9.22.16

If you are new, welcome, and if you are a long standing member of the SANE family, thank you so much for sharing another wonderful evening with us.  We’ve got Dolores in house, we’ve got Valarie in the house, we’ve got Jane in the house, we’ve got lots and lots of people in the house, and if you are new to the house feel free to introduce yourself.  You will notice in the lower right-hand corner of your screen, you will see a little chat box where it says write your message here.  As you may suspect, if you write your message there it will show up in that little chat window.  Feel free to introduce yourself.  If you have a question for me and you want to get my attention please make sure you click the little talking bubble next to where you would type, and change the mode because I can’t keep up with all the chats.  But if you want to get my attention, if you want to ask me a questions, which is brilliant and beautiful because that’s what these sessions are for; for us to interact.  Please click on that bubble, change it to make it look more like a little Q&A, like Raina, your wonderful SANE certified coach just did and you can ask questions like, if a clown holds the door open for you is it considered a nice jester?  Raina, what are you doing to me?  That’s awesome.  I love that.

We are live and you can play little jokes on me, which is wonderful.  Thank you, Raina, that’s actually very funny.  If you want to get my attention please do as Raina did.  What’s up Marsha?  What’s up Lorraine, Laura, Nick?  What’s going on everybody?  Lots of live questions are great.  We’re going to go for 90 minutes and we are going to do in these calls, we are going to do stuff that we can’t do anywhere else.  So, as you know, hopefully because you’ve been in the same support group and coaching group please jump in there immediately after this call because in there you’re going to find your other amazing SANE family members, as well as your incredible SANE certified coaches.  It is a wealth of love, support, caring, and a wonderful place to get all your questions answered 24/7/365, and of course you got the print check list for your step-by-step program that is the backbone of your Ignite program.  I promise you, if you can do five steps per week—when you log into your Ignite program—at the top, in the middle, everywhere it’s a step-by-step.  Just click on Step-By-Step and complete the steps in order right in the very first orientation course you’ll see the ability to download a PDF of this.  It’s a checklist so you can just check off your various steps.  As you go through this check list you’re going to get some amazing, cumulative transformational knowledge.

Between your step-by-step program and your coaching and support group there’s an amazing amount of knowledge there.  What I want to do in these calls is I want to provide you with a form and an opportunity to do stuff that is not covered in your step-by-step program, and that isn’t a perfect fit within the coaching group because we need to go really deep and we need to be interactive and we need to be able to do it live.  I’m going to try and direct these calls toward topics and subjects that are uniquely suited for our time together here.  Please post follow-up questions.  Let’s go deep.  Let’s make this a unique time together.  This is my favorite thing I do all week because we actually get to interact and be together.  Please post your live questions and let’s have some fun because these are wonderful opportunities for us to talk about stuff that you’re just not going to hear about anywhere else, in a way that we can’t just do anywhere else.  How cool is it that, literally, on this call right now, we have people from 21 different countries on this call right now.  That’s awesome so let’s do this, let’s make it happen.  We’ve got some great questions that were written in but before we get into that I’ve got to give shoutouts to our top contributors in the coaching and support group this week, because as I say every week, please, you’ve joined the SANE family and you’re here in the SANE family because you want a different result.  You want a different result from all the nonsense, calorie counting, starvation, and shame-based garbage that’s been said to use for the past 40 years.  You know what?  Everyone is recognizing that what we’ve been told over the past 40 years is wrong.  The United Sates government is starting to repeal a bunch of the nonsense information that’s been said around fat and cholesterol.  Even some of the big weight lose companies out there are radically changing their guidelines and approaches to be more in line with the modern science.  The fact is that the science is clear now around eating and exercise.  It’s not about shame, it’s not about starvation; it’s about using high quality food, high quality information, and high quality physical movement to general a high quality abundant life.  There’s no room for starvation and there is no room for shame.

A critical component of this is not only not having that correct science but I promise you that the science is so clear around the importance of consistent, loving, and social support.  That’s why every week I am going to go out of my way, Please, I encourage you, if you’re not in the coaching and support group daily.  Even if it’s just for 5 minutes.  Even if you’re just in there to like or to say, I agree, or something on another one of your fellow family members’ posts.  Please do that.  There is a direct correlation between the amount of loving, scientifically backed support that you have and your long-term success on your SANE journey.  Please jump in there and click on the word coaching anywhere in your Ignite program and you will see that there have been some amazing things going on.  I specifically want to recognize this week’s top contributors because we have awesome gamification, which you’ll see more once you jump into the support group.

I want to give some quick shout outs.  Obviously, everyone is doing a lovely job.  I want to shout out to our wonderfully SANE certified coaches, Raina, Wednesday, Lori, Rebecca, Josh and Andrea.  Always wonderful.  Such amazing people.  I want to give big shout outs to our top contributing family members this week.  Stephanie, Reisler—thank you so much Stephanie, Cici as always, Kjersti Koskinen, so sorry Kjersti but I love it.  Kjersti, thank you so much.  Amanda Ehrlich, Leinani Springer, Megan Williams, and Linda Baierthank you so much for our incredible contributions.  Thank you to everyone for your contributions.  Shall we begin?  I think so.  we got 80 minutes left and I’m going to give one more shout out to Step-by-Step Guide because it’s been so cool to see—we actually have analytic data so without being too creepy we can see how far along people are getting in their program.  People have been doing a great job working through their step-by-step program so I appreciate that so much.

Let’s get started with some questions.  I want to start  this week up with—if we have time we had some stuff we covered two weeks ago, which I didn’t finish, which we’ll jump back into but we did have some amazing questions come in before the session here.  Hopefully coming in live here during the session.  I want to answer those first.  The first questions I want to talk about was Xylitol.  Not just Xylitol but let’s talk about your Erythritol too because you may see that also in your SANE Ignite program, also in the SANE store, and in various SANE recipes.  The question is that Xylitol and Erythritol—we’ve talked about this a bit in previous coaching calls but it’s worth talking about again now.  The high level question here is do these SANE sweeteners cause or could they compound sugar addiction?  Will they actually help to reduce sugar addiction or because they’re sweet are they just indirectly stoking the fire of sugar addiction?  Fantastic question.  It’s a good way to think of it as, are these SANE sugar substitutes such as Xylitol or Erythritol, are those analogous to the vaper (smokeless cigarettes), where you just inhale nicotine or something along those lines.  The question is a little bit like, are they like that?  Where they still give you the addictive substance but aren’t as bad for you.  Or, can they actually help to wean you off a sweet or sugar addiction.  It’s a fantastic question, and as always, I want to not just answer the question but I want to go deep and I want to give you an overarching paradigm that you can take and rock in many different context throughout your life.  I want to give you something different, something that you’ve never seen or heard before.

The question here, generally, is about Xylitol and Erythritol, or sweeteners that we say are SANE and use within the SANE program.  Again, we’re never going to say that something like Xylitol is like a non-starchy vegetables where we want to go out of our way to eat more of it.  Let’s make sure that we understand that in the SANE program.  It’s like green light to red light, or an orangish light.  Things on the green end of the spectrum are non-starchy vegetables, nutrient-dense protein, so on and so forth.  We want to go out of our way to eat more of those things.  Then we start to move into the greenish-yellow mid-point.  There are things like legumes and some dairy products, these are things with 0, 1, or 2 servings per day and probably aren’t going to stand in our way but we don’t necessarily need to go out of our way.  For example, if you don’t eat a lot of beans today, if that not something that is part of your lifestyle, you’re never going to hear me or anyone in the SANE Ignite family say, hey, you need to go to the store and buy a 50 pound bag of beans and put them in your blender and make a bean smoothie.  You’re not going to hear that.

