Bloodwork is back. What has KETO done to us?

hey everybody welcome back to living tradition's Homestead we are in the house today in front of the wood stove because it is kind of a cold nasty rainy day outside luckily we already had this video planned for you guys we thought maybe we'd shoot it out on the porch but because of the weather we decided to move inside in front of the wood stove we have a topic today that you all have been very interested in as you know Kevin and I starting in January of this year started a new way of eating we started eating a keto diet or a keto way of eat eating so today we're going to talk with you about um how that is all going for us right and some information that you all have been very interested in receiving from us now for those of you who don't know or might be confused about what a keido lifestyle is or a keto way of eating is we don't like to use the word diet first of all because that implies that it's something that you're going to do for a little while maybe get some benefits from but then you're going to stop it and go back to the way things were and that's not something that we're going to be doing so we call it a keto lifestyle or a keto way of eating and what it is it is a low carb moderate protein and high fat diet and really when you think about it and when we think about it it is really a very good way of eating for homesteaders because all of those things everything that we can grow and produce ourselves really fall into that category for the most part as soon as we started talking on YouTube and actually with our loved ones people in the community that we were transitioning to a keto way of eating lots of people were very concerned for us and we received a lot of feedback that uh we would see our cholesterol just Skyrocket that we were setting ourselves up to getting heart disease and that our blood pressure was going to get out of control and I think a lot of that comes from people not really understanding how a Kido lifestyle works or how what how that affects your body but nonetheless when you hear that type of feedback from people in all different aspects of your life it's kind of hard to not get a little worried about that stuff yourself I mean you're feeling some benefits you're you feel like you you are seeing some of the positive things but what's really happening to your under you know like inside your body that was kind of the unknown for us so just this last week Sarah and I both went to the doctor we had a good physical workup we had blood work done and today we want to share those results with you guys but before we share the results we want to kind of step back and uh review why we decided to make this big change of eating keto and really it was primarily for health reasons now I have heart disease that runs in my family and Kevin has diabetes that runs in his family and we know that you know being overweight causes health issues and can cause both of those to uh happen for each person so we also wanted to not only prevent those things from happening to us but we also wanted to uh manage our weight a little bit better so when we first started this I think one of the things that we heard a lot from people was but neither of you are overweight uh you look just fine um you know compared to everybody else you you look great and while some of that may be true that's not all true so before we jump into all the blood results I want to tell you just first of all where I was weightwise one year ago when we started this when we started this uh way of eating I weighed 196 lb and at 196 lb I was very squarely planted in the overweight category for my height I'm 5' 10 I'm 47 years old at 196 lb I was really almost 20 lb overweight and so even though when you go out and about you might see a lot of people who are a lot bigger than you that doesn't mean that you're not overweight it just means you're not as overweight as some of those other people now at the beginning all of this for me in January I was 146 PBS now the BMI range for what is ideal for my height uh goes up to about 150 so I wasn't exactly overweight but I was pushing kind of the top level for my height and I wanted to bring that down a little bit uh the ideal weight for somebody in my of my height is about 127 lb and the ideal range for someone of my size again 5' 10 is 157 lb so I was at 196 my ideal would be 157 and kind of a healthy range BMI wise is really from about 130 to about 175 I think it's like 174 point something so you can see when I started this I was way above that 175 which put me clearly into the overweight category so that is where we were starting off at the at the beginning of January now when we went to the doctor for our physicals um I was very happy to see on the scale there at the doctor you know you always weigh more at the doctor than you do at home well first of all let's be honest when you weigh yourself at home you're not wearing anything most of the time because you want to be as light as you can right at the doctors you have all your clothes on so the day at the doctor I was 136 PB lb so 10 lb lighter than I was at the beginning of the year and when I went to the doctor last week I weighed in at 174 lb again that is clothed so really less than that which puts me into the normal category no longer overweight and is about a 22 lb loss from when