Hi! I'm your SANE concierge. What can I help you find today?
Real quick…during this call I accidentally said that green beans are *not* a non-starchy veggie on the live coaching call…I should have said they are a non-optimal non-starchy veggie. They are a non-starchy veggie…they are simply not as nutrient dense as leafy greens etc. Aka They are good…enjoy them and count them towards your NSV goals
I’m so sorry about this.
If you are ever curious what food group a specific food fits in, please feel free to check you 7 Days to SANE guide in your step by step program here. http://program.sanesolution.com/course/orientation-start-here/ Thanks for the rocking call!
We actually have some awesome questions that were sent in to your wonderful Coaching and Support Group beforehand so we’re going to cover those and also have some time set aside to have some fun homework assignments and challenges, which I have a tendency to forget so please help me to remember. Also, please, please, please, let’s use this time in a unique way that this time allows us, which is to be interactive, to have a conversation here and to go deep into things that aren’t covered already in your Ignite Program.
Hopefully, you’ve seen your Ignite Program is amazingly comprehensive, which is great because you’re here for life because you want to improve your life for the rest of your life. This isn’t about the next twenty-one days; this is about the next twenty-one years and beyond because we’ve had enough of that temporary nonsense. It’s time for real permanent lasting results through some simple science and loving support, as you’ve hopefully seen in your Coaching and Support Group.
My one request for this call is that we have the opportunity to do something unique here. That is to go deep into some pretty cutting-edge stuff and have an awesome dynamic back and forth. In order for us to do that, we’ve been seeing some awesome things happening. One is that, we’ve been seeing some amazing participation and completion of the step-by-step program, which is the backbone of your Ignite Program.
Right here, this is a printout which I show during every live Group Coaching Call because it is so important. When you log into your Ignite Program, you’re going to see all over in the header, in the body, step-by-step. You’ll see in the very first section of your step-by-step course, there’s an orientation. In the orientation, there’s a link. That link contains a PDF. Within that PDF is a wonderful checklist of everything that is in your step-by-step program. This knowledge, this science — this is what makes the difference.
There is no shortage of Top Ten lists “eat this, not that”, snake oil nonsense out there. I promise you, if that worked, if there was this magic Top Ten “Just tell me what to eat” list, we would not have the challenges we face today. One of the coolest things about your SANE-certified coaches, your other SANE Ignite family members and the SANE Ignite Program in general is that we celebrate the beautiful biology that is going on underneath the surface of all of our bodies. It’s not something that we address with these Top Ten lists and these quick-fix gimmicks.
By no means do we need a Ph.D. in biology or a Ph.D. in neurobiology but we do deserve to know the truth about our health, our wellbeing, our mental performance — everything about our lives. People go to college for four years to get a degree which may or may not be useful. I promise you, if you spend three — no, that’s not enough — if you spend fifteen minutes a day, five days per week, just going through one item in your step-by-step course so that you’ve completed maybe five to hopefully seven steps per week, that would be awesome. In six months, you will have taken in so much proven information. Then you’ve got your Coaching and Support Group to ask questions and to refine that. That will transform your life, period.
Imagine if you didn’t know how to drive at all and you could kind of follow directions and some people told you to go right, go left, you could kind of get there but if you finally learned basically how a car works — which pedal makes the car go, which pedal makes the car stop, how to shift your gears, the basic rules of the road — you don’t need to be an Indie car driver; you don’t need to be a taxi cab driver in London which has to get this very detailed education by having that baseline knowledge that is so empowering. Please make sure — that’s what we want to do here. We want to give you that knowledge in your step-by-step program and then of course, provide you with loving care and support twenty-four/seven/three-sixty-five in your Coaching and Support Group.
There’s just been amazing participation in both of those places, both in the step-by-step program and in the Coaching and Support Group. So I say all of that to not only celebrate your progress there and to encourage you to keep it up but also because we’re going to use this time to go a bit more advanced and to be a bit more interactive. So if you haven’t had a huge amount of time to go through your step-by-step program, it’s all good. This call is being recorded and it’s being transcribed. I promise, as you become more and more familiar with the SANE science and all the tools and techniques that we’re going to give you, it will make more and more and more sense.
You can just watch it over and over and over again and it will make more sense over time with just being here and just hearing this and just letting it wash over you is going to help you take on a SANE mindset that is going to change how you look at eating and exercise and sleep and even your psychology, your self-image, and your relationships. It’s all-encompassing. Just let it wash over you because, no matter what, it’s going to make more and more sense over time and it’s going to transform your life.
If you do have questions, which is what this is all about, please type them in that chat box. Don’t just type the message; chat. Click on the little bubble and it will change so that you can make it sort of a question and an answer. You actually see Raina, your SANE-certified coach, just did an example of this where she posted a question that is super helpful. If you have a question for me, please post it as a question using that little box because I can’t keep up with all the chats unfortunately. They come in too fast for me so if you do have a question for me, which I hope you do, please post it there as a question, as you saw from Raina.
