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SANE 202 / Lesson 1

A More Effective Approach To Exercise


Jonathan: Welcome to Living the Smarter Science of Slim, where we provide a scientifically proven lifestyle for long term health and fat loss by eating more and exercising less, but smarter.

Carrie: Eat smarter, exercise smarter, live better.  I am so ready for that.

Jonathan: Hey everyone, Jonathan Bailor and Carrie Brown comin’ at you here live from the chilly studio in Seattle.  It has shifted seasons from slightly rainy to continuously rainy.

Carrie: That’s not fair – it hasn’t rained here in like four months! So now it has rained for 10 days, but hey.

Jonathan: But yes, we’ve busted out the jackets and we have transitioned to a time of cuddles; cuddle time.

Carrie: You left and you took the sunshine with you, and then you come back, but you didn’t bring it back, that’s what I’m blaming it on.

Jonathan: I did.  I was actually down in California.  Actually, when this podcast airs, who knows this may even be available, so we were fortunate enough to work on a non-profit project – some videos, educational videos, kind of like a “School House Rock”.  You know, the (singing) “conjunction junction, what’s your function . . .” like that, but a bit more modern.

Carrie: Do that wiggle again.

Jonathan: (laughing and singing) “Conjunction junction, what’s your function.”  That actually should be coming out in early 2013, so should be pretty cool.  So that’s where I was – the sunshine was down there but didn’t come back.  But, we’re back now.

Carrie: Woo-hoo

Jonathan: We’ve got some exciting stuff to talk about this week.  We’re moving on to smarter exercise – how we can exercise less by smarter, and I’m excited.

Carrie: You’re always excited.  Hey, I have been writing, you know, my blog, the thing that I do, and I have had some questions come in around rice.

Jonathan: Rice.

Carrie: Rice.

Jonathan: Just rice, or

Carrie: Not just rice, but how it is that in other cultures, the perception that we have is that they eat a lot of the things that you are teaching us make us fat.

Jonathan: Specifically rice, specifically rice.

Carrie: But they’ve been really, really small people.  So how does that work?

Jonathan: Gotchya. Just to tease it apart, you said a lot of, we’ll get to exercise in a second here folks, but this is a wonderful question I’d love to take some time to answer it in a little bit of detail because you’ll probably get the same question when you start to talk to people.

So a couple things: I think you are talking about rice specifically, and not things like candy bars, because there is no culture in the world that eats more junks, starches, and sweets like candy bars and potato chips than we do in the United States.  So, talking specifically about rice, let’s be clear about that, and a couple things when someone brings this up: it’s a great point and there’s no reason to get defensive.

There are four things to keep in mind about this: so first of all rice, in terms of starches, it’s still insane, because it is not particularly satisfying, it’s quite aggressive, actually white rice has significantly more impact on our blood sugar than table sugar does – significantly; it is not nutritious – contains very little nutrients; and is quite efficient at being converted into body fat.  That said, it is “saner” than the dwarf mutant wheat and genetically modified corn that we typically eat in the west.  We get our starch from mutant dwarf wheat and genetically modified corn, whereas people in eastern cultures generally get more of it from rice, which is a more benign starch.

Carrie: Okay.

Jonathan: So that’s point number 1.  Point number 2 is that the starch we eat in the U.S. is not the same as the starch we ate 50 years ago, or the starch eaten elsewhere.  Just point blank, the level of genetic modification, all those kinds of fun things, we are eating different types of starch here in the west just from an agricultural perspective, than other places in the world.

Another thing to keep in mind is that, you know, not everyone who smokes gets lung cancer.  That doesn’t mean that smoking doesn’t lead to lung cancer; just means that not everyone who does something bad is gonna have something bad happen to them.