Whereas, you will hear us say, go get your 50 pound bag of green leafy vegetables, blend that up and make a green smoothie.  I want you to go out of your way.  We have food that we want to go out of our way to eat more of and food which if we eat them 0-2 servings per day, not a big deal.  They do have some positive health benefits, they could also have some not so great aspects to them but again not the end of the world.  Then we have foods that we actively want to be too full for.  Please, the way I phrase that is very intentional.  I didn’t say that we want to eat less of.  We want to deprive ourselves of.  We want to crowd them out.

That’s a fundamental difference in our SANE mindset that we have here and that you’re hopefully taken on.  We want to fill our bodies, intentionally—we want to go out of our way to fill your body with so much nutrient-dense, delicious, whole, natural SANE food that you are just too full for inSANE nonsense.  It’s not about deprivation.  It’s about crowding out the inSANEity.   As you’ll see though out your Ignite program.  That logic applies to more than just food.  Honestly, I have to tell you, that mindset was taught to me at a very young age by my wonderful, one of my best friends in the whole world—with all honesty and sincerity—my mother.  She’s still my other but one of the things that I know she and I are both most proud of is how our relationship, as well as my relationship with my father, has developed into a wonderful friendship.  One of the things that she taught me and continues to teach me—I remember her saying, Jonathan, there’s so much good in the world why would you let the bad in.  There is so much good in the world, so much beauty.  Don’t let the bad stuff get in the way of that.  That’s what we want to do with the SANE mindset when it comes to food, physical movement, people, emotions, thoughts—what we take into our and body.  Take in so much good that we crowd out a bit of the bad.

We’ve got food that we want to use to crowd out the bad, foods that are right in the middle and then the food that is getting crowded out.  Where does Xylitol and Erythritol fit?  We are not going out of our way to say eat more Xylitol, it’s therapeutic.  It’s definitely not that.  We’re also not saying eat so many vegetables that you’re too full for Xylitol because if you eat Xylitol it’s bad for you.  The reason for that—let me pop out and define what this thing even is.  What is this term Jonathan’s talking about?  By the way, the one thing I didn’t say yet this week, which I say every week, you’ll notice that I’m talking a little bit fast, and I’m saying things like Xylitol and Erythritol and if you’re new you might be like what is he talking about.  Please remember that these calls are recorded and they will be transcribed so you could watch them back and you can always access them from an archive perspective.

I am going to go pretty deep and pretty fast in these calls because that is the point of them.  If not everything makes sense right away, please don’t feel bad, and please don’t let it intimidate you because I promise that as you go through your step-by-step program, if there’s something that doesn’t quite make sense as you start learning the SANE science then as you start asking follow-up questions in your coaching and support group it’s going to make sense.  Let this wash over you and if you need to come back to it, it’s brilliant.  The one thing I’ve got to ask you to promise me is that you are not going to let this intimidate you.  Because we are going to go fast, and it’s a little bit like jumping into the deep end but you’ve got lifeguards all around you.  We want you to feel the water.  We want you to have that experience and know that it’s not the deep end.  It just feels like the deep end.  We’re going to make sure you never, ever drown.  You can come back and learn more as you go.

I’m going to go a little bit deep, please don’t let that scare you.  Xylitol and Erythritol are sugar alcohols and they are natural.  This is a very important distinction because people sometimes say, well, isn’t this like the new Sucralose or the new Sweet ‘N Low.  Xylitol is, for example, found in birch bark, it’s a naturally occurring substance in plants.  It is physically isolated out.  There is no chemical processing that takes place.  Much like, for instance, table sugar is natural.  You take sugar cane or sugar beets and you physically process them—not chemically process them—to isolate out the sugar.  A similar thing can be done with birch bark or corn to create things like Xylitol.  It’s called a sugar alcohol.

Things like Xylitol and Erythritol are as natural as something like table sugar or honey or Agave.  They are all equally natural.  The thing that makes Xylitol and Erythritol SANEr, or what we would call SANE sweeteners or safe sweeteners is that they do not cause hormonal problems in our body.  They don’t spike our blood sugar, and in fact, there has been research done on Xylitol.  Xylitol is actually antibacterial.  It’s used often times for oral hygiene; believe it or not.  This thing that you use in place of sugar, not only doesn’t rot your teeth like sugar but it’s actually good for dental health, which is pretty awesome.  Xylitol and Erythritol do have beneficial health effects.  That doesn’t mean we want to eat pounds and pounds of them but they are consider SANE sweeteners so if we do need to sweeten what we are eating using things like Xylitol and Erythritol are classified within the SANE matrix of sweeteners as natural and non-caloric or not really caloric.  They don’t negatively impact your set point.  They don’t negatively impact your hormones but the excellent questions that’s be post here is do they negatively affect your mind in the sense that they’re still giving you that sweetness.

The question is, Jonathan, I understand that these aren’t going to raise my set point, necessarily.  I understand that they’re not going to cause hormonal problems.  I understand that they’re natural but are they going to just stoke the fires of my sugar addiction.  There are two ways to look at this.  One is, the reason I began all this—by saying, I don’t want you to go out of your way to eat more Xylitol is.  We have been brought up in a culture over the past 40 years where all the wonderful tastes that are available to us, like Umami, which is this sort of fatty, meaty taste, salty, savory, bitter sweet has dominated everything.  Just think about beverages with the exception of, maybe, coffee–but even coffee people sweeten a lot.  It’s like, if it’s not sweet we’re like, why eat that.  We see this a lot in kids, especially.  It’s like the only taste that matters is sweetness.  Why drink it if it’s not sweet.

From a general perspective, I would strongly encourage us—we are going out of our way to eat more non-starchy vegetables, nutrient-dense protein and whole-food fats.  None of those foods are particularly sweet.  We can prepare them to be delicious and savory.  We can salt them because we’ll never add enough salt to our food to cause a problem.  Sodium only becomes a problem when we eat processed packaged nonsense because the amount of sodium they put into that—you would never ever, ever put that much sodium into your food.  I promise you, you would have to sit there with your salt shaker—your arm would get tired before you manually put the amount of salt in food that you find in packaged process nonsense.  It’s from a macro perspective.

I do want us to lessen our dependency on sweetness in general.  That is not at all to say that we need to avoid sweetness.  If SANEity required avoiding sweetness, I would not be SANE because I have a sweet tooth.  I love sweet but what I love is not being addicted to sweets.  It is entirely possible, sweet, the taste of sugar, the sensation of sweet has a unique ability to trigger dopamine receptors in our brain.  That’s why research has now shown, very clearly, that high doses of sugar or any of these natural caloric sweeteners can cause a literal addiction in the brain.  That’s why giving up sugar and giving up sweets is so uniquely hard.  You get the shakes.  You have what’s called cross sensitization, so people who try to go off sugar—you see in studies they have a type of tendency to then start doing other addictive behaviors.  That’s an indication of an addiction.  Because of that we don’t want to swear off sweets.  There is no need to do that.  Sweet is a valid and wonderful flavor.  Sweetness is a wonderful experience in life.  There is no need to get rid of it.

What we do need is to take back our control.  We need to take back our control over sweets.  A good analogy is, I think is alcohol; right?  Because it is entirely possible to drink alcohol without it becoming a major problem in your life.  Absolutely.  Now, it’s a lot harder to do that with cigarettes.  There are people who smoke cigarettes socially, it’s rare but there are people who smoke cigarettes every once in a while.  They are not addicted to them and they can stop smoking them.  That’s very rare.  There are a lot more people who can drink alcohol without developing a problem or without developing alcoholism.  Right now, a lot of us because of the bad information we’ve been taught have been turned into sugar addicts.  The amount of sugar, the dose of sugar that we have to take in to get an effect is so high that it causes a bunch of unhealthful nonsense in our body, in our brain, and in our hormones.

