Slim Is Simple.org, Mercury, How Much Resistance, and Bikes for Smarter Cardio

JONATHAN: Hey, everyone, Jonathan Bailor and Carrie Brown,coming at you with another episode of Living the Smarter Science of Slim…Carrie, how are you doing today?

CARRIE: I am doing awesome.

JONATHAN: I am doing well as well because I’m going to butcher this, but I think Carrie just fed me a cinnamon apricot…

CARRIE: No.

JONATHAN: (Inaudible 00:00:38)

CARRIE: No. No cinnamon.

JONATHAN: Oh…

CARRIE: Apricot cardamom.

JONATHAN: Oh, cardamom …try to say that in cinamenee…I cannot say any of those words properly, but it was – made me feel like I was in some sort of a French bistro, it was fabulous.

CARRIE: Yay…

JONATHAN: Yay, it was good. It was good. You going to post that up — did you post it up yet?

CARRIE: I haven’t posted it yet, but it will be up soon.

JONATHAN: I was…

CARRIE: Unfortunately…

JONATHAN: But it’s good…

CARRIE: Jonathan and I have just eaten them all, so now I have to make another batch of (Inaudible 00:01:06).

JONATHAN: Now it’s good stuff so everyone tune in for that recipe because actually Jonathan Bailor gives that two raring thumbs up. It’s a very unique taste, so I like it (Inaudible 00:01:17) and other things to clap about this week has been a super exciting week. I have not gotten much sleep because this week, we launched a brand new non-profit organization called “Slim is Simple”, which is really, really neat. It’s – we were lucky enough to get some angel investment funding out of Ann Arbor Michigan, to create compelling educational multi-media resources that teachers and counselors and trainers and maybe government officials someday can use to teach the science, the simple and fun science of nutrition rather than disproven theories or mythical dogma, so pretty excited about that.

CARRIE: Wow – teaching truth — whatever next.

JONATHAN: Teaching facts. And yes, it will be our first…

CARRIE: You’re a brave man Bailor.

JONATHAN: I know. I know, well the first thing we did was a short, well, it’s not really that short, but it’s I guess you call it a full length nutritional education piece, self-titled, so it’s called “Slim and Simple” and it’s animated, it was inspired by the School House Rocks series where you’ve got some kind of fast paced and it’s all animated and I think folks will really like, we’re really, really excited about it, there was also some live action cut-in of myself, and it’s getting a lot of really good press and I think it’s going to be a wild ride and I’m just really excited about it and we’re going to debut – I’ll actually play the audio when we finish the podcast so if you haven’t watched the video, do watch the video, the audio will give you a sample, but the visuals are just excellent. We work with a company called Blare Media – (??), (2:55) out of Fresno, California, and they did a level of animation and visual design on this thing that is just spectacular, so it was a lot of fun.

CARRIE: It is pretty awesome. It’s definitely compelling. I loved it when you sent me my little sneak preview. I loved it. I think it’s awesome.

JONATHAN: Well, thank you very much Carrie, and listeners if you enjoy it which I think you will, please the one ask we have is to share this, cause the whole point of these things are to enable us to freely distribute accurate and compelling information, so please give it a look – the primary place to find it is on YouTube, but there is a supporting website, called slimissimple.organd the home page is really just the full screen (Inaudible 00:03:38) experience where you can watch that first video and you can click “about” and there is some more information about the organization as well as some of our partners and some supporting videos. More behind the scene stuff about why we created the video and also a blooper reel which I was not expecting to have created because there are bloopers of me, so…

CARRIE: Yay…we love that. It’s worth going up to slimissimple.org just to see those.

JONATHAN: Yes, yes and actually and do remember apparently slimissimple is something else too, so slimissimple.com, as well as there’s some things on YouTube that are called slimandsimple, it will be pretty clear what’s our thing and what isn’t, because it’s like some weird multi-level marketing thing, so…

CARRIE: Okay, that’s not us.

JONATHAN: No, that’s not us.

CARRIE: No, no, no.

JONATHAN: It’s on YouTube, you’ll see it’s slimissimple.org educational non-profit effort or something like that. It’s very clear of what we are and what they are, but be sure when you talk to people it’s .org, not .com,.org, cause they’re going to be like oh, yeah, no gimmicks, it’s on the .com site. Whew…

CARRIE: Great job.

