Audio Version
Today we welcome back best selling author & podcasting superstar Jimmy Moore, as we talk about his new book ‘Keto Clarity’. Have you looked at a low-carb diet simply as a means to lose weight? What if you learned that combining a low-carb nutritional approach with a high fat intake produces a powerful therapeutic effect on a wide variety of health conditions that most people think requires medication to control? That’s what Keto Clarity is all about.
Join as we get down to the knitty gritty stuff regarding fat, ketosis and low carb living.
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In this episode we talk about:-
- How Jimmy lost over 100kg in weight!
- What ketosis is and why you should know about it
- The most accurate way to measure ketones
- How to having amazing brain health
- Why you must eat saturated fat
- Dispelling the myths around low carb & ketogenic diets
- And much much more…
Get more of Jimmy Moore
- His new book – Keto Clarity
- Website – Livin’ da vida low carb
Keto Clarity & Low Carb Living Transcript
Guy Lawrence: Hey, this is Guy Lawrence of 180 Nutrition, and welcome to another episode of The Health Sessions.
Our special guest today is no other than best-selling author Mr. Jimmy Moore. Now, he’s here to talk about his new book, Keto Clarity. And Jimmy’s wealth of knowledge when it comes to ketosis and low-carbohydrate is outstanding and we really dig deep today into covering all the myths and misconception that we might hear in the media as well regarding: “Low-carbohydrate diets are dangerous, we shouldn’t be doing it, and it’s all fad,” and everything else.
Jimmy’s story is exceptional. We’re gonna hear it straight from him in a moment. But, in a nutshell, he was over 200 kilograms in weight at one stage and was following a low-fat diet, tried many fad diets, was getting larger and larger by the year. And so once he sort of really understood low-carbohydrate living, bringing in; measuring ketones in the blood and going into ketosis, then he managed to drop all that weight and now lives a very happy, healthy life.
And this book, I think, is very important and needs to be written, you know, and to get a really clear understanding of what exactly low-carbohydrate and ketosis is and what the relationships are. Because they do differ, actually.
You know, I learned a heap from this podcast today and I have no doubt you will enjoy it.
As always, if you are listening to this through iTunes, and you enjoy our podcast, we’d love you to leave a review for us. It simply helps, A, give us feedback, where we can improve as well but also the fact that it helps with rankings and helps get our podcast and our message out there. Because me and Stu certainly believe that everyone should be, you know, at least listening to these podcasts, because I think our message is so important and we want people to truly understand what good health and nutrition is.
Anyway, I’m gonna stop talking. And let’s get over to Jimmy Moore and chat about his new book, Keto Clarity. Awesome.
All right. Let’s get into it. Hey. So, I’m Guy Lawrence, I’m joined with Mr. Stuart Cooke, as always, and our superstar podcasting low-carb special guest expert today is, Mr. Jimmy Moore.
Stuart Cooke: He’s behind you.
Jimmy Moore: I’m looking for him. I don’t know who you’re talking about.
What’s up, guys? How are you all?
Guy Lawrence: Fantastic. Thanks for coming back on the show.
Jimmy Moore: Thank you. I love this show.
Guy Lawrence: Last time, you were obviously talking about your book, Cholesterol Clarity, and we were very keen to have you back on today to talk about Keto Clarity, your new book.
But I was actually reading it a couple of days ago about your story and I’ve gotta be honest; I felt your pain that you were going through and frustration coming out. And it’s so inspiring to what you’ve actually gone on and done from that and turned it into something amazing.
So, I figured before we kicked off into the book, can you just tell people, especially for all our new listeners who haven’t heard the last show, who’s Jimmy Moore, a little bit about that. Because it’s phenomenal, I think.
Jimmy Moore: Sure. Go back and listen. (I’m just kidding!).
So, back in 2003, I was a 410-pound man. So, what’s that? Just over 200 kilo. It’s a lot of man; let’s put it that way.
Guy Lawrence: That’s incredible.
Jimmy Moore: And I was wearing, you know, humongous shirts, humongous pairs of pants, ripping them every week. I was on three prescription medications for high cholesterol, high blood pressure, breathing medication.
I was 32 years old, you guys. And I’m a tall guy, but 400-plus pounds is not healthy on anybody.
And that’s where I found myself. And I had tried low-fat diet after low-fat diet and all of them had always failed me. And I defaulted to low-fat because we know that when you want to lose weight, people say cut your fat down, cut your calories down, and then exercise on the treadmill for an hour a day. And that’s how you magically lose weight.
Well, unfortunately, that magic pill doesn’t work for everybody.
So, my mother-in-law, for Christmas that year, had bought me a diet book. Yes. Mother-in-laws are wonderful about giving not-so-subtle hints to their son-in-laws that they’re fat.
Guy Lawrence: Very straight to the point, that present, mate.
Jimmy Moore: Absolutely. And she’s a sweetheart lady, so I definitely am very thankful that she gave me the book that she did at Christmas 2003, because it was not a low-fat diet book like all the ones I’d gotten before. It was one about this diet that I had not really tried before: a low-carb, high-fat diet. It was the Atkins Diet.
And I read that book, and I’m thinking, “Man, this guy is wackadoodle. How in the world do you energize your body when you don’t eat a lot of carbs?” That didn’t make sense to me.
And then the fat thing? I was looking at it and going, “Doesn’t he know that raises your cholesterol and clogs your arteries and you’re gonna keel over of a heart attack?”
But, guys, I think the breaking point for me was I was 400-plus pounds. That was reality. I was on three prescription medications. That was reality. I was ripping pants that were size 62-inch. That was reality. I needed to do something.
And I had tried literally everything but this, so what the heck? Let’s give it a whirl.
