Mark Bell's Power Project - Power Project EP. 124 - Maria & Craig Emmerich

Episode Date: October 9, 2018

Maria and Craig Emmerich are owners of Maria Mind Body Health LLC. Maria is a nutritionist who specializes in the ketogenic diet and exercise physiology. Craig has studied nutrition for about 8 years now. Both work to help others follow a Ketogenic lifestyle to heal and lose weight. Maria is also an International Best Selling author of several books including “Quick and Easy Ketogenic Cooking” and “The 30 Day Ketogenic Cleanse”. With Craig’s scientific background, they co-authored “keto.” which digs deep into the science of ketogenic dieting, explaining how dozens of diseases can be cured or controlled through keto and how ketogenic diets are fueling a new breed of athlete. ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots ➢Subscribe Rate & Review on iTunes at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mark-bells-power-project/id1341346059?mt=2 ➢Listen on Stitcher Here: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/mark-bells-power-project?refid=stpr ➢Listen on Google Play here: https://play.google.com/music/m/Izf6a3gudzyn66kf364qx34cctq?t=Mark_Bells_Power_Project ➢Listen on SoundCloud Here: https://soundcloud.com/markbellspowerproject FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell Follow The Power Project Podcast ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/MarkBellsPowerProject Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz

too. Yeah. Clients always talk about that, you know, struggle with one, one person that's, you know, on the program. One is not. Yeah. I think, you know, I've heard from some couples, are we going Andrew? We're good. Yeah, we're good. Yep. I've heard from some couples, uh, sometimes they sabotage each other. Like one, you know, one, uh, adult might lose 30, 40 pounds. And the other one's like, like, where are you going? Why are you leaving me? Why are you leaving me here all fat? Exactly. And we'll try to sabotage each other. Is that what you were trying to do to me all this time? No. You guys do it together now, but it wasn't always that way? No. I met him when I was 17. Do it together. I'm talking about

keto. Sick minds out there. You know, I met this cutie when I was 17. Wow. And for me, it was a journey to my health because I was sick. I was told I had PCOS. At a young age? Oh, yeah. 16.

Here's an acid blocker. Here's an antidepressant. Did you say PTOS? What's that? PCOS. PCOS. It's kind of like a fertility that, or diabetes that affects female fertility. And so PCOS is basically high androgens, which is a male hormone, which we want some of, but we don't want too much because that in turn will cause infertility.

And so I was on the- Were you just like super jacked? No, I was kind of like, uh, just overweight, unhealthy. Um, well, what, what causes the high androgens or excess carbohydrates and caffeine. And so it wasn't just the caffeine sugar that I needed to cut out of. It was caffeine too. And I worked at coffee shops at that point. But, um, so I was on this journey to health and I still loved him even though he didn't want to eat keto. It's almost 20 years ago now, so.

Yeah. He brewed his own beer. Even though he ate carbs, you still loved him? Oh, yeah. That's true love. True love. And he brewed his own beer. You were over there snacking on carbs and she was doing beer.

We would go out to eat and he'd get, you know, the fries and the, whatever he wanted. The dessert, the dessert usually killed me. I'd be like, oh, I need to go to the bathroom or something now. Get out of here. That's kind of amazing because there's such a divide. You know, like I know you guys have been to like keto conferences and stuff. And those things can get, you know, people are very passionate about it because of what the diet does for them, you know? Right.

But that's my personality. I'm not a judgmental person. Like you do your thing, Mark. I'm going to do my thing. As long as you don't judge me, we'll be friends, right? And that's just how I am with my whole family. Like, my parents aren't keto. My siblings aren't keto.

And I still go to their Thanksgiving, and I love them just the same, you know? Do they think you guys are crazy? A little bit. Yeah, you know, less so now than it used to be because everybody's getting to know what keto is. Maria, did you know Dr. Oz talks this? It was like, yes, I told you that a long time ago. But once Dr. Oz says it, then I'm not so crazy. Yeah, it used to be Oprah.

People would come to me and they're like, Oprah's talking about fish oil. I'm like, people have been talking about fish oil for the last 20 years. About time you guys came around. Right. So, you know, it's just, that's my nature. Like I, you know, I was on this journey and he never pressured me any other way. And I didn't pressure him. And I just kind of learned by example, which is what we tell our clients a lot to do is show them by example.

Show them your results. Show them how much weight you lose and how much more energy you have. They'll come along. They're going to be like, all right, I want some of that. I want some of that energy. And I'm eating good food. He saw me eating ribs and chicken wings and burgers just without the bun. How does anybody get bored of that?

I know. It's all the stuff that I thought was bad that I get to eat all the time. I sat next to a woman today that had a huge gallon Ziploc bag of baby carrots. And yeah, baby carrots aren't the devil. But here she was really overweight. And probably dipping in a ranch or whatever else. You know, it's just like you don't have to, I used to make that mistake, you know, like eating all these fat free foods and thinking I had to stay away from the burgers. Right.

No, you just have to stay away from the buns. Well, I think what makes that hard is, and people talk about, they don't talk about as much because keto has gained so much popularity. Now we have, you know, keto brownies and we got some convenient things that can kind of help you stay on the path. Right. I'm not a huge fan of a lot of that stuff. But, hey, whatever you've got to do to get yourself started. Right. Oh, my diet looks so different 20 years ago than it does now.

Yeah, now it's probably pretty pure and pretty clean. Right. It's not fathead pizza. No, not really. I'll have it occasionally. He likes it. But, you know, like our clients, there's a different situation if you're trying to maintain versus lose weight, right? And so to lose weight, you got to kind of dial things back a lot and actually focus mostly on the protein.

Right. You know, and get maybe even leaner protein so that your body is going to start burning more of that body fat for fuel. So diet can look a lot different when it's, you know, weight loss versus maintenance. Yeah, and it takes a long time. You know, people talk about this like fat adaption, you know, are you fat adapted? And, um, you'll hear people say, oh, you know, I tried keto and it didn't work. And I'm not going to like tell people that they're full of crap or anything like that. But, uh, I think sometimes maybe their idea of what they tried, you know, maybe it wasn't, uh, quite enough or maybe they didn't stick to it for long enough. Right.

And I, I mean, I spend my days talking to clients on the phone and when they tell me what their diet is, it's not what I would recommend. Right. For sure. You know, living off of. They're like, well, I had a bag of chips and you know, you're like, oh, okay, well. But even these things that you think are keto, I wouldn't be successful losing weight. Right. You know, and it's just all the mistakes

that I made in the past. You know, living off of, you know, cheese and nuts. Fatty coffees, bulletproof coffee, and that kind of stuff. That can help you maybe transition into keto, but that's certainly not going to help you lose weight. Do you guys utilize stuff like that now? Like bulletproof coffee and things like that?

I don't. I don't drink any caffeine. I've never had it. But you eat whole foods, right?proof coffee and things like that i don't i don't drink any caffeine i've never had it but you need whole foods right what about okay so you don't you're not into like adding a bunch of extra oils and no but you may cook with them for example but right i try to use it in sauces or in soups but adding fat just to add fat it's all about lipolysis and most i say 90% of people want to lose weight. Agreed? I mean, they want to cut the fat. If you want to really tap into your body fat for ketosis, you need to let it. It's all about the negative fat flux. If you keep stuffing yourself with... Would you call me? If you keep stuffing yourself... You're a negative fat flux, Andrew.

That's right. And where you want to be. I mean, that's basically, you know, our bodies are always putting fat in and out of our fat cells, right? Our adipose tissue. That's where you store your fat. And you want, if you want to lose body fat, you want more fat coming out than going back in, right? That's, it's, if you break it down to the simple biology, it's pretty basic. So if you're putting a lot of fat in your mouth. Right. It's going to be going in to those fat stores and not coming out as much.

So you kind of use fat as a lever, depending on your goals. Calories are a factor. Yeah, it's still a factor for sure. But it's leveraging the macros to help with satiety, help with staying on the diet, which those are the keys for a diet is something you can stick with. Right. And that's what I was about to transition to was people used to say all the time that the keto diet is not sustainable. And what I always think is like, well, the standard American diet is not sustainable because of the disease that it's riddled with. People are dying young and there's just there's all kinds of problems.

You actually suffered from some depression as well or anxiety, was it? Yeah. Yeah. She gave me a, my doctor gave me an antidepressant and I was like, I need to do something else. And I like to call this the happy diet because I'm a completely different person than I was then. Wow. You know, it's just amazing. It's amazing how your brain kind of feels different when you're running on ketones.

Right. You just have more clarity. And that's why, you know, you want to dive into what are your goals are. Because if somebody's trying to do this for, you know, moods or getting off antidepressants or anti-anxiety medications, you might want to turn that fat lever up because, you know, that's what's going to help with your neurotransmitters and things like that. But so it's really dependent on what your goal is. I see what you're saying. So like if there's a very specific maybe medical reason,

maybe we're going to go after the coconut oil a little stronger, the MCT or whatever it is. Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's. Seizures. So that's why I'm not saying don't eat any fat. That's not what I'm saying whatsoever. Don't fear fat, but if weight loss is the goal, don't dump it on.

Yeah, you don't need to eat. If you're chasing percentages, if you're if you're chasing percentages if you're aiming for like a 70 fat and you're like hey maria i didn't reach my 70 fat so i did a shot of mct oil that's not a good idea you know because what happens a lot of time when you add that extra fat what what gets reduced the protein yeah that's not what you want and also like just in what uh in what world would that normally happen? Right. That's not normal conditions, right?

Amen. Totally. Totally. Drinking a liquid fat. That's the thing. Especially women. That's the same as drinking sugar, right? If you look at it.

That just doesn't happen normally. You don't normally just drink a big piece of sugar. In our book, we did a whole chapter on nutrient-dense foods. Right. And we talked a lot about protein because that's where a lot of your nutrients come from. Organ meat. Yeah. And organ meats are like this.

If you want to talk about a real superfood, beef liver. But everybody's like, ew, gross. I don't want to eat that. And heart and things like that. That's what we feed our dog is ground up beef heart. Right. And people are like, oh, I don't want to eat organ meat. Of course you want to get quality sources.

It's like, listen, do you want to look like our dog or not? But, you know, I don't want to eat organ meat. Of course you want to get quality. It's like, listen, do you want to look like our dog or not? But, you know, I don't want to eat like liver and onions. That's just not my jam. But what we do is we have a food grinder because I'm a bull hunter. I don't know. Don't get any haters. Okay. I was hunting yesterday morning.

Craig, does she do it with her bare hands? She makes the bull bowls out of wood. I did gut out a deer last year. The kids thought I was super cool. But you just grind that liver up and add it to the hamburger. And if you do like a four to one ratio, you won't even know it's in there. Do it in your chili. That's spicy enough.

I have a keto chili. It sounds actually really delicious. It is. And it's hidden. You don't know what's in there. The nutrients go through the roof because the beef liver is just, it's one of the most nutrient-dense foods on the planet. So like meatloaf, meatballs. Yeah, Tommy.

Yeah, actually, I mean, I don't, for me, I don't mind some of it. Like I don't mind like liverwurst and some different things. Liver and onions. My mom is all over liver and onions. That's great. And so I think, you know, when people think about sustainability and they think about, like you mentioned, the woman with the carrots, a lot of times somebody is like they're really diving into something. You hear people say it all the time. I'm sure you guys run into clients. That's it. Monday, I'm starting it.

And you're like, well, shit, it's only Wednesday. You know, like now we got to wait all the way till Monday. You're going to have this like parade of like whatever the hell it is. Yeah, they're going to eat like junk all the way till Monday. whatever the hell it is. What are you waiting for? Yeah, they're going to eat like junk all the way until Monday, right? Before I talk to people on the phone, before we have our phone call, you know, we're in the trust tree. They can tell me whatever. And I'm like, okay, tell me a good day and a bad day.

They're like, oh, before our call, I had X, Y, and Z. You know, it's like they think they're going to jail, you know? You're like, those days are over. I was like, you still get to eat good food. Like, I don't want to eat chicken breast and broccoli, and I don't. I want to eat good, tasty food. Right. And you get to.

And most of the time, that's when men jump on board because they're like, whoa, I can have a steak? Right. Yeah, you just don't get to have the potatoes with it. Do you get more resistance from women trying to diet? I would say it's men. I think women are, I mean, we're a vain society. It's interesting. I have a type 1 diabetic that I work with, and she said, Maria, I wish I would gain weight, I mean, we're a vain society. It's interesting. I have a type 1 diabetic that I work with.

And she said, Maria, I wish I would gain weight when I cheated. She's only 30 years old, had her first stroke. She just had a baby. And she's like, I wish I gained weight when I cheated because we are a vain society. She has a whole heck of a lot of inflammation going on. Obviously, she had a stroke. But she's like, I would change something if I would gain weight, but I don't. Yeah.

So you don't see that reflected on your body. And we judge people when they're overweight. And in reality, a thin person can have diabetes too. Oh, yeah. You know, or a lot of different issues. Oh, yeah. I mean, you were suffering from all kinds of stuff. Oh, yeah.

I was overweight, though. Oh, yeah. You mentioned that you were heavier. Yeah. How many clients do you guys work with approximately? Boy, I've got a folder of just client testimonies. And we don't even ask for them. People have just said, you know what? Here's my results. I wanted to share it with you. Yeah.