JONATHAN: Well, anyway, so Slim is Simple, new non-profit basically working to provide free resources for educators, influencers, everyone, just to get the correct information out there and hopefully, get our kids involved too. I heard from my sister that my 11 year old nephew and 13 year old niece were glued to the computer screen independent of the fact that their uncle was in it. They like the animations and they thought it was neat, so hopefully we can get the kids involved to get them eating right, so…

CARRIE: I think it was great. I think you did a really outstanding job.

JONATHAN: Well, stay tuned at the very end of this podcast, we’re going to broadcast the audio premiere of Slim is Simple and then hop over to YouTube or just hop over to slimissimple.org, check it out, share it on Facebook, share it on Twitter and share it at your school, share it at your church, share it wherever you want, use it for curriculum if you’re a teacher or a trainer, it’s free, it’s yours, enjoy it and do it with it what you will. It’s even (Inaudible 05:44) license, so you can remix it if you want (Inaudible 00:05:47) style parody of it, I don’t care. Let’s just…(talking over each other) 5:51

CARRIE: Don’t give me ideas…

JONATHAN: I started to say let’s be healthy, because Carrie it’s, I was thinking about this this morning I was doing an interview about the effort and people were asking me — I mean there already is nutrition curriculum out there that people have health classes, but there’s two problems with that, one is what we’re being taught is wrong, but the other thing is it’s also the same thing people were taught decades ago and we don’t use the same computers we used decades ago, we don’t fly the same airplanes we flew decades ago, nutritional science hasn’t paused for the past 40 years, but yet we’ve still been taught the same things for the past 40 years and things that are clearly not working, so this is like the new, the new era, the new science, the new curriculum so hopefully we can rally around it and get it off the ground. Good stuff?

CARRIE: Good stuff.

JONATHAN: Excellent.

CARRIE: Almost as good as my apricot cardamom muffins.

JONATHAN: Cardamom …I love it, so now with that out of the way, stay tuned to actually hear it and check it out on the web, let’s get into some more FAQs, Carrie, this, some FAQs for this wee — the first one is one that is definitely controversial one, but I don’t think it needs to be controversial because when we go on a SANE lifestyle, eating seafood is a big part of that and actually people sometimes say, going SANE seems very, very similar to Paleo or caveman or primal or ancestral or whatever you want to call it and it is, it is incredibly similar — there is very few differences, but one difference, I guess you could call it is that in a SANE lifestyle when we really want to go out of our way to eat seafood like that’s important, if we had to stack rank seafood versus meat, not that meat isn’t good, but seafood is on top of that where to get protein from pyramid, followed by grass fed beef and free range poultry, but when people hear about seafood, they sometimes think about these things we’ve seen in the news about mercury. Now we’re all going to turn into thermometers if we go SANE…

CARRIE: We’re all going to drop dead from mercury poisoning.

JONATHAN: Yes.

CARRIE: Except we’re not…

JONATHAN: Exactly. So, let’s pop up a level here, right? So, the concern here which is totally valid, is foods that are otherwise healthy could be in some ways contaminated and that is a concern that we should have about everything, right…non-starchy vegetables could have been genetically modified or had weird pesticides used upon them or…

CARRIE: Well…e coli…

JONATHAN: Exactly.

CARRIE: How many times we had e coli and lettuce scares.

JONATHAN: So, and meat can have improper hormones in it. The point is, is that any food can be tainted so the point is not to say, oh, well, don’t eat this food because it may possibly have foo – (??) it’s eat high quality foods that don’t have foo – (??) in them, right, like we can go and we can ensure that our plants are not treated with improper pesticides. We can go and ensure that our meat is not overdone with hormones and we can ensure that our seafood has been tested and has low levels of mercury. For the mercury thing, really keep in mind that whenever we’re eating seafood, we’re eating instead of eating something else and that something else, and that something else if it’s the traditional western diet, I promise you will do more harm to you than the sliver of mercury that maybe found in some seafood and we’re going to go out of our way to eat seafood. Does it have a lot of mercury? So, at the end of the day, it’s all about doing the best you can and focusing on the big things, folks, because again, like I said if we want to eliminate all foods from our diet that may have been tainted in some way…

CARRIE: We will eat nothing.

JONATHAN: Literally, you can’t even drink water.

CARRIE: Right.

JONATHAN: So, and you can’t breathe because there’s pollution in the air.

CARRIE: Right.

