What can living with wild wolves teach us about how to eat and live as humans?
Well today, believe it or not, we’re here with a remarkable woman who actually lived amongst wild wolves in the Arctic Circle.
This is a throwback episode of the Fat-Burning Man show from 2012. But just because it’s not new, doesn’t mean it’s not relevant. In fact, I think a lot of listeners really need this message more than ever. Nora certainly spreads a lot of wisdom.
Nora Gedgaudas is the author of Primal Body, Primal Mind, she maintains a private practice in Portland, Oregon as both a board-certified nutritional consultant and a clinical neurofeedback specialist.
And on this episode with Nora, you’re about to learn:
- Why so many people fail on Atkins, keto and the carnivore diet
- How medicine ceased to be a profession and became a profit-oriented industry
- How you can limit your exposure to EMF pollution
- How Nora lost 25 pounds without exercise, while eating butter by the stick
- What it’s like to live by the Arctic Circle among wild wolves
- And tons more…
Let’s go hang out with Nora.
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Nora Gedgaudas: Primal Body Primal Mind
Abel: Today we’re here with Nora Gedgaudas, a clinical neuro therapist and author of the wonderful book “Primal Body, Primal Mind.” How are things on the West Coast, Nora?
The West Coast is absolutely gorgeous today.
We have cool temperatures and clear skies, and fall is in the air. You got that sort of magical lighting going with the sun at the angle that it occupies in the sky this time of year, and it’s just very nice. And it’s a Friday so how bad can it be?
Abel: Nice. That was very poetic.
To start things off, can you give us a little bit of background about how you became interested in the evolutionary approach to nutrition, physiology and the brain?
Oh man! Well, you said this was only like an hour long program.
It’s such a convoluted trail. I took up an interest in nutrition back when I was in my teens and began devouring, if you will, books on the subject in a variety of ways.
I took up the study of nutritional science in college. I was also interested in anthropology and at one point I had started to pursue a double major in those things.
But for the life of me, I couldn’t imagine how those two things could possibly mesh. This is how compartmentalized my thinking was at that time
So anyway, long story short, I eventually came across the work of Weston Price, and I think that was what opened the floodgates for me.
The awareness of the way in which our ancestors ate, and how different that was from mainstream recommendations about what constitutes a healthy diet.
And that opened the door to me, to thinking more in terms of our more distant ancestors.
How the diets of those people that were our earliest ancestors would have possibly shaped our physiological make up and our nutritional requirements, and how that might reflect on what our needs are today.
And so I kind of started down that path 15-20 years ago now. And it’s been in and of itself a gradual evolution, no pun intended.
Abel: I’m a sucker for puns.
Thinking about this, one other thing did have a rather profound influence for me. Again my life has been very cross-disciplinary.
I’ve done a lot of different things along the way and one year I spent a whole summer of my life living less than 500 miles from the north pole with a family of wild wolves.
Abel: Really?!
Yes, long story. Fairly industrial-strength religious experience and pretty transformative for me on a lot of levels.
I was there basically helping to conduct behavioral research.
And I was in the company of a very famous wolf biologist, Dr. L. David Mech. He’s a dear friend.
He was quite well known for his work with wolves all over the world, arguably the world’s foremost scientific expert on the wolf.
Abel: Wow.
He had found this family of wolves back in 1986 up there on Northern Ellesmere Island, and was going up every single summer.
And he had managed to habituate to this family of wolves, found the den and all that, and every summer went and lived among them.
And one year I got invited along. And so I spent the whole summer there.
In fact at one point, he came back down to Minnesota because he had some business to conduct, and he sort of left me up there and then he came back a few weeks later.
But it was a profound experience on a lot of levels.
And one of the things that struck me is that I am sitting out there on a permafrost laden tundra, and it’s a bit of a thermal oasis there. There are definitely plant life growing and everything else in this particular area, but there’s permafrost just under the ground.
And I am looking over this landscape, and there are remnants of all these ancient human cultural sites all over the place in the area where this wolf den is.
