Speaker 1:
Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast, the weekly podcast where Dr. G gives you the tools you need to boost your health and live your healthiest life.
Dr. Gundry:
We’re approaching the most wonderful time of the year as Andy Williams crooned. But for most of us Americans, it’s the most health wrecking time of the year too. In fact, did you know that the average American gains five pounds over the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas? I get it. The Thanksgiving feast and all the holiday parties with indulgent foods can be tempting. But it doesn’t have to be this way for you. That’s why today I’m going to give you some life changing tips to help strengthen your focus and keep you on track with your health goals even during the holidays. I’m also going to offer my recommendations about which supplements to include during the holiday season and which drinks to serve at your holiday party. That is, if you drink, otherwise, don’t start and I’ll reveal what foods and beverages my wife and I pregame with to help us avoid eating foods at get togethers we’ll regret later. Plus, I’ll share with you some of my best recipes and ingredient swaps so that you can have a delicious holiday feast of traditional holiday foods you love that actually love you back. Stay right there.
I’ll be back after a short message from our sponsor.
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Yes, the holiday season is upon us and you deserve to enjoy it to your very best. But historically speaking, as you know, the average American gains five pounds, yes, five pounds, between Thanksgiving and New Year’s every year and you know that the holidays can wreak havoc on our health with the foods that we choose to eat. So that’s why weight gain is so common for most of us at this time of the year. But you don’t have to fall into the winter weight gain trap. So in just a minute, I’m going to share my tips for enjoying the holiday season without sacrificing the lean, healthy body you want in the process. So topic number one, what to do before the party and this may be my most important tip of this entire podcast. It’s preparing for the party that really is going to make all the difference. So you don’t want fast all day because you know you’re going to be gorging on foods that really you don’t have any other time of the year.
What you really want to do is, number one, eat something healthy before you get to the party, before you walk out the door. Now, I’ve told you before, grab a handful of nuts whether they’re walnut or macadamia nuts or pistachios, hazel nuts your choice and know the mixed cocktail mix with the peanuts and cashews do not count as a healthy choice. Eat it before you get there. Don’t say, “Well, I know they’re going to have handfuls of nuts and I’ll just grab them when I get there,” because chances are, it’s going to be that classic cocktail mix, which is quite deadly, not only because of the peanuts and cashews, but also because of all the really bad vegetable oils they’ve been cooked in. Have yourself a half an avocado. It’s actually a great way to get full before you head to the party. I personally like a bunch of jicama sticks dipped in guacamole. It’s going to give you the crunch that you’re going to crave when you go to the holiday party so you won’t be tempted by that giant bowl of corn chips or potato chips.
You’ll already have the crunch out of the way. The other thing to arrive with before you get there is a stomach that’s full, quite frankly, of my favorite sparkling water, San Pellegrino or sparkling water of your choice and you know my trick. Put a little bit of balsamic vinegar in it. It’s going to taste like a Coke. But you’re going to have all that nice bubbly fullness in your stomach before you get there and that’s going to really, really take the edge off of things before you get to the party and it’s a trick that I use whenever I’m heading out for anybody’s house or any holiday party and we certainly do get invited to our fair share of them. So topic number two, what do you eat once you get to the party? Well, one of the first things you do, and I always look like somebody who’s almost cutting into line, as you know, a lot of these parties are buffets. A lot of them are bring your own.
If it’s a bring your own dish, Penny and I always makes something unique that nobody else is going to try and it usually ends up being kind of a big winner. For instance, you’d be surprised how many times we’ll take a raw coleslaw as a dish and it’s not something that everybody brings and we make it quick. You can even buy coleslaw mix, the cabbage and a few raw carrots. Make your own dressing. We actually make it out of avocados and guacamole. It’s really delicious and people are struck with how good it is. You don’t have that much time, actually take guacamole and mix it with cole slaw mix and you’ll be shocked with how good it is and it’s going to give people the crunch they’re looking for.
