Transcript

Neely Quinn: Hey everybody. This is Neely Quinn, and welcome to the TrainingBeta podcast. Today I’m going to do something a little bit different because I’ve been reading online a lot about ketosis, the ketogenic diet, and I’ve been getting a lot of questions from climbers about whether or not it’s a good idea for them. I wanted to put in my two cents.

The latest article that I read was from Neil Gresham, who is the training columnist over at Rock & Ice and Climbing, I believe. He’s a trainer from England, and he went on the ketogenic diet and proceeded to send the hardest climb he’s ever sent, which is awesome. I also just talked with Dave MacLeod. I don’t know if you listened to that interview on the podcast but he talked about his new, secret diet that he’s been trying for the past few months and it made him lose the weight that he’s been trying to lose for a while and also lets him send hard stuff and go out and do big, long days and not be hungry at all.

I’ve put some other things about low-carb out on the blog and on Facebook and sometimes, not so much in favor of it, and I’m always met with somebody who says, “No, I’m in ketosis right now. I’ve been doing it for this many months and it works really, really well for me.” So, I guess what I want to do here is answer some questions that I know are common and clarify some things and give my opinion, in my experience, with it because of course, when you hear somebody say, “I tried this diet. It’s actually really good. I felt awesome on it. I wasn’t hungry. I lost weight. I sent my hardest route ever,” of course you want to try it. That’s great. I think that everybody should experiment with diet. I think it’s something we should all do and I just want you guys to be careful and have the knowledge that you need in order to do it correctly.

First of all, what is the ketogenic diet? Neil Gresham actually does a really great job of explaining what it is. If you go to Rock & Ice you’ll be able to find it on his column there. Basically, it’s very low-carb, moderate protein, high fat. The purpose of that is that you’re training your body to not use glucose as its main energy source. You’re training it to use ketones, which is what fat turns into in the absence of glucose in your body. That means you can use your own body fat stores or you can use dietary fat, like the fat that you eat, in order to create ketones.

Now, some people would say, “Well, you can’t live on ketones alone. Your brain needs a certain amount of glucose,” which is true. Your liver actually produces enough glucose, or so they say in the research, in order to fuel your brain everyday. You’re set on that count.

Now, what does low-carb, moderate protein mean? There are lots of books written about this and there are a lot of bloggers who have experimented with this, including myself. If you’re interested more in my experience with it and my knowledge of it, if you go to www.paleoplan.com and search the word ‘ketosis,’ maybe ‘ketosis experiment,’ I wrote extensively about my experience with it and my knowedge there, which was really bad. What happened for me is I felt terrible. I felt like I was going to die everyday and I only lasted seven days. Of course, the biggest complaint about that from my readers was, ‘You didn’t give it enough time,’ and ‘You need to do it for at least three weeks in order for your body to adapt,’ which I totally agree with. If I hadn’t felt like I was going to die I would have gone the distance with it.

I think that one of the things I did wrong was not eat enough food and not eat enough salt. The problem with ketosis in that regard is it is really difficult to eat a lot of food because you’re not hungry. For whatever reason – well, it’s not for whatever reason – fat is very satiating and hormonally it’s very satiating, meaning that you feel full and you don’t have these carb cravings or food cravings that you normally do. That’s a main benefit of the diet, too. As Dave MacLeod said himself, he just goes out on these huge climbing days where he’s walking miles with these big packs, doing big routes, coming home, and then he’s hungry. He’s not hungry all day. His body has learned how to use his own body fat stores and sort of stay very even-keeled, even in the absence of food. That’s definitely one of the benefits.

