I had the pleasure of talking with Ben Azadi on The Hard To Kill Podcast about the ketogenic diet. If you’re keto-kurious, this chat is definitely for beginners but will also reveal some new insights for the keto diet expert.
“We’re stuck as sugar burners…We’re never accessing the body fat, that’s gonna lead to a lot of problems…and it’s gonna make you easy to kill.” – Ben Azadi
A Matter Of Life And Death
For Ben, losing weight was a matter of life or death. He was,
“sick and tired of being sick and tired,”
and was considering taking his own life. Instead of succumbing to the demons of being fat and out of shape, he decided to take extreme personal responsibility. He lost over 80lbs, went from 34% body fat to 6% and started helping others in their weight loss journey. All this from deciding his obesity was entirely his responsibility and not due to…
“…a slow metabolism or poor genetics.”
What Is Ketosis?
Ketosis is what Ben calls, “an ancient healing strategy” where the body can use ketones rather than glucose for energy. In essence, most North Americans are what we could call “sugar burners” that rely on the massive amounts of glucose from foods like: snack bars, cereal, pasta, alcohol, candy and fruit.
This essentially prevents most people from entering into a state of “ketosis” whereby the body realizes there’s not any readily available glucose so it “switches” its fuel source to ketones which come from the oxidation of fat cells.
Ketones
Ketones are a classification of organic molecules with a very recognizable one being acetone. Without getting too deep into my biochemistry notes, ketones are more efficient at producing ATP (our energy currency in our bodies) than glucose is.
For Nerds ONLY – Read about Krebb’s Cycle for more details.
Essentially, if you constantly have high insulin levels due to chronic over-eating with high glycemic index food, you’ll never give your body a chance to enter into ketosis which improves fat burning and overall energy levels.
Why Try The Keto Diet?
This diet, most likely, mimics the ancestral ways our species used to eat. There were no grocery stores or highly processed foods 10k years ago, just meat and some fruit. This is why we have the cellular machinery to be able to function on simply protein and fat. As Ben says,
“There are no essential carbohydrates.”
Keto Basics
Ben recommends pulling back your carbohydrate intake to under 50g per day to fully get the benefit of the diet. That means you’ll have to make up the rest of your calories from dietary fat and protein. Considering most N. Americans eat upwards of 300-400g of carbohydrates per day, this is going to be tough for most.
Of important note is the quality of the fat that you will consume. Make sure that it is not processed. Meaning, it needs to come from anything but a seed and a heavily industrialized process to reduce the inflammatory response these oils will cause. More on this in my YouTube post here.
Harder To Kill
As Ben eluded to at the start of this post, being fat, metabolically broken and dependent on big pharma to save you is a poor plan and it makes you significantly easier to kill. Poor health as you age shouldn’t be tolerated.
Losing body fat should be your number one goal, above all else. The ketogenic diet is but one tool in a toolbox you need to be willing to become harder to kill.
Find out more about how I intend to help 100k veterans lose 2 million pounds and how Ben intends to help 1 billion folks improve their health by following us on socials.
Train Hard, Fight Easy
Dave is a retired infantry officer and Afghanistan war veteran. He’s the creator of the HRD2KILL training programs that were built on the principles that got him from not being able to get out of bed to competing in the Crossfit Open, Spartan Races and the Ironman. You can find more mobility-based exercises in his new book, “The Nimble Warrior”, now available or tune into his Best Veteran Army Podcast of 2022 The Hard to Kill Podcast