Originally published at: https://ketowomanpodcast.com/christine-trimpe-transcript/
Welcome Christine to the Keto woman podcast. How are you doing today?
Oh, I'm doing so great. Thank you so much for having me. Daisy. I'm very excited to be talking to you.
And, being a true Brit, I have to ask you about the weather. I can see lots of snow behind you.
Oh yes. We're going through a rather wintry season right now here in Michigan and we've had snow and bitter cold, but January's done and we're looking forward ahead to spring now.
Yeah. Wait for all those spring flowers to come up and the sunshine to come up and that snow to melt.
Yes. Fortunately we have had quite a bit of sunshine so that does help get us through the month of January here.
It does, doesn't it? And that's something nice about snow, really, I think, when the sunshine is out, as long as it's not too deep and too cold that it stops you doing things. It's actually quite a lot of fun, and to be honest, snow days when you're a kid especially are fantastic, aren't they, because you get to build snowmen.
Yes, we've had quite...I don't have little kids any longer, my kids are young adults, but yes, we've had three snow days this week for the kids in our area, so I'm sure they've been enjoying that.
Is there a maximum age to get enjoyment out of building snowmen? I don't think so.
I don't think so. I know, my daughter, she would be out there in a heartbeat if it wasn't so frigid right now. It's been really cold, too.
That's the only problem with it is when it's really biting.
Yes.
Okay, so enough Brit talk asking about the weather. Tell me about you.
Well, I'm so excited to have this opportunity to talk to you, and about how the Ketogenic and intermittent fasting way has completely changed my life, 100%, and I just have this really exciting passion to share with people. So I will start, I guess, with how I got to be in the position that I needed Keto. I have battled obesity, I guess my entire life, because I was a chubby kid and then as soon as my teenage years rolled around, I was a little bit slimmer. I'm not sure, like looking back, I'm not exactly sure why, but I wasn't overweight when I graduated from high school. And then when I went off to college, it didn't take me long to start gaining the "freshman fifteen". Are you familiar with that term in Europe?
No, I'm not. I've never heard that.
Okay. It's a big term here in America, when kids go off to college. I went away to school so I had to eat cafeteria food and very quickly started gaining weight. I think probably by the time I graduated from college I was probably close to about 160 pounds, which was a significant difference from when I graduated from high school. So I have battled with obesity since then. I have tried every diet under the sun for thirty years. Weight Watchers, a medical weight loss clinic, exercising. And right before I turned forty I actually did a liquid protein diet under hospital supervision for ten months. I did lose quite a bit of weight. I never did quite make it down to my goal weight, but I was comfortable enough that they started putting me on maintenance and as soon as I went on maintenance, they reintroduced foods like potatoes and whole wheat pasta and whole wheat breads and grains and it didn't take me long to gain that weight back.
All those healthy, heart-healthy grains.
Exactly. And oh, it was so depressing. I just didn't understand it. I was very adherent to the diet, to the liquid shake diet when I was doing it. I never cheated. I have a very unique ability, discipline, that I don't cheat when I'm on diets. I consider that a gift. I know a lot of people don't understand it. So once I started eating, you know, the menu that they were providing, that the dietitian was going through with me, and I started gaining weight again. I just, I started gaining weight immediately and then started getting really depressed and gave up and said, you know, I just...
What did they have to say about it, though?
I actually kind of just walked away from the program at that time because, you know, you were supposed to go weekly for sessions and things like that. And of course I had to pay for it out of pocket. My insurance didn't cover it, so I just kinda went off on my own and continued to do things like counting points through Weight Watchers and using applications on my phone, like Lose It, and trying to track things. And when I'd go through the periods of eating really healthy, trying to eat really healthy for my body and gaining weight, it was just very depressing. So that's how long I've been battling that and before I was forty-nine, right before I was about to turn fifty, is when I was fortunate enough to discover this way of life.
But tell us how you discovered that, because you went in for a scan, didn't you, for something completely different and then stumbled across the problem.
Right. I was having a lot of health issues. If PCOS would have been a thing when I was a younger woman, like in my teens and early twenties, I'm positive I would have been diagnosed with PCOS because I was told that I had a lot of cyst problems, and very painful cycles. So they started reappearing again, and because I had had NovaSure, which is a uterine ablation, so I wasn't having a lot of issues for quite a while, no heavy periods, things like that. But then they started popping up again and I started having a lot of pain in my abdomen. So I went to my gynecologist and she ordered an ultrasound scan just to see what was going on. And they did discover ovarian cysts, which neither of us were surprised about. But the other thing they discovered was that I had a fatty liver and that was surprising to me because it's not really talked about much here. I don't know if they talk about it much in Europe, but it is starting to become more known and people are starting to recognize it more.
