Bonus 11: With Sean Croxton on Underground Wellness

Sean: Welcome back to another episode of Underground Wellness Radio. I appreciate you guys tuning in as well as podcasting. It’s very, very cool, you guys. We have Jonathan Bailor on the show today. He’s the author of the Smarter Science of Slim. Scientific Proof. Fat Loss Facts. That’s what I’m talking about, some fat loss facts. It can be a really good show. I want to admit, I’m just lucky to be with you guys, because that’s kind of what I do. I’m not ready for this show at all but it’s all good because typically what I’m not ready for a show, we end up having the best shows.

I’ve just been like eating, sleeping and breathing the real foods. You have no idea how much work this is. I forgot. With Paleo, I almost forgot how much work that was. I’m on a mission to be done by June 15. That way we kind of kick back and work on a few other things before we launch on July 8, because last time I learned my lesson about waiting until the last minute to get stuff done. That was not a good idea and so kind of consumed with the real foods. I hope you guys are totally going to dig it again. That’s on July 8, so I’m little bit behind with my reading.

We have Ray Audette ready to rock on Tuesday of next week. He is the author of Neanderthin. We had to reschedule him, because again we’re trying to get all these stuff done; but on Thursday of next week we’re actually going early. I think it’s a noontime show. We’ve got Peter Cohen who’s going to be on the show of PeteCohen.com. We’re going to be talking about psychology and personal development and health and fitness and how all that stuff comes together so even in the UKs, we’re going to be a little bit early so it’s going to be 12:00 o’clock Pacific Time, 3:00 o’clock Eastern Time next Thursday. Again, no show on Tuesday. FaceBook.com/UndergroundWellness. Twitter.com/UGWellness.

You guys want to call in and speak with Jonathan tonight at 347-237-5608. One more time, 347-237-5608. Hey, there’s a lot of listeners tonight. A lot of people are on the switch board. Thanks guys for tuning in. Of course, speak of my eBook, The Dark Side of Fat Loss in the Underground Wellness Store or at DarkSideofFatLoss.com. Underground workout manual is in there as well. It’s like an in-home workout program with videos to teach you how to do all the stuff, and of course, you can check out my blog at UndergroundWellness.com. There’s a really hot blog on there right now that I wrote last night about autism and some of the stuff that we talked about on Thursday with Dr. Shanahan, autism and the brain and infant formula. It’s got a pretty huge response, so check that out on the blog. You guys are ready to rock. Let’s do this.

We’ll give you Jonathan’s bio. Jonathan Bailor has a proven track record for solving tough problems as the holder of over 20 US Patents. Bailor was the inventor of the marquis feature in Microsoft Office 2010. As an entrepreneur, Bailor has started successful businesses, authored three critically acclaimed books, produced a promotional magazine and has helped develop a radio show as well. Some other stuff in here that we’ll talk about in a second, but Bailor’s new book The Smarter Science of Slim has already been hailed as an important new work by top medical professionals, athletes and health science researchers. He’s on the show tonight. Jonathan, welcome to the show, man.

Jonathan: Hey! Thank you so much for having me, Sean. It’s a pleasure.

Sean: Thanks so much for being here. Hey, I’ve got to mention your website is TheSmarterScienceofSlim.com and you also have another one at JonathanBailor.com. That’s B-A-I-L-O-R. Are you doing good tonight?

Jonathan: I’m doing great. How are you, Sean?

Sean: I am great. I like seeing all your posts on the Twitter. You know what I’m saying? I’m like “Oh, what’s this up?” It was sent over today. Very cool, man. Thanks for all the info. I really, really appreciate that. Hey man, we’re just going to get started and I want you to tell me how you became such a nerd?

Jonathan: Well, let’s just say it’s part genetics, and I’m a part of nature and nurture combined, but, yeah, I’ve always been interested in health and fitness as early as I can remember. In fact, as early as high school is really when I began my formal… I would say, before I entered this field, I actually became a trainer with Bally’s Total Fitness as early as high school. That’s how I paid for college. That’s really where this all started. I began working with clients and teaching them the traditional ‘eat less, exercise more’ approach that I was taught as a trainer that I learned through all traditional media and was just continually disappointed as I know you can empathize with of the lack of long-term results my clients would see when I wasn’t there to tell them to just eat less and “Come on, just spend two more hours on the treadmill.”

It broke my heart. It broke my client’s hearts and that’s really when I started to turn to the academic literature because I was really out of options. I was already a trainer. I’d already gone through that whole rigmarole but it didn’t give me answers that were actually working in the real world so that began a ten-year journey into the depths of the most technical people out there and coming up with this as an alternate approach I call the Smarter Science of Slim.

Sean: You seriously went down the rabbit hole. Isn’t it true that how everything that you’ve learned before becoming a personal trainer and while becoming a personal trainer, the stuff you tried to implement with your clients is completely a hundred degrees upside down wrong?

Jonathan: Well, it is, and it’s funny because on one sense this is why it’s so confusing is there’s certain paradigm. Where if we believe they’re true, if we believe that it’s all about the quantity of calories we consumed and all about the quantity of the calories we burn off then a lot of this stuff makes sense. It’s like if you believe the world is flat, it makes sense not to go sail to the end of it, but the world isn’t flat.

Sean: Right.

Jonathan: It makes sense with those paradigms, but sadly those paradigms are not what have been proven. They’re theories, and sadly they are wrong; and we’re paying the consequences for that.

Sean: Pardon me if this is a redundant question but what do you mean by The Smarter Science of Slim?

Jonathan: Well, what The Smarter Science of Slim is this… so over the past decade I’ve been working with top researchers around the world, studying over 1,100 scientific and academic journal articles, amounting to over 10,000 pages of research, and The Smarter Science of Slim is just a book that simplifies and applies those findings into a lifestyle. It takes sort of what we’ve been taught. It shows how science doesn’t support that, and then it shows what science actually suggests.

The thing that really gets me excited about it is one, it’s surprising but two, people like yourself have been doing such a good job of communicating this message and what we’ve seen with this research is that we’re starting to gain a lot more mainstream acceptance. We gotten endorsements from top doctors of the Harvard Medical School, John Hopkins, UCLA, and just recently the book was approved as curriculum for registered dietitians to get continuing education credits through the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics so we’re bringing this research, stuff that frankly, you’ve been saying for quite some time ideally more mainstream. Not the words you think, and we’re having some success which is really exciting.

Sean: Wow, that’s pretty darn impressive. Your book kind of reminds me of Good Calories, Bad Calories Gary Taubes’ deal but it’s easy to understand. I remember when I first read Gary Taubes’ book the first time I was “I got to start over. This is confusing. This doesn’t make sense to me right now. I got to go back to the beginning and in the hope that it clicks this time, because it was really heavy information. It seems you’re kind of like me. You like to take really complicated things, and make them really simple. Is that true?

Jonathan: That’s absolutely true, and it’s funny because professionally, this is currently is not my full time gig. My full time job is I’m a program manager at Microsoft and what I do professionally is I work with the extremely technical people at Microsoft to simplify and apply their concepts so people are like, “Why did you write this book?” Well, that’s what I love to do. I love to take really complicated technical things, both technologically and biologically, and make it so that’s useful for non-geeky people like myself.

Sean: I like how in the book you really emphasized, just like me, long-term health and fat loss. Long-term, not this short-term, “I’m going to drop weight for a couple weeks while I get ready for the pool party type of stuff.” You’re really talking about long-term stuff, so why did make that emphasis?

Jonathan: We all know it’s been long established how we lose weight in the short-term, right? Ask any wrestler or boxer how to make weight, and they’ll tell you how to drop 15 pounds in a day but really that’s not what we’re after. At the end of the day, if a woman walks into a formal event, no one asks her how much she weigh. If they are going to judge anything, they’re going to judge how her skin glows and how her dress fits and the way she carries herself; and, Sean, that has nothing to do with how much she weighs. According to the body mass index, I’m clinically obese. If you’ve seen a picture of me, I’m not a fitness model or anything, but I’m pretty in-shape dude. Most people would be like “That guy is obese.” so…

Sean: I think I’m way too overweight on the weighing scale. I’m sorry. That’s cool.

Jonathan: This concept of weight, it traps many of us in a prison. It’s kind of like using money to judge success. Sometimes, there’s a correlation, but not really. We’re all after feeling good about ourselves and being healthy and man, just using weight as an approximation for that, that’s just going to cause nothing but frustration. Science really doesn’t bare it out because the techniques we use as you know to lose weight are in many ways the things that cause us to gain fat long term and compromise our health long term. There’s all kinds of ways to just drop weight. It’s not healthy though.

Sean: No, absolutely not. Hey, I know when you’re in personal training, your philosophy were just like mine, “Calories in, calories out. Eat less, exercise more. No bones about it. That’s how it’s done.” Through your research, what did you find out about that universal formula?