Some of these sites have never been touched by archeologists.
Abel: Amazing.
So you can see the bones of the animals that they hunted, some of the tools laying around, and different things.
And at the time I was eating a mostly vegetarian diet, it wasn’t totally vegetarian by any stretch of the imagination, but at the time I kind of had it in my head that that was probably the healthier way to be.
And so I was eating all these fresh vegetables all the time, which I still do by the way. I probably still eat more vegetables than most vegetarians do, but I just really hadn’t thought it out well enough.
So, there I am sitting on the tundra and the last thing on my mind was a salad.
All that summer, all I did was sit there looking out over this frozen landscape, and all I could think about was fat-rich food.
We brought all these provisions with us, and I sat there on my duff and I ate bags and bags of nuts.
There was some hunting that we did, there were other things that we brought that were packaged. I was eating salami and cheese.
And I was just obsessed with butter.
How Nora Lost 25 Pounds Eating Butter By The Stick
There was a weather station some distance away from us that we made a pilgrimage to about once a week, so that we could take showers and maybe make a five-minute phone call back home, and that sort of thing.
And the OIC, the officer in charge at the station, knew about us and gave us permission when we came at usually 3am. It was 24 hour daylight so you could not really tell if it was 3am or 3pm.
And he said “Yes, you’re welcome to come in and use our facilities and make a quick phone call. And if there’s any food laying out in the mess hall, you are welcome to it.”
Well, they always had this great big bowl of butter, and they had bread sitting off to the side, which at the time made a great vehicle for the butter for me.
I would take a slice of bread, I’d toast it, and I’d put about an inch of butter on it. And I’d just stand there hovered over this little station making slice after slice. And it wasn’t the bread, it was the butter.
And I thought, “What the heck am I doing to myself by doing this?”
It was an interesting obsession. And as I sat there and thought about it, I realized that fat would have been pretty gosh darn important to people who lived at these sites. Vegetables were not a particularly practical food.
I was eating fat-rich food and I couldn’t stop eating, and by the way I lost about 25 pounds that summer.
Abel: Really? That’s interesting.
And got almost no exercise at all, because we were mostly sitting around watching wolves sleep, or watching them play around the den or whatever.
And if we followed them on their hunts, we were on four wheelers when we did that.
I would take walks occasionally in the evening, but there was not a whole lot of physical activity involved with this.
In fact, if we stood up and walked around at all while the wolves were hanging around the den and they could see that, it was rather upsetting to them.
They were totally cool with us as long as we just sat there.
So I found myself sitting there, wiggling my toes a lot trying to stay warm, putting on layers.
But the thing that your body uses to keep you warm is primarily fat. And so, my furnace was stoked.
I was burning the logs, as I’m sure you’re familiar with that analogy. I’m kind of getting to be known for now, and not bothering with very much kindling at all, because it just didn’t make sense, and I lost a ton of weight.
And I never forgot the lesson of that.
In the course of my interest in nutrition, which just really took a new turn between that experience, which was really a big seed that got planted in my mental state. And then as soon as I came across the Weston Price material, it just exploded in a new whole direction.
So that was catalyst for me. And it’s gone through multiple evolutions. It’s gone through evolutions since the time I published my book.
And my thinking keeps growing in these areas and I become better and better at distilling things down, at thinking things through. And I’m pretty careful about my facts these days.
I’ve become increasingly convinced at the central role that fat really plays in our physiological makeup, and should be playing in our dietary makeup.
And so, it’s led me to where I am now. And of course I don’t know if you attended my talk at AHS12?
Abel: I did, yes.
Cool. So, the whole ketogenic approach to things, I decided rather than come at this from the standpoint of carbs are bad, we’ve all grown weary of that whole thing.
Some people are almost OCD about it, and that’s all they can think about. Everybody is sort of tired of it, and people occasionally keep asking.
But I’m thinking, I need to come at this from a different standpoint, because it’s not just about the idea that carbs maybe aren’t the best thing for our health, but it’s how important fat really is.
