Table Of Content

DEDICATED TO MY WIFE, CARRIE, WHO OFFERS INSIGHTS INTO LIFE I COULD NEVER HAVE DISCOVERED ON MY OWN CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication INTRODUCTION: The Keto to a Long, Happy, Healthy Life I Building the Metabolic Machinery CHAPTER 1: The Keto Reset Diet 101 —What, Why, and How CHAPTER 2: Metabolic Efficiency: The Ultimate Goal for Weight Loss, Health, and Longevity CHAPTER 3: The Health, Performance, and Disease Protection Benefits of Keto II The 21-Day Metabolism Reset CHAPTER 4: The 21-Day Metabolism Reset Overview CHAPTER 5: Ditch Toxic Foods and Replace with Nutrient-Dense Foods CHAPTER 6: The Keys to High Fat, Low-Carb, Primal-Style Eating CHAPTER 7: Live a Keto-Friendly Lifestyle III Going Keto CHAPTER 8: Are You Ready? Final Launch Preparations CHAPTER 9: Go Keto! CHAPTER 10: Advanced Strategies to Accelerate Progress CHAPTER 11: The Finish Line and Beyond Photo Insert CHAPTER 12: The Keto Reset Diet Recipes APPENDIX: The Nitty-Gritty Details: Science, Supplements, Testing, Troubleshooting ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INDEX About the Authors Introduction THE KETO TO A LONG, HAPPY, HEALTHY LIFE The Keto Reset Diet is going to help you reprogram your genes back to the original human factory setting of being fat-and keto-adapted (a term that appears throughout the book—let’s nickname it “keto”). Keto is a state of metabolic efficiency where you are able to burn stored energy in the form of body fat and ketones, and not be dependent upon regular high-carbohydrate meals to sustain your energy, mood, or cognitive focus. When you conduct the 21-Day Metabolic Reset and transition away from carbohydrate dependency, then go keto, you will normalize your appetite hormones so that you are almost never hungry. This happens very quickly, and it’s an absolutely stunning revelation. It’s like discovering a hidden superpower that stabilizes your energy, mood, and brain function all day long, because you have readily available stored energy to burn —even if you skip meals. You’ll enjoy delicious, nutrient-dense meals and snacks that are deeply satisfying in a way that a carb binge never will be. This means you never have to worry about adding excess body fat, blowing your “diet” and tail spinning, or falling victim in your later years to diet-related diseases. You become what I affectionately call a fat-burning beast, and you’ll stay this way for the rest of your life. I’m eager to share this journey to keto with you because my own journey to keto represents the culmination of a long career in the health and fitness world, and a long quest to discover the truth. While the truth is that personal preference and dietary flexibility will always trump any regimented dietary protocol, it’s also important to acknowledge that keto is the default human metabolic state, because it was the only way humans were able to survive the withering selection pressure of human evolution. I sincerely believe that The Keto Reset Diet journey we are about to commence could represent the greatest breakthrough in the history of nutritional science—and the history of dieting (finally!)—to promote successful long-term fat loss and weight management. My passion for nutrition, fitness, and healthy living dates back to my teenage years. Yes, I was one of those weird kids running to and from school, sometimes in snowstorms (I’m known as a Malibu dude today, but I grew up in Maine), to prepare for high school distance running. I devoured nutrition texts instead of comic books. After college, I ditched plans of medical school to train for the U.S. Olympic team for the marathon. I ran over 100 miles a week for ten years, once placing fifth in the USA national championships. After trashing all my joints from extreme running, I moved over to triathlons and took fourth at the famed Hawaii Ironman competition. I could perform great endurance feats and had a lean, toned physique, but on the inside I was in horrific shape. I suffered from chronic inflammation, tendonitis, osteoarthritis, and IBS, and I definitely had what we now identify as leaky gut syndrome. I caught six upper respiratory infections each year, and I was not fit for anything except moving straight ahead for hours on end. I thought my strict low-fat, high- carb diet was making me healthy, but—in tandem with my chronic training—it was significantly accelerating the aging process in my body. Before I was 30 years old, I had crashed and burned out of elite racing and turned my attention to helping others as a coach and personal trainer. My athletic successes were gratifying and character