[00:00:01] You are listening to episode number 244 of reversing diabetes with Delane, Md.
[00:00:07] Welcome to reversing diabetes with Delane, MD, where women who are confused and worried about their type two diabetes come to learn strategies to fix it. I'm your host, Doctor Delane Vaughn. Ladies, if you know you are capable of doing badass things at work and for your family, but you're frustrated with why you can't seem to stop eating the chocolate cake, this podcast is for you. Let's talk. Hey there, and welcome to the podcast. Today we are going to talk about nutritional ketosis. This is a tool that I've used in the past as probably one of the main three tools that I've taught for reversing type two diabetes.
[00:00:41] It's not that I don't teach it anymore. There was this trend, I think, that went, and lots of people, lots of women have tried nutritional ketosis, and it is a very effective tool. It's not that it's ineffective. Um, I just don't like to, for anybody to think that it's a recurrence requirement, and it's not the only effective tool, and it's not necessarily the most effective tool. So I don't really teach this as that third main tool anymore, really. The things that I think are most effective for reversing your type two diabetes is normalizing or not normalizing. It's pulling out the, um, fast foods, the junk foods, the processed foods. Pulling those out is probably the number one thing that I teach for people that they really have to do to improve their type two diabetes. And it's not because I want to restrict anybody. It's not because I want anybody to feel like they don't get to eat the foods that they like or that I want. It's not because it's right or wrong or bad. Those foods, those processed foods, that junk food, the, um, fast foods, those food types, they just do not match our biology. You are a human being with a certain biology in your body. There's a way that your body works. Those foods do not match the way that your body works. And that's why we get sick. I always remind women when you're thinking about, like, think about the zoo, like, and what they feed the giraffes versus the rhinoceros versus the, you know, large cats, the tigers, the lions, those kinds of things. Those foods are not the same. They're not like, oh, we just ran out of tiger food, so we're going to feed the tigers what we feed the giraffes. We don't do that because the biology of those different animals is not the same. And they, the zoos spend a ton of money and thought and process, looking at what they feed each animal and making sure it's the correct food type. When we think about that, they put more thought into what they're feeding those animals. Many of us put more thoughts into what we feed our pets, our dogs, our cats. We put more thought into what we feed them than we do what we feed ourselves. Those foods, again, those foods being the processed foods, the junk food, the, um, fast foods, those foods are not right or wrong. They just do not match our biology. And when we're not eating in a way that matches our biology, we end up sick, is really what it comes down to. That sickness is type two diabetes. Okay? So the primary tool that I teach and really believe that must happen to get better blood sugars and reverse your type two diabetes is really, you have to pull that food out of your diet. The other tools that I teach that I think are really, really powerful. Intermittent fasting is a huge, powerful tool. And then exercise is probably the thing that you can do to get the most bang for your buck as you're wanting to see better blood sugars and reversing your type two diabetes. So let's talk about nutritional ketosis. Where does this fit, fit into that? So, a couple of things. One, you can end up into ketosis in nutritional ketosis even when you didn't intend to do it, just by pulling your carbohydrates down, or, you know, and by pulling your carbohydrates down, I mean, you're pulling out the processed foods. That alone is going to pull down your carbohydrate intake each day. That can do it. And then fasting, you can accidentally end up in ketosis when maybe you didn't even mean to, okay? But today, for those who are interested in using nutritional ketosis, you've done it in the past and you love it. Awesome. We're going to talk about how to do it and why it's so powerful. So remember, all of these tools that I teach are taught because you want to pull your insulin levels down. That is how I teach women to see better blood sugars, to fix their type two diabetes, to reverse their type two diabetes. I do this by teaching them to pull that insulin level down. Your insulin level, your type two diabetes is because you have such high insulin levels in your system that your cells stop responding to it. Okay? Or maybe you're, you know, in the stage of insulin resistance or type two diabetes, where your pancreas stops working. The reason that your pancreas has worked so hard and stops, quote unquote, working is because it's been pumping out so much insulin over the years in order to overcome the insulin resistance at a cellular level that your pancreas is like, look, I can't even do this anymore, and it just stops. Okay, so the fix or the way or the strategy, really, to improve your blood sugars and improve your type two diabetes or reverse your type two diabetes is really, we have to lower the insulin level in our system.
[00:05:44] And there are a number of strategies to do this.
