The Keto Diet Podcast Ep. #078: If You Can’t Do It, No One Can

March 25, 2018 By Leanne Vogel July 18, 2018

Solo episode, chatting about my approach to keto with allergies, what “true keto” is and what I think about it, the horrible things I tell myself sometimes, and so much more.

It’s been a minute since I last recorded a solo podcast episode. I love recording these episodes because they feel like I’m just hanging out with my friends, chatting and catching up; you guys had some great questions for me this time! Taking a minute to reflect helps me ground myself, and I really appreciate the opportunity to pause after what feels like a constant stream of go go go.

There were a lot of questions about how I approach keto — how I deal with keto in times of stress, how I deal with criticism about my version of keto, and how that criticism translates to my own self talk. The content of this episode was a great reminder of why I do what I do. Ultimately, I want every woman to feel confident about their own journey, including myself.

It can be really overwhelming to embrace ourselves when we have so many voices telling us all the ways we aren’t “enough,” and sometimes, the loudest voice can be our own inner critic. I hope this episode is a reminder that you are enough, your way is the best way, and this life is yours to live — if you can’t do it, no one can.

In today’s podcast, I’m chatting with YOU and catching up on your most asked questions.

This episode is all about how I do keto, what I do to overcome the doubt from others, how I practice self kindness, and more.

Let’s get to your questions!

For podcast transcript, scroll down.

Show Notes + Links

• Subscribe on iTunes or your favorite podcast app
• Check out more solo episodes: #60 My Keto, Tattoos, and Dreams, #35 Exogenous Ketones and Cravings, #28 Favorite Keto Foods from Expo West 2017, #18 Keto Prime, Depression & Carb Ups, and Keto Side Effects, #10 Signs of Ketosis, Adrenal Dysfunction, and Hunger, #7 Personality Influences Diet, #6 Carb Ups and Fasting, and #1 Wait, What? Welcome!.

Timestamps

• What I think about “true keto” (23:23)
• How to balance keto with allergies (29:24)
• The horrible things I tell myself (46:08)

Partners of The Keto Diet Podcast

Transcript for This Episode

Leanne Vogel: You’re listening to Episode Number 78 of The Keto Diet Podcast. Today we’re chatting about how to balance keto with allergies, what true keto is and what I think about it, the horrible things I tell myself about myself sometimes, and so much more, so stay tuned.

Hey, I’m Leanne from HealthfulPursuit.com, and this is The Keto Diet Podcast. Keto is a low-carb, high-fat diet where we’re switching from a sugar-burning state to becoming fat-burning machines. Starting keto and maintaining it long-term can be quite a challenge if you don’t feel supported.

My 60-day program, The Keto Bundle, provides you with clear, step-by-step how-to on successfully adapting to a ketogenic diet, avoiding common ketogenic struggles, and healing your body completely and fully with a ketogenic diet. Go to HealthfulPursuit.com/bundle, and use the coupon code PODCAST all in caps, no spaces to get 10% off your order, exclusive for podcast listeners only. Now, let’s get this party started.

Hey, guys. Happy Sunday. I can’t believe it’s almost April, what the heck? It’s crazy. I am in New Orleans right now recording. We’re going to be chatting about why I’m in New Orleans and this huge project I’m working on in a little bit, but I’m here sitting. The sun is coming in, my laundry is being washed, so if you hear a little song go off, that’s my laundry and I’m pretty excited about it because I got a lot of loads to do.

The show notes and full transcript for today’s episode can be found at HealthfulPursuit.com/podcast/e78. Let’s hear from one of our awesome partners.

I like to take extra precautions to support my gut during cold and flu season. The stress of daily life work and traveling can take a toll on anyone’s immune system and none of us have time to get sick, am I right? I like to take a strong probiotic as a way to repopulate my healthy gut bacteria, which leads to a stronger immune system. Wolfe Clinic Royal Flora is my choice for soil based probiotics.

Wolfe Clinic is offering 20% off their probiotics to US and Canadian listeners of The Keto Diet Podcast. Head to HealthfulPursuit.com/gut and use the coupon code GUT, all in caps, no spaces at checkout to receive 20% off. Unsure of the link? Simply check out the show notes of today’s episode to get all the details.

Two great announcements today. The first one, and if you listened to Episode 76 a couple of episodes ago, you heard about this in great detail… I’ve been working on a massive project over the last four years. In fact, as soon as I found keto, I had this dream of this amazing 12-week program guiding women through how to eat keto, how to heal their bodies with keto, and the ins and outs alongside with a doctor, a lot of coaching and encouragement and things like that.