Jonathan: Well, the key thing, and it’s always the citation we always hear about why that has to be correct is the law of thermodynamic. You go to any internet chat room, and I’m sure you’ve seen people post this, the law of thermodynamics. Well, again, it’s not crazy. There is some sense here, but it’s a misunderstanding. There’s four laws of thermodynamics. Two of them have nothing to do with what we are talking about here. They have to do with the finding absolute zero and other even more geeky subjects such as that, but there are two that applied to health and fitness. They tell us that energy cannot be created nor destroyed, it can only change forms.

What people do is they take that and they make the reasonable jump, logical jump that if we enter a state of caloric deficit, if we just eat less and exercise more, our bodies have to burn fat because energy cannot be created nor destroyed, it can only change forms, but Sean, there’s an assumption in there. Well, the laws of thermodynamics, the applicable ones tell us is that when we’re in a state of caloric deficit, our body has to do something. The physical laws do not tell us what our body has to do, and they certainly don’t tell us that our body has to burn fat. They just prove that our body has to do something.

Now, when we bring biology into the picture, which is really what matters, not physics, biology — we’re biological organisms. What study after study shows is that if we just eat less of a diet which has caused us to have suboptimal health and fitness and just do more traditional exercise, four things happen. First, we become malnourished, right? We’re taking in less nutrition. We become malnourished. Certainly, that’s not good for our health. Second thing that happens is we slow down, right? Our body doesn’t have enough fuel, so it just runs slower. Anyone who’s ever eaten less or just gone a long time without eating has experienced this, right? You’re lethargic. Your brain is cloudy. You’re in a bad mood. Your body has just shifted into second gear. It doesn’t have enough energy, and without taking up too much time, it is not a slight slowdown.

Many studies have shown, for example, one at the University of Minnesota where researchers did a very conservative ‘eat less, exercise more’ study where they gave participants 1,600 calories per day, again, quite modest biologically on what we see out there and had them walk just a few miles per day had participants’ metabolism slow down by an average of 40 percent. Now, if we want to keep fat off our body and improve our health, Sean, you and I both know that slowing our metabolism down by 40 percent is not helpful. In fact, it’s harmful. First, we become malnourished, second, we slow down our metabolism, third, we do start to burn body tissue if we’re still in the state of caloric deficit, but it’s not fat tissue, it’s muscle tissue. Why? We don’t have enough calories, so what does our body want to get rid of? Tissue that burns a lot calories. Can’t go after our brain. It hopefully doesn’t go after our heart, but it can and will go after our muscle tissue. Again, it’s not a little bit. Study show that up to 70 percent of the non-water weight we lose if we just starve ourselves comes from muscle tissue. Again, if our goal isn’t short-term weight loss, if our goal is long-term health and long-term fat loss, burning off our muscle tissue is the last thing we want to do.

If all of that has happened, and we still don’t have enough calories then we will burn fat; but at what cost? We harmed our health and we set ourselves up for long-term fat gain. Looking back to those laws of thermodynamics, what do they actually prove? When we layer on biology, what they prove is that eating less and exercising more — if we just do, that we actually set ourselves up for long-term fat gain and harm our health. That’s probably why these programs have been proven. They’ve been proven, Sean, to fail, and you quote this on your blog, “95.4 percent of the time.” They have a 95.4 percent failure rate. To put that in perspective, the American Cancer Society performed a study on the long-term success rate of quitting smoking cold turkey.

Now, this is interesting because nicotine is the third most addictive substance in the world, second only to heroin and cocaine. What’s the long-term success rate for quitting smoking cold turkey, no help? It’s 5.5 percent. So long-term success rate for doing what you and I were taught as trainers and what we all hear out there in the mainstream is 4.6 percent. We are more likely to give up the third most addictive substance in the world without any help than we are to achieve our long-term health and fitness goals via what we’ve all been told. I’m getting a little excited. I have to calm down.

Sean: No, get excited. I like it. Let’s get them. We want that. That’s all that reminds me of when I was a trainer. One in twenty would actually get the results, and it’s another reason when I talked to other trainers, I go “Really, man, how many of your clients actually get results, like long term?” They’ll go in turn, “Hey, not that many.” Not that many, actually that’s right. Just one out of twenty. Maybe, even less for some people.

Speaking of training, you talked about calories in but what about the calories outside thing? What about exercise? I’m always fascinated by the whole “Exercise more, exercise more. We’re not exercising enough.” If we go back to 1960’s or 1970’s, I can imagine if I looked outside, I probably wouldn’t see all the people jogging and stuff. You know what I’m saying? Tell us what you think about all that.

Jonathan: Well, I love this subject, because you’re exactly right. We have obesity problem in this country, because we’re not exercising enough. To be very clear, and I know you’re a pretty young guy. I’m a pretty young guy, so this is a little bit before our time; but in our parents’ generation especially for women it is a fact that women were told… we’re talking 50, 60-year-old people. This isn’t like great grandparents. We’re told when they were growing up that if they exercise, they would become infertile. Women were literally not allowed in many university gyms, because it was commonly accepted that strenuous exercise was harmful to women.

For us to now say that we have an obesity problem because we’re not doing enough of something that we did even less of before there was a problem, it just doesn’t make any sense. Again, if we do buy into calories in and calories out, it kind of make sense; but then we miss this huge part of the equation which you are a wonderful advocate of and that’s hormones. I would never smoke a pack of cigarettes and then say, “I’m going to go run a mile, because by running a mile, I’ll cancel out what those cigarettes did to my lungs.” because we know the cigarettes did something. They fundamentally changed my lungs in some way.

What we failed to get told about in our culture is that, if we eat 300 calories of sugar and starchy insane food, not only do we have 300 calories, but we have caused a lasting hormonal and metabolic change in our body that no amount of exercise will just erase the weight. It’s not tit for tat. It’s like smoking. It causes a change in our body, and we will lose sight of that when we just think we can absolve ourselves of eating junk by exercising. It doesn’t mean exercise is bad. It just means we have to use different kinds of exercises for different kinds of goals. There’s exercise that’s effective of burning calories, but burning calories isn’t really effective for long-term health and fitness. What we want is exercise that changes our hormones, and there are ways to exercise to do that but if they’re a very different form of exercise then, it’s a form of exercise that we can’t do a lot of.

Sean: I want to go to the phone lines in a few minutes. We got a caller from the 551 in there, hanging out. Again, 347-237-5608, 347-237-5608. If you guys are already in the switchboard, just go ahead and press number one, and they’ll put you on the queue so I’ll know you have question so go ahead and jump in there. Jonathan, you talk in your book about set point weight and hormones. As you’ve been talking about mostly we just hear about calories, we don’t hear about set point weight. We don’t hear too much about the hormonal aspect of this, and so tell us what’s the deal with the whole disconnect here. Can you explain that a little more?

Jonathan: Well, you’re right. It is all about hormone. And we know… on some level, decidedly we know this. When we people have diabetes, we don’t tell them to eat less. There’s a hormonal problem, and we understand this. Why we as a culture are not told about it? I don’t know if people just think it’s too complicated for us. I personally don’t think it’s that complicated.

Sean: It’s not.

Jonathan: Our body speaks hormones. The way the various aspects of our body talk to each other, metaphorically speaking, is through hormones. If we want to change the conversation that’s happening in our body, if want to change our body from saying “Store this fat. Store this fat.” We have to change that hormonal conversation. The way we do that is by changing the quality of the food we eat, the quality of the exercise we get. It’s not a quantity problem. Just like we would change if someone has a heart problem, if they had a heart attack, their doctor doesn’t really say eat less. Their doctor says “Eat these foods, not these foods.” because it’s the quality of food that affects our core metabolic system.

Why we’re not told about that? Again, I think it’s really because we get our nutrition information not from actual experts. We get our nutrition information on the back of cereal boxes and from the government, which I’m not going to say they’re out to get us, because they are not; but they are not biologist. They are not endocrinologists. Even family practitioner doctors, they have so much they need to know to expect them to be the fountain of nutritional wisdom really fair. There’s an entire discipline of medicine and research called endocrinology, which is just about this. We don’t hear from those people, because they don’t have marketing budgets.

Sean: Absolutely agree. In fact, I think they are out get us because being obese and being unhealthy actually makes a ton of money. They’ll come out and just say Call me conspiracy theorist. I’ll take it, but it just seems kind of obvious to me. Can you elaborate on the set point deal? We haven’t really talked too much about that on this particular radio show.

Jonathan: Yeah, so we’re taught that we need to manually balance the calories we take in and the calories we take out. Just think about any other biological system. Think about our cardiorespiratory system or how much our heart beats. Certainly, we can increase our heart rate temporarily, and we can decrease our heart rate temporarily but the way any mission critical function in our body works is our body automatically regulates it. If we had to think about how frequently we blink, we wouldn’t be able to do half of the things we do in a day. Our metabolism and our metabolic system works the same way.

Our body composition is automatically regulated around a set point. It’s not a theory. It’s a proven fact. This set point is determined primarily by two things: our genetics and our hormones. We can’t change our genetics, but we can change our hormonal balance; and we change that hormonal balance by increasing the quality of the food we eat and the quality of exercise we get. When we do that, we can enable our body to automatically regulate our body composition around a slimmer set point. I know that may sound too good to be true. It’s like, did I just say our body will automatically burn fat for us? We all know people who already do this. There are called naturally thin people.

