The Keto Diet Podcast Ep. #016: From Vegan to Keto

January 15, 2017 By Leanne Vogel December 14, 2018

Interview with Jamie Rautenberg, a licensed psychotherapist, chatting about her experience switching from being a raw vegan to following a ketogenic diet, how it changed her relationship with her body, how she learned to listen, and how she eats today.

For podcast transcript, scroll down.

Show Notes & Links

• Feel awesome on your keto diet with The Keto Bundle
• Free 7-day keto meal plan
• Subscribe on iTunes or your favorite podcast app
• More from Jamie Rautenberg

Timestamps

• From vegan to keto (11:07)
• Listening to your body (14:29)
• BS monitor for health information (52:12)

Partners of The Keto Diet Podcast

Transcript

Leanne Vogel: You’re listening to episode number 16 of The Keto Diet Podcast. Hey, I’m Leanne from healthfulpursuit.com and this is The Keto Diet Podcast. Where we’re busting through the restrictive mentality of the traditional ketogenic diet to uncover the life you crave. What’s keto? Keto is a low-carb, high-fat diet where we’re switching from a sugar burning state to becoming fat burning machines. If you’re in need of keto recipe food prep inspiration, I’ve prepped a free seven-day keto meal plan exclusive for podcast listeners. The plan is complete with a shopping list and everything you need to chow down on keto for seven whole days. Download your free copy at healthfulpursuit.com/ketomeal. Let’s get this party started.

Hey everyone, happy January 15th. I have some awesome announcements and great things that are happening, but before I get into that, I have to share this awesome thing that’s happening this week. Well, it’s not happening, but I just, it’s so simple. You’re probably going to roll your eyes, but I have to share with you. It’s spaghetti squash in the instant pot. I don’t know what it is about winter, but I hate cooking even more than I hate it in the summer. Like, it blows me away that this is my profession.

It’s not that I hate cooking, I just very much dislike spending a lot of time in the kitchen when I could cut corners and like get on with my life and just eat and then do other things. With the spaghetti squash in the instant pot, I just cut it into quarters, and I take all the guts, and I put them in the compost. Then I put it in an instant pot for like eight to 10 minutes. I like it 10 minutes so it gets a little bit more squishy than it should. Then, while that’s cooking, I blend up some awesome ingredients in the blender like nut milk or coconut milk or even water. I’ve done water and tea once. That was pretty good with MCT oil and collagen and some cinnamon.

If I want to get crazy, I’ll put Chai space in there. Then once a squash is done, I put it in a bowl, and I mash it up with the milk, and it’s like instant porridge. It’s so good. If you want to heat up the milk, I just let it blend in my vita mix until it gets warm. Then I have a little bowl of porridge, and it’s like keto, and it’s really good, and you should try it. What we’re covering in today’s episode is transitioning from vegan to keto, overcoming negative thoughts about your body and doing keto “perfectly” so much more we’ll be discussing. The show notes for today’s episode can be found at healthfulpursuit.com/podcast/e16.

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If you have an idea for a podcast episode or want to submit praise over and above the review which you are about to leave for the show. You can reach me by emailing info@ketodietpodcast.com. We have an awesome interview today with Jamie Rotenberg. She is a licensed physiotherapist, intuitive counselor and writer specializing in trauma recovery. After a lifetime of medical misdiagnosis, she discovered she was living with late stage neurological Lyme disease in 2013. While receiving intense daily IV infusions, Jamie reframed her healing experience by creating the daily infusion.com. A wellness blog where she offers guidance on how others can begin to reclaim their lives through chronic illness, chronic pain and the emotional traumas we may hold within our bodies. Through much patience, faith and will, she continues to experience greater health as a result of embracing a holistic healing approach in all areas of her life that’s ever evolving.

Her work has been featured on Huffington Post, mindbodygreen.com and Elephant Journal. It’s her passion to empower others as they reconnect to their bodies so that they can feel safe and secure to express the undiscovered and emotional truths that lay underneath their skin. If I could interview keto people for the rest of my life on their experience on being keto, I would be a happy woman. This is my favorite thing to do.

I love having Jamie on the podcast. If you too love these keto experience podcast and you want me to do more of them, please, please, please email info@ketodietpodcast.com or leave a review saying that you want me to do that. That way I know what you like and what you don’t. Because other than that, I can’t tell what you want to see and what you don’t. If you love these sorts of podcast episodes and you want me to do more of them, definitely let me know and I will because I love doing them. The reason I wanted to have Jamie on the show was that there’s a lot of self-criticism within the keto space.

I wanted to chat with somebody who’s gone on the other side of it and loves and respects their body, while also seeing that they still have more work to do. As somebody myself who receives a lot of criticism from myself as well as others because I put myself out there in such a big way, I thought it would be a really good conversation to have between two keto ladies that are eating all the fats and feeling really great and accepting their bodies for where they’re at right now. Whether it be physical or mental, emotional or even the way that our bodies display symptoms. Without further ado, let’s get to this interview. Hey Jamie, thanks so much for being on the podcast today.

Jamie Rotenberg: Hey Leanne, I’m excited, thanks for inviting me.

Leanne Vogel: Yeah, you bet. For listeners that may not be familiar with you, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Jamie Rotenberg: Yes. I am a licensed psychotherapist and intuitive counselor. I specialize in working with people who’ve gone through chronic pain, chronic illness and trauma. I like to get into a lot of somatic work which connects people back to their body, especially after they’ve gone through any traumatizing experiences and medical issues. Which I have experienced.

Leanne Vogel: How did you find keto?