Finally, after four years, that’s why I’m in New Orleans right now. We are recording all of the videos for this program and putting together the last little touches on it. Again, we actually chatted about this in Episode 76 where we had my friend and colleague Dr. Nina on to chat all about this new program.

If you want to learn more about Happy Keto Body and what it has to provide for people, we’re going to be launching here in a few weeks maybe-ish. You can head on over to HealthfulPursuit.com/member to sign up to be one of the first to know more when the program launches. This has been a dream of mine for so long and to be able to work closely with a doctor and putting together so many of the scientific pieces of keto, specifically for women and how our bodies respond to the ketogenic diet and how to adjust the keto diet to work for us in a scientific level so we can really understand what’s going on with our body, it’s just a dream come true. I’m so excited to be able to share this with you. Again, it’s HealthfulPursuit.com/member to find out more about it.

The second announcement is every once in a while I record wicked solo episodes to share my own experiences. In fact, the last time I recorded a solo episode, I was basically in a very similar place. I had rented a place. I was hanging out on the bed, just chatting with you guys. That’s where I am right now, just straight chilling. If you’d like to check out previous solo episodes, I’ve included links in the show notes.

We are going to jump right in today. I really wanted to focus on sharing my experience and using that as a way to encourage those that may be feeling frustrated, discouraged, or in a slump. I don’t often talk about really all the, not negative things, but just all the challenges I have as a person living in this world eating a ketogenic diet, trying to be “healthy” while also respecting my body and allowing myself to go with the ebb and flows of life. There are challenges that pop up. I mean, all of us have them, it doesn’t matter. Even if I look at my social media account, sometimes I get jealous of my own life. I’m like, “Oh, right. Yeah, no.”

There’s a lot of things that happen in our life that don’t share on social media. I think, because of this, so many of us really push ourselves to be a version of ourselves that can’t exist because we are looking at other people on social media and thinking, “If they have this life, why can’t I?” I really wanted to do this episode on really reminding you and all of us that it’s okay to be discouraged sometimes, it’s okay to be frustrated, it’s totally normal, and we don’t always have to listen to everyone else’s opinions and we don’t have to dwell on those opinions. We don’t have to dwell on other people’s successes. We don’t have to dwell on our own failures. We need to discover where we’re focusing our time and energy, and if that focus is making us feel like hot garbage, perhaps we should address that and get it out of our lives.

There are a lot of issues that you guys have chatted about in our community nonstop lately. Every time I read them, I’m like, “Aw, man. I want to talk about this,” and then there’s never really a place. So, let’s get started.

The Keto Diet Podcast, including show notes and links provides information in respect to healthy living, recipes, nutrition, and diet and is intended for informational purposes only. The information provided is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, nor is it to be construed as such. We cannot guarantee that the information provided on The Keto Diet Podcast reflects the most up-to-date medical research. Information is provided without any representations or warranties of any kind. Please consult a qualified physician for medical advice and always seek the advice of a qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding your health and nutrition program.

The first one that I get asked quite a lot of is, “Do you jump right into keto 100% and then just ride off into the keto sunset or did you have missteps? What does it mean if somebody keeps starting and stopping?” When I found keto back in 2014, I went hard at it for like six months. About the six month mark, I started having a lot of issues. I couldn’t go a full day eating low-carb, high-fat. I was always “cheating on my diet.” I was starting to feel really restrictive. I wasn’t having a good time sleeping. I ended up going off keto for a little while because I was just binging so much that I was completely out of keto at that point. I still had bulimia so I was binging and purging. It was a hot mess and I had to do a lot of soul searching because it was difficult.

Anyone who’s been eating keto, even for a couple weeks, you know it’s like you find this diet and it makes you feel so good but there’s so many restrictions that you can’t “control yourself.” I’m going to try not to cry because I totally know what you’re going through and I know it really sucks when you found something that makes you feel good but you can’t stay on it because you feel like you can’t control yourself and you’re constantly binging, maybe even purging. I don’t know, but you feel completely out of control. Once I got back on keto and I tried to give it another “try,” my whole thing was like, “I’m going to set the intention to eat low-carb, high-fat, but if I don’t, whoop-de-do.” That was really helpful until I started renovating our house.

We went through house renovations a couple of years ago. Things were really stressful. The budget doubled. We didn’t have the money for it. We were freaking out because our house was completely ripped apart and we couldn’t pay for it. I started restricting my food a lot because I felt out of control. The only way to bring control into your life is to restrict your food, right? That’s what I thought back then. I went to the restrictive mode. I had worked so hard on the eating disorder tendencies that I didn’t binge or purge or anything like that, but I started restricting a whole bunch, to the point where I then started eating a bunch of carbs and binging again.

