The Keto Meal Plan Explained with Guest Louise Hendon | The Healthy Me Podcast Episode 002

Welcome to The Healthy Me episode number 002… I’m Trina Felber, Registered Nurse and CEO of Primal Life Organics.

In a modern world that’s crowded with fad-diets and flash-in-the-pan workout routines, it can be challenging to figure out what’s really best for your body. Especially when you consider what’s best for your body, might not be congruent with what you’re trying to accomplish physically.

Are you trying to lose weight?

Get lean?

Build pure muscle mass?

Flatten your stomach and fill-out your glutes?

There are a ton of variables to weight, and a ton of options to consider.

And that’s what makes today’s guests on The Healthy Me Podcast so special — they’re a couple who knows what it takes (from a dietary perspective) to improve your health in a holistic way that complements your personal goals, whatever they may be.

Meet Louise and Jeremy Hendon, founders of Paleo Flourish, and grand champions of all things related to the Keto diet.

If you’re not familiar with the Keto diet, or you simply want to learn more about the remarkable impact it can have on the body, then this is the episode for you!

Stated simply, keto is a lower-carb form of the paleo diet. Like paleo, keto is all about getting quality foods into your body to maximize nutritional intake, and minimize overall inflammation.

It’s about making getting the right decisions.

Eating the right meats. Eating the right fats. And eating the right fruits and vegetables.

So, sit down and listen in for this intriguing episode on the subject of ketosis, and get ready to hear Louise and Jeremy tell you a little bit about the 3–2–1 keto meal plan they developed.

Transcription

Trina Felber: Hey, everyone, welcome to “The Healthy Me”, Episode 2. I’m Trina Felber, registered nurse and CEO of Primal Life Organics. I believe there is a healthy person living in everyone. “The Healthy Me” is designed to help you call up your healthy self, step out of your comfort zone, shake things up, and get results.

So let’s find and empower your Healthy me.

Today I am joined with Louise and Jeremy Hendon. Louise is the creator of 321 Keto meal plans and author of “The Essential Keto Cookbook”. She loves creating easy and delicious meals for busy people, which I believe is everyone out there. And in her spare time, she loves traveling the world and reading mystery novels. She states, “I am beyond gluten-free, grain free, paleo-primal, a lawyer, an ex-physicist, a cook, a blogger, a Brit living in the US, an ex-violin player and occasional cross-fitter, a mystery book junkie”, and she blogs all about her recipes and paleo-primal gluten-free health articles at theancestralchef.com.

Jeremy is an author, speaker, and entrepreneur who started his health journey by losing weight wit ha low-carb diet almost 15 years ago. Since then, he’s written and spoken about ancestral diets, gut health, psychology and habits, and much more. He recently co-hosted The Keto Summit with Louise, Chris Kelly, and Tommy Wood. So thank you for joining me! I’m excited to have you guys here.

Louise Hendon: Thank you for having us!

Jeremy Hendon: Even we’re excited.

Trina Felber: Yes. Alright, so first off, I wanna talk about the keto diet because I have dabbled a little bit with the keto diet, but I haven’t done the deep dive. So can you guys explain to me what the keto diet really is?

Jeremy Hendon: Yeah, so I’ll jump in very quickly to talk a little more into the science and the background.

So there’s a very simple premise to a keto diet, and that is that the diet itself is supposed to get your body into a state that is called nutritional ketosis. Ketosis is just a benchmark of where your body is relying a certain percentage more on fats for energy than on carbs for energy.

So literally that’s the most basic, the simplest explanation. The keto diet is meant to get your body into ketosis. And we can talk about what that might do for you, why that might be good, why it might be important, what might or might not be wrong for it, but that’s really the basis of what a keto diet does.

Trina Felber: Awesome. So what’s the difference between keto and paleo? Because most of the audience is familiar with the paleo diet, but I am still even confused as to what really is the difference between keto and paleo, and I’m sure you guys get that question all the time.

Louise Hendon: Yeah, we definitely do, and I think the simplest way of thinking about it is just to say that keto is just a lower-carb form of the paleo diet.

Trina Felber: And what is the benefit of that?

