Are you suffering from carb confusion in ketosis? Worried that being keto means you can never touch a carb again? Confused by carb cycling or unsure of where to start? Tune in to hear Ali and Becki interview keto guru Leanne Vogel about her book The Keto Diet and her unique approach to ditching the keto dogma and figuring out what works best for your body!
In this Episode, Ali and Becki pick Leanne’s brain about all things keto, from how she got started with her journey to how she discovered the beauty of carb cycling and so much more! Whether you are a fat-adapted keto-warrior or are just starting to consider keto, this episode is a refreshing reminder that black and white diet rules don’t work for everyone. From defining carb ups to discussing her concept of metabolic profiles to nerding out on the hormonal influence of keto and carbs, Leanne shares her wealth of knowledge from her personal experience of coaching thousands through their own keto journeys.
Also In This Episode:
- 3 Key Hormones Impacted by Keto and Carbs
- Insulin
- Cortisol
- Leptin
- Defining Carb Ups
- Is Testing Ketones Necessary?
- How Your Metabolic Profile Determines your Needs
- Troubleshooting Keto and Supporting Your Journey
- Virtual Ketosis Program (use code KETO2018 for $50 off!)
- Leanne’s Rocket Fuel Latte: A (creamy) upgrade to the classic keto butter coffee… without butter! Specifically made to assist women in burning fat all morning long while regulating hormones and abolishing cravings
8 oz. brewed decaf or regular coffee or your favorite tea
1 tablespoon liquid MCT oil or powdered MCT oil or coconut oil
1 tablespoon cacao butter
1 tablespoon hemp hearts or your choice of nut/seed butter
2-4 drops alcohol-free stevia, optional
1 tablespoon grass-fed collagen
Leanne’s Bio
Leanne Vogel is the founder of Healthful Pursuit, best-selling author of over 11 health programs, host of The Keto Diet Podcast, author of the bestselling paperback, The Keto Diet, and the creator of Fat Fueled living – a holistic, paleo- friendly approach to a ketogenic, high-fat diet. She has been in the field of nutrition since receiving her holistic nutrition certification in 2007. Leanne shares free videos, podcasts, recipes and keto-friendly resources on her blog, healthfulpursuit.com.
Where to find more:
IG: instagram.com/healthfulpursuit
Twitter: @be_healthful
Podcast: ketodietpodcast.com
Book: ketodietbook.com
Transcript:
Welcome to the Naturally Nourished podcast, that delivers cutting edge food as medicine solutions for optimum health. Ali Miller is a nutrition expert sought out by the media and America’s top medical institutes for her revolutionary functional medicine interventions. From disease treatment to prevention, every episode will empower you with ways to put yourself back in control of your health. Please note, the topics discussed are for educational purposes only. Now welcome integrative dietitians Ali Miller and her co-host Becki Yoo.
B: Welcome to episode 64 of the Naturally Nourished podcast. Today we have an awesome guest, Leanne Vogel of Healthful Pursuit website and author of the Keto Diet.
A: Leanne and I met in KetoCon in Austin on a podcast panel and her philosophies and approach to ketosis are so right on and she provides structures, science, and most importantly flexibility for sustained results. So, I was truly shocked when I was vending after lecturing and I hear someone speaking about how carbs could be positive on stage at Keto Con. I felt super excited that she was stepping out there to do so. As you guys know, I am a big fan of ketosis and using fat as fuel as is Leanne with her authoring the Keto Diet, right? But one of the coolest things about this is that she includes fat fueled profiles, that may encourage carb cycling for better results for those that are having stagnation or negative influences of ketosis, whether they are hormonal, thyroid, adrenal, you name it. Are you confused? Potentially. Hang tight and she will talk about all of these things and so much more today. Leanne Vogel is the founder of Healthful Pursuit, best-selling author of over 11 programs, host of the Keto Diet podcast, author of the bestselling book, The Keto Diet, and the creator of Fat Fueled Leaving, holistic paleo friendly approach to ketogenic, high fat diet. She has been in the field of nutrition since received her holistic nutrition certification in 2007, and Leanne shares free videos, podcasts, recipes, and keto friendly resources on her blog, Healthfulpursuit.com so thank you, Leanne, for being here today.
L: Thanks so much for having me today. Thank you.
A: Yeah we are pumped. Leanne and I, as I said in the intro, met in KetoCon and really hit it off on our podcast panel and I did a guest episode on her Ketodiet Podcast and I was so excited to have her on here, and we have so many questions for you from listeners so we’re pumped to have you on here.
L: Yeah I’m excited to dive in and I’m so excited that we met. It was a really busy weekend so it was really nice to meet a grounded soul on the last event. It was just wrapped things up nicely.
A: Good, good all things good in the universe.
L: Yeah.
B: Awesome so, Leanne, we haven’t met in person yet but I’m definitely a podcast listener and I wanted to just jump things off by having you share your personal story with listeners that either don’t know you and your work or know you but they don’t know your personal journey with keto. So tell us how you started.