[00:05:48] Pulling out, you know, cleaning up your diet, pulling out the junk food, pulling out the high, highly processed foods from your diet. That's one way. Intermittent fasting is one way, and then nutritional ketosis is another way that we pull the insulin level down in a way that allows ourselves to get a break from the insulin and heal up. And this is how we. We permanently improve our blood sugars and fix our type two diabetes. So, a lot of times in medicine and, like, western medicine and in the healthcare industry, they're only looking at your blood sugars. They just want to pull your blood sugars down. And there are things that you can do that seem to pull your blood sugars down, but do not improve that insulin level. If you only pull your blood sugars down and do not improve your insulin level, you will not improve your overall health, your diabetes. Okay, so the meds that we give you that cause your blood sugars to lower by squeezing more insulin out of the pancreas, are not going to fix your blood sugars long term, it's not going to fix your diabetes. In fact, it will probably make your diabetes worse because it's not fixing the root cause of it. The root cause of your diabetes is not your blood sugars. It's the insulin level. Okay, so the strategies that I teach women for. For improving their blood sugars, for getting better blood sugars, for reversing their diabetes, really revolve around how do we pull that insulin level down.
[00:07:22] So, nutritional ketosis is a way to do this. Okay, so other names for this are like, um, keto, eating keto. I mean, you know, I'm eating keto. I'm trying to think of the other. There's a number of different ways. But if you're talking about ketosis or keto, we're talking about nutritional ketosis. So let's talk briefly about what nutritional ketosis is. If you are familiar with diabetic ketoacidosis, please understand that these are not the same things.
[00:07:53] Nutritional ketosis is a switch in your biology in the way that you create energy for your human body. Okay? Nuc. Nutritional ketosis utilizes fat as a primary energy source instead of carbohydrate as the primary energy source, or glucose.
[00:08:18] Remember, you know, the whole role of insulin and this insulin resistance component. The whole role of insulin is that insulin wants to tell your cell to open up and bring glucose inside. So the glucose can be burned off as energy by the cell, okay? That's what insulin is meant to do. Insulin is meant to tell your cells, open up, there's glucose present, open up and burn it off as energy. When your cells become insulin resistance or resistant, even in the presence of glucose, the cell does not open up and does not bring the glucose inside and burn it off because the cell isn't hearing the message that insulin's trying to tell it, okay? So when your cells are insulin resistant, the glucose is high on the outside. Your pancreas is spitting out insulin, but your cells no longer open up and bring that glucose inside and burn it off. Okay? Now the pancreas can spit out more and more, like increasing amounts of insulin, more and more and more and more insulin, kind of yelling at it louder until it overwhelms the cell. It over it like there's a threshold, and it overwhelms that threshold, and the cell will open up and bring the glucose inside and burn it off. But what that does when the cell or when the pancreas has to keep putting out more and more insulin, what that does is means the next time that the cell needs to bring glucose inside, it's going to take even more insulin. And this is how we drive that insulin level up very high, and it's because of this insulin resistance. And that's why making more insulin is not the answer. Giving yourself insulin injections, that is not the answer to fixing this diabetes problem. Okay? What we need to do is lower that glucose level so that our pancreas is not seeing such high glucose levels, and it stops spitting out so much insulin. Okay? We can do this with cleaning up our diet, not putting up, you know, so much junk food, so much highly processed food into our bodies. That's one way. Intermittent fasting is another way, because we're giving ourselves a time each day where we're giving it a break from this high insulin level. There's not glucose in the system because we're fasting. Right? So our glucose levels drop really low, and that stops sending the message to the pancreas to make more insulin. Right? So that the insulin level can drop very low, and that allows your cells to get a break from that constant message of insulin, telling it to open up and bring the glucose in. When that help happens, it helps our cells become insulin sensitive again. Okay?