There is the old Atkins approach to ketogenics which involves eating lots of protein.
Abel: Right.
Which isn’t really a true ketogenic diet, as it turns out.
Abel: Because it becomes sugar.
Yah, because your body will metabolically convert and burn that protein.
It’s not that it spikes your blood sugar to eat a chicken breast, or something like that.
But there was a big thing online recently where somebody did all this research and they said, “Well, it didn’t spike my blood sugar at all.”
Well, no, it’s not going to spike your blood sugar, but if you’ve been accustomed to burning carbohydrates as your primary source of fuel, and your body has come to expect that, your body will become eminently efficient at converting whatever it can to that fuel as well, if that fuel is readily available.
And protein is the next most logical thing, and it will do on an as-needed basis.
So, you’re not spiking your blood sugar, but you’re still perpetuating that same metabolic cycle in the process.
Abel: Right.
And I think why so many people failed on Atkins is because they never really ceased to be sugar burners, in a manner of speaking.
They dove into all kinds of carb substitutes, and all that crazy stuff. So they maintained that weird processed substitutes for carbs, most of which were soy-based. Which, don’t even get me started on that.
But they also over-consumed protein-rich foods in the belief that you couldn’t over-consume protein-rich foods.
I think that way of thinking has shifted some in the consciousness of the paleo community, and even some of the leadership of the paleo community that previously promoted protein-based diets.
Fat is sort of a free metabolic fuel.
Ironically, it’s the one thing that’s been most vilified throughout the last hundred years, and is probably the single most important component, if you want to relegate something being more important than something else.
Fat seems to have a real central role to play in the functioning of our brain and nervous system, in our cellular membranes, the way we manufacture our hormones, and in maintaining healthy energy levels.
And we are designed to burn one of two types of fuel.
We’ll burn either carbohydrates and glucose, or we will burn fat, or free fatty acids and ketones.
And that’s what we’re designed to do.
And different fuels have different values under different circumstances, but I don’t think we were ever designed to rely on glucose as our primary source of fuel.
Yet that’s taught in medical schools. That’s what’s taught to conventional nutritionists and dieticians.
And I don’t know if you saw the article. There was a blog post written by Dr. Briffa, who I think is over in Great Britain. And the title of his blog post was “Diabetic Transforms His Health with a Low-carb Diet and His Doctor Urges Him to Eat More Carbs.”
Abel: I did read that. It’s totally absurd, and so common, too.
That particular diabetic, just to blow my own horn for a second, it turns out, had read my book and decided to make major changes to his diet based on what he read.
And his markers all went to just beautiful normal ranges and his physician said, “Oh my god, this is amazing. What are you doing?”
And he said, “Well actually, I’ve given up carbs and I’m eating all this fat.”
And the doctor blanched, and I think maybe his heart stopped beating for a second.
And then he immediately just started in worried fashion, saying, “Well you have to eat carbs, you just have to.”
And he said, “Well I am, I’m eating vegetables.”
And the doctor says, “No, no, no, no, no, you have to eat starch.”
That’s the way physicians are trained to think.
But of course, we all know you don’t go to medical school to study health.
We all know you don’t go to medical school to study health. @NoraGedgaudas Click To Tweet
Abel: Unfortunately.
You go there to study disease, and how to treat the symptoms of disease with these pharmaceutical agents, and surgery, and other expensive medical procedures.
And somewhere during World War II, medicine ceased to really become a profession, and became an industry, and a very profit-oriented industry.
And so what we have as a healthcare system today, of course, is primarily a disease management system.
Nobody’s really profiting from foundational thinking and restorative measures to health.
It’s more of a, “You can’t do anything about a disease once it takes hold, so let’s just treat the symptoms and hope for a good outcome.”
Abel: It is, unfortunately. There are more and more doctors who are coming on board with this overall message in this community, and we need them more than ever.
