#97 Thom King – Guy Gone Keto – Stevia Sauces

Meet Thom:

Show Notes:

ABOUT THOM

• I sort of adapted to keto for different reasons
• I work in the sweeteners space, so my company supplies sweeteners to manufacturers that make keto products
• It was probably 4 years ago that I was in Las Vegas for a trade show and went to dinner with one of our suppliers. I had steak, a potato, dessert, and wine. I got back to my room, looked in the mirror and I was disgusted with myself
• I woke up in the morning feeling sluggish, I got brain fog and I was carrying about 35 lbs. of extra weight
• I felt like an imposter because I was working in the health and nutrition field and I was not very healthy and I was not really focused on nutrition that much
• My grandfather was my biggest mentor and integrity was his cornerstone of who he was and when I looked in the mirror and I felt like I did not have very good integrity, I was not taking care of myself
• It was in that moment when I was looking myself in the mirror and really doing a hardcore self-assessment that I felt the pain of looking of who I have become
• At that point, I think that the pain of my crappy behavior exceeded the payoff
• I started journaling about what I was going to do to change the direction of my life and a part of it was to really jumping into keto, not as a diet, but as a lifestyle
• I tried keto as a diet before and it did not work
• I needed to adopt a different lifestyle and that’s what led to keto, fitness and getting in shape
• That was in the year 2015
• At one point in time, my blood pressure was 190/99, which is very high
• I was on blood pressure medication for a good solid year and after adopting a ketogenic lifestyle, my blood pressure is now 120/80 consistently
• Red wine was my thing and I would drink at least half a bottle every night
• I was drinking a lot of wine that increased my ferritin levels
• When you combine high blood pressure with iron levels in your blood, that’s just the recipe for a heart attack
• I stopped drinking wine when I went keto
• I’ll occasionally have a glass of wine, but I am not hitting the wine like I used to
• When you stop drinking wine, you realize it is more of a habit
• Now, I lean into other reward systems
• I still work for the same company and that is my main job
• We supply sweeteners to sports nutrition companies or any actual food manufacturers that are looking to have clean label sugar reduction in their current formulas
• The side hustle is Guy Gone Keto and it really sort of was incarnated by my journaling
• I was writing a lot and that’s what formed the book by the same name: Guy Gone Keto
• After a year and a half of journaling and probably couple of hundred pages with fairly decent material, I just turned it over to a publisher
• The book came out, but I was also finding out that I could not find any condiments that were keto-friendly
• I am a food technologist and so, I just got into the lab and made ketchup, barbecue sauce, teriyaki sauce and steak sauce that I could use – high in fat with no added sugar
• Out of it, we just launched the brand and it grew organically
• I was originally born in Wisconsin and my family moved to Colorado
• I was raised on a farm
• I moved to Arizona and from Arizona, I moved to LA and I worked in the entertainment industry
• About 15 years ago, I moved to Portland, Oregon and that’s where I really dug in my roots, started building the ingredient company, wrote a book and am trying to get another book out
• My book is a keto book and more about a lifestyle. It’s also about my journey and breaking several bad habits
• Mindfulness is a huge point and I think you need to be mindful when you eat
• Occasionally, somebody will come up to me and recognize me from the book which is hugely flattering unless it is a vegan because usually, the vegans are like, “you’re destroying the planet by only eating bacon and cheese.”
• And I think that is the biggest misunderstanding about keto
• I usually tell them that I actually eat more vegetables now that I ever had, but I do not eat starchy vegetables and I have eliminated fruits except for occasional berries
• I think when people go to the store and buy meat, they are just buying meat in a package
• I am also a proponent of hunting and people harvesting their own proteins because I think if you are intimately involved in that harvesting process, it takes a big shift
  

