time getting glucose in into their cells because of insulin resistance. What's fascinating is a ketogenic diet is not creating metabolic flexibility, it's actually creating almost like a weird complementary opposite inflexibility as what you have happen in diabetes because it causes a type of insulin resistance. It's called free fatty acid induced insulin resistance. There's not much insulin to get what little glucose is consumed into the cells. And so you end up with a metabolism. It's not like it's just stuck on the fat knob. What happens is when you start having trouble switching back and forth between glucose and fatty acids is, well, amino acids, let's burn those. So you see, when people who do a ketogenic diet for weight loss is you almost have this knob, it's stuck, right? So the, the Krebs cycle, the mitochondria can't shift from different inputs and you end up burning lean muscle mass and losing more lean muscle mass, which of course tanks your metabolism and you end up basically lowering your basal metabolic rate. Which has the effect of you don't lose as much weight for how many calories you're eating because you're burning less just lying around. Ideally, we all want to have a high basal venom.

Great.

Because that means that we're going to burn a lot of calories just by doing nothing. Any activity that we do is above and beyond that. And as long as our caloric intake is reined in and we have a flexible metabolism, we're going to be able to achieve healthy weight. What's happening with a ketogenic diet is you're breaking that knob when you're talking.

About basal metabolic rate. I mean, one of the big things with having a good BMR is having a good thyroid function. Yes, yes. So that's the one, that's the key that I saw here. And I really love this talk about metabolic flexibility because I think that's the most important thing is, is you've got to be able to switch fuels. And the other side is you want to have a healthy metabolism. Talk about the research of what ketogenic diets. And this is, this isn't someone who goes on a ketogenic diet for one week, two weeks, three weeks, this is someone who's staying on one of these things for an extended period of time.

Correct, Correct. So all of the research that we use to look at adverse reactions to a ketogenic diet or what are called long term studies. So you'll often hear the term keto adapted. So you have a lot of people say, like, oh, you can't, don't pay attention to any of the horrible symptoms that you have in the first week. You just, or the first month. You just need to get keto adapted. And different proponents of keto will tell you how long it takes to become keto adapted.

Okay, let's talk the bad symptoms of the first couple weeks and then what it means to be keto adapted.

So in the first couple weeks, severe lethargy, headaches, constipation, a lot of other type of GI symptoms are very, very common. People will generally just feel they can feel achy, they can almost feel like keto flu. Keto flu. Right. So it feels right, it feels like you, you have the flu, brain fog, sort of like loss of memory. Right. So it's actually affecting what's called working memory. So it's your ability to recall. So access a word. So you'll find yourself like getting into a sentence and forgetting a word that you use all of the time. Studies show that people do have worse problem solving skills in those first few weeks after keto, and that may actually progress farther. And then some people actually will have things like their cardiovascular disease risk factors get crazy out of whack. So their triglycerides and their LDL cholesterol will skyrocket. That doesn't happen to everyone, but it certainly happens to some. Some people will get things like kidney stones, which is of course a real problem. And then because of the impact on the immune system and this actually, some of these things get worse once you're keto adapted. And some of them will kind of resolve once you're keto adapted. But because of the impact on the immune system, there's also this increased susceptibility to infection. And in epileptic patients, we see that as being like sepsis, pneumonia, like life threatening infections. What we're seeing sort of the anecdote. And it's really hard to make conclusions based on what people share of their experiences on social media. But you see that people will have things like an abscessed tooth that doesn't seem to get better on antibiotics or they'll get, you know, the flu was so bad. And there's always like some other, you know, culprit that gets blamed. Except that we know that a ketogenic diet really strongly suppresses the immune system. At first, that can look like your inflammation is resolving, but after a while that means your immune system's not doing its main function, which is to protect you against pathogens.

And what about thyroid? Let's talk thyroid. Yeah. Because that's, that's one that alerted me because, you know, I see these things. I did this when Grant was coming through out of his initial brain injury. So we used this temporarily. He did have some rebound issues with the thyroid after it. But that also could be because he had, you know, a severe brain injury. And that can impact a whole lot of hormonal issues. But I've seen this and heard it talked about, about the impact on thyroid health.

So.

So it seems like here you are trying to lose weight and then you've just crashed the thyroid. Exactly.

And I think it is sort of important to say that. Right. In the case of traumatic brain injury. Right. Neurological and neurodegenerative disorders, the cost benefit analysis is quite different than if you're using keto to lose weight.

