Our Story
As a couple, we’ve always led active, healthy lifestyles: hiking, swimming, running, you name it. However, “healthy” is very much a relative term. Despite working out and eating what we thought was “right,” we both struggled to maintain healthy weights.
A while back, Thanh visited the doctor for a routine physical and the results were not pretty– pre-hypertensive blood pressure and high cholesterol levels. So, what did we do? We minimized eating food with high dietary cholesterol and saturated fats and replaced them with low fat foods and grains and starches.
The following year, his physical results were surprising. Even though Thanh had maintained his weight year-over-year, his cholesterol and blood pressure levels had worsened.
How could this be?
One late summer night, we randomly stumbled upon the Netflix documentary Sugar Coated. Now, I know, you have to be careful with documentaries, but with some background in Biochemistry and some of the extreme claims the documentarians were making about the negative effects of sugar, Thanh felt compelled to follow up. One of the expert interviewees was Gary Taubes, who happened to have a popular book in circulation called Why We Get Fat: And What To Do About It.
Taubes discusses in detail the recent history of nutrition and the increased dependency on not only sugar, but carbohydrates in general, within modern society. What Taubes recommended was to follow a ketogenic diet, which was originally developed to treat epileptic patients. This was not a recent concept either, with records over 100 years old discussing the health benefits of abstaining from carbohydrates. Taubes backs up his claims with history and a plethora of published scientific data. We decided to look into this “diet” a little further.
Enter Keto
After reading Taubes’ book and researching the ketogenic, or keto, diet calling for low carb, high fat and moderate protein, we were thoroughly convinced this would work for us. We leapt head-first into keto (actually, Sonja went in kicking and screaming)… and the results were staggering. The weight came off like nobody’s business. And while we say weight, we actually mean fat because due to the way the fat metabolism works when a person is adapted to burning fat as a primary source of fuel, you don’t break down and lose muscle fiber as readily. We were truly eating fat to lose fat. Within just a few months, we had lost almost 30 pounds each. But, we didn’t revert back to our old habits. See, the ketogenic diet doesn’t have to be a diet that you struggle through then quit when you hit your goal weight. We like to call this the “No Pain, No Gain” diet because you don’t ever starve yourself and you don’t gain weight (but rather lose it). In fact, you get to indulge in some seriously decadent food, which you’d have felt guilty eating in the past.
What was the hardest part for us? What you’ll find is that there aren’t very many keto-friendly or low carb products available commercially when compared to everything else out there. As a result, ketogenic dieters have to rely heavily on cooking and preparing almost every single thing they eat, which can be tough to keep up. For us, that wasn’t going to work and when it comes to maintaining keto for the long-term, convenience and variety are key. Fortunately, there are plenty of new products being introduced every single day in the ketosphere. We love walking down all the aisles and finding new things to try to share with everyone.
And that’s our mission: to find the best-tasting and convenient products on the market that will support the keto and low carb communities and encourage a long-term ketogenic lifestyle change.
Thanks for following along on our journey. We hope you find the information on this site to be useful and help you along your own journey.
Feel free to drop us a line anytime.
In good health and spirit,
Sonja & Thanh
[Oh, and about those health stats. Thanh is back in the normal ranges for weight, cholesterol and blood pressure and intends to keep it that way.]