Jamie Rotenberg: I found keto when I started to realize that my obsession with being interested in healthy through my recovery from illness, wasn’t actually as being healthy as possible. Like it wasn’t true health. As a therapist, I was doing some somatic work with myself and realizing that I was a little bit disconnected from my body still and started looking at different ways. We see how that was reflected in my life and my choice. Eating was one of then that just became very highlighted that I was a raw vegan at the time, mostly. I’m mostly vegan.

I was trying to do the clean thing and being the conscious person, and not quite recognizing how many judgments were involved that. It was affecting me and my body started getting imbalanced again. It was a doctor who had mentioned maybe eating some meat here and there. I had this intellectual barrier to it, but I started looking up information. Eventually found your videos and other people’s videos about keto. There was a resonance with this especially because you talked about having and experienced being vegan. I know it’s a very popular choice when people are recovering. It’s the popular thing to do to detox. It didn’t quite work for me after a certain period. I was like, “You know what, I might as well try this.”

Leanne Vogel: That’s a scary thing. It’s the scariest thing. You went from raw vegan to keto, which I didn’t make that drastic for a transition, mad props to you on that one. What was that experience like? How did you even start?

Jamie Rotenberg: Well what’s interesting is that I actually, I started with, I didn’t feel okay to incorporate like red meats right away, so I tried to go light. For some reason, I was still in the mindset of restricting a little bit. I didn’t realize how much was going to be required when you’re switching from non-sugar burning state to the fat burning. I was still eating a lot of vegetables and just drizzling olive oil on everything basically and doing that whole thing. Then realizing that I’m so really hungry.

I ended up gaining weight. Just like, “What’s going on here? This is, my body seems ultra confused.” I just was curious about it, and I examined. I was like, “All right, what if I try adding this?” I tried to stay as compassionate as possible with myself as I added different things in, knowing that, that weight gain was just reflecting some imbalance that I didn’t know what I was doing, so it required further knowledge. I needed to learn a little bit more. That’s what I did. I just treated it as like this experiment. I started, I read your Fat Fueled, or I listened to the audiobook.

Leanne Vogel: Yeah, who reads books, come on.

Jamie Rotenberg: Right. I started structuring my meals that way, realizing that I wasn’t eating throughout the day. I was just haphazardly eating randomly, maybe sometimes later in the day I would have my first meal and then a dinner and not really eating enough. Once I started eating three solid meals a day just to reset my body and getting in this habit of nourishing my body with these foods, I felt so much better. That was the feedback that I required to get it. When I felt better, I was like, “All right, I’m going to keep going and just testing it here and there and tweak it when I need to.” Because they always change as we go.

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This creamy spread is non-GMO and ready to take your keto milkshake, rock off your latte or fat bomb to the next level. Even better, each jar of Thrive Market almond butter is made with only one, yes one wholesome ingredient, just almonds. No added oils or sugars in sight. Again, that’s thrivemarket.com/hp. Sign up for your 30-day free trial with Thrive Market today and get your free jar of almond butter. Do we ever, oh my gosh, so much changed. That’s the cool thing when you listen to your body, which it sounds like you are doing. It makes it a lot easier. I think what you are saying is, first we had to trust your body, and that must’ve been a pretty difficult thing to get over as well. Did that happen while you were eating keto or the trust and listening to your body, did that happen before?

Jamie Rotenberg: It happened before because I’ve gone through a period of having chronic illness. The way that I recovered a large part of myself through that experience was learning how to surrender into trusting that I didn’t know what was going to happen. I would have to eventually test different treatments to see how I would react. The key for me was not to judge any part of that experience. I started learning that, that everything that happened as a result of anything that we do with our bodies is just information. The moment we put a judgment on it, we create the stagnancy in our progress.

I was determined to heal my body so as I was doing that; I gained to trust in seeing these results. Of course there are times, and there are moments where I would go into my mind, and there would be that tendency to want to like I want everything to go faster and not understanding that the things that we looked at as setbacks are part of the progression and all of that stuff. I could still go there. Usually for me, as a therapist, the importance is feeling what was underneath that was always like the priority for me. It was just the drive I knew I had to have to heal. It’s what works for me regarding changing my body. I instill those values in the keto transition for myself.

Leanne Vogel: Which is phenomenal, because I know a lot of people don’t even know what’s buried under their feelings. Negative beliefs toward yourself, I don’t think so. We’re not encouraged to feel, and that’s unfortunate. Like you said, I think that your ability to overcome such momentous odds probably put a lot of things into perspective, wouldn’t you say?

Jamie Rotenberg: Absolutely. What I see with the people I speak with who go through similar issues is that it’s not just anybody who you consider is going through like a life-threatening illness. We all are conditioned to turn those signals off because we’re so afraid of how it might look or how we’re going to appear and how we want to control everything so badly without realizing that, that’s sort of what’s keeping us locked up.

Leanne Vogel: Let’s talk a little bit more about control. Because you came from a raw vegan and I was raw vegan, and I know how much control I had over every morsel that entered my body. How have you not gone crazy on keto? Like, what was it that, because there’s one way to do keto which I’ve done, which is macro counting, weighing, measuring, taping, like everything. Then there’s more of the fat field approach. How did you go about that for yourself?

Jamie Rotenberg: Well, I was fortunate enough to have you as a resource.

Leanne Vogel: Oh, thanks.

