Ketogenic Diet and Metabolic Flexibility

All right. Well, let's delve into a bit of a synopsis or an overview of a keto diet and what it actually involves. So basically, when you're not eating carbs or when you eat very few carbs, your body will start oxidizing fat and creating ketones. And that's to basically fuel your nervous system, your brain. And it's more of like a backup generator type thing. And it's not for everybody. It works fantastically well, especially in the first phases of people's training. But you don't necessarily have to do a traditional ketogenic diet to pump your ketones up. So like right now, I'm eating far more protein and far less fat than most people. But the ketogenic diet originally was made for epileptics because it reduces their seizures. And now they've created the exogenous ketones so that people that are epileptics can actually eat carbs, take the ketones, and keep them from having seizures. So that's great. but people seem to think this is a ketogenic diet it's a relatively new idea fuck's sake i was doing this fucking when i was 18 i was fucking what 23 years ago how old am i no eight whatever it was 20 years ago it was many years ago i mean i was 20 yeah it's 23 years ago i was doing this shit like dandy shane reading body opus had two copies of that sergeant law mcdonald with he had an old website in the 90s that he basically logged everything he did then he wrote the ketogenic diet book and we've got records of the ketogenic diet back to 1862 when William Banting wrote a book on it called Letters on Corpulence. So this is not a new thing. Atkins in the 70s, South Beach Diet in the 90s. So they're all spins on keto style nutrition. It is. It's all spins on keto or, you know, modified low carb dieting. And I think the majority of your general population are probably going to do better on a lower carb diet, but that doesn't mean a no carb diet. And So people think, okay, I'll just cut all my carbs out. Well, what the fuck is going to fuel your training? Because that's your go-juice when it comes to training. And the more volume you do, you're probably going to want to add that back. And I think people are getting crazy with adding in shit tons of fat, and they're not thinking about where the fat's coming from. High circulating levels of fat can cause insulin resistance. The wrong kinds of fats can screw up your prostate gland in production and make you pro-inflammatory. There's a lot of stuff people need to think about. and for me a ketogenic diet for people who train isn't necessarily high fat and it's not low protein um you know because that would be the typical sense it's actually quite low protein super high fat 20 to 25 protein and then the rest fat and quite low veg as well because and that's i mean fuck man you're not you're not eating any veg because you're worried about your carbohydrates and people already don't eat enough veg as it is you can't eat fruit and all that and And people think fruit makes you fat. There's a lot of shit I could just rant on right now. But it's because people don't understand nutrition. Now, do other – I mean, there's always outliers. Do some individuals actually have to have that existence where they can't eat many vegetables and they can't eat too much protein? They have to have that typical stereotypical type keto existence to stay in that state of ketosis? Well, I'll talk about one of my clients in Queensland. She's a state record holder in her for weightlifting. and she came to me because the doctors didn't know what to do with her. She has microscopic colitis, so she's got an autoimmune disease that basically attacks her intestines. So with her, when we first started, she couldn't eat any fiber. Every fiber, she'd be on the toilet and basically diarrhea all day, and the doctor says, oh, you're not going to be able to get rid of this. We can only manage it with some medication and just stop competing because you're just never going to be able to compete again. And then here we are competing.

years later and she's won multiple broker record multiple times and she's now eating stuff she could never eat before avocados and fruits and we still have to be a bit careful but the first year we were pretty much doing a ketogenic style diet and she was having to eat basically baby food she would have to peel all of her veggies and cook them until they were baby food consistency mush and yeah that that helped out a lot you look at people with FODMAP issues and SIBO and things like that yeah they may have to cut that stuff out but it shouldn't be forever if it's forever something's really bad and you got to refer that out to a gut specialist and let them take care of it but oh okay so it doesn't have to be that extreme so what's your version of a like between what parameters can a keto diet look like i mean honestly i've seen people go up to 45 protein and still stay in ketosis and what i mean by that is we're measuring uh bhb blood ketones we're using a ketometer we're watching that and they're still fine like 45 30 35 45 protein the rest in fat and they seem to do just fine but that's taken into account that they're actually training and unfortunately like if we look at like evidence-based research you're not going to find any studies that show the effects of a ketogenic style diet with high protein and moderate fat and training yeah but the only place we have now we have to look at empirical data which is we have to look at the guys in the trenches actually doing it and i know you've done that with some people um and i've done the same thing with saying okay 20 to 25 percent protein is probably not going to be very good for somebody training five days a week with weights or twice a day or even doing the conditioning and all that so we pump the protein up yeah you're going to make some sugar out of that but that's okay because you're burning it off when you train yeah okay um so it really could be and what about carbohydrates you mentioned i mentioned up to 45 percent protein i think i've been up to 200 250 grams of carbohydrates it's still just maintained 1.5 to 2 on the ketometer, but I was training twice a day. So is your general rule of thumb cool? Keto, if it works for you, go through the pros and cons in a second. But it is under the caveat that you're checking that, I think it's beta-hydroxybutyrate in the blood. So you've got a monitor and you're checking that periodically throughout the day? Or is it if you're in there, then you're fine? If your levels are sweet? You know what, I like taking it first thing in the morning on some people, and then we'll do it after their training as well. And you'll see, like, that it's really high after training, especially if they're doing a lot of conditioning. The major stimulus is that your liver is running out of glucose, right? So the easiest way to get the liver to run out of glucose is do aerobics. Easy, right? So, you know, what we might have people do is the first couple of days, they do, you know, a couple hours of aerobics over two or three days, and they're pretty much in ketosis at that point. Right, right, right. Speed up the process. Speed up the process. And I used to use insulin on myself and I almost killed myself a few times. That was when I was young and dumb and full of cum in my early 20s. And I don't touch insulin anymore because I'm scared shitless of it now. Yeah. It's a strange beast that insulin. Yeah.