But getting back to scanning the buffet table, what I’ll do is I’ll actually look, walk down from one end to the other and see what my obstacles are and see how I can actually fill up my plate with stuff that is going to look like I’m stuffing myself and it’s going to look like I’m really enjoying whatever our host and hostess has put out. But I’ve filled my plate up with a lot of the vegetables and believe me, as you fill up with vegetables, you’re going to find that you really don’t have any room for all the wonderful, awful stuff. Are there any foods you should never eat at a holiday party? Well, it’s actually most of them. But first of all, one of my favorite holiday drinks is eggnog. Interestingly enough, I always blame getting sick at holiday parties on eggnog and as it turns out, I was right because most eggnogs, number one, they’re buying at a store. Number two, there’s so much sugar content in eggnog. It’s unbelievable. Even if it was was made with half and half, it’s most likely casein A1 milk.
So maybe there’s a really healthy egg in it. But that’s about it. If you want the eggnog, believe it or not, eat a hard boiled egg with a little of eggnog spices, nutmeg sprinkled on it and you’ll actually be shocked with how good it tastes and you’ll say, “Oh yeah, that’s a pretty good replacement for eggnog.” So those are some of the tricks, which brings me to one of the tricks I talked about years ago with my wife Penny. She loves bread. I think if she could have any food in the world, it would be bread and she knew from experience that bread didn’t love her. As you know, we try to teach you how to eat foods you love, but love you back. So we decided to use a mantra for Penny that bread was something she couldn’t have. But she was a person who doesn’t eat bread and she defined herself in this way so no longer was, “Oh, I can’t have the thing I love.” I’m a person who doesn’t eat bread and to this day, it’s fascinating.
Whenever a waiter comes over to a table, particularly at a restaurant we don’t know or has a great reputation for baked goods, she goes, “No, I’m sorry. We don’t eat bread,” and that’s it and it’s work for her. So go to the party with that intention in mind. I’m a person who doesn’t eat five pieces of cheesecake. It’s easy to say, “I’m a person who doesn’t eat fruitcake,” and that’s a story in itself. But just start with that mantra. I’m a person who doesn’t eat this. I’m a person who used to eat a pound of M&Ms. When I go to a party now and that pound is sitting there, I am a person who doesn’t eat peanut M&Ms anymore and it’s a whole lot easier rather than depriving myself. Okay, it’s holiday season and it’s time to drink and that’s when things really start to get out of hand. Yes, alcohol is a great way to reduce inhibitions and it makes people social and people say the most fascinating things at holiday parties that the next day they wish they hadn’t said.
But the important thing is you’ve got to be realizing that even though alcohol does decrease your so social inhibitions and makes you who a much more friendly person, it also decreases your inhibitions on going for the foods that you’ve already decided you’re not going to do. So are there safe ones to drink? Are there not safe ones to drink? First of all, interestingly enough, there are some studies that suggest that red wine and also champagne, particularly what’s called non-dosage champagne, where there’s no sugar added and straight alcohol, now be it gin, bourbon, whiskey, scotch, please no vodka or tequila that’s colored may not break ketosis and there’s actually some exciting work done by some of the founders of Dry Farm Wines that they’ve drunk their red wine and did not break their ketosis. I’ve experimented with that myself and I can drink red wine, particularly from Italy and France and I don’t break a ketosis fast, which is fun fact. Now that’s not a license to say, “Dr. Gundry says that I will stay in ketosis if I drink red wine.”
Believe me, if you drink a bottle of red wine, the odds are you will break your ketosis. So that’s not a license to drink. Number two, take a tip from my father. My father rose to executive vice president of Mutual Beaumont insurance companies in Omaha and he was constantly, constantly at cocktail parties and he had to have his wits about him. So he would meet the bartender at whatever function he was. He would order himself a gin and tonic and he would take that gin and tonic back to the bartender and the rest of the night he would be having a gin and tonic that had no gin in it and it looked exactly like what he did the rest of the night and he appeared to be the jovial, fine person he was. But he never got inebriated like most of the people he was with. I learned this trick from him as an undergraduate at Yale.
Fun fact, I had a bet with my father that I would not drink, smoke or toke for four years at Yale and if I accomplished that, which I did, I would get a car, which I did and how did I do it? Well, quite frankly, when you go to all these mixers, I would get a ginger ale in a glass without ice and ginger ale in a glass without ice looks like a beer. Now warning, do not do this at home. Chugging a ginger ale is one of the worst experiences I have ever had in my life. Go ahead. Try it. So I learned from my father that you can appear to be drinking alcohol and not drink alcohol and I think that’s the point to take away. The other point to take away is, as silly as it seems, dilute your alcohol with ice cubes or with sparkling water. Make a spritzer and make a point of it, saying it’s the holidays. I want a holiday spritzer. Can I have some sparkling water in my wine? There’s always ways around this and if you do drink, please don’t drive.
