Hi! I'm your SANE concierge. What can I help you find today?

7.6.16


JONATHAN: Again, please feel free to ask me anything you want. We’re going to go for 90 minutes here or until I pass out. I did have my air conditioner on before we got stated here today. It’s a little bit cooler in my office today, so hopefully, there will be no passing out.
With that said, again, please feel free to post any questions that you have and let’s dig into it. We have some awesome questions that have been written beforehand here. Keep that in mind, again, these calls are recorded so if you ever can’t make them live, you can—Stacy’s here and she said it’s okay for me to say Stacy P. All right. What’s up Stacy? It’s okay if you can’t make the call, although we love, love, love to have you here. You can write in your questions beforehand on the scheduling surveys that we send out and I will answer them to the best of my ability during the call. If I don’t get to a question, I will carry it over into the next session and of course, your coaching and support group is there for you 24/7/365.

So, let’s do it, shall we? We’ve got some small questions and we’ve got some big topics that I want to cover today so hopefully they are all helpful.

The very first question I wanted to talk about because we have quite a few all along the same lines and they have to do with cost saving tips. What are some of the ways we can save money while going SANE? Always a very helpful topics to cover and certainly there is a lot on this in the Ignite Program already in your step-by-step course, so please check that out if you haven’t, but I wanted to cover some cutting edge stuff that isn’t covered yet in the program.

One of the first things are if you do not shop on the Internet, specifically Amazon or not, Walmart.com, these can actually be wonderful, wonderful resources, especially for canned sources of protein and actually the SANEest sources of protein, nutrient dense protein is seafood, which I know can be the sometimes hardest to acquire, depending on where you are in the world and can also sometimes be the most expensive. The good news, and ironically is that high quality canned seafood is actually one of the most affordable and easy to get things on the Internet.

I just know for me at least, I never really thought of the Internet as a viable grocery store. So, I think that’s a huge thing that we can use to our advantage, either popping over to Walmart.com or Amazon.com and checking out things like canned tuna in water. Of course, you want to make sure that’s dolphin safe and BPA free on the cans. Things like canned tuna, canned albacore, canned clams, sardines, oysters. These are wonderful SANE foods. Canned salmon and in fact, things like wild caught salmon, which if you try to buy fresh, can be $15.00 plus a pound. If you get that canned, you can get that for less than $5.00 a pound and the beautiful thing is, you actually don’t even need to cook it. You can just heat it up. You can carry the cans around with you. All you need is a can opener and possibly some no sugar added or no sweetener added marinara sauce, some seasonings. You take your canned seafood, you mix it with some seasonings or some all-natural sauce and you’ve got a wonderful source. In fact, an optimal source of nutrient dense protein and you can buy those online. You can buy them at Costco. You can buy them at Amazon.com and you can buy them at Sam’s Club or Walmart or Walmart.com. I know with both Amazon.com and Walmart.com, there are free shipping for certain volumes of orders. I think at Walmart for example is like $50.00 or more. You can get canned wild caught salmon. Delicious. I don’t know if you want to eat it right out of the can. You might need to season it a little bit. You can get that for less, well under $5.00 a pound and you can get it delivered to you free of charge. I only discovered Walmart.com recently. Personally, I’ve been using Amazon.com for a while. Walmart.com has got some great options. Again, you don’t even have to leave your house. So it doesn’t get much more convenient than that. Amazon.com also have this subscribe and save option, which of course, we also have on the SANE store, but we don’t sell canned seafood. You can actually say, hey, I go through about this much canned wild caught salmon per month, so I just want to go ahead and have that automatically delivered to me and Amazon is going to take an additional 5 to 15 percent off. Using the Internet as your grocery store can be a great resource for anything other than vegetables. So I found that to be very, very, helpful for me.

I know some follow up questions are, what do we do with canned seafood? I don’t know, you get canned clams, what do you do with them? Just open up the can and just drink your canned clams? No, don’t do that. What I would recommend is think of canned seafood a lot like you would think of chicken. I know that canned seafood can seem a little bit scary, especially items or types of seafood that you’re not used to, specifically, molluscs or things like oysters and clams. Interesting enough, these are the most nutrient dense sources of nutritious protein are the optimal nutrient dense sources of protein. They are so rich in vitamins and minerals and also vitamins and minerals that are very difficult to find any place else, such as zinc and magnesium. These are key for sex hormone production. They are key for body fat regulation and they are key for just so many other metabolic functions and they are very, very hard to find, especially in the pure and very biologically available forms that you find them in things like oysters and clams. I say that and you say, that’s great Jonathan, what do I do with oysters and clams.

Sometimes when we’re introduced to a new food, it can seem very, very scary, but it’s only because we’re not used to it. Let me give you a specific example of what I mean here. If you think about it, chicken, straight up chicken—I don’t know if any of you have tried to poach a chicken breast or just to grill a chicken breast with no seasoning applied to it. If you have, you probably know that it’s not very tasty. Just eating a plain old chicken breast is not good and is not very tasty at all. Usually, people eat chicken very frequently. At least here in the U.S. because it will take on the flavor of whatever you put it in. The beautiful thing about clams, but even tuna fish or albacore to some extent, and really things like salmon or oysters, if you think of these like chicken, done—you’re really 80 or 90 percent of the way there. So in any recipe where you would use chicken, you can substitute in a marinara sauce that you prepared and had with meatballs, you know that you could probably take ground turkey instead of ground beef to make the meatballs. It might taste a little bit different, but it would work. You could substitute pork for chicken in a recipe and it might taste slightly different, but fundamentally it would work.

The beautiful thing about nutrient dense proteins is we can extend that and we can actually use that same logic of substitution for these types of seafood, especially the most affordable and most convenient and most nutrient dense sources of seafood, canned mollusks and canned wild caught seafood and just do the same substitution. Maybe right now, if you have access to a pen and a piece of paper, anything that you can write with, if you have some key dishes that you love to prepare, that your family loves, that you personally love, anything you’d normally make with chicken, anything that you’d normally make with beef with the exception of meatloaf. I’m not really sure that a clam meatloaf would work, but anything else you can just substitute in—not that we would eat chicken alfredo, but you could have chicken alfredo and you could eat it with spaghetti squash or zucchini noodles instead of regular noodles. So that’s one substitution.

In addition to that, instead of just cutting up and cubing chicken, you could use clams. You’re going to get so much more nutrient density and believe it or not, those wild caught clams bought online, canned, wild caught, way more affordable than even conventionally bought chicken. So I think that is just a great way to save money on SANEity. The first step is to see specifically Amazon.com and Walmart.com, those are my two favorite places to do grocery shopping online. I know that might seem a little bit strange, but remember, you’re getting things that don’t need to be refrigerated necessarily and the beautiful thing is I know we’re all busy. These things get delivered to you, usually free of charge. So that’s a beautiful thing.

The second thing is what the heck do I do with that stuff? Use it just like you would use chicken. I know it sounds new, but again, it can be substituted in to all of your favorite recipes, just like you would any sort of meat. You can just swap in seafood. I know you’ve been told and you’ve probably heard, seafood is really good for you. Make sure you eat fish at least once a week. I’m always shocked when I hear that because I say to myself, if fish is so good for you, which it is, why is the recommendation only to eat it once a week? It’s like the default hypothesis is we have to eat meat everyday, multiple times a day and there is nothing wrong with that, but fish once a week? For a lot of people it’s like I’ll eat fish three times a week? That’s crazy. That’s so much fish, but eating meat everyday or multiple times a day, that’s just normal.

I think what can be really cool, is as we start to eat more and more seafood, not only can we save some money, not only can we sometimes protect ourselves with some of the problems that come with conventionally bought meat, again if you’re doing grass fed or free range meat, that’s a totally different thing. It’s way better for you, but if you can do canned wild caught seafood it’s a great option, not only because of the nutrient density, but also because of the types of fat that you’re going to find in those foods is totally different.

For example, the fats found in chicken are predominantly Omega 6, polyunsaturated fats and monounsaturated fats, which can be fine. Monounsaturated fats are therapeutic fats, but the fats you’re going to find in seafood, those Omega 3 fats, believe it or not—please believe it because it’s true, Omega 3 fats can actually be prescribed to you. A psychiatrist can actually write you a prescription for the type of fat that you find in seafood because it has been found to so positively impact your mood.

I know whenever we’re trying to make a big lifestyle change, sometimes our mood can take a hit, which means our motivation can take a hit. Isn’t it amazing, that while we’re saving money, we’re saving time reading the most nutrient dense foods on the planet and we’re substituting those into our existing recipes, that we’ll be taking in more of a fat that is so therapeutic, not only to our body, but to our mind that we could actually written a prescription for that. When I say nutritional therapy, that’s not an exaggeration, that’s not being hyperbolic, that is literally true when it comes to seafood, which is amazing.

