What exactly is your keto success path?
The success path is the broken down, step-by-step, day-by-day process that people will be going through. We really want to just show what happens when you do the Keto Made Simple Masterclass and start a keto diet, to take away any fears and debunk all the misconceptions that you might have heard about it, of course with the idea of leading you to success – we call it the success path.
There are five stages along this success path. I’d like to go through each stage. Stage one is where you feel hopeless, burnt out, doubtful, frustrated, overwhelmed, confused, and possibly even disappointed. You are tired of ongoing diet roller-coaster rides and you’re ready to make some serious changes. Can you talk us through some of what folks might be experiencing at this particular point in stage one?
There’s so much confusion these days about what keto is and even just how to improve your health. Diet is so powerful. What we want to make sure is that people know that it’s not confusing once you get taught in a way that is simple. And it’s sustainable if you do it in a simple way that’s effective. There are a lot of fears people have and even reluctance to try something – confusion, feeling overwhelmed – these are the feelings people have when they come to see me. And that’s okay. We can take you from this stage onto the next. It’s manageable.
On the other hand, if you’ve done keto for a while and you’re at a stall, you don’t know where to go, this path is perfect. It will pick you up where you are. The process that we have will teach you the basics, the fundamentals of how to do it. It corrects a lot of the confusion and issues that have occurred today. In 2020 there are all sorts of reasons to be confused due to all the different products that are available, the keto pills… Some people come to me thinking the keto diet is drinking apple cider vinegar! No! That’s not our approach. We want to make things simple and effective all at the same time.
So, people that are at stage one might be presenting with some of the following: they might be overweight, they have either decreased energy or lethargy, brain fog, chronic pain, pre-diabetes, type 2 diabetes, PCOS, elevated blood sugar, unstable blood sugars, they might be on medications with side-effects, they might have fatty liver disease, and they might not be happy about the way they look or feel.
Stage two is the learning phase, where you’re excited to start learning and implementing what you learn. This is where you are about to learn Dr. Eric Westman’s tried and tested four-step ‘NEST Method’. What is the NEST method, and how can folks learn to implement this?
I’ve boiled down essentially 20 years of experience in the research and clinical setting with these diets into the ‘NEST Method’. You can think of it as sort of like a bird’s nest, so to speak. We would teach you what to do and then you can fly off on your own.
The ‘N’ in NEST stands for ‘Nutrition’. It’s important to know the basics of nutrition, the boundaries of what you can and can’t eat, how much you should eat, and also what types of nutrition to have. A lot of people in keto are surprised to find that protein is the most important thing to think about (not fat). You need to know some basics about nutrition.
You need to know what not to ‘Eat’ – that’s the ‘E’ in NEST.
Then, the ‘S’ – we have a specific way of teaching you how to ‘Start’. Starting can be simple and easy. It can be complicated or difficult. If you want to buy books of recipes with 20 ingredients in them, great, or you can start very simply without really cooking much at all! The method we use is flexible enough so that we can teach you to start in any of these different ways and take away the fear of that.
‘T’ stands for ‘Training’ your mindset. When you get started with this, it’s all well and good to learn how to do it, but you’re going to come into some common pitfalls or bumps in the road. People might tell you you’re doing something that’s unhealthy or you’re doing great and then at the holidays your family members come in and give you doubts about what you’re doing. We’ve put together the training and the mindset component so that you can be prepared for the most common things other people say and also for you to come to grips with why what you’re going to be doing goes against everything you’ve been taught in the past You may have that nagging voice in your head that says, “Is this really healthy to do? Is this really something that I am okay to do?” Yes. We want you to know that upfront, so that you’re prepared when you go out and fly.
We teach you to fly. You have to know that there are some things you want to avoid when you’re out there flying on your own. So, to summarize, ‘N’ for nutrition, ‘E’ for what to eat, ‘S’ for starting simply, and ‘T’ for training the mindset.
That brings us on to stage three. You are now ready to go, you’re feeling motivated, inspired, and confident that you have what it takes to succeed. What do folks do at this stage?
There are some simple things that most people will do just to make it easier. It’s better to start with a carb-free environment. You want to clean out your cupboards, your pantry, your fridge, of all the carbs. If you’re craving them and they’re around, you’re going to have them, so give yourself a fighting chance by getting rid of the carbs in the household at first. If you like to plan out your meals and your grocery list, we help you figure that out with some pre-prepared ideas. Again, you can cook in many different ways or not even cook at all. You can eat at fast food places or restaurants or get your food online and have it delivered. This is flexible across all of those different platforms.
Probably the most important thing to know is that when you do this, you have to do it 24/7. You have to be all in. It’s not something like a pill or a thing you can do once a week or 23 hours a day – no, you have to do it 24 hours a day. The good news is that when you are all in, the cravings go away. That’s the next stage of what you’re going to experience, so you want to prepare yourself, learn the method, and then get into the implementation phase.
Stage four is the metamorphosis stage. Most people feel fine, some may experience short-lived food cravings, or even the ‘keto flu’. What starts happening at this stage?
Everyone feels different. For most people, it’s a seamless transition and you just notice your hunger going away. What’s happening behind the scenes, if you will, is that you’re changing from eating carbs and burning carbs to not eating carbs and burning fat instead. Your body wakes up to the fact that there’s fat on your body and you start consuming and burning your own body fat. That’s why your hunger goes down, which you will notice in the first day or two. It might even be gone totally. It doesn’t take much time for the hunger to go away.
Inflammation improves. People tell me they have more energy and less joint pain, fewer body aches, less bloating, because you’re starting to get rid of that extra fluid you’ve been carrying around; this happens in just the first few days. If you’re on medicine, of course you have to do this with someone who understands how the medicines need to be changed. Blood pressure can come down. If you’re on medicines for blood pressure, you need to be careful with that, make sure you’re monitoring it at home. Same with diabetes medicines.
The thing you’ve heard about – which most people don’t get – is the keto flu. You might experience a little headache or fatigue, but we have some things to do to prevent that or minimize that in the class. This involves adding some electrolytes and salt. I don’t want you to use these if you have a history of high blood pressure or heart failure – the medications may become too strong when you do this. So, in the first week, you’re going to notice the hunger goes away, cravings go away, and your body starts to burn its own fat.
Finally, you’ve reached stage 5 of the keto success path. This is the results phase. You start to see and feel changes within your body. You’ve gone from confusion to clarity, doubtful to confident, struggling to being in control, stuck to motivated, and skeptical to, “Wow! I can actually do this!” What do folks start seeing at this stage?
The first few days when you notice the hunger going away and the energy changing, it’s pretty empowering and self-motivating. Most people come to me after they’ve been on this trajectory of weight going up, so this is all going to start turning that around. It’s going to snowball and so you’ll notice some fluid loss, water loss, which is weight you have to get rid of at some point and the body starts burning its own fat so that you have more energy. The clothes start feeling looser and in the first week or two you might even have five to ten pounds of weight loss already, if weight loss is what you’re doing this for. Blood sugars will stabilize so that the cravings and hunger starts to diminish and go down. Behind the scenes, you are becoming a “fat-burning machine,” which in the big picture is a great way to just be healthy and have your body heal from so many different things.
Check out the full video here.