#24: Exploring Ketogenic Diets for Mental Health with Nicole Laurent
FEBRUARY 20, 2025
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In this episode of Courage to Heal, Anna interviews Nicole Laurent, an experienced psychotherapist specializing in the use of ketogenic diets for treating mental illness and neurological disorders. Nicole discusses the mechanisms of how ketogenic diets work, their potential benefits for conditions like bipolar disorder, depression, schizophrenia, and anxiety, as well as the support systems needed to effectively implement such dietary changes. They explore the rationale behind this approach, the importance of professional supervision, and emerging research supporting the mental health advantages of ketogenic diets. The conversation offers hope and new perspectives for those living with chronic mental health conditions.
[00:39] Understanding the Ketogenic Diet
[02:48] Ketogenic Diet for Mental Health
[06:38] Bipolar Disorder and Keto
[10:50] Metabolic Psychiatry and Research
[14:12] Implementing a Medical Ketogenic Diet
[21:05] Therapy and Ketogenic Diets
[28:31] Challenges and Support for Keto
[34:17] Nicole's Resources and Programs
Episode Links:
Transcript
Anna: Hello friends and welcome to Courage to Heal. Today you will hear an interview with Nicole Laurent. Nicole is an experienced psychotherapist specializing in the use of ketogenic diets as a treatment for mental illness and neurological disorders. She also works to educate the public regarding ketogenic diets with her blog, social media platforms, and podcasts. And she develops online programs to increase public accessibility to metabolic and nutritional therapies.
Nicole, welcome to Courage to Heal. It's great to have you here.
Nicole: It's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
Anna: So, Nicole, first of all, for those of my listeners who may not be aware, what is a ketogenic diet?
Nicole: Yeah, a ketogenic diet is a diet in which the macronutrients, the macronutrient ratios are flipped, so to speak. So what happened? So we have a, a glucose kind of heavy carbohydrate kind of heavy diet in, you know, in, in Western cultures for sure. And, and now all over the world, really. And so it's very high in carbohydrates and when a diet is very high in carbohydrates.
Insulin is often pumped out, often, constantly, and when insulin is very, very high, then the body cannot burn fat for fuel very well. So, a ketogenic diet has actually been around for over, well over a hundred years now. In the world of neurology to treat epilepsy and other seizure disorders. And what ends up happening is on a ketogenic diet, you restrict your carbohydrates down low enough that your body, your insulin levels drop and your body is forced to access its own body stores for fuel in the form of broken down fatty acids.
And also it will begin to utilize better fat for fuel that you eat in the diet. And so when fat, whether fat is a fuel, whether it's fat that's being burned off of your body or whether it's what you put in your mouth, what you eat, when those fatty acids are broken down, they ketone bodies. And there's different, different ketone bodies.
Some are more well studied than others, but basically what these do is kind of some amazing things for the body and the brain in particular, so much so that they can stop seizures when other medications fail. It's, it's used for errors of inborn metabolism, really serious genetic issues and. Epilepsy, you know, when, when the meds fail, this is what they bring out still.
And so what we're finding is that it can be quite useful for other neurological issues like mental illness.
Anna: Wow. That's fascinating because I know I've definitely heard of the keto diet for weight loss. And I have actually gone on a keto diet for a month for that reason. But I think this is such a new idea, to most people who aren't in the industry, new idea that a ketogenic diet can be used to manage mental health.
So what kind of conditions improve on a keto diet?
Nicole: Well, you know, it's been, there was just a review in the literature, the scientific literature, that called it a transdiagnostic intervention, meaning it's appearing to improve symptoms across different diagnoses. And if you think about it, that makes sense because a ketogenic diet is not, you know, a ketogenic diet is not like a, like it can be powerful, like a medication.
It can have medication-like effects, but it doesn't seem to work in the same way as a medication. We're often in the mental, in the mental health population, they are looking for symptom reduction, right? Nobody, you know, nobody takes an antidepressant or an antipsychotic medication, for example, thinking this is going to fix my disorder.