So, I made it my New Year’s resolution, 2004, to lose weight. And I started January 1st, 2004, lost 30 pounds the first month. What’s that? About 13, 14 kilo. And then the second month I was so energetic at that point I could really feel the effects of what I now know is keto-adaptation. And I had to start exercising. So, I added a little bit of exercise, which, for a 380-pounder at that point, meant walking about 10 minutes on a treadmill at three miles an hour, which was a lot of work. I tell people I was lifting weights. It was my body weight.
And I lost another 40 pounds that second month. By the end of a hundred days I lost a total of a hundred pounds. And I knew at that point there was something special about this. And, unlike any other diet I had ever been on in my entire life, I had no hunger, I was not craving anything. By the end of that hundred days, I had really become fully keto-adapted and able to sustain myself and do quite well without worrying about all that processed carbs that I used to eat.
So, it was a total transformation, not just physically but here. I mean, I remember there was a mantra. I didn’t tell this story last time I was on. There was a mantra I did to try to help myself overcome my carbohydrate cravings, and I made the mantra: “sugar is rat poison.”
So, if you think something is rat poison in your mind, are you going to eat it? No.
And so, after awhile, I honestly believed anything sugary was rat poison.
Guy Lawrence: That is a very good mantra.
Jimmy Moore: Yeah. I mean, it tricked my brain into thinking, “That is not a good thing to consume.” I now call those things “food-like products.” Not real food.
“Just eat real food” does the same thing. But having that negative imagery with this thing that I thought I could never live without was so vital. By the end of the year, I did end up losing 180 total pounds and it kind of kicked me off to the man you know me as today.
I started my blog in 2005 and that rose me to prominence that this guy said, “Hey, you should be a podcaster.” So now I have one of the biggest podcasts in the world on health. The Livin’ La Vida Lo Carb show. And, yeah. I mean, I’m gonna keep doing this for as long as the good Lord gives me breath to breathe.
Guy Lawrence: That’s awesome. That’s awesome.
How many podcast are you up to now, Jimmy? Just for people to know.
Jimmy Moore: So, on the Livin’ La Vida Low Carb show, it’s over 850 episodes. I’ve interviewed well over 900 guests from around the world, literally. All the experts that you can possibly think of have been on that show. And I do several other podcasts as well.
So, all in all, well over a thousand episodes that I’ve done combined with all of my work. It’s really humbling when you start thinking about, “Whoa! A thousand episodes!”
What episode is this? What episode are you guys on?
Guy Lawrence: We’re up to about 25. We do them once a fortnight.
Jimmy Moore: Nice.
Guy Lawrence: Sometimes that goes over to once every three weeks, depending on work outside of running the 180 business. But we just have literally converted our website over. We’ve been spending a lot of time on that. And we really want to start bringing these back in a minimum once a fortnight.
Guy Lawrence: It’s really hard, if you’re not consistent, you know. And if you get like a good schedule. Plus, you start saying, “OK. I just talked to the Jimmy Moore guy. That was so exciting. I want to do another one.” And so you have this passion and zeal wanting to do more.
Because when I first started my show, it was once a week. And the people were like, “Oh, we want to hear more.” So I went to twice a week. And now: “We want to hear more.” And so I went three times. “And we want to. . .” And I’m like, “I’m not going any more than three times a week.”
Guy Lawrence: It’s amazing. Because we appreciate it. I mean, what people don’t know is that you actually inspired me to start podcasting when I met you in Sydney last time. We had this conversation. And it’s like, “Right. We’re gonna do it.”
And then we came back to our studio and did a podcast. And then we switched into making a video podcast as well. And, yeah, love it. But I can appreciate it, because we now realize how much work goes into it, just per episode. So, what you’ve done is phenomenal, and I certainly hope that people appreciate that. Incredible.
But let’s crack open the new book. So: Keto Clarity. This is a two-fold question. Why did you write the book? And, B, could you explain to people what ketosis is, if they’re not sure? I thought that would be a good place to start.
Jimmy Moore: So, yeah, so, why write the book? Quite frankly, the book has never existed before. We’ve had lots of books about weight loss and ketogenic diets. Thank you, Dr. Atkins. Thank you, Protein Power. You know, some of the ones that have been out there for a long time.
And then we’ve had a few others that talk about the treatment of epilepsy, which we’ve long known is one of the strong benefits of a ketogenic diet on health. But that’s it. And you’ve never really seen any kind of practical guide as to: Here’s how you get into ketosis and then once you’re there, here’s how you stay in it. And then if you can’t get there, here are some of the problems you’re probably doing trying to get there.
So, we tried to make like a step-by-step guide: This is how you do it. Because that’s never been written before.
I was, quite frankly, shocked, you know, when I was doing my research for the book that, hey, nobody’s ever written a practical how-to on ketogenic diets before. And then all in one place talking about the totality of health benefits that come from eating this way. It goes well beyond weight loss. Well beyond epilepsy. Which, those two things we have very strong evidence for. But there are so many other things that I’m just really excited about, and some research that’s coming.
So, that’s why Keto Clarity was born, and now that the baby’s out there, it’s really done very well, because it is unlike anything that’s ever been out there on the market before. And in fact, I was just checking before we came on the air: It’s the No. 1 nutrition book in Australia right now, on Amazon.
Guy Lawrence: There you go! That’s awesome.
Jimmy Moore: So, I’m proud of my Aussie friends.
Guy Lawrence: And it’s a beautiful book. Like, it’s so well laid-out. And I love the way that you go the, you know, there were 22 food people you had on board as well, and all the way through each chapter, you know, everything is reinforcing your message as you go through the book. And it does make it very clear to understand.
Jimmy Moore: Thank you. Yeah, we tried to do the same format. Cholesterol Clarity, when I talked to you guys last year, that was kind of the: All right. Let’s prove the concept that people will like this format, with the moment of clarity, quotes from the different experts, and then my co-authors Dr. Eric Westman, a very respected researcher and clinician with low-carb diets, and he did little doctor’s notes throughout.
And in Cholesterol Clarity, it was funny because he didn’t give a whole lot of input on Cholesterol Clarity, as much as he did with Keto Clarity. Because he’s just one of the foremost authorities on the world on ketosis. And so I really relied heavily on him, especially in those science chapters.