I usually encourage them to take before photos or whatever it is, like kind of journal. You don't have to share it with me. It's more if you want to put that on your fridge or whatever. Like, I wish I had more before photos, but I destroyed a lot of them, you know. But it's really empowering to see like, wow, look at this. This is fantastic. But, you know, those client testimonies, we've got almost a thousand in that folder right now. And that's just people who came to us and said, I want to share my story because we had such great results. And they're pretty amazing. They're like people with handfuls of pills that, you know, multiple blood pressure medications,

and they're off of everything. And that's what our goal is. I did a whole series of slides at the end of my presentation at Low Carb Houston that's coming up. It's for doctors. And I did a series of slides of outcomes. You know, what's a doctor want? They want an outcome. Does the patient come to me and then get better? What's the outcome? Do they get better? And our outcomes are just, like she said,

there's 600 pills a month this woman was taking, and she's now taking nothing. That's crazy. Every kind of antidepressant and blood pressure and stat and all this stuff. You want to change healthcare. Yeah. Food it. I mean, and it's scary.

I thought I grew up on a bad diet. I took my kids to the grocery store the other day and there was like pink string cheese. I was like, what the heck is this? It was like my little pony fruit punch string cheese. Yeah. I mean, that's scary. It is. It's terrifying.

And, you know, what we feed our kids is crazy. And a lot of times you'll hear adults say, you know, they'll cook up this fantastic dinner and they have like lobster and steak and soup. And then they pop in a frozen pizza. They're like, oh, we got pizza for the kids. It's like, shit, man. I'm going to keep my mouth shut here because I could really upset some family members. Why can't the kids, you know, eat some of the stuff that you're enjoying?

Absolutely. Or it could be slight alteration of what they're eating. Maybe they have a hamburger or something instead. Yeah, right. Some of it makes some sense, I get it, but it doesn't have to be, like, shit, you know, stuff that's shitty for you.

Cheesy nuggets. Right, right. I mean, I wouldn't say my kids are foodies. They just eat what is offered to them, you know? They just, it is what they know. They don't have an allowance. I mean, they have an allowance, but they don't have like a driver's license. They can't go to the grocery store. They don't know. We drove by a McDonald's and my son's name is Micah. He's like, M for Micah. And I was like, oh man, I love you so much. He doesn't know what that is. He doesn't know what it is.

That's awesome. You know? Yeah, that's actually really cool. So doesn't know what that is. He doesn't know what it is. That's awesome. You know? Yeah, that's actually really cool. So do your kids just eat very similar to you guys? Yep. Yeah. You know, we basically don't limit the protein. Just let them eat as much protein as they want.

And then any of the fats that come with it. That's where the studies that say ketogenic diets kill. They're focusing on people that are doing fat fast. And it's not even really low carb. I mean, 150 grams, that's not low carb in my idea. No. Yeah. And a lot of those studies too, like we talked, either they'll just do two week study. Well, it takes four to six weeks to adapt. Right. So that's a flaw in the study from day one. Right. But the study she's talking about with kids, you know, people will say, you know, it can stunt the growth, right?

And they point to these studies. Well, the studies, they were therapeutic for seizures, to control seizures with these kids. So they were fed 80% fat. Very limited protein. Like 10% protein. So if you look at the protein amount for these kids were getting, it was like 20 grams of protein a day. Right. Of course it's going to stunt their growth.

You need amino acids to grow. And that's the thing. Like so many women come to me and they're like, oh, Maria, I'm losing my hair. What am I doing wrong? I was like, are you doing bulletproof coffee and fat bombs? They're like, yeah, that's what the internet tells me to do. I'm like, well, that's your problem. You know, that's nothing.

That's not what I do. You know, you need amino acids for your hair and your nails and your skin. And it's funny, I had the opportunity to speak on the low-carb cruise last week, and we're having dinner together, and you order different foods at the dinner. And I said, Kai, do you want a Caesar salad without the croutons? He's like, what do you think, I'm a vegetarian? Because we joke that we're carnivores. They're really into dinosaurs, and so we joke that we're carnivores. They're really into dinosaurs.

And so we talk about being a carnivore and stuff. And we make it fun. And they know what foods make them feel good. And they know what foods make them feel bad. We were on a flight to Hawaii. And if you have children, especially boys, you know not to sit next to each other on a plane. So we always sit.

I sit with one and Craig sits with the other. We usually switch. They'll end up beating the crap out of you. I know, right? So I went to the bathroom and the flight attendant asked Kai if he wanted a Sprite or a soda. She said soda.

And we have a soda streamer at home where we make just, you know, Stevia based sodas. And so he's like, oh yeah, I want a soda. We should probably call something different because you brought him a Sprite. Yeah.

And a flight from Wisconsin to Hawaii is really long, especially when you have puke all over you. Oh, he started throwing up. Yeah, he was so sick. He's like, I never want sugar again. He's like, see, that's what happens, you know? And I think that's our natural reaction to get a huge sugar bomb, especially like soda that's liquid and absorbs so quickly. Our bodies are really good at adapting. And if you're constantly flooding it with the sugars,

it gets used to it and it adjusts. And I think people don't realize how awesome they can feel. I certainly didn't. I was like, wow, give me some more of this natural medicine, right? Because I'm like the Energizer Bunny. He jokes that we need more kids because I outweigh it. Someone to slow you down. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I noticed, you know, in seeing so, I, you know, someone to slow you down. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I noticed, you know, in seeing so many people, you know, just eating junk food and kind of going through this process, it's actually surprising to me that a lot of the weight gain and a lot of the problems that people have, it surprised me. It doesn't happen a lot earlier. I know. Really? I mean, because if you guys just went like, let's just say we said, Hey, you know what? You got to do a whole week of just eating, you know, muffins and donuts. And like, I mean, it would just feel so bad. I mean, you probably wouldn't like gain like 60 pounds or anything, but you'd probably

just feel awful. But that inflammation that's happening in the body is happening right away. I mean, Dave Feldman, he's a friend of ours. He's another engineer. I'm electrical engineer in my background. Got these engineers coming in and getting into this nutrition space. He's like a human pincushion. Do you follow this guy? I am aware of him, but I don't know. He's like the cholesterol king. He's been doing all these experiments on his body

and taking all these tests. And he usually eats keto. He's spending more every month on blood tests than his home mortgage. Just doing all this stuff that he's figuring out. That's cool. But one of the things he has been doing, he went about, I think, 18 months of eating keto and he tracked his CIMT, which is the thickness of your artery walls. They do an ultrasound to see how thick the artery wall is. You want it thinner because thick means you've got inflammation and plaque building up, right? Right. It slowly went down and down and down over 18 months eating keto that's a good thing yeah he did a sad

diet experiment nothing crazy not you know not sugar load but for one month did you know sandwiches and brought this stuff back in his arterial wall thickness higher than when he even started one month yeah that's that inflammation sugar right that inflammation right and that and sugar, right? That inflammation. Right. And that's happening in the body all the time if you keep feeding it with that. Yeah, it's crazy. And, you know, I think when people are trying these, like, these quick diet solutions and they're trying to get fancy and they're thinking, oh, you know, Monday I'm starting my diet.

Oh, I did that. I'm hitting the gym and I'm going to do a bunch of cardio. So they do, like, an hour of cardio. So they do like an hour of cardio. Maybe they read something about fasting. So they fast, they do all these things and they make it to like Thursday and then it starts to kind of unravel again. They're like, I'm going to try it again. And they go Monday to Thursday again. And then it just kind of goes back and forth and they kind of have in their head because they have done a couple of days of the diet that they tried it. And unfortunately they didn't really try it hard enough because the message I'm trying to share in their head because they have done a couple days of the diet that they tried it and unfortunately

they didn't really try it hard enough because the message i'm trying to share with people is that being in shape and having the body and the health that you want is a full-time job i'm sorry to say that to you but that's the truth of it i can't i cannot sell you on anything else because nothing else is true. I get fit shamed a lot, but I lift weights like a mad woman. I eat really good. I don't drink any alcohol. I don't drink any caffeine. Judge me if you want to, but I work hard at it.

But I do love this diet and I'm addicted. I have a very addictive personality. I'm addicted to feeling good. I just change those addictions for good things. I do love to work out. I'm addicted to feeling good. You know, I just change those addictions for like good things. Like, you know, I do love to work out. I do love to cook good food. And, you know.

I posted on our website one of these memes. It was a photo with, it said, my lifestyle or diet got a lot easier when I can't have that. Changed to, I don't want that. And that, I think, is the key to making this something that you can sustain. Look and focus on the things that you can have. Don't worry about the donuts and things that you can't have. I've shared that same exact thing with relatives because they'll say, oh, you can't have this. I said, that's actually not true.

I can do whatever I want. But I don't want to have it because it doesn't go along with the goals. For me, it's a little bit more goal oriented. Like I luckily I'm blessed with a pretty good digestive system and I haven't noticed anything all that crazy other than like if I eat a lot of junk, then my sleep will get compromised. I don't sleep that much anyway. So that's kind of the only thing. But yeah, it's more about like I don't I don't want to take part in that because I got these other goals. And that's the other morning I was on a Skype call with a girl in Panama who she was only 16 years old.

Exact story as me. She was just diagnosed with PCOS. She had an antidepressant. She had an acid blocker. I was like, oh, my gosh, girl, like, you are me. And so it was with her parents too she was they were on the call too and i just i i almost i kind of started tearing up because i was like you can change your life you have the opportunity to change your life right now

but you need to be positive like i'm naturally kind of a positive person by nature and i always thought this is these are the foods I can have. And I told her like, instead of saying you can no longer have your Cheerios or whatever she was eating, you know, don't be sad. Don't be mad at Maria. You know, this is a good thing because you can be a pioneer and change your life. And it was just so ironic how similar my story was to hers. And yeah. And who knows who else it will impact, too. Like a lot of times, you know, that comes into their household and then maybe it's helped save somebody else.

And it's like sometimes these journeys that start with somebody losing 20 pounds, you know, it ends up like saving someone's life. Like a co-worker or something like that. Yeah, it's really wild. We get a lot of those testimonies, too. We have these families where maybe the mom started just for weight loss, then got the husband on. All the kids are just eating what they're eating. And ADHD.

Autism, all of those types of things. Huge improvements they're seeing. Food is really the medicine. It really is. Can you imagine a TV commercial that's like that, that sells you on the fact that if the fact that, uh, if you have a nutritious lifestyle, all these things are wiped out. If we could put this in a pill, we'd be billionaires. But that's the thing. People think that it costs too much to eat healthy. We get, um, people saying I save about $2,000 a year now and they, they buy organic grass fed, real quality eggs. Um, they save that by not buying, you know, the chips and the bread and all of those snacky things.

That stuff's expensive. And I'll tell you what. We just were at an airport and there was like, what is it, 3 o'clock in the afternoon? There's a line in Starbucks buying $5 coffee drinks, but yet we complain about $4 of organic eggs. I think that's something. 12 eggs. It's an investment in your health.

It is. And then also, too, here at Super Training, we have one of our members is a chef. Awesome. And she can cook some really crazy, crazy things. And she was talking to me about diet, and I was like, well, what's the weak link? And she's like, I love candy. And I was like, okay, well, what kind of candy? I'm thinking like probably some nice, like dark chocolate or something. She just likes hard candy. She likes like Skittles and stuff. I said, okay,

think about how actual, actually dumb this is. You went to culinary school. You are a master of like, you know, cooking stuff and you know, some really-end crazy foods and you cook these dishes that are you know hundred hundred some odd dollars a dish and i was like and you're eating like a candy that costs i don't even know like probably a third of a penny or something you know totally and that reminds me a lot of those awesome chefs they also smoke and i'm like, you're killing your palate. Right, right. Yeah, it's just, I think people need to kind of get the idea that they need to just treat themselves better. Oh, absolutely. Show yourself some self-love. Somebody's sick and you say, oh, you know what?

Why don't you go home? It'd be great if you went home, got some rest so you look like you could really use a good night's sleep or you give them advice and say, you know, drink more water. But you need to do that to yourself. Right. You know, and you're eating poorly and making these bad decisions. You need to kind of talk to yourself that way, I think. Totally. And I think a lot of women, I mean, we're taking care of our aging parents.

We're taking care of our children. We're trying to, you know, take care of our husbands or, you know, whatever. And a man can have this issue too. But, you know, we give, give, give. And I tell them, unless you feed yourself well and treat yourself well with some self-love, I mean, nobody's happy unless this mommy's happy. And my family knows it. Well, and if your health is bad and you're not going to be around. It's okay to say no to a friend that needs your help in order for you to cook good for yourself. I think that's okay to tell ourselves that. Yeah. Someone brought this to my attention. It's something I never even thought of.

But somebody said, yeah, you know, over the last decade or so, or maybe even a little bit longer, there's been more women that are in the professional workspace. Right. And there's a lot of times both parents are working. Yeah. Yeah. And then that kind of leaves the kids to do what with their food. You know, and it's like somebody should be accountable for not just picking up McDonald's on the way home. Right.