Yeah. The only time it tends to come up, well, I say tends to come up, always comes up with obese patients who are going for weight loss surgery. It's something that they always get put on a specific diet for a couple of weeks before they have the operation, with the specific intention of reducing the size of their liver. Mostly because from a practical point of view, when you're gaining access, they tend to go in through a keyhole surgery. And to gain access, if your liver is fatty and so, enlarged, it's in the way and there's more chance of it getting nicked or something.
Oh, interesting. I did not know that.
Yes, they get you to reduce it. Unfortunately, not in the best of ways. People have been put on generally either the milk diet, which is exactly what it sounds, it is just milk, or the other diet, the typical Slimfast-type shakes. I wasn't actually put on anything. I can't remember whether it's because they don't tend to so much in France. They don't tend to bother. Or maybe they looked at my health markers, which showed that I didn't have a fatty liver. I've actually always had fairly good bio-markers. I have quite good glucose control and reasonable triglycerides. Both of those had been very good. So it wouldn't indicate that I had a fatty liver. But I'm not sure whether he looked at those and made that assessment or whether it's just not something they do. But so, it is, in that community, fatty liver is a very well known term. But outside it, probably not so much, although like you were saying, it has started to become talked about a lot more on the media. There was a program recently where they had some Type 2 diabetics in a clinic for a couple of weeks and one of the tests they ran was to assess the state of their liver. So it's becoming something that people are becoming more and more aware of for its health implications.
That's good. Well, my bio-markers have always been really good. My liver test results would never have indicated that my liver was filled with fat like that. But, I probably would have found out eventually because I was considering weight loss surgery and I had a consultation in January of 2017, actually, but I had to cancel it because our insurance changed and then insurance was not going to cover weight loss surgery any longer. So I canceled that and that was just such a godsend because on January 13th, 2017 is when I discovered Keto and intermittent fasting. That was like divine intervention, if you ask me. So I was kind of disappointed that insurance wouldn't cover the weight loss surgery, but then I was given this gift instead, so, very happy.
It's funny how things work out sometimes, isn't it? You think something's a real disaster and it's ruined everything. Actually it opens up a much better opportunity. And how did you discover it? I always find it interesting to ask people because for some it's a book. Gary Taubes is one of the most common books I hear people citing. But what was it for you?
All right. So, back up a little bit to when they told me I had fatty liver. I started doing a little bit of research on my own because my doctor, the gynecologist, she was mostly concerned about the cyst and she said, let's give it three months and re-test the cyst with an ultrasound. That's all she was really willing to do. So I myself had to go on to the internet and start looking up fatty liver, and that's when I really started becoming concerned, and that's when I started stumbling on things about our hormones and how hormones control so much in our body that we've never talked about that. Even being in that hospital program, they never brought that up to me. Anything about hormones, about my insulin. They did tell me I had metabolic syndrome, but they didn't tell me anything more about that other than you need to lose the weight. So I started doing some research.
Nothing about actually it's not your fault, it's the way your body's working that makes it impossible for you to lose weight!
Yeah. So that gets me to the most exciting point and answer to your question is how did I find Keto? So I'm doing all this research and I decided that I'm going to quit sugar. So I did that. On March 10th, 2016 is when I quit sugar. I would say it took me about six weeks to get over, like, sugar cravings. And when I say I quit sugar, I quit, like, the white stuff. I quit desserts, table sugar, and adding sugar to my coffee, things like that. But the cravings went away and I felt a tiny bit more energetic every day. But I was very discouraged by the lack of weight loss. And so I continued my research and I was having lunch one day with a friend, complaining, and she's really into her hormones and stuff, too. I was complaining to her about how I had quit sugar, but I didn't see any results. This was on January 13th, 2017. She said, have you ever heard of Dr. Fung and intermittent fasting? And I was like, no, I've never heard of Dr. Fung. She told me a little bit about him and then the conversation kind of dropped. She didn't really say she was following his protocol or anything like that, but I went home that evening, it was a Friday, I went home that night and I was on the Diet Doctor website and watching all of Dr. Fung's intro series on intermittent fasting. He's got like six or seven short, five to seven minute videos, on Diet Doctor.
Have you watched the long one? I know when I stumbled across him on YouTube, it was the etiology of obesity.
Yeah, so I definitely have watched that.
7-video course or something. They're about an hour each. It's quite a long watch, isn't it? But I soaked that up. That was my first meeting with Dr. Fung.
