Video 18 Transcript:
Transition from S.A.D. to keto
It seems like every single day, a trove of new people hear about keto, along with its amazing results. Now they’re ready to start keto to get amazing results of their own!
Then reality sinks in. Sure, eating lots of delicious fat to drop weight quickly sounds like a good idea…but many people don’t even know where to begin. After all, we were trained from a young age to fill up on “healthy” whole grains and fruits. How is it even possible to go from eating a diet made up of 60% carbs to less than 5% carbs?
Is that where all of these keto success stories are coming from? Are these people dropping 20, 40 or even 100 lbs by starving themselves?
Watch this video until the end to learn 3 ways to easily transition from your S.A.D. diet to keto.
Perhaps I just offended you by calling your current diet SAD. If you’re following the nutrition guidelines set by the government, your diet is in fact a SAD diet. The acronym SAD stands for Standard American Diet. I suppose it’s just a funny coincidence that this diet leaves many Americans actually feeling sad because they dutifully follow these government guidelines and now they can’t button their jeans!
If you’re coming from a SAD diet, my first tip is always going to be to start with low carb!
While a lot of keto experts will advise you to jump head first into the deep end by lowering your carbs below 20 and eating healthy fats by the fistful, I’m here to let you know this is setting many of our hopeful keto friends up for failure.
Basically you’re asking your body to switch from a fuel source its run off of its entire life, glucose, to switch to a fuel source it hasn’t utilized since you were a baby – ketones. And if you drop all of your carbs all at once, you’re asking your body to make this shift overnight.
While perhaps this may sound like an ideal plan to you, it is in fact not an ideal plan for most. Once you drop the fuel source your body knows and loves all at once, your body is going to HATE YOU! Your body is going to hate you in the form of diarrhea…it’s going to hate you in the form of baseball sized constipation… it’s going to hate you in the form of feeling like you’re going to pass out because even though you’re eating fistfuls of fat, YOU ARE STILL SO FREAKING HUNGRY!
And those are just a few of the side effects that can happen when you expect your body to switch fuel sources overnight.
To add to all of this misery, you might even be gaining weight if you’re forcing a high fat diet that your body isn’t quite ready for.
To avoid this, I recommend taking a more gentle approach to lowering carbs and raising healthy fats. You can start with the approach I talk about in My Big Fat Life Transformation, where you start by lowering carbs to around 20 grams per meal instead of less than 20 grams per day. While you make this shift, you can then begin to raise healthy fats to a level you can appropriately digest.
This brings me to tip #2 on transitioning to keto. If you’re coming from the Standard American Diet, you likely spent years, or maybe even decades, filling up on “healthy” whole grains while attempting to eat less fat in your diet. In fact, the little fat you did eat was probably the kinds of fats that can be toxic for most of us.
Perhaps you think your digestion is just fine and you don’t need to improve this aspect. Let me tell you, if you’re running to the bathroom singing diarrhea cha, cha, cha, every single day, advancing to keto where you need to eat more fat isn’t a good idea. You need to get your loose stools under control for your own sanity, but also to find success on keto. But improving digestion doesn’t end there.
If you spent years eating low-fat foods filled with grains, your digestion can likely use some work. While there’s nothing sexy or exciting about working to improve digestion, this pretty simple step can save you tons of time and frustration. It’s also the 1 step that got me out of the yo-yo weight regain cycle I was stuck in for over 20 years…and before I began to improve my digestion, I had no clue it was even broken!
But it was broken and in a major way! For decades I dealt with debilitating migraines, daily headaches, cycstic acne, constant junk food cravings, frequent sinus infections, painful gas, nausea…especially everytime I attempted to lower my carbs, anxiety, depression, insomnia…and the list just goes on and on. I thought all of these problems were hereditary and just the health cards I was dealt. It turns out…every single one of them was tied to the fact that my body wasn’t able to digest the food choices I was providing appropriately.
I failed diet after diet for more than 20 years because even though I was eating, my body was really starving for nutrients since I couldn’t break down what I ate properly. Once I followed the steps laid out in Kick Your Fat in the Nuts and the digestion course, I was finally able to stick to a low carb diet long term for the 1st time in my life. I lost more than 100 pounds, which I’ve been able to easily maintain for over 2 years and all of the health problems I listed all improved drastically, if not cleared up completely.
My final tip to making a smooth transition to keto is to keep it simple. As I talked about in last week’s video, there are many different versions of keto you can follow, all with intricate details. Trying to figure out how all of these different approaches work is enough to drive a person to eat carbs!
Many people make keto far too complicated. They think they need to meticulously calculate every macro and then feel like they failed their keto diet if they eat 1 carb too many. This can cause a lot of keto newbees to throw in the towel much too soon.
Many also obsess over how much fat and protein they need to eat and work hard to fit every macro into their day, whether or not they’re hungry. While some stuff the macros in, others go back to a starvation keto plan where they limit their calories to under 1200 per day because some 5 ft tall keto expert who weighs 90 pounds soaking wet told them they need to eat less than 1200 calories each day to find keto success.
Yes, if someone is only 5 feet tall and weighs 90 pounds, he or she probably only needs to eat 1200 calories to feel good….but if you don’t come in this petite package, you likely need more nutrients to find success.
The point I’m trying to make here is you need to keep keto simple by learning how to listen to your body. If you calculate macros, but you’re not hungry, don’t stuff food in just to hit those macros. At the same time, don’t starve yourself to hit your goals either. I can tell you after more than 20 years of attempting to control my calories like that, it just doesn’t work.
You may be asking…so how do I begin keto if I’m not obsessively measuring every macro? That’s easy! You can start by sticking with the low carb food you enjoy. Low carb foods typically include eggs, meat, cheese, nuts, some veggies and fat sources.
Put together meals you enjoy that are low in carbs and then add some healthy fat.
I personally feel like the only thing you really need to track at the beginning of keto is carbs. I mentioned earlier that carbs are the most important to keep low. If you’re not monitoring carbs at the beginning, it can be very easy to go over carbs since you’re so used to consuming these as your main nutrient.
In the Keto Decoded course, we teach our members to use a macro tracking app like Cronometer and a food scale or measuring cups to determine the carbs they’re eating each day. Some people can track carbs and then listen to their body as far as eating enough fat and protein are concerned, and that’s all they really need to do for keto success. Others will need to dial in their fat and protein macros.
Start with keeping carbs low. Once you got that part down, you can focus on adjusting your fat or protein as necessary if you’re not seeing the results you want by just keeping carbs very low. At the beginning, keep keto simple so you stick with it.
So there you have it – my 3 tips for a smooth transition to a keto lifestyle. Let’s quickly review:
Tip #1 – Start with a low carb plan
Tip #2 – Check in with your digestion
Tip #3 – Keep keto simple
Start with these easy transitioning tips and you’ll be a keto success story in the making in no time!
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I’ll see you next Wednesday to tell you all about one of our success stories from our Keto Decoded membership. Suzanne lost more than 65 pounds in less than a year. I’m going to talk about some of the steps she took to completely change her life! My hope is you pick up some tips to make a huge lifestyle transformation of your own!
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