This is going to fix the underlying issues that are going on and ketogenic diets seem to be able to heal brains. And this makes sense because in the epilepsy population. About 50 percent of people who use ketogenic diets as a treatment for seizure disorders after one to five years of being on a ketogenic diet, they are able to eat normally or they're able about 50 percent are able to eat normally, able to titrate their carbohydrate intake up.
Some just go right on back to a standard American diet, right? And, and so there's this, there's this idea or this, it appears that this seems to heal brains. So if you think about it, if mental illness, if the, the biological pillar of practice, right? So I'm a psychotherapist. So the biopsychosocial pillars of practice are how I conceptualize mental illness and other psychiatrists do.
This is a pretty important bio pillar. If this can heal brains, this, this is a, this is a big, important piece of the puzzle for mental health recovery. You know, it, it's very useful. So there's lots of published case studies and even for even pilot trials for bipolar and schizophrenia where we're, you know, where we use the, you know, we use words like recovery.
And remission and these people are just thriving after utilizing a ketogenic diet and we don't know how long they have to stay on it yet. Like that, those research studies haven't been done, but there's case reports for there's case reports published in the peer reviewed literature for bipolar, bipolar two depression, treatment resistant.
Um, anxiety disorders like generalized anxiety disorder. Like Lori Calabrese is a clinician and researcher, and she has some beautiful, very complicated comorbid case studies like the case studies coming out. These are not like clean diagnoses where this person just had depression, or this person just had binge eating disorder.
This person just had generalized anxiety disorder, like diagnosis is messy and people come in with, with real comorbidities, but we're just like seeing. Improvements across the board for the people who are responding. I don't think it matters what your diagnosis is. This is just really good for your brain.
And I think this is very, very helpful for people.
Anna: Wow, that's indeed fascinating if it can heal your brain, because I know that for my listeners, to give you a bit of background is I live with bipolar disorder and I did a big series on bipolar at the start of my podcast, they might be particularly interested in hearing how a ketogenic diet might help with bipolar symptoms. And, you know, because we are told that once you are diagnosed with bipolar, that's forever.
Nicole: I know what you're told. And we're, and we're finding evidence to say that is not the case with this particular intervention. So it's super exciting.
Anna: That is so exciting, that can give hope to so many people, including myself. And so, you mentioned bipolar type 2 improving on keto. Does that mean that just depressive symptoms improve, or do manic symptoms improve as well, do you know?
Nicole: So, so yes, the whole spectrum of the illness seems to improve.
Now, We, you know, yeah, people, so where to start? I'm so excited. I don't even like know where to start to tell you about this. So we have, we have medications that appear to control mania quite well. A lot of the medications that we use in bipolar disorder are actually epilepsy medications, right?
Remember this is used in epilepsy. We use those, those anticonvulsant medications in bipolar disorder and antipsychotics. But as you know, those have serious side effects. Those have side effects that just really hurt people's quality of life. They get cognitive symptoms. They're tired. They sleep many, many hours a day.
So while we have medications that treat the manic symptoms of bipolar, you know, treat, mask They're not great, people don't like them, and they often go off their medications because they find the side effects to just be so horrendous, right? Weight gain, metabolic dysfunction and they're not great to be on your whole life.
There's, there's, there's research that suggests that, you know, on those medications, long term people don't live as long and they have more heart disease, and they have more different kinds of chronic illness that are metabolic diseases, right? And while the, you know, and then there's lithium and that's can be fine for some, but a problem for others, you know, there's side effects to that too, but anyways, we have these meds that can kind of create some stability for manic part, the manic parts of the, of the different illnesses.
For that are bipolar spectrum, but then the depressive symptoms, we don't have good medications for the depressive symptoms of bipolar disorder. And that's just not my opinion. Like we have published stuff in the peer review literature saying we don't, we don't have good solutions for bipolar depression.
And that's the truth. And I, this really does amazing things for that. Where, where I haven't seen other things be successful. So it's good for both. I get people that respond well to a ketogenic diet and then have to be very, very carefully tapered off their medication. But I have people who use the ketogenic diet as their treatment for bipolar disorder, and they do beautifully.