Jeremy Hendon: So yeah, so let’s talk about benefits. So very quickly, the main difference we draw, paleo is all about food quality. It’s all about nutrition, right? So the original theory of a paleo diet … It starts with ancestral palate, but really it’s two things. It’s to maximize the amount of nutrients we get and minimize the amount of inflammatory things that we’re eating. And so that’s based mostly around the types of foods that we eat. We wanna make sure that we eat food that are high in micronutrients, high in vitamins, minerals, and they’re low in things like gluten and like other parts of food that will cause inflammation in our bodies and cause problems.

Keto diets on the other hand are not focused on that. Now, you can do a keto diet that’s focused on that, and we do, and that’s what we actually try to help people get into, but the purpose of a keto diet is not that. In general, the purpose of keto … it can have many purpose and many benefits, and we’ll chat about those, but the purpose of the keto diet, like I said earlier, is to get your body into ketosis.

Now the possible benefits of that. So originally, keto diets were used for medical purposes, and they still are to a large degree. So kids with epilepsy. It’s a very old and very common treatment for kids with epilepsy, and very proven for about a hundred years. Very, very … A lot of studies and a lot of statistics in how well that works for children with epilepsy, and even adults with epilepsy.

And then it’s used for some other neurodegenerative diseases. There are some people right now who are doing good studies on reversing Alzheimer’s and reversing other neurodegenerative diseases with keto diets, because it has a lot of effects on your brain. For people who aren’t gonna use it for what we call therapeutic purposes, that is to treat some sort of illness, a lot of people find that they can lose weight on it, particularly if you’re been overweight for a long time and can have trouble otherwise losing weight, and particularly if you have insulin sensitivity issues or you have blood sugar problems. Then it becomes really important, because what that means is that your body can’t handle sugars well.

If you have insulin resistance, then your body really can’t process and use sugars the way it should, and so a keto diet helps your body fix that. It helps it become what’s called more metabolically flexible, that is to switch back and forth between sugar and fat as an energy source, by taking away the sugar as an energy source for a little while. And that actually has profound effects for a lot of people, starting with weight loss, but then also how much more energy they feel. People tend not to get tired during the day because they don’t have those sugar rushes and sugar crashes. Tend to have a lot more mental clarity, and a lot of people don’t even realize that they’re lacking this mental clarity until they go on a keto diet, a ketogenic diet, for a week or two and all of a sudden it occurs to them that, “Wow, I can think a whole lot better”

So that’s a slightly long rant in terms of what a keto diet can do for you and how it’s different.

Trina Felber: And what about the AIP diet, or the autoimmune protocol diet? What’s the difference between keto and that?

Jeremy Hendon: So I would start by differentiating paleo and autoimmune, because it’s an easier place to differentiate. So the way we usually tell people is that autoimmune is just a much stricter form of paleo, and the whole purpose of an autoimmune diet is to remove anything that will cause flare-ups of an autoimmune condition. So Hashimoto’s, any sort of thyroid issues, Crohn’s, anything to do with your gut, any sort of those autoimmune conditions. An autoimmune diet is built specifically to take out foods that will cause flare-ups and exacerbate those autoimmune conditions, and what it looks like is a paleo diet, but then also removing foods that would otherwise be healthy and good, like nightshades, so tomatoes, potatoes, a lot of spices, removing eggs because eggs often cause flare-ups for people with autoimmune conditions. Doesn’t mean eggs are unhealthy in general for someone who’s healthy in the abstract, but theoretically it just means that if you’ve got an autoimmune condition you might need to remove eggs, you might need to remove tomatoes and potatoes and things like that, and some other food.

So it’s just a much stricter version of that. Versus keto, then, again … So the way … One thing I haven’t mentioned, well I sort of alluded to this, is we think everybody should really mostly be on a paleo diet to begin with, that is everybody should be looking and trying to eat foods that nourish their body, reduce inflammation, and then if they have an autoimmune condition they should go a little stricter, be on an autoimmune protocol, at least for a while, because autoimmune doesn’t have to be forever. And then occasionally if you want to lose weight, if you want to feel better, maybe cycle in and out of a keto diet.

