SANE Travel, Sleep, Water, and Success

Jonathan: Hey, everyone, Jonathan Bailor and Carrie Brown coming at you with another Smarter Science of Slim podcast live in the studio in Seattle on a beautiful almost summer evening. It’s almost summer, but if feels like summer’s been quite nice here outside, and it’s quite nice inside here with none other than, Carrie Brown.

Carrie: Yay.

Jonathan: What’s up, Carrie, how are you?

Carrie: I’m doing great.

Jonathan: Carrie, you’re going to be doing even better when you hear about the first subject of this week’s podcast because it is an area that you… there’s nutrition labels, there’s avoidance of exercise, and then there is…

Carrie: I am an expert on both of those subjects.

Jonathan: Then there is SANEity on the road, on the road again.

Carrie: My favorite topic ever, road trips.

Jonathan: So, Carrie, tell us a little bit about ways we can stay SANE on the go.

Carrie: It’s easy if you prepare.

Jonathan: Okay.

Carrie: A little bit of preparation goes an awfully long way. Where do you want me to start?

Jonathan: Just give us some tips, if I’m going on a road trip tomorrow what am I prepping tonight?

Carrie: You’re going to go to the store unless you have these things in your pantry already. You’re going to buy water. You’re going to buy beef jerky. You’re going to buy sardines, and you’re going to buy… what I buy is romaine lettuce and cucumber, and you’re going to buy eggs. So my menu for road trip, and I always road trip on my own so it actually has to be something that I can grab without having someone having to pass it to me. My SANE road trip menu is beef jerky — make sure you get the least sugar, most protein. Sardines, hard boiled eggs, and lettuce and cucumber, and then water. When I start out every day, I’ll make a big old flask of green tea or peppermint tea and I’ll take that with me.

Jonathan: I love it. I love it. I would put all of those on my trip as well, and a few other suggestions people may enjoy, powdered vegetables. It’s going to sound a little bit weird. You can find some in the SANE store, but they’re whole foods. The typical ones are things like spirulina and wheatgrass, but also just things like spinach. You can buy powdered dehydrated spinach. It does not taste good, but if you’re on the road or if you’re on a plane, and you want to take in some non-starchy vegetables, it’s a pretty good alternative. I always talk about Quest Bars. Certainly we’re always about whole foods when possible, but if you have got to eat a bar, Quest Bars are the SANEist we’ve found. [[[UPDATE: This was recorded a few years ago. Since then Quest has added inSANE additives to their bars. The new SANE bars are now the only bars that provide the specific nutrition needed to clear hormonal clogs and lower your Setpoint Weight.]]]

Also, homemade frozen meals. Here’s what I mean by this: for example, we have given a lot of cool recipes involving Greek yogurt. If you take a Greek yogurt concoction, and you put it in the freezer the night before and then you put it in an insulated bag ‘x’ number of hours later, it’s ready to eat, right? So you can do that with a lot of different things, just things you would normally take out of the refrigerator and eat, freeze them and then put them in an insulated bag and then upon thawing you can enjoy them which is pretty neat. Then finally I very much in addition to the cucumbers, and the romaine lettuce Carrie mentioned. I find peppers, celery, and carrots to be excellent travel veggies as well.

Carrie: Celery and carrots are awesome. Celery really doesn’t do it for me, so that’s why I don’t take that. Cucumbers are my thing. I eat them like apples. The other thing I forgot to mention was sometimes if I’m traveling, doing a road trip in the winter, my hot nutty cereal mix which I make, if you take it in a Pyrex dish with a lid on it; and then you take a glass of hot water or when you stop at a rest stop, they normally have the places where you get free coffee. You can normally get hot water on route and so then I just tip the water into the Pyrex dish and I have hot cereal or SANE cereal to have, and I really like that as a warm option if I am traveling in the winter.

Jonathan: I love that, and it also made me think of when you said hot nutty cereal. Clearly nuts and nut butters are going to be a good on-the-go option, of course don’t eat them by yourself, because you could eat 10,000 calories of nuts in one road trip if you really put your mind to it.

Carrie: I think it’s easy, especially if you’re driving. It’s easy to lose track of how much you’ve eaten especially if you get bored on the road. So nuts, I would recommend putting them into smaller Ziploc bags so you know when you’ve eaten a portion and you know, “Okay, now I need to stop, and I don’t need to eat another bag for a little while. “ So put them in portion-sized bags instead of having a big bag because you’ll probably find the whole bag will go if you just have the big bag to dip into.

