Psychological Tips To Improve Your Health

Jonathan: Hey everyone, Jonathan Bailor and Carrie Brown coming at you with some Smarter Science of Slim action this week, and I say action because we’re actually going to, this week, we’re going to maybe transition the podcast a little bit. We’re going to move a little bit away from the chronological narrative nature we’ve had up to this point. Really, I think we’re at podcast 31 now and we’ve really gone from one to 31 really telling one consistent story, and that story is done but that’s by no means the end of this podcast.

Carrie: Yay! We love podcasts!

Jonathan: It’s more just the beginning of the next phase of the podcast, so we’re going to get a little bit more dynamic. Each episode is going to be a little bit more modular, so if you’re just joining us now, please make sure to listen to the previous 15 hours of podcasts. Hey, it’s 15 hours of free content. You can’t beat that, and we’re going to wrap that up this week. We’re going to start out a new adventure on the same podcast, so that’s pretty cool.

Carrie: That’s awesome except. I realized I never said hello, people!

Jonathan: And this is Carrie!

Carrie: Love the people in podcast listening land!

Jonathan: It’s all about new adventures. I can’t get into too much detail here but talking about new adventures. I think we can’t get into details, like I said but Carrie’s got some new adventures going on. I’ve got some new adventures going on. Carrie just said in brief talk about your new adventures.

Carrie: My new adventure involved a lot of noise, and some handsome men and…

Jonathan: Remember I say not a lot of details. Well played. Well played.

Carrie: And a very big lovely new space in my kitchen.

Jonathan: Okay. I was hoping you would end that sentence appropriately. Yes, Carrie had some remodeling done.

Carrie: I’ve had some remodeling done. Oh not remodeling, I’ve had a whole extra I’d knocked out bathroom and a pantry because they were completely useless to me, and now I have a big space which I’m going to move my logging and my photography studio into that space so it’s all in the same space as the kitchen, so I quit burning stuff and get to eat more and run up down the stairs less.

Jonathan: It’s awesome, because it’s for you. Your job involves cooking, and then photographing it. The ability to do those simultaneously is very, very cool. I have sort of similar news. I was very happy to see that this week a counter, counter, counter, counter offer on a home was accepted so we’re moving forward with a new home for just myself and my wife which is just wonderful news. My wife and I are like two peas in a pod, we’re very close.

We get along very well but we live in a 680 square foot condo, right now. I don’t care how much you like someone when you have 680 square feet and one teeny tinny bathroom, having to rush someone out of the shower because you need to use the restroom is just never a pleasant dynamic and also potentially some professional transitions for me, not 100% yet but some exciting opportunities on the horizons, so it’s all about transitions for all of us right now. So that’s cool.

Carrie: Hey, you know that 680 square foot and one bathroom thing?

Jonathan: Yes.

Carrie: That’s exactly why I live with cats. I never have that problem.

Jonathan: No, you absolutely not.

Carrie: In fact I just took a bathroom out, because I had one too many. I have two too many really.

Jonathan: Rub it in, rub it in. Yes, so, it will be very nice to live in a place which is not the same size as the studio we’re recording in right now, so that will be fun. Getting back to the science, to the science so let’s wrap up the narration or the narrative nature we’ve had. Carrie, I want to take a step back. Actually, I just want to start the meat of this week’s podcast with a quote by a researcher, Dr. Uffe Ravnskov, who I really just love this quote, and I think it embodies what we’ve been doing for the past 30 or so podcasts.

I’m just going to share this quote here real quick, “True scientists put the solution to a medical problem first and not the preservation of their own hypothesis. No matter how clever the hypothesis may seem or how proud of themselves, they may be for creating it.” I think that really just encapsulates what we’ve been talking about how…

We’ve been told quite a few hypotheses, and that’s what they are hypotheses, and frankly and sadly over the past 40 years that, that hypothesis, we’ve seen the results of it, and the results speak for themselves. It’s just so exciting that we now have scientific fact that we can bring to the table to reverse this horrendous epidemic that’s upon us, so I think it’s really exciting.