[00:11:18] Another way to do this is nutritional ketosis, right? Instead of utilizing glucose as the primary source of energy at a cellular cellular level, our body starts to burn off fat and utilize fat as the cellular energy, okay? So instead of the cells opening up and pulling glucose inside and burning it off as fuel, our bodies are starting to utilize fat, and it's called ketone. What the body does is it break down, breaks down adipose tissue or fat tissue into ketone bodies, and our cells bring those ketone bodies in, and that doesn't require insulin. Our bodies do that in a different mechanism. So that means that we're not sending a message to the pancreas to keep putting out a bunch of insulin, and we don't need to rely on energy coming inside of the cell in a way that utilizes the insulin. Right? The energy, the ketone bodies come in in a different way, okay? And it doesn't require insulin. So our cells are not over stimulated by insulin to the point that they stop responding. Right? We're doing it in a different way. So it. It bypasses, it brings energy. Being in nutritional ketosis brings energy inside of the cell in a way that is not relying on insulin. And that alone allows ourselves to get a pause, get a break from insulin, and start to be more insulin sensitive. Okay? That's the power. That's why nutritional ketosis is so powerful. Again, this is entirely different from diabetic ketoacidosis or keto or. I'm sorry, DKA. Living or living in or utilizing nutritional ketosis is different from diabetic ketoacidosis. And the reason that that is is because in diabetic ketoacidosis, your blood sugars are very, very high and you don't have any insulin available to the cells, okay? And diabetic ketoacidosis primarily happens in type one diabetics, not type two diabetics. So when I'm talking about use using nutritional ketosis, I'm talking about this for type two diabetics, not type one diabetics, okay? Type one diabetics is a smaller. Like 5% of the diabetics in America have type. 195 percent have type two. So when we're talking about diabetes, we are almost always talking about type two diabetes. Nutritional ketosis can be a very effective method for improving insulin resistance and the underlying disease state of type two diabetes. Okay? So again, nutritional ketosis works by utilizing fat as your primary energy source instead of glucose. And because we're utilizing fat and not glucose, our cells are getting a break from insulin. Okay? There is a shift that has to occur in your body to shift into this biochemistry. It's different.
[00:14:31] And that shift can take a while, and sometimes it can be uncomfortable when your body does this biochemical shift. Okay, nothing's wrong. But there can be like. Because, I mean, as your body's like, oh, we're not using glucose anymore. Instead we're using fat. What's happening here during that phase of kind of confusion, as your body's shifting in, your cells really aren't getting any energy, and they feel pretty cruddy. Okay, so there can be what's called a keto flu. People talk about this all the time. Um, but that is what's happening. There is a shift, I will tell you that I don't use. I personally don't use nutritional ketosis as a primary tool for improving my insulin sensitivity. That keto flu, for me, it lasts a long time. Like, some people say it can last ten to 14 days. And you usually shift out of that. Mine lasts at least that long. I just don't feel good when I'm in keto, when I do keto, so I don't do it a lot. Some women feel amazing. It's like there's a euphoria that comes with it. I don't know how you're going to respond. I wouldn't write this off as a tool, but give yourself, like, understand, for the first ten to 14 days of doing keto, you might feel poorly, you may not feel fabulous. Some women, when they get beyond that, they feel amazing. Okay, so, um, recognize some discomfort is expected. Long term discomfort is probably not necessary. My last fasting insulin, which was, um, gosh, it was six months ago, my fasting insulin was, I think, three on my last reading. And, you know, we know that insulin resistance is unlikely to be present if you're less than seven. So my insulin, my serum insulin level was in a good place, and my last a one c was 4.9, also in a good place place. So I don't do keto, and I maintain biochemistry that's within an optimal range that we, you know, as. At least as far as the studies tell us, that is, you know, where it needs to be to not be insulin resistant. So I don't want you to believe that you have to do nutritional ketosis just to see the results that you're hoping to see. You don't have to do it. But again, some women love the way they feel and they like this as a tool. So I do teach this, and I teach it to my group also.
[00:17:04] So one of the questions I got there is a Delaine MD reversing diabetes Facebook group. You can find it on Facebook. You just have to search. Um, you have to, like, put it in the search bar and find my name. Um, one of the questions that I got from that group was, how is doing keto different from doing low carb? Okay, so sometimes people who do low carb end up in keto unintentionally. So that may be. There may not be a difference, right? I don't know that there's always a difference.
[00:17:36] Some people find that they can normalize their insulin function and get better blood sugars just by dropping their carbohydrates to under 100 carbs per day. Okay. I used to tell women, you got to get below 50. What I've seen with working with many, many women doing this is. That's not always the case. Okay, so how is this different from doing low carb? Well, if you're in that 50 to 100 grams of carbs per day, you may not drop into ketosis, but you might. Okay. Most women find when they drop below 50 grams of carbs per day, they will go into that ketosis, that nutritional ketosis range. Okay? And I'm going to talk about what it means to go in and how you determine that here in just a few minutes.
