Episode #46 My Journey

You’re listening to the Keto and Low Carb Success podcast, Episode #46, My Journey.

Introduction:  

Welcome to Keto and Low Carb Success where I am here to help you on your weight loss and good-health journey. I’m your host Miriam Hatoum, course creator and author of Conquer Cravings with Keto, originally published as Breaking Free From Diet Prison.  I am privileged to be part of your journey with this podcast based on my trademarked Granny Keto Transitions Program. And, please, be sure to go to miriamhatoum.com/resources to get all the free guides to help you along the way. I am in your shoes, my friends, and I wrote these guides for both of us. The link is in the show notes and transcripts.

0:55    And now to the episode, My Journey

 
As some of you already know, I’m a wife, mother, and grandmother of two – and also a lifelong dieter. For years I was scolded by doctors who never believed I was following their diet advice – a horrible cycle that started when I was just 13 years old!  

Listening to Gary Taubes’s Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It was my lightbulb moment. For the first time, I realized that the food itself was keeping me fat all these years and it was not my fault. I began a ketogenic (“Keto”) diet that day and never looked back.  

 For myself, I enjoyed the freedom of Keto (that’s right – freedom even with all those food restrictions!) but when I started my coaching practice as Granny Keto, I realized early on that Keto is not for everyone – either because they don’t want to do it or do not need to do it. 

 My husband is one such person who is blessed with a great metabolism. So after I began coaching, I decided to widen my scope and create Granny Keto Transitions Program: Five Steps to Ketoä  that helps people slowly become accustomed to Keto, go straight to Keto, or allows them to just stay put at one step, only giving up sugar and baked goods, for instance. I know this sounds like an infomercial but I just wanted to give you some background about how I landed up even doing Keto in the first place, and why I incorporated Low Carb.

 2:33     What is your dieting history? Can you relate to mine?

Have you done any – or ALL of these or MORE??? I am listing my attempts so that you can see you are not alone. In doing Keto I realized, once and for all, that it was NEVER I who failed the diet. The diets failed me.  Yes, I still needed personal work setting goals or sitting with urges, but, overall, after learning about insulin’s effect on hunger and fat storage, I realized that the food itself was the major contributor to driving me to eat.

Here is the long non-exhaustive list of diets I've tried:

·       At the age of 13, Mom took me to a doctor who put me on a calorie/exchange program AND put me on amphetamines – in 1965 I guess they were no big deal.

·       At the age of 16 I was dropped off by my mom at Weight Watchers meetings.

·       When I was in college, I put a fridge in my room and made a pudding out of Carnation Instant Breakfast, water, and gelatin, and ate that instead of meals.

·       Between the amphetamines and the Carnation Instant Breakfast pudding there must have been at least a dozen stupid (and dangerous) attempts to diet – it was, after all, the age of Twiggy.

·       Stillman Diet – (precursor of Atkins) – NOTHING but protein and vegetables, most notably cottage cheese and carrots.

·       EVERY incarnation of Weight Watchers – from the original (liver and fish five times a week, no-ketchup-only-mustard version) up through all the different POINTS systems. There have to have been no fewer than 12 different programs. If you don’t remember “Fat and Fiber” or “New Freedom” or the original “Winning Points” you haven’t been with it long enough to feel my pain!

·       The Zone Diet

·       CAD: Carbohydrate Addict Diet

·       South Beach Diet

·       Gluten Free and Wheat Belly diets

·       (Medically supervised) Elimination Diet

·       Tosca Reno’s Clean Eating

·       Joyce Meyers Eat and Stay Thin

·       No S Diet

·       Beck Diet

·       Overeaters Anonymous

·       100 Days of Weight Loss

·       Mark Hyman – Both Blood Sugar Diet and the Eat Fat Diet

·       Low Glycemic Index Diet

·       Volumetrics

·       Never did Juicing but I did buy a Nutribullet thinking that a few of those recipes might “boost metabolism.”