I made actually a video, I think it was on Periscope a long time ago, and I put it on YouTube after of just being in my car crying because I couldn’t stop thinking about food that wasn’t keto. That was really the last straw of me being like, “You know what? This whole diet thing is not working for me.” That’s when I made a promise to myself that I would never put any rules on myself of what I would eat or not eat.

Since that point, I’ve actually been able to maintain a ketogenic diet quite effortlessly. For me, I jumped off and got back on the “keto wagon” a couple of times and 100% I had missteps. I still have missteps. Recording in New Orleans has been such a dream of mine, but it’s also like if you’ve ever, and I’m sure you have, pushed yourself to accomplish a dream, it’s really scary and I have been overeating more than normal because I’m stressed, because I’m scared, and this is just a normal thing. Knowing that, it really lessens the load off me.

When I’m like, “Oh my gosh. I’m overeating. Why is this happening? Okay, I’m overeating because I’m stressed, I’m scared. There’s a lot of fear there. How am I feeling?” Just asking myself that allows me to give myself permission to just feel the feelings, all of the feels and move forward. I hope that was helpful on the whole starting and stopping thing.

Then, there is another question that kind of falls in line with that. That is lack of consistency. Are there ever times when you feel frustrated with a lack of “consistency?” Oh, man, girl. I live in an RV full-time. Nothing is ever consistent. When I go into Costco in Sacramento, it’s a completely different Costco than in El Paso. When I go into Whole Foods in New Orleans, it’s completely different than the Whole Foods in Philly. I never have the same food. I never know where we’re going to be, when we’re going to have food, how that’s all going to work, and I think this complete utter disruption in my life, and really it has really felt like that, has been one of the most challenging things I’ve ever had to do, but it’s also I can already see myself thriving in this environment a lot more than a couple of weeks ago even.

I don’t know if frustrated is the good word for it. I think that when I feel like things aren’t consistent and I’m not seeing like steady growth in something or when I’m trying to “lose weight,” if I’m not seeing the weight come off in a certain way that I want it to, then I get flustered. I just want to control more. If I can’t find avocado oil mayonnaise — which doesn’t exist in the South, I can not find it anywhere in any Costco — when I don’t find those things, I feel out of control. My way, my sign that I’m feeling out of control is when I start to immediately look at food or my body and I start to judge myself. For me, lack of consistency shows up when I am judging myself or being really hard on myself.

When I am judging myself or being really hard on myself, I have to step back and be like, “Wait a minute, Leanne. Are you feeling out of control in certain areas of your life?” Right now, that is definitely the amount of travel that I’m doing. I now travel for a living. 100% it’s hard, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I think at the end of the day, if the life you’re living leads to not having consistent growth, then you really have to ask yourself, “Is it worth it?” For me, being able to travel everywhere and see new experiences while also working a whole bunch and getting to do that allows me to get to see the world and experience it while also working my butt off. If I was still sitting in my house in Airdrie, I’d be staring at a wall right now working and I will have done the same things every day leading up to that point. I just wanted more excitement. You just need to see which one resonates best with you. If that leads to inconsistency, is it worth it? If it is, then great, keep doing that thing.

Another piece that I get asked about a lot is breaking keto. How do you “justify” when to break keto? Justify is in little air quotes if you couldn’t tell. I don’t really justify anything. I think the moment you feel like you need to justify something, that really feels yucky to me. I don’t really like “justify,” I don’t like that word. It has the “just” word in it, I hate that word also. I don’t eat keto when I feel like it. For me, you know, the other day, we were out for dinner and Kevin really loves Chili’s and I really don’t totally love Chili’s, but he really wanted to go and it was really important to him. He’s been so sweet with just everything lately. Work has been just crazy for both of us and he’s been so supportive and amazing. He said, “I really want to go to Chili’s.” I’m like, “Cool, let’s just do it.”

I’m at Chili’s and I’m like, “I could really go for a drink. I need to get a little tipsy. That’d be really great.” Then I’m kind of going through the process of, “Okay, then I drink. Then I’m not feeling so good, but I feel happier. Then I don’t feel so happy. I’m going to have a hard time sleeping. Then I’m probably going to crave sugar in the morning. Do I have time to crave sugar in the morning? I’m craving sugar because I’m off keto because I had alcohol.” Always, when I have those sugary drinks at Chili’s, I’m totally off keto and it takes me like 24 hours to get back on. For me, it’s just like, “Do I feel like doing that? Do I want horrible sleep and do I want to wake up with sugar cravings? Do I want to have all those experiences right now?” No, then I won’t have it.

