Smarter Exercise, Zero Carb Diets, Type 1 Diabetes, Beets, and Slipping Up

Carrie: Hi everyone this is Carrie Brown and I am with Mr. Jonathan Bailor.

Jonathan: What’s up Carrie? How are you?

Carrie: Awesome.

Jonathan: We are recording in an extra special place today.

Carrie: Yes we are.

Jonathan: We are not in our typical location so we are out of our comfort zone but we’re going to do an awesome job.

Carrie: Yes we are. We’re going to have some fun.

Jonathan: We’re going to have some fun and we’re going to do a bunch of awesome reader questions today Carrie and I wanted to urge our listeners if at all possible, please if you do have questions come over to the Support Group, which actually might be moving soon. Regardless go to smarterscienceofslim.com, check out the Support Group. Please post your questions there. If you post your questions in private e-mails or in private Facebook posts, we can’t answer them. We like to answer the questions in a public forum so that everyone can benefit from them.

So please, please, please feel free to ask your questions but please do so in the Smarter Science of Slim Support Group. Carrie what’s cool is we’ve been doing this for so long now that we have literally thousands of questions already answered. So if you want immediate answers to your questions I’ve found that if you go to Google and you type in Smarter Science of Slim in quotations and the noun and verb from your question. For example, vegan sources of protein, you will find answers to your questions because it will search the Support Group, it will search blog posts, it will search transcripts. That’s instant, so that’s all good.

Carrie: That is awesome.

Jonathan: So if you can’t find something there, post in the Support Group and then we will do our best to answer them. For example, we have a question here from Dr. Allison [Lul 0:01:43]. Dr. Allison [Lul 0:01:45] says she is a giant fan of our podcast which we very much appreciate.

Carrie: Yay.

Jonathan: Yay. She’s listened to every episode and has gotten lots of other people hooked on to it too.

Carrie: Yay.

Jonathan: Yay. She’s changed major things about her diet and exercise listening to our show and preaches to whoever will listen about nutrition. She works as a forensic scientist and used to be an astrophysicist but in her spare time she reads about nutrition and exercise. She’s been an elite athlete for her entire life and for the last eight years she’s been a kickboxing instructor. She really feels and then she says this with love that our podcast is like a good foundational exercise program, even though we stress how important the right type of exercise is to getting the maximum benefit to your health.

She tries to incorporate eccentric exercises into her classes and in more of an interval style way than a straight hour of cardio but she has little to go on from what we’ve talked about. So she basically wanted us to just cover exercise more holistically in a podcast and she says “I may have rambled too long, but I’d appreciate it.” So thank you Dr. Allison [Lul 0:02:52] for the question. Looks like we need to give a little bit of exercise info.

Carrie: Exercise info. We did do a little series of podcasts where we tried to explain how to do them in the studio but it was really hard to explain so I think that’s probably where we’re failing. It’s very difficult to explain movements successfully on a podcast but let’s see what we can do.

Jonathan: Absolutely and what I heard Dr. [Lul 0:03:22] also asking for is just, we covered eccentric exercise, we said it’s good, we covered interval training, we said it’s good, but I think we might need to revisit the macro exercise spectrum we talk about. So one key point that we haven’t talked about for a while or maybe not at all in this forum is the difference between exercise and being human.

Carrie: Okay. I’m definitely at the being human end of that spectrum.

Jonathan: In our culture we’ve gone so far away from what is actually normal. For example, someone will take the stairs instead of taking the elevator and say I got exercise. Whereas, not taking an elevator is the natural state for people.

Carrie: Right.

Jonathan: Walking up stairs isn’t exercise it’s being a person.

Carrie: Well now you’ve taken away my only form of exercise Jonathan. Because I do actually walk up the stairs at work.

Jonathan: So things like walking up the stairs, playing with your kids, walking around outside that’s not exercise. That is baseline being a human. If we want to have the ability to walk around and function as we become older, we need to walk around and continue to function when we’re younger and throughout being older. So that’s not exercise. When we talk about exercise we’re really talking about doing things that are deliberate and intentional for a specific period of time with a specific goal in mind.

