3.23.16

All right.  It’s that awkward moment where I’m not sure if we’re live or not.  We may or may not be live.  I don’t know.  It’s always fun when we get started here because it’s like being in a limbo.  Are we live, are we not live?  I think we’re live.  I’m seeing myself on the little preview here.  We might be 10 seconds out.  Oh, my gosh.  Oh, my goodness.  Yes, we are getting started here.  I love it.  Here we go.  What’s up?  What is up everybody?   It is 4 P.M. Pacific.  This is the earliest this year we’ve had one of these calls.  And it’s daylight’s savings time.  It’s bright outside.  It’s light here in my home office.  Hey, what’s up [inaudible 00:01:00]?  Oh, my goodness. It’s Wednesday, 4 P.M.  It’s sunny outside.  We’re here live.  Oh, my goodness, it’s a good day.  I’m a little bit fresher for today’s session.  It’s early in the day.  I like it, I like it.  What’s up Cynthia?  Hey, what’s up Christina?

 

And hey, if you’re new, if this is your first time here with us just a quick heads up that you can chat here in the chat box.  That’s the funest part of this whole thing, making it interactive.  So please, go ahead jump on in the chat box.  You can see that I posted something rather long and boring.  It’s a little bit of a disclaimer, but I’ll post it again here just so you can see it since chat’s flowing in.  And if you’re shy, or if you’re new or you don’t want to post that’s cool too, but we love the interaction.  So feel free to just listen in, but it’s always great to post in the chat and to have fun.  And while we’re talking about chatting and while we’re having everyone join us up here please, let me know if you can’t hear me, of there’s any technical problems or anything like that.  And if you notice in the chat box there’s a little thing to the left where it’ll say Write Your Message and then there’s like a little bubble, if you click on that bubble you’ll have two options.  You can chat or you can press on something that says Q&A.  And if you have a question for me, which is awesome because I love live questions, puts me on the hot seat.  I have not time to prepare.  Please, submit the question using that Q&A just like this.  Watch this.  Just like this.  That way I can see it.  I can’t always see all the chats because they come in really fast that I sometimes see some chats that not everyone else sees and it’s. “Oh, my goodness, technology.”  So I can’t see everything.  But if you have a follow-up question which is awesome, we got a bunch of great questions submitted here. I also have some great questions from the support group that I said I would cover today because I really wanted to talk about them and I didn’t want to type about them.

 

So we’re going to talk about that.  And I have some cool demos to show you, some cutting edge stuff, but yes, if you have live questions I love those as well.  Please, post them as questions there.  And hopefully you can hear me.  I know we’ve got some folks still coming in.  We got a lot of new folks this week.  So that’s going to be really, really exciting.  A lot of new people joining the SANE family and as always, let’s do the one bit of boringness.  Standard disclaimer.   And so, one thing we can’t do in this call [inaudible 00:03:23] we’re going to do.  A demo of some new stuff we have coming.  We got a bunch of new questions and answers.  I’m going to try to do something like I did last time that failed horribly when I tried to something new and I just thought I disconnected everybody.  So we’re going to do something else like that this time and hopefully it will–I’ll do a better job and if for any reason we get disconnected please, just join back in.  It’s like if I drop your call when I click over to call waiting, if that happens just call back in, just come back in.  I’ll still be here.

 

And the boring stuff though is that the one thing we can’t do is medical advice and please, don’t ever take medical advice from anyone over the Internet.  It’s actually illegal for people to provide you medical advice over the internet.  So we’re going to do medical advice, but we’re going to do a bunch of fun things. We’re going to do specific, cutting-edge, next step.  I’m going to take specific questions, but I’m also going to generalize them.  So if you hear a questions that you don’t think applies to you please, don’t tune out because I’m going to try to make it so that it does apply to you in the spirit of teaching one to fish rather than just giving fish.  So we’re going to do that and as always, I want to make sure that you know you’re a part of just a wonderful supportive and loving community.  So hopefully you get that sense from that call.  These calls are the highlight of my week.  So I appreciate you being here and hopefully you have a lot of fun, a lot of smiles.  And as always, if you are watching this as a recording, these are recorded and they may even be transcribed so please, keep that in mind with what you choose to share.  And you can find these and all the other recordings on your Ignite site by going down to the footer and clicking on Get and Stay Motivated.  So you can see the previous recordings.  All right.  So with that I’m a little distracted here.  So I have a sample of the recording on my other screen here and it is frozen on that.  So hopefully I’m not frozen for you.  If I’m frozen for you please, tell me.  My face is a little bit [inaudible 05:26].  So I’d be glad.  And close this down.  And we’ll get started.  Is that all right?  Okay.  Excellent.

 

So the very first thing we’ve got—so I figured I was going to do something a little bit different this week, a little bit different this week.  We’re going to start out with a demo because this is something we’ve been working on for a while and I wanted you to be the first to see it here live.  So hopefully that’s going to work and then we have some great questions that were written in.  Thank you [inaudible 00:05:54].  Not frozen, I like that.  And we have some great questions that were written in, quite a few of which I can answer pretty fast which is great because then we have some deeper things that I really wanted to get into and really take some time.  Sometimes with these calls I intentionally don’t prepare for them because I want them to be spontaneous.  But for this one I did prepare some stuff.  So it’s hopefully going to be helpful for you.  If it’s not I love that feedback because we’ve been seeing a pattern of questions.  So I want to give you [inaudible 00:06:25] hands in the face.  Here’s my hand.  Check it out.  I wanted to present some things that I never showed before.  So hopefully you like them and hopefully they’re helpful.  But before all that I want to demo something for you here.  And this should be live on the website in the coming weeks, but it’s proven to be rather technically challenging, but it’s been very requested.  So I’m going to demo it for you here now, live.  So again, if we get disconnected, don’t worry.  Just click the link and come back because we’re going to try some cutting-edge stuff here.  So I’m going to try to share one of my screens with you.  All right.  Now there was me, this is live.  All right.

 

So here we go, we’re sharing screens.  All right.  So now I am going to present to everybody.  So hopefully you can see my screen.  If you cannot see my screen.  Raise your hand if you’re not here.  So okay.  Hopefully you can see my screen and what you’ll notice is that we’ve got a little new thing here.  This guy right here.  Look at this.  Login a meal directly on the website.  So I know we’ve got the Windows mobile app.  Oh, great, you can see the screen.  Excellent.  Yes, yes.  You can see my screen.  Okay.  Excellent.  So we’re still working on the Windows app.  That’s proven to be harder than we thought it was going to be.  Unfortunately that Windows mobile is newer than Android and iOS, but even if you don’t like to use the app check this out.  So you can be like, “Vegetables, two. Protein, one. Fats.”  You can change your fitness goal.  We’ll talk about that in a second.  And you can boom, log a meal, click, double check.  Two vegetables, proteins, fat, yes, that’s right.  Added.  Meal successfully added and website update, yay.  If you don’t like to use the mobile app, but if you still like to use the mobile app you can get them right here and yes, the mobile app is now running on some Kindles.  And that you can even change your fitness goal.  So right now let’s change it to just getting started and then you’ll see my SANEometer changed and my servings changed.  Yay.  So now if for some reason you can’t use the app or you don’t want to use the app very soon you will be able to log a meal directly on the website.  Yay.  So isn’t that cool?  And I think the demo worked.  So yay.

 

Oh, no, Mrs. Hadely’s not seeing the screen very clear.  I am sorry.  I don’t know how to make it more clear, but maybe the recording will be more clear.  But here’s what’s good.  The point is, even if you can’t see my screen, soon you will be able to log meals directly on the website and you’ll also be able to change your fitness goal directly on the website.  So that’s exciting and cool and fun.  So I don’t want to get too hung up on that, but that’s me.  So hopefully now we’re going to transition out of that and you’re going to see my face maybe.  And you know, what?  Let’s just call a spade a spade.  You’re also going to see the pimple on the left side of my mouth.  What?  Oh, my goodness.  Pimples.  I don’t have any cover up.  I do have matting cream for my forehead because it tends to get shiny, but I do not have cover up.  So anyway, that is the demo.  Hopefully that makes you as happy as it makes me.  It’s just taken a little bit long to get it done because [inaudible 00:10:02] with the app and how do you show meals here and yap, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla.  But it’s in the works and thank you for the awesome suggestion because that’s why we built this.  So that is exciting.  First ever live demo on one of our group coaching calls.  So that is fun.  And let’s jump into some questions.

