Why Luke Is Starting The Keto Diet | What Is Keto? | Part 1

Hey all, Luke here, Megan's husband from Wilson Homestead. I know I'm not normally the one to do these videos, but I thought that some of you might be interested in going along the journey with me to explore the keto diet. I've been doing more and more research lately and it's just seeming to be a proper human diet that we should be consuming. So what is the keto diet? The keto diet is really low carb and high fats and a lot of protein as well. Basically the complete opposite of the standard American diet. So I'm going to try to keep my carbs below 50 grams per day, though that's hardly anything. I've done the GAPS diet two times for about five months each. That's very restrictive. Pretty similar to keto. It will be a little bit less that I can eat on keto, but I don't think it'll be a problem. I'm pretty disciplined when it comes to my diets. If I get set on it and I'm determined to do it, I will stick with it pretty well. So I'm going to be starting this diet at the beginning of the year. So I'm taking the holidays off. I'm not having any restrictions on sugar or whatever. About one month left and then I'm going to dive into this and see how it goes. The biggest reason people try the keto diet, or any diet really, is to lose weight. I'm not really overweight. I'm pretty close to my ideal weight, I'm pretty sure. So that's not really why I'm doing it. But the beauty of the keto diet is if you are overweight, you will lose the weight down to where you're supposed to be. And if you're underweight, you will gain weight and you will get to a healthy weight for your body type. So it all kind of just levels out. There's no restricting calories on this diet. So you just eat as much as you want until you're full. And that makes it really simple. You don't have to count calories or anything like that. You can eat as much as you want from the approved food list. So that makes it nice. One reason I'm doing it is it really helps reduce inflammation and can help prevent headaches, which I get occasionally. So that'll be nice. So many of the grains, GMO foods that most people eat every day can really play a toll on your body and are just not healthy. People get headaches and they're inflamed all the time and they're just used to it. They just think that's how they're supposed to feel. Just feeling like garbage all day. So I want to see if that will improve. And another thing is I want to see if it will increase my energy to help me work longer days and have enough energy and not be riding the carbohydrate rollercoaster. Always feeling like you need to be eating just constantly throughout the day and eating sugar. I'm just sick of those cravings. I hate feeling like I'm a slave to certain foods. This really helps keep you full for longer, it reduces your appetite, so that'll be super nice. A lot of people on keto really quickly move to two meals a day and even one meal a day. And it makes it super easy to do intermittent fasting and even longer fasts, like two or three days. I'm not going to get into that right now, but there's been a lot of research on eating in smaller windows of time so your body can be repairing itself and it's just super healthy for you. So I want to try that when you're on a really high-carb diet and always eating cookies and cake and stuff like that, you just constantly need to be refueling and your body just burns through the sugars so fast. Once you are on keto for a while, you start burning fat instead and it's much more efficient, more steady, and should just help even things out a lot better overall. Some of the biggest things I'm going to have to be cutting out are grains, so no more corn and oats and rice and pasta and stuff like that, which makes up the majority of most people's diets. So that's always a big step to do, it's going to be a little hard at first, but you'll get used to it. Sugars, a huge one as well, there's sugar in so many foods right now, it's ridiculous. That's one's going to be hard to stop as well. Sugar cravings are a real deal, and I do like my sweets. And then the other thing is just some vegetables, like a lot of root vegetables, like carrots and potatoes, beets and things like that are really high in carbs and too starchy, so that'll be an extra thing on top of Gap's diet that I'm used to, I don't feel to eat, which is going to be pretty hard because we use a lot of those in our soups and stuff, so just have to change around a few things to make this work for us. So the majority of my diet is going to be a lot of meats. We did a big butcher day for chickens a couple months ago, so we got a chest freezer that's about half full with tons of chicken, so we'll be eating lots of that, and we just got in our two hogs, those are in the freezer, so that's a big chunk of the freezer, so we'll be eating lots of pork and chickens, and we'll be having an occasional rabbit from our rabbit poultry outside, and we do still have some beef left, and we'll be eating other meats, but the majority is going to be chicken and pork. The oils that I'll be eating are going to be a lot of lard and coconut oil and butter, no more vegetable oils, not that we eat those now anyway, pretty healthy on that front. So for the vegetables, you can eat basically all the leafy greens you want, plenty of lettuce and kale and spinach, stuff like that. It's nice that Megan's got some cauliflower canned and some pickles, which are going to be nice for when I need a little snack, and she's got some green beans, all those are really good for keeping it low carb. Still need to get some things from Costco and Azure, like hopefully some peppers, some celery, I want to get a bunch of cabbage, that's really good, as well as for making sauerkraut, just things like that, just to break it up and make it easier to do this diet. Dairy is another big one that you can have, basically as much as you want on the diet, so that'll be nice. We've got a good source for raw milk locally, we get a gallon or two of that per week, that'll be nice to have. We get our butter from Azure, still need to get a couple big blocks of cheese, which is good on everything, and hopefully our eggs will be, our chickens will be laying more eggs here soon, we'll be eating a lot of eggs. So that'll be making up the majority of the diet, I don't think it'll be too bad, it'll be rough at first I'm sure, just adjusting to burning sugars and carbs to burning fat, but I think I can do it. It'll be fun to try it and see how I feel, and if you want to join in on this journey with me, I'm starting January 1st, so you can still enjoy all the unhealthy food for the next month, and get all your holiday tasty foods out of the way, and then try to get on track, get healthier for the new year. I don't know how long I'm gonna go yet, probably at least three months, but we'll see how it's all along the journey, alright, see you later, bye.