L: Ok so I studied holistic nutrition back in 2007 and at that point, I was a vegan. I was also really, really into running, cycling, swimming, I was a triathlete I did a lot of activities. I was also on hormonal birth control and in school I learned that hormonal birth control isn’t so great for you so I decided, you know, based on my health goals and where I wanted to be, I decided to go off hormonal birth control and that kind of started the roll and how I started getting into keto about 6 year later, for about 6 year I didn’t have a period. I went off hormonal birth control, my period never came back and all my doctors said “well do you want kids?” and I said “no never” and they said “well what’s the big deal?” and so as a 20 something you’re just like “this is awesome” but when I was training for a race where I needed to actually bulk up a lot of muscle very quickly I was going through the program and my trainer was like “what’s going on, why aren’t you building muscle, when was your last period?” and I’m counting on my fingers, I’m like “6 and a half years?” She’s like “that’s not a good thing.”So I went to a bunch of specialists, we drove all over western Canada, I’m Canadian, trying to find a specialist that would help. I ended up finding an endocrinologist that would at least help me this was the first doctor that said that “I will help you,” but his help was putting me on hormone replacement therapy. So I went on the patch, I started taking pills, I was on estrogen patch and progesterone pills. I ended up getting a period for about 2 months. It then went away and I gained about 20 pounds of hormone weight gain in a very short period of time so, here I am, not being able to build muscle, my training is suffering, now I’m heavier and I’m not feeling well, and I started having allergic reactions to the prescriptions he was giving me. So then I went to a naturopathic doctor, she recommended a low carb diet I said “are you nuts? Low carb? I’m an athlete. I can’t go low carb” and it just so happened that one of my girlfriends had just started eating keto, and I saw her picture on Instagram and thought “what’s a keto? What’s this hashtag thing?” I clicked on that hashtag and my life will never be the same.
A: Wow.
L: As soon as I saw it I thought “what are these people doing to their bodies? All they’re eating is, like, cheese and bacon and they’re saying that this is healthy? I don’t understand.” So I did a bunch of research and decided that this vegan, she’s going to eat bacon and mayonnaise for 30 days. And that was really my introduction to keto and after those 30 days, I just I couldn’t go back and now it’s been 3 ½ years and I’m crushing life I got my period back after about a 1 ½ year of eating keto, I’m off ADHD meds, my life is just completely different. I remember how much I struggled when I was in those periods and how far I’ve come it’s just incredible to see the difference that’s kind of how I ended up here.
A: Awesome I love that. And you’re speaking 3 of us on here that are all recovering vegans.
B: Yep.
A: And you know I think today we’ll talk a lot about overriding the signals of your body, you know, where I’ll often say dogma creates disconnect and I think that that can happen in any diet so I think that you know we’ll talk about let’s go in your transition of- so how long when you started keto, what were a couple of the greatest wins. So you said you got your cycle back, you had weight loss, and was there any other- oh, and you said some mental clarity?
L: Yeah I was able to go off of my ADHD medications. I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was 11 and I was on 3 different prescriptions until I turned about 21, and then I whittled it down to 1, and then I was able to, like, there was like a new prescription it was out and it kind of merged all of my 3 together, so I would just take that every day and I was able to go off of that forever.
A: Wow, awesome
L: That was such a big deal. And if anyone has ever taken ADD or ADHD meds, they don’t make you right in the head like it’s just it’s really frustrating to take them and being able to live a life without those, and be able to think on my own is just such a freeing feeling.
A: That’s amazing. So let’s talk about in your journey from you know keto being this turnkey solution to when your body then started having other symptoms of imbalance and what you did about it then.
L: When I was eating keto you mean?
A: Yeah. Yeah.
L: You bet. So like I said, those first 30 days was like sort of the honeymoon phase of “everything’s going great I love my life, I’m losing weight, life is good.” And then from the end of month 1 to month about 6, I was losing a lot of weight, I had lost all of the weight at about month 2 ½. I had gone down the 20 pounds then I decided that, you know, what’s another 10 pounds let’s just try to get there and then it became this game, myself, of how low I could get my weight and it was really fueled by the conversation I was having with friends and family when everyone was saying “oh my gosh you look so good, what are you doing?” And I just kept pushing and looking back, I was forcing myself to intermittent fast which I’m sure we’ll talk about.
A: Yeah.
L: I was you know not eating when I should have been eating, I would be hungry, but I thought because I was fasting I should be hungry and I would just push through it. I started craving a lot of carbohydrates, like I would watch people eat and just fantasize about the food and just watch them and become completely obsessed. I counted calories so much that I would start to have panic attacks when I went over my calorie allotment or carbohydrate allotment. I remember actually physically freaking out, I had to run to the bathroom at restaurant and I thought I had ordered a certain amount of broccoli, and more broccoli came, and I ate that broccoli and then I started panicking because I ate too much broccoli and it put me over my carbs. Just little things like that, more mental stuff and then physical things like I started getting pins and needles in all my extremities to the point where I couldn’t practice yoga anymore because my left leg would fall asleep ,like, indefinitely. I was supplementing with electrolyte I was doing everything quote on quote “right” but really I was starving myself and using the diet as an excuse. So after those 6 months, I had a lightbulb moment of “wait a minute, wait, I didn’t do this to lose weight, I did this to get my period back” and then after that kind of realization, I kind of shifted things to say “ok, I’m not going to force myself to fast, I’m going to eat when I‘m hungry so if I wake up at 2am in the morning and I’m hungry, I’m going to eat. I’m going to downstairs and I’m going to make something and I’m going to eat.” And then the next piece was having carbs when I felt like carbs, like I had avoided fruit completely. I wasn’t even having I would measure out my lemon juice because I didn’t want to go over my carbohydrates so then it became ok I’m going to have the lemon juice, I‘m going to have kale and spinach and these things and not sorry about it and when I feel like a starchy carbohydrate, I’ll have that too and I’m sure we’ll talk about carb ups and how that played a role. And after I did that for 9 months, I got my period back so there were a couple of struggles and I think the main thing was using the diet as an excuse to starve my body.
