Ease. Can you bottle it up?
Bliss: What if it came in a pill that lasted for a very long time?
This morning, I felt both ease and bliss just swelling up in my chest as I walked, feeling utmost joy as I listened to the saddest of songs. I asked myself, what conditions helped me to feel this way?
I woke up with a fasting glucose of 99 mg/dL and ketone (BHB) levels of 0.1 mmol/L, which was surprising since I definitely ate a lot more carbs the day before. But I’ve also been introducing more fasts lately: intermittent and a few 24 hour ones. So even though my ketones were low earlier, it’s safe to say that I’m pretty keto-adapted, compared to how I used to be before I learned about the power of ketosis.
I would say these days I am about 80/20 when it comes to eating keto and low-carb, but I always go back to keto because of how it makes me feel. Fasting is also a way to get into ketosis, even if you’re not eating keto 100%.
Sometimes I wonder if the year I was in measurable daily ketosis with an average GKI of 6 (as measured and tracked using Heads Up paired with a Keto-Mojo meter) has contributed in me feeling better than ever, even after so many years.
Note: Glucose: Ketones Index/GKI of under 9 means you’re in ketosis; when my husband had cancer in 2014 , now in remission, and we used a therapeutic keto diet as an adjunct with conventional treatment, we aimed to get his GKI under 2 much of the time, after reading Thomas N Seyfried‘s book, Cancer As A Metabolic Disease and a brief consult with Miriam Kalamian, who wrote Keto for Cancer.
Regular mostly low-carb, keto-eating, fasting, meditating and consistent exercising (including slow walking), being out in nature, staying away from news and social media, learning, creative writing, especially slow-writing, and surrounding myself with good positive people and accountability (in all the ways) has been helping me.
On my walk today marveling at the beautiful turquoise jewel that is Barton Springs, I was thinking that I feel better now at 51 in mind and body than I did back in my 20s and 30s. We live on the 15th floor of an apartment building we’re currently renting, pausing from the RV life for now, and over the years, even during the pandemic, I have no problem regularly walking up the stairs as opposed to taking a crowded elevator up to our apartment. In fact, I can sprint up 15 floors’ worth of stairs in under 5 minutes!
Then it dawned on me: It wasn’t until my 40s that I started eating better, started learning about the health benefits of fasting, of autophagy, of ketosis, insulin resistance, oxytocin. It’s crazy to think, but it was because of my partner getting cancer that helped us to really reign in on what we were eating and how we had been living. A friend of ours had told us about the keto diet and we dove in headfirst in 2014 and have never looked back. Ketosis via food and fasting helped us to feel better in mind and body.
Although I’m still learning today about mental and metabolic health, I feel grateful that we now know how to use it to feel better!
In fact, speaking of oxytocin and ketosis, I just listened to this oxytocin-inducing podcast episode with these two women doctors who I love and wanna share.
It’s never too late to focus on better health using ketosis as a portal. It’s no surprise that bliss and ease are a natural result.
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