So please, if you do have questions, if you wouldn’t mind please post
them as a question, otherwise, I might miss them. I do see some questions
coming in here. Let me see if I can catch it.
Sandy says, what is my favorite brand of oysters, smoked or not? Great question Sandy. I personally don’t have a favorite brand. I am a cost conscious shopper. So I will purchase whatever is available in water, not in oil. That’s just my preference. I personally don’t like the kind that you get in little tins that’s packed. I like the kind you get in cans, but that’s just my preference. So I’m usually purchasing whatever I can find that is the most cost effective. Just make sure that it is packed in water, rather than being packed in oil. I would strongly recommend against getting any canned seafood that’s packed in oil, simply because that is not an optimal source of fat. If we’re going to eat oil, if we’re going to add fat to our dishes, let’s do it in a way that’s conscious and delicious rather than accidentally having all of this oil infused to our good food because that’s how a manufacturer chooses to package things. Just so long as it’s packed in water and it’s cost effective, that’s how I would make my choice.

I think a lot of people can get into a maze of complexity with, oh, well, the seafood is coming from here or this source here or that source there. I will say with all of the confidence of all my professional, all of my experience, helping hundreds of thousands of people over the past decade, that eating seafood, as long as it’s not from just complete—you don’t want to eat mystery meat, you don’t want to eat mystery seafood, it’s got to be from a reputable brand. It’s got to have a baseline quality characteristics, but what we know, what the science has proven without a shadow of a doubt is that the nutrient density found in the seafood we’re talking about. The types of fat found in seafood we’re talking about, is so therapeutically good for you, that it radically outweighs any of the “negative aspects” of seafood.

Let’s be very clear. When we say negative aspects, there is no food on the planet, none, that has no negative aspects. Seafood, meat, everything, there is a report that’s saying don’t eat meat, then it’s seafood is bad for you, then it’s eggs that are bad for you and then it’s not just animal foods, because we know corn, wheat, soy, GMOs, we have pesticides, vegetables, pesticides, GMOs, soil depletion. There is no food we could possibly identify where if you went to Google and you typed in, risks of eating _____, you will never get zero search results. You could go to Google and insert risks of _______ and insert any food you want and Google will never say zero search results.

What we need to do, what we know are the positive benefits of certain foods and the unequivocally bad implications of other foods. For example, processed starches and sweets. We do not have an obesity epidemic in this country, we do not have rising rates of cancer, and heart disease and Diabetes because people are eating too much seafood. I think it’s a really important way of thinking. Maybe even write that down. If you’re ever going to be worried about something, especially as you’re taking on a new SANE lifestyle, it’s about thinking SANEly, we have to ask ourselves, am I in the position that I’m in today? Let’s say maybe you’re pre-diabetic, let’s say maybe you have 30 lbs. of fat on your body than you would ideally like. Am I pre-diabetic and am I 30 lbs. overweight because I ate too much seafood in the past? The answer of course is going to be no. When we hear this nonsense in the media, it would lead us to believe that nothing we do is right because if we do this, or this is this. This is bad about this thing and this is bad about this over here. Look, we know non starchy vegetables, nutrient dense protein, whole food fats, low fructose fruits, offer so much good, relative to anything negative, that to do anything, but to savor and enjoy those foods in abundance, so much so, that we’re too full for things.

Do we have a Diabetes epidemic in this country because we’re drinking too much soda? Because we’re eating too many processed starches and sweets? Yes, absolutely. We absolutely do. Anything you can eat that will cause you to eat less of those things is a net positive because it has so many good things about it and the teeny amount of bad things that has about it, which everything does, right? Their air you’re breathing in right now, has pollution in it. Does that mean you should hold your breath? Absolutely not. The water I’m drinking right now from this cup, has some form of contaminate in it. Yes, I put it through my Brita water filter, but there’s probably something wrong with it.

Here’s the beautiful thing. Your body is so capable of healing itself that as long as we keep our metabolism healthy, as long as we have that baseline level of nutrition, our liver is designed to filter out toxins. Our nostrils and our lungs are designed to filter out toxins that we breathe in. Our body is designed and was created so that we can handle a small natural level of negativity. In fact, if we had no negativity ever like the boy in the bubble, then if anything negative ever got into our system, it would cause chaos, because we wouldn’t have antibodies. There is a reason we sometimes get immunizations, or if you get chicken pox once, you don’t get it again, because now your body has developed resistance to it in a good way. There is no way and it’s not even desirable to possibly avoid anything that could be in the least bit harmful.

So what we need to do is not get bogged down in fictional minor negativity and focus on the major positivity of things like canned wild caught seafood that’s super affordable and can be delivered right to your doorstep and enjoying so much of that and celebrating our success that we’re too full for the other nonsense.
It looks like Wednesday here is bubbling up a question. She asks, on behalf of Rhonda, what are some other dense sources of protein that aren’t seafood? Nutrient dense versus dense. Let me define those two things really quick. Nutrient dense just means that you’re going to get protein in high quantities along with a lot of other essential vitamins and minerals. Then when we talk about just dense or more concentrated sources of protein, these are foods where you’re going to get upwards of 70, 80, or 90 percent of the calories are coming from protein. So there are actually two different things, but there are foods, for example that are both nutrient dense and extremely concentrated sources of protein.

Let me give you an example really quick. Whey protein for instance, specifically a whey protein isolate or a whey protein hydrolysate, is not something that I strongly recommend. What it is is a highly refined form of whey protein which is one of the proteins found in milk where they just processed the heck out of it, such is what you’re left with, is a powder is that over 90 percent protein.

For example, if you were to eat a scoop of whey protein hydrolysate, about 90 percent of what you’re taking in there is actual protein. There’s no water in it, there’s no nothing else, it’s just pure protein, but whey protein hydrolysate doesn’t have any real amounts of essential—everything has some, but it doesn’t really have critical essential nutrients outside of protein and amino acids which is essential. So it doesn’t have any vitamins, doesn’t have many minerals, doesn’t have phytochemicals, things like that.

Now, if we contrast that, for example to a nutrient dense source of protein, such as clams, or such as oysters, which has healthy fat in them, or such as liver, it’s a great source of nutrient dense protein, these foods are going to get depending on, these foods are going to get anywhere from 60 to 80 percent of their calories from protein and you’re going to get a lot of essential nutrients along with them. So while they’re less concentrated sources of protein—tuna fish is a very concentrated source of protein. Extremely concentrated source of protein. I believe almost 90 percent of the calories, if not more that you find in a water packed tuna, is coming from protein. Tuna doesn’t have nearly as many vitamins and minerals, along with that protein, as something like clams or oysters or beef liver for instance. Then there are things like chicken and muscle meats. So when we talk about things like steak, things like sirloin, ground beef, these are considered muscle meats. For example a very fatty low quality ground chuck is an example of something is not only not nutrient dense, so it’s not going to contain nearly, not even close to as many vitamins and minerals per calorie, as some of the seafood we just mentioned, but it’s also going to get most of its calories from fat. So like the type of beef that McDonald’s uses, or shall I say, pink slime, so it’s not a concentrated source of protein, you’re actually getting more calories from fat, than you are from protein and then it doesn’t have many essential vitamins and minerals in it.

So what we want to do is we want to eat things that are concentrated sources of protein and whenever possible that will provide us with a concentrated dose of essential vitamins and minerals. That’s really separates out in your step-by-step program within Ignite. You’ll notice within one of the very early courses, there’s getting started or first seven days E-book. In there, you’ll see that for nutrient dense protein, whole food fats, low fructose fruits, as well as non-starchy vegetables, we identify what those are and then we tell you, hey, there’s optimal versions. The difference between a normal nutrient dense protein and an optimal nutrient dense protein is really just the quantity of essential nutrients that are found in it. This applies to all food groups, not just protein.

For example, with vegetables, non-starchy vegetables, something like celery is a non-starchy vegetable. Fabulous for you. It’s great. You should eat all of the celery you should ever want, but when you contrast celery to kale, kale is also a non-starchy vegetable, but the amount of nutrients, vitamins and minerals and phytochemicals that are found in kale are astronomically higher than that found in celery.

