#88 Craig Emmerich – Environmental Factors

Craig Emmerich graduated in Electrical Engineering and has always had a systems approach to his work. He is also an international best selling author. He followed his wife Maria into the nutrition field and has since dedicated his time researching and looking at nutrition and biology from a systems perspective. Over the last 10 plus years he has worked with hundreds of clients along side Maria to help them heal their bodies and lose weight leveraging their biology and a ketogenic lifestyle to make it easy.

ABOUT CRAIG

• Maria, my wife, started our family on this journey and it was to help herself with health issues
• She struggled all through her high school with not only her weight, but also with PCOS, acid reflux and IBS type issues
• She tried everything that conventional wisdom told her to do, which is to eat a lot of healthy whole grains, low-fat and exercise more
• She was doing all those things and nothing was improving
• She went on to college for health and human performance and got a lot of the same nutrition messages
• She even got to a point where she would run marathons, but would not see improvements in her health and not lose weight
• Immediately after school, she started researching everything she could get her hands on: studies and books. They were talking about different lifestyles and she learned about low-carb and the ketogenic approach
• She incorporated it into her own life and was seeing huge improvements
• It was kind of an eye-opening experience for her and while in the process, everybody wanted to know what she was doing and so, she started writing a book
• It took me a little bit longer and it was harder for me to come around to the whole idea
• But during the week, she’ll make food for the both of us and I would eat out during the weekends. I’d have some other things that I was not yet willing to give up
• After a couple of years of seeing her improvements, I started to come on board and I did not like how I felt on the weekends anymore
• So, I completely converted over about 10 or 12 years ago and our family has always been this way
• I’ve seen big improvements in my digestion and how I feel
• The biggest thing for me is the mental clarity and the amount of focus I am able to put into things
• I had about 40 lbs. of extra weight that went away too
• About 8 years ago, we brought home our sons and they were barely registering in the height and weight charts
• So, we just started feeding them what we ate
• Sleep is an important thing for healing, weight loss and just general health
• If you don’t get enough quality sleep, your hunger is increased the next day
• So, sleep is very important for weight loss
• The blue light blocking glasses might help a little bit just to get the melatonin going
• Because we live in such an estrogenic environment, when you go keto, the body will start detoxing that estrogen which raises your estrogen levels and you get imbalanced with progesterone
• And what happens is, people will fall asleep okay, but then wake up at 2:00 AM and they can’t fall back to sleep
• That is a classic sign of low progesterone
• They can add some supplements like, evening primrose oil and progesterone cream before going to bed to help balance those levels while the body is detoxing and getting rid of those bad estrogens
• Our bodies store toxins in our fat cells and as you lose body fat, you are going to release those toxins into your system and go through the detoxification pathways
• In general, we tend to stick with symptoms, but everybody is different
• But, all lab ranges of “normal” are all just based on the average of what those labs see
• And it is for people who are on a standard American diet
• So, if you are eating a standard American diet, those ranges might be where you want to be
• If you are eating keto or some other way, we really do not know the “normal” range
• A slower thyroid is shown to be good for longevity
• As far as labs go, you have to be more critical and we tend to look at more symptoms and go by those
• We are not a big fan of bio identical hormone replacement or those kind of things
• We try to treat with food – ketogenic diet
• We’ve had so many women that are menopausal or post-menopausal that have seen reductions in their symptoms and balancing of their hormones when they are keto
• Diet alone can go a long way to help
• There’s a lot of natural supplements that can help balance things too and that’s the route we typically go
• Skin has a lot of fat in it
• When you fill your body with unhealthy fats, that can be oxidized easily, then your skin is composed of those. So, when you hit the sun, you will burn easier because you have fats that are populating your body that are not stable
• When you switch to keto, you will get more stable saturated fats that aren’t going to be easily oxidized
• Omega-6 is still an essential fatty acid and you still need some of it, but it is balancing that against omega-3
• When you are in keto, you cut those all out so you will get a one to one balance in omega-6 and omega-3
• But in general, I would look for an omega-9 as a base

• Intermittent fasting tends to come naturally for people that are eating keto
• With this lifestyle, you keep insulin and glucose levels low
• So, you are not getting those hunger pangs
• A lot of people just go naturally with 2 meals a day and maybe for 6 to 8 hours of time
• There’s a lot of added benefits when you do intermittent fasting where your body can do other things like, autophagy
• When blood sugar is falling, you get hungry. It doesn’t have to be low, it is just when it starts to fall
• So, when you eat a bunch of carbs, your blood sugar spikes too high and insulin spikes as well
• So, your blood sugar rapidly drops about an hour or so after you eat
• Even though you ate a very large meal, you will get hungry because your blood sugar is falling
• That is the viscous cycle that a high-carb diet produces
• If you eat the right kinds of food, after your meal you should be energized

TYPICAL DAY OF YOUR DIET

• Most days, I will start with some sorts eggs
• Whether it’s eggs and bacon or eggs mixed with cheese. That’s usually around 9:00 AM or 10:00 AM
• And then, around 3:00 PM or 4:00 PM, I will have my second meal that can be a number of different things, but it is usually some sort of eggs
• It is predominantly what you probably call, carnivore
• With my Lyme disease that I have been dealing with for the last couple of years, I found that being carnivore will keep my symptoms down
• One symptom that I had with Lyme was slowly getting more and more pain throughout my back
• Finally, I got to the point where I was limited enough in what I was doing to go in and just go to a functional doctor and get a blood test done to see if there is something going on
• I had been keto at that point for about 6 or 7 years
• Everything looked great, but the CRP which is a marker for inflammation came back at 50 and I realized that something was not right
• My publisher told me to take a test and it came back positive

WHAT IS NEXT FOR YOU

• The big thing is our carnivore book that is coming out this October
• Maria’s doing an air-fryer cookbook that is coming out this December
• Skin is the biggest organ in our body
• People do not realize that everything you put in your skin is absorbed into your body

WHERE ARE WE FIND YOU

https://www.facebook.com/ketoadapted