Along those lines, and the last point, and the most important point is it really is a myth that cultures that eat a lot of rice don’t have health problems.  There’s over 200 million overweight individuals in China, and in fact, in 2012, the Harvard School of Public Health published a study in the British Medical Journal that looked at over 352,000 people from China, Japan, the United States, and Australia, over more than two decades, so that’s a big observational study, and what that study revealed is that people who ate the most rice were one and a half times more likely to have diabetes than people who ate the least rice, and that correlation was actually stronger for people in Asian countries.  Pivoting that data a little bit differently, you can think of it this way: for every additional large bowl of white rice eaten per day increased people’s risk of diabetes by 10%.

Carrie: That’s not insignificant.

Jonathan: That’s not insignificant at all.  So the other things to keep in mind, so there are the four points, but let’s keep going Carrie, because this is definitely a point that I think we’re gonna have to address as we start to go sane.  If we actually look at statistics, the stereotype that eastern cultures are more starch centric than western cultures is actually false.  The top rice and grain producing cultures in the world are China, United States, and India.  And if we look at the actual food an agricultural data provided by the United Nations, we find that amount of starch in the Chinese or Indian diet is significantly lower than the amount of starch in the average American diet.  So, they’re just eating less food overall and they’re eating less starch.  So they are less starch centric.

Finally, finally, this is a cliché, it’s not science saying that countries in Asia are starch centric and slim has nothing to do with science, and it’s just inaccurate, right?  In fact, the countries America Samoa, Kiribati – I believe is how you pronounce it, and French Polynesia are actually the first, second, and third heaviest countries in the world, and they are in that part of the world that we are stereotyping by saying they are all slim; that’s just not accurate.

I would encourage individuals who bring up this to, you know, just get familiarized with the data, familiarized with the facts, and of course if eating rice works for you, keep eatin’ it, that’s fine, but let’s not base our lifestyle on stereotypes, let’s base our lifestyle on science.

Carrie: I’m up with that.

Jonathan: Fair?

Carrie: I think that’s very fair.  Good answer!

Jonathan: Thank you!  I pass!  Speaking of stereotypes, there’s another stereotype, and that stereotype is that people who exercise are slim, and people who don’t exercise are not slim, and that the only way to be slim is to exercise more.  What we’re going to talk about in this podcast and quite a few podcasts to come, is how that is not true.

Carrie: It is not true.

Jonathan: Not true.

Carrie: I vouch for that.

Jonathan: Carrie vouches for it.  Carrie tell us more.

Carrie: I used to cycle a hell of a lot and lost no weight and it annoyed the living daylights out of me.  And then I met you and I stopped and I got skinnier.

Jonathan: It’s funny, I heard this quote from a woman, Kim, I can’t think of her last name, but she’s successfully completed 18 marathons and over the course of that time in her life she’s gained 18 pounds.  She’s like, “you know I’ve gained 1 pound per marathon I’ve ran, it’s completely maddening.”

Carrie: I also, I have several girl friends. I have one girl friend who took up cycling in a big way, does those mad cycling races and cycles around Lake Tahoe and whatever; she is the exact same size, weight, shape that she was when she started.  How does that work?

I have another girl friend who runs up a mountain everyday.  She’s not a fitness freak, she was just trying to lose weight.  Runs up a mountain everyday, goes on these “tough mudder” things and these crazy off road running, running, running; she’s getting bigger all the time.

Jonathan: Yep, yep, well, and we’ve mentioned this in earlier podcasts folks, just to be very clear before we dig into this, this is not meant to be like the “bash exercise, exercise is bad for you show,” that’s not the intention at all.

In fact, let’s classify quote, unquote, “exercise” into 3 groups: let’s say one group, or you can imagine a spectrum, so on the left side of the spectrum we have very low intensity activity, like playing, you know, basketball casually, walking, yoga, stretching, gardening, walking up stairs, mostly just activity, let’s not even call it exercise.  That’s on one end of the spectrum.  On the other end of the spectrum we have the type of very intense but very safe and very low impact, smarter exercise we are going to cover.  So that’s the other end of the spectrum, and that’s extremely good for you as well, much like the low intensity stuff is.  Then you have the stuff in the middle, this is the thing that we’re all told to do, and the thing that the science, it is really not in support of, and that’s things like jogging, where they’re not really intense, and they’re very high impact and we have to do a lot of it, and it stimulates our appetite, so the act of doing it really just wears out our joints and builds up our appetite, and then it’s easier to eat calories than it is to burn them off, and that calorie math isn’t the point anyway.  But even if it was, we would still end up actually consuming more calories as a consequence because, again, it’s easier to eat calories than to burn them off.