Carrie: It’s very exciting, and it reminded me although I don’t know why, it reminded me of the craziness that surrounds us when Pepsi just announced…

Jonathan: Oh, their weight loss power?

Carrie: Their magic fat blocking, sugar high fructose corn syrup laden pop in response to the Mayor of New York’s, you can’t buy soda, and I was just like, wow!

Jonathan: Oh no. The article I read about is there was actually a quote from them which was something like, “Now you don’t have to choose between the pizza and the hamburger, you can have both and their fat-blocking soda.”

Carrie: And guess what, the magic fat-blocking stuff is made of potato. Bless their hearts!

Jonathan: Yes, bless their heart! Folks, just a good mental trick I find, is anytime you heart about anything pill, powder, potion that’s going to magically solve this problem, try to think about that in terms of… imagine you heard someone says “Hey, I have this pill that makes smoking not damage your lungs anymore. The foods, these insane foods we’re talking about, they’re literally incompatible with our body, just like smoke is incompatible with your lungs.

Your lungs are meant to handle fresh air. You’d breath in anything, it’s not just I mean you breath in too many paint fumes or too much carbon monoxide I mean anything isn’t just oxygen, your lungs stop working. When you eat things other than the natural whole foods we’re supposed to be eating, eventually your metabolism is just going to stop working, and there is no pill that will ever be developed that will make that untrue, just like there is no pill that makes oil and water mix together. It’s just not possible.

Carrie: That’s a good way of looking at it. I’ve never really thought about it like that, but that’s so good way to look at it.

Jonathan: Let’s talk about some other I think maybe good ways to think about this whole lifestyle, the SANE eating lifestyle and this eccentric exercise. One way I like to say this is certainly we live in an insane world. Carrie is great about reminding us even when we talk about drinking a lot of water, how even that can become complicated because what looks like water isn’t.

It’s sweetened with something, but one thing that I find especially to people who live in the States, even in Europe, people who live in Western cultures is, there is a lot of other cultures around the world and even other lifestyles that practice dietary restriction in the same world that we live in, such as the Islamic religions, Hindu religion, the Jewish religions, and even just individuals who are diabetics or vegetarians.

If we look at all of those people, and we assume that a third of them don’t actually follow those dietary restrictions, we still end up with about a two billion people around the world that restrict their diet in a way that is more difficult than staying SANE. I just think that’s such a profound thing to think about, because two billion people is a lot of people, and certainly those two billion people don’t have anything on us. When we talk about going SANE, and just enjoying as much non-starchy vegetables, nutrient dense protein, whole food, natural fats, and low sugar fruits as we want, I mean we can absolutely do that. If two billion people can do more restrictive stuff than that, we can certainly do that.

Carrie: Yes, we can.

Jonathan: I think that’s just another interesting mental shift, similar one has to do with the exercise. If you look at the statistic in the states, the average individual in the United States spends about 24 minutes, or over 24 minutes per day driving to and from work. When we talk about exercising eccentrically, we talk about spending about 20 minutes per week driving a hormonal clog out of our body.

If we can spend over 25 minutes per day commuting, man we’re only talking about spending 20 minutes per week driving that hormonal clog from our body. I just thing when we frame it this way, it shows us that of course it’s more difficult than doing nothing, but it’s also difficult to have diabetes and it’s also difficult to have cancer. It’s also difficult to not be pleased with the way you feel or look, so we’ve just got to frame it right, I think.

Carrie: Yeah, I agree, and what you were saying also made me think that something else that makes it difficult is the money associated with having those diseases, that makes life difficult, too. I think that’s hard, and to not have to deal with that is huge. When you consider the relatively tiny amount of time, we’re suggesting you put into making those things go away or not getting them in the first place.

