Bonus 9: JB Interviewed by Pete Cohen

Jonathan: Welcome to the Smarter Science of Slim, the scientifically-proven program where you eat more and exercise less to burn fat and boost health.

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

Pete: Good evening everyone. I feel like saying ‘good morning Vietnam’, but I won’t. Good morning everybody. Good morning. Good evening wherever you are in the world. Thank you for joining me tonight on Weight Loss Guru Radio, brought to you by weightlossguru.com. Wow, what a fantastic show we have lined up for you this evening. We have a fantastic guest, someone I’m very, very excited to speak to. I can see he’s already waiting to come in and I will bring him online just in a few moments.

Guys, I wonder if you had a chance to listen to the show. We did an extra show on Monday with the great Dean Dwyer from Make Shift Happen all the way from Toronto and what an inspiring show that was. Again, he is like one of those dark knights out there that is really trying to lighten people up and make people aware of the truth, of what it really takes to be slim, fit, healthy, and well and have loads of energy. If you haven’t heard of that show, just go to my blog weightlossguru.com/blog and it’s the second blog entry on there you can check it out. So, who we have on the show tonight?

Well, we have Jonathan Bailor from The Smarter Science of Slim. Now, I came across Jonathan probably about two or three months ago and I was just literally blown away by some of the things he was saying but really more blown away by the amount of research that this guy has done. Research for me, when I was in University was always something I kind of struggled to do and looking through books, trying to find out the truth and that’s one of the things that this guy has done and he has developed a method, a system, some protocols that are so effective for people, that if you apply some of this principles, they’re going to make a huge, huge difference to your life.

Guys feel free to phone after the show tonight and call in. All you need to do is call (001) 646-478-3661. And any questions you can post them underneath the player where you’re listening to now. Of course you need to sign in to blog talk radio. I already have a few questions. I was thinking to myself, because one of the things I like to do, I like to play a little song for the person that’s coming on, so I was thinking to myself what song could I bring Jonathan onto? I was thinking maybe this type of song.

[Music 04:00 – 04:14]

It’s the James Bond in my eyes of the weight loss. Well, Jonathan Bailor good afternoon. How are you?

Jonathan: After that kind of an introduction, I’m doing quite well.

Pete: Brilliant! Listen, thank you so much for joining us this evening. I really, really appreciate you giving us your time just to share some of what you’ve done, some of what you’ve observed, some of what you’re doing. Thank you so much. Tell us where about in the world are you today?

Jonathan: Seattle, Washington, sunny Seattle Washington, surprisingly.

Pete: Well, can you give us a little bit of that sunshine my friend because we have had the worst summer I can ever remember in my 42 years of life. We are just talking like it is just rain central. Can you bring over some of that weather for us?

Jonathan: Well it sound like you stole the rain here from up in Seattle, so I thank you for that.

Pete: Brilliant! Well listen, just tell us a little bit about yourself and how you kind of got into this world. This isn’t the area that you’ve always worked in, right?

Jonathan: Well, it’s actually the area that I first worked in and now sort of going more public in my work in that area, so to tell a story a bit of The Smarter Science of Slim and all this research. Over a decade ago, I was a trainer, personal trainer and really immediately upon entering that field became sorely disappointed with the results my clients were getting. I mean I was doing everything that I was taught as a trainer in terms of the traditional dogma we all hear, eat less and exercise more and of course while my clients were working with me and they had someone to help them “starve themselves and exercise excessively,” they would see results but the results would inevitably be short-term.

They would stop working with me because we complete our 12 week program and then they would gain all of the weight back and then some. This disappointed them. This broke my heart and frankly, I was at a loss because I was doing everything that I was taught and I was just fed up. My goal in being a trainer was to help people not leave them worse than before we worked together. I turned to the only resource I had left and that was just dense, dry, academic research like truly from the horse’s mouth if a scientist or a researcher didn’t write it in a paper or email it to me or we didn’t talk about it on the phone, I wasn’t interested in it because I figured these are the actual experts.

Ten years later of doing that I just simplified and applied over 1,100 studies worth of data into a book called The Smarter Science of Slim, which shows and prove that for over 95 percent of us, eating less and exercising more harms our health and leads the fat gain, more often than not and there is a scientifically proven and pretty shocking alternative and that has to do with eating more and exercising less but doing those things smarter, doing those things based on science, rather than gimmicks or hype or things like that.

Pete: What happen when you really face that truth? Was it like it must have been a pretty challenging moment for you that made you realize that maybe what you’re doing for so long really wasn’t that effective?

Jonathan: Well, it was definitely. There was cognitive dissonance involved, like how could this be true but I distinctly remember a moment probably about three years into the research, where I had just a light bulb went on in my head because I had been thinking how can it be true that everything we’re doing is wrong but then I said to myself, wait a second, the concept of dieting and the concept of exercising for hours and hours and hours really only became popular like in the late ‘70s early ‘80s and that’s also when obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and all those things started to climb.

In fact for the four decades that we’ve been attempting to and successfully eating less and exercising more, our health has gotten worse and we’ve gotten heavier. I thought to myself actually like how can that be true like if it was true, wouldn’t we be doing better, not worse, and we’re not, we’re not.

Pete: Yeah I mean my background is quite similar to yours. I did a degree in Sports Science and then I worked as a person trainer for many years and I’m fully over the bit like you and just realizing that maybe what I was doing wasn’t as effective as it could be and I could definitely see that a lot of my comrades who where personal trainers weren’t getting results either and the results we were getting were short-lived because most of our clients would put the weight back on again.

I suppose, like you, I did start to look a little bit outside the box and think that there’s something else going on. In fact, I remembered many, many years ago realizing that the food pyramid as we call it over here was designed by the Department of Agriculture and I remember thinking why have they designed it? What do they know about health? There must be some sense of conspiracy going on and I know people are quite weary of that word but do you think there has been a little bit of conspiracy going on as far as misinformation and confusion when it comes to weight loss?

Jonathan: Well, I’ll say yes and no. I do think there has been some shenanigans taking place however I wouldn’t call it conspiracy because I actually think people are pretty open about it like the United States Department of Agriculture, which is the, I fundamentally agree with you I mean to put a different spin on it. They are the people who develop the food diet pyramid which inspired the pyramid on your guys end and then what’s now called MyPlate and they call themselves the United States Department of Agriculture.

They don’t call themselves the United States Department of Health and Human Wellness. Their job and their mission statement is to ensure a profitable agriculture industry. What are the top crops in the States, at least soy, corn, and wheat. What’s the fundamental component of the pyramid? Grains and starches and things like that, so they’re openly telling us we’re the United States Department of Agriculture.

We’re not the United States Department of Health and you’re exactly right, so why are we trying to get health information from these people and why are they putting out guidelines really that’s just marketing for our agriculture industry, not for our health and well-being?

Pete: Yeah, so what’s your kind of goal now? What is it that you’re actually trying to do?

Jonathan: Well, it took me ten years to dig in to this research and to find what the actual experts, when I say experts I mean endocrinologists or researchers, people who spend their lives in research labs, not on infomercials or in that they don’t have marketing department. I’m simply trying to take their wisdom and simplify it and get it out to the masses.

I feel so fortunate because so many of these researchers, they’re happy to help. They want their research to help people as much as it can and should but again they’re researchers, they’re not marketers, so just like the food industry has people working to market their ‘information’, I want to share the information of coming from the academic and scientific community in a way that we can all live and enjoy.

Pete: Yeah and I think you’ve already done that incredibly well. I think your website is just brilliant. The blog articles you write are very refreshing, they’re very honest. They’re very easy to digest and it seems to me that what you’re trying to do is to make common sense, common practice to people. I also just listening today to one of your podcast with is it Carrie Brown the name of the lady?

Jonathan: Yeah, it’s Carrie Brown, a fellow Brit.