We’re about ready to just jump in. Before we do that, I want to celebrate as always. We have had some amazing things going on in the Coaching and Support Group. Next time you log in to your Ignite Program, not only are you going to click on the Step-By-Step word button — it’s everywhere — but also make sure you’re clicking on Coaching because that’s going to take you into your Coaching and Support Group.
We have seen amazing things happening. We’ve seen Ignite family members such as Kate Bosco has gotten promoted to Level 5 of SANEity which means she has been just amazing in the SANE Coaching and Support Group for a long time. Congratulations, Kate. Megan Williams got promoted up to Level 4 of SANEity. So much love and support. Huge congratulations there for those Level 5 and Level 4 SANE promotion celebrations. Also, big shout-out to some amazing contributors recently — CeCe, Sarah Waerham, Gaynor Heller, Megan Williams, Missy Celta, Barbara Foster, and Linda Baer. Thank you, thank you, thank you. It’s been an amazing couple of weeks in the Support Group. I wanted to give some quick shout-outs. Thank you again.
With that said, let’s jump into our questions. Again, please, no matter what, even if you don’t have questions here, please don’t let this seem overwhelming. Have fun. Let it wash over you. We’re going to go deep. We’re going to go fast. Here’s the good news, you’ve got Josh, your SANE coach here; you’ve got Raina, your SANE coach here; you’ve got Wednesday, your SANE coach here; and you have even more SANE coaches in your Coaching and Support Group as well as family members. Any questions you have, pop in there twenty-four/seven/three-sixty-five and we’ll get you taken care of.
We’ve got ninety minutes. We have eighty-two minutes left. With that said, let’s jump in and have a good time.
The first question we have here is related to our skin — our epidermis, as we say in the nerd community. This question was specifically about acne but I want to make sure that everything we cover in these calls will apply to you no matter what your life situation is. Even if you do not suffer from acne currently — maybe you have in the past, maybe you know someone who does — but no matter what, chances are, you have skin. If you have skin, what I’m about to say applies to you. If you don’t have skin, I’m sorry, you might want to mute me for a little bit. But I’m pretty confident that no one’s going to be muting me here pretty soon.
This question comes in — it’s a great one — it is an individual who says, “I have made significant changes in my diet. I went SANE and so many aspects of my health have completely changed for the better, which is wonderful.” She says then, “However, there are two issues I’m still having. I believe it’s related to hormones. One is hair loss/re-growth — so losing hair where we want to have hair and growing hair where we don’t want to have hair. This happened after having a baby.” Apparently, this family member has had four of them.
The second issue which has always been with her is acne — come and gone throughout her life; definitely related to hormones. Now that she is approaching forty, she’s seen some significant changes in her skin but it’s gotten worse. The big question is, “What foods trigger acne or skin issues or things like hair loss, hair re-growth and what can we do about it from a SANE perspective?” In fact, what is great here and the reason I wanted to highlight this question in this call is because, one, we all have skin so we can all benefit from this, no matter what. Two, this individual was cool enough to actually share with us some information that she was provided by a specialist that gives some very specific dietary recommendations.
Some of the dietary recommendations actually conflict with SANEity. Wow, what a great opportunity for us to talk about what we do when we hear conflicting and contrasting information and always making sure that we celebrate our primary care physicians and people that have firm medical degrees rather than people who call themselves specialists but, let’s be clear here, anyone can call themselves a specialist but what we really want to make sure to do in a SANE lifestyle — and this is what really makes your SANE Program different from any other program out there — is really focusing on peer-reviewed science and also taking a SANE approach to that science, meaning that, for instance, it is one hundred percent true that if we have high cholesterol, we could take statin medications.
Statin medications will lower our cholesterol but I hope and pray that anyone who would recommend statin medications to you would never present a statin to you as, “Hey, all a statin does, if you take it, is it’s going to lower your cholesterol. Done. That’s it.” Anything that seems that one-sided or sound-bitey, I promise, that’s the thing that’s been holding us back. That’s the thing that’s been holding us back as individuals and as a culture, is not looking at both sides of things in general but especially things with health. Statins — are they good or bad? That’s really not a topic for this week but I can promise you that taking statin medication does more than just lowering your total cholesterol.
If you take nothing else away from this week’s call other than to rock and roll in your step-by-step program and to make sure you’re getting the loving awesome support that you deserve in your Coaching and Support Group is that when you put something into your body, it doesn’t do one thing ever. There is no one food that causes acne. There is no one supplement you could take that reduces or that all it does is cause acne or all it does is reduce acne. That is not how your body works, I promise. Everything you ingest into your body, the science is perfectly clear. It has a constellation of effects.
What we want to do is we want to learn, we want to get an understanding of how our body works, how our brain works, how our hormones work. Again, not at a Ph.D. level but at enough of a level that we can handle and we can parse through all the confusing information out there. Honestly, my favorite part of this is so that we can personalize SANEity for ourselves because, just like we could never ever say, imagine if someone said to you, “Hey, the best outfit for every person to wear is a pink blouse and black pants,” you would say, “That is not the best outfit.” I mean, it might be a very fine outfit; it might look good on that individual; it might look good on millions of individuals.