Jonathan: Absolutely. Absolutely, and maybe we just look at, you know we just had a presidential election here. I mean. our podcast is probably going to come out way after the presidential election and maybe even time for the next presidential election. No, I’m just kidding, but yeah, we record these out of time is obviously health care and all of the billions and billions. I think it’s up to something like $190 billion per year spent on medial issues that can be prevented through lifestyle intervention, like we’re talking about here. Frequently, we hear eating these types of foods is expensive. We’ve already talked about how it doesn’t have to be expensive but even if it is slightly more expensive, having diabetes costs about $50,000 a year.

Carrie: Right, and I think when it comes to the money aspect you have to look at almost your costs for a year, and not just across your grocery bill. You have to look across the whole year with all the related expenses. For example, people are just like you bought 50 pounds of ground almonds. They’re like “Why would you do that.” I am like because one “I don’t want to go to the store every five seconds.

I want to be had it just open the competence and have them” but also it’s half the price and it may take you a little while. If you’re on a tight budget, it might take you a little while to switch from weekly shopping to bulk shopping because one week you’ll have to buy $100 of almonds and then, so it might take you a little while to get going, but once you’ve shifted to that bulk buying, your total spend on grocery will actually go down not up, once you got it going.

Jonathan: Absolutely. In many ways you think of it almost like an investment. You spent a little bit more money up front, and it pays dividends over time, which is cool.

Carrie: Right. So, whey powder, the whey powder that you and I use is not cheap but I’ve just bought a bag, a ten-pound bag of chocolate and a ten-pound bag of strawberry and ten-pound bag of vanilla, and it cost me whatever $280, but I won’t have to buy any for a really long time now; and I saved a lot of money over buying the five-pound bags or the one-pound bags or whatever else. Plus, the transportation to keep going and getting them because the shipping was free and so once you get into that bulk purchase rhythm, you’ll actually save a lot of money. It just takes a little investment up front.

Jonathan: Yeah. It’s like once you stuck up and the other thing it’s all I think relativity is such an important play here like we could say Carrie just, if you were listening closely, Carrie just spent $280 but you just spent $280 on whey powder? One, she probably purchased six months to a year’s worth of it. The other thing to keep in mind is we have to look at per serving. We always had to look at per serving so you know the 30 grams of protein that’s incredibly filling, it’s incredibly good for you.

It’s part of a complete meal. Breaking it down by serving, you’re looking at like 25 cents. You cannot buy a can of Coke for 25 cents, and we’re talking about some really high-quality food. When you actually break this stuff down by meal, I mean you can make some of Carrie’s exquisite SANE recipes, like a serving of that for under three bucks, easily you go to McDonald’s, and you spend five to six bucks easily. We’ve got to keep that relative and another thing which I think is interesting about living this lifestyle, which I am sure a lot of our readers…

Carrie, I know you have and I know I have faced and again our readers and our listeners definitely have is, as we start to eat this way, people kind of might be a little snarky with us saying things like “Don’t you like food?” snarky things like that. One thing that I always find interesting about that or just an interesting way to look at it is, the individuals who say to us “Don’t you like food?” Those are the individuals who are dieting. Those are the individuals who are intentionally trying to eat less food, whereas we are the opposite of disliking food like we’re going out of our way to eat more food and to eat the finest foods available.

Carrie: That’s the thing that makes me laugh, is that we’re the ones that are actually eating food and they’re the ones that are eating a chemical, I don’t know what, which is just kind of funny.

Jonathan: Absolutely, and just trying to like their idea of like you skip breakfast, skip lunch, or eat some Special K Cereal, or something like, whereas we’re just saying eat real food and not only that but it’s like someone who really likes music or really likes wine or really likes cigars, they don’t just listen to anything or drink anything or smoke anything. They are very selective, and in fact, being selective is often the characteristic of someone who cares deeply about something, not someone who doesn’t like something. People who just kind of take whatever and do whatever, those are usually people that actually don’t care too much about what we’re dealing with, whereas people who are selective and conscious, that’s usually a sign of a discerning taste and someone who really values that thing. So really it’s the opposite of disliking food on so many levels.

