3.15.16

Please also remember that these sessions are recorded for easy access.  For you in the future, if ever you can’t make to one of these calls or if you want to watch it again because we’re going to go fast.  You can watch all of these calls by clicking on Get and Stay motivated section in the footer of your Ignite program.  Which is also really neat because if you have to leave early or if you can’t make one of these sessions, what you can do is write in those scheduling surveys, you can write in your questions, we‘ve got a bunch of questions here, pre-written in questions here.  I will answer your question during the session and you can watch the recording and that is awesome but because it’s being recorded, please don’t share anything that you don’t want to have recorded.  No personally identifiable information, no medical information but other than that everything, nothing is off-limits.

 

So here are some great personal questions last week for me and I am happy to answer anything that you want.  This is your time; this is the highlight of my week.  So it’s always a lot of fun so please again, feel free to jump in the chat box.  Chat it up if you have questions please use the chat box as well but use the little question mark and that is always a lot of fun.  So please let me know if you can’t hear me or if the audio video cuts out at any point in time.  If you’re shy, it’s all good but remember it’s all about the interaction so please feel free to you know you can ask me anything you want.  I’ve got some great stuff planned and I’ve got an abundance of questions that came in beforehand so follow up questions are great and as always if you are brand-new and a lot of people who just joined in the SANE Ignite family which is exciting.

 

I apologize for the short notice for today’s session you’ll get more notice for future sessions.  We try to do it about one of these a week and they’re a lot of fun.  So just to know what to expect today, because I know we’ve got a lot of new family members here.  This is all about interaction so if you’re shy, that’s cool but please feel free to interact.  It’s going to be a lot of fun and we’re going to keep this to 90 minutes.  So we’re going to be here till about 7 p.m.  Pacific.  If that is okay with everyone and it’s going to be a lot of fun so there are always four goals in each and every one of these calls.  And these calls are good, they’ve stood the test of time and I want you to hold me accountable if we’re not hitting these goals.  I want you to tell me because we’re here just like I always say, the whole team always says “Progress not perfection”.  We always want to make the SANE program better.   So please, feedback is always welcome and so our goals for these sessions and for everything Sane related but especially these sessions because these are really the highlight and I appreciate the opportunity to do them with you because I love doing this stuff.  It’s really to make sure you feel that sense of love and community.  I actually have some stuff I’d like to talk about today, if we have time.  Which has to do with how important that sense of social support and love and community is to long-term weight and wellness and health.  Most often it’s “eat this, not that.   We get this almost kind of a reductionist view but this is really about the whole person.  It’s about healing. So really making sure you feel that sense of love and community here is extremely important to me.  So please let me know if these calls don’t do that hopefully they do.  I want to make sure that you get some specific cutting edge in immediately actionable information last week, if you haven’t seen that call. We got it some very specific, very cutting edge stuff.  A lot of this is depending on the questions you ask. So please ask me anything you want and I’ll give you some specific and cutting edge immediately actionable things but I also have a third goal is I want to make sure this is helpful for everybody.  I want to make sure we’re taking a teaching-approach rather than a telling-approach.  It can seem helpful to have the “eat this not that list” but what happens when some things are not on that list, right?

 

So it’s the whole teaching a person to fish, unfortunately fish is extremely sane so that’s it’s the whole teach a person to fish rather than give a fish.  I want to make sure that even if we have very specific questions that don’t seem like they apply to you.  I will do my best to generalize them and make them apply to you as well.  Please don’t tune out if you hear a question that doesn’t seems to apply to you.  I’ll try to make it apply to you as well.  And of course I want to make sure we have a lot of fun and I would like to tell you how much I appreciate the opportunity to do these calls.  They are the highlight of my week so thank you so much for being here.  And again, as always we’ve got a wonderful list of questions that people wrote in which I am going to do in order.

 

If I don’t get your question I will carry it over into the next session so please no worries on that.  I’ll make sure I answer them all and as I go I will of course answer the questions that come in here like the one that just came in from Holly.  Good job Holly.  Using the special question box here so I will answer Holly’s question; first, just because she had the courage to be the very first person to post a question here in the live session.  Though we have some shy people and its all good, no pressure at all.  You’re always welcome for sending in your questions beforehand. Is it okay to get started?  Let’s go ahead and let’s rock and roll.

 

We’ve got a question from Holly here.  So she says hey JB, so last week or so you provided a modular meal for the Picky family.  And your suggestion taco night which was great, thank you. But that was already my go-to meal.  Is there a place for I can visit more modular meal options for the half-sane families.  You know Holly it’s a great question, so there is not a specific place on the SANE website which these are just modular meals, but what you’ll find at least in the same meal plans in general.  This has been my experience is that most meals are inherently modular, like they are unless it’s pizza which is inherently a starch which of course we can make it other ways.  The key is just going to be whether it’s burgers without the bun whether we said taco night without the taco shells.  We can do lasagna with eggplant noodles.  We can do spaghetti with zucchini noodles or zoodles.  Those smart substitutions.

 

If you can let me know if you have some sort of family favorites that we don’t have SANE alternatives for, I’m totally happy to provide modular meals alternatives there but one thing that a lot of people find to be helpful is SANE eating is kind of a [inaudible 00:10:12] approach. We went to have our non-starchy vegetables on half the plate, nutrients protein whole food fats and we want to eat so much of that stuff that we’re too full for starch and some sweets. So if you think about a lot of meals, like Asian dishes its protein and vegetables served on top of a starch.  What we would do in that case, the modular is the people who are going Sane just have more of the protein and the vegetables and not the starch.  Or they just don’t have the rolls.  They’re going to make spaghetti or any sort of pasta based dish you just shred up some zoodles or some zucchini noodles using a mandolin and then you make pasta and you can use the same meat sauce for both.

 

With most meals unless it is like a Stromboli which actually has the starch infused into the thing.  Usually, it’s just about saying eat more of the SANE stuff even if [inaudible 00:11:07] eating on the go in a lot of sessions.  Troupoli–?? and buffets things like that are wonderful places to be sane or even subway.  We’re just going to eat more of the same, that’s a sure version any meal can be made modular I guess unless it’s all infused together by saying just prep more of the vegetables and the protein.  The SANEr people in the family are going to eat those. The people who are not going to SANE they are certainly enjoy the starch it’s just not something that’s the SANE individuals would enjoy.  Hopefully that’s helpful.  The [inaudible 00:11:42] approach and that’s even how the weekly meal plans work we got our main dish then we got the SANE side.  It’s just more of the main dish and more of the SANE side. Hopefully that is helpful and let me jump in some great questions here written in… I want to make sure we give some awesome time to these the follow up questions

 

Holly please let me know if that was not helpful if you have follow up questions or anyone else questions.  Please feel free to send them in here in the chat box.  The first question that was written in is I know this is a member of the family who is not always able to join us on these calls because she works in the evening.  So this is a great question here which is, What about if you work in the graveyard shift or if you work odd hours?  How does that relate to weight loss?  Does that have a negative impact on weight loss?  One general point that I’m going to make sure here is that everything that I share with you in these calls and in these SANE program in general, I want it to put into two very clear buckets.  One is this is from peer-reviewed research the other is this is what I’ve observed in my personal experience.  In those two, if they ever overlap I’ll put it all in the peer-review research bucket because that’s really what matters.  I personally have not seen peer-reviewed research around the graveyard shift being uniquely bad or disruptive from a hormonal perspective.  I think that, I would imagine in my personal experience that the sunlight in your action with melatonin and serotonin there is going to be.  I would think some impact from your body from not following the natural circadian rhythms.  However, human beings are incredibly adaptable species so when it comes to this specific question like if I work the  graveyard shift, am I just hosed the answer to that is absolutely not.  You’re not at all absolutely hosed just because you work on the graveyard shift.  I think there might be some differences in your hormone levels but nothing that’s insurmountable.  We got people that live in frigid climates.  We have people live in the warm climates.  The human body is incredibly adaptable.  We just need to make sure that we treat it with kindness and love and sanity regardless of those situations.  I do not think that you are at a disadvantage if you work odd hours.  I will say that if you’re not, so this is peer-review research now if you’re not getting six or more hours of sleep per night that is so important.