we started a year ago so I was very happy with that next up we were concerned about our blood pressure we had gotten a lot of feedback from people that we were just going to kill our blood pressure by doing this um I generally have a normal to low blood pressure so this really wasn't much of a concern for me uh but at the doctor my blood pressure was 100 over 64 which I mean honestly it's pretty normal for me right and so again this was an area of concern for me because I have had borderline high blood pressure in the past uh especially back in the days where we were still working in corporate Amer America um I would go to the doctor and at that point you guys I was even heavier than I was when we started this I think I never saw the scale get over 200 but I'm pretty sure at one point I was over 200 lb and my blood pressure would range anywhere from like 140 150 over 90 somewhere in that range but I was pleasantly surprised that when I went to the doctor last week my blood pressure was 120 over 70 which puts me right in the normal category so I was blown away by that because it's been a long time since I've seen my blood pressure be actually in the normal category so now let's get to blood work right because this is where there is the most controversy and the most concern uh from you know our family and community members and from you all from YouTube so let's get let's get down to the nitty-gritty right so let's start with cholesterol because that's the big one that every's like oh you're eating eating all this meat and you're eating all this fat and you know you're you're going to get your cholesterol is just going to be so out of whack so I'm going to actually grab my paper here cuz I don't have them all memorized and we're not going to go over every little test that they did because they did quite a bit of blood work so we're going to go over the ones that we know everybody's going to be concerned about based on diet right so the first one we're going to start with is just overall cholesterol and the number you want to see uh should be less than 200 right mine was 176 and mine was 156 next up is the HDL you want a number that is greater or equal to 50 right uh mine was 78 and mine was 48 uh next up is the LDL which is a lot of times considered the bad add cholesterol and you want a value that is under 100 right and mine was 85 mine was 94 and the final result which was a big one for me because in the past I've had this number be quite high triglycerides triglycerides are are one of those things it's another type of fat or another type of lipid in your blood that if it's elevated can really increase your risk for heart attack stroke a hardening of the artery and you guys so the number that you're looking for is below 150 I can tell you at one point while we were still in the Phoenix area my number was above 150 and my doctor actually wanted to start me on a pharmaceutical for it but I actually ended up just taking krill oil which brought the number down not all the way down but it brought it down enough that I was kind of out of the woods but you guys so we're looking for under 150 when we went to the doctor last week my value was 59 that is fantastic yeah it was over a 100 Point drop from where I was probably at my heaviest and mine was 44 so that is fantastic also right so that is all of the like fats in your blood those are the things that people are worried about for heart attack stroke things like that and as you can see uh eating a moderate protein high fat low carb diet really made those numbers all fall into the normal range now the last thing we concerned about was uh the potential for diabetes that runs in Kevin's family so we wanted to check that out as well yeah there is quite a bit of diabetes in my family especially on my dad's side of the family so that is always a concern for me especially you know with being overweight and all of that so this was something that you know once you're diabetic you're diabetic so I was hoping I had never gotten into the diabetic area and the good news is that that uh after going to the doctor last week my glucose which is kind of a snapshot of what your your glucose is right at that time so that was 94 which is in the normal range and then they also tested our A1C which is kind of a bigger picture of how your glucose does so an A1C kind of looks at kind of like a few months what your kind of average is doing my A1C was 5.5 which is also in the normal range so no sign of diabetes now I wasn't really worried about it for myself but my glucose was 83 and my A1C was 4.9 well overall uh our physicals and our blood work and our our blood pressure all of that checked out really well we're very happy we're very relieved and we're really excited about those results right and excited about the future because now we know that we're on the right track right and overall you guys we are feeling Fant fantastic we've got a ton of energy uh we we love what is going on here now one thing that we did want to talk to you guys about as well is that you know while it's great that we've lost weight on this keto diet and that you know like physically I think we appear better we feel better but there was another kind of hidden reason why we wanted to start this lifestyle in the first place and that was inflammation if you do any amount of research on your body and