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Summary
On episode 351 of 40+ Fitness, Coach Allan sits down with Jimmy and Christine Moore, Jimmy a longtime author, speaker, and podcaster behind Livin’ La Vida Low Carb, one of the longest-running health and fitness podcasts and one of Allan’s own early influences, and Christine a nutritional therapy practitioner, to talk about their book Real Food Keto.
The two argue that “real food” shouldn’t need a qualifier, but modern grocery store food has changed so much that it does: no label, no ingredients you can’t pronounce, nothing chemically processed. They also cover how much today’s produce and roughly 70 percent rate of insulin resistance in the population change how any individual body handles carbohydrates, including keto staples like fruit and sweet potatoes.
Christine also shares how she rebuilt her ability to digest fat after having her gallbladder removed, and the two walk through 17 practical tips for eating and living better, closing with a call to drop the online diet-tribe fighting and just eat real food, whatever that looks like for you.
Links
- https://rebootingyournutrition.com
- https://realfoodketo.com
- https://livinlavidalowcarb.com
Key Takeaways
- Real food needs no ingredient label. Christine defines it simply: nothing with a label of ingredients you can’t pronounce, food that’s grown rather than manufactured, like the free-range eggs from their own 26 backyard chickens.
- Modern food and modern bodies have both changed. Today’s produce is bred sweeter, so an apple that once fit easily into a keto diet can now kick someone out of ketosis. Jimmy notes that roughly 70 percent of the population carries some level of insulin resistance, which is why carb tolerance, even for whole foods like sweet potatoes, varies so much from person to person.
- Losing a gallbladder doesn’t rule out keto. Christine explains that low bile flow, often from a low-fat diet, is what caused her gallstones in the first place. After surgery she rebuilt her fat tolerance over about a year, starting with saturated fats like butter and coconut oil that don’t require bile, then slowly adding mono- and polyunsaturated fats while supplementing digestive enzymes and bile salts.
- Fix digestion before blaming the diet. Jimmy says people often start keto, run into digestive symptoms from an underlying issue like low stomach acid or ulcers, and conclude keto doesn’t work for them, when the real problem was digestion that needed to be addressed first.
- Aim for a healthy mix of fats and respect smoke points. Christine recommends roughly 60 percent monounsaturated, 30 percent saturated, and 10 percent polyunsaturated fat, using grapeseed oil, butter, and coconut oil for cooking and saving olive oil for after cooking or on salads.
- Small, practical shifts add up. Among their 17 tips: eat seasonally, buy from local farmers, choose raw dairy and sea salt where available, add fermented foods slowly if you have gut issues, and support sleep with blue-light blockers and a cooler bedroom.
- Track your own labs instead of relying on a standard panel. When Christine had thyroid symptoms, her doctor didn’t see the need for a full panel, so she and Jimmy ran one themselves and found an elevated reverse T3 and elevated antibodies that a routine TSH, T3, and T4 test would have missed.
- Drop the diet-tribe fighting. Jimmy and Christine say keto, paleo, vegan, and every other camp share more common ground than the online arguments suggest, and that real food, not any one label, is the actual common denominator.
- Jimmy and Christine’s three strategies to get and stay well: take your health into your own hands instead of waiting on a doctor to catch everything; be kind to yourself and to others, since the stress of online diet contentiousness works against your health; and don’t let perfectionism, like insisting on grass-fed, grass-finished beef every time, stop you from just doing the best you can with what’s available.
“We all have more in common than we have disagreement.”
Jimmy Moore