Some stay on a small amount of medication. Some, some go off very, very slowly and carefully. I'm a big proponent of hyperbolic tape tapering, hyperbolic tapering. And, and so, yeah, and then people are, people do really well with it.
Anna: Wow. That's incredible because I think for like people who don't have bipolar, the uninitiated, so to speak they might say, well, why not just take an antidepressant, but we know that antidepressants can trigger mania and mixed symptoms and bipolar. So having this tool of, you know, change your changing your nutrition and then having that impact on the depressive symptoms. That's really amazing.
Nicole: Yeah, and it's, you know, that there's case studies published from, you know, all over all over the world, really. And so it's not just like that, you know, it's not like there's just one clinician getting these results like we've got case studies from all over.
Stanford has a metabolic psychiatry clinic that uses ketogenic diets for. Eating disorders that uses ketogenic diets for bipolar, schizophrenia, major depressive disorder. And they've actually been around for quite a while. Harvard is creating a metabolic type of clinic for the community and their doctors are starting to be trained in metabolic psychiatry, which is under that umbrella.
So there's metabolic psychiatry, and then there's many different metabolic interventions that fall under that term. So one of the most powerful ones we have is a ketogenic diet, right? That's in that toolbox. But there's also exercise, sleep light exposure you know, met, you know, getting rid of toxins, medic, you know, certain medications or certain supplements or dealing with nutrient deficiencies.
It's really good psychiatry practice, paying attention to your relationships, paying attention to your thoughts and how they disrupt you emotionally and how emotional disruption dis, displaces brain or disrupts brain metabolism, which, right, it just starts the cycle. So that's what metabolic psychiatry means.
But my point is it's on coast to coast. Right? Like the major research institutions and hospitals are, are starting to adopt it. The Mayo Clinic is, is doing a study on it. There's RCTs going on, there's an RCT going on in Australia for schizophrenia, and I think schizoaffective disorder. We have a bipolar and MDD clinical trial going on in Canada.
If people go to metabolic mind dot org and they click on the research thing, they'll get all this information about these published studies. They'll get to see this cool little map that shows them where all the research studies are going on that they've funded, the Baszucki brain research fund has funded.
And so, yeah. Oh, I think maybe there might be some on there. The research literature has just exploded about ketogenic diets for all kinds of chronic illnesses, but the mental health field is particularly exciting.
Anna: That is indeed exciting. And again, I think that the layperson out there may not know about this because they've only heard about this diet as a tool for weight reduction, and they don't know that it can heal your brain. So this is, to me, revolutionary stuff.
Nicole: Yeah. Yeah. So we should talk about that because when people think about the ketogenic diet, they, they often think about the, the one that's just kind of floating around for weight loss, where you get this nice little list of low carb foods and you try to eat off of that.
And sometimes it's a little, what they call dirty keto, right? So the, you know, you get a little bit of sugar here and there, or you get gluten from bread or whatever.
Right. And as long as it fits your macros, that's okay. You know? But this is a little bit different.
So this, this is a medical ketogenic diet. And so while many people have just done it for weight loss and had fantastic results like then, and there's a case study done by Chris Palmer, have you heard of Chris Palmer?
Anna: No, I have not.
Nicole: Oh, well, he, he wrote a book, I think a couple years ago now called Brain Energy that talks about the metabolic, underpinnings of mental illness. And so he's putting force forth a theory that mental illness is actually a metabolic disorder. And or driven by metabolic factors.
And so you would love that book. That's it's really fascinating. And it's, it's quite a solid theory. And we are seeing evidence to support that theory, right? So people put forth the theory and then we start testing to see and. We're seeing some evidence that that is absolutely the case. So, it's like a whole paradigm shift in the psychiatric world, and I would say the psychological world, the psychology, clinical psychology world, should also be paying attention to this in a biopsychosocial model of practice.
But anyways, the so the, so a ketogenic diet to heal a brain looks a lot like the ones they use in epilepsy for adults. The, the, there's a, you know, there's a super, super, super fatty one called a four to one ratio that no adult would want to eat and the children barely want to eat. But when we treat epilepsy in adults, we don't use a four to one ratio because not enough protein for an adult and you don't need it anyways.