Jamie Rotenberg: I modeled myself after what you did. That’s not to say that I didn’t go a little crazy. Because I did, I was testing for a little bit. I was testing my blood glucose, and I was checking for the ketones. What I found was I would get the information that “looked good.” I wasn’t feeling quite right, especially in that weird phase of switching over. What I noticed is that, it’s probably a natural part of the process too, as you’re shifting in making any change in your life. You’re going to uncover some emotions about that change. What I started to notice going from more of the vegan is to this was that I had this addiction and I had to face that. I had some feelings about that. That’s really what, that’s what I think we call going a little crazy, as we start have all these things stirred up. We don’t always believe we can cope with it.

Leanne Vogel: How did you deal with like some of the emotions? I know for me, huge emotion is the emotional nourishment that I get from food. Usually, when I’m hungry, I have to ask myself, “Is it because I had a bad day? Is it because somebody said something not so nice to me? Like, am I hungry?” B my big thing is like, and I’m sure a lot of people are you know, had a bad day. Therefore I’m going to eat, and it makes me feel better. How did you deal with some of the emotions that came up from the switch?

Jamie Rotenberg: I needed to once again put on my scientist cap and explore. Really uncover what is creating a situation right now? Like, what is this really about? It comes from that feeling of this lifetime feeling of restricting. That this is just another way of I’ve been, I’m trying to control this whole experience of going keto. I’m just being reminded at this moment right now. If I have this urge to binge on something, then that’s my little queue to take a look at what am I not digesting emotionally. For me, it was looking at just the principles of how we digest our food, for instance. I would apply that to this moment that if we just eat a meal and we’re full, I don’t know, the half-hour later you get hungry again when your body hasn’t digested it.

It hasn’t been given the time and space to digest that meal, and you add more stress onto the body, it’s going to, you’re going to have some symptom that’s going to arise. There’s going to be a message from your body to tell you there’s something that’s up that you have to take a look at. That’s just what I would do when I would have those urges come up when I knew I was doing the right things or whatever. There was always something to look at emotionally. I would look at what’s the belief that I have behind this action right now. What is this belief that I don’t feel good enough, there’s something that I might experience right now that I’m not comfortable with.

I’m going to try and distract myself from this feeling and not fully digest it and add another stress by eating some chocolate and binging on that or going into a bag of chips and going crazy. Now I’ve just added all of this other stress that I have to now digest later as well or keep going and it’s going to eventually come out. I have just to feel it. I find that as a kid, that’s what I have to do. I have to go into this kind of childlike place by myself without projecting this emotion on anybody else and crying it out or getting frustrated and physically acting out that emotions to get it out of my body because that’s what needs to happen for me to digest it.

Leanne Vogel: Yes. When I realized that I could go into my car and drive and scream at the top of my lungs, it was such a liberating, like how have I not figured this out until like six months ago. I was just in my car, and I was frustrated and just started screaming and crying. It was the best emotional release. I think in today’s day and age, even when I say that I’m like, “Are people going to think I’m crazy?” I mean, emotions are there for a reason. After I had done that, I was so happy, and I felt so much better.

Often I’m guilty of it too, of coming home and not allowing those emotions to release and then I just bury myself in food. I mean it’s a thing that happens. I love your point on the emotions and beliefs behind all of these thoughts. I know that a lot of women listening are like, emotion is great, that’s all fine and dandy. I hate my body, and no amount of feeling my emotions is going to help the fact that and insert horrible thing about yourself, I’m fat, I’m chunky, I’m whatever, in a derogatory term toward yourself. Did you ever have those feelings about yourself and do your clients? How do you navigate feeling better about oneself?

Jamie Rotenberg: Absolutely. I think every human does to some extent has. For me, I am somebody who is sort of like intellectual knowledge junkie. That’s sort of how I started out as like, “I wanted to gain as much information as possible to understand my experience.” I didn’t realize that part of that was also avoiding all of these reasons that we have that all the voices that come up that tell us that we’re not enough as we are. The way that I always started out anything is just trying to explore what it is that creates that condition. Why is it that we as human beings have developed into a place where we’re shaming ourselves all the time? I started looking at things more generally. It’s like, “I don’t feel admitting, I don’t feel so safe in my body right now. I feel things suck, hating myself. What if I just zoom out for a bit and I take a look at why is this happening and why does everyone feel this way?”

I started to understand how these pressures can develop over time, not just based on whatever traumas we may have collected over time. Just little subtle messages we receive from society, the media and our parents and our friends. Just ways in which we’re taught to doubt ourselves through our environment. When I started seeing things from this little bit more of a general perspective, it became easier for me to see. I wasn’t alone and having developed these feelings. I felt a little less shame about it, that most people we all we’re in this together. There is something about feeling connected to something in that, which helped me have a little bit more compassion and soften to myself a little bit more. Once I was softened to why I had those beliefs and how it was created. Then I could start.

Like it naturally, I wanted to treat myself better and doing just maybe one thing that was different and felt truly loving and nourishing to my body every day. Just trying that one thing. Whether it was going for a walk, even if I could only walk around the block once. I knew I was getting some movement in. For me, it was like this acceptance plus movement of some kind created this transformation. I gather this information to accept how did I get here. Then there’s some internal movement and choice that I then make that builds that muscle to get a little bit stronger that I can, I do know how to treat my body right. As I start treating it right, I want to treat it right more. Then I start feeling a little bit better about my body. I hope that makes sense.

Leanne Vogel: Totally it does. To me, I’m a visual person. I imagine like just changing the lens of your glasses. I agree with you. In fact, I started spinning recently; I started going to like once a week spinning classes just to like get into the groove a little bit because I love cycling and I haven’t done it for so long. The teacher, bless her heart, I don’t think she meant anything by it. She had a bunch of music videos playing like as we’re spinning. All of it was of like, practically naked women that were all like super thin and like everything that I wish that I would’ve been, two years ago, three years ago.