Even my own doctor when I go in, it seems pretty hopeless, unfortunately. And I’ve tried to talk about fat-burning versus sugar-burning.
I’ve tried it both ways and I’ve been a fat burner for quite some time now. But my background is in the brain and psychology.
It really fascinates me with the way my brain feels when I’m using different fuels. The difference is pretty shocking.
It really is a roller coaster ride when you’re burning sugar. Click To Tweet
I’ve run marathons and all of that. I’ve always been a runner. And so they say that you need to eat lots of starches, lots of sugar, those little goo packs and all of that.
It’s kind of like a nitrous boost for a car. You are super-charged for a little while, but then you get sick. Or you crash.
And I can say, being primarily a fat-burner now, there’s something that feels almost more regulated.
I’m not sure if that’s the right word, but I feel more centered, more balanced, and I feel like I can think much more clearly.
And you can, as a matter of fact.
There was an interview with Peter Tia and Dr. Andreas Eenfeldt. And he was talking about the value of ketogenic diets in cognitive functioning, and that it seems to have a particularly enhancing effect on cognitive functioning, which it makes perfect sense.
The brain is made of fat, and the brain needs a tremendous amount of fuel. Nothing provides more energy per calorie, or per gram, than dietary fat.
And well, ketones in particular, is what the brain is really beautifully designed to make use of.
In fact, we’re born in a state of ketosis.
Abel: It’s so interesting.
We were literally born to rely on fat as our primary source of fuel.
The Journal of Neuroscience Research states that once the onset of suckling takes place, ketone bodies become the major fuel for brain development.
And, of course, apart from coconut oil and palm kernel oil, the richest natural source of medium-chained fats, which are the most reliable source of ketones, is human breast milk.
They’re saying that when we’re born, the brain basically runs off of ketones.
And it’s not until we introduce a carbohydrate-based diet, that people start to overly rely on ketones.
Ketosis vs. Ketoacidosis
Abel: Let’s talk a little bit about ketosis, for the people who are just kind of dipping their toes into this lifestyle, who might not be fully aware of what it means.
I know it can be a scary topic. I know a lot of doctors are scared of it.
I think you mentioned in your book, most people when they think of ketosis, they think of ketoacidosis, which is very different.
So can you just give a basic primer about these two different things?
Very simply defined, ketosis is a state in which you’re relying on fat as your primary source of fuel.
I don’t know who wouldn’t want that, right?
Diabetic or ketoacidosis, it most commonly manifested in what you call untreated Type 1 diabetes. This is a pathological metabolic state and it’s marked by extreme and uncontrolled ketosis.
Normal ketosis is a real functional aspect of fat-based energy metabolism, and that tends to be induced by either prolonged fasting or very low carbohydrate diet.
In acidosis, what happens is that your body releases keto acids that basically alter the pH of your blood pretty substantially. They’ll lower the pH, make you highly acidic and that’s a potentially life-threatening condition.
We all walk around, we’re all supposed to be walking around with a pH somewhere between 7.35 and 7.45.
People have said ketoacidosis, when you start to dip too far, like you start to go too far in either direction.
So fasting or consuming a diet with very low carbohydrate is really going to, even in a type 1 or type 2 diabetic person, lead to a state of ketosis, but not ketoacidosis.
Ketoacidosis is a fairly rare condition, and unfortunately the two get conflated together.
I think that it was Jane Brody of The New York Times, who popularized the idea that ketones were toxins, and that we need to avoid the production of ketones at all the cost.
Well, that’s, of course, wrong.
And in fact, it’s an incredibly important and viable source of fuel for us.
When you first decide to go on a low carbohydrate diet, your body is going to start manufacturing ketones.
And a lot of people buy those urinary keto sticks at the drug store and they pee on them. Look at all the ketones, I’m in ketosis.
Well, that’s just not accurate. You’re probably producing a lot of ketones, but you may not yet be adept at making use of them.
Like putting diesel into a gasoline engine, you know it’s in there circulating, but you may not be able to make use of it as it takes time to make that metabolic conversion from relying on sugars as a primary source of fuel, to one that relies on fat as a primary source of fuel.