Pete: You see, I thought so, there are three podcasts that you’ve put up with her and I really like your approach in trying to just inspire people to do something for themselves. I was speaking to Dean Dwyer on Monday and it seems you’re another person just like him, trying to help people take responsibility for their own lives but give people the real information that they need to make a difference. Am I correct in thinking that?

Jonathan: You’re absolutely correct, Pete and I actually really appreciate you making that point because you said a word which I think is so critical and doesn’t get enough credit and that’s…or phrase, excuse me and that’s ‘giving people the right information.’ So often, we are led to believe that health challenges and weight challenges are a lack of discipline or we’re just undisciplined. Pete and I’m sure you’re going to empathize with this when you were a trainer, people want, a lot of people, the majority of people, want to be healthy and want to be fit and put a massive amount of effort in.

The problem is, if the effort you’re putting in is to eat extremely low fat, low protein diet that’s high in low fat starches and sugars and you’re doing hours and hours and hours of traditional, moderate intensity cardiovascular exercise, you’re putting in the effort but you’re going to get bad results. When you get that results, you’re going to be like what the heck is the point of doing this and you’re going to stop and you’re going to get in this condition called learned helplessness, which makes you feel like no matter what you do, you can’t make a difference and the problem at the very beginning is bad information.

We’re not all lazy and stupid as people would have us to believe. We’ve been given bad information and once we have the right information… Take smoking for example, there are certainly still people that smoke but nobody who smokes, smokes thinking they’re helping themselves. There’s millions and millions of people today who will eat food and perform exercise thinking they’re helping themselves but actually hurting themselves because they’ve been given bad information.

Pete: It was interesting. I listen to two of the podcast that you put out there today. I listen to them on iTunes and the first one with Carrie was saying when she went to the doctor and she was struggling to loose weight and the doctor told her to have pretty much nothing but Slim Fast. The law of thermodynamics is eat less, do more and you said that she would lose 10 pounds and she went back there after two weeks or something and she hadn’t lost any weight at all and the doctor kind of looked at her and say “You’re a liar.” Things are not always as straightforward as they seem and you’re right, so many people still think the best way to get results is eat less, do more, cut out fat but let’s just talk a little bit about the difference between long-term health and fat loss versus the kind of short-term weight loss, which so many people seems to be after. They want results right now.

Jonathan: This is the key issue and the challenge with all of these things Pete which I found in my research is that what we’re told like, there’s some truth to it but its not complete like there’s a hint of truth and that’s why it’s so confusing, like 10 percent of it is true but the other 90 percent is not backed by science. For example, if someone wants to just lose weight, if their goal truly is to make the number on the scale go down as quickly as possible and that’s their goal which I actually don’t think that’s their goal.

I think their goal is to look and feel better for the rest of their life. I think that’s actually their goal but let’s say their goal is just to make the number on the scale go down. Eating less and exercising more is unquestionably the most effective way to do that. If you want to do it even faster put on a 15 layers of clothing and do your exercise in extremely hot room that way you’ll dehydrate yourself, like wrestlers and boxers have been doing this for generations in order to drop 10 pounds in two hours so they can make weight but that’s I would argue and I’m sure you would as well.

Our goal isn’t actually to lose weight for next week. Our goal is to feel better and our goal is to look better forever and if we want to do that, we should not be eating less and exercising more. If we want to lose weight temporarily only to gain more back and to feel worse long-term, then we should eat less and exercise more but if our goal is longer-term health and fitness, we actually need to eat more and exercise less but smarter.

Pete: Well, let’s look into that. I think for me, again was what I like your approach so much because you’re really encouraging people to be healthy and I think people think they’ll be healthy when they‘ve lost weight, rather than let’s get health because it will help our bodies to work more effectively and help our bodies become better at burning fat as opposed to storing it. Let’s talk a little bit about your research around the calories in and the calories out theory of weight loss because we all hear that every day. You told about the law of thermodynamics, what did you really find out? What did your real research show you there?

Jonathan: Well, if you don’t mind Pete, I would love to break those two things. So, first let’s talk about calories in and calories out and then let’s talk about thermodynamics a bit separately because I want to give them both justice because we’ve all been hearing about them for the past 40 years.

Pete: No problem.

Jonathan: When it comes to calories in and calories out, challenge here is that yes of course calories in and calories out matters and let’s think of it like breaths in and breaths out. Our bodies is designed to automatically regulate the amount of air we take in and the amount of oxygen we expel, our body does that automatically if our body is healthy. Think about the way your heart pumps blood, we don’t have to worry about blood going into our heart and blood going out of our heart. Of course that matters but when our heart is functioning properly, it takes care of that for us.

When it comes to calories in and calories out, when we have a healthy, properly functioning metabolism, the body will automatically regulate that. It will automatically ensure we take a proper number of calories in and it will automatically ensure that we burn a proper number of calories off such that we maintain a healthy weight. Our body wants to be fit, we did not evolve to be heavy and sick. We would have died off of the species long ago if that was our natural state.

Our body automatically regulates mission critical functions such as our breathing, such as our heart rate, and such as our weight but what happens is when we eat the wrong quality of food, we destroy our body’s natural ability to automatically regulate our weight and this causes it to essentially regulate us around a higher point. This is called an elevated set point weight and that is why we generally experience, we do things, we eat less, we exercise more and it seems like our body is fighting us.

It’s like okay, I’m going to eat less and your body says well, I’m just going to slow down and I’m going to try to keep you at your heavier weight and again that’s because our body is automatically regulating us but it’s automatically regulating us around a higher, what the research calls set point weight. Calories in and calories out matters but it doesn’t matter in a sense that we need to manually regulate it. It matters in the sense that once we heal ourselves hormonally, our body will automatically take care of that for us and that’s the key to long-term health and fitness is restoring our body’s natural ability to keep us slim.

Pete, I know that might sound too good to be true but we all know people that do this. They are called naturally skinny people. We all know someone who eats whatever they want, doesn’t exercise and stays slim. We may even experience that like when we were teenagers. We eat whatever we want, we didn’t seem to gain weight. We all know the human body can do this. The question is how do we make ours do it and my research goes into detail on how to do that, so hopefully that helps a bit on the calories in and calories out.

Pete: Why is it not common knowledge?

Jonathan: Why is it not common knowledge? That’ a good question. I would say that individuals again who have discovered this just don’t, well let me put it differently. There is a lot of money to be made if you think that you need to manually regulate calories in and calories out because that’s an impossible task. If I told you that you needed to regulate the number of breaths you take in and the breaths you take out per day like if everyone just started believing that, I would start a business tomorrow that like created all these programs and all these tools to help you count breaths in and count breaths out.

I would become a coach to help you monitor your breathing more effectively because anytime you make something complicated you can create a business to simplify it. I guess there is just a lot of money in people believing that they consciously need to eat less, so buy 100 calorie snack pack or here’s some low calorie products because you need to worry about this and believing that they need to manually control calories out. Buy a gym membership. Do this. Buy these new running shoes. Buy, buy, buy, buy, buy so maybe that’s why.

Pete: Yeah it’s funny I gave a talk the other day to some lady who’s been working for the company’s Life Fitness. I’m sure you’ve come across Life Fitness, sort of big fitness manufacturer. I gave a talk to employees that worked for their company and I was talking about some of this stuff and it was almost like for some of them they couldn’t handle it. They couldn’t handle what I was saying because it just went against, so many years of thinking and acting in a certain ways.

It was like a religion to a lot of people about weight, about believing that it has to be about eating less and doing more and I can see that’s one of the challenges that people like you and I face and trying convince people that there is another way but I’ll tell you people that do try things this other way the results they get are just incredible. It’s not just weight is it, people are having increased energy, feeling better about themselves, being fit or being stronger. I take it that’s what you have found some people that have followed your method, your ideas.