So just like for instance, carrots, great, good non-starchy vegetable, fine, but not nearly as nutrient dense as something like Swiss Chard. Of course, these are all enumerated in that E-book. Same thing applies to proteins. When we talk about there are things like tilapia. Tilapia is a nutrient dense source of protein. It has a fair amount of vitamins and minerals, nutrients in it and it gets the vast majority of its calories from protein, but if you were to contrast that with something like salmon, salmon has way more Omega 3 fats. It has way more essential nutrition in it, along with that protein. So it’s fabulous to eat. Any kind of non-starchy vegetable, any kind of nutrient dense protein, any kind of whole food fat, and any kind of low fructose fruits.

If you want to turbo charge your SANEity, that’s when you go into those optimal food groups, but again, please don’t let that bog you down. Just know that there is always that optimal step you can take. Fruits are no different. We know there are things like there are pomegranates, there are cranberries, there are blueberries, there are things like acai berries, there are these fruits that are super nutrient dense and then there are fruits which are not nearly as nutrient dense.

So again, we have our conventional or standard low fructose fruits and there are optimal low fructose fruits, and the same thing applies. For instance, we talk about nuts and seeds are whole food fats, those are absolutely true, but if you were to contrast a sunflower seed to a chia seed, both of those are going to get the majority of their calories from healthy fats, that’s why they’re in the whole food fat category, but the amount of essential nutrition or really therapeutic fats that you’re going to find in the optimal sources of whole food fats, such as chia seeds, flax seeds, macadamia nuts, olives, cocoa powder—one of my favorites, coconut. They are just taking it to the next level in terms of the quality of the nutrition that’s found in there. So that is a really long answer and we covered a lot more than what is just a cost effective way of going SANE.

What’s beautiful here and what I think is so amazing, is that when we leverage the power of shopping online or even locally, I think sometimes when you shop locally, when you shop for sales, for instance, whether it’s Piggly Wiggly, or Kroger or Safeway or Thriftway or whatever the local grocery chain is in your area of the world, if you just take a look at the sales ads they usually have these things every week or every other week that are called loss leaders. So they’ll actually sell certain things at a loss, add an idea or with an idea that they can get people to come in the store and then buy a bunch of other high margin junk food, which you won’t do.

For example, canned seafood is frankly used very often as these loss leaders. You can get a can of wild caught salmon, packed in water, for $.50 and they’re literally losing money on that, so you don’t have to shop online if you’re not comfortable with that, you don’t have to join a Costco or a Sam’s Club, although those are options. Those are things that I do and my family do. You can even leverage this at your local grocery store. You can save money. You can save time. You can swap those in for other sources of protein in the food that you eat.

Some people say, I don’t like fish. The reason you might not like fish is because you’ve always been served fish, as here’s just a piece of fish. Truly, chicken, if you eat chicken, I promise you that there’s a lot of seafood that if you haven’t tried, you’d really like if you prepared it the same way you prepared chicken. Chicken has no taste. If you doubt me, boil a chicken breast and eat it plain. You will say, that Jonathan guy knew what he was talking about because this is disgusting. Chicken does not have some innate, delicious molecule in it that makes it taste so good. It’s that chicken is used in recipes with seasonings and other sauces that make it taste fantastic. I promise you that you can take any other mild tasting form of seafood, swap it in for the chicken and it will be as delicious, if not more delicious and it will work miracles for your waistline, for your mind, as well as we talked about here. Hopefully, that is very helpful. Please let me know if you have follow up questions. Post them up there please and it’s all good. Let me share my screen.

I don’t do this often because it scares me. This is not a great example, but I wanted to share something with you based on data and it’s the only data for this topic that I could come by and why I wanted to illustrate is how there is sometimes a belief that eating whole food, eating non-starchy vegetables, nutrient dense protein, whole food fats and whole food fats, non-process whole foods, is more expensive than eating junk food. What’s interesting, is when you actually look at the data, the opposite is true. When we think about it mechanically, it makes sense.

The more processing that has to go into a food, the more expensive it can be. So, certainly, there are exceptions to this rule. I wanted to show you this one example, and unfortunately, it’s an example with a food that is [Inaudible 00:36:13], it’s with potatoes, so this not me saying, go eat a bunch of potatoes, because as we know potatoes are starch and while eating a potato will not certainly immediately give you Diabetes, it’s just not an optimal source of satisfying, unaggressive nutritious and inefficient calories. We’re all about giving the body the best things we can and potatoes, while they’re not toxic, they are going to crowd out those other more nutritious options we could be eating.

I’m going to try something here. I’m going to try to share my screen with you, so if there is a flicker or if things temporarily cut out, please don’t panic, because that will cause me to panic and then I’ll get very sad. If for any reason we get disconnected, just click the link again, and we’ll start back, but I really wanted to show this to you because I think it’s really interesting data and I know it’s not something you’ve seen before because I just created it. So let me see if I can get this going here. So hopefully, it will be a special treat or a complete disaster, we will see. One second here.

All right. If you wouldn’t mind, let me know if you can see and I will get to the questions here. Screen share—here we go. Screen share—share.

All right. So, if the tech-gods are on our side, you may be able to see something here. I’m just going to keep vamping until somebody says that you can see what I’m projecting. Please, please let me know if you are. I’m going to type a little mention here in the window. Can you see a graph? People can see it. Wednesday, yes, you can see it.

All right. Let me know if you can’t see it and I will try to zoom in more and for people who are not seeing it or who are watching this later, who are reading a transcript, what you’re seeing here is a graph where on the left axis, thank you much—Julie can see it. Gina sees it. A bunch of people are seeing it.

So, what you see here on the Y-axis is price per pound and what you see on the X-axis are types of potatoes or ways that you could buy potatoes, which you will not be doing because you’re going SANE. It’s all good, but this is just for example purposes. Feel free to take a screenshot if you’d like so you can show your friends, or I can figure out a way to get this. Maybe we can get this posted in Support Group.

On the X-axis you can see from when we go from a regular whole food, unprocessed, Idaho potato and as we move this is based on average price across grocery stores, across the United States of America, we move to canned, they become more expensive, frozen wedges, mashed, boxed potatoes, frozen, twice baked, chips, kettle cooked chips, ruffled chips and then a lean light chip. So we go from least processed to most processed and you can see that the price per pound skyrockets as we become more processed.

Here’s the really interesting thing. The reason why I wanted to use potato chips, not only because it’s where I could actually find the data, but also because potato chips are a great example of okay, let’s move way over to the right on the graph here. So right to the most processed end. I bet that Pringles are going to fall on that right end here, most processed and most expensive. So not only are they expensive, but Pringles tells us in their advertising, “Once you pop, you cannot stop.” So, Pringles is advertising that that source of calories has the lowest satiety that’s the “S” in SANE, you could ever imagine. Not only does it have a low satiety, but it has negative satiety, meaning that eating 50 calories worth of Pringles will not only not satisfy you, but we all know, what’s it going to do? It’s going to make you want more Pringles. So the “food” itself, I’m not sure we can call Pringles food, the “food” is radically more expensive, per pound, then it is going to make you hungrier rather than filling you up.

Talk about a one-two punch and talk about why we’re going to slide over there to the left. Not in terms of this literally because we’re not doing the potatoes, but you can imagine the less something is processed, the closer it is to what you find in nature, not only is it better for you, but it’s better for your wallet, which is beautiful. Cool. So, hopefully that worked out and hopefully that made sense. Let me get you back to my face here.

Hopefully, we’re going to come back to my face. We had Leanne join us. What’s up Leanne, how’s it going? I think that is such amazing data and really helps to illustrate the point here of how we can have a win-win-win. We can save our lives, we can save our wallets and we can do all kinds of other fun stuff when we get the right information. So I think that is a great example. I spent a lot of time on that, but hopefully, it’s helpful for everybody. I want to get to some of the other questions that have written in, because there were a bunch. I’m so sorry if I missed a question here.

Gina says here, is there a way to submit suggestion recipes for the website? Gina, you can do that. It’s a great idea. You can do that and anything else that you want in the coaching and support group. That is why that place is heaven. It is heaven because you have your SANE certified coaches there, your other SANE family members in there. I meet with your SANE certified coaches weekly, whenever possible, when I’m not on the road and they always come to me. They say, Jonathan, here’s some things we ought to do, these are next on the agenda. So that is a great place to suggest any suggestions. I appreciate that so much. So, yes, SANE, go to the coaching and support group as soon as you can because it is such a great loving place. Honestly, there’s nothing else like it, so please, pop over there. Any suggestions, anything else, good stuff.

Gina asks, what about sprouts? Gina do you mind adding a little bit more information? I don’t know what you mean, but I’d be happy to answer the question? Could you just ask it in a little bit more detail? Because we could be talking about bean sprouts. What type of sprouts and I would be happy to help you out?