And so just because you are peeing ketones doesn’t mean that you’re burning them.
So initially they do get thrown off, like a waste product.
People might find that their breath is a little weird, that they are giving off maybe some weird body odor or something as your body starts to excrete ketones both through your skin, through your bowels, and through your urinary tract, and whereever else.
That’s a short thing. That’s a very temporary condition until your body starts to figure out, “Wait a second. We are throwing away the only fuel that this person is giving us. We’ve got to figure out how to make use of it.”
As your body goes driver on you, it starts the conversions that it needs to, to suddenly now make use of this much more efficiently produced type of fuel.
Even the slenderest person listening to this program right now has roughly 20 times more stored available fat at their disposal.
And so sugar is rocket fuel. It’s designed to kick in as a primary source of fuel during times where we are in a state of fight or flight, or we’re exerting ourselves in some extreme anaerobic fashion.
That’s where it shines, that’s where we’re designed to make best use of it.
It’s like fueling a formula one race car. That race car can really move around the track, and it may look really cool while it’s doing it.
But is that the car that you really want as your daily driver, or to take and rely on for your cross country trip?
Technology, Neurofeedback & Our Brains
Abel: I just did one of those, but certainly not in a formula one racer.
Let’s go back a little bit to how out of touch we are now than a few decades ago.
You were pretty much living at the North Pole, and I wouldn’t imagine there was a heck of a lot of technology around you.
These days, it seems like every year or two there’s another gadget that’s in our hands or by our bedside, another computer or another TV.
So what effect does that have on our physiology and on our brains?
Electromagnetic frequency pollution of course is this very, very new thing.
I’d say 15 – 20 years ago now, when I first got started training in the field of neuro-feedback, there was a pretty even mix of people who came in in a state of functional under-arousal, as those coming in in a state of functional over-arousal.
I know you’ve got a background in neuroscience so you have a grasp of what that is, but to just explain, the state of under-arousal shows up as a form of maybe depression or low energy brain state and where you just can’t get it going.
And over-arousal is more of a chronic state of fight or flight, where people are going to be very anxious.
And we would train accordingly, I should say, based on certain training frequencies.
We do higher frequencies for people who were functionally unaroused, and that tends to work well for them.
It was on a case by case basis. People came in and we’d make a determination on which direction we thought the training needed to go.
And we would select frequencies accordingly, even adjust those frequencies based on people’s responses.
The years went by that increasingly there seemed to be more and more people coming in that were requiring lower frequency training.
And I thought maybe we were sort of self-selecting or something, although it really did seem to be a changing client population.
I found that it dialed frequencies lower and lower as time went on. Literally to where past a certain point, pretty much everybody was training at at low frequencies.
Now this is sort of ancient history in neurofeedback talk now, but back in early days we were training somewhere between like 12 to 18 Hertz or whatever for the average person.
And within a span of less than a decade, your average person after a while was maybe running 68 Hertz or something like that. Nowadays, I don’t train anybody that high anymore.
Abel: Wow.
People’s neurological states seem to be increasingly over-aroused.
And most people, I’d say, are walking around in some varying state of fight or flight. I won’t say everybody is.
There was supposedly exceptions to the rule, but I’m sitting there scratching my head going, “What could possibly account for this shift?”
Our equipment requirements passed a certain point, and we all hit basement that we never even thought we have a reason to go to.
And then a $10,000 training system became a piece of junk, and we had to buy a whole new system. I’ve since bought a whole other system that now gets regular software updates that allows for expanded capabilities.
And there are people getting trained in almost 110,000 to one hertz.
Abel: Wow.
Now, it could be argued that there are things going on at these infra-low frequencies that involve several organizing principles that may have had a value, too, all along.
And I think that that’s probably, in fact, true, and may even be on a glial level with the infra-low frequencies that we’re training.
It’s a different frame than it used to be, but what interests me is how we got there. And that’s the question I ask.