Carrie: Actually, I had a lovely lady email me this week to tell me that her husband has gone SANE, and he doesn’t even and realize it because she has been cooking all the recipes on my blog, which are all SANE; but they were really yummy, and so he doesn’t even realize that he’s on a diet. He doesn’t know it, and she says it has been so easy to make him go SANE without him knowing it because he loves all your food. So, for people who think when we talk about what we do and people who think health food, they’re thinking traditional health food, a lot of which tastes awful, that’s not where we are about.

Jonathan: Absolutely. Well, it’s funny, too, because everyone literally everyone eats sanely already sometimes.

Carrie: Right.

Jonathan: If you’ve ever been to a barbecue and had grilled meat or fish and vegetables and that was your meal, you had an extremely SANE meal and you probably were like, “That was delicious.” We say all the time, it’s just about doing it consistently, that’s really is. Another quote I wanted to bring up which is just talking about when people criticize us or say snarky things, that’s going to happen. Any time we do anything which isn’t normal, people are going to have issues with it. Dr. Seuss actually has this wonderful quote where he said “Those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.”

Carrie: Love that.

Jonathan: I just think, truly that is awesome. I just think that’s great, and then the other thing that I like to keep in mind is I just mentioned anytime we try to do something which isn’t normal, people are going to try to bring us back to normal. The key thing to keep in mind that at least helps me personally and Carrie, I want you to thought some on this is it sounds simple but like look at it deeply. If we don’t want what everyone else has, we can’t do what everyone else does. I’ll say it slightly differently, if we don’t want typical results, we can’t do what’s typically done.

Let me just unpack that a little bit. If someone is not happy with what’s going on in their life, and they’re criticizing you for doing something different, you can see this doesn’t make any sense because they’re like well doing what they’re doing is clearly not going to achieve the result you want, so if you don’t want what everyone else has, you can’t do what everyone else does. In some sense, if you’re not doing what everyone else is doing, it’s probably a good sign, because you probably don’t want what everyone else has.

Carrie: Right. You don’t want to be one of the 95 percent of people that are forever on a diet, and they don’t work.

Jonathan: Exactly. You don’t want to be part of one in every four people… Carrie’s cell phone went off, podcasting violation, podcasting violation! Carrie’s so red right now. It’s awesome.

Carrie: Did you all notice how quickly I turned it off?

Jonathan: Carrie, literally, you can tell she has been exercising smarter, because she just leaped over the table, dove and turned off her cell phone, so I love it. I love it.

Carrie: Now, I’m all red, and I’m going to turn this thing off.

Jonathan: Okay, now we’re good.

Carrie: Now, it’s texting me.

Jonathan: Carrie’s in high demand. I think people are just calling in to give her feedback on her delicious recipes. No, it’s great, folks. I just wanted to provide some ways to help our mind process because any of these are changes and they are significant changes but when we can keep those in perspective and just have some great insights from people like Dr. Seuss, I feel like they can help us stay SANE very easily. Carrie, what I wanted to do next in the podcast here was to talk about how this can be a bit of a challenge but how we can overcome that and I know that you and I have some techniques that we each use that makes our lifestyles going SANE and getting eccentric easier, just various things we do. I’ll share mine first. We talked about this before, but I am a Costco-aholic. I have no affiliation with Costco. I am not being pain anything to say this. I pay Costco a hell of a lot of money every week when I go grocery shopping there but for me, Carrie mentioned this buying in bulk, shopping at Costco I love. I like to shop at bulk grocery stores. Carrie, what are some of the things you like to do?

Carrie: Trader Joe’s and I know that’s kind of specific to the U.S., sorry international listeners but if you are in the U.S., Trader’s is awesome, and I think maybe I would love to go to Costco more but this is just me. I go to Costco for cat food but for me, some of the bulk in Costco is just too bulk for one little girl, so I shop at Trader Joe’s because it’s so cheap, but the quality is far higher. It’s a lot less money like green tea is just quite crazy cheap but yet a lot of things so that’s my go-to place.

