You’ve been helping people fight chronic illnesses like type 2 diabetes, obesity, and other metabolic conditions in your clinic using nutrition as therapy for the last 15 years. You’ve had incredible success in reversing these conditions using nutritional therapy. I have often heard you mention that your keto diet method is more powerful than a prescription drug. Can you expand on that, please?
It’s more powerful than many prescription drugs. In fact, I see it as a substitute for prescription drugs. The current system teaches doctors how to use those, but a keto diet is as powerful or more powerful than many different drugs like diabetes and high blood pressure, because we can take people off those drugs by just changing the food.
If you were to have 100 patients follow your program exactly, how many of them would be able to come off their medications?
Just about all of them. It’s pretty amazing. It may take some time, but the idea that you can treat these chronic medical conditions with lifestyle and nutrition is really powerful.
You have refined your method to a point where you have a near 100 percent success rate for people following your program. It seemed a natural progression for you to come up with an online course that helps people implement the program without having to physically come and see you. You’ve got a six-month wait list at your clinic. Now, people can enroll, and we have people enrolling from all around the world.
Yes. I’ve learned from many different doctors, including Dr. Atkins. I asked him to do research, and he funded us at Duke to do some of the original or the pioneering studies on looking at the safety of this method. It turned out that it is safe and it’s as powerful as all these different drugs. Finding what the most important elements you need to know are, takes time to refine, to have the experience across lots of different people from all walks of life, but there are a few simple principles that we’ve boiled it down to and that’s what we offer for people who take the class.
One of the hallmarks of your teaching is that your method is extremely easy to follow for someone starting keto. You are able to take someone from where they are now to where they want to be in four easy steps. Can you tell us what those steps are?
Yes, we call our method the “N.E.S.T. method” – we’re teaching you in the nest and then you’re going to be flying on your own. It doesn’t take that long. “N” stands for nutrition. There are some basics about nutrition that everyone needs to know, especially if you’re going to be in charge of what you’re eating. We give the basics of nutrition much like I would teach the students or doctors who learn from me at Duke.
“E” stands for what to eat. We’ve learned that a very simple way to teach people what to do is to put it all on one sheet of paper. The simple “what to eat” system is all laid out right in front of you. You have to stick to that list of foods.
“S” speaks to different ways to start. It doesn’t have to be complicated, it doesn’t have to be difficult, and you don’t have to have an app and write out everything you’ve eaten for the day or the week. You can do that if you want to, but we talk about many different ways on how to start the program
“T” is training your mindset or getting comfortable with a new way of looking at food. It’s really important to help you come to grips with the fact that this probably goes against everything you’ve learned if you’ve been following the mainstream programs. This may seem different. It’s like I’m teaching someone to drive on the left-hand side of the road when they’ve always driven on the right-hand side. There are things you need to get used to. Inevitably, you, your doctors, or your family will have questions about your health. That’s the paradigm shift, training your mindset to make sure you understand at the level that you want to know that it is healthy and it’s a good thing to do for the short term or the long term, depending on what you want to do.
That’s the N.E.S.T. method that we’ve boiled down through the years that pretty much works for everyone who wraps their head around it and does it.
There’s a lot of confusion out there and we aim to clear up a lot of that confusion. There are hundreds of YouTube channels, blogs, Facebook posts, and groups that you could follow, and there’s such conflicting information out there. For you, it’s very important that the foundation is correct from the beginning. Why is that?
Again, it boils down to good nutrition and doing it in a healthy way. My training and what I’ve learned as a past president of the Obesity Medicine Association and as a professor at Duke University for 30 years is that you have to be careful with nutrition to make sure you’re getting the appropriate type of nutrients that you need. The method I use has been around for about 150 years in terms of the low-carb nature of a program like this and the idea of keto distracts a lot of people. It distracts them from the product purchasing and thinking you need to buy these products or pills or drinks and all that. That’s not the method we use. We use a keto approach that is basically real food, not fake foods. It’s a double-edged sword to have the popularity of keto make it so loud and popular, but it also has brought in people who are selling products that you don’t really need and it just complicates things and gets people off track in many cases. So we boil it down to what you really need to know and what really works.
The course is only available for a few days every couple of months because in addition to the modules, it includes three weeks within a private Facebook group where you go live and you offer Q&A. It’s important for you to give real value to your students.
Yes, there are a lot of people who have tried this before and it didn’t work, they’re shy about starting, or they don’t know anyone else who’s doing it. The idea of helping you not only with the information but also the real-time support as you get started is really important to me. I’ve always done that in my clinical programs where I would teach and then follow up to make sure it’s working. We’ve made sure that that’s a part of the class so you get the information and also the personal support from me and the people I’ve trained so that I know that you’re doing it correctly and safely and in a way that really does work. We’re going to do our best to make sure that it works and people get the results they want.
Watch the full video on starting keto here.