building, but it was my struggles and failures that shaped the defining mission of my career: to help others enjoy healthy, fit, happy, and long lives without the pain, suffering, and sacrifice we have come to believe, erroneously, is necessary. Today, breaking scientific developments in epigenetics and evolutionary biology validate a simple premise: the secret to lifelong health and peak performance is in modeling the lifestyle behaviors of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. This promotes optimal gene expression and counteracts the many health-compromising forces of fast-paced, fast-food modern life. With the primal/paleo/ancestral health movement in full bloom, and conventional wisdom getting challenged and recalibrated each day, it feels like we are finally on track to eventually manage the epidemic disease patterns of metabolic syndrome, Type 2 diabetes, cancer, and heart disease that are directly linked to adverse dietary and lifestyle practices. And yet the primal baseline of ditching grains, sugars, and industrial oils and of avoiding chronic exercise are just scratching the surface of the potential to transform your life through ancestral living in general, and keto in particular. Ketogenic eating can also protect against assorted inflammatory conditions that lead to dysfunction and disease; dramatically improve immune and cognitive function; minimize the risk of today’s epidemic heart disease, cancer, and cognitive decline; and enable phenomenal breakthroughs in athletic performance and recovery, both for endurance efforts and strength and power. These are some big claims, I know, but the research and case studies prove that if you follow the correct approach to going keto (as we’ll do in this book), the results will surpass anything you’ve ever experienced before. While keto is the key to health transformation, the booming popularity of keto has also made it the latest fad diet, replete with marketing hype, oversimplification, misinformation, and promoters misinterpreting the foundational science and proven strategies. I’d like to help you avoid the hazards of most fad diets; that’s why I’m sharing my unique program in this book. The Keto Reset Diet will protect you from the pitfalls of many of these questionable programs. Instead, you’ll follow a thoughtful, proven two-step approach that is flexible, highly customizable, effective, and intuitive instead of regimented. With the plan I’ve created, you reprogram your genes to make fat and ketones your preferred fuel, instead of the carbohydrates that modern humans have become dependent upon owing to ill-advised food choices, coupled with overly stressful exercise and lifestyle habits. The Keto Reset Diet will make this happen at the deepest level of gene reprogramming, so that it lasts for the rest of your life. As I’ll detail shortly, this is a refreshing contrast to the typical quick-fix weight-loss programming that often has adverse rebound consequences. The Keto Reset Diet blends cutting-edge information from numerous research and clinical experts with anecdotal evidence from keto devotees ranging from ordinary health enthusiasts to some of the world’s elite athletes. I’ll also share the breakthrough science and expert recommendations for how to avoid common mistakes and ensure success. The Two Steps to Going Keto The ultimate objective of the two-step plan I’ve developed is to build what I like to call metabolic efficiency or metabolic flexibility—being adept at burning stored energy in the form of fat and ketones instead of relying primarily on carbohydrates you consume at regularly timed meals. The first step in the process is the 21-Day Metabolism Reset to kick your dependence on dietary carbohydrates (which is the essence of metabolic inflexibility) and boost your fat-burning metabolism. During the first week of the Reset, you’ll learn the best way to ditch grains, sugars, and refined vegetable oils; and you’ll also discover the nutrient-dense, high-fat, low-carb primal/paleo foods with which to replace them. During the second week, you’ll focus on the supportive lifestyle behaviors that are essential to succeed with dietary transformation. These include optimizing your exercise patterns, dialing in your sleep, and implementing effective stress-management techniques. In your final approach to the 21-day mark, you’ll put it all together—thereby escaping carbohydrate dependency once and for all, and plunging headlong into the world of fat adaptation. This 21-Day Metabolism Reset alone is quite likely to transform your health for the rest of your life. When you kick carb dependency, you