So, we’re not here to say exercise is bad, please don’t hear that, that is false.  What we’re here to say is let’s be smart about how we exercise.  Let’s do as much low impact, low intensity activity as we can; things like walking, fantastic, walk as much as you can, and then lets jump all the way to the other end of the spectrum and do things that are extremely safe, extremely sustainable, but work our muscles completely and efficiently, and that’s the kind of smarter exercise we’re gonna cover.

Carrie: And take 10 minutes a week!

Jonathan: Exactly.

Carrie: That’s my favorite bit.

Jonathan: And again, it’s not this too good to be true thing, right, like just intuitively we know the higher the quality of an exercise the less of it we can do.  Like you can’t sprint as long as you can walk; it’s not because you are lazy, it’s because the more intense an exercise is the more energy it uses, and the faster you use up your energy, the less of it you can do.  If you drive your car at 200 miles per hour, you’re gonna be able to drive for less time than if you drive your car at 2 miles per hour.  So, shall we drive our car at 200 miles per hour Carrie?

Carrie: Let’s.

Jonathan: Let’s.

Carrie: I was always up for a bit of speed.

Jonathan: A little bit of speed.  The need for speed here at the Smarter Science of Slim.  So, let’s start with a quote.  This is coming from researchers at McMaster University, and they tell us that they thought the findings around smarter exercise were startling because it suggests that the overall volume of exercise people need to do is lower than what’s recommended.

So Carrie, let’s pop out a second.  The reason we need to rethink exercise is because we’ve basically redefined the way our body works.  Right, like we spent the first couple podcasts talking about how we’ve been taught this calorie counting approach that we need to manually balance calories and we showed how that is false.  How the body is designed to balance calories, just like it balances our blood pressure and our insulin levels, and you know, like the sodium levels in our blood.  It’s designed to do that automatically; we just need to keep it healthy so that it can do that.

But if we’re going to redefine how the body works, and we’re going to say that it’s not about counting calories, well then we’ve got to refine the point of exercise because up until this point why do we exercise?  To burn calories?  But we’ve said that’s not the point.  Does that make sense?

Carrie: Right

Jonathan: So if we’re going to redefine how we think about our body, we of course have to redefine how we think about how we eat, and then we’ve got to think about redefining how we exercise.

Carrie: I must say for me that the whole eating smarter makes a lot more intuitive sense to me than the exercising smarter.  Even when you do the exercises, it feels like, “I’ve only been exercising for 10 minutes and I’m done?”  I feel like a fraud.  It’s almost unbelievable to me, still, after knowing what I know, that 10 minutes of exercise can have the result it does, even though I’ve had those results from doing it.  My brain is still going “this cannot work”.

Jonathan: You’re not alone with that Carrie.  I actually, I think people know my story.  I used to be a trainer, and I was a chronic exerciser, literally exercising multiple times a day.  In fact, you know, this is Jonathan Bailor, this is the guy, and yes I did just refer to myself in the third person, I did all this research and it took me, like literally I think it was over a three year period that I went from exercising every day of the week to my current routine of exercising once a week.  Because I was literally like, okay okay, I’ll go down to 4, okay okay okay, I’ll go down to 3, okay okay 2, okay okay, I gotta do 2, I got gotta do 2, and then finally I went down to 1 and that’s when I achieved my current results, which are the best I’ve ever had in my life.  If it took me that long,

Carrie: No comment.

Jonathan: (laughing) Anyway.