A: I love how you say that because I think you know like I open with that phase of that dogma creating disconnect and on any end of the spectrum even on a “perfect diet” can be disruptive to our body when we’re not listening and it sounds like there are like yells and it’s that dogma of like “but I’m doing it I’m doing keto right and my body just needs to catch up or my body just need to adjust.” I remember when I heard you talk at Keto Con I was like “oh my gosh I had such a breakthrough” because I always had a 2 phase to ketosis in my clinic, and there’s always been one that’s less than 30 grams and then one that’s 30-75 grams as a phase 2, and I’ve allowed people to cycle them and that’s where w’ell get into this transition. But I felt like I was cheating keto, like I couldn’t use the term keto because it wasn’t the dogma or the direct so when you talked about carb ups and crab cycling, it was like “this is validated” and I mean as a medical practitioner, I should have known better, but the funny thing is I think we go into this yes or no, on or off human mentality and having that flexibility, I think, is amazing and I love that you do that for your whole community and beyond.
L: Yeah thanks so much . I can totally relate. I know that when I decided to start incorporating carbs into my ketogenic diet, I knew the people would not be ok with this. And it’s unfortunate too because there’s a lot of big names in the Keto Industry now especially or never low carb or even if you are like a paleo or vegan it’s sort of like it’s this way or nothing, and I think that actually stop a lot of people from experiencing success. So I just kind of stepped out there like I’ve done in the past, like “hey guys wait a minute, so I’m eating carbs every day but I’m still registering ketones, what’s up with that?”
A: Right.
L: To kind of stir the conversation, so I love begin the rebel and I love breaking the rules and I think when you’re talking about dogma creating this disconnect it’s so true and something that I always loved to kind of go through things and see when I can break rules a still adhere to certain things while also doing stuff completely different and that’s how I’ve structured my ketogenic journey.
A: That’s awesome.
B: Awesome. We both think it’s awesome and that can be so freeing to hear and you know so great of our listeners who have participated in our Virtual Keto Krogram and are afraid to put a carrot in their pot-roast. So I think it’s so freeing to break away from some of that dogma. Before we get into talking about carb ups, I want to talk a little bit about three key hormones that I know both you and Ali are all about. So talking about insulin, cortisol, and leptin and how keto influences all of these hormones so I’ll let you guys nerd out on this one if you want to.
L: Amazing. Love nerding out on hormones. Ok so insulin, first off, if people don’t know, it’s a hormone that’s made by the pancreas and it metabolism bit of both fast and carbohydrates. So it’ll maintain your blood sugar from getting too high or too low, and on a ketogenic diet, because we’re not eating a lot of carbohydrates, our insulin is regulated, when insulin is out partying in the bloodstream say, I don’t know, have an apple, your insulin is out trying to shuttle stores or rather trying to shuttle glucose into your stores, you cannot burn fat in that moment. So insulin helps us to store fat, but not burn it. It’s a storage hormone. So insulin resistance is a condition in which cells through the body no longer respond to the normal actions of the hormone, insulin. So this is a condition that I would say, at least 80% of the ketogenic community comes to keto because they’re’ like ”I’m insulin resistant , my blood sugar is probably too high” that’s usually what I see is people with highest blood sugar and they’re coming to keto and they’re like ”how do I resolve this?” and so that’s really insulin when insulin is out, partying in your bloodstream you cannot burn fat that’s the big thing.
A: And it’s not the fun guy at the party it’s the really obnoxious guy at the party. It’s the guy at the party that you want to go away from at the corner of the room.
L: Yeah. Amazing. Do you have anything to add?
A: Yeah I think that’s right on. And I think you know connecting with these, I love the way that you explain things it’s great, and connecting with insulin and I guess let’s do leptin before we go to cortisol because I think that it’s just like anything where and you’ll connect with leptin and carb cycling and over fasting, right? Where we tend to think in one way shape at least definitely in the American in lower must be better, but just like anything, in leptin resistance we can also lost leptin sensitivity and go too low in our leptin response in the body. So let’s talk about leptin and that response and how keto starts with leptin but what can happen if we do too much fasting or too much restriction.