 

Oh, no.  One other thing I wanted to say.  New recipes, as if the thousand or so recipes that are currently available on the website are not enough, we got some awesome feedback from people on the call, people not on the call, all the members of the Ignite family that there are certain desserts, snacks and breakfasts, would love to see a little bit more diversity there in terms of what’s available.  And you will see actually starting today there’s going to be a bunch of new stuff in each of those categories rolling in gradually.  Things like side dishes, things like SANE versions of biscuits and bread, all purpose baking mix, muffins, things that you might not think could possibly ever be SANE.  Lots of more recipes around those things coming in.  So more snacks, more breakfasts, more desserts and then some more lunches which is going to be really neat.  And some cool things that you can do with eggs.  So we’re getting tired of scrambling eggs.  Eggs are great and we’re going to show you some more stuff you can do with them.  So be on the lookout for that stuff.  All right.  Excellent.

 

 

So let us move on to actual questions.  And I apologize here, guys.  I’m seeing a few comments coming in about stuff being out of sync.  I don’t know how to fix that.  Let me know if it becomes too much of an issue and I will pray to the Internet gods that it stops being an issue because I don’t know what to do about it.  But the good news is that if it becomes too much of an issue I think the recording will be in sync so hopefully that will help.  But let’s jump into the questions shall we?  All right.  So the very first question that was written in, and as always, two things to keep in mind about the questions.  First is if you don’t get a chance to submit a question before the live session that’s okay.  Please, ask questions here.  I love getting questions on the spot.  They make me think.  They keep me fresh.  So feel free to send in a question here.  If I don’t get to your question I will roll it over into the next session or you can just post it into support group and we’ll take care of it there.  I’m also starting to bring some support group questions into these sessions because I feel like I can do a better justice to them [inaudible 00:12:36] I speak to them.  And if you can’t make a group coaching session, as I mentioned earlier, you can get this recording and all recording of previous sessions if you click on the Get and Stay Motivated, or something like that, link in the bottom of your Ignite site.  So that’s awesome.  So you can submit questions, and even if you can’t make it, I’ll still answer your question.  So that’s all good.

All right. Cool.  So let us jump into those questions.  So the first question that got written in was that someone said, someone in the support group talked about mono eating, eating just one thing at a time and then another later on.  I’ve read that protein should be dosed because the body can’t process a lot at once.  Other than that, does spacing meals or having mixtures of food at a meal matter?  It’s a very good question.  There’s actually a couple of questions here.  I’m going to dig in into each one here.  So the eating one thing at a time and then later on and then protein dosing and spacing meals and mixing.  So there’s actually a couple of different questions here.  I think there’s three different ones.  One has to do with do food combinations matter?  For example, does eating a bunch of whole food fats—or just to be maybe an exaggerated example, if I ate all my non-starchy vegetables in the morning, all my protein in the afternoon and all my whole food fats in the evening would that yield different results than if I mix those together?  Then there is the spacing of meals.  And there’s another question in here about intermitting fasting.  So we should definitely talk about that.  And actually, so maybe there’s just two questions.  Oh, and then protein dosing.

 

So the protein dosing, that’s the quickest and easiest one.  And yes, absolutely the dose of protein matters.  As you get through your step-by-step program you’ll learn more and more about this, but we focus on specific doses of protein between 20 and 30 grams so that we trigger something called muscle protein synthesis which is incredibly metabolically beneficial for you.  It’s actually triggering your body to rebuild itself and since we’re interested in metabolic healing here in the SANE Ignite family having the raw material for your body to create a newer, healthier version of yourself quite literarily, just like if you cut your skin you will have new cells generate, you can also do that inside the body not just outside the body on the skin.  So we definitely do want to dose protein in 20 to 30 grams servings.  If you were to eat two 15 gram servings of protein you would not trigger muscle protein synthesis and if you ate one serving of 30 grams of protein you would.  So that’s a perfect example of how dose does matter.  And you are exactly right.  There’s only so much your body can—when it comes to like fiber or protein, these are things which technically if you overdo anything you can have problems, but especially things like protein, you don’t want to eat like when we talk about getting between 100 and 200 grams of protein per day depending on your size and activity level and so on and so forth, you would never want to take in probably more than 50 grams of protein in a sitting.  That’s just too much.  That’s going to be too much in the system.  And it’s just not necessary.  We want to break it up into smaller doses.

 

Now, when it comes to spacing it out, spacing out protein is actually very important because we want to keep your body in what’s called an anabolic state rather than a catabolic state.  So remember that your body is never in a steady state.  Right.  When it comes to biological organisms we’re either getting better or getting worse.  There is no steady state.  That’s the difference between biological organisms and mechanical things.  So we always want to be in the state of growth and in the state of development.  So we want to space our protein servings out evenly throughout the day in those 30 grams or so doses.  So the most common way is breakfast, lunch and dinner, but there’s other variations.

 

Now, eating just one thing at a time.  I always give the disclaimer in these sessions that there’s two buckets.  There’s things that are just pure peer reviewed research, no anecdote, no personal experience.  I mean, I could have personal experience with it, but that’s just pure peer reviewed research.  Then there’s this is inspired by peer reviewed research, but there was not a study that actually tested like eating vegetables in the morning, protein in the afternoon and fat in the evening.  So that’s a second bucket.  So I just want to be really clear about.  So what I’m going to talk about now we talked about protein dosing, that is straight up pure peer reviewed scientific research, no hypothesizing or extrapolating, just pure proven science.  Now, when it comes to blending foods.  Food combinations again, there’s not a study that demonstrates this because it’s impossible to study certain things in humans, it would be illegal.  Or just not practical.  But when we have an understanding of biology and how foods interact and work together, for example, we know that any time you eat fats with any other food it slows the digestion of the other food.  So the net glycemic load, or hormonal or insulinemic impact of the meal if you add fat to it, it would drop it.  So there is definitely an impact and a desire to combine certain foods.  Let me give you another example.  Protein is acidic.  So meaning that when you eat protein it can cause an acidic environments in or body. And we generally don’t want our body to be acidic.

 

Because of that if you look for example in the section of the Ignite website where we talk about the SANE app and the SANE scoring you’ll notice—I actually got a great question about this this week.  Somebody took a photo using a SANE app of a can of tuna fish and that was their lunch. And the SANE app came back and said that you know, that was yellow, that’s not green.  It wasn’t particularly SANE.  The person was confused.  They said I thought tuna fish was a nutrient dense protein, I thought it was SANE.  And what the app is doing is kind of speaking to this point about food combinations.  The app—and our bodies, the way we think, I would really encourage us to think in terms of meals.  Right.  So what we want to do when we sit down and eat, if at all possible, when we eat we want to be conscious, we want to savor what we’re eating and we want, whenever possible to eat a complete SANE meal.  Now, complete is the key word there.  So this is my recommendation.  My recommendation is not to mono eat because for example, if you mono eat, if you just ate protein you would have your body be in net acidic state until you ate something else.  And you would have a higher insulin response, not that that’s necessarily bad, but we could temper that insulin response if you ate that protein with some fat.  And we could balance the pH of your body if you ate that protein with non-starchy vegetables, which are extremely basic versus acidic.  So I strongly recommend that you do not mono eat, that you space your meals out evenly throughout the day.  So use protein as a benchmark.  We know we need to dose protein, we know we need to space it out throughout the day.

 

And then let’s add sort of a third tip to that, which is when we eat we want to do everything in our power, whenever possible, to eat a complete SANE meal.  And a complete SANE meal has three components.  Non-starchy vegetables first and foremost, then nutrient dense protein, then whole food fats.  Because the whole food fats are not only going to help to satisfy us they’re going to slow the digestion of the meal.  So it’s going to lower the net aggression, or the A in inSANE of the meal. And then the non-starchy vegetables are also going to help with satiety, they’re going to fill us up physically so that helps with satiety and they’re also going to help to ensure that we maintain an alkaline state in our body.  Whereas if all we ate was protein we’d have an acidic state.  So the answer to this question is, my take, based on lots and lots and lots of science, an underlying biology is that evenly spaced out, complete SANE meals defined as non-starchy vegetables first, protein second, whole food fats third is the way to go.  So it matters, and that’s a great question.  So thank you for asking that.  And of course, if you have follow-up questions please, post them here, but if you’re shy that is okay too.