 

We hear so much about exercise more, exercise more, and exercise more.   The research around lack of sleep and health impact and weight and hormonal impact is so phenomenally powerful.  Graveyard shift I wouldn’t worry about sleep deprivation I would.  You even remember that probably from the SANE results plan or from the master class.  Which is that, lack of sleep is right up there with anything else that could stand in the way of weight loss and there have actually been studies on which we talk about hormonal clog a lot.  We talk about metabolic dysfunction so that’s just the constellation and again we’re going to get a little bit advanced on these calls but that’s kind of the point of these calls so I apologize if some of this is a little bit science-y.  I want you to give the goods of these calls.

 

The cost of chronic weight gain is as you know is not a will power issue, it’s not a character flaw.  There’s a heavy genetic component and as important if not more important is a constellation of systems in your body how they’re interacting.  The three that are most changeable for lack of better terms is your gut, your hormones, and your brain.  Your endocrinology, your gastroenterology and your neuro-biology; how those interact.  And the reason that we now know that obesity is a disease much like diabetes is a disease.  And hypertension is a disease.  We can identify a disease state.  What do I mean by disease state?  We can identify a common set of characteristics in human biology which are consistent among every single person who has that condition.  When that state doesn’t exist, people don’t have that condition. What does that mean?

People with diabetes right, we know there’s a condition around blood sugar which everyone who has diabetes has that condition and if you don’t have that condition around blood sugar or insulin response, then you don’t have diabetes.  Diabetes is just the name we give to a consistent metabolic state.  The reason obesity was not called a disease until recently is the science haven’t gotten into the surface.  Science is still bubbling up to the surface but people look at obesity as a willpower problem.  People just need to eat less. There’s no common metabolic state that causes obesity.  It’s just a willpower problem.  What we now know definitively is that if you look at people chronically overweight they have a different type of bacteria in their gut.  They have different hormone levels and they have different neurology in their brain; certain types of their brains that would be inflamed. There are certain different neural circuitries they have even different taste centers going on.

 

A lot of that stuff we can then reverse.   If you look at someone who is naturally thin they will have different gut bacteria, different hormones and different neuro-wiring.  And by eating SANE, what we do is we take that disease state and we shift it from dysregulated gut biota, deregulated hormones and deregulated neurobiology, we re-regulate it.  Why did I just give you all that information?  The reason I gave you all that information is again, obesity is a disease; it’s not a morality issue.  Because it’s a disease it is not cured by eating less just like you wouldn’t cure hypertension by eating lesser diabetes.  By eating less you’re cured.  By what you eat, the quality of what you eat.  If you are sleep deprived, there are studies that have been done get this.  This is like really tuned in for this because if this is only taking away from this week’s call and you prioritize sleep higher because of it. It’s worth the price of admission because it will change your life.  There have been studies done which consistently showed that if you take someone who is not, does not have the deregulated gut, deregulated hormones and deregulated neurology that someone struggling with overweight has and you sleep deprive them, after one night, after one night, of sleep deprivation like 4 or 5 hours sleep they will have a mild case of metabolic syndrome.  They will essentially in one night, have started to develop the deregulation that would lead to obesity.

 

And remember, I didn’t say anything about what they’re eating.  I didn’t say anything about how they were moving their body.  The study shows that just from lack of sleep, inflammation begins in the brain.  Deregulation starts in the hormones.  Hormone levels change up.  Cortisol spikes for example and gut bacteria changes such that their body is starting to get the disease that will then lead to chronic fat gain. Just like we say, it is critical that we move our body.  It is critical that we eat the right kinds of foods right up there.  It is critical that we’re getting quality and sufficient quantity of sleep. Specific question of the graveyard shift question is I don’t, my opinion is that graveyard shift in it of itself shouldn’t matter.  I haven’t seen peer-reviewed research that says if you’re at the graveyard shift you are done for.  But what I would say, ensuring quality and quantity sleep is literally right up there with what we’re eating and how we’re moving our body.  So hopefully, that is helpful.

 

Holly got a follow up comment so I technically shouldn’t be reading this Holly Shame! Shame! I’m just kidding.  Oh no! She says thank you.  She isn’t going to chow down the same amount as veggies of that of an eight-year-old.  Yes, totally Holly, so don’t, all good, all good. So, I apologize for giving you the fake shame there.  It’s all good.  So the graveyard shift, hopefully that was helpful.  And please make sure to getting that sleep.  It’s super important.  That was a general thing.  Let me give you some specific tips for sleep.  That’s really important.  And this actually going to tie into something else that I wanted to talk about later.  Actually, it’s not going to tie in.  I’m not going to tie it in.  A couple of things you can do right away, turn off your screens.  I think you’ve all probably heard that and you probably like, ‘yes, that’s great but I’m not going to do that.’ You probably heard turn off and the reason for that is your screens emit different types of light.  One of them is blue light and blue light is emitted by the sun. In fact, some people buy this—oh my gosh—like I have one because I live in Seattle.  It’s not very sunny here. One of these types of things were all it does is emit blue light.  Some people use this during the wintertime or when it’s grey outside and you actually need it to shine into your eyes.  The reason for that is because blue light is one of the main sources of the sun.

 

The human beings have developed such that if we don’t see blue light, we don’t fully become awake.  We can stay sleepy so blue light helps keep us awake.  It helps to keep our mood elevated, which is great except when you’re trying to go to sleep.  You can supplement blue light, which will help you stay awake and improve your mood so it’s good takeaway tip.  These are like 30 or 40 bucks.  You can get them at Costco.  I think I got this online at Amazon, good stuff.  You want to make sure you don’t have blue light in the evening because back to the circadian rhythms, back to normal sleep schedules when it’s dark outside, that’s the signal to your body that it’s time to change the hormonal makeup; time to secrete a little bit of melatonin, for example, to help you go to sleep.  Blue light shining in your eyes from your monitors or from your Ipads or from your tablet, it’s going to screw up those hormonal signals.  People say turn off your screens.  That’s not going to happen if you’re me and as well as not going to happen if you’re you either because I like my screens.  However, there are apps like there’s an app called Lux free.  It works on your desktop.  I don’t know if it works on your tablet or not yet. But what it will actually do is it will detect your location.  And when the sun goes down, it’ll actually change the light emitted by your monitors not to use blue light anymore so your monitor will turn a little bit orange.  You could still see things. It takes a little bit getting use to but it just turns down the blue light.

 

You can do the same thing with your television.  You can usually adjust [00:22:55].  This is a super hack right here so in your television, you can sometimes go and you change the contrast and you can change the actual colors where it will say RGB: red, green, and blue. You want to turn blue down as much as you can tolerate if you’re going to watch television when you go to sleep.  That’s going to help you sleep better.  Minimizing blue light exposure is super helpful; chamomile tea, a great herbal option; valerian root, another great herbal option.

 

Some people do melatonin. Melatonin can be fine.  I wouldn’t use it all the time simply because it is a hormone.  You want to make sure you don’t overdo it with hormones because you don’t want to suppress your natural melatonin production but it can be helpful.  Then, another tip that I find to be extremely helpful and is actually born out in research as well is a lot of times; it’s hard for us to fall asleep because we’re thinking about stuff. We can’t get our mind to calm down.  If you have the same experience, please keep a pencil and a piece of paper next to your bed.  Write down all the things on your mind on that piece of paper, and set them to the side.  And know that they’re going to be there when you wake up in the morning and that you could tackle them in the morning.  But I sometimes see that at least with me if I don’t do that, it just keeps ruminating, ruminating, ruminating. When I write it down, I see it’s there.  It’s going to be there for me tomorrow. Now, it’s time to go to sleep.  I think that’s helpful.