[00:18:26] So, um, that is my answer to that question. You know, how do you know the difference? The only differences is whether you're spilling ketones, whether you're producing ketones, and we're going to talk about what that means here shortly. So, um, when you're in ketosis, you are utilizing fat as the primary source of fuel. Again, I. We just talked about this as the primary source of fuel for your cell, and that means you don't need insulin. And when you get really, like, when your body really shifts into this gear, you're into this biochemistry, your body is like, oh, we're just doing this keto thing. We are burning ketones as fuel. We don't even need to worry about any of that insulin business that allows your insulin level to drop into a normal range, giving your cells a break. It's not that you're not going to have any insulin in your system. There's going to be some insulin in your system. There's going to be some glucose in your system. That's just normal biology, but there's not going to be so much of it that you're overwhelming your, you know, cells with it. Okay, so this allows your cells to heal from that insulin resistance, that over exposure to insulin. Right. I just put in the Facebook group, somebody asked a question about something and whether it was good or bad. And I'm like, listen, you know, all the. Oh, it was fruit, all the good things. Fruit isn't, you know, I call fruit nature's candy to us. Like, that's what fruit is for us, it's nature's candy. But even the sunshine, or the sunshine burns if you get too much, right? Even we get. Even the sun burns when we get too much. I always remind women of this, right? So there needs to be a certain amount of glucose in your system, and there will be. Your body will take care of that perfectly unless you're medicated. And I'll talk about that at the end. If you're medicated for your type two diabetes, your, um, protective mechanisms to keep your glucose at a normal level is different. And you need to be careful with some of these tools, both, you know, cleaning up your diet, intermittent fasting, all of those tools, those two tools. And nutritional ketosis and exercise. If you're medicated for your type two diabetes, you need to be careful with all of these things, because the natural system that your body has to keep your glucose in a normal range, that has been dampened by the medications, okay? So do understand that. But when we lower our glucose intake, our carbohydrate intake, and we cause our body to shift into using ketones or fat as its energy, that allows a natural lowering of the insulin. And when that happens, your cells can start to heal. There are many healing effects. Not just. I mean, like, lowering the insulin heals your cells from insulin resistance, but having ketones in your body. There's a number of different, um, studies in the medical literature that talk about how ketones, ketones alone that just burning. And what do I mean by ketones? What is that? I guess I should talk about that when our bodies take adipose and release it. So adipose is fat, and I hate to use that word, because I think it's got a horrible connotation, but adipose is fat. When our bodies take that tissue and break it down to burn it off as energy, which is all adipose is. Right. All that adipose is in our system is stored energy. Okay? 10,000 years ago, when our biology developed, we did not have refrigerators to hold the energy that we needed in the future. So our bodies had to develop this way of storing future energy so that when food was available, we could consume it, use what we needed in the moment for energy, and store the extra stuff. That's fat. That's what fat is. It's this thing, this amazing thing that our bodies did to store energy. Okay? But when there was no energy available, our body breaks down that fat and that adipose tissue, and it breaks it down on a cellular level. What happens is that adipose breaks down and becomes ketone. Ketone bodies, okay? Those ketone bodies are burned inside of our cells as fuel. Okay, but. But wait, there's more. In addition to being able to burn that as fuel, those ketone bodies are also healing to all sorts of systems and parts and tissues of our bodies.
[00:23:06] So, non alcoholic fatty liver disease, right. We know that that's an effective insulin resistance on our liver, but there is evidence in the medical literature that says that having ketone bodies circulating in our system actually helps heal the liver.
[00:23:24] Nephropathy. That's kidney damage caused by insulin resistance and high blood sugars. There is evidence in the literature that says having ketone bodies circulating in your body helps heal your kidney from the damage that's been caused from your diabetes. There's evidence that it helps heal inflammatory changes in your body. There's evidence that it helps improve your cholesterol levels despite probably eating more fat. Right? Like most women, lots of people who try to go into ketosis, they try to do it quicker by eating a ton of fat. I don't necessarily promote that, but that is one strategy. But when you are burning the fat that you have, you can, like, those ketone bodies can help heal that cholesterol, that, you know, abnormal cholesterol panels. Okay, so just being in ketosis. Yes. It helps improve your cellular insulin resistance. Boom period, end of sentence. That happens. And there's more. There's also this healing effect that happens, okay? There's this anti inflammatory effect, this healing of the damage to the kidneys, healing of the damage to the liver. There's all sorts of healing effects that are documented in the medical literature by having ketone bodies in your system.
[00:24:46] So let's talk about how to do it. Okay? Okay. We talked about this a little bit, but recognize we're lowering our carbohydrate intake to a point that your body has to shift into burning fat. Okay? So, again, that makes your body think, what. What the hell is happening? Here. There's no glucose, there's no energy. What are we going to do? Oh, well, what we've got to do is the thing that we were developed to do, that we were designed to do, we're going to go ahead and take the fat that we've stored and we're going to start burning that.
[00:25:15] That's what we want to happen.
[00:25:17] And that does take some shifting of gears, biologically and biochemically, in our body, and sometimes that's uncomfortable. What I tell women again, is to start with around 50 grams of carbohydrates per day, and then you do this for five days, and then you start to check your urine ketones. I'm going to talk about what that means here in just a second.
