Hello everyone! Intermittent fasting (IF) is one of the top health visions of 2018, and promises to make a continued surge into 2019.
IF has shown tremendous health benefit through recent studies with more becoming available - promising benefits include prevention of cancer and Alzheimer's disease!
On today's show Frank discusses the Paleolithic (Paleo), Ketogenic (keto) and Intermittent Fasting.
Hope you enjoy!
Here are the notes from today's show:
Frank:
00:00 Hey everyone and welcome to unconventional wellness radio is a powerful and inspiring podcast set to revolutionize and disrupt healthcare. It's trying to put you in the driver's seat and be the force of change necessary for the lifestyle you've always wanted. Hey everyone. What's up? Frank Ritz here for unconventional wellness radio and today we're going to talk about something that is near and dear to my heart as it is one of the current ways that I am actually looking for in my nutrition unconventional wellness. What we're looking to do is we're trying to look at, you know, nutrition and we're trying to look at movement and we're trying to look at getting better sleep and reducing your stress and being able to remove toxins in your body. Well, today's podcast episode is going to actually attack one of the legs of nutrition than I'm going to talk about as a whole on the on unconventional wellness and that is the key to genic diet, but before we speak about the ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting, I also wanted to talk about the Paleo Diet.
Frank:
01:06 Now the Paleo Diet is something that myself and my wife had been following ever since probably about, oh, 2000 and maybe 2011, 2012 when it was just first starting to emerge as an actual consideration for a way to eat and that's what I want to make sure that we understand is that when I talk about nutrition plans, they're just that they're actually more of a lifestyle and I don't want you to confuse it with the word diet anymore. Diet has such a negative connotation to it is that, you know, when I hear the word Diet, I think it's a fad or that it's going to be short lived or it's hard to. Followers has a lot of different things that make it very difficult for me to be successful with. And so when we look at the lifestyle of what nutritional pathway you want to take, I want to be able to create an environment where you understand the sciences as they are currently and what I'm actually doing in my own life in order to be able to help you make the decisions of those things that you want to do in your life as well.
Frank:
02:09 And so let me back this train up a little bit and talk about the Paleolithic Diet and then we'll kind of segue, excuse me, into the key to genic diet and then of course wants to talk about intermittent fasting. Along with that. Now intermittent fasting is up and coming. It is definitely one of the hot topics of health that I've seen on multiple health websites as it is the thing that is going to finish out Tuesday in 2018 strong and then work its way in even 2019 as well. It is definitely gaining more popularity in terms of the amount of effort and searches on the Internet as even the. The key to genic die. But the key to genic diet is one that I like to couple with intermittent fasting as well. And so when we talk about Paleo, we are talking about how ancestors of ours used to eat.
Frank:
03:01 The concept is is that, you know, we didn't have an icebox or cold storage or some other way to be able to store food for future consumption. And so it is a understanding of the Paleo Diet is that we are the Paleolithic Diet, is that we're actually going to be consuming those foods in a more fresh way. And so the foods that we're actually looking to consume are going to be high quality proteins. So that can be any type of protein. It could be seafood, it could be beef, you know, grass fed beef, it could be, excuse me, any type of poultry or pork. And we want to make sure that we get it from a very good source. We don't want to just simply go by whatever we can find in our low. So local grocery store without it being high quality meat. Now the Paleolithic Diet as well as the Keto Diet, I just want to say something quick about those is that people think that we just need to become like carnivores and that's not true.
Frank:
03:55 That's where people actually make mistakes on the Paleo Diet as well as the key to genic diet is that they look at it as a way of just saying, I'm going to simply just consume a lot of protein and that never worked. Even for something like the Atkins died. That's the reason why a lot of people did not do well on the Atkins Diet, at least in my understanding of it, uh, because they just did nothing but consume lots and lots of lots of proteins with the Paleolithic Diet. The staple of any good diet should be the consumption of vegetables and those need to become very, very high up on what we consume throughout that day. And I would say that it's something similar to like what I've seen on the Mediterranean diet. There's a little food pyramid for the Mediterranean Diet where, you know, vegetables are the, are the largest staple. And so what we like to do in the Paleo, that the lithic diet as well as the key to genic died, is actually look at creating things revolving around vegetable consumption.
