Ep.24 – The Myth of Quick Fixes

Jonathan: Hey everyone, Jonathan Bailor and Carrie Brown coming at you with another Smarter Science of Slim podcast, and this week, we are going to give an extended answer and discussion for this single, most common question asked about the Smarter Science of Slim and that is, “When can I expect results?” and, “What kind of results am I going to see?” We live in a world of seven day fast and lose 14 pounds in two weeks; and that’s what everyone wants to know.

They want to know if I go SANE and get eccentric, what kind of crazy, quick fix solution is this going to be? What we’re going to talk about in this podcast is about how, if that’s what we’re interested in. If we’re interested in some quick fix, temporary Band-Aid solution that really doesn’t work, Smarter Science of Slim is not going to be the right place for us but if we’re looking to fundamentally change the way our body works, and enable ourselves to achieve practical and permanent fat loss and health for the rest of our life, this is going to be the place for us. With that introduction, Carrie, how are you doing today?

Carrie: Well, I didn’t think you were ever going to take a breath so I could say, “Hello!” Hello!

Jonathan: Well, I have to warn the listeners, this is a subject that I get amped up about because often, slim is, let’s be fair here. Slim is in the title of the book The Smarter Science of Slim, as well as the title of this podcast. That sometimes causes people to think that this is a quick fix weight loss program, and as you know, Carrie, it is anything but that.

Carrie: It is not, but it does work.

Jonathan: But it does work…

Carrie: Long term.

Jonathan: It does work long term, and the analogy I like to use just to get started is, think about what we’re doing here at the Smarter Science of Slim, like what you would do to heal a broken bone. Let’s say you break your ankle, okay, because we always talk about at having a broken metabolism.

Carrie: I did that. I jumped out of an airplane and poof, there was my ankle broken!

Jonathan: That’s great actually! When you broke your ankle, then what happened? What did you have to do to heal that ankle?

Carrie: Then I hopped around for eight weeks.

Jonathan: Well, you got a cast put on your ankle right?

Carrie: Did yes.

Jonathan: You got cast put on your ankle, and for eight weeks, you really didn’t see your ankle getting any better?

Carrie: No. It just hurt.

Jonathan: It just hurt, and you didn’t really, and you had to give a time to heal.

Carrie: Yes.

Jonathan: You trusted the medical experts to sort of say, “Put it in a cast. This is how you heal an ankle, and then eight weeks later, you were good to go?”

Carrie: Yes.

Jonathan: And you’ve been good to go ever since?

Carrie: Yes.

Jonathan: Awesome! Okay.

Carrie: I haven’t jumped off an airplane since either. It probably helps.

Jonathan: That’s actually a really great analogy. Let’s think about that here, folks. We’ve got our body, we’ve got an ankle, we got the ankle broken. Let’s talk about our metabolism now. We’ve got our metabolism, and our metabolism is broken. It’s not broken from jumping out of airplanes. It is broken by eating the inSANE starches and sweets and processed fats that we are inundated with day in and day out.

Now, once our metabolism is broken, we have to heal it, and the way we start to heal it is, we eliminate the types of things that break our metabolism that we just said. We also essentially put it in a cast, or we start doing eccentric training and we start eating SANEly, then we have to wait for, at times, four weeks, eight weeks, twelve weeks, because our body is literally repairing itself, and that doesn’t happen overnight and it also doesn’t happen linearly. It is not as if you are going to lose one pound a week for fourteen weeks. That’s not the way it works. That’s the way it works for some people but for a lot of people including my brother, is that after eight weeks, twelve weeks, they don’t change anything about the way they’re eating and exercising, and all of a sudden, their body just starts to work differently. That’s essentially the cast coming off, your metabolism being healed, and your metabolism then leading you to a life of effortless health and fat loss forever at that point.

Carrie: It is awesome!

Jonathan: It is awesome, and just like it’s awesome to have a healed ankle; and then to be able to walk around on it without thinking about it. It is also awesome to heal your metabolism once and then again, don’t jump out of airplanes or eat starches and sweets, but you’re good. What we’ve been doing is we’ve essentially been strapping braces on our broken ankles.