will escape from the epidemic metabolic syndrome disease patterns (e.g., obesity, Type 2 diabetes, and heart disease), and you set the stage once and for all to reduce excess body fat without having to worry about its coming back, as happens when you normalize an extreme diet or back off on exercise now and then. You will likely notice immediate weight loss, largely owing to a reduction in inflammation and the ensuing fluid retention in cells throughout the body (caused by the inflammatory effects of high-carbohydrate eating) and also because you will unlock stored body fat to burn for energy around the clock. It’s not uncommon for devoted enthusiasts to drop 10 to 15 pounds total, including 3 to 6 pounds of excess body fat, during a 21-Day Metabolism Reset. Your journey toward becoming fat-and keto-adapted continues in the final section of this book. First, you’ll make some final launch preparations to fine- tune your metabolic fitness, and even take a midterm exam of sorts to ensure you are ready for your initial foray into nutritional ketosis. Then, you’ll go keto, dropping your carb consumption to less than 50 grams a day and also likely lowering your protein to less than you typically consume, while also emphasizing nutritious, natural fats as your main calorie source. Your foray into nutritional ketosis should last for at least six weeks. Then, with your newly minted degree in fat-and keto-adaptation, you can consider and experiment with assorted long-term options, including going back into nutritional ketosis any time in the future to shed excess fat, protect against disease, and enhance cognitive and athletic performance. Being fat-and keto-adapted means that you can veer off the plan now and then — a departure from ideal food choices—and not tailspin into a month-long sugar binge. When you have this esteemed metabolic flexibility, you can wake up the day after eating cake by the ocean, or even a bunch more stuff on a week-long cruise, and get right back into the groove—whether through fasting, a string of keto-aligned meals, or even strategic use of ketone supplements. In contrast, consider what happens to a carb-dependent, metabolically inflexible dieter going for a cutthroat calorie-restriction cleanse: there’s fatigue from a lack of the usual steady supply of dietary carbohydrates (since you are inefficient at burning body fat), sugar cravings that will ultimately be impossible to resist, and eventual burnout from an overstimulation of the fight-or-flight response that’s triggered by calorie restriction when you are not fat-adapted. Having metabolic flexibility means you can depart from ideal food choices now and then, and then get right back into the groove. If you’re worried about your chances of succeeding with keto, realize that your diet is only as good or as bad as your last meal—or last week or month of meals. No matter who you are and what your starting point is—even if you are battling obesity or Type 2 diabetes—you can take baby steps in the right direction each day and experience immediate, discernible benefits. If you complete the 21-Day Metabolism Reset and lose the book after that, your life still will be transformed. You will feel more alert and less hungry while at work, less exhausted after workouts, and less fried after a hectic day. These benefits occur because you are finally giving your body a break from the lifelong, high- stress roller-coaster ride of a high-carbohydrate, high insulin–producing eating pattern that promotes inflammation and oxidative damage throughout the body. Taking that initial step of getting the junk out of your diet is a huge deal! But that only scratches the surface for the absolutely life-transforming benefits of being fully fat-and keto-adapted. That’s what this book is all about—heading toward fabulous new frontiers with absolutely, positively no turning back. This time, you are going to do things the right way, once and for all. This new mindset differs, though, from thinking that you can reach for keto to work like a magic pill that slims you down for your bikini vacation or bridesmaid gig. Instead, with this approach, you won’t find that annoying weight gain happening in the first place (even if you cut back on exercise); that’s because your body has become exceptional at burning stored body fat for energy around the clock. In The Keto Reset Diet, you’ll be guided every step of the way to do things right, to proceed at a sensible pace, and to never struggle, suffer, or backslide, like so many ill-prepared and misinformed enthusiasts. You’ll learn exactly which foods to eliminate from your diet and