Jonathan: Absolutely, the step number one, I mean what The Smarter Science of Slim teaches is much like what you’re saying here is to restore your body’s natural ability to be healthy, like be healthy first ,like you said it’s not lose weight and then you’re healthy. It’s be healthy and then your weight will take care of itself and that’s been scientifically proven like once you heal your hormones, your weight will absolutely take care of itself so even before your weight starts doing anything positive that you want, which when we talk about weight, we’re actually talking about fat loss because we want to keep our muscle tissue that’s very important.

You’ll see your eyes glow. Your skin will glow. You’ll have more energy. You’ll sleep better because why? Your body is back to the way it wants to be. It’s healthy. It’s functioning properly and just one of the positive side effects of that is your excess fat will shed from your body and your muscles will become stronger but that’s really that ensues that’s not the primary thing that just flows naturally and when it flows naturally, it will flow long-term because again we fix the problem and the problem is the broken down metabolism.

The problem isn’t we’re eating too much or exercising too little, it’s that our body’s lost natural ability to keep us healthy. As soon as we fixed that, we will not want to eat more. Our body will naturally keep us full. We will feel satisfied and we’ll burn off plenty of calories in order to keep us healthy and fit.

Pete: Well, let’s come back in a minute if we can to eating ourself hormonally because that is something, that’s such a fascinating area but let’s just finish what we were saying before just about the law of thermodynamics.

Jonathan: Oh wonderful!

Pete: Just explain with me about that, please?

Jonathan: So this is my favorite topic to talk about because I bet your listeners after hearing this podcast will go and share the information they’ve learned with someone and what they will hear is well is, that’s interesting but the law of thermodynamics proves that if you eat less and exercise more, you will burn fat. Now let’s quickly and once and for all dispel that myth. Okay, here’s what the science actually shows. There are four laws of thermodynamics. There is not one law of thermodynamics, there are four. Two of them have nothing to do with fat loss, nothing. They have to do with like defining absolute zero. The two that do apply to fat loss tell us that energy cannot be created nor destroyed, it can only change forms. Now, this is applicable when it comes to weight loss and here’s how the logic goes. People say okay, energy cannot be created nor destroyed it can only change forms, so if you eat less and you exercise more, you put your body in the state of caloric deficit, meaning it doesn’t’ have enough calories and since energy cannot be created nor destroyed it can only change forms, your body must burn fat, right? Sadly, no.

Let’s look at the applicable laws of thermodynamics, Pete. They tell us energy cannot be created nor destroyed it can only change forms, that’s it. When it comes to our body if we’re in a state of caloric deficit, what the applicable laws of thermodynamics prove is that our body must do something. They don’t prove what our body must do at all, that’s biological law, that has nothing to do with physical or thermodynamic laws and what biological law shows is that if we just starve ourselves, if we just eat less of our existing diet or just do more traditional exercise, three things will happen, actually four things will happen.

First, we’ll become malnourished as we don’t have enough nutrition. Obviously, that’s terrible for our health. The second thing that will happen is our metabolism will slow down. We’ve all experienced this right even a long time without eating or you go on a 1,200 calorie diet you feel terrible. Your mind feels foggy. You feel tired that’s because your body just slows down. It’s like I don’t have enough calories so what I’m going to do in response to that.

Thanks to the law of thermodynamics, is slow down. So after we’re malnourished and after we slow down, the third thing our body will do is it will burn tissue but sadly it’s not fat tissue. It’s going to burn muscle tissue. Why? We don’t have enough calories, so what’s our body want to do, preserve calories. What burns a lot of calories? Muscle tissue, so what’s our body going to burn off first? The tissue that’s burning a bunch of calories a.k.a. muscle tissue. In fact study show that 70 percent of the weight, the non-water weight we lose when we starve ourselves comes from muscle.

Law of the thermodynamics summarizing so far; malnutrition then we slow down, then we burn off our muscle tissue. At that point if we’re still in a state of caloric deficit, yes our body will burn fat but at what cost? We slowed ourselves down, we’ve harmed our health, and we’ve burned off our muscle tissue. Frankly Pete, that sets us up for long-term fat gain, not long-term fat loss.

Pete: Yeah.

Jonathan: The laws of thermodynamics they do tell us yeah sure you’ll lose weight but you’re going to destroy your health, you’re going to burn off all your muscle tissue, you’re going to slow down your metabolism, so actually the law of thermodynamics proves that eat less and exercise more is harmful, not helpful.

Pete: Anyone who’s listening to this I really encourage them when this becomes available as a podcast. Listen to that again. Listen to it a few times and really allow yourself to digest because once people understand what you’re saying that’s when the change really starts. I think it’s the awareness of that, that the law of thermodynamics just doesn’t really makes any sense and we have to work with our bodies and not against our bodies. If you look at prehistoric man and how prehistoric man lived his life, there is no way that they would have had lifestyles that we lead today.

I really would encourage anyone who really wants to understand this a little bit more is to go to The Smarter Science of Slim and read some of the article and read some of the article and listen to some of the podcasts because for me, Jonathan like I said, once people come and get that head around it, they can really move on and really start to change their life around. Thank you for sharing that with us. It is very, very refreshing to hear it and for you put it across in a way that we can all understand. You’re not talking to us like in science speech, you’re talking to us in layman’s speech and the whole world needs to hear this stuff because it’s the obesity crisis is spiraling completely out of control.

You and me are on a mission like many other people to try to do something about it. If it’s okay, I’d really like to talk to you a little bit about what you said before about hormones and about hormone health did you say? Is that what you said, healing, yes, how do we do that and how do we get out of balance hormonally? Obviously, that is a huge question, right? There are many factors but can we just discuss that a little bit?

Jonathan: Yeah. How much time do you have? I’m just kidding. So yeah, hormones are really. Let’s take a step back and talk about what hormones are, so we hear hormones and we’re just like electrolytes, we hear these terms and we don’t necessarily know like Gatorade has electrolytes in it so I am going to drink Gatorade, I guess. Well, okay anyway, so hormones are essentially what facilitates communication in your body, so your brain communicates to your muscles which communicates to your digestive system, which communicates to your heart via hormones.

The language your body speaks to itself is spoken through hormones. We’re speaking English, the body too itself speaks hormones. Now, the reason that’s important is because if we want our body to do something different and in fact if we want to change that dialogue like right now, many of our body’s are probably communicating ‘store fat’. That’s the conversation, so like store some more fat, what do you think we should do today? I think we should store some more fat. If we want to change that conversation, we have to change the hormonal balance in our bodies, again so our goal is not eat less, exercise more. Who cares about that? Our goal is, change our hormonal balance, change what our body is communicating to itself and eating less and exercising more doesn’t do that at all.

It changes it but it changes it in a negative way, however, when we change the quality of the food we eat and we change the quality of the exercise we do, we can actually change this hormonal balance and that therein basically by simple alternative to what we’ve all been taught. What we’ve all been taught is about quantity, quantity, quantity, eat less, exercise more, quantity, quantity, quantity. If you look at what’s really changed over the past 40 years, it’s the quality of the food we’re eating.

The concept or the definition of food in general has changed and because we have changed the quality of the food we’ve put in our body, we changed this hormonal balance or this hormonal conversation away from one which is shed fat to one that’s store fat, so as soon as we change the quality of our diet, the quality of our exercise, we change our hormonal balance and this allows our body to drop the set point weight I talked about earlier and automatically keep us thin, much like a naturally thin person.

From an extremely high and abstract level, the reason a naturally thin person can eat whatever the heck they want and exercise less and stay thin, is because their hormones are different from an overweight person’s hormones and if that overweight person can make their hormones more like that naturally thin person’s hormones, their body will behave like the naturally thin person, it’s that simple. The way we change our hormones, there’s a lot of ways to do it like the way we sleep, the amount of stress we get blah, blah, blah, blah, blah but for the point of this podcast, the quality of the food we eat and the quality of the exercise we get are two major control systems for the hormonal balance in our body.