Carrie: Well I’m very good at being human you’ll be glad to know.

Jonathan: So for example Dr. [Lul 0:05:05] here she’s, sounds like a kickboxing instructor and therefore she must really love kickboxing. Again she’s kickboxing, it sounds like because one she enjoys it and two because it may have some side health benefits. First and foremost it sounds like she does it because she enjoys it.

Carrie: Which is awesome.

Jonathan: Anything that you’re doing because you enjoy it as long as it isn’t hurting you or hurting someone else, rock and roll.

Carrie: If you’re not having fun what’s the point?

Jonathan: Rock and roll. It sounds like Dr. [Lul 0:05:37] another thing you’re doing that’s great is you’ve taken the principles of smarter exercise which is trying to do things more in higher-intensity safer bursts rather than in just a steady state. So you take that and you apply that to your classes and you are getting more benefit. So I think you’re really on the right track. When you say let’s take a more macro view of exercise, the macro view of exercise is this, the more intense and safe the exercise is the more beneficial it is for your health, fitness and fat loss. Bottom line.

Carrie always says and she put this brilliantly, resistance, not reps. Resistance, not reps. Resistance, not reps. So I don’t care what form of modality we’re doing. Recently some people gave some feedback that they weren’t so happy with how we talked about TRX. I didn’t mean to throw TRX under the bus. The point is just any form of exercise that makes it easier to increase safety and increase intensity we like.

Any form of exercise which decreases those two things we’re not big fans of. So however you like to move your body do it. Movement is critical. If you want to maximize the benefits of it do it as safely as possible and as intensely as possible.

Carrie: But it’s not just that we like or dislike things, it’s that they’re more effective for reaching our goal which in this case is burn your body fat.

Jonathan: Exactly and global metabolic healing. I really thank you for calling that Carrie, I should not have said like or dislike. We here just try to communicate what the science shows and the science shows unambiguously that the more resistance you use, the more muscle fibers you activate, therefore the greater hormonal response you trigger and therefore the better results you get.

Carrie: I think that was a first. I was more specific than you Jonathan.

Jonathan: I love it. So Dr. [Lul 0:07:30] hopefully that is helpful. Remember again just to pop up a level, movement is baseline if the choice is between moving in a non-eccentric or non-interval based way and not moving at all. Move. But if you can take your preferred form of movement, your preferred form of exercise, and apply the principles of eccentric and smarter exercise a.k.a. do it safer, do it more resistance and therefore do it for shorter periods of time because it should be physically impossible to do more.

Carrie: Resistance not reps.

Jonathan: Boom you’re good to go. Good to go. Carrie look at that we’ve talked about exercise and you contributed significantly.

Carrie: It’s a miracle.

Jonathan: Look at you. You’re. . .

Carrie: Beaming now.

Jonathan: You’re a convert.

Carrie: But let’s not go too far.

Jonathan: Next question here and again my apologies if I ever mispronounce anyone’s name. This is from Kate [Klosterman 0:08:27] who says “Hello Jonathan and Carrie. I am a type one diabetic on an insulin pump. Therefore no matter what I do I will not be able to conquer this type of diabetes. I produce no insulin at all.”

Yes Kate is again type one diabetics are individuals who are born this way. This is not a lifestyle disease. They just do not produce insulin. Whereas type two diabetics remember are individuals who have become insulin-resistant. Their pancreas no longer produces enough insulin to get energy into their cells. It is a similar problem a.k.a. stuff isn’t getting into cells but has a different fundamental cause. In one case there is no insulin. In the other case the insulin isn’t getting its job done.

Anyway back to Kate’s question. “I would love to cut out most carb intake but because I must take at least some insulin at all times I have to have some carbohydrate. Otherwise I will end up in metabolic trouble. If I cut out carbs altogether my endocrine system will do weird things. How would you suggest I make modifications? I am not overweight but on the cusp. Thank you.”

