Right, I’m Off. But What a Bloody Summer.
By the time you read this, I’ll either be packing, thinking about packing, or mentally already lying beside a pool in Spain.
And I am SO ready for it.
In a few days, I’m buggering off to Spain for a couple of weeks and, quite frankly, I cannot wait to switch off for a few weeks.
I plan to read loads, swim loads, sunbathe loads and do as little as possible.
I’ll get to see my dad and his wife while we’re there, which I’m really looking forward to. Sadly, my big brother, who also lives there, is leaving for work the fricking DAY before we arrive, which is just fabulous timing. Hey ho.
One of my besties is coming out too, so there will undoubtedly be plenty of sitting around putting the world to rights, and mostly I’m just looking forward to hanging out with my hubby and daughter, having some fun and getting some much-needed downtime.
Because bloody hell, this summer has been a LOT.
I’ve spent most of it disappearing down one enormous metabolic health rabbit hole after another, experimenting on myself, researching, changing things, watching what happened and questioning quite a few things I thought I already knew.
But if I’m going to tell this story properly, I actually need to go back to May.
Yes, I deliberately ate shite for a month
There was a reason for it, although about two weeks in I did begin to question my own sanity.
I’d already decided that I wanted to spend the summer really digging into my own metabolism. I’d been stuck around the same bloody weight for years despite eating keto, carnivore, fasting and being very good at getting myself into ketosis.
Something wasn’t adding up and, as anyone who knows me will tell you, I am utterly incapable of leaving something alone when it doesn’t make sense.
But I didn’t just want to lose some weight. I wanted to understand what was happening.
And if I was going to spend months experimenting with different nutritional approaches, recording what happened and eventually use what I learned to inform how I work with other people, I needed a proper baseline.
So from mid-May to mid-June I deliberately ate a kinda standard Western diet for a whole month, including foods I hadn’t eaten regularly for years.
FECK, that was not pleasant.
OMFG I felt like absolute shite.
My appetite changed, cravings came roaring back, my energy changed, I felt bloated and generally bloody awful, and I regained around a stone, and my skin was sooooo bad again. The hot flashes of menopause even reared their ugly fecking head again.
It was fascinating and horrible in fairly equal measure.
BUT......... if I wanted to do this right and truly feel what it would be like to reset my metabolism from a standard starting point, I was willing to do it.
There was also some really crappy stuff happening on a family level at the same time, which made the whole thing considerably more stressful than I had planned. Obviously that meant this wasn't some beautifully controlled little laboratory experiment where every variable stayed exactly the same, but human beings don't live in laboratories. Stress, sleep, hormones, food, life and everything else happen at the same time.
And actually, all of that gave me incredibly valuable information.
I know what happens when I change my own diet and I know how it feels on a physiological level. But I really wanted to understand how it would feel if I were someone else, starting from a different baseline.
All of it was really intriguing, and it gave me something real to work from.
Then the real rabbit hole began
I need to explain why I was doing all of this in the first place, because I wasn't new to ketogenic nutrition and I certainly wasn't starting from scratch.
Food had already completely changed my life.
I had been 23 stone, very unwell, covered in psoriasis, dealing with autoimmune chaos, brain fog and joint pain, and heading towards type 2 diabetes if I wasn't already there.
So I researched FOOD and changed what I ate.
My psoriasis disappeared, the autoimmune flares stopped, my brain came back, the joint pain disappeared and I lost six stone.
That experience eventually changed the entire direction of my life and work. I went on to study nutrition much more deeply and ultimately became a Nutritional Therapist and Therapeutic Carbohydrate Restriction Practitioner. And, I also teach Nutritional Therapy, so I learn constantly.
But there was one thing that continued to annoy the absolute shit out of me.
My weight.
For about six years I had bounced around the same number. I'd lose some, regain some, lose it again and eventually end up back in roughly the same place.
I had done keto. I had done carnivore. I had fasted. I could get into ketosis without any difficulty and I knew I was extremely well adapted to using fat for energy.
So why the hell was I still carrying so much of my own?
Turns out I was bloody brilliant at burning fat
The problem was, I wasn't burning it off my ASS or my TUMMY, or anywhere else on my body for that matter.
So yeah, I was absolutely in fat burning mode each time. But I was only burning the FAT I was eating.
That sounds ridiculously simple now, but it made me completely rethink the way I had been approaching ketogenic nutrition for weight loss.
For years, I had heard all the usual keto advice. Eat fatty cuts of meat. Add butter. Add cream. Add cheese. Don't fear fat. If you're hungry, eat more fat.
And to be clear, I am absolutely NOT about to start telling people that fat is bad for us. That isn't remotely what I have learned from this.
Fat is incredibly important.
Dietary fat provides energy, helps us absorb the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K and supplies fatty acids needed throughout the body. Fats are structural components of our cell membranes, while cholesterol is involved in the production of steroid hormones and has other essential roles in human physiology.
There are also plenty of situations where eating more fat makes complete sense therapeutically. If someone is moving away from a high-carbohydrate diet, needs more energy, is struggling with hunger or is using ketogenic nutrition therapeutically rather than specifically trying to reduce body fat, dietary fat can have a very different job.
What I had failed to separate properly was healing with fat from losing stored body fat.
Those are not necessarily the same nutritional job.
And once I really got my head around that, I started asking different questions.