One more thing I’ll add there Pete where hopefully a lot of listeners empathize with this on way we all understand the important that hormones have on our weight often has to do like with other substances like drugs for example. Individuals who are diabetic and who’ve gone on insulin know firsthand that without changing anything about the quantity of food they eat or changing anything about the amount of exercise they get, they gain fat. That’s because insulin changes the hormonal conversation in your body to be one storing more fat. Individuals who quit smoking experience something similar where they gain fat because the withdrawal of nicotine from the body changes that hormonal conversation. Individuals who take antidepressants often experience weight gain with no change in what they’re eating or exercise, why? It’s changing that hormonal conversation. Athletes who takes steroids. What’s a steroid? It’s a hormone.

They change nothing about how they eat and how they exercise and they burn fat and build muscle. Our question is how can we use food and exercise instead of drugs to change our hormonal balance and we can and it’s been proven and it’s not hard and it’s fundamentally, eat natural foods, that’s it. Non-starchy vegetables, lean protein, natural fats, eat as much as you want, whenever you want just from those sources and you will heal your hormones. Your body will communicate a message of thinness, not heaviness and you will be happier and healthier for the rest of your life.

Pete: Fascinating. It’s just simple. It’s simple as nature provides us with everything that we really need to balance ourselves, whether it’s good, clean oxygen, good, clean food it makes bodies work so much better. It seems like modern living and that’s probably why there are so many illnesses and diseases, modern living plays around with our hormonal…way our body communicates with itself and that’s why we have so many problems. It makes so much sense. Why do you think people struggle to eat a kind of a natural diet, to eat more foods which are more organic? Why do you think people struggle with that?

Jonathan: Well, the way you phrase that question is perfect. I’ll say two things and they all have to do with bad information, so one like when you hear day in and day out we don’t hear this. We don’t hear like just for example organic grass-fed beef is natural like for the past en thousand or million years, we have eaten animals and we’ve eaten plants and we’ve eaten fish and we hear all this like red meat kills you. It doesn’t make any sense. How could red meat, like natural grass-fed red meat kill you? That doesn’t make sense like why would we have evolved to crave a substance that kills us, like mushrooms that kill us taste bitter.

Our taste buds have evolved to avoid those kinds of things. What we hear is eat a low-fat, low-protein, high carbohydrate diet and it’s not to say that carbohydrates are bad, they’re not. Vegetables and fruits are fantastic for us and they’re carbohydrate but we don’t get told ‘eat natural foods’. We’re told like these sound bites of basically just eat a bunch of starch and sweets and the other challenge is when we do hear, again, it’s all marketing, right? We hear the term organic thrown around like there are organic pastries and this soda is all natural. I get the fact tobacco is also natural but doesn’t mean it’s good for us necessarily. What we need to do is we need to take a step back from marketing like it’s not about marketing,it’s about science. Biology isn’t a matter of opinion it’s a matter of fact and just like we study what drugs do when we ingest them and what they do to our body? Scientists have studied of what food does. It’s not even debatable like we can debate the morality of eating beef but we can’t debate what beef does when you eat it.

We can study that and researchers have and they’ve shown that organic grass-fed beef is fantastic for you and they’ve shown that vegetables are fantastic for you and the fruits are fantastic for you and the seafood and nuts and seeds and they’ve also shown that starch in all forms is bad for you and that sweeteners such as sugar, honey, organic cane juice it doesn’t matter, are bad for you. If we just stick to those, I call them water, fiber, and protein rich foods. Non-starchy vegetables, lean protein, and natural fats, we will heal those hormones and it’s just really that simple.

Pete: It’s interesting, there was an article I think it came out last year about beef. Eating red meat can kill you and if you really look into the study, which I did, it was kind of based on the typical meats that most people and especially in America eat, which is meat which is very poor quality. Can you tell us a little bit about that because again I think that’s something which a lot of people don’t realize where their meat actually comes from?

Jonathan: Well I’ll say two things there too and one thing, just to empower your listeners when they hear studies like this. We looked at a sample of 10,000 people and saw that the people who ate the most red meat died more frequently. That’s an observational study that means we can’t prove anything, it’s just an observation. If you look at individuals who…bathing suits have gotten progressively skimpier over the past 100 years. In addition, the average temperature of the earth has also increased but we can’t say that bathing suits getting smaller caused the temperature to increase like there is a bunch of weird inferences and stuff that take place in these studies.

The reason I mention that is because what most of the time these studies show is that people who eat more meat also tend to do other things like they may not be as health conscious. They may smoke more. They may not eat as many vegetables, so we have all these other conflating factors like for example, if we have two groups of people in the study and one group eats a little bit of meat and a lot of vegetables and another group eats a lot of meat and a little bit of vegetables and then we draw a conclusion that says the group that ate more meat died more and it was the abundance of meat that killed them. Well, that’s not true. It could have been the absence of vegetables, so what if we ate a lot of meat and a lot of vegetables. What if we ate a lot of fish and a lot of vegetables and a lot of meat. There is a bunch of conflating factors that you should be very careful when you hear this kind of sensationalized headlines.
Now, regarding the quality of meat, yeah, I mean hopefully we’ve all heard about pink slime, right? The way the cattle are raised traditionally in the States and one thing Pete I want to be very clear on.

What my research shows is that seafood is just phenomenal for us, so I don’t want this to come off as like ‘oh The Smarter Science of Slim shows that we should all eat nothing but beef all the time.’ Organic grass-fed beef is fine for you but there is plenty of vegetarian or pescatarian options, you don’t have to eat meat but you also shouldn’t think it bad for you based on propaganda because it’s not what science shows. I personally don’t eat meat that often, simply because I live in Seattle. There’s a heck of a lot of wonderful seafood available to me.

Anyway, the way meat is created often in the industrial food system, so cows are designed to eat grass, that’s what cows do, they eat grass and if you want to fatten the cow really quickly and therefore get more money when you sell the cow because it weighs more, how do you do that? Well, you feed it corn. You feed it starch. Ironically, if you want to fatten a cow, what you do is feed it more of what we’re all told is healthy for us, starch, and it doesn’t. It makes us fat just like it makes the cows fat.

The cow will be raised eating grass up to a certain point then it will be taken to a feed lot, where it’s fed “food” that makes it gain weight rapidly and that food is starch, generally corn and then the cow is slaughtered and we have this fatty, unnatural meat. Because again, the composition of the cow changes just [inaudible 41:53] composition of a person changes based on the food that it eats. So eating a cow that has been rapidly fattened on unhealthy food yields an unhealthy type of meat, however if you eat a cow that has been feed wonderful food, that yields a wonderful form of meat. The same thing applies to fish. If you have farm-raised fish that are fed, there have been stories of fish being fed chicken.

Fish aren’t supposed to eat chicken. There’s not like chicken floating around in the sea that fish eat. When you feed fish what they’re supposed to eat and when you feed animals, what they’re supposed to eat, the meat and the fish that you get on the other end is way better for people. So if we’re going to run studies that say well, when you eat this unnatural meat, bad things happen. Absolutely, that’s why we need to eat natural things and it’s not about like plants versus animals either, because there’s genetically modified corn and there’s pesticides on soy, so it’s not like plants are protected either. There’s plants that have been genetically altered in all sorts of ways and are killing us. Sugar comes from a plant, that doesn’t mean is good for us. It’s not about plants versus animals, it’s about high quality, natural food and that can come from plants or it can come from animals.

Pete: Tell me why do starches make us fat then, why can they make us fat?