Yeah. And this is what I want people to understand is there's all these different diets, know why you're using it and what, what the therapeutic outcome you're trying to get from it is, and then use the Right thing for the right time. I mean, you know, it's like lowering carbs can be very helpful to lose weight, but ketosis isn't the, isn't going to be your long term solution because of this. So go ahead. Sorry.

Yeah, so, so, you know, the cost benefit analysis being different for certain conditions where maybe you just know that thyroid hypothyroidism is a possible consequence and you just monitor that and deal with it when it comes because it's an okay cost for the benefit you're getting. But if you're doing this to lose weight, it's really important to know that your thyroid gland is like your body's thermostat. It controls your metabolism, but there's also really strong crosstalk between your thyroid and insulin sensitivity between your thyroid and your sex hormones. So thyroid gland is a very, very strong signal towards reproductive function. That's why we see fertility problems in so many women with hypothyroidism. It has also really strong cross crosstalk with your stress axis. So having a hypothyroid, so a low functioning thyroid is not good. The symptoms include unexplained weight gain, lethargy, migraines, depression and anxiety, constipation, dry skin, hair falling out and brain fog. Right. It's miserable. I can tell you because I have Hashimoto's thyroiditis, which also makes my thyroid not a super functioning organ. It's miserable. So ketogenic diet. There was a really, really well done study published last year in patients with epilepsy. They were on a ketogenic diet for their epilepsy. They were monitored very, very closely by doctors, but it was actually the first long term ketogenic diet study to actually do a thyroid panel in the patients, which was to me, I'm like, you guys have been studying this for a hundred years. No one thought to do a thyroid panel before. So they did a thyroid panel and they found that one in six of the patients in the study developed hypothyroidism, most of them within the first month. Although they, they actually followed these patients for a year and they all, all the ones that developed most of them within, but all of them that developed hypothyroidism was within the first six months. And it was, it required thyroid hormone replacement. So they actually gave them levothyroxine as thyroid hormone replacement. So it was like what would get you diagnosed with clinical hypothyroidism? It was reduced T3, the active thyroid hormone and elevated TSH. And it's kind of important here to sort of like, okay, well, you'll hear people say, well, like, well, any weight loss diet will suppress your thyroid. What's really interesting is studies that have used just calorie restriction to achieve weight loss have also looked at what it does to thyroid function. And it, it does cause a slight decrease in T3. It's considered a normalization effect because it doesn't make it tank to the point where you need thyroid hormone replacement. You don't need to take drugs for hypothyroidism if you're just losing weight on a, on a calorie restricted diet. Whereas in the ketogenic diet, it, it does with fairly alarming frequencies. Like 1 in 6 is much higher levels of hypothyroidism than we see in the general population, which is more like 1 in 200.

Wow. It'd be interesting to look at this and go, all right, so ketogenic diet, 5 to 10% of the calories from carbs. If you were sitting at 20 or 30% of the calories from carbs, would you be okay? My sense is probably is because you haven't shifted, you're still metabolically flexible, you're able to shift back and forth between fuels. You're not creating that problem. You're not creating such low insulin.

Well, not, you've hit the nail on the head because insulin actually has a, it's a super hormone. It has a lot of roles in our body that have nothing to do with glucose. So it controls muscle protein synthesis, bone remodeling, it controls memory. And one of the things that insulin actually controls is activity of this enzyme called type 2 diiodinase, which is a fun one to say five times fast. But this enzyme is our main enzyme that converts the pro hormone thyroid hormone that our thyroid makes into the active thyroid hormone, T3. So if you don't have good insulin signaling, say you're diabetic or you've been on a ketogenic diet for a while, or if you're not making very much insulin because your carb intake is too low, then the activity of this enzyme drops and then you don't convert T4 into T3. And then that can cause a type of manufactured hypothyroidism, which is probably exactly what is happening in these epileptic patients.

And wouldn't that impact. Because it's really important for people to understand. You want your body to hear insulin. You want insulin to come up, to do its job and come back down. So, so it's not just having low insulin all the time that's a problem. Insulin needs to be here to do its job. But what about insulin? What about menopausal women here going into this and its impact on estrogen and what would go on there? Is there any issues there?