Jonathan: That’s awesome. Well, if I had to make one recommendation to any listener or reader of the Smarter Science of Slim to make sanity easier, and recently it took me months to convert Carrie. I am not in the business of converting people, but Carrie is a unique case, is a high quality blender. The reason for this is the number one “requirement” of going SANE is eating a minimum of ten servings of non-starchy vegetables per day; and if you’re a busy person, which I know a lot of us are sitting down and eating ten servings of non-starchy vegetables a day it’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just not necessarily super practical. I would love to do it if someone would cook it for me and if I didn’t have meetings.

Carrie: No, I will not be your personal chef.

Jonathan: The way I get around that is I make green smoothies, but you got to have a high quality blender to do this I mean if you have a $50 blender it’s going to break vegetables up into little pieces and it’s going to be chunky and disgusting. I have a Vitamix blender. There are other things like Blendtec. There is also another brand which isn’t as good called the Ninja, but it’s much more affordable. It’s going to take things that you never thought could become liquid and turn them into a liquid. It’s just shocking.

Carrie: I’m going to say because I’m new to this and well, relatively new to this and you’re not. If you get one, your first experience with the Vitamix will just have you going, “Why didn’t I not have one of these 20 years ago or 10 years ago or however long?” The difference in the product you get at the end of using a Vitamix versus a Cuisinart or one of the regular blenders is just it is day and night, absolutely day and night.

The soups on my blog are again, they are wonderful in a regular blender, you still got the flavor but the texture is just not the same, whereas in the Vitamix, it’s just a completely different experience. You’ll understand on your very first smoothie or your very first soup why we say invest in a high-speed blender.

Jonathan: Yeah, and again just to reiterate neither Carrie nor I have any affiliation. We’re not getting any money for these recommendations. These are things that we just found and used, so it’s not meant to be an infomercial. Like I said there’s other, Vitamix are going to cost you if you buy, they’ve got a bunch of different models personally, there’s really no difference, personally I’ve looked at them. I recommend buying a refurbished one. You can buy them from the Vitamix website. They’re like $330 but they have the same warranty, all the same goodness. They’re going to try to sell you one that’s like $520.

There’s no need to buy that one. It’s $330 that’s obviously a lot of money for a blender, but it comes with a seven year warranty and their customer service is ridiculous. I’ve broken mine three times. You call them, they can send you new stuff. It breaks down to about $50 a year. It’s a pretty good deal and Carrie already said this but I like to use an analogy when I talk about high-end blenders. A high-end blender is to a low-end blender a bit like an airplane is to a car, meaning they’re both modes of transportation, but not only is one much faster than the other; but an airplane can do things, like go from the United States to Europe that a car just can’t do and the Vitamix or a Blendtec…

I’ve never actually used the Ninja, but I’ve used the Vitamix and the Blendtec and those are the really high-end ones. It’s going to allow you to do things like I make protein pancakes where I use this casein based protein called UMP, and I put coconut, just actual coconut in there. I put some egg whites and some eggs and some cinnamon and I blend it for a minute and you just get this completely consistent, it’s just glorious. You could not create that or put whole flax seeds in a smoothie and out comes nothing. You would guess there was no flax seeds in it. A normal blender just doesn’t do that, it’s a mixer. It’s a fast mixer. Vitamix, Blendtec awesome! Anyway…

Carrie: However, the chef in me is going “ah” and I have my Vitamix but I also have a regular blender. If you’re cooking the recipes on my blog, I would say on some of them don’t use your Vitamix, because sometimes you want, like my hot cereal, the porridge that I made, you want some texture.

Jonathan: Yes. Absolutely, that’s a great point.

Carrie: If you put it in the Vitamix you’re going to get soup.

Jonathan: No, that’s excellent.