 

All right.  So the next question here was: I really need more help with eating out. About once a week I really don’t have the choice to do otherwise. Good news with this question is there’s actually a bunch of great stuff within the Ignite program about this.  In fact, I think in the very first step-by-step course SANE 101, there’s some really neat videos we put together.  In fact, there’s one video in particular, it’s less than five minutes long and it shows you how to make the SANEst choices at the most popular fast food restaurants.  And the general guidance that I always give here is most restaurants, unless they’re just pure pizza parlors where all you can get is pizza, you can make almost any restaurant have 80 percent of the options in the menu become SANE if you tell your server, “Hold the starch and double the vegetables.” Just hold the starch, double the vegetables. And another great tip is if you sort of feel uncomfortable doing that or you don’t think that the server will take you seriously, two things that you can say: one is that you can say that you are lactose intolerant and you can say that with confidence because I think on some level all of us might be somewhat lactose intolerant.  Not everybody, but if you say I’m lactose intolerant you’re not—it’s not even a white lie.  On some level you probably are lactose intolerant.  Lactose is very difficult to digest so that’s why when people eat a lot of lactose sometimes they can get bloaty or gassy.  So you can say, “I’m lactose intolerant.” And that will actually be noted by the server.  They have to do that for regulatory reasons.  And that will help them to avoid adding any dairy to your dish if you want to watch out for that.

 

And then if you say, “I’m pre-diabetic.” Which we can say with 100 percent certainty because if you’re not currently diabetic, by definition you’re pre-diabetic.  We’re all pre everything if we’re not that current thing right now, but that will help the servers take you seriously and to make sure that they’re very kind in adopting and accommodating your needs.  But if you have specific questions please, let me know.  There’s a bunch of great resources about eating out in the program itself.  So please, check it out.  I know we’ve covered it in some previous calls.  And yes, if you have specific questions please, let me know, but there’s a bunch of great stuff.  Please, go check it out in the Ignite program. That will take care of this for you.

 

All right.  Cool.  So it looks like, so just a quick—oh, what’s up, Kendra and Ashley?  We have new people here, what’s going on?  Just a quick reminder, if at all possible, if you have a specific question for me please, use this thing right here.  So you’re going to go down in the lower hand corner and I’m just going to type gibberish and you’re going to make it a question and answer, click on the bubble and instead of chat make is say Q&A because sometimes I’m not able to see all the chats, but I am able to see the questions and answers.  So yes, and Raina says there’s a SANE show episode that just recently came out where we talk about this in detail.  Not answering questions here, but the eating out and eating at fast food restaurants.  And so, Kendra’s question here is that I notice that most of the recipes like for smoothies are made with your products, do you have resource for how I can make SANE smoothies with stuff that I can get at my grocery store?

 

Absolutely. And Kendra, I actually appreciate you asking this question because if the perception is that hey, to go SANE I have to eat things that I buy from the SANE store I really apologize for that and I’m going to try to do a better job of not making that be the way it seems.  The way we try to present the smoothies is—and I think some of them may even actually have this exact language in them, which is if you can put six servings of spinach into your blender, rock and roll, that’s all good.  If you don’t want to eat that much spinach and you want to use some Garden in My Glass instead that’s cool too.  So they are always presented as a supplement, they are presented as a way to boost your vegetable intake from certain vegetables and substances that you can’t get at your grocery store such as [inaudible 00:25:32], chlorella or certain forms of mushrooms or certain things like wheatgrass and spirulina which are you know, if we could get the, fresh at our grocery store I would recommend buying them at your grocery store like acai berries.  We talk about kicking some acai.

 

You know, those are just not available for most of us at the grocery store, but the key thing is yes, those hopefully, and if they’re not, like if you see examples where the smoothie is like you have to use these things or the smoothie is invalid please, tell me.  Because the way that smoothie should be presented is non-starchy vegetables that you can buy at your grocery store, some low fructose fruits and then a cinnamon, maybe some lemon.  And then if you want to add some super foods to take the smoothie over the top and to boost your vegetable intake that’s all good, but it’s definitely not required.  So my apologies if it comes off of that way and if you can help me fix that I would really, really appreciate it.  Yes, because you definitely, definitely, definitely, those are not required.  They’re there for convenience and they’re there to turbo charge in some way because for a lot of us, actually for everyone I guess I’ve ever met, certain fruits and vegetables just aren’t sold at grocery stores.  So the only way we can enjoy them is if we get them in powdered form.  So that’s why I want to make those available to you.  So hopefully that’s helpful.  Tiffany, what’s up?  Tiffany Coleman.

 

Just a quick, friendly reminder, everybody if you have a question for me specifically if you could post it as a question by clicking in the little chat box down there and then picking the little Q&A option.  That will just help me not miss your questions because I don’t want to miss your questions.  So there’s Raina there.  Oh, and then Ashley, yes.  Ashley’s reminding me to do the exe doctor analogy.  Thank you, I will absolutely do that and it’s going to come—there might be like me going on my [inaudible 00:27:21] for the last half hour.  Oh, I forgot to say, we’re going to go for 90 minutes today.

 

Eye doctor analogy will be part of that, but let me get to Tiffany’s question here.  So Tiffany and Kendra, hopefully that answers your question. And please, like I actually—that’s actually really important to me.  It’s really important to me that people don’t think that they have to buy out super foods to be SANE.  It breaks my heart that any—so, help me fix that if at all possible, please.  So Tiffany says, how do I determine how many servings of vegetables I am getting to meet my goals?  I was not sure I should go by the serving size on the package.  Yes, great question Tiffany.  So yes, the serving sizes on the packages of vegetables are accurate.  So totally, for vegetables at least.  So for vegetables like spinach, if you buy a bag of spinach at Costco what it says in terms of servings there, one serving from that bag is as SANE serving.  There’s not a difference per say.  There is that seven days to SANE quick start guide.  It’s the very first lesson in the SANE 101 course and that’s going to provide a bunch of guidance around SANE servings, but Tiffany the good news is yes, absolutely, it’s what the label says when it comes to vegetables is accurate.  So you don’t need to reinvent the wheel there, but a lot of vegetables don’t actually come with servings attached to them.  Like if you know, if you buy some fresh kale or something like that that doesn’t come in a bag so then we always say the general rule of thumb is what you can hold in both hands like this if you were to chop it up.

 

So if it’s raw like this, so like two to three cups of green, leafy vegetables raw and if you cook the vegetables down and they shrink then a half cup is the serving.  So mushrooms for example, spinach would shrink a lot down.  So hopefully that helps.  And then, yes, Nico.  What’s up Nico?  And then yes, Nico has got some great advice there.  And then again, any questions about serving sizes is another great way to use the SANE support group.  We saw some excellent questions this past week of like how many servings is this, I made this, how would you SANE score it?  That is a super, super great way to use the SANE support group.  You got your SANE certified coaches in there and you have a bunch of wonderful things, family member that can help you out there.  Let me answer a few questions here that got written in, but thank you, I love these live questions coming in and I love how many new people we’ve got in the call.  That is awesome.  Ashley, Nico what’s going on?  And Tiffany is here too.  So that is rocking and rolling.  All right.

 

 

Intermitting fasting.  I do intermitting fasting.  Eat, stop, eat, buy bread, pile on maybe.  Sorry if I’m misspelling or mispronouncing his name.  I have my last meal about 6 P.M. and my next meal’s is between noon and 1 P.M. the next day.  Is this SANE?  That’s a great question.  So I’ll answer it in two ways.  The first is, is it SANE?  In the most like general sense what does the science of SANE eating say about this?  The science of SANE eating actually doesn’t have anything to say about this.  SANE is designed to—I’ll give you a better answer in a second, but I just want to give an official answer.  SANE is any acronym that helps to identify the high quality of foods to eat.  So the one way that I answer this question is the research is incredibly clear about what are the most satisfying, most ingressive, one of the most nutritious and one of the most inefficient or SANE foods in the world.  Now, the general guidance is going to be eat those when you’re hungry and stop when you’re full.