Jonathan: To really answer that question, let me quickly explain what determines the quality of the calorie, so the research shows that the quality the calorie is determined by four factors, satiety, aggression, nutrition, and efficiency. I abbreviate that using the acronym SANE, where SANE calories are high quality calories and inSANE calories are low quality.

Satiety is how quickly a calorie fills us up, how long it keeps us full. Aggression is how quickly that calorie is converted to sugar within our body and how likely it is to be stored as fat. Nutrition is how many nutrients we get along with the calorie and efficiency is how easy it is for our body to convert that calorie into triglyceride, which is then stored as fat on the body.

Okay, anyway, so we can look at any food and we can simply say how satisfying is this? How aggressive is this? How nutritious is this? How efficient is this? We can then just stack rank foods, we can just say okay, what are the most SANE foods in the world? Well, the research shows they are non-starchy vegetables.

Things like greens so; broccoli, carrots, spinach, mushrooms, tomatoes all that kind of fun stuff and we can just go down the line and say let’s just stack rank foods. Now, when we look at starch so when we say starch we’re talking about things like rice, bread, potatoes. Basically the majority of most people’s diet unfortunately they’re not satisfying like as just science shows that we have to eat dramatically more calories worth of starch to fill us up and keep us full than we would have to eat for example of say protein or a non-starchy vegetable. Then, we look at aggression.

We’ve all heard about the glycemic index and glycemic load and we know that starch is converted into sugar very easily by our body and that’s not really helpful. That means it’s aggressive, that means it’s rushing into our blood stream really quickly, that means it’s likely to be stored as fat and then we look at it from a nutrition perspective. We say well healthy whole grain. Whole grains are healthier compared to refined grains but take fiber for example, the whole grain flour has about, I think it’s eight times less fiber per gram than spinach. If you compare grains to other foods available to us, they’re just not nutritious.

It’s not debatable, it’s math. You just divide the number of calories, divide it or take the number of nutrients divide it by the number of calories and you get nutrients per calorie and starches just have low nutrition density, which is the technical term for it.
Finally, efficiency, if you compare starches or carbohydrates and proteins, the body can convert starch into fat about twice as easily as it can convert protein into fat, so we just look at… I don’t have anything against starches, I don’t work on the dairy or the meat committee or the International Atkins Endorsement Foundation.

I have no invested interest in this but when you look at it just analytically, starch is not that satisfying. It’s aggressive, it’s not nutritious and it’s incredibly efficient as being converted into body fat. We can eat it, absolutely. I’m not like eat starch, that’s fine if you don’t mind gaining weight and destroying your health. Some people don’t, a lot of people smoke. They know it’s bad for them but they consciously do it. What breaks my heart is when parents feed their kids starch, thinking it’s good for them like that’s a travesty.

What we can’t have is people doing things like being told things are healthy that aren’t. If we chose to do things that we know are unhealthy, that’s total freedom of choice, absolutely but like starches aren’t good for you, like they’re not. It’s science and that’s fine, don’t ban them like you want to eat 25 donuts for breakfast, go ahead, more power to you but I hope you don’t do so thinking that it’s good for you because that to me is just heart breaking.

Pete: When we’re talking [Inaudible 0:47:05] there are few questions. If anyone else has got any questions, you can email me at petecohen.com. Those of you who are signed up to Blog Talk Radio… By the way, if you are not signed up to blog talk radio, I would recommend that you do because every time I do a show, it means you can join the chat underneath the player that you’re listening to. Any questions that you’ve got for Jonathan I’m going to shoot a few of those through to you in a little while, if that’s okay?

Jonathan: Absolutely!

Pete: But then let me just ask you, when you’re talking about starches are there worse starches? Are there starches that are worse for us than others?

Jonathan: Oh, absolutely. Again, it’s not, we can look at food groups on a macro level. They’re like starches all up. Starches all up are less SANE than non-starchy vegetables for example. Across the board there is no starch like for example take quinoa, which a lot of people have now like that starches are bad except quinoa. Well, quinoa compared to spinach, there’s no comparison. If you have to eat quinoa or spinach, eat spinach. The science is clear but quinoa is way better for you than dwarf wheat, which is the wheat we generally all eat. If you can read Dr. Davis’ wonderful book Wheat Belly but the wheat we eat today has no resemblance to natural wheat. It has been genetically modified all to hell and so if you look at wheat versus quinoa, quinoa is a way more SANE as my research would put it, than wheat but here’s the challenge and this happens a lot. Just because one thing is better than another thing doesn’t mean it’s good for us.

This is a stupid example but like one broken leg is better than two broken legs. That doesn’t mean that one broken leg is good, so quinoa is better than processed white bread but that doesn’t mean you should eat like you should fill your plate up with it so that you don’t have any room for a natural protein or non-starchy vegetables, which is what a lot of people do. It doesn’t mean it’s going to kill you either, there’s plenty of people that eat starch and they don’t get heavy or sick but there is also a lot of people that smoke and never get lung cancer.

Let’s just look at the science and then we can just be like okay, the science is on the table. I chose to eat starch and what it actually doesn’t seem to bother me so great doing it. However, you’re not happy with the results you’re getting, replace starch and replace sugar with non-starchy vegetables, lean protein, and natural fats and I guarantee you’ll be happier but if you’re happy with what’s going on no need to change because you’re doing well, so it’s all good.

Pete: I like that. It’s very refreshing approach. I like the fact that you’re not all or nothing. To some people, they just have to find out their own way. Years ago, I used to think that an alcoholic maybe they could just drink a bit, rather than stop drinking altogether but then I kind of realize from doing my own research because there are some people when they put alcohol in their body, it really changes their whole chemistry, their whole chemistry and they shouldn’t drink it all.

I suppose for some people, it may be like that with starches, maybe they handle them better than others and that’s up to the individuals to work it out but this is as far as weight loss is concerned, like your saying possibly one of the most important things people need to understand is if you eat starches it’s going to be very difficult. It’s going to be very challenging to get your body to work the way it needs to work for you to efficiently burn fat. That’s correct, right?

Jonathan: Absolutely! Let me add one thing to that Pete and that’s…let’s say, so there is plenty of non-obese, healthy people that eat starch, right? Obviously and so people might say well therefore; like starches are good for you. Well again, you can be healthy and you can be even healthier so I will gladly have a, if anybody wants to say to me ‘starches are healthier for you than non-starchy vegetables.’ If you have to chose between spinach and rice you should chose rice I’m like let’s have that conversation because that’s false and again that doesn’t mean starches are evil.

It just means that the scientifically proven fact is that we can stack rank food, we can. We can analyze it based on agreed upon criteria in the scientific community and sadly starches are relatively low on that list. Again, it doesn’t mean they’ll kill you. It doesn’t mean you can never eat them. It just means let’s have all the facts available to us so we can make informed choices.

Pete: It’s very interesting isn’t it that this kind of modern disease which is a lot of people have which is the fatty liver disease. A lot of people can actually have been carrying a lot of fat on their body even though you wouldn’t know by looking at them, right?

Jonathan: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely! Sometimes people call it I’ve heard it called skinny fat where your body fat percentage is actually quite high but you look small and again there is also a people who are quite large and have a lower body fat percentage. It’s actually kind of a funny story so according to my weight, I’m obese. My body fat percentage is actually more like nine or ten percent.

I’m six feet tall and I have a 31 ½ inch waist, so I’m like not obese but according to my size and weight, I am. So how we carry our weight and our size, again let’s move away from number scale. It’s about how you feel, if you care about how you look, then it’s about that and it’s about your health and if you take care of those things, everything else will take care of itself.

Pete: Yes, it’s very simple, it’s just doing it. One of the things I’ve noticed I was in Houston this year for about seven weeks and one of the things that’s very kind of different in America to England, we’re copying you. We tend to copy Americans in most things. You go down one street in the United Kingdom and you might see a McDonalds, you might see a Burger King and then you turn the next street, you’re not going to see another one. You might see a Kentucky Fried Chicken.