Being in ketosis does NOT automatically mean you're burning the fat on your arse
This was probably one of the biggest lightbulb moments of my summer.
Ketosis tells us that fat is being used and ketones are being produced. It doesn't automatically tell us where all that fat came from.
If I am supplying my body with loads of energy from the food I've just eaten, why would it need to go rummaging around quite so enthusiastically in the enormous energy reserve I already have attached to me?
I spent years burning fat.
It just wasn't necessarily the fat from my body.
That sent me properly down the rabbit hole of energy metabolism, insulin resistance, fat mobilisation, protein requirements, muscle preservation, metabolic adaptation, hormones and therapeutic weight loss.
And the more I learned, the more I wanted to experiment.
So I did.
I tried different approaches, watched what happened, made changes and kept learning from the response rather than deciding in advance what should happen because a particular version of keto said so.
Some things did bugger all. Other things made an enormous difference.
And eventually I changed the way I was eating quite dramatically.
Protein became much more important
This has probably been another of the biggest changes in my own approach.
Instead of starting with fat and building everything around it, I became much more deliberate about protein.
I still kept carbohydrate very low because I wanted the metabolic effects of carbohydrate restriction, but I stopped automatically filling the remaining energy gap with dietary fat.
That meant my body had a reason to access more of its own stored energy.
And finally, things started moving.
I lost 10 lb in the first week of one of the stricter phases. My waist dropped dramatically. My energy was ridiculous. I started waking naturally earlier in the morning feeling ready to get up, and eventually I broke through a weight I had been stuck above for what felt like FOREVER.
After six years of pissing around with the same numbers, that felt pretty bloody amazing.
But the more interesting part for me wasn't actually the number on the scales.
It was understanding why my body was responding differently.
Because that is information I can use.
The food has to match the job
This is probably the biggest thing I am taking away from the whole summer.
I haven't stopped believing in ketogenic nutrition. If anything, I've become even more interested in the therapeutic possibilities of carbohydrate restriction.
But I've become much less interested in the idea that there is one correct way to “do keto”.
- Keto is not a religion.
- Carnivore isn't a badge of honour.
- More fat isn't automatically better.
I am much more interested in asking:
What does the food need to do here?
If someone is metabolically unwell, dealing with insulin resistance, trying to stabilise appetite and blood glucose, recovering their health or specifically trying to lose stored body fat, those things matter when deciding how their food should be structured.
- The person matters.
- Their history matters.
- Their symptoms matter.
- Their metabolic health matters.
- Their hormones matter.
- Their medications matter.
- Their goals matter.
And their response to what we actually do matters.
That's the bit I have become obsessed with this summer.
Not finding THE perfect ketogenic diet, but getting much better at understanding how we can manipulate carbohydrate, protein and fat depending on what we're actually trying to achieve.
And because apparently I can't just investigate one thing...
This has spilled into pretty much everything.
I've been digging deeper into metabolic health and insulin resistance. I've been looking much more closely at protein, muscle and what happens as we get older. I've been thinking about hormones, menopause, body composition and why weight loss can become such a bloody battle in midlife.
- I've questioned things I used to accept.
- I've changed my mind about some things.
- I've strengthened my opinion about others.
- I've also become much more comfortable saying that two things can be true at the same time.
More dietary fat can be incredibly useful therapeutically AND deliberately reducing dietary fat can make sense when the goal is to access stored body fat.
Ketogenic nutrition can be extremely powerful AND you can still do it in a way that isn't achieving the result you actually want.
Someone can lose weight AND that doesn't automatically mean what they're doing is optimal for their long-term health, muscle or metabolism.
Someone can also improve their health enormously before the scales do anything particularly exciting.
Nutrition is full of context, and I think the more I learn, the less interested I become in rigid rules.
This summer has changed my work too
I think this is the bit I didn't expect.
I started out wanting to understand my own six-year weight-loss stall. Because no matter how hard I tried to not let it bother me, it did. I felt a bit hopeless.
But with everything I have learned so far, it has completely changed the way I look at my work.
I've been writing new educational resources. I've been developing my therapeutic food framework and thinking much more deeply about how I explain all of this and how to help others who struggle with metabolic dysfunction, which results in major weight loss resistance.
I've also realised that I want to do much more around metabolic health and therapeutic weight loss.
I love that for years I have mainly focused on chronic health and autoimmune issues, but something else I realised lately is that. This is not my story anymore. But where I am now, I know I can help others get here too over time.
What that actually looks like when I get back from Spain, I genuinely have no bloody idea.
It might mean opening a handful of one-to-one spaces.
I might decide to run a longer therapeutic weight-loss programme.
I might build something completely different.
I've got a million ideas fighting for space in my head at the moment, and I'm deliberately NOT making myself choose one before I go away.
That would just be creating something because I feel as though I ought to have an offer ready, and that's not how I want to work.
I've learned too much this summer to rush the next bit.
So now I'm buggering off on holiday
After the summer we've had, some normal family fun and downtime will be very welcome.
And I think getting away from my desk is probably exactly what my brain needs now too. I've spent months filling it with information. I don't need to shove any more into it at the moment. I need to switch off, enjoy myself and give all of this stuff a chance to settle.
Then I'll come home and decide what the hell I'm going to do with it.
If you want to know what comes next, JOIN THE WAITLIST and I'll let you know when I know.
For now, I'm off.
Linda x
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