So there are these it's a, it's a ketogenic diet, also known as ketogenic metabolic therapy. And it can be quite, doable for people, it's, it's not the old 1920s childhood epilepsy diet anymore. The, the epilepsy world has done a fantastic job of figuring out what ratios kind of work for adults to make ketone level.
So when a, when we generally are trying to get people to make a certain level of ketones of blood, BHB or other ketone markers that might, that seem to have treatment effects. And so, yeah, that's what that looks like. So my people that I work with, they track their food. They learn how to track their food.
I like to use chronometer. I give them professional macros based on, you know, that are personalized and we get them a keto mojo so they can track their blood glucose and their ketones with, you know, a little finger prick, just like diabetes, diabetic people will check their blood glucose. And we just keep playing with the macros, protein, fat, and carbohydrates in such a way that we get those therapeutic levels.
Anna: Wow. Okay. So, so it sounds like it's you know, involves quite a lot of maintenance and precision because you want to get to the right ratios. And so I wonder how safe are these diets? Can a person just read about it and go on one or should they do it under supervision of a professional?
Nicole: So if you're doing it for mental health and you're on any types of medications, you really should work with a professional and you should construct a treatment team. So as you know these, these. These interventions are not readily available, and I mean unless you happen to be near Stanford for their metabolic psychiatry clinic or Harvard.
Right. But most of us are not. And so what I do is I have people put together treatment teams. So that should have a ketogenic informed professional, someone who is able to initiate and monitor the diet. And then you need a medical professional who can monitor medications.
Transcribed and blood and some of the blood work because ketogenic diets are really powerful. So think about it, right? So it can stop seizures when all other medications fail. And I have someone with bipolar disorder on two or three different medications. And then I add a ketogenic diet, it's like almost like I'm adding another medication, right?
To some, to some degree. So people sometimes need to have their medications titrated down rather quickly. There's a, a famous, I think she's famous, she's got a huge following on YouTube. Her name's Lauren Kennedy West. Or Lauren, I think I might've just got her name backwards, but Lauren on the living well with schizophrenia channel, YouTube channel it's now titled living well after schizophrenia because she very publicly did metabolic psychiatry interventions that included a ketogenic diet and she is now in remission from schizoaffective disorder and is off all of her medications and just flourishing beautifully and just the portrait of absolute stability and flourishing.
So anyways, I bring that up because about just two and a half, maybe three weeks into her ketogenic diet, she started to get what we call potentiation effects where her, she was starting to get side effects from her antipsychotic medications and she was feeling very sedated, like she couldn't even get out of bed and so she, we were like, what could this be?
And if she wasn't working with a professional, she would have thought, oh, this ketogenic diet is making me so tired. I, you know, forget this. But she had a treatment team that included me, a medical doctor, a psychiatrist, and even a therapist. So her team was on point with lots of people. And so we were able to have a conversation and she, she reduced her medication and felt better.
It's just like, that was it. So you have to be really careful because. It's a powerful intervention when used in this way and, and it's important to have a prescriber on board. They don't have to be a perfectly ketogenic informed prescriber. Those are coming. We're training them. They're coming. But right now you just, you just got to have any old prescriber that's willing to work with you on this and open to the idea that you might actually get better and need less medication.
Anna: Wow. That's again, so much hope there. That, you know, as this becomes more popular, and there's more professionals who can offer this kind of help. I mean, like I said, I would very much be interested in trying this for myself, for my bipolar symptoms, because the promise of getting off medication, I think, is a huge one.
For all the reasons you named earlier, there are side effects, it, you know, it shortens your lifespan. And it's just nice to be able to say, you know what, my brain is functioning optimally. It doesn't need all these meds to just be balanced and function like your average healthy person.
Nicole: Yes. Yeah.
Anna: So tell me where does therapy fit into this? Do people still use psychotherapy while they're on a ketogenic diet?
