Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Duster Mud podcast, episode 20. In today's episode, we're going to cover tools that helped us on our keto journey to keep us from sinking.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:00:11] Speaker A: And we're also going to cover some pretty significant farm updates, things that have happened around here this last week when we get to the end. So stick around for that.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure.
[00:00:22] Speaker A: All right, Keto.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: Yeah. First off, I don't think we would have made it without some tools.
[00:00:28] Speaker A: No.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: So what we wanted to do was share with you guys the tools that really became the life raft for us, getting us started and really learning a keto lifestyle. So that's where we're going today.
[00:00:43] Speaker A: Yeah. Changing lifestyle is really, really hard to do, especially in a world where it's so socially and culturally important.
Everything is around food, and without it, people feel really lost.
[00:01:04] Speaker B: Right.
[00:01:05] Speaker A: And these tools were, they really did help us and kept us afloat in the middle of our social life.
[00:01:13] Speaker B: Yep. So we're going to cover three of them today. The first one is a book by Dr. Colbert. It's called the Keto Zone Diet. And this book, we found it to be very helpful because first off, when you don't know anything about it, a lot of the books that you find on the keto diet just dive right into all of the science and they start drawing out the chemical compounds and the molecular makeup of ketones. And it can be a bit overwhelming. And so this particular book we found was written at a level that it made it easy to comprehend at the beginning. There's tons of more stuff out there, obviously, and a lot of things that go way deeper into the details.
[00:02:01] Speaker A: The big thing for me was whenever I read it, because we both read it, and then we turned around and gave it to almost everybody that we knew because we're smart people and it made sense to us and it spoke to us in a way that it felt like, I think I can do this.
He made it to where it just seemed doable.
[00:02:28] Speaker B: Yeah. I need to throw out right now. We're not affiliated with any of these tools.
[00:02:32] Speaker A: No.
[00:02:32] Speaker B: So it's not like we're getting anything out of it. We're just trying to give you the tools that really helped us.
[00:02:40] Speaker A: Yeah. And there are other books.
There's a lot of YouTube stuff out there. This one was just the one that really solidified it to myself and to both of us, that it could be done and it could be done long term. Not just, well, we can do this for a month, but that we could maybe because he talks about the zone and once you've gotten yourself fat adapted. And what does fat adapted really mean? And once you are fat adapted, when can I ever eat one carbohydrate more than 20 or 50? Is that something that's possible? And he goes into depth, but not too far, about fat adaption, how to find out what your threshold is for carbohydrates in your life. Because some people, as I was reading, can have maybe a little bit more once they're fat adapted and have been doing this for six months to a year, and then you can start to play with what does your body do with it? And that was like one of the big things for me.
[00:03:53] Speaker B: Yeah. And just a quick overview. Fat adaption is what happens when your body would prefer to burn ketones. So use fat, turn that fat into ketones, and then use those ketones as energy. When your body would rather do that than to use glucose, at that point, you would consider yourself fat adapted. That's a different time period for everybody, typically somewhere in the four to six month range. And so once you become fat adapted, what Dr. Colbert talks about is at that point, then you can start adding some healthy carbs on top of what you already were having to get yourself fat adapted. So for most people, that's somewhere in a 20 to 30 range is typically what will help you to get into ketosis and then start to become fat adapted. And then once you are, then you can start adding some carbs on top of that, 30 carbs per day. Some people can get up to 50. Some people he talks about can get up to 70, maybe. And what he calls it is your keto carb limit. And you can check your ketone levels as you're doing this fat adaption test, basically, and not a fat adaption test, your keto carb limit test. So as you're trying to find that limit, you check your ketones. And when your body stops producing ketones, then you know, okay, hack, that's the point at which I will no longer be in ketosis. Then you back it down off of that. And now you've found what your body's keto carb limit is, and what that means is the number of carbs that you can eat and still stay in ketosis.
[00:05:44] Speaker A: Right. And the book also has a lot of good recommendations as far as an outlier cases. And he goes through and explains what can happen to individual people, what can happen with metabolic issues that you might have. And he explains it on a level that we can understand.
[00:06:07] Speaker B: Right. And recommendations for different things, like if you're diabetic. Here are some things to consider, and here are some things that you must do.
[00:06:18] Speaker A: Right.