Carrie: I’m saying nothing!

Jonathan: Saying nothing.  So the point here folks is that we’ve gotta, just like we’ve reprogrammed our mind in terms of how our body worked, and in terms of how eating needs to work, we also have to reprogram it in terms of how exercise works.  And that’s pretty easy though, right?  We talked about how we want to eat more, but smarter, because it’s all about lowering our set point, and the way we do that is by changing our hormones and clearing that hormonal clog, back to the clogged sink.  So the point of exercise is the exact same; exercise is just another tool we have to help us clear out that hormonal clog.

So it’s not about burning calories, and once we get the burn calories off of our radar, well then duration and frequency kind of becomes irrelevant.  Because if the goal has nothing to do with burning calories, but everything to do with triggering hormones, well it’s just like let’s, okay, forget everything you learned about exercise because all exercise information you’ve been given up to this point is all predicated on burning calories.  And we’re saying that doesn’t matter at all for our goal, which is hormonally unclogging.

Carrie: Hey, do you mind, my favorite thing you’ve ever said about exercise is the thing about walking doesn’t make you grow taller.

Jonathan: Oh, you want me to do that explanation?

Carrie: Yes, yes.  I love that.

Jonathan: Alright, what, walking doesn’t make you taller?  Okay, so a couple, we’re gonna mix a bunch of analogies here, so I’ll do 2 different analogies – the walking analogy and then I’m gonna do the reading analogy.

Carrie: Okay.

Jonathan: Then I might even do the steak knife analogy.  Many analogies (laughing).  Okay, so the walking analogy. Yes.  So, people will say to me, they’ll say to me, “Jonathan,” I’m tired of referring to myself in the 3rd person.  So they’ll say, “Jonathan, isn’t walking good for you?”  And absolutely, and again we’ve already clarified that in the podcast, but when people just hear sound bites, they’re like “exercise less, what?  That doesn’t make any sense.”  Of course walking is good for you.  But walking is good for you, what is it good for you at – it’s good for your health, and it’s awesome to improve your health; we should walk to improve our health, and it’s good at that.  However, walking is not good at making us taller.  And I know that sounds stupid, but stick with me here for a second.  What makes us tall, or short for that matter?  Our genetics and our hormones, right like children grow because they have growth hormones, and they have tall parents or short parents.  Walking doesn’t impact our genetics, nor does it impact our hormones, therefore, walking will never make us taller.

And we all get that.  That’s why we would never be like, “Hey Tom, I noticed you like to walk a lot.” And Tom was like, “Yeah dude, I’m trying to get taller.”  We would be like, “Tom, what?  That doesn’t make any sense.”

Carrie: (Laughing)

Jonathan: Okay, now, let me bring this back home.  So, however, now if our goal when we are exercising, or walking in particular, is to burn fat, well let’s pause for a second here.  We know that the levels of fat on our body are determined by what: our genetics and our hormones.  And we already established that walking doesn’t impact our genetics, nor our hormones.  So, just like walking won’t make us taller because it doesn’t impact the factors that determine our height, walking won’t make us thinner long term because it doesn’t impact the factors that determine our fatness in the long run.

Carrie: I love that!

Jonathan: Boom! (laughing)

Carrie: I love that!

Jonathan: But again, people are like, “Are you saying don’t walk?”  No, no, no.  Let me use another analogy here.  So, for example, is reading good for you?  Of course reading is good for you.  Like, we should all read as much as we can.

Carrie: Hmm.  It depends what you’re reading.

Jonathan: (laughing) Yes, okay.  Well, it’s probably still good for you, but maybe in another, but anyway.  So again, reading is good for you.  Should we read more?  Yes, we should read more.  However, if our goal is to metabolically heal ourselves, reading is not going to do that.  Again, walking is like reading; walking is beautiful for you, walk and be as active as you possibly can, but please don’t do it with the expectation that it’s going to heal you hormonally because it’s not.  It will keep you healthy and functional, and please do it, but just like you wouldn’t read if your goal was long term fat loss, you would do something else like you’re learning on this podcast, you also wouldn’t be walking if your goal is long term fat loss, because while it is good for you, it’s not good for that goal.