Carrie: I have a regular you know a $50 Cuisinart I think blender for when I want some texture but then I use the Vitamix for when I want just beautiful , silky smooth smoothies, soups, or whatever so different products for different things.

Jonathan: Yeah, I mean the blender that’s a great distinction because a blender is going to take big things and make them smaller. The Vitamix will turn it into a liquid.

Carrie: Right.

Jonathan: It truly will.

Carrie: Right. My point was, don’t throw out your blender. Keep your blender. You just won’t use it all the time. You’ll just use high-speed blender some time, but you still have a use for your regular blender.

Jonathan: When we talk about actually making these vegetables/green smoothies, Carrie’s got some wonderful, more elaborate recipes but I’ll give a quick formula here that a lot of listeners and readers have had a lot of success with and the formula is very simple.

1. Step one, is take a bunch of spinach like more spinach than you think is reasonable, like four big handfuls and stuff it down in the blender.

2. Step two, take an orange or a cup of strawberries.

3. Step three is to add some vanilla, whey protein powder and again we want a low sugar whey protein powder.

4. Step four is to add some water and some ice cubes and you blend that up and if you use an orange, it taste like an orange creamsicle. If you use strawberry, it tastes like a strawberry smoothie.

You will be shocked. I have a 100 percent success rate at this. You will be shocked at how little, if at all you taste the spinach. It’s going to look green. It’s going to look weird and then it’s going to taste like the fruit and it’s going to taste like the vanilla whey protein powder. You will not taste the spinach. Carrie, am I lying?

Carrie: You’re not lying and what you need to do is to get one of the colored, one of those hard plastic colored zippies and put it in like a purple one because the green will freak you out until you’re used to it, because the one I just made was like, lime green and there’s just no way you could think, “Carrie, that cannot possibly taste like an orange creamsicle and I am like “It does but you’ve got to get past the color.”

Jonathan: It’s so cool, because that’s really easily almost four servings of awesome non-starchy vegetables. You can use spinach, you can use Romaine lettuce, you could use kale. I would say if you’re just getting started use spinach, kale is going to be a bit more bitter. Start with spinach, go from there. It’s an awesome resource and the next thing on the list Carrie? Well, do you have something you want to throw out there or want me to keep going?

Carrie: No, keep going.

Jonathan: Keep going. I love buying unsweetened, undutched raw cocoa in bulk.

Carrie: I buy in bulk too.

Jonathan: I am just a huge fan of it. Cocoa is an incredibly, incredibly healthy food. You can put it in all kinds of stuff. Carrie has a massive amount of recipes. I’ve got some fudge and putting recipes up on my site. It’s just it cures those chocolate cravings which have been scientifically proven to be the most common cravings in the world.

Carrie: One thing when we talked a little bit ago about where you shop at Costco, I tend to shop at Trader Joe’s. The other thing I do a lot is Amazon, is for the bulk. There are some things I do buy in bulk a couple things that will last: cocoa powder, the whey protein, ground almonds, almond meal, stuff like that, which I can either freeze or that have a long shelf life. Those I do buy in bulk. Amazon sells most things and I do that because of the cost savings.

Jonathan: I’m going to sort of tread a fine line here. I am absolutely not in the business nor is Carrie in selling pills, powders, or potions. That said, both of us do have brands we really like and I’ve also been able to broker some good deals with some companies. The reason I mention this is I don’t sell any products but if you do go on the Smarter Science of Slim website, you’re going to see a tab called the SANE store.

All it is, is a collection of links, many of them are affiliate links, but, for example like you can get the refurbished Vitamix blenders, you can get bulk cocoa from a reputable provider called Z Natural Foods, so, none of this is coming from me. These are just the brands I use, the brands Carrie uses, and we’ve got all the links to those various brands up on our site and the cool thing is you’re not going to pay any more. In fact, in some cases, you’re going to pay less, like with the Vitamix, you get free shipping and we get a little very, very small percentage of that, so it’s a cool way to support the show even if you’re going to buy these products anyway, so that would be appreciated and hopefully, still keeping our integrity here, so that’s all good. Bulk unsweetened cocoa, also I am a big fan of bulk natural nut butters. Peanut butter is my personal favorite, but almond butter, all this kind of fun things.

