4 Ways To Gain Weight On Keto

how to gain weight with healthy keto while maintaining muscle mass while the

vast majority of people go into keto and intermittent fasting because they want

to lose weight there are also people who are thin and yet have insulin resistance

or diabetes or there are also those people who would like to gain weight but

they don't want to eat a bunch of sugar and carbs and grains and junk food so if

you have trouble gaining weight what do you do that's today's topic and we're

gonna cover all the angles you know exactly how it works coming right up I'm

doctor Ekberg I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete and if you

want to truly master health by understanding how the body really works

make sure you subscribe and hit that notification bell so that you don't miss

anything the vast majority of advice about keto

and intermittent fasting is aimed at people who are trying to lose weight

reverse diabetes or insulin resistance so just a quick recap that with those

people the people who are overweight and insulin resistance whether it's

full-blown diabetes or not they are trying to reduce insulin they're trying

to reduce the stress hormone cortisol they're trying to increase growth

hormone they're trying to reduce calories and they're trying to reduce

carbs so that's the standard advice and today we're going to talk about a couple

of other cases where someone is either under weight or they just don't want to

lose any more but there's still insulin resistant they still have diabetes or

they need to reverse their insulin levels and we also have people who are

underweight but insulin sensitive they eat no matter what they eat it seems

like they just can't gain weight so if they're underweight an insulin resistant

the only change is that they're gonna try to increase the

calories okay all the other steps are going to be identical you still want to

reduce insulin you still want to reduce cortisol you still want to increase

growth hormone and you still want to cut carbs and when we say increase calories

and reduce calories the thing is that with keto and intermittent fasting

you're not trying to count calories or reduce calories it just ends up that you

eat less because you end up being full as you're burning the fat off the body

you'll get less hungry or satiated longer you can go longer between meals

and you eat less so that can be a problem when someone's trying to gain

weight because the mechanism is still there that they're not as hungry so

these people are gonna have to try to eat more and we'll talk about that so

that's really the only difference someone who is underweight and insulin

sensitive they're not trying to reduce insulin resistance they're just not

wanting to eat junk so that they develop problems over time and raise insulin

resistance so their insulin they're trying to keep it about the same they

don't want to increase it they don't need to decrease it they still don't

want to have more cortisol cortisol should be kept at a at a minimum or

normal what is appropriate for a normal healthy balanced life so they don't want

to start doing things to increase cortisol just to become more insulin

resistant cortisol is destructive and it is muscle wasting it's protein wasting

so all of these people we are assuming that obviously they want to maintain

their muscle they're either trying to lose weight by losing fat or they're

trying to gain weight by gaining muscle maybe a little fat as well growth

hormone everybody wants to increase because that's how you build muscle

growth hormone is the hormone that builds muscle and these people also are

going to have to want to increase their calories as much as possible so these

people can increase carbs or maybe stay the same depending on where they are

they don't want to start loading up on carbs and especially they don't want to

start eating a bunch of junk carbs like processed carbs sugar grain etc they can

eat some some beans and some starchy vegetables like sweet potato potato

various different tubers but they still want to keep their carbs in check

because even though they're very insulin sensitive they don't want to become

insulin resistance so they can tolerate a good bit more carbs but you don't want

to go overboard obviously before we go further though I just want everyone to

really take some time and reflect on why are they trying to gain weight are you

really too skinny or are people just telling you that or are you comparing

yourself to an impossible ideal what is normal okay when I was competing in

Decathlon I typically was about two hundred to two hundred and five pounds

my body fat was extremely low today my body fat is probably around 10% when I

was competing it was around three to four percent and I am 6 foot 3 and today

my comfortable body weight is 180 to 185 in pounds 4 kilograms you divide that by

2.2 but that's where I'm comfortable and yet most people would probably tell me

that I am too skinny or if they compare themselves to me they say oh I wouldn't

want to be that skinny well that's normal for me that's what my body likes

to be so don't compare yourself to supermodels or bodybuilders or some

contrived ideal really be honest and figure out what is that normal place

your body there are also some circumstances where the body may just

not be quite healthy enough to gain weight because there's a lot of it's a

lot of work for the body to build new tissues maybe the body is really busy

just repairing after a disease so people who have had cancer or chemo they

shouldn't be in a hurry to gain weight they should still eat healthy but they

should sort of go very very slow and allow the body to do things at its own

pace it's sort of like growing grass that grass is going to grow at the rate

that grass is supposed to grow you can't you can't force it you got to be patient

let's talk about calories again we don't necessarily typically emphasize calories