JONATHAN: So, if you’re alive, there’s nothing you can do to avoid these things, so just keep that in mind and the same thing applies to protein supplements. There was some consumer reports, news, probably, I don’t know, over two years ago at this point saying that certain protein supplements contained heavy metals. Yeah, absolutely, avoid those and do it a quick websearch before you buy a protein supplement, but the take-away that the media has you to believe is avoid protein supplements.

CARRIE: All of them.

JONATHAN: That doesn’t make any sense…

CARRIE: Right.

JONATHAN: Right?

CARRIE: Yeah.

JONATHAN: Because by that logic we avoid all food.

CARRIE: Yes.

JONATHAN: And all water and can’t breathe.

CARRIE: It reminds me of that – there’s a website that was saying that spinach is going to kill you because of theoxalate issue thing. I’m like — don’t throw the baby out with the bath water, most people have absolutely no issues with oxalates…

JONATHAN: Exactly.

CARRIE: At all…

JONATHAN: Yep.

CARRIE: So, to tell everybody globally that spinach is the enemy and it’s just ridiculous.

JONATHAN: And I think it’s also – it’s just short sided because we have to eat something, like at the end of the day —

CARRIE: Right.

JONATHAN: We have to eat something. So, if we assume that nothing is perfect, then we have to pick our battles.

CARRIE: Right.

JONATHAN: And the other thing to keep in mind and I believe it was Gary Taubes who at least most recently brought this up, is that something can be not good for you let’s say, and not matter. Here’s what I mean by this. Let’s say that the oxalates in spinach for example, let’s say that if you could have spinach without those things, it would be better for you. Like let’s say that it’s not ideal for you, however, let’s say that a person who consumes spinach at even a SANE rate, which is a lot of spinach, let’s say that doing that daily would actually not impact your health negatively, unless you did it for 200 years.Well, none of us are going to live to be 200…so, so it kind of doesn’t matter and this is a long standing tradition in medicine, right, for example a lot of, if you’re a male and you get diagnosed I believe with prostate cancer at the age of 70, like in order for that cancer to actually do anything to your body is so slow growing, that they just won’t treat it because they know you’ll die before the cancer kills you.

CARRIE: Right.

JONATHAN: So, the same kind of thing here, right, is the pollution in our air bad? Yes. Is it going to kill us before natural causes do? Probably not, so I wouldn’t lose sleep over it, we just gotta do the best we can with what we got.

CARRIE: Yeah.

JONATHAN: So…

CARRIE: Yep. You are right.

JONATHAN: Keep it in mind. All right?

CARRIE: And given that we know that a lot of the “foods” that are the prepackaged things in the grocery stores on supermarket shelves, we know for sure that they will earn us heart disease and diabetes for sure why would you not go with something that may or may not?

JONATHAN: Absolutely, and another way to phrase is that if you have to choose between proven good plus theoretical bad and your other option is…

CARRIE: Proven bad…

JONATHAN: Proven bad…go with the former and don’t let people who are just trying to sell…

CARRIE: Rain on your parade…

JONATHAN: Or you know, or get reviews on their blog posts…again, if we wanted to pick a fight with any substance on earth, we could find a way to do that, so, let’s not do that, let’s be peaceful

CARRIE: And that’s a good point. Is that the only reason I want every single one of your listeners to go to my blog is so that you can enjoy healthy super tasty fabulous food that is going to help you in your fat loss and health goals. That’s the only reason. That’s it, that’s the only reason. I mean there’s no agenda…

JONATHAN: Oh, yeah, exactly. Not selling anything.

CARRIE: That’s what I mean. I mean that’s, yes, I want you to go to my recipe site, but that’s why because I want you to enjoy awesome SANE healthy food that tastes fantastic.

JONATHAN: I love it. I love it. Well, the next FAQ Carrie has to do with smarter exercise and actually the whole next series FAQs have to do with smarter exercise and this one is how to gauge the resistance you should be using when you’re exercising Eccentrically.

CARRIE: Okay.

JONATHAN: All right, so, I’ll answer this one in a couple of ways. The first is, as a general rule of thumb you will know you’re exercising Eccentrically with proper amount of resistance when you no longer question how doing that once a week can have results. Let’s put it that way. I mean if the next day, you’re like — ah — I can do that again, you have not yet arrived at the proper level of resistance.

CARRIE: Right.