It was so triggering. It would’ve been so triggering for me a couple of years ago. Like, “I need to be that and why doesn’t my body look like that way?” Like you were saying, that lens, I saw it as like, isn’t that unfortunate? Like, I hope that those girls that are in that music video wanted to do that. What are the other women thinking? Their bodies don’t look like that. Are they feeling really bad about themselves? I really want to give all the women a hug. Because we’re all in this together. You know but, a lot of people don’t think like that, and they have that other lens of, “I don’t look like that, therefore I’m bad, and I need to work harder on this bike.” It’s sad that it’s like this.

Jamie Rotenberg: That’s the thing, is we come to link our self-worth and our value based on these judgments and thoughts that we’ve collected and these beliefs we’ve collected. The truth is, none of those beliefs and emotions that we hold within us and the thoughts that we have within us determine our value. It’s just not true, that the willingness and to have the humility to feel all of your experience in life and see the truth of it and love that and be with that. That is actual, that’s where the value is. It’s not in all of the other stuff that we seem to think creates like our worth.

Leanne Vogel: Yes, totally. Within the ketogenic realm, because we’re both keto ladies, totally crushing the facts. I know for myself keto well, I understood body love and self-acceptance and all that stuff. It wasn’t until I went keto that it was sort of like a phased approach of eating enough fat and feeling like emotionally balanced. I didn’t feel as “crazy” as normal. My brain felt more balanced. Would you say that you had some experiences where body love and acceptance came easier when you became keto?

Jamie Rotenberg: Yeah. I definitely noticed that just because also there wasn’t this constant lingering hunger that I was living with without really realizing I was living that way doing the whole vegan thing. It was never enough; nothing was ever enough without meat. It’s how I lived for years. The majority of my life, I was a vegetarian. When I switched to keto, it’s like you feel the sensation of being full for the first time. Then you’re like, “Wait a minute, how was I treating myself before?” Because I thought I’ve done all this work on myself, I’m so proud; I do my therapy. Then it’s just like, “Oh no, girl. You’ve got some more stuff that you didn’t even see when you added more of this fat and actual nourishing foods and properly eating and the food timing and noticing that there is an entirely different way to experience life and it’s much more balanced.” Because we’re more balanced, we have more awareness.

Leanne Vogel: Way more, like way more awareness. I can’t remember what, so I stopped do Stevia for like a couple of weeks just because I was curious to see what would happen. Then I had a drop of it in some like coconut butter or something. Then the next day I woke up with a pimple and I was like, “Kevin.” My husband, “I got a pimple from the Stevia.” He’s like, “What are you talking about? How do you even know that it was the Stevia?” I’m like, “I just know.”

Jamie Rotenberg: The same thing happened to me. I did the same experience. I’m going to cut out anything that likes ads sweetness to things just to see where my addiction lies right now. Just to test this out. It totally, yes, it reveals stuff to you, and you just start seeing things.

Leanne Vogel: Which I mean, when I was vegan, I was like looking at old meal plans a while ago of what I ate when I’m vegan. There’s no way that I knew what was happening in my body at that point. I was eating like every two hours. I was always hungry, and now it’s like, you’re just not ruled by that hunger anymore. Just that deep insatiable hunger no matter how much you eat, it’s never enough, and I could just keep eating.

Jamie Rotenberg: There’s …

Leanne Vogel: I …

Jamie Rotenberg: Sorry, go ahead.

Leanne Vogel: No, I was just going to say, I think that creates a lot of space to do other things like listen to your body and maybe like go out with your girlfriends.

Jamie Rotenberg: Absolutely. That’s the cool thing also. It’s like, I love to go for a really long walk. I live in Los Angeles so I’ll go down to the beach. I used to walk and walk for miles and miles, but when I was doing vegan, I have to stop off and get like these, I get these little sweets here and there and little raw vegan sweets. Which are totally not even nourishing at all? There’s no nutritional value in it. I’m eating just things filled with agave and just tons of nuts, which had an effect on me that I didn’t realize until I went keto. All these stuff that it’s like, I can’t just do this leisurely walking without thinking about it even. When you go keto, when you start shifting this way of being fat fueled, which is actually where I’m really at right now, is being more fat fueled with a lot more flexibility. I can go for these long walks and not once do I have to think about that I didn’t eat. Because I’m not hungry.

Leanne Vogel: Like blowing my mind. My vegan self is like, “what do you mean you’re not hungry?”

Jamie Rotenberg: They’re so good, they’re so tasty. That you don’t even realize, it’s like, “That’s why I’m breaking on my chin all the time when I was vegan.” Okay, got it.

Leanne Vogel: It all comes together. I’m assuming that you probably have some self-care practice. Would that be fair to say? Do you have a self-care practice?

Jamie Rotenberg: Yeah. I mean, it’s, I always feel a little funny talking about this. Because I feel like the self-care practice is just, I just try to live in a healing state knowing that I’m never really done. I’m always going to be changing, and I’m never going to have them perfect. I live with this flexibility every day to not be as rigid as I once was. I call that my self-care practice. Which is not to be crazy with planning every single moment. That if at this moment I’m feeling a particular way in my body, I will listen to what it feels like at that time, what means. I’m going to not talk to anybody for the rest of the day. Go down by the ocean and take a bunch of pictures. I’m going to do that if it means I’m going to see a movie with friends, I’ll do that. It’s going to change all the time. I called both of those things self-care.

