Having a hard time sticking with the diet? Use these tips, foods, and tools to help you along in your journey. It is so important to follow the diet, but unfortunately, that doesn't make it easy to follow. Having certain tools in your back pocket can help you stick with the diet.

Tips:

Have a clean, open, and uncluttered kitchen.

Make your grocery list throughout the week.

Never go shopping when you're hungry

Foods:

Almond flour for keto bread.

Keto fat bombs for satisfying your sweet tooth.

Cauliflower as a utility food for many substitutes like rice and macaroni.

Tools:

Food processor to blend food or make things like cauliflower rice.

Spiralizer for creating zucchini noodles.

Slow cooker or pressure cooker to have food ready when you come home.

As always, subscribe to our show on iTunes and leave us a 5-star review if you like what you heard!

And join our Facebook group – The Ketogenic Benefit Group – for more support, tips, and helpful people to keep you motivated. Cheers!

It seems like there is always some sort of objection to the ketogenic diet. Whether it's heart disease or kidney failure, there is always some fear making way into the minds of people looking to start the diet. While you may not have heard of these objections before, they are bound to come up at some point or another. You should be prepared to understand why the diet is not dangerous. We go over 3 of them in the show: heart disease, thyroid scares, and kidney concerns. Follow each link to our articles (with tons of research references) to learn more about each situation.

Heart disease is not a disease of cholesterol. If it was, then we would see problems all over the vascular system - not just in the tiny space of the coronary arteries. Don't be worried that your cholesterol goes up. You will have a healthier heart than most.

Your thyroid function will go down. But is that a bad thing? Does that mean your thyroid is hurt? Or maybe it means your body is more efficient with less thyroid activity - which would be a good thing. Because all of your thyroid hormones decrease, that means there is no build-up anywhere along the signaling cascades - so your body does not think it needs thyroid hormones. There are even studies that show less thyroid activity means a longer life. Decreasing your thyroid activity it a good thing! Please don't worry about it.

Your kidney will be just fine! The only objection people have with the diet in relation to kidneys is that the high amount of protein can be harmful. Who said the keto diet is high in protein?!?! No one! It is moderate to low in protein. Anyway, high protein diets are only harmful if the person has pre-existing kidney dysfunction. Those kind of people have to watch their protein no matter what die they are on. There is nothing a high protein diet can do for a perfectly normal kidney.

As always, subscribe to our show on iTunes and leave us a 5-star review if you like what you heard!

And join our Facebook group – The Ketogenic Benefit Group – for more support, tips, and helpful people to keep you motivated. Cheers!

What is the thing about sugar that makes it so bad? As you can guess from the title, it is fructose. This simple sugar plays a major role in metabolic disease and addiction. We go over what fructose is, why it is so addictive, why it leads to metabolic instability, and what to do moving forward. If I had to sum everything up into a single sentence, it would be this. Stay away from fructose, and especially keep it from your kids. The kids are the only shot we have at rooting this out of our society. We, as adults, have already become addicted to sugar. We fully accept and embrace it in our society. But the kids haven't experienced that yet. They still have hope, and I truly believe that is how we will get rid of this nasty substance. As Max Planck said, "A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

As always, subscribe to our show on iTunes and leave us a 5-star review if you like what you heard!

And join our Facebook group – The Ketogenic Benefit Group – for more support, tips, and helpful people to keep you motivated. Cheers!

Resources mentioned in the show:

Robert Lustig's review on fructose:

Lustig R. (2013). Fructose: It's "Alcohol Without the Buzz". Advances in Nutrition 4(2): 226-235.

Research on how fructose leads to metabolic problems and organ fat:

DiNicolantonio JJ, Mehta V, Onkaramurthy N, O’Keefe JH. (2017). Fructose-induced inflammation and increased cortisol: A new mechanism for how sugar induces visceral adiposity. Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pcad.2017.12.001.

How does insulin play a part in the ketogenic diet? It is actually front and center into allowing your body to go into ketogenesis. Most people think eating fat gets you into ketosis. That is only partially true. The counterpart to that idea is that you need to keep your insulin down. So a high fat diet is not enough - it also needs to be low carb. It is the "low carb" aspect that allows you to generate ketones.

Insulin is a hormone in your body used to get glucose into cells. It is also the hormone responsible for storing that glucose when your cells don't want it. It stores the glucose as glycogen in muscles and the liver. When those stores get full, insulin then converts the glucose into fat for further storage.

Thus insulin is the energy storage hormone. If we want to go into ketogenesis, then we need to make sure insulin is not around to store our energy. Rather, we want to use up that energy. That's what ketones are. They come about when your body cannot store energy and has to do something else with it. The energy substrates get sent down a different pathway when insulin is not around.

Keeping insulin levels down is not just good for a ketogenic diet, but it is a good idea no matter what. Hyperinsulinemia can be to blame for a lot of physiological diseases. Most importantly, it helps our bodies become insulin resistant. When there is so much insulin around, your body responds to it less and less.

So, we want to keep insulin down, but we actually don't want it to go too low. If there is absolutely no insulin around, then our body starts burning fat to an extreme nature where we go into ketoacidosis. However, you don't need to worry about this coming from diet alone because our bodies always have a base level of glucose and insulin around no matter what we eat. Keep your focus on making sure insulin is not too high, and your body will take care of it getting too low.

As always, subscribe to our show on iTunes and leave us a 5-star review if you like what you heard!

And join our Facebook group – The Ketogenic Benefit Group – for more support, tips, and helpful people to keep you motivated. Cheers!

General information on the roles of insulin:

http://www.vivo.colostate.edu/hbooks/pathphys/endocrine/pancreas/insulin_phys.html.