Like somebody's got to figure that out. Totally. And I think I love my mom. Hey, mom, if you're watching. But I think that we all learn from our parents. And I remember at the young age of five, she would pick me up from kindergarten and she'd have nothing planned for dinner and she would be really stressed out about it. And I think that I just learned, I don't want any more anxiety throughout the day. So I'm always one step ahead of time. So whatever we're going to have for the next night, I plan the night before. And when I wasn't really being a step ahead, right. And when I was new to this, you know what I did? I had three slow cookers and I would fill

the slow cookers, the shell of them. And you can put that in the fridge. And then the morning, all you have to do is take them out and turn them on. And I would leave for work. I didn't always work from home. And what I think is great with that is if you have kids in sports or after school activities, whatever, whenever they're hungry, they can open that slow cooker up and make a dish. And it's delicious. Right. And then when you get home from work or whatever, I talked to a psychologist about this whole idea of family dinners. It's not the actual act of eating together, but oftentimes that's the only time we spend together. Right. That's not

important, the eating part. So if you aren't eating together, do something else. Like we have different fasting schedules than our children, but we're, we homeschool them. I mean, we ride bike together. I go fishing with them every day. They come hunting with me. We're spending a lot of time together. And they help me prepare dinner. And I think that's an art that is lost in our generation, our kids, that they don't know how to cook. Helping you do anything is great. They help you make the bed. It's like then the bed and just everything is more valuable.

Right. The bed fairy doesn't come and do it every day. I mean, come on. They get to see where it happens, right? Yeah. And then with helping with the food. Yes. You know, maybe they added pepper to the recipe or something.

And you can make all that fun. And you can say, oh, I can really taste the pepper. And my kids didn't even like scallops until they made them themselves. And then they were like, hey, I made this. I'm going to try it. And one of them likes them. One of them doesn't. But, you know, at least they tried them.

Right. Your kids fast too? Oh, no. I was just saying. Oh, your schedules. Yeah. I was going to be like, what? No.

No. If, you know, they eat three meals a day. If they need a snack, they have a snack. But this idea, are you familiar with the onion? No. It's a joke. It's actually, are you familiar with The Onion? No. It's a joke. It's actually out of Madison. It's really funny.

It's always like a big sarcasm joke. And on the front it said, Americans now eat one continuous meal a day. And it's so true. I just was in Disney World, and these people are just eating nonstop. Mindless eating. My kids are used to eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If they need a snack, it's fine. When they're growing, you can tell definitely when they're going through growth spurt.

It's like a nightmare out there sometimes. You're just looking at, and it's not to be rude, but you're looking at one person getting fatter than the next person than the next one. And they got cheese dripping off their face and all that stuff. You're like, what is going on? Can we slow some of this down somehow? And when you're not eating and dig on can we slow some of this down somehow and when you're not eating and digesting food your your cells are healing themselves so this idea um that you know we need to eat like you need two hours or every two hours or something your body's never

actually healing itself yeah and that's what intermittent fasting which you know we do it's not extreme you're getting we're getting all the calories we need for maintenance. We just compress it into a maybe six-hour window or less. But I can work so much better then. I love that I don't have to stop for a meal all the time. You don't have to plan three meals. You just plan two bigger meals. Cleanup's easier.

It makes things a lot easier with your lifestyle as well. But what happens is when you're not digesting calories, not only does it help at night with human growth hormone and some of these things that you want your body doing, you also go into this state where you start doing more autophagy, which is breaking down your cells into their parts and making new ones. What's also great for ramping up autophagy even more? Strength training.

So that's building that new muscle and breaking out so you can also get some of that benefit with intermittent fasting well the other thing that fasting helps with is uh no meal prep yeah right well if it's full fasting yeah i mean it's it's that's that's a convenient side of it i mean like uh a lot of you know the guys and gals that i deal with a lot of times they're bodybuilders or powerlifters. And, um, they're actually really shocked that when they, when they switch from like a bodybuilding style diet where you do eat every two hours, it's kind of a minimum of like six meals a day. And you, you almost get in this phase where you're kind of force feeding yourself. They'll, they'll be shocked when they get into not necessarily a ketogenic diet because

a strict ketogenic diet's just not great for strength for multiple reasons but when they switch to like eating less carbs or they do a little bit of intermittent fasting they're totally shocked that they're not losing a bunch of muscle they're like i thought i'd be like you know string bean at this point you know less branched chain amino acids are used when you know you're in a ketogenic state yeah that's the thing like you can do you can accomplish so much more during the day. I have a really cool video where I'm on a paddleboard with a humpback whale. I don't know if you saw it. It's pretty cool. That's amazing. Yeah. This mom and baby came up next to me and

you know, I was out in the middle of the ocean. Is it on YouTube? Hours. Yeah. Some commercial guy. Yeah. It's on our channel too. Yeah. um it was like trying to pull it once in a lifetime uh opportunity and i was out there for hours without you know anything and i could have never done that in my past life because you know it's just i feel like i'm experiencing life so much more um there was a really great quote saying we are most human when we are not eating and it's really like animalistic when you're eating and stuff. And then, you know, you're living life when you're not. Yeah.

Well, also, too, when you're eating and after you're eating, you're kind of fatigued. Yeah. You know, you're fairly tired. What do you guys kind of recognize as being? Oh, my God. That one was. That was just a boat that we were on. That's Micah there.

We were on a little boat where are you uh we stay in maui in the wintertime but if you there's one where i'm actually on a paddleboard that's amazing uh i've never got to see a whale up like that that's pretty cool yeah i'll try to find it okay cool thanks that's that's amazing what do you guys kind of recognize um as being the main problem in America with people being, you know, people being so overweight? Oh, marketing lies for one. I mean, my kids with their see, see, mom, that commercial said milk is good for you. They're going to tell you a lot of things are good for you. So I think, just sold a lot of lies. I think since the 70s, if you take the vast majority of the common knowledge

or the general guidance, FDA or whatever, and flipped it over, you'd be better off. Yeah. I mean, there's so many things that you can point to, whether it's avoid fat,

no fat in your diet. Avoid salt. Whole grains, lots of healthy whole grains. You need your whole grains. Other things like salt with blood pressure and those issues. Like milk. Milk doesn't look that good.

Sunlight, this absolute fear of some people of getting any sun, and yet vitamin D is so critical in these cholesterol sulfates that we can only make in our skin from the sun. Very health beneficial. And cold therapy. Everybody wants to take a hot bath. I'm really into cold therapy. Of course, we live in Wisconsin, so cold therapy is kind of easy for us.

But even in the summertime, I have a bathtub outside and it's only allowed for cold water. There you go. And, you know, so I'm outside in the sun, ice cold water. It's good for recovery and inflammation. So, yeah, there's just so many of these things that we've been kind of taught as, you know, do it this way. And it turns out if you do the opposite, you actually end up doing better. You know, the avoidance of red meat, you know, from these flawed studies that were put out. And if you look at red meat in an honest way, like we did in our book, it's full of nutrients.

I mean, that's what you want to eat. And of course, you want quality meat. But again, like instead of spending all this money on supplements or whatever which i believe in supplements i really do but people are you know they'll love to take a pill but yet they don't want to spend the money on food and it's like you know if you buy the organic eggs you'd need less yeah they're taking a supplement like three times a day yeah and they're they're into that but then they're still like drinking on the weekend or whatever and you're like that's not all these things are not right you know, going together, you know,

necessarily. If you actually look at how much, uh, in this country we spend on food compared to other countries, we spend the lowest percentage of income than just about any country. And if you look at a place like Japan, they spend like, like almost 300% more of their income on food because they look for quality food and they look,

you know, it's just, it's just such a different mindset here. It's about, again, four bucks for 12 eggs, which will feed me three meals. Right. And you complain about that. Like we, we're just got that skewed view. So you think maybe it's like kind of the, it's like big food companies, right? It's a farming, you know, it's a big big one the american way of like kind of people creating these um processed foods and they're in abundance everywhere the tv commercials are non-stop um

but what do you what do you guys think about like when people come to you guys and they're really kind of lost and they're like i you know maybe they don't even have much diet experience and they're just like i just need help i don't even have much diet experience. And they're just like, I just need help. I don't know what's going on. I don't know what to do. Do they really not know that what they were doing like was, you know, was just adding those pounds and making them sick? Or like, what are you guys seeing? Some don't. I mean, the family I just talked to that, you know, with that young girl, the dad really thought he was doing her well.

And I was like, oh. You hear some people say, I eat say i eat pretty good and you're like oh what does that mean you know like um getting rid of the gluten type foods they were doing a lot of gluten-free breads and all of the stuff that's in the health food aisle and health yeah but you know like those gluten-free foods are the worst thing that happened to gluten-free diets. Because in the past, when someone had a gluten allergy, they just cut out bread and pasta, you know? But now we have all these frankenfoods that, honestly, rice flour has about 50 more carbohydrates than white flour does and 100 more calories than white flour does.

So, sure, you're getting rid of that food allergen, but you're still inflaming the gut. Only about 8% of celiacs truly heal, and that's because they're replacing the gluten stuff with rice flour, which have low iron, low B12, all of these different things going on in your gut. And they just never heal because they just keep doing sugar. When I say carbohydrates, I mean sugar. Yeah. I mean, that's normally when we talk on this podcast about carbs. I mean, on occasion, we'll have like a bodybuilder on here.

And the carbohydrate conversation is actually quite a bit different because they pick from like about three or four different types of carbohydrates that they eat. So there's not a lot of, there's not a lot of great selections really is what I think a lot of people don't know. But most of the time we're talking about carbs, talking about kind of junk. We're talking about like something that might be in pizza or in a sandwich or in ice cream or, you know, sugars and a lot of bullshit like that basically. Well, that's the thing. I was talking to a grocery store owner and this was probably eight years ago. And he said, I know that there's a problem because when I started here seven years ago, bread had a shelf life of five days. I needed to get it out of my store within five days.

He said, you know what it is now, Maria? Eight or seven years later, 14 days. So we're adding stuff to those processed foods. Right. And what is that doing to ourselves? You know, all of those preservatives. Yeah. Right.

All those additives. There's been like 7 million different new food additives that have been added to food in the last like 20 years. And that becomes a problem when you're talking about like, you know, being on a keto diet and, uh, you know, trying to abstain from carbohydrates. And then you're kind of making this weird fake health food that has, uh, sugar alcohols. I have a lot of friends that make a lot of these products. I think that they're great because it can help people to stay on it. Like if, if we can help you to stay on something that's more positive. But use it as a transition. Yeah. Then

what you were doing before. And, and if you really like, uh, I don't know if you want to have like a keto cookie when you go to a movie and that's like your indulgence and I guess go for it, you know, but as long as you're able to still make progress. Yeah. And as long as that's not something that triggers everything else to go haywire. That's's the thing. I have some recipe testers and they're like, I can't test your dessert anymore because I eat the whole thing. Is it the keto dessert that caused you to keep not losing weight? No, it's probably just because you overate on that, which I totally get. But I do tell people, they are always

asking, what's a good protein bar they are always asking like, what's a good protein bar? And I was like, it's called beef stick. Yeah. Yeah. But they want a protein bar that's sweet. And I was like, there are none. Like, you know, if it comes out of a package, there's junk in it.

No, there's, there's, and, and some people try to do combinations of like peanut butter, almond butter. And it's like, you still look at those and there's quite a bit of ingredients in a lot of those foods. And, you know, when you're talking about switching out like something where someone says, yeah, that'd be great if you're on a gluten-free diet, it'd probably help with a lot of things.

And then somebody runs out and they have a gluten-free donut. It's like, well, that gluten-free donut has 37 ingredients in it. Like, and none of them are probably, I mean, I can't even picture what would be good for you in those 37 ingredients. Probably nothing. Yeah.

Right. Well, and that's another thing, too, is in her cleanse book, we actually did the meal plans in there with no sweeteners, no sweet things. And that's part of the process, I think, too, is shifting your palate away from that sweet, you know, where you constantly are looking for the sweet, you know, flavor. Right. Yeah. I think they, when we had a Jay Cutler on the podcast, he's a four time Mr. Olympia champion. That's the biggest thing that you can reach in a professional bodybuilding. And, uh, you know, he kind of has this saying of, you know, don't be, uh, don't be fancy, be consistent, which I, which I, uh, which I really love.

But even in like his diet and a lot of the diet of these bodybuilders, they don't have a lot of sugars in there. Because it's the same thing. It's going to trigger you. I'm sure they could probably afford. These guys are, you know, 250 pounds. They're all muscle. And they can probably afford to have a little bit of sugar, maybe post-workout or whatever it is. But they're just like, nope.

We just kind of keep going. And they get rid of that sugar. Oh, I see it in our kids. You know, it's like, would you, because like with birthdays come around and stuff, I'll do like a keto cake. Like it's a very rare occasion, but you know what they'd rather have?

Like another hamburger. I mean, they are totally like that. You asked how old our kids were when they came into our life. They're from Ethiopia. But one of them was so young that I had a friend breast milk but then we transitioned him to bone broth and that little baby begged for it he would like oh yeah he would

do sign language asking for more i would like tease him and pull i don't blame him bone broth's delicious but you can really form your kid's palate you really can so instead of them and we just started doing the whole foods and we take beef and just puree it and let them eat the beef. Oh, and the salmon. Anything you can eat, they can eat if you just puree it. As babies, they ate what we ate. It's just pureed. And then a lot of bone marrow.