I’m not saying that you can’t get positive effects from training those higher frequencies in some people.
What I’m saying, it’s something that drove us to go lower, and lower, and lower. And some of it was a learning curve. But I’m telling you, some of it was that people just kept needing it.
Needing lower, needing lower, needing lower.
And one thought that came to mind actually, a friend of mine brought it up was that, it might just be EMF pollution.
Fifteen years ago, I knew people that didn’t have cell phones. Nowadays, everyone’s got them.
And regardless of whether we have them or not, we’re all being inundated by this high frequency electromagnetic sort of pollution.
And if you go to a website called antennasearch.com and you type in your zip code, it will tell you how many cell towers you’ve got within four miles of your home. I have 67 cell towers.
Abel: Oh my gosh.
Yah. And there are 200 types of antennas. There’s no way to escape those tangles. They’re everywhere.
We know from research, from really well-conducted research, that EMF pollution will either generate or exacerbate excitatory activity in the brain and nervous system.
I don’t have the research right in front of me, but there’s been some very interesting research published on the effects of space weather.
In other words, solar particles, high-charged up, is now coming in. The space weather is very, very different now than it was a decade or so ago.
Abel: Watch out for that solar wind.
You better believe it.
And a weakened magnetic field that is making the effects of those solar particles much more pronounced on our nervous systems.
And they do find that during periods where there is solar maximums there are higher rates of violence, there’s more war, there’s more unrest, and there’s more anxiety in populations during those time periods.
So I think there is sort of a convergence of things coming together.
Carbohydrate-based diets and the state of the world that we’re in just from a psychological perspective, is anxiety provoking.
You’d have to be either living under a rock some place, or I don’t know, completely stone dead from the neck up, to not be stressed out by what’s going on in our world.
Everything from the economy to our environment, to the whole political arena and corporate thing.
I’m not a fear-monger.
My attitude about things is, I’m not paranoid simply because I am informed.
It’s not hard to realize that we’ve got stuff coming at us that our most distant ancestors couldn’t have even begun to have fathomed.
It’s just a different world with very different demands on us.
We have a very primitive physiology in the modern world, and in no way are we designed to deal well with that.
There’s a lot that’s going on that’s really outside of the realm of our immediate control.
The drum that I love to beat is that we have to take control of what we can.
We don’t have the room for error, the room for indulgence that maybe our grandparents or great-grandparents had.
I think the subsequent generation that has suffered the effect of the food industry, for instance, or environmental degradation, or if you look at the whole scenario, each subsequent generation becomes increasingly vulnerable. And the current generation just doesn’t have any room for error anymore.
So, that’s the idea that taking control of what we can.
Let’s try to do what we can, take the principles that serve to evolve our physiology and nutritional requirements, and apply those to modern conditions.
The longevity sciences is a means of optimizing these principles. And truthfully, I don’t know that it’s possible to be optimally healthy anymore.
If you cannot afford to be sick, and nobody can that I know of, then you can’t afford not to eat optimally.
I don’t care if somebody else decides that they want to eat their carbs. I’m not here to tell anybody what to do.
But my interest is just in saying that this is what I’ve come across. This is the way I see it, and you can take that information, and do whatever you please.
How Many Carbs is Enough?
Abel: Now, on that point, this is kind of an interesting one because I think everyone has a different definition, but we throw around terms like: Low-carb, controlled carb, high-carb.
Is there a numeric value that you personally assign to that?
Well, I don’t know that anybody’s ever calculated a safe minimum exposure to dietary sugars and starch.
Because where all sugars glycate, and we’re not talking about the controlled enzymatic glycation that we need.
We need some free radical activity in order to do our metabolic processes perfectly.
That doesn’t mean that we need to consume free radicals in order to be healthy.
But in order to maintain a state of ketosis, we need to stay below a threshold of about 50 to no more than, maybe, 60 grams of carbohydrates a day.
And the fact is, we do not have to get any of it from diet or sugar or starch.