There’s plenty of Ubers and Lyfts out there now and don’t get on the road please. Okay, what are you going to do before you go to bed? First of all, please, please, please, please try to stay up rather than crashing into bed. So many studies show that if you go to bed on a full stomach, you’re going to have really impaired sleep. You probably going to get some heartburn that you wish you hadn’t done and you’re going to regret it in the morning. Now when I stay up, what you do is get yourself a pair of blue blocking glasses. They are ubiquitous now. You can get them on Amazon or wherever you want to go for about $10. Block blue light. That way, you can watch your favorite TV show or you can read a book. You can be on your Kindle and it won’t impact you going to sleep. There’s more and more and more really important research coming out that even brief exposures to blue light before you go to bed is going to impact your sleep pattern. But stay up and don’t just crash into bed.
The next thing, if you screwed up and before you go to bed, say, “Okay, I screwed up and I’m not going to do this again,” because usually you notice you’re going to feel bad before you go to bed and almost certainly you’re going to feel bad when you wake up and make the intention. Okay, that’s it. I did it. It’s out of my system. That doesn’t mean that the rest of this holiday season because I screwed up once or maybe twice, I’m just going to blow the whole thing. Once you fall off the horse, as I tell all my patients, just get right back on. It doesn’t mean that you’re a failure and this whole holiday season is down the drain. Just get back on the horse. One day is not going to make that big a difference. Okay, so that’s it for holidays. Now people are always asking me about what kind of supplements to take, particularly around the holiday season.
The holiday seasons, you’re going to be exposed to a lot of different individuals in close personal contact and the best thing I can tell you to do is make sure you’re taking vitamin D3. Be conscientious about taking vitamin D3. If Penny and I know we’re going on an airplane, we double, triple, quadruple the vitamin D that we normally take and I can tell you it makes a huge difference in preventing flu, viruses, colds because you’re going to be in close personal contact. If you want to add some vitamin C to your regimen, just remember that vitamin C is water soluble and it only lasts for about two or three hours in your system. So easy fun thing to do is buy some chewable vitamin C tablets. Please get the sugar-free kind that don’t have surculose and chew about four during the day every four to six hours and it’s another great trick for the holidays and it really works. So those are my supplement tips for the holidays. Okay, we’ve got an audience question, one of my favorite parts of the show.
Audience question comes from Heaven Sent Travel on Instagram, asks, “What brand of cereal do you recommend?” Well, first of all, stay out of the cereal aisle. Almost all cereals, if you’ve noticed, even some of the organic ones are filled with glyphosate, better known as Roundup and they have no business going in you or your children. Most cereals are very heavy sugar-laden products. Be careful about the grain free cereals in general because most of them have sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, lots of sugar from honey. So try to stay away from those. There are alternatives. If you love oatmeal, you can’t resist oatmeal, you can make millet oatmeal or sorghum oatmeal that will give you absolutely the texture and the flavor you’re looking for, but won’t contain those harmful grains. So millet and sorghum is always an option. Also, there are some coconut flake based cereals out there. Thrive Market, for instance, carries one that are really pretty safe. They still have a little more sugar content than I like. But they’re loaded with healthy fiber from coconut and as you know, I’m a huge fan of coconut. So there are alternatives.
But the takeaway is breakfast is really one of the least important meals for you to think about. Your ancestors never ate breakfast because there wasn’t any breakfast.
So the holidays are always associated with drinking and here’s my first word of advice. If you don’t drink, don’t start. The holidays are not time to tempt fate. But if you do drink, there’s some very interesting things that you should know. First of all, drink champagne. The grapes that go into champagne have some important polyphenols that have actually been shown to potentially improve memory in champagne drinkers. Number two, if you’re going to drink wine, choose red wine over white wine. White wine has far more sugar. Red wine has two important compounds, resveratrol and quercetin that actually improve brain health and are very potent antioxidants. Number three, if you’re going to drink spirits, used aged spirits, that is the darker spirits that have been in wood. It turns out there are polyphenols in wood that are extracted by the alcohol and the alcohol is actually a vehicle to get polyphenols into you. Unaged, clear spirits like vodka or gin. Try to stay away from.