Yeah, me too. That night I watched so much and I read. I immediately ordered The Obesity Code off of Amazon. I was completely blown away. In one of those videos, he said, this is not your fault, and he taught me about controlling my insulin all in these short little videos that were free for anybody to find out there. And when he told me this was not my fault, I know I just sat there and I had tears in my eyes and it was like a major, major life changing moment. So that was the last day I ate bread, whole grain healthy bread. That was the last day I ate bread, the last day I ate potatoes and the last day I ate pasta. I had already weaned myself off of the white sugar. So you know, I was already successful with that. But as soon as I quit the bread, pasta and the potatoes is when I started losing weight rapidly. And immediately I went on the Diet Doctor website and I signed up for the two week challenge to get started. I picked a couple of recipes off of there. I don't really enjoy cooking too much or at least my old self didn't enjoy cooking that much. I picked a few of their recipes and I just repeated those recipes for two weeks and I started incorporating the intermittent fasting into my lifestyle. I was like, there's absolutely no reason why I have to eat after six o'clock. I'm not hungry. If I'm eating after six o'clock, it's emotional hunger. And then I also immediately stopped eating breakfast because I've never been a breakfast eater. In my childhood, my mom used to have a fit when I wouldn't eat breakfast before I left for school. But if I ate breakfast, I was starving by 9:00 AM. I was eating breakfast at that time. I was eating oatmeal with blueberries on it and I was trying to follow the diabetes prevention program diet that I was in. I was in the year long program at my work, so I immediately stopped eating oatmeal in the morning. I'm never, I'm not hungry in the morning. I was just doing it because they told me to eat five meals a day.
No wonder you fell asleep. It's one of those sorts of meals, isn't it? That you can just picture on these posters that are the healthy eating goals.
Yes, the oatmeal.
Yeah, exactly. I remember my sister saying to me, because we both used to eat porridge and enjoy it. Don't get me wrong, I love porridge. It's delicious. But I realized when I tested my blood sugar before and after, just how elevated. I mean my blood sugar went through the roof. And that was, actually, there was no difference. And this is really telling. I never used to put a lot of sugar on it, but I used to sweeten it a little with some brown sugar. There was no difference in that blood sugar spike between having or not having the sugar on it.
So it was so as the oatmeal.
So it was all about the oatmeal and my sister used to say to me, I have this oatmeal and it's supposed to be really good for you and keep you going all day. I can remember this advert when I was a kid, I think it was the Quaker oats advert and there was this boy walking to school and he had this orange halo around him, that the warmth that he got from having these wonderful oats that just kept him going all day. And so, you know, grew up with this idea that, you know, having porridge for breakfast was the thing to set you up for the day. And my sister said to me, you know, I don't understand it. I have this porridge and then couple of hours later I just want to go to sleep. I said, and of course you know with hindsight, yeah, I said that's because you've had a sugar high and now you've got a sugar crash and you just, you just want to sleep it off.
And here I thought I was being so healthy because I was eating steel cut Irish oats, right? Oh, these are so healthy!
I read about these steel cut oats and that's exactly what I would do as well.
I was putting blueberries on them because I gotta eat my fruit, right?
This is the healthiest of the healthiest options when it comes to oatmeal.
And since I had quit the white sugar or the brown sugar, I was drizzling a tiny bit of the brown rice syrup on there. So it was still adding a little bit of sweetness, right. Oh my goodness. I wasn't into testing my blood sugar at that time, but I bet, oh I bet it would have been crazy. So anyhow, that's the day. January 13th, 2017, the day I met Dr. Fung. Hopefully someday I can meet him in person, because that would be amazing. He literally changed my life. His work and Diet Doctor website is just an amazing resource for me. And then also, after I read The Obesity Code, I did read Gary Taubes' book, Why We Get Fat and What To do About It. That was very eye-opening, too, because he also said, this is not your fault. The standard American diet. I don't know what you call it in Europe, but that's what we call it here. It's very SAD, the standard American diet.
It really is. And I think that's the absolute classic phrase that has stopped people in their tracks and has been that light bulb moment. When somebody, a respected professional, respected presenter, a respected expert on the subject, who deals with people who are overweight, obese, metabolically unhealthy, sick for whatever reason all the time. And they say, it's not your fault.
It was amazing.
Because of course we've just assumed that that's exactly what it is; that we're the ones to blame.
Right. Am I not exercising enough? Am I eating at the wrong time? I'm eating five times a day. Am I doing the timing wrong? This whole wheat bread is supposed to be good for me, right? It's not. It's amazing that I found out how much healthier I could be by not eating bread, potatoes and pasta. I have an Irish background. I loved, I used to love potatoes. I don't miss them at all anymore because I know what they do to me.
I have to say that is the one thing that I do miss.
The potatoes?