L: Yeah which is something I experiencde and we’ll chat about in a second. Ok so, leptin is also called the obesity hormone starvation hormone, fat hormone, there’s a bunch of you know other names for leptin, but I like to think of it as your satiation hormone on the opposite side of ghrelin. And how I remember ghrelin is just like the goblin that’s just like “Mmm mmm food food” and leptin is like “no girl, we got fuel, we’re good” and on the flip side, leptin will tell us when to eat, or tell us that, you know, we have the fuel in our bodies, we don’t need to worry about anything, I’m not hungry. So caloric deprivation continues to lower our leptin levels and slows down our metabolism. So when I was eating keto for a really long time forcing myself to fast, I think a lot of the reason why I started wanting to binge on food is because that leptin level was really imbalanced for me. And what we’ll talk about in a little bit, when you eat carbohydrates on a ketogenic diet, so you’re fat fueled, your body is using ketones as energy, when you have carbs, your leptin is actually reset and a lot of the times, when people have been eating keto for a while they start waking up every morning pretty hungry and that’s a huge sign to me it’s like “girl you need to carb up you need to do a carb up, it’ll reset your leptin so the next day you won’t have to be hungry in the morning” so that’s a really good indication that something must be off, if you’re on a ketogenic diet and you wake up always hungry. Do you have any thoughts too, Ali?
A: Yeah so it think that’s great and I love that because I thought the same thing I always thought gremlin, ghrelin – totally. And I used to think also back earlier when I was learning about pathophysiology that the more leptin, the better on the other end of the spectrum but that typically indicates leptin resistance and so leptin has this sweet spot where when I’m looking at a blood monitor and seeing leptin values in the bloodstream too high, that’s an indicator often of leptin resistance and that’s where fasting and keto can really help in a sensitivity of leptin use. But then like you said, there’s that sweet spot where over restriction over time, it’s a survival mechanism with adequate leptin and ghrelin communication and leptin starts to reduce and that’s when yes the carb cycling helps with that reset and refuel the tank, if you will.
L: Totally a champ- you’re so smart.
A: Oh whatever. And then I’ll cruise on cortisol because I know we want more from you, Leanne, about your story but cortisol can kind of play an influence both of these as far as insulin, you know, you connected it also earlier with glucose and its ability to bring sugar into the cells. And when we have that resistance, that can drive more fat storage but generally speaking more insulin means more fat storage. And insulin tells the body that there’s fuel available that you don’t need to go into your fat stores we fuel, we need to keep packing up more. Pack up more. And so it is, it is a body fat builder but cortisol, you know, even those who have insulin resistance and they’re even doing keto, and they’re not getting good clinical outcomes, you know, beyond looking at macros and beyond getting tighter, tighter, tighter, I think a beautiful thing about your approach with these metabolic profiles is that it allows not only individualized structure, but it also takes out the stress factor because we know that cortisol as a primary stress hormone when you get so rigid and you’re white knuckling your diet, you know like your broccoli scenario, I mean that’s really at a point where I don’t believe anyone can get beneficial outcomes because there’s definitively in an imbalance of their HPA axis. So the adrenals are off, the corticosteroids are on high and there’s so many different metabolic breaks, that you’re not going to get that symptom of expression regardless of how perfect that macro distribution is.
L: Yes and when you’re ketogenic and you’ve been eating keto for a while and you have a stressful period, it’s so interesting to watch your ketones just go away.
A: Yep.
L: And that is cortisol doing what it’s naturally supposed to do, but we were renovating our house a couple of years ago and it was super stressful because we were way over budget, the guy just didn’t show up, just took all of our money it was totally stressful, and I was great one day, eating all the same things and the next day I just could not get my ketones up no matter how hard I tried and that was the stress of the whole situation so it’s really good to stay mindful when you are eating keto if you are going through a stressful period whether it be your kids moving off to college or starting a new job you may find that your ketones are affected by that.
A: For sure.
B: Of every stress on the body like an infection or an injury or something like that.
A: Absolutely.
B: Something like that would be a times when cortisol is elevated and we can’t get into keto
So let’s define now Leanne we’ve talk about it a couple of times, what is a carb up exactly and how do you go about incorporating that?
L: Yeah so a carb up is a form of cyclical ketosis and there’s a lot of different ways to practice a cyclic ketogenic diet. Some of them that I don’t practice because I tried and absolutely failed is you eat keto for a while , maybe 2 week, 3 week, 4 weeks and then you have an all-out carb day where you just eat the carbs morning, lunch, evening, whenever. That never worked for me I felt like it was an all-out binge fest, I never felt good after. There’s other approach is where you have carbs before workouts, or you have carbs after workouts, there’s one where you limit your protein intake to under 15 g of protein and you just eat all of the carbs all day. My approach that I’ve found worked best for my body and when I was working through carb up process with a lot of the people in our HealthfulPursuits, the one that worked best for us, was you eat keto all day and you have some carbs at dinner times. So whether that be a sweet potato, maybe you really like plantains, maybe you like apples on your salad maybe you want to grill up some peaches and put them on pork chops. So really what you’re doing in this practice is you eat keto breakfast, lunch, and then you add some carbs in your dinner but you take out some of the fats so if you had a dinner of pork chops with greens and maybe you wrap the pork chop in bacon, perhaps with your carb up meal you take out that bacon and you maybe put in those grilled peaches. So you kind of think of it as a teeter totter of taking out the fat and putting in the carbs. And depending on where your health status is, I find that you know, for myself, who was overcoming amenorrhea, the lack of period, when I started doing carb up I was doing them every single night. And my carb ups were quite small, I’d have half an apple on a salad or a bowl of strawberries after dinner, or maybe a sweet potato with some cinnamon and a chicken breast and that would be my dinner. And when I got my period back, I found it didn’t need the carb up as much so I think it was maybe every 2 days a week I was doing a carb up which was maybe a little bit larger because I wasn’t eating as many carbs, and now, I mean, I think the last carb up I did was 2 ½ weeks ago. And it becomes a lot easier for me to go longer periods of time without carbs whereas 2 years ago I couldn’t do that because I was too hormonally damaged.