We all know people who eat whatever the hell they want and don’t really exercise and stay slim, so it’s not a question of “Can the human body keep itself slim automatically?” There are tens of millions of people who have already proven that to be true. The question is, “How can we change our biology to work more like those people?” Actual experts, endocrinologists, biologists have proven how we do this. We just haven’t been told about it.

Sean: I’ve been hearing or reading a lot on the blog this year lately that insulin isn’t the issue when it comes to obesity. I could have sworn I was listening to your interview on the Jimmy Moore Livin La Vida Low Carb Show, and you may have mentioned the study where they took all this people and they didn’t really change anything, they just administered insulin to them and something happened. Remember this?

Jonathan: That’s correct. Yeah, absolutely. Well, a couple of things. Insulin absolutely plays a role. However, to say it’s just about insulin, it is kind of like saying it’s just about calories. It’s not. Calories do matter, right? If you and I sat down and ate 10,000 calories a day for the next ten days, we would gain weight, so it’s not that calories are irrelevant. It’s just that there are a piece of a puzzle which really isn’t that complex, but we need to talk about the whole puzzle.

Insulin is another important piece of that, but there’s other pieces as well, other hormones left and growing and other kinds of things. There’s a complex system. Insulin is a great component of that but it is broader than just insulin. There are studies which show that with any system. If one aspect of that system gets out of whack, the system will still break down; so focusing on insulin is useful, but it is just one piece of the puzzle.

Sean: Do you recall the study that you mentioned on Jimmy’s show?

Jonathan: Yeah. I’m going to try to think off the top of my head here. There’s actually a couple. The one that is most useful I think is you take… well, first of all, it’s a well-known medical fact that people who are given insulin as diabetics are generally shown to gain between ten and twelve pounds in their first year of that medication. The three specific studies that… I’m actually looking this up in real time.

Sean: Sorry to put you on the spot.

Jonathan: So two seconds notes. No problem at all. Here we go. All right. Nope, that’s not it. I try to find this specific study. Here we go. Here we go. Got it. There’s a couple of studies. There’s a first one that was mentioned in the Journal of Diabetic Medicine and found that, just generally speaking, giving people the hormone insulin is not only associated with weight gain, but specifically an increase of belly or trunk fat mass, which is the most dangerous form of fat mass to have on our body because it impairs our organ. Another study done by the Journal of Diabetes in metabolism reported an average of about 13.2 pounds in weight gain during the first year following the initiation of insulin therapy.

The Journal actually went on to conclude and just come out and say that when it comes to taking shots of the hormone insulin, weight gain seems mandatory. They went so far and then finally in the Journal of Diabetes a title of a study was Intensive Insulin Therapy and Weight Gain in Type I Diabetes and showed that only two months of insulin therapy caused a body weight gain of six pounds with the vast majority of that being fat mass. Keeping everything else constant so again, if we just manipulate one component of the system, it absolutely matters and it’s something we need to monitor. It is not the complete picture, however.

Sean: Let’s go to the online and then I want to come back and talk about SANE and insane calories and stuff like that. Call is from 551, what is your name? Where are you calling from?

Area: Area and I’m calling from New Jersey.

Sean: Is it Area?

Area: It’s like are with an extra A.

Sean: Got you. Got you. Thanks for calling. I appreciate you waiting there.

Area: Yeah, man. I’m a long-time listener. I’m finally calling here.

Sean: Right on. What’s your question?

Area: My question here for… is it two part question instead of one.

Sean: Yeah, go for it.

Area: My question for Jonathan is, I know you’re talking about this earlier with calorie restriction. I just want to know your thoughts on calorie restriction and its effects on longevity.

Jonathan: That’s a really good question, so one things I like to always be open about is what my research did and did not cover. My research was really focused on the impact of food and exercise on our metabolism and the effects on sort of body composition, so sadly my research did not cover longevity, so I’m not an expert in that field. I’m sorry I can’t really help with that one, but I can try with your second question.

Area: Well, then, my second question is what are your thoughts on implementing? Because I know a lot of people that are on calorie-restricted diet, and yeah, it does lower their metabolism; but they’ve been implementing like a cheat day, once per week, usually on a weekend, but for instance to raise their lepton levels, and that ensures, kind of helps reboost their metabolism. I guess I just wanted to know either your thoughts on that. What do you think?

Jonathan: Sean, you want to answer it, or do you want me?

Sean: Go for it. I’m just the host.

Area: Hey, you matter, too, Sean.

Sean: Go for it, Jonathan.

Jonathan: Just to clarify really quickly. The actual method of eating that is recommended by my research is not about eating more calories. It’s about eating more food, and if we end up eating the right foods and a lot of them and that incidentally causes us to consume fewer calories, that’s not a bad thing. My research isn’t saying intentionally consume more calories. What it’s saying is intentionally consume more of certain kinds of foods, and the reason of consuming more of those certain kinds of foods is important is because of the combination of micro and macro nutrients they provide. Even if we consume fewer calories, we will avoid the metabolic and muscle wasting effects that are associated with taking a nutritionally deficient diet and eating less of it.

There’s a big difference between taking an unhealthy diet and just eating less of it, and taking in a huge abundance of nutrition and coincidentally happening to have less calories available to our metabolism. That’s an important nuance there. I’m not sitting here saying eat 10,000 calories per day, and when it comes to the cheat days that again is not something that my research… I’ve never seen any peer reviewed study — and this doesn’t mean they don’t exist — that just means I haven’t seen it that says “Definitely, do this. It’s good for you.” However, in my experience, I use the analogy of a clogged sink, where when we heal ourselves hormonally, just like if a sink is working properly on occasion, we can put the wrong stuff in the sink, and the sink won’t break down and get clogged.

It’s that chronic consumption of the wrong stuff, so having the cheat day, I think practically is very helpful for a lot of people because if you tell someone they can never have something ever again, it’s generally a formula for failure, but myself once I began living this lifestyle, the desire to cheat and how I felt after I cheated like the migraines I would get and the inability to sleep caused me to just stop cheating. It was more painful to cheat than it was not to cheat, if that helps.

Area: Yeah. That’s definitely an exact segue. You could definitely say that. I know this would be really hard for 10,000 calories really help me for say broccoli and grass-fed meats. You don’t eventually gain weight, right?

Jonathan: That’s the key thing. Again, we have risk of oversimplifying it on both ends of the spectrum. Calories do matter. It’s just that they’re irrelevant when we eat the right kinds of food. You will never overeat non-starchy vegetables, natural proteins. Your stomach would explode before you overate that. It’s physically impossible to fit 10,000 calories of those types of foods into our body. That’s why I so ardently recommend focusing on quality, not because quantity is irrelevant, but because when you focus on quality, everything else takes care of itself.

Area: Right.

Sean: Yes, sir. Just eat real food. Really hard to over consume it. Oh, yeah. Thanks for calling in.

Area: Yeah. Thanks a lot, guys.

Sean: All right. Let’s go to the 334. What is your name? Where are you calling from? 334, are you there? I can hear you. You want to come back, and let’s go to the 315. What’s your name? Where are you calling from?

Gina: Hi, this is Gina. I know I’m 315, but I’m calling from Maui.

Sean: Right on. Thanks for calling in, Gina. What is your question?

Gina: Sean, first, I’m a big admirer, and I’m just loving Jonathan’s explanations so between Gerson and The Simple, The Slim book, this is just perfect for the people I work with. Being that I do work with eating-disordered women, I try to get them where they’re at. They won’t possibly think about letting go of dieting and restricting and over exercising when it comes to their fertility. So my question to Jonathan was if he saw any research or data of taking the over-exercising which I am one of those people. I’m 57. We didn’t exercise, and we were naturally thin; but if you take the over exercising and the dieting or the food restricting, if there are any studies showing when that really all started and the infertility rate that women are now experiencing, which is they’re very high now. Are there any studies or anything that I can point my women to?

Jonathan: If I’m understanding, you’re asking if there’s been any sort of like long-term studies that are showing any correlation between the rise in dieting and the rise of exercise which did take place in the ‘70s.

Gina: Yes.

Jonathan: In the 1977 is when the government presented select committee on nutritional needs came out and said, “To solve obesity, eat less and exercise more.” They didn’t use those words but they use very close to those words and then we saw an exponential rise on these things. I have not seen data formally correlating those two things. However, it would be simple enough to…. We have those data, so we can create an excel chart pretty easily.

Gina: Right.

Jonathan: I haven’t seen a formal study, sadly that correlates those two. I know, Sean, I don’t know if you have.

Sean: I have not.

Gina: Okay. Anything that relates to those, the dieting and exercising in the ‘70s and then also the increase, anything around that time to infertility?

Jonathan: Well, what I can say is this. Fertility is a hormonal issue.

Gina: Correct.

