#85 Bad Keto Diet Advice with Richard Nikoley

Richard Nikoley (0:00)

Less carbs, more fat. Less carbs, more fat, right? Don't count your calories, just eat more fat.

Eat fat to satiety. Stupidest fucking shit ever. Yeah, it's all this hyper palatability, like we talked about. It's actually what the food companies use to get you to buy their stuff more. How do I eat as much fat as I want but still lose weight kind of people? The way it's described isn't bullshit.

That's what I have a problem with bullshit, right?

Siim Land (0:31)

Body Mind Empowerment. Get stronger, faster, smarter, quicker, friendlier, more helpful, more driven.

Richard Nikoley (0:39)

Everything the body needs. Control your mind.

Siim Land (0:44)

Welcome to the Body Mind Empowerment Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land, and our guest today is Richard Nikoley. Richard is an entrepreneur, author and a blogger. He also runs the Facebook group Ketotard Chronicles that helps to differentiate helpful low-carb keto-advice from the nonsensical ones.

Richard, welcome to the show.

Richard Nikoley (1:05)

Thank you. Thanks, Siim.

Nice to be here.

Siim Land (1:07)

Yeah, I recently heard another podcast where you were a guest as well, and I just wanted to get you on the podcast on my own and talk about these. You have like a very unique way of saying things, and I would imagine that a lot of people can find this entertaining and educational at the same time.

But before we get into the nitty-gritty and things like that, why don't you give a little short backstory of where you're coming from and what's your story?

Richard Nikoley (1:37)

Sure, sure. And everybody in these various dietary space, carnivorous sort of, alio, low carb, keto, and then there's all of the so-called biohacking having to do with that as well, the circadian stuff and the lights and all of that.

So but anyway, it started for me back in about 2008, 2007, 2008 I'd already been a blogger since 2003 and quite a lot. My blog has 4,700 posts now on it, so it's a lot since 2003

But I had a business, a company, a financial services company, about 30 employees or so, and I was doing a lot of other stuff like properties, rental properties, and even like options trading, and I was doing all this stuff and stressing myself out and getting fat. I'm 57 now, so we're talking about 10 years ago, so I was coming up on 50 at the time, and getting that weight creep, that 10 pounds every year that adds up and adds up. And so I started going to the gym, and one thing led to another, and I stumbled into the whole paleo community, but at that time, low carb was quite well known at that time, but the more ancestral sort of evolutionary approach to it really resonated with me.

So I basically cut out the junk food and started eating meat, fish, fowl, vegetables, low fruit, kind of was paleo, low carb paleo, low carbish paleo, and I introduced fasting and I introduced lifting heavy weights and it worked. I dropped like about 50 pounds or so in the space of about a year and I blogged the whole journey and because at the time paleo was just starting to come up, I ended up getting to be pretty well known in the community and ended up doing a lot of podcast interviews like this and speaking engagements at conferences and so on. And then I guess with the advent of Jimmy Moore's keto clarity, I don't know, maybe sometime about five years ago or so, when this whole idea of nutritional ketosis came out, which is what it means is that you can get in ketosis by just caloric restriction. Fasting gets you into ketosis, enough caloric, chronic daily caloric restriction, maybe 300 calories on up, and you'll get into ketosis. But nutritional ketosis was really what was originally known as the epileptic diet. It's a way to get 100% of your energy, but still shoot off ketones, which can ameliorate the seizure problem with epilepsy.

But it's really gone off the rails then, so it was about a year or so, a little over a year, maybe 15 months. It was June of 2017, when I just got this idea, I said enough is enough, and so I created that Facebook group, Richard Nikoley's Ketotard Chronicles. It only has about 2,000 members of it, but a lot of them are very astute people. So, it's not a bunch of people searching for info on how do I eat as much fat as I want but still lose weight kind of people. It's more people who are knowledgeable about the science, and so we, you know, it's part science based, so it's three parts to it really. So part of it is to put out the real science on ketosis and be critical about it. You know, for some people it's good, for some people it's bad, and it depends on what level and where your proteins are in the whole scheme.