The reason I mentioned this explicitly is we want to go natural. All of us probably have peanut butter in our pantry right now. The fact that it is in your pantry is a sign that it is not natural. The reason it can stay good in your pantry is because it has a bunch of hydrogenated garbage in it that is literally breaking your metabolism. If all possible, when you buy not butters, the ingredients should say peanuts or almonds or cashews, that’s it.

There should be nothing else on the ingredients label and even some stores have like little machines nowadays that make them for you, so you’re just like put a little almost like a soft-served ice cream cone but it’s a cup. Underneath it you press a button and it takes peanuts, and it turns them into peanut butter right in front of you, which is cool.

Carrie: Right or just read labels. Again, Trader Joe’s have their peanut butters is fabulous, it’s just got peanuts in it and it taste fantastic and it’s all good.

Jonathan: It’s all good and these need to be refrigerated and just a general tip we may have mentioned earlier which is, any time you do anything involving nuts or seeds technically they don’t have to be refrigerated, but you’re going to get much better results if you do.

Carrie: Nuts have a lot of fat in them and fat goes rancid, so…

Jonathan: I just think a lot of people don’t and the experience is so much better if you do, so keep them fresh.

Carrie: The taste of rancid nuts is not pleasant, and they are expensive.

Jonathan: Like they’ve taken that white look.

Carrie: They are expensive. You don’t want to be throwing nuts away because they’ve gone off, but you can freeze them. You can freeze them. If you can buy them in the shell, you can freeze them in the shell. If you buy them out the shell, you can freeze them. I just keep a small jar in the fridge, and then I keep bulk nuts in the freezer. I just top them up when I need to. Same with the almond flour. I keep the almond flour in the freezer, because I can buy in bulk and store it way and then I just keep a big storage jar in my kitchen, which is what I use to make all this crazy cookies and things I’ve been making lately.

Jonathan: The other thing about nuts to keep in mind folks is there are raw nuts and there is like honey roasted peanuts. Those are not the same thing. Raw nuts are ideal. This doesn’t mean you can’t eat any other kind of nuts, but just be careful because… I love Costco, but Costco has chocolate-covered this kind of nut and sugar, salt blah, blah, blah. If at all possible, buy raw nuts in bulk, and again some good resources to do that.

One other thing I forgot to mention, when we’re talking about blenders is, Carrie and I very consciously recommending blenders, not juicers. A juicer extracts all of the fiber out into this pulp container and all you’re left with is the juice and that’s not bad. You’ll still get a lot of vitamins and minerals, but it’s not going to satisfy you at all. Remember we talked about satiety, water fiber, and protein. You’ve got water with juice but you have no fiber.

Fiber is good stuff, so use a good blender and it’s going to make the thing a liquid and you’re going to get all the fiber you’re eating a whole food. With the juicer, you’re not eating a whole food, you’re eating the juice. If we’re going to be about whole foods which we are, we need to eat blended whole foods, not juiced foods.

Carrie: I think some of the confusion for want of a better word around that is because when you put food in a regular blender, you don’t get something like juice.

Jonathan: That’s exactly.

Carrie: When you put food in a Vitamix, you get juice but you get all the fiber in with it. When I did have a juicer, it used to kill me. All the stuff that I was throwing away use to kill me, and your juice you know like three heads of celery and you get like four ounces of juice, and it’s like, “Really?”

Jonathan: It’s really cool I don’t know how many billions dollars are marketed is this flavored water market. One of my favorite things to do in the world is you don’t really make juice but you make flavored water like take 12 ounces of water and put two frozen strawberries in it, blend it for a minute, you’ve got this delicious. It’s crystal clear. It’s water. It tastes like strawberries, it’s fantastic. You can make your own vitamin water, and it doesn’t have the sugar and other garbage in it or you could just make it out of juice. You just use less water and more fruit and of course you can have vegetables and then it’s even better, so that’s all good stuff. The final thing I would say is, more having to do with exercise and that is, if you’re going to be exercising at home is having some resistance bands.