Leanne Vogel: I think that’s brilliant. It’s almost like an all-encompassing self-care practice.

Jamie Rotenberg: It’s just living every day, having the courage just be a human being in your body and all the sensations that come with it. Knowing that you get to decide how you want to spend that time. The more that you’re okay with not being this perfected being, the more you allow yourself just to follow whatever your body wants at that time. For me, I guess going through the experience of being sick at one point. I’m not willing to go back there. I’m just not willing to do that. I put down boundaries where I need to, which is a hard thing for me to do you initially, is shifting into being a, I’ll do anything person.

Like, if anybody asked me to do something, I would do it. I felt bad about canceling plans if my body wasn’t feeling right, I would force myself into doing things. It didn’t reflect well regarding my health, and that affected me. I got the very clear message of that. I’m not willing to go through that again. It’s enforcing those boundaries when I know I need have that space for myself. Then knowing when it’s time to engage with being social again. I go through these periods of being a little bit more insular and then I go out. The ebbs and flows like that. That’s just how I care for myself.

Leanne Vogel: I think that that’s beautiful, 100%. I can completely relate to the boundaries thing. I’m the type of person who says yes to absolutely everything. While that’s gotten me really far in life, it’s also super stressful and doesn’t allow me to like have any time for myself. It’s cool that you’ve developed a self-care practice that works for you. I think that that’s so great that you don’t have like, I’m the type of person who “needs rules.” I need to go for a walk in the morning. Otherwise, I won’t do it. Like I just won’t do it. I know that, that makes me feel good and that works for me. I love your approach of just like, every moment of every day I’m going to choose to nurture myself. That’s awesome. Maybe one day I’ll get there.

Jamie Rotenberg: I just like to know that, it can look different every day. Because the thing is I find that I was somebody who I always wanted to have that routine. Because in a way that routine can be helpful to get us to a place where we feel safe. For different periods in our lives, we might need to have that structures so that we can start to come back to our body and feel safe in our skin again. Then as we start to feel a little bit stronger in our body, a little bit more connected to ourselves, we can put in a little bit more flexibility.

Maybe my walk today will include just going to the farmer’s market and walking around there. Maybe it’s not going up and down all the hills to get a little bit more of a burn. I’m just going to stroll around the farmer’s market instead. I switch it up based on whatever is happening right now. For somebody else, it might be that there needs to be more of a structure initially when you’re developing the self-care practice.

Leanne Vogel: We both been talking a little bit about listening to our body and not forcing ourselves to do what we don’t want do. There’s a very separate conversation opposite to that of like, pushing yourself, you know like the fits post off. All the fits post off of like pushing yourself, and you’re not the best until you’re sweating. Whatever those things, I never followed the fit-spiration stuff. How do you listen to your body and know that you know, walking around the market is better than going up the hill? How do you know that?

Jamie Rotenberg: I think my experience is just moving through trauma and I’m working in trauma recovery teaches me that. Just because I think most of us, the majority of people in this world are walking around in flight and flight mode without even realizing it. It’s slowly killing us in a way. Just even on an emotional level, we’re disconnected all of the time. To me, I’ve learned that you have to get into that parasympathetic state to be able to hear any of the truth of what’s going on for you if you want to start healing things and you’re not happy with your current circumstances.

You’re going to have to look at that stuff. That’s why going for a slow walk around the farmer’s market is totally therapeutic. Because if you’re running around like crazy and like, “Go, go, go. Go harder.” You’re really reinforcing that trauma mode. You’re reinforcing this idea that “This is not safe, I’ve got to go harder. I can’t be okay as I am. I can’t be okay as I am, I’ve to go to push forward.” It’s just not allowing any room to breath, and how can anybody heal that way.

Leanne Vogel: I think that go, go, go at least for me is coming from that negative critical voice. I know a lot of people internalize that. Maybe it was from the bully in school or your mom that picked on you, saying certain things that were totally insensitive. What are some of the ways that people can effectively silence that negative critical voice? Any tips?

Jamie Rotenberg: For me it’s like, I like to go back to when I look at the way that children process the way that they deal with the world in a very natural way. That we’re educated out of. I try to model myself after what a kid would do. When we’re a kid, and we’re born into the world, we’re feeling it. We don’t really; there’s nobody putting a judgment on a baby for crying really. Even as we grow just a little bit, we’re getting the message subtly in little ways that it’s not okay to go through that expressive process, and then we shut it down.

For me, understanding that that voice was built out of that progressing, silencing from the world. It’s not our fault that it’s there. I think that getting caught up in the fact that it’s there. We stop ourselves; we judge ourselves that this voice is here and it’s our fault somehow. For me, it was key to understand that it wasn’t my fault. Once I understood that then it was like, “I don’t want to blame myself anymore.” It got quieter. It just got quieter when I started to have developed a better understanding of why that voice was there in the first place. That it wasn’t even really mine.

Leanne Vogel: Yeah, totally and it’s not yours. I know that my coach Summer Innanen, she was, I’ve shared her stuff constantly, she’s so great. She called it your doppelgänger and something that’s helpful for me is when I have that critical voice. I mean, it happens a lot. Like I put myself out there at a time. I get a lot of negative feedback and a lot of critical thinking inside of like, who are you to share this information constantly. Instead of listening to that critical voice, I say, “Well it’s not interesting. What are you trying to protect me from?”

