Why I started Ketogeni
I was six years old when I first ran across my grandmother's farm in Iceland, picking plants for her kitchen. My other grandmother walked the mountains with me and taught me every herb by name and use. I have lived among plants ever since, and I have worked with them for forty years.
Fifteen years of pain
From 2005 to 2020 I lived with pain that no one could explain. In August 2020 I was operated on, and the surgeons removed a tumour 28 centimetres across. It was a leiomyoma: a benign tumour, not cancer. Years later a leiomyosarcoma, a rare cancer, was found, and only then did the doctors understand that the first tumour had been its precursor.
About six months after that operation a new pain settled in my ribs. I went to the doctors with it again and again. In September 2023 the tumour was already visible on an X-ray, but no one saw it. It was not found until March 2024. That is not how it should be, and I say it here because others are living the same story. Since then it has come back three times.
What changed
Long before that I had studied herbalism formally, and I had begun to think seriously about what a natural approach could do. The turning point came in the summer of 2025, when I started a metabolic, therapeutic ketogenic diet: twenty grams of carbohydrate a day, or less.
My whole health turned. Blood values that had been wrong for years, high PTH, high CRP, diabetes, came right. To understand what that meant: in 2023, the year I kept going back to the doctors and was not heard, I had influenza five times, and each bout kept me in bed for about four weeks. That is how little my immune system had left. Since keto it is stronger than it has been in twenty years. I still eat this way, and I use the plants alongside it, as I always have.
Out of the same knowledge I founded the HerbWoman School, where I teach what my grandmothers taught me, with the science beside it.
Falkasete
Today I live on Falkasete, our small farm in Rogaland, Norway. My husband Nils carries most of the farm work now, and the garden has been rebuilt in raised beds so it meets my hands. The orchard, the sage by the stone wall and the view over the fields are the place I cook from.
Clean food
I know how it feels to be ill and too tired to cook, and how, exactly then, you need real food most. So I keep everything clean, without exception. I buy only clean food, organic or naturally grown. I cook in stainless steel, cast iron, glass and wood: never in Teflon or aluminium, never with plastic utensils, never wrapped in plastic. No sugar. No preservatives beyond plain salt, nothing with an E-number. Everything made from scratch.
But clean is not enough on its own. When you are ill, or simply worn out, you need food that is also genuinely good: gourmet, not grim. That is the first thing Ketogeni is for.
That is why Ketogeni exists: clean, gourmet keto recipes that help you cook real food yourself, step by step. And my intention is that one day everyone can order the same food, clean and nourishing, in their own area.
María Hrefna Hjálmarsdóttir Ringdal
Herbalist, Falkasete
This is my own story, not medical advice. If you are ill, keep talking with your doctor, and ask for the follow-up you are entitled to.