 

There is plenty of research that shows that eating three meals a day is good and then there’s some research that shows eating six meals a day is good.  And some research that shows the benefits of intermittent fasting.  And it might be good to intermittent fast for a little while and then to stop intermittent fasting and so on and so forth.  The thing we know for sure is that the quality of what you eat determines the quality of your health.  So what I would do personally, what I would recommend is that there’s no question that there are some benefits to fasting.  There are absolutely benefits.  Proven metabolic benefits to fasting.  So if you choose to fast every once in a while and it works for you that’s awesome.  If you’re an athlete, or if you’re trying to maximize fat loss while maintaining lean muscle tissue then eating frequently is going to be priority for you because you want to maintain that anabolic state.  You want to help your muscles recover.  It’s hard to say is it SANE.  Technically it’s sort of NA, it depends on what you’re eating determines whether or not it’s SANE.

 

What I would say personally is that if you like the results you’re getting keep doing it.  If you don’t like the results you’re getting than we can maybe mix it up a little bit and if you have some specific goals meal frequency becomes a lot more—I can help a lot more with meal frequency if it was just you know, is this good or bad totally depends on your goals.  But if it’s working for you and if you’re not ravenously hungry then yes, I would keep doing it.  Absolutely.  And just making sure you’re SANE.  Though one thing to keep in mind though, if you want to make sure to maximize metabolic healing that you’re getting the double digit servings of vegetables and that’s you’re getting at least three 30 gram servings of protein per day.  So with that said that will impact meal frequency, right.  Because if you for example, if you have to eat 12 servings of vegetables in four hours that’s going to be hard.  It might cause digestive issues.

 

So my personally recommendation would be we’re prioritizing the quality of what we’re eating first and that might dictate a little bit how frequently we eat just depending on your tolerance.  For some people if they eat more than three servings of vegetables in a sitting the amount of fiber is going to cause them digestive issues.  For some people it’s not an issue.  So just balance that and the bottom line is, at the end of the day—some people get surprised when I say this, but what I think doesn’t matter.  I mean, hopefully it’s helpful, but what matters is what’s working for you and that’s what I want to be here to empower you and I want the entire SANE family to empower you to use proven science to find something that works perfectly for you.

 

And Ashley, this is a perfect place to do the eye glass analogy.  So I’m going to do it now.  I was going to do it later, but I’ll do it now.  So the eye glass analogy.  All right.   I have terrible vision, I have very powerful prescription.  And maybe you can empathize, but let’s say you go to an eye doctor and you go into the eye doctor’s office and you say, “Doc, my vision is blurry, can you please, help me?”  And the doctor looks at you and she has glasses on.  She takes the glasses off of her face, puts them over, and sticks them on your face.  And says, “Hey, Ashley, or whatever your first name is, does that help?”  And you say, “No, doc. My vision’s actually worse now. And I’m getting a headache, what are you doing to me?”  And then the eye doctor says, “You’re ungrateful, just try harder.”  The eye doctor probably wouldn’t say that, but that is actually what some people say when the sort of, “Here’s what I do. Now, you do exactly that.” doesn’t work.  You know, that’s kind of the point of analogy here.  The eye doctor had great intentions of saying, “Hey, look. This works for me, maybe it’ll work for you.”  And the eye doctor actually even has science on her side, meaning that while it is true that her eyeglasses might not work for you, it might actually make the situation worse there is a perfect prescription for you that a physician or that a trained scientific expert can help you find, but the key is that we have to personalize that prescription just for you.

 

Whether it’s correcting your vision or correcting your metabolism, but here’s the key thing, and one thing I want to help protect you from, there’s a lot of information out there on the Internet that would make you think that like personalization is extremely important.  I think eyeglasses are a great example of this, right?  Taking someone else’s eyeglasses of their face and putting them on your face is probably not going to help you see better, but here’s the key thing: the reason, and this is sort of sound strange, so just stick with me for a second, my prescription makes my eyes clear for the same reasons that your prescription will make your eyes clear, meaning that at the end of the day the human eye, the biology of the human eye is the same.  Now, we might need slightly different angles of our lenses to correct it, but like the way the retina reflects light that’s the same underlying biology.  So that’s why we can say things like non-starchy vegetables, nutrient dense protein, whole food fats, low fructose fruits because at the end of the day every human being is 99,9 percent genetically identical.  That’s from the Harvard Medical School.  So there is some variation there and that’s why we need to personalize, but for example, the non-starchy vegetables, nutrient dense protein, whole food fats, low fructose fruits, that’s like hey, glasses.  If your eyes are blurry we can find the pair of glasses that will work for you.

 

So we can find the combination of non-starchy vegetables, nutrient dense protein and whole food fats that will work for you, but maybe the time of day will vary. Or maybe how you prepare them is going to vary, or maybe how much you eat at once is going to vary, or maybe the ratio of carbs to protein or carbs to fat is going to vary a little bit for you.  So that’s why I really love that analogy because the underlying principles are going to be the same for all of us, but what works for me or what works for Nico or what works for Cheryl isn’t necessarily going to work for anybody else because we are unique in that way.  So hopefully that analogy is helpful and if anyone ever tells you, “Hey, just do what I do.” then you can think about that like say, “Hey, just put on my eyeglasses and maybe it’ll help you see better.”  So hopefully that’s helpful.  I like that analogy and it’s actually inspired by Steven [inaudible 00:38:05] so I always want to give him credit when I say it.  So let’s see here.  Let me go ahead and jump over to the question that was written in and I’m going to jump back to the live questions if that’s okay.  But hopefully that was helpful and that analogy was good.

 

This is a great question here.  SANE and vegan.  Can’t you get enough proteins through vegetables and nuts?  Super foods and servings and then, do you count herbs and spices?  So I can definitely answer at least two of these questions.  I’m not sure about one of them.  So the first question is can’t you get enough protein through vegetables as nuts.  This is a really good question because it allows us to ask a bigger question, which is what is the definition of enough protein?  So enough protein for what?  And this is something that I think is really helpful about this thing in program is we talk about like a SANE mindset.  And let me give you an example of a SANE mindset.  Switch.  So often times we will hear that whole grains are healthy.  And the reason we hear that whole grains are healthy is because there is an assumption that we have to eat grains and that whole grains are more nutrient dense than refined grains.  And that’s true.  It is true that whole grains are more nutrient dense and are SANEr than refined grains.  But it’s also true that a shorter cigarette is better for you than a longer cigarette.  Smoking one pack of cigarettes per day is better for us than smoking two packs of cigarettes per day.

 

The reason I give that analogy is that it sort of uncovers a way that nutrition has been misrepresented to us.  The way that nutrition has been presented to us is that one thing is better than another thing then it is objectively good or it is objectively helpful.  And we know that isn’t true.  I think we can all agree for example that smoking one pack of cigarettes per day is objectively better for you than smoking two packs of cigarettes per day.  That doesn’t mean it’s good.  So we have to really always keep in mind it’s not a question of like are we eating enough proteins it’s are we eating an optimal amount of protein for our health or for our goals.  Not is this healthier than that, but is this healthier than anything else I could be eating right now.  And that’s for example one of the reasons I really stress the vegetable so much is I so often see starches crowding out vegetables.  I actually had the opportunity to have a conversation publicly with the former spokesperson on the American Dietetic Association, and this is one of the few remaining associations who maintain the position that eating grains is required for optimal health.

 

And I mean, this is the position which top medical institutions are saying it’s not true.  It doesn’t mean that grains are toxic, it just means that saying that you have to eat grains to be healthy asserts that grains contain some sort of essential substance that is not attainable through any other food.  And that’s just not true.  In fact, everything that grains do vegetables do and way better.  Like more fiber, more nutrients, way less negative impact on hormones.  So the question is always not necessarily is this thing better than this other thing, but is this thing the best thing we could be eating right now.  And here for the proteins, through vegetables and nuts you know, can we get enough?  Well, the question is what is enough?  Our goal here, the only way we know if it’s enough is if we put enough in the context of a goal.  So enough in terms of daily recommended allowance by the government which was a standard that was established like 50 years ago to ensure that soldiers who went to war didn’t die of malnutrition, that’s one goal.

 

So for example, if our goal is sort of lower and it’s don’t die of malnutrition then there is a certain amount of protein that would be enough to not die of malnutrition.  But now if we want to ratchet that a little bit and say out goal is to actually heal our body and to enable our body to rebuild itself from the inside out through a process known as muscle protein synthesis well, then we know that there are certain amino acids that have to be at a certain level in our bloodstream to activate something called the mTOR pathway in our brain which triggers our body to start rebuilding itself because our body says, “Hey, look I’ve got enough protein to use it for non-essential functions.”  Because your body rebuilding itself, becoming even better than it was before, that’s like not only not dying, that’s—I mean, to maintain calorie hungry muscle tissue that’s a calorie hungry process.  So when we say enough protein the amount of protein we’re looking for is the amount of protein that’s going to help our body heal itself.  And to do that we need those 30 gram doses and the challenge with trying to get that much protein through vegetables and nuts is just that you would have to eat 2000 calories of nuts to get—just from nuts, just to get that amount of protein.  Because nuts for example are like 70-80 percent fat.