Next question though that was written in has to do with extensive use of antibiotics. This member of the SANE family says, I’ve recently been on extensive IV antibiotics. I know I’ve compromised my gut bacteria. Any probiotic of prebiotic foods that I should focus on?

Yes, absolutely. If you’re not aware, antibiotics are potentially very over prescribed, at least in the United States. One of the challenges of the antibiotics is that there are bacteria in your gut, which are very good. So, antibiotics do a great job of killing bacteria, but sometimes we don’t want that to happen because there is healthy bacteria. So of course, there are instances where you have to take antibiotics. Antibiotics have saved millions of lives. So this is not at all a condemnation of antibiotics, but simply the understanding that antibiotics can do some damage to your gut bacteria or good bacteria and then we need to take steps to heal that or repopulate our gut bacteria.

So, one of the number one things that you can do, so prebiotics, probiotics are fantastic, but let’s keep in mind that eating the high fiber, so non-starchy vegetables, nutrient dense protein, whole food fats, low fructose fruits, these are SANE foods, and the three things that SANE foods have in common is there are on average when compared to other foods, they’re high in water, fiber and protein. Those are the common denominators. So fiber is phenomenal for gut health.

So when you’re going SANE, you will be taking in anywhere from six to ten times the amount of fiber that the average American takes in and that will do fantastic things for your digestive health. Fiber is not actually digested, it can at times ferment. It feeds the bacteria in your gut, but there are of course, foods that take it to the next level. For instance, you could do high probiotic, low sugar dairy foods, just make sure they are low sugar. Some of the most popular, “gut healing yogurts” in the world are nothing more than highly marketed sugar. Things like Activia, this is not total nonsense. You turn that Activia over, you see that little tiny cup, you’re getting as much sugar than if you drank a can of Coca Cola. So that’s no good.

So things like kefir, things like low sugar, plain Greek yogurt, cottage cheese. These can be helpful. Any fermented food as long as it doesn’t have sugar added to it, is a great option. Artichokes are a great option. Prebiotics are sometimes harder to find than probiotics and really there is Jerusalem artichokes, if you can find Jerusalem artichokes, eat them because they are great for you. I have personally had a hard time finding Jerusalem artichokes so we actually prebiotic fiber as one of the top three ingredients in both your SANE vanilla almond meal bars, as well as the cravings killers, simply because it is such a therapeutic food and it’s very difficult to find at local grocery stores.

So it’s not a sales pitch, it’s just reality, your SANE almond meal bars I believe have 18 grams of fiber per bar and the vast majority of that is coming from prebiotic fiber. Same things with your cravings killers. So those are great therapeutic foods and they are also delicious. Those are great options as well. Again, that high fiber in general following a SANE lifestyle will absolutely heal your gut in a therapeutic way, no questions asked. The amount of fiber, the amount of nutrition will be radically helpful there.

So, Gina asked a more detailed question here which I appreciate. Gina says, I’ve read about alfalfa or bean sprouts having greater bioavailability of nutrients. Any thoughts on cheaply raising sprouts? Are they worth it nutritionaly for the cost?

There are a couple of different things. Alfalfa sprouts—if it’s a non-starchy vegetable, bean sprout, non-starchy vegetable, and then there are sprouted grains, so I wanted to be very precise. Grains, sprouted or non-sprouted—sprouted grains are better for you than non-sprouted grains, but they’re still not as good for you as non-starchy vegetables. Sprouts, as a non-starchy vegetables are great for you. Bean sprouts or sprouted beans are going to be potentially better for you than just regular beans. So as a general rule of thumb if you’re sprouting something, the act of sprouting it will make it better for you. Personally, for me, things like that are never worth the cost in terms of time. That’s just for me. I don’t know. I mean the vast majority of people I’ve worked with are like, I have no time. The things that I believe are worth it from a cost benefit perspective and that I’ve seen actual research on it is true that sprouting is going to be more nutritious for you than non-sprouting, but if you’re the type of person who is thinking about that, chances are you are so healthy already, that I’m not sure the marginal benefit of moving from non-sprouting to sprouting—if you’re asking that question, you’re super healthy.

So, I’m not sure if that’s going to take you to the next level in terms of the amount of effort that will go into it, but if your effort went into maybe doing more of the optimal sources of non-starchy vegetables or the optimal sources of nutrient dense protein, the optimal sources of whole food fats and the optimal sources of low fructose fruits, those don’t take any more time, they don’t take any more money and in some cases they take less money because they’re less popular, so they’re not jacking the prices up on them, that would be a better cost benefit analysis or ratio for you. The simple answer is sprouting for you is better for you than non-sprouting, if that makes sense.

All right. Now, the next question here is a pretty deep one and a pretty involved one. I really appreciate the courage of the individual who wrote this question. I’m not going to be able to share the whole question here, because it is quite long. It’s an individual who is sharing that mentally, he/she is having a very tough time staying on track. Basically, right now, she’s about 45 lbs. over her comfort zone and she feels weak. It is a she. I am identifying that in my question, so I’m not just saying that. She is feeling very out of shape and just having a hard time sticking to the plan. She would like to get ahold of even the simplest repeatable good SANE habit.

I have done green smoothies for a month and felt good and then stopped. From time-to-time I’ve had a meal of SANEity, but just can’t see the gusto I need for making the long term changes I want to make. I post online a few times, but then I stop, but then I stop. I exercise a week and then I stop. What’s wrong with me? Do you have any suggestions?

Wow. First of all, let me say thank you for this question. This is exactly the type of thing that I feel so blessed and honored to help with during these calls, especially the section here on this individual says, what is wrong with me and I think there are five things I want to say about this. The first is a thank you for reaching out. I want to give some quick things, but I want to do some more macro things here first of all. This individual talks about how they started doing green smoothies and then they stopped. They ate a little bit SANEly and then they stopped. I think all of us, myself included, anytime we’re making a change in our life, there tends to be a short term focus. Now, what’s really important, you’ve heard me say that many, many times, but there is short term focus both in terms of the positive and also in terms of the negative. Let me tell you what I mean here.

So, the general way that we, even myself, reflected on this a while today before our call because this question really hit home with me—is I usually talk about the short term in the sense of hey, let’s not talk make our goal to be, I want to lose 7 lbs. in 7 days because that’s focused on the short term and the things that we do to have success in the short term when it comes to weight loss actually make us gain weight in the long term. I cover in the detail in the program, I covered that in previous calls, but a lot of great science there.

That short term focus can also be incredibly destructive when it comes to slipups or negative things because remember, if we’re in this for the long term, if this individual was doing green smoothies for a month, and then had a bad week, if we’re thinking in terms of the long term, if you could do four weeks of green smoothies and you slip up for five days, and then you get into the coaching and support group and you share your challenges, you get motivated, you go back, you get four more weeks under your belt, maybe you get five more this time. Because you’ve already done four and you’ve got that success, so you initially had four weeks on, a week off, then you have five weeks on, a week off. Then you have six weeks on and a week off. Oftentimes when we have that short term mindset, we’ll say, oh, my gosh, I didn’t drink a green smoothie today. I failed. I failed today. So you know what? Tomorrow, why even worry about it? I’ve already this week, is already messed up, so I might as well forget about the whole week. The whole week is a lost cause. That is also short term thinking.

For myself, for everyone who is listening to this, who is watching this, who is reading this, we’ve got to get that short term thinking out of our mind, because this courageous individual is a great example. She did green smoothies for a month and then she slipped up for a week, and her perception is that she failed. She is saying, what’s wrong with me? There is nothing wrong with you .Honestly, there is nothing wrong with you.

In a five week time period, you did green smoothies, four out of five of those, so that’s 80 percent. That’s fantastic. Over the course of a year, if you got it, nailed it, 80 percent of the time, long term, I swear to you that you will have a year from today better results than you’ve ever seen in your entire life because the reason what we’ve done in the past hasn’t worked is because we didn’t stick with it. The reason we didn’t stick with it isn’t our fault. It’s because it’s ridiculous.

There are things like starvation dieting. Nobody can starvation diet for the long term. That’s like saying eat less for the long term literally—please let this sink in. Somebody telling you to just eat less food over the long term is like someone telling you just go to the bathroom less. Just breathe less. Eating is not optional. Eating is a core need of your body. As long as you are hungry, you will not be able to think optimally, live optimally, perform optimally, nothing. Your body is saying, I need fuel. So if your body is saying I need fuel, it needs fuel. Nothing else is going to work well until it gets fuel. So someone is saying, hey ignore that signal is nonsense. That’s like saying your body is saying, I need to use the restroom, or I need to drink water, or I need to go to sleep and someone just saying, just don’t do those things for the rest of your life. That’s ridiculous.