JONATHAN: If it’s fun, you have not yet arrived at the proper level of resistance. If you can smile or talk to someone while you’re doing it, you have not yet arrived at the proper level of resistance. I think a lot of people grossly underestimate how strong they are when they move slowly and Eccentric fashion, it’s always, always priority number one to be safe and to gradually ease your way into more resistance, but please, please, please, we’re trading quantity for quality here, we’re exercising less, but we’re not exercising less because we’re lazy, we’re exercising less because we should be using so much resistance that it’s impossible for us to exercise more. You say, Jonathan, what type of resistance should I be using or how much resistance should I be using? If you try to exercise Eccentrically and you’re acclimated and you’ve slowly increased your resistance on Monday, and you can do the same thing just a few days later, you didn’t use enough resistance.

CARRIE: Right.

JONATHAN: So, bump the resistance up.

CARRIE: Right. And I think that half of the problem with that is again that we’ve been taught so repeatedly that more is better, more, more reps, more reps, more reps, it just feels — it just feels weird…

JONATHAN: Uh-huh…

CARRIE: To exercise so hard for such a short time…

JONATHAN: Uh-huh.

CARRIE: And then actually have the feeling – I never did any traditional exercise that made it impossible for me to exercise one, two, three days later.

JONATHAN: Absolutely.

CARRIE: So, I think it’s a whole new experience for almost everybody…

JONATHAN: Yes…

CARRIE: And we just have to get over that like — with the food, we just have to get over that hump of all the miss-information that we’ve had for 40 years.

JONATHAN: Just to make sure we don’t give an exaggerated message here too — I don’t want people to hear – where we’re very quick to say that more is better theory is false and it is and it’s also false in the amount of resistance arena as well, like using too much resistance is also a bad idea. So, don’t just think keep adding resistance, keep adding resistance, no matter what – and the way to know if you’re using too much resistance is if you can’t slowly lower the resistance for ten seconds, or you can’t do it for ten seconds for the six repetitions, right? If you put so much weight on an Eccentric chest press for example, you try to lower the weight and you just drop it – that’s too much and that’s not better, that’s worse because what we want to do is we want to balance what’s called time-under-tension. We want to make sure that our muscles are working for a long enough period to get fully exercised, but we also want to ensure the resistance is high enough to maximize the type and number of muscle fibers used and a great way to balance that is to go for those six, ten second Eccentric repetitions – and to do that – such that the next three days, you’re not even thinking about exercising let alone being ah, well, this is easy, I could do this again and that’s when you know you’ve arrived at the right resistance. It’s not too little, not too much, very goldilocks like.

CARRIE: But again, when you’re first starting out, don’t expect it to be perfect and if you don’t get it perfect, give up.

JONATHAN: Uh-huh.

CARRIE: It will take you a little while to get used to how it feels – to feel what resistance is right –

JONATHAN: Yeah.

CARRIE: Don’t worry if you don’t get it right the first time, you probably won’t because it feels so different, so just for the first few times you do it, just concentrate on finding out what resistance is right, figuring out how it feels, and then after three or four times of doing it, then you can worry about it being perfect.

JONATHAN: In fact, Carrie is spot on, if it’s really the first time you’re doing it, you shouldn’t at all be focused on how much resistance you can add. It’s about understanding the movement and feeling comfortable with it. I would say it’s really not until the third go-around…

CARRIE: Right.

JONATHAN: That you should start really pushing yourself and what I often find is that there’s three phases, let’s called it, Eccentric training – the first phase it’s called the introductory phase — you focus on movements where you’re slowly lowering yourself, because that in and of itself is not what we’re usually doing, right, we’re usually lifting weights, not focused on lowering weights. So, we do that slowly – we start to feel comfortable with the movement, we get it. Then we start to add resistance so we start to see like okay, this is pretty challenging, but we’re consciously lowering the resistance for ten seconds. We’re counting like, five, six, and we’re consciously lowering it, like we’re thinking to ourselves, okay, arms or legs, lower down – and then once we’re comfortable with that we move to the third and final stage, which is we end up just trying to not move, but the resistance is so high that it makes us move, it’s a find distinction, but once you do it physically, you’ll see the difference – one is — here’s a good analogy, one is you’re sitting down, but you’re sitting down slowly, but you’re consciously sitting down. The other is like you have a backpack on that is so heavy you’re trying to stand up, but it is making you sit down.

CARRIE: Right.

JONATHAN: And that’s that proper level of resistance when despite your best effort, no matter what you do, you’re trying not to go down. The resistance forces you down, but it doesn’t force you down any faster than ten seconds, otherwise it’s too much.

CARRIE: Right.