 

So to try to get protein from something which is 80 percent not protein by way of sort of an exaggerated example it can be a little bit like trying to increase your vegetable intake by eating carrot cake.  It’s kind of a silly example, but if you think about it well, like carrot cake does have vegetables in it, but it doesn’t actually mean that’s what we should use if we want to increase our vegetable intake.  Now, this isn’t to say that as a vegan or a vegetarian you can’t eat a SANE optimal amount of protein, you absolutely can.  But we are going to need to do supplementation there either with p-protein, hemp protein or rice protein all of which are available in very clean variations in the SANE store.  And then yes, vegetables, things like spinach, most people don’t know this, but gram for gram spinach actually has more protein in it than some cups of beef.  But again, the amount of spinach you would have to consume to get 30 grams of protein will probably make your stomach explode.  So I would advise against that, but yes, we want to look at sources of protein that get more of their calories from protein than from carbohydrate or fat because if we don’t do that then if our goal is to increase our protein intake, but the foods we’re eating to do that are more carbohydrate or are more fats than they’re protein well, that we’re actually doing is increasing our carbohydrate and/or our fat intake and protein’s kin of coming along on the side, if that makes sense.

 

So that’s for example, sometimes you see in recipes we talk about egg whites in addition to whole eggs, it’s not because whole eggs are bad, it’s because whole eggs are 64 percent fat and the egg white of the egg like that’s what makes up the protein.  So if you’re trying to increase your protein intake a whole egg is primarily going to increase your fat intake whereas if you just ate the egg white which is about 90 to 93 percent protein that’s going to increase your protein intake without increasing other stuff even more.  Hopefully that makes sense.  But yes, as you know, some of the most amazing SANE success stories come from vegans and vegetarians who make the SANEst choices available within that framework and then we just might need to do some plant form of protein supplementation.  The second question here was super food and servings.  I’m not even sure what that means, but the good news is that if you go into the SANE store and you click in the How To Use, at each page it says like how to use, it breaks down the servings and it says like one tablespoon of Garden In My Glass equals one serving of vegetables.  So that’s there.  And if it’s not please, tell me.  I’ll make sure that it gets there. So I always try to get better.

 

And then do you count herbs or spices?  No.  That’s another great question. So is it SANE?  Is an herb or a spice SANE?  They don’t, it’s sort of like saying is water SANE, it’s NA.  Something has to have calories in it for us to determine whether or not it’s SANE because again, SANE is the measure for the quality of a calorie.  So since herbs or spices are calorie free we can’t call them SANE.  We also can’t call them inSANE.  Same thing for water.  But I can tell you that herbs and spices as a general rule of thumb, they’re a great source of polyphenols, they are great sources of other—like cinnamon is fantastic for blood sugar regulation, turmeric, curcumin, there’s a bunch of great stuff.  As a general rule of thumb, herbs and spices are absolutely the way to go.  Like just crush it with herbs and spices because especially when you use herbs and spices instead of sauces—sauces can be an inSANE nightmare.  You get these—even things that you would think would be healthy like a marinara sauce you see it’s just high-fructose corn syrup, sugar added, trans this, hydroxyl, methyl.  Herbs and spices man, they’re the way to go.  So be careful with sauces and absolutely love those herbs and spices.  Great stuff.   I mean, add cinnamon in like bog doses to your smoothies if at all possible, super helpful with blood sugar.  So hopefully that helps.

 

Live question here from Ashley.  So I want to answer that.  What’s the best way to break through a plateau?  More protein, more veggies or no dairy, fasting one day a week?  Ashley, unfortunately it’s not an easy question to answer without knowing a lot more about what is causing the plateau.  For example, if someone is like 10 pounds over what they think is their desired weight and they think that’s a plateau that’s very different than if someone had a 100 pounds to lose, is down 50 and has stalled at that point.  The easiest places to—so, in the first case just keep in mind that the closer and closer we get, like the leaner and leaner we get the slower that—to try to get from 40 percent body fat to 30 percent body fat is much easier than getting from 30 percent body fat to 20 percent body fat.  And if you have any doubts in your mind let’s just keep going.  Going from 20 percent body fat to 10 percent body fat and then from 10 percent body fat to zero—like you can actually see your body wouldn’t let you go to zero percent body fat.  Right, that’s where the set point.  I’m talking about homeostasis, the body automatically regulating itself.  So your body is going to try to keep you at that healthy point.  So just keep in mind that the closer you are to that healthy point you’re going to see a little bit of diminishing marginal return.

 

And sometimes our culture can train us to think that like having abs isn’t the healthy point.  It’s not necessarily unhealthy, but that is—the natural healthy state for most human beings isn’t being able to see their abs.  So assuming that’s not the case, assuming that we’re sort of further away from our ideal weight, the plateau absolutely, I think just like in the quantity model we would say, “Oh, you’re at a plateau.  We’ll just even eat fewer calories.”  In the quality model we really got to look at the quality of what we’re eating.  So is there a way that we can increase the vegetable intake?  Are we getting the three, the four, the five 30 gram servings of protein evenly spaced out throughout the day, are we getting those whole food fats, is there any inSANEty?  Because that little bit of inSANEty if it’s that two or three cookies at night might be fine if you’re at your goal, but if you’re plateauing that spike in blood sugar right there, that could be causing some problems.  But there’s also things not even related to diet.  If we’re getting four hours of sleep per night at some point the body’s just going to say, “I’m not going any further.  I’m not going any further until I have sort of more time to heal.”  And it may also involve how much we’re moving.  Like do we need to increase the quality of our exercise?

 

So Ashley, this is something that I think we can dig into a way more detail for you in the support group.  The plateaus are talked about on the Internet as being a thing, as if there’s sort of a thing in our brain which says, “At this point I am just going to stop.”  And the science is like—there’s no such thing as your body saying—like your body has a set point, right.  So based on all the different inputs that we’re putting into our body: stress, sleep, medication, quality of our eating, quality of our exercise.  This is going to establish a set point for our body weight and that’s going to be regulated by our brain, by our hormones, by our gut bacteria.  So to break through a plateau it’s a little bit like the more we put in the more we get out.  And in the old calorie counting model what a calorie counter would say is if you plateau at 1200 calories and one hour a day of jogging, you need to cut that down to 800 calories and do two hours per day of jogging.  Now, of course, the problem with that is that is that is not only horribly unhealthy, but no human being could keep that up for the long term.  So as soon as you stop doing that you’ll gain all the weight back and more which is worse for your health than if you never did anything.  Yo-yo dieting is very bad for us.  So what we need to do if we’re sort of at a point if what our body has reached homeostasis at what we perceive as a plateau is we need to look at all those elements.  We need to look at stress, we need to look at sleep, and we need to look at quality of our eating.  And instead of saying, “I’m going to eat fewer calories and burn more off.”, we say, “How do I increase the quality of my sleep? How do I reduce my stress levels? How do I bolster the loving relationships that I have in my life? How do I maybe eat more green leafy vegetables rather than like carrots?”

 

I mean, there’s just the optimal SANE food groups and there is the regular SANE food groups.  You can see those outlined in the first SANE 101 course.  So hopefully that helps.  I would not fast one day per week.  I mean, if we’re fasting because we know about the benefits of autophagy and we want our cells to recycle themselves, like that’s a one thing, but sometimes fasting is used as an euphemism for starving oneself.  And if we go on the Internet and we say, “Hey, I fast one day per week to help with my weight loss.”  People might say, “Oh, okay, that’s—“   They’ll react one way let’s just say that.  But if we go to our friends and we say, “Hey, I starve myself one day a week so that it helps me lose weight.” everyone would kind of intuitively say like, “Food is healthy. There is no—please, don’t starve yourself. Don’t concentrate all the starvation down into one day. Increase the quality of what you’re eating.”  And then also give your body some time.  You know, what might be perceived as a plateau might just be your body needing a little bit of time. Weight loss and metabolic healing isn’t linear.  We like to think that things are linear.  It’s going to follow this, “I’m going to lose this much, at this much rate and then it’s going to happen.”  But again, we know that isn’t the case because if that was the case then we could eventually weigh zero pounds, which of course we never can.  If our ideal weight is a 150 pounds and we start at 300 pounds you can imagine that at some point the rate of fat loss has to slow down because if it didn’t, once we hit 150 we just keep going until we weigh nothing.  So that again gets into the science of the set point.

