The Kick Sugar Coach Podcast
The Kick Sugar Coach Podcast
Matt Baszucki: The Power of Ketogenic Therapy for Bipolar Disorder
What if the root cause of severe mental illness isn't a chemical imbalance in the brain, but a metabolic disorder that can be addressed through diet? Matt Bazuki's remarkable recovery from debilitating bipolar disorder offers compelling evidence for this revolutionary approach.
At just 19 years old, Matt's life spiraled into chaos as bipolar disorder took hold. Despite coming from a supportive, educated family, he found himself cycling through psychiatric hospitalizations, taking multiple medications, and even experiencing homelessness during manic episodes. Conventional treatments failed him completely – he was officially labeled "treatment resistant" while taking five different psychiatric medications that left him barely functional.
The turning point came when Matt's mother discovered research on ketogenic diets for mental health. After implementing a strict ketogenic diet in 2021, Matt experienced what can only be described as a miracle – his symptoms completely resolved within months. Today, nearly four years later, he lives independently, works successfully, and has drastically reduced his medications.
Matt explains the science behind his recovery with remarkable clarity. Mental illnesses like bipolar disorder may fundamentally be disorders of brain energy metabolism. For some people, switching from glucose to ketones as the primary brain fuel source creates a metabolically favorable environment that allows the brain to function normally again. This challenges our understanding of these conditions as purely genetic or as simple "chemical imbalances."
Beyond diet alone, Matt follows a comprehensive metabolic health protocol that includes proper sleep hygiene, regular exercise, meditation, and circadian rhythm management. This holistic approach supports his brain's energy needs from multiple angles, creating sustainable mental wellness.
Now co-hosting the BipolarCast podcast, Matt shares the stories of others who've found similar healing through metabolic interventions. His family has established the Bazuki Foundation to fund research in this emerging field of metabolic psychiatry – work that may ultimately transform how we understand and treat mental illness.
Could changing what you eat change your mind? For those suffering from treatment-resistant mental health conditions, Matt's journey offers not just inspiration, but a practical pathway toward recovery that conventional psychiatry has overlooked. Listen now to discover how addressing the metabolism might be the key to mental health that millions have been searching for.
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Welcome everybody to an interview today with Matt Bazuki. Let me tell you a little bit about him. First of all, you can see he's really young, so he's already a world expert in a topic that I think is only going to explode in the future, because there's more and more young people that are experiencing what Matt experienced in terms of this massive transformation in his mental health. So he is now currently a patient advocate and co-host of the BipolarCast podcast, along with Ian Campbell, Matt struggled with type 1 bipolar disorder for five years. He was hospitalized four times with manic psychosis, saw dozens of psychiatrists and specialists, tried everything and attempted multiple treatment centers.
FLORENCE:In 2021, Matt used the ketogenic diet to treat and cure his disorder. Now, on their podcast, he and Ian interview other patients who have used metabolic therapies to treat their illnesses. We'll get into what are metabolic therapies. He also discussed general metabolic interventions and they also discussed general metabolic interventions, including also discussed general metabolic interventions, including physical exercise, circadian rhythm management, meditation. In his free time, you can find him digging into biographies, playing chess, practicing piano and pushing weights at the gym. Welcome, Matt.
MATT:Hey, thanks for having me on.
FLORENCE:So your story has gone famous, because not only did you find a, get you, I think you read Chris Palmer's book, is that right? You read it and the light bulb goes on. Oh my gosh, it could be my diet, it could be Well it happened earlier than that, so Chris's book came out pretty recently.
MATT:But my mom originally found the diet many years ago and she got in touch with Chris and then that's when we put it on. We put me on the diet, so I've been on a keto diet for almost four years at this point.
FLORENCE:Okay, okay, got it. So let's go back into your story. Tell us a little bit about it. I mean I hit some highlights there, but tell us a bit about, yeah, what it was like to have this bipolar condition and what it was like to be introduced to the idea that there's a ketogenic nutritional intervention that can actually turn this around for you.