JONATHAN: So, it’s those three phases, make sure you’ve got the movement down and I think we talked about this briefly in other podcasts, Carrie, but, as you’re getting acclimated to the resistance needed for Eccentric training, you can still go bananas with your smarter interval training, because that for a lot of people is really easy to just go 100 percent, right out the gate because you just crank up the resistance on the bike, it’s a pretty familiar movement, and you can really maximize that while you’re still learning the Eccentrics…

CARRIE: Right.

JONATHAN: You don’t have to feel like well these three weeks are just lost causes because I’m not doing anything. No not at all.

CARRIE: Right. Yeah. No, but really don’t beat yourself up. If it takes you three or four weeks to work out what it means for you to do the Eccentric exercises. It’s progress, not perfection.

JONATHAN: Absolutely. Always getting better. Second exercise related FAQ for this week, Carrie, we just talked about doing smarter interval training on a bike. Frequently people ask if we can do smarter – like do we have to have a bike, or can we do smarter interval training via other means.

CARRIE: I have no idea, I have a bike.

JONATHAN: Carrie has a bike. Well, it’s interesting to know that Carrie actually has a recumbent bike.

CARRIE: Not anymore.

JONATHAN: Oh you got a new one?

CARRIE: Da-ta-da…

JONATHAN: Oh, you got a…

CARRIE: My new bike arrived this week.

JONATHAN: Nice.

CARRIE: Yay…

JONATHAN: You got one you can stand up on?

CARRIE: Yes.

JONATHAN: Oh, beautiful, beautiful.

CARRIE: I haven’t built it yet, but I have it.

JONATHAN: So, folks just so you’re clear on what we’re talking about here, so, when we talk about stationary bikes, there’s two types, one is recumbent, that’s the one that looks like a recliner and then there’s one that upright and that’s one that looks like more like an actual bicycle and the one we generally recommend for smarter interval training is the one that looks more like a regular bicycle because it allows you to stand up on the pedals, like if you’re pedaling up a hill.

CARRIE: So, if you have a recumbent bike and you don’t have the budget to buy an upright bike, you can use a recumbent bike – I’ve been using a recumbent bike all this time and you can do it, but you have to hold yourself upright…

JONATHAN: Uh-huh.

CARRIE: With the bars,which adds another level of pain to the whole proceedings, because your arms, you know, you’re having to physically hold yourself up.

JONATHAN: Yeah.

CARRIE: So, you can do it and I’ve done that for a year.

JONATHAN: Uh-huh.

CARRIE: I’m not sorry that the recumbent bike is going, but I don’t want people to feel like —

JONATHAN: Yeah.

CARRIE: That they have to go out and buy a new bike now.

JONATHAN: Absolutely.

CARRIE: You can make do with the recumbent bike, it just has an extra (Inaudible 22:51) and arm workout.

JONATHAN: Absolutely.

CARRIE: At the same time – and it is more difficult to start to pull yourself up —

JONATHAN: Yes.

CARRIE: But you can do it.

JONATHAN: Yeah, and when it comes to cost, the good news is that we actually don’t want the expensive kind of upright bikes, we actually want the less expensive kind and what I mean by that is we don’t want the electronic ones. We want the manual ones that sometimes called Spin bikes, that’s a specific brand and you don’t need to get that, but if you go on Amazon for example, I think we have one in the SANE store, for less than $200.00 bucks it’s a very simple mechanical bike, it’s less than a cell phone and they last a really long time and you don’t have to drive anywhere or do anything, so it’s a really good investment and again you do want the less expensive one that’s mechanical because it has no upward limit to the amount of resistance you can use.

CARRIE: Right.

JONATHAN: Whereas the electronic ones, like it goes to Level 20, whatever that is.

CARRIE: And I must say, so there were two things that bugged me about my recumbent bike, well, one the extra effort it took to hold myself upright was one thing, but also I topped out on the resistance…

JONATHAN: Exactly.

CARRIE: And then I couldn’t do anymore and strange though this may sound, that was frustrating to me that I couldn’t make the resistance…

JONATHAN: Yeah, absolutely.

CARRIE: More.