Jonathan: Absolutely. It’s funny how the ability of our brain to detect satiety can sometimes… we just have to be aware of it. Similar to the story that Carrie just mentioned, my lovely wife, Angela, is a huge fan of Greek yogurt. She’s also an accountant, and so right now it is very busy for them when this podcast airs it will be way past April 15th, but we’re recording this on April 2nd. So she’s working 100 hour weeks. When she comes home, she’s just famished, and she’s stressed out. She was eating so much Greek yogurt that we didn’t actually realize it, but I shop at Costco and I was buying six. So they have six. It’s a dual pack. There’s two 32 ounce containers in a pack, and I was buying six of those a week. I’ve been eating something other than Greek yogurt right now. I used to be a big Greek yogurt fan I still like it, but I’ve just been experimenting with other things. So my dear wife was eating 12. I’m going to try to do the math here while were on it. She was eating twelve 32 ounce containers of Greek yogurt per week which breaks down to about….

Carrie: That’s twenty-four pounds.

Jonathan: I know, and the funny thing was, what we did now is we took a little container that holds two cups, and she just puts it in that container. What she finds is that when she finishes it, she feels fine. She feels great. It’s just the idea that if you have that bottomless bowl for a lot of us, especially we were raised like you have to clean your plate. That’s not actually crazy thinking. There’s been all sorts of studies done where they have soup bowls for example, where there’s actually a hole in the bottom of the bowl and through the bottom of the table they actually take a pipe and stick it up in the bowl and they will continue to fill the bowl with more soup while the people are eating to see if people stop eating when they’re full or if their sensation is full. That’s the crazy thing, Carrie. Can their perception of the bowl actually influence whether or not they feel full? Would an empty bowl actually psychologically make you feel more full than a non-empty bowl, which I just think is crazy. That’s like putting it in a bag or putting in a bowl not because were afraid of calories but rather clearly you don’t want to drink too much water. You don’t want to do too much exercise. You don’t want to eat too much food. Too much of anything isn’t good for you. That’s why keeping an eye out and just having an upper hand is a helpful approach.

Carrie: Preparation is the key for me to go on a road trip, but the thing that will mess you up faster than anything else is going inside the gas station. I have a rule. I’m very clear about what gas stations are for and what I do in them and what rest stops are for and what I do in those, and I’m very clear.

Jonathan: It’s probably very good to have those rules in general.

Carrie: I always make sure I stop at the rest stop and pee before I need gas so that when I’m in a gas station, I just gas up and do not go in to use the rest rooms in the gas station, because if you are walking through that store between that gas pump and the bathroom, everything other than the beef jerky is completely inSANE. If you emotionally connect road trips with regular snack food, candy, chips, that kind of stuff you are not going to make it to the bathroom back without buying something. So I am really clear that rest stops are for using the bathroom, and gas stations are for gassing up; but you don’t go in the building, you use your credit card in the machine outside and then you get back in the car and you drive away. I’m really clear – I’m very definite about stopping in rest stops and only stopping at gas stations to get gas, because if you go in that building it’s all over.

Jonathan: My mom used to tell me and this is very profound advice, she would say, “Jonathan, avoid the occasion of sin.” Just do not put yourself in the context where the temptations going to be there, so that’s a great… I love that suggestion, Carrie, and I would, aside from the beef jerky, I would say there is one other thing if you’re starving and you’re just going to pass out on the road and crash your car if you don’t eat something. There are those little 50 cent or dollar packets of nuts, generally they’re planters or something, like that. Those are respectable options as well.

Carrie: That’s why you prepare. If you get hungry, and it combines with needing to use the bathroom. The gas thing is the next thing that comes up. You are on that slippery slope, and you’re going to be inSANE within the next 10 minutes, and once you’ve started down that path it’s just that much harder to stop. So have with you… I always have enough food with me to go, and I normally drive for 12-14 hours at a stretch at a time; and so I have enough food for 16 hours to get me to where I’m going, plus a couple of hours buffering in case something happens or in case I get stuck, so that I’m never hungry and I never run out of SANE food. Then I don’t go in the gas station. I gas up, and then I go to the bathroom at the rest stop.