too much everyone else does but calories is usually not where it's at however if

you want to gain weight and you are following a low-carb diet so that your

hunger is reduced you want to start counting calories and make sure that you

get a lot of them because you have to be at a calorie surplus and your body's

setpoint is going to work against you in this case just like overweight people

they lose the weight and their body will often try to get them back up to the

setpoint the same thing holds true for you if

you're thin and you try to gain weight your body is going to try to get back

down to that setpoint so again make sure that you really want to change your

weight or need to change your weight before you start forcing that setpoint

away because it might be if you're successful it might be harder to get

back if you change your mind but you need a calorie surplus you need to eat a

lot of food and your body will compensate by raising its metabolism so

if you figure that you're burning 2,500 calories and you increase your ingestion

your consumption to 3,000 your body might just

raise its basic metabolic rate to 3,000 and you have to go for 3,500 everyone's

different figure out how it works for you but realize you have to be eating

more calories than your body burns it's not enough to ingest the calories you

also have to be able to digest and absorb them and here again you can put

the stuff into your body but if you don't have the right balance between

insulin and cortisol and growth hormone then your body is not going to know what

to do with it you need the growth hormone to make new tissue you need some

insulin to store the fuel to help the fuel both insulin and growth hormone are

anabolic hormone they're building hormone cortisol is a catabolic it's a

breakdown hormone so if you want to gain weight you want to increase growth

hormone you want to decrease cortisol limit cortisol and it seems like you

would want some more insulin but if you are insulin resistant then obviously

we're still in the process of reducing insulin so therefore we have to kind of

still manage insulin with a low carb diet so if you have digestive issues or

if you're stressed then your digestion may not work the way it's supposed to

and you may not be able to utilize all of that fuel so sugar is very very

easily absorbed that's why people even when they're unhealthy they're still

gonna absorb all the carbs but that's not going to help us because we want to

reduce insulin so when you eat fat and protein your digestion has to be in

tip-top shape it has to be functioning at a high level in order for you to

absorb these foods otherwise they'll just go straight through you a lot of

people are eating plenty of protein but they're still protein deficient they're

deficient in certain amino acids because they don't break them down and absorb

them properly so what you can do to help you there are digestive enzymes there's

a lot of them on the market talk to some people who

or who can counsel you in my office we muscle test and we evaluate each case

individually depending on on the person but digestive enzymes can be very very

helpful especially because after age 40 we reduce we lose the ability our

production of digestive enzymes tend to go down and the older we get the less

enzymes we make we also need a functioning gall bladder or a good liver

output to digest fat so if you don't if you have some gall bladder problems or

if you have trouble digesting fats you want to maybe supplement with some bile

salts or some lecithin or some choline you want to have some emulsifiers to

break down that fat and almost all the talk all the advice about how to handle

these issues in nutrition circles are about how many calories what macros what

sort of nutrients what sort of foods but hardly anybody ever talks about what is

it in the body that is able to digest and utilize that food so the nervous

system your digestion does not function without your nervous system so the

healthier your brain is the better your digestion works and vice versa because

the gut also affects the brain but if you have a healthy brain you can digest

things a whole lot better a lot of stress interferes with the brain's

ability to digest food stress shuts off the brain stress shuts off digestion so

stress is the same as the sympathetic or the fight/flight it produces cortisol

and the parasympathetic is your feed breed it's your relaxation response and

your digestive system your ability to produce digestive enzymes your ability

to absorb food your ability to build things out of food your anabolic

function is entirely 100% dependent on how well is

that parasympathetic nervous system working how well is that feed breed

system working and if this one is taking a backseat to this sympathetic to the

fight flight then you are never going to have a digestive system that fires on

all cylinders stress reduction is critical and we want to understand again

everyone's talking about how the food should be how the nutrients should be

but if you don't absorb it if you don't have a healthy brain if you don't have a

healthy gut then it doesn't really matter so much what you eat it's still

important but we can't just look at one side we want to remember that the body

has chemical components chemical aspects it has structural mechanical aspects and

it has emotional aspects and holistic health is about finding the balance on

all of those so the first two have to do with the chemical component these are

more of the standard advice as far as what to eat the macros etc first of all

you have to eat more and like we said on keto you're less hungry with

intermittent fasting you're less hungry so you have to make yourself eat you

want to count the calories to make sure that you're getting enough and that

you're getting more than you think you need and you don't want to increase

carbs you don't want to increase protein so that leaves fat correct fat is the

type of food that's the macro that you increase if you are insulin resistant

then you want to keep your carbs very very low your body has if your insulin

resistance you have a very poor carbohydrate tolerance and you probably

want to keep them under 30 grams per day under 30 grams of net carbs again if you

want to be in ketosis you need to measure the ketones so that you know if

you're actually in if you are very insulin sensitive if you're just skinny

and you can't put on weight but you've done the test

your blood Sugar's low your a1c is low your fasting insulin is low then you

probably want to increase your carb some you can probably get up to 50 to 70

grams a day maybe even up to a hundred you probably don't need to be in ketosis

all the time I think there's benefits to being ketosis but I don't think you have