Whereas a couple of weeks ago, we were going for a movie and I knew I didn’t really feel like popcorn, but I knew I wanted something snacky. I knew it wasn’t like a keto snacky thing. We went to Whole Foods and I picked up a little bag of dried mango. I had that at the movie theater. I don’t know if it’s a justification, it’s just like I feel like dried mango. I’m going to have it and move on with my life. With the dried mango, it doesn’t really affect me. The next morning, I wake up, I’m not hungry. I end up fasting because my leptin has been reset. Then I have dinner and I’m feeling pretty ketogenic by that dinner the following day. Then I wake up and then I’m back in keto. Everything is hunky-dory. I think you might be overthinking it if you’re like, “How do I justify this? What are my macros on that?” It doesn’t need to be that complicated.

Another piece to this is missteps. A lot of the questions around, “How do you just pick up where you left off and move on with your life?” This is a little bit more tricky, especially if you’re coming from the diet mentality. Like I said earlier, I do keto because it makes me feel good and my body likes feeling good. I like not having ADD anymore. I like being able to have a bowel movement every time I eat. I like being able to have my menstrual cycle completely aligned with the moon. These things are important to me. Keto allows me to have this. When I do things “off plan,” I mean, I’ve been doing things off plan for the last two years and I’ve never been healthier or felt better in my entire life.

I think there’s a lot of trust that you need to put in yourself and your body when you first start this practice. That can be scary, but, really, at the end of the day, if I’ve gone down the rabbit hole of feeling really bad for myself, perhaps I ate too much last night and I’m just feeling guilty and yucky, I just close my eyes and imagine my 80-year-old self. Here I am at 80 years old. What am I thinking about? What matters to me? What activities do I do? Who have I surrounded myself with? I would say probably 99.9% of the time when I ask clients this, they think of this wonderful strong woman who doesn’t give a care about anything and is surrounding herself with amazing, loving people. Why can’t we be that woman today? Why do we have to wait until we’re 80 to have that? That really helps me get out of the funk and stop dwelling on my missteps.

Next piece is expectations versus reality. The question is, “How do you set realistic expectations on yourself?” It could be because I’m a Type A and if I want to do something, I just do it. I don’t really set expectations. I mean, my expectations are so, so, so high that I usually stress myself out a lot. Anyone on the Healthful Pursuit team will attest to the fact that I have very unrealistic expectations of everything. For myself, really the only thing I expect of myself is to be kind. If I do everything with a goal of just being kind to myself, you really can’t mess up on that, right? If I wake up in the morning and I stretch for five minutes, maybe I don’t do a whole yoga practice of 60 minutes, but I did five minutes, I’ll count that as me being kind to myself because at least I did something.

I think a lot of people would be like, “Oh, at least I did something? That’s not enough.” That’s definitely the attitude I would have had a couple of years ago, but ain’t nobody got time for that. I think, like what I was saying earlier with social media and stuff, we put such high standards on ourselves. I look at some of the accounts that I follow for our full-time RV living life and I look at these people’s lives and I’m like, “I want that. Why can’t we have this? Our RV doesn’t look as beautiful.” Then I’m like, “Wait a minute. When I edit my pictures and I make them really bright and everything, it looks exactly the same.” That’s not at all how the house looks. It’s way darker than that and all those things. That’s just a tiny little example of all the things that add to us feeling like we’re not good enough. I think if we just come from that kindness, “How can I treat myself with kindness? How can I treat others with kindness?” It really allows you to have realistic expectations.

Next one is chatting about keto perfection. A couple of people have asked, “Do you struggle with perfectionism? If so, how do you deal with it?” Like I said, I am a mega perfectionist. It’s something that I think I’ll always need to work on. In another way, it’s like if I didn’t have that perfectionism, I don’t think I’d have a blog. I don’t think Healthful Pursuit would be a thing. I honestly don’t think I would be married to Kevin because he is such a perfectionist and as am I. I don’t think I would have appreciated that as much when I met him. I mean, he is like an ultra perfectionist, I am nowhere near where he is. It’s pretty interesting, the two of us.

I do struggle with perfectionism. How I deal with it is usually other people will have to tell me that I’m going way too far. I just get so stressed out because I want something to be so perfect and it comes at the cost of other things. There will be days where I do not eat, and I’m hungry, I’m just so in the zone that I can’t even bother to get up and eat. That’s just a small example, but that’s just because my perfectionism, that I can’t just take a moment for myself. That affects my self-care.