A: Sure.
L: So really gives you the variety and really it’s- it was nice for me in that moment of getting that permission slip of like “wait a minute, I can eat keto I can still feel great my mind can be on point and I can also have carbs” you know, with friends or when you’re in social situations or when you’re at home and you just feel like an apple I’ll never forget on the book tour back in April, one of the ladies sitting on the floor because we didn’t have enough space for everybody she said “I just want a granny smith apple and I’m like “ok just go have that apple, it’s not going to kill you.” So that’s kind of what carb ups are and how.
A: Awesome and so for listeners to think about when to- how about pitfalls of carb ups like when do you hold off or reduce a carb up or when what do you do to recalibrate when a carb up goes wrong?
L: Yeah so a lot people think that carb ups are wrong when you overdo the carbs and then you need to take exogenous ketones or workout really well or fast longer. Don’t worry about it don’t sweat it. I like to think of the ketogenic eating with carb ups very similarly to Snakes and Ladders if you’re familiar with that game. There’s going to be a lot of ladders that you’re going to go up and then maybe a couple of snakes where you go down like maybe you had a really epic carb up, you overdid it, it’s very rare that you find that one snake – do you remember that one snake at the end and makes you all the way back to the beginning? That snake does not exist in the keto snakes and ladders game so it’s very rare that you’ll get all the way to the beginning unless you go a week eating carbs breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but if you accidentally just ate too many carbs don’t worry about it. When you wake up in the morning like we said the carb ups they are going to sees your leptin so you may find that you are not hungry in the morning which, total win, so just go until you’re hungry and then have a regular meal and get back to it. There are some people that perhaps shouldn’t practice carb ups and that will include perhaps people that have insulin resistance, like we chatted about, or maybe diabetes, maybe they’re really, really metabolically imbalanced and incorporating carbs at this point will just throw them off. But where I find carb ups can be really helpful is if people have a blistered relationship with food and saying that you’ll just never eat a carb again just triggers a lot of things, it can be really helpful in that area. But if you overdo the carbs, just life goes on and wake up the next day and go about your day, it’ll be fine.
A: Yeah I love the real life perspective. We usually have people just go two weeks deeper back into keto and try a different technique like maybe if they did fruit, maybe they try a starchy vegetable, or they try a different form if they’re eating out with friends. Maybe they tried it home or vice versa maybe they try it out just so that you kind of think back through your behavior chain of what went wrong and it’s not about wrong like, slap on a wrist because your meter read something wrong, it’s about wrong because you felt crummy after the carb up not about, again, kind of this report card perspective.
L: Yeah it’s so great that you had mentioned fruit versus starch because some people, even depending on where you’re at in your cycle I find, sometimes I do better with fruit for carb ups than I do with starches with carb ups and it depends on people’s hormones of what’s going on, but, yeah, it doesn’t mean- maybe you even did grains when you should have stayed away from grains. So maybe try a carb up where you do grain free or a carb up where you don’t include dairy, and just play around with all the different variations.
A: And so you mentioned in the beginning that you are able to – and like you said, it’s fluctuating, so maybe one week you do a carb up once a week maybe for 3 weeks you only do 1 carb up over that 3 week period of time, but you mentioned that you tend to see yourself in ketosis in the morning, are you still ongoing monitoring and how regular are you with that and what do you recommend to people in the community?
L: Ok loaded question.
A: Sorry.
L: No that’s fine, so I don’t currently test my ketones. I stopped doing it maybe a year ago right around the time I was finishing writing my book because it was stressing me out to monitor ketones just everything. So I don’t monitor them anymore. I will maybe once a month just for fun with my husband who also eats keto and we, like, have this little game of whose numbers can be higher and he always win because he’s just a guy and it’s easier to do everything. But if I were to test every day, I would probably do a breath monitor but I guess I’ll just kind of go through testing really quickly. If you’re first starting off on keto I really, really, really advise you not to test your ketones and the reason for that it- it is quite distracting for people and I just find that those first 30 days, you’re learning a lot, you’re probably making a couple mistakes because you’re just not sure that a carb is, or what a fat is or how to do certain things or perhaps you way overdid protein or didn’t eat enough so I would just take the measuring out of the equation but what I found really helpful when I was first getting started is once I got acclimatized to what keto was and how my body kind of fit into it, I liked testing my blood I found it to be the most accurate, but now people are saying that a highly attune body to keto shouldn’t dump the ketones in the blood either so it’s like, I don’t even know, if you feel great, then just keep doing that thing.