[00:06:18] Speaker B: And so that's the outlier type cases that he talks about also.
[00:06:22] Speaker A: Right. And there also are some. He lays out some beginning steps for you to take, how to get started, what you need to shop for, and gives you some great recipes to start with. Menus, day one, day two, day three. And that was really helpful for us.
I don't think we had the book when we very first started. We came upon the book, but we.
[00:06:48] Speaker B: Hadn'T been doing it for long. No, we had not been doing it. I think it was less than a week.
[00:06:52] Speaker A: Right. But once we grabbed hold of that book and we went to the back of it, to those recipes, it was like, oh, we can use this. This is great. Let's start here.
[00:07:01] Speaker B: And it gave us a guide. Instead of fumbling, we just were sort of fumbling along, trying to figure this whole thing out.
[00:07:07] Speaker A: Right.
[00:07:08] Speaker B: And it's just not easy.
[00:07:10] Speaker A: No, it's not.
[00:07:11] Speaker B: To do without some type of guide. And we found it's easy.
[00:07:15] Speaker A: It's not easy because it's so different.
[00:07:18] Speaker B: Yeah, fair.
[00:07:18] Speaker A: It's very easy.
It's everything, you know, on its head, and therefore, it goes against the grain so much that that's what makes it so difficult. And outside of that, it really is easy.
[00:07:32] Speaker B: Yeah, you're right.
[00:07:34] Speaker A: Yeah. It's just so different than what we're used to doing and eating. We're used to it Now. We've been doing it for many years. But when you first start out, it's so bizarre.
What's another tool you have?
[00:07:48] Speaker B: Well, before we move on to the other tools, there was one thing that I wanted to say about the book that I don't necessarily love, and that's in the title. I don't love that he calls it a diet. So the title of the book is Keto's Own Diet. And if you use the word diet from a big picture as a way of eating, then, okay, I get it. I understand why he calls it that way.
[00:08:16] Speaker A: But whenever you use the word diet, the majority of Americans refer to a calorie restricted way of eating. Instead of eating the donuts, we have to eat a salad. I'm on a diet. And anytime you add that word, you're adding restriction. You're adding something that you cannot do without.
We do not use that word on purpose. Carb manager app tool number two.
[00:08:48] Speaker B: Wow. Life saver.
[00:08:50] Speaker A: Huge. I don't really enjoy personally tracking every single thing that I eat. I don't like keeping track of all of the calories and the macros and all of this.
[00:09:01] Speaker B: No, because it reminds you of a diet.
[00:09:03] Speaker A: It reminds you of a diet. It reminds you of, I have to track all my calories.
I have to weigh my oatmeal.
Old school.
However, in order to switch my entire thinking to, I need 128 grams of fat today.
I don't even know how to do that.
[00:09:23] Speaker B: Right.
[00:09:23] Speaker A: That is not something that any of us understand, or. I only need X amount of carbs or proteins anyway. It's super easy. You just click little. Just tick, tick, tick buttons on your phone, on your app, and it is the easiest way that I have ever come across. They have really simplified it. It allows you to be able to track everything that you eat down to how much water you drink pretty quickly.
Intrusive in your life.
[00:09:56] Speaker B: You start with a meal, and you hit breakfast, and then you hit the plus. It's got a little button on it that has a plus. You hit plus, and you add the food that you ate, and it has a huge library of foods in it. And so I remember when we first started using it, it was Jimmy Dean Frittata, and the Jimmy Dean Frittata was in, liKe. And so I could add that in for breakfast. And then you can add in water, you can add in your coffee. All of the things that you're eating or drinking. You just pop it right there into the app, and then it has a wrap, a circle wrap, and that has your carbs, your proteins, and your fats.
[00:10:38] Speaker A: It's very similar to closing the ring on your iWatch, on your fitness rings. It's kind of like closing the rings on your Apple Watch, and you just watch the ring close. And when it gets closed, or when it's getting close to being closed, either one, yay, you've had enough fat.
Or you're getting close on, which is hard to do. Yay. You have eaten enough protein today.
[00:11:05] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:06] Speaker A: Or I can't have any more carbs today.
I'm done.
[00:11:11] Speaker B: And that's exactly how we looked at it.
[00:11:14] Speaker A: That's how we looked at it.