For me, this might be you as well, if your perfectionism affects something like self-care, which is important because if you don’t care for yourself, then you end up like off the deep end, just being a hot mess, then it’s really important to put that structure in place where every morning, 20 minutes self-care, no exceptions. Just do it. I hope that that was helpful.

More of our solo chat after this message from one of our podcast partners.

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True keto, this is a thing that a lot of people have been saying lately. One person asked, “How do you trust yourself to do your own version of keto?” Then, the followup, kind of the naysayers of what I’m about to say, and, “How do you deal with the negativity from people who differ with your version of keto?” This also ties in with the next question which is, “How did you move away from the 3:00 PM comparison hour and do you still struggle with this?” This is kind of like all intertwined.

I trust myself to do my own version of keto, which is very much keto, it’s just like more alkaline vegetables, to be honest, and a couple carb ups here and there, because I did a carb up once and I tested my blood and it came back that I was still in ketosis, and so I did it a second time and did the same thing and I got the same results, and a third and a fourth and a fifth and sixth.

For almost a year I did that. I was experiencing results one day at a time. I was experiencing results, I was monitoring my blood, I was still showing that I had ketones in there. I was feeling good, my hormones were coming back online. I ended up getting my period. I think it’s like day by day. What’s the worst thing that can happen if you change one thing today, just one thing? If that thing is removing Splenda from your coffee, do it tomorrow. Replace it with stevia. If you feel like hot garbage, don’t do it again. If you’re like, “Hmm, I don’t know. I feel exactly the same,” keep doing it and see if things improve. What’s the worst thing that can happen? That’s a big thing.

How do I deal with negative people? I’ve gotten much better at this over time. I think for me especially, I’m sure I get a lot of negative comments, but I don’t read them anymore. As soon as I feel like it’s a little bit of negativity, I just close the window or move onto the next comment. I don’t really get a lot of it in person and I know that there are people that I know in person that may not agree with my version of keto, but they are very respectful, just like I am with how they practice keto.

If there’s anyone in your life that’s being super disrespectful either online or in person, I just don’t understand why you would still be around those people. I say that knowing that some of you are like, “Yeah, but family.” So what? That may sound harsh, but there were very, very close people in my life, family included, that I have cut out of my life because they didn’t make me feel good.

That might sound horrible, and maybe it is, but we only have one life and because when I was younger, I dealt with a pretty serious eating disorder, to the point where there was a period of time, about three years, where I was doing a lot of drugs, I was very sick, and I’m very surprised sometimes that I didn’t die. I’m not exaggerating that, I was very, very, very sick and very far gone and hanging out with very wrong people. Looking back at that, it’s like… life is way too short, regardless if they’re family or friends, if you chat with them and they’re not jiving with what you’ve got going on, it doesn’t mean that later you’ll be a stronger person and you can deal with that and you can choose to have them in your life. I just don’t have time for it, you know?

When you start to see just how quick life is over, you can tell now just, oh my gosh, it’s already March. It feels like January was just a week ago. Oh my gosh, now it’s July. It goes by so fast. Why would you fill your life with people that don’t like you or don’t like the way you eat? Who cares? It’s your body. It is your body. You can do whatever you want to your own body. It’s your own.

With the comparison hour, I mean, I do have my moments where I think, “Oh, she has a better business than me,” or, “How come she’s doing this and I can’t? Her book is better.” I always compare myself to women. That’s clear just by listening to myself right there. Somebody will always be doing something different than you.

It’s neither good nor bad. It’s just different. Those results might lead to different things, but neither of them are good or bad. I think what’s really taken this home for me is I was very, very excited to do the Kelly and Ryan piece in New York. It’s something I have dreamed about since I was really little. For those of you who don’t know, I was invited onto the Kelly and Ryan Show to chat about keto right at the New Year. It was going to be huge, great for the book, great for keto, just everything, and my body screamed at me to slow down. It was the most excruciating pain I’ve probably ever experienced. My entire spine tightened up. My neck got all twisty. It wouldn’t let go. All the muscles were just really, really cramped.

That was really hard on me mentally, emotionally, psychologically, just dealing with that. Suzanne from Keto Karma ended up going in my place. There was a piece of me that was like, “Oh my gosh. I just gave up this huge opportunity. Stupid body. Stupid, stupid body. Why? Why now? Now Suzanne gets to go and it’s going to be so great for her. It can’t be me. This sucks,” but life went on.

It was like, “Okay. I have to deal with this thing. My body is yelling at me to take care of it. I just need to focus on this.” Ever since that happened, I actually haven’t had a 3:00 PM comparison hour. This is where I just sit on Instagram or wherever and just compare myself to others. Hey, yay.