Nicole: Yeah. Well, I'm kind of, I'm a little bit of a, of a, I mean, there's probably more like me now, but in the beginning I, I think I was the only psychotherapist running around. You know, getting extra training to do this with people. So, so I will, I've been a clinical psychotherapist for 17 years.
I think, and then probably the last eight years, I think now I've been using my psychotherapy tools. In order to help assist people behaviorally, emotionally and socially with the implementation of a ketogenic diet. So helping them, helping them behaviorally master it, right? And you know, what I have found is that when you help some, when you, when you help someone stick to their ketogenic diet and support them on it and their brain gets just a little bit healthier, psychotherapy is much easier.
Much easier and they make way bigger gains way, you know, it's just so much easier to do a DBT worksheet or a CBT worksheet when you, when you're not cognitively impaired with, with medications, you know, I think it's a little unfair of us to ask that of our, of our patients and our clients, right? And so I really love doing psychotherapy work after a ketogenic diet.
And you know, it's not that a ketogenic diet replaces psychotherapy, although some people go off and just enjoy feeling well for a long time and you know, before they want to do any other work in any other area, it's not a replacement for PTSD work necessarily. Right. But it's so much easier to do something like EMDR or exposure therapy.
When your brain is working better, when, you know, when you, it's just so much easier. So I, I kind of think brain health is the foundation to good psychotherapy. And that's not to say that, that people who have made, you know, I've worked with lots of people who have made gains when I do CBT with them or dialectical behavior therapy or EMDR, they, they make gains.
You know, sometimes they're hard ones. Some, sometimes they're a little easier, but. I see better outcomes when we could just improve brain health just a little bit with, with nutritional or ketogenic therapies. And I, I just think. I think it's important that, that people know that. So if, so if someone has done CBT in the past and didn't get results or if someone has done EMDR, you know, DBT or anything like that, then if they didn't get benefits from that.
They might after a ketogenic diet because brain plasticity improves right when we're healing a brain when we upregulate BDNF, we're able to make connections, we're able to Insight and perspective is better. There's just a really beautiful kind of recovery that kind of happens on a ketogenic diet.
And yeah, you'll just have to do some investigation, but yes, therapy is not going anywhere. We're very useful as psychotherapists and it can be really useful. In your life, even after a ketogenic diet I will say for a lot of people, they're like, I don't think I need it. I'm good. I feel good. I feel good.
Life is not overwhelming. I don't have social anxiety anymore. I'm not worried all the time. I don't even meet criteria for these illnesses anymore. I don't have generalized anxiety disorder. So yeah, maybe, maybe we're optional as psychotherapists, you know,
Anna: I mean, isn't that in a way kind of the goal of, you know, I would say any good psychotherapist ideally hopes to work themself out of a job if we had a world full of mental wellness rather than mental illness, I would be very happy and I would find something else to do for sure.
So this, I think to me, again, it's so interesting that. You can change your nutrition, change your diet, and then it makes everything else in terms of mental health treatment easier, and it makes so much sense.
Nicole: Yeah, yeah. It's, it's what was promised with medication. So when I was in college many years ago, They always told us that when someone is severely depressed, or they have bipolar disorder, or they have schizophrenia, or whatever well, maybe not schizophrenia.
For schizophrenia, our job as psychotherapists were just to keep them on their medications in spite of the terrible side effects. That's what we were told to do. And quite frankly, in the old days, it used, that used to be the same for bipolar, too. It was about soothing y'all to stay on your meds, right?
Because, of course, because life, life is shattered after mania, you know, with mania and stuff like that. And, and depression, and suicidality in the death rate, right? I get it. But, We were told as psychotherapists in my day that medication helps the person function a little bit better and leads to better outcomes in psychotherapy.
And I don't know what, and that was evidence based, like there was studies that kind of showed that. Which, if you think about it, makes sense. Because if a, if an antidepressant, Reduces the range of emotions that a person is experiencing, they're much, they're much more likely to possibly, you know, come to therapy and approach therapy and regulate a little bit.
But I will tell you, that is not what I saw as a psychotherapist. What I saw is that after, you know I did not see brain improvement. I did not see improvements in their ability to think and reason necessarily. I did not see any of that. And if anything, the medications, I think, dampened the distress around what was ever going on in their life in such a way that they were quite likely to leave therapy.