The other thing that I mentioned is I don’t think that I had enough salt. One of the things that people do is they’ll just salt their bacon or they’ll salt everything. There are even salt supplements that you can take to get the amount of sodium you need in order to not feel like ass. Some of the symptoms that I was having were: muscle cramping, heart palpitations, very, very dizzy upon standing or doing anything, I had extreme muscle soreness, and fatigue. I had done a workout, which was stupid, on the first day of me going into ketosis, or starting the diet, and I/that workout wouldn’t have made me very sore, maybe for a day afterward, and for the entire six or seven days that I was on the diet I could not walk upstairs without screaming out in pain. That’s how sore I was.

Those are common, that and muscle spasms and headaches. People get depressed, they get moody, they have trouble sleeping. All these things can happen, and this is what I don’t want you guys to do to yourselves. That’s the point of this. I just want you to do it right and really monitor what you’re doing in order to get the best benefits.

Now, having said that, some people are going to try ketosis and be perfectly fine with it. They’re going to be really intuitive about what their body needs and, just like Neil Gresham and Dave MacLeod, it’s just going to work for them. I think that some body types work better for it and you just have to figure that out for yourself but now, having said that – I guess I have a lot to say about all of this – if you do want to start it, what I recommend you do is start logging, or find a logging – like a diet logging online – that you like online. There are tons of free ones and the one that I use and suggest to all my clients is www.myfitnesspal.com. It’s free, I have no affiliation with them whatsoever, and you can put your food intake there and try to see how many calories are you eating, carbs, fat, protein, sodium, other micronutrients as well. That can really help you plan out what you need to eat.

What I did before I started, which obviously didn’t work very well, is I kind of guesstimated what I was eating at the moment, like at the present time before I started ketosis. I figured out, whatever it was, that I was eating 1,700 calories a day, or maybe it was 1,500 and maybe that’s why it didn’t work, because I was eating too little. That was a guesstimate. You can actually go into MyFitnessPal and log your last three days of normal eating, figure out how many calories you’re eating, and then you can try to get somewhere close to that on ketosis. What I did is I made a sample menu for myself and tried to figure out: this is how much food I’m going to be eating, so this is what my breakfast is going to look like, this is what my lunch is going to look like and this is what my dinner is going to look like. I ate that to a t every day, and apparently I wasn’t eating enough. I think that was what was contributing to the dizziness and maybe even the muscle spasms or – I’m not really sure.

By the way, when I did ketosis for those six days, I lost like five pounds, in six days. For that reason, it did work for losing weight, but everything else was bad.

Then, you’ll create a sample plan for yourself and you can figure out what your macronutrient ratios are going to look like on that sample plan. It’s really easy. They’ll even tell you the percentage. The range that you’re going to be looking for is, like, 5-15% carbohydrates and 10- maybe 20% protein, and up to 70% fat, which is a lot. Normally, people are at 40 or 50% carbs and then 20% protein-ish and then maybe 20% fat. I don’t know if that math adds up but that seems to be somewhere around where normal western people are at. It’s very different and you don’t want to overdo the protein, and it’s very easy to do that, to just sit down and have a big steak and vegetables with tons of oil on them and avocado and stuff like that. That would be maybe a low-carb meal but that’s not necessarily a meal that would put you into ketosis.

The reason for that is when you eat too much protein it can actually turn into glucose in your body, by gluconeogenesis. That means that you’re going to be using that glucose just as if you had eaten sugar, so you’re not going to produce as many ketones. Your meals are going to look more like – a lot of people on ketosis, if you look around the blogosphere, they’re eating a lot of bacon, they’re eating a lot of fatty meats that you’re normally told to stay away from, and then along with that Neil Gresham, in his post, said that you’re trying to stay away from dairy. I totally agree with why he said that. He said it’s because dairy can be inflammatory and part of the whole purpose of being on ketosis is to try to lower your inflammation. He also mentions staying away from wheat and staying away from dairy and staying away from beans. He says lentils but it’s all legumes in general.