Carrie: Right.

Jonathan: Cool.

Carrie: I love that.  I love that.  Love, love.

Jonathan: And I’ll do one more analogy here, hold on.  The last analogy has to do with, so we already talked about walking, let’s talk about other forms of exercise, such as these extreme exercises we hear so much about, right.  These infomercials become popular, probably once every 5 years, don’t worry folks if you’re getting tired of seeing these on TV they will go away soon, and then there won’t be any, and then 3 or 4 years from now there’s gonna be another batch, because that’s the way these things work.

And, so think about it this way: you see people doing those, they appear to be slim, that’s fine, you’re gonna burn calories, your gonna get some level of results.  But think about these extreme forms of exercise, such as these things you see on television with these infomercial DVD programs, like brushing your teeth with a steak knife.  Stick with me here.  Can someone stick a steak knife in their mouth and remove plaque from their teeth?  Yes.

Carrie: I would imagine they can.

Jonathan: Yes, but why, when there are such safer and more effective ways to get plaque off your teeth.  The same thing kind of applies to these extreme workout programs.  Can they cause some level of metabolic healing?  Yes!  Will they build up a sweat?  Yes!  Will your body release endorphins at the end and you’ll feel pretty good?  Yes!  Are there safer, and quicker and more effective ways to do that and you can continue for the rest of your life, not just while you’re in your early 20’s, like everyone you see doing those programs?  Yes!  And that’s what we’re gonna talk about here.

We’re not gonna brush our teeth with steak knives.  In fact, we’re gonna brush our teeth more with those, like those Sonicare toothbrushes, which if you’ve ever used one, that’s kind of a mind bender too, because the instructions are you don’t actually brush your teeth, you just gently sort of glide them across your teeth.  Like it’s key that you don’t even apply that much pressure.  Whereas even when you use a manual toothbrush, you kinda dig in there a little bit, but believe it or not, these Sonicare toothbrushes, because they are using a different technology, you don’t press hard, but the brush actually gets your teeth even cleaner.

That’s what we’re gonna talk about here.  We’re gonna use science and technology and our brains to clean our metabolism in a way that is impossible via any other form of exercise.

That is so many analogies, I think that’s my analogy quota for the next 5 podcasts.

Carrie: There was also a lot of arm flailing going on during that.

Jonathan: I missed Carrie.  I was out of town.  We enjoy doing these podcasts, so we’re getting all of our pent up podcasting energy out on this one.  So your eyes are getting the brunt of it.

Anyway, so hopefully those analogies didn’t overwhelm people, but the key point here is when we talk about exercising less, but smarter, that’s because we’re after hormonal healing, not calorie burning.  And the way we will exercise to heal our hormones is very different from traditional exercise.

Traditional exercise is done frequently; smarter exercise is done very infrequently.

Traditional exercise is done for long periods of time, you know this is why you have to watch a freakin’ movie at the gym while you walk on the treadmill for an hour and a half, whereas smarter exercise is done in very short periods of time.

Traditional exercise is done with very little resistance, whereas smarter exercise is done with a lot of resistance.

And traditional exercise has a very high injury rate.  I think the statistic is that about 55% of joggers end up getting hurt from jogging, whereas smarter exercise is completely low impact.  In fact, it’s most popular in physical therapy circles and among seniors because it is so low impact.

So, sharp contrast, because we are going after a very different goal.

Carrie:  You had me at infrequently!

Jonathan: (laughing) And for short periods of time!

Carrie: (laughing)

Jonathan: But before we get into all of this, another quick disclaimer.  This podcast folks is all about kinda setting the stage, and we’ll get into the actual exercises in future podcasts, but again, we’re here to talk about science.  If we just want top 10 lists, this isn’t the best podcast to listen to for that, but if you want to get educated on how you can change your body, your mind, and your life for the rest of your life, we’ll give you that foundational stuff here.