Jonathan: It absolutely is. Our body is designed to prevent us from dying. Creating life is a pretty metabolically taxing thing to do. In fact, one trial single most metabolically test…. Any woman who had a child probably tell you it has more stress on the body than anything else so if we’re in a state of starvation, and we do not have enough nutrition, if our body is going to burn muscle which has been proven, I can only imagine that protecting itself from further stress such as trying to create another life when it’s trying to protect its own, I can only imagine that has to be related.

Gina: Right. Yeah and those women that I do have are all in their in their amenorrhea. They haven’t had their periods for years, so obviously they aren’t fertile and that is the hormonal caused, correct, of the problem there.

[Crosstalk 35:49]

Jonathan: It is also the general push we have in our culture to move away from natural proteins and natural fats. We must have natural proteins and natural fats to live. We have to, and we must choose synthesized and utilized hormones correctly. However, we’re told to get about 65 percent of our calories from carbohydrates. Carbohydrates is not bad. Vegetables are carbohydrates, and they’re fantastic for us, but to say that we need to eat the vast majority of our calories from them does result in hormonal malfunction which I can only imagine has an impact. Especially in men, for example, low intake of fat protein has absolutely been shown to negatively affect testosterone levels and in women and men together, growth hormone levels. Things like that.

Gina: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for your excellent words, and Sean, thanks for having Jonathan and all your great guests on. Loving you both.

Sean: No problem. No problem. Hang on for two seconds, Gina.

Gina: Sure.

Sean: I recommend that you go on Facebook and look up Fact Finder Steph. That’s Fact Finder Steph. S-T-E-P-H. She just start a website called FactFinderSteph.com. She’s who did all the fact checking, all the research or what not for my book, and so hit her up. She can literally find anything, and pretty soon, actually in the summertime, we’re going to be launching a product on teaching everybody how to do their own scientific research in the field of health and nutrition so it should pretty cool. We’re working on that. I’m working on that now.

Gina: Wow. This is fabulous stuff. Fabulous. Thank you. Fact Finder Steph.

Sean: Yep. She rocks. She’s super smart.

Gina: Thank you.

Sean: No problem. Gina, thanks for calling in.

Gina: Aloha, Sean.

Sean: Aloha. All right, let’s go back to 334, see what’s up over there. 334, are you there this time?

Tiffany: Hey, I am.

Sean: Hey, what’s up? What’s your name?

Tiffany: Hi, my name is Tiffany. I’m calling from Alabama.

Sean: Thanks for calling in. What is your question, Tiffany?

Tiffany: My question was, in the beginning Jonathan talked about exercising to change your hormones. I’m an insulin-resistant hormonal mess and just trying to heal myself with real food but trying to get out of the mindset of enduring three hours at the gym, so what type of exercise would you recommend to change your hormones?

Jonathan: Well, my research shows… Well, it’s not really my research, other people’s research that I had in a reference show… Sean, do we have a second? I would like to give a little bit more of a detailed explanation here, if that’s all right.

Sean: You got as long as you want. Take your time.

Jonathan: All right, cool. Just like we have different muscles on our body, like our arm muscles work our arms, our leg muscles work our legs. We actually have different fibers within our muscles. For example, we have what’s called Type I-A muscle fibers. These muscle fibers allow us to do a little bit of work for a long time. They are what enable our mouth to move and our fingers to type and our legs to walk all day, and we don’t really get tired. Now, by contrast, we also have four different types of muscle fibers. I’m going to skip right to the last one, which is your Type II-B muscle fibers. These muscle fibers are just the opposite of the Type I-A. They enable us to generate a lot of force but for a very short period of time.

They’re generally used to go only, historically, in emergency-type situations. If you drop something very heavy on your foot, and you traditionally couldn’t lift that, somehow you magically can. That’s because you are tapping into your Type II-B muscle fibers. Now, what researchers have shown in a very exciting fashion, I get into this into detail in the book, is that it’s when we work these deeper muscle fibers, these Type II-B muscle fibers and our Type II muscle fibers in general, those are the muscle fibers that trigger this hormonal reaction. It’s not that traditional exercise which works like cardiovascular-type of exercise, walking on the treadmill, anything we can do for 30 minutes or more, that works our Type I-A muscle fibers. It’s not bad.

It’s just doesn’t work the muscle fibers which are responsible for this hormonal change to work those muscle fibers. We have to perform exercises with more resistance because these muscle fibers only get activated when we have to generate a lot of force. For example, instead of doing 20 bicep curls with five pounds, we would be much better served taking a heavier form of resistance and for example, slowly lowering it so finding ways to use more resistance and more taxing exercise but in a very safe way.

This is the type of training in the book I described as eccentric training which I know Sean is familiar with and it has to do with, instead of focusing on lifting weights, focusing on lowering weights because by doing this, we can enable our muscles to generate maximal force while also staying extremely safe because all we’re doing is slowly and very controlled lowering weight. So instead of doing a push-up, for example, you would do a lowered down. I know it sounds a little bit silly, but it is the proven way to require our muscles to generate more force, work these different muscle fibers, and therefore get a different and much more impactful hormonal result.

Sean: Does that answer your question, Tiffany?

Tiffany: Absolutely.

Sean: Nice. Any follow up, or you’re good?

Tiffany: I think I’m good. Thank you so much.

Jonathan: The way you do that, you might be “Well, how do I actually do that?” I do that. I definitely talk about that in more detail in the book.

Sean: Check out the book. Bye-bye, Tiffany. Let’s go. I want to do another call then I want to do a Facebook question and get back to our questions. I don’t think I got this. 714, what’s your name and where you’re calling from?

Caller: Hello?

Sean: Hello. What’s happening?

Caller: Oh, okay. Cool. Hold on one second. I got you on the headset. Yes, so I’ve been listening. I just want to know, what do you guys think is too much exercise?

Sean: Jonathan?

Jonathan: Again, thank you for asking this question, because I do not mean to suggest that exercise is bad and that we should intentionally exercise less. My research didn’t show that for example, walking on the treadmill for half hour is somehow healthier than walking on the treadmill for an hour. The issue is that it’s walking on the treadmill that isn’t effective, and when we do higher quality exercise, it’s pretty simple, right? If we were to sprint, we can’t sprint for as long as we can walk. When we do what I call ‘higher quality exercise’, when we work our deeper and our more impactful muscle fibers, we can’t exercise a lot.

If you go out right now, and I don’t recommend doing this, but it’s an easy example, and put a hundred pound backpack on your back and sprint up stadium steps, you can’t do that every day for two hours, so it’s not that exercising a lot is bad, it’s that exercising a lot is indicative of exercising with low quality. When we exercise with low quality, we aren’t triggering a hormonal response or the optimal hormonal response in our body, so it’s not about being lazy or just exercising less. It’s about making ourselves too sore to exercise a lot. Does that make sense?

Caller: Yeah, I get you. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense now.

Jonathan: Then again, it’s not “Don’t exercise.” It’s focus on working your muscles with higher quality. Focus on going deeper into the muscle with more resistance and then the next day you won’t wake up and be “Oh, man, should I exercise today?” You’ll be like, “Oh my God, how am I going to walk down the steps?” You won’t be able to exercise more. You see what I’m saying?

Caller: Yeah. Cool.

Sean: Do you have a follow up or does that answer your question?

Caller: No, and then Sean, I just want to give you a shout because I’m in Aztec myself.

Sean: What?

Caller: Yeah, you definitely see you in the arts, but you guys are too expensive to train me.

Sean: Well, thanks so much for calling in my Aztec brother.

Caller: Goodnight. Cool.

Sean: Have a good night. Hey, actually we’ll get to the Facebook question in a second. I want to jump to this question about SANE. S-A-N-E, what does that stand for?

Jonathan: SANE is just an acronym for the four factors that science has shown determine the quality of a calorie. I’m talking about high quality calories and high quality exercises. Well, SANE calories are high quality calories. Insane calories are low quality calories. SANE stands for the four factors which are satiety, aggression, nutrition and efficiency. To break those down really quickly, high quality calories have high satiety. They’re satisfying. They fill us up quickly, and they keep us full for a long time. They’re unaggressive. High quality calories are unaggressive, meaning they don’t dump a bunch of glucose or energy into our blood stream all at once, overwhelming our body and forcing us to store fat.

High quality calories are SANE calories that are nutritious. They provide us with a vast amount of vitamins and minerals and macronutrients such as protein and essential fatty acids per calorie. Per calorie is an important distinction. Finally, high quality calories are inefficient, meaning that it’s not easy for our body to convert them into fat. Most people don’t know this, but we actually burn about ten percent of the calories we burn every day, simply turning food into energy or stored energy body fat onto our body; and different foods are processed very differently by our body.

For example, 300 calories worth of protein to actually metabolically convert that into body fat would burn 200 calories. So even if we could live in an imaginary world where we were completely sedentary, eating 300 calories of protein and no movement would cause a hundred calories of fat to be stored, two hundred would be lost in all the chemical reactions leading up to that. However, a starch is twice as efficient. Two hundred calories worth of 300 calories of starch could be converted into body fat so we can actually eat more food and actually have less calories available to our body by eating inefficient food. SANE high quality calories are satisfying, unaggressive, nutritious and inefficient.