What we need to do as we start going SANE is by taken in our non-starchy vegetables, or nutrient-dense protein, and our whole-food fats—what we’re going to do is we are going to decrease that lack sensitivity to sugar, and we are going to increase our sensitivity to sweetness in general.  We’re also going to develop our taste for bitter.  I know that sounds like, bitter, that’s disgusting but remember wine and beer are extremely bitter and most people don’t have too much of a problem enjoying those substances because bitter can be just as enjoyable as any other flavor.  We general like to eat what we are used to eating and what’s beautiful about that—I know it sounds obvious but what we’re used to eating is 100 percent up to our control.

We have people from 24 countries on this call, across those 24 countries, that which is considered delicious is very different.  That which is considered delicious is that which we’re used to eating.  We need to go SANE.  We need to focus on non-starchy vegetables, nutrient-dense protein, and whole-food fats because what that will do is it will allow us to continue to enjoy sweetness in a safe way using SANE sweeteners like Xylitol and Erythritol, and other things like Stevia, and Luo Han Guo but those are a bit more advanced.  If there are follow up questions I would be happy to answer those but lets focus on Xylitol and Erythritol right now.  To be able to enjoy those like we would enjoy a fine glass of wine with dinner.  We’re not drinking a bottle of wine in the bathroom by ourselves—that’s probably not something you want to do, but we can absolutely have a nice glass of wine with dinner.

Same kind of thing, if we want to make a wonderful SANE smoothie or SANE dessert and we want to sweeten it up using some Xylitol—first of all we are going to use way less Xylitol than we would have used as we go SANE because our sensitivity to sweetness will go up.  Ask anyone in your SANE family who has been SANE for longer than 30 days and they will tell you, baby carrots or sugar snap peas or even things like almonds, you start to taste sweetness.  Especially in fruits.  If you go SANE for 30 days and you bite into an orange, you’re just like, Wow, that’s a totally different experience because your taste buds have recalibrated.

Will eating Xylitol and Erythritol cause a furthering of sugar addiction?  Can they do that?  Let me give a quick disclaimer here.  Everything you’re going to see in your SANE program, one of the reasons it works so well is because it’s not my opinion.  It’s doesn’t matter what I think.  It matters what has been proven in peer-reviewed research.  Your life, your health, and your well-being, that’s not a matter of opinion.  That matters too much to be dependent on some guru’s opinion or some, so-called expert on the internet’s opinion.  What I want to provide to you, what every member of your SANE family wants to provide to you, and what every member of your SANE team wants to provide to you is peer-reviewed, scientific research.  If anything I say here starts to become a little bit more of my educated opinion, I’m going to be very clear about that.

So, what I’m about to say here is going to be a bit more educated opinion because I’m not aware of any double-blind controlled trials that have taken sugar addicts and fed one of them high doses of sugar and another group high doses of Xylitol and seen if—and did FMRI Scans at the end and saw if the indicators of sugar addiction was still present.  That’s the kind of bar that I have for you.  That’s the kind of bar that your entire SANE team has for the information we give you.  We’re not going to say something that is true unless there is definitive, scientific research showing that if you eat more vegetables your cholesterol profile will improve, period.  Always.  No question.  Done.   Here, I’m going to take what we know from science and what we know from experience and I’m going to give you my best guess.

My best guess based on—it’s called hyper-palatability—your brain doesn’t really care so much if the sensation of sweet is coming from aspartame, which is an unnatural, artificial, non-caloric sweetener.  Whether it’s coming from honey or whether it’s coming from Xylitol.  Your taste buds say that this is sweet and your brain says, I feel good.  I feel good about this.  Even sugar does not cause sugar addiction if it’s not consumed in high doses.  There is no evidence for sugar addiction, every, when it is consumed in natural doses.  Natural doses, for example, would be the occasional piece of fruit when it’s in season.  Fruit that has not been crossed breed and hybridized to be really high in fructose.  Right?  Modern apples are like candy.  If you eat a red delicious apple that you find at the grocery store it’s this monolithic, GMO, cross-breed thing that is saturated with fructose verses if you were to go and find a naturally occurring apple; it’s little and it’s bitter.  It’s not particularly sweet.

There is no research anywhere that indicates that when we consume natural foods, in their natural state, with their natural levels of sugar that sugar addiction develops.  Sugar addiction—or let’s call it sweet addiction because that’s really what it is—is when we get a certain threshold, a certain dose of sweetness at a critical mass of frequency, which makes sense.  That’s how addiction works in general.  You’re not going to become an alcoholic if you have a glass of wine with dinner three times per week because one glass of wine three times per week is not enough of a dose to cause a meaningful change in your neurological receptors or in the sensitivity in your body.  Now, if you drink a high dose of wine, if you chug a bottle of wine twice a day or every day of the week then you have a problem.

When we talk about addiction, in general, it’s really a function of the dose and then the frequency.  It’s not sugar addiction, it’s a sweet addiction.  It’s really not even a sugar addiction.  It’s sugar and starch that both break down to sugar in our bloodstream and that causes a good sensation in your brain.  So, sugar and starch, that whole rigmarole that going on, that’s a function of dose and concentration.  Even concentrated starches like rice and pasta, those are not things that human beings have eaten for very long.  Iit seems like we’ve eaten them for a long time but when you look through the course of human history, that dose, eating 300 grams of starch—and I know 300 grams is not particularly meaningful to anybody but that’s a lot of starch.  There’s like 30 grams of sugar, plus or minus, little bit less than that, there about 24 grams of sugar in a can of coke.  It’s not hard to eat breakfast cereal or a plate of pasta and to consume 300 grams of starch, or 10X that, which then just turns into sugar in your bloodstream so that can also cause problems.

If you were to consume Xylitol and Erythritol or any sweet substance at a dose and frequency there’s a chance that it can stoke addiction.  If you follow the SANE guidelines you will not do that.  There is no way within the SANE framework.  To follow what we say, in terms of the quantity and quality of non-starchy vegetables, the quantity and quality of nutrient-dense protein, and the quantity and quality of whole-food fats.  If you do that it will be physically impossible for you to eat enough Xylitol or Erythritol to cause—and I would argue especially with the counteracting effects of non-starchy vegetables, or to continue a sweetener addiction.  But, if we use, for example, if we were to have a very stressful day at work and we were to come home and just eat a dozen SANE sugar cookies—which I believe there is a recipe for in the Ignite program—that very well could cause addictive properties.

It’s not because Xylitol is bad or evil, it’s because almost anything that we’re ingesting into our body and causes a big enough dose of certain chemicals in our brain can cause an addiction.  Even things that are otherwise healthy.  There are demonstrable cases—let’s call it a weak addiction, in terms of actually scanning the brain and determining addictions.  For instance, exercise addiction because things like jogging—things along those lines—cause a dopamine rush and there are individuals who exercise to exhaustion, or exercise when they shouldn’t be, or exercise to the expense of their quality of work, or the quality of their health, or the quality of their family relationships are also signs of addiction.  Doing something that we know is bad for us continuously because even though we know it’s bad for us in the long term or it’s making us feel bad it actually makes us feel good in the moment.  Even exercise can cause that.

Does that mean we want to avoid exercise?  Absolutely not.  It just means we want to take a SANE approach to it.  That’s a really long answer to an excellent question, which is can consumption of Xylitol and Erythritol, or any other SANE sweetener cause or further a sweet and starchy—let’s call it the same thing—addiction.  Can it cause it?  No.  If you were SANE to begin with—if you started out SANE—and you had a baby and the baby started out SANE then within the SANE framework they would never consume enough Xylitol or Erythritol to develop that level of addiction.  If we already have a sweetness addiction and we start to use Xylitol and Erythritol and to continue to take in the same amount of sweetness but we’re just using Xylitol instead of table sugar—if we’re consuming 100 grams of table sugar per day, which sounds like a lot, but when you add up fruit juice, soda, what we add to our coffee, and what we’re fed at social events that’s actually a very low number.  When we look at the data and we just replace that with Xylitol that will actually help our health but it won’t help our addiction.  The addiction will stay.