They may let us walk around for an additional week. They may allow us to lose five pounds here, five pounds there; but then, we just end up re-hurting our ankle or we end up regaining weight, because we haven’t actually stepped back and allowed our body time to heal itself and then prevented it from re-hurting itself; and that’s the shift we need to make.

Carrie: I must point out, though, and if you remember a year ago, when we met and I started doing this, I lost 10 pounds very quickly in two weeks. Since then, I haven’t lost any weight since then, but my body has been shrinking. I think it’s important to note that some people may experience that early weight loss and then get to walk, you know, historically called the plateau, but that’s when you must remember that’s kind of when your scale needs to just go in the garage or down to Goodwill because it’s, that’s not the key metric that you’re looking for.

Jonathan: I’m so happy you brought up the scale, too, Carrie, because again if your goal is weight loss, please stop listening to this podcast because our goal is not weight loss. You will, if you are significantly overweight, you will lose weight, but that’s not our goal. The reason it’s very important for us here, it’s not our goal is there’s three primary ways we can lose weight. We can shed water, aka we can dehydrate ourselves, we can burn fat, and we can burn muscle.

If we do traditional calorie counting approaches, eat less and exercise more, we’re going to dehydrate ourselves. We’re going to burn a bunch of muscle, and we might burn some fat, however, we are going to do all three of those things. That’s going to make us lose a lot of weight but that’s going to break our metabolism, or even worse, we’re going to gain more in the long term. Smarter Science of Slim is not going to dehydrate you. In fact, we are going to drink way more water. It’s going to build muscle, not burn muscle. Not so much that it makes you bulky, just to let you look toned and awesome and it’s going to burn fat but if we actually increase the level of water in your body and increase the level of muscle, two of those three factors are going up, not down. If our goal is weight loss, Smarter Science of Slim in some cases, can be counter-productive, at least in the short term.

Carrie: What we really, I would imagine that what most people are here for is really fat loss. We call it weight loss, but that’s not really what we want, we want to lose the fat.

Jonathan: Exactly. In fact, until we start eating and exercising in a way that laser focuses on fat loss, rather than just destroying our body which is what traditional things do. They just say, “Get rid of everything, shed everything.” Until we do that, we will continue to be frustrated because we’re going to continue this cycle of yoyo dieting and fighting against our body; whereas, we have to first heal ourselves hormonally, which will enable our body to burn fat for us and once that happens…

Again, you won’t need to look at the scale because you’ll feel better, you’ll look better, your clothes will fit you better, and fundamentally, I personally think Carrie, that freeing ourselves from the constraints of weight and starting to think in terms of other more productive goals, is really just one of the keys to achieving lifelong fitness and health; because, frankly, I don’t know about you, but just hitting some arbitrary number on a scale is actually pretty demeaning. It doesn’t motivate me. It demeans me.

Carrie: Well, not only that, really you are the only person that knows it.

Jonathan: Exactly.

Carrie: Whether it’s going up or down or stay the same or what, it doesn’t really matter. I think what’s important is losing fat, because excess body fat causes also sorts of illnesses and diseases that we know. We want to get rid of the fat. We also want to feel better, we also want to look better, we want to fit in our clothes better. Everybody else will notice that.

Jonathan: Absolutely.
Carrie: They don’t actually care what the number is. They just care what the whole package looks like, those that do care; and they want to know that you are healthy.

Jonathan: Absolutely.

Carrie: So, throw away your scale!

Jonathan: Throw away your scale and if you do want something to measure, it’s not that you should just blindly trust and never measure anything, that’s not what we’re saying. If you want to measure, you can. Let’s just use an accurate and useful measure for example, your waist circumference just get a 99 cent measuring tape, measure your waist. If you’d like, once a month at the same time of day, on the same day of the week because things fluctuate, because your waist measurement, one does actually correlate with a lot of health markers, having a large waist circumference, having a lot of adipose tissue in your stomach region. That is very, very bad for your health, and in addition to that, that is a measurement that will reward you for burning fat and for developing lean muscle tissue, and it will, not necessarily, reward you if you do traditional approaches.

Carrie: I have… that was the first thing for me that changed was when I increased the protein I ate, my muffin top disappeared.