Speaking of foundational stuff, very common thing that’s brought up is when we talk about using a lot of resistance, especially among our female listeners, is the very legitimate concern that, you know, “Won’t that make me get bulky muscles?”  Very legitimate concern, and let’s dispel that though because once we understand how our bodies work, we can stop worrying about that.

Carrie: I’ve never worried about that.

Jonathan: (laughing) But there are some people who do worry about that.

Carrie: Yes, I know.

Jonathan: We all have a gene called GDF8, and that controls a substance in our body known as myostatin, which controls the amount of muscle we have and how much it can develop naturally.  So the base levels of myostatin in muscle, and basically all women and most men make it physically impossible for us to naturally build bulky muscles.  So that doesn’t mean we can’t develop, like Michelle Obama arms, where they’re toned and defined and they look fantastic, but it does mean that unless a, let’s talk about women specifically, unless a woman genetically already has bulky muscles, she’s not going to develop them from weight training unless she takes steroids, which hopefully none of our listeners are going to do.

So you just please, please don’t worry about that, it’s not going to happen.  The only thing that’s gonna happen when you start strength training is you’re going to transform the way your body looks and the way your body fuels itself; a way that no amount of aerobic exercise could ever, ever do, and we’ll get into the science of why.

But please, you know, even if you don’t believe the science, just give it a shot.  I promise you won’t wake up one day and just have giant bulky muscles.  Like, it doesn’t, you know, we don’t worry about, “We’re gonna lose too much fat too fast.”  Like no one is like, “Oh god, I don’t’ want to start an exercise program because it’s gonna work too well.”  That’s kind of what we’re worried about here.  It’s like, “Oh, it’s gonna work.”

You know there’s lots of men who spend a lot of time and a lot of money trying to develop big bulky muscles, and they can’t even do it.  Right, I mean if it was that easy to build bulky muscles, you’d probably see a lot more people with big bulky muscles, but we don’t.  So, please free yourself that concern.  There’s a lot of things in this world to be concerned about, that’s not one of them.

Carrie: Got it.

Jonathan: Got it?

Carrie: Got it.  I wasn’t anyway, but I’ll make an extra effort not to be concerned about it.

Jonathan: And one other, one other, I am going to use another analogy; way to think about this is think of the size of your muscles, so muscular size, kind of like muscular speed.  So, just like there are people who are genetically fast, and these people who are genetically fast, you know are able to run faster than most of us even if we trained all day every day, there’s people who are actually bulky, and they’re going to be more bulky than any of us can become no matter how hard we try.  Again, there’s all things we can do to maximize our genetic inheritance, for lack of better terms.

Carrie: Disposition.

Jonathan: Yes, disposition.  But again, very few of us are, have any risk of accidentally becoming an Olympic sprinter.  We also have very little risk of accidentally becoming an Olympic power lifter.  It’s just not gonna happen.

So, the other thing to keep in mind is doing more repetitions with less weight is really not a great approach.  It’s really doing a lot of low quality exercise, and a lot of low quality exercise is never going to get us the hormonal reaction we’re after.  Think of the hormonal reaction, I’m going to use another analogy – this is analogy week at the Smarter Science of Slim.

So imagine that you needed to move like a heavy piece of furniture, and then you get next to that, like a couch let’s say, you get next to your couch and you take your pointer finger and you just kind of point and poke at the couch, like I’m doing to Carrie right now.

Carrie: He’s poking me!

Jonathan: So you poke it 1, 2, 3, a hundred times, the couch will never move.  It doesn’t matter how many low quality pokes you give the couch – never gonna move it.  However, if you give it one powerful shove,

Carrie: Don’t, don’t, no, stop – we don’t need you to practice on me for that one!