Well, so what's really interesting is that insulin is very, very important for sex hormone regulation in general. So it, for example, if you're insulin sensitive, having insulin will enhance the production of estrogen and testosterone. So it's really predominantly those two androgens, but it also suppresses a very important little protein that is just floating around in our blood called sex hormone binding globulin. So you can be making enough estrogen or testosterone, but if it's all bound up with sex hormone binding globulin, it can't do its thing. Which is why a doctor who sort of specializes in hormones, hormone balancing and hormone replacement therapy will always measure, in addition to your hormones will also measure sex hormone binding globulin to get a sort of like active. What's your, what's your actually active amount of testosterone or estrogen in your, in your body and not just your total amount.

Okay, so it's like looking at TSH and free teeth as opposed to just tsh.

Exactly. So this is where it gets really, really complicated and really, really muddy. Because insulin suppresses sex hormone binding globulin and enhances estrogen and testosterone production. But as soon as you're, you got this kind of weird thing happening when you say you're on your way to diabetes, which is where most of this research comes from in terms of understanding the link between insulin and sex hormones. You see hormone dysregulation very, very commonly in diabetes. That's why pcos, for example, which is quite hallmarked by elevated testosterone, really high testosterone in women. PCOS is basically considered a symptom of insulin resistance. It's caused by insulin resistance. It's very commonly co occurrent with type 2 diabetes. And so you see that insulin has this very complex role because when you're first on your way to diabetes, the first thing that happens is you're making more and more insulin as your cells get less and less sensitive to it. So you end up with this kind of two different things happening is you're making more hormones, but you're binding more of them up. And depending on the exact details right where you are in that process, you can either get sex hormone excess or sex hormone deficiency. The basic thing you can say is going to mess up your sex hormones. That's, that's pretty Much like the most generalization that you can make. But in women who follow a ketogenic diet for epilepsy, that there have not been studies in postmenopausal women that have specifically looked at this, but you can see an effect because a very, very large percentage of them end up losing their periods or having some kind of period abnormality. So it's called amenorrhea, you know, when it's reported in a scientific article. But it's, it's up to. I mean, there. I have seen articles where. And typically smaller studies, but it's something like 63% of the women will end up losing their periods, and most of them will have their periods come back when they adopt a regular diet. But, I mean, I very, very clearly recall one paper that was fairly small. I think it was nine women, seven lost their period on a ketogenic diet. And when they went off the ketogenic diet, six of them got their periods back. But that one woman and one in nine is like, that's a pretty high percent occurrence. Right? You need more. You need larger sample sizes to be able to really dial in. Like, what, what is the risk here? But that one woman basically, you know, made herself infertile with a ketogenic diet, and that is mediated through these effects on sex hormones. So in, in postmenopausal women, there have been studies looking at whether or not a ketogenic diet is effective for things like weight loss in postmenopausal women, but nobody has gone into the details of. And how, how is this going to impact your hormones, given that low estrogen and progesterone tend to be very, very common. Like PCOS is low estrogen, low progesterone, high testosterone. That's one of the things that we see. Chances are very, very good that it's not going to have a therapeutic benefit on hormones for someone who's dealing with menopause symptoms.

Makes sense you wouldn't want to bind up your hormones or lower them further when you're already dealing with that.

Right.

So let's switch gears real quick. And I know just, just for everybody listening, we're gonna. I've stolen, stolen Sarah away for two podcasts, so you're gonna also get a chance to hear her talk about the autoimmune protocol. But I just wanna wrap this one up with what you would recommend for weight loss. Cut through the confusion. What would you recommend?

Yeah, I mean, we have really great science showing that higher protein intake and eating a lot of vegetables are the, like, the number one and two things that increase weight loss, healthy weight loss, preserve lean muscle mass. And actually, vegetable intake is the number one thing that predicts success of weight loss maintenance. So it's not just about losing weight.

Right.

You can lose weight a thousand different ways. The trick is keeping it off. That is the hard part.

And that's a different skill set. This is a great study. No one talks about. About what you need to get you there is not what you need to keep you there. I think if we put 20 nutritionists in a room, the only thing anyone would ever agree on. Well, there'd probably be one outlier in there, is that you should all be eating more vegetables. It's like, it's non starchy we're talking about here, right?

Generally, I mean, I think that a moderate carb consumption, something like 30 to 40% of your calories from carbohydrates, is very consistent with weight loss efforts. A couple of other things, you actually need to have a caloric deficit. It's not, you know, I don't want to say calories in, calories out, but calories do matter. So I recommend some kind of portion control. I think tracking and journaling is an amazing tool for weight loss.

