821: Ketosis, Fasting & Autophagy for Deep Healing With Dr. Courtney Hunt

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Ketosis, Fasting & Autophagy for Deep Healing with Dr. Courtney Hunt
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821: Ketosis, Fasting & Autophagy for Deep Healing With Dr. Courtney Hunt
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Today’s guest is Dr. Courtney Hunt, who is an OB/GYN who practiced for 15 years before stopping her practice to pursue her interest in quantum biology and nutrigenetics, or essentially the interaction between our environment and our DNA while reversing her own Hashimoto’s. Using her extensive medical training, surgical experience, and 20-plus years in clinical practice, she’s able to methodically, rationally, and correctly help patients heal with a comprehensive approach.

In this episode, we go deep into ketosis, fasting, and autophagy for deep healing. She explains all the reasons why fasting works to heal our bodies, even though we might be told not to fast. Courtney has groups on Instagram to go deeper into the work, which I’ve actually been a part of, and also has a book called Your Spark is Light that she gives away entirely for free on her website. We just barely scratch the surface of this amazing topic so if you resonate with any parts of this conversation, I highly recommend checking out her Instagram groups.

I learned so much from Dr. Hunt. I hope you do too!

Episode Highlights With Dr. Courtney Hunt

  • Her own story of recovery from Hashimoto’s
  • She was trained as an OB/GYN and her path to what she does now
  • You are not your diagnosis
  • The importance of seeing yourself well
  • What autophagy is and how it can be such a valuable tool
  • How to encourage autophagy and self-cleaning in the body
  • When you enter ketosis as a metabolic state you make acetoacetic acid which breaks down into beta-hydroxybutyrate and acetone and why this is beneficial
  • How to flip the metabolic switch to burn fat as fuel
  • When you burn fat as fuel you are either burning someone else’s fat or your own fat
  • What leptin is and what it can tell us about health
  • How to avoid starvation cues with fasting and ketosis and make sure you nourish your body enough
  • The myth that women shouldn’t fast or that women shouldn’t fast around their periods
  • We make ¼ of the ATP when we eat a lot of carbs 

Resources We Mention

More From Wellness Mama

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Hello, and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com. And this podcast is one I have been excited about recording for a long time. And I think that you will really like today’s guest. I’m here with Dr. Courtney Hunt. And in this episode, we go deep on ketosis, fasting, and autophagy for deep healing. And I love her approach. She actually is able to explain why some of the things I found that worked when I was in the process of recovering from Hashimoto’s were so profoundly helpful, even though they were things I was often told I shouldn’t do with thyroid issues like fasting and cyclical ketosis. She explains all the reasons why that’s the case. And I have recently been following her and actually done some private groups with her on Instagram to learn more deeply from her. She was trained at the University of California, Berkeley as an OB-GYN and practiced as an OB for 15 years before stopping obstetrics to pursue her interest in quantum biology and nutrigenetics, or essentially the interaction between our environment and our DNA. And in this process, she reversed her own Hashimoto’s. And with her extensive medical training, her surgical experience, and 20 plus years in clinical practice, she’s able to methodically, rationally, and correctly help patients heal with a comprehensive approach. And we only barely scratched the surface of her approach today. But these are things I have been learning from her, things that were helpful to me in my own Hashimoto’s recovery, which I get so many questions about. And I feel like she is such a wonderful voice explaining these pieces so well. She also has a book called Your Spark is Light that she gives away entirely for free. And the link to that is on her site or in the show notes, you can find that link as well. It’s a great starting point. But if you resonate with any parts of this conversation, I also highly recommend her Instagram groups because these are the first groups that I’ve actually completed online. And I feel like the format she does is really, really helpful. So, so much to learn from Dr. Hunt. Let’s join her now. Dr. Courtney Hunt, welcome and thank you so much for being here.

Courtney: Thank you. Good morning.