We could say that wearing something above the waist and wearing something below the waist is a common characteristic of all good outfits so there are some common characteristics that we’re going to share in terms of what we wear and what we put on our bodies but there is no one best thing to put on our body and what looks good on one person may look bad on another person and what looks good in one situation — like what you might wear to a wedding — what might be good to wear at a wedding might be bad to wear at the beach. That exact same thing you put on your body in one context is good and in another context is bad.
There is a common thread, which is that, putting things on your body in public is probably a good idea unless you’re at a nude beach somewhere; then that would be inappropriate. The same thing applies to what we put in our body as what we put on our body. There are definitely common threads — non-starchy vegetables, nutrient-dense protein, whole food fats, low-fructose fruits. The common threads are SANEity — that which satisfies us, that which is unaggressive, that which is nutritious, and that which is inefficient — that which is SANE. That’s going to be helpful for all of us but we’ve got to customize it.
When we look to customize it for things like this — for example, what do we do in terms of acne? What do we do in terms of healing our skin? What do we do to help with these possible hormonal issues? The reason I just gave all that seemingly unrelated background is, it’s very easy. What actually happened to this individual is, they were given a list of foods and they said, “These foods can cause acne and these foods help to eliminate acne.” We need to be very, very careful about this. These types of recommendations are all over the Internet and they apply to way more than just acne.
We’ll see things, let’s say, for example, “This food causes this. This food causes that, period.” Again, it’s treating food like one thing maps perfectly to another thing and that is never, ever, ever the case. Even if there are foods, for example, that could possibly contribute to one bad thing, that same food may have other good elements to it. What we need to do is we need to find the right balance. That’s what I’m going to try to help you do today in this call and also cover some other things as well. This is a great case study.
In this specific case, what I can tell you is, there’s three major mental tools that I would advocate that you use any time that you are trying to target a specific health issue with lifestyle change. My overarching belief — and the overarching scientific evidence — is overwhelmingly clear that treating your body and your health and your wellbeing holistically will almost always yield better results. The first thing to think about is when we go into a thought process of, “I want to solve this issue with my body, whether that be my cholesterol levels; whether that be acne; whether that be hair growth in areas I don’t appreciate; whether it is my nails are brittle; or whether it is specifically fat on my underarms — just know that the more specific we try to make our goal in terms of “I want this specific consequence in my body,” the bigger the chance that we are going to get misled because, frankly, that’s just not how our body works. There is no way to target fat loss here. That doesn’t work. Our body can either be storing fat or can be burning fat globally. Due to various genetic and hormonal factors, we each store that fat in different places.
We can definitely, without a shadow of a doubt, we can globally heal our bodies, heal our brain, heal our metabolism, heal our hormones and we will see global benefit, period. With one hundred percent certainty, the research in your SANE Program and the research shared by your SANE-certified coaches and shared by me, this is research that will globally heal every single human being on the planet; I don’t care if you’re five years old and female or a hundred and five years old and male. We’re all homosapiens. We all have an incredibly similar genetic makeup.
There’s going to be fine nuances but if we tackle our overall health and our overall metabolic health, our overall psychological health, we will often times see better results in specific areas than if we targeted that specific area specifically because when we do that, what will happen is, we will — let’s use statins as an example. Statins are effective at lowering total cholesterol. If we had a mindset — and I use statins because now the science is just overwhelming around statins and a lot of people are either on statins or they know someone who’s on statins so it applies to them. Please note that everything I’m saying is not a specific recommendation about whether or not to go on or off statins; it’s just recapping the science around them.
Statins are a very common standard of care recommendation for lowering total cholesterol. Now, that is a very specific recommendation for a very specific problem — total cholesterol. Within that specific recommendation for a specific problem is an assumption that high total cholesterol is meaningful; meaning that, if you have high total cholesterol, it should just be lowered. There is also an assumption that having lower total cholesterol is more advantageous than anything else that taking a statin does to you. Without a shadow of a doubt, there are cases the scientific literature has shown where the specific treatment of taking a statin in a specific case for a specific individual, the benefits may outweigh the harm.
The positive effects may outweigh the negative effects. But what I can promise you is that there are myriad effects from taking statins. If we’re not conscious of all the different things that taking statins can do to us and what we think we’re doing is, we just take this medication and it just solves this problem and we just eat this food to solve this problem and we just eat this vitamin to solve this problem. We think we’ve got this very precise arsenal to target these very specific issues but that’s not at all what’s happening.
In fact, those different things interact. When they interact, we can start seeing totally new issues crop up. It’s a little bit like if you are familiar — and if you’re not familiar with it, I’ll explain it real quickly — there’s a story in the Bible called the Tower of Babel. In this story, I believe — I’m not super familiar with it — but I believe from what I remember when I was younger, the Tower of Babel was an effort of people to build a tower that they wanted to show that they were more intelligent than God. Again, this is not a religious conversation; it’s a story. Please just take this for what it’s worth; no judgment here about your belief system.
