Double Bonus: New Book (The Calorie Myth) Updates and More

Jonathan: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Living the Smarter Science of Slim. I am Jonathan Bailor, and we of course have…

Carrie: Carrie Brown.

Jonathan: We are welcoming…

Cathy: Dr. Catherine Britell.

Jonathan: I love it. Well, we have got the trifecta in the house, which means none other than support group questions. Shall we begin?

Cathy: We should. The first questions we have are about the new book. Ranoltin23 asks: Are you guys publishing a workbook alongside the new book? The Smarter Science of Slim workbook was key for me, and I want my friends and family to have the same opportunity.

Jonathan: Ranoltin23, thank you so much for the kind words.

I’m very happy we actually brought up the new book because, through the wonderful Smarter Science of Slim Support Group, which if folks haven’t checked it out is SmarterScienceOfSlim.com/community, I learned that the new book, The Calorie Myth, is available for preorder on Amazon. I didn’t know that, but it is. It is super. The cover art isn’t up and the subtitle is wrong, the page count is completely wrong, but apparently it is up there and you can order it.

Cathy: Didn’t we just the send the draft off? That’s weird.

Jonathan: I think it is somewhat automated, like RSS, once they list it in some sort of a catalogue, it gets picked up. But anyway, it is called The Calorie Myth. The subtitle is wrong, the cover art is not up there, everything about it is wrong except the title, and you can order it now, which is cool. It will contain – if you liked the workbook, the elements of the workbook that you liked will be reflected in The Calorie Myth. So the things like the more prescriptive exercise routine, the more prescriptive mental exercises, think of The Calorie Myth as the best of the first year of the Smarter Science of Slim, all properties put together, condensed into one awesome package, plus a bunch of other new cool stuff.

Cathy: Wow. Yes, I am really looking forward to that.

Jonathan: Yes, it is going to be quite awesome. It is amazing as an author to have the opportunity to essentially take the amazing interactions we had in the support group, the amazing interactions we had in the podcast, on Facebook, on Twitter and in person, take all of those learnings and take the three original Smarter Science of Slim books and basically say, If we could take the best and if we could integrate that, what would come out the other end. It is The Calorie Myth, and I am pretty excited about it.

Cathy: Ranoltin, I think your friends and family are going to have some wonderful opportunities and I am just really excited about it.

Jonathan: I also hope, too, that the Smarter Science of Slim original book, definitely, there was like, “Well, check out the workbook; oh, make sure you check out this, make sure you check out this too, make sure you check out this too.” Which isn’t bad. And certainly you can never provide everything anyone would ever need in one book, but there has definitely been a concerted effort to say that which you need to get started, just if this is the one thing you read, you will be good to go.

Cathy: This is it.

Jonathan: With the exception that maybe it is really hard to explain exercises with the written words. Just trying to write out how to do exercises is hard. Harper Collins is probably the publisher, but the specific imprint is called HarperWave, and it’s a brand new leading imprint at Harper Collins.

Their staff is amazing. They brought in a second editor and she is an amazing person. This is the best of knowledge – I have used it before, but I will use it again. Think of the Smarter Science of Slim hopefully as a great six-track recording that we created with an independent recording studio, and think of The Calorie Myth as a double disc fully produced, brought in the best producers in the world on the best soundstage on the world and really wanted to showcase the best of what we have all created over the past two years.

Carrie: So remind us, when is it being published?

Jonathan: Actually I have more information there, too. The official publish date is 12/31/13.

Cathy: NEKLocalvore asks: Why has Smarter Science of Slim gone out of print, and will the new book include all of the same information, but better?

Jonathan: It absolutely will. And there is also some things – I don’t want to give this away, this is something that I want. I would love, love, love for the support group, Twitter, Facebook, everything to do this, and that is, “What do you think are the biggest differences between the two books?” Because there are some things that I consciously removed because I thought they were more distracting than helpful.

I am not going to say what they are. It is not like, “Well, if I would have known that, then everything would have changed.” But I am just curious to see – when you release a product of any kind, you get feedback and you can update the product. You very rarely have a chance to do that.