The next piece is keto with allergies. I don’t think a lot of you might know just how many food allergies and sensitivities I have. When people are like, “I can’t do keto because I’m allergic to avocado,” or, “I really don’t like coconut. I can’t do keto then,” I’m like, “Girl, you have no idea. Listen to this.”

I’m sensitive to oxalates. I can’t eat a lot of kale anymore or spinach. Oh my gosh, so many things. Apple peel on my carb ups, I now have to peel my apple. This is a genetic mutation. I begged my mom to get tested for it, too so we’ll see how that goes. My sister played around with it a little bit too. We were chatting about it. It sounds like maybe she’s sensitive to it, too. This is a thing that multiple family members can have. I can’t do a lot of the lower carb vegetables that are lower carb. Then, I can’t do nightshades. I’ve never been able to do nightshades. These are like tomatoes, peppers, eggplants. I can do a little bit of potatoes but not a lot. Anything spicy, totally off the table, which sucks because I’m in New Orleans and everything is nightshades.

I can’t do seeds or nuts because I’m a gut healing protocol, which is really, really, really working. I chat about this a lot, like so much in Happy Keto Body. It’s incredible. Definitely stay tuned for that. With the gut healing protocol, basically very much AIP keto. No nuts, no seeds, no eggs. Those are kind of like the big, big ones, including seed spices like cumin. Cumin’s like my favorite of all time. Cumin.

Just knowing that, kind of looking at what can you have on keto? If you follow me on Instagram, you see that I still eat all sorts of yummy things. I think keto with allergies is totally doable. Keto with any sort of any other protocol, totally doable. You just have to get a little bit creative or not even creative, like uncreative. There’s nothing wrong with just cooking meat in coconut oil and serving it with a side of greens and calling it a meal. Don’t over-complicate it.

We chatted about this next one, social media versus what’s reality. I just wanted to kind of push you in this direction. I think it’s so easy to dwell on failures. Sometimes social media can make people feel like, “I failed while other people are succeeding. What am I doing wrong?” A lot of people, you know, say, “Social media’s so inspiring for me.” I see it as actually being quite harmful. Yeah, it can be inspiring, inspiring, inspiring until it’s not anymore.

I like to think of willpower very much like a muscle. Well, I don’t know if it’s a muscle, really. Maybe willpower is like a glass of water and every time you use a little bit of willpower, you drink a little bit of water. Weeks from now or, in your case, years, in the terms of willpower, you won’t have any water left in the cup. There’s no way to fill it up. This is like water in a cup in a desert where there’s no water ever, ever. No rains, no nothing. When it’s empty, it’s empty.

I really feel like this is like comparison. There comes a point when you just won’t have water left in the cup. That is your comparison or your willpower. There’s nothing left. You can’t get it back. Now you’re just super jaded and binging all the time or comparing yourself and hating on yourself and saying horrible things to yourself over and over and over and over again. It can be really, really harmful.

My suggestion for you is surround yourself with people on social media who are awesome and make you feel good. The interesting thing is, sometimes certain people make me feel good and sometimes they don’t. There’s some accounts that I follow that I really, really love and then they go in a different direction and they start showing more of their body or more of their workouts. I’m like, “Why can’t I work out like that? How come my body can’t look like that?” Then I’m like, “Okay. Time to unfollow,” because those are not good thoughts to think.

It’s not to say years from now you can’t follow those people and feel more confident and true to yourself. That’s definitely been the case for me. In fact, when I was recording Episode 73, if you haven’t already listened to Episode 73, I highly recommend you do. It was so interesting because I used to follow Isabel Foxen Duke long before I started on this work of being kinder to my body. The stuff she would say, I was like, “Girl, you crazy. You do not make any sense. I don’t understand this at all.”

When we had the conversation on the podcast recently, I was like on fire. I totally understood what she was saying. I was totally getting it. I was like on par. I was like, “Yes, preach. This is so great.” We can really change in just a matter of a couple of years. Our confidence changes, how we view the world changes. Some of the people we couldn’t follow before we can follow. I just think if when you go on your phone, you start to feel bad about yourself, start to look at the people that you’re surrounding yourself with.

The next one that people ask a lot of is, “How do you deal with being the only keto person in the household?” Kevin, my husband, wasn’t keto for like the first I guess three years that I was keto. I didn’t really think it was a big deal. I guess, I cook the food and if you’re not okay with that, go make your own food. I’m going to go grocery shopping. I’m going to make the food that I like. You know, because Kevin really liked carbs then, if I was making sloppy joes, I would add the fat to mine later, puts some nuts and seeds on mine, serve mine on keto buns or greens. Then, Kevin’s, I just put his on a bun or on rice. We were really having the same meal, I was just outfitting it with different things.

