if protein is involved in every one of the processes that our body is ever going to do
then it's important that we have the best quality healthiest protein available for our body protein
is one of the macronutrients that we need to eat to survive the most common um action of protein
that you hear me talk about is building and repairing the body and our body will constantly
build and repair and that's in order to keep us as healthy as it possibly can and there are certain
circumstances where your body is going to need more protein so for example if you're pregnant
or if you have an injury or if you're suffering some kind of illness the other reason for protein
in the body are enzymes so enzymes allow chemical reactions to happen for example breaking down food
so digestion making energy healing our body so healing cuts and and problems that are happening
internally and of course contracting our muscles so that we can do stuff the third thing that i
can talk about is hormones they're another type of protein that give relay information back and forth
uh communicate within the body we're often talking about insulin that's the hormone that tells our
body when to store fat for example it does other things there are different types of hormones that
are involved in the regulation of sugar as i just said the regulation of growth of our body
the regulation of the sleep wake cycles our sex hormones regulate for example expression
of our sexuality and also it regulates like when our body goes into puberty
now honestly i know that there's many more actions that proteins have in the body i'm not going to go
into all of the deeper things that proteins do because first of all i'm not a doctor and second
of all it's not particularly relevant to what i want to talk about today i just wanted to give
you the three top major things that we often talk about so you understand why i focus so much on
how much protein i eat but also focus on the quality of the protein that i eat if protein
is involved in every one of the processes that our body's ever gonna do then it's important that we
have the best quality healthiest protein available for our body while i was doing this research
there was always this long list of things that technical and complicated about what protein does
it would always at some point in the article in the research give this one little oh and
by the way protein can be used by the body as energy if it needs to or oh by the way the body
doesn't prefer to use it as energy the reason i'm bringing this up is because so often we see
that they try to make us believe that protein is the and the other energy source and that's
not the case when i was doing my research and they were talking about protein it was very clear that
although protein can be used as energy if we are in difficulty or can be used by the body as energy
in very specific situations the majority of the time the body will use carbohydrates and fats
there are 20 amino acids that make up our body's protein and we can actually make a 11 out of the
20. so there's really nine that we need to eat to get into our diet so those essential amino
acids that they're often talking about meat fish eggs and dairy are considered complete proteins
because they give us all nine of these essential amino acids so the macronutrient makeup of animal
protein is that somewhere between 22 and 30 grams of protein per 100 grams of food and when we're
talking about eggs it's 12.6 grams of protein for every 100 grams of food when we're looking at
plant protein there are some plants that actually give us complete proteins and those are the only
ones i'm going to talk about today because i just want to i want to try to keep this balanced
and of these plant proteins the ones that are giving us the complete protein as you can see
spirulina which is a type of algae is giving us the best bang for the buck i would say
with a hundred grams of spirulina giving us 58 grams of protein it comes in a powder and it
comes in in a pill form so it makes me think that because i couldn't seem to find it in a regular
shape like like the algae from the sea people don't seem to eat it that way maybe there's
somewhere in the world that they do but in North America this seems to be the format that you can
get it in if there's another way to get actually i'd be very curious to know because i like eating
things that are whole foods as we're looking at this what we're seeing is that hemp seeds
32 grams of protein for 100 grams chia seeds 16.5 so you're getting a good amount of protein however
i need us to understand that it's coming along with quite a bit of carb so hemp seeds for that
100 grams you're gonna get about eight grams nine grams of carb in there chia seeds you're gonna get
42 grams of carb spirulina you're getting 25 grams of carbs so the best options that i see there put
the average person trying to do keto over their numbers there are other foods and the carb count
though was always quite high now i haven't and i'm not going to talk a lot about protein powders and
processed protein because in my opinion processed foods are too quickly absorbed and manufacturers
tend to manipulate us when they create processed foods processed proteins they use the cheapest
quality food they can and sell to us as if it's the most beneficial type of food we can eat and
so for that reason i would rather talk about real foods whole foods that you can buy in the grocery
store and feed your body appropriately so now the question is is it possible as a vegetarian
to get all the protein that you need to be healthy and apparently the answer is yes
is it possible to do a healthy vegetarian keto diet so for me to get all the protein that i need
and to keep my carbs under 20 grams if i consider eggs as vegetarian then i'm gonna say i could do
it i would be able to eat what i needed to eat i want to put some perspective on this though
to get half of my 90 grams of protein from eggs i'd have to eat like nine eggs every day
is that doable for me it is because i don't mind eating the same thing every day so i would do it
but that's a lot of eggs and then i still have to try to get the other half from vegetables
now if i went i can go higher though i can do 75 percent from eggs i could do i could even do 100
from eggs and then allow some veg for variety the point that i'm trying to make here is that even
if i wanted to use spirulina the carb count is so high that i wouldn't be comfortable remember