JONATHAN: You’re getting stronger, so that’s actually an important point folks, an analogy I’d like to use here again, once you find the right resistance, it’s not going to be the right resistance for long, going back to our earlier question, right? It will be the right resistance for one, maybe two workouts unless you’ve been weight training for years and years and years and then you’re going to need to increase the resistance, so finding the right resistance is an evolving thing. You need to keep going up and an analogy I like to use for that is, for example, if you want your brain to get smarter, from an algebra perspective, once you’ve learned your multiplication tables, you can’t just keep rehearsing the multiplication tables over and over again. It’s never going to make you any smarter. Like you get to a level and then you need to move on to…

CARRIE: Something more complicated —

JONATHAN: Yeah, a pre-calculus and la-la-la. So, once you’ve mastered 20 lbs., that’s your multiplication tables, you’ve got to go up to 25. Like you have to – continuing to 20, will keep you where you’re at, so if you’re happy with where you’re at that’s fine, but I mean, you really want to make sure you are increasing that resistance, because again, we’re just not exercising less, we’re exercising less — but smarter.

CARRIE: Right.

JONATHAN: Which is with more resistance, but…

CARRIE: I was amazed at how fast I graduated from the 12 and half pound weight that I thought would last me forever, to a 20 pound weight.

JONATHAN: Yeah.

CARRIE: I mean it shocked me at how fast that was.

JONATHAN: I think that’s…(talking over each other) 25:29

CARRIE: How fast that happened.

JONATHAN: One of the coolest things about any forms of resistance training especially if you’ve never done it before, is just how quickly you will see strength improvement.

CARRIE: Yeah, it is amazing.

JONATHAN: And when I say strength improvements, I don’t in any way, shape or form mean you’re going to start looking like the incredible hulk, we’ve covered this in an earlier podcast. I guarantee you, you will never accidentally build too much muscle. It’s not going to happen. Just like you’ll never accidentally burn too much fat, you will never accidentally build too much muscle, but what you will start seeing is it’s a heck of a lot easier to walk up stairs, why? Well, because your legs are stronger. So, historically, it was harder for your legs to lift your body up the stairs, but now it’s easier, so you’ll feel like you’re in better cardiovascular shape, whereas in reality just because your muscles are stronger, everything is easier. Everything is easier and you’ll just feel stronger and more confident as a person and literally week by week, by week you will see noticeable change and for someone who’s been strength training for years, you plateau just like anything else, but as you just get started, that’s such (Inaudible 00:25:28) you may need to write it down, because you’ll see like, I am twice as strong as I used to be. Twice as strong in four weeks? What?

CARRIE: Right.

JONATHAN: I mean that usually doesn’t happen right? So —

CARRIE: Right.

JONATHAN: That’s pretty cool. We’ve actually veered off the path Carrie, the question we were answering was can we use other types of machines for our smarter cardiovascular exercise and we’ve kind of answered it. We said, yes, but there’s a caveat there. The reason we’re talking about using an upright stationary bike is because it’s no impact and it allows us to add resistance easily. Those two things are required for smarter cardio, so for example, can you do smarter interval training by running on a treadmill? Well, the answer is no because even though you could increase the speed at the incline of the treadmill, running is a high impact exercise and there’s a finite amount of incline (Inaudible 00:27:28) you can’t run up 90 degrees so you can’t do it by running. You can do things like an elliptical machines, you can do things like there’s a versaclimber machine, which is a bit like you’re climbing up a ladder – as long as the machine has zero impact on your joints and as long as you can increase resistance indefinitely and safely, you can do smarter interval training on that machine.

CARRIE: So, you may already have a machine at home that isn’t a bike that you can utilize to do that.

JONATHAN: Exactly. Just make sure it gives you enough resistance and make sure it’s not doing more harm than good in terms of damaging your joints. Good stuff?

CARRIE: Yes.

JONATHAN: Good stuff, Carrie. Well, we’ve got a bunch more smarter exercise FAQs that we will get into next week, but I want to make sure we have time to debut the audio of the Slim is Simple non-profit animated and hopefully fun, educational piece – so folks I want to give you an opportunity to listen to that. It’s a 12 minutes long and Carrie and I will sign off and we’ll see you back next week.

CARRIE: See ya.

END AT 28:32 INTERVIEW

JONATHAN: The question. When did healthy and fit start making us heavy and sick? Since the 1970s we’ve been told we need to eat less and exercise more. Today more of us are dieting and exercising than ever and yet more of usare overweight and diabetic than ever. What’s going on here? Staying healthy is one of the most basic abilities we have as human beings. This cannot be that confusing. Remember not too long ago, when we didn’t know what calories were let alone count them and almost nobody was obese or diabetic? How did that work? Did everyone from our distant ancestors up until a few decades ago know something we don’t? How were they able to stay fit, healthy and slim so simply, without all the confusing diet, exercise and calorie counting programs we have today – without all the expensive pills, powders and potions we have today, without even really trying. How were they able to stay so slim, so simply? What’s the secret? What’s the mystery?