In America when you go down most streets and you’ll just see a McDonald and you’ll see a Burger King and you see [indiscernible 53:36] Burger and you see all these different places and then you turn left and you see them all again and they’re all designed to be the same. I was reading a fantastic book at the moment with The Power of Habit and it talks about how a lot of these convenient places of eating are all designed to look and feel the same way to kind of trick us and I would imagine it’s quite difficult for anyone who says “Okay, I’m wise to this now. I’m going to take my own heath into my own hands. I’m going to cut down the amount of starch that I eat.” A lot of people find that very difficult to, not only from a physiological point of view but from a psychological point of view, to cut out these foods when they’re so readily available. What sort of advice would you give to people that kind of want to cut these foods out of their diet? How do you go by advising someone to kind of go down on that road?

Jonathan: I would highly recommend that they take on the word they hold in their mind shouldn’t be elimination because people don’t like having things taken away from them. No one likes having something they have right now taken away from them. What I would recommend the word in your mind is replace or substitute because one, if you’re hungry and if you’re dissatisfied it ain’t going to work. Nobody will tolerate hunger and dissatisfaction for the rest of their life and that’s what we’re after.

It’s long-term so however, almost everyone at one point in time in their life has probably been too full for dessert or they’ve eaten a meal where they ate a bunch of fish and a bunch of meat and maybe some really great non-starchy vegetables and they were just too full to eat a roll. What if we were always too full to eat starches and sweets? What if when we serve dinner to our family tonight instead of having the main course and maybe a little bit of vegetable and then a bunch of starch we just prepared twice as much as the main course and three times more non-starchy vegetables and then just don’t set the starch out.

See if anyone notices and when they’re enjoying a bunch of their main dish and a bunch of their wonderful non-starchy sides and they just get full and is like wow, I’m too full for dessert now or I’m just too full for starch or even people are like how do you do this like what about Asian cultures. Go to an Asian restaurant. I actually think those are some of the easiest restaurants in which to do this because instead of getting what I often see is like individuals will go to an Asian restaurant, I used to do this myself, and you get the main dish and then you get rice and you take half of the main dish and you put it in rice and then you take the other half of the main dish home because you’re too full.

What if you just ate the whole main dish? That’s really the delicious part, so, just eat so much non-starchy vegetables, so much lean protein, and so many natural fats that you’re too full for starches and sweets. Do you have to do that forever, all the time? No. Depending on your goals just do it as much as you want, if you want to lose a lot of fat, try to do that as much as possible. If you want to lose a little bit of fat, do it when it’s convenient. It’s simple as the more often you are too full for starches and sweets and that’s key. You can’t just say no more starches and sweets because you’ll be hungry and you’ll be worse off than you were before because you’re starving yourself and that’s not healthy. Stay full of the right kind of foods and it will make everything easier. It will keep you happy. It will keep you nourished, and it will heal your body.

Pete: I really like what you said about replace. I think that’s a really empowering way of looking in it as opposed to taking something away. Just think about when we were children or our own children. If we take something away from them they go crazy you know something that almost innate within us. If you take something away that’s close to us, we want it. It’s very, very interesting.

I could literally to you talk all night, there’s no question about that and it would be great maybe if you come on the show again but there are few other things I would love to touch base with you on that I think are very, very important and then there’s a couple of questions. I just want to know when people stop eating or they cut down the amount of food they eat, they’re obviously going to crave starchy foods, if they go the long periods of time without eating?

Jonathan: Well what you’ll see and this is many, many, many people has demonstrated this. We tend to like to eat what we have eaten however, if we change what we eat, like 21 days. It takes 21 days to form a habit, if like this is just an experiment. Listeners, you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to but it might be fun. For 21 days, don’t eat starches or sweets like just try it. On the 22nd day, you will not crave starches and sweets because your taste buds will be calibrated.

You’re like you’ll eat an orange and it will be like the most delicious thing you’ve ever eaten in your life because your perception of sweet will change, things like squash will give you more satisfaction starch ever has and that’s really the key is, like yeah, it is going to be tough for the first week, two weeks, three weeks and actually the science shows that’s because we developed an addiction. We can spend all night talking about this but sugar and starch addiction is a clinically proven thing and that’s why it’s hard to give up because it triggers endorphins, dopamine release, and when we go off it we experience withdrawal.

You will have headaches. For the first week, it’s going to be terrible because you are literally going through withdrawal however, week two will be easier, week three will be easier and that week four you’re going to be like man, you’ll be kind of like a vegetarian but for starches and sweets. Vegetarians aren’t like “Damn it, I really want to eat meat” like they just don’t want to eat meat and we call it going SANE. Once you go SANE for say a month, you just won’t have any desire to eat starches or sweets or you might like you had a party and want to have the cake, that’s fine which you won’t be like “Oh cake. I need some cake.” It’ll be a much more full and something that you have control over because you have broken that addiction.

Pete: Well, this year my diet massively changed and that’s because of a lot of research that I did about cancer; my partner was diagnosed with a brain tumor. We went out and got her treated in Houston by Dr. Kaczynski I don’t know if you’ve heard of him, but he is a guy who treats people with antineoplastons. It’s a form of peptide, synthesized peptide. This treatment has radically saved Hannah’s life but we also saw a guy when we were out in America. He’s brilliant, he does a lot of work with a guy named Charles Palanquin. You’ve probably come across or heard about him.

Jonathan: I love Charles.

Pete: His name is [indiscernible 1:00:29] and he is going to come on my radio show in a few weeks. It was so fascinating to seeing him because he did some tests with Hannah. One of the things he found, he did this test to see how acid her body was, he did a ph test. What he did is, he got her to drink some lemon and every minute he took in some litmus paper to see how quickly it took her ph balance to come back to normal. It took like half an hour, and with me it took like four or five minutes, you know.

She obliviously had a really acidic environment in her body because, you know, she was never really into eating practically well, food was never that important. She has radically changed her diet. The biggest diet change she has made is cutting out the amount of starches that she eats in her diet. In fact, she doesn’t eat any starch. She’s cooking all the time and that’s where I kind of joined her on that journey. I must admit, it was tough like you said, for the first few days. I’ve done it before in the past, but not like I’ve done it now.

I really went through that 21 days. It’s very incredibly liberating to go through that process. And then to feel you are actually in control of what you eat, rather than what so many people feel, which is feeling the food actually controls them, which is what happens with, I think, drugs and alcoholics, and cigarettes, you often feel that that substance has some form of control. I suppose what I really like about, again I reiterate that point that you made Jonathan about replacing some sweets with an apple or replacing some sweets with, I don’t know, some salmon you cooked in the oven, rather than cutting things out.

I find that all really, really refreshing. I really appreciate you sharing that with us.
Can we just talk a little bit about exercise? I know that’s another area that you are really passionate about. When it comes to exercise how can it be possible to exercise less and actually get results?

Jonathan: The reason that sounds odd is because we’ve all been taught that it’s about calories and calories out, we kind of circle back to the beginning of the podcast here, where we have to increase calories out, so we need to exercise more but what we now know, what science has shown and hopefully what your listeners now know, we’ve done a good job explaining it here on the podcast is that it’s about hormones. The question then becomes not how can we use exercise to burn more calories? What science actually shows is the question we should be asking how can we use exercise to change our hormonal balance.

Interestingly enough, the type of exercise that we do to change our hormones is a type of exercise that uses much more resistance and it uses that in a safe fashion but when we do that we can’t do a lot of exercise. Think about it, we all know we can’t sprint for as long as we can walk, we just can’t. There’s an inverse relationship between the quality of exercise and the quantity of it that we can do.

