Yeah, that's great. Your environment's always stronger than any willpower, right? So if you continue to surround yourself by people who bring you down, it's just real, real difficult to make positive change in your life.

Damn near impossible.

Yeah. Yeah. Will you share with us from a nutrition perspective, changing topics a little bit, how you feel about the ketogenic diet, where you are with things right now. I think if I understand your story, you dove into the ketogenic diet to help you drop this weight. I'd love to hear a little bit about just the basic, if you could share with us the basics of what a keto diet is and then what you think about it from a health perspective because I know there's a lot of controversy around it. If you feel like we should stay in the ketogenic state all the time, if we should cycle in and out, I'd love your perspectives on that as well. Yeah,

absolutely. I love this topic. It's something that I love talking about. It's a very popular topic. When I lost my original weight in 2008, I didn't do it with keto. I didn't know about keto back then. I did it pretty aggressively. And I learned a lesson because although I lost all the weight and I was shredded, I had a physical six pack, I was still not healthy. I still had digestive issues, some acne and brain fog. And that's when I was still exploring what true health felt like. And I did a vegan diet for a year and a half in 2012, did not work well for me. And then in 2013, I started to get in, I started to discover, not discover, but come across work about a ketogenic diet. And of course, Mark Sisson, who we were just talking about offline, had some info about it. My mentor, Dr. Pampa, had some info about it. And then some others like Dave Asprey and Mercola, it wasn't a lot of people talking about it. So it was fascinating to me because I started to research keto, and what I discovered is that ketosis is more of a metabolic process than it is a diet. Now a diet could get you into ketosis, but the reason that is important is because it's been around forever. This metabolic process of ketosis has been around for as long as humans have existed. And it made sense to me that our ancestors all tapped into this metabolic process of ketosis of burning fat instead of sugar, but they didn't stay there forever. They had the carbs and they would burn sugar when they could and they needed to, and they would burn fat and use ketones when they needed to, and they kind of went back and forth. So this is that concept of metabolic flexibility that Mark Sisson talks about. And I do believe that's the way that we're designed to live our lives. The problem that we have now is 88 to 93% of American adults, according to whatever studies you want to look at, but somewhere around there, of these adults are metabolically inflexible. They're metabolically unhealthy. They're sugar burners. They're essentially in a keto deficiency. They've forgotten how to burn fat and use ketones. So they really need this metabolic process. We've got to shift them to a different direction and start burning fat. But then we have a new problem with people in the keto space who have been doing keto and seeing all the benefits. And now they're only burning fat, only using ketones long-term, and that's not good either. So we want a healthy balance of burning fat, burning sugar, using whatever substrates that are available and you want to be really efficient, you want to have healthy mitochondria to go back and forth and use whatever is available. So I love keto as a tool, but I'm not one of the dogmatic people out there in the keto space saying you should all be doing keto. Men and women, I believe do it differently. Women of different ages do it differently. Ketosis is a stress to your mitochondria. And it's not that stress is bad for you. It's only bad for you when your body doesn't adapt to it. Stress is vital for health and vitality as long as you're adapting to it. So when you're in a state of ketosis, it's signaling times are tough to your mitochondria. Short term, this is amazing because the mitochondria get stronger. They end up duplicating through mitochondrial biogenesis. So you have a huge increase in ATP energy production, over 400% increase in because of this mitochondrial biogenesis process. But if you stay in ketosis too long, now all of a sudden the benefits go away and you start to hurt yourself. So I love it as a tool, but it's not the only tool and we got to use it wisely.

So let's say you have a 50-year woman who has been obese. She's dropped the weight. She's keeping it off. What would be a good way for her to what like what should be her eating style?

So she's 50 years old. She's a woman. She was obese and she's lost lost the weight is what you're saying.

Yeah. I

would ask if she is in menopause yet or not. If she's still having a cycle, even if it's a regular, she's probably close to menopause. And I would, for this unique situation, I would focus heavily on the adrenal glands more than anything else, because now, you know, that's when the ovary start to shut down and retire, the adrenal glands pick up the slack for a lot of the work. So we would focus on looking at heart rate variability to see what her baseline is. And using heart rate variability, I would use that as a gauge for how aggressively I want to do keto with her and how much fasting and different structures I want to do. If I see a good HRV and it's trending in the right direction, I could get her into ketosis. She could get the amazing benefits of what it does for the brain and everything else. But if I see it tanked, we would cycle in and out more frequently. We would limit fasting, we would limit these stressors until we filled it back up.

All right. So listening to the body, it's stress response. If it can handle significantly reducing carbs and we would do that, we find that when men, when women drop into menopause, their ability to tolerate carbs decreases, would you say? Yes.

They become more insulin resistant.

In general, we need to continue to live in a reduced carbohydrate lifestyle more so when we're in menopause versus not. Exactly.

Yeah. It could be low carb, it doesn't have to be keto. Low carb could be 100 grams of carbs per day and it's not going to necessarily get you into ketosis, but compared to the 300 grams of carbs per day, most people eat pretty damn good. So,

for you personally, what do you eat in a day and do you cycle in and out of ketosis? What do you follow yourself?

