#54 Biohacking the Ketogenic Diet with John Limansky MD

John Limansky (0:00)

You can get rid of 90% of your liver and still function. If you get rid of one more percent, you have full blown liver failure and you die.

A lot of people do not understand that being in ketosis doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to lose fat. Why is our insulin elevated? Why is our glucose elevated? We're just treating the number. And that, I think, we need to get away from, and we need to start focusing on the underlying cause, which everything that you and I have talked about on this podcast is really going to the root cause. If you think about it, a lot of theories that are discounted in the past in the medical community come back around, you know, 50, 100, 200 years later.

And for some reason, we realize, oh, you know what, that guy who was saying this was actually right. The monks used to go and meditate and reach nirvana. Well, I'm assuming probably some of that nirvana is because they were in deep ketosis. They weren't eating.

Siim Land (0:53)

Body, mind, empowerment.

SPEAKER_3 (0:55)

Get stronger, faster, smarter, quicker, friendlier, more helpful, more driven.

John Limansky (1:01)

Everything the body needs.

SPEAKER_3 (1:02)

Control your mind.

Siim Land (1:05)

Welcome to the Body, Mind, Empowerment Podcast. I'm your host, Siim Land, and our guest today is the biohacking doctor, John Limansky.

John is a board certified physician of internal medicine who has worked with hundreds of patients. His approach focuses on nutrition, and he's a big proponent of the ketogenic diet as well. John, I'm glad that you could make it to the show, and I want to welcome you.

John Limansky (1:30)

Yeah, thank you, Siim. Really good to be here.

Siim Land (1:33)

Yeah, I'm glad.

So, like, let's talk about keto, because it doesn't really fit the mainstream narrative or the mainstream dietary recommendations of health and obesity. So how did you get involved with keto, and how did you implement it into your practice?

John Limansky (1:51)

Yeah, great question. So I've actually been doing a version of keto for 12, 13 years. And you're right, it's not what the mainstream medical community has recommended, but it's starting to change. And I think hopefully soon we'll see that the mainstream will kind of catch up. But my story is I used to be a pretty competitive triathlete, not professional, but I used to do quite a bit of training. And I was very healthy. I thought I ate very well. I was mostly eating vegetables, lean fish, no fat whatsoever, very low body fat percentage, you know, muscular. And I had to do some blood work to see kind of for an experiment when I was in medical school. And what I found out was that I had actually developed insulin resistance and I was pre-diabetic.

And so at that time, I figured this is wrong. How can this be? So I rechecked the labs and sure enough, I was still pre-diabetic. And at the time, there wasn't much information out there. I thought I was following, you know, the perfect recommended diet. I was exercising. And so I started going down the path of figuring out why is this happening, right? This doesn't make sense.

And at the time, not too much information. There wasn't really much on the Internet. So I started looking at Adkins and reading some of the research behind that. And started implementing more fat into my diet.

And three months later, we checked my labs. Everything had resumed and was back to normal.

So that got me thinking, well, maybe there is something more to it than just eat, you know, very, very high vegetable diet with no fat. And since then, it's been a progression where now we're having so much research out there looking at specifically the ketogenic diet, really good books like Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. And, you know, the science is catching up to what you and I know, which is that saturated fats, healthy fats are actually necessary for nearly every function of the body.

And so for the last six, seven years, I've been strictly keto. And, yeah, it's been basically part of my lifestyle. Since then, yeah, go ahead.

Siim Land (4:18)

Yeah, I wanted to say that, yeah, a lot of people follow the same story in the sense that their health got messed up because of eating the mainstream diet or the standard American diet or even like the food pyramid diet as well.

And it's funny how to see how going the opposite direction completely improves their health entirely, and it's quite funny to see. What are some of the...

John Limansky (4:42)