Or therapy became more of a venting session as opposed to something where they were actually able to do work or willing to do work the kind of work that they had originally said they wanted to do. So, The medications did not hold out in the promise of helping psychotherapy outcomes, in my opinion.
Anna: Wow, yeah, I can definitely see your point there. It's medications are just complicated. And, like, I, I totally agree with you. They don't always fulfill that promise of we're gonna take you to this level of wellness, and then you can work on, let's say, PTSD, trauma, you know, other things. Yeah, so this again is just so interesting that we can manage those symptoms that medication promised to manage but didn't necessarily live up to that promise with nutrition.
Nicole: And I would say not manage. I would say, for many, eliminate the symptoms.
Anna: That's important. That's really important because I think that's what we all hope for, is to have a complete remission, like you said, of those symptoms and not just management of them. So Nicole, are there any reasons that a keto diet fails that are common that people can kind of foresee?
Nicole: Some of this, some of this has been done in the epilepsy world, trying to figure out who, who sticks with a ketogenic diet and who doesn't if you're asking like who, who, who would be a non-responder and who would be a responder, we can't kind of tell that yet, that the studies are being done on that.
There are non-responders, there are people who get minimal or no, or no benefit. I haven't. I haven't worked with someone who has stuck with a ketogenic diet for a long enough period of time where they didn't get some benefit, whether it's just a little bit of better energy, or maybe they lost some weight, or maybe some of their metabolic health markers improved, right?
To some degree, but maybe they didn't get the mood effects they were hoping for. So, but non responders do exist. And we at, we absolutely care about the non-responders and we're working really, really hard to try to figure out why there are non-responders. But you know, other than that, when we look at the kind of psychosocial pieces so, so people, people will often stop the diet if they don't have adequate support.
Again, why it's so important to have a treatment team. If they don't have adequate support, sometimes social pressures, they'll go off of it. Sometimes, , it can be all kinds of things. Sometimes their family is not supportive. Their family thinks that if they eat all that fat, they're going to die of a heart attack, which is we're finding is not the case.
Or we know is not the case. Fat has been exonerated as. It's causing heart disease, but a lot of doctors for some reason don't have that memo. They keep trying to put my people on statins when their LDL goes up a little bit. And so, so sometimes it's that, sometimes it's oh my gosh, all kinds of different, you can only imagine because eating is a social event.
It's a systemic event. It's not just nourishing you. It's also an experience that you share with the people around you and there's rituals around that. And there's Thought patterns around that and it's You know, if, if you're, if, if I'm going to eat that doughnut and you're not eating that doughnut, you're ruining my doughnut because I think you're judging me while I'm eating that doughnut.
Right? So, I mean, it's a legit question, but there's a million different answers for it.
Anna: That makes a lot of sense. And I'm even thinking we say, you know, breaking bread, we don't say breaking steak. So there is a certain social ritual to meals, like you said. For example, when I went on a ketogenic diet, I did so purely to lose weight and to kind of to help regulate my blood sugar, which worked spectacularly well.
I lost weight that I needed to lose. And the reason I stopped doing the ketogenic diet is because it was just difficult to feed my family and myself because my family wasn't on that diet. So kind of cooking two meals or cooking a meal that was acceptable to both somebody who's on keto, and then you could add a little bit of carbs for the person who's not, you know, it was, it was a lot of work.
So I just want to acknowledge for. Those listeners who are thinking, okay, I want to do this, but it's hard that it is hard. But I also think that it's doable as well.
Nicole: Absolutely. And the people that seek me out are, are, are so miserable and they're so motivated.
And while they'll say it's hard, it's not as hard as the mental illness that they're dealing with and the medication side effects they're living with a ketogenic diet to treat mental illness is not as hard as having that mental illness. You're already doing the hard thing, right? What's you know, what's harder is dealing with those symptoms without an end in sight.