[00:25:39] You start to check, and if you're not using, if you have a fancy ketone meter, which is a finger stick meter, you'll take a drop of blood and you'll measure it on this meter, and you see that you're in ketosis. Great. You get to do just 50 grams of carbs a day, and you just do that until your blood sugars start to come down and your, you know, you heal your body. Okay?
[00:26:03] So that is how you do it. Some women will do this for five days. They'll drop to 50 grams of carbs per day, and they'll do it for five days, and they never get into ketosis. And if that's the case, then you probably need a drop to 40 grams of carbs per day. And you do it for five days. And you see if you get into ketosis, and if that's the case, great, you move from there and you go forward. But if that doesn't get you into ketosis, you may have to drop to 30 grams of carbs per day or 20 grams of carbs per day. It's very rare that I see somebody have to drop lower than 20 grams of carbs per day. And, in fact, I don't know that I really love to drop more. I don't like to even make that recommendation. So, um, if you're having to drop that low, ketosis may just not be a great tool for you, is really what it comes down to.
[00:26:51] So, um, you do have to be careful once you've gotten into ketosis to not get a concentrated dose of carbohydrates in one meal. So don't eat all 50, all 40, all 30 grams of your carbohydrates in one meal in a day, because if you do that, it may cause your body to shift out of that ketosis biochemical pathway, okay? You may go back into carbohydrate burning versus fat burning, and then it may take you another three, four, or five days to get back in to ketosis. Okay? So I don't recommend that when we talk about being in ketosis, I mean that your biochemistry is in, in that pathway of burning fat instead of burning glucose, all right? So that is how you do it. You drop to 50 grams of carbs, you start looking for ketones, whether you're using a ketone meter or urine ketosis. And I'm going to talk about that here in just a few minutes. I'm going to talk about ketone monitoring and how you do that. Um, and then you do it for five days. If you don't see ketones start to develop, if you don't start, you start to see your ketone levels start to rise. And if you're using a ketone meter, there is going to be a guide on that to know when you're in ketosis. If you're using a urine ketone strip, there's going to be a guide with that also. But if you don't get into ketosis based on that, then you need to probably drop from 50 to 40, from 40 to 30 if you have to go less than 20. I just don't recommend that. So who do I recommend ketosis for?
[00:28:30] I recommend ketosis primarily for women who really are just averse to the feeling of hunger. They just cannot tolerate that feeling of hunger. And honestly, even some of those women that I've worked with, they don't need to do ketosis. But if you really just do not have not, um, built the muscle of managing hunger, or you have so many cravings in your brain that it's likely caused from the processed foods that you've eaten. Like naturally, the human being does fine, they don't crave food. They eat food. They may feel hunger, physical hunger. And that tells their brain, hey, it's time to go hunt and gather food.
[00:29:12] But cravings, that desire for food, like, if you're hungry and your brain believes a Snickers bar is the only way to fix that hunger, that is a craving. That's not hunger. That is not physical hunger. And the way that you know that is because 10,000 years ago, Snickers. But bars weren't available.
[00:29:32] There's not a biological need for a Snickers bar or a cookie or bread or chocolate or potato chips.
[00:29:40] Those foods, the desire for those foods are in your brain because food manufacturers have put additives into the food to make you want them and make your brain believe you need it right now.
[00:29:56] That is not nature. That is man made food manufacturing tricks that have happened in the food, okay? And again, the way you know it is if your brain is telling you that you absolutely need a food right now, and you know that food is not naturally available on the human existence, like 10,000 years ago, that food wasn't available, your brain believes you're needing a food that was not available 10,000 years ago. That is not true.
[00:30:27] There's no way that your brain would think you need a food that wasn't even available to you in a natural setting, okay? So just remember that. But some women still are under the impact of those cravings so heavily that they really just do not tolerate that hunger. And it really is just an obstacle. It's like a brick wall for them to move beyond and start to improve their insulin resistance. If that is you, my friend, try some nutritional ketosis. This allows you to eat more frequently and even eat maybe more food. And you may not see weight loss with it, but you can eat more food and not stimulate insulin production, so you start to heal yourselves. Okay? That's really who I recommend nutritional ketosis for.
[00:31:20] All right, um. Women will ask me about total carbs versus net carbs. This is fancy math, ladies. This is not anything that's required.