That's like a jello for a baby. What about some of the clients you guys have that have children that are, um, you know, that are, that are not, maybe even not necessarily heavy, but they just, you know, these kids nowadays, they love sugar. Yeah. Yeah. Are you guys able to help with that too? Because you're able to help mom and dad and there's a kind of transfer over to the whole family.

Yeah. Sometimes parents are worried like, okay, so what if I feed them keto at home and then they cheat when they go to school or whatever? I was like, you're still going to give them a lot of benefit by giving them real food at home. Right. And eat all those nutrients. And you'll start to change your palate. I was the pickiest eater when I was a kid.

I remember making my best friend's mom cry because at dinner I wouldn't eat her pot roast or something. We've had kids like that over at my house too. Oh, it drives you nuts, right? What the hell does this kid eat? And I did. I was that kid. Like one kid just ate crust of his

sandwich or something. Every time he came over, I was like, he didn't eat the meat or the cheese. I'm like, I don't know what's going on. I know exactly what you're talking about. Kids that are really picky eaters that just like buttered noodles or that type of... Usually have very low good gut bacteria. And if you look back, they might have been on a lot of

antibiotics or exposed to all those hand sanitizers drive me nuts, you know. But that type of stuff kills your good gut bacteria, causes you to be a very picky eater. Maybe they weren't breastfed. Right. Who knows? Yeah. You know, whatever you do, what you can do as a mother.

Right. But, yeah, it's going to change your good gut bacteria. And that, in turn, i was on a lot of antibiotics had ear infections um so bad that they would bleed when i was really little and you know i don't know if that caused me but i also had um you know pcos usually have acne and that was i was given a prescription for acne medication that killed a lot of my good gut i think it was just so unfair that no one really thinks about it they just like prescribe it oh my doctor told me that she would get everyone's so trusting oh i know it's it's the you know we start out in our book talking about inputs and outputs right and if you look at the

body it's just a big system this is my engineer coming out right you got inputs food light sleep exercise those are all inputs to the body, right? And if any of those inputs get off, what are the bad outputs that come out? Diabetes, weight gain, these problems. And so we got to go back and look at these inputs to fix the outputs, right? So much of healthcare today, we just slap a Band-Aid on the output. We put a medication on it that, you know, you got to go back to those inputs and change the inputs before you really start to heal. But we even see close family members that they ignore that input and they would rather take a pill than change an input.

Yeah, I think people are scared of the change, right? They're scared of, I've heard people that are alcoholics before say they can't envision themselves being at any event or doing something at night without a drink in their hand. And then so they're kind of scared of like, what does the rest of my life look like if I'm not high or drunk? And then probably what is the rest of my life look like if I'm not able to indulge in pizza with the guys on during Thursday night football or whatever it might be. Right. And that's that's where you could bring fathead pizza. You know, like, that's the thing. I grew up in Medford, Wisconsin, which is where Tombstone Pizza was invented.

This is like the first frozen pizza. And my dad worked at the bar where it was invented. And his best friend said, Joe, do you want in on Tombstone Pizza? And he's like, nah. And I just think about how different my life would be because I know the guy who owns it. And, you know, he sold that to Kraft.

And anyway, so I grew up eating frozen pizza like you did, too. He grew up in the same town. Every night we had frozen pizza. We had it even at school lunches because we got like the junky ones that were like misshapen or something. They would give it to school. But so what I do is when I do make pizzas for these guys, especially when I'm traveling a lot, when I get everything out, it's a family event.

We turn some good music on and we make like 12 pizzas and we put them in the freezer. And then you can just like, you know, throw one in the toaster oven as needed. It's like a frozen pizza at that point. And so you have the guys over for a game and throw that in. And so... Being prepared and planning ahead and having options ready that you can

just pop in an oven. Yeah. It helps a lot. Yeah. The meal prep. It is. It is. You know,

we prioritize so many things in our life that to me, it's just common sense. You know, like Americans watch on average five hours of TV a day. That's a lot. Yeah. Like throw the TV on in the kitchen or something and get to work. It's the TV is costing a lot.

And, and the junk food that you're eating while you're watching is costing you. I mean, it's not the price of the TV, but it's the price you're paying for not being active. It's just the time you're wasting, you know, as well.

I, you know, recently I've, I'm down to like, well, I've, I watched some football. I love football, but I'm down to like one TV show that I watch. I'm like, man, I don't even, I don't watch TV. I don't watch TV at all. But I'm like, I don't, I feel like I don't have time for it.

If it's the option to watch something or go to bed, even though I don't really like to sleep, I'll sleep because I know I need it. You know, I'm like, oh, I gotta go. I feel like a little kid. I gotta go to bed. Yeah. Yeah. Stomping my feet, you know, uh, walking, walking to the bedroom. But when you were talking about alcoholics before that reminded me, uh, what was it a week ago? Um, so again, I'm not a judgmental person, but I'm never going to allow or suggest having a cheat day. Like I just don't believe in them because it's a slippery slope. Yeah.

And alcoholic, someone who was one, thanked me for saying that because they're like, just like when I quit alcohol, if I said, oh, I'm going to have a vodka. Just one. Just one. Right. On Friday. That's never going to work. If you are a food addict, having a cheat day is never going to work. You might relapse the whole week.

Oh, we've had people go disappear for a year and say, one Girl Scout cookie threw me off for a whole year, but I'm back. And gained all the weight back. But I even have close friends do that to me. Yeah. Like, I know when they're on it and when they're not because- You don't hear from them. I don't. They don't want do that to me yeah like i know when they're on it when they're not because you don't hear from them i don't they don't want to they don't want to talk to me they see you at the grocery store and they run the other way yeah when uh we had some bodybuilders on the show you know they talk about eating the six seven meals a day and you know constantly kind of you know

flooding your body with nutrients what they're trying to do um i was kind of surprised i was like wow man that's a lot that's lot of dedication, how much these guys are eating. And then I was just kind of curious. I was like, I wonder how much the average person eats. It was something like 14 times a day. Oh man. And I was like, Oh my God. I was like, Oh yeah. Eating like any form of eating. I buy that. Yeah. 14 times a day. Oh yeah. You know, candy at the office. And I mean, again, not judging. I was there myself, you know. Every time you walk by something, you tend to want to grab it. And it's mindless. People don't even realize. We have a Sunday night group meeting, like kind of to keep people on track.

And last night, a woman said, I actually tracked, like because we encouraged her. And she said she actually tracked and she was surprised at how much she was eating and she thought she was doing keto right but it was just that mindless eating where we sit at a computer and eat and like you said watch TV and eat like we don't what was mind opening

is a woman asked me to lead a keto trip in Italy and I was like heck yeah I'll do that so I taught Italy while we went through or I taught keto through Italy. And what was interesting is even the drivers, the truck drivers, you name it, they didn't drink or eat anything in their car. They stopped at these gas stations, which were more like coffee shops. And they would sit and chit chat, have a cafe au lait, get back in their car, brought nothing with them in the car. It's not that mindless.

It was even drinking, though, because, I mean, I have water and stuff in the car, right? But no, to them, you stop and enjoy every bite. You stop and enjoy every drink. And then you do the rest of your life. I just thought that was really eye opening as, you know, a dumb American. I always, like, whenever I'm about to go somewhere, I always think, like, I'm preparing for an apocalypse or something. I bring so much food with me all the time. Oh, yeah. And I'm like, I really probably don't need to eat this much, but... But it's nice to have it so you don't, you know,

I have beef sticks in my carry-on. You don't deviate. Yeah. Yeah. How do you guys work it out where you plan ahead? You mentioned the frozen pizzas and the freezer. And how do you do some other things? Usually when I travel, I always get like an extended stay hotel or something. And I take the Uber right to a grocery store, pick up some food, stock the fridge when I'm traveling. And that's how we travel most of the time. Extended stay. You got the kitchen.

Or a condo, something like that. And some people think it's a lot of work. Hey, I'd rather be on the beach swimming than sitting at a restaurant any day.

Yeah. That's like in Maui, we do the same thing. We got a condo with a kitchen and so we just stock the fridge. I go like every two days I'll go and pick up

some fresh fish. Yeah. The little local grocery store gets fresh fish twice a day. There's nothing better. I love to go out to eat,

but I'm the same as you guys where it's like, man, that takes a long time. I would rather do something fun. You're sitting there forever. Yeah. I mean, no matter where you go, and it seems like nowadays

it takes longer than it used to for some reason, but it just seems like it takes, you're just carving out like an hour. Yeah. And sometimes it is nice to get served. It's nice to have, you know, someone else kind of waiting on you and that kind of stuff.

But once you start getting the habit of cooking at home, being in control of what you're consuming, there's nothing better than that. I mean, it feels so much better. And like you said, then it leaves more time to do something else. Yes. Something more productive with your time. Totally.

Yeah. And one of our boys absolutely love her protein noodle lasagna, which is, so this is something we'll make like, again, six big things of on a Sunday and freeze for the week. It's basically you take the noodles out and you replace them with thinly shaved chicken breast, like deli meat. Wow. Like Applegate or something like that. Good quality.

So many people say it's better than the original. Most people don't even know it's not a noodle because it's kind of slimy like a noodle. Right. You're like, wow, this is pretty awesome. And it's chicken. Yeah. Chicken, like deli meat. I've never heard of that.

Like you can get organic deli chicken, like Applegate Farms or whatever, and you just use that and they love it. They make that, put it, you know, for prep, if you put it in single serving sizes, pop it in the freezer, you pull it out, warm it up. How old are the kids, did you say? Seven and nine. And then what's their interaction with other kids? How does some of that work?

Well, we do, I'll say Craig homeschools. I don't. He's a patient one. But they have their friends and birthday parties and they go to- They have flag football practice with their friends. And karate and that type of stuff. If there's any activity, we'll just say, you know, no food, we'll bring, if there's a meal that's required, like a camp, we'll just pack a lunch for them. Right. Yeah, but they joke that they're

carnivore dinosaurs. And the other kids are like, I want to be a carnivore dinosaur too! You know, so we try to not make it a big deal. And they know a lot about food and stuff just because they hear me talk. I saw one of them peeking in here. And so he knows where sugars are hidden, where other kids may not. And I was like, you know what, Micah hun?

Not everybody likes to know it all. So even though you want to help, let's try to keep that to mommy. And don't tell the other kids that's not good for them. Because we just don't want to be, you know, the sugar police. And then what if they do eat some carbs here and there? They usually say that they don't want to do it again because they feel so ill. And so I think that's like what I was- But do you guys try to prevent it or are you just like, you know, just let it happen? We let them. We educate.

If they're with a buddy and they eat like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich together or something like that, does that happen? That kind of thing happen? Not really at this age. I mean. Still a little young, I guess. Yeah. Yeah.

But they'll say, does that cupcake have sugar? And I'll say, yeah. And you know, it's your choice. But they were like, can we make cupcakes when we get home? And I'm like, absolutely. Or if it's a birthday party, we'll just bring some cupcakes to share right so they can have an option while they're there right and most moms that i i mean we know most of the moms right they're more than happy to have so they can have some cake too and not you have some uh parents that are

like outspoken about it or what about like maybe not to your face but what about like on the internet some people kind of like, Hey man, you'll always find haters. Yeah, I know. I find haters all the time. And that's just like, but there's some people that are like,

Hey, kids need carbs. And I mean, yeah, well, I don't know, but I'm just saying like, I'm just saying these people might.

Yeah. I mean, we don't get as much of that. I don't think as some people. We used to. You'll get it now. Get it from this crowd yeah but you know we just we've always prided ourselves on following the science and the biology yeah and so we you know

like i was talking about those studies with the seizure control yeah you stunt stunt growth when you don't have the carbs but it wasn't the carbs it was a lack of protein and they were underweight i mean um kai was well one and half, and he was like a newborn. Like, I held him in this baby carrier while I would cook all the time. And Micah, they were, I don't know. About 4% on the height and weight charts, barely registering. Wow. And what did they know?

And within a year, they were 50%, and two years, they were, you know, 70%, 80%. Wow. So, I mean, you met them i think they're doing pretty good yeah and you know they run races with me because they love it you know and so yeah the twin cities marathon was this last weekend and they have like a family run and stuff and um they're like the energizer bunnies do you guys eat any carbs like any fruits or anything or nuts or we joke that. We eat like tomatoes, cucumbers, olives.

So mainly like vegetables, sources. Well, those are technically fruits. Yeah. Right. Okay. So it's kind of a joke. Like I made a fruit salad

in one of my cookbooks and it was like a Greek. Avocado. It was like a Greek salad, you know, with cucumbers, tomatoes, olives, you know,

that type of stuff. But, you know, boys will get like, seasonally get berries. If strawberries and raspberries are in season, we'll get those you know, that type of stuff. But, you know, our boys will get, like, seasonally get berries. If strawberries and raspberries are in season, we'll get those for them, and they'll enjoy those. But, again, I'm not a short-order cook, so it's kind of like, if I'm writing a cookbook, everybody's like, what are you eating? It's like, that cookbook. You know, because we're, like, taste testing that type of stuff, you know.