Katie: I have been so excited for this conversation for such a long time because I have followed you on Instagram for a long time and sent so many people to your page for help and advice and to learn from you. And I figured it was way past time to actually just have you on here and introduce you to the wider audience because we have some synergy in our experience in that I also used to have Hashimoto’s and no longer do. And I actually sort of intuitively did some fasting and ketosis in my healing time of that. And I feel like when I found you, you put all the pieces together of why that worked, especially when most experts are telling people you can’t fast if you have Hashimoto’s. You can’t fast, et cetera, et cetera. And I know you have a personal story with this as well. And I get asked so often, how did you get rid of your Hashimoto’s? What did you do? And I feel like this conversation is going to help shed light on so much of that. So if you’re willing, will you start with a little bit of your personal story? Because I feel like it’s so relevant for what we’re going to talk about today.

Courtney: Sure. So, I’m a very type A driven person. And I am an OB-GYN by training, trained at UCLA, traditionally trained by some of the best in the field. Alan DeCherney, who’s one of the leading people at the NIH for infertility, was my mentor. And I decided to go into private practice after a year in a group practice. Did 30 to 40 deliveries a month, had my own babies back to back, didn’t think I wanted children. And then at 39, I decided I did, struggled with a little bit of infertility. In my mid-thirties, all of a sudden I just started getting slow, tired, anxious, laid on the couch every night by 6 p.m., started getting just a thickness all over my body, found out that I had TPO antibodies in the 600s. Went to an endocrinologist, immediately had the ultrasound, did the ultrasound on myself, of course, because I had the machine in my office. Saw that I had Hashimoto’s. Started on medication. Realized that my vitamin D level was nine. And was told that that wasn’t a big deal. I should just take a supplement.

I went to a couple of different functional doctors who told me that my testosterone was zero and that I needed testosterone replacement hormone pellets. Did all of that, did years of research on the non-native EMF, moved my office, moved my practice to get away from the hospital, to get out of a non-native EMF concentrated neighborhood. Only to find that I just couldn’t escape it in the city. And so I thought, I understand stem cells. I understand babies. I understand how growth happens. Why am I getting sicker and sicker and sicker? I’m doing all of the things. I’m doing paleo. I’m doing certain doctor-named protocols, which is why I’m really careful to say this is ketosis and fasting. This is not a Hunt protocol. This is ketosis and fasting. No one deserves to put their name on this.

And so I just started hiking every morning towards the sunlight and started having these what I used to call flow state feelings. And I just said, I’m tired of being sick. I’m going to figure this out. And I started looking at ketosis and I started realizing these people have way more energy than I do. And so I started learning that and fell through all the pitfalls of that. At the same time, I was studying DNA, nutritional genetics. I had been a speaker for a stem cell company for years and I had understood cancer genetics, the myriad BRCA genes I was doing in the late 90s. So I had a good foundational understanding of that. And I thought, wait, if our ATP and our mitochondria is making us, meaning our metabolism, is making us develop cancers because these tumor suppressor genes aren’t working, it’s also telling us how to build and rebuild ourselves from our food.

And so I started looking at MTHFR, COMT, MAO. I just started building my language of DNA until I understood nutritional genetics. And I used it on myself. Light, then I started researching more about natural electromagnetic radiation, light mitochondria DNA. So I use that on myself to speed up the process of metabolic healing. And then, you know, I tell people I was hiking that mountain in 2018 and 2019 saying, get ready, get ready, get ready. Those of you who were with me a long time know that I was.

And so, I decided the day that COVID hit that I was going to get off my thyroid medication, that I had healed enough. My thyroid antibodies were almost normal, and I did not want to be stuck on a medication when I knew things were going to shut down. So I just, and I don’t recommend that anyone do this without doctor’s advice, but me as a doctor, I just started weaning my thyroid medication. And by December of 2020, I was off with normal thyroid function tests for ketosis and normal antibodies. And during the process, my hair came back. My lichen sclerosis in my vagina, my vaginal itching and vaginal dryness from inflammation went away. My weight went down 30 pounds. My skin got better. My vision got better. I mean, everything just got better. My vaginal laxity, peeing when I would work out, would get got better. I don’t leak anymore. My spider veins on my legs got better. And so as an MD and practitioner, I cannot make claims that those things will happen to you. But those are the things that happened to me. And it’s just through that process of repetitive ketosis and fasting that I did.