For example, I am sure George Lucas maybe would have changed something about Star Wars if he could have, but he can’t. Once Star Wars is out, it is out. So how often do you get a chance to essentially revise, update and improve a creative work? So again, everyone in the support group is as much part of this book as the three of us are here in the studio, and it is through your feedback that the book will be what it is. So I hope I did a good job. We will see, though.

Cathy: Will the old discussions and FAQs remain?

Jonathan: Short answer, yes. Longer answer is the book is titled The Calorie Myth. The first book was titled The Smarter Science of Slim, as is the website. The Smarter Science of Slim is the answer to The Calorie Myth. So it’s not going to go away. The Smarter Science of Slim as a property, as a brand, as an awesome way of life, will continue.

What this book introduces is a different framing and an expansion of the problems. So what you will see is a new website focused on the new book. That website is going to be pretty simple and mostly about telling people about and encouraging them to get the book. The Smarter Science of Slim will continue to be much richer in terms of blogs, podcasts, support groups, all that kind of fun stuff. Basically, once you read The Calorie Myth, once you understand The Calorie Myth, and you want to apply The Smarter Science of Slim, you will go to the SmarterScienceOfSlim.com to do that.

To make this really easy, we are also going to update JonathanBailor.com because, God willing, there will be many books and we can’t just have a million websites, so we have to have a scalable approach. What you will actually see is this über-navigation bar across the top of SmarterScienceOfSlim.com, CalorieMythBook.com, JonathanBailor.com and our nonprofit, .org, that allows you to navigate between all four sites.

So you are going to have like über-navigation with all the properties up there, and you can navigate between them. I actually was inspired by the great Dr. Oz for that one. If you go to Dr. Oz’s website, he does this. Because he has got his Dr. Oz, and then he’s got Share Care, and he has got Real Age. Because he has a bunch of different properties, but it is a really cool way to link them all together.

So lots of things in the works. One other thing I will mention, my dear Carrie has not said anything, but Carrie has got tens and tens of amazing and exclusive recipes in the new book, and we present them in a pretty cool way. I am excited. Carrie, confirm. Are you excited?

Carrie: Yes.

Jonathan: Our dear Dr. Cathy, you have the exercise section.

Cathy: Yes, I do.

Jonathan: Three published authors in there.

Cathy: Next question: Tom Levine says that soy has come up repeatedly on the forum, and the thing that concerns me with soy is how much of the worry is hype about soy versus real science? The people that he is concerned about are the vegetarians who struggle with getting enough protein in their diet. So how worried should we really be, or can soy be a reasonable source of protein in a balanced diet, especially for vegetarians or pescetarians?

Jonathan: We can apply the same criteria to soy as we can really to any food. Remember that the Smarter Science of Slim does not have any innate biases or preferences towards any kind of food stuff. It just says look for things that have the most water, fiber, protein; things that are the most satisfying, un-aggressive, nutritious and efficient as possible.

So, when we ask about soy, we just take it through that spectrum. We have to say, How satisfying is it per calorie related to other foods; what kind of a hormonal response does it trigger; does it have a lot of nutrients per calorie; and is it efficiently converted into fat or not.

One other question to ask is, think of it as a layer on top of SANE, which is how was it produced? Like is it a mono crop, is it a GMO mono crop that was produced on soil that has been just denatured and there are two companies that make all of it, so it is just that it has gone rancid and likely spoiled, blah-blah-blah. That matters a lot.

A lot of these things like rice, wheat, a lot of the traditional starches, part of the reason they are so inSANE is one, they are not satisfying, they are not water-fiber-protein strong. Also the way they have been bred is bad. If you want to learn more about this – wheat, for example, there is an entire book on it called Wheat Belly where the wheat we eat today is not the same as the wheat that was in the ‘50s and certainly not the same as in the biblical times, for example. Soy, if you look at it on the SANEity spectrum, I am going to ignore all the anti-nutrients, I am going to ignore all of the, let’s call it controversial stuff where if you ask a vegetarian, they are like, “That’s all myths.” And if you ask a paleo person, they are like, “That’s all been scientifically proven.”