Jonathan: One thing to keep in mind folks, I could imagine some listening to this and thinking like, “I don’t want to carry a cooler around with me, and all this preparation.” Here’s the truth, if you don’t do that in a certain number of years you’re going to have to line up your insulin shots and take your oxygen tank with you. If you don’t take the time to do these things now; one you’ll do them, it will be delicious. You’ll feel full. You’ll feel great. You’ll look great. There’s a bunch of added benefits. If you don’t do it now, later you’re going to have to do a bunch of prep work just to feel terrible. It’s so worth it.

Carrie: It may seem overwhelming the first time, once you’ve done a road trip like this once, it’s easier the next time. It’s just easy, and I have… that is my travel kit, and it’s got everything I need. I just fill it up with food, and off I go. The other thing is that, as I said, I always road trip on my own, and I drive 12 to 15 hours straight on my own and eating SANE food. I tell you I am powered by beef jerky. I never get tired, and it’s because of the food I’m eating.

If I was eating regular road trip food like chips and cakes and all that stuff, I would be falling asleep at the wheel. I don’t, and people are amazed, they’re like “How do you do that?” and I’m like, “I’m eating beef jerky, and that protein keeps me energized and keeps me awake.” So there’s the added benefit of, “I’m not in danger.”

Jonathan: Nor is anyone else.

Carrie: I don’t have to stop and take a huge break to have a nap. It’s just incredibly efficient, and I arrive after driving for 12-14 hours straight/ I will arrive feeling just as good as if I sat and watched TV all day, which is brilliant.

Jonathan: I love it. For individuals who use airports frequently, I can’t remember the last time I took a road trip just because. I do not have the ability to sit in a car. Carrie finds it therapeutic. I find it rage-inducing, so I’m usually at airports.

Carrie: Let’s not travel in the car together.

Jonathan: Don’t worry, it’s not going to happen. The airport, there’s differences with the amount you can carry on and if you do need to buy food in the airport which sometimes you do. I have two go-to types of restaurants that you can find in most, if not all major airports. One is Asian-type restaurants, so any kind of Wok, because Panda Express is not ideal. I don’t recommend eating at Panda Express on a regular basis, but if it’s the only thing available and you’re at an airport and its Panda Express or McDonalds, go to Panda Express. Hold the starch. Don’t get lo mein. Just get a double side of the vegetables, and a chicken or some sort of meat or shrimp main dish. That’s a good option.

Even preferable to that is, you can almost always find a Chipotle or Qdoba or something like a Baja Fresh. These more Mexican type grills where you can get a salad for lack of better terms which is just a giant bowl of shredded lettuce and beans and meat and wonderful salsas. That is an awesome and delicious, and it’s probably one of the most affordable in terms of nutrition and raw food you’re going to find at an airport. Choice number one I’ve found is look for a Baja Fresh, type Qdoba, type Chipotle in the airport. If that’s not around, look for something that’s more of a stir fry. Those have been the best options I’ve found in airports.

Carrie: If you do end up — because McDonalds are everywhere — if you do end up in a McDonalds, just hit the salad. They have chicken salads. The problem I find with going into a McDonalds is it is very easy for your brain to get sucked into the food, so again if you don’t put yourself in that environment you’re not going to be inSANE. For me, again my two staples, when I’m at the airport is beef jerky and Quest Bars. I never leave without Quest Bars because you never know when you’re traveling by plane, you never know when you’re going to get stranded, you never know if you’re going to get on the plane and sit on the tarmac for three hours, or the plane is canceled or whatever. You don’t want to let yourself get hungry, because when you get hungry is when the inSANEity passes by, you can’t not eat it.

Jonathan: That is absolutely brilliant. Avoid the occasion of sin, and also avoid putting yourself in a physiological state where just anything, just, “I need something.”

Carrie: Eating beef jerky and protein bars all day is not ideal, but it’s still better if you’re in that situation to do that, then go down the route of inSANEity, because once you start — and I’m sure there’s lots of people out there like me — once you start, that chemical does something to your brain, and then it becomes increasingly harder to get back onto not eating that stuff. I swear there’s drugs in it that make it addicting.

Jonathan: There’s a reason Pringles says, “Once you pop, you can’t stop.” They’re very open about it. It’s not as if you eat one potato chip and say, “Oh I’m good.” No eating one potato chip actually makes you want two potato chips, actually it makes you want three potato chips.

Carrie: For me, I can’t stop, so therefore it’s very important for me to have my couple of bags of beef jerky which you can in the US anyway, you can get beef jerky just about every single airport. You can find it everywhere, and then I take Quest Bars from home with me and that gets me through whatever until I get off the plane, and I go find some salad.