Right. So. But, yeah, otherwise, I mean, you know, probably, like, tomatoes. You know, we have lots of tomato sauces and those kind of sources for carbs. I'm just trying to I mean, we, you know, probably like tomatoes, you know, we lost tomato sauces and those kinds of sources for carbs. I'm just trying to think of what are, but we do lean towards more carnivore than, yeah. I mean, it just makes it easier. So like no specific carbohydrates, like rice or potatoes or anything like that. No, no, we haven't had that for, I don't know, decades.

Yeah, more than 10, 12 years for me. It's been a long time. You know, you were saying you had, uh, some acid reflux. Yes. And,

uh, some people would think like to eat like meat would be like the exact opposite, right? Of, of what would, so how, how did this style of diet help? Um,

gluten and dairy are, if you cut gluten and dairy, that acid reflux will probably go away. I mean, if you look at Prilosec and those acid blockers, it says do not take for longer than two weeks. Right. So when I work with people overseas, like in Europe,

they don't use it longer than two weeks. Here they're years. But here, I mean, my dad was put on it for, like, I don't know what's up here. Or how long, yeah, the people chewing on the tums and everything else, right? Oh, I know. And that's such a terrible calcium and

that calcium builds up in your arteries and it's stones kidney stones kidney stones gallstones all of that type of stuff but when you cut gluten and dairy and get rid of the inflammation and when i say that i mean get rid of the sugar carbohydrates that acid reflux will go away you know that's so interesting what do you guys think about uh the carnivore diet you know like where people have been talking so much about this diet and there's you know a lot of people going back and forth on it what are your thoughts on it i i guess i'm a i don't like to count anything like the whole idea of counting points or anything it gives me a headache and so for me it's just easy yeah i think you know a couple things if if your goal is weight loss, it can be,

like you said, a really good way to do it. And you can be keto and not really have to track much because you just eat the animal proteins and you don't get any carbs and it makes it easy. Right. You know, I think in general, again, you know, like in our book, we talk about these micronutrients, you know, and the animal proteins are so nutrient dense. So I think if you did it right and included kind of nose to tail eating. So you ate the liver and the heart and everything and got all those nutrients. I don't think you're really deficient in anything. I think you can do it.

And I think it's a perfectly valid lifestyle that you can lead. You know, we like onions and tomatoes. Yeah, whole flavor, right. Dairy and stuff. But yeah, I mean, I don't think there's inherently a problem with it. Right. From that standpoint. Yeah, it's actually a really, really interesting thing because it doesn't seem like anyone really knows.

Obviously the human body was designed to do all kinds of things. Yeah. I'm sure that we could live off of fruit for a very long time or we could live off whatever, you can live off all kinds of different things because we're designed to survive i think right so but it's interesting when you hear people talking about it and they're like well you know you're not eating any fiber like how are you going to the bathroom newborn babies go poo all the time and they don't get any fiber yeah right and think about people with diverticulitis crohn's colitis i see that every day in my practice you know what the doctor tells them to do get rid of the fiber and eat the white stuff because the fiber is causing a lot of intestinal damage and

irritation to that gut. So why not get rid of it before it comes a problem? There's even a study that looked at removing the fiber and it actually improved constipation in these patients. Yeah, because it causes bulk to the stools. Right. But I was going to say, I work with this doctor out of New York who is this amazing fertility doctor. People come from all over the world. And I spoke there, what, two weeks ago or something. And he says variety isn't the spice of life.

It's the spice for disaster. Because if you think about it, you go to a buffet, you fill your plate up. When you get bored of a flavor, you move on to the next flavor. So you know what he eats every day? Eating all those flavors from different continents. He eats a big old ribeye every day. He eats once a day, a big old ribeye and my keto ice cream. That's what he eats every day. And that's it. That's it. And he's like, he lost a lot of weight and he has a lot of success with making his patients eat keto. Because if you

think about cholesterol makes healthy hormones. So when you're deficient in these hormones and causing fertility issues, cholesterol makes healthy hormones. Right. And so I just wish I would have put that piece together a long time ago, but I have these two awesome kids. Yeah. Yeah. The cholesterol has actually been shown to do all kinds of positive things as well. Yeah, and even the FDA has finally backed off of the dietary cholesterol issue. Yeah, the carnivore diet, I just don't think a lot of people really know. Because even in terms of the vitamins and minerals, it's like, well, if we're not eating all this other stuff that messes up our, our body, then maybe we don't need as many vitamins and minerals and stuff. Amen to that. Because like the more sugar you have in your diet, the phagocytic index,

that's how much you intake vitamin C. Um, that level, when you have a lot of sugar in your diet, you can't intake a lot of vitamin C into your cells. And so you need a lot more vitamin C when you eat a lot of sugar. But when you get rid of all of the sugar and carbohydrates, your vitamin C demand goes down. They actually go with each other. The lower carb you eat, the less vitamin C you eat. And so that's just one example. We don't know how many other examples go along with that. And I would say fiber probably fits in there too. Like if you're not eating a bunch of, you know, huge variety of food,

you probably don't need tons and tons of fiber. Yeah. We don't really. Your gut microbiome will shift depending on what you eat. And it can actually shift very rapidly, like within days. And people talk about probiotics, prebiotics. Prebiotics, you think are carbohydrates and the fiber and things like that.

You actually get a lot of prebiotics in connective tissue. So if you're eating the ribs, if you're eating the chicken wings, you're getting the prebiotic fiber there. Collagen, glucosamine. Yeah, chicken wings. My kid loves those. And they're so easy to just throw them into a toaster oven. Yeah, they're fantastic.

Super easy. We had some the other day. I used to always go out for wings and get them fried because I didn't know what I was doing yet. But I've cleaned that up since. They're so easy. Yeah. Yeah. When you guys first start people on a keto diet, do you have them having a little bit higher percentage of fats and things like that?

Just to kind of get them a little boost into it or is it just kind of a blanket thing? Yeah. On our meal plans, we have like some fat bombs if you need. If needed. Because some people, the hunger is like, you know, outrageous because they're just coming from a different lifestyle. And so they might have leptin resistance and things that they're just not having the signaling that I'm full. Yeah. And so adding some extra fat bombs or treats at that first few weeks can be helpful to help them keep on track, keep those cravings away.

But we always say, you know, once the hunger subsides, get rid of that stuff and just focus on the real food. And some people want to just rip the Band-Aid off and do it right. You know. Right. What are you guys tracking? Tracking anything? Tracking ketones? Tracking calories?

Tracking carbs? Well, higher ketones do not mean higher results. Yeah, that's one misconception as well, is that ketones have to be at this level to be really doing well. I'm a 4.1. I know. Everybody back up. Yours are probably low because you're an athlete.

Mine are really low because I'm working out in a fasted state. And the longer your keto, the lower your blood ketones will actually be because your body gets more efficient at using them. Right. And so unless you're in a therapeutic state where like procedures or Alzheimer's or something like that, where you want high blood ketones, don't even worry about them. Yeah. You know, it's not even real.

Just worry about getting the carbs low enough. Do you have people just to check? Some people, you have people like Gadget Guy over here that like it. You know, I'm a minimalist. I don't like gadgets once i mean once you once you're doing the diet and once you have some of the benefits of it at that point it's like who really cares right but i guess if you're still troubleshooting maybe you want to know right and some people if they want to add in some carbohydrates or you know kind of

play around with some different foods um you know the effects yeah and then what about uh calories or anything like that any tracking of any of that kind of stuff you know our effects yeah and then what about uh calories or anything like that any tracking of any of that kind of stuff you know our meal plans are in a a tight um range but we usually just focus on the macros first and you know it's keep carbs low enough hit your protein goal so you got enough amino acids around for your lean mass and then fat you just adjust you know based on your goals a little bit less if you're not losing your goals a little bit less if you're not losing enough weight a little bit more if you want to stop losing weight i'm really a sensitive person and i don't like to look at like amazon reviews or anything like that and he's like oh you just

got the best bad review on amazon and i was like i don't want to know he's like no it's great they say i hate this diet i'm always full it's like that is the point that you do not have you're not hangry anymore you'll get hunger but you're not like hangry i remember that like 11 at 11 o'clock i was like so hungry i couldn't even focus at work you know and it's just different now you'll get hunger but it's manageable you know and that's why a lot of people don't like this diet because they do like eating a lot of times. They, you know, like I have family members that won't do this because they like to eat multiple snacks throughout the day. Um, I would rather have it, you know, let's, let's get the work done, you know, but I'm a worker bee, so I like it.

Yeah. One of our friends, uh, Stan Efferding, he has a diet that he calls the vertical diet. And the vertical diet is the promotion of basically eating more. It like teaches you to eat more. And it's for people that do like bodybuilding and powerlifting. And it's kind of on the high end performance of like athletics, like trying to squeeze the most juice out of everything. So he tries to just cover every basis he can. everything. So he tries to just cover every basis he can. And you basically, for lack of a better communication, you just try to cram in as much food as you possibly can. And you're not, it's not, you know, it's not without a lot of thought. He's put a lot of thought into the diet and it's,

it's working really well for a lot of people. But I think that people don't understand that there's these opposite ends of the spectrum and you can pick and choose and you can, like you can pick and choose and you can like, you can pick and choose what style of diet that you're on. And even within a ketogenic diet, as you mentioned, you've been doing, you both have been doing it for years. The way that you started is not the way that you're doing it now. And the way that you're doing it now won't be the way that you're doing it in three years from now. Like you're going to kind of shift and move. And just because these diets kind of promote a certain thing doesn't mean that you can't adjust it.

So with this vertical diet, people are eating carbs at every meal and having six meals a day. And they don't realize that if you want to do it for weight loss, it'd actually be very easy. You just cut out a couple of those carbohydrate meals and you would be there because he promotes to eat a lot of meat and nutrient-dense foods, all the same things you guys are saying. He just doesn't, this particular diet is not a ketogenic style diet. You know, so it's interesting to me that you can kind of move things around quite a bit within all these diets. Well, actually, some of the first people out there to do carnivore did it because of what their body was doing, right? carnivore did it because of what their body was doing right uh they uh i have lyme disease which is a nasty condition um and it caused a lot of inflammation in the body so you get a lot of pain

um these people were doing keto and seeing a lot of improvement they took it to carnivore and saw even better improvements so like you said they're just my brother's experience yeah yeah adjusting based on their body, they just feel better. And if you feel better, go for it. There's a girl who I know, Amber the carnivore,

and she... Sounds ferocious. I know, right? Well, she has severe bipolar disorder, but if she eats carnivore, she's off all of her medicine and she has no symptoms whatsoever.

But even spices, a lot of people don't even realize that cinnamon there's carbohydrates and cinnamon and spices and stuff right so she has to be aware of that but if she eats strictly carnivore she's just fine no medication and this is like not diet or like weight loss related whatsoever. It's just mental health. So it's just how inflammation can be anywhere. Well, I think that diet and exercise can affect everything. And it's, I mean, it shouldn't shock anybody at this point. I mean, you exercise and a lot of times you're like, oh, I feel better. Yep.

Or you just even like, you know, you just get your heart rate up. Yeah. You go do something. It doesn't have to be like this rigorous, hard exercise thing. Go out for a walk. Go out for a walk right now in the sunlight. Yep. And go walk around the block.

You'll feel amazing. Oh, yeah. Exactly. Getting outside is so important for our kids and for us. Oh, absolutely. If I'm in a bad mood, he's like, you want to go for a run? Like, yep, I do. Yeah.

Yeah, going for a walk. And then even the types of food that we eat, it should be of no surprise to anybody that it's not only affecting the way that our bodies appear. I think that that's what everyone's kind of, their goal is like, oh, I just want to lose weight. But it's like, you wouldn't even be talking about weight loss if you understood what it could do for your brain. Yeah. I mean, the impact is so big. A lot of people start the keto diet for other reasons. Weight loss is a side benefit. Yeah. Time and time again with our clients, the weight loss is just a bonus because they feel so much better. They have so much better focus and moods and energy, you know, and they just feel so good.

They can believe how good they can feel. Some people will say that, you know, on other styles of diets that if you just lose weight, period, that you'll end up experiencing a lot of the benefits that you guys have talked about with the ketogenic diet. How do you guys kind of feel about claims like that? Like, are you guys kind of for like, hey, whatever way you want to lose some weight, like if it worked for you, that's fantastic. Or you guys pretty much just kind of keto all the way. Well, I think number one, yeah. If, if they've seen benefits and done certain, you know, great, that's, that's great for them. Uh, what we've seen with certain things says there's something else there. Like, for example, one whole slide that I have in this presentation is MS. There's no cure for MS.

But we have had clients who have gotten off their medications. So many. Somebody who hadn't walked on their heels with their heels for 20 years and is now doing that. Wheelchairs. Because their feet were in so much pain, right? Yeah. So, you know, they were seeing big improvements. I don't think, I think there's something else there because it wasn't

weight loss. Right. And that reminds me of Kiki with alopecia. She had no hair and I lifted weights with this woman for, I don't know, five years. I thought maybe she had cancer. I never talked to her before. And she came up to me, she's like, can I work with you? And so we changed her diet and she was a professor. And so I didn't see her for the whole school year. And then she came back in the summertime with a bandana on. She always wore a bandana. She

came up to me with tears in her eyes and she took her bandana off. She said, I had my first haircut in 20 years. You know, like you can't do that on Weight Watchers. Bad food inputs can cause a lot of these problems and, You know, like you can't do that on Weight Watchers. Bad food inputs can cause a lot of these problems. And, you know, cutting out things like gluten and dairy and these things just can really reverse a lot of disease process in some people. Autoimmune diseases, you know.