MATT:Yeah, so I can give the summary of my whole story, which is that I grew up eating a lot of sugar and a lot of carbohydrates, and I can remember some very vivid memories of the sugar that I would consume when I was growing up, like I remember going to church and then after church they would have the donuts laid out and I remember I would eat like four or five donuts without my when my parents weren't looking after church, and then when we would go out, I would go out to eat with my friends when I was 13, 14, and just drink these massive sodas, root beer, and I would just have like two of them. I I loved. I loved sugar, I loved carbs, I loved pasta. I loved all of that when I was growing up and then when I was in college, I was drinking a lot of beer and I was at a fraternity and using marijuana and not getting much sleep when I was 19. So this would have been in 2015, 2016. And it was really just an awful situation. There was a lot of stress. It was an engineering curriculum very challenging, and so what happened in March of 2016, which was when I was 19 years old, is I had a manic episode. I started to sleep less and less and less, and this is one of the symptoms of bipolar disorder. It's called a manic episode, which means that people start to sleep less and they become hyper and they become impulsive and have racing thoughts and I'll do all of this destructive behavior. So that happened to me and I started to sleep. I went six, seven days without sleeping. I was full-blown psychotic, having delusions. It was awful and eventually I was medicated. It was awful and eventually I was medicated. I was hospitalized at Stanford in the psych ward for two weeks. So I was in an intrapatient unit and they would feed me graham crackers and, you know, root beer again and all of this stuff. Like it's just it's funny to me that they had that food in the psych ward.
MATT:And for the next two years so 2016 to 2018, from when I was 19 to when I was 21 years old I'm 27 now I was in and out of psych wards for psychosis, for type 1, bipolar manic psychosis, delusions, grandiosity, all of these horrible horrible things. It's really like a debilitating thing to happen. And I was hospitalized four times over the course of those two years, each for two weeks. Each one of those hospitalizations I was in a psych ward, locked up in the psych ward, like unable to go outside, in some cases just having delusions and paranoia, and it's really unpleasant. I mean it's like a horror story. So eventually I ran away from home because I was so manic and I was homeless and I was running around on the streets for a few weeks. It's funny to think about it now how, if my dad or mom hadn't come to rescue me and bring me to a hospital that last time, I would be one of those homeless people talking to themselves on the streets and I came from a very good family with educated parents and all this stuff. Like it's just very, very funny and that's a humbling thought.
MATT:So I, I, that's the story of the illness, I, so that's the story of the illness. I think it was really drinking marijuana and bad food. The way we're starting to understand mental health with Chris's theory and all of this, the metabolic psychiatry movement, is that this is really just metabolic dysfunction that manifests as psychiatric illness. So schizophrenia, depression, bipolar psychosis, it's in the metabolism, so it's not in the brain. I mean, the brain burns fuel, so ketones and glucose. We could talk about that more, but this problem really centers in the metabolism.
MATT:So the recovery was I was really struggling and my mom found out about Chris Palmer's work and about the ketogenic diet for mental health and so she you know I was really having a hard time at that point and I went on the diet in 2021, in January, and I think within about three or four months I my symptoms went away Like my symptoms completely went away when I went on a ketogenic diet and dropped the sugar and the carbohydrates. And it was shocking for my family and me, because my parents had seen me struggle for years and I was. I was declared medication resistant, a treatment resistant I was. I was on like five meds. I was told I'm on a couple now at very low doses because I've been able to get off them, but I was on five meds.
MATT:I couldn't think I had no executive functioning. Work was challenging, like it was going to be a really really hard life. And then I just I started keto and I've been on keto for three and a half years now, tracking ketones, eating high fat, high pro, high, moderate to high protein and very, very low carb and all pretty much all whole foods. Um, and it's just miraculous and now I'm working, I have my own place. Like it's crazy. Everything has just become easier and it's a life that I never would have had. So that is the short version of the story.
FLORENCE:One of the things that we're referencing a book by Dr Chris Palmer, who's not going to be on the summit this year, but he was on the site. He's been on the summit a couple of times and he came out with a book called Brain Energy and he has this theory that our brains burn fuel like every other cells in the body and that for some of us there was like this massive moment in the book for me where the penny dropped. I just went. Oh, it was just like you reel For me.
FLORENCE:I was reeling because he says you know, we think the psychiatric or mental illness issues we see that they run in families and we assume there's a genetic component and I said, but what if it's actually not genetics in the way we think, what if the genetic predisposition piece isn't to mental illness, it's to carb sensitivity and that's what's being passed down the generation. And that when people are hyper responders to carbohydrates, there are cells that will overexcite manic and there are cells that will under perform, which is depression and you know, in Matt's case, cycling between the two. And he says that when we eat these refined, really you know we are overdosing on sugar. When we overdose on sugar and refined carbohydrates and we damage our metabolism and our microbiome and the brain is struggling to manage its fuel source so that it's steady and reliable and consistent. And it's in the right.