But, you know, if I had a family that was eating keto, I think something like the level machine might be fun to have in house. It’s something we had in our house for a while and my husband and I really enjoyed using it. But, on the flip side it can be really costly like any of these solutions are quite pricey. You can test your urine but that won’t tell you much and will probably just make you discouraged so when I was first starting out with carb ups I tested my ketones directly after the carb up in the mornings so I would wait about 12 hours before I tested and my ketones would go down, for sure, but by that same night-, so say I ate a carb up on Monday at 6pm, by Tuesday at 6pm my numbers were the same, before I started the carb up to that day so, that was really cool see that my ketones just jumped back up in a 24 hour period.
A: That’s awesome and I think so too, it’s like I often get that feedback where when I hear people aren’t making ketones, yes, I like to look at their CRP for inflammation, yes, I like them to work with adaptogens for stress and it’s a piece of information but if they’re not getting ketones and it’s like “well what else is going on?” “Oh I’m just not getting ketones in my meter” but it’s like “well but oh what’s going on again?” It’s like “what are we stamping such value on?’ I think that can get really overdone and that creates a lot of judgement and shame and a disconnect with the body again.
B: Awesome I love that and I love just how all of this comes back to listening to your body and not following one dogma or the other or being so stringent about testing daily. And really what I love about your work Leanne is that it really takes carbs off of this pedestal that some of us may have put them on and just kind of puts them out there. So let’s talk about some of the metabolic profiles, I know there’s a few of them so if you want to just go through, kind of, how you created these and what your thought process was in terms of coming up with different metabolic profiles.
L: Yeah so in my book, The Keto Diet, as well as in Fat Fueled, which is my online program for taking people through healing their body with keto, I introduced everyone to 5 different fat fuel profiles and who would do best with what type of profile. So the first one is Classic Keto and this is a low carbohydrate, moderate protein, high fat approach so this is like the keto that we all know and love, you just eat keto forever and ever and ever. So this is really good for people who are maybe sedentary or their doctor has told them they need to do a ketogenic diet, or people that have insulin issues, aerobic athletes do really well with this approach so basically you’re eating anywhere between 75-85% fat, and the rest in carbohydrate usually about 5% protein anywhere from 15-20%. And then you have Pumped Keto and this is a new profile, that I put together probably about a year ago. It’s not one that I really dabbled in, because I don’t do well with this but a lot of people tell me that they do well with this so I’ll explain it. Pumped Keto is where you are lowering your fat to about 60% and you’re increasing your protein to about 35%. So you can see in Classic Keto you were eating a lot more fat and in pumped Keto we’re actually eating quite a bit of protein, and this is great for individuals who have blood sugar regularities, might not do well on Classic Keto like they just feel off and they’ve been eating it for quite some time but eating actual carbohydrates, like having a sweet potato, is just not something they can maybe mentally do right now, or physically do. By increasing the protein you’re actually encouraging a little bit of gluconeogenesis so your body’s actually creating glucose by having that protein but like indirectly so it’s not like you’re eating a sweet potato but you still might have a little bit more glucose which may make you feel just a little bit better. In both of these profiles, you wouldn’t have carb ups so you just eat your 60% fat, 35% protein, or you’re like 80% fat profiles. But then in the last 3 profiles, there’s Full Keto, Adaptive Fat Burner, and Daily Fat Burner. So Full Keto is you eat low carb high fat until you become adapted, so that can range anywhere between 2-6 weeks depending on the individual and then once you’re fat adapted, you start eating those carb ups usually about once a week-ish. Once or twice a week, this can be great for people that don’t have health imbalances, who are sedentary, who are social and are invited to lunches with their boss and there’s carbs on the menu and they’re like “shoot” so that gives you more variety. Adaptive fat Burner is where, again, you are eating a low carb high fat for 2-6 weeks to get adapted and then you’re incorporating carb ups two to three times a week. And then with Daily Fat Burner, right from the get go as soon as you start Keto you are having carb ups every evening and I created this specifically because there are a lot of people that don’t actually make it to the Fat Adaption stage either because they’ve been eating a sad diet for the last 30 years, and the whole concept of lowering carbs forever and ever is just too much for them. People that have adrenal dysfunction to the point that when they get to about day 5 of eating Keto the symptoms are so intense that they actually can’t become fat adapted it’s just too much for their bodies. Another one is people with a lot of Candida usually can’t go through the fat adaption phase because they just have too many flare-ups. So that just kind of gives people more variety and I’ve tested these profiles with, oh gosh, 7000 people when we were doing the Fat Fueled Program and it was really great to get peoples’ feedback on “change this, do this, this is what happened to me, this is how much carbs I ate” so it became a lot easier to pull it all together.
A: I love it, I think it’s so great. And how often, Leanne, do you say that people have to commit to a particular profile?