You’ll notice at the beginning of Chapter 16, we tell you: This is how you read scientific papers and which ones are more important as we see these headlines in the newspaper, and I know you guys have it there in Australia: “Red Meat Causes Cancer!” “Avoid the Atkins Diet Like The Plague!” And then you go and look and it’s a mouse study. So, a mouse study doesn’t do a whole lot unless you’re Mighty Mouse. And unless you’re going around saying, “Here I come to save the day!” you’re not going to have any application for your body.
So, you have to figure it out for yourself. Look for the randomized control clinical trials. Those are the ones that are really the gold standard. Unfortunately, they’re not using that standard of science on ketogenic diets. So, that is coming. In the coming years, we’ll see more and more. But right now it’s few and far between seeing those kinds of studies.
Now, you asked earlier, “What is ketosis?” That is a great question, Guy!
So, ketosis, in a nutshell, and just to keep it real simple for people, most people walking around, about 99 percent of the world’s population, are sugar burners. So, carbohydrates become the primary fuel source for their body. And then that’s what most people think of when they say, you know: “How do you fuel your body?” How do you. . . That’s why athletes carb up. Because that’s the fuel for their body.[ebook]
Well, that’s if you’re a sugar burner. But ketosis shifts your body from being a sugar burner over being a fat burner. And so how do you do that? You have to eliminate the sources of sugar, and in this case it’s glucose in your body.
So, what raises glucose in the body? Oh, yeah! Carbohydrates is like the biggest way to raise glucose. So, if you lower those down, and it’s not gonna be the same amount for everybody, but if you lower them down to your personal tolerance level (and we show you how to do that in the book; how to figure out that number), and then moderate down the amount of protein. . . This is a biggie. This is probably the biggest mistake most people make on a low-carb diet is they forget, if you eat too much protein, more than your body can use, there’s this long G-word we talk about in the book called gluconeogenesis.
And that’s just a fancy-schmancy word for: if you eat a lot of protein, your liver is going to turn that protein into, guess what? Glucose. So, when glucose is high, ketones cannot be produced. So, eliminate the carbs to your personal tolerance level, moderate down your protein to your individualize threshold level. And then, guess what? All that’s left is fat to eat. So, you’re eating monounsaturated fats and saturated fats and, of course, the omega-3 fats are in there. Definitely not drinking vegetable oil. We talked about that in Cholesterol Clarity, why that’s a very bad idea.
Guy Lawrence: Yeah, don’t do that.
Jimmy Moore: And so if you do all those things, you’re going to be shifting your body from using sugar and carbohydrates as the primary fuel source to being a fat and ketone burner, and that’s being in a state of nutritional ketosis.
Guy Lawrence: Fantastic.
Stuart Cooke: I just; I’m intrigued, Jimmy, about your keto journey. Any “aha” moments along the way. You know: How did you find it? What were the pitfalls? Because I think the common perception over here is, to people that don’t know a great deal about it, that it’s a wacky diet. It makes your breath smell. And, you know, it’s crazy.
So, what was your journey like?
Jimmy Moore: Yeah. So, I’ve been low-carb, you heard my story at the beginning, you know, for a very long time. And low-carb; a lot of people have made low-carb and ketogenic synonymous. They are not. You have to really get sophisticated, and we can talk about that here in a second, but my journey looking into ketosis really, really seriously actually began reading a book called The Art and Science of Low-Carbohydrate Performance. It’s by these two very famous medical researchers in the low-carb realm, Dr. Jeff Volek and Dr. Steve Phinney, and they really outlined, you know: Look. If you want to get into a state of nutritional ketosis, you have to start measuring for blood ketones (and I had never heard of blood ketones before; I always thought, ketones, you pee on a stick and it turns pink or purple. That’s ketosis). But there’s much more sophisticated ways to measure now.
So, I read that book and I thought, well, dang. And I was struggling a little bit at the time, as you guys know. So, I was like, “Hmm. Maybe I should give this a go and do an experiment and, well, what the heck, I’m a blogger, let’s do it publicly.”
So, May of 2012 I started on my nutritional ketosis N equals 1 experiment. We give a whole chapter in the book about how that went and the results. But I started, and what I found was, I was not in ketosis when I started. Even though my carbs were low, I was not eating enough fat. That was a big mistake. I was eating too much protein, thinking that chicken breast was a health food. It is not. I was probably indulging in some low-carb snacks, counting the net carbs and not the total carbs. I am, like, adamant now: You have to count every single carbohydrate you put in your mouth, I don’t care if it’s made out of fiber or not, to be intellectually honest with your personal tolerance level, you have to count it all. And some people will be, like, “Well, fiber you get to subtract it because it doesn’t impact your blood sugar as much.” That’s true, but it still impacts. Even though it’s slower, it still has an impact.
So, if we’re looking at carbohydrate tolerance levels, you have to be really honest with yourself and say, “Hey, look. Thirty grams is 30 grams. And that’s what I’m gonna count.”
So, that was kind of the start of my journey and so I started bringing my carbs down pretty; I pretty much knew where my carb tolerance was. It was the protein that really had to come down, down, down, until I found that sweet spot for me and then added in more fat.
I was probably eating 55 or 60 percent fat, which by all definitions would be a high-fat diet. But I found it wasn’t enough. I needed to get close to 80 to 85 percent fat in my diet before I finally saw the ketones show up in the blood that then gave me all the health benefits that I was looking for.
Guy Lawrence: There you go. Now, I imagine that would vary from person to person, right?
Jimmy Moore: Absolutely. And we explain this in Keto Clarity. Please do not try to mimic what Jimmy Moore did. Because you may not have the crazy, messed-up metabolism that I did, being a former 400-pounder.