I know life gets busy, work errands, family, friends. I get it. Feeling good on top of everything else can be hard to do. When my friends complain about headaches and fatigue from their busy lives, I always recommend a few things. First, remove those lectin rich foods like grains and nightshades. Work towards shortening your eating window and also electrolytes can really help too. LMNT pronounced “element,” a tasty electrolyte drink is a great way to replenish electrolytes. Plus, it has none of the junk, no sugar, no coloring, no artificial ingredients, no gluten, no fillers. LMNT can help prevent and eliminate headaches, muscle cramps, fatigues, sleeplessness and other common symptom of electrolyte deficiency. It contains a science backed electrolyte ratio, 1,000 milligrams sodium, 200 milligrams potassium, 60 milligrams magnesium. LMNT is a fan favorite of many, from the NBA, NFL and NHL players, Olympic athletes and Navy Seals, to everyday moms and dads and exercise enthusiasts like my wife, Penny. Right now, LMNT is offering my listeners a free sample pack with any purchase. That’s eight single serving packets free with any LMNT order.
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I am so excited today because I’ve got my head chef extraordinaire, Kate Holtzhower with me today. What are some of the easy swaps that people can do to survive this season and still eat the Plant Paradox way?
Kate Holtzhower:
Well, one of my favorites is swap potatoes for cauliflower. Any way you prepare potatoes, you can prepare cauliflower, roasted, mashed, even fried and you get the same starchy feel, the same flavor, but without the lectins and another favorite, anything you could do with beans, you could do with broccoli.
Dr. Gundry:
You’re exactly right.
Kate Holtzhower:
Yeah.
Dr. Gundry:
And I think the traditional green bean casserole with a can of mushroom soup and onions that are French fried on top of it may be one of the most lethal holiday foods there is and everybody goes for it because, oh, there’s my serving of vegetables. It’s healthy.
Kate Holtzhower:
But why not take some broccoli with some caramelized onions on top of it, maybe even a little coconut cream if you want that creamy texture and you’ve got a similar dish, but something that’s not going to kill you.
Dr. Gundry:
Yeah and it’ll actually improve your health.
Kate Holtzhower:
Yeah.
Dr. Gundry:
Yeah. That’s what we’re trying to do. Not kill you, but make you better.
Kate Holtzhower:
Right.
Dr. Gundry:
So how about turkey and gravy? I mean, you’ve got to have turkey and gravy. What are we going to do?
Kate Holtzhower:
Well, we roast the turkey. If you check out Dr. Gundry’s YouTube channel, not only can he roast a turkey, he can carve a turkey and he’ll even show you how.
Dr. Gundry:
I’m a surgeon, after all.
Kate Holtzhower:
He’s a surgeon. Yeah. But gravy’s a little trickier. Traditional gravy is thickened with flour. But it doesn’t have to be. I find heavy cream or even coconut cream thickens up a gravy nicely if you just cook it over the stove.
Dr. Gundry:
Okay.
Kate Holtzhower:
Yeah.
Dr. Gundry:
So that’s a great swap out.
Kate Holtzhower:
Yeah, ditch the flour. Make it a little richer and more delicious actually.
Dr. Gundry:
And everybody’s got to have their apple pie or their pumpkin pie. Any swap outs here?
Kate Holtzhower:
Sweet potato pie.
Dr. Gundry:
Oh.
Kate Holtzhower:
Just make it with a lectin free crust. There’s one in the cookbook. You can also just mix together unsweetened, shredded coconut and a little grass fed butter or coconut oil and pat it into the crust like a graham cracker crust. Easy.
Dr. Gundry:
Sounds pretty easy.
Kate Holtzhower:
Yeah.
Dr. Gundry:
Now dairy, a lot of people are worried about dairy. As you know, I’m very worried about casein A1. We actually now have a test looking at whether people react to casein A1 and we’re not surprised that a lot of people do. So what do we do about dairy?
Kate Holtzhower:
Well, this one’s been personal for me. I’m not great with dairy myself. So even before you and I teamed up, I’ve been doing a lot of work avoiding dairy in my life, except sometimes ice cream.
Dr. Gundry:
Aha.