It was a tower. They were saying, “Hey, we are going to build a tower to the heavens because we are more intelligent than God. We are supreme, knowing we’re going to build a tower.” Of course, the tower crumbles and it’s not good. We have to be very careful when we’re not looking at our health to not construct a dietary or a supplement or a medical Tower of Babel. Meaning that, we try to build these very specific purposes and we stack them on top of each other and we’re like, “Oh well, I take vitamin E pills to do this and then I take this to do this and then I take these three pills to do that and then I drink this magic thing that I got at the grocery store to do this” and then eventually it all kind of comes crumbling down because it’s so complicated; it’s so nuanced; and it doesn’t give us the results we want.
In some ways, it really does map back to that Tower of Babel analogy because, regardless of your belief system, we live in an amazing complicated world. Whether or not we came from intelligent design or whether or not we came from a process of evolution, in either case, we are the result of something amazing. We are the result of either a divine being or we are the result of millions and millions of years of optimization. In both cases, we are beautifully complex and we adapted in an environment where this “take this to solve that” and “know these five complicated things” and “if you mix them in this way, you get this result”, none of that existed prior to all of the health problems and issues that we face today. Literally, think about that. Back, a hundred years ago, we ate food. When I say food, I mean food; I don’t mean packaged and processed nonsense.
We had ridiculously lowered rates of heart disease, obesity, diabetes, depression, anxiety — all these things; even factoring in age, lower lifespan, da-da-da-da — it doesn’t matter; even factoring in our current toxins, so on and so forth. Basically, the more complicated we’ve made this, the harder we’ve tried, the less well we’ve done. That’s because we’ve gotten away from that holistic approach and we’ve tried to say, “Look, I’m going to continue to eat.” We don’t say this because we are SANE here together but if you look at most people, the standard American diet consists of about forty to sixty percent non-food — packaged and processed nonsense.
An individual in the common case is just going to keep eating that forty to sixty percent junk processed inSANE food and then they’re going to say, “Oh, give me the specific herbal supplement” or “Give me the specific medication” or “I’m just going to eat more of this one food or just eliminate this one other food.” That’s not the ticket. The ticket is to focus on the big things that we know work and to do them to the hilt to focus all of our effort on getting those things right that we know work and then, as we do those big things, then we move on to the small things. Let me give you a specific example of what I mean.
Here, for acne, and then of course I’ll take follow-up questions to talk about it for issues in general — this individual suffering with acne. She went to go see something, did some research on the Internet, and she got this big old list. I’m looking at it right now. It is this big old list and it says “reduce or eliminate” and then it just lists all these foods and it even includes some foods that we would generally call very, very, very SANE. Then it actually recommends some supplements and it becomes very, very complicated very, very quickly.
What I don’t want to say is that everything on this sheet is wrong because it’s not and you can’t see the sheet so that’s not particularly useful. But what you will see on this sheet and on any other list of recommendations for any specific issue or disease is, you’re going to see some things in common. It’s in these common things that we find the nugget of gold. If you look at any — and this is so important — this is so important and it will so change your life. If you don’t do this but if you’re on the Internet and you just randomly search for, like, the “Top Ten things To do with your diet to reduce acne” or the “Top Ten things to do with your diet to reduce your risk of cancer” or the “Top Ten things to do to reduce your [insert anything bad]”, you’re going to see a couple of things in common.
One, do not eat processed starches and sweets, period.
Two, do not eat processed hydrogenated oils.
Three, eat way more non-starchy vegetables.
Four, focus on nutrient-dense humanely-raised safe non-toxic sources of protein.
These common denominators are so important and are so universally beneficial. What happens? What happens is, we are given these giant lists. It’s true. Even in this list that our SANE family member was given, everything I just mentioned in terms of getting rid of and adding is in here but it’s buried in all this other complexity and nonsense. It starts to be like, “Oh my goodness, I have to do all of these things. I’m so overwhelmed. I’m going to do nothing.” What we need to do instead is say, “All right, let’s double down on our core SANEity.”
Let’s not let complexity and let’s not let the mindset of “make this one specific change take this one specific supplement, take this one specific pill, eat this one specific food, to get this one specific result. We have to free ourselves from that mindset. I promise you, I promise you that if you free yourself from that mindset and take a more holistic approach, you will get a wholly different result and a wholly better result.
What we would say here in this case is we would say, “There are absolutely foods that contribute to acne.” But you know what? Those are the same foods that contribute to everything else that is causing us to suffer. Foods that are high in unnatural oils, that are processed, starches, sweets — things like that — they absolutely contribute to acne and they also absolutely contribute to everything else. What can we do to help get rid of acne or just to heal our skin in general? There are some specific recommendations such as increasing our intake of probiotics but that’s global. That’s just not going to take care of our skin; we recommend eating fiber, prebiotics, probiotics globally because it helps to keep our system in check and it helps to balance out our hormones.
Even more importantly, you know what’s not on this list at all? What is so commonly ignored is stress. It’s absolutely stress. I happen to know that for this member of our Ignite family, while she has dramatically increased the SANEity of her eating, recently there has been some tough times and her stress level has skyrocketed. So now look at what could happen to this individual? I bet you’ve been in a situation like this before. You might even be in this type of situation right now. Stress levels have gone up or maybe sleep levels have gone down or maybe we’ve become injured so we’re not able to exercise. That has caused some health concern to flare up. We then ask someone about it and they tell us to make all these different changes to our diet — all these different changes to our diet that make us feel overwhelmed and confused.