I’m not saying people can’t do a keto diet forever, but we see most people, particularly if you’re active, do better cycling in and out of it. And I don’t mean on a daily basis, it’s hard to get out of ketosis that quickly, but say doing it or a couple months at a time, maybe two or three times a year.

Trina Felber: And how long does it take to get into ketosis?

Jeremy Hendon: So that really varies by person, it depends on how active you are, it depends on how much insulin resistance you have. I would say for most people, if you’re very strict about it, you can get into ketosis within a week. And that’s often a very painful week if you’ve not done it before. I don’t wanna lie, I don’t wanna lie, I’m not gonna make it sound easier than it is. If you’re not done this before and your body’s very reliant on sugar and it’s metabolically inflexible, that is your body’s not very good at turning over burning fat and using that energy, metabolizing that fat for energy, then it can be a very painful week, because what happens is if you’re not good at burning fat, not only do you feel tired, but you’re not getting any energy to your brain, or not much, not enough, and your brain all of a sudden feels very bad, so you get tired, you get irritable, you get grumpy, and you’re in withdrawal, literally, because your body’s not getting the energy that it thinks it needs.

Now, you get over this, and you feel even better than you did before, of course, but-

Trina Felber: Then you get that energy spike and you actually feel better.

So I know … Tell me, is there anyone that should not do the keto diet? It’s probably not for everyone. Is there anyone that should not do it?

Louise Hendon: In general, we do think that if someone has an autoimmune condition, they should focus on healing that first. Like a good friend of ours, Chris Kelly, always talks about keto as it’s a tool in your toolbox to use, to optimize your diet a little bit further to get that extra few pounds of fat that you’ve been wanting to get off off. But it’s not something that’s great if you already have a ton of health issues.

Trina Felber: And when someone goes on the keto diet, what’s an average amount of time that you stay on the keto diet?

Jeremy Hendon: That’s a really hard question to answer, because it really does vary. I mean, there’s some people that have been on a keto diet for 20, 25 years. Obviously it’s gotten more popular recently, but it’s been around for a very long time. There are people who’ve done it for a very long time. I think … oh, who’s the exercise guy, like a name of … Phil Moffelton, I actually think Phil Moffelton’s been doing it for like 25 years. I could be wrong, so don’t quote me on that, but you’re live and you’re recording.

So I apologize to Phil if I’m wrong about that, but I think he’s been on it for a very long time, if I’m not mistaken. People like Dominic [inaudible 00:10:19] tends to stay on it, as far as I know, for a very long time.

So you can do it, and I don’t personally think that there’s anything necessarily wrong with it, there are no studies or anything to indicate that’s [inaudible 00:10:29], but also I don’t think there’s necessarily … you don’t get as many benefits after a while.

Louise Hendon: But I think one of the confusions around the keto diet is like, “What does it mean to be on a ketogenic diet as opposed to just being on paleo?” ’Cause actually, a lot of people eating their paleo diets today could actually be on a ketogenic diet already. And it’s very much a sliding scale. Traditionally, they’ve said if you measure your blood keto levels and it’s over 0.1 millimoles, then … So .5, then you would be in nutritional ketosis. But for a lot of people they get the benefits of weight loss and the benefits of energy without ever hitting .5. They could be much lower.

And for whatever reason, different people just react a little differently. Some people can go into much higher levels of ketosis pretty easily eating the same foods as someone else, and yet the other person achieves much lower. But yet, they might both see the same results.

Trina Felber: What types of foods to you eat on … I know the difference between paleo … So explain the diet or what you’re eating when you’re doing the keto diet for our viewers. And if anybody out there has questions while you’re watching, post them in the comments below because we can ask them, we can see your questions and we’ve got the experts here so they can answer your questions for you while we’re doing this.