Jonathan: Absolutely, I like that I like that a lot. Two other things I want to cover this week, Carrie, that are important on or off the road which are sometimes under appreciated aspects of living a SANE lifestyle. The first is water, very important getting sufficient water/green tea, not only is it good for you to help flush toxins out of your body, but physiologically it absolutely helps your body to burn fat more effectively. That is a clinical fact drinking more water literally enables your body to burn fat more effectively, so that’s useful, not only from a health perspective but also from a fat loss perspective.

Possibly, the single most ignored and neglected portion of leading a SANE lifestyle is sleep, getting enough sleep. When we do not get enough sleep, it does, Carrie, it does so many things in addition to us just being tired. In the Smarter Sense of Slim we talk about the key hormones. There’s many more, but insulin and leptin, and there’s also another one called cortisol. When you don’t sleep enough, those hormones just become… you basically catch case of leptin resistance. Leptin can’t do what it needs to do in telling your body that you’re full, and you’re not hungry and you’re satisfied; so by not sleeping, you are literally setting yourself up for inSANEity. You’re in some ways… we just said to avoid the occurrence of sin. If you’re not getting at least six hours of sleep a night, we should really be aiming for more like eight.

It’s like you’re trying to run a race with a freaking weight tied to your back. Don’t especially do the following: do not compromise on sleep so that you can do more cardiovascular exercise. A lot of people do that. They’re like,” I’m going to wake up at 4:00 in the morning and go for a jog. By not sleeping, one you’re depriving your body of the opportunity to recover, then you’re actually damaging it more; so it’s like a one two punch. Not only did the body… imagine it’s like a battery, and you’re asleep and your body didn’t go to a 100 percent, it just went to 80. You start your day at 80 percent, and then you go do traditional exercise, not smarter exercise, and that drops you to 60. This healthy activity prevented you from not only… you’re not at a 100, you’re at 60 percent because you didn’t get to a 100 percent from sleeping, and you actually lost another 20 percent from doing an inefficient and inappropriate form of exercise. So, please do all that you can to make sure you’re getting that high quality sleep. It is so under appreciated and important.

Carrie: Not only the physical toll, but the mental toll is if you don’t get enough sleep on a consistent basis you can actually go mad. Seriously your brain can start doing really crazy things; depression and all sorts of things if you don’t sleep.

Jonathan: This is why sometimes I get some flak for poo pooing cardio, but we only have a fixed number of hours in the week; and I’ve yet to meet a person who has a job or a family or just really anything else going on in their life where they have time to do their job or take care of their professional or personal responsibilities, to exercise for 15 hours a week and to get proper sleep. People will skimp on the sleep to do other things. The science is clear. We can exercise smarter, we can shrink the time needed for exercise to sub one hour a week, and accrue more benefits than we would with other forms of exercise.

Here’s the gloriousness. We take that time that we saved we spend it sleeping, and that’s the furthest thing in the world from being lazy. That’s being smart. So you take the time you would have spent stressing your body out further, and you redirect that into recovery and sleep, and you will achieve not only a mental serenity, but a metabolic serenity and healing; because remember that’s what we’re after here. We’re after metabolic healing and enabling your body to be in a restful state when it’s sleeping and healing itself. That is just extra important.

That’s another reason why we want to exercise smarter is you only have a certain number of hours in the week. If you’re exercising smarter, take the time you saved spend it sleeping one two punch gloriousness.

Carrie: How could you not love Jonathan Bailor? He tells us to eat more, to exercise less, and go to sleep. How could you not love him? Every week he gives me more reasons.

Jonathan: Carrie, this is how backwards our society is. We talked last week about how we do this, because we love it; and this shows you how backwards our perception, our societal perception of health has become. What we just described; eating food, not over-exercising, getting sufficient sleep, that is obviously what humans are designed to do, to sleep when they’re tired and to wake up when they’re not tired anymore. They’re designed to eat when they’re hungry and stop eating when they’re not hungry anymore. They’re designed to move around but not to get on these crazy contraptions for three hours until our bodies breakdown. For us to think that, that is some sort of magic permission like, “Hey, you get to do this.” I’m so flattered, and I’m glad it comes off as that way; but I hope if nothing else that just shows us how backwards our societal perception of health has become, because really that’s the way humans were meant to be, right?