Our blood sugar will be objectively helped by that but the addiction won’t be.  The excellent question here is, yes, technically, if you consume a sufficient dose and frequency of anything sweet and you continue that dose and frequency with SANE sweeteners the addiction will continue.  But, if you follow the SANE framework and if you allow your body time to re-sensitize itself to sweetness in general, and then you take a SANE approach to your overall eating, Xylitol and Erythritol are beautiful because they allow you to enjoy sweetness like you would enjoy a fine glass of wine a couple of times per week.  It’s not going to have any of the negative health impacts in terms of your metabolic health or your digestive health or your hormonal health that the conventional forms of sugar, honey, Agave, and things like that would have. So boom!  There’s the deep answer for you.   Let me see if there any follow up questions to that one.

We do have some excellent questions that have come in but none about this.  Please let me know if you have follow up questions, I know there is a little bit of a delay so it’s okay if you have a follow up question about sugar, please let me know.  Hopefully that was helpful.  I will come back to that in a second if there are any follow up questions.  I want to move onto the next question that came in, which has to do with a substance called Inulin.  Inulin is an extract from chicory and it is being used in a lot of healthy products so you’ll see it on ingredient lists, you might be hearing about it and might be wondering; what is this?  Or what is chicory root fiber and where does it lie on the SANE spectrum.

Inulin is a type of fiber that is not easily digested by your body, technically not digested at all.  It’s a pre-biotic, which means that it actually feeds bacteria in your gut.  Because of that it actually has some very beneficial properties for your health.  It can cause significant digestive problems.  When I say digestive problems I mean gas, bloating, and diarrhea because it is not digested fully.  In fact, here is a little inside scoop for you.  In the very first batch of the SANE meal bars we used chicory root fiber and, quickly, we stop doing that because from our own internal SANE team beta testing, you ate a bar and then you couldn’t leave your office or house.  So, inulin—put it this way.  You will naturally not overconsume inulin or chicory root fiber or anything along those lines—let me phrase this differently.  You will know you overconsumed it because you will have to go to the bathroom, and you will not do that again because it’s a very unpleasant experience.  So, while you can, for example, sugar—you can just keep eating sugar and the more of it you eat, the better you feel in the moment but you’ll feel terrible later.  It’s very difficult to eat inulin—just like it’s really hard to overeat spinach, like your stomach would really start to hurt if you ate seven pounds of spinach.  There are some substances–let’s call them self-regulating, it’s very hard to overeat them.  Inulin, I would say is fine and potentially even beneficial in a SANE life style because the dose of it that you would be able to conformable eat is a dose that would have more positive effects than any negative effects.

Inulin, chicory root are okay in the doses that you would eat them in and if you ate them in higher doses you would stop for other reason; if that is helpful.  Let’s go ahead and take a quick look here at some questions that did come about the sweetener stuff that I was talking about.  CC asks, should we use Xylitol and Erythritol over Stevia in my green tea?  Beautiful questions, CC.  No.  I would highly recommend pure stevia, that’s important, pure stevia extract is not Truvia.  Truvia is something else, it’s a product where they blend stevia with other things.  Stevia and Luo Han Guo are herbs.  They’re herbs that are like cinnamon, think of it like cinnamon for example.  They are very flavorful, they’re kind of sweet.  They’re not really sweet.  If you took Stevia, pure stevia leaf extract and you put it on your tongue it would not give you the same sensation that table sugar does.

If possible, my recommendation is if you are going to sweeten anything use Stevia and Luo Han Guo as your go to sources.  The problem with them is that they are very difficult to bake with because stevia extract is teeny, teeny, tiny.  I mean, if it’s liquid stevia extract you’re putting an eye dropper, you’re putting one drop in.  If it’s powder you’re putting a sixteenth of a tablespoon in, so if you are trying to bake and you need to add a cup of sugar and you’re substituting in—like you can’t substitute a drop of Stevia for a cup of sugar because the cup of sugar changes consistency.  People will use Xylitol frequently for baking because it substitutes gram for gram or once for once with other sweeteners.  If you do need to sweeten, which again, you don’t have to sweeten things but if you do, Stevia and Luo Han Guo are your primary sources.  If that is just hard and you’re like, if I have to do this I’m not going to do it and I’m going to go use sugar instead, then absolutely, you’re going to use Xylitol and Erythritol.  Hopefully that helps, if you can you’re going to use the herbs Stevia and Luo Han Guo.

Leinani asks, do the same principles apply with respect to whole-food fats?  A follow up question—thank you so much—is, can you get addicted to a feel in your month, for instance, the feel of something creamy?  I’ve seen no research around an addiction—there’s a habit, there’s a strong preference, and then there’s—when I say addiction that’s a big statement.  There’s the diagnostic manual for psychological conditions.  Addiction is very well defined and there are various measures we can do to define an addiction.  Sugar addiction—a lot of research had to happen for people—I should just say, sweet addiction.  There are still some researchers that say that’s not a real addiction.  There’s a lot of research that says it is.  If you take a questionnaire that evaluates whether or not you are addicted to a substance it would be pretty easy to see that many of us would qualify as addicted to sugar, sorry, sweetness.  I have seen no research that suggest the same thing can happen for creamy.  You can become very—you can love creamy, you can love salty, but whether or not you start to get headaches or experience what’s called cross sensitization, for those things, I have seen no research suggesting that.  I could say that with pretty high confidence because the sweet research is very compelling and there are still some researchers saying, I don’t know if that is really an addiction.

Let’s be clear, there are different levels of addiction.  There is an addiction scale where—heroin, cocaine, and tobacco.  These things are at the top of the addiction scale, whereas there are other addictions that are going to be lower on that scale.  Alcohol addiction exist but it is not as server as a heroin addiction.  There are different levels of addiction as well.  It’s a spectrum; right?  At some point we say it’s not classified.  From here up on the spectrum it’s an addiction and from here down it’s not, so right around here it becomes ambiguous whether it’s an addiction or not.  The real thing to be concerned with, Leinani, and an excellent questions, is what’s called hyper-palatable foods and hyper-palatable food like products, we can develop an addictive tendencies towards hyper-palatable foods.

Hyper-palatable foods are food like products, meaning there’s nothing in nature that is hyper-palatable, nothing in nature is unnaturally delicious.  It is naturally delicious because it exist in nature.  But when food manufacturers—which is an oxymoron because you cannot manufacture food.  When food became comparable to cars—they come off assembly lines, it’s like, oh, my goodness.  But anyway.  Salt, sugar, or fat, things like MSG, and other additives by now it’s pretty well know that major food companies hire advanced food tastes scientist that literally engineer things like Oreos, Twinkies, and certain frozen meals to be so delicious that we have the Pringles affect, which is, once you pop, you cannot stop.  So, we have foods that have been engineered to high jack our brains.  Those foods are called hyper-palatable foods and anything that is hyper-palatable is going to give you a dose of reward—when we say reward, I mean, like chemical response in your brain that can trigger addictive behavior.

Here’s the secret or here’s the trick.  It’s when you combined salt, sugar, and fat in unnatural doses and unnatural context that that happens.  Sugar—this is actually very fascinating, so I really appreciate you asking this.  If you think about sugar, think about a Pixy Stix, or think about a soda, or some of these Kool-Aid type things.  Here’s a great analogy, think about if you have every eaten a bowl of sugary cereal—hopefully you haven’t done this recently but I’m sure we’ve all eaten—I definitely remember back in the day when I was younger, much younger, Peanut Butter Crunch, and the Peanut Butter Crunch was so crunchy that it actually cut up the roof of your month, but it was so good.  It was hyper-palatable; that’s not good.  If you’ve ever eaten a bowl of very sweet cereal, a lot of people would say, what’s your favorite part of that experience?  A lot of people would say it’s the milk at the very bottom that’s had all the sugar soaked up into it.  Yummm!  It’s like the more sugar the better.  In food taste science it’s called the bliss point.  It’s like higher and higher concentrations of sugar, it just goes higher and higher concentrations of pleasure chemicals in our brain, which sounds a lot like higher and higher doses of a drug, I mean, just pure cocaine.  I hate using those words but that’s the way this stuff is being used.