FLORENCE:It's the consistency that there's not cells that are going off the deep end, manic, hyper excited and cells that are hypo excited. We're going to get to the root cause of mental illness. Not all of it, but a lot of it, and Matt's living proof of his theories. He's living proof of this theory. And what a game changer this is for the world to understand that Matt didn't have to grow up disabled, on five different medications, maybe never being able to hold on a job worthy of his talents and his passions, right, capable of matching the fullness of who Matt is. It's incredible.
MATT:It's incredible. Yeah, there's a lot to touch on there. We do have this idea that mental illness is an imbalance in the brain and that that's just what everyone was told, and that this is genetic and that there's nothing that people can do about this. And then we have a model to treat these illnesses that centers around medication and psychotherapy. Many of these medications, though they can help with acute symptoms for example, the antipsychotic to treat mania or psychosis in the long term, many of these psychiatric medications that doctors prescribe actually cause a lot of metabolic damage in the long term, and you'll hear stories about people who gain weight on meds, and you know I took an antipsychotic medication. I gained 60 pounds in the first year or something like that. So you have to wonder whether, in the long term, being on a bunch of these meds is going to hurt the metabolism for the person and then that's just going to make them sick. If we understand these illnesses, these mental health illnesses, to be really metabolic illnesses and the mitochondria aren't functioning and things aren't functioning properly, then just prescribing a bunch of meds that hurt metabolic function isn't going to do any good, and I think it's really sad, and unfortunately people just don't know that sugars and carbohydrates and that these things can be so damaging in this way for so many people. I mean, if you asked 100 people who have bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, I think very few would acknowledge. Some might say a diet is a factor, but few would acknowledge that this is. The driver of the illnesses is what we eat. So, yeah, it's really sad, and so, with the foundation and my family and everything we're doing, we're just trying to spread the message and awareness.
MATT:And there's a lot of momentum picking up in this world of metabolic psychiatry, because people know that these treatments don't work.
MATT:People know that these meds don't work and that Americans are just getting sicker and sicker. And it's no coincidence that we gave everyone the food pyramid 50 years ago and told them to eat bread and refined carbs, basically, and now we're just getting sicker and sicker in many, many comorbidities between metabolic illnesses traditional metabolic illnesses like type 2 diabetes, heart disease, obesity, things like that and mental health issues. So people with mental health issues are more likely to be obese, more likely to have type 2 diabetes and vice versa, which leads us to believe that there is an underlying root cause that is causing all of this. And if you have type 2 diabetes and bipolar disorder. You're going to go to two different doctors for two different medications to treat both of those things when in reality the root cause might be the same for both. So it really speaks to the problems with healthcare in America, as well as just the power of this diet, I mean, and of dropping all these foods. It's powerful.
FLORENCE:Incredible. And one of the things that's interesting about his theory and the idea of some of us are hypersensitive to refined carbohydrates and we over consume it is that there's a book by a man named Adam McArnold. It's called the Affliction of Addiction and he said nobody can get addicted to a substance unless it acts very quickly and intensely. If there's like a little lift, I kind of feel good on that. There's a delay in feeling good. You know, when you eat chocolate chip cookies you're not, that's not something you're going to get addicted to. So even by virtue of the fact that we compulsively eat it, fact that we compulsively eat it, like there's this, like oh, give me more. You know it's an early sign for some of us that that addiction suggests the hypersensitivity.
FLORENCE:And where there's that hypersensitivity you have brain cells that are lightened up like a Christmas tree, as Dr Mark Hyman would say, and eventually they burn out and you do wind up with these neurotransmitter deficiencies, plus the processed junk foods push out. These foods with higher actually have nutrients in them, so we become nutrient deficient. So there's all these complexities, but the bottom line is is that when you go wow, you get back to whole foods and in matt's case and in the case of your foundation, what you're you're trying to raise awareness of is that sometimes just getting back to whole foods isn't enough to heal the metabolic psychiatric issues that you needed to let go of the carbohydrates to restore functioning of the brain, because burning ketones is a different fuel source and for some brains it just just goes. I can heal. Now do you want to speak more to the science around that?