HOW DID YOU START KETO

• It looked like a big ugly train wreck in the beginning because I thought that I would be able to have cheat days
• So, I would go the entire week with a BHB supplement
• I wasn’t super disciplined in the beginning
• And so, I would take days where I would eat anything that I wanted and I would go crazy
• But, I found out that there is no such thing as a cheat day
• I don’t think that I have great metabolic flexibility, particularly since I have been keto so long
• I would say that the thing that really jumpstarted my success was fasting
• So, I started out doing a 36-hour fast every other week
• My first fast was a black fast which is having no water and that was probably sort of a spiritual experience
• The fasting every other week jumpstarted not just the weight loss, but also mental clarity
• The more I fasted, the more energy than I would have
• Now, I will do a 16/8 fasting
• The first one I did was dry fast, and then I just incorporate with the water
• Probably after 5 or 6 of those, I started incorporating some tea
• Coffee tends to play around with my sugar a little bit, while tea doesn’t, so during my fast, I stay away from coffee
• The BHB that I take is from a company called Pruvit
• I still check my weight every single day because I am big on data collection
• The 35 lbs. came off about 3 months
• I generally check my ketones first thing in the morning and if I am feeling a little junky in the afternoon, I will check it again
• If I have a diet coke or diet Pepsi anytime in the afternoon or before I go to bed, I am out of keto the next morning
• Zevia doesn’t affect me which I find it pretty interesting
• I’ve done tons of self-experimentation and what I found is, aspartame and sucralose will elevate my sugar levels slightly and bring my ketones down
• I really researched that quite a bit and found out that the sweet constituents that are in stevia or monk fruit are called glycoside and exist in nature
• Your body knows what to do with that and it recognizes it
• With food that is chemically created because sucralose is a chlorinated sugar molecule so, they treat it with chlorine gas and your body cannot metabolize it because it doesn’t exist in nature and our body is not designed to take any chemicals
• What happens is, your brain kicks in and it will give you an insulin response and you’ll fall off of keto
• I don’t believe when somebody says, “if it tastes sweet, it’s going to elicit an insulin response” because I had stevia and stevia is neutral so far, same as monk fruit

ABOUT YOUR COMPANY

• The  Guy Gone Keto was just a result of me not being happy with myself
• The way that I started Icon Foods was when I ran into a guy who came back from Paraguay who had some ground leaves in a jar and he asked me to try it
• When I tried it, it was about 25% sweeter than sugar and this was in the ’90s
• I immediately start to think that if I could unlock the sweet constituents from that leaf, I would have something like an industrial level sweetener
• That was about an 8-year journey of being able to figure that out by just using the vegetable and water
• The sweetener business I started is really because of metabolic disease
• I really believed in just making a difference
• So, I started the business purely in that perspective
• Because I am a food scientist and technologist, I just wanted ketchup on my hamburger and so, I went into the lab and started formulating the product and using it myself
• My colleagues told me to try selling it and we did

WHERE CAN PEOPLE FIND YOUR PRODUCTS

• guygoneketo.com or Amazon
• Sign up for our newsletter to be updated because I am always inventing new products
• The ketchup is super popular, but when we did the promotion for the teriyaki sauce everybody lost their minds
• So, I would say that the teriyaki sauce is our bestseller, followed by our barbecue sauce
• We have some people that are fanatics about our ketchup
• If you’re into deep frying or you can use an air-fryer
• What I have been doing is actually getting jicama, and cut jicama into a French fry’s size
• When you fry them up with French fries, they taste so much alike
• I use an air-fryer to cook bacon
• I heard peanut oil is probably a good quality oil to use
• I would use peanut oil if I did not have access to MCT oil
• You can reuse MCT oil about 10 times
• I have a little vessel where I pour the MCT oil and I will put it into the refrigerator

HEALTH BENEFITS FROM KETO

• Brain function. Just having a clear head
• Indigestion
• Weight loss
• Since I adapted keto, my hiatal hernia went away and along with it the heartburn
• When you look at carbs and glucose, those things are digested in your stomach
• Fat actually is metabolized in your liver
• So, there’s less digestive process going on in your stomach and more in that digestive process is pushed into your gut and your liver is handling a lot
• That’s my theory, it’s not really backed up with medicine, but it is supported with a lot of PhD’s that I know

WHERE CAN PEOPLE FIND YOU

• Websites: guyonketo.com thomking.com iconfoods.com stevia.com
• Facebook: Guy Gone Keto
• Instagram: guygoneketo
• LinkedIn: Thom King
• Twitter of Stevia Brands: Steviva Brands
• Thom’s Twitter: Thom King

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