Yeah. I've never really completely got over that. Don't get me wrong, I don't crave them all the time at all. And I can perfectly happily do without them. But they are the thing that when I'm out for a meal, I will maybe have a few chips or fries as you call them in America. But it's very occasional and I don't have very many. And what amazes me actually is that I can get something like, a typical plate here, steak frite, so you know, steak and fries, and I'll mostly obviously focus on the steak and I'll have just a few of those fries and I will leave the rest and I never would have done that. Never.
It's amazing how empowering it is that we can touch a couple of French fries and leave the rest alone. I did have a couple of French fries when I was in Ireland last spring because I was in Ireland for three weeks. I had to have some sort of potato, right? Because I knew I would get harassed by my family and friends at home. Like you don't, yeah, you don't have to be so obsessive do you? I'm like, yeah, okay. I will try. I was with my daughter and she totally respects and supports my lifestyle, so she didn't harass me or anything, but she was like, you know mom, it's not going to kill you so let's do this. I'll hold your hand.
I've always also grown up with not wanting to leave anything on your plate and have that sort of no waste policy. One thing that I found very useful, regardless of whether I'm with someone like that or not, when I'm eating out at a restaurant, I will just leave the food I don't want to eat now. There's someone I go out to dinner with quite a lot. He quite likes it because if I can't eat all my food, sometimes the old restriction from my weight loss surgery kicks in. I can't predict when it's gonna kick in and it might kick in halfway through my steak or something and I can't finish it. So he tends to finish up all the bits and pieces, especially with dessert. Like, I might have a mouthful and then the rest he gets to have all that if he wants. So he quite likes going out to dinner with me. So tell me what happened. How quickly did all the changes and benefits happen to you after you started eating this way?
They started happening amazingly fast. Within those two weeks that I was doing the two week challenge that Diet Doctor offers, I started feeling so much more energy. I was buzzing around the house. My husband is asking me what's going on. I'm assuming I slipped into ketosis pretty easily because I had already quit the white sugar. My exhaustion started disappearing, the brain fog started going away and I was convinced within a few days that this was the lifestyle that was going to work for me.
Tell us some of those real measurable results that you saw. What issues that you'd had before that went away or improved and you know, what kind of time period. I think, I seem to remember looking at your notes, sort of, the difference in a year was quite astounding.
It was quite amazing. I actually did a blog series about everything that Keto's healed for my body. Of course, the weight loss is amazing and it's enabled me to, you know, go about my day much easier. But my blog series, I talked about how I cured my chronic exhaustion, cured my obesity, reversed my nonalcoholic fatty liver disease. I reversed my obstructive sleep apnea and my need for a C-PAP machine. I no longer get migraines and headaches. I used to get migraines monthly with my cycle. I would usually have headaches daily. And I'm convinced that that was because of sugar. I no longer have any joint pain. I don't feel inflamed. And I'm positive now, I actually have a doctor's appointment tomorrow to see my functional medicine doctor. I ask her to test my insulin every appointment. The last two times my insulin has been in the normal range, so I have considered myself healed from insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome, or under control, with the insulin resistance. So those are the exciting things that I wrote about because those are real improvements in my health that have just completely changed my daily life. I no longer want to come home and just sit on the couch all day and do nothing. Now I'm on the go like, go, go, go, 24/7.
I'll tell you what I love about a couple of those blog posts, and we will list those in the show notes so people can go and find them, and read them for themselves, but it was a couple of the earlier blog posts, I think. What I particularly liked were the pictures of how you were feeling, and what, practically, you were able to do. So there was one in particular, I think, and you can remind me, it was some falls somewhere? You went on an eight mile hike and there's some wonderful pictures of you, obviously, you know, really having a good time and really pleased with yourself, that you'd been able to do this because you wouldn't have been able to do it before.
Right. That was actually the picture I used for the blog post series, was me standing at the top of the summit, in Glendalough National Park in the Wicklow mountains in Ireland when we were on that three week vacation. That was the last full day that we had there. We went on an 11 mile hike, which is something I never ever would have done in my previous life. And I stood at the top of that summit and I made my daughter take a picture of me holding my arms up because I kicked her butt that day. And my daughter is an athlete and she was like, I can't believe that I'm having a hard time keeping up with you mom. So it was a really exciting day for me and I was glad that she was there with me to realize that because she obviously knows my struggles all these years. So yeah, 11 miles and fasted, too. So, that was really exciting. Yeah, it was a beautiful day. One that I will never forget and I'd love to go back and repeat it.
So you employ, make use of, intermittent fasting quite a lot.
Yes, I do. I did a lot of intermittent fasting through my weight loss portion of my journey.
And in what sort of form did that take, as sort of a daily intermittent, or did you have blocks of time?