·       Way-of-life sort-of diets: Mediterranean, Paleo, Primal (I actually draw on these now).

·       Calorie counting: My Fitness Pal, SparkPeople, and Lose It (as well as paper and pencil during the dark ages).

·       Suzanne Sommers (food combining)

·       Any of the dozens of books with titles such as Think yourself thin, Thin from within, etc. 

·       All sorts of exchange diets (American Heart, Diabetic, etc.)

·       Overeaters Anonymous

·       TOPS which stands for “Take Off Pounds Sensibly”

·       Eat This Not That

·       Hungry Girl Diet

·       Tony Robbins: The Body you Deserve

·       DASH Diet was supported by my workplace, so I looked, but did not follow.

·       Positive Changes (Hypnosis, and by far the most-costly one even if I add up all my years and products at Weight Watchers)

·       The Slow Down Diet

·       Intuitive Eating

·       Mindful Eating

·       Karly Pitman’s Growing Human Kindness and Untangled programs

6:51     Not all these diets are off the mark , and as a matter of fact a lot of them had excellent advice, but they did not ring all the bells and blow all the whistles for me. In the past I looked at all these attempts to diet as my failure. 

I have turned my thinking around and now see that it was just a matter of not succeeding, and that some of these diets had built-in problems because of the foods and methods, no matter how well-intentioned they were. 

I now no longer see myself as a failure, just attempts that did not work out, but which supplied the building blocks to bring me to where I am now.

          I am sure you have heard some of Thomas Edison’s quotes, among them: 

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.

Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.

Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won’t work.

 Bless you, Mr. Edison. I see I am not a failure nor were my hundreds of attempts at dieting in the 60+ years (!) I have been making them. They were merely stepping-stones to finding what works, and to help me grow and mature. What I learned from trying all these diets is that the answer is within me and it is within you too. 

 Stay tuned to the end with this week’s actionable coaching advice to see how you can use all your diet attempts as stepping stones to finding something that is right for YOU.

 And, it is not just a matter of the foods themselves that we choose to eat, but also the emotions and feelings we have behind eating those foods. 

 8:54    Now to Story behind Granny Keto.

 In 2018 my WHYs we really embedded like no other time in my life

 My original WHY with doing Keto was to bring down my blood sugar and other extremely poor blood markers, like triglycerides and CRP – but more on that in another episode.

 During the months of November 2017 through March 2018, I had several crises that showed me that I had the strength to stick to my new WHY which was wanting to be healthy and to be authentic so that I could feel honest about being a Keto coach. 

 In the Fall of 2017, my new grandson had a bowel obstruction and was hospitalized. I took care of my three-year old granddaughter, juggling taking care of her and working. It was a short period of time, but I did not crumble under the stress – between going back and forth from the hospital, staying overnight with her, and then dropping her off at daycare then going to work, there were lots of meals out, or in the hospital – and the distance was a triangle with one-hour distance between my daughter’s house-work-my house. But I did it! This pales in comparison to the next set of crises.

 In December I got a call from California that my sister had 12 hours to 3 days to live and I had better get out there from Boston. This call came at 11 AM on a Sunday and I was on a 4 PM flight that day, packed and ready for about three days. 

 She came through the crisis, but the outlook was not good. I stayed in California about two weeks, came home and then turned around and went back Christmas day and stayed until sometime in January. 

 My first visit she was in the hospital, and I went back and forth from the hospital to her – again all meals either at the hospital or at restaurants. For the second visit, she was in hospice near her condo, and I used that time to empty her condo to put it on the market – we knew that she would never be returning. 

 It was a heartbreaking and stressful time. I went home on a Thursday, and she died the following Monday. That Friday we had the funeral. 

 Three weeks later was my mother’s funeral. 

 I was finally getting my footing back when one morning (the first Friday in March) I hear my husband yell, "Get me to the hospital," and that was it – he was unconscious. We got him to the hospital just in time as he had a ruptured "Triple A" (abdominal aortic aneurism). 