why; you’ll have a wide array of delicious keto-approved foods to choose from; and you’ll find out how exercise, lifestyle, and stress management fit into the picture. I provide a meal plan for your 21-Day Metabolism Reset, some fine-tuning exercises to get you ready for keto, and a 21-day Keto Meal Plan that you can follow to the letter, or borrow from here and there, during your nutritional ketosis effort. I’ve also included more than 100 recipes to make going keto not just a metabolic transformation but also a celebration of delicious dining. I Building the Metabolic Machinery CHAPTER 1 The Keto Reset Diet 101—What, Why, and How I’ve been familiar with the ketosis aspect of ancestral eating for nearly two decades, but I always considered keto to be an extreme and temporary practice, perhaps suitable only for brief periods of fasting for aggressive fat reduction or as a last-ditch strategy for the obese to right the ship and protect against a medical catastrophe. In the past few years, though, there has been renewed interest in keto, both in the sciences and among the most adventurous in the ancestral health movement, as a strategy with broad application to promote the esteemed goal of metabolic flexibility. Inspired by the thought leaders whom you’ll meet in this book, I started fooling around with keto several years ago, and I noticed some immediate, discernible benefits, especially increased mental clarity and reduced hunger. As my writing partner, Brad, and I maintained states of nutritional ketosis for sustained periods of time during the research and writing of this book, we both experienced significant health and athletic performance breakthroughs. Indeed, The Keto Reset Diet book is powered by ketones! As I’ll detail throughout the book, regulating appetite and developing the ability to survive—and thrive—on fewer calories is key to optimum health and maximum longevity. Owning this insight, though, requires a massive shift in mindset from the flawed “furnace will burn” thinking that represents one of the most destructive concepts in conventional dietary and exercise wisdom (details in Chapter 2). What Is Keto? “Keto” is a catch-all nickname for anything pertaining to the metabolic state of ketosis, the burning of ketones, a.k.a. ketone bodies, or the dietary macronutrient composition (ultra-low-carb, moderate-protein, high-fat) that promotes the attainment of this delicate metabolic state. Ketones are a source of caloric energy in the body that are used by the brain, heart, and muscles in the same manner as is glucose (sugar). They are produced in the liver as a by-product of fat metabolism when—owing to extreme restriction of dietary carbohydrates— insulin, blood sugar, and liver glycogen levels are very low. Most people go through life never getting anywhere near this state, and never experiencing the almost magical effects of this natural superfuel. Ketones and fat (since the burning of these two caloric energy sources always go hand in hand) help minimize the inflammation and oxidative damage that come from eating the modern grain-based high-carbohydrate diet. Keto awareness arises from the primal/paleo/low-carb dietary movement that has become wildly popular over the past decade, but it is more specific with respect to required dietary macronutrient ratios; and it can be even more effective for weight loss, disease protection, and peak cognitive and athletic performance than a standard low-carb diet. By comparison to the Standard American Diet (SAD), the modern ketogenic diet is very high in natural nutritious fats, moderate in protein, and ultra-low in carbohydrates. Out on the street (which I guess today means the Internet), terms like “keto,” “ketone-burning,” “ketogenic,” and “ketotic” are used indiscriminately to describe the burning of ketones for energy and the pursuit of (or existence in) a fat-and keto-adapted state. You’ll learn about the differences along the way in this book, but it’s particularly important to understand the distinction between ketosis (a metabolic state quantified by blood or breath meter values) and ketoacidosis. The latter is a potentially life-threatening condition that almost always occurs only in Type 1 diabetics who can’t produce insulin or in alcoholics with poorly functioning livers (insulin immediately shuts down ketone production; that’s why a high-carb meal knocks you out of ketosis). Unfortunately, ketoacidosis is often confused with ketosis, even among nutrition and medical professionals who should know better but have only vague exposure to the concepts related to ketone production in the liver. Owing to this