What’s interesting is, we have actually — the thing that really changed recently for us is probably stress or it might even be something unrelated to our diet but what we’re told is to change our diet and we’re told to change our diet in a very confusing, specific way. That very confusing specific way — what it does is it increases our stress levels. Now what we have is an individual who is particularly stressed and going through a hard time. That stress is truly the underlying cause.
If there is an issue that you have faced your entire life, whether it be unhealthy cholesterol levels, whether it’s anxiety, whether it’s depression, whether it’s acne, whether it’s having abnormally low sex hormone levels — if this is an issue that you’ve battled for your entire life and then it flares up, I can almost guarantee you that stress has a huge role in there because we don’t, as a culture, appreciate how much inappropriate stress we’re under and the impact it has on our bodies. Then often times, the manifestations of stress such as acne, such as anxiety, depression, weight gain, are then treated and the treatment causes more stress. It causes more complexity in our lives. It causes more confusion. If what we did instead was say, “Let’s stick to simplicity and self love and focusing on the big things,” —
One, focusing on simplicity — a.k.a. non-starchy vegetables, nutrient-dense protein, whole food fats, low-fructose fruits; in that order — getting at least six hours of high quality sleep per night, getting loving support constantly in your SANE Support Group or wherever you can get it but especially in your SANE Support Group, moving our body intelligently — so moving as frequently as we can, doing safe restorative activity, and then a little bit of high-intensity but safe eccentric activity. If we do those things, the global benefit and the global level of stress reduction will radically transform our lives.
If we’re seeing a flare-up in a chronic condition, those flare-ups are almost always tied to our stress level because when you perceive that you are under an abnormally high amount of stress, that stress is literally taking every aspect of your biology and it’s tying a hand behind it’s back. Whether it’s neurological function, whether it’s sexual function, whether it’s hormonal production, whether it’s digestion, whether it’s your metabolism, when we perceive that we are under an immense amount of stress, anything that you struggle with is going to flare up. Why? Because when you are sane and SANE, your body is beautifully fueled so its hands are not tied behind its back.
It’s able to ward off those free radicals or it’s able to help keep your hormones in balance, your brain chemicals in balance so that you have a steady mood, but when stress comes in — the reason stress is so important, even eating inSANE foods — that’s a stressor; inappropriate exercise — that’s a stressor; all the psychological things we experience — that’s a stressor; watching the news and hearing about all the terrible things that are happening all the time — that’s all stressors. Your body just takes that and it’s just like tying its arms behind its back and that then causes — whether it’s acne, gout, anxiety, depression, belly fat gain, whatever — that then flares up.
What we need to do is, no matter what — no matter what — please, if there’s one thing you take away from this kind of rant now, is, I promise that to cure what ails you, the overarching principle has to be increase self compassion and decrease self-imposed stress. Those are really two sides of the same coin. The reason I say self-imposed stress is because there’s been wonderful research done that shows, without a shadow of a doubt, how much we can control our perception of stress. There are of course situations — loss of a job, loss of someone we love in our life, illness, sickness, catastrophic events, presidential elections — that objectively are stressful.
No matter what, we choose our response to that level of stress and it’s very difficult to do on our own so that’s why we need to have a support system and that’s why your SANE Coaching and Support Group is so important. What so often happens, what so often is done to us in this specific case for this individual, she sought help for this condition — acne. What happened? It stressed her out. The advice that was given to her, the recommendations that were given to her, increased her stress level. This is what we call — here’s a fun technical term for you — it’s called iatrogenics.
Iatrogenics is — the Greek given is “caused by the healer.” So when we seek help — weight loss is a perfect example but so are other things. If what we do and if what we’re told to do stresses us out, like “Go get on the scale and weigh yourself constantly and here’s this food list of this detailed — “I’m so stressed” — that will make the issue worse, period. Because maybe we can fight through the stress for a little bit but we don’t want to solve this problem for a little bit; we want to solve it for a long time.
The overarching principle that I need you to take away from this rant — and then I’m going to answer some questions — is, the first principle of long-term healing — there’s two things. The first principle is, it is impossible to “just” get rid of your anxiety or “just” get rid of your acne or “just” burn belly fat or to “just” increase the robustness of your nails. That doesn’t happen. If it does happen, it’s temporary. If it does happen, it’s probably causing some other problem. The first principle is that we have to focus globally. What’s beautiful about that is when we do focus globally, it forces us to focus on the big things. That’s the second principle here because if we’re going to focus globally, what we can say is, we have I think four but maybe five — because I didn’t plan this beforehand — big levers that we can work towards.
One is the simple SANE dietary changes — non-starchy vegetables, nutrient-dense protein, whole food fats, and low-fructose fruits in that order.
Two is intelligent movement of our bodies, doing as much restorative activity as we can and then doing some smart higher intensity but safe activity.
