Keto Proof

Welcome to Keto Proof, we are proof that this Way Of Eating is a valid, safe and healthy way of life.

There are literally thousands of blogs on the internet, and hundreds of those are about the keto diet. Why would we need to make a blog about our experience eating the keto Way Of Eating?  Because every body handles keto eating differently, no two people will experience how this diet makes you feel, but maybe your story and ours may walk the same road of experience for a short while. It’s always nice to know that you are not crazy feeling this way.

Bernadene Whitten:

I guess I should start at the beginning of my story.

I was born in Juneau Alaska 6 days after Alaska became a state. My birth certificate is #6. Yep, 6. That’s how new my home state was.

I was an ordinary scrawny kid and ate a mostly fish, fowl and game diet. Not many vegetables, unless you count the canned kind, and fruits were always from a can.   The first time I ate a tomato I had no idea what it was and didn’t eat beef until I was in my late teens. I moved from Alaska to Utah because of my marriage and my then husband being in the air force.

Years late,  divorced and so far from the diet I had grown up eating caused me to gain a whopping 328 pounds!

My starting weight was 438 lbs! I was tired all the time and had just had five surgeries in six years!

My body was tired, it was literally killing me to carry all that extra weight around. All this weight was creating the cancers that I’d just had five surgeries for. I was cancer free and I intended to stay that way.

I hadn’t heard of the keto diet, I did know about the low carb or Atkins diet plan. I tried many of the diets such as weight watchers, the cookie diet, the cabbage soup diet.

I googled for a diet plan that included meat, fats and low  carbs, the first selection was the keto diet.

Here’s the easiest way to understand keto and how it works: our bodies only knew protein and fat as a baby if you were breast fed. If you were bottle fed your body was getting the protein, fats and carbs, carbs it didn’t need. Carbs are added to baby formula to bulk up your child. Isn’t a healthy baby always a fat baby? At least by society standards they are. We don’t need the amount of carbs we get as an infant. As a baby we were set up to become addicted to carbs in infancy and it continues into adulthood, sugar is as addictive as heroin. While in ketosis your body stops using carbs as the energy it needs and uses fat and proteins for fuel. When a person says they are fat adapted, it means their body needs very little to no carbs and they use fat as the body’s energy source. Once you are in ketosis, not ketoacidosis, you’ll notice several things right away, you may feel euphoria, at least I did, amazing happiness and feeling the healthiest you’ve in a long time. Your eyesight may improve. I have cataracts and overnight that improved so I could see closer up. I do eat an egg a day and a recent health study shows that eggs have natural vitamin A which has been shown to improve eyesight.

Brain fog recedes and it’s amazing how focused I became.

I have lymphedema, it’s hereditary, my great, great grandmother, my great grandmother and my grandmother all had lymphedema. It skipped my mother and I was diagnosed, my daughter was just diagnosed as well. It’s on one side of the family and it only affects the women.

When I started keto I was using lymphedema wraps, thick black wraps made of neoprene, hot in summer, bulky,  with lots of adjusting 24\7. One day I woke up and my legs were normal sized and I didn’t have to wrap again! That’s been 14 months as of October 2018.  I was surprised and grateful, a little angry that my doctor didn’t know about this diet, it could have saved months of pain and from many surgeries. I had also lost the ability to walk. I have since been walking as long as possible until the pain from my arthritic knees puts me in my chair again. If you thought it was hard to learn to walk as a baby it’s 10x as hard as an adult.

My asthma has virtually disappeared, I haven’t used my inhaler for 12 months or more, I’m not even sure if it still works.

Kelly Richan

Brianna Whitten