Jonathan: (laughing) If we give it one powerful shove, it will move.  The same thing applies a bit to our hormonal clog.  No quantity of low quality movements will ever clear that clog out.  Whereas a few very high quality pushes will clear it out.  Does that make sense?

Carrie: Yeah, intellectually it makes sense, but I think we’ve just been so bamboozled with this whole more, more, more thing,

Jonathan: Yep.

Carrie: That I just, I, logically it makes sense, but emotionally it just feels like that cannot be right.  But I know it is, because I’ve experienced it.

Jonathan: And the other thing, is again, not all of this stuff has to, um, like we don’t need to wait until it really makes sense to us for it to start changing our lives.  If you ever need to just sort of, don’t ever do anything in life on faith alone.  I mean have some other reasons, but, one good thing to fall back on if some of this science just seems like, “Really?” is simply to ask yourself has doing more traditional exercise worked.  And if it hasn’t, well, doing more of something that hasn’t worked is not a particularly effective approach.  So why not try something else.

Carrie: Well then, but I also think that 10 minutes a week.

Jonathan: Yeah, why not.

Carrie: It’s worth doing a trial, right?

Jonathan: (laughing) Exactly.

Carrie: I mean it’s 10 minutes a week, sock it and see.  I mean you know try it.  You will get the results.  I know you will, you will.

Jonathan: Yep.

Carrie: Just, you know, have enough faith just to try it once.  You won’t look back.

Jonathan: Absolutely, absolutely.  And one more quick thing, because you will, as you start doing more things like resistance training, which is at the core of what we’re going to be talking about on the next couple podcasts, you may hear people throw around this phrase, “muscle weighs more fat”.  So let’s quickly talk about that phrase, because it is a common phrase.

So, muscle doesn’t weight more than fat; just like a pound of feathers doesn’t weigh any less than a pound of lead – a pound is a pound is a pound.  But what people mean when they say this is that muscle is significantly more dense than fat.  So if you were to lose five pounds of fat, and gain five pounds of muscle, your weight would be exactly the same, but your waist would shrink –

Carrie: Smaller.

Jonathan: dramatically, dramatically.  Like people see these fitness models, let’s use female models as an example here, female fitness models on the cover of Shape, or whatever, you know these women are like let’s say 5’6”, 5’7”, you know they’ve got their little halter tops on, and they’ve got abs, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.  Most people see these women and they think they weigh 104 pounds.  That’s not true.  They weigh about 140.  The reason for that is, see all that toned muscle on their body – that is not taking up a lot of space, but it is dense and causing them to weigh more.

Unless your goal is to look like, you know, these emaciated runway models, which I personally hope no ones goal is, I personally, this is Jonathan Bailor’s opinion, I personally like women who’s got some meat on her bones.  I like a woman who looks like a woman.

We’re gonna build some muscle, some tight compact muscle, that’s gonna make you have those curves and make you look like a woman and not like a board, which I think is a great goal.  I prefer when women look like women and boards, and that is going to potentially cause you to “gain” weight.  But all of your clothes will fit dramatically better, and you’ll feel dramatically better, and you’ll feel stronger, and you’ll feel more capable of just, you know, groceries – carrying groceries won’t be an issue; picking up kids, or doing blah, blah, blah.  You’ll be just like Superwoman and that’s awesome.

Carrie: And you’ll look hotter.

Jonathan: (laughing) And you’ll look hotter.  I don’t want to say it, but Carrie can say it.

Carrie: Which is really why we’re here Jonathan.

Jonathan: Exactly.  So, and if

Carrie: But that’s also,

Jonathan: Yes

Carrie: also why we need to throw our scales away.

Jonathan: Exactly.  That’s exactly right.  It’s very true.  It’s funny, if you go to the Smarter Science of Slim website, type in the search box, or just go to Google and type in like, “overweight is irrelevant” or something like that.  I put a blog post up of me and my dear wife on our wedding day.  It’s funny because both my wife and I are, my wife is classified as overweight according to her weight and height, and I am borderline obese, according to my weight and height.  I posted a little excerpt of our wedding video up there and I think you’ll see that, um, those are not fair characterizations of us.