[00:11:16] Speaker B: And probably the hardest one for me was getting enough fats.
I was okay with restricting the carbs and keeping that ring open, but trying to close the fats ring, man, it's difficult to get. And you can set the percentages that you're looking for. On ours, I believe we set it at 70% fat, 20% protein, 10% carbs, I think, is where we had ours set.
Trying to fill that ring, that 70% fat ring, man.
I think for me, that's really where the learning came in, was trying to find ways to add more fat to get that ring closed was really probably one of the bigger learning points.
[00:12:08] Speaker A: And the main thing that that app did for me was it helped me make decisions. It helped me make decisions about what I was going to eat during that day, how much I was going to eat, and what. And when I got towards the end of the day, what did I need to eat next? And it was my decision maker, not me. And that was huge, because whenever you're embarking again on a lifestyle change, it's really hard, and let the device decide.
[00:12:35] Speaker B: Yeah. And it has a free version. We used the premium version right now. I just checked it. I don't know what it will be when you're watching this or listening to this, but right now you can pay annually, and it ends up being $3.33 a month that you pay annually. So just over $36.
[00:12:57] Speaker A: And the paid version obviously comes with more features in terms of what you can record, the things that you can pick as far as what diets you're on, and all of your different settings, and you have access to a whole bunch of recipes.
[00:13:14] Speaker B: For us, it was recipes.
The premium version allows you to do meal planning, and it allows you access to the recipes. And those two things made it really worthwhile for us. And we did an annual membership, and I think we renewed it the first year. So we had it for two years, and then we have not renewed it since.
[00:13:37] Speaker A: Honestly, we don't use the app at this point because we understand how to eat this way now, and it is our life, and so we don't really use it. But for that first year, we use it pretty religiously.
[00:13:50] Speaker B: Yeah, I would say everything that we ate and drank, at least for me, I don't remember exactly. For me, it was somewhere between three and four months. I tracked everything, and then at about that point, it really clicked, and it's like, okay, I know about how much of all of these things. And so then I was able to start making the decisions for myself, and then I used it for recipes or for. This is a food I'm unfamiliar with. This is a brand.
[00:14:24] Speaker A: What are the macros in this?
[00:14:26] Speaker B: Yeah, this is a brand I'm unfamiliar with. So I would use it for those types of things to answer the questions that I just really hadn't encountered.
[00:14:35] Speaker A: Right. Yeah. So get yourself the carb manager app on your phone. Number three ketoconnect. Net. It is a lifesaver as far as recipes on what do I eat now? What is. Okay, I really would like to have some bread.
Is there any fake bread out there? It's not fake. It's real, but it's keto bread.
[00:15:05] Speaker B: So recipes, they have copycat recipes that will allow you to take a thing and say, I am craving cinnamon rolls.
[00:15:15] Speaker A: Yes. And they do have a recipe for it, and that is keto.
[00:15:18] Speaker B: Then you can go to the copycat recipes, type in cinnamon rolls, and then you can find a keto version of a cinnamon roll that just might curb your craving.
[00:15:29] Speaker A: Curb your craving. That's what we used it for for a long time. Was curbing the craving on muffins or what else did we. Keto bread. Chaffles. Okay. Those are still a staple in our house. Chaffle. That's a silly, silly word to me. But what it is is a cheese waffle. And Mozzarella cheese is very versatile.
And you can take eggs and Mozarella cheese, a little bit of almond flour. You don't have to use the almond flour, but it does help bind the stuff together. And you can either go sweet or you can go savory. And you throw that into your waffle iron and you make yourself some waffles.
We have chaffles probably once a week for breakfast, or sometimes we'll make them savory. You can take the same base and you can add cumin and all of your Mexican spices and make that the base of a burrito plate on those.
[00:16:32] Speaker B: I like to replace the mozzarella with cheddar, and it just adds a different flavor profile to it. And they're really good.
[00:16:39] Speaker A: You could do any grated cheese that you want, whatever flavor profile that it is that you're looking for. You can make it Italian. You can make little pizzas out of it.
It's really versatile. So if you haven't ever heard of it, it's a chaffle. And you can find some recipes on keto connect as well as Google at large.
[00:17:01] Speaker B: Yeah, we made keto muffins for quite a while.
I got tired of the prepackaged foods for breakfast.