All of those things, that’s the whole premise of the Paleo diet right there. You stay away from these foods, and these foods are the most inflammatory for our digestive system, which means they’re the most inflammatory for our entire bodies. If you stay away from those foods you’re going to reduce inflammation which is going to reduce heart disease which reduces depression – or, the heart disease doesn’t reduce the depression but the low inflammation reduces all sorts of diseases and symptoms that we have. That’s why it works so well for some people. Obesity is even linked with inflammation and diabetes and all of these things are very much so correlated with inflammation, so that’s why Paleo works so well for so many people.

One of the main things that I wanted to clarify here is that what Neil is describing here looks very much like a Paleo diet, like a normal Paleo diet. He even says that. He says that it’s basically Paleo but on a different level. He’s right. You’re going to be eating a lot of the same foods but you’re going to be eating them in different ratios. It’s very important if you actually want to be in ketosis, to get the ratios right and that’s the percentages I was just talking about.

What’s the difference? Why would you want to be in ketosis rather than just Paleo? The benefits that people talk about are, like I said, you’re more satiated, you’re hardly hungry, you lose weight, you’re leaner, and because you’re drawing on your fat stores more for energy you’re not depending on a sports drink right before you go up a climb or right before a session. You have more even energy. A lot of people say that they don’t feel depressed or anxious as much, their energy is just very stable and their mood is very stable. Ketosis is also used for people with Autism, people with Alzheimer’s, people with certain brain cancers, and people with seizure disorder. Those are the main ones that I can think of right now that they are using this diet, so obviously there’s a lot to be said for brain health and ketosis.

What you’re doing when you’re in Paleo or on the primal diet is similar, and Mark Sisson, of www.marksdailyapple.com talks about as keto-adapted or fat-adapted diet. That means if you go Paleo, you’re going to be lower carb than most people on a typical Western diet and for that reason, you’re going to be increasing your fast just by virtue of being lower carb. You need calories somewhere and higher protein, so your body becomes less dependent on carbohydrates and more dependent on fat for energy. For that reason, you become fat-adapted and you have/a lot of times people have fewer carb cravings, you have better blood sugar control and more stable energy, and you lose the weight because more carbs equals more fat. Sometimes/for a lot of people, your insulin levels start to normalize, people with Type 2 Diabetes start to be not people with Type 2 Diabetes – that’s a thing. You can just start to be not Type 2 Diabetic anymore by going lower carb. Those people are fat-adapted but if you’re actually going to be on the ketogenic diet, the only way to know if you are, for sure, is to either test your urine or test your blood. You get these strips, basically, and you pee on them and it shows how many ketones you’re peeing out of your system, which indicates how many ketones are in your system working to fuel you. You can also do it by blood. You can prick your finger and test your blood on this little strip and it’ll tell you a little bit more reliably if you’re in ketosis.

When I did ketosis, I was testing myself everyday and I was very much in ketosis, but there are a lot of people who try it and they’re doing the diet, which they think is the ketogenic diet, and they test themselves and they’re not actually in ketosis. Of course, there’s a spectrum. You can be sort of in ketosis and you can be very much in ketosis. In order for you to know if you are, and if you even care, you know, that’s what you would have to do, is test yourself. That’s one of the things I wanted to clarify, is there’s a difference in being fat-adapted and being in ketosis. I think it’s a semantics thing at this point. I think what people are finding, what these climbers are finding, if they’re not actually in ketosis, is being fat-adapted and not being so reliant on these very sugary foods that affect our insulin and blood glucose levels, is a more stable place to be.

In summary, to wrap this up, ketosis, or the ketogenic diet, is high fat, moderate protein, very low-carb. In order to do that, you’re going to want to avoid grains and beans and sugar. Those are the highest carb foods that we have. You’re going to want to avoid starchy carbs or vegetables as well, and that’s why he, Neil Gresham, mentions in his article about not even having that many sweet potatoes or potatoes, because he says that they’re low-glycemic, and they’re actually not that low-glycemic honestly. They’ll take you right now of ketosis if you’re in it. It’s not something you can typically have all the time, and maybe not even everyday if you’re trying to actually be in ketosis. If you’re trying to lower carb and more fat-adapted then yeah, you can eat sweet potatoes and that’s fine.