 

I think it’s also helpful to see sleep as a luxury and an opportunity. Sometimes, I know for me, I get stressed like I have to sleep now! Fall asleep now!  The quickest way to not fall asleep is to get stressed out about falling asleep.  Now, what I was trying to do was visualization exercises, thinking about positive experiences that I’ve had in my life and really almost taking on that sense of meditation consciously slowing down my breathing. Some people say they have a hard time meditating because when they do meditate they fall asleep.  Well, one thing found helpful is to try to get into that meditative state so the deep breathing, the slow deep breathing, the visualization while you’re lying in bed I find that to be very helpful and it will help you to fall asleep. Sleep is extremely important so please put that up to the top of the priority list and Reina, as usual, has some great suggestions here so thank you very much Reina. You are awesome.  Oh sorry.  And it’s flux not lux, yes, F-dot-L-U-X.  Thank you Reina as always and I’m glad you’re here! I know you’re in a different time zone so that’s cool.  So thank you so much for joining us.  That’s awesome.

 

So another great question here came in on SANE keto.  Could you give me a sample diet of what that would like with all the veggies?  We translate this.  SANE is a set of guidelines, right? It’s not necessarily the SANE diet.  It’s more like you could be SANE low carb.  You could be SANE ketogenic.  You could be SANE paleo.  You could SANE South Beach.  You could be SANE Kosher.  You could be Sane Halal.  You could be SANE Vegan.  You could be SANE vegetarian.  What SANE does, it’s a mindset thing.  It’s a way of exercising and it’s a way of choosing which foods are the SANEst or best for you or most satisfying, least aggressive, most nutritious and least efficient at being stored as fat within your existing framework.  So if your framework is ketogenic, meaning you want to have your body burning ketones as an extremely low carbohydrate diet, you’re going to eat more fat.  You’re going to eat moderates amounts of protein and you’re going to be sensitive to the carb count in your vegetables.  An individual, who’s just going Sane out of the box, will just be ‘give me whatever vegetable.’  It’s all good, the more vegetables the better.  If you wanted to be ketogenic, you have to be very conscious of your carb count, staying as low as maybe 30 grams of carbs per day.  The general and the simple answer to this and please give me follow-up questions if this is not enough detail, but on a typical day here for SANE ketogenic diet, you just got to focus on green leafy vegetables.  I mean those are the lowest carb vegetables.  They’re also the most nutrient then, so deep green leafy vegetables are fantastic.

 

Your breakfast is going to be whole eggs because you’re going ketogenic so you’re going to up your fat intake a little bit.  I still would want you to 30 grams of total protein but since you’re not eating almost any carbs, you’re going to use a little bit more coconut oil in the pan.  You’re going to use whole eggs.  You’re probably going to have some nitrate-free all-natural bacon and you’re going to have a bunch of green vegetables.  And in fact, even in the ‘New Atkins for a New You’ book, they are very clear about that.  It’s like mandatory. When you’re in the induction phase of Atkins, green leafy vegetables are not optional.  You got to have those green leafy vegetables.  It’s the same thing as any time of SANity except it’s just going to be no fruit and it’s going to be more whole food fat, so the fattier cuts of meat. You’re going to be cooking with more oil because that’s the only place you’re going to get your calories.  Then, you’re also going to moderate your proteins so you’re going to want to make sure that if you’re going purely ketogenic that means you’re getting like 70% of your calories from fat.  I don’t use the term extreme negatively.  I mean it’s transparent.  A ketogenic diet is an extreme diet.  It can be extremely effective.  It’s a therapeutic diet but it is extreme.  You’re going to be cooking in more oils. You’re going to be eating fatty cuts of meat and you’re going to moderate your protein intake because you want to do everything in your power to keep insulin levels low.  That’s the point of a ketogenic diet. So, just make sure that you’re total amount of protein per meal is only 30 grams.  But other than that, there is no difference if you’re using fattier cuts of meat, fattier fish and sticking to green leafy vegetables: breakfast, lunch and dinner.  Hopefully, that’s helpful.

 

When you say all the veggies, you’re still looking at like a net carb count.  You can stay below 30 grams of net carbs if you stick with purely green leafy veggies.  The question I think I would ask though is obviously, there are some huge benefits to a ketogenic diet.  It can be very therapeutic.  I think it would be an interesting discussion to have to say if you started to avoid eating vegetables because you thought that the carbs found in vegetables would do more harm than the nutrients in the vegetables will do good.  Personally, every single piece of peer-reviewed research I’ve ever read would say that is probably not like I would not trade the nutrients in the vegetables to avoid the carbs found in them.  Now, certainly low carb vegetables are going to be the way to go.  Non-starchy vegetables are by definition the lowest carb forms of vegetables.  But I would personally not recommend sacrificing the consumption of vegetables to save on carbs.  That’s not where you’re going to save on carbs, maybe moderate your protein intake a little bit more but you’ve got to make sure you get that nutrition.  And that’s actually one of the biggest things that was changed about the Atkins diet in the more researched version like Volek and Westman and some of the people at Duke University that are really taking the ketogenic research to the next level.  Reemphasizing the importance of vegetables and not letting that scare you off is something they definitely focused on.  So if you haven’t read ‘New Atkins for a New You’ and you’re interested in going ketogenic, that’s a good book to read.  Hopefully, that’s helpful.  Let me know if that doesn’t really answer your question.

 

General question here, which is are there any important SANE topics that you would like to bring up that none of us have asked yet.  Oh goodness!  Yes, there are all sorts of topics.  Yes, I do have some things I’d like to cover.  They all have to do with more of the mental side of things and habit formation.  And if we have time, I’d love to get into some of those but we got to go with a bunch of great questions here so I’m going to try to balance live questions and questions that are written in and some stuff I’d like to talk about.  Linda, I think you just submitted a question here.  If you could just make sure that it’s tagged as a question so that I don’t miss it if you have future questions.  I think Linda’s question here is what about cauliflower you keep saying green veggie.  Linda, I don’t know the net carb count of cauliflower off the top of my head.  If you type in cauliflower nutrition data into Google—we’re actually creating a Sane cool tool around this but it’s not read yet—you could just look at the carb count of cauliflower and just, maybe, compare it.  Use spinach or kale as the benchmark in terms of fiber to sugar or fiber to starch and just see how it compares but, unfortunately, I don’t know the carb count of cauliflower off the top of the head.

 

It is important to note though that there’s three phases to the Atkins diet. There’s induction, and then whatever and then something else. It’s important to note that even folks on the Atkins diet, you don’t stay in induction forever. If you go to Atkins website, cauliflower is used all over the place.  All over the place!  The induction phase of a ketogenic SANE lifestyle is to kick-start some aspects of your metabolism. But there are only a few instances, which I would say are more about medical needs than dietary needs, where you would stay in that phase. So all intents and purposes, Linda, that’s the right thing. If we’re avoiding cauliflower because we think the carbs in the cauliflower, those hurt us more than all the nutrients, I personally think that would then be going too far. There’s no question that cauliflower is going to do more good than harm, in my opinion, in the research I’ve seen. Hopefully, that is helpful.

 

So this is a big question that came in here, which I really appreciate like.  I’m going to summarize it because it’s quite long.  It’s a good one and this individual says, ‘I know we focused on progress not perfection but they find that they want to kick it up a notch and they want to get really super Sane with their eating and I love to hear that and they say that they feel better when they eat clean and that’s their goal.’  And sometimes when they see a meal plan or a recipe that has even a little bit of say like crackers in it as a seasoning, they just shut down the whole because they get frustrating.  They’re wondering if there was a scale where they could just find super SANE things and know that everything in the recipe is super SANE. There are a bunch of other really good suggestions and questions. I just want this to be easy.  And then thanks Jonathan!  You guys are great!  So thank you!  I appreciate that!