When we think long term, we have a lifestyle, like SANEity that we can do. There’s no hunger involved. We’re just talking about taking all of the flavors we love, sweet, salty, savory, bitter, fatty, all of that stuff, we’re just swapping in SANE versions of food and we’re eating it whenever we’re hungry until we’re full, in order, non-starchy vegetables, nutrient dense protein, whole food fats, low fructose fruits, in that order, all of the flavors we can ever love, but the one catch is that we have to free ourselves from the short term thinking, not only in terms of how much weight did I lose this week, but also if you have a bad day, in a week, that means, six out of seven days, you rocked it. It’s always about the long term. Please it’s always about the long term.

Just don’t let the short term slip up, make you feel like a failure. The timeline in which you are measuring your progress is so important. Think of the stock market. Even if you’re not a super stock trader, you’re probably heard the financial advice that the people who are in the stock market and they are trading stuff around and they’re like, what’s happening everyday? They get panicked because the stock market fluctuates. It goes up and down and up and down. You have people like Warren Buffett, people who had long term success, which is if you put that money in the stock market and you forget about it for ten years, chances are, almost inevitably, unless you’re timing is really bad, ten years after you invest it, you’ll be in a better place because over the long term it’s going to trend up.

I think that’s such an empowering mindset for us. What we’re going to do is we’re going to gradually and patiently and compassionately with self-love, trend up. That doesn’t mean it’s a straight line up. It’s going to be like this. It’s going up/down and up/down. As long as we’re trending up—and the only way that will ever happen is if we give ourselves permission to think long term, right? This is the secret. If you trend up, you can’t not succeed. That’s a terrible way of saying, if you trend up, you will succeed. I promise you that because if you trend up, six months from now, you’ll be radically SANEer than you are today. Six months from them, you’ll be radically SANEer than you were then. Six months from then and six months from then. I know six months in a microwave culture seems like an eternity, but you know what? We’re all going to be here six months from now. We’re all going to be here a year from now.

I don’t think any of us are planning on leaving this earth less than five years. We’re going to be here for the long term. We’re going to be on this planet for the long term. We’re going to be with our family and our friends and our loved ones for the long term. We need to look at ourselves and our SANEity and our eating in terms of the long term because that not only helps us set our positive goals, but when we have slip ups, just like I’ll say, it’s not about short term weight loss. If you slipped up in the short term, that doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things and in fact, if it motivates you to do better in the future, it’s fine. Everyone slips up—always. There is no human being on the planet who has ever tried to make a positive change in their life that hasn’t done two steps forward, one step backward. As long as you keep walking. Keep walking. There is no destination. This is enjoyable lifestyle, but you just have to keep it up. I think that is such a helpful mindset because then we don’t go into the downward spiral of this day didn’t go well, so it doesn’t matter if the next day doesn’t go well, because I’m thinking in terms of the short term.

I would flip this on its head. Individual says, I exercise a couple of weeks, then I stop. You exercised a couple of weeks. That’s awesome. If you slipped up for one week, that’s okay. Let us, let everyone who is on this call, let everyone who is in your SANE coaching and support group help say, it’s okay. You’re going to pick it up. This is in all major religious and spiritual traditions. This is not how many times you fall down. It’s whether or not you pick yourself back up and there is a beautiful saying, which is be strong at the broken places. It’s a metaphor that when you break a bone, sometimes it heals back stronger than it did before.

I think with the information you have in your SANE Ignite Program with the beautiful and loving community that you have here in the SANE Ignite Program family, we can help you to become strong at those broken places, stronger than you were before and then you can actually parlay that into greater success. So I think that mindset is extremely important. I think that you are at all a failure. That’s like saying the stock market is a failure because [Inaudible 01:00:42] left the European Union, nope, it’s just that the stock market took a little dip. It’s going to come back and we’re going to be okay. If it doesn’t, we’re all screwed, so then it really doesn’t matter. So you’re not a failure at all. At all. That was really macro.

A bunch of questions came in, but I also wanted to give you some very simple things that you can do. The first and it might sound a little silly, but we mentioned smoothies and that is my defacto, just do that. It’s the one thing that if you drank SANE green smoothies once a day, twice a day, as many times as you’re able to, it has so much ripple effect through your life, which we’re not going to have time to get through today. It’s basically a concentrated source of the most SANE substances in the world. It’s beautiful and if you can do it, that’s great.

Here’s a little technique that you can use. It sound a little bit silly. Take your blender and put it on the floor. Put it in a very annoying place on the floor. Do not put it somewhere where you’re going to trip over it. For example, do not put it at the top of your staircase, so you don’t trip over it. Jonathan told me to put my blender on top of the staircase. I tripped over it and broke myself and now I can’t do anything.

Just put your blender somewhere that’s very annoying. Put it on your floor somewhere, put it on your desk, just put it somewhere where you’re like, what is the blender doing here and it’s a constant visual reminder. I’ve got to leave that blender there until I drink my green smoothie. It’s a little bit like there’s a technique that some people use if they have a hard time staying motivated to exercise for individuals who like to exercise in the morning. They say I go to sleep with my workout clothes on because when I wake up, I’ve already got my workout clothes on, so I’m already halfway there. So, it’s a similar thing where it’s a very simple thing that you can do. Every human being on the planet, if you have a blender, can take the blender, can put it somewhere it will annoy you until you do something with it. The thing that you do with it is you make a green smoothie and that can be a simple thing to do.

Another thing, which is very simple, but I know it’s not easy, but it’s critical and I’m going to try to prevent myself from going on a huge tangent here because I know a bunch of questions came in—is throwing away your scale. That’s number one. Get rid of your scale unless you have to have a scale because you need to measure the weight of a child for some medical reasons. I’m going to use words that I don’t normally use because I really want this to sink in. The more you weigh yourself, the fatter you will be five years from now. Bottom line. Any contestant from the Biggest Loser will tell you that. They’ve told me that personally when I work with them.

The more you weigh yourself the fatter you will be in five years because every time you step on that scale, it is focusing your mind on short term thinking and the wrong metric, which is your weight, rather than your health, than your body fat percentage, because the way you reduce your weight, the way you make your scale happy is by doing the things that will make you fatter and sicker long term which is starvation dieting.

So please, you have to get rid of your scale. You have to. If you really want to be awesome, I want you to have a ceremony. I want you to see that scale as the embodiment of all the starvation, shame based, misogynistic, shrink yourself nonsense that has been pushed on to you for the past couple of decades embodied in that object. A scale. A device which has “measured your self-worth” for all these years. It’s an embodiment of everything that inSANE in the world. I want you to take that out into your backyard. I want you to take that anywhere you can go. I want you to get a baseball bat. I want you to get a golf club. I want you to get a hammer. I want you to get a jackhammer. If it’s 4th of July and you have some leftover fireworks, strap the fireworks to it. Get your cellphone, videotape yourself putting it out of its misery. Make a ceremony out of it, get it gone, physically destroy it and see that as you breaking it is you breaking free from all of the inSANEity that it represents. We can all do that. We can absolutely all do that. Share it on social media, tweet it to me at Jonathan Bailor, I will re-share it with the world because I think it’s beautiful, I think it’s empowering. Hashtag smash your scale, whatever you want shared in the support group if you’re not a big social media person. That’s a big thing. That is something that if literally we have to be able to stop using weight as a measure of our self-worth and of our success. Like the blender, it’s like blender thing. The scale is sitting there. You see it everyday when you go into the bathroom, so it’s like I have to weigh myself. Get it out of here. Nonsense. Gone. Put your blender where your scale used to be. That’s what you need to do. The old one-two punch. Put the blender where the scale used to be.

You say, Jonathan, how do I track my success? Success is tracked visually. Very easy. You will feel better. You will look better. If you want to, please go to your doctor, get your bloodwork done because what we’re talking about his healing your body from the inside out and the only way that you know what’s going on in the inside, is by working with your primary care physician for getting a full blood panel done and to go in there every four to six months and see how your body is literally healing from the inside out.

Your pants. Your pants will tell you. Everything will tell you. Your energy levels will tell you how easy it is to walk up the stairs will tell you. Your friends and family will tell you. When your mood is better. When your skin is more rich and full. When your eyes are sparkling. When your hair is stronger. When your nails are stronger. You’ll know you’re moving in the right direction. You don’t need a scale to tell you that. The scale is self-sabotaged package. It is a self-sabotage in a box. So blow it up.