My normal schedule was I did three forty-two hour fasts weekly. So normally I wouldn't eat on Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays. And that fit perfectly in my social schedule. Like on Monday nights I went to an exercise class so there wasn't any time to make dinner. On Wednesday nights, my kids were at church youth group, so they weren't around so I didn't have to cook for them. Fridays was just something, at the end of the week I just kind of, that's how I ended my week. So I would eat two meals a day on Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. And I would eat around noon for lunch and I would always be done eating by 6:00 PM for dinner. So two meals a day, four days a week, and then three 42 hour fast during the week. And then occasionally during my weight loss journey I would throw in a couple of five day fasts, which I was surprisingly able to do. The first time I did it, it really shocked me. But I'm telling you, being a fat burning machine, I was never wanting for food when I was doing those fasts. I really focused on keeping myself busy. I'm very goal oriented, so to set a goal and achieve those goals is very satisfying for me as well.
And it sounds to me like you're an upholder. I don't know if you read Gretchen Rubin's work, but you're a classic upholder.
What does that mean? Somebody that goes after their goals?
It really means that you hold yourself accountable but you react to goals set to you by other people but also by yourself. So you're just really good at sticking to things and you just do it. As soon as those goals are set and you've got the rules for what you need to do, you just stick to them. You uphold them. Whereas somebody like me, who is a rebel, is the absolute opposite of that. So when you were saying people can't understand I'm the type of person who can stick to a diet really easily, I'm one of those people who finds that difficult to understand. Not because, you know, I know there are people who can do it but I can't very easily, that there are ways of getting around the barriers that rebels put up, but it's a slightly more tricky process.
Well that is really interesting. I'm going to get the name of that book from you because like I said, I feel, sometimes I feel really bad when I'm talking to people and they're struggling and I'm trying to empathize with them and how to hold their hand through these days that they're having a hard time. So I would love to read that book so that I have a better understanding because I've started feeling bad that I don't struggle with this and I don't think I should feel bad about that.
No you definitely shouldn't, but it's very, very useful. If you can find out which tendency somebody else is, you can work out the best strategy not only for how you communicate with them, but how to tailor an approach that's going to work for them.
That is awesome. I'm glad you brought up upholder because that is really fascinating to me now, because this is something that I've been struggling with for the past couple of months. Like how do I deal with this? So I'm sure that will be very insightful.
Absolutely. And your family must've, well, they obviously noticed a dramatic change, but I mean they must be so proud of you.
Yes, I do believe that they are. Like I mentioned, my daughter's an athlete, so it's fun for her that I'm able to do stuff when we're out hiking and just being out for the day and not getting tired. My husband is extremely proud of me. I know he talks about me at work all the time and he brings up bacon and he brings up my website to people and they have a running joke in his office about how much bacon I eat and I get to hear about that all the time. But yeah, he's really proud and he's a big support system and he's actually the one, actually my entire family is the one that has encouraged me to share my passion with other people. My kids were saying, mom, you need to start a YouTube channel. And I'm like, I'm not a YouTube star. And you know, that's their age, they're young 20's. So they've been encouraging me all along to share my passion. I'm trying to do it in a way that I'm comfortable with. And then I have a ton of friends at church that I support, that I started on my, I call it my Keto train. Lots of friends have followed along and I have a private Facebook group that I manage for them to share tips and stuff, because they were starting to ask me to get together individually one on one, and I love to do that. I love to sit over a cup of coffee with heavy whipping cream with them and talk to them about it, but it got to be too much because I was working full time as well. So I was like, I'll start this group for everybody and I've got about 170 people in there now. Mostly people that I know. And then I do let people invite their friends in as well.
How fabulous. And do you do some local meetups and Keto meetups?
Yes, we've done that quite a few times at my house. We have a Keto lunch after church on Sundays sometimes. And that's really fun because everybody brings one of their recent favorite Keto dishes and we all get to sample a little bit. And we usually have about, you know, 15 to 20 people here and it's a great time.
That sounds like fun. And you mentioned this regular routine of fasting and I think that is a pattern that I've employed before. I really, as I've mentioned, find it very difficult to stick to regular routines. But when I have that Monday, Wednesday, Friday thing with fairly light eating days on the Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays at least the first meal, because I, it's something that really dials my restriction back in. And I think for everybody when they start eating after fasting, even if it's not for a particularly long period of time, find the appetite is a bit suppressed. But for me that's intensified even more. So I would have fairly light eating days on those other days. But then Sunday, because I'd had the Saturday to sort of start ramping the food back up, Sunday was my real feasting day. And I really liked that difference, that switching up as Megan Ramos talks about, and having all those really different things that, you know, one day you were really firing up your metabolism, and another day you were fasting. And I think that really can work quite well.