Again, these are incredibly inexpensive. They’re less than $50. They allow you to add resistance to your at home eccentric exercises very easily. You could potentially grab a set of adjustable dumb bells like Carrie has, and there is also a thing called a weight vest, which is a thing you wear, which is also somewhat useful.

Carrie: I haven’t got a weight vest yet.

Jonathan: You don’t have a weight vest. It’s not required. It’s just some people like it, like if you’re…

Carrie: We’ll see if I ever graduate to that. “Hey, I had my numbers done last week. I didn’t tell you?”

Jonathan: Number of what?

Carrie: My annual blood test medical numbers thing.

Jonathan: Oh, wonderful! Yeah. How you doing?

Carrie: My weight’s the same.

Jonathan: Okay.

Carrie: My waist, however, is two inches smaller.

Jonathan: Yeah! That is because you are building muscle and burning fat.

Carrie: If you’re still hanging on to your scale, lovely people, let this be the lesson, same weight, waist two inches smaller. Everything else was lower that needed to be lower. Everything else that was higher was supposed to be higher, it was it was all goodness.

Jonathan: That’s awesome, and that’s not like Carrie’s opinion is not my opinion. Your waist circumference has so much more to do with your long-term health than your weight. In fact, statistics actually show that people who weighed too little actually have a higher mortality rate than people who weighed too much. Your weight is just not relevant at all. Focus on your waist circumference if you’re going to focus on anything and remember to measure at most once a month and to measure at the same time of day and the same day of the week because 8:00 a.m. on a Monday morning is very different in terms of your waist than 8:00 a.m. on a Friday night.

Carrie: And if you’re a girl, be careful when in the months you do it.

Jonathan: Or just do it consistently.

Carrie: Or just do it consistently with, you know what I am talking about.

Jonathan: Absolutely. The last thing I will mention is sort of a grab bag podcast, and next week, we’re actually going to dig into some more studies; but the one thing I’ll mention here is I often get asked about how to eat in relation to your workouts because you only have one or two per week. The thing we keep in mind with the science is pretty clear here. Taking in one of your 30 gram servings of protein before your work out and potentially another one after your workout, definitely one after your work out, potentially one before your workout is a very, very good strategy and if, and this is because it helps your muscles to recover, do the 30 grams of protein after your workout, just do that.

The 30 grams before is optional. The other thing to keep in mind is that you are going to go insane, doing it immediately after your workout is the best time to do it because the fact that you just exercised eccentrically, will sort of buffer the metabolic damage a bit. Again, I am not encouraging everyone to go swing by crispy cream after your workout, that’s not it at all. However, if you’re going to go to crispy cream, no matter what, if you can do that within an hour after finishing your eccentric workout, that would be the best time to do that activity, which ideally you would ever do. Does that make sense?

Carrie: Yes.

Jonathan: So, making the best of a bad situation.

Carrie: Right.

Jonathan: So, Carrie?

Carrie: Because every once in a while, the people like me who have been on the dark side…

Jonathan: The dark side.

Carrie: Just need to do something crazy but at least…

Jonathan: I’m going to challenge you because I have seen your recipes and we’ve got freaking SANE cones, you’ve got SANE cookies. It’s only a matter of time, so you come up with some SANE donut recipe, which is going to be, so I mean it’s all good.

Carrie: But until we get there…

Jonathan: Awesome. Well, hopefully this has been helpful folks. We’re going to do kind of a summary of some more science next week and then we’re moving on to phase two of the Smarter Science of Slim podcast which will be very exciting. Jonathan Bailor and Carrie Brown, we’re eating more, we’re exercising less, but we’re doing it smarter and we’ll see you next week.