 

So hopefully that’s a little bit helpful.  I apologize that there wasn’t like just do this and you break through the plateau, but one some level hopefully that maybe gives you some confidence in the SANE program because anybody who says like. “It’s this magic thing.”  Hopefully all of us here in the SANE family know that there’s no—right, what we’re talking about here is a medical issue.  Chronic weight gain is like diabetes or like hypertension, it is a—there are underlying metabolic dysfunctions that we have to heal.  The American Medical Association recognizes it as a disease.  Just like diabetes and just like we went, “Do this and diabetes goes away.”   The more we understand that the more we can give our body time, time, time to heal because that’s what it needs.  So I’m going to cover in a little more depth later on if we have time, but we’re kind of running out of time.  So I’m going to go a little bit faster here.

 

Cheryl has a question.  If you go into the step-by-step program, she’s asking where do I find paper forms for SANE app?  The SANE overview, the very first thing, it says start here, there’s a section about the app, there’s a link in the lesson about the app that contains the link to paper form.  And just as a general rule, the more we can focus on just going through the step by step program one step at a time we’ve spent years putting that together in a logical fashion so that for example, you don’t try to use the app before you understand what serving sizes are.  So we’ll explain what the serving sizes are before we get into that stuff if you go in a step-by-step fashion.  So [inaudible 00:57:19] can be very helpful.

 

Let me sort of go through some questions here kind of fast because I did have some stuff that I think Ashley and I think everyone else is really going to appreciate because it has to do with the metabolic healing topic.  So we’ll try to go through these questions really fast.  If I don’t do them justice let’s try to do them in the support group.  This is a great question here that says, in the video on eccentric squats I mentioned a burst based belly breathing dissipates cortisol in your muscle so you can do it longer.  It is unclear in the demo whether the breath is in through the nose and out through the mouth or in through the mouth and out through the mouth.  It has always been my understanding that breathing in through the mouth rather than nose actually raises cortisol, I’d like to hear more on this subject especially what studies support this theory.  So the general rule of thumb here is you just don’t want to hold your breath.  I mean, breath however works best for you.  There’s quite a bit of research.  So the way we talk about exercising is very different than the most people exercise.  So for example, if you’re taking 10 seconds to lower weight—like if you don’t breathe for 10 seconds while doing intense exercise you will pass out, your blood pressure will spike, you’ll blackout.  So there is a difference because of this very specific form of exercise we’re doing we want to make sure that we’re breathing continuously so that we don’t spike out blood pressure.  And it’s less about cortisol, but it’s about helping to clear the lactic acid out our muscles.  So in that video if I say something about cortisol I should not have.

 

So please, let me know if I did.  I think I said something about lactic acid and blood pressure, but the general rule of thumb is you want to make sure you are breathing naturally and not holding your breath.  And then as the exercise gets more and more difficult we naturally have a tendency to hold our breath.  And then your face gets all red.  So what a lot of people encourage, if you want to get really deep into the science, doctor Doug McGuff who wrote a book Body By Science is a great resource here, is you do sort of rapid breathing like that so that you again, you force yourself to not hold your breath and to be able to continue pushing.  And by way of analogy if you think about another context in which human beings have to exert a lot of force over a long period of time giving birth is a pretty intense form of exercise and you’ll notice the form of breathing that takes place there is don’t hold your breath, keep breathing, keep the oxygen flowing through.  So it’s the same thing here.  Again, you want to make sure you’re doing something that you’re comfortable with, but the key takeaway is if breathing into your nose and out through your mouth helps you I would say that that’s fine.

 

What I’ve seen in practice, and I’ve seen some literature support is that if you tell people to think too much about their breathing they just forget about it.  So what we want to do is just how you naturally breathe which for a lot of people is just I’m breathing in and I want to focus on doing that.  The more intense the exercise gets don’t forget to breathe because you’re holding that movement for 10 seconds and if you try to hold your breath for 10 seconds bad things are going to happen. So please, don’t do that.  Hopefully that is helpful.  Nico, perfect.  I love that.

 

And next question here is how do you handle social engagements and eating at other people’s houses?  I used to try to eat before I went or eat whatever was served so the host didn’t feel bad.  How do I handle being a single mother on a tight budget who works 10 to 12 hours per day plus school?  I feel like I don’t have the time or the money to eat healthy are some of the big reasons I gave up in the past.  I mean, this is a great, great, great question.  I want to make sure that we can do justice to this question and lie social engagements, limited time, and budget stuff.  Please, please, please go to the Stay Motivated section of the footer of the website, check out some of our previous coaching calls.  We cover this like in massive detail and also in your step-by-step program.  Like the thing that’s neat is—well, not neat, but like we all have struggles with social engagements.  Like that is a challenge for all of us and like going over to other people’s houses and they sort of make us feel awkward or bad, the work plus school, the budgetary constrains.  The cool thing about the Ignite program is if you can imagine that there’s a quite a few people that have this problem if you haven’t found it already or if we haven’t gotten to it yet in your step-by-step program it’s there.   So like the more typical a challenge might be, the good news is the more we’ve got a bunch of stuff already.  They’re like outlines that can help you out, like here is the quick tips to eating in the—like coking in bulk and how do I save money grocery shopping.

 

Like we have videos for this so please, continue to work through your step-by-step program.  If you want we will help you find this stuff, so just copy and paste this question into the support group and we’ll post a bunch of links there just boom, check this out, check this out, and check this out.  Because we’ve got a massive amount of stuff that can help you and I mean, the good thing—I mean, I’m sorry that I’m not giving you the sort of specific answer here, but this is a big topic and I want to serve you, I want you to get all the answers that you could ever want and we’ve got those answers for you.  So if you don’t mind we’re going to help you find those and—so sorry, that’s sort of a non-answer, but the answer is we’ve got a lot of other answers for you.  So we’ll get those and we have like how to save money, how to save time, just abundant good stuff for you here.  So if you can copy and paste the question, jump into the support group and let us make sure that you are 100 percent taken care of.  And I just clicked back in my browser which made all my notes go away.  I’m so sorry about that.  Let me just a second here.

 

 

All right.  So I’m going to try to do one more quick question here and then I did have some stuff that I prepared and I think it’s going to be really helpful for everybody.  It has to do with metabolic healing and time tables and goals.  So then I’m going to try to jump into that if that’s okay for the last half hour here.  This is a really good question here that came in, which is I don’t see how needing to find out serving sizes is any different from calorie counting, maybe I’m missing the point here?  This is a great question, great question.  And I love it.  It’s like Jonathan, you’re saying we shouldn’t count calories, but now you’re telling us to count servings.  What’s the deal?  Great question.  So the problem with calorie counting isn’t that—if calorie counting was, “Hey, think about what you’re eating and eat mindfully.”  That’s great.  Like we should all eat mindfully, we should do everything mindfully.  We should be deliberate about everything in our life, just like we’re deliberate about what we read and who we spend time with and the movies we watch.  We want to e deliberate and conscious about what we put into our bodies.  That’s a hugely intimate act, we’re putting things into our body.  So calorie counting isn’t a problem in the sense that I don’t think you should think about what you’re eating, I absolutely think you should think about what you’re eating.  The problem with calorie counting is that it has you track the wrong stuff, it has you track the quantity of what you’re putting into your body rather than the quality.  And that’s the challenge, right.  Twelve hundred calories of cake calorie counting would say that’s okay, but it’s not, just objectively it’s not, it’s going to harm our bodies.  So the idea isn’t to stop thinking about food, we want to think about food, we want to make conscious choices and deliberate choices about everything in our life, but we want to focus on the quality of what we’re eating and we want to do that in a way that’s sustainable and intuitive.  So we eat food, we don’t eat calories.