Katie: And I love your story so much and also the hope because like you, having been diagnosed with Hashimoto’s, I know I was told by the doctors that you are going to have this your whole life. You’re going to be on medication your whole life. This is not reversible. And I feel like even the message of hope opens a whole new paradigm for people who have been told that or who feel like you, where they were trying to do all the things. They were trying to do everything right and nothing seemed like it was working. And what stood out to me when you speak too is I feel like you break through the noise about keto especially. That became such a buzzword on social media. And you really make the distinction between keto diet and what people talk about and ketosis as a metabolic state. And I feel like where that nuance is is where it’s so important to understand if you’re trying to actually use this as a tool for recovery.

Courtney: So, I started out in 2016, 2017 with Instagram as a way that I thought that I could store things from my children. And then I realized that the group was getting bigger and bigger. And I started out saying, you are not your diagnosis code. You are not your ICD-9 code. You are not your ICD-10 code. And you have to see yourself well. You have to have hope. I didn’t know how big that that was going to get, but it just kept getting bigger and bigger. And every day you make the wrong decisions, someone has to teach you the right decisions. But every day you make the wrong decisions, you are walking closer to your diagnosis, your diagnosis code, which is how AI is now assessing us, or you’re walking away from it. But somebody has to give you the keys. And the keys were supposed to be handed down through our religions or our science, whichever side of that coin you fall on. You were supposed to learn this at church, temple, or mosque. It’s Ramadan. It’s Lent. And you were supposed to, if you are a scientist, you were supposed to be taught it in school.

The second you don’t have hope is the second you give up and you fall back to your patterns of sadness and self-sabotage. And I’m not going to do it. It’s too much. The second someone gives you hope and says, you came from a baby that could heal itself and heal its mother, you can heal too. You have the energy within you, you find it to get up and repeat the behavior that you need to repeat, but someone has to teach you the behavior. And that’s where I think we have failed people miserably because it was supposed to come down through religion and it was supposed to come down through schools and science. And those two streams have missed the mark.

Katie: And I’ll make sure in the show notes, there’s a link to your website where people can download your book for free, which I love that you make this so available because you really go deep on that topic there. But you’re right. I feel like this seems like something we should have been taught and we weren’t. And the fact that every major religion includes some form of fasting and the fact that we wouldn’t have had access 24-7 to every food imaginable for most of human history, it always just stood out to me when people would say fasting is dangerous. Women can’t fast. You can’t fast if you have thyroid issues. You can’t fast if fill in the blank because I’m like, we weren’t meant as humans to have constant access to highly processed foods all the time.

Courtney: This isn’t one size fits all. Everybody has a different skin type that responds differently to sunlight. And that’s controlling your immune system. That’s controlling your pain response. That’s controlling your hormone response. You evolved to use your food. Summer and winter, day and night, depending on what part of the earth your ancestors evolved on. And when you understand that, you can use that knowledge to heal. But if you take a year-long cycle to do it, you’re not going to get better fast enough because you probably spent 30, 40, 50 years not knowing it. So you have to speed up the cycle. The sad part for me is the women who are 16, 17, 18 years old and just start getting the band-aids put on them at that age and they’re never even given the opportunity to understand that they have poor mitochondrial function or poor mitochondrial energy production. That’s the saddest thing. The women who say I’ve always been tired my whole life, because there is a way out.

Katie: And that message of hope, like I said, I think is so important. And I love that I hear you all the time repeat, see yourself well, see yourself well, because I know also my physical body didn’t shift until my mindset shifted as well. And I think that component is huge. When we talk about being able to use this as a tool, will you talk about autophagy and what’s happening in the body and how we can signal the body to make use of autophagy?

Courtney: Autophagy is the process of self-eating. I see it as you having, I’m very visual and I teach very visually, which is why I think sometimes when people see my excerpts on Instagram, they don’t understand me. But if I can’t get you to make a mind-eye connection of what I’m talking about, you’ll never remember it. So I see autophagy as a Pac-Man and you have little Pac-Men inside of you. That are recycling cellular components inside of you to rebuild you better. And you have this your whole life. But the trigger is you have to go into a rest state.

