April 25, 2024

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Martina Slajerova: How a Hard Diet Led to an Innovative App

Martina Slajerova knows just how hard dieting can be. She was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s disease, an autoimmune disease that interfered with her thyroid. This, in turn, made it difficult for her to lose weight and she suffered from low energy levels.

Martina Slajerova Goes Keto

Her struggles came even though she was adhering to a traditionally healthy diet, subbing out meats for plant matter, skipping sweets, and otherwise trying to be healthy at meal time. Her condition was beginning to impact her career and personal relationships. Something had to change, so Slajerova decided to give the Keto diet a go. 

The Keto diet is one of the most popular diets but it’s also among the most controversial. The idea of skipping many fruits and vegetables, along with grains and the like, flies in the face of what most people consider a “healthy” diet. 

It’s true, the long term benefits and drawbacks of the Keto diet remain debatable. Then again, it seems like each week butter is declared healthier than margarine, or vice versa. Despite ample research, nutritional science remains among the most hotly debated subsections of health and medicine. 

But for Martina Slajerova, the debate was quickly settled. After switching to Keto, she found her energy levels rising and even started to lose weight. Still, as anyone with experience can tell you, sticking to the Keto diet can be difficult. 

Related: Bugging Out: How Insects Are Dominating the American Diet

The Struggles of Keto

At first, Keto might seem like the easiest dieting regime. You don’t have to eat like a rabbit and can enjoy ample amounts of cheese, meats, and other fatty but carb-lite foods. But burgers minus the buns and cheese minus the pasta get old pretty quick. 

On top of cravings, there are many real dietary downsides to Keto diets as well. This is especially true if you cut out carb-heavy foods without replacing the vitamins, fibers, and minerals you’re losing. How do you make sure your body gets everything it needs? That question plagued Slajerova.

Like most Keto-dieters, Martina Slajerova initially struggled to stick to the diet with both her cravings and nutritional concerns constantly eating away at her. But given her improving energy and dropping weight, she had no choice but to stick to it. That’s when she decided to become a Keto expert and to craft a balanced, healthy diet plan.

Many Keto dieters struggle to get enough potassium in their diet, for example. Bananas, oranges, and mangos are just some of the many fruits and vegetables rich in potassium. They’re also packed with carbs. And while potassium is found in many types of meat, there’s much less per given serving. Yet some veggies, such as spinach and zucchini, are both rich in potassium and low-carb.

Another serious concern is fiber. Meat, cheeses, and most non-plant-based foods simply lack fiber all-together. And with so many Keto dieters avoiding fruits and vegetables – due to the common misbelief that all of them are packed with carbs – fiber deficiency leads to a whole host of digestive issues.

Again, there are many foods, such as blackberries, that are packed with fibers but light on carbs. The more Slajevero learned about Keto, the more she realized that she could follow the diet but she’d have to plan carefully. And as her pantry and fridge were loaded up with new but diverse foods, it became easier to stick the plan.

Enter Keto Diet App

For most dieters, simply losing weight and enjoying more energy would more than justify the diet. Yet as Martina Slajevero reflected on how much of a struggle it was to adjust to the Keto diet, she recognized that there was a serious pain point that needed to be addressed. 

Keto-dieters needed easier access to information. All the blogs, books, videos, and whatnot were simply overwhelming. And even after reading through dozens of sources, Slajevero often found that she still lacked a plan and simply had more questions to answer. Slowly, painstakingly, she found most of the answers. 

So why not share them with her fellow Keto dieters? The question (and answer) came down to delivery. Should she start yet another blog? Write yet another book? Still, the more Slajevero thought about it, the more she realized that questions needed to answered on the fly, not in the den. 

Countless times, she had found herself standing in the produce section, wondering how she could sub out an ingredient in a recipe, or if she could eat a particular vegetable. Often, she found the answer by using her smartphone to dig around on the web. And that’s when the solution hit her: create an app that people can use to plan out their Keto diet and answer questions in real-time. 

Instead of digging through blogs or reading countless books, Keto Diet App users can start building their diet plan right in the app. And when questions do arise, say in the grocery store aisle, customers can simply scan the barcode to pull up data. So with a splash of technology, the Keto diet suddenly becomes much easier to adhere to. How about that?

Picture of By I&T Today

By I&T Today

Innovation & Tech Today features a wide variety of writers on tech, science, business, sustainability, and culture. Have an idea? Send it to submit@innotechtoday.com

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