Frank:
04:54 Matter of fact, even just for myself, I like to eat one or two vegetarian meals throughout the week in order to take a break even from the protein that I would consume throughout that week. So lots of fresh and wonderful vegetables, preferably organic. Uh, if you cannot find organic around you, go to your local farmer's markets, it's a great place to find food that is grown using organic practices. Whether, whether or not, excuse me, they are labeled organic or not. Those farmers that, those farmer markets with those produce can actually let you know how they actually grew it. And the question is, you want to ask them, are, you know, did you spray it? Uh, how is your, you know, rate of being able to, to get it into the ground. How do you get it into the ground? What implements or what additives are we using to get it into the ground?
Frank:
05:47 And then how do you harvest and all those sorts of questions. So from seed to table you can ask all those questions and lots and lots of farmers, if they're doing it the right way, will not normally get squeamish and there'll be happy to answer those questions for you. And it's a really great way to get your hands on. Otherwise organic foods that are just not certified organic are labeled with that certified Usda Organic label. So vegetables, high quality meats, low amounts of nuts, and low amounts of fruits. Even though fruit is still okay on the Paleo Diet, you just want to make sure that you don't consume so much that you're getting a ton of excess carbohydrates even though they are natural carbohydrates that are found in a lot of our fruits. So that is the staples, if you will, or the way of going about the Paleo Diet.
Frank:
06:33 And that's been the Diet that myself and my wife had been following now as a base for at least six years, maybe even seven years, I think at the end of this year. But what we've done as we've, you know, we've, we've alternated it with a couple of other different types of diet or lifestyle plans and so currently what we're doing is whenever we feel like we need kind of a breakthrough or we're looking for a little bit more weight reduction or a little bit less inflammation or something like that, we like to jump into the ketogenic diet and the ketogenic diet is very similar to the Paleo Diet except for the fact that we are looking at eliminating some other foods that we are trying to maintain a threshold of our macro nutrients and one, let me talk to my match macronutrients for a little bit. So on the normal Paleo Diet, if you're at about 40 to say maybe 60 grams of what we call net carbs, and I'll talk about net carbs here in a second, but if you're at 40 to 60 grams of carbohydrates throughout the day, that's about the benchmark for being on the Paleo Diet.
Frank:
07:41 Now, ketogenic diets on the other end are kidogenic lifestyle. You're trying to restrict your carbohydrate intake even more and there are some definite, a proven scientific medical benefits to actually restricting the carbohydrates even more. And like I said, I'll talk about those in a field. So let's talk about net carbs, right? So when you look at the back of the package of whatever food you're going to consume, or you look up the nutrition information of whatever food you're going to consume, there are a couple different ways that carbohydrates are listed. Uh, the very first thing is that Osa total carbohydrates. So let's just say that, excuse me, you pick up a package of food that you want to consume on, say your Paleo Diet or even your key to genic died. And let's just say that it has six grams of total carbohydrates. That is any macro carbohydrate that is inside that package and always pay attention to the amount of servings that are also in that package.
Frank:
08:38 Because say if you pick up, I mean, you're not going to find out only six gram a package of say rice or something like that. Uh, but if there's four servings of rice in it and we have six net carbs, or excuse me, six total carbohydrates in each serving, then obviously if we do simple math, six times four, actually 24 grams of carbohydrates. And now let's talk about carbohydrates. Carbohydrates provide four kilo calories of energy per gram. That's what the body can look at. Okay? And so when we're looking at total carl total calories and things like that, we take the amount that is six and my example, multiply that by four. And so therefore we're getting 24 kilo calories out of our 2000 calories on average that the daily, you know, American eats, whether it be plus or minus bay based upon your nutritional needs.
Frank:
09:31 But that's where we're coming at and that's how we get those food calories as well. And so let's just, once again for this example, we're going to take our six grams of whatever food we're eating, but underneath that, the next listing that is a sub category of carbohydrates is something called dietary fiber. Now, dietary fiber is going to be both of your soluble and insoluble fibers. On the key to genic diet, you can subtract those dietary fiber grams from the total carbohydrates in order to come up with something called net carbs. The net carbs are actually what is being calculated for your carbohydrate intake throughout your day. And so on. The key to genic diet, usually in a day we are looking for 20 grams of carbohydrates, 20 grams of net carbs per day or less. And so if I'm taking, and I'm this package of food as a, you know, say four grams of dietary fiber, I can take my six, I will subtract four from it and I get to net carbs, always makes sure that you also pay attention to the amount of sugars that are inside of it as well because with the ketogenetic diet, if it is a different type of sweetener that is not something like a cane sugar or, you know, regular white sugar or something like that, say it's something like Stevia.