It's such an interesting thing because for some people it doesn't bother them at all, you know, so they can eat these certain foods. And so then we end up with this wide array of information, you know, of this person saying, oh, like if you just follow a well-balanced diet and you start to lose some weight, then a lot of your problems will heal up. And if you exercise. But meanwhile, that's probably not true. They probably need to go through some sort of-

If they have an autoimmune disorder, no. Right. Yeah. And, you know, autoimmune disorders are on the rise for a reason. I actually think any disorder. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, autoimmune disorders are on the rise for a reason. I actually think any disorder. Yeah. Personally. Like, I just think, I think, you know, that these other diets can definitely help with a lot of things.

And when you lose weight and you manage your body, you manage your body fat levels, a lot of people are going to feel better. But when you think about someone that has like something crazy going, well, I shouldn't say crazy. Someone that has like something crazy going, well, I shouldn't say crazy. Think about when somebody has something like bipolar disorder or just any of these other disorders that are really impacting their life and impacting the health of their mind. I think these ketogenic diets are at least worth, and a carnivore diet, it's at least worth a shot. You know, I don't mean like trying it for two or three weeks. I think that you have to try it for a year. Right. Yeah.

I think you have to really try it. But what if, you know, what if it could be the thing that absolutely changes your life forever? Absolutely. As a female, you know, when you have a bad hair day, that's like a make or break a deal, right? And this woman, Kiki, didn't have any hair. And so for her to be able to go and sit in a salon and have a haircut meant the world to her.

Yeah. You know, and that's worth any diet. And she did not lead to lose anyway. She was little. Right. Yeah. So it's crazy. It's crazy that the impact that it can have. And I think a lot of people just think it's just going to drop 15 pounds, 20 pounds. But it can help with all different kinds of things. I mean, I think diabetes and, um, I guess heart diseases, you know, people are still kind of weighing their options in terms of the fat and the, I know, I know the cholesterol,

right? Everyone's always freaking out about a lot of that stuff. What have you seen with your clients in terms of like their heart health and, uh, consuming more fat? The coronary artery calcium score, it's where they do a MR or a CT scan of the heart What have you seen with your clients in terms of like their heart health and consuming more fat? The coronary artery calcium score, it's where they do a CT scan of the heart arteries. Yeah, we have Dr. Davis William coming in soon. Oh, my gosh.

He called me. Oh, yeah. Yeah, he called me about 15 years or I don't know how long ago. I almost fell over. I was like, he's like my celebrity crush. That was awesome. But, you know, the calcium score really, it shows you directly how much plaque is in the arteries. So that's heart disease, right?

Right. Coronary artery disease. So we've had tons of clients that get those scans and they're zero. And a perfect example of this is one of our clients, her husband's a doctor. Heart surgeon. Heart surgeon. He was always on her case about her cholesterol levels because her cholesterol was in the high 200s, 300 range. He was always really low.

They got a new machine in that does calcium scores. And we told him. So he said, okay, well, let's get it done. She goes in. Her score was zero. Zero arterial plaque, even though her cholesterol has always been in the 300s. He said, okay, you do it. And you're like, okay, they're kidding around.

He's had low cholesterol, like 160s his whole life. There's not going to be any issue. He had like 500, which is like a heart attack waiting to happen. And it was, number one, it was good that they found this out because they can do take some action on it. But here's the two examples. You know, she was following keto. She had high cholesterol. And that's what's frustrating is like women, when we go through perimenopause, menopause, or if you have thyroid disorders, cholesterol makes healthy hormones. So if you have low hormone output, whether it be your progesterone, estrogen, your thyroid, whatever it is, if that's low, your cholesterol is going to try to get out.

It's going to go elevated and try to get those hormones to work. In menopause, your progesterone and estrogen are not going to respond. So your cholesterol stays elevated. And guess what? Doctors mistakenly put you on statin drugs. Yeah. You know, and inhibits the hormone production even more because you get less cholesterol. Dave Feldman did my cholesterol and it was really high.

I'm a hyperlipid responder. That's what his definition was. And that's, I'm the definition. I'm an athlete, female athlete that, you know, is eating keto. And I don't know, he just said, you have nothing to worry about. Everything else is on par. You're triglycerides and all of that. It's just, there's so many health markers. Cholesterol isn't the only one.

A1c is a great marker. It tells you your average blood sugar and how stable your blood is. Have you been spiking your blood sugar really bad and causing those problems or not? There's other things like CRP, which is an inflammation marker. There's all these other markers that are so much better at telling you what kind of health you have than just the cholesterol. What's the biggest challenge in helping people? Food pushers. I don't know.

Biggest challenge? You know, I think for us personally, it's getting the word out there fast enough with us. We have so many clients and so much. I guess, like you said, we'll get a lot of haters here. Sometimes I'm glad I'm not as popular

as you because the people we do help, they're pretty passionate about us. It's not about how many fellows you have. It's your engagement. Oh yeah, you guys have actually physically probably worked with or come close to just about everybody. You're a fan, right?

Right, and that's really powerful. Yeah, that's huge. Rather than having a bunch of people that, you know, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I think that's been one of our biggest benefits for our business is that we have such strong engagement. A lot of it's word of mouth, right? Right. If you have somebody who had that happen with MS and their symptoms, they're going to tell everybody.

Yeah. They're going to tell everybody what they did and where they can go. They're fanatical about it. Yeah. They become fanatics that really want to spread the word. And that's, our whole business has been that way from the beginning. We haven't spent a dime on advertising ever. And it's all been word of mouth from the beginning.

And it's all because of the success. What's just the biggest challenge with like, uh, helping a client, you know, you get someone through the door, they want to do it. They're paying, they're excited. They're on week three, but they keep screwing up. Habits. I think, I think habits are really hard to break. Um, I grew up on a bed night snack. I swear my mom thought we were going to die if we didn't eat right before bed. We weren't even hungry. And she's like, bed night snack time. I was like, okay.

Sounds great. And mentally, as a grown up, you know, going into college, I wasn't hungry. And I remember like dealing with these emotional battles where I wasn't hungry, but my mind was telling me this is bed night snack time. mind was telling me this is bed night snack time. And I think, you know, I was glad I had to change my diet as a young age because now I have friends, you know, that are getting in their 40s and they're like, how do I break these habits? But they were on my swim team or whatever, and they could eat whatever they wanted. They would go to the ice cream shop every day after practice where I couldn't do that. And I understood that at 16. But they could always eat whatever they wanted.

Right. But you can be skinny and a diabetic. Right. It's about how stuffed your cells are. And so now, you know, having those habits for many decades, they're hard to break. And also food pushers. It's really just shifting the perspective. You know, like, again, another one like movie theaters.

Got a munch on popcorn. It's all these habits that we have that we got to try to get through or substitute with something healthier or a healthier habit. Make a different habit that you do. Maybe some yoga before bed. Do clients have a lot of access to you guys? Yeah. And then that way you can kind of talk them off a ledge if they're losing their way a little bit, right? Yeah, and food pushers are real.

We deal with them ourselves, you know, especially at the holidays and stuff like that. I'm a stubborn German, so like I'm fine with it, right? But yeah, food pushers are real. What's interesting is somebody's trying to cut alcohol or cigarettes. You don't push them. You don't push them. You support them. But if someone's trying to cut out sugar or carbohydrates, man, the food pushers come out of the woodwork. We talk about that a lot here. You tell someone that you're on a diet, like even it doesn't even matter what diet, but if you say keto diet,

someone's gonna be like, is all that fat healthy for you? I don't think it is healthy. If you're doing bulletproof coffee and fat bombs, I do think it's going to cause heart issues. Especially long-term. If you actually look at a lot of our clients' diets, if they do an honest accounting of what they're eating, before and after, the fat doesn't really change that much. They're already eating high fat and high carbs. You're just cutting the carbs out and that helps. Chips have a lot of fat.

Welcome to America. Chips have a lot of fat. Cookies have a and that helps. Chips have a lot of fat. Welcome to America. Yeah. Chips have a lot of fat. Cookies have a lot of fat. Donuts have a lot of fat. Yeah. You know, we're just cutting those carbohydrates. Well, and the same thing can be said, and the same thing can be said about carbs is people don't really realize how many carbs they're eating.

Oh, yeah. Because these, a lot of these like cookies and stuff. I mean, the interesting thing is there's way more calories coming from fat in a lot of those foods, but there's so much sugar in them. You're just having this abundance of sugar all day long and just processed crap. Right. And it's all about oxidative priority when you have all of those different foods, carbs, protein, fats, even alcohol, throw that in the mix. That's a concoction for absorbing. Fat storage.

Yeah, fat storage. Because oxidative priority is where the process in which your body processes fuel, the order. Alcohol is number one, and it goes all the way down to fat. So it's alcohol, ketones, if you take an exogenous ketone, protein, carbohydrates, fat. That's the order. And it makes a lot of sense if you think about your body and your biology,

which one's got the biggest storage site? Fat. You can store that away easy. So it makes it the last priority. Alcohol, there's no storage capacity for alcohol. You get too high of blood alcohol, you can die. So the body's got to take care of that first. Right.

And get it taken care of and burned off and out of your system before it moves on to the next fuel, right? And so when you have a meal that's high in everything, well, while it's dealing with the earlier stuff, all the other stuff's going to get stored. What I always like about the diet is I always feel it's actually the easiest one for me to follow. It's the easiest one for me to follow and actually manage the calories.

A lot of times, even, well, until more recently when I actually did a bodybuilding show, but when I have more carbs in the diet, I tend to have more cravings, even with healthy carbs. I could have healthy carbs in the diet. I could have rice, potatoes, this and that. Um, and I'll want to go off the rails, you know, I want to, I'll want to eat something that's a sweet, but on a keto diet, it's, it's the only diet that, that, uh, or on a keto diet, it's the only diet that, or not the only diet, but it's one of the few diets

I've been able to really follow and manage the caloric intake throughout the day. You guys have people count calories or they, I know you kind of mentioned they- Focus more on macros. Protein was the kind of the main thing you said, right?

So what is the protein recommendation? Like where do you kind of start? 0.8 times your lean mass. Yeah. So it's not extreme. 0.8 times your lean mass? Yeah. So it's not extreme. 0.8 times your lean mass. That's a good amount, though. Yeah, and if there's

athletes or things, we're going to go up to maybe one times your lean mass. Right. But yeah, I mean, it's not overload, but it's also not low.

So people are like, high protein? It's not a high protein. We just want to make sure you hit your protein goal because you cannot make muscle on fat like it's just physics yeah you need amino acids to rebuild and it's how much you have to rebuild that's uh was one of the things when i first started a ketogenic diet um i did a ketogenic diet in the like mid 90s and messed

around with it uh from that point on, on and off, like my whole life basically. But when I did it more recently and kind of heard some of the information that was coming out about the, this is like a couple of years ago, but Bulletproof coffee and stuff, I was like, okay, let me try some of these things. And that didn't work, work well for me. It didn't, it didn't work great for me. Um, I was able to, you know, uh, do a little bit of fasting or what I was kind of calling a fat fast, which is just, you know, having, you know, something like the bulletproof coffee and then waiting to like two or three or whatever and eating a little bit later. But I wasn't dumping in like enormous amounts. Like other friends I was,

I was talking to, they were having these huge servings of fat and they're like, oh, you know, my morning coffee is like 500 calories. I was like, whoa. If you sit down to seven, eight eggs, you're going to get bored of that. But you can easily chug down. I've seen it in my kids. You can chug down that fat within seconds. Yeah.

And so for me, I was just blending up like, uh, just as like half teaspoon of butter in the coffee, you know what I mean? It's like a little drop in the bucket just to add some fat to it. You know what I mean? Little things like that. But that's kind of a common mistake I see people making with the keto diet. They just want to start pouring oil all over everything. It's like, well, slow down a little bit.

No, like having a big old steak is going to have enough fat in it. You don't need to add a stick of butter to it. But people think that you do. They think that the steak is too much protein. No, check yourself. It has enough fat in it to make it keto. You don't need to add a stick of butter. Yeah, they think that this is actually

going to help me. Yeah, because your ketones will get higher. But it doesn't matter. Higher ketones don't help. Right. But then you guys are going to deter everyone from MCT poop. Oh, yeah. You want diarrhea? Yeah.

Drink the MCT oil. But that's the thing, too. A lot of people talking about poop, constipation often goes along with the keto diet because people are living off of dairy and nuts. That's why I wrote books that don't have dairy or nuts in them because those are big misconceptions. I'd like people to focus on real foods rather than that. What's wrong with nuts?