 

I think the core question here is I know that we’re about progress rather than perfection but if I do want to go super SANE which is a term that I’ve used before, how can I do that? And I think this individual might feel that some aspects of the Ignite program are tailored for people who are not yet super SANE and you’re right.  It’s not tailored for advanced.  It’s tailored to scale a way up and the reason for that is that if you want to go super SANE, in my personal experience, is that it’s much easier to make things SANEr.  If you, for example, see a recipe and it calls for a little bit of cheddar cheese, you know that cheddar cheese is not super SANE so you just don’t put it in the recipe.  Similarly, if you see a recipe and it’s calling for chicken, you say to yourself, hey chicken is definitely not the most optimal of a nutrient as protein source.  It’s not bad for me but it’s just not optimal.  Instead, you cooked the recipe but you just used maybe clams, which now you sound like that’s crazy.  But if you just like clams from a taste perspective, chicken kind of taste like nothing.  Clam’s kind of takes like nothing.  They take on the flavor of what you put them in so my recommendation is, first of all, awesome.  Optimal SANity is fantastic and in fact, let me actually share this link.  There’s the breakdown early here in the program.  Here, let me post this.  That breaks down the food groups, the SANE food groups. Reina, that’s a lot of clams. I like that. It breaks the food groups down into normal SANity and optimal SANity.  So my recommendation will just be if you see a recipe, it’s like progress versus perfection in the other end.  So just because the recipe isn’t perfect, like maybe it has some things in it that aren’t perfectly SANE but not let’s not let that stop us from progressing towards optimal super SANity.

 

If the recipe calls for olive oil, actually, this is a great example.  There have been some great discussions in the SANE coaching and support group for people are like why do all these recipes call for melted coconut oil.  It’s a pain to melt coconut oil.  Can’t I just use olive oil? It’s a great question.   Olive oil is easier to cook with because it’s already liquid.  Coconut oil is a SANEr oil so with some recipes, we are trying to make them as SANE as possible.  So, it might be a hustle to melt coconut oil but it makes it SANEr.  If you want to go super SANE, I’d say the number thing to do is just to print out the pages from that food’s list and anytime you see something that isn’t optimally SANE, just exclude it from the recipe, easy breezy, or swap something else then.  I don’t think we have any recipes, which are like use 12 cups of flour.  If we did, which we don’t, you can just to say swap in coconut flour, which is the optimal source of flour.  Almond flour is sometimes easier to bake with but it’s not optimal Sanity.  So, just swap in optimal sources and exclude things that aren’t perfectly Sane.  If you do that, you’re going to have optimal Sanity.

 

Please, it’s a two-step process.  One, give yourself permission to say, ‘hey, if this recipe isn’t perfect, that’s all right.’  I’m not going to let it hold me back from my pursuit of SANE perfection.  Then you’re going to pull out that link that I just sent you and you’re going to say, ‘all right, this ingredient isn’t optimally SANE, I’m just not going to include it.’  Just the same mindset of let’s say you don’t like olives.  Olives are wonderfully SANE. They are optimal fat source, great source of amino and saturated fats.  But say there’s a recipe and it calls for olives, you probably just wouldn’t put olives in the recipe, same kind of thing here, optimal SANity. You’ve got your list of SANE foods.  You’ve got your list of optimal SANE foods.  If it’s a SANE food, swap it in optimal version.  If it’s not quite SANE, don’t put it in. Bam!  You have just made the entire SANE recipe library optimally SANE and you’re really going to see some great results when you do that.  And from a vegetable perspective, it’s the same kind of thing; green leafy vegetables, more exotic vegetables, things like arugula, and Swiss chard that aren’t super common but they’re on that guide right there.  Please let me know if you have follow-up questions about that.  Just like we talked about making SANE substitutions to make recipes that are totally SANER, we can take Sane recipes and use optimal SANE foods to make them optimally SANE.  Hopefully, that is helpful.

 

Penny… Cool, yes. Thanks for the info on keto SANE.  Even my functional doctor also eats this way, absolutely!  And Penny, let’s keep in mind that there are therapeutic benefits like I think ketogenic diets have been used to help with certain temporary treatments of schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s and things like that.  So we always have to take it on a case-by-case basis.  What is the goal of being in ketosis?  That would be a great conversation to have with your functional doctor.  It’s not a questioning of whether or not ketosis is valid, but it’s like why am I in ketosis, and how long should I be in ketosis, and what is the point in being in ketosis.  Because sometimes, human beings, we have a tendency sometimes to focus on the means rather than the end.  What I mean by that is, and we talked about this a little bit in the master class, often times people will say you know I want to be in low carb or I want to eat organic or any of these labels and in the 1990s and ‘80s was low fat. I want to eat low fat.  Nowadays, a lot of it is I want to eat organic or you know grass fed.  And it’s not that any of those things are bad and actually, there’s a question about that.  If you think about it just a little bit differently and this is kind of an advanced SANE mental technique, they all meant to get us some place. We’re not eating ketogenic just to eat ketogenically. We’re eating ketogenically so that blank like so that what. We’re not just eating grass-fed meat because it’s fun. We’re eating grass-fed meat because of what and that because of what is really important because it’s different for different people. Some people if they’re ketogenic because they have seizures and they’re trying to minimize having seizures and when they have seizures they fall down the stairs and become seriously injured, then absolutely.  It’s much more important not to have a seizure and not to fall down the stairs than it is to eat 14 servings of vegetables versus eight.  So that’s the key thing is to have those conversations about why am I doing this, what is the end goal.  Because the end goal like the end goal is not to be paleo.  The end goal is not to be low carb.  The end goal is not actually even to be SANE.  The end goal is to be happy and healthy and to reverse whatever is causing us pain and that’s the judge.  That’s the barometer and if being ketogenic gets you there, then keep doing it.  I just think that’s really important because we can sometimes get hang up on am I adhering to this set of rules rather than am I letting results be my guide because at the end of the day that’s really what it’s all about.  If tomorrow you found out that eating Cheetos, Dingdongs and Ho Hos and drinking Pepsi made your lipids healthier and major A1C level is fantastic, it made you feel great then it’s healthy for you.  No human being is that way.  But the goal is not to adhere arbitrarily to a set of rules but to focus on the outcome.  I think, often times, we get that in other areas of life.  If we’re planning a family vacation, it’s not about like we’re doing that because we want to have fun.  We want to bring the family together and I think maybe family is a great example because I think we’ve all had instances where this thing, this tool, that we’re using to try to bring about a certain state.  Maybe this is going to date me, but when I was growing up, we were like my family board games.  And there were some board games that we just didn’t like.  And if the goal is to play a board game, that’s very different than a goal to have fun as a family.  But if our mind is like no look it’s game nights, we are going to play a game.  If that’s making everyone miserable and sad, then is the goal to play game or is the goal to make everyone happy.  If the goal is to make everyone happy and this game is making everyone sad, then maybe we need to play a different game!  And it’s the same kind of thing with food.  It’s not like being ketogenic is not the end.  It’s a means to the end and if it’s getting us to the end, rock and roll. Then if it’s not, then we need to reevaluate it and we need to always compare to that end rather than the means.  Hopefully, that makes sense.  It’s kind of esoteric but I hope it’s helpful.

 

The next question here that was written in has to do with what I just said and it has to do with what about grain-fed versus grass-fed beef and other meats.  Probably, the common wisdom of what you’ve heard is what the science says.  Absolutely, grain-fed beef is not fantastic and this is a great question to couch in the earlier question of optimally SANE versus SANEr.  And we should be very clear that there’s a big difference here. So I want to be clear that it is okay to just want to be SANEr. The vast majority of people who are struggling with their weight and who are struggling with obesity and diabetes and metabolic syndrome, it’s not because they’re eating conventional beef versus grass-fed beef.  At that point, we’re going from B to an A plus.  Whereas most of us, we’re not trying to go from a nine to a ten. We’re trying to go from a lower point to a higher point. So this is a great question to highlight that because it’s really easy to say.  Look, I can’t get grass-fed beef.  It’s four times more expensive than everything else or it’s not even available to me, I give up because I can’t be perfect.  So let’s be very clear.  There’s super SANity and then there’s SANity.  Now, what I can tell you about Sanity in terms of peer reviewed research is SANity is proven to help you avoid diabetes, obesity, hypertension, dementia, Alzheimer’s, cancer, yada-yada-yada.  That’s why I’m all about getting us to Sane, getting us to non-starchy vegetables nutrient as to protein whole food fats.  That is required to be the awesome vibrant version of yourself.  Now, we think that if you’ve done that and you want to do more doing things like grass-fed beef or wild caught fish, should help.  It seems pretty clear that it should help.  Now, the question is how much should it help and is it helping enough to merit the cost.  I don’t know.  That’s up to you.  You could see how you feel.