UNKNOWN: The code, the puzzle. What’s the key?

JONATHAN: What the key answer? What is the secret? What if it wasn’t a secret? What if I were to tell you that the most brilliant minds in the scientific and medical communities knew how to make our bodies work more like those of naturally thin people? How to get back our body’s natural ability to stay slim and healthy without counting calories or spending hours exercising. How to enjoy lives of simple slimness and health, like 90 percent of us did just decades ago and approach that work to heal us rather than starve us, that enables our body to burn fat 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, rather than just a few hours at the gym. Over 1100 international research studies and the best (Inaudible 00:30:09) scientific research and medical minds around the world have found it. The truth to healing our bodies rather than fighting them. So, we can start making healthy – healthy again. First, you must free yourself from the last few decades of dietary misinformation. Forget about starving yourself. Starvation and depravation are not healthy. Besides, the largest increase in obesity and diabetes in history took place alongside the largest increase of dieting in history, so why would anyone tell us that more dieting is the answer. Forget about counting calories and confusing math. Start thinking about common sense, simple biology and proven science. Wait a minute, doesn’t counting calories work? Well, maybe, but why do we all of a sudden need to count calories when we were slimmer and healthier before we even knew what a calorie was? Besides, calorie math does not work the way we’ve been taught. For example, it’s been proven that on average we are consuming about 300 more calories per person per day than we were in the late 70s. Between then and now that adds up to well over 3 million more calories per person, which if the starvation is healthy, count your calories and metabolism works like math premise were true, means the average American today should weigh well over 1,000 lbs. Over 1,000 lbs., lucky for usbiology does not work like math. It works like biology.

Let’s think about the biology of your body like sink. When a sink is working properly, more water poured in, means more water drains out. The water level may rise temporarily, but the sink will automatically take care of that. A healthy body works similarly, automatically balancing us out. That’s why we each haven’t gained even close to the 1,000 lbs. we should have gained since the 1970s if we needed to manually balance calories. Our body is designed to burn more when we eat more and burn less when we take less in. Just like we use the bathroom less when we drink less and more when – you know – a healthy body is designed to balance itself out. This is called your set-point weight. More in, more out, automatically. Less in, less out, automatically. The only time the water level stays high is when the sink becomes clogged. When the sink loses its ability to take care of more in, with more out automatically. Well, when does the sink get clogged? When the wrong quality of things are put in it. Things that do not belong. When a sink is clogged any amounts of water in, no matter how small will cause the water level to rise and to stay high. Well, wait – why don’t we just turn the faucet down even more, cut the water level altogether and keep the water level down forever. Well, that could work except that we would inevitably starve to death. The answer is not to cut off food entirely, but instead to fix the underlying problem. We must unclog our sink. Our bodies become hormonally clogged when we put the wrong quality of food in them causing the level of body fat to stay elevated. We have an elevated set-point. Eating less is just like turning the faucet down, it doesn’t actually fix anything. It doesn’t do a thing about the clog. We can keep our drain and our body from overflowing simply by only putting things in them they were designed to handle by focusing on quality, rather than quantity. Just like no quantity of clean water will ever clog a sink, no quantity of the high quality clean foods we were designed to eat, will ever clog our body. Eat smarter, not less. Problem solved. Wait…what do I eat then?

We eat clean, high quality, hormonally clog-clearing foods that restore our bodies and natural ability to keep us slim. What? And those are? Excellent question.