Three is rest and recovery. This is ensuring that we’re getting proper sleep. If you’ve never tried meditation, it’s very helpful. Sleep is also extremely important.
Four is going to be our psychological health through support and getting support and making ourselves vulnerable to loving supportive people that are qualified to help us. That’s what your SANE Coaching and Support Group is for. You take a holistic approach because you want to solve the whole problem; not just target this one and you don’t want to target one thing and cause fifteen other things to happen.
Two, the way you do that is through those four primary mechanisms. By doing that, you will automatically reduce your stress level because you don’t have this giant “do this, not that but what about this?” in this context because you have this overarching premise which is, if doing X — I don’t care who tells you — it’s me telling you. If eating more vegetables gives you a panic attack, don’t eat more vegetables because a panic attack is way worse for you than eating more vegetables but what I think we’d love to do is we’d love to show you how eating more vegetables doesn’t have to cause a panic attack because it can be very nice but that one principle of gradual self love and stress reduction and solving seemingly specific problems which aren’t specific problems — they’re usually symptoms of a much deeper problem — through just getting back to basics and rocking those basics consistently; all of them.
Is the basic SANE principles for eating in line? Are you at double-digit servings of non-starchy vegetables? Are you at three to four servings of nutrient-dense clean protein? Are you getting the majority of your calories from whole food fats? Are you doing that so you’re avoiding toxic processed starches and sweets? Are you getting adequate sleep and high quality sleep? Are you following the exercise guidelines? Are you getting the loving support you need?
If the answer to any of those questions is no, throw all the complexity out the window and focus on those basics. They will heal the whole system. That will not only help with the acne or help with any specific issue but it will cause a constellation of changes in your body that will make that lifestyle easier and easier and easier so that your body can defend you naturally against all these specific problems.
Think about it — this is another analogy. I’m sorry I love analogies but this is so important and it can literally save your life. I don’t know much about cars. I’m not particularly automotively inclined but I do know there are a couple things that are really important. For example, you’ve got to have air in your tires; that’s very important. You’ve got to have fuel in your gas tank; that’s very important. You’ve got to change your oil every once in a while; also very important. Let’s just do those three things.
Let’s imagine we didn’t do one of those or all three of them or we just focused on keeping the windshield of our car very clean. We actually kept the outside of our car very clean — just taking it to the car wash every day, focused on detailing it, getting nice rims put on it, really making sure the interior of our car was nice and clean. But then it started to make kind of weird sounds and have these very seemingly specific issues. Those specific issues are going to be caused if we have these chronic low level — we don’t have air in the tires, we don’t have fuel in the gas tank, we don’t get our oil changed — we’re going to see issues crop up.
It seems like they should have a specific cause. It’s like, “Why is my car making this noise? I didn’t hit a pothole. Nothing specific happened.” However, we’ve had these chronic underlying problems which may have been taking place for years and most of us unfortunately have been given misinformation for decades so we see these specific symptoms crop up, we look for a specific solution, but those specific symptoms are really symptoms of a chronic underlying problem that are the result of us being given misinformation so we don’t need to find a specific solution to that specific problem; we need to go back and put air in our tires, we need to get our oil changed, and we need to keep our fuel tank full of premium top quality fuel.
The beautiful thing is, unlike a car, because a car is mechanical so it doesn’t actually heal itself, the key thing that differentiates living organisms from mechanical things, there’s nothing you can do to a car that’s going to make it heal itself, at least not yet. There’s none of that. The way your body works, which is so brilliant, the only way we ever heal is if our body heals itself. If we break a bone, how does it get better? It gets better because we created an environment in which our body can heal itself.
If we lift weights and we do resistance training, we break down our muscle tissue, what happens? The muscle tissue grows back stronger. If we cut our skin, what happens? It grows back. It heals. When we give our body the global raw material it needs, our beautiful biology will heal us. The number one thing that stands in our way is when we let unnecessary complexity stress us out, I cannot stress — I cannot stress — the point here strong enough, which is, nailing the basics to allowing your biology to heal you and then giving yourself the time and the self love to let your body do its thing. It will change your life, period.
All right, that’s a lot of stuff. Let me take a quick look at some of the questions that came in because I know that was a long, long answer but it was hopefully helpful. Oh my goodness, let’s see what we got here.
CeCe asks, “Does caffeine/free green tea have the same metabolic effect?” Yes, it does. That’s an easy one. We can check that off the list.
Missy asks, “Please tell me if green beans are acceptable or not? Since we’ve avoiding legumes, I’m concerned about green beans.” Missy, they are not non-starchy vegetables; they’re legumes. Within the same framework, I believe we say zero to two servings of legumes are fine per day but they’re not a non-starchy vegetable. Please don’t count them towards your non-starchy vegetable goals; you’d be doing yourself a disservice.
Suzanne asks, “Should I stop statins? I haven’t been eating. Why?” Suzanne, you should not do anything without consulting with your primary care physician. Please, please, please check with your primary care physician on anything related to medication. Very, very, very important. Hopefully, that is helpful.
Some other questions that came in here. Let me just do a quick tech check to make sure that everything is looking good. All right, cool. Looks like it’s looking good.