Kate Holtzhower:
But if you’re worried about casein A1, you can do a 2 milk. You can do heavy cream as the casein isn’t in the cream.
Dr. Gundry:
Correct.
Kate Holtzhower:
You can also use coconut cream or unsweetened almond milk, coconut milk. There are really a lot of possibilities that make even swaps that aren’t problematic.
Dr. Gundry:
Cranberry sauce. What do we do with all the sugar in cranberry sauce?
Kate Holtzhower:
Well, a few options. You could use Swerve or monk fruit sweetener or one of the other-
Dr. Gundry:
Stevia maybe?
Kate Holtzhower:
Stevia, Gundry approved sweetener. Stevia tastes a little metallic with the cranberries, I find.
Dr. Gundry:
I agree. How about just sugar, one of my favorites. It’s mostly inulin with a little bit of orange essence in it.
Kate Holtzhower:
And orange is really beautiful with cranberries. It’s a little harder to find in a lot of supermarkets. But I find you can find it on Amazon. You can find Swerve at just about any Whole Foods. So for people who are wanting to shop in store, it is an option.
Dr. Gundry:
Yeah and actually Whole Foods has agave based inulin. It’s a powder and it’s perfectly safe. Inulin, as you know and I know feeds good gut bugs. It’s actually some of the gut bugs’ most favorite fuel.
Kate Holtzhower:
They also have agave inulin syrup now.
Dr. Gundry:
Yeah, they do.
Kate Holtzhower:
[inaudible 00:30:48] which if you’re wanting a really quick cooked or even a raw cranberry sauce is a way to go.
Dr. Gundry:
And since you brought up agave, agave syrup, not agave inulin syrup-
Kate Holtzhower:
Is a problem.
Dr. Gundry:
Is very different. We talked about some recipes. As you know, one of my favorite recipes from the Plant Paradox Cookbook is the millet stuffing.
Kate Holtzhower:
Yes.
Dr. Gundry:
And everybody’s got to have stuffing.
Kate Holtzhower:
Absolutely. Stuffing’s delicious.
Dr. Gundry:
And we’ve got a YouTube video on how to do that, right?
Kate Holtzhower:
We do.
Dr. Gundry:
Yeah.
Kate Holtzhower:
It’s pretty simple. You take your basic stuffing ingredients. Ditch the bread and use cooked millet instead. I mean, most of the things in stuffing, celery, carrots, onions, a lot of herbs, perfectly fine on the plan. You could even use some pasture raised sausage if you’re able to find it, if that’s your style or a whole lot of mushrooms like I do in my stuffing. We’ve got vegetarians in the family and done.
Dr. Gundry:
Yeah. I put a lot of mushrooms in ours. But there are actually pretty easy to find sausages from pasture raised animals online. Turkey, we talked about that. We got the gravy figured out. Okay, nobody’s going to pay 100 or $200 for a true pastured heritage turkey, probably.
Kate Holtzhower:
Probably and they’re hard to find even if you’ve got money.
Dr. Gundry:
They are. So what do we do?
Kate Holtzhower:
Well, we look for the best we can find and we accept that if we’re eating turkey like this once a year, it’s not the end of the world. We go for a kosher bird because those are available at just about every major supermarket or if a heritage bird that’s not pasture raised is available, go for that. There is a lot of options out there, especially if you’re shopping at the Whole Foods or some of the higher end grocery stores. But even my local Ralph’s, which is part of a chain that’s nationwide, has kosher birds.
Dr. Gundry:
Yeah. So not the Butterball, huh?
Kate Holtzhower:
Not the Butterball.
Dr. Gundry:
Oh.
Kate Holtzhower:
Butterball is injected with saline, which doesn’t sound appetizing because it isn’t. It’s not flavorful. It’s raised on almost all corn feed.
Dr. Gundry:
And it’s also injected with some interesting vegetable oils, which shouldn’t be in there as well.
Kate Holtzhower:
Right. Turkeys have plenty of their own fat. They don’t need help.
Dr. Gundry:
That’s exactly right. Full disclosure. The Butterball turkey is my wife’s favorite turkey. It has been banned from our house for over 25 years. But she still every year says, “Can’t I have a Butterball turkey?”
Kate Holtzhower:
Well, you can get a similar flavor by really brining your own.
Dr. Gundry:
Exactly.