They're very constipating and the carbohydrates do add up, especially if you're on a diet, you're not going to eat a cupcake every day. But some people, they eat like a keto cupcake every day or a keto pancakes. It's like you wouldn't do that on a diet, you're not going to eat a cupcake every day. But some people, they eat like a keto cupcake every day. Keto pancakes. Or keto pancakes. It's like you wouldn't do that on a diet. Right. Like let's move.

First of all, let's get the sweet tooth gone. Right. But let's move to real food. And it's cheaper. People complain about the cost of almond flour and all of those things. Well. Sweeteners and stuff. We don't really use that.

Yeah. You don't buy them. Yeah. We just just you know we focus we have three chest freezers that are filled with meat yeah killing sweet tooth and killing hunger is huge yeah yeah you know i've never really suffered from having like a crazy appetite but i do have a sweet tooth i love like just ice cream and stuff like that and so for me the ketogenic diet was the only thing that ever killed that.

Yeah. And it's still gone. I still don't have, I still don't have a sweet tooth anymore. That is one of the biggest powers. What's that? Even with poor sleep, your hunger isn't satiated or,

uh, intense. No, yeah. I, I don't have a crazy like appetite. Okay. That is pretty much when I was young,

I used to eat a lot, but that was, that was about it. When I was like a teenager, I used, I used to eat a lot, but that was, that was about it. When I was like a teenager, I used to be able to kill some food, but I think, I think maybe, so in powerlifting,

you can kind of have at it, you know, you can kind of, it's not the best way to go about doing things, but if you weigh more, you can lift more. Yeah. And so,

you know, I got myself up to like 330 pounds and I was just slugging down whatever I could to kind of add more calories and be big. And I actually think that that killed my appetite. Yeah. Pretty, pretty good. But getting on a keto diet also kind of taught me and utilizing some intermittent fasting. It also taught me what real hunger was.

Right. You know, I started messing around with some different fasts and I did 24 hour and 48 hour kind of, you know, I didn't use that a lot, but I just wanted to kind of see how it really felt. And when you start to really learn, like, okay, that's very small impulse to like want to eat. And you're like, but it's only eight o'clock in the morning. It's not a big deal. And you learn to just deal with it. You're like, that's, and then you learn what real hunger is. And when you have real hunger and you don't feel great, you just eat.

Yeah. Exactly. It's kind of like a muscle. You got to kind of flex that hunger to feel it again. Because we're used to just mindlessly constantly eating and we never really feel any hunger. That's a good way of putting it. Do you guys sleep well? Yeah.

I asked you about your hunger because if I don't sleep, and I find this with clients too, like that leptin and ghrelin hormone are like in way overdrive where if we have a wedding or a party or something and I don't sleep well, even though I'll still eat keto, that dial is turned way up, you know. Yeah, more hunger. And, you know, so it takes more food to satiate you. So I just wondered because you just mentioned your sleep yeah to put it simply when you don't get enough adequate sleep um you basically it's like if you have the munchies when you smoke weed yeah yeah there you go it is all day the next day it seems like yeah um i think i heard you guys on another podcast talking about like the um blue light and whatnot um we had a really cool question it came from like

a couple episodes ago from a listener and they asked do you guys think um if blue light and whatnot. We had a really cool question. It came from like a couple episodes ago from a listener and they asked, do you guys think if blue light affects our metabolism? Because I know it affects like the levels that you just talked about that are really big words that I can't pronounce. But as far as like actually like messing with your metabolism. Well, there's a lot that goes with circadian rhythm. And like your hormones, Well, there's a lot that goes with circadian rhythm and like your hormones, you can determine your hormone and hormones kind of determine your metabolism.

Right. With different, you know, blue light and. Yeah, I think it's hard to say, but if you look at all the things connected to circadian rhythms and even had a study that looked at surgeries done in the morning versus afternoon for like heart surgery and the outcomes were much better in the morning so there's like this cycle that the body's naturally always going through where before you wake up cortisol rises that helps you wake up so that's why it's also good to work out in the morning because your cortisol is already high so you're not stimulating that you know in the evening right before bed cortisol spiking when you're working out that's's not a good thing. It's going to interfere with your sleep. So it's all about those cycles, you know, and blue light is an influencer of those

cycles because in the morning you get that blue light in your eye, the, in the back of our eyes, there's a receptor that connects to the SCN of the brain. That's the part of the brain that's puts out melatonin. It makes you drowsy and want to sleep. So when there's blue light, it turns it off. So no melatonin comes out. That's what happens in the morning. In the evening, naturally, you're supposed to have less blue light.

Sunsets, you know, we're not talking about today in our environments with iPhones and lights and that, but in our history, in our evolution, that's when it went down and blue lights, melatonin started to naturally come out. So that is all influenced by lights and the blue light. And I, I would not be at all surprised if there's key components of metabolism connected that as well. Yeah. Um, have you guys seen those, uh, it's for like, um, areas where the sun actually won't rise when you need to rise. They're like earplugs that light up. Oh, no, no.

Man, I don't know. I'm really interested to see if those actually work. Yeah. There's a movie like 30 Days of Night, which it's a terrible movie, but it's about Alaska. And I'm like, wow, I would. That would be so hard. The sun doesn't come up for 30 days and then it doesn't go down for 30 days either. I think that would be really hard for me. Rhythm, for sure. You guys are in Minnesota where it's real cold. So like in the winter.

We got natural cold therapy. Yeah. But you guys take any supplements, take any vitamin D or anything like in the winter? Well, what's interesting. I'm glad you brought that up. Our kids are from Ethiopia, which is right on the equator. And with adoption, you need to bring them to the United States to get all these tests done. Their orphanage was basically that kids play outside.

So they were outside all the time. Their vitamin D was in the low 30s. That's really shocking to live on the equator. Closer to 50. They have natural, like they're dark. They have that natural sunscreen right and so we're just aware that even though that they do get a lot of light in the summer because we're outside all the time like we live outside um it's important to supplement with them

um especially in the winter you know everybody's very very different um you know i'm fine in the summer but in the winter i definitely need to supplement and i usually recommend about a thousand i use per 25 pounds you weigh because every vitamin every cell of your body fat cell whatever cell has a vitamin d receptor and so that's why the need goes up so yeah if you look at studies on chronic disease and things relating to vitamin d levels there's a strong correlation to a whole lot of bad stuff if your vitamin D levels are too low. But you don't want to be ignorant and just go crazy, you know,

because too high is not good either. Right. Always ask your doctor. I think it can help with your insulin sensitivity and stuff like that too, right? Yes, totally. Bone density, all kinds, right? What about some other supplements? Gosh, I'm a big fan of supplements.

Yeah. There's just so many. Like, even when you think of... You talk about a lot of supplements in your book as well. Yes, I do. But, you know, just for example, most people, they start this keto diet and they're like, oh, I'm going to get some good quality salt. So they, you know, get on the sea salt or Himalayan salt, which is great.

But we live in a world where we don't get enough iodine nobody's eating oysters like craig right i don't like oysters and we don't have access to good quality seafood and so what most people don't know is you know morton salt is fortified with iodine right and so there's not sometimes of other stuff in it too like maltodextrin oh yeah it does there's a derose, and that's an anti-caking agent, but anything with O-S-E means sugar. So now salt has sugar in it. But I'm just saying, you know, it's good to switch to a good quality salt.

Oh, maybe just use a mix here and there. But a supplement of some sort of iodine. Oh, I see. You know, like getting your iodine in somehow. Like that's just an example. Like, sure, you're moving to a quality salt, but you're missing a key ingredient in your health. Low iodine could cause poor development in children. It can cause constipation.

It can cause low moods, low thyroid, lots of different things. Yeah, thyroid, I think, is a big one, right? Yeah. What about potassium? Since you're not eating like uh a lot of fruit you know where are you getting potassium from beef if you look at uh we got some of those charts you know in our book beef is one of the best sources but i think there's more you know you always think of an avocado yeah having tons well 100 grams of beef just a steak has almost as much potassium i mean it's loaded with that so yeah i mean i um

run a lot and work out a lot and sweat so my electrolytes needs are different than craig's um however you just have to be careful because if you're on high blood pressure medication or anything like that you just don't want to be like oh maria said take potassium so i'm going to take potassium because there are medical interactions so i never like to that's why i'm like dancing around your question right oh so you just ask your doctor you just use a supplement basically um yeah when i'm right if i'm in an environment uh where i'm sweating a lot yes right but it all depends on the person too like we have a lot of clients that come with chronic conditions right and they that could be from 20 years of eating nutrient deficient foods. Well, if you have a boost of vitamins, certain vitamins for their situation in the beginning,

it can help, you know, kind of top the tank up, right? And potassium can help with blood pressure too. So it's like one of those. But blood pressure medication usually has it already in it. Right. So that's why you don't want to like overload. It's just like migraines. That's something I see every day with clients and supplements,

not only diet, diets first, it's always first, but there are supplements that will make those, especially monthly migraines go away. Yeah. You know, cause diet isn't going to really help you at first,

but you take those supplements, they'll be gone in a month. And what about some other convenient things? Like, um, you guys make your own bone broth or anything like that or or do you like buy like store-bought bone broth like what are some things you guys do that uh help you stay on the diet i guess so in the summer i like to be on

my bicycle and like i anything that will help me like there's no judging there's really good products out there now i do like to make my own bone broth. But when it's nice out, like Wisconsin, we have like three months of good weather. I'm going to suck that up. Okay. So there's like kettle and fire broth. It's real broth. It's not like gelatin. It's thick. It's not like going to the store. But, you know, I get that shipped to me. My mom will drink that. She has a lot of like joint um, joint pain that helps her and stuff like that. But there are some good, and I like to support those companies because I don't want them to go away because they do make that transition a lot easier for people. I agree.

There's some great, uh, snacks out there. You taste it and you're like, oh, okay. That's pretty damn good. Like mission meats, beef sticks. Love you guys. We always have those back. They're like one of the okay, that's pretty damn good. Like Mission Meats beef sticks. Love you guys. We always have those back. They're like one of the only ones that doesn't have sugar in them. Even things like grass-fed beef, you know, butcher box.

You can get that mailed to your house. You don't even have to go to the store and you get quality stuff. I don't like to go shopping. I do not like to be under fluorescent lights and wait in line. And so most everything, I either hunt fish or it's mailed to me you mentioned a slow cooker yeah um what kind of things you guys cook in there i'm sure a lot of this is in your book and stuff like that too but um what are some favorites well there's grandma nancy's italian beef that's my mom she turns uh 70 in a week oh cool happy birthday mom um so there's grandma nancy's italian beef

that's super easy, you know. Short ribs are great. Short ribs. Oh, those are my favorite. Barbecue ribs. Like make a simple barbecue sauce and throw the ribs in the slow cooker. And then what you like especially is if I throw them into a broiler oven to crisp the skin up. So they're like falling apart, but you get a nice crispy burnt edge, you know.

Right. You could do chicken wings and then finish them in a broiler oven to get that crispy skin. You can even do my protein noodle lasagna in a slow cooker. I actually am editing a book right now. It's an Instant Pot slash slow cooker book. So it's not just, it's over 200 recipes, and it's not just Instant Pot directions. It actually gives you the slow cooker

too so if you still love your slow cooker like i do you can do it this way but if you want to do it in your instant pot this is how you do it you guys have have written books together right yeah yep our book keto was written together we did about half and he's the math guy so he does usually the um breakdown of nutritional information for me and meal plans and stuff in the cookbooks. That's great. And then you've written a bunch of books, right? I mean, you've written, it seems like over 10 books or something like that, right? Yeah, what's interesting is I was lifting weights and you just lost your job. And so I was a puddle because we tried to,

we were starting to adopt children and he lost his job. And so I was a puddle because we tried to, we were starting to adopt children and he lost his job. And if you know anything about adoption, when you lose a job, that means you lose insurance, which means you lose everything with that adoption. And when you spend on hold, yeah. When you spend like $20,000 and that goes away and you have no money,

like we lost our cars, we lost everything. And, um, I was a rock climbing guide and i had free membership to the gym so i'm lifting weights and this woman said maria you should write a cookbook of the recipes you make to help raise money for your adoption i don't want to cry and started but that's where it started and it just went gangbusters and now we have these two beautiful children and, um, yeah, that like, it gave me

a reason to wake up in the morning and, uh, that's where my happy place is. I'm an introvert. If you can't tell, um, I do like to help people, but, um, I would prefer to be in the woods hunting or something like that. And, uh, I just like to be in the kitchen and with my kids. And so that's why it's easy. How did, uh, this adoption like to be in the kitchen and with my kids. And so that's why it's easy. How did, uh, this adoption thing come about? I mean, you mentioned your medical issues, aside from that, like I told him, you know, like adopting kids from Ethiopia, Ethiopia is very brave thing to get into. Well, I told him, you know, when we fell in love, I was 17 and we got married. I wasn't even 21 yet. And I said, you know, told him about my, you know, when we fell in love, I was 17 and we got married. I wasn't even

21 yet. And I said, you know, told him about my, you know, PCOS and he's like, that's okay. We'll adopt kids. And, um, the man who married us, our pastor was from Ethiopia. Um, and he just encouraged us and it really is a beautiful country. Um, I just had so many friends that was, they, they have adopted or tried to adopt from the US and you know the children were with them for a few months and then the birth parent would come back and it just kind of I guess I was more afraid of

losing brutal I know losing these children that I love yeah where you know we cross the border they're your kids they're your kids you know there we cross the border, there are your kids. There's no way of going back. So that was part of it.