So the analogy I use is you have kids. You have a five- or six-year-old little child. If you feed that child sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar all day, and then at four in the afternoon, you say, go clean your room. They’re not going to be able to clean their room. You have to withdraw the sugar, get them into a calm, restful state, not sleeping, but just calm. And then they’ll clean your room. Your cells in your body are very similar. If you feed sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar, that puts your cell into a storage state. And by sugar, I mean fruits and vegetables, carbohydrates. Pasta, rice, quinoa, fruits, vegetables, and then anything you think of as sugar. If you keep feeding, feeding, feeding, feeding, and you’re storing, storing, storing, storing, why would your body ever need to rest and recycle? It doesn’t. It just keeps growing, growing, growing, growing. It doesn’t ever rest and recycle. And so that’s different for different people. Some people are wired to be thinner. Some people are wired to have larger fat cells, which is, you know, part of the caveats that I teach when I teach it is mama bear, papa bear, and baby bear so that I don’t upset anyone. But your cell has to be forced to go into a rest state. And that happens, the first step is the withdrawal of carbohydrates.

Katie: That makes sense. And I love the science side. And I feel like you have the most clear explanation I’ve ever heard on when we go into that metabolic state of ketosis and you even explain the ways to know when you are in which state and what numbers to look at. But I love when you talk about how this can trigger acetoacetic acid, which leads to beta-hydroxybutyrate and acetone. I feel like most people have perhaps never heard of acetone existing in the body and how that can actually be beneficial. So can you walk us through, perhaps people have never even heard those words I just said, but what is happening when the body enters the metabolic state of ketosis and how that can be beneficial?

Courtney: Sure. So most humans rely on glucose and glucose comes from fruits, vegetables, pasta, rice, quinoa, ancient grains, cake, candy. It’s glucose. When you deplete glucose from your last meal, you have to have a backup source of energy. So we evolved that way to keep going, to keep hunting, to keep fighting. Your body is more redundant than the military. It has redundancy after redundancy after redundancy. So you don’t just die when you run out of sugar.

After you run out of glucose from your last meal and your body, your mitochondria read protein like glucose. So these high protein diets, carnivore diets for people who are not efficient at this, are just as damaging as high-carbohydrate diets. And I know people don’t like it when I say that, but it’s the truth. You dump the glucose, and then you have glucose storage, which is glycogen in your liver. You dump that and then you flip the metabolic switch, and it doesn’t happen all at once. But when you flip that switch, it’s literally called flipping a metabolic switch. You start to burn fat for fuel. When you burn fat for fuel, you are either burning ghee, butter, avocado fat for fuel that you’re still eating. And I train people to do that first. And then if you’re not eating, you burn your own fat.

So for example, I make the joke I’m burning my breast fat or my butt fat. When you start to burn your own fat, those are triglycerides coming out of your fat. They go to your liver. Your liver makes something called acetoacetic acid. So I joke about it and I say, want to drop acid with me? Acetoacetic acid is in my pee. So the first thing you do is you start testing your pee for ketones. As you get more efficient, you start making something called beta-hydroxybutyrate, BHB. Beta-hydroxybutyrate is great. So you poke your finger and you can see if you’re making beta-hydroxybutyrate. Now the government, the only two places I look for information are what is the government doing? And, well, pretty much what is the government doing? Because everybody else has a spin on it. And I mean the leaders in the government, the DARPA.

So beta-hydroxybutyrate has been developed by the government for our military to be able to drink, to put them into a high-energy state so that they can fight or hunt after they’ve had all the crap that they feed them in the field. We know that beta-hydroxybutyrate literally makes you, I’m going to use the word smarter, more cognitively in tune. So the way I say that is you blow open the door of autophagy and apoptosis with ketosis. You enter ketosis to blow open the door. And then you go into autophagy and apoptosis by fasting. When you fast, you’re burning your own fat, turning it into acetoacetic acid and beta-hydroxybutyrate.

And the last one that you make is called acetone. And acetone dissolves fat. It dissolves lipids. It’s fingernail polish. Do not drink it. But if you have one of those breath meters, you can test for it. I’m also not suggesting you do that. But it’s fingernail polish. It dissolves things. So when you have it coursing through your blood, it can dissolve lipids, plague. So I have my weird phrases so that you remember and clearly they worked on you.