Carrie: I have nothing. I wish I did, I wish I had some brilliant answer but I am relying on my podcast mate over here to sort that out.

Jonathan: Carrie I actually think you have maybe more insight here than you realize because Kate in her question says I can’t cut out carbs completely. The good news is. . .

Carrie: Well you don’t want to.

Jonathan: Exactly.

Carrie: We eat carbs. We just eat a certain type.

Jonathan: In fact eating sane carbs is the single most important aspect of a sane lifestyle that’s our non-starchy vegetables. So Kate absolutely I think that there’s good news here because no one’s asking you to cut out carbs completely. In fact the research is quite clear that carbohydrate found in the form of non-starchy vegetables is the sanest substance available to you. So if you need to eat carbohydrates, awesome. Let’s just make sure you’re focused on getting it from non-starchy vegetables remember those are vegetables you could eat raw and then lower-fructose fruits such as berries or citrus. Of course you’ll also find carbohydrate in low-sugar dairy products as well nuts, seeds, things like that.

Carrie: Awesome. It’s all good. That sounds yummy.

Jonathan: Carrie while we’re talking about non-starchy vegetables. Can you tell me a little bit about beets? Someone the other day was talking about beets and I know beets is a non-starchy vegetable or maybe it’s semi-starchy I don’t care. Either way it’s sane. You use beets in ways that I would never imagine and you hide them in foods in a cool way. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Carrie: It still weirds me out when you say beets because in England, they’re beetroot. One word. B-E-E-T-R-O-O-T, so beetroot.

Jonathan: Beetroot, for those across the pond.

Carrie: I love, love, love, love beetroot. I grew up in a house where my father grew beetroot and there’s nothing that rocks my world more than freshly cooked beets. Just that’s it. Just freshly cooked beets.

Jonathan: I think you might need to get out more Carrie if nothing rocks your world more than. . .

Carrie: I’m talking about food.

Jonathan: Oh okay, okay.

Carrie: Jonathan. Anyway yes let’s move on from that. So food. So love them. I love to eat them just as I say cooked, eat them fresh, peel them, cook them, eat them. But I also made and I don’t mean to brag but I made this beet and tarragon soup which was just awesome. In fact you tried it.

Jonathan: It was incredibly colorful.

Carrie: It was incredibly purple and beautiful. Beets make a fantastic soup. Actually makes a very creamy soup too. So it’s very, very filling and very, very tasty. I also, which you also tried chocolate cake with beets in, which you loved, but I think it needs a little bit of work so that’s why you don’t all have that yet. But now that I’ve mentioned it on the podcast I’m going to have to get back to the chocolate cake with beets in because you’re all going to want it.

Jonathan: Before anyone says “Beets in chocolate cake? That’s crazy!” Remember there are things like carrot cake and zucchini bread. Putting vegetables in baked goods is not crazy talk in fact, when you try said beet chocolate cake. . .

Carrie: You couldn’t taste the beets at all.

Jonathan: You’ll just be like, this is amazing!

Carrie: Jonathan could not detect what was in it. He was asking me, “What’s in it? What’s in it? What’s in it?” He was stunned when I told him.

Jonathan: And that’s just so cool folks. When you can have a friggin’ chocolate cake which has got those healthy fats in it, your non-starchy, I mean just think about how cool that is. You could eat your chocolate cake for dinner.

Carrie: Yes.

Jonathan: That’s glorious.

Carrie: Yes.

Jonathan: How is that anything less than just nutritional serenity? I love it. It’s great. And your soup was super simple right? It’s just like a Vitamix soup. You just put everything in there.

Carrie: Yeah it was very simple but fantastic color and beautiful flavor. So beets. Eat beets. You could also put beets in salad as well. You have to throw them in at last because they do stain. The purple color gets everywhere so you want to throw the beets in last. There’s a ton of things, now you’re excited about beets so now my brain’s going to be exploding with more beet ideas. There will be more coming.