If our model of exercise is one where we use exercise to change our hormonal balance and we know it’s been scientifically proven that it’s the quality of exercise that determines the hormonal reaction and that the higher the quality of the exercise the more positive the hormonal reaction and higher quality of the exercise the less of it we can do.

Not because we’re lazy, but because we’re too sore to do anymore, like we just physically can’t. We do it on Monday, then we try to do it on Tuesday, we can’t, we just can’t we’re physically not able to. Then ironically, we actually have to be exercising less, not because we’re lazy, but, because smarter exercise is a type of exercise that we can’t do a lot of and that causes a radically more positive hormonal environment in our body and it gives us a heck of a lot of time back. I’ll tell you what, we can all use this a bit more time, it’s actually really, really exciting.

Pete: What are we talking about, kind of doing some sort of like interval training? Or really be kind of an overload our muscles for a while and then let us recover and then do a little more than that? Is that what you mean?

Jonathan: Interval training is a wonderful early example of this model. Interval training great, there is even a better way of doing it. Again, we just want to make our muscles work as hard as possible, but as safe as possible. One of the challenges, sometimes with interval training for example, if we sprint, there’s a huge amount of risk there, right? What we want to do is increase intensity without increasing risk. Like sprinting up stadium steps is very risky. A lot of people get hurt doing that.

There’s a technique known as eccentric training, which is actually almost like Pilates or yoga mixed with weight training, here what we do is focus on slowly lowering weight, so instead of doing like a push-up, you do a lower down and you do it very, very slowly but you use so much resistance, that you try to hold yourself up, but in fact, gravity forces you to go down.

In doing this, we work the specific muscle fibers which triggers this hormonal reaction and it’s incredibly safe because it’s controlled and it’s slow. In fact, it’s been incredibly popular in physical therapy circles for decades because it’s so safe but now what research is showing is that it causes–when healthy people do it, not people who are recovering from injuries, it causes this wonderful hormonal change because it is so intense and it’s so safe that everyone can do it.

It’s sort of like V2 interval training, whereas interval training requires you to move faster and when you move faster you have an increased likelihood of injury. What eccentric training allows us to do move slowly and very controlled but using a lot of resistance and therefore deriving extreme positive hormonal benefit.

Pete: Is that what you call a “go SANE”? Is that what you mean?

Jonathan: Oh, no. Sorry no. So, sane is the acronym for high quality foods and eccentric training is what, I would call, smarter exercises. That’s just the exercise component of The Smarter Science of Slim.

Pete: If people want to find out more about eccentric training, can they find out about some of that stuff on your website?

Jonathan: They can also, there’s a book written on all this stuff. The book is called The Smarter Science of Slim. It goes into detail, but it’s an easy read, hopefully it’s an enjoyable read. It dispels all the myths, it steps you through all the science, and it shows you how you can eat smarter and exercise smarter, SANE foods, eccentric exercise, it outlines all of that stuff.

Pete: Well, we will come back and talk about the book in a little while. I just want to tell you about some of the comments that we gained, which is really sweet. I really appreciate these comments guys. A lovely lady, called Rosalind, is saying, “Hi, a really inspiring show. It’s certainly confirming a lot of things about starches. I’ve realized by personal experience, I’m curious to know what he feels, i.e you, about the value of saturated fat and legumes?”

Jonathan: Saturated fat has been horribly misrepresented. To be clear, my research does not suggest that you should get a…you should just drain bacon grease and drink it, like that’s not a good idea. However, saturated fat that is naturally occurring in high quality food is fine for you. It is absolutely fine for you. In fact, certain types of saturated fat, such as, medium change triglycerides, which are found in abundance in coconuts, have actually been proven, clinically, to help you burn fat.

They’ll have studies where they take like one group eat a diet, another group eats a similar diet except eat coconut and consistently, those that are eating the coconut will burn fat and this is because medium change triglycerides causes your body to metabolize food differently, speeds up your metabolic rate. To say that saturated fats are bad for you, is false, absolutely never been proven to be true and saturated fats found in whole, natural, high quality foods are great for you.

At the same time, that doesn’t mean, again, it doesn’t mean go buy a tub of lard and deep fry everything. It doesn’t mean that. It means, again, focus on whole, natural, high quality foods and if they happen to contain saturated fat that’s fine. You don’t need to go out of your way to add saturated fat, because again that’s unnatural. In nature, there’s not a saturated fat tree that we pick from and add to our food. Stick with natural whole food then you will be fine.

Pete: Yeah, coconut oil is a fantastic oil to cook with actually. It’s one of the things I really recommend people to use rather than vegetable oils, even cooking with olive oil which isn’t great to cook with. Coconut oil is a wonderful oil to cook with.

I’ve got a question here saying is it true that the cravings go? I look at cake, etc., with disinterest now and how awfully they affect our bodies. The question is, is it true the cravings go? Obviously, in this lady’s case they have gone. So, is it true that cravings go?

Jonathan: It’s absolutely true. We can, the human mind is an incredibly powerful thing. You hear stories all the time about people who smoked their entire life, and smoking is a good example because nicotine has been proven to be the third most addictive substance in the world, so heroin and cocaine are more addictive, but other than those two, nicotine is the most addictive. You hear stories all the time of individuals who smoked their whole life tried to quit, tried to quit, couldn’t, then got news from their doctor that if you don’t quit smoking you’re going to die. Somehow they quit smoking.

When the motivation’s there they quit. Or people who thinking “I could never give up starches and sweets, I just can’t.” They go to the doctor and get diagnosed with Type II diabetes, somehow they’re able to give up starches and sweets. The human mind is incredibly powerful and if we hold powerful information in our mind, information we know to be true because we use the scientific method to verify it, it’s not hype, it’s not gimmicks, you’d be amazed with what your mind can enable you to do. Breaking cravings is just one of the many things.

Pete: Yeah, it’s true and I’m tapping into that. Another way to tap into the power of our minds is to give our mind foods that our mind needs, our mind, meaning our brain. I don’t think people realize that our brain is just a big fatty tissue and another reason why it’s so important to eat fat rather than cutt it out, which is what so many people do when it comes to weight loss, right?

Jonathan: Oh absolutely. In fact, I love that you brought that up. You want to talk about exciting research. I think we would all like to be smarter, if we could just wave a magic wand and just have higher IQ points, I think we all would wave that magic wand. If you eat SANE foods, if you eat non-starchy vegetables and you eat seafood, and you eat foods high in a wonderful kind of fat called Omega 3 fatty acids, your mind will work better. It’s proven time and time again. Your mind will be clearer, you’re less likelihood of developing Alzheimer ’s disease.

You will remember better. Not only will you heal your body, but you will literally heal your mind. It’s funny because starch and sweets taste so good, anybody that’s been on the other side, meaning whose gone SANE, who’s experienced the benefits of eating high quality food and doing high quality exercises, will tell you that there is no starch nor is there a sweet that tastes better than the way you will feel 24/7/365. Like that five seconds of pleasure that you get from that starches and sweets, go just visit the other side. Just give use 21 days, visit the other side because you will feel better than that all day, every day for the rest of your life.

Pete: It’s pretty simple. That’s what my approach to weight loss has been about, I should say fat loss as opposed to weight loss, by getting people to identify some of their weaknesses and really look to make them their strength and give themselves at least 21 days to break a habit and take on some habits not only to help them lose fat but to keep the fat off.

There’s another question here from a lady saying, “What’s your take on peas and beans?” I think you call them legumes.

Jonathan: Legumes are fascinating, you’ll see this in the book and on the website. I call it the Sanity Spectrum. On one side you have SANE and on the other side you have inSANE or high quality, low quality and we just plop food on that spectrum. So, you know you have this nice visual representation of where you should be eating the most versus the least foods.