Another thing you can do and I’m going to get to the questions. It’s just gratitude journal. I’ve sent emails about this. We talk about it all of the time. Please, it takes five minutes per day, if not less and this isn’t Jonathan’s thought. The blow up your scale—that’s me. That’s just me. That’s my experience. Clinical research has proven that the simple act of writing down three to five things that you’re grateful per day and sharing that with people has a measureable impact on your quality of life. So if you’re not doing that already, please do that in the SANE support group.

Let me see what we have written in here because there’s a bunch of questions that I missed. I apologize. I went off on a little bit of a tangent there. Solvi, what’s up Solvi? I haven’t said hi to you yet. You’ve got a great question here. So you are frozen on my screen. That’s not good. That’s not a question. Hopefully, I’m back now, but sorry about that. This is recorded. If you miss it, I will send a link out to it afterwards.

Let’s see if we have any more questions over here coming in. I think we’re good on questions. Let’s move on to the next thing here which has to do with dairy.

This question is very open ended. It just says, what’s the deal with dairy? Then, there’s a little bit more of a follow up. The individual is saying, I’ve been taught for years, and years, and years, dairy is its own food group. So how do we not eat if its own food group? What’s going on with that? So what’s the deal with dairy?

There are food groups which are real and there are food groups that are artificial. So if you think about it even if you look at the evolution of what is now my plate, used to be my pyramid and one way and the it was my pyramid in another way and if you do research on the Internet you’ll see there’s a bunch of different versions of it. All different countries around the world have different versions of it. There are things like vegetables, fruit, meat and fish, which those are scientific terms. They’re real. The United States Department of Agriculture did not name those.

The scientific community named those because they have identifiable characteristics that make them a group, whereas, things like dairy as a food group was just conveniently manifested by the Dairy Manufacturers Association of America as its own food group. If you think about it, meat isn’t its own food group. It’s lumped into something else. Fish is not considered its own food group, it’s lumped into something else and then depending on where you live and what year it is, beans are in the same food group as meat and fish even though beans are 80 percent carbohydrate, but a lot of meat and fish is like 80 percent protein, 20 percent carbohydrate, but they’re in the same group, even though spinach, calorie for calorie actually has more protein in it than ground chuck. Yes, you heard that correctly. Ground chuck. Calorie for calorie, if you ate 100 calories for spinach, you’d take in more grams of protein than if you ate 100 calories of ground chuck. So dairy is just the greatest example of this. I tip my hat to the dairy lobby in the United States at least for giving dairy its own food group. I don’t know how dairy got its own food group, but I think some greased palms may have been involved. Dairy and everything else we need to look at it in the SANE spectrum. We have to say, is it satisfying? How aggressive is it? How nutrient dense is it and how efficient is it? We have to look at the amount of water, fiber and protein. So dairy, just like any other food group. It’s not good or bad just because it’s dairy or just because it’s fish, or just because it’s grains. It’s good or bad based on clinical research, based on how satisfying, how aggressive, how nutritious and how efficient it is.

Dairy—there are SANE dairy options. Kefir, low sugar yogurt, low sugar Greek yogurt. Low sugar cottage cheese. Thinks like whey protein concentrate. These are SANE foods. Again, we’re not about these artificial distinctions. We want to look at what the actual research has shown. There is no research ever that has shown that you have to eat dairy. If there is any doubt in your mind, there are hundreds of millions of people on the planet that can’t eat dairy. Talk about irony.

We have this thing that has been given its own food group. Even though it’s called lactose intolerance and it is quite common for a large portion of the population that can’t eat it. So, one, how did it get its own food group and two, is it discriminatory to say that all you people out there who genetically can’t eat this food are wrong, you should be eating it because it’s part of your balanced breakfast, except that the thing that tells you is part of your balanced breakfast requires dairy for you to eat it because it’s cereal that’s served in milk. Wait a minute. Hm…So, dairy is neither good or bad because it’s dairy. We have to look at the science. We have to look at what it does to your body, but what is important to understand is the difference between essential things for your health and non-essential things. Essential vitamins, essential minerals, essential fatty acids, certain fatty acids, essential amino acids. These things are essential. There is no such thing as essential dairy. There is no such thing as an essential grain. It doesn’t exist.

Dairy has good things about it, like it has calcium in it, but so do oranges, so do green leafy vegetables. In fact, they have radically more calcium in them calorie for calorie than full fat dairy. So, if the reason dairy is supposedly healthy is because it has calcium in it, but if you could get all of the calcium and more with none of the negative aspects of dairy, then you don’t need it. Personally, let’s look for SANE sources. I would strongly recommend—I don’t think drinking cow’s milk, or drinking calories outside of smoothies that you make is a good idea. There are calories you drink have a lower satiety than calories you eat with the exception of whole foods that you just pulverize down, aka green smoothies. If you need to use a milk like substance, coconut milk is the SANEest. Almond milk can be fine. Rice milk can be fine. Hemp milk can be fine. I would steer away from soy milk personally, but coconut milk would be my preference. Dairy is neither good nor bad. We just have to look at it in terms of SANEity like anything else. Hopefully, that is helpful and you might think to yourself, how did it get its own food group? That is a little bit interesting. It’s what’s going on with that?

Next question here. I used to count calories. I was trying to stay under 1,2900 calories per day last year and my sex drive was non-existent. Since then, I’ve been diagnosed with IBD, switched to a Paleo diet, but my weight went up several times because I tried different diets, while sticking to Paleo food. I’ve been eating Paleo for a year, but I have no sex drive. I was wondering if my numerous attempts at losing weight caused it and if a SANE way of living will help me get it back. I really wanted to make sure we had time to answer this question because there is a lot of great aspects to it. I do apologize. There are some questions we’re not going to get to this week, but I will carry them over until the next session. Of course, the coaching and support group is a beautiful, wonderful place. Please pop over there if you haven’t.

First and foremost, this individual says, I was eating 1,200 calories per day and my sex drive went away. Absolutely. And I appreciate you saying that and being open and honest about that because let’s break this down really quickly here. When your body is starving, which it is, let’s be clear, in the last true starvation diet that was done on humans because they can’t do them anymore because no medical board will approve them because you cannot do inhumane things to people in experiments anymore. They don’t allow that, so starvation dieting experiments aren’t done very frequently. The last major one that was done, was done around World War II, at the University of Minnesota and the diet they used to starve people and they were doing this to see what they should do about people who were starving in war torn Europe after the war ended.

They put individuals on 1,600 calorie diets. You heard me correctly. A study to simulate starvation in war torn Europe, and otherwise healthy males, so let’s keep that in mind. They were adult males, but still, 1,600 calories per day. You go on the Biggest Loser and you eat 1,600 calories per day, Jillian Michaels is going to slap you upside the face and call you a lazy gluten. Whatever, I think that is horrible and science agrees with it—1,600 calories is not something we should be focused on. This individual was being starved on 1,200 calories per day. Her body was literally shutting down. That’s what starvation means. It means your body is going to shut down, mission critical functions. So your sex drive is essentially there to create life. It’s to reproduce. If this happens to be a female, who is writing this in, which I’m going to guess that it is, because 1,200 calories is typically what females are told to eat by inSANE people out there in an effort to lose weight. Your body is telling your mind and your mind is echoing back to it, we are dying. We are starving. We are being deprived of that which is essential for life. What’s the first thing the body is going to do is say if I can’t even maintain my own life, I am certainly not going to tell you hormonally to create additional life that is also then going to starve. Think about starvation dieting like what it is. Starvation.

We live in a world now where there are more people who struggle with overweight than struggle with starvation. The first time that’s every happened in the history of the world. Starvation is still a big deal, except when it happens in first world countries when we say, let’s go on television and starve ourselves. It’s the same thing. It’s the same thing that’s happening in war torn and impoverished countries. People are slowly dying. It’s not a good thing. It’s not a healthy thing and when your body believes it is dying because it’s being deprived of essential nutrition, it shuts down your sex drive. It shuts down your mental functions. It shuts down everything. Your heart rate slows. Your core body temperature slows down. You are essentially not alive. You are like sleepwalking. You are not fully there.

So, I’ll tell you first of all, no matter what, it is way better not only from a psychological perspective, but from a health perspective and a quality of life perspective to be overweight is better for you than to be starvation dieting. Without question, you’ll feel better, you’ll live longer, no question because yoyo dieting is terrible for you. So, yes, you will absolutely lose your sex drive and a bunch of other things if you starvation diet. That’s why I urge the focus on the long term because the way you lose weight in the short term is to starve yourself, but it will kill you literally and also figuratively, you won’t fully live your life in the long term because it will shut down mission critical functions in your body.