Carrie: I’m not the science geek in this partnership, but I would hazard a guess that sleep is also regulated by hormones, and so eating a SANE diet has got to help that whole process. I can pretty much put money on the fact that if you change to a SANE diet, you will sleep better. Those hormones will also be in much better shape, and so if you are having issues with sleep; can’t get to sleep or wake up all the time or wake up and can’t get back to sleep or just can’t stay asleep long enough. Changing to a SANE diet will actually help you to do that, because your hormones are getting themselves sorted out.

Jonathan: I love that you said that, Carrie, and I actually don’t think you saw that this was open on my computer; but there’s three quick reader success stories I wanted to share this week and the first…

Carrie: I can’t see that far.

Jonathan: The first one is actually a gentleman named Jim who lives out here in Washington. In two weeks had two pretty amazing… because again we always talk about healing the body and how that takes some time, but don’t let that fool you. When you go SANE and you start getting eccentric within the first couple of days and weeks you’re going to see a difference, for Jim specifically, and Jim is a 50+ year-old gentleman who has had PVCs, which are actually called premature ventricular contractions. It’s a cardiovascular problem. Within two weeks of SANEity and eccentricity after years and years and years, his PVCs stopped and his sleep apnea — back to the topic of sleep — went away. Two weeks!

Carrie: I have no scientific background for that, but it just makes sense to me that if hormones control sleep like they control every other process in our body, then if were eating a SANE diet that’s also going to start regulating itself without any weird intervention.

Jonathan: Second success story for this week, Carrie, comes from Heather, HeatherE007.

Carrie: Hi, Heather.

Jonathan: I love that you share this, so Heather was not looking at the scale. She’s focused on measurements, which is wonderful and had a pretty interesting experience with her waist measurement changing. She was walking out of the grocery store carrying bags of groceries, so both of her arms were occupied, and her pants started to slide off because she didn’t realize she was progressing so quickly because this was just over the course of about 10 days. So she’s walking to her car and she starts having to walk bowlegged, so her pants don’t fall down because it was raining, and she couldn’t put down the bags because they were paper bags and she didn’t want to get them all wet, so Heather we really appreciate…

Carrie: And your modesty is intact.

Jonathan: Yes, she did, but there was almost a wardrobe malfunction due to her SANEity.

Carrie: I can’t think of a better reason to be embarrassed by a wardrobe malfunction. If you’re going to have one, at least let that be the reason. Reminded me of your wardrobe malfunction on the beach last year.

Jonathan: I had a similar experience where I didn’t realize that my waist had shrunk, and it had; and I had my old swimsuit on. My wife and I went to a resort in Mexico. We got to the ocean. I’ve got my swimsuit on. It’s all tied up, ready to go and I’m sprinting. I run into the water, the wave hits me, and, oh, there goes my swimsuit in the other direction. I stayed submerged in the water just very calmly, got my swimsuit, and it was all good. Got to be careful.

Carrie: The joys of SANEity.

Jonathan: We’re going to have a wardrobe – elastic waistband pants are going to become back in fashion.

Carrie: We should have a page for SANE wardrobe malfunction stories.

Jonathan: The final success story for this week, I wanted to share, Robert Stinnett’s wonderful success story. Actually his story is going to be featured in my next book, because it is just so fabulous. Robert is one in an elite club, a club I love every time someone else joins, and that’s individuals who have experienced 100+ pound weight loss, and, of course, were not about weight loss; but if you weigh 400 pounds and you lose 100 pounds, that means you’re burning fat.

You’re doing it the same way. Robert has lost in 10 months, went into triple digit weight loss, and did so without being hungry, did so without needing to exercise eccentrically, felt great throughout it. You can read his story up on the smarterscienceofslim.com, just search for Robert Stinnett.

Robert, just wanted to congratulate you. I’m sharing this story a bit late, because we always hear these stories, but then people end up struggling and going back. Robert has lost the weight, is keeping it off, and is not struggling or exercising for six hours a day or going to a ranch and mortgaging his whole life to do it. He has as much time as ever, more energy than ever, and is now down triple digits so congratulations, Robert. That’s awesome.

Carrie: And that, lovely people, is why Jonathan and I do what we do.

Jonathan: We love it and we hope you love it, too; and we love sharing the evening with as always and were eating more, were exercising less, and were doing it smarter. Can’t wait to chat next week.

Carrie: See ya.