Jonathan: Yes.

Carrie: …literally overnight, and in the last year, I stopped weighing myself, but I had my numbers done, or my health numbers done the other week and my waist is two inches smaller now than it was a year ago, so that to me, was a good number. That’s a good thing to measure.

Jonathan: I think the good news is, correct me if I’m wrong, Carrie, is most of the time when people say things like, “My waist is two inches smaller,” and here’s the trail of tears that led up to that. I’ve been eating just lemon juice and grapefruits for the past two weeks and exercising chronically. Do you feel in any way deprived or that, “Oh, God, next year at this time, my waist is going to be back up, because what I am doing right now is so hard and unsustainable.”

Carrie: No. I have weekends of pure foodie joy.

Jonathan: I don’t make that point to be like, “Yeah, the Smarter Science of Slim is so good,” but more want to make a seemingly obvious… but a point that has been lost on us, because of all of these diets and programs we’ve heard about. Folks, if we stop doing what we’re doing, we’re going to go off the track. If we’re doing something that we cannot keep up, any results you see from what you’re doing are going to go away as soon as you stop doing it.

I know that sounds obvious, but truly like if you have a job and you will like having income and you stop doing your job, you’re not going to have income anymore; so you have to have a job that you can keep doing. If you enjoy being slim and you enjoy being healthy, you have to enjoy the lifestyle that enables you to do that, or you will not be slim and healthy long term.

Carrie: Right.

Jonathan: That’s the key. The question is not… just the other day, this is, I’m going to get a little emotional now because this kind of frustrates me. The other day, I got an email from someone just saying you know, “Hey, I used to do calorie counting and excessive exercise and I lost 20 pounds in two weeks, and I’ve been doing your program and I haven’t lost any weight yet. Thanks!”

It’s just like a snarky, mean email but this person, the thing that breaks my heart about this person is this person, on some level believes that what they did to lose twenty pounds in two weeks was good, and the Smarter Science of Slim is bad despite the fact that I’m assuming, they put 20 pounds and then some back on, which is what caused them to come to Smarter Science of Slim in first place.

Carrie: Right.

Jonathan: Getting short-term results which are not sustainable, if you remember back to earlier podcasts, is worse than getting no results at all.

Carrie: Right.

Jonathan: The things that you are doing to get those results are actually breaking your metabolism more. They would be like Carrie breaking her ankle. Let’s say Carrie and I both broke our ankles, and let’s say Carrie’s going to take a smarter approach, and I’m going to take a quick fix approach. Carrie is in a cast, and she can’t really do anything but five days after breaking my ankle, I’m like, “Hey Carrie! I got this sweet brace on my ankle, and I’m going to go skiing! I can go skiing, Carrie! Look how much fun I’m having! I’m skiing, while you sit home and then two weeks later, I’ve got an infection, and my ankle is still busted and two years later, my ankle is just worse and worse and worse, while Carrie is running around doing whatever because she sucked it up and was smart at the beginning. She began with the end in mind, whereas I was just after that quick fix thing and that ended up screwing me up in the long term. Make sense?

Carrie: Makes absolute sense! The other thing I wanted to say was, that I can see how it would be easy for people listening to this podcast thinking that maybe I have an I have no agenda. My, the things I share on this podcast are what I have personally experienced as being someone who met Jonathan, fat and frustrated and completely unable to lose weight by exercising more and eating less, and this has just been my experience that I’m sharing with you.

There’s no hidden agenda, there’s no coaching, there’s no, what I tell you is how it is. I have not… I do spend a weekend eating, but I eat SANE food, and I have not put on any weight, and my waist is two inches smaller and all the important numbers from my blood tests are better, up or down whichever way they needed to go. They are better than they were a year ago, and to me, that’s what’s important.

Jonathan: You’re feeling better. Your hair is looking better. Your eyes are shining. Your skin is glowing, and frankly, folks, I think that… let’s take a step back even further and just really talk about motivation, because, again as Carrie said… Let’s use a little story here. Let’s talk about Carrie’s example here. Carrie is smaller, she’s healthier, she’s more energetic, she looks better overall, she feels better about herself, and her weight is basically the same. Okay.