That’s something that Summer taught me so well. Is just anytime I’m having that critical thinking or critical behavior, like my behavior if I start restricting my food or I’m like Jones in to weigh my body. Or you know, I feel like I’ve gained 5000 pounds, how could I possibly. The rigmarole of digging yourself into a deep hole that you can get yourself out of. It’s always like, “Well, I believe these things, where is that coming from? What is my doppelgänger trying to protect me from?” Often it’s like, “I don’t want to hurt. I don’t want to be judged. I don’t want to be rejected.”

Them I’m like, “Well, what are things that I could do that make me feel like I’m not being rejected, that I’m not being judged.” Usually, it’s spending time with friends and family that love me a lot or doing activities that make me feel like my body is powerful. Like spin class for instance. My thighs are ginormous. Like, I can spin until the cows come home and it makes me feel really good. Like, “Wow, my thighs are here for a purpose.” Like, “I got muscles in there.” Doing those sorts of activities like you said, can really like take yourself out of that critical voice. Would that be fair to say?

Jamie Rotenberg: Yeah. Like you said, those defenses are built for a reason. Like that voice got built to protect us from what we thought was going to be a threat against something. It’s like, it’s something that I think we all have and we’re not alone in that. Just reminding ourselves that it’s not who we are is so key and then we can see that a little bit more clearly and move in the direction of making different choices. Where we do feel more loved and more connected to the truth of who we are. Which is like you said, connecting with those who are our intimate connections, or doing things that fuel us and feed our spirit.

Leanne Vogel: Totally. Feeding our spirit is so important. Without that, we’re talking before we started recording of just you know when you’re not connected to yourself, and you’re pushing yourself, and you’re not creating these boundaries. You’re forcing yourself to do things you don’t love to do. Chances are your body at some point will just be like, “Nah, I’m good. I don’t want to do this and here is some adrenal fatigue, some thyroid imbalances, and some weight gain and have fun with that. Oh, don’t forget about the brain fog.” Although some of these body love conversations and talking about like listening to your body might sound a little bit, I don’t know, woo, woo, as my husband would say. When it gets down to it, your body is here, and it’s the only thing that’s helping us experience this life.

Jamie Rotenberg: It’s been hearing us. It hears our choices and what we say to ourselves and the belief that we have. What will come out is a physical symptom. There’s your real evidence that it’s not so woo, woo. It’s like, “No, there’s a reason that’s there, and that’s happening.”

Leanne Vogel: That’s very true. I know that when I was vegan, I used to struggle with these like massive stomach pains. They were, oh my gosh, like I can’t even describe. Well, the way I used to say it is, there’s a gremlin in my insides with a knife stabbing me. That’s what it felt like. A couple of months ago I had that very same pain. I was like, “What the heck, I’m not even eating vegan. I thought it was because of the beans and everything else that I was eating that didn’t resonate with me.”

I was going through a very traumatic experience. I was stressing about everything. That was my life when I was vegan. Like, I controlled absolutely everything that entered my body. When I started to get stressed a couple of months ago, it displayed in a physical symptom very quickly. It wasn’t the food; it was just that mind space that I was in at that current moment so that, that was very, it just took it home for me. Like, “Right, yes, okay I need to go for a walk. I need to do things outside of work and outside of this situations so that I can ground myself.”

Jamie Rotenberg: It was the same thing for me when I was obsessing over healing my body, and I was going through just medical treatments and like looking for what medicine could I take. What treatment could I do? I was like obsessing over trying to control everything through these treatments. I was getting worse physically. It just didn’t make sense because I’m doing all the “right things” and it wasn’t until I relinquished some of that hyper-vigilance that my body started to turn around. I saw the evidence of what happens when you release that control, and I couldn’t deny it.

Leanne Vogel: That’s so cool. I love that stuff. I mean, that’s almost self-sabotaging in a way. I see so many women in my practice, and I mean I run into people all the time. They’re like, “Then I did this, and this and I did this and this at this time in this weight and everything.” I’m thinking of my head like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t even keep anything you’re saying straight in my head.” It’s a form of, I mean there’s a couple of things. One is, not trusting yourself and that’s not your fault.

The reason you don’t trust your body is not that you’re bad or anything. It’s just because you were told that your body cannot be trusted, that’s first off. The second piece is, that self-sabotaging activity can be related in so many ways. Like I know, I have so many experiences of this rather where you know, when I was on the whole weight loss thing and trying to lose weight and all of this stuff. I’d lose the 10 pounds and feel great. Then sabotage the experience by eating a whole bunch or being mean to people and just not being myself. Do you have any experience of self-sabotaging as it relates to like listening to your body and stuff?

Jamie Rotenberg: Yeah. Only a lifetime of it. When you end up in a state where you’re chronically ill, I mean it came from chronically doing that pretty much. Because I learned very young that my body was not a safe place to be and I didn’t trust it from a very young age. I was in a constant state of fighting myself and like, “This is not good.” I was like, “The body is the enemy.” I was pushing myself through all these different things that in different addictions, I guess we could call them, with food. Then eventually like with alcohol and things like that. Then you would think it’s; you tell yourself that it’s normal to go out and tune out and have drinks after all the time.

Doing a lot of stuff like that is completely disconnecting from yourself. Which is another way of fighting your body? Because you’re not allowing like yourself to feel what’s there to heal it. If you do not feel what’s there to heal it, you’re working against it. That’s a fight, that’s me fighting me. I was chronically in that state and not even realizing how bad it was until I reached kidney failure essentially. It’s just like, “All right, there’s something you I got to look at. There’s a message in this that we get very sick from engaging in these addictions and these forms of avoidance of ourselves, life and allowing it to happen to us.” That kind of the constant with the food, with the restriction, that constant restriction is the same thing as restricting our emotional experiences that we have some heavy-duty feelings about what’s going on inside of us and we’re not willing to feel it.

