#58 What Happens After 18 Years Eating the Ketogenic Diet - Luis Villasenor aka DarthLuiggi from KetoGains

Luis Villasenor (0:00)

Yeah, when you're young, you can basically eat an ice cream and you grow strong. Or you can just look at a piece of meat and you gain muscle. When you become older, you have to go out of your way to ingest your blood in it. So if you don't use it, you lose it. If you don't do some sort of exercise or strength training or whatever, your body decides that you don't need that much muscle. You're going to have to be tracking something. I'd rather you track your macros, not really ketones, right?

We call that ketones. I can put ketones in my body. It doesn't mean that I'm producing them. You are really in ketosis if you produce those ketones yourself, right? They go with a simple is better. And you're going to get like 90% of the results that you want by doing the fewest thing possible. You're on a diet, not on a culinary tour.

SPEAKER_2 (0:46)

So just stick to basics.

Siim Land (0:49)

Get like body, mind empowerment.

SPEAKER_4 (0:51)

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

Siim Land (0:57)

Everything the body needs.

SPEAKER_4 (0:58)

Control your mind.

Siim Land (1:02)

Welcome to the Body, Mind and Power Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land and our guest today is Luis Villasenor. Luis is known as Darthluigi Online and he's the founder of the KetoGains subreddit and website.

SPEAKER_5 (1:14)

He's been doing the ketogenic diet for nearly 18 years, if I'm correct, and he's successfully built an amazing physique with it.

Siim Land (1:21)

So Luis, I want to welcome you to the show and I'm glad to have you here.

Luis Villasenor (1:25)

Thank you, Siim, for having me.

SPEAKER_5 (1:27)

Yeah, I think you're really one of the living legends of the ketogenic diet because there really isn't anyone else who has been doing this for so long. So how long has it actually been?

Luis Villasenor (1:38)

Yeah, you got it right. About 18 years now, consistently. Of course, people always ask me if I haven't eaten a carb in 18 years. Of course, I do have some deviations. It's normal. It's pretty much like someone who is not doing keto will probably do keto five, six days in a year. I also go out of keto on average, I'd say five, six days in a year, and very much on purpose. Like I want to eat some chocolate cake or whatever.

If the occasion really is worth it, I may go out of keto for a meal, basically. It's not something that I go for a whole week, just for a single meal.

SPEAKER_5 (2:20)

Yeah, but you still kind of maintain, let's say, a state of nutritional ketosis almost all the time, basically.

Luis Villasenor (2:26)

Exactly. Yeah, that's basically my way of life.

SPEAKER_5 (2:29)

That's cool. So what got you into ketosis?

Luis Villasenor (2:34)

Very much I did it at first without knowing that it was actually ketosis. I was more so trying to follow a classic bodybuilding cutting diet, which as most people already know, is just eating super low carb in the way that you don't eat starches. You eat lots of green vegetables.

You eat protein, basically broccoli and chicken rice, right?

SPEAKER_2 (2:58)

No rice, just broccoli and chicken.

Luis Villasenor (3:01)

Trying to find out more the science behind it, and I started reading about the ins and outs, the whys and hows.

And I started a little bit of research on the internet. At the time, we didn't have Reddit. And so, I'm talking about late 1999, 2000 And there were bulletin boards, and there was a bulletin board regarding bodybuilding. And there was one particular, I don't even remember the name. It was very much like IRCC chat, or even Lyle McDonald participated. So at the time, he was finishing or had just finished his book, The Ketogenic Diet.

And I remember that someone pointed me to that book, which was very basically the Bible or in my heart, it's the Bible of a ketogenic diet for recomposition purposes. And that basically, that's what got me to keto.

SPEAKER_5 (4:00)

Yeah, yeah, that's, that's, you're so correct in the sense that keto has become very popular within the last few years only. And before that, you really had to dig very deep into finding out the information of how to do it.

And people are even skeptical about whether or not you can build muscle. And when you showed up in the scene of, oh, I've been doing it for 12 years, and the people were like, okay, maybe, maybe there is something there that can actually work. So how did you see your performance change after the first periods of starting keto?