 

A lot of people, for example, if you had to choose between very lean grain-fed beef because the reason you want to do grass-fed beef is it’s leaner, it has a better nutrient profile, and so on and so forth.  But the toxins, the hormones, and all that issues in grain-fed beef are found in the fat.   So if you get very lean grain-fed beef, if it’s ground beef, then you squeeze the fat out with paper towel. Is the difference between that and grass-fed beef going to make a meaningful difference in your life and that’s the key point of something that we talked about in previous sessions, the meaningful difference.  It could be healthier.  But will it matter in the long term? That’s the question. Is it worth it to you? So I think, all things considered, if you can easily get wild-caught salmon, personally, I get frozen salmon patties and canned salmon from Costco rather than their fresh salmon because the frozen and canned types, not only are they less expensive than the fresh but their wild caught.  And I have access to both and when I’ve access to both, I am going to choose wild caught, especially if it’s more cost effective.  If I’m going to eat beef, I would try to get grass fed but what I personally paid twice as much for it, I don’t think the cost benefit is there.  And I don’t think there is any peer reviewed research that shows the cost benefit to be there.  It’s not that it isn’t better.  It’s called the ‘any benefit myth’ something can be good for us like, is Ferrari a better car than a Honda Accord or Toyota Camry.  Is it $300,000 better of a car? They both get you to point A to point B.  So I think that’s the key.  That’s just something we have to take on individually.  Yes, in an optimal world, not only we are doing grass-fed beef, but we’re doing grass-fed organ meats.  I want to be super SANE.  Muscle meats are nothing from a nutritional density perspective compared to organ meats. Conventional liver contrasted with grass-fed muscle meat, the conventional liver went hands-down in terms of nutrient density and metabolic healing.  So that’s another thing to watch out for, just getting optimal sources of conventional SANity.  That’s really important.  I would take conventional kale personally over organic iceberg lettuce any day of the week.  Organic is good for you.  It is the optimal choice but what are essential for life are vitamins and minerals.  We know if you don’t eat enough vitamins and minerals you die.  That’s why they’re called essential.

 

We also know that the body can deal with some level of toxins.  That’s why we have an immune system.  If we couldn’t deal with any level of toxins, we couldn’t breathe in our air. Our air is polluted like crazy and in fact, there’s really interesting phenomena.  We’ve heard of posttraumatic stress disorder.  This is called a posttraumatic growth, which is in fact, like we don’t want to avoid all forms of toxicity.  The quickest way to screw up someone’s immune system is to have them never be exposed to viruses or bacteria, ever.  It’s a whole like the ‘Boy and the Bubble’ story.  If you were kept in a clean room your whole life and then you ever stepped out of that clean room, you’re done for.  Because the way biology works, which is amazing, is biology says hey you’re harm, I get a little bit of harm, and it doesn’t mean we want harm but a little bit of harm can cause growth.  So yes, grass fed is good.  Wild caught is good.  Organic is good.  Whenever possible, we should make those choices.  We really shouldn’t beat ourselves up if we can’t make those choices because one, it’s not clear if those choices will matter long term.  We’re all going to die someday or something so there’s only so much you can do.  There’s a question as to what is the right level of refinement for what we’re eating.  At some level, we need our children to be exposed to viruses and bacteria.  Otherwise, they don’t do well.  That doesn’t mean we want to throw ourselves in a room full of people with chickenpox at all, especially not chickenpox.  That’s no fun.  But the point is again to really understand that our body is a brilliant dynamic organism that is capable of healing itself and that it is good to, whenever possible, grass fed or wild caught but please don’t beat yourself up if you can’t do that.  They are the optimal choices but remember we’re not always about optimal.  They’re available.  We’re about what we can do sustainably and enjoyably for the long term.

 

Bernadette! I don’t think one ever asked the question before so I love it!  Bernadette is piping up.  I like it.  When talking about functional and integrative doctors, what things to look for when choosing one.  That’s a good question Bernadette and I’ve never actually been asked that question before.  I’ve been asked a lot of questions.  I’ve never been asked that one.  Hopefully, I would spend a lot of time here in your SANE Ignite program, especially in understanding a lot of the science and the mental aspects and just have a conversation.  This might the rule of thumb to use, just two of them.  One is any health care professional who isn’t open to collaboration like there’s actually been studies done on this in terms of like doctor efficacy and surgeons.  If you were, for example, be having a medical condition, you were talking to a medical professional and you said, ‘hey my mother-in-law is a doctor and she said X.’  And the other medical professional that you’re talking to is like, ‘Oh well, why don’t you just go talk to them instead.  Ah!’ I would not work with that person. Think about it. What’s the mindset?  The mindset needs to be, ‘hey Bernadette we need to do everything we can to help you.’  If you and I are talking, which is what we’re doing right now, my goal is not like for me to be right and for you to listen to me. It’s not about me, it’s about you and it’s about your success.  So if I was your functional medicine doctor and you came to me and you said, ‘hey Jonathan, it’s really interesting what you said about grass-fed beef, my mother-in-law is a doctor as well and she said this what do you think about that.’  I’ll be like, ‘Oh you know that’s great, no, maybe let’s get her on the phone and let’s collaborate, let’s figure this out.’  And if you say, ‘Oh, you know I want to get a second opinion on something.’  Hopefully, your functional doctor will say awesome like please go do that.  Go get a second opinion because we need all the information we can get. So the first thing I would say is their openness to collaboration and to divergent opinions. Because remember just like I said earlier, we are results and outcome focused.  We’re not about being right.  We’re about being healthy and about being happy.  They should be open to collaboration.  They should be open to differing opinions and that’s how science is done. That’s how science is done.

 

We have conflicting ideas and opinions, we test them, then we looked at the results, and then we refine.  But when we don’t look at the results, we have what happened in America over the past 40 years.  Fat is bad for you.  Sugar is great.  Just keeping eating this way and then the obesity and diabetes rates are doing this.  And the medical institution up until about 10 years ago is just like we’re right, results are wrong.  Now, we have an obesity epidemic because we weren’t focused on results, we were focused on, ‘oh goodness, I said this publicly in a journal article so I can’t take it back now because that’ll make me look foolish.’  Look, if you’re an architect, you’re building a bridge and the bridge collapses, like the bridge collapsed.  That’s all that matters.  And our nutritional bridge collapsed.  We need to rebuild it.  We need to be open to collaborations.  That’s a great question. Anytime you’re working with anyone in any field I think would be great.  Are they open to collaboration?

 

The second thing is I think that things like supplements can be a red flag.  Obviously, with the same lifestyle, we provide SANE super foods.  They’re there and the make SANity easier but we’re not like okay, ‘Hey to go SANE you need to spend 700 dollars on this super food and then you need to mega dose this and need to do these 15 other things.’ Not that it can’t work, there might be some instances in which that is necessary.  But remember, these things are called supplements.  If our supplement bill is higher than our grocery bill, there is no supplement in the world.  On the record, there will never be a supplement in the world that will have as much positive impact on your life as a good night sleep, done, done!

 

There’s a third tip.  I forgot.  I don’t remember them.  But focusing on that stuff like eating nutrient dense foods, moving your body safely, getting a good night sleep, minimizing stress, and staying hydrated, if you don’t get those things right, everything else is like I’ve used this analogy before and I’ll use it again.  They’re a little bit like if you walk outside your house, you saw your neighbor and the car was burning.  The car is immersed in a ball of flames.  And your neighbor comes strolling out of their house and the windshield’s dirty. It’s got about smut on it from the smoke and they’re like cleaning their window off with some Windex while their car is burning.  It’s just crazy.  Like your car is on fire.  Don’t worry about the smudge on the window.  Yes, the smudge on the window is unfortunate. Yes, having a clean windshield is good but your car’s on fire!  Our first steps are getting those nutrients, protein, whole food, fats, low-fructose fruits, and non starchy veggies. Getting that quality sleep. Keeping those stress levels down.  Building those loving relationships.  Moving our bodies; a lot in a low impact way and a little in a high intensity safe way with eccentric exercise.  Getting that stuff right is so much more important than anything else.