Kate Holtzhower:
Or even injecting it with your own homemade brine, the way they do with their very synthetic brine.
Dr. Gundry:
Yeah. So we get a heritage organic turkey and we brine it ourselves. But there are brined turkeys. Mary’s makes brined turkey now.
Kate Holtzhower:
They do.
Dr. Gundry:
And most kosher turkeys are brined.
Kate Holtzhower:
All kosher turkeys are brined.
Dr. Gundry:
So there go.
Kate Holtzhower:
That’s part of the laws for kosher.
Dr. Gundry:
So don’t sweat it. It’s only one day and enjoy yourself or two days. A lot of people do it at Christmas holidays as well. Breads, come on. We got to have bread over the holidays.
Kate Holtzhower:
Well, there’s a great lectin-free bread recipe in the cookbook. It was really hard to come up with. But it’s delicious.
Dr. Gundry:
I know you really worked hard on that one.
Kate Holtzhower:
Yeah, we went through 10 different flours before settling on a good combination.
Dr. Gundry:
Now when you say flours, are these flours that the average person can go to Whole Foods or another kind of health food store and find?
Kate Holtzhower:
Yes. I make it a point when I’m developing a recipe to make sure things are available in every major metro area and available on Amazon and available at most Walmarts nationwide because that way I know that no matter where someone is in the country, they can work within your diet.
Dr. Gundry:
Yeah and again, that was the whole idea behind the cookbook and also the Plant Paradox: Quick and Easy. It’s one thing to live on the west coast or the east coast in a major city. But I grew up in the Midwest and the south.
Kate Holtzhower:
I grew up in the Midwest.
Dr. Gundry:
And you grew up in the Midwest. That’s correct and those are really the people that matter and quite frankly, when I visit my hometowns, they unfortunately are some of the people who need this the most and we’ve got to bring a good way to eat healthy to all Americans, not just us who have Whole Foods on every corner.
Kate Holtzhower:
True. Though the rest of the country, you matter too.
Dr. Gundry:
Exactly. All right. Sweet potato pie. How do we make it?
Kate Holtzhower:
We bake our sweet potatoes, not yams and if you’re more of a pumpkin pie person, you season it with pumpkin spice, if not, cinnamon and lemon juice. Lemon zest work and there’s a little more classic for sweet potato. You use a Gundry approved sweetener, whether it’s Swerve, your just like sugar, your monk fruit and thicken it with eggs or a little coconut flour and with skin. I think I use about half a cup of coconut cream.
Dr. Gundry:
I think you do. Yeah.
Kate Holtzhower:
It gives it a really nice creamy texture and the coconut actually tastes really nice with sweet potatoes. Simple as that. If you’re using eggs, you bake it. If not, you just chill it.
Dr. Gundry:
And in fact, there’s actually a lot of Caribbean dishes that combine coconut and sweet potatoes.
Kate Holtzhower:
Yeah, Indian food as well.
Dr. Gundry:
Yeah, absolutely. So it’s a good flavor combination.
Kate Holtzhower:
It is.
Dr. Gundry:
And one of the things that’s great about working with you is you and I are all about flavors and we don’t want people eating twigs and bark. It’s all about enhancing the flavor.
Kate Holtzhower:
If people were stuck on a twigs and bark diet, they’d get bored and they wouldn’t stick with it. So it’s about-
Dr. Gundry:
That’s exactly right.
Kate Holtzhower:
Making it for the people actually crave.
Dr. Gundry:
Yeah. All right.
Kate Holtzhower:
You hungry?
Dr. Gundry:
So what the heck is this delicious looking casserole, which looks like something that should be on the table for the holidays? What have you come up with it?
Kate Holtzhower:
It definitely should be on the table for the holidays.
Dr. Gundry:
Okay.
Kate Holtzhower:
Like you said, everyone loves their green bean casserole.
Dr. Gundry:
Yeah.
Kate Holtzhower:
So I took the basics of that, creamy, veggies, crispy topping and I did a spinach and kale casserole with curried coconut milk inside it to really boost the flavor, topped it with a lot of high quality Parmesan cheese and baked it. It’s not going to be the prettiest girl at the dance. But it’s going to be the most delicious.
Dr. Gundry:
Okay.
Kate Holtzhower:
So if you want to go ahead and try it.
Dr. Gundry:
I do. Is this my spoon?