Frank:
10:50 Those also can usually be looked at in terms of degrading or should say subtracting from, uh, the total carbs in order to get your net carbs. So like I said before, the target on the wall is 20 grams of net carbs per day or less on the key to genic diet. So what that's going to do is that's going to place your body if you're following it appropriately. Some people will go into this sort of condition a pretty quickly. Some folks actually might take up to a couple of weeks, but you will put your body into a state of ketosis. Ketosis. Whenever you hear the O, s I s in Metro medical literature. It's actually just simply means that condition of her estate of and so it's a state of having ketones inside of your body are actually inside of your bloodstream. It can be that actually can be measured just like a.
Frank:
11:37 You can do a urine dip, stick for determining if you have any sugar in your urine. You can actually do a dipstick as well to determine if you have ketones. And if so, what is the level of ketones that you might currently have inside of your body? According to this urine dipstick. And so when we. Excuse me, look at the ketosis. We are trying to place our body into a state where the glucose or the simple sugar as well as the glycogen, which is a more complex stored version of sugar, predominantly in the liver, and then it's also a little bit more so in the, uh, in the skeletal muscles as well as smooth muscles of the body. But anyway, we're trying to consume those glucose and glycogen stores in order to try to convert our bodies to become more fat. Burning fat is there for a reason.
Frank:
12:25 Fat is one of the most dense, or it actually it is the most dense macro nutrient that you can consume. Your body will store additional carbohydrates as well as additional proteins, as fat it can convert them. There are some metabolic processes that will help your body do that. And so that's how we actually gained weight. That's how we gained fat weight. Well, we want to make sure that we turn our bodies. When we look at Ketogenesis, we want to turn our bodies into fat burning machines instead of sugar burning machines. We'll get into a lot of the medical research that have shown a lot of the benefits and things like that, but being able to become fat burners rather than being a sugar burner will in fact help a person lose weight if that's also the most, most common goal for people who want to do the key to genic diet.
Frank:
13:10 All right. Lastly, let's talk about what we talk about for the podcast and that's intermittent fasting. Well, intermittent fasting is similar to ketogenic. A, it's similar to the key to genic lifestyle in the sense though that we are looking at a period of time now that we're going to consume our calories. Now, for me, for example, I try to have a 16 hour fast. You can have something I've seen as low as 12. You can have something as high as 24 if you want to do it for a full day, but I shoot for 16 hours, which means from the period of time from about noon until roughly six or I'd say probably about noon to about six or seven. That is my window of being able to eat, so I'll usually eat lunch. I'll usually have a snack in between and then I usually will have a nice dinner as well and so when I finally get to it about eight hours throughout my day, I'm awake and I'm able to eat.
Frank:
14:03 I do my fast while I consume my very last calorie of the day, excuse me, into my bedtime, and then I sleep and the entire time I'm actually fasting. And so what we are doing is, uh, we're looking at intermittent fasting as a way of not necessarily saying we're going to put a limitation on calories, we're not going to limitation on making you feel deprived and we're not going to actually put a, you know, some sort of a weight loss strategy. You will lose weight on the key to genic die. You will lose weight on intermittent fasting if you actually be able to follow intermittent fasting the way it's supposed to have a. There is a, a way of looking at inflammation, right? So like inflammation, we have started to see scientific evidence that inflammation can be caused by dairy as well as different types of starches inside of the body and so with intermittent fasting or even key to genesis, first of all, we're not consuming those excess carbohydrates, but then we also try to look at consuming few to little amounts of dietary or excuse me of dairy as well, so cheese, milk, yogurt, those sorts of things.
Frank:
15:11 We try to reduce those as well because I've noticed a absolute difference in my knee pain, my back pain, my neck pain, my shoulder pain, you know those types of things because I feel that overall the inflammation in my body has in fact reduced ketogenesis or excuse me. Intermittent fasting is also linked to better blood sugar balance, so for you diabetics out there, this might be something that you may want to really look into because it will help give you better control of those blood sugars as well in order to help you with your condition of diabetes. Lastly, there is a lot of research that is being found about having an increased amount of cognitive function. Cognitive function is simply just brainpower folks, we are looking at being able to have better focus and being able to have a better memory and really be able to just restore ourselves in such a way that we're able to combat a lot of the stresses and adversarial things that happened throughout our day.