 

So if anyone is like, “Well, you know I wouldn’t worry so much about your sleep instead take this pill” I would run the other direction and if peer reviewed research supports.  And the third thing I would say– I really appreciate you asking this question because it’s very rare that I’ve asked a question that I’ve never been asked before.  So I’m sorry I’m kind of rambling with this one, but I think there’s some good stuff here.

 

The last question is– Oh, Bernadeta I lost it.  The focus, Oh, yes, the last one is certainty.  So this is a big one.  This is a big one.  Nutrition is incredibly complicated.  Hormone balance is incredibly complicated.  We are just starting to understand these fields.

 

So you’ll notice sometimes that what I say and what you see in the same program it’s flexible.  It’s like do this and if it works keep doing it if it doesn’t then stop and do something else; because the more we learn about nutrition– Actual experts in nutrition, and hormones, and biology; the more they know the more they don’t know they know yet.

 

Right, and this is why we focus so much on whole foods because the more it’s more like eat more vitamin C, it’s like well if you just take more vitamin C pills that actually blocks the absorption of other vitamins.  So it’s not about eating more vitamin C it’s about eating the right balance of vitamin C relative to everything else.  And right so it’s not like vitamin C from an orange is literally treated differently.  If you eat an orange and it has 30 milligrams of ascorbic acid in it, which is the technical name for vitamin C– and so if you take a person and feed them an orange with ascorbic acid– that has ascorbic acid in it naturally and then you take another person and just feed them 30 milligrams of a ascorbic acid, you will see independent of the sugar intake, like the actual receptors will behave differently in those contexts; because vitamin C in the context of an orange with fiber and all the other vitamins and minerals that’s totally different.

 

And we kind of know that. Right, like it’s– When you eat a food you’re eating millions of different things that go into your body, and they will react so differently based on your stress levels and everything else. So the third thing to look for in an integrated doctor is if they’re like, “This is true. This is false.”– and I’m certain– and you should definitely do this all the time; run the other direction because with most things in life the more a person actually knows the more they’ll be like, “Hey, try this, but keep in mind we don’t have all the information yet because– Yeah, so hopefully– It’s kind of like the teenager mindset where I could speak for myself at least, but I think we’ve all had this experience like when we’re younger we objectively know less than when we’re older but we think we know everything. Like “Yes, this is totally what I should do.” My 15-year old self knows everything, and my 15-year old self had way less knowledge than I do today. And the older I get I’m like, “Well, there’s another way to look at that.”

 

And so the more you know the more you know you don’t know and hopefully your doctor will reflect that.  So thank you for asking that question, ten bonus points.  The next question here is a good one and certainly a very common and awesome one which is, how do you get fourteen servings of veggies in a day?

 

Well let’s give a very quick answer to this one; I think it’s easiest if we break it down by meals.  So if you just want the easy way to do it; green smoothies.  So if you have breakfast– I think breakfast– If you have time to make eggs– something with eggs in it it’s very easy to incorporate vegetables into it.  So if you do that that’s two servings of vegetables right there incorporated with your eggs scrambled, omelet, whatever.  That’s two servings plus you got a green smoothie on the side; that’s another two to three servings.  You have five servings right there.

 

If you don’t have time to make eggs and you want something quicker you still have your green smoothie and you’re already at three servings.

 

Let’s say now we move onto lunch.  If you need a snack in the meantime your snack can be sugar snap peas, baby carrots, celery, or some other sort of non-starchy vegetable that could take you up to six or four; non-starchy vegetables respectively or you could have a green smoothie in between breakfast and lunch, which would take you up to another two. So now the worst case scenario is that you’re at four servings.  You could be at seven, and it’s before lunch and before your using anything found in the same store.

 

Now, at lunch a salad is very common, whether it’s like a Thai dish, an Asian dish, or Mexican dish.  You’re getting vegetables with that.  You’re eating more vegetables, more protein, less of the starch, so by the very nature of your meal you’re probably eating three servings of non-starchy vegetables.  So now you’re at anywhere from six to 11 servings of non-starchy vegetables and we’re just at lunch, and you didn’t even drink a green smoothie with lunch.

In between lunch and dinner if you get hungry you have a green smoothie.  Now you’re at eight to 13 servings of vegetables.  You haven’t even eaten dinner yet.  And dinner is like lunch.  You’ve got nutrient-dense protein.  You have your non-starchy vegetables.  So that’s going to take you up three more vegetables.  Some people don’t like having green smoothies with dinner because it’s more of a liquid and depending on how late you eat that might keep you up at night because you’re using the restroom.  But either way as long as you’re making sure with every single meal you’re getting vegetables in, and if you’re not getting vegetables in the meal itself you’re having a green smoothie.  And you don’t necessarily need to have 14 if you’re at 12 you’re doing great, but green smoothies are the key and if you wanted to add a couple of tablespoons of garden in my glass to each one of those smoothies you’re at abundant servings pretty quickly.

 

So hopefully that is helpful, and e-Catherine has a great question here.  When you have more than one green smoothie per day do you put fruits in all of them or just once?  You don’t have to put fruits in any of them if you don’t want to.  I don’t put fruits in any of my green smoothies simply because I generally recommend fruit as a sweetener; strawberries, lemons, and oranges being the most effective but you don’t have to put them in there. In fact, if you were going more of the ketogenic style you would use a SANE sweetener, like [01:04:54] instead of the fruits. So no you don’t have to use any fruits in context if you don’t want to.  Personally, I think that you– when the research supports that from a fat loss perspective we want sugar content as low as possible.  So using fewer fruit from a fat loss perspective and more vegetables is better.

 

One way to think about fruits, this isn’t a knock on fruits.  This is just true, and this, what I’m saying applies to fruits that you would buy at your grocery store not like super fruits, like Acai.  As you know from previous recordings “Acai kick some like Acai”. There are some super fruits, which are really, really good, but general fruits, we’re talking about what everyone’s thinking about.  Fruits are essentially vegetables with more sugar and less vitamins and minerals. So blueberries are great.  They’re good for you, but it’s important to note that there’s nothing found in fruit that is not found in vegetables with much less sugar.

 

So, in some ways fruits are sweeter vegetables; one way to think of it.  So as you’re becoming saner, you might need a bit more fruit but then it kind of trails off over time and then you can certainly use super fruits, but the thing to really avoid.  And I appreciate you asking this question because well this is a really important point to make, but the common guidance we hear is to eat more fruits and vegetables.  Eat more fruits and vegetables.  Five a day; and first of all, five a day is way too few, but fruits and vegetables are lumped together.  That is terrible advice.  Please don’t let that lie come into your life because just by a way of example grapes have 18 times more sugar in them than spinach.

 

So let me translate that; someone says eat five servings of fruits and vegetables per day, you eat five servings of grapes in a day you’d be eating.  That’s the same amount of sugar you’d get in like three to five cans of soda depending on the type of soda you’re eating where as you can eat 18 servings of spinach.  You shouldn’t do that, but if you ate 18 servings of spinach or excuse me 17, if you ate 17 servings of spinach you would take in less sugar than if you ate a serving of grapes.  It might not be spinach, but green leafy vegetables are very low in sugar.  The point is that they’re not the same thing. So just make sure you really focus on the vegetables first.

 

So hopefully that is helpful.  And I got to crank through some of these questions here.  I actually have a special treat for the end.  I wanted to do something that I’ve never done before and hopefully it works. We’ll see.  Staying SANE on the weekend; if you could provide a little bit more clarity around this question or maybe post it in the support group; I’d appreciate it.  I’m not 100% sure what that means in terms of being different from the week.  I know for some people staying sane on the weekend is easier than staying sane on the week because you have access to a kitchen more readily.

