Today is Day 10 of following Dr Georgia Ede’s plan, from her book, Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind: A Powerful Plan To Improve Mood, Overcome Anxiety, And Protect Memory For A Lifetime Of Optimal Mental Health.

I’m aiming for about 8 weeks to help me reset the internal mental and metabolic chaos that has accumulated over the past few years when I’ve been more lax with how I’ve been eating. My husband is joining me. As well as one of my friends who has diabetes type 2. It’s been a while since I’ve been as strict with myself with eating healthy. Not since those early years when we learned to use keto for my husband’s cancer. When I accidentally discovered that eating keto also helped my mental health (as someone who was once diagnosed with bipolar disorder type 2).

It’s remarkable how different I feel eating this way, compared to how I was eating just a few weeks ago.

I just feel so much more calm. The incessant food noise has disappeared. As Dr. Georgia Ede says herself in her book, when she first began eating keto, she wrote in her food log: This is a calm diet.

That’s why she renames her diet plan “Quiet”, as in “Quiet Paleo”, “Quiet Keto.” I’m following her roadmap, beginning with at least two weeks of “Quiet Paleo”, then aiming for “Quiet Keto” for another six weeks.

It’s miraculous that after just 9 days of eating this way, my fasting glucose has dropped to a healthy number again. This morning, my fasting glucose was 85 mg/dL. My ketones/BHB: 1.0 mmol/L. My GKI (Glucose to Ketones Ratio): 4.7. (Note: GKI < 9 means you are in ketosis. When my husband had cancer and used keto as an adjunct to conventional treatment, he kept his GKI under 3.)

My friend and I text each other to keep each other accountable. She tells me her fasting glucose used to hover in the 300s to 400s range, but with just a focus on protein and less carbs, she’s down to about 168. She hasn’t needed to take her insulin. Even though she had eaten some ice cream the day before, she is still 200 points lower than what it used to be. She’s added a daily walk.

We’re counting the days.

I text her images of my calendar, crossing off the days: “Happy Day 9!”, “Happy Day 10!”

She jokes back: “It’s like being a drug addict counting the days of sobriety.”

And it is. It’s no joke. Food addiction is real.


Lily Chien-Davis

I am a writer curious about all the ways we feed bliss into our minds and bodies. With the short time we all have on this earth, how might we be our best selves with ourselves and each other? I enjoy sharing what I am still learning to be a better human.

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