Louise Hendon: So I guess number one I would like to emphasize that you do still eat vegetables, ’cause I think most people think that when you go low carb, because vegetables have carbs in them, that that means that no, they can’t be keto anymore. So we do eat a lot of cauliflower, broccoli, we eat spinach, we eat kale, we eat arugula. We eat a lot of vegetables still. But then we cut out some of the starchy vegetables like sweet potatoes that a lot of people depend on, almost, on a paleo diet. And then we still eat fish, meats, organ meats, we drink bone broth -

Jeremy Hendon: You cut out most fruits. A lot of people can get away with eating berries and other things that are high in fiber and low in sugar. You really can’t eat pineapple and bananas. A little too [crosstalk 00:12:47]. You can get away with occasionally apples and pears, they’re really not gonna spike your blood sugar that much if you’re not particularly active. And again, it really does vary. If you’ve got somebody who’s working out two hours a day who’s a semi-pro athlete, particularly if they’re male, because they often have more muscle mass, which often makes a difference in how much sugar can be stored in your muscles and used there, which will still keep you out of ketosis to some degree.

Sorry, I said that slightly inaccurately, but nonetheless, your amount of muscles mass makes a difference.

So it really does vary. So some people can get away with eating a little more in terms of the amount of carbs they can eat, but Louise is really right. We emphasize that all the time. We sort of joke about it, but people do really think, “Oh, all I have to do is eat bacon and butter.” Which is fine, we don’t have anything against bacon and butter. Whatever you need to eat. But you really do need to get some vegetables, you need to get them for the fiber, there are a lot of vital nutrients in them. There’s some things that traditional mainstream nutrition’s got right, and one of those this that vegetables are superbly healthy. There are a lot of [inaudible 00:13:49] vegetables that are really good for us, and particularly we’re talking about leafy vegetables and colorful vegetables, they’re just really, really good for people in general.

Louise Hendon: And especially as we’re discovering more about the importance of gut health, meaning cutting out vegetables would be quite detrimental to most people’s diets.

Trina Felber: Right. What about fats? How much fat should you eat? ’Cause I know that fats are really important, not just for your brain but for your body. So talk about fats. What kind of fats should you eat, focus on? And how much fat?

Jeremy Hendon: I would say that the … The one-line advice I would give people is to learn not to be afraid of fat, but don’t feel the need to add extra. And this again, we’re just talking about people who are doing a ketogenic diet for general health purposes, to feel better, to lose weight. Therapeutically, if you were using it to potentially, adjunct treatment for cancer or to treat epilepsy or to treat neurodegenerative disease, then it looks way different and you need to add a lot of fat because you really want to make sure that you keep [inaudible 00:14:55] higher, ’cause it makes a much bigger difference therapeutically.

By the way, I’m not a doctor, don’t pretend to play one.

Trina Felber: Right, give the disclaimer.

Jeremy Hendon: Yeah, yeah. So if you’re using it therapeutically it’s gonna look much different. But if you’re doing it for general health, we don’t generally think that most people need to add that much fat, particularly when you’re trying to lose weight, because fat … calories still matter to some degree. If you’re eating 5,000 calories a day, even if they’re all fats, you’re not gonna lose weight unless you’re superbly active, unless you [crosstalk 00:15:27] in the pool for eight hours a day.

And so we recommend that people become not afraid of fat, because a lot of people do start off being afraid of fat, like not even wanting to put as much fat as is in a normal recipe into the recipe. But then don’t feel the need to put an extra stick of butter on whatever you’re eating.

And as far as forms of fat go, because we still take the underlying ancestral approach, we highly recommend either saturated or monounsaturated fats, because those tend to be much more stable, tend to be much healthier. Polyunsaturated fats, omega 3, omega 6 is fine, but we would like to minimize those a little bit ,particularly in the forms that are problematic like vegetable and seed oils that have been highly processed.

Louise Hendon: So the similar things to paleo, like olive oil, avocado oil, coconut oil, ghee, [inaudible 00:16:21], lard …

Jeremy Hendon: Real lard, not the hydrogenated one.

Trina Felber: The real stuff, yeah.

What are your thoughts about the keto drinks or the keto bars? In your opinion is there any benefit to those?