You’re going to be wanting to have really high quality fats like coconut oil, and coconut oil is a medium-chain triglyceride. That is the kind of fat that actually helps you get into ketosis very quickly and that’s the kind of thing they’ll give people with Alzheimer’s: MCT, medium-chain triglyceride oil. They’ll make them take tablespoons of it every day in order to get them into and keep them in ketosis to help manage their disease. That’s what’s in coconut oil, so coconut oil, coconut milk – he talks about dairy not being okay but there are thousands of people in ketosis who eat dairy every day. It’s actually easier to do the ketogenic if you do eat dairy and don’t have much of a problem with it becuase cream and butter and ghee, especially from pastured sources, they are just very high in fat. They basically are just fat and so they’re going to help with the fat ratios of your diet.

Avocados actually have a surprising number of carbohydrates in them, which I learned when I was doing the diet, but they’re definitely a food that’s high in fat. Nuts also have a surprising number of carbs in them, so they’re not something that you can just rely on all day.

Let’s see, for proteins you’re going to do meats and fish and eggs and if you’re a vegetarian, this would be pretty hard to do. I’m sure that there are people doing it. There’s probably a blogger out there who’s doing it but I’ve never talked to or worked with anybody who was a vegetarian who is doing it.

Those are the kinds of things that you’re going to be eating, and vegetables – green leafy vegetables, hardly have any carbs in them

. Well, that’s actually not true. Kale has a surprising number of carbs but a lot of it is just fiber. Sometimes in ketosis, or on the ketogenic diet, you’re looking at net carbs, which is the total number of carbs in a food minus the fiber in a food, and that can really bring down the net carbs to pretty low in most vegetables. Very little fruit. You’re gonna have, like, berries and that’s pretty much it for fruits because all other fruits have much more carbs in them than berries do, and that’s about it.

That is the ketogenic diet summed-up. I’m not sure if that’s helpful at all but I just wanted to explain it. There’s some really great resources out there and Neil mentions these, too. Jeff Volek and Stephen Phinney wrote great books on this topic. Doctor Peter Attia is this paleo-type guy who has a blog. Another one, Jimmy Moore, of Livin’ la Vida Low-Carb – I know it’s the weirdest name for a blog, but he’s/I don’t know if he is anymore, but he lost like 100 pounds on ketosis and he blogged about it basically every week, and gave his stats and what he was eating and how it went for him. I learned a lot from him, actually. If you want to learn more, those are great resources and also, like I said, my website that I wrote about this on was www.paleoplan.com. I’m no longer with them but I wrote some stuff on there and you can search for that.

If you want to work with me on this, and I didn’t even mean for this to be a plug for myself – this episode – but if you wanted to work with me on this and try it for yourself I’m taking clients right now and I’m happy to help you with it.

I think that’s it. If you guys have any questions feel free to comment on this episode page or email me at neely@trainingbeta.com. This is actually an interesting topic to me, obviously, if I’m making an entire episode about it. I like talking about it so hit me up with questions. I hope that helps a little bit. Be safe out there, know what you’re doing, like, record what you’re eating and make sure that you’re eating enough, make sure that you’re getting enough salt. I actually don’t know exactly what that amount is and everybody’s different so you’re going to want to eat more salt than you normally would and if you’re feeling those symptoms, like the dizziness and mostly the muscle spasms and the heart palpitations, that’s going to be a good indicator that you need more salt so eat enough. Test yourself to see if you’re in ketosis and stick with it unless you feel awful, and then don’t. Add some more carbs in. It’s not for everybody. It’s definitely not for everybody, so I just want to let you guys make good decisions for yourselves and be safe. That’s it.

Thanks for listening and I’ll talk to you guys soon. I have another episode coming up this week, actually, so thanks for listening.