that if i get to 18 in my carb count i start having pain and inflammation and it's not good
these are things that we need to think about if we're going to try to have a vegetarian keto diet
and i would love to be able to if anyone knows a way to do it if there's a food that i'm missing
please put it in the comments below because i would like to know how and i've heard people
talk about being vegetarian keto so often how are you keeping your carb count under 20 while
getting all the protein that you need sold for me i need 90 minimum 90 grams of protein that's
not counting the food i'm eating that's just the grams of protein i need to get out of the food
i would love to know how people make that happen what we've learned is that meat is
the source of protein that provides the least amount of carb to the diet what we already knew
is that sugar causes our insulin to rise and high insulin causes our body to store carbs away as fat
in the presence of high insulin when the body is in storage mode we also need to understand
and i learned this from Dr Fung i believe that anything that is present while my body is storing
sugar away as fat also gets stored so if i'm eating protein if i'm eating right so because
my body is trying to lower all of this energy that's come in the protein that you would have
gotten from the plants is much more likely to be stored because it's coming in with all the sugar
and i want us to keep in mind that that's not limited to plant protein if i eat for example
a steak but i have rice and potatoes and everything with that i'm eating a high carb meal
chances are some of that protein is also getting stored it's very tricky to try to keep all this
straight right but what that means to me is that protein that i get from vegetables
is likely to be stored because it comes packaged with so much carbohydrate and then when we
decide to put those carbs on our plate we have to consider that our threshold is what causes us to
be in that fat storage mode so if i already have insulin resistance my threshold for carbohydrates
is already low so then if i'm getting a lot of my protein along with carb carbohydrates already are
a 10 on 10 when it comes to increasing insulin and causing us to go into storage mode but then when
we add to that the fact that it's the only source of protein coming into my body what is that doing
to my health what is that doing to the protein that i'm supposed to be using to build and repair
you know i often hear people blaming the fact that we over eat protein as the reason that we store it
but many keto doctors have clarified that when we eat protein alone even if we eat a lot of it
somehow we tend to be able to use it and we don't uh convert it over to sugar and start
using it for energy but when we eat it excessively so like when we actually eat it like overeat it
so now i'm not talking about just eating a lot of it i'm talking about eating it to the point where
it's too much for my body to handle then it becomes used as energy and the other way that they
say that we use it for energy is when we eat it alongside carbohydrates this is something that we
need to take into consideration when we're talking about the food we choose to put on our plate and
if we're making that plate you have to make the meat in my opinion and again i'm telling you what
works for me because i've been doing this i make the meat the center of attention my bowls look
more like the top plate it's like if there's veg it's a little bit of veg and then when i do have
my large salads it's still a large amount of meat this is a i'm not even a good representation of
what my salads look like i would still say there's probably too much vegetation on that in that salad
my salads are usually like half and half and again the reason is that what we really need
and what we're trying to accomplish is to have good quality protein to build and fuel the body
so if we understand that the vegetation you put on your plate is there more for entertainment
because you're you're getting all the building blocks you're getting the protein from the meat
with all the amino acid profile that you're trying to attain the meat the fish the eggs
you're also getting quality energy because you're getting the fat that comes along with that protein
and it's again also giving you a quality building block because fat is a building block then we do
start to see that vegetation is it's entertaining for us to have there because it keeps the meal
a little different but it's not necessary so if you're doing healthy keto
and you're no longer snacking so there's no veg between meals then you have a higher possibility
of being healthy if you keep the vegetation on your plate lower so the higher you allow
the carb count to be the more likely you are to store that protein away and that means that
your body will desperately need to make you go out and eat more and then if you're eating
more you're going to gain weight and if you're not allowing your body access to that protein
that you're eating the internal structures that you're building are not going to be as healthy as
you want them to be the internal structures that you're building are not going to be as strong
as you want them to be your body is not going to be able to do the repairs that it needs to do as
often as it needs to do them because when we eat the more we eat the less opportunity our body has
to do repairs so it means slower weight loss it means delayed internal repairs and that
means prolonged metabolic issues i know that i lived them my knees my elbows my back hurt me
for years before i figured all of this out and i only figured it out because my hip issue was
excruciating so wellness warriors i want you to improve your health and that means getting enough
protein all right tell me how you're going to ensure going forward that you're eating complete
proteins what's the plan especially if you're vegetarian what's the plan how are you going
to make sure that you get enough essential amino acids that your body can repair and build and make
sure that you're the strongest possible version of yourself that you can be and remember that we need
to have a healthy body if we want to lose weight if we want to lose fat especially we can't lose it
if we're not healthy i lost 70 pounds right doing this so i have a video that i'm going to link here
that tells you the three tips that i used to lose that 70 pounds and the best source of protein for
our body turns out to be animal protein because it's the least likely to cause metabolic issues