inflammation and how just how bad having ongoing inflammation is in your system you'll understand why you want to do something to negate that and when all the research we did about how to control inflammation in your body through diet it almost all LED back to doing a low carb keto diet more and more research is coming out and information that sugar and carbs are very inflammatory to the body in inflammation information I had been experiencing some uh what I think was gut inflammation some some digestive issues I yes some yeah IVs and so if I could get that more under control through diet through a high fat low carb diet that was worth it for me and for me and I've told you guys about this in the past I've suffered with I have psoriasis uh so I have skin problems and I have psoriatic arthritis so let like psoriasis inflammation in your joints and I can tell you after doing this diet for almost a year now you guys first of all my skin problems are almost 100% gone I still have a little bit of dry skin on my hands but other than that my skin problems are pretty much gone and the same is true for my joint problems um other other years during the summer especially out you know gardening and working hard and all of that my joints would be inflamed and sore uh this summer and now going into winter I have no joint pain whatsoever and my digestive issues if I'm doing you know no cheating uh my digestive issues are completely gone I have never felt this good with my whole guts in my entire life and I think that that is just evidence you know that what we're doing is working for us right now we want to talk with you a little bit about what eating keto looks like for us and before we kind of get into that I want to tell you that prior to doing keto we ate really well uh we thought we were what we thought was well yeah we were we thought we were eating pretty healthy and you know we were eating primarily homecooked meals and you know very simple ingredients we weren't getting processed foods we weren't buying boxed or frozen meals we were eating what I would consider like a whole food diet like we made everything from scratch pretty much most of our meals had ingredients that you could actually pronounce right like we so we thought we were eating a very healthy diet yes so because our diet was really relatively simple anyway it wasn't a very difficult transition for us the hardest thing to kind of wrap our minds around when we first started eating keto was that there are things that we've been told our entire lives are good for us that more and more research is starting to show aren't good for you and really because the body treats carbohydrates like sugar right okay so any carbohydrate whether it's you know table sugar maple syrup um rice bread that is yeah that is all converted to a type of sugar in your body and your body uses it like it uses sugar right and so our goal with going to a keto lifestyle or a low carb lifestyle was to get rid of as many things in our diet that turn into sugar so obviously giving up sugar itself was a big deal but also we needed to research and learn about all the different things that we were eating that were tur into sugar in our bodies so that means grains even if it's whole grains right bread pasta potatoes sweet potatoes a lot of fruits corn yeah corn yeah corn a lot of fruits watermelon apples uh which I was a big fruit eater prior to this I mean I would I would eat apples watermelon bananas all that kind of stuff almost every single day right so so we had to kind of retrain ourselves and relearn about the carbohydrate content of a lot of things especially fruits and vegetables I mean getting rid of Breads and and all those kinds of that's kind of like a no-brainer okay well yeah you can't eat those but then relearning what fruits and vegetables we can and can't eat um that was a learning experience for us and and we think we have that under control now and there are a lot of lists out there online to tell you the net carbs of fruits and vegetables there's actually app that we use and and used when we were starting out especially that we have on our phones called carb manager uh and it's it's a great app not affiliated with them in any way but it's just a great app because you can put your stuff in there you can even snap a picture like of the box of your food and it has a database and it'll tell you kind of where that falls but it also helped us figure out really for the amount of weight that we wanted to lose how many total carbs per day we should be consuming right um for me that ended up being about 21 carbs a day right and for me it was somewhere around I think 40 carbs per day really yeah so for weight loss that's where we were at and really for maintenance um we're we're finding that 30 to 50 carbs per day is about where we want to stay and those 30 to 50 carbs we make sure come from healthy things so it it's important to to not just say okay well that means I can have one candy bar or whatever every day you still want those carbs because there are carbs even in some of the things that we do eat there are still carbs and you need to add those all up so like broccoli still has carbs uh not much but say there's four carbs in a serving of broccoli I don't know what it is off the top of my head but say it's four okay well now we're down to like 26 that you can