Yeah, that's, that's amazing. I still fast, daily now. I usually keep like an 18/6 schedule because like I said, I'm not a breakfast eater. There's absolutely no reason for me to eat breakfast. I usually eat, start getting hungry around 11:30, eat between 11:30, noon, and then if my schedule allows it we're usually always done eating here by six o'clock at night. My husband gets home from work and he wants to eat immediately, so he helps out with that schedule too because he's home by five, and like, what's for dinner?
Feed me.
Yeah, exactly! Feed me! And for the most part he'll eat my keto food. He is not on Keto. I'm trying to switch him to low carb, healthy fats. He's not overweight, he doesn't have health issues. So he's very supportive and he will eat my keto meals, but he does have some limits. He does not like eggplant and he turns his nose up at my eggplant Lasagna. I don't understand why, it's delicious, but he's a good, he's a good sport.
And what does the typical day of Keto look like for you food-wise?
Well, right now I do, when I wake up, I turn into a coffee fiend through this Keto lifestyle. I didn't even really discover coffee until I was in my forties and I was never really that addicted to it. Like, I didn't have to have it in the morning, but now I do. So I do have coffee with cream in the morning, a couple of cups, and then I will get hungry for lunch around noon. I do work in an office three days a week, so the lunch that I always pack and typical lunches that I even eat at home are really simple. I like to keep it simple, silly. So KISS is the acronym. Typically I will have some bacon, some olives, some cheese, half an avocado with some lemon squeezed on it and Everything But the Bagel seasoning. And those are the things I keep stocked in my fridge at work. So they're always handy. And then, just because I don't like to complicate things, I have things like that in my fridge. So that's a typical lunch for me, or some egg salad. Lunch is very routine for me. If I'm home, I might fry up a couple of eggs to eat with my bacon.
Oh, same here. I'm like, you, I go for brunch. I don't tend to eat that early. I'm the same. I have a coffee or something. I take the dogs for a walk and then I have my breakfast when I come back. So it's invariably much more lunchtime when I eat. Bacon and eggs, I have bacon and scrambled eggs scrambled in butter every single day. So I'm quite a routine person in that way.
I get that. I totally could eat bacon and eggs every day. And when I tell people that, they're like, oh, how can you eat eggs every day? I'm like, eggs are the perfect Keto food. They keep me full and they keep me satisfied. They have the right nutrients. And I have grown to love eggs, too. I really didn't eat a lot of eggs before Keto.
It amazes me. People who say, oh, how can you eat the same thing like bacon and eggs every day, or eggs every day, or what people tend to, whatever they have for breakfast, but then they're the kind of person who will have the same cereal every day. I don't really understand. I think breakfast is one of those meals that a lot of people just have the exact same thing, right?
Yeah. They reached for the oatmeal or the box of Life cereal or whatever. Right. Yeah.
I don't see what's weird about having the same Keto food every day. What's more weird than having the same cereal every day? I don't quite understand that.
And through this journey, what I have discovered or learned about eating is that I treat food as fuel now, strictly. So I'm not obsessively thinking about some type of food that I'm missing out on or some type of food that I could replicate as a Keto recipe. Food is strictly fuel to my body. And that's another reason why I could eat bacon and eggs every day because I know my body needs that fuel and I can go about my day after I've had a lunch like that. And that's very freeing. That was, that's another part of the freedom of eating Keto too.
Yes. I can't say that I've lost my passion for food, and liking variety and liking different tastes and playing with recipes and things. But yes, I like the fact that I suppose the extent I go towards that is just feeling like I'm in control, rather than the food being in control of me.
That is exactly, that's all part of our journey, too. Right.
And so what's a typical dinner?
So a typical dinner, I have a new appreciation for pork, too. I cook pork quite a bit. I love, my favorite recipe is the crispy skinned pork shoulder or, butt, you know, it's nice, it’s got a nice fatty layer on it and it crisps up and that is my favorite way to prepare meat. We eat steak quite a bit and if I need to do a quick dinner, we'll do a hamburger patty with some cheese and some pickles. As far as side dishes, I love to eat cauliflower, make it into a cauliflower mac and cheese or roasted cauliflower. I do make some Keto casseroles, you know, like with some meat and of course they're all lots of cheeses and I'm very thankful that I'm not intolerant to dairy. I don't know how I would be able to do Keto without cheese because I love cheese. I've always loved cheese and I didn't have to give that up, which was another great asset about Keto. I really do keep it really simple, Daisy. I do like to cook now if I find a good Keto recipe that a friend has shared or like, you have to try this. We post a lot of food pictures in that Facebook group I have. I will try things on the weekends. I get a little more adventurous, but the work week for me is pretty busy and I try to keep it simple.