MATT:definitely, brains are very different. Um, people respond differently to carbs and I respond very, very well to ketogenic diet. I mean, in ketosis, when I'm burning fat for fuel and using ketones, I just my, my brain is clear, I can think clearly. It's like it was almost like the lights came on when I went on this diet. But humans are essentially hybrid cars where there are two sources of energy we can use for fuel. We can use carbohydrates and glucose, or we can use ketones, and so if we eat a lot of carbohydrates, we'll burn that glucose as fuel. But by entering a ketogenic diet and eating very high fat and moderate protein but very, very low carb, the body runs out of sugar, glucose pretty much and you have to burn fat for fuel and so body starts producing this different fuel source, which is ketones. And I can measure ketones in my blood with a little finger prick. Right now, 1.5 to 3 millimoles per liter is typically the range that I like to be in, to feel at my best.
MATT:But, like you said, this is an intervention for people who specifically have all of these problems with carbs, and I think you're right. If I, even if I had replaced the crap, I was eating Taco Bell and like whatever I was eating, with whole foods, which is great and for a lot of people that's just amazing and brown rice and potatoes, all this good stuff. But I think for me I really needed to go the extra mile and put my body in ketosis and go ultra, ultra low carb. And I don't even know if keto, the keto diet, is the one size fits all solution for everyone. I mean it just. I think I happen to be.
MATT:The fact that I did so badly on all of this sugar and I think I was addicted in my teenage years. I can really speak to that. But the fact that I did so badly, the fact that I do so well in ketosis, makes me think that I'm just genetically not wired to perform well on carbs. So I think for many, many people, just replacing all this bad food with whole foods whole foods Generally if there's one or two ingredients on the packaging in that you're like doing pretty well you probably don't want to see like 50 there, but that's really good for many, many people.
MATT:For me, I just had to do ketosis and it's so funny looking back at my childhood and all of the sugar addiction and just all of the like I would get low blood sugar, like I remember. I would crash after three and a half hours if I hadn't eaten and I would get irritable. And that was because I was eating all of this, these carbohydrates, and my blood sugar would crash after three and a half hours and so I would have to eat more um regularly throughout the day. And my mom talks about my dad had the same thing when he came home from work earlier in his life my dad's low carb now as well. But now I don't have this. I don't have the sugar crash because my body is not. I'm not burning glucose for energy, I'm burning ketones and I sleep better and more balanced energy in my brain.
MATT:I mean, you know, this is really. This is more powerful than people realize, and we're not. We don't. We don't grow up in the West thinking about how impactful food is for everything, don't. If we don't grow up in the West thinking about how impactful food is for everything, I mean, if you think about it, it should be obvious. The food we eat becomes us, it becomes our brains, it becomes ourselves, it becomes everything. It's critical, it's like beyond critical, but somehow it's just ignored. There are a lot of special interest problems in medicine where doctors are just make more money the more meds they prescribe. I mean, the best thing for the healthcare industry is for a child to get a chronic illness and be on medication for the rest of his life. So it's very sad but we're trying to, you know, start the movement here.
FLORENCE:Wake and peak blop and join us and try it.
FLORENCE:One of the things that I also want to sort of speak to or have you speak to, is the fact that there's so much misunderstanding around the keto diet or when things to. The keto diet means you're eating a book, you know, like a boatload of meat and fat and bacon and cheese and, oh my lord, stop. Keto is not a diet, it's a physiological state and you can be in ketosis when you're fasting and you can be even a vegan keto. There's ketotarians. You can be a vegetarian keto and still benefit from burning fat for fuel and you want to speak to that because there's so much misunderstanding yes, there is a lot of misunderstanding.
MATT:Um, you do need to eat fat, that is the one thing, but you can fast, and fasting like people will go into ketosis if they fast because they still have carbs. Keto can be done. Carnivore it can be done. Vegan avocado One of my friends is a vegan, a vegetarian keto, and there are a lot of foods that can be done.
MATT:It's more challenging, but it can absolutely be done Almonds, macadamia nuts, and there are lots of, lots of ways to do this. Um, I think for me you know, I've always been a meat eater that works for me, but this can be done many, many different ways. So, yeah, so it's not. It's not I.
