Episode #36

Ali Miller

How Your Diet Influences Your Stress & Anxiety + What To Do About It

036: Ali Miller - How Your Diet Influences Your Stress & Anxiety + What To Do About It
Anxiety truly is the Achilles heel of chronic illness. Click To Tweet

Many people don’t realize the amount of stress their body is dealing with on a constant basis.

Some admit, isn’t that what 40 is supposed to feel like?

But being burned out from juggling too many hats and always feeling tired and anxious should not be the norm.

And if it is for you, you’re going to set yourself up for a plethora of chronic illnesses.

You can be in a therapeutic state of a high fat, moderate protein, low carbohydrate diet, making nutritional ketones, and getting therapeutic benefits, without going into over-restrictive burn out mode. Click To Tweet

Instead of getting to that point, and to avoid that death sentence altogether, it’s important to understand how nutrition plays a key role in both stress and anxiety.

And that’s exactly what I’ll dive into in this podcast episode with my guest speaker and registered dietician, functional nutrition practitioner, and book author Ali Miller.

Ali specializes in functional medicine and has been using a ketogenic diet as a tool to improve her patients’ health since 2009.

In this episode, she’ll share how stress, anxiety, and keto are all interconnected and how they impact each other, plus all the lifestyle habits that can help you keep both stress and anxiety under control.

After listening to this episode, you may be surprised to see what’s really going on here.

We’ll also tackle these topics:

  • How your nutrition could be the root problem behind your stress (and what to do about it)
  • How a keto diet and carb cycling can help restore hormones and get stress and anxiety under control
  • The connection between anxiety and chronic illnesses
  • The role of a functional medicine practitioner (+ a sneak peek into their process and how they can help)
  • How functional medicine practitioners (FMP) are able to uncover issues that routine lab work might miss
  • How inflammation turns into a chemical warfare in your brain
  • Why it’s so crucial to remove pro-inflammatory foods from your diet (+ what happens when you don’t)
  • 5 pro-inflammatory foods to get rid of oday
  • What’s really happening inside your body when you’re in a food coma
  • Two essential nutrients that can replenish your dopamine stores
  • Why food quality is more important than chasing ketones
  • How stripping refined carbs can help you break the addictive mood chasing cycle
  • How to recognize the signs of anxiety and where to turn to next
  • Why it’s crucial to listen to the feedback your body gives you
  • What to do if you haven’t experienced the “keto high”
  • Common factors that may be contributing to a keto plateau
  • Ali’s trifecta of failure: how overdoing it in these categories could be why you’re not seeing results on keto
  • Why keto is not about calorie restriction and why you’ll miss out on therapeutic benefits if you over-restrict yourself
  • How to move your body from reactive mode to regulatory mode with exercise
  • 4 lifestyle factors to adjust right away
  • Why Ali recommends switching from coffee to matcha
  • CBD oil and how it supports GABA mechanisms to help you feel mellow and less stressed or anxious
  • When fasting is a good idea and when it should be avoided altogether
  • How a “bookend” style of eating may be beneficial for some people
  • How exercises like spin or CrossFit can perpetuate gland burnout in people already in a stressed out state
  • Why a shift in movement towards this style is a better route until your body adjusts
  • 2 types of lifestyles that make exercise mandatory vs optional
  • How to tell whether the issues you’re having are coming from your gut microbiome or things like adrenal fatigue
  • Ali’s two-phase approach to carb cycling and who this is right for
  • Carb cycling for men: why Ali believes it’s a good idea for some
  • The 1 life hack Ali uses to help women regulate back to a 28-day cycle
  • Keto for breastfeeding, pregnant moms, and their kids
  • The exact point Ali resumed her keto diet after breastfeeding
  • Why keto should be a metabolic health tool for kids, not a restrictive diet
  • The one time Ali recommends that’s a good idea for a child to be on keto
  • Why it’s a good idea to power your child with autonomy and to give them the choice to decide on their food
  • Ali’s typical nutrition and movement targets on a day-to-day basis

If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to the Keto Answers Podcast on iTunes to get automatic updates. Use Android? Click here to subscribe on Stitcher and here to subscribe on Google Play Music.

Mentioned in This Episode

More Resources