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After suffering the devastating loss of her young son, Dr. Anna Cabeca spiraled into depression that brought along with it weight gain, hair loss, other symptoms of stress, and early menopause. Through her own healing journey, she discovered the optimal way to get your hormones back in check and live a vibrant, healthy life.
So many of you may have heard of the Keto diet, but if you’re going about this diet the wrong way, it could be leading you down the path to disease. In this interview, we discuss how to properly use the Keto diet to regain health overall, banish dry eye symptoms, and live a healthier, happier life.
What we eat is 25% of the process. When we eat and who we share meals with are incredibly important as well! This is why so many diets fail - we fail to realize that it’s not all about food. The Keto diet means restricting carbohydrates and incorporating more healthy fats and protein into your diet, but you must be careful about the foods you’re choosing.
Unfortunately for many women trying out the Keto diet, they notice they become “keto crazy”, as Dr. Cabeca calls it. Not only do they feel nauseous and have digestive problems, but they also feel incredibly anxious and irritable. Choosing meat and cheese to hit your ketosis goals is the wrong way to get healthy, because this is throwing your body into acidity.
Instead of filling yourself with unhealthy saturated fats, choose wild caught, farm raised, grass fed meats and fats such as avocados, olive oil, and coconut. By choosing this way of keto eating, you’re giving your body the ability to become more alkaline vs. acidic.
Checking urine pH is necessary to find out if you’re properly nourishing your body and managing stress. You want your pH to be as close to 7.0 as possible (above 7.0 is more alkaline and below that is acidic). By being plant-based or plant-rich, alkalinity is much more possible, and this is important for fighting inflammation.
The ketogenic diet will decrease carbs in your body, leaving little to no sugar (glucose) for your body to use. When this occurs, your body becomes more insulin sensitive and instead relies on fat for fuel. Healthy fats are naturally anti-inflammatory and essential for cell membrane health. We need a wide complement of amino acids to keep our muscles and bones strong, and plant based fibers also help this process. By feeding your cells the Keto Green way, you’re giving them their best chance of health and vitality.
The alkaline or greens component is so important as well, and this goes beyond the green foods you should be eating. This means decreasing stress and balancing energy through prayer, meditation, a long walk, enjoying a beautiful sunset, getting a great night’s sleep, and staying well hydrated. This manages cortisol, the fight or flight responder. When cortisol is on for too long, it can crash and inflammation instead begins to surge. By resetting your circadian cortisol cycle, you can begin to heal not only your body, but your eyes as well.
Initially, restricting carbs can help a person realize just how many carbs are in certain healthy things they may be eating (for example, certain fruits like bananas). The Keto Calculator is one resource that can help you manage your fat, protein, and carbohydrate intake, but Dr. Cabeca recommends that women stay below 40 grams of green, alkalinizing carbs. You’ll need to pay attention to how this makes you feel, and if you’re not feeling great you’ll need to make a change along with your doctor’s guidance. For women over 40 finding the right Keto Diet can be really tough. Dr. Cabecca makes this very simple to understand and follow in her E-Book, Making Keto Work for Women Over 40.
By testing your ketones and pH, you’ll easily be able to see what’s throwing you out of ketosis and alkalinity. For example, if you have a food sensitivity to dairy and you’re eating it, your body may end up acidic.
A typical day of eating the Keto Green way starts with intermittent fasting through breakfast, and the recommended time period for fasting would be 16 hours (roughly between dinner and lunch the next day). Learn more about intermittent fasting here.
Break your fast around lunchtime with a green smoothie. Try to keep this smoothie very green with lots of healthy fats and oils (avocados, nuts and seeds, coconut or MCT oil) and avoid high sugar fruits. Try to keep higher carbs for later in the day, because this will help you sleep better. Alternatively, you could instead make a large green salad including the leafy green of your choice (spinach, kale, arugula, etc), a healthy protein like wild caught smoked salmon, capers, lemon juice, and olive oil.
Eat an early dinner (preferably outdoors for some added stress relief). When you eat later, after 7pm, your body secretes 30-70% more insulin (putting what you eat into storage). Make sure to keep your dinner relatively light but keto friendly. Feel free to have grass fed beef, wild caught fish, or a vegetarian protein source like baked tofu, eggs, tempeh, or a veggie burger.
If you want to have the occasional dessert, make chia pudding! Heat up full fat coconut milk and combine it with chia seeds, nuts, and blueberries. Allow it to sit for a few hours so the chia seeds fill up with liquid. If you eat chia seeds raw, you can risk gastrointestinal issues. This is a simple, dessert-like snack that will keep you full and satisfy your sweet craving.
Dr. Cabeca’s new book, Keto Green 16, is now out to purchase wherever you love to buy your books.
Make sure to connect with Dr. Cabeca on her website dranna.com and follow her on Instagram @drannacabeca. Join her Keto Green Facebook group for more information on this lifestyle.
Dr. Anna Cabeca is a board certified obstetrician and gynecologist and board certified in integrative medicine and regenerative medicine. She began practicing in St. Simons, GA in the 1990s. She speaks from experience, as she’s risen from her own ashes of personal tragedy that spiraled into depression. From not one but two rounds of menopause. From weight gain, hair loss and many other debilitating symptoms.
Her journey led her around the world to learn about true health and natural healing. She came away empowered with the knowledge that modern medical training and research, combined with time-tested wisdom and remedies, will yield indisputable results.
Dr. Cabeca has published two best-selling books: The Hormone Fix, a groundbreaking holistic lifestyle program for menopausal women, and Keto-Green 16, a comprehensive nutritional plan to staying healthy and slim, at any age.
She’s also spent years developing and perfecting a complete suite of life-changing products and programs. Everything she has developed is part of her daily routine, and based on her exhaustive research and never-ending quest to find solutions that help women reclaim their vibrancy, sexuality, health and happiness.