 

But if you do have specific questions please let me know, like if that has to do with you go out with friends and how do I stay sane around friends.  Totally happy to help.  If we don’t have time to get to it then please post in the support group or post it up next time. I’d love to help.  I don’t know how to help.  So stay sane on the weekend.  The weekend is a fun time. Get some extra sleep.  I do a lot of my eccentric exercise on the weekends because I’m too busy during the week.  Sometimes I do my grocery shopping on the weekend.  I do my bulk cooking on the weekend.  So in some ways the weekend is time for optimal sanity, so that’s how to stay sane on the weekend.

 

And this next question is a great one.  I’m 77 with hypertension and family history of heart disease.  My cardiologist wants me to walk 10,000 steps per day.  Is that an issue with the program?  It’s not at all an issue.  In fact, we say boom to your cardiologist.  It would be very, very clear that the whole exercise less that’s like do less of conventional exercise.  I’ve said this before so I’m going to go through it kind of quickly here, but we have a lot of new people this week.  Right.  When we say exercise less there’s a spectrum of exercise.  There’s low-intensity movement, like walking. We want to do that as much as possible.  I don’t even consider that exercise.  People were walking before the term exercise was ever used. Walking is great. Standing is great.  We should do that as much as possible.

 

Moving our bodies, like people have done since the beginning of time is great and we should continue to do it.  Exercise is something very unnatural.  It’s very contrived and it’s very powerful. When we do exercise, formal exercise, we want to do eccentric or very high intensity but low impact movement, and we do a little bit of that because we can only do a little bit because it’s very intense.  So please move as much as you can; at low intensity, low impact, the healthier you’ll be.  So I’m not saying jog as much as you can.  Jogging is much different than walking.  It has some negative consequences, negative side-effects, but movement is great for you.  So that’s awesome.  Totally, your cardiologist is spot on there for sure.

 

A great question here is how to manage the information in the program.  There’s a lot of it and this person wishes there was a checklist or a check off sheet so I can make sure that I’m doing and I’m so happy you asked this question and I’m so happy I read it before we got started today because here’s exactly what you’re asking for.  It’s actually where you log in to your [Inaudible 01:10:23] program.  There’s a thing that says start here, click that, and you’ll be taken into your orientation course and then in the same 101 course.  No, it’s the first step of the orientation; it’s called the void overwhelm.  There’s this checklist in there. This checklist has got all of your step-by-step courses in it.  So you can go through that one course by day, or five per week. I think it’s a great process goal.  So just set a goal; every week I’m going to go through five of these steps.  And remember we’re not here for the next seven days, we’re not here for the next 21 days this is a long term thing.

 

We want to get long term results.  We want to get healthy and sane for the rest of our lives. So just take it one step, literally in the program per day.  I just posted the link to the checklist there and it really like helps. I know we have a tendency as human beings to say, “I want it all now.” The body will heal itself and we just have to give it time.  We have to give ourselves permission to take our time.  I mean I know it was a wonderful conversation I think in constant journal in the support group where we talked about speed of results. And the bottom line is like you’re here because you are courageous and you understand that the quick fix crash diets don’t work.  The bottom line is if they worked we would be a country that had no one who had diabetes and was not obese because we would just do seven day cabbage diets and they would permanently solve all of our problems but they don’t.

 

Right, the way we heal disease, and obesity is a disease it’s not a moral failing, is we make consistent sustainable enjoyable healing lifestyle changes that we maintain.  Just like if you’re driving on the freeway and you’ve got your foot on the accelerator to get up to 60 miles per hour, like friction exists so if you take your foot off the accelerator it’s going to slow you down.  Friction exists in life in general, so if we put our foot on the accelerator, aka we go sane, we have to do it in a way we can keep going because if we take our foot off the accelerator we’re just going to decelerate.

 

So try to do everything it wants.  Try to be perfect. It’s not that it’s bad to do everything. Like yes I want everyone to complete the same program.  I want everyone to complete all the steps so they can get all the value from it, and I want us to achieve optimal sanity and I want us to have our eccentric exercises be as intense as possible.  But I know if we try to do that in one day we’re not going to get anywhere.  Just like if you wanted to run a marathon and you said, “That’s it. Let me get fueled up here.  I’m going to head outside. I’m running 26 miles, right now.” You’re not going to run a marathon.  The way you run the marathon is by gradually getting started and building your way up, and then eventually you’re running 26 miles; same kind of thing with sanity.  So hopefully that checklist helps there, and, yes, there is an actual checklist, which is cool.

 

Actually, while we’re talking about it there’s another question here, which I’m happy I read beforehand because someone says, “They really want the Cocoa Cookbook, and they thought that it was not fair that the only way to get it is by buying the powder.”  Because they live in Canada, and shipping is expensive to Canada, which it is and I’m sorry.  But here’s the good news you definitely don’t need to buy that cocoa eBook.  You can get it for free. Its part of your ignite program.  Remember you get one cookbook per month totally free of charge.  So you don’t need to buy anything to get that cookbook.  We do sell it on its own on the store, so you definitely don’t need to buy the cocoa powder.  But look here’s even a link to it, boom.   There’s a link in the chat box right there for your cocoa eBook, and if you’re not able to get that or see that just write in to your say ignite customer support line and we’ll get you a copy of the eBook.  That’s all.  We’ll take care of you.

 

You’re part of the family, so if you ever feel like something’s not fair or not up to expectations please give us the opportunity to fix that for you because in some cases if it’s a checklist for example or access to an eBook we’ve got you taken care of.  And we love to take care of you, so thank you for giving me that opportunity to take care of you in that way.

 

The next question is about arthritis.  So this individual says they have arthritis in both knees, and they find their range of motion is limited.  What accommodations and suggestions would you suggest for exercises that require bending of the knees?  The good news here is that with the eccentric exercise it’s like saying that it’s a principle; it’s an approach.  So there’s no such thing as an eccentric exercise there’s only “I am going to perform this exercise eccentrically or in an eccentric fashion.” What I mean by that is literally every exercise: bicep curls, tricep extensions, squats, dead lifts, pull-ups, bench press, pushups, leg curls, leg extensions, whatever.  Any weight bearing resistance exercise can be done eccentrically.

 

And the way you would do that is just by focusing on the lowering portion of the movement rather than the raising portion of the movement.  It’s called lifting weights, but we actually get better results if we thought of it in terms of lowering weights, so the greats news is the accommodations and adjustments.  So bending of the knees, right, that is going to be very maximally affected leg movements, like squats, dead lifts, and lunges but if we can’t do those we can do things like leg extensions and leg curls, which since I can’t demo with my whole body I’m going to demo with my hand.

 

So hopefully this is helpful.  These are my legs, these are my hand legs.  I like to call my fingers my hand legs.  Have you ever heard that before? So you’re sitting down and you kick your legs out.  The traditional ways these would be done is like kick, drop, kick, drop; that is not the eccentric way of doing it.  The eccentric way of doing it would be we bring it up and then you bring it down 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10. Of course actually counting to ten; not fast ten. And so that’s leg extensions.  That’s going to work the front of your leg, your quadriceps.  So instead of doing it bam, bam, bam you’re going to go real slow on the way down.  And remember we talked about this a little bit in the support group, it’s a great post and there are about five ways to increase the intensity of your eccentric exercise.

 

You’ll notice in any movement there’s a point and that’s the hardest.  So for leg extension usually it’s like the top point, like you don’t want to lock your knee out, but right before you lock your knee out so you can hold that so maybe for eight seconds and then down slow for two.  And then leg curls are the opposite.  In some ways this is just kind of how your body works, you notice your arm works the same way.   Arm extensions; so your triceps does this and your bicep does the curl.  So your hamstrings are like your leg biceps.  My hand legs and my leg biceps; what is this guy talking about?  What’s in that cup?  I’m just kidding. So leg curls are just like this; you’re laying down so this is your head and these are your feet, your hand feet, and you would curl it up and then instead of dropping it, which is what most people would do, you curl it up and then go down slow for 10.

