My entire journey with food, body, and fitness up until the last couple years has been completely fucked.
It was based on wanting to be skinny so I could be more loved, feel more attractive, and prove that I wasn’t enough as I was in the moment.
I looked at food as evil. I only worked out to lose weight. I found every possible thing wrong with my body and let my inner critic have a megaphone when it came to my body image.
Although it’s incredibly easy to get tied up into diet and fitness culture with social and cultural conditioning, I take full responsibility of my experience and have learned many valuable lessons from my time spent relating my worthiness to how I looked.
So, after losing 60 pounds and restricting my diet, counting calories, and being cray cray around it all–I started studying Eating Psychology…
Through studying to be certified at the Institute for the Psychology of Eating I was able to create a more spiritual relationship with food + body, and I gave myself some grace for the first time in my life to let my body just “be” and eat whatever I wanted.
There are 11 Phases of Nourishment us humans can be in at any time in our lives–I definitely was in the “anything goes” + “emotional” phase for a long time and ate intuitively.
Mentally, emotionally, and spiritually that was great for me to chill out around my past hyper controlled behaviors but then I started to want to actually FEEL really good in my physical body.
Years later after healing the emotional trauma with food, body, and fitness, I was desiring more energy, less brain fog, better poops, better sleep, not to feel bloated after eating anything…I wanted to feel GREAT physically.
I wanted to learn how to heal my adrenal fatigue naturally…
So in true Libby fashion, I dove IN DEEP to the wellness world again but with a different lens than losing weight–this time my lens was: How can I feel epic + focus on longevity?
I did a ton of research on keto which simply put is: eating real food + healthy fats so your body can burn fat for fuel vs. burning sugars + carbs (this is called ketosis because your body is using + burning ketones in your body).
I then hired an expert to write me a meal plan for doing keto since I wanted to make sure to do it in a healthy way and have ultimate benefits.
It wasn’t too much of a change since 99% of the time I eat real whole foods of high quality–but I did cut out these which have made me feel so much better it could make me cry with happiness:
-Dairy
-Sugar (including fruit)
-Refined Carbs (breads, pastas, crackers, etc)
And these are things I eat typically (organic + grass fed + pasture raised + non-antibiotic + high quality):
Greens (arugula, kale, spinach, mixed greens, broccoli sprouts, etc), cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts), mushrooms (only in powder form for me bc of taste), chicken, steak (I was hardcore vegan for years and feel so much better eating high quality beef now), olive oil, avocado oil, coconut oil, macadamia nuts, almond milk, coconut creamer, flaxseed crackers, Mykonos vegan cheese, avocado/guacamole & I would eat salmon if I liked sea food haha
All my sauces are from Primal Kitchen as I found that so many sauces I was using had sugar and traces of gluten in them as well.
Then obviously getting hydrated every day with Mountain Valley Spring Water (the best).
So, I’m almost 5 months in now and & here’s what I’ve noticed in my own body from eating keto:
- I have 100x more energy
- My blood sugar is stable
- I stay full longer
- I am less bloated/inflamed
- My brain fog is gone
My biggest excitement + celebration is having more energy which is why I decided to test keto in the first place.
It’s not a challenge at all to eat keto either–it’s straightforward and simple, which I love.
I also think it’s important to note that eating this way does not feel restricting to me because I genuinely feel happy choosing to eat things that make me feel better.
Depending on where you’re at with your body image, food, and fitness journey, doing something like this could feel like deprivation and that’s not fun…feeling like you’re restricting yourself leads to rebellion.
Diet culture is fucked and all based on making you feel bad–I’m choosing to eat this way not from scarcity that my body needs to change externally but from a place of deep desire to feel my best physically and internally.
So yeah–it might be trendy to do keto but honestly, it’s helped me so much already. I’m grateful so many functional medicine doctors and experts are sharing the message.
And, it’s not all cheese and animals–in fact I just read a book called
Ketotarian which is plant-based keto.
That’s my update for now–I plan on doing keto-ish for the next few months as well to see how my body continues to feel.
So excited to share more with you on my healing journey and will share more on what I’ve been focused on recently (hint: healing my gut).
Lots of love,
Xo-Libby