Kate Holtzhower:
This is your spoon and go dig in. Since I put the cheese on it, I’m going to avoid it for dairy reasons.
Dr. Gundry:
And there’s broccoli [inaudible 00:37:57].
Kate Holtzhower:
There’s broccoli. There’s kale. There’s onions, tiny bit of spinach.
Dr. Gundry:
All right. Had to get in all these great things that are going to make people better. They’re not going to leave the table going, “Oh, I can’t believe I ate that stuff.”
Kate Holtzhower:
Right.
Dr. Gundry:
“Why did I do that? I feel so miserable.”
Kate Holtzhower:
Yeah. You’re sitting down with your loved ones. You may as well show them how much you love them.
Dr. Gundry:
Or friends who don’t eat this way, if you’re hosting the dinner.
Kate Holtzhower:
Oh, I just cook it and I don’t tell them. No one’s going to know unless you go, “Oh, I did these crazy things.” They’re just going to, “Oh, this is a really good meal. It’s different than what we usually have. But it’s great,” or you tell them after.
Dr. Gundry:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s what we usually do. We tell them afterwards. “What?”
Kate Holtzhower:
Exactly.
Dr. Gundry:
Once we had some friends over and I put lemon flavored cod liver oil mixed half and half with olive oil for the salad dressing.
Kate Holtzhower:
That’s a choice.
Dr. Gundry:
And they said, “Oh man, this is the best salad dressing. This is great. Can we have the recipe? What’s in it?” And I go, “Cod liver oil,” and, “What?”
Kate Holtzhower:
Well, don’t they know Caesar salad’s made with anchovies? It’s not super different.
Dr. Gundry:
That’s exactly right. So they didn’t know that they were actually having a really healthy salad.
Kate Holtzhower:
You could probably make a great Caesar dressing with cod liver oil.
Dr. Gundry:
Yeah.
Kate Holtzhower:
Let’s try it.
Dr. Gundry:
Okay. Okay. Work on that. Okay?
Kate Holtzhower:
I’ll get right on that after the holidays.
Dr. Gundry:
Now what do you do? Here’s the biggest problem with the holidays. You’re invited over for a party or for dinner and your friends don’t see this way. What do you do?
Kate Holtzhower:
Well, if it’s a potluck, I say bring one thing that you find especially satisfying and delicious. Share it. But give yourself a big old helping of that and then pick and choose. Always go for the turkey if you eat meat because it’s not the worst thing on the table, even if it’s the Butterball and beyond that, pick and choose and if it’s a fully hosted dinner where you’re expected to show up, load up on the salad or if there’s a veggie you can eat or even the sweet potato casserole with the marshmallows scraped off and just have a little bit of everything else. Like we said earlier, it’s one day. It’s not ideal. But it’s not going to kill you and you don’t want to be rude if someone’s having a really nice party and you’re invited.
Dr. Gundry:
Yeah and what we do is we’ll have a couple handful of nuts before we have those parties.
Kate Holtzhower:
Oh, that’s smart.
Dr. Gundry:
Which really helps us not eat as much or not sit there and go, “I don’t really want to eat that stuff.”
Kate Holtzhower:
You can also fill up on the cheese plate. Just skip the crackers.
Dr. Gundry:
Yep, exactly right. Yeah. But cheese can be eaten without crackers. What do you tell people who think this is just too hard to do?
Kate Holtzhower:
Be patient. It feels really hard if you think of it as this one big thing you have to do all at once. If you think I have these little tiny micro goals, it’s not so bad because then the setback’s just a tiny setback, not the end of the world and you get to check a lot of things off your to-do list rather than one big thing that you feel like is never going to happen.
Dr. Gundry:
The other thing that was interesting to me and I’ve taught all my patients through the years, many times there are these almost psychological stop points. For me, 200 pounds was this amazing barrier and I see it with a lot of my patients. They get to 200 pounds. They get down to 198 and then all of a sudden they’re up at 204 and they go, “What the heck?” And they’ll go again. It took me probably, I don’t know, a couple of months to get off 200. My next barrier was 180 and the same thing. It’s like, what do I have to do and looking back, these are actually places to take a pause and say, okay, let’s not sweat it. I’m going to tread water. Turns out we have set points in our body that says, “Oh, you’re starving to death and I’m going to do everything I can do to stop you from starving,” and did you ever have that happen to you?