MATT:And one of the other points I'll make is that I think people, a lot of doctors, make the assumption that people are undisciplined and that it's going to be very difficult for the assumption that people are undisciplined and that it's going to be very difficult for people to like adhere to this diet, and people won't adhere to this diet. And for mental health, the mental health condition can be so debilitating in its most acute forms that people will do this. On the podcast, we've talked to dozens of people who have done keto for many, many months meat-eating, keto, vegan, keto, vegetarian keto, all kinds of keto and they've seen just tremendous, life-changing, truly unbelievable benefits. People have their lives back from changing the way they eat. So, yeah, this you know anyone with a mental health issue. I think this should be the first thing we try. Really, it doesn't work for everyone, but for many, many, many people it works and there's no reason it shouldn't be the first thing we try.
FLORENCE:Absolutely. Or, you know, maybe some people stabilize, as you said, on medications out of psychosis and then when they've got some bandwidth to start to play with and there's lots of different right ways of doing keto. So how did you learn how to use keto effectively for your body? Was there experimentation? Did someone mentor you?
MATT:Experimentation, yeah, so I tracked my food for a while and I was able to kind of figure out how many carbs I could eat. I try to stay under 35 or 40 a day is when it seems like I'm really at my best. And then I would just do the finger prick and test my ketones and then, based on what I was eating, I could figure out how much I could eat and how much protein and how much fat was appropriate. And it takes getting used to and there's an element of FOMO when I started this because I loved drinking. I love because I don't drink either, I love drinking. I loved pizza. I loved burgers. I love bread. I love pasta. I loved soda, like the ices you get at the movie theater. I love all of this more than anyone.
MATT:So to give it all up 100% is was challenging and I remember, like my girlfriend at the time, years ago, would like eat a lot of ice cream and this stuff and all these foods. And yeah, it was. It's hard. And I think there's another thing that we we don't speak about as much but that I've talked to people keto people about, which is like the cultural festivities and traditions around food and everyone participating in the food and so you know, you really kind of just gotta hold firm and hold the line, but with the benefits that come with it, it's absolutely worth it. And then, like, what happened to me is I just woke up and I started to see all the sugar and I think really we will have a revolution akin to the cigarette smoking revolution around ultra processed food. I do believe that is absolutely coming. I think it's closer than we realize, hopefully right around the corner. So that would be really my hope and that would be amazing to see.
FLORENCE:Oh my gosh, it would be amazing to see I've been on this path for 30 years because I was, and where you were. I was suicidally depressed in my 20s overweight, cystic acne, in and out of doctor's offices, on and off pharmaceuticals. My file was this thick, blinding migraines, like I just like what is wrong and you know, I just kept getting new prescriptions and I just thought it's not working. Like it's not working. I was in and out of urgent care with you know they. I don't know what they were shooting in my in my butt cheeks back then.
MATT:Now they do it all with IVs.
FLORENCE:But back then they just shot something into my, into my behind, and it wasn't working. And even when they were giving me morphine I'd be like just stop it, it's not even. It's what's wrong, what is wrong with my body? And in the dark I would be like I know you're not happy, I know you need something. I just didn't know what it was. And I got, lucky Chris Palmer's book. My book was called the Sugar Blues and he made a connection between sugar and depression. And I went, what it's the sugar Like? I love that stuff Like.
FLORENCE:And then you look at your diet and you realize, oh my Lord, I'm eating at breakfast, lunch and dinner and everything in between, every single meal, every single meal like toast, waffles, pancakes, cereal, extra sugar on top, and then white bread, sandwiches, craft dinner, pasta, pizza I was addicted to strawberry Twizzlers. I always had a pack on the go, like I ate that stuff all the time. Pop brownies like ice cream, like can't junk. No kidding, I had the same meltdown you did and I started that same journey of unhooking Um, and I was probably on the bipolar two spectrum. That there was many was many, as in depressions, for sure, good God, I know. And all these people are out there suffering and they're running, they're seeking for help. And yet I think there's a lot of fear of the keto diet and I think that if you're trying it, it hasn't worked yet. There could be tweaks that happen. People think, well, what about plants? You can eat plenty, plenty of vegetables while being in ketosis. How many vegetables do you eat in a day?
MATT:Moderate. I wouldn't say it's too too high, but I do eat all of the normal vegetables broccoli, kale, spinach, berries in moderation. I mean I love, I mean it's all great. My meat is real. My diet is really. It's whole foods is really it's whole foods. It's like grass fed beef, chicken steak, fish, eggs, full fat cheeses, heavy cream and some nuts, almonds and macadamia nuts and and some vegetables. That's that's the diet. That's pretty much all I eat. So it's amazing. It is so good, it feels so good to put this nourishing, um nutritious whole foods in my body. It's amazing.