Louise Hendon: So I assume you mean some of the [inaudible 00:16:44] bars that have come out. And they tend to … and I think they come out of the low-carb movement very much so that they’re often a little higher in protein and they tend to be a little lower in carb and use a lot of sugar replacements, either erythritol or there’s some with stevia, but it just doesn’t taste that good so I don’t think [inaudible 00:17:10].

I’m not against it, because in the end I feel like if someone needs a snack and they want to stay in ketosis and not have to go through keto flu again or break their diet, then it’s not a bad form, but at the same time it’s definitely not something we recommend people go and stock up on.

Jeremy Hendon: Yeah so … And I’ll just jump in on that very quickly. So our position is, look, if you’ve gotta do it, then it might be better than eating your original junk food or brownies or cookies, like original cookies, original standard American cookies. But at the same time, there’s something called a hyperpalatability, very well researched, and it’s got a pretty big consensus among obesity researchers, and once you start …

And what hyperpalatability is is when you take something that has a certain amount of fats … you put together a certain amount of fat and a certain amount of sugar with a certain amount of salt, it becomes almost irresistible. So people are more or less susceptible to this, but all people are susceptible to it to some degree. And what I mean by become more or less irresistible is, you can think about having a big meal. Let’s say you just ate a 12 ounce steak, you had some mashed potatoes or something with it, and you had a glass of wine or something. You’re really full. And someone says “Oh, look, I’ve got this extra 8 ounces of steak, do you want it? Well, you love steak, steak tastes very good, but that steak is not hyperpalatable, it doesn’t have any sugar in it. You’re gonna be like “I’m stuffed, even though that steak’s beautiful I can’t eat anymore.”

And yet if somebody comes and offers you a piece of cake, as stuffed as you are, there’s a decent chance you might be able to eat that piece of cake, because the cake is hyperpalatable. Literally changes how our body reacts to this food. And the reason I bring this up is a lot of packaged foods that come along in paleo form and keto form or whatever recreate hyperpalatable foods, and they are potentially better because maybe they’re slightly less inflammatory, maybe they still keep you in ketosis, so I’m not arguing they’re not better. But they do recreate a different problem. It’s still a problem, particularly if you’re trying to lose weight, and trying not to overeat, is that they’ll just make you keep overeating.

Trina Felber: Right, that’s interesting. What about veggies? I know you talked a little bit about veggies. What are the primary veggies you wanna eat? So you wanna stay away from anything that’s … Obviously processed sugars and anything that has a lot of sugar in it. And some of the fruits that you talked about, like pineapples, bananas, things like that. But are all veggies fair game, or are there some that you wanna avoid?

Louise Hendon: Just the very starchy ones, so pumpkin or sweet potato. But, again, it’s like in some ways you’re measuring your total sugar or carb intake. So you have one tiny chunk of sweet potato, it’s really not gonna make very much difference. It’s more that when we say, “Oh, don’t eat sweet potatoes”, because typically when people eat sweet potatoes they eat a whole sweet potato, and that’s [crosstalk 00:20:06].

And so that has sufficient carbohydrates in it to be problematic if you’re trying to stay in ketosis.

Trina Felber: Right, got it.

Louise Hendon: [crosstalk 00:20:18] there’s tons of lower-carbs vegetables, like we really love spinach, kale, arugula again, we ate a lot of salads …

Trina Felber: And squash, I love squash, we’re coming into the fall, and spaghetti squash is my favorite.

Louise Hendon: Exactly, yeah.

Trina Felber: Butternut’s a little bit sweeter, but I’m assuming that’s still okay.

Jeremy Hendon: Depends on how sensitive to it you are. Then you’d have a few more carbs, but …

Louise Hendon: Again, also, athletes are able to deal with the amount of carbs they take in a lot better than most people, so athletes are actually able to eat a whole sweet potato and still be in nutritional ketosis, it doesn’t affect them the same way. But if you have blood sugar issues, then you’re probably gonna see your blood sugar spike a lot faster than someone who does five mile runs every day.

Jeremy Hendon: Yeah, there’s some people in the weightlifting and athletic worlds that say that you need to earn your carbs. And there’s some truth to that, that if … The more active you are, the more you’ve sort of earned your carbs, particularly after you’re active your muscles have an increased uptake of glycogen, your body handles the sugar and the carbs that you eat better. And so there’s some truth to that claim. It’s just the more active you are, the better you can handle it, the better your body metabolizes them moves back and forth.