L: Oh that’s a good questions. Ok so Classic Keto you’re kind of waiting for the Fat Adaption phase to take place so I would say about give it like 4 weeks. Pumped Keto I would say you should know in about 2 weeks’ time if it’s working well for you. Once you’re adapted, once you’re fat adapted you can really move between any of the profiles. And you know maybe there’s one week where you have one carb ups a night, like you were saying, Ali, and then the next week you have 3 carb ups a night so you’re really going from Keto to Adapted Fat back to Full Keto but I would say, definitely give it like 4 week on Classic Keto before you change in 2 week on Pumped Keto, before you adjust would kind of be my destination.
A: Cool ok also you had within your profiles, different ranges of carb cycling I think it was as grams/kg or grams of carb/bodyweight pounds, and so is this always recommended in the evening because I think the highest one was like 1 g of carbs / pound of body weight I thought it said – is that right?
L: Yeah you got it, that’s the Full Keto profile and the reason why that’s so high so like if you weigh 150 pounds you’re going to have 150 grams of carbs in your carb up meal so that’s just at dinner, not spread throughout the day, just at dinner. And the reason that’s so high is because you’re only having 1 carb up for an entire week, whereas say the Daily Fat Burner, because you’re eating carbs every single night, you’re going to do around ¼ g of carbs for every 1 pound that you weight because you’re not going to be, rather you’re going to be resting carbs in every dinner meal. So just gives you more variety throughout the week.
A: Ok ok got it. So it would – it still would not be distributed even if it’s that higher amount, it would just be pretty carb heavy meal, if we’re talking about-
L: Exactly.
A: Ok.
L: Really big sweet potato, like pound that thing, maybe an apple. It’s quite- it’s quite amazing when you start eating carb-ups say, every night, how little carbs you need to start feeling better like I‘m talking like half an apple it’s really not a lot, but when you go a long people of time, like 7 days without it and you have these carbs and you replenish your system, it’s actually quite easy to eat those 150 grams of carbs.
A: Sure and this is such a time where it’d be really important too, to journal not only your food and not for neurosis but to journal how you feel in your body during these times, you know, to really determine what works right beyond just looking at that weight on the scale which we know can be reflection of 2 weeks before with whooshing and different various metabolic changes, it’s about did you feel heavy? Was that comfortable? Did it create or evoke emotional relationships and such and I think that’s important too.
L: Yes thank you for mentioned that. Every number that I say out loud is really just like “meh” maybe start with it and if you feel better doing something else, do that. Who am I to say what to do with your body?
A: Love it.
B: I love that and I love that you said that, Ali, because that’s, you know, with my clients that’s one of the first things that I ask them when they start Keto or when they’re a few weeks into it I always ask how they feel before I ask if they’re testing, or I put them on the BIA machine to get a body composition scan, it’s really about how they feel in their body.
A: Absolutely.
B: So let’s talk a little bit about people who have trouble getting into Keto in the first place, when you would keep trying and kind of what are your clinical pearls are, Leanne, that you’ve seen form, you know, over 7000 people trying this?
L: Yeah.
B: This program. And when do you kind of give keto a rest and know that it’s not for you?
L: Totally. I think the biggest thing that I’ve seen people use that’s been very helpful is getting an organic acid test so if you’ve gone like 3 months, you’re eating Keto if nothing is working, you feel like hot garbage, an organic acid test can help determine how you metabolize ketones and whether or not you do. And this can change I’ve seen people that don’t metabolize them well, like remove oxalates and then 3 months later they get the test again and they’re totally fine, so it’s just a really great test I feel like to kind of get a feel for how your body metabolizes ketones. There are people on this planet that the Keto diet doesn’t work for, you know my – I have friends that thrives on so many carbs and I just – I can’t even comprehend, they make the biggest fruit bowls and they feel so good and their health is great. I’m like “good on you” so if that type of person goes to Ketogenic Diet they may not have success so I think it’s also being honest with your heritage and your genes even, and to kind of look at how that’s going but I think a lot of the time, the people that are having the most issue with Keto say, you know, they do the organic acid test and everything says that they’re fine and they could eat this way, they’re usually, you know, the women are eating very similar to what the husband is eating and they’re usually eating way too much fat.
A: Yeah.
L: They’re usually fasting too much, they’re usually eating just too much food or not enough food or they’re just trying to mirror their husband or their partner and they’re not being successful with that so it’s nice to kind of align yourself with maybe women-based community to kind of see how they’re doing things. If you’ve hit a weight plateau that’s probably the #1 thing that I deal with are weight plateaus on Keto, usually has to do with the types of food that people are eating and not their macros. That’s a huge mistake I see over and over and over again of people that say “well I’ve been at the same weight for the last 4 weeks, I don’t understand what’s happening, so I’m just going to lower my carbs and increase my fat macros” and I’m like “Stop, what are you eating on a daily basis?” and they’re like “conventionally raised meats, lots of like bacon stuff and mayo made of canola oil and all these other things” and you know, after we adjust those things they end up losing the weight so it’s also looking at the types of food and the equality of the food and also being patient. If you have a lot of metabolic damage, it’s going to take time and by focusing on the food quality, it can be helpful but I’ll be the first to say that there are people where this eating style doesn’t work for just like vegan didn’t work for any of us.