We just don’t want to deal with it. We think that’s going to control it somehow. We think if we can control the food and do everything perfectly, it’s going to somehow magically make me feel better but the feelings aren’t digested, they’re still there. You’re just trying to exercise control of how can I cover this symptom up. It’s just another way to cover it up. That’s what addiction is essential. It’s escaping an emotional truth. This obsession with clean eating and doing all the right things. It will end up screaming back at you that, you still haven’t felt something. You still haven’t dealt with something eventually, because it is an addiction.

Leanne Vogel: Totally and it never makes you feel better.

Jamie Rotenberg: No. Then you’re shameful and guilty afterwards. Now you’re like, “Oh, here’s another reason to beat up myself.” Once you can start understanding like how it’s formed, it’s a little bit easier to see it wasn’t your fault.

Leanne Vogel: It’s sad that two women were chatting here that like, it sounds like you’ve been through a lot. I know that I have too. It took me; I got pretty low before I realized, “Oh yeah, whoops, okay I almost killed myself.” Really? Does it have to get that far? That’s really why I started like way back in the day. That’s why I started Healthful Pursuit. I’d been a drug addict and eating disorder stuff and all the stuff just compiled. I mean, if there is anyone listening that just hates their body that much that they have to do all of those things. Let’s make sure it doesn’t get that far. It really for me, now that I’ve gone through everything over almost a decade of being in recovery.

It’s well over a decade of being in recovery. Mine was a fear of my power. Just like, I have all these things that I want to share and all these stuff and oh my gosh, that’s scary. I can’t deal with that. That can be scary, and for others, it could be a totally different thing. That self-sabotaging, when I think self-sabotaging now, I think you lose 10 pounds. Then you gain it all back quickly because you’re scared of what that life will bring to you. That 10 pounds lighter, what does that mean? I mean, the deeper you self-sabotage, like you were saying, comes into like the activities that were engaging in that harm ourselves and our well-being and our ability to heal far, far, far beyond what our body looks like.

Jamie Rotenberg: With that obsession of trying to do all the right things. Like, even let’s say after you move through, you are not engaging in disordered eating or alcohol and drugs or anything anymore and you can go into that clean eating realm. Understanding that anything, like we have to be so honest with ourselves with how we’re engaging and healing our bodies and connecting with our bodies or not. Because that’s just as much of addiction as anything else. I certainly went down that path. That’s what keto highlighted for me even more, is seeing that “Oh wow, yeah.” Like, anything can be this addictive pattern to a avoid that power that we have. That responsibility that we have to take over our lives. Knowing that we can develop fate in ourselves. Well, maybe we’ve learned the opposite our entire life. We never believed in our self. That’s scary.

Leanne Vogel: It is very scary. I know like, I’ve interviewed quite a lot of people so far for the podcast. Some of the things they say are like, “That’s going to be triggering for some people.” It’s different for everyone. I just finished a recording, and it was fabulous. We chatted about sugar and strawberries and how strawberries are bad, and I was like, “No.” For some people, I know for me, if I don’t eat strawberries or like berries or I don’t have any like just something sometimes I will eat all of the candy. I have a sweet tooth, that’s just a thing. It’s different for everyone. I think in the space of healthy, like a “healthy helpful, clean living.” It can be a slippery slope like you said.

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Leanne Vogel: Something that I’ve noticed on keto is like; my BS monitor has gotten really good. I’m like, “No, this doesn’t like this doesn’t make sense to me.” If it doesn’t make sense to me, I’ll just like, cut it out of the podcast if it’s something that I’m sharing. Because I’m not okay with sharing that information. Or if I’m listening to something or somebody says something and I’m like, “No. I’m just going to let that flow.” It doesn’t mean that I can’t get information from that person. Sometimes you have to use that meter.

Jamie Rotenberg: Yeah, I mean and it’s … Sorry, go ahead.

Leanne Vogel: I was just going to say, the more you know yourself and the more the relationship with yourself is built, the easier it is for that meter to get pretty strong, I would say.

Jamie Rotenberg: Oh, yeah. That requires vulnerability. Which I think is the strongest top-quality that we could develop having that humility and vulnerability to say like, “We don’t have all the answers.” People and I included in that. When you get involved in that clean eating thing, you could think that this is the answer to everything that everyone should be doing juicing, and everyone should be doing this.

You go, and you tell your friend about all the documentaries. I went down this huge rabbit hole of thinking, “This was it, and everyone should subscribe to this.” When that’s just, it’s like a façade, and it’s not true, and it’s not vulnerable to the truth that we’re all different. Much of what I followed seem to be like wanting to create this image of how maybe with the intention buried deep down in there of wanting. That’s like, little desire to be better than where we are. It eventually snowballs into this appearance of health. Which isn’t the truth. It’s not real.

Leanne Vogel: It’s fake. It’s all fake. It’s scary when we start to see it like that. I mean, 20 years ago it was weight loss, and now it’s health. We were forced to look at our bodies as wanting to lose all the weight. Now it’s like, “If you’re not clean eating you’re not a good human.” There’s so much more to life. If I cared as much about all of the body things that I did five years ago, there’s no way that I would have a business. There’s no way that this podcast world is a thing. There’s no way I would have a mortgage. Because I was so consumed with all of that stuff that I had no time for anything else. Let’s chat a little bit about, maybe, because you mentioned that you’re more on a fat field protocol now than a strict keto protocols. How was that transition for you from like the strict keto protocols to the fat field protocol? How did that help you get a sense of everything?