Jonathan: Another reason I have a soft spot in my heart for beets Carrie is I had actually never tried beets prior to you introducing them to me and they are a great example of, I’ll sometimes hear from people that are not familiar with the sane lifestyle that deprivation. Just ideas like “Oh, I’m not going to be eating starches and processed garbage.

That’s such a limited selection of foods.” Just non-starchy vegetables there are so many! Just go to Kroger, Piggly Wiggly, QFC, whatever is in your neighborhood and just look at the incredible diversity. Most of us are just happy with our five go-to vegetables and our three go-to fruits. But if you start playing around with some of that stuff and you start doing what Carrie does with mixing these flavors together, that’s a whole new world and it’s awesome.

Carrie: I think there are two problems. I think there’s two camps of people in the ‘don’t like vegetables’ so that is one camp of people that have eaten a lot of vegetables but they were prepared so poorly that they taste nasty and they grew up hating them because they weren’t cooked well or properly. And then there’s the other group of people who just as you say have their five go-to veggies and they just have not experienced all these other things.

I have thousands of leek converts now because I made so many leek recipes that they’re all like, “Oh, for goodness’ sake, let’s just go get some leeks and try them.” I have mail all the time from people who just love leeks now, so they’re expanding their veggie repertoire and I just think it’s fantastic. There’s a ton of stuff out there that you either haven’t tried or you’ve tried a badly-cooked version. Revisit. There’s recipes up in my blog at carriebrown.com where you can get some ideas for using different vegetables or how to cook existing bank of vegetables properly and I think give some time you’ll find it much easier to get more veggies in your diet.

Jonathan: Another good thing about non-starchy vegetables and this was something that one of our awesome team members Mike Rich brought up. He calls non-starchy vegetables a brilliant sane fat delivery mechanism. For example, there’s quite a few people who, if you’re eating nutrient-dense proteins, if you’re eating non-starchy vegetables, actually eating sufficient healthy fat can become kind of an issue especially if you don’t like sweets and you’re not making our cocoa and coconut-type desserts and if you don’t eat nuts for whatever reason.

But if you just went simple Jonathan-style assembly vegetables, getting something like spinach or kale and onions and some garlic and putting it in a pan with some coconut oil or some beef tallow or some bacon drippings or just some lovely, healthy saturated fat that’s good eating too.

Carrie: Talking about strange vegetables a lot of people don’t like, I have done a recipe, it’s not posted yet but it will be very, very, very soon. It’s a brazed cabbage recipe. If you don’t like cabbage I think you will love this. It was so good. I had a cabbage-hating girlfriend came over the day I made it and she even knew it was cabbage but I made her eat some and even she said, “I would eat a whole dish of that.”

Jonathan: Yeah.

Carrie: There’s cabbage goodness coming lovely people.

Jonathan: Cabbage goodness coming. So stay excited. Carrie we’ve got time for one more question this week and this question is from the lovely Zoey Rose. Zoey says “Hi. I’ve been finding it difficult to start my journey off. I start it, I’m great for a few days and then something happens and I fall off the wagon. Do you have any tips? Maybe I’m trying to make too many changes.”

Carrie: My first response to that would always be it is so much easier to stay sane if you clear the house of anything insane. If you’re stuck for want of a better word at home and the only things you have are sane, it’s so much easier to just stay there and then over time two or three weeks, you will find that your taste buds actually change. The cravings will stop and you won’t want so much sweet stuff and that will help you. I find that when I do that and I know Jonathan is the same, that you actually no longer want the insane foods.

Jonathan: Yup.

Carrie: But number one for me would be get rid of everything insane in your house. Take it to the food bank, give it to people who don’t yet have an interest in eating healthy. Just get rid of all the insane food. Stock your house with sane foods, particularly things that are easy. Jonathan’s assembly is good when you get started because you want something that you can quickly eat and stop any cravings that you have. Then over a very short period of time you’ll find that you will just want to stay that way.