[00:31:30] So, net carbs versus total carbs. What are this? How do you figure out net carbs versus total carbs if you get a package? Ladies, please. I just saw a loaf of bread. Somebody asked me, one of the women in the Facebook group asked about, and it said 4 grams of net carbs. It's only 4 grams of net carbs. If you looked at the package, the total carbs on that was 36 grams. Okay, that is some b's math, ladies. That is not going to work. That is not going to fix your insulin resistance. So let's talk about what total carbs are versus net carbohydrates.
[00:32:10] They determine net carbohydrates by subtracting dietary fiber from the total carbs. And you can make anything. Like, you can add enough dietary fiber and these, like, you can add dietary fiber by adding metamucil to your chocolate chip cookie recipe, right? Suddenly you've got so much dietary fiber that it brings down the flour. Like the total carbohydrate from flour brings down that number. So I want to offer to you, this is fancy math, and this is probably. I. Somebody said this the other day and I didn't even think about this. But net carbohydrates is a gimmick that food manufacturers have developed to make you believe that their food is going to help you and be quote unquote healthy. It's kind of like Quaker oats saying that oatmeal might be part of a heart healthy diet. It is not. When you're eating the brown sugar, the maple and brown sugar, which was my favorite. If you're eating that, that is flat. That's sugar. It's inflammatory.
[00:33:20] Just because it's carried on oatmeal does not mean it's suddenly part of a heart healthy diet. It is not.
[00:33:27] Inflammation leads to heart disease. Sugar leads to inflammation. Sugar is maple sugar and brown. You know, brown sugar and maple, whatever that is. Right. Like, don't eat that. If they have to tell you it's healthy, you have to question that. Okay? These are gimmicks that food manufacturers put, like, marketing gimmicks that they put on their labeling and on their food so that they will make you believe that it's healthy and you'll eat it. And then you can't figure out why you're not getting healthy net carbs. Is that, okay? What I have found with women who do use net carbs instead of total carbs, they just have to drop their carbohydrate count lower to get into ketosis. So be very careful if, like, I would never recommend. It's like adding a math step. Ketosis already seems like a lot of math to me. This is just adding another step of monitoring, and it doesn't usually work. It usually just means you have to eat less carbs. So my $0.10, just use total carbs. If somebody's trying to sell you something on net carbs, it's probably a gimmick. Okay. And I don't mean your buddy. I mean the food manufacturers are trying to sell you on their net carbs. It's a gimmick. Don't believe that. Is it important to get dietary fiber? Absolutely. Is it important to get dietary fiber that's actually chemically bound to the carbohydrate component of the food that you eat? Yeah, that's probably more important. Okay. And if it's bound in that way naturally, there isn't this, um, this. Oh, we're gonna. That's what's happening. They're just putting loose fiber, non bound fiber, into the food to increase the dietary fiber component and then do this math piece. Okay. The fiber, that's. I mean, adding dietary fiber in that way has some benefit. I'm not going to tell you it doesn't. But the real beneficial fiber is the fiber that is actually physically, there's a chemical bond to the carbohydrate. So if you think about eating, um, a carrot, a raw carrot, the fiber in a raw carrot is bound the carbohydrate component of that carrot. And that is the beneficial part to improving your health. It's why a raw carrot so healthy. If you cook that carrot, there's a break to that chemical bond. It is no longer the fiber and the carbohydrate bound together. That is why raw carrots are softer and why they taste sweeter. Because they break apart that chemical bond. The heat, heat dissolves that fiber, and all you're left with is the carbohydrate component, and it tastes sweet. Okay, you're losing that benefit. Now. Are cooked carrots horrible? No. Nobody got diabetic because of their cooked carrot problem. That's not a problem to eat them. But do understand, you're probably not getting the fiber component when you cook it. Okay, so that's my $0.10 on total carbohydrates versus net carbohydrates. I would just use the total carbs. I would not mess with the net carbs. It's just more math. Let's talk about monitoring. There are two ways that I know of to monitor. One is through a ketone meter, and one is through urine strips. So, a ketone meter, you prick your finger and you can get ketone meters, like a meter that has both your blood sugar reading on it and your ketone reading on it. You can get both. Um, I think they're more expensive. I've never done fingerprint ketone readings. I personally have never done them. I've always used ketone strips if I'm doing ketosis. Um, so there is, you know, this one that you can get, or you can just get a separate ketone reading meter and then your blood sugar reading meter. Okay, you can have two separate ones, but you basically, you prick your finger just like you would checking your blood sugar, and you have a drop. It's on a strip. It's very similar to your blood sugar reading. And it tells you how. What ketones? You know, where your blood ketone level is. My understanding, you want this around four. I would look at your meter and see what its reading is. Again, I don't use these meters, but some women will.