to force yourself to be there constantly I think you can go one week around 50

and another week maybe 70 to 80 or even a hundred again this is going to depend

on your age your fitness level your physical activity and your level of

insulin sensitivity so monitor these things so that you can see if anything

changes you don't want to go in the direction that you don't like number two

intermittent fasting if you are insulin resistant I suggest that you still keep

about an 18-6 to a 16-8 feeding pattern meaning that

if you do a 16-8 that you eat all your meals during an eight-hour period which

leaves you 16 hours of fasting why would we do that

because the most powerful factor in reversing insulin resistance is the

fasting period the time where you are eating zero carbohydrates where you're

not stimulating insulin at all because you have to eat a lot you might want to

go to an eight hour feeding window because in eight hours you can easily

put two meals you might even be able to put three meals because if you need to

eat a lot of calories then you're going to need some time to do it if you're

shorten that window too much where people try to do oh man it is very very

difficult to get enough food into that one meal or that one feeding period if

your insulin sensitive I still suggest that you do a little bit of intermittent

fasting in that you give your body a rest between meals because it is very

very healthy it allows for your digestion to

hover it allows for you to not become insulin-resistant you might even on some

days do like a 12:12 feeding pattern if you want to try to get a lot of food in

then go 18 6 16 8 or maybe even 12 12 someone whose insulin sensitive it the

only reason that you would want to do Oh mad one meal a day or a longer fast is

to start try to get the benefits of a toffee gee but you can't do that very

often because if you go long without food then your body is going to lose

that weight for those who are insulin resistant but trying to increase their

calories if you have a hard time getting enough calories getting enough fat in

then feel free to still do a bulletproof coffee in the morning feel free to have

a few fat bombs or some keto snacks with that bulletproof coffee even if that is

outside of your feeding window if you wake up in the morning and it's still

not your feeding window you could still have that bulletproof coffee because it

has a minimal impact on insulin yes it is breaking the fast but what we're

talking about is reversing insulin and pure fat has an almost zero impact on

insulin next way to talk about the structural mechanical aspect of this so

yes exercise has a metabolic function it still has a hormonal impact and a

chemical impact but it also has a brain impact and we want to have the exercise

is going to help the brain get more activated an activated brain is going to

help inhibit the stress response which is going to make your digestion and your

sleep and your recovery and your healing work better the specific type of

exercise that you want to do is your not exercising to burn calories obviously

because you're trying to get more calories you're trying to burn less

that's the whole problem you want to gain weight but you also want to give

the a reason to build some more muscle you

have to load up the muscle you have to challenge the muscles in order to give

the body a reason to make more of them so when you do weight and you probably

want to do that two or three times a week you want to do few reps and high

weights why because you want to challenge the muscles you want to if you

load them up if you have heavy heavy weights and you push the muscles to

where they fail but you don't keep it up very long you do just a few reps now you

are spiking growth hormone you're challenging the body you're telling it

hey you know I put a lot of pressure on you

you'd better build some muscles so you can handle this better next time because

I'm gonna do this again and you better be prepared so build some more muscles

and for that reason you also want to avoid any long-term strenuous exercise

you don't want to do any anaerobic you don't want to do any I heart rate

activity for an extended period of time because that will trigger cortisol which

is muscle wasting it is virtually impossible to build muscle while you are

exercising and doing like long-distance running just look at the bodies of

long-distance runners how much bulk muscle do they have not much that's a

clue you do want to do some hit if you're healthy enough to do it high

intensity animal training will spike growth hormone the duration is so short

that even though it's a high cortisol activity the duration is so short

you only secrete a tiny little bit and the secretion of growth hormone far

outweighs the detriment from the cortisol but you want to keep it to a

few minutes you do a warm-up you get all of your high-intensity stuff in in a 2

to 3 to 4 minute period you only do that twice a week so the total hit for a week

there's only a few minutes altogether you can also do aerobic exercise but

make sure that it is truly aerobic and not anaerobic it's not wear you out you

should not be fatigued afterwards so I would basically say keep it to walking

and don't try to power walk don't try to walk fast just go for a stroll and yes

you will burn some extra calories so you have to eat even more to compensate for

that and number four that is the third side of the triangle

the emotional part emotional stress can be devastating it increases cortisol it

interferes with digestion it interferes with growth hormone it shuts down your

parasympathetic nervous system so to reduce stress we want to relax we want

to do breathing exercises we want to do meditation just try a few find one that

you like and do it on a regular basis it's like a muscle that you're building

it's not just for the few minutes that you're listening and relaxing it's a

skill it's a pattern that you program into your nervous system and the better

you get at chillin the better you'll be able to resist to handle stress in the

future another technique is called emotional freedom technique known as

tapping that's a very powerful way to interrupt a stress pattern it's a very

very neurologically based mechanism tapping is a pattern interrupt and if

you combine that with retrieving emotions then you can interrupt those

you can develop new emotional habits if you enjoyed this video I think you're

going to love that one thank you so much for watching and I'll

see you next time