Sean: The diet program in your book, is it just kind of along the lines of just eat real food? Is it Paleo? What’s it like?

Jonathan: It’s very, very similar to Paleo. It’s very similar to real food. It has a little bit of nuance but it’s really again focused eat way, way more non-starchy vegetables so way more kale, spinach, carrots, onions, peppers, things like nuts, potatoes and corn and then focus on eating way more protein, so Greek yogurt, organic grass-fed beef, chicken, whey protein, eggs, things like that and natural fats, nut seeds, chia seeds, flax seeds, coconut, coco, almonds, all that kind of stuff. It is very similar to Paleo. There are some nuances, but by and large, a Paleo diet is a SANE diet. SANE is a bit more permissive than Paleo, but Paleo is a SANE diet, and that’s why so many people achieve so much success on it.

Sean: One of my Facebook friends was asking about the fat content. She noticed that there was egg whites and skinless chicken and whatnot. Is there any issue with the saturated fats?

Jonathan: No, so it’s not at all that saturated fats are bad for you. It’s that it is easy to over-consume fat. For example, I love peanut butter. Love it. I love natural peanut butter, and I love coconut. I could sit down and consume 2,000 calories of coconuts without thinking about it, but I love eating coconut; and I want to continue to eat coconut. If I want to get a balance of calories from protein, carbohydrate and fat, instead of eating three eggs, scrambled and some coconut, which would give me 70 percent of my calories from fat and maybe 30 from protein — probably less than that actually — to ensure that I get a balance, I personally would eat a mixture of egg whites and eggs and then have some coconut afterwards so that it’s a balance.

It’s all about balance, so it’s not about eating low fat intentionally; but if you do want to eat a lot of nuts and seeds and enjoy fats in those forms and you’re interested in a balanced ratio of protein, carbohydrate and fat, then you just have to pick where you get your fat from. It’s not at all that fat is bad. The book goes into massive detail on how important fat is and even saturated fat such as medium-chain triglycerides. It’s simply that getting a diverse set of fat is very important, so I recommend mixing egg whites with whole eggs. You’re still getting all of the fat in the whole egg but you’re boosting the protein content. Same thing with steak is fine for you, but if you want to then eat a handful of nuts afterwards. It may be in your best interest to eat a leaner cut rather than a fattier cut. Not because fat’s bad but because you want to get your fat from another source, if that makes sense.

Sean: Got you. Facebook question from Mike. Which fat do we lose first, visceral or subcutaneous?

Jonathan: That is a good question. My research did not provide a definitive answer of which goes first. Sadly, I do not know the answer to that question.

Sean: That’s all good. Let’s try Mike’s second question. Are ketones a good marker of fat loss? If so, what time of day should it be measured? Any thoughts on that?

Jonathan: Yeah. Again, my research was very specific, too. Again, these clinical studies… and I did not uncover any that said optimize your ketone levels to this, that and the other things, so sadly, I do apologize. I like to keep my comments very restricted to…

[Crosstalk 49:53].

Sean: When I’m on the show and they ask you something I don’t know, I don’t know. I keep everything I was on whose show is on, Dr. Axe’s show and somebody called in and was “What’s the best way to stop smoking?” “I don’t know.” You know what I’m saying? “I have no idea.” Let’s see. Let’s try this one from Brooke. “Does the natural sugar in fruit prevent fat losses?” Let’s see if you’ve got anything on that one.

Jonathan: Again, this is a tough one, because your body doesn’t care where sugar is coming from. What we hear in the mainstream, to be clear, berries and citrus fruits… so when I talk about SANE, they are SANE fruits. They are berries and citrus fruits. However, things like apples, bananas and grapes, if you look at their fructose content, which is a uniquely fattening sugar relative to the amount of fiber and nutrients they provide, they are absolutely fattening; and they are absolutely possible to overeat. If you ate ten bananas in a day, I know there’s some girl on YouTube that seems to do that with great success, but we’ll talk about that later. If you drink apple juice or coke, they both contain 30 grams of sugar. Your body is not like, “Oh, one came from apple juice”.

Again, fruit is good if it’s SANE fruit, berries and citrus fruits because of the fiber and the nutrient content. It does contain some sugar, but it’s sugar in a moderate form accompanied by a lot of other good stuff; so, can fruit inhibit some people from fat loss? Absolutely. When a lot of people try what we call a SANE lifestyle, if they’ve had a lot of yoyo dieting in their past, they just don’t do any fruit at the beginning, and they focus on just purely on natural fats, protein and non-starchy vegetables. Then, as they begin to see results they may work fruit in, but again, fructose is fructose. It does not matter where it’s coming from in terms of fructose. It’s good if we can take in fructose with a vast majority of other things, but it’s still fructose.

Sean: Man, the fruitarians are coming after you.

[Crosstalk 51:59]

Sean: My durian writer is on. Do ask me about fruit? I’m like, “Oh, man! Here we go.” I’ll just connect to the phone line. Caller from the 405, what’s your name? Where are you calling from?

Jeff: I’m Jeff. I’m calling from Oklahoma.

Sean: You said Jeff?

Jeff: Yeah.

Sean: Thanks for calling in, Jeff. What’s your question?

Jeff: I got a question for both of you. I’m 56 years old. I started eating Paleo about two and a half years ago. I went from about 320 pounds to around 215 to 225. I still got belly fat, type II diabetes. Eat a Paleo diet but kind of having a hard time breaking through that. Any suggestions?

Sean: Jonathan?

Jonathan: Sean, do you want to go first on this?

Sean: Go for it. You are way smarter than me. Go for it.

Jonathan: Well, I think one thing that a lot of people have seen success, at least with my research is with the exercise component, because a couple of things; so with the vast majority of the population will never work their type II. We have an entire set of muscle fibers. We talk about we only use three percent of our brain. Well, we only use a small fraction of our actual muscles, and the research is unequivocal that when we work our Type II-B muscle fibers, we create a hormonal response that is just simply impossible via any other mechanism.

There are studies that have gone so far in that when researchers would take rats, and they would just engineer them to have more this Type II-B muscles fibers, they would then feed these rats garbage, not garbage but they should just pump them full of sugar, and the rats would not gain fat and their blood sugar levels would not get abnormal. It was as if this muscle tissue had literally immunized them. The researcher’s name is Zaman, and he’s over at Boston University. It is just profoundly exciting research, so I would recommend looking into the, what I would call ‘high-quality work eccentric exercise’, which is something that is very new. You can’t go to your gym and ask the average trainer “Hey, can you show me how to exercise eccentrically?” But it is hugely powerful from a hormonal perspective and can often times serve as catalyst for this hormonal change.

In fact, Professor Ratey over at the Harvard Medical School and a lot of other individuals are beginning to recommend this for diabetes, where they’re seeing just these teeny tiny doses of very high quality exercise having a profound impact on insulin levels and blood sugar levels because again, think about it like the difference. This is sort of a little bit not perfect of an analogy but think of the difference between a baby aspirin and Percocet. There is just so much more potency, and when you have such a more potent stimulus, you can get such a different dramatic result and that’s what this type of exercise does, so that may be something for you to check out.

Sean: Jeff, do you have a follow up?

Jeff: Yeah, I do. I have… of course being 56 and overweight for so long, I’ve got some pain issues. I’ve had a neck fusion, and I’ve got a laminectomy in my back, so does your book recommend any type of exercise that you could do for the pain issues?

Jonathan: You see, the good news is this form of exercise is incredibly safe because what eccentric training is, is just for example, we all know how to sit on the toilet. We just do a little squat action. Well, instead of traditional exercise, we’ll have you squatting up and down and up and down and a bunch of perky-jerky movements that could potentially aggravate your back.

[Crosstalk 55:45]

Jonathan: Exactly. Well, with an eccentric training, what you would do is potentially just get down into the bottom squatting position supporting yourself and just holding that position. Think of it a bit more like a Pilates or a yoga, where it’s incredibly slow and it’s incredibly controlled. Because of that I’ve had… so I don’t have an interior cruciate ligament in my right leg. I’ve blown my right knee out three times, and I didn’t get the third surgery so I’m literally missing a ligament and I’m missing a meniscal disc in my right leg. My brother has had fused discs in his neck.

This kind of training is really the only kind of training we can do, because of these physiological limitations. We can’t move laterally. We can’t run up and down the hills. We can’t do this kind of things but this type of training, and frankly it’s very popular in physical therapy circles, not in popular literature, but physical therapists have been doing this for a long time because it’s so easy on the joints and so low stress on ligaments and things like that.

Jeff: That’s just great. I’m glad to hear it. Thanks for the information.

Jonathan: You bet.

Sean: Thanks for your calling in. Congrats on your weight loss.

Jeff: Thank you.