 

The concept of a calorie is not something that’s been around for very long at all, and in fact, it allows there to be a lot of complexity and confusion.  Like oh, 100 calorie snack pack, that’s healthy because it’s low in calories.  It is not healthy.  And when you go into McDonalds and they say the healthy choice menu are just the McDonalds options that are 400 calories or less.  I mean, just think about hoe easy that system is to fudge.  I could sell fudge and call it healthy as long as I just shrink the serving size.  Oh, the serving size is under a 100 calories.  So the criticism of calorie counting is that the calorie is the quantitative measure of the energy we’re putting into out body and what we really need to focus on is the quality of the food we’re putting into our body.  So I mean, food journaling is great, being conscious about what we’re eating is great and then once we do that, once we keep track of our servings for a while we’re going to be able to do that intuitively.  Like people who’ve been going SANE for a year or more generally don’t continue to use the app.  Not because they don’t like it, but because they now just—it’s pretty hard to intuit calorie counts, but it’s very easy to intuit, of, after about a year or so of doing this, I’ve got this many servings of vegetables, this many servings of protein, this many servings of fat and I can get that and I can go out to eat and I’m like, “Yes, this, this and this.”  And pretty soon you don’t need to count anything because you sort of pain by numbers and you just do it like second nature. It’s just, “Oh, vegetables, protein, fats, low fructose fruits. Cool, I got it.”  So yes, my apologies if it came off as you should count this, not that and the idea is we do want to be conscious about what we’re eating, but we want to be conscious, we want to count things that matter and things that are intuitive and things that we continue to do for the long-term and things that can’t be manipulated.  Calorie counting at the end of the day you can manipulate the heck out of that.  I mean, look at the 100 calorie snack pack.  Look at the Weight Watchers meals, the lean cuisine, the meal is tiny.  Of course it’s less than 300 calories a meal it is this big.  You can’t fake vegetables, protein, whole food fats and low fructose fruits.  There’s just no way to manipulate that, there is no tomfoolery going on.  It’s just food and it’s just simple and it’s healthy.  So hopefully that is helpful.

 

And the last thing that I wanted to cover here, and hopefully we can get some good follow questions in it, there’s a wonderful member of the community, her name is Connie.  And she has been posting some great questions in the support group, a lot of great—if you’re not in the support group please, jump in there.  There has been some awesome stuff going on recently there.  It’s just blowing up and the thing that I appreciate here is that Connie heard me say something about a broken bone analogy and about the speed of goals and metabolic healing and bla, bla, bla, and plateaus.  And all right, Jonathan, I just want to lose weight, okay.  Would you just tell me, I want to lose weight, stop talking about metabolic healing.  And it’s fair.  I mean, it’s a fair question and I want to do it justice here.  So she specifically says, and this is great and I so appreciate it—because this is a safe place.  Please, like feel safe, bring up whatever you want to bring up, we’re here for the long-term, we’ll get you taken care of.  So give you context, I often say that a broken metabolism is like a broken bone.  So for example, you’d break your ankle like you have to put it in a cast, it’s going to take weeks or months to heal, but then once it’s healed you can walk around on it for the rest of your life.  And rather than thinking that like, “Oh, this quick fix miracle thing is going to make your ankle better.”

 

Well, she says that the broken bone analogy doesn’t quite work for her because of one specific difference or one significant difference, a specific timeframe.  Yes, while the cast is on there’s no way to see the healing going on, but the doctor does give a specific timeframe, eight weeks and the cast will come off and you will be healed isn’t vague, he doesn’t say it depends—eight weeks and done, boom.  But the same can’t be said for a broken metabolism.  You said that reversing this disease will take time, months to years, not days or weeks.  And I completely understand, but why the months to years, open-ended timeframe?  Not being able to see visual results during that timeframe is my mental block, results are my motivator.  So I’m just going to keep going on a little bit here.  She says, I agree that it’s not a bad deal if, “I can reverse 80 percent of the damage caused by over 40 years of dieting in year”, but it is really going to take one year or maybe it’s going to take two years and once I’m healed then I start to lose weight.  So lots of good stuff here.

 

The key thing, and the thing that I appreciate is, “Okay, if you’re going to say that my broken metabolism is like a broken bone, my doctor can tell me hey, your broken bone will be healed in 12 weeks.”  So that’s a great point and let me refine my analogy.  So I’m going to try to share my screen here a little bit.  I wanted to see if this works.  So I don’t know, hopefully folks here now and that are watching this later are familiar with the show Grey’s Anatomy.  If you’re not, it’s a very popular show here in States and I think probably around the world.  And there was a character by the name of McDreamy.  And McDreamy ended up going off the show because he got in a very bad car accident.  And let me just try to share my screen here real quick.  And please, let me know if you can not see my screen, but these are some photos of McDreamy from the show after he got wrecked.  So now, I’m not trying to be like, “Oh, look at these disturbing photos of a human being.”  But like when we look at a person and like they got in a car wreck like there is no way you would look at McDreamy in this episode of Grey’s Anatomy and say, “You know what, he’s going to be better in let me tell you the specific timeframe.”  That all of these things that have happened to him because he got hit by a truck.  He got T bone by a MAC truck.  And his body is broken.  And it’s heartbreaking and you know what, the doctors don’t know when he’s going to be better.  They can tell you it’s definitely not going to be a week, it’s definitely not going to be two weeks, but it’s going to take some time because the body takes time to heal.  And that’s what we’re here to do.  But now the difference here is like while McDreamy didn’t come back, he went off the show, this ended up totaling him, we can come back, but—like I’m sort of getting chills and shaking a little bit because I just don’t know how else to communicate you’ve been so lied to.

 

Like this isn’t just you eat less and you burn off fat.  Like your doctor if you have diabetes or if you have hypertension or if like you got diagnosed with cancer, the doctor would never say, and this is my fault for using a bad analogy and I apology for the, the broken bone analogy needs to be refined, but a physician like an actual expert would never say, “Cheryl, you have ovarian cancer and if you do exactly this it will be exactly gone in exactly this amount of time and that progression will be linear.”  I think we all wish that that’s the way the body works.  But it’s not unfortunately.  And it will never work that way.  But here’s the good news.  It can be healed.  Like the body is the most resilient—the human body is the most resilient and adaptable thing in the world. And if you give it time your body—the only way you will ever overcome a disease is if your body overcomes it.  Medication doesn’t heal diseases, taking insulin doesn’t get rid of diabetes, and it masks the symptoms of diabetes.  Taking blood pressure medication doesn’t cure hypertension, it addresses the symptoms of hypertension.  Starvation dieting will never reduce the inflammation in your brain that causes chronic weight gain.  It will never repopulate and change the composition of the cut bacteria which determine log term weight.  It will never reregulate hormone receptors in your body, but these things can happen.

But they just take time.  And like while McDreamy is laying in his hospital bed there’s going to be good days and there’s going to be bad days.  And it’s not going to be linear and it’s not going to be neat and it’s not going to be tidy, but like we know what we’re doing is correct.  There is no world in which eating more nutrient dense food in place of food that we know is addictive and toxic isn’t the right approach.  I think that might be the most helpful thing is first understanding—you know what, I drop the ball here, broken bone analogy isn’t deep enough because the broken metabolism—a broken bone is like this bone broke.  Okay.  That’s not what a broken metabolism is.

 

My fault.  A broken metabolism, like very specifically has three major components and there are more, but if you take a person who is struggling with the disease that is chronic weight gain and you put them in a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine or FMRI machine and you scan their brain you will see a level of inflammation in certain areas of their brain that an individual who is not suffering from obesity doesn’t have.  If you take a sample of a gut bacteria of someone who is chronically overweight and you compare that with the gut bacteria of someone who isn’t they are different and they’re consistently different.  And in fact, if you transplant the gut bacteria of one to the other like they’ll spontaneously gain or lose weight.  And the same thing happens with hormone levels if you measure the baseline levels of leptin or insulin in someone who’s struggling with their weight.  So the reason I say this is like we now know so much about this disease and we know how to cure it, but it’s a disease and it’s a multifactorial disease that has so many intermingling parts.  And that’s why I use the example of McDreamy because it’s not like oh, he just broke a bone.  Like he got hit by a MAC truck.  And it breaks my heart and it wakes me up every day and it keeps me up late into the evening and it’s caused me and my wife to delay everything else in our life, including having children and we’re kind of running out of time so we’re hoping we can actually do that some time soon, because once you know the science and once you know that just like—I mean, imagine, it’s kind of heartbreaking, but imagine that—okay, here’s a better way.