Think about fat.  Think about taking a stick of butter, which is just pure fat, put it on a Popsicle stick and just taking a bite, not particularly appetizing, right.  So, butter or fat is only good often times when it’s combined with something else.  The way that the taste for fat or umami works—it’s not just like we want pure, we want to get a big fatty piece of meat and ignore the meat, cut off the fat around the edge and just eat the fat.  Most people find that disgusting.  I don’t know too many people that think biting into a stick of butter is particularly delicious.  While I so know many people who think drinking pure sugar mixed with water is quite delightful, in fact, that’s what’s sold in grocery stores, sugar mixed with water.

The same thing applies with salt.  Just eating salt, you’ll notice it’s not like, Oh, man, when I get to the bottom of a bag of popcorn I just like to get the salt at the bottom, just pure salt.  No. It’s usually that salt needs to be diluted with something.  So, sugar is unique in that sense, sugar is just pure sweet and can cause this addictive response but when we start to mix salt and fat, or salt and sugar, or sugar and fat, or salt, sugar, and fat, that’s when crazy hyper-palatable things happen in our brain.  If you’ll notice there are certain combinations that don’t happen in nature.  Fatty and sweet, there’s no—or there’s not a lot—there’s not a food that I can think of easily that is both natural, high in fat, and high in sugar.  There are things that are naturally high in sugar and there are things that are naturally high in fat but those things don’t go together.

If you look at inSANE foods, they’re kind of characterized by foods that combine fat and sugar together.  Donuts.  Candy bars.  They combined fat and sugar.  Those combinations cause some chaos in our brain.  But when we’re eating natural SANE sources, that’s much less of a problem because our non-starchy vegetables, nutrient-dense protein, and whole-food fats, and even if we combined our whole-food fats with a natural amount of our safe sweeteners, we are getting high doses of fiber, we’re eating a bunch of vegetable anyway so fat and salt already have a less addictive characteristics than sweet.  Then when we eat them within a SANE framework it’s going to be difficult, if not impossible, to dose them to the level that it would cause a problem.  But, again, if we eat them in an unnatural context in food like products can definitely cause a problem, it can definitely cause addictive behavior.  While sweet addiction is pretty well classified as an addiction, hyper-palatable food can cause addictive like behaviors, let’s say.  We’re going to avoid all that nonsense when we go SANE because we’re going to focus on eating real whole foods and real whole foods can’t do that anyway.  Excellent question.  I really appreciate that.

CiCi asks a question here, she has an arm injury but as long as she is doing her eccentric exercises on other parts of my body I’m I still release the right amount of hormones?  Oh, because she has an arm injury.  CiCi, great questions.  So, CiCi’s questions is, if I’m not working my arms eccentrically is the overall metabolic effect of eccentric exercise being compromised.  The short answer is no.  That’s good.  The long answer is as exciting as a heck, and it’s a great opportunity to share some really compelling science with you so thank you for asking that, CiCi.  I remember this, it’s a quick antidote—there’s a term in psychology called a light bulb moment or flash bulb memory.  If you were around when the news about President John F. Kennedy had been shot, or probably everyone who is on the call was around when the news of the 9/11 terrorist attacks happened.  Often times you could probably remember where you were and exactly what you were doing when you heard that news.  It’s like a flash bulb happened and your mind captured everything.  It’s called a flash bulb memory.  They don’t always require catastrophic terrible things to trigger a flash bulb memory.  You may have some other flash bulb memories that don’t involve horrible examples like I just gave.  Sorry about that.

One of my flash bulb memories that didn’t involve anything horrible was very early in the journey towards all the research that led to the SANE way of living I read an article and its title was something like squat for strong arms.  It was presenting research that was new at the time—this was a long time ago, it’s not new anymore.  It was research where individuals—there was a very rigorously controlled trial and you took one group of people and you had them do nothing but arm exercises, and you had another group of people do nothing but big leg exercises.  So, squats, leg presses, movements that involved all their muscles below their waist.  So, their gluteals, their hamstrings, or quadriceps, like, 70 percent of their muscle is below your waist so it’s really important that we work that muscle, for the following reasons.  They then looked at the results in strength at the end of the study and they found that the individuals who trained just their arms actually had a less increase in strength than individuals who trained their big leg muscles.  You say, that’s crazy.  How is that even possible?

Well, the real benefit to smart exercise is that it triggers the release of hormones that have a global impact on your body; it’s called Global Metabolic Conditioning.  It’s a little bit like when you work your big muscles—they’re big muscles. Right?  They’re going to cause a big hormonal response in your body.  That big hormonal response in your body triggers the growth and development of calorie, hungry, lean muscle tissue.  Again, we’re not talking about big, bulky muscles, we’re talking about natural, lean, sexy, health, calorie, hungry muscle tissue.  The more of those hormones we can trigger in a natural fashion the better results we get.  Your arm muscles are a teeny, tiny fraction of the total amount of muscle on your body.  That’s why our goal with eccentric exercise is to focus on our biggest muscle groups and then to make sure we hit every single muscle fiber within those muscle groups because the more muscle fibers we activate, especially our deeper muscle fibers—which if you don’t know what I’m talking about, it is—that’s why we have our check list here.  It looks like Course SANE201, we’re going to go deep into eccentric exercise and deep into deep muscle fibers, so be sure to check it out.  But do it in order.  It’s not going to make sense if you don’t do it in order.

When you trigger your deep muscle fibers within your big muscle groups you’re going to get a wonderful, what’s called, anabolic cascade, which is going to have tremendous metabolic benefits throughout your body.  Benefits that are not possible through any quantity of any other form of exercise.  It’s just not possible.  If, for instance, you just did not—even if you weren’t injured and you just said I’m never going to work my arms.  I’m never going to do strength training for my arms and you diligently did eccentric for your legs, you would reap 90 percent of the benefit—again, I don’t have a peer-reviewed—the vast majority of the benefit.  Not only that, but your arms would actually get stronger.  That’s just objectively true.  You can actually see the studies in your step-by-step program.  No questions.  You don’t need to worry as long as you are working the biggest muscle groups and you’re getting deep within those muscle groups, that’s when you’re going to get the biggest benefit.  Because the benefit, again, from exercise, the idea of like, I’m going to just work muscles here and just remove belly fat here.  Anyone who tells you that you can do that, I would strongly recommend running the other direction because that is objectively false.

You cannot burn fat here.  Your body doesn’t work that way.   It works globally.  Of course, you can strengthen your forearms by doing four arm exercises, but, for example, saying, I just want to burn fat on my underarms so I’m going to do triceps extensions; it does not work that way.  I assure you, you will actually burn radically more fat on your triceps by working your leg muscles because the hormones you’ll release—your anabolic hormones—in your legs will be massively higher dose than the amount you’d release by working your triceps, and that higher dose will cause a much better benefit throughout your body and not just in your triceps.  Thank you for that excellent question, CC.