Next thing here again. Please do let me know if you have questions about the bigger topic we just talked about. The next thing that I wanted to get into was emotional eating because I know this is a big thing that we all face, myself included. I think there is a very unique SANE approach to this and this is a great forum to discuss it.
Emotional eating — what’s the deal with emotional eating? Here’s my controversial statement about emotional eating. Unless you are an athlete or a robot or a physique competitor who only eats to fuel your body — and there are people like this; there are people who just say, “I’m going to eat chicken breasts and broccoli and weigh all my food and measure all my food because I’m going to get onstage in three weeks and I want to see veins in my abs.” That’s all good. But for everyone else, eating is not only a source of fuel and a source of energy and a source of life but it’s also an enjoyable experience.
In fact, there has been psychological research done which was actually from the University of Chicago, a gentleman by the name of Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who is the pioneer of the concept of flow. You’ve probably heard of that term before. They did something called the experiencing sampling method and they asked many, many people across many, many cultures — this was back in the day — they just asked them randomly throughout the day, “How do you feel? What are you doing? What makes you happy?” Eating food was universally one of the happiest times.
Eating is one of the most wonderful things we can do and it is an enjoyable emotional activity. The way that emotional eating is commonly portrayed is that we shouldn’t do it and that it’s bad. We all eat emotionally all the time. The key thing is to eat emotionally sanely and SANEly. Sanely means that we need to look at what the cause is of our emotional eating — again, it kind of goes back to the global point we made before. If we have a boss at work who treats us like dirt and that triggers emotional eating, the problem is not emotional eating; the problem is the boss at work that’s causing this problem. If the commute stresses you out or your kid is being crazy and that just stresses you out, your problem actually isn’t emotional eating; the problem is that cause of stress.
Again, the treatment that we would be prescribed is just willpower — stop emotional eating. What we’re doing when we emotionally eat is, we’re saying there’s a stressor. That stressor causes the state in our brain and our biology and when we eat food, the food reverses that. We have a stressor; the stressor puts us in an uncomfortable state; we then use food to ameliorate that uncomfortable state. The problem isn’t emotional eating; the problem is twofold — one is what is causing us to get in that state to begin with and what can we do about that and the second thing is then, what types of foods are we using to elicit emotions in our body?
One of the coolest things about a SANE lifestyle is that every single flavor ever is available on a SANE lifestyle — sweet, salty, fatty, bitter — all of it; we just make SANE substitutions. There’s over 1,400 recipes on the site; there’s beautiful desserts — all flavors are available to us; and we never need to be hungry. That in and of itself helps. We can help you twenty-four/seven/three-sixty-five in the SANE Support Group to help you find SANE substitutions. If there is something that you do like to emotionally eat on, I promise you that we can find a SANE substitution for it.
More important is to figure out — and we can help you with this as well — what is causing that because the answer, I promise you — if you cut your hand and you just pump bandages on your hand to the point where you’ve got this big clump of bandages on your hand and someone was like, “Look, your problem is you can’t put your shirt on because you’ve got a clump of bandages on your hand and your shirt doesn’t go over the bandages,” the bandages aren’t the problem; the problem is that you’ve got this big old cut on your hand and we need to figure out a way to get rid of that cut, period.
Please, again, going back to the very first point, if you’re struggling with emotional eating, I promise you that further stressing yourself out and saying that “I’m bad because I’m emotionally eating” will not help. It will make the problem worse. You say, “Okay, Jonathan, I appreciate that. That’s very nice of you. So what do I do instead?”
What you do is two things, very specifically. If you are struggling right now with emotional eating or in the past, as soon as it happens, period, as soon as it happens, you pull out your phone; you pull out a tablet; you pull out a computer; you go anything connected to the Internet, you go into your SANE Coaching and Support Group and you say, “I am feeling extremely sad/anxious/[fill in the emotion] and I’m feeling that way because of [blank].” If you don’t want to share everything, that’s fine, but give a high level understanding. “I feel [blank] because of [blank]. Now, I want to do [blank].”
First, the act of doing that — the act of engaging your conscious human mind — if a dog gets mad, a dog can’t be like, “Huh, stop. I’m mad. I’m going to go get on my tablet and post in the Support Group and go get some help.” It can’t do that. That’s because the dog doesn’t have the part of our brain called the neocortex which is very unique to humans. One thing we do share with dogs and every other animal is the part of our brain called our amygdale. This is where our emotions come from so a dog can get angry; a human can get angry; but what we can do because we’re awesome is we can say, “I’m feeling angry.”
Traditionally, I’m feeling angry/I’m feeling sad/I’m feeling depressed/I’m feeling anxious, I will eat inSANE foods. Now what we’re going to do is, “I’m feeling sad/depressed/anxious/blah,” I’m going to get in the Support Group, post something, engage my brain for no other reason because what that is going to do is when you’re feeling that emotion, this part of your brain — the part we share with animals — that’s driving; that’s in control. But you say, “Okay, get on the computer, start typing, start thinking,” the focus of your brain is going to shift up here.