Now, this individual is saying, I then yoyo dieted. I still don’t have sex drive. Can a SANE way of living bring it back? Yes, absolutely. What a SANE life is going to do is it is going to heal you literally from the inside out. It sound like heal magic. It’s just science. We can put you in a FMRI machine before going SANE and we can put you in a FMRI machine which is Functional Resonance Imagining on your brain and we can look at your brain after six months of SANE eating and we can see for example, in your ventral medial hypothalamus if you’ve been eating the seafood like I’ve told you, the amount of inflammation in that area of your brain will go down and because of that, your appetite will re-regulate itself. That’s just real. The level of sex hormones in your blood.

If you eat a SANE lifestyle you will be taking in more protein, you will be taking in more essential fatty acids, you’ll be taking in way more of the minerals zinc and magnesium and you put those things together and your sex hormone levels will skyrocket and other stress related hormones will plummet. Your blood sugar will normalize and not only will you get your sex drive back, but you’ll get your blood sugar under control. You’ll get your blood pressure under control. Your moods will stabilize and that sounds like magic pill that solves everything. Kind of because if your house is on fire and someone were to say, I can put the fire out. We’re going to remodel it. Like yes. Your refrigerator will run better. Your floors will look better. Your walls will look nicer because there was this global fire and we’re going to put that fire out and we’re going to respackle everything and polish it up. That’s what we’re doing with SANE eating, but it takes time.

So we’re literally healing you from the inside out and yes, every aspect of the beautiful system that is your body, when you flood your body with abundance of essential nutrition which is what we’re doing, highly satisfying, unaggressive, nutritious, inefficient foods, what else could your body do? It has an abundance of therapeutic foods, so much so that it does not have room to take in the addictive and toxic substances. It heals. That’s all your body can do. If you break a bone and then you create the condition where your body can heal itself. What does it do? It heals itself. The only way our body can heal is if it heals itself. The only thing we can do is to create an environment in which the body can do that and then we have to give the body time. That’s why I really dislike the concept of hacking. I’m going to do this hack. There is no hacking. You can’t hack a garden. The garden takes time to grow. You can’t hack having a loving, healthy, long term relationship with another person. It takes time and love and care and if you give your body the time, love and care, not only will your sex drive come back, because you’re the opposite of starving, you’re growing, you’re thriving and you’re healing. You will shift from second gear up to fifth gear and you will be like turbo you and it will be beautiful. You can absolutely get that sex drive and the drive for life back in general.

Oh my goodness. We have nine minutes left and we don’t have a huge amount of time and I have a bunch of other stuff that I wanted to cover, but I wanted to close with one personal anecdote which I hope you’ll find helpful. I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time. We talked about in this call and in all of the calls we’re always focused on progress rather than perfection. I am no exception. I have quite a few things that I need to work on in my life like I know we all do and we also need to love and appreciate where we currently are at. Of course, we can always do better. That doesn’t mean we are not doing great already.

One thing that I’ve wanted to do for years, is meditate. The research is so clear on meditation. It’s like SANE eating. Smarter exercise. Sleep, loving relationships, and meditation. Things that the research is clear, unambiguous, across countries, across people, good stuff for you and I tend to have a mind like I bet a lot of people on this call may have. A mind that keeps on going.

So, I said, I want to meditate. So, for a long period of my life, as you likely know, I was doing two things at the same time. I was working at Microsoft as a Senior Program Manager and I was doing a lot of work on the Nike Plus connect training program, as well as Xbox fitness and then in my spare time, I was doing all of the research a little bit like a hobby, but then it turned into something else, which is really cool. Eventually that turned into SANE and everything that you see here, but that ended up being a lot of stuff. It ended up being too much stuff and I just couldn’t get my mind to slow down. Fortunately, thanks to supportive individuals such as yourselves and a bunch of other nice things that happened, we were able to turn SANE Solution to the next level, bring you the Ignite Program you have today, is now my 100 percent focus and we have a wonderful team here to support you and love you and help you live this lifestyle, but until we got those things set up, there was just craziness going on and I kept telling myself, Jonathan, you need to meditate. I couldn’t do it. I tried to sit. I couldn’t sit still. Couldn’t happen.

Now, I said, I cannot be out there telling people how to change their lives and how to improve their lives if I personally cannot do this thing that I’ve wanted to do for such a long time. So here’s what I did and it’s so funny because I did exactly what I tell people not to do.

Meditation. I did not know much—I knew the theory of it. I knew why it was good. I knew that I wanted to do it, but I didn’t know how necessarily to do it. What I started to do was try to figure out the best way to meditate. I started listening to all of these audio books about meditation and I tried to meditate and I’d be like oh, I’m not meditating perfectly or I’m not meditating enough or I just missed a day of meditation so forget it. I can’t meditate. I’m a bad meditator. This is me. This is the same guy, remember? The same guy that told you the exact opposite about an hour ago? This is what my brain is telling to me.

I was sitting there two weeks ago and I was downloading my next audiobook on how the perfect meditation techniques and the different schools of meditation and which ones should I do? I said to myself, I don’t know why, I don’t know what caused it, but I said Jonathan, you are doing the exact same thing that you tell people not to do. You are letting perfection mythical perfection get in the way of you just doing it. You know the basics of meditation. This is me talking to myself. It’s sit quietly, to focus on the breath and if thoughts come into your mind, to acknowledge them and then just to peacefully focus back on the breath. That’s it. that’s what meditation is. I learned that in my books. There’s all kinds of stuff on top of it, but like SANE, non-starchy vegetables, nutrient dense proteins, whole food fats, low fructose fruits. In that order. I said, Jonathan, follow your own advice. Stop trying to be perfect and just do it. Just do it. I have to tell you. I’m proud and embarrassed at the same time to share this with you that two weeks ago I had that realization and it took me 15 years to get there. I don’t know how long I’ve been wanting to do this, but then for two weeks I made a commitment to myself. I made a commitment that I’m going to focus on progress rather than perfection.

On Day One I said, I am going to sit down and I’m going meditate as best I can. I’m not going to do it in the morning or do it in the evening, the best time of day to meditate. I did it wrong because I couldn’t do it exactly when I woke up. Nope. When I have five minutes, I’m going to go and I’m going to sit quietly for five minutes, focus on my breath. And then the next day, I’m going to do five or six minutes and the day after that I might take it up a couple of more minutes. So, it’s been two weeks. I’m up to 20 minutes and I’m doing it. It’s amazing and it truly has been as revolutionary for me as when I first started eating SANEly or exercising Eccentrically or just doing it, just focused on doing the best version that I can and trending up, just doing better over time. It’s changed my life. I’ve had some slip ups, but I now have the commitment and I am committing to you here just like I hope you will commit to the rest of the SANE family that I, too, am going to be focused on progress rather than perfection. You can hold me to that. You can hold me to that.

I wanted to share it with you because it’s been a long time since I’ve had that experience because I’ve been eating SANE and exercise Eccentrically for a very long time, but this is an area of wellness I don’t have a lot of experience with and I’m really trying now. I’ve got to tell you, that term, right them, really trying—I have seen more progress and more success the less I’ve tried. It’s almost like the Matrix. If you ever saw that movie where Morpheus, Lawrence Fishburne is talking to Keanu Reeves and Keanu Reeves is trying to punch him and Morpheus says stop trying to hit me and just hit me. Like you’re thinking about it too much.

I told myself, just go, sit quietly for five minutes. It’s changed my life. Throw your scale off the roof. Eat vegetables, just do it and love it and watch your progress over time because if your experience is anything like my experience, I’ve been struggling with this for 15 years and I made the decision to stop struggling and the way I could decide to stop struggling is I said I’m going to do the best I can. Then, I’m just going to get better over time and if it doesn’t work out perfectly, I’m just going to keep trying to trend up and I’m going to focus on progress rather than perfection. I tell you I am so proud to share with you and I’m so happy to share with you that it works. It absolutely works. It could work for you too. For all things in life and I’m so happy that I proved it to myself.

Anyway, I wanted to share that with you because we’re a family here. You guys are part of the SANE family and I’m so blessed and honored and I know Wednesday, Laurie, Rayna, and Rebecca and all of the other SANE members of the community and also your SANE family here we so appreciate your trust. We so appreciate your support. The only reason we’re able to do this is because of your support and your trust. We love doing it and we are so honored that you allow us to do it. Thank you so much. I feel so honored and proud that hopefully now, you have written down somewhere, “Trend up.” Trend up and I really hope that I start seeing some posts in support group or on Twitter, Facebook or whatever, just make sure you tag me or tell someone to tag me or just smash in the scale. So we’re going to trend up, or we smash our scale.

