The Ketogenic Diet & Personal Power

One of my clients was sharing an experience she had at a wedding she went to. During the cocktail hour a friend of hers refused to eat the baby carrots and cucumbers set out as hors d’oeuvres and instead pulled a small baggy filled with meat slices out of her purse.

Why this “inconspicuous” baggy of meat do you ask?

No, she wasn’t faithfully supplementing a major iron deficiency.

She brought the bag of meat because she was pre-occupied with her body weight (reported by my client) and was following a ketogenic diet, diligently tracking her 20 net carbs or less.

If you know nothing about the ketogenic diet, simply know that it requires a person to eat very, very low amounts of carbohydrates (yes this includes cautiousness around carrots and cucumbers) and relatively high amounts of dietary fat. It’s been used to treat drug-resistant epilepsy for some time and research is pointing to possible efficacy treating other neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, sleep disorders and more. (source. source. source. )

This friend of my client had none of these health conditions or any other major health challenges.

A Sideways attempt at Personal Power

Many women are trying very hard to regain some sense of personal power through their eating or changing their body in some way.

By power I mean:

Power Within – the power of connecting with the forces of life and your own spiritual center

And…

Power To – the power to do something because you say so

These are very different than, Power Over – which has to do with domination over something or someone

Power Over, which is an damaging and distorted form of power, is a very popular strategy women use against…THEMSELVES.

(What Marion Woodman would call the Power Principle, the wounding aspect of “the Patriarchy”)

How does it show up?

CONTROL

Controlling the body: by cutting calories, dragging the body to the gym through fatigue or injury, denying real feelings of physical hunger, emotional flow, or intuition.

Overpowering or Overriding what’s happening in the body: by reaching for stimulants like coffee, sweets, extra portions of food, or alcohol.

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