And so I think that, I mean, I have great success working and other clinicians like me, like I'm not a unicorn, there's all kinds of Nicole's running, you know, Nicole, like people running around doing this, getting great results. So if you just have the right support, and when you, you know, if someone does ketogenic metabolic therapy, I, you know, I tell them you treat our appointments like doctor's appointments.
You show up because that's going to keep you on track, you know, whether you've tracked properly or not, whether you accidentally ate a donut or not. So accidentally, whether you're, you know, whether you're feeling with it or not come keep coming, just keep coming and, and, yeah. Two weeks in everybody's like, “Oh my gosh, this is so hard.”
I can't do this. This sucks. I don't want to do this anymore really and we always we always tell them keep going in three months You're gonna come and tell me that this is easy and sustainable and you got this believe it or not But you know like all new things it just you gotta have that level of support
Anna: Absolutely.
That makes a lot of sense. And you know, I want to say that at least in my experience I do remember like at first it was difficult because I did have cravings for carbs and, you know, wanted to be part of the crowd that was eating bread and stuff. But it went away really quickly. I want to say that within a week, I didn't crave sugar anymore.
And that persevered even after I stopped doing the keto diet. My sweet tooth, it may have come back a little bit, but it mostly went away and I was really amazed by that.
Nicole: Yeah, we see that it's a, it's being used as a treatment for binge eating disorder and a certain percentage of that population actually has, they meet criteria for what's called food addiction.
And, and so very kind of persistent and, and they do beautifully on a ketogenic diet.
Anna: Wonderful. Oh, I'm loving all this information. And Nicole, I know you have a blog at mentalhealthketo.com. And I think you even offer a free brain nutrition guide that people can download. So I'll make sure to put all of that in the show notes.
And I believe you also teach an online masterclass on brain fog recovery. Is that right?
Nicole: I do. So I should explain that because like, what does that, what does that have to do with metabolic psychiatry? Right. So when I, when I first decided that I needed an online version for what I do in individual consultation.
I, you, you do research, right. And, and that was like three years ago now. So, and, and in order to do the research for that program, I kind of, I went into the depths of Reddit and I went into Facebook groups and I went into, you know, on, on different platforms and they were not ready for the idea that a diet could possibly put them in remission.
In fact, my presence was upsetting to them. The idea that I, you know, it was, there was so much resistance to it. That I was like, Oh, I, I can't, I can't make a program like, like this. That just focuses on the mental health treatment. It has a mental health intervention, right? Potential treatment with a treatment team was a medical provider on board.
And so I thought, well, what can, what can I do? Because I still want to offer this. This is still really useful for Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease, early stages, mid to early stages and mild cognitive impairment. There's lots of women with peri and post, you know, brain fog kind of symptoms. And I think of brain fog as mood and cognitive symptoms.
And so I just kind of rebranded what I did in such a way that it focuses on on on that. So my brain fog recovery program, I have people with all kinds of serious diagnoses that you wouldn't just call brain fog. So I have Parkinson's and MCI, I have traumatic brain injury people, I have and then, you know, people with just anxiety and depression, people with a little bit of menopausal symptoms, PCOS, the brain fog symptoms that come with PCOS.
Are neurological. They are not hormonal in nature, and they respond to a ketogenic diet beautifully. And then I've got depression, anxieties, schizophrenia, schizoaffective, so that's, that's what that is. And so my, the masterclass is I myself have been on a ketogenic diet for many years because I had mild cognitive impairment that showed up in my career for reasons that I yammer about in my masterclass.
So that's, that's what that kind of looks like, but the online program is really exactly what I do in my individual consultation for these populations.
Anna: Wow. Okay. That's, that's fantastic. Like I said, I'll make sure to include all of that in my show notes so people can find you if they want to work with you, if they want to engage in this online program.
And Nicole, thank you so much for stopping by today and giving out this great, very much needed information about ketogenic diets. I really appreciate your time.
Nicole: Oh, thank you. I really appreciate you having me. It was super fun. Thank you.
Anna: Wonderful. And for all of you listening, I hope you'll be feeling a little lighter and more empowered.
Remember healing takes time and you're exactly where you need to be. Take care of yourselves. And until we meet again, be kind to your heart.