My wife Christine, actually, she did a nutritional ketosis for a month just to kind of “let’s test and see where you are.” Her macros came in at right around 55 percent fat instead of the 85 that I was doing. And then about 30 percent protein, which I was doing about 12 percent protein. And then 15 percent carbohydrate for her, and I was doing about; what was it? About 3 percent carbohydrate for me. And she got higher ketone levels than I did. On a totally different macronutrient ratio.
Guy Lawrence: Wow. Who do you think should; anyone listening to this, you know, if ketosis is a new paradigm they haven’t thought about before, like, who should consider ketosis, Jimmy? Do you think it’s for everyone? Does it fit all? What’s your standpoint on that?
Jimmy Moore: I think everybody should at least try it one time, just to see what it feels like. You know, certainly if whatever you’re doing now is giving you optimal results in your health, Jimmy Moore is gonna be the first one to step up and say, “Dude. Why would you stop?” Unless you’re a girl. Then I’d say, “Dudette, why would you stop?” Keep doing whatever it is that’s giving you that optimal health.
But unfortunately, you guys, you know most people aren’t healthy. More people aren’t experiencing that optimal health and they’re looking for some kind of modality that might give them that.
So, that’s the cool thing about ketosis. And, you know, if it’s all about weight loss, certainly it is a great benefits to go ketogenic to lose weight. But don’t do it just to lose weight. There are some many more benefits, and I’ve often told people: I would eat ketogenic if I never lost another pound, just for the brain health benefits. Because your brain is so optimized when you eat this way, because the brain loves fat and ketones. It thrives on those. And so if you’re depriving your body of fat, which then, in turn, is depriving your body of ketones, guess what? You’re bringing on early-onset of some of these neurodegenerative disease like dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s. We’re actually finding ketosis helps with all of those things, improve them, and even prevent them from happening to begin with.
Guy Lawrence: Exactly. It’s funny, because the whole keto thing for me, like I first heard about it when; I was just telling a story because I did a talk in Tasmania, the weekend, about how 180 Nutrition got off the ground. And it was being exposed to a charity that was helping people with cancer. And when I got up there, you know, there were about 35 people in the room. All had serious issues of cancer, you know, from brain tumor to breast cancer to skin cancer. You name it. And the first thing they did was put them on a ketogenic diet. I hadn’t even heard the terms back then.
And I got frustrated, because I was seeing the results from these guys and how it was helping them. And that doesn’t get recommended even to this day, still, by doctors.
Jimmy Moore: Yeah. Unfortunately, it’s a fringe thing, and I just got back from a huge paleo conference here in America called the Ancestral Health Symposium. And I was a moderator on a panel there that we talked about this very topic, Guy, of ketogenic diets and cancer. And even the practitioners on the panel were still real hesitant about saying too much too soon about it, that, “Well, we don’t really know the mechanism. We just know that it does put people on the right path to maybe not use as much chemo.”
And, you know, it’s certainly something that I would love to see more randomized control clinical trials on. It’s just when you talk about something like cancer, you know, they kind of look at ketogenic diets as the last resort after you’ve done all these chemicals and everything trying to get the cancer, and I’m certainly not bemoaning any oncologist who’s doing that; they’re trying to save their patient’s life. But I wonder, I just wonder: are we promoting that they should just eat, eat, eat whatever, which is what I’ve heard. I’ve got some family members that actually have cancer and they’re told, “Just eat whatever. If it’s Twizzlers, if it’s, you know, Coca-Cola, just get calories in your mouth.”
That is a horrible, horrible message. Why wouldn’t you want to at least starve those cancer cells of what it thrives on, and that’s sugar? Don’t feed it sugar. And then you give your body a fighting chance to maybe not have to go through as many chemotherapies as you otherwise would.
Guy Lawrence: Yeah. It’s frustrating. It’s frustrating.
Stuart Cooke: So, where would be the best place to start a keto journey? Would we have to go to the doctors first and get our bloods checked and get some markers as a starting point? Or do we just dive into your book and just go for that?
Jimmy Moore: Well, I’m not a; I often tell people I’m not an MD, RD, Ph.D., or any D after my name. I’m just a Joe Schmo out here that lost some weight and got his health back and now is kind of a; I consider myself like an empowered patient trying to be a patient advocate of helping people grab back control of their own health.
I know we talked about this with Cholesterol Clarity. People have abdicated their responsibility for their health to that man in the white coat. And they’ve said, “OK. Whatever that person says for me to do, I’m gonna do in my health,” not realizing that person has no training in nutrition, really no education in how to deal with formulating a really good diet.
And so I definitely would not make any recommendations for anybody. Definitely consult your physician if you have any questions. But this book is ready-made for somebody to test on themselves and try and just see how you do. I mean, there’s certainly no harm, because guess what? We’re talking about real food. That’s it. We’re not talking about some wacky green tea supplement or raspberry ketones or any kind of weird things that are out there in our mainstream culture. We’re talking about eating bacon and eggs cooked in butter for breakfast.
Guy Lawrence: I’ve got to ask you a question as well, Jimmy, just for the listeners. Because for so many people it’s so hard to get their head around that they can eat fat. Like, as a natural fat. We’re not talking about the homogenized or the manmade fats or whatever.
You know, just to hear it from you, how much fat can somebody eat, if it’s natural?
Jimmy Moore: So, yeah. Trust me, Guy. This was the hardest chapter in the whole book to write, because I know people are fat-phobic. In Australia, in America, and around the world we grew up propagandized that fat’s gonna make you fat, fat’s gonna clog your arteries. It’s just like when I saw the Atkins diet for the first time I’m like, “Man, this guy is wacked out. What are you talking about eating all that fat?”
And I think how much is enough will depend on your satiety signal. I think first we need to dial in those things that are making you hungry, so, that’s the carbohydrates in excess and that’s the protein in excess. So, you dial those in to your personal tolerance and your individualized threshold levels and then what we say in the book is: Eat saturated and monounsaturated fats primarily. So, that’s: butter, coconut oil, meats, cheese, cream, avocado, avocado oil, macadamia nut oil, all those kinds of fats. You eat those to satiety.[ebook]
So, when you bring down the things that would drive your hunger, it may not take as much fat to make you satiated. And one of the cool things about ketosis is it gives you a natural satiety. But you get that satiety because you’re eating enough fat.