Legumes are fine in moderation. Zero to two servings of legumes a day are totally fine. I would not say intentionally..like I say eat more smarter. Legumes don’t fall under the umbrella of try to eat more of them. When I say eat more smarter, I mean that. I want you to intentionally try to eat so many non-starchy vegetables that you got spinach coming out of your ears. I want you to try to over eat certain kinds of food. Legumes, if you like them, I would continue to enjoy up to two servings of them per day because we all need variety, we all need to enjoy food. However, I wouldn’t go out of your way to consume more of them.

Pete: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I can just see that one of my ladies just said, “I just downloaded the Kindle version of the book only £4.99, so about $7.00 I think and now I’m not being paid to advertise.” Someone was just saying, just a couple more questions, what sizes would you call a serving?

Jonathan: It’s pretty much standard. There’s a free e-book on my website called Smarter Success, excuse me, it’s called Seven Days of Sanity. It has all the visual representation of all the different serving size, but I don’t try to offer potentially new serving sizes; just a standard serving size. I talk about try to eat 10 servings of non-starchy vegetables per day or more. Look on the back of the spinach box or bag and whatever it says is a serving is fine.

Pete: Okay. Listen there’s one more question. This is a friend of mine in Dallas, Texas and she says, “Is there such a thing as a healthy dessert?”

Jonathan: Absolutely, I actually have two recipes on my website. I have a huge sweet tooth. Again, it’s not that sweet is bad for you, sugar snap peas are sweet, but they’re not bad for you. One of my favorite desserts, I’ll just do two recipes real quickly. So, I use Greek yogurt and then I add vanilla whey protein to it and then I add either some peanut butter or some almond butter; or just any kind of nut butter and then I add some cinnamon and I add some vanilla extract. It tastes like peanut butter pie filling. It is fabulous. It is fabulous.

Another thing I do, I use cocoa, some pure un-Dutch cocoa, fabulously healthy for you. Cocoa, some natural nut butter, I put some chocolate protein powder in there. I potentially put a little bit of flax seed oil in there and you can bake this. You can make protein brownies. You can eat it and almost taste like a fudge. You can put some Stevia in there. Stevia is a non-caloric natural sweetener, it has no calories and it is a plant leaf. Splenda is a chemically derived, it’s not natural, but it’s non-caloric, so it’s better for you than caloric sweeteners. However, there are non-caloric, natural sweeteners, such as Stevia, which you can do all kinds of amazing stuff with.

Put some Stevia in some Greek yogurt and maybe add some strawberry protein powder and now you’ve got this wonderful strawberry fabulous mixture. I got one more, I do a strawberry and blueberry ice cream. The way I make this, I have a really nice blender, I put some ice cubes, I put some frozen strawberries or frozen blueberries. I put some vanilla whey protein powder in and blend it for 30 seconds and I’ve got some ice cream.

Does it taste like Ben & Jerry’s? No, if you don’t eat Ben & Jerry’s for 21 days and you try this will it taste fabulous, yes. And is it something you can enjoy for the rest of your life and without feeling bad about it, absolutely.

Pete: Oh, fantastic. Of your three books, which one is the best one, do you think that people…? [crosstalk 1:18:18]

Jonathan: Definitely. There’s The Smarter Science of Slim, that’s it, that’s the one. Then there’s a workbook and there’s a journal. You need to read The Smarter Science of Slim, that has all the information. The workbook builds on that and the journal is an extension of the workbook. So certainly you can buy all three. There’s a special discount on Amazon if you buy all three, but the workbook won’t make any sense unless you read The Smarter Science of Slim. The core book is called The Smarter Science of Slim, that’s the one that has the research and all that good stuff in it.

Pete: One more question, one more question. An alternative to cow’s milk and yogurt someone just asked…?

Jonathan: I’m not anti-dairy, I’m not anti-anything, I’m pro science. Science shows there is high quality dairy for some people. Some people are lactose intolerant and certainly, if you have a nut allergy, don’t eat nuts just because I say they’re SANE. You’ve got dairy allergies, please don’t go eating them. Just because I say they’re SANE. Different people react differently to different foods. Greek yogurt and cottage cheese, I generally enjoy the lower fat variance because I enjoy to get my fat from other sources of my diet but those are extremely SANE sources of dairy.

I literally probably eat a 32 ounce container of non-fat plain Greek yogurt, I mix it with other things every three days. I love it. I love creamy. I love dairy. I know a lot of people that put Greek yogurt in their coffee or in their tea instead of milk, I know that sounds odd. However, if you just want to substitute milk, I would do an almond milk, unsweetened almond mink. I would stay away from soy, because soy is part of the industrial food nonsense, unsweetened is key, make sure it’s not sweetened. Almond milk is a good choice.

Pete: Fantastic. Listen guys I really would encourage you to check out Jonathan’s website. It’s thesmarterscienceofslim.com. You can find out about the book. There’s extras there, there’s videos, there’s a support group, there’s blogs. There’s podcast. Really, go and check it out. There’s so much inspiring stuff. I’ll love to have you on the show again my friend.

I can’t thank you enough. I think without a shadow of a doubt, all of you who have listened to this should all be clapping your hands right now and just a massive thank you for your time. For me, the thing that I hear the most from you it’s not just what you say it’s the passion and the enthusiasm behind what you say. I’m sure people, we’ve all kind of feed off that [indiscernible 1:21:09].

So, please go check out Jonathan’s website. Once again, my friend, thank you so much for making this an extra special show tonight.

Jonathan: My pleasure, Pete. I look forward to coming back soon and I hope it was useful.

Pete: Thank you. You take care my friend. That was Jonathan. I really hope you guys enjoyed listening to him as much as I did. I mean I really go a lot out of this evening. Please you need to understand that weight loss guru radio, brought to you by weightlossguru.com is really only focused on one thing and that’s inspiring you. Inspiring you to live a better life, need to be healthier, to be happier, to be more confident, to have more energy, and ultimately for some, for a lot of you, maybe to shed those excess pounds of fat.

This is a podcast that I would really encourage you to listen again. A few times, maybe because there was a lot of food for thought. If you pardon the pun. A lot of food for thought. And please, this radio show is brought to you, it’s free. If you want to help support the show then please sign up to my weight loss program, weightlossguru.com. Which of course is a fantastic program on its own, which focuses on a lot of what Jonathan was talking about tonight about breaking habits, about doing things for 21 days. People who follow my program generally feel they’re getting coached by me, there’s a great support group there as well.

Check that out. Also if you go to my blog, weightlossguru.com/blog, in about 10-15 minutes, I will put up this interview so you can hear as many times as you like. But aslo there’s hundreds of entries on my blog. Loads of podcast, videos, just like there is on Jonathan’s site. And I really encourage you to interact with that. Aslo if you go to my website, weightlossguru.com, you can see my blog there, but sign up to our news letter because then we can tell you about all of these shows, every Wednesday night, 8 o’clock British summertime. Weight Loss Guru radio comes to you. Next week, I’m really excited because we have the amazing Lincoln Bridgon. Lincoln Bridgon is a health fitness expert extraordinaire and I’ve known Lincoln for 23 years. I became a fitness instructor with him in 1989, we did our aerobics qualification together and he is really into metabolic training and more will be revealed about this next week.

Jonathan was talking about some of this tonight as well. So what can I say, I really hope you’ve enjoyed this show as much as I have and I really, really look forward to welcoming you back on the show next Wednesday night and if you’ve enjoyed it, please go to my blog and make some comments about what you’ve taken away…..

Jonathan: Wait, wait! Don’t stop listening yet.

Carrie: You can get fabulous free SANE recipes over at CarrieBrown.com.

Jonathan: And don’t forget, your 100% free ‘Eating and Exercise Quick Start Program’ as well as free, fun daily tips delivered right into your inbox at BailorGroup.com.