Jamie Rotenberg: I noticed that what got triggered was like when I started doing the keto. It’s just; I want to do everything perfectly. That was my queue that those feelings were still in need. That it was like, I’m still trying to do everything right. This is just because I soak up all the information I could get on doing keto perfectly, doesn’t mean my body is going to react exactly how people are talking about. I think I started to feel a little bit off when I was getting rigid and controlling. It was good and helpful for a while to notice that to get some like I said, I needed the structure at the time. Because I didn’t know what to do or where to start.

It was a good starting point for me to switch over to a different perspective and understand how does it feel to incorporate this lifestyle. Then what is my body, how is it reacting? Then tweaking it based on how it’s reacting. That’s where the fat field approach came in and showed me that, it didn’t have to be this way. Because my body after a while was not reacting so well. It was showing me that it wasn’t maybe the total picture. I needed to go through some like grieving process to be like, “I can’t be in ketosis.” It’s like, “I wanted to do this.” It’s like, “I wanted to do it perfectly. If I eat just a little bit of carbs that’s over 30 grams, then I’m not going to be in ketosis.”

Somehow the defined my worth, again. Now I’m not going to be a valuable person if I’m not in ketosis all the time. Where if I have like 50 grams of carbs. When in reality, before I was eating so much more than that. Why am I now just like laterally moving to this other place of beating myself up. This doesn’t make any sense. When I read Fat Fueled, it was like, “I can breathe better. I’m starting to feel happier because I get to enjoy my squash more often. I get the enjoy my sweet potato chips. I get to enjoy all these things. I’m not restricting.”

I was still restricting, and I didn’t even really realize that. Having that restriction in there, being so strict was incredibly triggering for me. It was like, “This is making me feel all sorts of things.” My body is having; it’s telling me something isn’t right and balanced. I’m stressed, I’m feeling stressed, so that indicates an imbalance to me. Switching over to fat fueled, I started to feel more balanced and happier. I’m like, “All right, now I know. This is much more standard to where I am right now.” I don’t need such a rigid structure at the moment. I can be flexible.

Leanne Vogel: Totally. Well, I’m so happy you found it and that you made it your own. That makes my heart so happy. Because I was definitely in that place too. I’m like, “This can’t be the only way.” It’s so funny that you say that too. Because I know I was like at the 20-gram carbohydrate place. I was like, “Oh gosh, if I could just have ten more carbohydrates like I just need ten more grams.”

I struggled with it for months, months. Until I just said, “Screw it.” Now, as I can be in ketosis and like 80 grams of carbs. You nailed it right on the head of like, your body will dictate what it needs. If anyone gets anything out of our conversation today, what I took away from what you said is, it’s not about the food. Well, keto helps and it’s helped both of us so spectacularly. It’s not about the food. If you’re stressed about that carbohydrate amount or moving things around or you’re stressed about what people think about your body. It’s not actually about your body. It’s not actually about the food. Let’s dig a little bit deeper and see like what’s going on.

Jamie Rotenberg: I think that quality of life is affected. We have to look at that.

Leanne Vogel: Totally, huge. I actually saw my sister for the first time in three weeks today, and we’re super close. She looked at me, and she’s like, “You look fabulous. Your skin, are you drinking more water?” Like, “No, I’m explore-king.” This is a thing that Kevin and I have been doing. Where we get an RV, and we explore places. I don’t know what it’s done to my health, but it’s phenomenally better. It’s crazy. It goes far beyond what we’re eating. The fact that my sister said my skin is glowing, she’s like, “Are you pregnant?” Like, “Gosh, I hope not.” I

Jamie Rotenberg: No, I’m just enjoying my life.

Leanne Vogel: Yeah, exactly. Totally. Imagine that, enjoying your life. I totally agree with you and I really, really appreciate you being on the show today. Where can people find you if they want to learn more and see what you’re up to?

Jamie Rotenberg: My website is, thedailyinfusion.com. I have a YouTube channel under the same name, and I offer coaching sessions for just anybody going through a chronic pain and chronic illness and counseling. They can email me at info@thedailyinfusion.com.

Leanne Vogel: Good, well thank you so much for being on the show today Jamie. I’m glad we got to chat.

Jamie Rotenberg: Thank you for everything that you share and you do. Just your flexibility and your vulnerability and your courageous in how you share is just so valued and needed and just thank you.

Leanne Vogel: Thank you so much. I’m sure you know, being in the place that where at, online, you don’t really get to connect with people as much.

Jamie Rotenberg: No.

Leanne Vogel: It’s nice to hear like, I just throw stuff on the Internet and I’m like, “I hope people get something out of this.” It’s really nice to hear that there’s somebody out there that feels that way, so that’s really great. Thank you so much.

Jamie Rotenberg: Many people feel this way.

Leanne Vogel: Thanks to much for being on the show. I will include all of Jamie’s links and everything that she shared today on this episode. You can find the show notes at healthfulpursuit.com/podcast/e16. We’ll see you guys next week. That does it for another episode of the Keto Diet Podcast. Thanks for listening in, you can follow me on Instagram by searching healthful pursuit, where you’ll find daily keto eats and other fun things. Check out all of my keto supportive programs, bundled guides, and other cool things over at healthfulpursuit.com/shop, and I’ll see you next Sunday. Bye.

This entry was tagged: eating high-fat, eating keto, eating low-carb, fat-adapted, how eat keto, keto basics, keto diet, keto for women, keto life, ketogenic diet, ketogenic for women, ketosis, low-carb paleo, vegan, what is keto