So, what we tell people is limit the carbs, moderate the protein, but then have fats to your satiety signals. So, you kind of learn, “Oh! This is what my body’s supposed to feel like. I’m not supposed to be hungry and jittery at 10 o’clock in the morning. And after I just ate two hours before that nice bowl of oatmeal with margarine in it and a glass of orange juice, and I’m wondering why I’m hungry so soon.
Stuart Cooke: Absolutely. It makes perfect sense. Eat till you’re full. Your body will tell you when it’s full. I guess our body is smart enough to let us know when we’ve had enough.
Jimmy Moore: Well, and one of the quotes that my co-author gave in the book, Dr. Eric Westman, he said in Asian countries, they have kind of this old proverb of: “Eat till you’re 80 percent full.” So, you’re not stuffing yourself but you’re kind of getting to that imaginary point: “Oh, I’m at 79.9 percent.” No, I’m just kidding.
So, you get to that imaginary point in your brain of, “OK, I’m satisfied. I don’t need any more food.” And that’s a beautiful place. And the cool thing about this way of eating is you’ll feel satisfied and you’ll be able to go hours upon hours after finishing your meal without feeling hungry again.
How many people walk around in this world, they eat breakfast at 7 a.m. and they go, “Hmm, I wonder what I’m gonna have for lunch?” While they’re still eating their breakfast.
Stuart Cooke: “I know. We’re so focused on that.”
Jimmy Moore: That happens all the time. We are so “breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner, snack, midnight snack.” And we’ve got to get out of the mentality you need to eat that much. Even the dieticians promote that: “Oh, you need to keep your blood sugar under control and keep it nice and steady throughout the day, so eat little small meals every couple of hours.” And I’m going, “No! I eat one to two times a day, and that’s it. I don’t need to eat any more.” And do you know how freeing it is to not have to eat constantly? It’s great.
Stuart Cooke: Absolutely. It’s liberating. We’re just following the carbohydrate train, aren’t we? Up and down and up and down. That’s what we’re doing.
Jimmy Moore: Yep. A rollercoaster ride.
Stuart Cooke: So, tell us about the; you mentioned the ketone sticks originally. Perhaps they weren’t the best way to measure our levels. So, what do we do now?
Jimmy Moore: So, as I was mentioning the Volek and Phinney book, they talked about this thing called blood ketones. But let’s back up and let’s explain why urine ketones aren’t that great.
So, the keto sticks are traditional. You pee on the stick. It’s a little container of 50 of them for about 15 U.S. dollars. And you pee on the stick, it turns pink to purple, and when you first start off, that’s probably a good way to measure for ketosis. Now, the name of the ketone body in the urine is called acetoacetate. OK? So, what you’re detecting is the ketone body, acetoacetate, spilling over into the urine. All right. Great. It’s changing a color. I’m in ketosis.
But then something interesting happens when you are in this ketosis for a couple of weeks. Suddenly, you pee on the stick and guess what? There’s no change. And you haven’t had carbs and you’ve moderated your protein and you’re doing all the great things and suddenly there’s no more acetoacetate. What’s going on?
Well, acetoacetate actually gets converted once you become keto-adapted, and there is this adaptation period of a couple of weeks to four weeks in some people. For 410-pound Jimmy Moore, probably two or three months. But you have this adaptation period. And once you become adapted that acetoacetate then turns into the blood ketone. And that’s called betahydroxybuterate.
And so that’s why measuring for blood ketones, like Volek and Phinney talked about, is so critically important.
Now, you guys are really lucky there in Australia because you have a meter called FreeStyle Optium. It’s the exact same one we have here in America called Precision Xtra but the strips for your FreeStyle Optium are like 70 cents Australian dollars. Here in America, those same strips are about 4, 5, 6 dollars apiece. And so it can be very expensive. There are different ways, and I’ve tried to work with the company to get them to get on the bandwagon of nutritional ketosis.
And it’s funny: now that they book’s out there, people are starting to call the company that makes them, and they’re, like, “You know we want these strips but we can’t spend $5 apiece. What can you do?” And when I tried to convince them there’s a market out here for it, they were like: “Oh, all we care about are diabetics, for this thing called diabetic ketoacidosis.” They were not at all interested in people wanting to do nutritional ketosis.
So, I’m hoping with all those tens of thousands of books that are out there now that people will flood them with calls and say, “Hey, we want this.” Because, quite frankly, they’re just being idiots leaving money on the table because it’s a great business opportunity for them to expand their market.
Guy Lawrence: And I think just; you triggered something saying “ketoacidosis.” That’s another thing people get confused with.
Jimmy Moore: Let me explain that one in a minute. Let me finish the ketones story, because there’s one other ketone body in the body that you need to be aware of. But the blood ketones, Volek and Phinney say, should be between .5 and 3.0. When I first started my experiment: .3.
So, I was below the level of ketosis. I’m like: Hmm. Now we’re getting somewhere as to why I was struggling.
So I started testing that. So, now there are some really interesting ones that have come along measuring for the third ketone body that’s in the breath is called acetone, and there’s actually only one meter right now, it’s this guy that has epilepsy, he lives; he’s an engineer, of all things, that lives in Sweden. And he wanted to; he didn’t like the messiness of peeing on a stick and he didn’t like the prick and the very expensiveness of measuring for blood ketones. So, he went and tried to find a breath ketone meter. He couldn’t find one. So, he made one. He’s an engineer, and he called it Ketonix, K-e-t-o-n-i-x, and he started sharing it with his friends: “Hey, check this out” and they wanted one. And then they wanted one and their friends wanted one. So he’s like, “Well, maybe I should make this into a business.”