Sean: All right, I got two more questions for you, and I am feeling very Santa-ish right now, so the next caller I’m going to give it a free Paleo Summit, so I’ll do one more caller. You get a free Paleo Summit, call in now 347-237-5608. It’s totally going to suck if nobody calls. That means nobody wants the Paleo Summit.

Jonathan: I’m going to get my cellphone right now. Hold on.

Sean: Let’s see. Where do I want to go here? Hey, I was listening to the Jimmy Moore Show that you did, and there’s a quote from you that I really like and I just want you to expand on it. You said “Biology is not a matter of opinion.” Talk about that.

Jonathan: Sean, you can be SANE and be a vegetarian. What I’m about to say has nothing against the vegetarianism. However, if people want to talk about, for example, not eating meat, there is a moral aspect to that, for example, and there’s an environmental aspect to that and those can be debated. When you eat a piece of fruit, we can study, and we have studied what that does to your body. It is not a matter of opinion what happens when you consume bread. That’s like saying it’s a matter of opinion what happens when you take penicillin.

Any chemical that you put into your body can be studied, and we can prove objectively in a lab what it does; so Biology is not a matter of opinion, but we continue to hear opinions. It was like “Well, I think I had success doing this.” or “Tommy had success doing that”. You know what? Tommy also comes from a family who are genetically predisposed to being huge in terms of a musculature, or Sally comes from a family where her parents have always had super skinny figures, so what Sally does may not at all be what you should do because Sally has different genetics. We have to move away, but eating and exercise is no different than medicine.

It has to do with stimulus applied to the body, and that’s something we can study, we have studied and there are scientific facts telling us what we should do. Doctors don’t have opinion about how to treat diabetes. They study it, and they prove and then they are “Okay, give people insulin.” It doesn’t mean they are perfect. It doesn’t mean that science doesn’t change, but what it does mean is that we don’t need to argue about these things. We need to use science to see what’s been proven, and let’s build off of that. Let’s stop arguing about it. It’s not a matter of opinion. It’s a matter of fact. Let’s just get to the facts.

Sean: Amen. Hey, Jonathan, how much time do you have left?

Jonathan: I’m having a good time, so it’s all good.

Sean: Okay because I’ve created quite a mob of a monster because a whole bunch of people just called. I guess they want the Paleo Summit. There’s a good 30 seconds there where nobody was calling in. I was little worried but we’re good now. Let’s go to the 614. What is your name? Where are you calling from?

Tom: Hi, my name is Tom, calling from Columbus.

Jonathan: Six, one, four, I am from Columbus, Ohio as well, Tom. Go Buckeyes.

Tom: Oh, awesome. Awesome, yeah.

Sean: What’s your question, Tom?

Tom: I just have a little question. I’ve switched over to a Paleo diet about a year and a half ago and probably lost about 20 pounds from there. It was very helpful, and essentially I’m kind of hitting the point where the whole safe starch thing I kind of experimented with that, because I found that my job is pretty physical and needed more calories. I thought I would try adding more carbs so I typically used more fat. It’s okay, but I’m kind of finding I think the fat might have been a little better. I’m not sure which direction to go. I just basically need more calories, and not sure what’s the best route to go with that.

Jonathan: Well, Tom, I’ll tell you my recommendation would be absolutely to go the natural fat route, and I also say that because it’s not only hormonally more beneficial; but this is an emerging field of science which is so exciting. For example, the medium-chain triglycerides found in coconut are showing some incredibly promising things. The omega-3 fatty acids in chia seeds and flax seeds, and not only that, but it’s an immensely practical. Take two tablespoons of flax seeds or chia seeds and two tablespoons of coconut manna, which is just coconut ground up until like a peanut butter-type substance and just…

Tom: Oh, I’ve just got about five pounds of that right now, so I definitely know what you’re talking about.

Jonathan: You can pound that stuff and that’s 700 calories right there, and that’s not going to cause…

Tom: It is a lot of carbs, though. I think there’s a good amount of carbs in that, though.

Jonathan: Yeah, I’m not super familiar with Paleo, but it’s my impression that Paleo is not like an Atkins-type diet where it’s no carbs. It’s just I think it’s like sub-30 percent of your calories from carbs. Is that correct?

Tom: Well, I’m not sure about that, and Paleo is more of a guideline I guess, but I don’t really target macronutrients.

Jonathan: Okay. Carbs aren’t bad. To be very clear, non-starchy vegetables, my research shows that the single most beneficial food we could ever consume, and they’re carbs. Carbs aren’t the enemy. Low quality food is the enemy. There’s low quality carbs, there’s low quality protein, and there’s low quality fat. The question is not, “Should I avoid carbs?” The question is avoid low quality food so high quality fat that are going to contain some… again, carbs are not bad. Natural food, eating food has carbs in it. I wouldn’t be too worried about that.

Tom: You busted me on that because you’ve made me realize that a lot of junk has crept into my diet, so, in fact that it wouldn’t be an issue. What do you think of green supplements, by the way? That’s really the last thought I have for you.

Jonathan: If the choice is between nothing or like a wheat grass or a spirulina, absolutely taking those in supplement form is better. I personally am a huge fan of whole foods, not the grocery store; but if you can get a nice blender and throw some spinach in there and maybe throw some strawberries in there and throw some vanilla whey protein and some coconut in there and you can just drink that, that’s going to be a lot better for you my research would show.

Tom: I do eat a lot of blend broccoli and things like that, but I’m not too adventurous with the vegetables.

Jonathan: This is going to sound odd, but I have yet to have anyone who’s have just horrible experience with this. If you can swing a nice blender. and you can put a handful or two of spinach, I know it sounds odd, put some tasty like vanilla or fruit flavored whey protein, maybe like a handful of strawberries; and you won’t even taste the spinach. That’s how I get 90 percent of my vegetables. It’s actually in blended smoothie form, because it also enables me to eat raw vegetables. I find it really convenient.

Sean: I got a Vitamix last week. It is like the best…

Jonathan: Vitamix. I love it.

Sean: It’s the best thing I’ve ever bought in my life. I eat more vegetables in the last week than I have in the last year. Seriously, that’s all I do. I just juice vegetables all the time. Of course, I eat my meats and all that stuff, but when you can juice your vegetables, it makes it so much easier because I’m not a huge fan of vegetables at all.

Jonathan: Sean, when you say juice, you actually mean blend, right?

Sean: Blend. Yeah, thanks for correcting me. Yeah, blend. The thing’s awesome. It’s kind of pricey but it’s totally worth it. Tom…

Jonathan: It’s got that seven-year warranty on it, so if you can keep it for seven years, it’s pretty good.

Sean: Tom, send me an e-mail sean@undergroundwellness.com and include your phone number. That way I’ll know it’s you, and I’ll send you out a free Paleo Summit. As for everybody else who has called in tonight, I just don’t want to discriminate, and just give it to one person, so Jeff, Area, Gina, Tiffany, my man from SGS shoes, send me an email and I will get you out a Paleo Summit. Tom, thanks for calling in.

Tom: Thank you.

Sean: Yup, and obviously my audience likes to be bribed to call in, so we got a lot more people who are on the switchboard now. Caller from the 973, what’s your name? Where are you calling from?

Deirdre: Hi, it’s Deirdre.

Sean: Deirdre, thanks for calling in.

Deirdre: Hi.

Sean: What is your question?

Deirdre: My question is, I am a breastfeeding mom, and I have lost a lot of weight after… I have an 18-month old son. I’ve been eating Paleo, but I crave carbs. I’ve been making a lot of almond bread and stuff like that, but I really love carbs. What do you think about that?

Jonathan: When you say carbs, do you specifically mean starches and sweets?

Deirdre: I do. I like dark chocolate, rice cakes, brown rice. I try to do as high quality as possible, but…

Jonathan: Well, here’s what I’ll say. A couple of things… Let’s be very clear that there’s never been a study performed that says if you eat quinoa, which is a very high… if you’re going to eat a starch, it’s a very high quality starch, you will die. Clearly, it’s not toxic. Sugar is toxic. High fructose corn syrup is toxic. Starch generally causes bad health and hormonal chaos. However, clearly, there are billions of people around the world who eat starch on a regular basis and aren’t just dropping dead. I don’t want to paint this picture where if you ate three rice cakes a day, you’re up… A big part of the Smarter Science of Slim is advocating… It’s not about perfection, right? It’s just about being conscious of what we’re doing.

For example, not being “Oh, I’m not going to eat that steak because it has fat, and instead I’m going to eat this plate of pasta because it’s low fat.” And you know not to do that. If you’re breastfeeding, and if you’re craving these foods, and if you’re able to control that craving, one, starches are different from sweets. Try to steer clear of the sweets, but if it’s just like a rice or a quinoa or the whole grain, again, they’re not poison. They’re just not the best foods you could be eating.

Deirdre: Yeah. I mean for the most part, we eat like grass-fed meat. We eat raw dairy. We eat very high-quality food, but it is definitely after dinner. I like to have a very small piece or maybe not so small but of 80 percent chocolate.