That’s Carrie current. Let’s say, fictional Carrie. Fictional Carrie weighs 30 pounds less than today’s Carrie, but she’s tired all the time, she’s crabby, her mind is in a fog, her numbers, her health numbers are worse off, and she feels weak and lethargic all the time. Is that Carrie more successful because she’s lost 30 pounds? Is that something we should be celebrating, or we should be actually like, “Oh my God, Carrie, what are you doing to yourself?”

However, how many of us in our culture, we seem to celebrate that sort of break yourself down in the short term to lose weight when the things that actually matter, how you feel, your mind, your body, your spirit, are all being compromised in favor of your weight? How backwards and demeaning is that?

Carrie: I’m laughing, not because of what you are saying is funny but you’re just getting so wound up, and it is good! That’s funny.

Jonathan: I might even get more wound up because I’ve been in this field for over 10 years, I used to be a trainer. When I was a trainer, I worked with, that’s really what spurred the Smarter Science of Slim, because I told the story before, I’ll tell it again really quickly. When I was a trainer, I worked predominantly with women who were trying to lose weight. This was before the Smarter Science of Slim, this is when I was educated with eat less, exercise more.

I’d have these women eat 1,200 calories a day and do one or two hours of cardiovascular exercise per day, and they would potentially lose weight. They would feel terrible, and they would end up gaining it all back as soon as they stopped working with me because no one can keep up hunger and feeling like crap 24 hours a day, seven days a week forever. They ended up worse off. Simultaneously, I’m eating 6,000 calories a day, because I’m trying to put on more muscle and that’s not really working for me either. These poor women were just… what they were doing to themselves in the spirit of what?

This arbitrary weight loss, one, it’s terrible for your health, but two, even from a, sex is all that matters in this country, cynical perspective, I have yet to ever meet a heterosexual male who sees a woman and says, “Oh man, look at the ribs on that girl. She must only weigh 86 pounds! That looks good!” Even heterosexual men don’t think that skinny is attractive. “Thank God!” I don’t know if it’s ever been this way, but if you look back at the 50’s like Marilyn Monroe, no one was after twigs, they were after women that looked like women.

If you look around today, people even the pop stars like Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez, people who are, these athletic women, we’re after fit and healthy. People are attracted to fit and healthy. People who are not attracted to emaciated. Nobody is, but we are continued to be given “health” and fitness information whose goal is emaciation, not health and vibrancy. That’s just so wrong on so many levels, but when it’s all we hear, we almost become brainwashed and that’s just so sad. It’s just very sad, it upsets me.

Carrie: I can tell.

Jonathan: Well it’s also because, the other reason it upsets me, Carrie, is if you’ve ever been there, which I’m guessing a lot of our listeners have, if you’ve ever been in the starved and chronically tired, and crabby mental fall place, you know, you can just in your mind, you feel what’s called cognitive dissonance, because you know the way you’re living is not something that is right. Intrinsically, we all know this cannot be what life is about.
Carrie: Well I think one of the problems is, when I look back over my years is that you, it becomes normal, so you no longer recognize that you should not feel that way.

Jonathan: Exactly.

Carrie: That just becomes your new level. Tired is normal. It’s no longer tired. You can almost go through life not recognizing that you’re not at your peak.

Jonathan: You’re exactly right, Carrie, and that’s why I urge people to just please for three months, just three months of your whole life, just trust the mountain of research out there supporting this. I actually don’t trust it, if you read the Smarter Science of Slim, if you haven’t already, read the research, and fundamentally just understand that all we’re saying is eat the most nutritious food available and do exercise which does not jeopardize your joints in any way. That seems like a win-win, no matter what.

Trust that for three months, and just go by how you feel. When you cross that threshold, you will feel so right, not only biologically, but mentally. It will just click. It will just make sense. I don’t know, sometimes people like if you’ve ever met the one or maybe when you were picking your first car, you just saw the car and you knew it was the right car or you had a house and you knew it was the right house, or you picked a university, and you notice that university just felt right.