have for the day so if we have broccoli you know twice that day we're eight of our you know 30 carbs have now come from broccoli right so it's you got to really shift your mind and realize that you really need to pay close attention cuz it's easy to go over that level even when you think you're being good right so what does eating keto really look like for us what are we eating right and that's a question we get a lot because people assume that on a keto diet you're going to be eating nothing but you know meat and cheese is what they think they think oh great meat and cheese again meat and cheese again and while we do eat a lot of meat and cheese honestly because we like meat and cheese even before we did keto we ate a lot of meat and cheese uh that's a choice that we make it's not something that you're forced to do on a keto diet right but what people may not understand is that including fiber into your keto lifestyle is extremely important right and actually that's another comment that we get so much from people is that oh you're going to get colon cancer because you're not getting any fiber on a keto diet and that is a bunch of bull and we've heard from other people who start out doing keto that they're you know they're constipated they're not going to the bathroom and when you ask more questions you find out well it's because they're only eating meat and cheese right and of course your body needs fiber and so when we're eating a meal we are incorporating obviously uh some protein and high fat but we're also including something that is high in fi or four us right so to us what that looks like most of the time is a meat and cheese and then a vegetable right a low carb vegetable like broccoli cauliflower green beans um brussel sprouts sure uh things like that so yes we eat a lot of meat cheese other dairy products eggs nuts low carb vegetables low carb fruits which are very limited really to mainly berries Beres most and even though those are on a limited amount like I've told you guys in the past I I eat yogurt and blueberries almost every day because I really enjoy it and it's a good way it seems like a treat but it sticks to our diet right uh for sweeteners we are primarily using Stevia but occasionally if we do some kind of low car baked goods we'll incorporate um an orthol sugar substitute but one of the main things that we are concentrating on and really you should on a keto diet is fats so when we are eating meat that has fat on it we eat all of the fat right but we're also including we're intentionally including more fat into our diet right um in the form of butter bacon fat right lard avocado oil avoc yeah uh coconut oil um but what we're not including as far as fats and oils are highly processed oils and Seed oils like canola oil soybean oil corn oil yeah we just don't eat all of those absolutely uh because they're highly processed and they're hydrogenated right which is not good for us that process changes some of the fats from good fats into very bad fats and you don't want to be consuming those right so also during this process we've gotten questions uh about how switching to a keto lifestyle is is affecting how we're going to Homestead right you know what what are you going to grow if you're not going to right doesn't seem like in corn and potatoes so really um the answer to that is we we already grow a lot of what what is in a keto lifestyle I mean we we produce all of our own meat uh right now we're buying all of our dairy products well most of our dairy products but soon any day now our heer is going to C and then we'll be able to produce those things on our own and we do a ton of growing you guys so not much is really going to change except we just don't need to grow as much variety of things in the garden and in the greenhouse we'll just grow more of the things we can eat and stop growing the things we can't eat right you know watermelons was a big thing in the past I've grown a lot of watermelon uh this last year we actually planted watermelon and you guys not even like on purpose purp yeah but we ate one of the Watermelons that we grew this last year the rest either went to the pigs or we gave them away to my parents or or whatever but um we've just now we're just feeling so good the way that the Temptation wasn't even that strong absolutely so you know I may still grow watermelons in the future maybe we'll have one during the summer as a treat um but it's not something that we're like sitting around anymore just dreaming about we're kind of feeling sorry for ourselves like we're no longer looking at all the things we can't eat but we're excited about the things we can and I think I said this even at the beginning of this video that really this way of eating should be what all homesteaders are doing because you can grow almost everything you can grow on a homestead already fits into a keto lifestyle right and we you know over time we have those Cravings less and less and I and you know you just kind of get used to it but I also want to say a lot of that I think comes from how satiated you are when you eat this way we're very rarely hungry because what we're eating um is you know high in fat which sticks with you sometimes we get to dinner and we're like you know we're just pretty much still full from lunch so let's just have you know a couple pieces of cheese or some