Kate Holtzhower:
I definitely did and one of the biggest things I did for myself was go, you know what? It’s fine. You’ve come this far. It’s already remarkable. Give it a minute. I actually would let myself eat a little more and sometimes I found that just upping the calories I took in in a day, would re-jumpstart it. It was like me giving my body permission to keep going.
Dr. Gundry:
Years ago I was lecturing in Phoenix and there’s a blogger by the name of Keefer and Keefer was really one of the original ketogenic dieters and I’ve told this story before. He introduced himself to me and told me his story. He was almost constantly in ketosis and a big exercise fanatic and one night apparently is he tells that he just couldn’t take it any longer and he ate a dozen donuts and several pieces of cake and he went to bed. He says, “Oh my gosh, am I going to pay for this.” Well the next morning he woke up and he was actually three pounds lighter and he said, “What the heck?” And what had happened was that he was actually insulin resistant being in ketosis for so long and this blast of carbs actually got fat to burn better than he did. So he actually cycles. So yeah, I think a lot of times just changing it up for a few days will make a big difference. But the important thing that you and I both know is don’t sweat it.
Kate Holtzhower:
Don’t sweat it. Be patient.
Dr. Gundry:
Yeah.
Kate Holtzhower:
And celebrate little victories because it’s hard.
Dr. Gundry:
Yeah and I said in my first book weight off fast will never last. Weight off slow, you’re good to go.
Jillian Jalali:
Hi. This is Jillian. Those of us here at Court Junkie have a new podcast called Civil, where we dive into fascinating civil cases, like in the case of a principal who took it upon himself to hypnotize students as a hobby. Then many of those students ended up dead or when a man was publicly and wrongfully accused of being the I-10 freeway shooter. We’ll also be covering popular civil cases you’ve likely heard of, like OJ Simpson and Alex Jones versus the parents of Sandy Hook.
AC:
This is AC. I have OJ in the car.
Speaker 6:
Sandy Hook, it’s got inside job written all over it.
Jillian Jalali:
Hosted by me, Jillian Jalali, researched by Nicole Gusmerotti and written by Matt Stroud and Nick Keppler. If you like following criminal trials like I do, I think you will love Civil. Subscribe to us now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Dr. Gundry:
Thanks for tuning in to this special holiday episode, and please share it with friends and family too so they can have a healthy, happy holiday season. Okay, it’s time for the audience question, which comes from Bulletproof Coconut on Instagram. “Can you discuss visual snow syndrome?” Yeah, that’s actually a very interesting syndrome where people see sparks, flashing lights, sometimes floaters. It’s also associated with ringing in the ears, migraine headaches, people seeing visions of things they just looked at even after they looked away. Now this can be signs of beginning retinal detachment. It’s often seen in older people who are nearsighted. That means you needed glasses to see distance vision as a young person. As you get older, the jelly inside of your eyes sometimes pulls away from your retina. During that time, you can actually see little flashing lights. Usually it safely falls away from your retina. You can be left with floaters that are completely innocuous. But that’s mostly the cause of this. There is no treatment.
But interestingly enough, a great number of people with these issues and migraines and ringing in the ears, leaky gut and lectins are a major cause of this. So if nothing else, follow my guidelines to get these things out of your life and that’s a great question and now it’s time for the review of the week. This week’s review comes from Dan F. on YouTube. “I got on your food advice years ago and I couldn’t be healthier according to my doctor. My motive was to reduce my hypertension. No more weight problems and now no hypertension. Thanks for all you do. I continue to tune into your comments on the podcast.” Well, thank you very much, Dan F. That’s why we do this. I’m remarkably pleased that you, among lots of my patients, got rid of your hypertension just by following a few and simple changes in your diet and I’m sure your doctor hopefully is asking you lots of questions about how you accomplished this. Sadly, I know many patients, doctors who just brush this off as completely incidental and having nothing to do with your program.
But thanks for writing in and this is why I do this every day, every week because I’m Dr. Gundry and I’m always looking out for you.
Thanks for tuning in to the Dr. Gundry Podcast. You can also head over to my YouTube channel to find thousands of hours of tips for healthy living and wellness. No matter what platform you use to listen, remember to rate and review the podcast. Your review might just get featured on the show.