You know, and it was, like you said, our pastor at the time, he was there a lot. So we started looking into the country. And it was a beautiful place to visit. I think there's two million or actually more than that under the age of 13 orphans in Ethiopia. And what was really sad is when we were walking around the streets during this whole adoption process of Ethiopia, these little 13-year-old shoeshine boys, they call them, because they got kicked out of the orphanage. And they were begging to shine my flip-flops.

And I'm like, here's some food. That's their destiny if they don't get adopted before 10 or 12 or 13 and they're out on the street. It's crazy. Yeah. And then what was it like like when you, and I'm sure it was a rigorous process to get them, right? Yeah. What was it like once you had the kids, like the first couple days and stuff? I mean, was it chaos?

Oh my gosh. You know, it was. They were afraid of everything. A one and two year old. A one and two year old. Okay. Yeah. And they didn't know really what a bathtub was.

So here we come home and they're filthy dirty. Or a car seat. They didn't know what a car seat. They never were in a car before. So our first trip from the orphanage to the court, they screamed and cried. Yeah. And then we finally got them to stop screaming because in Ethiopia you can hold children in your arms in the car.

Car seats. Okay, so then we get to the United States and they have to be in car seats in the back. Oh man, they screamed. It's a long drive from the airport in Minnesota to our house in Wisconsin. Screamed all the way home. And I'm looking at him like, oh my gosh. And the flight from Ethiopia to here was like a day and a half.

And so we didn't really eat. So we were really hungry. We had screaming kids and then dogs in Ethiopia were very aggressive most often. And so children are usually afraid of the dog. So then we go pick up our dog from the kennel, throw her in the back seat and they're screaming and crying. and then I put them in the bathtub they're screaming I'm like what did I do and honestly like it that was the first day it was scary and ever since then like I mean you met them they're like freaking cool like they're just like they I don't want to cry on you but they're like made for us. Like they are. Yeah, they really were like it was written in the stars. Like it really was like this whole like I remember when. It's got to be an interesting feeling.

You know, you go through all the time to get them. Oh, my God. And I'm sure the date probably changes a bunch. And then you actually get them and you wake up the next day. And oh, they basically said, here, you can go. You can go to Ethiopia to get them. And I'm like, Oh my gosh, I'm a mom now. Like it was kind of freaky,

but I remember when he first lost his job, my mom's, you know, I was always, you know, sad. And my mom said, your kids weren't born yet.

And that really stuck with me that, you know, they weren't these two, these two are mine. Like I, we're, we're like doppelgangers. Like they're like my little buddies. That's awesome. That's really cool. Like, we're like doppelgangers. Like, we really are.

Like, they're like my little buddies. That's awesome. That's really cool. You know, with my, you know, my children, my daughter is 11, my son is 14, and, you know, I just, I can't imagine my life without them. You know, it's, I don't even, I barely remember what any of that was like. Yeah. You know, they're just, they're just. Just part of you. Injected into your life and there you go. It's never a dull moment, but I think it makes life just so fun.

Like it, you know, there's definitely like hard times. There really are. But they do like. I just love living through them again as a kid. Yeah. Playing with Legos and stuff, you know. Yeah. It gives you an excuse right yeah

anything else over there andrew um you said you homeschool them what is this through a program or is it just like all you it's all all me um you know there's guidelines there's tons of guidelines and you know i'm right now it's pretty basics you know just math and reading and you know, right now it's pretty basics, you know, just math and reading and, you know, fundamentals. But eventually you want to do what's called unschooling. It's kind of where instead of following like standardized tests and guidelines, you follow more of what they're interested in. What's the Tesla guy's name? Elon Musk. Elon Musk.

He actually started a charter school that was an unschool so that his kid had some place to go. That was that type of learning. They kind of just lead their own path into what they're interested in. And they kind of drive the learning based on what they're interested in. That sounds awesome. Well, what's nice about that is we have two very different learning styles with our kids. One is very advanced and he picks up like he he says he dreams in numbers and he really does. Like he, you go out there and you ask Micah, like, what's like, you know, 20 times 39. And he'll just be like, I'm like, I need my phone. I need my calculator.

Right. Um, but he'll just like, yeah, he just turned nine and he's very advanced where my other one's more of the artist. And so what's nice about unschooling is, I mean, I always assumed that my children would go to college. Like that's just what you do, right? But I saw him work in a cubicle for so long and it sucked the life out of him. And to know that you can be successful in different ways and you don't have to be that whole um square box type person and you can have a lovely life like it's just really odd to see me think this to this and yeah what do you go

to school for right i mean well and i just heard on the radio when we were coming in that steve jobs had a 2.4 gpa yeah he dropped out. Yeah, he dropped out of college. And he dropped out of college. Oh, yeah, but in high school it was a 2.4 GPA. It's just a lot of kids that structure doesn't fit with them. And I see that in one of my kids. You know, he would be the goofball in the back, you know, getting lost. And so it's just nice that we can suck him in with stuff that he really is

engaged by. And we're not skipping by the hard stuff it's just we engage him by getting him into this and then we move on yeah and so like where do you guys see that ending as far as homeschool i'm only asking because we homeschool our 10 year old and by we i mean my girlfriend homeschools her and i try my hardest to help out but she's flourishing like big time. Yeah. And she actually asked, she's like, so in junior high, what am I going to do? Yeah.

And our only answer was like, whatever you want to do. And that's kind of an unschooling part of it is once you have all that foundation built of knowledge and now it's what are you interested in, right? Okay. You know, you go, you know, like Kai is more into art. And so if that's his passion and he wants to learn more about art and do more and more of that, we'll help him and enable him to go down that path. And schools are different now. You can enroll them in one class. If you fail at, say, Phi Ed or whatever, that's my specialty.

I'm just kidding. ed or whatever that's my specialty i'm just kidding but you know like whatever area you want them to maybe be more social in a fied setting you can let them go to the school is like across the street like maybe a mile away so we could go drop them off for that hour like we pay taxes through the roof like they deserve to go to school if they want to um but they can go for just that hour we pick them up and they come back and do our school. There's programs like that. Or if math is your hard, math is a specialty, but if whatever it is that you struggle with and can't keep up with your kids, you can take them to that part. Do you guys think you're going to get bummed if like Kai gets a friend and he's like, oh, he goes to this school. Is it cool if I just like,

you know, bounce? But that's where we, well, that's where we like have them in after school activities like karate. So they make a lot of friends. It makes a lot of sense. And football and all of that. So they get that outing. That's awesome. Back to keto and diet and all that stuff.

How do you guys wean people off of just sugar? It's an addiction. Yeah, there's a conversation in the chat room right now just about soda. Like, I can't get off the soda. I'm like, oh, my gosh. You know, things like Zevia is a good transition. Zevia does a good job of making, like, cola, and they even do a diet Dr. Pepper one. Yeah.

You know, it's sweetened with stevia. And it's good, people. Yeah, they have, like, an iced tea also. And what I found really interesting about it is it doesn't have a lot of flavor to it. But I'm thinking like, man, if this was invented like 80 years ago, you would drink it. Yeah, you'd drink it and be like, whoa. But I like stuff like that. Like I just drink like tea regular.

I don't have a problem drinking water. But yeah, it's not easy for people to get over that and then some people transition into like a just a regular diet soda and they have like 15 of those a day yeah not good either and that's the thing they studied rats that you know they gave them either cocaine or sugar yeah and then they put a twist on it where the rats could choose the cocaine or they could choose a sugar and get a shock. They still chose the sugar with the shock. You do some messed up stuff to rats. I know, right? It wasn't me, I swear.

Rats are just trying to party and we're doing soda. Messed them all up. Yeah. So then for me, I see it as like people are just uneducated. They don't understand that right now this like kind of blandish tea tastes bland. But like in a couple of couple weeks it could taste amazing. Yeah, and just use some of those things like Zevia to transition. So you get the sugar out.

Maybe it's a diet soda with Stevia. But you have to get it out of the house, and that's what I tell people. It will call your name in the middle of the night if it's there. Nobody needs it in your house, not your kids. They don't need the crackers and anything like that. So getting it out of your house. Make the whole pantry open.

Yeah. We have parties at my house and then like people bring over like cookies and all kinds of different stuff. You're like, take it, take it. Well, as soon as the party's over, I just throw it all out. Yeah. I mean, I try to see if people will leave with it. No one ever wants to leave with it because they feel guilty.

Right. And I'm like, I know you're probably going to stop it in an Outburger anyway, but I'm always, I always just chuck it all out. And my wife will look at it and she'll be like, I can't're probably going to stop it in an Outburger anyway, but I always just chuck it all out. And my wife will look at it and she'll be like, I can't believe we just threw away all that food. I'm like, there's nothing else to do with it. Yeah, I know. You don't want to give it to people. And that was the thing.

We had this discussion with my dad about feeding starving people in Africa and how we're dumping Jif peanut butter because because it's shelf stable and I was like that stuff's hydrogenated crap you know like that's not feeding anybody that's just giving them substance they deserve real food yeah if your choice is no food or that that's a different scenario it was just a discussion

yeah so do you guys have like a timeline for people to understand like hey like right now it's going to be kind of rough to get going the first couple weeks can be that's where supplements help and staying uh getting your electrolytes up that's the key because what happens is when you cut out the carbs your body releases a lot of water retention that's the 10 pounds from the in the first week yeah but with that water is going to go a lot of electrolytes, your sodium, your potassium, your magnesium. That's where you have heavy legs walking upstairs.

Cramps. That'll make you feel like crap. Yeah. So you got to get those electrolytes in. And focus getting enough salt too, because you can't just drink more water. You're just going to pee more. So you need to make sure. And that's the thing, like breads, pastas, cookies, crackers, whatever.

Those have a lot of salt in them. And people don't realize a small McDonald's milkshake has more sodium in it than their French fry does. So a lot of the sweet things have a lot of sodium. And so when you eliminate all of those things, you need to really like don't be shy of seasonings and salt when you're cooking, which we've been told to stay away from. But if you set aside two and a half teaspoons of salt by your cooking vessel, most people don't even get that much when they're eating keto. You should get about two and a half teaspoons. So you have to either add it to water or somehow.

To your food. Yeah. I eat tons of salt. Salt will help you go poo. Yeah. It will. The colon needs salt. If you're constipated, that's another thing you should first try is upping your sodium

because the colon extracts moisture big time if the body's not retaining it. It's saying, I'm keeping this moisture. It causes constipation. So if you get your salt up, it fixes it. So you guys own a business together as well, right? Yep. And you got all these books. And what's the website?

MariaMindBodyHealth.com. And then we also have Keto-Adapted.com, which is kind of our support site. Cool. And then you guys have like a Facebook group and stuff like that too? Oh, yeah. Keto Adapted on Facebook. I'm Maria Emmerich on Instagram. And then Instagram, yeah.

I'm Maria Emmerich and C. Emmerich for me. Yeah, this is the video. It's just nuts. It's this baby. I put my phone under the water there. She's on the paddle board with a waterproof case. How did you not just freak out? Oh, man.

Just wait. Like the baby touches my paddleboard. No. This is crazy looking. Comes up right next and then it just kind of flips its tail. The babies are very curious. The mom is just kind of sitting back watching. But then a male comes and starts to fight.

Oh, gosh. And where was this? Maui. Just on a paddleboard. Yeah. How far out were you? Gosh, I was probably an hour paddle into the ocean. And you have to be careful because those winds pick up fast.

One time I almost got swept away. That's too late. Yeah, when the trade winds come in and start pushing, it's a problem. But in a second here, it comes up and basically touches her paddleboard. Yeah, skip ahead a little. It would be terrifying to be that far out into the ocean. I wouldn't be able to do that.

That's a big animal. They're gentle giants. I mean, that big flipper on the mom is probably 15 feet long. I live for this type of stuff. There we go. There's that baby. Holy shit. That's what she was saying right then too in the other.

Yeah. That's insane. He's right there. So with owning a business together, who does what? I usually, I do all the phone calls with clients and stuff. He does all of the stuff that really stinks like you know the website website you know the techie stuff you know and you know i i moved away about 10 years ago from my engineering background i was in health care and stuff but i moved to our business to focus

full-time but ever since i've been studying nutrition as well and biology to really understand this. So I help a lot of clients as well online with questions. Yeah, that's cool. And then do you guys step on each other's toes or is it so different that it doesn't separate? I could do it with nobody else but him. Like, honestly. Like in rhythm. Like we know these things I do.

She does these things. It's it is. It's like a little perfect dance. And sometimes each other's nerves at all. Oh, but, you know, like we'll talk passionately and we have to explain to our kids because they're there all the time. And they'll come into the office like eyes wide open. I was like, we're not we're not fighting. It's a passionate discussion about X, Y or Z, you know, like run a spell check,, dude, you know, something like that, you know, it's just simple things like that, but it's,

um, yeah, I could do it with nobody else. Cool. Well, it was awesome having you guys on the show. I appreciate it. We're so grateful. Strength is never a weakness. Weakness is never a strength. Catch you guys later.