[00:17:10] Speaker A: When you were busy?
[00:17:11] Speaker B: When I was busy and working, commuting. Yeah. And so we transitioned to the keto muffins, and then so I would have. The muffins were a breakfast staple for me.
[00:17:23] Speaker A: We had the savory, and we also did so savory being eggs and bacon and throw in, make it kind of salty, sausagey egg cheese thing. Or we also did some French toast style muffins, and they were the more sweeter flavors, and they're really good.
Once you come away from cakey stuff, the actual glucose wheat sugar stuff, and change your taste buds, it really does work as far as curbing the cravings for that stuff.
[00:18:01] Speaker B: The other thing we did quite a bit of was fat bombs, and that was a way that we were able to significantly increase our fat intake and get. As we worked towards closing that ring, as we tracked our fat macros, the fat bombs were a way to do that. And so they have recipes for those, typically quite a bit of coconut oil. Some type of flavoring really is pretty much what it is.
[00:18:29] Speaker A: And get it cold.
[00:18:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:18:32] Speaker A: All of their recipes, everything on their website is free.
And it is really good.
They're just good recipes. They work.
I think those three things are the. Those were our life raft.
[00:18:50] Speaker B: Yes. Those tools kept us afloat on our.
[00:18:53] Speaker A: Keto journey when we set sail on it. And now I couldn't recommend them more to help anybody out there succeed on their journey.
[00:19:05] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. On a lot of the podcasts, we do updates on the farm, we milk two a two a two Jersey cows. If you're unfamiliar with a two a two. We did a podcast called the Magic of Raw. A two a two milk. That'd be awesome to take a look at or listen to. We milk two Jersey cows and one of our jerseys. Her name was Betty, and she got sick. She got sick and she got sick the first time. A couple of months ago, we had the vet come out, emergency visit on a Saturday afternoon. And he said that he thought it was probably pneumonia and not a. Yeah, not a viral pneumonia, a bacterial pneumonia.
[00:19:51] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:51] Speaker B: We treated her with antibiotics.
[00:19:54] Speaker A: She got better, and I was so happy that she was better. And now that I think about it, I don't think that what he thought was the problem was it. There was an underlying, more difficult problem.
[00:20:06] Speaker B: So then about six weeks later, she got sick again and was doing pretty bad. And there wasn't really anything we could do to get her to eat. And so we had the vet come out to the farm again, and she was like all of her tests, she just wasn't finding anything.
[00:20:26] Speaker A: So she was losing condition rapidly. She had scours, which is diarrhea for cows.
She wouldn't eat. Her energy was just going down.
Her milk production quit. One day, it just quit.
[00:20:44] Speaker B: And so she treated her for parasites. She treated her for a bacterial infection to include potentially a mastitis that we couldn't see. She really threw the book at her as far as treating all of the things that it could possibly be, and.
[00:21:01] Speaker A: Then recommended that we do a couple of bovine tests, have additional tests run. And so she ran BVD, which is bovine viral diarrhea.
[00:21:20] Speaker B: Yeah, BVD. When the vet was out last time, he tested for a bovine leukemia, which could cause them to get sick, and that came back negative. So this time they tested for BVD and for a disease called Yonis, is the way it's pronounced.
So we waited for the test results to come back, and during that time, Betty started eating a little bit more. We had a little patch of green grass that we tried to keep the animals off of an area behind our house, and we let her onto it just to give her something to eat. And she was eating that a little bit, but was not recovering condition at all. She started eating hay a little bit, but still really no appetite, no energy, not recovering condition at all.
[00:22:12] Speaker A: No. And so several days went past by, and finally the doctor called and said she did test positive for Yoni's disease. And quick synopsis of what Yoni's is, is it's a bacterial infection that lands in the intestinal wall, can land in intestinal walls of cattle. It is known to be within the dairy cattle. And the problem with the disease is that it is not detectable until they're about two years old. So a heifer or young cow, cattle can have it, and it's dormant. You don't know that they have it. You can't test for it. You don't know that it's there until it starts showing signs and symptoms and they get old enough for it to be detectable.
[00:23:05] Speaker B: Yeah.
It can affect all ruminants. So sheep and goats are susceptible to Yonis as well. The research that I did looks like they have a different strain of the bacteria.