Yeah, I do too and actually one of my favorite regular meals, which is what I had last night is, to roast chicken thighs with some salt on, so that skin goes wonderfully crispy and I've always preferred the darker meat with chicken anyway, so I just love chicken thighs. And I literally just have a couple of those with some mayonnaise. I love that. My favorite regular dinner.
Easy and something I should try because I do like chicken. I just don't think to eat it a lot. I'll give that a try, too.
For sure. So you've touched upon how you've started a blog and you're thinking about YouTube and all the things. Tell us a bit about what you're doing. We were talking a little bit before about how I found a number of people, especially those I've interviewed, who have gone on to use their passion for Keto to help other people and sometimes turn it into an income, a job for themselves.
Right. That would be amazing and I'm hoping that doors will open, that I could possibly support myself financially with something. But to start with, I launched my blog in April of last year after my family was pressuring me to do something. Nah, I shouldn't say pressure, encouraging me to do something with my story because they could see every day the people's lives that it was touching and the people that I was helping and in my little Facebook group and my group at church, etc. So I sent my story to Diet Doctor and Amanda Atkisson was the editor at the time that picked up my story. And so she's shared my story, in the success stories on diet doctor. And I've developed a long distance friendship with her right now. I adore her. She's just such a sweetie.
She's wonderful.
Yeah. So actually, after she shared my story, my success story ended up being the number two success story on Diet Doctor for that year for 2017. I was like, wow, I didn't know so many people were clicking on my story. And so I started sharing the Diet Doctor links on Twitter and some random person who had just started doing Keto reached out to me in a message on Twitter. I'm not very active on Twitter, so when I got a message, I usually tend to ignore those. But for some reason I opened his message and he's a web developer in the States and he just said, I'm really touched by your story. I really think you could help a lot of people. You need to build a blog or you need to build a website. I told him, I said, I have absolutely no idea how I would build a website, I'm not a technical person, I'm an accountant, and he helped me completely start the website, gave me all the tools that I needed, gave me encouragement and I tried to pay him and he would not accept anything from me. He said, just keep sharing your story. It's amazing. You're going to help so many people. And so shout out to Chris. That was, his name's Chris, and I was just completely blown away and encouraged by his support.
How fantastic.
I just jumped on board and fortunately my husband is a software programmer so he's able to help me. He's not a web developer, but he knows enough. He knows his way around computers and technology enough so that he helps keep my website running when he has spare time. He does work full time, too. But anyhow, that's how I got to the point of launching my blog in April of 2018.
And it's called?
It is called JoyfulKetoLife.com, because I picked joy, that is, my hashtag saying is choose joy always. And this lifestyle has just completely restored my joy in life. I think joy is one of those words that just is so hard to describe and to put into words. It's something that bursts forth from your heart, you know? And I like to share that joy with everybody that I encounter on a daily basis.
Yes. Well that's what I saw captured in the pictures I mentioned earlier. That's what's lovely to see. It's always fantastic to hear about people who've lost especially a significant amount of weight because you know, I know personally how much difference that makes just from a purely physical practical point of view, the things that you're able to do, the things that you're able to do without pain and frustration all the time. But what I really like to see is the specific things that people are able to do that brings them joy because of that weight loss. Not the weight loss on its own, but what comes about because of that.
Right. I mean, the fact that Keto took away my chronic exhaustion, it just enables me to be able to do all of that. And I don't know if I mentioned to you that my story was featured in a national magazine here, too, last month. It's called First For Women. And a journalist reached out to me. She found me on Diet Doctor as well, and she reached out to me and she does a monthly series on tiredness, cures for tiredness. And so she picked up my story. It was a two page spread in this magazine. I got to go for a professional photo shoot and professional makeup and everything. It was, it was a lot of fun. So that was, that was in the December edition on newsstands. So that was really exciting and fun. Those are the kind of doors that I would never have expected to open and I can walk through and share my story. And if it just inspired one person to change their life, then it was really worth it. And I've heard from quite a few people through my blog. They have emailed me and said, I found your story in First For Women magazine, and it's really exciting to see and hear from them. I love to hear people's stories. Absolutely love it.
Oh, me too. It's really what I love. Yes, talking about things that just crop up and opportunities that open up, I mean, you know, that's why I'm here talking to you today. That's why I'm a podcaster. Absolutely. That's all because of Keto. It's all because somebody started a conversation with me way back over two years ago now on a weight loss surgery Facebook group, challenging me about some rubbish I was spouting about good carbs versus bad carbs. She showed me the science and she made me see the light basically. And that's what started me on my journey.