Yeah, so it's always changing for me. I like to continuously things up. I like to keep the body adapting and guessing. I think that's where you get, continuously get results. I just came off of a 90 day carnivore experience where I did the carnivore diet for 90 days. And I didn't plan on doing it for 90 days, actually. I tend to do carnivore for 30 days. I've done it for 45 days max or twice a year as a reset. This time around I said I was gonna do it for 30 days and the goal was to create some content from it. So I said I'm gonna do a whole bunch of lab work on day one, which I did a full comprehensive panel from LabCorp that retails for 3500. I did a stool test, I put on a continuous glucose monitor and I said I was gonna do 30 days and do all the retesting on day 30. Okay. But I found myself really busy the last 90 days, and I was moving, I was traveling, I was speaking, and I didn't make time to retest, so I kept saying, okay, I'll go to 45 days, okay, I'll go to 60 days, and then I ended up going 90 days, I'm like, I gotta break it now, this is longer than I teach people to do it. And on day 90, I retested everything. I did my labs, I did the stool test, and I'm looking at my aura ring stats before and after. And I got to say, I felt incredible during the 90 days. I felt really good. Mental clarity was improved. My sleep ring, my aura ring showed that I had more deep sleep, more REM sleep, better HRV, lower resting heart rate. My awake time was lessened, so I spent less time waking up at night. And I just got the labs back too, which is interesting. So I could share a little bit about that, but I'm waiting on the stool test results for the day 90 and then I'm going to put it all together in a video.

And I can't wait to see that. Will you share? Will you give us a little snapshot? Yeah,

yeah, absolutely. So my labs look pretty good on day one just because I've you know, I live a pretty healthy lifestyle that do all the things I actually teaches, right? So my labs look pretty good. My inflammatory markers were all good on day one. C-reactive protein was good. Homeocysteine was good. Thyroid markers look good. My insulin was good. So what was interesting, the most interesting thing on the labs before and after the day one versus day 90 was my lipid panel. And this is the thing, this is probably the main reason why I wanted to do it because we've been brainwashed to believe that total LDL is bad for you. High cholesterol is bad for you. Eating all this meat and saturated fat is bad for you. But is it really the case? So my total cholesterol actually shot up really high. It went over 400 on day 90.

Wow. 400 and

my LDL, total LDL went to 350.

Wow.

But here's the thing. I also got my LDL particle sizes done. So I did an NMR test, nuclear magnetic resonance, which looks at two different patterns of LDL, the small dense, which is problematic and correlated, not just correlated, but it's just shown that if you have too much of these small dense LDL particles, it'll increase your risk of heart disease. And I also got the large and fluffy patterns, which is the pattern A done as well, which has been shown to actually improve the immune system and help with different hormones and not be problematic. The majority of my LDL particles were from the large and fluffy. When I looked at the range of the small dense LDL, I was actually in the optimal range. It was a small percentage. So that compared to my inflammatory markers and my triglycerides being really, really good, my fasting insulin being 3.2, I would say that I'm at low risk, but here's what I'm gonna do to just make this even more concrete for people who want more data. I'm gonna go get a calcium artery scan done, a calcium score done on my arteries, which is a hundred bucks out of pocket. Everybody should do it. It's gonna show if I have any calcium built up in my arteries, right? So I'm gonna look at the markers, look at my calcium score, and then I'm gonna present it all on a YouTube video on my KetoCam YouTube channel and let people make their own decision on what the conclusion is. Why

do you think that those numbers skyrocketed for you? I

think it skyrocketed because I was eating so much more saturated fat. A lot of red meat and my body was just running off of fat. I had no carbs in 90 days. I was just burning fat. My body was oxidizing a lot of fat, but the fat I was eating was high quality. I was not doing seed oils. I was not doing conventionally raised cows, et cetera. I think if I did it that way, I would have seen high, small, dense LDL particles. I would have seen a bad effect happen there.

There are some people who think that any type of elevated LDL is not good for heart health. What do you think about that? Even if they're light, you know, big and fluffy, that they're better than the small dense irritable type, but they're still not good. It's still just total is all that matters. What do you think about that?

I think there's relevance to that, but we have to look at the full picture. We have to look at inflammatory markers, A1C, insulin, a calcium score, and then you could see if it is problematic or not. If somebody had my markers, let's say that my exact markers with the high LDL, but the majority of it being the large and fluffy, but if I had high homocysteine levels, high C-reactive protein levels, high insulin, I would be concerned. But my C-reactive protein was 0.55 and the optimal range is 1.0 or below, I'm 0.55 and that's actually used as a marker from conventional doctors to assess cardiovascular risk and I'm optimal there. I was optimal day one, optimal day 90, my homocysteine was optimal, my fasting insulin was optimal, my A1C was optimal. So looking at the full picture, I'm not concerned, but I'm going to also get the scan done to see if there's any calcium built up in my arteries.

Yeah. So if someone was following this diet and they got the calcium arterial scan and it was elevated and they had a high, any type of LDL, then would you say that potentially that's not the best diet for them? For

sure. Yeah. You want a zero on that scan. You don't want anything more than that. Yeah.