You will get to a point where you say, you deeply exhale, and you’re just like, “I can do this. This feels good. I feel like I’m living a life.” Integrity is kind of the wrong word, but you will be honoring your body with an abundance of healthy food and with a motive exercise that you can continue until the day that you leave this earth, when you can see that, when you can see, “I can do this forever, and I feel great,” you will literally…

It’s almost like being born again because having confidence in your health and in your physical health and your mental health and being freed from these arbitrary criteria that society places upon us, and getting better results than you would have using those traditional approaches anyway, you can literally check a box that many people never check in their whole life, and you will feel so good.

Carrie: He’s taking a breath. Can I say something now?

Jonathan: You can, yes.

Carrie: I wanted to just say that one of the biggest things for me over the last year, and I am thankful for every day is that, except those odd occasions where I just go completely inSANE, which happen less and less, the thing I am most happy about is that I no longer feel like a pregnant hippo after I’ve eaten something. I am not bloated. I don’t know, this is just, I don’t feel stuffed, even though I’m eating way more food than I was, I no longer have that feeling of blah after I’ve eaten a meal. That for me is almost worth just that.

Without anything else is worth, I sit down, and I eat as much food as I like and I’m not having to unbutton the top of my jeans or that. I don’t get that anymore, ever! It’s fantastic, because for so many years, it was just miserable. You ate, and you were uncomfortable. I don’t get that anymore. For me, it was worth it just for that.

Jonathan: Not only eating and feeling uncomfortable physically, but I feel that a lot of us will eat and then feel uncomfortable psychologically. We’ve been conditioned in many senses to think that eating is bad. And if we go through life feeling bad about ourselves every time we eat food, we’re going to feel bad about ourselves way more than we should be. There is… eating is the single… this is going to sound stupid, but eating is the single most important thing we could do for our health.

We just need to eat the right things, and if every time we eat, we feel great as Carrie described physically, but we also feel great mentally because we know we’re doing something to heal our body, we’re going to get this level of affirmation, day in and day out. You can only exercise, once a day max, but you eat two to six times a day depending on your lifestyle. If every time that happens, you feel good physically, you feel good mentally, those little successes start to build on each other, and pretty soon, a new version of you, not only physically but mentally, comes out the other end.

It’s pretty awesome. Other things we could look at if we do want, we can talk about all these metaphysical stuff all we want, but sometimes people just do want to measure things. Some options, if people do want to measure things, we already talked about waist circumference. You can measure your body fat percentage.

Be wary though because a lot of over-the-counter things you can do to measure body fat percentage are horribly inaccurate. Horribly inaccurate, meaning like 40 percent margin of error, just bad, bad, bad! Your blood pressure, heart rate, fasting glucose, triglycerides, and cholesterol are all really good things to keep an eye on, so if you want to measure anything, those six things, body fat percentage, blood pressure, heart rate, fasting glucose, triglycerides and cholesterol. Those are meaningful numbers to measure.

Carrie: And your waist measurement.

Jonathan: Yes, your waist measurement.

Carrie: We love that.

Jonathan: Those are always great approaches. One of the favorite things I like to do is I tell people to simply find, either a pair of pants or shirt or a blouse that they really, really like, they can’t fit into now, but it’s something they could imagine fitting into at some point, and just buy that, because within a couple of months, maybe a couple of weeks, it depends on the couple of things we’ll talk about in a second, not only will you be able to wear that, but you will be able to wear for the rest of your life. That is what we’re focused on here at the Smarter Science of Slim, is the rest of your life part.

If you just want to lose weight, here’s how to do that. Stop eating, exercise as much as you can, take a bunch of amphetamines and a bunch of diuretics. You will lose a lot of weight very quickly. You’ll also just destroy your health, and you’ll also gain more than you lost as soon as you stop doing that horribly unhealthy approach. We don’t want to do that. We’re not about doing that here, and if your goal is weight loss, doing anything, anything other than that, will give you “bad results.” That’s again why I’m so against that goal, because if our goal is best achieved via something that is unhealthy, that is an unhealthy goal. I don’t want unhealthy goals for us. I want healthy goals for us.

Carrie: You’re such a male, Jonathan.

Jonathan: Why did you say that?