 

There’s also push, this is getting hard to demo.  You’re sort of kicking for the love so you’re standing like this in your leg and you’re kicking it back and it really works your gludials a bit.  You don’t need to bend at the knee.  Bending the knee very helpful but leg extension, leg curls, I don’t know what you call them the machine at the gym is called the butt plaster. That is the technical term it’s called the butt plaster.  Grill in, left in, add up the [inaudible01:18:30] and then the butt plaster exercise for goodness sakes.  You can perform as always, I recommend work with a physical therapist that has a PhD. They’re going to be familiar with exercise physiology as well the centric movements and what’s cool is you don’t necessarily need to see that person over and over again.  They can give you like an exercise prescription and then you can do that for the rest of your life which is really, really helpful.

 

Debbie has a good question here.  Last question, did you say there will be notes for this? I’m going to have to leave to get much needed sleep.  Debbie, there’s going to be a recording.  So there will be a link to a recording, we will have it up within 48 hours.  You can absolutely watch it through fast forward, rewind, pause all that good stuff so there won’t necessarily be notes but there will be a recording for sure.  So hopefully that is helpful.  We have 12 minutes left.  I wanted to do something special with this last 12 minutes.  I apologize that there are some questions that I didn’t get to but we can carry them over into the next session and we can talk about them in the support group if you haven’t gone in the support group, please do the support group has been amazing recently.  I will pick up where I left off here but I wanted to share something special to you and I like to do this.

 

This is something actually that made me cry, in a good way.  It’s really important for us, I think; it has to do with a lot of what we talked about today.  If you haven’t seen it already, I want to try to share a video with you. It’s a video.  I don’t have any affiliation with this company on some hand I wish I do, I wish I did.  The company is called Under Armor and they just came out with a new marketing campaign.  This is with Michael Phelps and it’s not like, ‘Hey I love Michael Phelps’ but it’s more of the message of the commercial.  I like to show you that commercial.  And then I want to talk a little bit about it because I think it’s really powerful. Watch and enjoy! Hopefully this will work.  So if it doesn’t I’m sorry.  It’s only a minute and half so let’s give it a shot here and then we’ll talk about it when it ends.

 

Alright so it doesn’t seem that the video went through.  I’m so sorry about that.  Goodness sakes.  That didn’t work at all.  I’m very sorry for that.  What that was suppose to show is a- -I broke the thing.  I hope I didn’t lose everyone here.  Come back!  Come back everybody. Oh no.  What we should have seen there is that there was a commercial that was put out by Under Armor which features swimmer Michael Phelps.  We’re all back.  So that was a disaster.  I’m so sorry.  I’m not actually sure if you saw the video or not if you didn’t let me just summarize because that was a tech nightmare.

 

After this, please go to YouTube and type in “Michael Phelps Under Armor” because what the commercial shows which I’m sorry I failed in showing you is it shows what Michael Phelps goes through to achieve what he’s achieved.  At the very end of the video there is a new catch phrase for Under Armor which says “It’s what you do in the dark that puts you in the light”.

 

Okay, cool I guess it did come through.  I actually stopped it halfway through and you missed the end which is the best part.  So please watch it again.  “Progress not perfection” but that was terrible.  Watch it, please watch the full thing.  The key part which I didn’t show you, there’s a phrase “It’s what we do in the dark, that puts us in the light”.  When you watch the entire thing you see why that matters.  Because it’s showing when you think of Michael Phelps and we think of Michael Jordan or we think of Serena Williams or Venus Williams, any great person they’re in the light. What we don’t see is the dark.  I don’t mean the dark in a negative way.  But like even in social media, magazines.  We see highlight reels of people’s lives. We always talk about photo shopped models causing negative body images which they totally do.  But in some ways like Facebook, in some ways can be like a photo shopped life.  We’re like all we see are the highlight from everyone’s lives.  Everything is working for everyone.  Everything is perfect all the time.  Am I the only one who’s struggling?  Am I the only that has to work this hard?  Am I the only that isn’t happy all the time?  What I love about that commercial is that 99% of what Michael Phelps does or what any person who has achieved greatness is in the light.  It’s in the dark and it takes time and it takes effort but it’s what we do in the dark that puts us in the light.  And for me, I got teary eyed because sometimes if you’re like Jonathan’s life is great the book has been very successful and great but it’s what you do in the dark man.  That 15 years of research took a while and I that know sometimes it can seem like I want this now, I want this fast. But I promise you that it’s what you do in the dark but what you do in the kitchen.  It’s these basic things, it’s the sleep.  It’s the eating.  It’s the non starchy vegetables stuff that isn’t sexy.  I don’t mean that in the physical term but just metaphysically.  It’s ironic that the least sexy things in life, like waking up consistently, getting good sleep, eating your vegetables, eating the nutritious protein, exercising eccentrically, getting the basics right. That not so sexy stuff it’s really cool on the internet.  We’re going to hack this.  We’re going to do this.  Those basics, one foot in front of the other non-sexy stuff, yields such amazingly sexy results over time.  For me, that’s just been so powerful and I would just encourage you as much as you can.  Athletes can be a good example sometimes athletics, there’s a reason why they are very well defined in a swim race.  We know who wins, it’s very clear.  It’s kind of good to use it as example.  When Michael Phelps or any athlete is training, it’s about I’m going to wake up today and I’m going to eat the right foods.  And I’m going to get the process right.  I’m going to have a good practice.  I’m going to do what I need to do and I’m going to do it consistently and the n when the time comes to be in the light, I will be ready. Michael Phelps is not just going to go to the Olympic be like let’s go the two-week Olympic training program.  We know it doesn’t work that way and we are all athletes not in the traditional sense but we’re here right to optimize our health and optimize our performance and to optimize our well being.  Our gold medal looks a lot different that Michael Phelps’ gold medals but having a life that we love and that we’re happy with and health that allows us to be vibrant and rock our mission and elevate the life of the people we love.  That’s gold medal. Be in there for your partner and for your children, for your friends and your family. That’s a gold medal.  Being there for yourself, being happy, bringing up people around you, that’s a gold medal.

 

Setting that example for people you don’t even know that you see when they get inspired like that is a gold medal.  We take on that mindset and we say, ‘look this is not a quick fix thing, I am about enhancing and healing myself and I’m training.  I’m going to put in the work’.  Not that I have the correct information it’s about that progress, swimming with an athlete. An athlete doesn’t go to run a marathon tomorrow it’s about that slow progress. For me, like everyone else I want the gold medal now.  I want it to be done.  I want to be overwhelmed with.  For me at least, that video; which I totally botched completely so sorry. I just got really panicked because the viewer count on my end dropped to zero.  And I was like I just kicked everyone off the webinar.  I can’t sleep tonight and I’ll have metabolic syndrome we talked about how important sleep is.  We all fall down sometimes.  We pick ourselves up.  We get a chance to watch that video and if you ever do, having reference points in our minds can be really helpful.  The reference point can be look at this model, look at this perfect thing. But if the reference point is almost a model of an athlete or a great pianist or a great artist or anything that we know that doesn’t happen over time.  A great surgeon, a great lawyer, a great family.  There’s no two-week quick fix to have a great family. It’s about the process.  It’s about what you do in the dark.  Maybe you’re waking up early and you cook a nice breakfast for everyone or you remember to get that birthday card and it’s what you do in the dark consistently that brings you into the light and I got to tell you one of the lightest parts of my week is when we get together and we get to have this kind of conversations.  I hope I was hopeful for you despite my botching it and get a chance please do watch it and if any of the links did not work for you for today’s’ session just shoot a quick email or post in the support group.  We’ll get you the links.

 

Thank you for putting up my ranting here and for my botching of the commercial.  Just search for Michael Phelps Under Armor on the web maybe bookmark it if you get down.  I think it can bring you back up and help the mind right and get us the attitude of making awesome progress.  It’s great man, and I’m so thankful and grateful that you’re here, that you blessed me the opportunity to take this journey with you.  All of us we’re going to put in that work now that we have correct information.  We’re going to give ourselves permission to make progress.  We’re going to have some gold medals.  Not the traditional sense but it’s going to be awesome and it’s already awesome.  I thank you so much as always so please have a blessed and SANE rest of your week; keep your eye in your inbox. The recording will be in the route and again, thank you so much for your patience and support and your love Thank you and I will see you during our next session.