[00:37:44] Um, I find that they're more expensive. It's just another fingerprint, and nobody loves that. Um, the benefit of this is you get a very accurate, um, current reading of your ketones, of your blood ketone level. What do I mean by current? I mean that. That. That is what is happening right now in the moment. All right.
[00:38:06] Some women, and the thing that I've used is actually urine strips. So you have to. You pee on a urine strip. So I find that the benefits to this is they are cheap and it's easier. It's, like, not as painful. Okay. It is dealing with urine, which nobody loves.
[00:38:22] Understand? If you're going to use the urine strips, there is a lag time to where your blood ketone level gets to the level you want it at, which, again, I think is like four millimoles. I think that's how it's measured. Okay, so when you're using the ketone meter, you're measuring that reading right in that moment. If you're using the ketone strips that you pee on, that level in your blood gets to the number that you wanted at, and then actually it gets higher and you start spilling that into your urine, your kidneys start to be able to filter that out. So you can be at the reading that you want in your blood for up to 36 hours before they start to spill over into your urine, and you pick it up on the urine strip. So there is a 24 to 36 hours lag and picking up when you're on ketosis. So if you have done ketosis, right, like, you've dropped your sugar or your carbohydrate intake to 45 grams a day, and you've done it for five days or four days. Let's say you've done it for four days. Maybe at day number four, you flip into ketosis, but you may not pick that reading up until day number five on the urine strips. Okay, so give your. You have to be a little more patient with the urine strips, but again, you're not pricking your finger. They're very cheap. They're like $10 for 50 strips or something. I think it's even less than that. You can find them on frickin Amazon. They're straightforward, easy to use, um, and cheap. So you do have to play with urine, which is kind of gross. And there is this lag.
[00:39:57] So how do you know when you're in ketosis? This is another question that I got from the Facebook group. This is how you know when you're in ketosis. You're measuring it on that urine strip, and it will. The urine strips will be more purple, almost. I think it's pretty universal that they use purple. So those urine strips will go from white to purple. You don't have to be dark purple. You don't need to be black purple, and you can get your urine strips into black purple. I'm trying to think of. Oh, I was doing, um, a dietary guide for a running program that I was involved with. And, of course, part of being a good athlete is you watch what you eat is really what it was coming down to anyway. It was dropping the carbs and dropping the processed foods out. And the whole message behind this program was, you want to clear your brain from the effect of carbohydrates, which I totally agree, and that's spot on. So I was doing it, like a 14 day program, and I didn't think much about, like, would this flip me into ketosis? I didn't think about that. I don't know why I didn't think about it, but I felt horrible. I was feeling awful on this program, and I was like, oh, my God, the 14 days can't get, you know, close enough to the end. And, ladies, I'm not eating Reese's peanut butter cups on the regular, but I definitely have fruit in my diet, and I have potatoes that I eat occasionally. My numbers have normalized. I can bring those foods back in. I make homemade bread, and I have. Have that in my diet. That's, again, once our numbers get to where you want them to be in your cells start functioning normally, you can bring those foods back in. So I eat carbohydrates, and clearly I eat way more to keep me from ketosis. I couldn't figure out why I was feeling so horrible. And then it dawned on me, and I went and peed on an old keto strip that I had. It was, you know, I had a bottle and some ketone strips in there, and I peed on it, and it was literally almost black. I was in such significant ketosis just by eating this dietary program, and I was like, oh, this is why I feel so horrible. I know I feel horrible when I'm in ketosis. This never feels great for me. And so, um, that's how, you know, is you pee on one of these sticks, or you use a ketone meter. Once you realize how many carbs you need to keep your food, your dietary intake below, you don't need to pee on those sticks on a regular basis. You just know when I do this, I'm in ketosis. Boom. Easy peasy. But as you're learning how to get in ketosis, that is a strategy you need to use those sticks. That's also one of the reasons I think I've never invested in one of the ketone meters, because once you know how to eat, you don't need to keep testing it. You just know that when I eat, you know, this many carbs, I know that I'm going to stay in ketosis. So that's how you know whether you're in ketosis or not. All right, so this is a really long podcast. I didn't realize how long this was going to be, and I had just a basic outline. So, um, if you have any questions about any of this, it's kind of complicated biology, so don't hesitate to send me any questions you might have. You can always send a question to
[email protected]. I'm happy to answer anything. Um, do not hesitate to do that, please, though, if you are going to use ketosis, this is one of the really dangerous, um, tools that I teach. If you are medicated for your type two diabetes, recognize, and this is true for all of the strategies I teach, you're going to have to make some dietary changes to fix your type two diabetes. It's just the way it is. Type two diabetes is 100% of the time. Okay, 90. I hate saying 100%, 99% of the time. I can think of some scenarios where it's not the food that we ate, but your type two diabetes is caused by the food that you eat in 99% of cases. Okay? If you change, if you've been medicated for that, you've been medicated because of the way that you ate, if you change the way that you eat, you're going to have to change those meds or you're going to end up really, really sick. The kind of sick that looks like hospitalization, er visits, death. Right? You can get very sick with that. So if you're in, definitely. If you're using ketosis, that's one of the big times that we see people get really sick with this. If they stay on their meds, they don't have somebody directing them to how to adjust their meds. Okay? So if you're going to make any of these dietary changes that I teach in this podcast, and this is, you know, cleaning up your diet, this is intermittent fasting, this is nutritional ketosis. All of those strategies, you really need to get on the phone with your primary care physician or whoever the provider is that prescribed your meds to you. You need to get a clear line of communication open with them. You need to tell them how you're going to share, or you need to find out how they want you to share your blood sugar readings with them, and then you need to hear from them how do they intend to share with you how they're going to change your medications so you can be safe as you're making these changes. All right, this is really, really important.