I’m going to ignore that stuff; I am just going to look at it from a SANEity and a mono crop perspective. Soy is going to fit in the same category. It is not inSANE, it is not SANE, it’s in the middle. Anything that is in the middle, my official position is I would not go out of my way to eat it. It is not required. If you do eat it, for example, I don’t think we have an obesity epidemic in this country because people eat too much soy.

I also don’t think the cause of most people’s diabetes is soy. Again, it is not this thing to actively try to avoid, it is not this thing to actively try to engage, it is right in the middle. If you need to eat it to live a happy life, I would eat it. If you don’t, then I wouldn’t. And from a more macro-philosophical level – I hope this doesn’t go too far off the ranch – but the way this question is phrased here in the wonderful notes is, “Soy, why don’t you recommend it?”

I think there may be this impression. Cathy describes it so well when she says “SANEity in Smarter Science of Slim is not a cult of personality, it’s a –“ how do you say this, do you remember?

Cathy: It’s a culture of empowerment.

Jonathan: Culture of empowerment, there you go. This is not a book or a program where we say, “Soy, it is this because it is soy.” We say what’s its satiety again, what’s its aggression, what’s its nutrition, what’s its efficiency.

My point is, again, we look at everything that’s edible and we take it on a case-by-case basis and we apply a criteria to it. And it is because of that that this is a flexible lifestyle. It is not something that is dogmatic, it is not something that is rooted in some maybe arbitrary ideology. It says, “Here is a criteria; we take things through it and it either passes the test or it doesn’t.” So it’s not about me or anyone else recommending it; it is about saying how does it stack up against science.

Cathy: Dean asks: I am trying to decide whether to invest in equipment or a gym membership to do the e-centric exercises. Which is cheaper in the long run? Will I inevitably end up at the gym at some point because you cannot purchase weights heavy enough to do a leg press at home, or should I just go with the home exercise program?

Jonathan: Short answer is gym membership. I have yet to see anybody who fully engages in e-centric exercise, does it for a year consistently, eats SANEly and really, really works to what we call complete e-centric failure that is not able to, for lack of a better term, transcend the amount of resistance that you can do at home.

Especially for leg exercises. Many, many, many people do not understand, especially for the female listeners out there, how strong you are. I will bet you that if you do e-centric training for a year and you go to a gym and you know what you are doing, and you have someone with you, just in case, you are going to put hundreds of pounds on a leg-press machine and be able to do it.

Hundreds of pounds. That might seem like a lot, but if a person weighs 400 pounds and can walk up stairs, they are lifting 400 pounds with one leg over and over and over again. When you think about the amount of resistance we actually need to tax our muscles in the long term, if our goal is continued progress, I would say gym membership.

If your goal is just to maintain health, you certainly don’t need a gym membership. It is very, very difficult to fully engage your muscle fibers as you get more advanced without a gym membership. Again folks, there is a key distinction there, and that is if you want to maximize results, go to a gym. If you have more moderate goals then you can do it at home.

But if your true goal is the best possible outcome, you have to have the best possible situation in which to manifest that, and it is going to be the machines at a gym. Again, it is always a balancing act, folks. It is about marginal benefit versus marginal cost.

If your goal is to be optimal, if you have a free Silver Sneakers Card which allows you to go to the gym for free, then certainly go to the gym. But if you can’t make it there, please don’t let that be an encumbrance or an excuse not to exercise e-centrically. Just see it as a valuable tool if you want to take it to the next level.

Cathy: Super.

Jonathan: Love it. Great questions. Do we have more for next week?

Cathy: I think we do, we have lots more.

Jonathan: Excellent. Folks, it is always a pleasure. Carrie, Cathy, and myself are eating smarter, exercising smarter, and we are living better. We will see you next week.

Carrie: See you.

Cathy: Bye-bye.