 Everything was aligned and they got him into surgery and somehow, he survived a 7-centimeter shearing off of his abdominal artery. In two days, he had 9 pints of his blood replaced (and our bodies only have 11 ½!) but he survived. The doctor said there is no protocol for survival with this situation, but he made it. So, as I sat there watching my husband on a ventilator, I realized that life is precious and if I have it at my fingertips to live a healthy life then just do it. 

 When I was in California, when both my sister and my mother died, and especially when I had my husband’s crisis, I would post on a Facebook page I belonged to, and I would receive comments and messages that, because someone saw my strength and determination and resilience to stay Keto and not turn to food to comfort myself, it gave them the determination and courage to not give in to their old familiar habits. 

 Where there was adversity, somehow, I found strength – I knew that no amount of candy or cake or overeating of any kind would bring back my mother or sister or help my husband. 

 I knew that to come through to the other side I needed to be strong and healthy and not lose myself in old eating habits and comfort food. So now I had my next WHY – It was time to take the plunge – get a real website going and social media and ACTUALLY become a coach! AND HERE I AM!!!

 I might add that my husband’s aneurism forced us both into retirement – something we had NO plans for, which is why I probably work so hard on the podcast and everything else I am doing. I didn’t have the plans OR mindset to retire so in my own way, I am still going to work everyday!

 14:19   This Week’s Actionable Coaching Advice

 I am going to take a guess here that this is not your first rodeo with dieting. What I would like you to do this week is to make a list of all the diets you can ever remember being on. With that list, I would like you to make a note of why they did not work. Are you seeing patterns? What are they? Then with the same list I want you to go through and see if anything does resonate with you, or what you found helpful with them or liked about them.

 Using keto or low carb principles – or even ANY eating style principles that I have covered in other podcast episodes such as Mediterranean or Intuitive Eating, for instance, can you be your own diet inventor? In other words, flesh out the things that you did like about the various diets you have been on throughout the years.

 Do you like the idea of eating what you love (like with Intuitive Eating) but respecting portion boundaries (like with Weight Watchers)? Do you like eating in very natural states like with Paleo or Whole 30, to give your body a chance to home in what sensitivities you might have? Do like a more freestyle way of eating without any restrictions (except for junk food) like with the Mediterranean lifestyle? Do your blood sugar numbers respond best, and do you see healing from Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver disease with Keto? Can you take the best of this one and that one, and make it Low Carb? 

 You are your own doctor. You are smart and intelligent, and as I said, it’s not your first time around the block with dieting. Work on paper otherwise all the diets and eating styles are just sugar plum fairies dancing around in your head. Make that list. Do Pros and Cons (and most will be a mix, although there might be several with only cons). 

 List your WHYs. You will have more than one. Does one diet help you with a certain WHY, while another one doesn’t? Start to analyze the information. Put on your white lab coat and become a scientist looking at data. 

 Getting to the bottom of all of this might be one of the most valuable actionable coaching suggestions I can give you!

 Now, let me remind you. If you’ve ever got a question you’d like to ask me or share a topic idea that you would like me to cover on a future episode, don’t be a stranger! I always look forward to hearing from listeners like you. You are welcome to email me directly… miriam@miriamhatoum.com. And don’t forget to leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. I would SO appreciate it. Leaving a review makes it easier for other people who are looking to listen about Keto and Low Carb.

18:00  Coming up in the next episode 

Next week I am going to talk all about my Granny Keto Transitions Program since I mentioned it here. My new course that will be ready for purchase in May, has a lesson on this program so I thought I would introduce it here on the podcast to give you a jumpstart.

 So go share the show with your friends, let them know that’s coming up in the next episode, and invite them to tune in with you and learn how to become free from diet prison with my Keto and Low Carb Success podcast.

 Until then, go live free from diet worry — I’ll see you back here next time. 

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