Jonathan: Well, that I would say a different story actually, because I mean, that’s going to have a little bit of sugar in it, but I would actually feel a little bit less bad about that because coco is one of the most healthy foods in the world. I mean, the antioxidants and all that kind of fun stuff and again, remember, it’s not about perfection.

Please don’t ever. I would not… at least unless if you’re getting ready to be on the cover of a magazine, you might want to beat yourself up about that; but you’re just trying to live a long, happy and healthy life, seeking perfection is not the way to get there. That’s the way that we get disappointed all the time. Here’s what you’re saying, you’re already conscious of this. You’re saying “Let’s do the darkest chocolate. Let’s do the chocolate that has the least sugar in it, and let’s savor it in moderation.”

Deirdre: Yeah.

Jonathan: To me, you’re hitting a homerun there. It’s a treat and you’re savoring it. I think that’s just fine.

Sean: Deidre, if it makes you feel any better, every few weeks or so, I’ll have dark chocolate covered almonds for breakfast.

Deirdre: Yeah, and sometimes I find myself doing stuff like that, but it is like a higher quality chocolate; or yes, with almonds or something like that.

Jonathan: I know some creative things you can do as well. I know Paleo is not a big fan of dairy, but my research did show that things like Greek yogurt and cottage cheese and whey protein can be very helpful. I do things, for example, I make a peanut butter pie filling out of Greek yogurt, peanut butter, vanilla whey protein, some vanilla extract and some Stevia. Oh my God, I have a huge sweet tooth. I love that. I do a natural peanut butter with flax seed oil and full fat cocoa, and this thing called Ultimate Muscle Provider from Beverly Nutrition. It’s a very unique protein supplement, and it makes this fudge, which you can also bake up. It turns out into a brownie, and then I top it.

Deirdre: Yes.

Deirdre: That’s supposed the recipe. That’s us.

Jonathan: The recipe is flowing up on the website. Just look for SANE fudge.

Deirdre: That’s great.

Jonathan: Again, it’s not about a life of depravation. That’s no fun. It’s just about making smart choices.

Deirdre: No.

Jonathan: You’re doing that so it’s all good.

Sean: Deirdre, it’s on there.

Deirdre: All right, cool.

Sean: All right. Have a good night.

Deirdre: Thanks. You, too.

Sean: Deirdre, I’m sure you’re still on the line there. Make sure you email me sean@undergroundwellness.com, S-E-A-N with your phone number, and I’ll get you the Paleo Summit. The website that Jonathan was talking about… let me get my volume back up. The website that Jonathan was talking about is TheSmarterScienceofSlim.com so you want to check that out and check out his book as well. Where are we going? To the 347? Caller from the 347, what is your name? Where are you calling from?

Lisa: Hey, Lisa calling from the beautiful Bronx. How you doing?

Sean: Lisa from the Bronx, what’s happening?

Lisa: Not much, just enjoying your show. Thanks very much.

Sean: Right on, what is your question?

Lisa: Couple of questions, actually. I thought of one while I was listening on another caller. I love veggies, but the thing is when I have them with my breakfast, it just takes a really long time to chew. That’s one question. My other question is I was diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome for about 16 years and then when I was diagnosed finally with celiac disease, I realized that IBS just stands for ‘It’s Bullshit’.

Then, I went gluten-free for about five years, but the last year and half of it, I was getting sick again, and then someone on the gluten-free Facebook page suggested Paleo. I’ve been Paleo for about eight months now, and I feel awesome. I lost weight. I have energy. I have more focus and concentration, but I still get diarrhea; so I’m not sure what the issue is.

Jonathan: So let me answer both of these. The chewing thing, I think you’re going to hear the same thing for both Sean and I, which is there’s a thing called the ‘Vitamix’ which is the uber chewing machine.

Sean: That was exactly what I was thinking.

Jonathan: Right in my office refrigerator right now, I have… well, I already drank one of them, but I have another one. It’s just this water bottle, and it’s green but it is quite tasty and it represents six servings of non-starchy vegetables, and I could be drinking it right now while I’m on the phone. To try to consume the amount of non-starchy vegetables that my research recommends we optimize our health at, you can’t. You’d be eating all day long. The only way to do it is to get a machine to chew it for you which the Vitamix that does a great job, so I would recommend checking that out. Sean, I know you would, too.

Sean: Absolutely.

Lisa: That’s the one that price 600 bucks though, right?

Sean: Well, I think…

Jonathan: It’s pretty expensive.

Lisa: Yeah.

Sean: It’s a little pricey. It’s worth it, though. I spent a lot of time….

Lisa: Researching.

Sean: Not buying it because of the expense. Once I got it, I freaking love it. It’s about $400 or so. I feel we’re doing a Vitamix infomercial right now. I’m going to request a payment from them tonight.

Jonathan: No doubt.

Sean: But my buddy sells, I think it goes SpinachMan.com. SpinachMan.com, my buddy Ingo. We’ll get you all set up over there.

Lisa: All right, cool. Thanks.

Sean: Jonathan, the second question.

Lisa: The second question about the diarrhea issues.

Jonathan: What I can tell you, we have a Smarter Science of Slim support group here on the website and irritable bowel syndrome is one issue that people have brought up as going away when they’ve taken on a more SANE lifestyle. What my research did not cover it specifically, however, if you do check out TheSmarterScienceofSlim.com, click on the Support Group tab. You can anonymously say, “I’ve been having this problem. Here’s what I’ve been doing.” and I think at least two or three readers will be able to chime in and say, “Here’s what I’m doing, and here’s how it went away.”

Lisa: Okay. Yeah, because here I am. I’m all proud that I’m gluten-free, and I haven’t been cheating. Then, I’ll get sick if I go to a restaurant and they swear up and down it’s gluten-free, and then I wind up getting sick for three weeks. Then, the same thing with Paleo. I’m really careful at home, and everybody at home is Paleo; and I don’t know… I’m wondering if maybe because I cook on the weekend, and then I have food throughout the week that maybe that’s causing it because it’s not freshly cooked. I’m wondering if there are other variables involved.

Jonathan: There are very well maybe, and the other thing we can do, we get you up on the support group as I have. Obviously, over the last ten years, I built up some wonderful relationships with some of the top researchers around the world and some wonderful holistic nutritionalists, people who have these kind of tactical answers like “What to do about irritable bowel syndrome?” They can answer it much better than I can, and I can definitely try to get you in touch with them as well.

Lisa: More than great. Yeah, I would appreciate that. Thanks.

Sean: Lisa from the Bronx, thanks for calling in.

Lisa: All right, thanks so much, Sean.

Sean: Send me an email for your Paleo Summit.

Lisa: Okay.

Sean: All right, caller from the 404, what is your name? Where are you calling from?

Tori: Is that me?

Sean: That is you.

Tori: Tori from… Sweet, I actually thought I didn’t get through. This is Tori from Athens, Georgia.

Sean: Thanks for calling in. What is your question, Tori?

Tori: Well first of all, I just want to say I’m a big fan. Thanks a lot, and also if it’s possible instead of a Paleo Summit, I would love the Dark Side of Fat Loss, but I understand if that’s not possible. Then, my question for…

Sean: That’s cool. That’s cool. That saves me money. That’s cool. Yeah.

Tori: I have literally read every Paleo book. I listened to everybody’s podcast. I’m on it. I cook every meal for my family. We all grouch that local blah, blah, blah, but so my question is kind of just for your guest is when does research, I’m kind of choose the area that I’m in right now, and I feel like I’ve conquered the macronutrients. I’ve conquered the micronutrients. I’ve done all this. I’m really interested in testing, and I also cook everything.

I kind of feel I’m a little bit of a home personal chef, so I’m really interested in cooking techniques and methods especially methods that can enhance or keep from messing up precious nutrients and enzymes, etcetera, etcetera; so I’m curious one about just testing in general. This is something, Sean, that I wanted to ask or recommend to you as well is that I know… I actually attended your webinar with… I’m excited.

Sean: Reed Davis.

Tori: What’s that?

Sean: Reed Davis. Reed Davis.

Tori: Yeah, it was Reed Davis. All that stuff is very interesting, but I still get really confused with… I just think a comprehensive podcast or blog post about panel testing and what’s what and all that would be amazing for the entire community. Back to kind of my main thing with your guest is, just in his research kind of in an advanced state as far as testing goes, what benefits if there was any kind of awareness as far as taking yourself to kind of a next level through testing and through awareness of just your body and your bio chemistry and also any research that was done particularly in the realm of cooking and food preparation.

Jonathan: Oh, man. Well, I’m so sad to disappoint here, but the general… this sort of a sad metaphor, but if you can’t imagine a really, really hard core university researcher performing a study on it, I probably don’t know about it. I’m really not an expert on the cooking techniques. The one area though that I am, when I was more involved in the body building community that’s where I really saw people pushing the limits of “Okay, I’m at eight percent body fat, and how do I get to six?”