Penny asks, I struggle with adrenal fatigue and that makes it hard to exercise.  Any suggestions?  Penny, first of all, I’m glad that you’re not saying, I suffer from adrenal fatigue so I’m just going to double down and do more exercise.   Which I know sounds silly but a lot of people do that.  A lot of people are in a state of caloric—what are we told to do?  What are we told to do, Penny?  We’re told that we need to wake up early.  So, we need to sleep less, don’t eat any breakfast, just fast, because food is bad for us.  Then go jog on pavement for 45 minutes.  So, slam our bones on pavement for 45 minutes and then come home and you’re probably going to have crazy sugar and starch addictions because that kind of cardiovascular exercise can cause that.  That will literally take fatigue adrenals—sleeping less and doing more of that kind of cardiovascular exercise will burn out your adrenals superfast.  Superfast.  If you’re experiencing adrenal fatigue or any other metabolic dysfunction, we need to heal that first.

Exercise is, for instance, someone who has 150 pounds of excess fat on their body.  According to the biggest loser, which—anyway, I have strong thoughts about that show.  If we have 150 pounds of body fat to lose, the last thing we would ever do is to take a body that’s carrying 150 pounds of excess fat and abuse it physically.  Because a body that’s carrying 150 pounds of fat and slamming up and down on pavement is not—we need to focus on food first, no matter what.  Think of exercise—actually, this is a really great analogy.  If you have the flu, no one would tell you, well, you need to go and get some more exercise.  What they would tell you is that you’re sick so you need to take it easy, and you need to flood your body with nutrition and you need to rest.  You need to get to a baseline state of health and then—right, so we only take it easy until our body can get back to baseline.  Then, if we want to get better, we do need to push our body because that’s what triggers growth.  But when our body is sick—think about it this way.  If we’re sick over here and we’re normal here and we’re super normal and SANE over here, we got to get here before we can worry about being here. Right?

Exercise is extra credit.  If you’ve got the flu, going and running a marathon will not make you feel better.  It will make you worse.  If you have adrenal fatigue, if you’re having thyroid problems, if you have any major metabolic decease, which is what these conditions are, we’ve got to heal you with loving social support.  We got to heal you with an abundance—a therapeutic dose of nutrition through SANE foods.  Through rest and relaxation and restored of healing activities.  Think yoga, think meditation, and think tai chi.  When we use those healing therapies to get you back to normal so you don’t have the flu anymore then we can trigger growth.  We can make you super normal.  We can make you super SANE.  But we’ve got to get you back to normal first.  Exercise is not bad, exercise is brilliant.  The right kind.  But we have to make sure that we’re at the right point in our SANE journey to take advantage of that.  I think the flu analogy is pretty helpful.  Hopefully that will help you.

Susan asks, how do you keep a positive outlook?  That’s the part I find hardest to do.  When I feel crappy I usually end up eating crappy food.  Excellent question, Susan.  There’s quite a bit of science—it’s an emerging field, positive psychology, for example, which we can’t do justice to in our time together here.  But there is an abundant amount of literature out there.  One of the things, for example, gratitude journaling, and social support that we talk about in the program.  These are proven techniques.  I would strongly recommend, if you have a chance, check out some of the peer-reviewed work—because it’s beautiful because now a day real researchers like Dr. Lyubomirsky, Dr. Seligman.  There’s a bunch of positive psychology.  Look up positive psychology at your library or on Amazon.com and there is an abundant set of—look, the person needs to work at—like Martin Seligman is the president of the American Psychological Association, ten year faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, I believe.  Those are the types of people we’re looking towards, not some other people who will remain unnamed.  I strongly recommend checking out some of the research there.

Of course, there is a huge component of our mood and our mental performance that’s tied to eating.  Absolutely.  You can be prescribed omega-3 fatty acids to help with anxiety and depression.  Pure un-dutched cocoa powder has a phenomenal impact on mood.  SANE eating in general.  Avoiding blood sugar swings.  That’s all going to help.  You really want to make sure that you’re sticking with your SANEity.  You want to use every aspect you have in your SANE tool kit.  That includes food, and that includes social support it.  Social support, again, clinically proven to help.  Exercise not only clinically proven to help but clinically proven to help at or, in some cases, superior to pharmaceuticals—and that’s Dr. John J. Rady, who you may have recognized from the Calorie book, he was quite an influential individual to that book.  He was also kind enough to provide some testimonials for the book, which is nice.  He’s on the dust jacket.  His research and many other researchers work at the Harvard Medical School, as well as many other institutions have shown that a proper dose of smart, safe exercise can have the similar effects with none of the side effects as things like a Zoloft, for example.

We’re going to use SANE eating.  We’re going to use SANE, loving support and self-love.  We’re going to use SANE smart exercise and then in addition to that, definitely check out real research based positive psychology.  I’m a huge fan of Dr. Seligman, I would just read all of his work.  Dr. Martin Seligman, he’s kind of the father of it.  Then Victor Frankl, also a wonder resource if you’re not familiar with him.  Check that out for sure.

Stephanie Reisler, says, have you ever heard of the experience of anyone getting high or speedy from eating SANE?  I’ve seemed to have sped up a lot.  Ton’s more energy and just buzzy.  Oh, absolutely.  Stephanie, thank you for asking this question.  This is awesome.  One hundred percent.  The one thing, as you know, throughout the program and throughout our time together, we’re all about honesty and we’re all about what the science says.  And, what the science says, period, is that what we do for a long-term metabolic healing and fat loss, we can achieve permanent fat loss.  But that requires healing, and that healing takes time.  So, we measure our success on six month intervals not six day intervals; for sustained healing and metabolic fat loss.  But for energy—holy moly!  That’s the kind of stuff—how we feel.  Our energy levels.  How we think.  Our mood.  Our sex drive and sexual performance.  Our levels of anxiety or depression.  These are things—our skin, our hair, and our nails—these are areas where we can see immediate and profound benefits.

It’s impossible for us to not feel those benefits if we’re truly going SANE.  Because what we are doing is flooding our bodies—I mean, imagine you have a car, imagine you have a Ferrari, a Lamborghini, a beautiful car that is so powerful, and unfortunately, for some reason the owner of that car has been told to put a blend of low quality gasoline, a little bit of kerosene mixed in with some lighter fluid and some water, for whatever reason, maybe because it was cheaper or maybe because some big company wanted to make a profit.  I don’t know.  The Lamborghini kind of didn’t run too well.  It broke down all the time and it was just like, what’s going on?  Then one day the person decided to say, I going to put premium, unleaded fuel in this beautiful machine.  You’re going to get beautiful results.

Stephanie, you and every other member of the Ignite family are here—none of us are born with diabetes.  None of us are born with metabolic syndrome.  These are thing because of the bad information we’ve been given.  When we give our bodies, our beautiful biology—I mean, when you start to understand the complexity and the control system, and when we feed it the proper food—just like it has antioxidants.  I’m sure you’ve heard of antioxidants.  What are antioxidants?  Antioxidants are things that help neutralize free radicals which help to prevent us from getting cancer, a.k.a, our body contains cancer fighting drugs; if you want to call it that.  Naturally, our body naturally produces cancer fighting substances because our body doesn’t want cancer.

Our body also, for example, will produce a hormone called leptin.  If we start getting too much fat on our body and we’re not hormonally clogged and we don’t have neurological inflammation from inSANE foods.  This hormone will naturally regulate our appetite, it will tell us we’re full and it will increase our basal metabolic rate so that we naturally burn off more calories.  It’s beautiful.  Biology is a beautiful, symbiotic system, which if we put the fuel, the pure fuel that’s intended to be put into that system.  We’ve all got Lamborghinis and Ferraris sitting in our garage here.  If we give it the fuel that’s it intended it is going to turbo boost.

Depending on how long the improper fuel was put into that system it might take a little bit more or less time.  Maybe we’ve got to drive it around a little bit and we got to wait to take it to the car wash.  The analogy kind of breaks down.  But, yeah.  Absolutely, Stephanie, when you flood your body with an abundance of therapeutic nutrition then when you start to move your body in a way that actually helps it in a way that helps it rather than hurting it—that’s smarter exercise verses conventional exercise.  Then the icing on the cake is that you’re making sure that you’re getting rest and relaxation through proper sleep.  That’s actually icing on the cake and then you top that off, maybe this is the cherry on top of that.  Coconut cake with some Xylitol in it.