As long as I did that, it was really easy. We actually had Kevin on the podcast the previous episode, Episode 77. If you haven’t already listened, definitely do. Kevin is a lot more passionate about keto than I am even now. He’s really, really into it and loves his carb ups every once in a while, has gotten a lot more in tune with his body. It’s been really fun to watch because he wasn’t at all like that before.

I think it’s just a matter of if you’re making the meals and, you know, other people aren’t, then you call the shots. You just kind of deal with it. With having other foods in the house, for me, it was no big deal because Kevin really liked gluten and I’m Celiac so I couldn’t really eat any of his food anyway so it wasn’t even an issue. Then, I think it comes down to if you have those foods in the house that they’re your binge foods or they’re hot ticket items and you’re always feeling like you need to eat those things, I would have a conversation with your family and say that it’s been really hard on you and see if you can open up that line of communication. If that’s not an option, then I would highly recommend listening to the podcast episode I did with Isabel, Episode 73. I think that would be really helpful.

There’s been some conversations about mood swings and keto so I just wanted to talk about that. Some people saying “keto peaks and valleys, bad attitude about the process.” I know that my mood has massively stabled since I started keto, but I know when I started, what gave me mood swings was when I didn’t experience the results that I wanted to experience. I don’t know if that has anything to do with keto.

In fact, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t. It’s the fact that we’re putting ourselves into ideals that maybe don’t fit our body. This is the example I use a lot of the times. It’s like I know that in order to be a size zero or a size two, I will need to cut one of my hipbones like totally off, just gone, because there’s no way even if I was skin and bones, when I was at a certain period of time, I was still a size seven. When I weighed under 90 pounds, I was still a size seven. I couldn’t get smaller than that because my hipbones are huge. I have the largest hipbones.

When we put ourselves into these spaces where our bodies just can’t get to, of course we’re going to be moody and upset because we’re not getting what we want. I think it really comes into the attitude that we have about the process. I think it really has to do with our attitude toward the whole thing and the kindness that we have for our body and the process. If you’re in the keto flow and feeling fantastic and you jump on the scale and all of a sudden you hate your life, maybe don’t jump on the scale. Maybe just skip that. What’s the big deal if you’re feeling great and healthy and awesome and you have more energy? Just go with the flow and see where it takes you.

The next question is, “What can a lack of faith, unrealistic expectations, and negativity do to a keto experience? How can these thoughts negatively affect someone’s process on keto?” Oh, man. Remember I was telling you that story about two years ago or so, I think it’s been more than two years, that we renovated our house and it was a complete disaster? Oh my gosh, crazy town. I’ll never do that again. Well, I’ll never say never.

I was so stressed out at that point that no matter how ketogenic I ate, I could not be in keto. I was dealing with so many blood sugar highs and lows and cravings. No how much keto food I ate or how many times I fasted or fatty coffees that I had, it didn’t make a difference at all. That is because cortisol will drive our insulin, which will make it impossible for us to stay ketogenic. This is a huge take home piece. If you’re stressed, even if your diet is stressing you out, you are not going to be in keto.

Let’s switch gears just a little bit and chat more about confidence. I wouldn’t say that I’m a confident person. I kind of just fake it all the time. I’m not sure I’ll actually make it. I don’t know. If I look back five years ago, well, I have to look further back. I would say in high school, I remember being so not confident in myself that I wore this big Mountain Equipment Co vest. It was this down puffy vest and I wore it over all my clothes. Regardless of what I wore under my vest, I always wore my vest. This is probably because I was massively underweight and really sick and probably freezing, but it was also because I had no body confidence and I wanted no one to see my stomach ever, ever, no one to see my stomach.

In some of the pictures that we have on Keto Diet Podcast and a bunch of things on Healthful Pursuit, there’s some belly shirts where you can almost see my belly button. That was such a huge thing that I was taking those pictures in public and wanting to post them on the website of just, “Yeah, this is my body. This is the way my body is.” That’s been a huge thing for me, but it really can’t be taught.

It’s just a matter of… maybe it’s an age thing or just constantly working at it. Confidence is a really interesting thing. I think we’re told that we need to look a certain way and if we don’t look that way, we can’t bother to be confident or we have no right to be confident. I think body confidence is one thing, and then we also have diet confidence or health confidence. Oh my gosh, when I started the ketogenic diet, my family had an intervention thinking this was the most unhealthy thing ever and why am I doing this to myself. Over time, I’ve been able to equip myself with resources and practices that help me lay a foundation for myself.