Carrie: Because you said you can buy a blouse and wear it for the rest of your life. There is no girl on this earth who wants to wear the same blouse for the rest of her life.

Jonathan: That is fair. Very fair!

Carrie: Same size, yes. Same blouse, no!

Jonathan: Very fair, just in terms of whenever you get into that blouse, which you undoubtedly want to then buy a new blouse. How long this is actually, we all want to unclog, unclogging takes time. Let’s just quickly run through some things that are going to affect how long it takes, Carrie. First of all, obviously the more ambitious your goals are, the more time it’s going to take; and there’s nothing you can do to speed it up necessarily, just, the SANEr you eat and the more eccentric your exercise, the faster it’s going to go, but then again, you can’t, if you cut your arm, you can put Neosporin on it but at the end of the day, it’s just going to take some time for that cut to heal like the body takes time to heal.

How frequently and how vigorously you’ve yo-yo dieted, historically, is going to dramatically impact the amount of time it takes your metabolism to heal because every time your weight’s gone down and back up, you’ve essentially like broken another bone in your metabolism. You’ve compounded that fracture. Someone who’s never really dieted before, a lot of men experience this, so I hear a lot of stories of couples, where the female will begin doing the Smarter Science of Slim and because she’s doing it, her husband will accidentally start doing it because she’s the one who cooks in the family.

The husband who is overweight but has never, ever tried to lose weight will then rapidly shed body fat and the woman who has yo-yo dieted throughout her life because she’s been told to eat less and exercise more, will not be seeing that same rate of results. Well, why is that happening? Well, the woman’s metabolism in that scenario has been repeatedly broken, gone down up, down up, down up, whereas the male’s has never gone down up, down up, it’s just kind of steadily gone up over time. That male metabolism will heal much faster, not necessarily because he is a man but just because he hasn’t weight cycled.

Carrie: Right.

Jonathan: Two people doing the exact same thing, if one of them has yo-yo dieted a lot, it’s going to take them a lot more time because again, they have just broken their metabolism more. Makes sense?

Carrie: That makes sense. It’s not fair, but it makes sense.

Jonathan: It’s not fair. I’m going to make it even less fair but, let’s get the facts on the table. The older you are, the more time it’s going to take and then this isn’t crazy talk. If you break a bone when you’re five, it heals very quickly. If you break when you’re 50, it takes much longer to heal. In fact at some point, our body just stops healing itself, how healthy you are. If we have many, many pre-existing medical conditions, that’s going to make it harder for our body to heal anything, let alone our metabolism. It’s just something to keep in mind, how slim our parents are. Researchers estimate that our body composition is anywhere from 40 to 70 percent genetic, just like our height for example. If you come from a family where both of your parents are significantly overweight, it’s going to be harder for you to unclog than it would be for someone who comes from a slim family.

Finally, how you live. The more you’re stressed, the more alcohol you drink, the more late nights you have, just generally, the more stress you put on your body, the longer it’s going to take to heal. Just like when you have the flu, and you didn’t stay at home and relax, you keep the flu for a long time. It’s just that, healing your metabolism is just like healing any other part of your body.

Carrie: Right.

Jonathan: You’ve got to eat the right things. You’ve got to do the right activities and you’ve got to just give your body some time, but then once it’s healed, you’re good to go. What do you think Carrie?

Carrie: I think it is just awesome but you know that and you do it for a year. It’s just awesome and I love it! I can’t just imagine going back to life before Jonathan. That’s a bit scary!

Jonathan: The pre-Jonathan era?

Carrie: Pre-Bailor.

Jonathan: Pre-Bailor, but again, folks, so it’s all about your individual goals; but let’s make sure our goals empower us and then the goal of the Smarter Science of Slim is long-term health and fitness. That is very distinct from short term weight loss. In fact, if you want short-term weight loss, again do not listen to this podcast, that is not our goal. If you do want to be healthy and fit in the long term, what we’re doing here is simply laying out the types of foods and the types of exercises that are going to allow your body to do that for you because fundamentally, your body wants to be healthy. The body wants to be alive.