That’s the loving social support you’re going—you can’t not have that level of energy and feel that speedy.  You’ve got premium fuel in your gas tank and you’re driving on the Autobahn looking out on the beautiful coast, you’ve got a freshly paved road.  It’s all green lights.  It takes a second to get there but it’s all green lights when you get there.  Thank you for asking that questions, and yes.  Absolutely.  Absolutely.  That’s why I act this way.  This is water, this isn’t any sort of stimulant; this is just water.

Next questions.  Leinani asks, how does isometric exercise compare the efficiency of eccentric exercise?  Isometric exercise can be very effective, Leinani, there has been some research on something called Max Contraction Training.  (Demonstrating) Where that would be, for example, if you’re doing a bicep curl, this is the concentric, if you just hold here it’s isometric, and then you extend with the eccentric.  The key, even with eccentric exercise, is it’s not to say that we don’t want to do the concentric action, it’s not to say that we don’t want to do an isometric, and then an eccentric.  The whole movement is good.  Concentric movement is good.  Isometric hold is good.  Then eccentric is good as well.  We just want to make sure that we are using those movements to our advantage.  With an eccentric focus on our exercise, what we can do is we can just handle more resistance than we could otherwise.

The same thing applies with isometric.  While you may not be able to lift a weight, you could probably get the weight—like, if you are doing a bicep curl, while you may not be able to take 50 pounds and do this but if someone gave you 50 pounds when you were already like this and told you to hold it, you probably could, but then at some point your arm would start to do this, and no matter how much you tried to hold it you’d go down.  That kind of what eccentric exercise is.  When you look through your program, what we recommend is that you get–with assistance—you get to that point of contraction.  That point of isometric when you try to hold the isometric but you used enough resistance so that you’re trying to do an isometric but it becomes an eccentric because the resistance is so significant.  With an isometric, again, if you had to hold the top position, or the isometric contracted position, you would use less resistance than if it was okay for you to slowly extend down, and we want to maximize the resistance safely so you can try to make it an isometric but if you could hold an isometric for 10 seconds you wouldn’t be getting as much benefits as if you added resistance and over the course of 10 seconds this slowly happened; if that makes sense.  Isometric is helpful, it just doesn’t allow as much of a load to be applied to the muscle and because of that we may be start isometric but then we add resistance till an eccentric is forced; if that makes sense.

Leinani has a good follow-up question.  She said, during her last eccentric workout her muscles were tired but not sore, they felt fine.  Within two days is it okay to do more than one eccentric session a week?  I would recommend doing one eccentric session and then one smarter interval training session per week and then the next week you would just increase the resistance you used during your eccentrics.  If the optimal amount of resistance is used during your eccentrics it should be physically impossible to do the same amount of resistance three days later.  That’s actually the best test for if you were using enough resistance.

Of course, you always want to practice safety first but if you were to do a leg press movement with 100 pounds and then three days later you could do it again with a 100 pounds then you could do it with more than 100 pounds.  Because you didn’t reach what’s called eccentric failure.  If you did reach eccentric failure it would be physically impossible to lift that same amount of weight or lower that same amount of weight three days later.  So it’s fine, we want to gradually work our way up to that level of resistance but my strong recommendation, based on the research, is that instead of saying, I’m going to less resistance more frequently, you would say, cool, I did that, I wrote down my resistance.  Now three or four days later I’m going to do smarter interval training and then the next week I’m going to increase my resistance, and I’m going to continue to increase my resistance until I feel the level of soreness that is required.

Again, you don’t have to be crippling sore but if you—put it this way.  You will not be sore but your muscles will still be repairing themselves, such that if you used a 150 pounds and you try to use 150 pounds three or four days later you might not be sore but you just wouldn’t be able to do it.  That’s a good way to determine the amount of weight you should be using is if you can do it more frequently than one a week you would necessarily always be sore, especially if you’re going really SANE, you’re getting proper sleep, you’re eating a proper quantity and quality of protein; we can definitely impact how sore you’re going to be.  If you’re not eating proper protein, for example, SANE, clean whey protein before and after your workouts can radically reduce your level of soreness, which a lot of people like, myself included.  What we want to do is, soreness is one measure but then if you can physically do the same movement with the same level of resistance more than once a week then it’s time to increase the resistance; if that helps.

Next question here has to do with steroids but not the type of steroids that we’re used to hearing about.  We’re not talking about anabolic steroids, we’re talking about other corticosteroids that are taken for other medical conditions like COPD or other types of things.  What has happened with this individual is they were put on corticosteroids for certain medical conditions, and the doctor had said that this is just something you need to be on for the rest of your life.  There have been side effects, unfortunately, which is weight gain, fluid retention, things along those lines. What do we do in these circumstances and is it expected?  Yes.  It is expected.  A common side effect of—we’re not talking about illegal anabolic steroids.  We’re talking about other steroids you would be given for therapeutic reasons by your doctor can increase blood sugar levels, which can cause a certain type of diabetes.  Yes.  This is expected.  The macro point here—and should you do anything differently, in terms of SANEity?  No.  Except that I would argue all of us to understand how powerful medication is.  It’s can save your life.  It is that powerful.

But anything that is that powerful—there is no such thing as side effects.  There’s just effects.  For example, when we take anti-anxiety medication, or we take statins, or we take corticosteroids, that has a major impact on way more than just the thing that it was prescribed for.  This does not mean it’s bad.  I have family members whose lives have literally been saved by some of those medications.  I also have family members who changed nothing about their eating and exercise and when put on SSRI gained 20 pounds of fat because that’s what SSRI do.  They change the way your regulatory system works involving your weight.  At least all my family members, I would rather them gain 20 pounds of weight than die.  This is not a question of like, medication is bad.  It’s that medication is powerful.  It’s powerful and anything that we can do to see medication as a last resort and to use the power, the therapeutic—no side effect power of SANE food, and physical movement, and sleep, and loving support.  These will radically reduce our need for certain medications. It’s seems as if it’s almost every week.  Some weeks, multiple times a week that we hear stories of individuals whose physicians–you should never take yourself off of medicine; ever.

But whose physicians take them off of medication for hypertension, for diabetes; simply because they don’t need them anymore.  Because that medication was brought in to help with a major underlying problem.  And I swear to you that the science is crystal clear that there is few, if any, underlying problems whether their physical, or mental, or the more we learn that everything is physical and mental, that nutrient dense SANE eating, smart physical movement, proper rest and recovery, and loving healthy support will radically improve those conditions.  Now, if you have type 1 diabetes and your body doesn’t produce insulin, it’s not going to spontaneously start producing insulin because you go SANE.  It will not.  But what it will do is naturally prevent certain spikes in blood sugar so that your need for insulin will go down.  You’ll still need to take insulin, of course.

Just like, I have horrible vision.  If you know how prescriptions work, this will make sense to you, if it doesn’t, I’m sorry.  I have negative 7, I have a negative 7 prescription in both eyes.  So, if I took my contacts out I would not be able to see the microphone that sitting right in front of me.  I am legally blind.  There is nothing I can eat that will make that go away but there is plenty of stuff that I can eat that will help my vision not get worse and to be the best vision that I could ever have.  Whether it’s corticosteroids or any of these substances; yes.  They’re going to have radical effects on our body.  Some of them will be positive.  Some of them will be negative.  Some of that will be in the eye of the beholder.  The point is that they are profoundly powerful.  I promise you that you will be so much happier, and healthier, and energetic if you use every tool that science has shown us when it comes to food, when it comes to exercise, when it comes to rest and recovery, and when it comes to strong social support.  To minimize your need for those very powerful last resorts.  They’re incredibly powerful.  They’re incredibly beneficial.  They can and will save your life when used properly.