Jonathan: Love it, love it. Here’s an analogy which may be helpful for folks. When we think of going sane and getting eccentric it’s really that we’re learning a whole new language. I mean we’ve heard of a language of eat less, exercise more, low-fat, protein is irrelevant, eat your whole grain that’s the language we’ve been taught over the past forty years.

Now if I were to tell you Zoey or if you were to tell me “Jonathan, I want to learn Spanish tomorrow.” You’re not going to learn Spanish tomorrow. No one can learn an entirely new language in one day. In fact if your goal was by end of day tomorrow, I’m going to be fluent in Spanish. You would “fall off the wagon”. I would argue you didn’t fall off the wagon in fact it would never be possible to go on that wagon if that was the approach. So I think a lot of us say tomorrow I’m going to be sane.

Carrie: 100%.

Jonathan: 100% sane. What I’d highly recommend and this is why we recently put out a free twenty eight day program. You can just sign up for it on the website smarterscienceofslim.com. We send you emails where it’s just on Monday do this. One thing. On Tuesday do this one thing. When I say do one thing like listen to one podcast or watch one of our videos, read one blog post, read one chapter in the Smarter Science of Slim if you already have a copy or The Calorie Myth when it comes out.

Commit yourself for twenty one days or twenty eight days if you sign up for our free program one thing. One thing every day for twenty eight days and on day twenty nine I think you’ll find that you’re not only on that wagon, that wagon is cruising on down the road in a way you never anticipated.

Carrie: Another thing you can do, another little one thing you can do is go up to my blog and pick some recipes. Pick one recipe a week. One new thing. This week, I’m going to cook this from Carrie’s blog and here’s what I need to go get from the store to get it. Every week you do one new recipe and then you’ll very quickly find that you have a whole repertoire of sane dishes that you know how to cook and that you enjoy and that you love eating and so it will become just organically, it will become more natural to you to eat that way.

Jonathan: It’s so critical to take those small sustainable steps. Just one more analogy you know I love my analogies Carrie. If Zoey, dear Zoey’s goal was to run a marathon and tomorrow if she said, “I’m going to run a marathon” she would feel like she fell off the wagon. She didn’t. That’s not how people work. We can’t just go from zero to one hundred. We’ve got to take those gradual steps. Sit down for twenty minutes, write down one thing you can do. Not even twenty minutes. Sit down on Sunday night and for five minutes or less, I’m going to do this one thing on Monday. I’m going to cook one Carrie recipe on Tuesday. I’m going to watch one video on Wednesday. Or just sign up for the email program and we’ll do it for you. Easy?

Carrie: Easy.

Jonathan: Love it. Folks. Go ahead Carrie.

Carrie: Be kind to yourself.

Jonathan: Be kind.

Carrie: Because this isn’t a race. Beating yourself up is not going to help you in this endeavor so be kind to yourself.

Jonathan: Carrie the fact that you said it’s not a race is so key. Because really there isn’t a finish line.

Carrie: Right.

Jonathan: That’s kind of the point.

Carrie: Well you have your own personal finish line but no one else is running towards that.

Jonathan: Exactly. Well I think what most people find to is that this idea that there’s a finish line that you’ve achieved fitness or you’ve achieved health. Like this is just a lifestyle. This is just. . .

Carrie: What we do.

Jonathan: Just keep on going. Exactly. Well folks we talked about exercise and how to apply that to all different forms of movement that you enjoy, about type one diabetes and how you don’t need to give up carbs. In fact you need to embrace the right kind of carbs. We talked about beets and how they’re glorious.

Carrie: Yes, they are.

Jonathan: And how chances are none of us are falling off the wagon, we might just be trying to do too much too soon. I love it Carrie.

Carrie: Awesome.

Jonathan: Folks thank you for joining us this week. Please remember this week and every week after, eat smarter, exercise smarter, and live better. Chat with you soon.

Carrie: See yeah.