Everything about the body is about propagating life. That is why we are here. The body doesn’t want to be overweight. The body does not want to be sick, and if we simply feed our body SANE foods and we help it unclog via eccentric exercise and we stay active, it will keep us healthy and fit just like it has for hundreds and thousands of years prior to us even knowing what a calorie was, let alone counting them. That’s it. It’s that simple but we’ve been so brainwashed with so much marketing and misinformation that it’s easy to lose sight on that.
Carrie: It is simply just a reminder, it’s not always easy.

Jonathan: Exactly.

Carrie: But it is simple.

Jonathan: It is simple.

Carrie: It does. I can tell you, it does get easier. Jonathan’s been living this way forever, so he doesn’t count anymore. It does get easier, very, very quickly. Surprisingly, quickly, and in fact, nothing else I’ve ever done got easier. Not only it didn’t work, but it never got easier. This did get easier very quickly, and as I said, I now can’t imagine going back to living the way I was, being hungry all the time, beating myself up if I hadn’t cycled, all of that stuff. It has just gone away, I just don’t experience, so even the peace of mind, for me, has made it worth it.

Jonathan: Getting easier over time, Carrie, you’re exactly right. Again, not changing anything about our life and just eating garbage and never exercising, in the short term, it’s going to be easier. In the long term, it is going to be harder because we are going to feel worse. We’re going to have health problems. We’re not going to be happy with the way we look and those having a heart attack when you’re 40 and being a hundred pounds overweight, and feeling like crap all the time isn’t easy.

However, it’s not easy to give up smoking, but long-term, it gets easier and easier to not smoke, and the benefits from not smoking will become clear; however, if we try to do eating less and exercising more, that is hard and it continues to be hard, and it will never stop being hard. It also makes us feel like crap. We kind of have to look at the options available to us, which feel like minor crap now and major crap later and it’s “easy.” Have a little bit of a challenge now, but it gets easier and we’ll feel great in the future or have a lot of challenge now and forever while feeling bad.

That last example is eating less and exercising more. The middle example where it’s a little bit of struggle now but it gets easier, and we feel better is the Smarter Science of Slim and feeling bad about ourselves now and feeling even worse about ourselves in the future is the standard American approach, which has led us to one in every four people being diabetic, pre-diabetic, and a 200 billion dollar health care crisis.

Carrie: I find now, one of the things that has made it easier, which people might find helpful is that I have now a little arsenal, and I know Jonathan does, too. They’re different, but I have my go-to-things in the fridge or in the cupboard that are SANE, but when I have that moment, when I’m like, “I just have the munchies or I’m upset about something” or whatever it is, I have stuff that instant that I can eat to get rid of that without doing something inSANE. I think, for me it’s okay for me to have a little arsenal of remedies when you are in that weird place.

Jonathan: Carrie, I agree with you and I even take it one step further and again here at the Smarter Science of Slim, we’re not about perfection. Let’s use the smoking analogy that I love to use because it fits so well. If someone smokes three cigarettes once a month at parties, they’re probably not going to get lung cancer and if we are inSANE once a week, our body will be fine, because again, remember we have a healthy body.

It’s just like if we have a healthy immune system and we end up getting a cold, our body will take care of us. We just have to avoid that chronic consumption of starches and sweets that breaks our body in the first place. Once we have a healthy body, it can deal with these bumps in the road long term and normalizes. That’s what it’s designed to do, so it’s okay to not be perfect. In fact our goal is never to be perfect.

Carrie: Thank God, because I would never ever, ever get there.

Jonathan: Reach that goal. Well, awesome! Well folks, hopefully this is helpful. Next week we’re going to continue with some techniques we can use to help us go after healthful goals, rather than harmful goals, and we will just pick up where we left off. Carrie, do you have any closing words for this week’s podcast?

Carrie: Do it.

Jonathan: Just do it.

Carrie: Just do it!

Jonathan: We’ll get sued by Nike.

Carrie: Oh see, this is the girl that doesn’t have TV, that doesn’t have any media stuff so I didn’t know that was someone else’s tag line.

Jonathan: Just eat it.

Carrie: Just eat it! Do it for two months, you’ll never look back.

Jonathan: Awesome! Jonathan Bailor, Carrie Brown. We’re eating more, we’re exercising less but we’re doing it smarter and see you next week