A: Right, totally true. I was just going to say I think that’s the freedom too in your 5 metabolic profiles, is, like you said, some people are going to enter into one of the Fat Burner Profiles without having done the first 4, 6, 8 weeks of tight keto and that’s ok too some people will just do a lower glycemic approach and that’s their way of being fat adapted.
L: Yes. Totally and that’s awesome I think the main thing we’re all going after is just feel great and you know, look great feel great, have a, you know, excited mind and be able to think for ourselves and who’s to say that increasing your carbs by like 30 g a day is going to make you a bad human? If you feel better at that amount, then live your truth, like as long as you feel good, that’s what we all want to do that’s what we all want to do so if you feel good, keep doing that thing that’s making you feel good.
A: For sure. So talking about types and quality of food, I had a rocket fuel latte this morning in your honor and I would like if for just a moment you can tell us, there’s about 2-3 recipes in the Keto Diet book and why you love them or why we should eat them
L: Oh gosh see I get asked this question so many times and every time I answer it it’s different.
A: That’s good, that’s good!
L: Ok great so right now, the 3 recipes that I’m making the most and are in love with all over again, Bacon Fudge which is basically you take bacon greased which I seem to have a plethora of all the times and you basically mix- I’ve been adding cocoa butter so the fat from chocolate, cocoa powder, I’m really digging monk fruit right now so I’ve been adding that in there and you just put it into molds, I put them into muffin tins because I live full time in my RV and I have a muffin tin that is it, so I pour that into the muffin tin and they make this delicious fudge, fattiness, it’s so good and the second one is ranch dressing. It’s a mayo-based dressing you can also make it with coconut milk, and I just put it on all the things. And then the third one is these pork chops, they’re like Herb Pork Chop, Herb crusted Pork Chops in the book and they’re basically pork chops that I cover in crushed up pork rinds and it’s crispy, it’s fatty, it’s good. Those are the 3.
A: I dog-eared that last night when I was getting ready to interview I was like “this one’s going to happen this week” I grocery shopped and it’s happening.
L: Nice.
A: Awesome awesome.
B: Oh my gosh so many yummy recipes and this book is just so dense with information I mean the first half of it is all about the mechanisms of keto, and the actual foods and explaining good, better, best of fats so I love that too that it’s not just a recipe book there’s a lot more density to it.
L: Yeah, thank you.
B: Um so just to wrap up this is all making me hungry and it’s just about dinner time here, we ask all of our guests, Leanne, for a 24 hour recall so tell us what you had to eat yesterday from rise to rest.
L: Oh. What day is it today?
A: I know it’s Monday, This is the last question.
L: Oh my gosh what did we eat? Oh yeah so we got a big shipment of Butcherbox, I don’t know if you guys are familiar with Butcher Box-
A: Yeah absolutely.
L: Awesome so we have a ton of ground beef to get through, so yesterday I picked up some spaghetti squash and I cooked it in Instant Pot and then I mashed it up with a ton of that, you know that butter flavored coconut oil, I love that butter flavored coconut oil with that spaghetti squash to I mix that up with ground beef and I had that with lunch. What did I have for breakfast? Oh I did my Rocket Fuel Latte but because I don’t have a blender right now, I’ve been making it with exogenous ketones, MCT oil powder, a little bit of monk fruit, and coffee. Is there anything else? Yeah so that’s what I had for breakfast and then for lunch I had the spaghetti squash and oh – last night’s dinner was kind of ridiculous. Pickles with kimchi and what did I have on the sides? – and cucumbers.
A: Nice – I like it.
L: So that was the story of my life yesterday it was kind of a weird day but yeah that’s what I had.
A: That sounds like a reverse of our days Becki we can it an Adult Lunchable so that’s how your dinner sounded like an Adult Lunchable just a little piecey, crunchy,-
L: Yeah yeah I call them Snack Plates and you just put a bunch of things on a plate and that’s what you do.
A: Awesome.
L: Oh I had a coconut packet with that too and coconut and kimchi does not mix, but-
A: Oh my gosh, amazing good. Well thank you so much for being on we will be sure to add your link to the book and Healthful Pursuit and all of the things in our show notes. It was such a pleasure talking to you and I hope that all of you listeners can definitely pull from this that there is not a one-stop shop, there are beyond 5 different metabolic profiles that you can use to use fat as fuel as that the biggest things it’s being connected with your body and listening to what feels right and that’s the diet that you need for your body and it’s going to shift and fluctuate and being kind to yourself is really a big piece of the puzzle too.
L: Yes, I agree thanks so much for having me you too.
A: Awesome, it’s our pleasure.
B: Thanks Leanne.
Thank you for listening to the Naturally Nourished podcast. Visit our blog at AliMillerRD.Com for recipes, wellness tips, and food as medicine meal plans. Connect with Ali and Becki at alimillerrd on Instagram, twitter, and Facebook. Until next time, stay nourished and be well.
What is a Level Machine?
It is a ketone breath meter.