Katie: They do make it easier to remember. Absolutely. And I love that your approach is that repetition and teaching people how to actually understand this to do it for themselves. Because as I’ve seen in health and wellness for years now, it’s not prescriptive and it’s certainly not one size fits all. You actually have to learn your own body and you’re an N of one, but you’re the most valuable an N of one you will ever encounter. And so I love that you give people tangible things to learn and to focus on. And another one that you talk about that I feel like I’ve never seen other doctors really explain is leptin. And you have that repetitive phrase, leptin four to 10. I would love for you to explain that because I will say, having been through autoimmunity and all of those things, I had a ton of lab tests and I did not test my leptin until last year for the first time. So can you explain how leptin can give us some kind of insight of what’s going on?

Courtney: So in order to understand leptin, you have to understand that hormones are what I describe as envelopes or envelopes in the body. They travel from here to there. So leptin is a hormone made by your fat that tells you to not be hungry. So when your energy tank is full, it’s supposed to tell your brain to calm down and not eat. And most people, especially Americans, just ignore it, ignore it, ignore it because food is always around.

So when your leptin goes, let’s start with too low. When your leptin goes too low, it’s a signal from your environment that you didn’t put enough fat. You didn’t store enough glucose in your fat cell. You didn’t store enough carbs in your fat cell. So you’re skinny. And you can be skinny fat or muscular skinny. But you’re thin. You didn’t store enough energy. The whole thing is dictated by, are we going to procreate the passing on of consciousness or the passing on of our DNA, or are we going to be stressed and be killed? The whole thing, all of it is genetically wired. Are we going to procreate or are we going to be killed? So leptin is basically a sex hormone in the sense that if you have enough fat on your body and not too much, you’re ready to make a baby. And you get that fat when carbohydrates are abundant in the summer.

Okay, so it is supposed to be a signal to tell your brain, oh, you had enough fruits and vegetables and nuts this summer. Stop eating. We’re good to go. We’re ready to make a baby. But because we overeat, it goes up and up and up and up and up. And it’s like saying the gas tank is overflowing and you’re not turning off the gas. And you don’t get the signal and things start breaking. So when it’s too low, your body sends a signal to turn things off. Turn off the sex drive. Turn off the period. This would be like the girls with, who run marathons or who have eating disorders or who have gut malabsorption.

If it’s too high, you’re also sending out from the fat cells what I call smoke signals of inflammation. You’re getting more and more inflamed, and you start attacking your own self. So you want it within a range, and for men it can be a little bit lower, but you want it within that range. And you should be fluctuating it with a little more carbs in the summer based on where you evolved. Basically, no fruits or vegetables in the winter if you’re a person who’s the same skin tone as you and me. So that’s dictated by the sunlight in your environment. If you’re a darker skin person, there would have been more carbs, but you also would have been outside in the sunlight more, moving more, hunting more, running around more. So if you understand how the sun is talking to us in this way, it all starts to easily make sense.

Katie: Yeah. And I also like that, I feel like often when people try a new protocol or approach your diet and it fails, it’s because that all or nothing mentality where they think I can’t do this forever for the rest of my life. And so I love with your approach, you teach people to figure out, are you a papa bear, a mama bear, a baby bear based on that, based on your labs, based on, I know you even go deep on genetics. What do you specifically need? How are you going to most actually support your body and learn to work with it? And that doesn’t mean you’re going to go into deep ketosis every single day for the rest of your life without ever cycling. I see you even on Instagram, you eat carbs sometimes. You teach ketosis, but you also eat carbs sometimes. This is not…

Courtney: I eat candy with my kids. I’m trying to show people this is a life you can live. You can’t do it all day every day. But I had a bag of gummy bears with my daughter again last night. Not a full big bag, but probably 10 pieces. I’m dealing with this, I’m going to use my parents as an example. My dad probably had more weight to lose than my mom, but my mom is like me. And she’s the driver in the family saying, honey, we’re going to do this. Honey, we’re going to do this. Honey, we’re going to do this. So my mom did ketosis and fasting like I told her, because she’s type A, she dropped her leptin. That’s what would happen in a long winter with no food. My dad still has some work to do. And I’m having to like tell her, Mom, eat the candy. You and Dad have diverged. He still has a little bit of work to do. You’ve gone too far. You went through a long, hard winter. The fruits and vegetables are coming back. Eat.