She shared the truth with you. We all have a moment in a story like that, which is amazing and that's why we need to continue sharing it and getting this news out.
Of course, because you could be that person for somebody else, and help them change their life for the better. I'm sure I've read something in the notes you sent me about wine. What is it about wine? And my eyes light up when I see something about wine.
I do love, again, in my late forties, I discovered wine, especially red wine. And once I started Keto, I was uncertain that I should include wine in my diet because I would stand in the middle of the grocery store aisle and just look at the labels. I had no idea what was in those wine bottles, right? So, and I'm very particular about reading labels and I was very strict counting my carbs, so I didn't drink wine for a long time. And then I found a company that marketed themselves as Keto-friendly and clean crafted wine. And so I decided to give that a try. And what I love about that company is the founder of the company. She'll go and scout the wine all over the world from little tiny mom and pop vineyards and wineries.
She has a fantastic job.
Yes, I want her job, right?
Me, too.
So she brings all these wines back and she tests them independently to make sure there's no added sugars and no added chemicals, no crappy stuff in this wine. So I feel very confident that the wine I'm drinking is very low sugar, the only sugar in it is the residual sugars from the fermentation of the grapes. And I don't drink a lot of wine, but when I do drink wine I want to make sure that it's clean because I am very particular about what I'm drinking. So this wine company is called Scout and Cellar and I am now an independent wine consultant for Scout and Cellar because I believe so much in the product and I know that there are people out there that like to continue to include wine in their diet. That's one of the top questions I see in Keto forums and Keto websites. Can I drink alcohol? Like yes, in moderation, you can. Be particular about what you're putting in your body, too, at the same time.
I think most people end up drinking less than they used to pre-Keto purely because it has to hit you a lot harder, I've certainly found.
Definitely.
I know lots of people feel the same way.
One glass of wine.
Exactly, yeah, one or two and that's pretty well my limit. I don't know about you but I, I mean I've always liked the dryer wines anyway, both with, especially with white, but red, too. I tend to like a really light and dry wine, both red and white, but certainly since Keto I can really pick up any kind of sweetness. Wine that somebody else will be drinking that they consider dry, I'll take a sip and say, whoa, now that's too sweet for me.
Exactly. When I started drinking wine, it was the high sugar, white fruity wines and now I, yes, I know exactly what you're saying. I'm definitely a dry wine drinker now. Your tastes definitely adapt with Keto, too, which is amazing.
They do. It's, it's like you've got a sugar radar built in that you can just taste it in everything, can't you?
Yes. I'm thankful for that part of the, not having any sugar cravings too. That's all part of it.
Well it's nice to finish up with a glass or two of wine. I too don't drink that regularly. I tend to just really have wine when I have friends over for dinner or go out.
Right, exactly.
So I don't really drink it very often, but I do like it and I've got very particular. Of course living in France, I've got to know a lot more about wine since I've lived here. And the wine here is really good. There's a lot to choose from.
I bet that's amazing. And I do have a lot to learn about wine still. Like I said, I just started drinking it in my later forties so I'm still learning. But I do know that I enjoy it over dinner with some girlfriends and it's good that I can still keep it in my keto lifestyle and when my friends are all drinking, I don't have to be so obsessive and say, no, I can't have that. Now I just usually take my own bottle because I know that my bottle is safe for my lifestyle.
A nice clean, dry one. Well it has been wonderful talking to you today. Perhaps you could round us up with a top tip.
A top tip. Well, going back to cooking and keeping food, you know, what Keto foods to use, I always like to tell people to keep it simple. As far as fasting goes. I like to tell people to keep busy and to keep, you know, keep distracted. When I was going through my fasting phases when I would do the longer fasts, my house got so purged of junk. It was amazing. So those are probably my two top tips. Do not overwhelm yourself in the beginning. I'm giving more than one top tip, aren't I? But, I have to say this, too. Another thing I love to tell people is that you have to learn the science yourself. The science is so amazing regarding Keto and low carb living. You have to learn this yourself so that you can apply it to your own life and then you will change your life and then you'll be full of so much joy that you'll go about your day and you will start to inspire and motivate other individuals. And then that's how we just keep the spark going, pass it on from one person to the next, and it's so fulfilling and so joyful to see lives changed through this lifestyle.
Yes and it really is a grassroots movement, isn't ? This big up-swell from the ground up that's going to change things eventually.
It is amazing. I love it. I love everything about this lifestyle and sharing it.
Me, too. Well, thank you so much for talking to me today, Christine. It's been a great pleasure.
Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm truly honored that my story is being shared to help inspire other people.