So, now Ketonix.com is out there. Right now, he’s the only commercially available breath ketone meter on the market. But there are a lot more on the way. There’s one in Arizona here in America that’s working on a breath ketone meter that she’s trying to get FDA approval for. And then in Japan, on your side of the world, they’re actually working on an iPhone app that you would connect to your iPhone and you blow into it and it’ll give you a breath ketone reading. And the breath ketones correlate pretty well to betahydroxybuterate in the blood.
So, those are the three was that you test for ketones. And if you don’t know where you stand, you really can’t tell if you’re in ketosis or not. Don’t assume, just because you’re eating low-carb, that you’re in ketosis.
Guy Lawrence: Is it something you would probably measure for a month and then after that you wouldn’t know when you’re in ketosis, or is this something you would keep monitoring?
Jimmy Moore: Well, you know, I monitored day and night and sometimes every hour on the hour for a whole year, just to kind of see. But, yeah, you’re right, Guy. After awhile, after about two or three months, I knew when I was in ketosis. And pretty much within a few tenths of a millimolar, I could predict what my blood ketones were.
And so people are like, “Well, I can’t afford to do the testing every day like you did.” And so one of the strategies that we came up with, if you don’t find the breath meter very desirable, if you want to test for blood and really get accuracy, test eight times in a month. So, sometime during the first week that you’re doing this, test in the morning. Sometime in the first week you’re doing this, test at night at least four hours after you ate or drank anything. OK?
So, then you do that over a four-week period and you see the curve. You see, you know, are you making progress or is it going down or is it just saying the same. And then you can make adjustments from there. But that’s a good cheaper way to see where you stand.
I don’t think you have to be obsessive about testing, but if you don’t test at least a little, you have no idea how well you’re doing.
Stuart Cooke: Yes. You need a starting point. And how easy is it to be knocked out of ketosis and then perhaps get back in, if, for instance you have a cheat meal?
Jimmy Moore: Yeah. And it doesn’t need to take a cheat meal for somebody like me who’s really sensitive to carbohydrates. You know, I could have a 12-ounce steak and that gluconeogenesis will kick in and I’m out of ketosis. And it’s not a big deal when you’ve been in ketosis awhile and you get out of it because of the higher protein or higher carb meal. It takes about two to three days and I’m right back in again. So, it’s not that long adaptation. Once you’re in, you’re pretty much gonna stay in, unless you had like a 500 grams of carb whatever cheat. That might take a little while to recover from.
Now, you mentioned diabetic ketoacidosis versus ketosis. I definitely want to address this, because you might have noticed in the book, it didn’t say it just once or twice or three times; I think we ended up doing it about seven total times, because we’re like, we wanted to slap you over the head with it to know this is an important topic.[ebook]
So, people might be going, well, I’ve heard ketosis is dangerous. Well, ketosis and nutritional ketosis like we’re talking about in the book is absolutely not dangerous. It cannot harm you. There’s no harm in being in a state of ketosis. What is the harm is for Type 1 diabetics and those Type 2 diabetics with no beta cell function – in other words, they don’t make any hormone at all – so, those are the only two people, two groups, that need to work about diabetic ketoacidosis. But catch this: The hallmark of diabetic ketoacidosis is very high levels of blood sugar and very, very high levels of blood ketones.
So, for a Type 1 diabetic or a Type 2 without beta cell function, let’s say they have a high-carb meal. What’s gonna happen? Predictably, their blood sugar will go way up, well over 240 milligrams per deciliter, in American terms, and that’s not good. But then the body thinks it’s starving. So then it starts raising blood ketone levels in parallel with that high blood sugar level and you have these humongous rises in the blood ketones, upwards of 15 to 20 millimolar, on the blood ketone meter. That’s a dangerous state.
Guess what? If you make any hormone at all, you can never, ever, ever, ever – did I say “ever”? – EVER get to that point.
Now, you guys know I tested day and night and sometimes every hour on the hour. The highest reading I’ve ever seen is 6.7 on that blood ketone meter, but here’s the kicker. My blood sugar at the same time: 62. Which is extremely low; it’s really, really good.
So, this is really just distortions by people who want to try to discredit ketosis. I know ketosis and ketoacidosis sound the same, but they are two totally metabolically, diametrically opposed states. And diabetic ketoacidosis can only happen in the presence of a high-carb, not low-carb, diet.
Stuart Cooke: Bingo.
Guy Lawrence: No, it’s good. Because I hear it. Definitely.
Which direction do you want to go, Stu?
Stuart Cooke: You know, I had a question. You touched upon diseases of the brain. And I have a friend who is very dear to me who has just been diagnosed with early-onset Parkinson’s Disease. Now, I am aware that, you know, high-fat diet, ketosis, would be completely alien. And this person would just be following a conventional diet. You know: processed carbohydrates. Where would we start if we were to suggest anything at all?
Jimmy Moore: So, we actually have a few pretty decent studies of about a year that. . . a very high-fat, very low-carb diet, which would be ketogenic, would help with people with Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s. You know, coconut oil, adding coconut oil to their diet is probably a great first start. One of my experts in the book is Dr. Mary Newport, and she put her husband Steve, who had Alzheimer’s disease; early onset Alzheimer’s disease, that’s what she started with. She didn’t change his diet. She kept his oatmeal and everything. But she just started adding coconut oil and MCT oil to his oatmeal.
Stuart Cooke: Was that the study where he was drawing the clocks?
Jimmy Moore: Yes. That’s exactly right. Same one.
And so she started doing that and then slowly he started getting better. And then she and I talked on my podcast, and I said, well, have you thought about maybe reducing down the carbohydrates. So, she started doing that and he saw tremendous benefits starting to happen there, and improvements in his health. That would certainly be applicable, I would think, to any neurodegenerative disease: Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s; any of those.