So it’s not the same for everyone. And it’s not, I think the biggest mistake women make is once they’ve been with me for a while, they get so good and they get so disciplined and they work out so much and they look so lean. They don’t want to, they can’t retrain their brain that they have to deviate. And this isn’t constant starvation. Constant starvation and lack of nutrition is just your hair falls out, your fingernails get bad, your skin starts to sag, you start to look exhausted, you start to feel exhausted, and you start, low leptin makes you feel like you have to hunt. So you’re anxious, you’re nervous, you’re waking up at 3 a.m. It’s not constant starvation. It is a lifestyle that when you understand what you’re doing, you could do it forever. And if you fall off the wagon for a two-week vacation, you just get right back on when you get home.

Katie: And I think it’s also an important distinction the way you teach that this is not, when we talk about ketosis, it’s not carnivore. It’s not just low carb. It’s not the foods labeled as keto that are still processed foods. It’s actually knowing those very specific numbers and being able to tell exactly what’s going on in your body and how to support your body, use that tool. And also like you just explained, cycle it so that your body’s not getting starvation cues all the time and that you can actually use that to build your hormones. It seems like maybe that’s the pitfall is people who do really strict ketosis for the long-term without understanding that piece you just explained is when they see that downshift in hormones, when they start to feel tired all the time.

Courtney: It’s stress. It’s stress. It’s just too much stress. It’s like going through a long, cold winter. It’s just too much stress.

Katie: And you also talk about how it’s not just avoiding the carbs. You’re very specific about your fat to protein ratios and actually getting enough fat, getting enough calories when you are eating, all of those things to actually signal the healthy hormone responses that you want in the body, not that starvation response over the long term. And I feel like that’s maybe where people have had negative experiences of what they thought was a ketogenic diet. Maybe they’ve run into that without actually knowing those numbers and knowing for sure what’s going on in the body.

Courtney: Okay, so here’s something that I’m seeing right now. I have people who go so far with me and then they decide that they’re going to hire a health coach who’s not looking at, you have macronutrients and micronutrients. And they’re hiring people who are telling them, you don’t have to take any vitamins. But I’m not going to track your micronutrients. So if you are practicing with someone who’s teaching you ketosis and fasting and you’re not eating very much and someone’s not paying attention to make sure you have enough B12, you have enough folate, you have enough zinc, you have enough of your micronutrients, that’s where you run into nutrient deficiencies.

Basically, ketosis and fasting with high-intensity interval exercise is a way to get stem cells to come out. And if you don’t provide those stem cells with the right nutrients, which is why I do DNA testing for it, what are you feeding them? It’s like, it’s like having a baby and not feeding it. It’s like having a zygote or an embryo and not feeding it. It’s like not taking a prenatal vitamin when you’re pregnant. And I don’t know one mother in the United States who would do that. It just doesn’t make sense. So it’s the whole thing. It’s ketosis, fasting, feasting with the right nutrition.

When women are told that they shouldn’t fast around their cycle, that’s another one that gets me. Estrogen and progesterone are neurosteroid hormones. They help your brain grow. They help with neurogenesis, meaning they help you make new memory. And every month when a woman goes through her cycle, she has an abrupt withdrawal of estrogen and progesterone, which means the brain is left wide open to inflammation. That’s why we feel crazy. That’s why we get mean. That’s why we feel moody.

Then you have the majority of the population that is sunshine vitamin D deficient, which is one of the most powerful hormones in our body to control them. It is the most powerful hormone in our body to control inflammation. Probably the next most powerful thing you can do to control inflammation in your brain is beta-hydroxybutyrate. So they lose their estrogen on those couple of days. They lose their progesterone on those couple of days. They already don’t have enough sunshine vitamin D. And now they’re told to eat carbs, which is a state where they make one-fourth the amount of ATP or energy. And they don’t even know that beta-hydroxybutyrate makes your brain feel better and lowers inflammation in the brain.