FLORENCE:And our bodies love it and we love our food and most of us don't tire of it. Every now and then we need to mix things up a bit. But what about in the early days, because you were coming out of sugar addiction background, did you ever relapse and have a relapse of your symptoms? Like, did you ever, once you were on keto? Did you ever relapse and have a relapse of your symptoms? Like, did you ever, once you were on keto? Did you never go back or did you have any sort of dabbling episodes that reinforced oh no, I can't go back.
MATT:No, I was always very strict about it, although I will say that there have been periods where I didn't track my ketones as carefully because it was just so habitual at that point. And then I'm sure there were many, many periods where I drifted out of ketosis because I'd had some salad dressing, had some carbs in it. My ketones came down to 0.3. That's happened many, many, many times. But the theory and what Dr Palmer and we all talk about is that there are some cases where even doing nine months or a year of keto or a couple of years of keto, the brain will heal so well to the extent that the person can go back to eating carbs. So I mean, that might be the case for me. I don't think I'll ever go back to eating carbs just because I don't want to and just because I perform better on ketones. So it's about that. But also there may be situations where people only need to do this for mental health for a couple of years and then they heal so much they can go back to eating carbs. And we've seen this in the epilepsy world. So people don't realize that this has been a treatment for epilepsy 400 years. The ketogenic diet and the ketogenic diet was originally invented as a treatment for epilepsy and many people go on a keto diet and their seizures stop. And many people go on a keto diet for five years and their seizures stop and then they can return to eating carbs and the seizures don't return. So this is just.
MATT:This is such a powerful tool and, like I said, I don't think it's necessarily for everyone, but for people who have tried everything, who have these mental health issues schizophrenia, bipolar depression, anxiety, all this stuff, even just low-grade anxiety I mean we can do the medication and psychotherapy thing, but I can only speak for myself and there is no amount of psychotherapy that could have modified the chemistry of my brain and body to start to burn a different fuel source. I mean that's not going to happen. So a lot of these tools can be really useful, but if people haven't tried ketogenic diet or whole foods or low sugar or intermittent fasting or any of these tools as well as sleep, diet, exercise, meditation, connection, community you know, bright light in the morning I mean there are so many tools at our disposals to to serve our metabolic health and improve the functioning of our cells. So it's really it's a great world to get into and the one that keeps on giving, because we just start to feel better and better.
FLORENCE:Ah, so amazing and I want to sort of pick up on that comment that some people can go back to eating whole foods, including whole food carbohydrates. They can eat their potatoes or whatever, which tells us that it wasn't the whole carbs aren't the problem, it's the refined carbohydrates that damage our metabolism. We become incredibly sensitive to carbohydrates and and ketosis being in the physiological state of ketosis, where you're burning fat for fuel can be an inter nutritional intervention that can repair the brain, repair the metabolism, and then you can decide, if you, what level of carbohydrates. Some people it's a hundred, it's under a hundred, some people it's under 80, some people it's under 35 or whatever. Right, some people it's zero, like jordan peterson's daughter, whose name I'm suddenly forgetting mikaela, the line diet right like zero.
FLORENCE:She keeps trying and her symptoms come back. Who knows, maybe one day she'll try and it will be okay just a longer healing journey, we don't know. Carbs are not the enemy. The refined carbohydrates have come into our diet. They've messed with our metabolism, messed with our mental health and this is just a kind of an extreme and unique and powerful intervention that matt is living proof of that can really heal metabolism and mental health issues in ways that you won't believe unless you try it. Is there anything else you'd want to say about metabolic therapies for mental illness?
MATT:Not that I can think of. I can do a really brief overview of the program so people just understand what I do on a day-to-day basis, which is it's really a few pillars of health. It's like I said diet, sleep, exercise, meditation, community and a couple others but this. But the diet piece is keto, it's strict keto. The sleep there are a lot of things I do for my sleep, like getting darkness in the evening and sleeping in a cool room and going. You know, I was trying to sleep like 11 to seven every night and then getting bright light outside first thing in the morning. Of course Huberman, andrew Huberman, has hit on that point enough that we all know bright light in the morning and then exercise so hard cardio three days, three days a week and lifting weights three days a week. I like to swim Peloton, stuff like that. You got my Peloton back here.