Frank:
16:08 And so what is really exciting about the intermittent fasting protocol is that we are looking at the ability to possibly help with cancer. All right? Because a cancer loves sugar and also be able to combat Alzheimer's disease. And so air is a lot of research being done right now and it is showing very good promise for both short and longterm effects of intermittent fasting. Um, we want to be able to simplify our lifestyle, right? So I said it before and I'll say it again, that the way that a diet or it should say once again, a way that a lifestyle actually works is we need to consume foods that are going to actually tastes good. Because I'll tell you what, if you can give me all the foods in the world that I know that are going to be good for me, but it tastes like slobber, it tastes like dirt.
Frank:
16:56 I'm not going to eat it and I'm not going to follow a lifestyle at all. Okay? So make sure that when you look at this, let me give you a couple of. I'm going to give you five action steps to really help you be able to look at why I would consider intermittent fasting is a lifestyle that I would love to follow and then how can I actually get it done in order to be able to implement it and start actually getting results? Okay? So what we're looking at is say, uh, first of all, it requires the correct mindset, the correct, correct way of looking at how can I be successful on it? Well, the good news is, is that we're gonna stray away from the typical American Diet. The typical American diet tells us to eat three or four meals a day, make sure that we eat them within a breakfast window, at lunch window, at dinner window, and then maybe even a snack before bed window.
Frank:
17:47 Well, that gets thrown out of the window when we actually look at doing intermittent fasting. Instead we should be looking at it more natural way, which is like we get up, we start doing some things and then we actually start consuming within a certain window, say 11 or 12, and we can consume for a couple of times throughout that day up to about maybe six or an eight hour period and then from that point forward we're not eating, eating anymore. Okay. So these are the most popular methods as a step one, is to understand the most popular methods, to be able to implement the intermittent fasting protocol as quickly as you can to be successful as you can. Okay. So during these fasting periods, I recommend water only now when you wake up and if you've been a creature of habit like I have. When I was in the military, I always wanted to have breakfast.
Frank:
18:34 Breakfast was a meal that I ate at 7:00 in the morning after I had worked out for the morning every single day, okay, 7:30 8:00 I was eating instead. Now I have something called a bulletproof coffee and bulletproof was created by a gentleman by the name of Dave asprey and you could probably go check out his podcast. He has the bulletproof protocol or the bulletproof podcasts on whatever device you're listening to and he's a wealth of information, but what a bulletproof coffee is is essentially it is a coffee that does not have any type of sweetener in it other than maybe Stevia, but you're really adding something called mct oil to it and then you're also going to add some sort of fat and usually that fat is buttered. Butter is what makes the bulletproof coffee. Bulletproof coffee and so that fat is to be there to help sustain you and to help give your body the feeling of CCA in order to be able to help you get from that period of you being up until you have your first meal of the day.
Frank:
19:33 Folks, I wake up at 5:30 in the morning every single day and I'm actually not really even that hungry until about noon because I have my bullet proof because I have my bullet proof coffee in the morning. The MCT oil stands for a medium chain triglycerides, which is another great way of getting a different type of a good fat into your body in order to help sustain you to get you into your intermittent fasting window. Plus, of course, great benefits of having caffeine. Uh, you can go ahead and Google all those. There's definitely a really good benefit being shown to having caffeine as long as we just make sure that we don't do it too much. So that's how I get through my morning fast period of time until I get to my window. So anyway, the three different methods that you can do as the 16 eight method, that's pretty much what I do.
Frank:
20:18 I do the 16/8 method, the lean gains protocol, you skip your breakfast and you actually only for about a period of eight hours and whatever, eight hours you want it to be, make it that eight hours. If you want to like you know, if you want to start off a little on the easier side and say like you want to go from like 10 until like about six. That can be your window. If you want to make it one to nine. If you want to make it a, you know, 12 to eight, whatever you want to do have about an eight hour period and then you fast for 16 hours after that. Then you have an eat stop eat. So you actually will fast for 24 hours once or twice a week and then actually go ahead and have dinner usually the next day in order to be able to keep your fasting going on.
Frank:
21:00 And then there's a five to two diet. Usually you have only about five or 600 calories on nonconsecutive days of the week, but then you can eat normally the other two diets. Now I've seen the five two diet be used a little bit more so unlike say someone who is like a, a, an endurance athlete or something like that. So I would normally say that the people that actually do the 16 eight method like what I'm doing is kind of the most sustainable and the easiest to usually stick to. Okay, so now we have to look at the correct mindset. Let's go to step two. Step two is let's look at now what the types of changes that are going to happen inside of your body and the things that we're knowing that we're doing good for our body. Right? So the levels of growth hormone.