So, it’s definitely worth a shot to try to increase the fat and lower the carbs somehow. I’m certainly not giving medical advice, but if that was my family member, I would immediately say, “Hey, can I take control of the diet just for a little while?” And try it, because there’s certainly no harm in doing real food. And they try to put all these drugs to combat these diseases when maybe it’s not a drug deficiency; maybe it’s a fat deficiency, and too much carbs.
Stuart Cooke: No, that’s great. And it makes so much sense to provide your body with such a fantastic source of fuel for the brain in a time when I think we’ve gone through a prolonged period of too much starvation for the body because we just don’t get all these nutrients on a conventional diet.
Jimmy Moore: Literally starving your brain. And, you know, people are like, well, aren’t you worried about heart disease with the saturated fat? And I’m like, “You know what? I’m over that. I care about my brain health too much to deprive my body of saturated fat.” Did you know you have 25 percent of all the fat in your body is right there. Right there in your head. And so they don’t call us “fatheads” for no good reason. I mean, we are fatheads. And guess what? If you’re not feeding your body that fat that it needs to have raw materials to fuel that brain, why are we surprised when people start getting dementia? Why are we surprised when you start having those senior moments. Now, we laugh about those in our culture. It’s not funny.
And then, you know, we just had a very tragic death of Robin Williams, a great entertainer. I wonder: Was his brain fat-deprived? It got him to be so depressed that it got him to kill himself.
You know, there are things we’ve got to talk about, and I think ketosis is a big part of the answer to that.
Stuart Cooke: Absolutely right. I’ve got; just had another thought popped into my head when we were talking about fat as well. Gallbladder. So, my friend’s had his gallbladder removed. It’s quite common.
Jimmy Moore: Do you know when?
Stuart Cooke: Recently.
Jimmy Moore: OK. Real recently. OK.
Stuart Cooke: So, he has been told, “You’ve got to steer clear of fat.”
Jimmy Moore: That’s what they say.
Stuart Cooke: That’s what they say. So, what’s your take on that?
Jimmy Moore: So, my wife Christine actually; let me see if I can get Christine to make a cameo. Come here, Christine. I want everybody to see. See, she’s never on, like, my video podcast that I do so I want to show; are you. . . There she is. OK. She’s like brushing her hair back. It’s like nighttime here in America, so. . .
All right. Come to the camera. She’s coming. There is the beautiful part of Jimmy Moore.
Stuart Cooke: Hi, Christine, how are you?
Guy Lawrence: Hi, Christine.
Jimmy Moore: They’re saying hello.
Christine: Hi.
Jimmy Moore: Say hi.
Christine: Hi.
Jimmy Moore: All right, cool. Bye, honey.
So, she, in 2000; your gallbladder. . .
Christine: Six.
Jimmy Moore: Had it taken out and it took. . .
Christine: About a year for me to be able to start eating fat again. Is that what you wanted to know?
Jimmy Moore: Yeah. So, she had to build up an adaptation to the fat again, and it was a slow journey, right?
Christine: Yeah. I found that if I ate too much, too quickly, my liver didn’t know how much bile to produce and so after awhile your body just knows how much bile to produce once you’ve been eating this way awhile.
Jimmy Moore: And now the woman eats more fat, almost, than I do sometimes. She loves, what is it? Five slices of bacon for breakfast in the morning.
Christine: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Bacon every day.
Jimmy Moore: Thank you, honey.
Christine: You’re welcome.
Guy Lawrence: Fantastic. So, it’s a process, right?
Jimmy Moore: It’s a process. And about a year later, she was able to ramp her fat back up. And I’d say she probably now eats about 55, 60 percent of her diet is fat, whereas maybe that year, like your friend, Stu, probably 25 percent, 30 percent the first year and you just kind of like work your way up to get back to that level again.
So, I don’t think it’s a forever and ever you have to eat low-fat and avoid fat like the plague. You need fat. Fat is one of the macronutrients that is essential. So, that’s why they talk about essential fatty acids. They talk about essential protein. Guess what? There’s no essential carbohydrates.
Stuart Cooke: Yeah. Absolutely right. That’s awesome advice. And it’s just, yeah, I’m so intrigued to look at conventional advice and then talk to people who are just questioning this. Because, you know, we’re all so very different and perhaps, you know, we can just dial in to these little intricacies that will take us on a better health journey.
Jimmy Moore: Right. You guys realize you got like an exclusive. I’ve never had Christine come up on any podcast.
Guy Lawrence: That’s awesome.
Jimmy Moore: You’re special, man!
Stuart Cooke: I feel special.
Guy Lawrence: Definitely. Just to tie it up, we won’t take too much more of your time, but I saw you put out a blog post a couple of days ago regarding what a journalist had been writing about ketosis and the diet and with the claims. And I thought, you know what? That would be really just a couple of good points to touch on because that’s what we’re hearing all the time. So, pull a couple of the claims up and I thought you could address them on the podcast.
And one of them, the first claim was: Your brain and muscles need carbs to function.
Jimmy Moore: That is what they say, isn’t it? In fact, they claim needs 130 grams at least of carbohydrate a day. And you know what I say, Guy? They’re 100 percent exactly right. Dot, dot, dot. . . if you’re a sugar-burner. Because if you’re burning sugar for fuel, your brain does need that. Otherwise, you’re gonna be starving it of the glucose that it needs. Because the brain can function on glucose or fat and ketones.
So, if you’re a sugar-burner, you’d better darn well be getting plenty of carbohydrates in your diet. Otherwise, your brain’s gonna be going; you know, people kind of get that foggy brain and they’re going, “Oh, why do I feel kinda cranky?” That’s it. You’re stuck in sugar brain. So, you’ve got to feed it sugar to make it happy. That’s why when people say, “Well, I didn’t do well on low-carb diet, and I added back carbs and I felt better,” I’m like, “Yeah, because you never fully made the switch over to being a fat-burner.”
So, when you’re a fat-burner, that is idiotic advice to tell people to eat that many carbohydrates, because that is counterproductive to making the ketones.