Yes. I like to say calories. You know, calories count, but where they come from is what really counts most because your body is a chemistry lab. I loved. I just saw the study come out where they finally said, yes, where calories come from counts. I'm like, oh, my gosh, finally, like, come on, you know, so there's a big difference between eating apple pie or eating an apple. There just is, you know, it's the reality.

There's a lot of vitamins and minerals, right? These are the micronutrients that are important for metabolism and for accessing stored fat. So if you're deficient in something like vitamin A or vitamin D or a lot of the B vitamins or zinc or magnesium or copper, you're gonna have a harder time in terms of accessing stored fat. So it's basically gonna impact your metabolism. So that's, you know, where do you get all those micronutrients? You get them from whole foods, you get them from vegetables, some fruit. Seafood is an amazing food. And then the other thing is lifestyle is also important. Studies show that people who have an exercise regimen as part of their we typically are more successful. It's not because they're burning more calories. It's because the hormone regulation that happens with exercise is really, really important for programming metabolism, programming appetite, helping you Sleep. And then sleep is actually the number one thing. And it works two ways. So one, yay.

You make me immensely thrilled to hear the sleep. One, I'm always burping about the sleep.

Well, sleep does two things. So first of all, it actually is really so it predicts your success with weight loss. If you don't get enough sleep, you are dramatically something 40% more likely to be overweight. You have a 2.4 times higher risk of developing insulin resistance, and also strokes and hearts, heart attacks and diabetes. You know all these things, right? All of these things increase if you're not getting enough sleep. Cancer risk increases. It's really, really important. But our sleep also impacts our appetite and it impacts our reward system in our brain. So when we're sleep deprived, our hunger signals basically get messed up so that we're a lot hungrier than we normally would on a normal day. So studies show that people consume anywhere between 10 and 25% more calories the day after they had six hours of sleep compared to eight hours. Studies even show that people buy more calories when they go grocery shopping if they haven't had enough sleep. So you're more likely to just buy bad food if you haven't had enough sleep, and then you're more likely to eat it. And then studies show that our brains are less responsive to the reward response from food. So you think you're, you start craving these high energy dense foods, potato chips or donuts or whatever it is, and then you don't even enjoy them as much. And because you're not enjoying them as much, you are more likely to eat more of them to try to trigger the same type of dopamine response in the brain as you would normally get from that food. And so all of those things combined, it's like the perfect storm for weight gain and all of the bad things that happen with weight gain when we're sleep deprived. So eight hours of sleep is like a. I mean, I think every single person should be getting eight hours of sleep every single night.

Yes, that as a starting point. I love hearing that. I had a buddy, Dr. Michael Bruce, a sleep doctor, and he did this. Glamour magazine, took his book and put, put these gals on just sleeping more. They didn't tell him to change their diet or anything else. One month they all lost weight and no diet change. All they did was sleep. So I want to leave everybody with that one. Like, just if you do nothing else from hearing all this stuff, sleep. All right. So we give great gifts from our guests. And I'M super excited about the gift you are giving Everybody your free 15 part Paleo ABCs.

Wow.

Super cool. Tips, ideas, resources, food lists, priorities, cooking tips, everything you need, guys. So so you'll want to make sure you grab that. I'm going to put this@jjvirgin.com Paleom and you can grab that and be sure to tune in for the kind of next because as you can tell, we could be doing five hours of podcasts here and I wouldn't even probably be in to scratch the surface, Sarah, of what you've got in there. We're going to be doing another podcast on the autoimmune protocol and so make sure you tune in for that as well. And Sarah, thank you so much for all your brilliance and sharing it with everybody. I so appreciate you.

Aw.

Thank you again for having me.

Sure. Now, after the break, I'll be answering a listener's questions, so stay with me.