[00:23:20] Speaker A: So Yonis is in dairy cattle. And we have had to make some very hard decisions over the past couple of weeks. And the decision was, the options were we could send her to be cold, we could send her to the slaughterhouse, but we didn't want to do that. We had given her antibiotics and a bunch of medicine that was not an option.
[00:23:45] Speaker B: And her condition was.
[00:23:46] Speaker A: And her condition was bad. And then the other option was just to euthanize her. And so doing the right thing, because she was going downhill so fast and she was not well. She was not feeling well, and the right thing to do was just go ahead and euthanize her.
[00:24:05] Speaker B: And every time she had a bowel movement.
Again, from the research I did, that was billions of pathogens then that were falling on the soil here on our farm, and that then can stick around in the soil for a long time, depending on the conditions, up to a year. So it was a going downhill fast, really not well, and contaminating the soil for the rest of the animals on the farm.
[00:24:36] Speaker A: So we did have to put her down. We had to do a lot of cleaning, we had to do a lot of sanitizing. We had to do a lot of animal moving. We had to prep the area for different things and get everything situated over the past week. But she is no longer with us, and we now milk one Jersey cow. Last week we found out and had tested our other Jersey.
Happy is negative. Thank goodness. We will continue to have her tested over time just to make sure that it stays that way. But she is happy and she is healthy and she does great milking. And whether or not we get another one, that question is on the table, but it's going to stay on the table for a little while. Yeah.
[00:25:26] Speaker B: And the vet really credited the cleanliness of the area that the cows are in to how you could have one that was positive and one that was negative. And so she really did commend us on the area that they live in. And that was another thing, is that with Yonis, it just happens.
Depending on the study that you look at, anywhere from 63% to 93% of the dairies in the United States have Yonis in their herd.
[00:26:02] Speaker A: Unknown.
[00:26:03] Speaker B: Yeah. And because it's not even testable until they're two, it's a difficult thing to catch.
The vet really put us at ease saying that this is nothing.
[00:26:17] Speaker A: Farmer fault.
[00:26:18] Speaker B: Yeah. This is nothing that you did. Like, you didn't do this. The most likely scenario. Scenario is that she contracted the bacteria as a calf, as a newborn calf, and then has carried it until now. And she's about two and a half. Between two and a half and three is how old she was when it really hit.
[00:26:43] Speaker A: Yeah. And these things happen. Animals get sick and animals die. And that's been the lesson, not just this week, but in the past two and a half years of farming, is animals do die.
[00:27:01] Speaker B: Yeah. And if you've watched any of our other videos with the milk and cows, or if you've read any of my blogs, you'll know that we also have a calf and a dairy calf heifer named Stella. And Stella was Betty's calf. So now she's almost a year old, which means we're still a year out from being able to test her for Yonis.
The most likely scenario is that she is not contagious. Even if she is positive, typically it's dormant until they're at least two years old, and that's when it can start showing up. So right now, Stella continues to live with Happy and they're our dairy herd, the two of them. And so we will just continue with Stella until we're able to have her tested. And as soon as she turns two and we test her, then we'll have decisions to make there. If she comes back positive for Yonis, she will become beef for the family. And if she comes back negative for Yonis, we will breed her and she'll become our next dairy cow.
[00:28:12] Speaker A: Yeah. So we'll have decisions down the road, but not today.
We've made all the dairy decisions, hopefully, that we have to make for a little while.
[00:28:19] Speaker B: Yeah. The good news out of the whole thing was that happy is healthy.
[00:28:23] Speaker A: Is healthy. Yes, absolutely.
[00:28:25] Speaker B: Yeah. She's doing really well.
[00:28:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:28:28] Speaker B: Other big farm updates are the last of the beef chickens are going to be processed tomorrow. So big news there.
We'll be without beef chickens or meat chickens for the winter.
[00:28:43] Speaker A: Yay.
[00:28:44] Speaker B: Yay.
And our lambs will be going to the processor in just over a week.
[00:28:51] Speaker A: Yes. So we will have more chicken and we will have lots of lamb for sale.
[00:28:57] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:28:57] Speaker A: Soon.
I think that covers the farm update.
[00:29:01] Speaker B: It does.
[00:29:02] Speaker A: The significant farm update. Yeah, it does. Thank you guys for watching and listening, and until next time, byE. Bio.