FLORENCE:Yeah.
MATT:And then I I love to meditate in the morning, I love to connect with friends, play music, get off technology as much as I can. So all of these are metabolism, metabolism builders, they're all, they're all healing for, for metabolic health. So I do all of them. And keto, with all of this put together, is like a supercharged health program that I never could have received from a medication or a doctor. It's a very special thing and it's funny. It's almost like being the poster child of this whole metabolic psychiatry movement.
MATT:I feel like we're forging this new program of health with all of these different things and keto diet and all of these other lifestyle habits that serve metabolic health.
MATT:So it's really an exciting time and, like I said, I feel like the revolution is coming and people are getting sick of this and people know that something is wrong with our health and they don't realize.
MATT:It's almost like the boogeyman, because doctors don't know much about nutrition and medical schools don't treat nutrition because medical schools Stanford took a $3 million grant from Pfizer, so medical schools treat, diagnose and prescribe.
MATT:So there's, you know, nobody knows anything about nutrition and there's a lot of misinformation about nutrition. No one actually knows what you're supposed to eat, because we've been fed a bucket of lies from the establishment about carbs and the food pyramid, and so it's very sad, but I really feel like there's hope because the people we talk to and the people our family talks to and that we have on the podcast and just hear so many reports anecdotally, of people whose lives have changed from changing the way they eat and not only people that Ian and I my co-host that we've talked to on the podcast, but other people I've talked to and just many, many people have reported life-changing improvements in mental health from doing a keto diet or changing the way they eat. So it's also really an exciting time and I can't wait to see what the next five, 10 years are going to bring for this.
FLORENCE:It's going to be awesome, exciting time and I can't wait to see what the next five, 10 years are going to bring for this. It's going to be awesome. I love that enthusiasm. Yes, I'll share a little bit about um. There was something you said, but I think I lost my thread. But I just wanted to share my own experience with ketosis.
FLORENCE:I drop it into as I got older and I got burnt out. I would drop it in and out of a trauma state called the freeze response and tried everything like I was trying. I was doing all the meditation I was. Oh, I know what I was going to say. You can do everything, right. You can meditate, you can exercise, you can go out and get sunlight on your face first thing in the morning, you go spend time in nature, you can connect socially all those good things and none of them compensate for, you know, a processed food diet if you're metabolically damaged, right right, there's. There's no superfood, there's no supplement, there's no amount of sunshine. Nothing can undo the damage these ultra-processed foods are doing to you. They have to go. You are throwing your money away at the osteopaths and the chiropractor. They're fabulous doctors, don't get me wrong. But as long as you are on the ultra-processed foods. They're trying to work upstream of a problem that cannot be solved except for to get rid of the ultra processed foods.
FLORENCE:So for me, I'm a whole food woman and I was still dropping into this collapsed freeze state and I was doing all the psychotherapeutic stuff really powerful, really interesting, somatic work, trauma work, all of it really great. But it wasn't until I went into ketosis that I could come out of the freeze response and it reminds me that we can traumatize the cells and when cells are traumatized they collapse. There is no energy there and we drop into this freeze response and we think it's all psychosocial, emotional. But there's a physiological piece and sometimes for some people, for many of us, potentially ketosis can kickstart back up the nervous system and give us enough energy to move out of the trauma response so we can actually do trauma healing work. I think it's blocking, I think it's supportive of trauma recovery work and I think not doing it can be a block because our cells don't get the energy they need to move out and move through. The phrase response does that even make sense to you?
MATT:totally, absolutely, absolutely. I mean without I. I feel the exact same way. Without keto I would not have the health that I have without, even if I had done whole foods, I mean even it's all, all the exercise and meditation and sunlight, and I was doing those things before I found keto. Even I was swimming and getting exercise and doing all this stuff and I wasn't well. I wasn't well and you're absolutely right.
MATT:Until the ultra processed foods go, we have nothing. It has to be priority Number one. I mean, I've always said sleep, diet, exercise are the big three. I'm starting to even lean food over sleep, diet and exercise for myself, just because when I started eating the right foods and suddenly my brain healed, I could begin to make the right decisions with regard to every other element of my life, my relationships, my other habits.