yogurt or or something for dinner instead of a full meal because it really is so satiating and when you're not super hungry when you're not having you know the blood sugar spikes up and down which this diet completely eliminates you don't get those Cravings right for sugar now one thing I would say and that we haven't touched on is that we also do intermittent fasting we're not going to get into all of that right now but basically we don't start eating till the bare minimum is noon every day we try to push it to 1:00 every day and we're done eating by 6:00 p.m. every day so we only eat with a 5H hour window and the most of the time we don't eat so um like Sarah said we get to lunchtime which is noon or 1:00 we haven't eaten since 6:00 the night before and a lot of days we're not even really that hungry when it gets around to lunchtime which is amazing I would have never thought that we'd be people who could do that right so the last question or kind of topic that we want to talk about is you know so when are we going to be done when are we going to be finished with this when we hit our goal are we going to go back to eating the way we used to so we can really have fun again right and the answer is you know this has really become a lifestyle for us um we are healthy we feel great we enjoy what we're eating and so we're not going to give it up this isn't a diet anymore it's a lifestyle right now just recently we actually became friends with another U couple here in our area that have a farm and they actually have a YouTube channel that they're just starting and their YouTube channel is called air to ground farms and they've been doing keto for over 5 years now uh they're about the same age we are and you guys they will never give it up either they absolutely love it and actually just recently on one of their podcasts uh rich is his name uh made a comment that really stuck with me and I think it it is so true he said if you go back to eating the standard American diet you can expect to go back to being the standard American weight and I think that that sums it up I mean back to and back to the standard American health issues right and I think that that is absolutely true so when we have now you know decided to make this a permanent change in our diet um that's exactly why because we don't want to go back to feeling the way we used to with skin issues and Joint issues and digestive issues we want to continue to feel the way that we're feeling now which is fantastic and actually now that we are friends with en Rich it is so nice to have another couple that we can talk back and forth about yeah I just basically getting support and so we encourage you if you're going to jump into this way of eating that you also find some uh other people in your life that you can you know just be friend right and they're very knowledgeable on this so check out their Channel if you haven't uh we encourage you to check them out but you guys this really is what we feel the best diet for us the best diet for homesteaders and we we encourage all of you to look into it now you guys if you are interested in doing this but you do have health issues we strongly encourage you to First go talk with your doctor uh get blood work done get some advice from them about truly if you want to do this how to do it safely for you right but realize that a lot of doctors aren't well educated on this either so you may need to look for a doctor who is and can really help you you maybe transition into this way of living uh instead of just making a big jump all on your own because you do need to you know especially if you are diabetic or have you know other health issues you do need to take it kind of slowly um and you may find that you can get off some of those medications after you're on this diet for a while but you need to do that with your doctor involved right you guys we are so relieved that even some of our anxiety is about you know what our blood work would look like after almost a year you know our anxieties are completely eliminated now we can just be happy eating this way uh continue on but most importantly we are excited about going into the future eating this way we feel like as we get older you know we're both about to be 48 here in the next couple months you know and as we age keeping our weight under control keeping our blood sugar under control keeping our heart health under control that is all going to be so important and we are sure that this is the way to do it so you guys we hope that this was educational for you a little maybe inspirational for you to see the transformation and you guys we hope that you will at least look into doing a keto way of eating you guys if you're enjoying videos like this make sure that you hit the Subscribe button and remember that the best way you can help us here in the homestead is just to share our videos on social media and this would be a great one you guys our blood test results are great after one year of Keto until next time thank you so much for stopping by our Homestead take care and God bless God bless

Channel: Living Traditions Homestead

Views: 293,929

Keywords: Living Traditions Homestead, Missouri, Ozark's, homesteading, Ozarks, self-sufficient, homesteaders, unjobbing

Id: gfF9xwD3fPo

Length: 30min 9sec (1809 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 22 2023