Trina Felber: So talk a little bit about what you guys developed, because you made it pretty easy for us to figure out how to eat on a keto diet. So you developed your 321 Keto Meal Plan. So talk a little bit about that.

Jeremy Hendon: I can tell them about the recent one.

Trina Felber: Yeah, why is it 321?

Louise Hendon: So one of the things we realized was how painful it is going shopping, trying to find keto ingredients, whether it’s reading labels or even figuring out which vegetables would be good to buy. So we actually decided we wanna make sufficient meals [inaudible 00:22:17] the whole week, but we’re gonna limit it to 30 ingredients. And so that’s where the 3 comes from. Where does the 2 come from?

Jeremy Hendon: Because it’s 20 grams or less of carbs per day.

Louise Hendon: I’m blanking on why we called it that.

Trina Felber: Isn’t that funny?

Jeremy Hendon: Yeah.

Louise Hendon: And the 1 is because we have this one purpose in all our meal plans, which is to help you lose weight and feel healthier.

Jeremy Hendon: Yeah. Mostly to lose weight, I mean we really did focus, because so many people … They’re not therapeutic. They’re not designed if you’re trying to use it to treat something. They really are just designed to help you feel better and to lose weight, because that’s what we find so many people were asking us for and were jumping into keto for.

And so that’s how we developed them, to make sure to keep the carbs low enough that they serve everybody, and we made sure to make it easy enough and simple enough with 30 pure ingredients, which makes your shopping simpler, which saves money, and also just saves a lot of time in the kitchen, because you don’t need to buy a ton of ingredients. And particularly if you don’t live in a [inaudible 00:23:17] metropolitan city in the US and Canada, often you can’t find a lot of ingredients that are in certain recipes, and so-

Louise Hendon: Yeah, we also designed it so that you get lunch and dinner, because I know there’s a lot of meal plan services that are coming out with just dinner, and then it just becomes this, well how do you … keto’s not exactly a diet where you can just pick and choose which day you want to eat keto and then expect to get all the benefits and still feel good.

So we really designed it so that you’d get both lunch and dinner, and then you can choose whether you want to eat breakfast. And I know a lot of people who do intermittent fasting, so you could also shift your lunch to breakfast and the dinner meal to lunch, so depending on which meal you want to do intermittent fasting for you could also shift the meal plans around that way.

Jeremy Hendon: Well, just to be clear, it has breakfast recipes in there, it’s just we-

Louise Hendon: Yeah, there are optional breakfast recipes that we’ve provided as a whole … Like you can choose one to stick to for the whole week or something. But it’s not … It gives you a lot of flexibility in terms of planning your meals as well.

Trina Felber: And talking about fasting for a second, fasting is becoming more and more popular as well. Do you guys practice that? Do you do a fast?

Jeremy Hendon: Yeah, in the past 13 months we’ve done two five-day fasts, so we do. We don’t tend to do … I guess we do do the 15 to 16 hour fasting. We don’t mean to. We don’t really think about it. But we often don’t eat for 15 or 16, you know, from night until the next day. We actually like longer-term fasts a couple times a year.

Trina Felber: So you’ll do like a five-day fast all at once. And the other thing that you mentioned is doing the 16 hour fast where most people will stop eating around 8:00pm, and don’t eat until around noon the next day, which is what I tend to practice.

Louise Hendon: I’ve just been chatting to our friend, Chris Kelley, on this, and I’ve traditionally really liked that too. So I would only eat lunch, then dinner, then fast until the next day at lunch, maybe have coffee in the morning. That’s it.

Trina Felber: Right, that’s what I’ll do, I’ll do my coffee, my bulletproof coffee, in the morning, and otherwise fast.