Carrie: (laughing)

Jonathan: But we both do carry a fair bit of muscle around on our bodies, so you know, that’s fine, I’ll be obese and my wife can be overweight, but we seem to be enjoying our lives just fine.  So, oh well.

Carrie: I um, I was gonna say when you were talking about, you know, the fitness models, your wife is a perfect example, because she is tiny, but she doesn’t weigh 110 pounds.

Jonathan: Nope.  And you know when she goes to the gym, and she squats more than many of the men at the gym with her.  And she, you know, I think she’s about 5’6”, and she weighs I think right around 140, but when you see her most people are like, “What’s your wife’s weight, 105?” you know.  Nope, she weighs 140 pounds, and she can squat easily, she can put more than her body weight on her back and squat down to below parallel and squat back up, I mean, which is pretty cool.  And she’s got a master degree, she’s a CPA, tax manager in downtown Seattle, so you know, I’m the luckiest man in the world because I’ve got the brains and the beauty, and she’s a sweet woman.

Look at this it’s turning into a sentimental podcast.  I love you Angela!  (laughing)  Carrie just threw up on the floor a little bit!  Aw, Carrie’s red.  Look at that Carrie!  She just drank some water and she’s, this is awesome!  I have to keep going because Carrie is literally about to spit her water out.  It’s coming out of her nose!  On that note, Carrie’s out, she is literally out, she’s walking to corner of the room right now because she is fearing nose splatter.  Okay, Carrie is coming back to us.

On that note,

Carrie: (coughing in the back ground) Let’s move on.

Jonathan: On that note, starting next week, so we laid the groundwork here folks.  Next week we’re going to start to dig into some principles of high quality exercise, or just like, you know, let’s keep these in mind as we start to look forward to how we want to exercise in the future.  But hopefully this week we gave you some foundational stuff, got the brain moving in the right direction, which is again really what we’re after.

We don’t need anymore quick fix techniques.  We’ve tried those.  We need to reboot our brain, reboot our body, and fundamentally approach this problem differently if we want a different solution, which we do and which we will.  It’s gonna be pretty awesome.

Carrie: Awesome.

Jonathan: Awesome – and Carrie’s back with us folks, so that’s good.

Carrie: I can speak!

Jonathan: Thank you so much for listening, and we will see you next week.  Remember to eat more and exercise less, but smarter.

Wait, wait, don’t stop listening yet.  If you like the podcast, if there are other ways we can help you, please join us in the Smarter Science of Slim Support Group , which is freely available on the Smarter Science of Slim website, Smarter Science of Slim.com.  There you’ll find all kinds of free recipes, success stories, and all kinds of fun stuff, like how to help your kids go sane, and just great community content.

Carrie: And just one last thing before you go.  If you wouldn’t mind heading on over to iTunes and Amazon.com and leaving us a review, and then going on over to facebook and liking us, we would hugely appreciate it!

This week:
– How to deal with people who say “What about cultures who eat a lot of rice?”
– How to base your life on science instead of stereotypes
– How there are essentially three types of exercise and how two of the three are great for us
– How the one type of exercise that is the least useful is the one we’re told to do
– How the higher the quality of an exercise the less of it we can do
– How we need to redefine how we think of exercise as we’ve redefined the way our body works (aka set-point = true, calorie counting = false)
– How smarter exercise is all about hormones, *not* calories
– How doing aerobic exercise to lower your set-point is a bit like walking to make yourself taller
– How extreme at home exercise programs is like brushing your teeth with a steak knife
– How smarter exercise is like using a Sonicare toothbrush
– How smarter exercise is done infrequently and for a short period of time
– How smarter resistance training will not make women look “bulky”
– How to think of muscular size like muscular speed
– How you should not do more reps with less weight
– How muscle does not weigh more than fat