The quality of our calories depends on four fascinating factors. Satiety, how quickly calories fill us up and how long they keep us full. Aggression, how likely those calories are to be stored as body fat. Nutrition, how many nutrients those calories provide and efficiency. How many calories can be stored as body fat. The more satisfying, unaggressive, nutritious and inefficient the calorie is, the higher its quality. The more SANE it is. The more body fat burning hormones that triggers helping us to clear our clog and prevent overeating. The more unsatisfying, aggressive, not nutritious and efficient a calorie is, the lower its quality. The more inSANE it is. The more body fat storing hormones it triggers contributing to our clog and encouraging overeating. When we eat SANE, high quality calories, we provide our body with an abundance of nutrition. We automatically avoid overeating because these calories are so satisfying and most importantly, we create a hormonal environment that dissolves our metabolic clog. They are like a natural liquid plumber for our biological sink. When we see how SANE foods heal us, why it’s so much simpler to eat more of them instead of starving ourselves is clear. And they are easy to identify because there are only three primary factors controlling the SANEity of food, water, fiber and protein. Water, fiber and protein rich foods are SANE. On the other hand, dry, relatively low fiber and low protein foods are inSANE. Starches and sweets such as cookies and bread, pasta and potatoes are some of the inSANE foods that will contribute to a hormonally clogged sink. When choosing your SANE foods, seek short ingredients lists and stay on the perimeter of your grocery store. Avoid heavily packaged and processed food. If your grandma wouldn’t recognize it, don’t eat it. The more natural it is, the more SANE it is. Smarter eating, staying clog free and staying slim simply like our ancestors and our naturally thin friends is simple. Eat way more, not starchy vegetables. Way more seafood and nutritious meats. More low sugar fruit and more nuts and seeds. Get so full and satisfied from eating as many SANE foods as you want whenever you want that you’re too full for desert.

So, go ahead, double the portion of your nutritious high protein main dish, triple that side of non-starchy veggies. Eating at an Asian restaurant? Great, eat all the protein and the vegetable main dish rather than half of that dish and lots of rice. Eating somewhere else? Simply tell your server, hold the starch, and double the veggies. And chow down leaving no room for desert. Never go hungry again. Remember, non-starchy vegetables, nutritious protein, fruits, nuts and seeds, were the only foods available to us while our metabolic system evolved. So, when you think about it, it really makes sense that these foods are water to our metabolic sinks. What we’re designed to take in. What keeps us in balance simply and what keeps us from overflowing automatically. SANE natural water fiber and protein rich foods are and always have been the best fuel for our bodies. Our ancestors stayed clog free, healthy and slim effortlessly and we can too if we stick to putting clean water in our sinks. So, instead of complex and counter-productive starvation and calorie counting approaches that are only needed if we eat clog causing unnatural starches and sweets in the first place, let’s stick with simple proven science instead. Let’s stick with the fact that our biology does not work like math. It works like biology. Let’s eat more, but smarter. Let’s focus on high quality food. Hunger isn’t healthy. We don’t need to exercise for hours. We don’t need expensive pills or complex prescriptions. This doesn’t have to be complicated. This isn’t some expensive Hollywood secret, that rich and famous knowabout, the secret is that there is no secret. All you need is the science. The knowledge and the answers that have been with us since the beginning of time. To restore your body’s natural ability to burn fat rather than to store fat. The ability to use biology to heal your body instead of starving it. Enabling it to work more like it is designed to, more like the body of a naturally thin person.

Think about it. Just about everyone stayed healthy and fit without even trying until very recently. Why? Because a healthy body automatically stays in balance at a slim and healthy set-point. More in, means more out because it’s not hormonally clogged by the wrong quality of food. Foods that our ancestors never had access to. And if you’re thinking I don’t have time, or money to watch what I eat. Think again. This is as easy as slapping a piece of meat on the grill or sticking a piece of fish in the oven and it’s as cheap as steaming a few handfuls of non-starchy veggies and I don’t know about you, but a little more time in the kitchen sure beats a lot more time in the gym. Not to mention losing those gym memberships and medical expenses altogether. Now, who’s saving time and money? You are.

Millions of Americans today are changing their lives with the power and confidence of knowing how to change their body and you can too. You can enjoy food again. You can eat more, but smarter. More water, fiber and protein packed foods found in nature, such as non-starchy vegetables, seafood, nutritious meats, like free range poultry and grass fed beef or eggs and low sugar fruits such as berries and citrus and whole food natural fats like nuts and seeds. Let’s enjoy so much of them that it’s easy to avoid unnatural, dry, low fiber and low protein starches and sweets. Let’s heal rather than fight our bodies with an abundance of natural nutrition and enjoy the foods we were meant to enjoy. Foods we were made to enjoy. Let’s remember that starvation isn’t healthy. Food isn’t our enemy, in fact, eating in abundance of high quality food is our most powerful and affordable tool to avoid obesity, diabetes and other diet related problems. Let’s remember that this is one of the simplest things in the world. Something that we’ve been doing for hundreds of thousands of years without even trying. Something we’re designed to do naturally. Something we can do again, now. Let’s stop making ourselves heavy and sick. Let’s stop complicating healthy and fit. Let’s start making healthy, healthy again.