Abel: Right.
You are going to five or 10 grams a day, there is no way to totally avoid glucose or some form of sugar or starch. In our diets, there really isn’t.
So you are roughly going to get five or 10 grams of sugars in the protein and meats that you consume every day.
Another 10 or 15 grams from things like fibrous vegetable. You know they are primarily very low carbohydrate, but you still get some.
There are going to be a few grams in nuts and seeds, a few grams if you decide to eat some fruits or berries, you’ll get some of that.
And so the idea is to keep it to a minimum, if you want to maintain that state of helpful well-adapted ketosis.
The other trick, and it is kind of an important one that gets overlooked a lot, is that it’s really important that we keep our protein consumption to less than about 25 grams or so, which is about roughly about 3 ounces or so of meat, fish or eggs in a single meal.
Each ounce of meat is roughly 6 to 10 grams of protein, so you can use that number if you want.
And I oftentimes recommend in the beginning, that people get themselves a little cheap digital food scale that can measure things in grams and ounce or whatever, and just weigh it out raw before you cook it so that you get a sense of how much is really in a meal.
And once you get used to doing that, you do not have to do it for very long.
I don’t like regiments, I don’t like having to be overly formulae about things, but it is kind of important to get a sense of what you’re doing going into this.
And then once you get the hang of it you can eyeball it after that. That’s what I do.
There are people who tend to have a real problem getting into that fat burning zone, and they’re just like, “Oh, you know, I’m just not eating any carbs, and I’m just sticking to the protein and vegetables and whatever.”
And it’s like, okay, you’re probably over-burning protein. And the other thing going on, as well, and this is something I have a tremendous amount of material on now where people get tripped up. And I’ll be doing some of that in the near future.
Abel: Very cool.
But one of the easy things you can do, and Jimmy Moore is doing this right now, is you can go out and get yourself a good ketone meter, and I’m not talking about keto sticks.
Don’t waste your money on those things that you pee on. With a ketone meter, you’re literally measuring ketone levels in the blood. It’s just like a glucometer.
You can buy these things online. There are couple of different kinds anyway.
So, by definition you’re in a state of ketosis, and you’re in kind of a more optimal state of ketosis somewhere between one and three millimolars of ketones.
So if you have one of these meters that’s what you are shooting for: 1.5 millomars. That’s usually a good threshold of millimolar ketones, which means that you’re in functional state of ketosis.
And so that might be a tool that some people can use to better tailor what they’re doing, and it will help your awareness of what you are and maybe what you aren’t doing right.
Abel: Very interesting. And how much do those typically cost?
Well, the meters are very inexpensive.
Where the expense comes in are, in fact, some of the diabetic supply companies and things like that literally give the meters away, or they’re just maybe $10 or something.
But it’s the strips, you know…
Abel: That’s how they get you.
Now, if you’re not a diabetic though it doesn’t end up being that expensive, because it can cost anywhere from $3 to $6 bucks for one of those strips.
Do your measurements once a day, pick a certain time of day. You’re more likely to have low ketone levels in the morning than you are later in the day.
So, pick a time of day and do it roughly the same time every day, if you can, and just kind of keep tabs on how things are going and try to make adjustments accordingly.
If in doubt, lower the amount of protein you’re consuming and increase the amount of fat.
Sounds crazy, but some things are so crazy they actually work.
Abel: Fat is king.
Where to Find Nora Gedgaudas
So we are coming up on time but before we go, why don’t you tell the folks out there where they can find you and what you’re working on now?
Well, you can find me at my website at www.primalbody-primalmind.com.
And my book Primal Body, Primal Mind is available through my website, actually. You know, it’s a little better for me if you purchase the book through the link on my website, but you can find it in online sources as well as in most of the bookstores out there. It’s just about in every bookstore.
And the stuff I’m working on now, I’ve got so many irons in the fire right now. It’s hard to know what is not pretty to talk about, but I have some exciting celebrity collaborations coming up.