So, you can choose: sugar-burner or fat-burner. And if you’re a fat burner you’re gonna, you know, fuel your brain with fat and ketones. If you’re a sugar-burner, you’re gonna do it with carbs.
Guy Lawrence: And I think, as well, if somebody; a lot of people have been a carb-burner their whole life. You know? And if the body’s gonna adjust, it’s not gonna happen overnight like if you’re been doing it for the last. . .
Jimmy Moore: Two to four weeks for a lot of people, right around two to four weeks.
Guy Lawrence: Another claim was: Low-carb diets eliminate entire food groups.
Jimmy Moore: You know I love this one, Guy, because they never say anything about vegans removing whole food groups. And I would argue whole food groups that are nutrient-dense foods they should be eating. So, yeah, this is; and then they consider, like, whole grains being a food group. Whole grains are not a food anything. I don’t consider them a human food. You have to highly process grains in order for them to even be humanly consumable. And so that’s one of the things that they’re talking about removing whole food groups.
But here’s the kicker. You’re not really removing anything. You’re just limiting to your personal tolerance levels, but you’re not removing. I mean, I still have 30 grams of carbohydrate. Is that “removing” the food group of carbohydrate? No. It’s just limiting it down, knowing that I have a certain tolerance level. These people say, “Well, just eat everything in balance.” I’m like, “How much arsenic do I have in balance?”
Stuart Cooke: Yeah. Exactly.
Guy Lawrence: Well-addressed. And the last claim was: Don’t do a low-carb diet for more than six months.
I hear these things as well.
Jimmy Moore: I know. And these are things that are put out there in our culture, and this was a very prominent article on a website, Philly.com, I think it’s associated with the Philadelphia Inquirer, which is a major newspaper here in America. I actually wrote to this journalist, by the way, after this, and I said, “You know, if you want the truth, I’m happy to talk to you about what a true low-carb ketogenic diet is.” But I never heard back from her. And didn’t expect to.
I later found out a lot of her posts are pro-vegan. So, take that for what it is.
So, no more than six months. I’m thinking, so at the end of six months of being on low-carb diet and I’m seeing great results and getting great health, then how am I supposed to eat? What’s my next step? If I’m thriving in that state of eating, why would I change?
It’s a logical question to ask. Now, if you’re not seeing results after six months, by golly, change. Do something different. But if you’re seeing results and improvements in your health and your weight, why would you change anything?
Guy Lawrence: Yeah. Absolutely.
Stuart Cooke: Perfect sense. It makes sense.
So, what’s next for Jimmy? Any more clarity books?
Jimmy Moore: Jimmy needs a break from writing, because he wrote two books in one year. That was a lot, you guys.
So, I actually did just sign a contract with my publisher for a follow-up to Keto Clarity that I’m gonna collaborate with this American blogger and Author named Maria Emmerich. Do you guys know her?
Guy Lawrence: I haven’t heard of her name, no.
Jimmy Moore: Ah. Well, you’re gonna find out about her. She was one of my experts in Keto Clarity and so we quoted her throughout the book, but my publisher said, hey, we’d love to have a cookbook. And I’m going, “Do you know how Jimmy cooks? He takes a bowl and he throws stuff in the bowl here and there and I don’t measure anything.” Like a quarter cup of this and a teaspoon of this. I don’t use this at all. This is not something I would use.
And so Maria does. Maria is really good at. . . doing all those measurements and taking beautiful pictures. So, we both are very enthusiastic about ketogenic diets. So, we’re gonna collaborate on a ketogenic diet cookbook that will be coming out sometime around summer; next summer.
So, that’s kind of the next one. Not as much writing for me for that book as it has been the last two books.
Guy Lawrence: Yeah. I can imagine. And you’re coming to Australia soon, right, as well?
Jimmy Moore: I am. The low-carb Down Under tour is coming back, and we’re actually gonna go to a lot more cities this time than we did the last time. We’re definitely gonna hit all the biggies: Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, the Gold Coast this time. We’re gonna go to Tassie this time. (Tasmania, for my American friends.) Perth this time.
So, we’re definitely gonna try to hit, like, all the major ones. But that’ll be in the month of November. And, in fact, before I come over to Australia, on the way over, I’m gonna stop in New Zealand with Grant Schofield and his group and do a talk in Auckland, New Zealand on like that Thursday night before.
So, definitely check out my social media stuff and we’ll share all about that real soon.
Guy Lawrence: Yeah, definitely. And keep us posted, because we’ll share across our channels as well once we get closer to the date.
Jimmy Moore: Awesome. Thank you.
Guy Lawrence: And in the meantime, if anyone wants to get more of Jimmy Moore, where do they go? Jimmy?
Jimmy Moore: “More of Jimmy Moore.” I love saying that. “More of Moore.”
Well, so, the book, Keto Clarity, if you’re interested in that, we have a website KetoClarity.com. We have all kinds of media pages. We have a sample chapter from the book. I think the introduction is the sample chapter of the book. And then I did the audiobook to my book as well. It’ll be on Audible real soon, but we have a sample of that. I believe it’s chapter one. We have the sample of where I actually did the reading. When you’re a podcaster, people want to hear your voice. So, I did the reading of that.
And then if you want to find out more about my work, it’s LivinLaVidaLowCarb.com or if you Google “Jimmy Moore,” it should be everything on the front page is all my stuff.
Guy Lawrence: Awesome. Mate, that was brilliant. You are such a wealth of knowledge.
Jimmy Moore: Thank you.
Stuart Cooke: Yep. Absolutely. Fantastic. We’ve learned so much and we can’t wait to share it as well. It’s gonna be great.
Guy Lawrence: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Awesome. Thank you so much, Jimmy, for your time, mate. And look forward to seeing you when you get to Australia.
Jimmy Moore: We will see you guys in Oz, man. Rock it!
Stuart Cooke: Thank you.
Guy Lawrence: Thanks, mate.
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