That’s something that’s not at all mainstream. Clinical researchers really don’t… the question is not “How do we get our society from eight percent to six percent body fat?” It’s “How do we avoid everyone dying of heart disease?” So I think maybe, and Sean, let me know what you think, but looking into the more hardcore body-building community might be an interesting place to look.

Tori: Actually, I’ve been doing the Body by Science in Super Slow Protocol for about the last eight months now. I even got my wife on it, and I’m still trying to locate a facility that has high brow equipment like MedEx or RenEx or something like that. Yes, I agree with that. I feel as I’m diving in to getting deeper into that community, and I didn’t know about the eccentric training, so I actually pulled that up on my browser and I’m going to get knee deep in that stuff, too, so I thank you for that.

Also, my last kind of one is with the Paleo community, obviously, everybody is kind of putting their own little template, their own little spin on it, and one thing that the Bulletproof Exec Dave Asprey has brought to the table is the whole concept of micro toxins, which I think directly plays in with your SANE kind of high quality stuff. I was just wondering, beyond just the general ovation of high quality food is relevant, but if you could shed any of your personal life on things like, for example spices.

A lot of people are cooking at home, and they think that they’re doing a lot of good things but they can potentially be using spices in their food that are full of toxins or something like that; so just anything relevant to micro toxins or just toxins in places that could take a higher quality food and maybe degrade them a little bit because it’s got a little bit of more toxic contents in it because of how it was process or treated or how long it’s been sitting on a shelf somewhere, something like that.

Sean: Jonathan, we got four more, five more, four more callers in ten minutes, so if you keep it brief that would be awesome.

Jonathan: Okay, I will because so sadly, Tori, because the Smarter Science of Slim is really focused on making a lot of these kind of concepts mainstream, and because of that, there are sort of the level of excellence that you’re after, I don’t think the Smarter Science of Slim will disappoint you, but it intentionally does not go to that level simply because I’ve met very few people that are as excellent and as passionate about this as you. Sadly, my research didn’t go in that direction, not because it’s not useful because it’s absolutely is and I’m personally passionate about it but there’s not a lot of people like you, Tori. Sadly, I didn’t look too much into that.

Tori: They’re on their way.

Jonathan: I apologize.

Tori: Every guest that heard thus far is not far behind me. It just happened to be where I was at that place in my life where I was ready to get hardcore about it. There are a lot of people that are ready to take these steps, and there’s people like you writing your book and Sean and everybody else in the community that are doing amazing things that are helping propel us to this fantastic level of being. Kudos to both of you, guys!

Sean: Thanks, Tori. I appreciate you calling in. I’ll get you set up with Dark Side for sure. Email me.

Tori: Thank you. That’s awesome!

Sean: Yup, yup, yup. Alright, let’s keep rolling. Try not to… we’ll get all the calls because we only have so much time left off but let’s go to the 313. What is your name? Where you calling from?

Stephanie: Hi! This is Stephanie. I’m actually calling from Atlanta from my beachside phone number and…

Sean: Thanks for calling in.

Stephanie: Yeah, so I love your show and your blog and thanks for taking my call and not just to continue to plug in but I also love my Vitamix, and I just bought the 32-ounce container just to make things a little bit easier; so I highly recommend that, too.

Sean: Awesome.

Stephanie: Jonathan, I am planning on buying your book, but I saw on your high quality and low quality food list, legumes on there, and I’m just curious about what you find in your research as it relates to soy and health and hormone, and if soy is even on your list.

Jonathan: Yeah, soy is in legume category, and that is classified as… Sanity is a spectrum where there is extremely SANE and extremely insane, and legumes fall right in the middle, in the sense of they’re not sane or insane. They’re something which if we never ate them, we’d be okay. My research shows that if we eat one or two servings of them a day, we’re probably not going to die because of it or get a chronic disease or have hormonal habit because of it, but it’s not something that I say, “Eat more.” Do not go out of your way to consume more of it. It’s right in the middle.

Stephanie: Okay. All right, just curious what you found. That’s it. I know you got some other callers so that’s it for tonight. Thank you.

Sean: Cool. Thanks, Steph.

Jonathan: Thank you.

Sean: Let’s go to the 515. What’s your name? Where are you calling from?

Matt: Hey, guys! This is Matt. I’m from Iowa. I have a question for you two. I play around with my diet quite a bit, and last week… I mean, I don’t bounce around quite like that, but last week it was a very low carb pretty much keto diet. I don’t want to sound vulgar, but I pretty much had no problem with last week on the keto diet and keep playing around my diet. I’m pre-Paleo this week, I noticed that a lot more bowel movements this week is the… What do you guys say on maybe the keto diet or what stool or amount of stool you have is reflective of what you are absorbing or stimulating.

Jonathan: My research does not recommend the keto diet long-term, simply because non-starchy vegetables are a critical component of long-term and sustainable health and fitness. When you consume a lot of non-starchy vegetables, you will be consuming a decent percentage of your calories from carbohydrate which is not bad, and you will have frequent and substantive bowel movements due to all the fiber found in those foods; so if you’re not having at least one bowel movement a day, my research would suggest that long term, long term, your diet could be a bit more healthy. Long term. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t periods of time where a keto diet might be useful, but long term I would suggest a diet that has more frequent and more substance of bowel movements.

Sean: Matt, thanks for calling in, man.

Matt: Yeah, thank you.

Sean: Yep. All right, let’s squeeze one more in. Caller from the 562, welcome to my show. What’s your name? Where are you calling from?

Josephina: Yes, Sean?

Sean: Yes, what’s up?

Josephina: Hi! This is Josephina calling from Los Angeles, California.

Sean: Thanks for calling in, Josephina. What is your question?

Josephina: My question is I’ve been on Paleo diet, and I know that earlier things like peanuts feel we consume because we all know in Paleo, we don’t really consume peanuts because it’s part of legumes. Well, I just want to know what’s the fault in legumes?

Sean: What is it that you want to know what, about legume?

Josephina: About the legumes, what is bad about legumes, consuming legumes that’s one from [indiscernible 1:26:14] especially?

Jonathan: What’s bad about it?

Josephina: I’m sorry?

Jonathan: I’m sorry. Is the question “What’s bad about consuming legumes?”

Josephina: What is your thoughts about it? What is your opinion about it?

Jonathan: Oh, sorry. Yes, again, a SANE lifestyle is a bit different from Paleo lifestyle in a sense that it is a bit more permissive. My understanding of Paleo is that legumes are generally sort of pushed to the side a bit as well as dairy. The research I did does not… there are low quality legumes and high quality legumes. There’s low quality dairy and high quality dairy. The only thing that is just outright bad is starches and sweets. Of course, there are better starches but they are just bad. My research shows that consumption of zero to two servings of legumes of a high quality variant per day can contribute to long term health and fitness and certainly would not do what a sugar or a starch would do.

Josephina: Oh, okay. What about grains like rice, like white rice and brown rice? Are they also like a high quality or…

Jonathan: No. Grain is one step away from sugar. I mean, when you eat a bowl full of rice metabolically, you are essentially eating a bowl full of sugar. I mean, people are like, “Oh, it has fiber in it.” If you sprinkle a fiber supplement on top of a Snickers Bar, it doesn’t make the Snickers Bar healthy for you, so Dr. Davis of Wheat Belly talks about if you’re going to filter on a cigarette, it’s still bad for you. It’s the same kind of thing here. Grains and again, it doesn’t mean they’ll kill you, it just means, if our goal is to eat foods that science has proven to be beneficial for health and for fitness rather than just not killing us, we would avoid all starches and all sweets.

Sean: Josephine, thanks for calling in. I got to wrap.

Josephine: All right, thank you.

Sean: Thank you. Good stuff, man. Really, really good show, Jonathan. I really appreciate you coming on. Your book is The Smarter Science of Slim. Scientific Proof. Fat Loss Facts. Fantastic stuff you got going on. Your website is TheSmarterScienceofSlim.com so everybody go over there, and check that baby out. Gosh, you got any closing comment for the audience tonight?

Jonathan: Well, I just want to thank you, Sean, for having me and I want to encourage… Your audience is one that’s scientifically-minded, and that just encourages me and makes me happy. I hope we can all work together to bring the facts back to fat loss, so it excites me.

Sean: I thank you, my man. Thanks so much for being on, and the show rocked and we’ll certainly have you on again.

Jonathan: Beautiful. Thank you, Sean. You have a good one, brother.

Sean: Yup. You, too. Have a goodnight.

Jonathan: Bye-bye.

Sean: Reminder to all of the people who called in to the show tonight, you guys get a free Paleo Summit so send me an email, sean@undergroundwellness.com. I’ve got your phone numbers right here in front of me. Use the first 6 digits so go ahead and send me an email, and I will get that sent out to you. It’s a downloadable product, and so you don’t have to send your mailing address. We’ll see you guys next Thursday with – oh, man! I lost it – Peter Cohen. We’ll talk about fat loss and health and personal development stuff and yada, yada, yada. I told you guys when I’m not fully ready for a show they’re always the best ones. This is really weird. I have to do this more often.