I’ve also got a couple of new e-books that you can download, including Rethinking Fatigue.
And you can also check out my new book, Primal Fat Burner: Live Longer, Slow Aging, Super-Power Your Brain, and Save Your Life with a High-Fat, Low Carb Paleo Diet.
I think those are going to provide some really, really, genuinely helpful material for people.
You can also find me on Twitter and Instagram @NoraGedgaudas.
I’m also planning to do another tour and will be speaking again in Australia, as well as New Zealand.
Abel: Wow, very cool. It’s an exciting life you live.
There’s definitely never a dull moment. Sort of feeling a little drawn and quartered some days, pulled in a lot of different directions.
I still have a very active clinical practice and I’m also planning to do a lot more in the future. Maybe doing less with the clinical practice and more with things going on on my website and elsewhere.
So, be sure when you go on my website to sign-up for my newsletter, sign up on there.
There’s going to be a lot more coming in the very near future, a lot of really exciting stuff and I hope you guys stay in touch.
Abel: Awesome. Well Nora, thank you so much for coming on.
This has been really interesting and helpful and we’ll have to have you on again soon.
Thanks, Abel. I really appreciate you inviting me on. It’s a real privilege.
Abel: You bet. Thanks a lot.
Before You Go…
Here’s a review for the Fat-Burning Man Show, that came in from Joe on iTunes. He says:
Beware the hidden costs. About a year ago, I made a change and decided to follow some better health advice.
The first episode I listened to was with Dr. Bill Davis. From there, I was hooked. Not only is the advice from Abel and his guests real honest accurate and devoid of corporate influence, but it really works.
In May of 2016 I weighed in at 290 pounds, and just last week passed the 205 mark. Many of my friends have noticed, and say things like, “You look like you have lost weight.”
I always have to correct them. You see, I’m in sales and I don’t like losing. Also, lost things have the potential to one day to be found, and I have no intention of finding that old self again.
So instead, I tell people that I’m shedding weight and if they want to know how they should listen to the Abel James podcast.
However, that recommendation also comes with a warning about the hidden costs that I glossed over at the beginning of my journey. I’m on my third belt and about to run out of holes again. I’ve had to re-purchase several dozen other items from my wardrobe, simply because this works.
It took me 38 years to grow that large and only one to properly shed the waist and waste I was carrying everywhere.
So if you really want to make a difference for yourself in the way of a healthier, happier you, ditch the standard American diet, and follow the Fat-Burning Man. The podcast and advice are free, just beware of the hidden costs. 😉
Joe, congratulations and thank you for making me giggle. I love a good bad pun. And shedding 80 pounds is just incredible.
I’m really psyched that you’re back in action, and I’m sure you look great in your new belts. 🙂
If you took your health into your own hands, and have a story that you’d like to share with me, get in touch by signing up for my newsletter, and just hit reply to the email that I’ll send to you with a bunch of goodies.
And if you’d like to support this show, then be sure to head on over to wildsuperfoods.com to get your own health-boosting goodies.
These are the health supplements that Alyson and I have been taking on an almost daily basis for many years now. And just in this past year we’ve been able to launch and now get them out to you to help support our own content and make more free content for you guys.
And there’s one thing worth mentioning. When you grab the Ultimate Daily Bundle—which comes with Mega Omegas, Probiotic Spheres, Vitamin D Stack and Future Greens—and select Subscribe & Save, we’ll knock over $128 bucks off the price and we’ll set you up with Free Access to the Fat-Burning Tribe, which is our online coaching community with tons of recipes, videos, articles, meal plans and more.
You’ll get all the health-boosting goodies of Future Greens, Mega Omegas, Vitamin D Stack, and Probiotic Spheres delivered straight to your doorstep each month. (U.S. only right now… hopefully we’ll be expanding soon!)
Just head on over to wildsuperfoods.com/save128 and select Subscribe & Save to get the deal.
What did you think of this interview with Nora Gedgaudas? Leave a comment below to let us know!