Louise Hendon: Yeah. So what he pointed out, and what a lot of the research on sleep has really been pointing out is that can hack your circadian rhythm, because we do … it’s like our body knows when our day begins by our first meal in some ways. So there is a recommendation that it’s actually potentially better to skip dinner if you’re gonna do intermittent fasting, and instead have breakfast still. And breakfast should be something that’s perhaps higher in protein or a little bit high on fat so that you’re not having-

Trina Felber: So they’re thinking possibly starting your fast earlier in the day? But eating earlier. Your eight hours of eating starts with breakfast.

Jeremy Hendon: Specifically what the research says is in the absence of light … So light is sort of the first factor for your circadian rhythm, how your body sets your circadian rhythm, but in the absence of proper light cues, and we’re all most of the time in the absence of proper light cues because we get too much light at night, and we don’t get enough light immediately when we wake up because we don’t wake up right with the sun, and so in the absence of proper light cues your body actually starts turning to food to set your circadian rhythm, and if you’re not eating until 12:00 or 1:00, then it starts to think that’s the beginning of your day to some — That’s an oversimplification, but that’s part of what happens.

So we actually recommend if you’re going to to that to eat breakfast as soon as you get up, and then if you want to do 16 hours, then eat for the next 8 hours after you get up and then stop eating.

Trina Felber: What about kids? Any thoughts about kids? When you’re doing the -

Jeremy Hendon: We’re thinking of it. It’s nice of you to ask.

Trina Felber: No, I’m just thinking about my kids. They like doing what we’re doing, and the keto diet … There’s ways to modify it for kids, but I don’t know if you guys had any thoughts, or parents out there that have kids.

Jeremy Hendon: So, clearly, it’s been used for kids for a long time with the epilepsy and other [crosstalk 00:27:30]. So it’s clearly possible. Kids tend to be pretty active, so they deal pretty well with a few more carbs in general. Kids, unless they have eaten really bad or have other issues, tend not to be as metabolically inflexible as someone in their 40s, 50s, or 60s, who has a lot more problems that they’ve accumulated over the the term of their life.

So I don’t know that kids need it as much.

Louise Hendon: Well, perhaps an easier explanation is, everyone just uses paleo as the base diet and then depending on whether you want to lose weight or you have autoimmune conditions or if you’re active or whatever, or less active, then you modify that to become AIP or to become keto. And I think the same is for kids. You wanna start from that paleo base, and then you can see if they need something extra to help them, and you can modify it from there.

Jeremy Hendon: Or not even just to help them. Chris, for instance, he has … How old is Ivy? Two and a half now? Two and a half or three, I might be getting it wrong. I’m usually pretty good with that. But he’ll point out that they don’t try to keep her keto, although he was keto for a very long time. [inaudible 00:28:44]. But maybe two or three days at a time, she won’t really want many carbs. And they feed her an entirely paleo diet, but they’ll let her eat … They’ll actually let her eat rice sometimes. But they clearly feed her plenty of fruits, sweet potatoes and things, but she might go for three or four days without them sometimes.

And they’re not really worried about it one way or the other. I think it really does depend, like Louise said, on what you’re using it for. I don’t think for most healthy kids there’s a need to put them on a keto diet.

Trina Felber: Right. I like the idea that you guys talk about, using paleo as your base, almost like it’s the base of your pyramid, and then you build upon that if you need the AIP diet or if you need the keto diet, then that becomes the top of your pyramid. But your base is always a paleo diet. You always wanna keep that base the same, and then alter it a little bit for what you need. And the same thing is true, obviously, for kids as well. So that’s cool. That’s very easy to think about.

Jeremy Hendon: The thing about it is it’s not good for anybody to be eating processed junk. There’s just no situation where it’s good and healthy. You can do it, I’m not saying doing it occasionally is going to kill you, but don’t ever fool ourselves that it’s good for us.

Trina Felber: Right. And that’s what we’ve done. I don’t even know if we’ve fooled ourselves, but we’ve been told that it was okay, and so we’ve been brainwashed into believing that it’s okay, I guess. And now we’re rethinking that. And now we realize that it’s just not okay. It’s not okay for an everyday thing. ’Cause obviously it has some health ramifications from it.