I think you can do the same by getting a bunch of information from a bunch of different places and knowing that you have the right to make your own decisions. There are things I probably say that you don’t resonate with, it doesn’t make sense to you, or you just think it’s crazy talk, and that’s totally awesome. That’s great. If you follow other people, you may pick up on some of their things but not others. Then it’s up to you to really pick apart what you want to take and really set that foundation for yourself.

I think that that is also to do with body confidence. Look at different body sizes and body types and colors and shapes and all the different things and put together this amazing view of the world. I think that’s been another thing I really like about living in the RV is traveling and seeing all the different types of bodies depending on where we are and what they’re doing with their bodies and different sorts of dance and music where their bodies are moving. It’s just so cool to see. What’s really taught me is there’s no one right body. There’s no one common body. Every body is so different. I think every keto needs to be different to align to that body.

The next question is, “Are there any practices that help you recenter when you feel like you’re in a keto slump?” Yeah, bacon. If I feel like I just need something awesome that makes me feel good, every time it’s bacon and sometimes even with chocolate if I’m feeling major slumpy. If I’m in a keto slump, I just eat keto more. I think we over-complicate it.

Maybe four years ago I would have said, “Yeah, drink a bunch of fatty coffee and try to fast more.” This is the way I talked four years ago, clearly, a little bit more high-pitched. No, actually the practices mostly that I use to recenter myself really have nothing to do with what I eat but more like what I do for my body. A lot of the times if I’m feeling overwhelmed because I’ve put a lot of pressure on myself like dietary or work or whatever, I just step back and take five breaths, do a little bit more meditation when I can, do a little bit more yoga when I can. That just helps me recenter so that I can get out of whatever slump I’m in.

Next question is, “What does eating intuitively and practicing intuitive keto have to do with keto confidence?” That’s a good question. It’s really like laying that foundation of yourself and getting a lot of information. You kind of just define your own eating style based on what resonates with you. Then, when you’re feeling good and it’s easy, then you build the confidence to be like, “Well, this is what I’m doing because I feel great so who are you?”

The next question is, “If somebody is getting frustrated at losing and gaining the same weight, being stalled or feeling bloated all the time, how can they use their own strategy or intuitive eating to get back on track?” I would say that if somebody’s getting frustrated by losing and gaining the same weight, they’re probably not actually listening to their body because their body’s telling them something. If they’re losing and gaining weight, they’re probably either, one, doing something their body doesn’t want to do; or, two, they’re not listening to their body and that’s just the weight that they’re meant to be at.

It is very, very clear that I am meant to be the weight that I am. Your body will just be at that weight. If you’re feeling bloated all the time, there’s clearly a food or a thought or idea that you’re having constantly that’s not resonating with your body. Take a look at the thoughts you’re thinking when you get bloated. Take a look at the foods that you’re eating, nuts, seeds, eggs, even avocados. Just kind of piece it together and start to kind of connect the dots there.

More of our solo chat after this message from one of our podcast partners.

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Last piece I wanted to chat with you guys is just that overall feeling of frustration. When you get to that place, I find negative self-talk is such a fallback for a lot of us. When we’re frustrated, then we don’t feel good. Then we beat ourselves up over things and we start talking down to ourselves. I mean, I’ve been guilty of it too. I do it, not all the time, but especially when I’m stressed, I’m very, very hard on myself.

I’ll start just saying horrible things about my body or the way I that do things or, “Why can’t I be better?” It really comes from that place of not being enough or not being that thing that I think that I should be. This really pulls together starting from the very beginning of this conversation. That’s why I wanted to develop Happy Keto Body and was because, as a woman specifically, I feel like I’m very hard on myself. I know a lot of other women are. We put ourselves to such high ideals because we want to be everything to everyone.

That’s not to say that men don’t try to do that same. I just feel like as a woman, I find great strength in surrounding myself with women that align with the same thoughts and feelings that I have in safe environment where I can connect with other women and work off of what they have going on.

It’s so interesting. When you’re in a group of women in the same kind of space and you’re all working toward a common goal, some women will be stronger in other areas where women are otherwise weaker. Those other women will be stronger in areas where those other women are weaker. You really build off one another. That’s really the goal that we had with Happy Keto Body. Again, we chatted about that a bunch in Episode 76. I’ll let you guys listen to that. That wraps it up for today’s episode. It was so fun hanging out with you guys.

The show notes and full transcript for today’s episode can be found at HealthfulPursuit.com/podcast/e78 and I will see you guys next Sunday. Bye.

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, bundles, guides and other cool things over at HealthfulPursuit.com/shop. I’ll see you next Sunday. Bye.

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