Now, would I tell a 90-pound, 5’6 woman to do that? No, because she’s broken. If I fast her, what is she going to eat? She’s got no fat and she has almost no muscle. But if you’re a 200-pound woman with polycystic ovarian syndrome and you feel crazy when you finally do get your period and you know you’ve got estrogen and progesterone withdrawal. And you don’t have enough vitamin D, one of the only things you can do naturally is to make beta-hydroxybutyrate to turn off the brain inflammation to give yourself some calm. Otherwise, you’re running to the doctor for Zoloft or Prozac. Or Wellbutrin, or Motrin, or Tylenol, or something to get rid of the headache. So, but you have to learn it for yourself. Each person has to know what am I? How is it working? How do all these things work in me? And if I’m having a bad day, what do I look at? Am I dehydrated? Am I electrolyte depleted? Am I close to my period? I teach it in a way that you know who you are and you know what works for you because you know where you are in your cycle and where you are with your hormones and where you are with your leptin or your weight.

Katie: I love that because one thing I say on here probably too much is that at the end of the day, we are each our own primary healthcare provider, and we’re the ones responsible for the daily choices we make that actually result in our health or not long-term. And so I love that you, even as a doctor, are always saying and focusing on this is not medical advice. You’re telling people how to figure it out for themselves. And I think that’s where the most powerful change happens. And we’re going to do a whole episode that I’m excited for on the light and the sunshine and the DNA and the mitochondria and all of those pieces that you’ve alluded to. But for this topic, I know that we could go on for days and still not completely touch the surface even of everything people could learn about this, but I’m right now even in one of your groups. So where can people, if they’ve never heard these things before, if they maybe have hope that they can get better, where do you recommend that they start? And I’ll put links, of course, in the show notes for people to find you and find your work.

Courtney: So I teach these as peeks into my life on Instagram. So my website is courtneyhuntmd. I have a catalog of webinars that you can take starting with ketosis then moving on to fasting, then moving on to light or sunshine or electromagnetic radiation. And then I teach an advanced course. It’s what to do if you plateau. But every month I also have two or three 28-day groups. And I teach it that way because I don’t think it’s very effective. In these groups, I hike a mountain and I talk to you about what I’m doing and why that day. So if I’m sick, I tell you I’m sick. If I don’t feel good and I didn’t sleep well, I tell you why I didn’t sleep well and why so you can learn from my mistakes.

And it’s a way for me to assess people’s level of understanding and where they are and we learn from each other. So someone asks a question, I give the answer. And then everybody else learns from someone else’s pitfall, so to speak. All of that’s at my website, courtneyhuntmd.com. I do the nutritional genetics, which is the cheek swab that can help kind of accelerate your healing. If you want to work with me one-on-one at my website, which is geneticprotocol.com. And basically I’m, I just try to do it the most affordable way so I can reach the most people daily.

Katie: Well, like I said, I’ll put all those links in the show notes. And I actually really love that format because I have bought a lot of courses over the years and not done most of them. And they were kind of like on your own pace. And I love that yours is a time limit. It’s for a month and you’re going to learn it during that time. And there’s the group energy and accountability and question asking. So I feel like it’s actually a very effective teaching tool as well. And I would encourage people, if you are at all curious about this, to just start with one of the groups because I knew of them for a while. It took a while to actually do one and I love the format. So all of those links will be in the show notes. I’m super excited to go deep on light with you next. But for this episode, thank you so much for your time.

Courtney: Thank you.

Katie: And thank you for listening. I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the Wellness Mama podcast.

If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.

Thanks to Our Sponsors

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Katie Wells Avatar

About Katie Wells

Katie Wells, CTNC, MCHC, Founder of Wellness Mama and Co-founder of Wellnesse, has a background in research, journalism, and nutrition. As a mom of six, she turned to research and took health into her own hands to find answers to her health problems. WellnessMama.com is the culmination of her thousands of hours of research and all posts are medically reviewed and verified by the Wellness Mama research team. Katie is also the author of the bestselling books The Wellness Mama Cookbook and The Wellness Mama 5-Step Lifestyle Detox.

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