Thank you so much for spending your time with me tonight. If I didn’t get your question, I will roll it over into the next session.

I am going to be traveling next week, so next week we’ll take off, but we’ll be back at it the next week after that. Don’t worry, everyone is going to get the same number of sessions. If we ever miss a week, it’s not like you lost that week, we’re just going to continue it a week longer.

I hope you have a wonderful rest of this week or wonderful next week and then I will see you the following week. Thank you so much. Blessings and we’ll talk soon. See you later.

SANE Psychology

  • Here’s the beautiful thing. Your body is so capable of healing itself that as long as we keep our metabolism healthy, as long as we have that baseline level of nutrition, our liver is designed to filter out toxins. Our nostrils and our lungs are designed to filter out toxins that we breathe in. Our body is designed and was created so that we can handle a small natural level of negativity. In fact, if we had no negativity ever like the boy in the bubble, then if anything negative ever got into our system, it would cause chaos, because we wouldn’t have antibodies. There is a reason we sometimes get immunizations, or if you get chicken pox once, you don’t get it again, because now your body has developed resistance to it in a good way. There is no way and it’s not even desirable to possibly avoid anything that could be in the least bit harmful. So what we need to do is not get bogged down in fictional minor negativity and focus on the major positivity of things like canned wild caught seafood that’s super affordable and can be delivered right to your doorstep and enjoying so much of that and celebrating our success that we’re too full for the other nonsense.

 

  • Don’t let the short term slip up, make you feel like a failure. The timeline in which you are measuring your progress is so important.

 

  • We’re going to be here for the long term. We’re going to be on this planet for the long term. We’re going to be with our family and our friends and our loved ones for the long term. We need to look at ourselves and our SANEity and our eating in terms of the long term because that not only helps us set our positive goals, but when we have slip ups, just like I’ll say, it’s not about short term weight loss. If you slipped up in the short term, that doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things and in fact, if it motivates you to do better in the future, it’s fine. Everyone slips up—always. There is no human being on the planet who has ever tried to make a positive change in their life that hasn’t done two steps forward, one step backward. As long as you keep walking. Keep walking. There is no destination. This is enjoyable lifestyle, but you just have to keep it up. I think that is such a helpful mindset because then we don’t go into the downward spiral of this day didn’t go well, so it doesn’t matter if the next day doesn’t go well, because I’m thinking in terms of the short term.

 

  • Just put your blender somewhere that’s very annoying. Put it on your floor somewhere, put it on your desk, just put it somewhere where you’re like, what is the blender doing here and it’s a constant visual reminder. I’ve got to leave that blender there until I drink my green smoothie.

 

  • Put your blender where your scale used to be. That’s what you need to do. The old one-two punch. Put the blender where the scale used to be.
  • How do I track my success? Success is tracked visually. Very easy. You will feel better. You will look better. If you want to, please go to your doctor, get your bloodwork done because what we’re talking about his healing your body from the inside out and the only way that you know what’s going on in the inside, is by working with your primary care physician for getting a full blood panel done and to go in there every four to six months and see how your body is literally healing from the inside out. Your pants will tell you. Everything will tell you. Your energy levels will tell you how easy it is to walk up the stairs will tell you. Your friends and family will tell you. When your mood is better. When your skin is more rich and full. When your eyes are sparkling. When your hair is stronger. When your nails are stronger. You’ll know you’re moving in the right direction. You don’t need a scale to tell you that. The scale is self-sabotaged package. It is a self-sabotage in a box. So blow it up.

 

  • Clinical research has proven that the simple act of writing down three to five things that you’re grateful per day and sharing that with people has a measureable impact on your quality of life. So if you’re not doing that already, please do that in the SANE support group.

 

  • We live in a world now where there are more people who struggle with overweight than struggle with starvation. The first time that’s ever happened in the history of the world. Starvation is still a big deal, except when it happens in first world countries when we say, let’s go on television and starve ourselves. It’s the same thing. It’s the same thing that’s happening in war torn and impoverished countries. People are slowly dying. It’s not a good thing. It’s not a healthy thing and when your body believes it is dying because it’s being deprived of essential nutrition, it shuts down your sex drive. It shuts down your mental functions. It shuts down everything. Your heart rate slows. Your core body temperature slows down. You are essentially not alive. You are like sleepwalking. You are not fully there.

 

What to Eat

  • The beautiful thing about nutrient dense proteins is we can extend that and we can actually use that same logic of substitution for these types of seafood, especially the most affordable and most convenient and most nutrient dense sources of seafood, canned mollusks and canned wild caught seafood and just do the same substitution. If you have some key dishes that you love to prepare, that your family loves, that you personally love, anything you’d normally make with chicken, anything that you’d normally make with beef (with the exception of a few things), and substitute clams or other canned seafood. Instead of just cutting up and cubing chicken, you could use clams. You’re going to get so much more nutrient density and believe it or not, those wild caught clams bought online, canned, wild caught, are way more affordable than even conventionally bought chicken. It is a great way to save money on SANEity. The first step is to see specifically Amazon.com and Walmart.com, those are my two favorite places to do grocery shopping online.

 

  • As we start to eat more and more seafood, not only can we save some money, but we can protect ourselves with some of the problems that come with conventionally bought meat, (again if you’re doing grass fed or free range meat, that’s a totally different thing). It’s way better for you, but if you can do canned wild caught seafood it’s a great option, not only because of the nutrient density, but also because of the types of fat that you’re going to find in those foods is totally different.

 

  • For example, the fats found in chicken are predominantly Omega 6, polyunsaturated fats and monounsaturated fats, which can be fine. Monounsaturated fats are therapeutic fats, but the fats you’re going to find in seafood, those Omega 3 fats, believe it or not—please believe it because it’s true, Omega 3 fats can actually be prescribed to you. A psychiatrist can actually write you a prescription for the type of fat that you find in seafood because it has been found to so positively impact your mood. Whenever we’re trying to make a big lifestyle change, sometimes our mood can take a hit, which means our motivation can take a hit. Isn’t it amazing, that while we’re saving money, we’re saving time reading the most nutrient dense foods on the planet and we’re substituting those into our existing recipes, that we’ll be taking in more of a fat that is so therapeutic, not only to our body, but to our mind that we could actually written a prescription for that. When I say nutritional therapy, that’s not an exaggeration, that’s not being hyperbolic, that is literally true when it comes to seafood, which is amazing.

 

  • Let’s be very clear. When we say negative aspects, there is no food on the planet, none, that has no negative aspects. Seafood, meat, everything, there is a report that’s saying don’t eat meat, then it’s seafood is bad for you, then it’s eggs that are bad for you and then it’s not just animal foods, because we know corn, wheat, soy, GMOs, we have pesticides, vegetables, pesticides, GMOs, soil depletion. There is no food we could possibly identify where if you went to Google and you typed in, risks of eating _____, you will never get zero search results. You could go to Google and insert risks of _______ and insert any food you want and Google will never say zero search results.

 

  • So what we want to do is we want to eat things that are concentrated sources of protein and whenever possible that will provide us with a concentrated dose of essential vitamins and minerals. The difference between a normal nutrient dense protein and an optimal nutrient dense protein is really just the quantity of essential nutrients that are found in it.

 

  • If you want to turbo charge your SANEity, that’s when you go into those optimal food groups, but again, please don’t let that bog you down. Just know that there is always that optimal step you can take.
  • Probiotics are fantastic, but let’s keep in mind that eating the high fiber, non-starchy vegetables, nutrient dense protein, whole food fats, low fructose fruits, these are SANE foods, and the three things that SANE foods have in common is there are on average when compared to other foods, they’re high in water, fiber and protein. Those are the common denominators. So fiber is phenomenal for gut health. So when you’re going SANE, you will be taking in anywhere from six to ten times the amount of fiber that the average American takes in and that will do fantastic things for your digestive health. Fiber is not actually digested, it can at times ferment. It feeds the bacteria in your gut, but there are of course, foods that take it to the next level. For instance, you could do high probiotic, low sugar dairy foods, just make sure they are low sugar. Some of the most popular, “gut healing yogurts” in the world are nothing more than highly marketed sugar.

 

  • If you need to use a milk like substance, coconut milk is the SANEst. Almond milk can be fine. Rice milk can be fine. Hemp milk can be fine. I would steer away from soy milk personally, but coconut milk would be my preference. Dairy is neither good nor bad. We just have to look at it in terms of SANEity like anything else.