[00:45:01] I'm saying this not to protect me. I'm saying this to protect you. Like, you need to stay safe with this. And the best way to do that is to get on the phone with your provider and figure out how they want you to communicate with them as you're making these changes. Okay? Be very, very careful. If you're implementing nutritional ketosis and you're medicated, please be very careful. If you are implementing any of the other changes and you're medicated, please be very careful.
[00:45:26] All right, there's also, before we end, there is a webinar. It is March 31. It's Easter weekend. Happy Easter. There is a webinar coming up this week. On Wednesday, April 3, 10:00 a.m. I'm going to be talking about how to do the things, the hard things, the things that you find challenging. I titled this webinar doing the damn thing, which is a thing that I joke about. If you've ever listened to the Walker Hayes, and we joke about it in the group and the, um, in my paid for group, we joke about this a lot. I feel like I joke about this all the time because I think the song is really funny. But there's a walker Hayes song, and one of the lines in it is do he says, doing the darn thing. You know me. I say, doing the damn thing. So, um, I always sing this in my head when I talk about doing the damn thing, but you can register for that
[email protected]. Forward slash, April 3. No capitals. Www.dalenemd.com forward slash, April 3. Okay, that will get you registered, and you get reminder emails. You get all the things that you need. You get the zoom link, all of those things. So register for that. If you do find that, you know, it's hard for me to pass the donuts in the break room. It's hard for me in the end of the day to, you know, not sit there and mindlessly munch as I'm making food for the family. It's hard for me at the end of the day to not have the ice cream. If these are the things that you're struggling with, register for this webinar that's what we're going to be talking about. And talk about tools and strategies to move beyond that so you can start really seeing your blood sugars improve.
[00:47:00] I also have the 14 days to better blood sugars guide. You can find that at Delanemd better. If you have any problems finding that, let me know. Delanemd.com dot I'm happy to answer any questions. Um, this will also get you on my mailing list. And again, this is where you're going to hear and get the links for the webinars. This is where I send out an email each week with helpful strategies. All of that is in that on that email. So sign up for that again. Delaney, MD forward slash better people the feedback I've gotten from that 14 day guide is fire. People talk about how powerful it is. If you go to the Delane MD reversing diabetes group. I mean, this week alone, three different women posted about how they reverse their numbers. Their a one c has dropped below five. They're seeing lower sugars. They dropped 20 pounds. All the things very, very powerful. So check out that guide. Check out the Facebook group. It's such a those ladies are so amazing and wonderful. And get in there, get in that helpful community so that you can get the help that you need to do this. Lastly, I have an ask if you have found this podcast helpful. If you've been listening to the podcast and you find it helpful, please rate and review on the podcast player. Please share it. If you're not listening on the podcast players and you're listening from my website, share it on your social media. Nine out of ten americans have insulin resistance. They are impacted by the same thing that you are impacted with. And the reason is not because genetically, we are destined to be diseased. In our middle age, we did not populate the earth and become the dominant species on the planet because of that.
[00:48:38] This is the food that we are eating. People need to know, they do not need to be sick. If you rate and review or share this podcast, you're helping get that word out. People need to hear this. They don't need to be sick. They can live healthy. Okay, that's what I have for you today, ladies. I want you to keep listening. I want you to keep avoiding the foods that make you sick and keep making the choices for your health, your vitality, and your longevity. I'll be back next week. Bye.