In addition to that, when you go SANE, when you take Let’s Bring It Back Home.  That’s what we talked about earlier.  When you take that beautiful biology and you put the—I don’t know if this analogy works but think of some of those medications—if the car breaks down on the freeway you have to get a tow truck and the tow truck is going to drag it along.  But that tow truck is very powerful.  There is a lot of negative aspects to having your car hooked up to a tow truck, like, you can’t really drive it anymore, so the goal would be to not, necessarily, need a tow truck; ever.  And if you do need a tow truck to then repair the car so that maybe someday you don’t need a tow truck, and maybe you will need to modify, maybe you can’t drive the car on the freeway anymore.

Maybe the car does need a little bit of a boost, forever moving forward.  But I promise that beautiful car, that beautiful Ferrari sitting in the driveway.  Even if it’s been sitting in the driveway for a long time.  Even if it’s got a little dust on the windshield, we can bring that back to life and we can make it run as well as it can, which I promise you is way better than you can imagine because the toxic environment that we’ve been exposed to.  The toxic fuel that we’ve been fed.  So many of us have been led to believe that what is normal is a state of low energy, and a state of mild depression, and is a state of constant hunger.  That is not normal.  Constantly feeling said and tired and hungry isn’t normal.  That’s a sign—that’s a symptom of terrible information being given to us.  We can reverse that.

Again, medication is a blessing, it can save your life but it’s like a tow truck.  It’s something that we want to try to avoid the need for and we want to work diligently with our physician to do everything that we can to use food, rest, exercise, and social support to heal the underlying causes.  Because that is the ticket to taking that Ferrari down the freeway and anywhere you want to go.  Driving off into the sunset and just loving it.  Putting the windows down and letting your luscious locks—like I have here—blow in the wind. Man!  That’s the way to go.  Hopefully that is helpful.

In the last couple of minutes that we have here we have got to do our challenge.  We have a few minutes left so if you have any last minute questions get them in now because we’ve got seven minutes left and I’m going to take up about five talking about our assignment or our challenge for this week.  Our challenge for this week is—this is something that we introduced a while back.  Every week there is a couple of things you’re going to hear from me.  One of them is your step-by-step program.  Please, this is why you’re here and I promise that this will change your life because it’s impossible.  It’s like, if you didn’t know how to read and then you learned how to read, how profoundly would that change your life.  Because now you see the world differently.  You can take in different messages and information.  Everything is different once you can read.  Once you understand how your body works.  Once you can read your biology.  Read your feelings.  Read your emotions.  It transforms everything.  You become biologically literate.  All the nonsense and all the confusing information, that goes away because you have a basic—we don’t need a PhD in biology—but a basic neurobiology and how our brain works.  Gastroenterology, how our digestive system works.  Endocrinology, how our hormones work.  You are going to get that.  Give it 10-15 minutes a day, five days a week in your step-by-step program.  So, please, please, please do that.

Please jump into your coaching and support group.  Let us know how this call went.  Let us know how—if you got questions about your step-by-step programs, pop in there—I’ve seen this happen already and I love it—and say I’m here.  I’m in Lesson 203:  How to protect yourself from gimmicks.  That’s sounds really interesting.  Check that one out but not before doing 201, 201 comes first before 203.  Talk about it in the coaching group.  Ask your SANE certified coaches, I have these follow up questions.  Get that going.

But the challenge for this week is, I would love for everybody, because we’ve seen kind of an uptake in some of the emotional related questions that have come up.  When you first started going SANE—and if you’re brand new to the SANE family you will hear this very soon, is the idea of gratitude journaling.  This is one of those things where it sounds so simple, and it’s the same thing with vegetables; right.  It sounds so simple.  Eat more vegetables.  Eat more vegetables.  Eat more vegetables.  But how many people do we know that actually eat more vegetables.  The average American eats zero.  How’s that for an average?  Eats zero servings of green leafy vegetables per day.  To talk about an area for improvement; and it’s so simple.  There’s all these different things that we can think about from a health perspective that are BPA this, and toxic this, and GMO that.  Ugh!  I’m just going to eat whatever.  It’s too complicated.

Whereas, if we focused on one thing, green leafy vegetables, we can so improve what we put into our bodies.  As simple, we talked about Dr. Lyubomirsky, or Dr. Seligman, or the Science of Positive Psychology.  My challenge to you this week, should you be willing to accept it.  This message will not self destruct, but should you be willing to accept it is to do gratitude journaling, which is simple.  Write this down.  I swear to you this will—it’s like, if you take statins this will happen and the “this” is often times not great.  If you do what I am about to tell you your brain will change in a positive way.  Your mood will change in a positive way; period.  It’s science.  Write down, I accept the challenge of every day for the next seven days, I’m going to take five minutes, every day for the next seven days.  I’m going to commit five minutes to login into my Ignite program, clicking on coaching, going into the coaching and support group, and if you haven’t already start your gratitude journal and just write down three things you are grateful for.  This does not have to be profound, transcendent insights.  I believe the gratitudes I wrote down today were something like, I am grateful for the conversation that I had with a member of the SANE Team earlier this morning.  Because it was a great conversation, and I think recently I said, I’m grateful for shredding, unsweetened coconut; because I am.  I eat a lot of it.  I eat a heck of a lot of it, and I love it, and I appreciate it, and it makes me happy.  So I want to shine a light onto that.  These can be simple things.  I appreciate my dog.  I don’t have a dog but if I did—actually I want to have a dog, we just don’t have one yet.  I think Boston Terriers are super cute—this is my December 2013 calendar but the dogs are so cute and I love them, so, you can say, I appreciate my Boston Terrier.

Get in there and say, I appreciate how Jonathan Bailor is so ridiculous that he has a December 2013 calendar hanging up in his office.  Please accept the challenge because it will transform your mind and when you transform your mind you will transform your body because when you feel better you will appreciate more and more how you deserve better.  Because at the end of the day that’s what we are talking about here.  You deserve better.  You deserve better than starvation.  You deserve better than shame.  You deserve better than that.  Right?  We talked about this last week.  We need to celebrate what we are eating.  We need to celebrate SANE wholefoods.  That’s beautiful and brilliant; right?

Food is fuel.  It’s medicine.  It’s brilliant.  Sleep is therapy.  Physical movement that is smart has a medicinally powerful impact on our body.  You deserve better so please celebrate that, which is going well in your life by accepting the challenge this week.  For the next seven days, five minutes, three things you’re grateful for because you deserve better.  Once you start to see that, once that mind shift starts to happen, and you know you deserve better.  Everything changes because you deserve better than those Oreo cookies.  You deserve better than that can of toxic, sugar, chemically nonsense.  You deserve better than that so let’s work together to really drill that into our brains.  Okay.

Thank you for sharing your time with me tonight.  This has been an awesome session.  We’re at the 90 minute mark.  So, thank you so much.  It’s always a pleasure and blessing to share this time with you.  Thank you again.  Please jump into your step-by-step program.  Jump into your coaching and support group.  Accept the challenge to prove to yourself that you deserve better by every day for the next seven days writing down three things you’re grateful for.  Again, thank you for sharing your time with me and your support and trust with the entire SANE family.  We so appreciate the opportunity to work with you.  We wake up every day excited and feeling very blessed and the reason we feel that way is because you’ve trusted to work with you like this.  Please again, thank you.  If you know of anyone else who would benefit from going SANE please invite them into the SANE family.  It’s always good to have a big family.

Thank you again, with much love and appreciation.  I’ll see you next week.  Have a SANE rest of your week and a SANE weekend; all right.  We’ll chat soon. Bye-bye