Jeremy Hendon: And I’m not saying that we never do it. We’re going to Paris tomorrow, we’re traveling Europe right now. We’re going to Paris tomorrow and for a couple days we’ll be there, and I’ll probably eat some gluten. I’m not planning on it, but there’s a decent chance I might eat a little bit.

Well, okay, she might not. So it’s not that I’ll never do these things, but I also know if I’m doing it it’s bad for me. But I occasionally make a choice to do something that’s bad for me, you know what I mean?

Trina Felber: That’s funny. Well, I hope you enjoy your trip to Paris, that sounds amazing.

Is there anything that we missed, that we didn’t talk about, that you think viewers or listeners would want to know? Anything that we didn’t touch on?

Jeremy Hendon: What do you think?

Louise Hendon: I think we covered quite a lot.

Trina Felber: Yeah, I think so.

And we’re gonna put the link up for the viewers of the listeners. You’ll be able to click on the link and check out the 321 Keto Meal Plan. And I know you guys have videos and more information on the website, so is there anything you want to tell them about the meal plan itself? What to look for or what to expect? And I know you guys are offering right now 25% off I believe? Is that a discount for viewers? So check it out.

Jeremy Hendon: The only thing I’d say, meal plans have been really popular, people are really liking those in particular. We’ve actually been surprised at how much people are liking them, not to say that we didn’t think they were good to begin with, but we’re sometimes surprised at how popular something is and how much people like it. So those have been really popular, and people have really loved those. And people are actually using them.

Louise Hendon: I think it’s a really good way to get started on a keto diet without the confusion, without figuring out, “Well, what can I eat? Can I eat this?” And it is designed to be simple so that your shopping list isn’t overwhelming, which is I think … We don’t make it customizable, you can’t go in and change things and move things around, because what we find is when people do that they come out with a shopping list that’s three pages long, and then it’s just horrific and it’s not user friendly in the least.

We’ve really tried to pare down the number of ingredients so that each week you use the same past vegetables in three different dishes so that you don’t have to buy 50 ingredients again.

Jeremy Hendon: By the way, we only started making and selling these meal plans back in May, was it May? Somewhere right around May. I had no idea how much work goes into actually making great meal plans, to really make them good. And what I mean there is that there are a lot of things that you don’t necessarily think about before you start doing this. Putting recipes together that use the same ingredients so that not every recipe uses different ingredients-

Louise Hendon: But at the same time, they’re different recipes.

Jeremy Hendon: At the same time they’re different recipes, so you’re eating different things. Working all this out, fitting them together so that you’ve got the right amount of food and the right amount of carbs, particularly in a keto diet. All of these things. There are a lot of considerations [inaudible 00:33:40] really hard to do, and that’s why we ended up doing it, is because it really does take a lot of that work out. Not everybody would make their own meal plans, but nonetheless that’s a lot of work that you’d otherwise be doing one way or another, throughout the week.

So that’s why we did them, and I think why they’ve been so popular is because we have put in a ton of that work to actually figure all that stuff out, make great recipes, figure out how the recipes fit together, make sure we can fit them together in a way that people don’t have to have too many ingredients, they don’t get too much carbs, they don’t get way too much food or too little, but they get some variety. It’s a lot to think of. It’s worse than planning wedding seating.

Trina Felber: Awesome. Yeah, I totally appreciate that, because anytime you can simplify something … I’m totally into simplifying things. If it gets too overwhelming, it’s too easy to let it go and set it aside. So I appreciate the fact that you guys made it super simple for everybody to jump in and try it out and just get your feet wet with it. It’s just made so easy, so thank you. I appreciate that, which is why I wanted to bring this to all of my viewers and everybody that is health-conscious, but yet confused, and it just simplifies it, makes it easy. Here it is, here’s the plan, this is all you need. Just try it and do it.

So I appreciate that so much. So thank you. I appreciate you guys coming out and explaining everything, taking time out of your day. And I will post the link for all the viewers so that you can check out “321: The Keto Meal Plan” that Louise and Jeremy put together with all their hard work and effort, and we thank you for doing that.

Jeremy Hendon: Alright, thank you!

Louise Hendon: Alright, thank you!

Trina Felber: Alright, thanks guys!