 

Imagine you had someone you love who has cancer or diabetes.  Like heartbreaking.  And they came to you and they said, “Hey, you know I read about this pill on the Internet that said it can make my cancer go away in two weeks.”  Or, “Hey, I met this guy or this gal at the gym who said if I do this new fangled workout my diabetes will go away in two weeks.”  Like that’s a mindset we have to have, you cannot heal your body through starvation.  I promise you.  Like go back to McDreamy.  McDreamy’s face is all messed up.  You can put concealer on his face, you can put a mask on his face, but that’s not healing the problem.  So we can starve ourselves and temporarily lose weight, but it’s not healing the disease and that’s what we’re here to do.  We’re here to administer nutritional therapy over the long term to our body to help heal a disease that is caused by misinformation and toxic substances being put in our body.  Much like diabetes, right?  What causes diabetes?   Diabetes is caused by an overproduction of insulin and then your body can’t react to insulin anymore, your pancreas can’t produce enough.  What causes that?  Eating certain foods, the quality of your diet.  Same with hypertension.  It’s not caused by eating too much food, it’s caused by eating the wrong kinds of food.  Same thing with obesity.  It is a disease and sadly, I wish it didn’t work this way, but diseases don’t have specific time tables by which they can be healed.  And they’re not linear.  But here’s what I can promise you, I can promise you that what myself, the entire SANE team and the entire SANE family is here to do will always work.

 

Constance has another question here and she says you know, are there some people that SANE doesn’t work for?  There is no human being on the planet.  So SANE just means these are foods that are more satisfying, not less satisfying.  These are foods that fill us up for longer periods of time and keep us full for longer.  These are unaggressive foods, these are foods that don’t cause wild swings in our hormones, these are nutritious, that’s the N in SANE foods, and these are foods that provide us with the most of that which is essential for human life: vitamins, minerals, amino acids and fatty acids and things like polyphenols and other good stuff.  And these are foods that are inefficient, that are not easily stored as fat.  The reason that SANE has to work is that there is no world, there is no way that eating foods that don’t fill you up and foods that do cause hormonal spikes, and foods that don’t provide you with any nutrition and foods that are really easily stored as fat like that’s definitely not going to work.  Okay.  So we know that eating inSANE food isn’t going to work and it seems pretty straightforward that eating foods that provide us with the most of that which is proven to heal us is good and then—or we could just say, “Forget it. I’m not just going to eat food at all.”  And that can’t work.  So we have three options.  Eat garbage food which we know isn’t going to work, eat no food which we know isn’t sustainable and even if somehow we could—like that’s not healing ourselves, it’s not, food is therapy.  So the only option left is to eat an abundance of high quality foods and then to give our body permission to heal itself.  And we say you know, will it work for everybody?  Yes, you will get better.  Now, would you have abs?  Probably not.  If you want to look like a fitness model there’s a bunch of different things that fitness models do.  It’s a fitness model’s job to do this.  Fitness models might not be particularly healthy.

 

So what SANE will do is SANE will make you have healthy and as fit as you can be for the long term, naturally and sustainably.  But it almost brings tears to my eyes because I don’t—like there is no way to become a great pianist in two weeks.  Like you cannot master the violin in two weeks, that’s just—there is no way you can put a seed in the ground and to have the plant sprout in two weeks.  That’s just not how those systems work, but like we know how to become a great pianist.  We can teach you how to play the violin.  It’s a predicable pattern.  Like you do these things, you give it time.  Now, not everybody will become a concert pianist.  There’s people—let’s use music. The Julliard Institute, one of the most prestigious music schools in the world.  Like every single person who gets enrolled in Julliard has spent 10,000 hours working really hard, but some people are better at playing the violin than other people.  So there’s going to be some people who go semi SANE for six months and have abs.  And there’s going to be some people that go totally SANE for a year and still have a little bit of excess belly fat.  But the cool thing is that like what we can do is be the best SANEst, healthiest versions of ourselves.

 

And yes, so SANE does do that always for everybody.  It can’t not.  SANE isn’t paleo, it’s not low-carb, it’s not like just be low-carb or just be like things our ancestors ate, or be anything else.  It’s just here are foods that are the most satisfying that cause the least hormonal swings in your body that provide the most essential nutrition and are least efficiently stored as fat.  Those are better for every human being on the planet than foods that aren’t those things.  I mean, in some ways all I’m saying is healthy food is—eating healthy food is better for you than not eating food or eating unhealthy food.  I mean, just to make it—I don’t know, that’s—and just please, give yourself that permission.  It is true and you can heal, but it’s just going to take some time.  So I’m sorry to keep hammering on this, but a lot of people will spend four years going to collage to get a degree that a lot of us found didn’t really help them that much.  So they spent four years and $80,000 getting a degree in marketing and they’re like, “Okay. What the heck do I do with this?”

 

I promise you, I promise you that if you eat non-starchy vegetables and nutrient dense protein, whole food fats and low fructose fruits in that order and you work on your sleep, you work on exercising smarter, you work on your stress levels that a year from today you can reverse 80 percent of the damage that has happened to you over the past couple decades.  In one year.  It takes four years, and like $100,000 to get a collage degree that may or may not help you, you can take 40 years worth of metabolic damage, a disease that has taken 40 years to develop and we can reverse it maybe a 100 percent of the way, but maybe not a 100 percent of the way. But 80 percent of the way in one year?  And then having it healed, like that’s where the ankle does fit.  Now our metabolism is healed, now we can continue that for the rest of our lives and we don’t have to keep fighting starvation, but it just takes some time.  So I hope that’s helpful, I’m sorry for kind of soap boxing that a little bit, but it breaks my heart when I mean, I see people and they’re getting tricked or misled by programs which make it seem like—right.

 

Let’s go back to McDreamy.  We can put concealer on his face and it looks like he’s healthier, it looks like he’s healed, but he’s not.  And it’s just going to take some time, but we have the science on our side and I’m going anywhere, the SANE family’s not going anywhere.  We’re here.  Like please, just keep putting one foot in front of the other and keep eating an abundance of the food that’s proven to heal you and your body will do the rest.  But the one factor that we don’t control and that is sometimes the hardest for us is time.  But I think if we can look at it from a perspective of like invest one year to take the rest of your life to the next level.  What other area of our life could we say, “I’m going to take 40 years of damage and in one year I’m going to reverse that, or the vast majority of it and then enjoy that new sense of just awesomeness for the rest of my life.”  It’s a pretty good deal when you think about it that way.  So I mean, just please, understand that you have been so horribly victimized by bad information and by yo-yo dieting and I feel so blessed and fortunate that you’ve given me and the entire SANE family an opportunity to help you use correct information to heal yourself.  And like that mindset, that image of McDreamy lying in a hospital bed I want you to sort of burn that into your brain only because like you are healing a body that has been so horribly damaged by misinformation, but we can heal it and we can bring it back and it is going to be so brilliant and beautiful and fantastic when it happens, but please, like think about it on like a six month interval.

 

And I just so appreciate the opportunity to help you with that journey because it will always transform your life and it will transform your life permanently if you give it a chance.  So I know I didn’t get to everyone’s questions, but I hope that’s helpful and I really appreciate Constance, you bringing this up because I’ve been using that broken bone analogy for a while now and I think I’m going to switch over to using a little bit of a different analogy which is just in short, like let’s not compare a broken metabolism to a broken bone.  Like obesity is a disease just like diabetes is a disease—and this isn’t me saying this.  The American Medical Association recognizes obesity as a disease.  Obesity is a disease, like diabetes is a disease, like cancer is a disease.  There is no time table for when one specific person with one specific cancer is going to no longer have cancer.  There is not a specific time table, but we know unlike cancer and unlike certain instances of diabetes, we can reverse the disease that is obesity or at least the vast majority of it.

 

Please, give yourself time and please, know how thankful I am for the opportunity to be able to help you along that journey and how much the entire SANE team feels honored to help you along in that journey.  So if I didn’t get to your question I’m so sorry.  Please, post it in the support group.  I will carry it into the next session.  We’re at the 90 minute mark, so hopefully that was helpful for you.  And man, we’re going to get new stuff launched on the website.  We got the new recipes coming, those will be helpful.  Again, thank you so much, these calls are my favorite, favorite, favorite portion of the week.  And you know, my deepest thanks and love and support.  And I will see you in the support group and I will see you in our next session.  Thank you so much.