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Welcome back. So this is the time where I answer a listener's question and I'd love to hear from you here. We grab these off of Facebook and Instagram, we get them off of our blog and things people send into our Customer Experience Team. And this one is all about carbs, which is why I wrote the Sugar Impact Diet. When I wrote the Virgin Diet, the number one question I got asked was about sugar and carbs. And what I noticed was there was so much confusion around it, but also a lot of control around it. People were controlled by it. They were addicted to it. So this question today from Tracy jj so how many carbs should I eat? Is one that I hear a lot of. And again, I saw that on a Facebook Live and I want to address this in a different way. It's we gotta look past how much to what. So there's a variable range and that's gonna depend on your adrenal and insulin, like how what's going on with stress and how insulin sensitive are you how active are you? Are you an athlete? What are your genetics like? Are you someone who needs to eat a lower fat diet or a higher fat diet? So there's all that in play. And I wanted to create a way for us to look at carbs because your range is going to probably be somewhere between 30% of your daily calories to 55%. And for most of us it probably will fall more into the 40 to 50% range. And I wanted to create, help you think more about where they come from because that's really the first step. I love that Sarah said, you know, eat loads of vegetables. I tell people that you want the goal is really 10 vegetable servings a day, but you're looking at 5 to 10 servings a day. With the goal is more is better. You know, more isn't always better. Here more is better. And when we look at vegetables, a half cup cooked or a cup raw is a serving. So that's step one is make sure you're getting in all of those vegetables and then the next thing, and this is where we want to really look at where are these carbs coming from? You don't want to get your carbs from sugar because remember, all carbohydrates turn to sugar. It's just whether you're making it slowly from the carbohydrates you eat, like legumes and sweet potatoes and wild rice, or if you're mainlining it like fruit juice or honey. So we want to make it slowly from the foods we eat. So when I look at carbs, it's really much more looking at where they're coming from. And you want to get as minimally processed or unprocessed, gluten free, corn free, slow, low carbs. So the Sugar Impact diet really goes through this in detail and helps you figure out where should you be on the spectrum. Where do you feel best? I find most people feel best having a little bit of carbohydrates at lunch, lots of vegetables. Again, I'm going to look at lots of vegetables with a little bit one to two servings of starchy carbs at lunch and one to two servings of starchy carbs, carbs at dinner, and quite often doing either a half a cup of fruit or no, not much carbs at all at breakfast. So again, that's something you use the Sugar Impact diet to help you figure out where you should be. But I want you to think back, how much should I eat to really look at? Which one should I be choosing? Because then your body is really can do its job. If you're eating some clean lean protein at each meal, either some of my all in one protein shake powder for breakfast or some grass fed beef for dinner or some wild salmon or chicken with your salad at lunch. If you're always getting in some clean protein, some healthy fats like olive oil, avocados, raw nuts and seeds with that, loads of non starchy vegetables and then a little bit of slow low carbs that helps create very balanced blood sugar and great satiation and low in, you know, gets you no real inflammatory response so that you're feeling great high energy, not inflamed, not craving. And that's what we're really looking for. So what I really want you to start to look at is not just how much, but really focus more on where those are coming from, from and they start to even figure itself out. Meaning that if you're not eating what Alan Christensen, Dr. Alan Christensen, calls the dry carbs like chips and popcorn, that kind of stuff, if you're eating more of sweet potatoes and wild rice and beets, you're not going to go and.

Gorge on this stuff.

I haven't really heard of anyone going, you know what jj, I picked out last night, I just ate so many beets like never. I can never think of that. So look at where they're coming from and then start with loads of non starchy vegetables and then have half cup to a cup of a starchy carb and see how you feel and see how your weight and body fat look and see what your energy is like and then you'll know that you've hit it out of the park. All right, thank you for that one. Tracy and Ashley Titus from Canada, thank you for this. You wrote in a five star review. Thank you JJ to Apple and I super appreciate this. She says JJ hosts an incredible podcast where episodes are the perfect link. Just right for a commute to work. Thank you. Because actually Ashley, I totally designed them that way. Sometimes I get overly excited and I don't let people off. But that's what I'm really trying for is that that commute time, I've learned so much in the car since subscribing and tuning into her show. I highly recommend all of our podcasts. Thank you JJ for sharing your love of health and nutrition with us and thank you Ashley. And hey, if you have not left a review yet, can I like badger you a little bit to go do one? I super appreciate them. Thanks. They help a lot. Not just for people finding the show, but also for our team's morale. Man, we all read these, love these, and they make us feel great. It's how we get our grades. So thank you for that and I will see you next time. Bye.

That's all for this episode of the JJ Virgin Lifestyle show, which marks another step towards a healthier body and mind. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe to the show and we'll talk to you next week.

Hello listeners, this is Anne Bogle, author, blogger and creator of the podcast what Should I Read next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week I tag all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read. They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately, and I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment. Whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change, or a the page turner to help them escape the stresses of work, school, everything, you'll learn something about yourself as a reader and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read, with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for what Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and Visit our website whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more.