Frank:
21:41 All right, so human growth hormone or hgh have actually been seen increased as much as five fold and that is mainly. That is massive because that helps for fat loss, muscle gain, just to name a couple of those benefits. Insulin sensitivity improved. So the cells that might say like, wow, I'm so burned out because you have so many carbohydrates, those receptors can actually improve and you can actually make body fat more accessible in addition to the cells are able to repair really, really well because they can remove dysfunctional proteins. Right? And then gene expression is really nice because that helps upregulate our capabilities of being able to have a boost in immune system. So very, very good. But then here's number three. Number three is also, it's a very powerful weight loss tool. Okay? It actually can help with hormone regulation. Okay. It increases hgh like we already said, and then it actually will help with fat burning because like I said before, you become a fat burner.
Frank:
22:43 Okay? Your metabolic rate can actually improve with short term fasting. Some studies I've seen it can do up to about 13 to 14 percent. Okay. So you can actually lose some belly fat. And um, that's a really good thing because when we have visceral belly fat, like what man men do is we usually put our weight like right around our abdomen and stuff instead of a female who usually puts it around their hips and their waistline and even their thighs, men have it a little bit more north than that, and that's what causes a lot of damage to the organs because they have to work extra hard because there's a bunch of fat in the way so it could actually help with belly fat as well. So number four though is, uh, you know, some health benefits stuff I talked about briefly. It can help with weight loss.
Frank:
23:25 It really can help with inflammation. Okay. Because with chronic disease, we have a lot of problems with inflammation. It actually can reduce or it may reduce bad ldl cholesterol and it's really good for brain health and it's also really great for anti aging. Okay. So how do we make it really simple to actually create a sustainable, maintainable lifestyle? Well, this is number five. Number five is that it can actually make your benefits simpler, or it should say it can make your eating habits simpler. You can prepare food, you can prepare some different types of meats. Vegetables are unbelievably fast. You just go to your ice box if you will, and just grab what you need and you make yourself a nice salad. And so that's the reason why it's really nice, especially among people who are looking for different ways of being able to sort of hack their lives and stuff like that.
Frank:
24:18 So it's really, really, really good. All right, so as always we want to make sure that we look at speaking with our healthcare professional when it comes to considering a new type of eating plants that make sure that you consult with your doctors before you actually try intermittent fasting because we want to make sure that you know, you look at certain things like you have problems with your blood sugar, you have bad blood pressure, you're taking medications or over or under weight and things like that. So make sure that you actually do discuss this with your healthcare provider before you, before you get going, because if you have your healthcare provider in your corner, then guess what? You're going to be able to follow intermittent fasting a lot better. Okay? You can actually, uh, you know, really get yourself going extremely fast. It's extremely easy.
Frank:
25:06 It can be a very powerful tool for you to help you lose weight, improve your health. I'm going to tell you right now that I'm doing it myself and I feel fantastic when I follow the baseline of Ketogenesis, but really the biggest things that I'm following my interment fasting protocol as well. So anyway, that's all I've got. Make sure that you run this by your healthcare provider as always, super important to make sure that you have a good team environment there. A, have an accountability partner. That's one last thing that is a bonus tip that I want to give you is that, you know, my wife and I do this protocol together and I tell you what, it makes it a lot easier because we're both looking out for each other. We both helped prepare the meals and we are both making sure that we stay accountable to one another because really our health depends upon it just like yours and so anyway, I love you guys.
Frank:
25:54 I think that being able to bring this intermittent fasting podcast to you today, I hope that you have found some value in it. Go back and relisten and definitely make sure that you hit that subscribe button so you can continue to get this great content and also make sure that you please give us a rating, a review, and tell somebody else about this because we want to be here to help you reach your goals and live and unconventional wellness lifestyle. So until then, I'm Frank Ritz. I appreciate your time and I cannot wait to see you guys on our next podcast. Take care everybody.
Speaker 2:
26:31 Oh Man, I sure do. Love bringing you this podcast and while we're at it, if you liked this podcast, please hit that subscribe button so you can always be getting notifications when we uploaded a new podcast and always as we love, go ahead and click on that review button. Click on that life button, send this podcast to a friend because we all could use every bit of education that we could in order to maximize the potential for our wellness. We will catch you guys on the next podcast. Thanks again.