MATT:So I think for people who are so depressed that they can't get out of bed and like all day and just can't get out of bed, like oh go, exercise, you know, exercise an hour of the day, well, that's unrealistic and it's not out of a lack of motivation or out of some sort of defective character or some psychological issue.
MATT:This is because the person is burning carbohydrates and sugar as fuel and the person's brain is not working because they have the wrong fuel source. So I think, for that reason, using keto as the first intervention where it's like, okay, even a treatment center that just did keto and you watch TV all day, that doesn't matter, we just need to get you in ketosis and then from doing that, brain can heal and suddenly the vigorous physical exercise becomes not just possible but enjoyable, and it's the sleep regularize becomes regular, and so all of these things. So I think really this you're absolutely right the ultra processed foods have to go. They have to go. There's no way around it. And all of these fancy therapies, nothing is going to do anything until we get rid of the ultra processed foods.
FLORENCE:Yeah, I really believe that for so millions and millions and millions and millions of us and I know when I was listening I was hearing your list of all the different things that you do in a day I was thinking back in my depressed days I'd be like, oh my god, I have to do all that to feel good. No, no, you, you get to do all that because you feel good. Right, ketosis first, and then you have this energy, you have this mental clarity. It's an unbelievable state, physiological state, for if it, if it agrees with your system, it's unlike anything Matt and I could describe. But once you've got more energy online, you start to want to do things that are so pleasurable and self. You know, self, I just self care, really high quality self care. You want to do it. It's not like, okay, now I'm gonna go meditate. It's like, oh, I get to go and drop into the, into this blissful experience of silence and stillness.
FLORENCE:I wanted to say one last thing and then we can wrap up. You know, sometimes it's not the case that people are burning the wrong fuel source, like the carbohydrates, it's that they're insulin resistant and they can eat all the fricking sugar they want. They cannot binge enough calories to get the sugar into the cells. They are insulin resistant. So it isn't sometimes that it's if you're so metabolically damaged that you can't even use that fuel source and it's. It might be a fine fuel source that you go back to and you go in and out of ketosis burning. You're metabolically flexible. You burn sugar, you burn ketones, you burn maybe that that you know down the road. That's possible. But when you're metabolically damaged, insulin resistant, leptin resistant, you can't burn the fuel. It's not working and no amount of eating more of it is going to change it. You're gonna have to switch your fuel source until you can get that fuel source to heal you and then you can figure out where carbs whole, healthy carbs fit in, fit into your life you know, for type 2 diabetes.
MATT:I mean, there's so much, there's so much that we haven't figured out yet yeah, yeah, we're early stages.
FLORENCE:Any final words you'd like to share, matt, before we wrap up today? Oh, not that I can think of tell us a bit about the bouziki foundation, what your parents have done. They were so yeah.
MATT:So families are families donating a lot of money to just facilitate the science and awareness for this, and they're handing out grants to scientists who are studying keto for mental health and for all these things. And there have been trials. There was Dr Sethi's at Stanford, dr Campbell's podcast co-host at Oberlin, edinburgh, so there are tons of trials coming out and it's really exciting and pharma is not going to like this, but it's picking up a lot of steam. So we've really you know, we've really put metabolic psychiatry on the map. It's very funny. This was not a this was not a movement five years ago, but my family and my parents have. They got all the scientists, all the professionals together, all these conferences and people are doing things and doing research and talking to each other. So, yeah, it's really it's funny to be a part of this burgeoning movement and to be like the poster child that you know, for all of this philanthropy to happen is very funny.
MATT:A lot of people want to talk to me about this. I really just say, look, I'm lucky, I found the ketogenic diet. I'm just very, very lucky because without that I would have nothing and I would be struggling and, um, I really struggled in life before. I found this not because I had some, like I said, defective character or psychological problem. It's just an energy imbalance. And then when I fixed that, everything fell into place. So I really want the best for everyone else as well who's going through this kind of stuff.
FLORENCE:You are lucky that you found the ketogenic diet and the world is lucky that your parents loved you, matt, and they watched the transformation and they're willing to put their time and their energy and their money into helping the rest of the world have their children you know themselves and their children experience this transformation. So thank you, thank you to them. I know many of us are like. Thank you for the to the Bazooki Foundation and all the beautiful work they're doing in the world, and thanks for your time today.
MATT:Of course, thank you.
FLORENCE:Bye everybody. Thanks for tuning in.