It’s going to go into the rational part of your brain; not the emotional part of your brain. Not that there’s anything wrong; emotions are what make us human; it’s what makes life worth living. But in this moment, you’re experiencing what’s called an emotional hijack. That is the technical term for it. The number one way to treat an emotional hijack is to have something that you can do that will flip you out of that emotional state. That is what your SANE Coaching and Support Group can do one hundred percent.
“I’m feeling X because of Y and that makes me want to do Z.” Please write that down. Maybe that’s the homework for this week because I think we all face emotional eating challenges sometimes. “I’m feeling Emotion X because of Stimulus Y and that makes me want to do Eat Z.” The reason that is a powerful format is because, one, “I’m feeling this emotion”; I guarantee you you’re not the only person feeling that emotion so we need to get you some empathy and we need to get you some support.
Two, “I’m feeling that way because of [blank].” If we can identify that blank, just identifying the problem is a huge step in the right direction to avoiding emotional eating so if we can avoid that problem or if we can even be conscious of that problem, it can help us to overcome it. “That makes me want to do [blank].” If it’s eat – just pound chocolate brownies, we might say, “Hey, so I understand that you’re feeling depressed. I’m feeling depressed too. I’m going through these challenges.” Cool, we make a connection on the Support Group.
“It sounds like you’re feeling depressed because your boss is treating you terribly. Man, what can we do about that?” Because of that, you’ll want to eat some chocolate brownies. “Well, it sounds like you’re craving chocolate; it sounds like you’re craving something sweet. What SANE substitutions can we make so that if you have this urge, you have a safe SANE alternative to address it with because, chances are, you aren’t going to change your boss immediately overnight and you’re not going to be able to rewire your brain to react to your boss differently but you are going to say, instead of going straight to the inSANE food, I am going to go straight to the SANE Support Group.
I’m going to express myself. I’m going to switch my focus. I’m going to change my brain from being emotionally hijacked to being supported intellectually and emotionally and lovingly in the SANE Support Group and I’m going to check in and I’m going to get a plan of action put together to, one, help me avoid the negative stimulus; two, if it’s unavoidable, then I have to find ways to deal with it proactively so that it affects me less. I’m sure we’ve all experienced the following: if you’re hungry and you’re tired and you need to go to the bathroom and something small happens, it can make us very, very angry.
Something minor happens — someone honks their horn at you and you have to go to the bathroom and you’re tired and you’re hungry — immediate road rage. Maybe if not immediate road rage, certainly I think you can agree that if you did not have to go to the bathroom, you weren’t hungry, and you were well rested and someone honked their horn at you — I mean, that’s actually a great example.
Imagine you have someone driving your car and you’ve got someone in your passenger seat who you love and admire and is awesome; you’re not hungry; you’re super well-fed; you’re super well-rested; you just saw a hilarious movie; someone honks their horn at you. What do you do? You probably go, “Who’s this guy over here honking their horn at me?” Not only does it not bother you but you’re literally laughing about it. Now take that same situation. No one’s in the passenger seat; you’ve had a really hard day; you need to go to the bathroom; you’re tired; you’re hungry; someone honks their horn at you. Same stimulus; radically different result.
So what we want to do is we want to get that person in your passenger seat and let us — your SANE family, your SANE coaches — let us be that passenger in your passenger seat. Let your SANE eating, your eccentric exercise, your rest, your meditation — let that be the funny movie, the food in your belly so that you’re full and so that even if you can’t escape your teenager who’s stressing you out or your boss who’s stressing you out, you’re not hungry and tired and crabby and alone; you’re full, you’re satisfied, you’re supported so that the SANE external stressor causes less internal stress. Then when it does cause internal stress, there’s less of it. Then you pop over to the Support Group and then we help you find a substitution. You’re knocking it out. Hopefully, that is helpful. It’s a big issue and I really do hope that helps because, I promise you, that just stressing yourself out more is not going to be the ticket.
Let me check back here to the question.
“Please repeat homework.” Okay, I will definitely do that here. Missy says, “Green beans are a legume.” Green beans are a legume. If there are any questions about what fits in what category, please just again pop into your step-by-step program. I think it’s in the second course in your orientation, Seven Days to SANE. It breaks down all your foods by category and of course your SANE-certified coaches are able to help with that as well. It’s covered there, which is awesome.
Cece says, “Please repeat the homework.” The homework is — and usually I do this at the end but I thought of it just now — so the homework is, if you face emotional eating this week or any week thereafter, I’m going to give you a very specific recommendation — and I usually don’t do this — but here is a very specific recommendation that’s backed by oodles and oodles of science. Please get out a pen and paper if you don’t have one ready. This will be very helpful for you.
When you experience what’s called an emotional hijack or something that just causes you to get severe — angry/sad/anxious — traditionally, the way you would handle that is by “emotional eating”. Instead of either emotional eating or just trying to willpower through it which will eventually exhaust you and then something worse will happen, I want you to go to the SANE Support Group, start a new post or go into your journal — actually, don’t go into your journal because I’m going to say, make a new post. In that post, you’re going to write your post in the following format. “I am feeling very [blank] (whatever emotion you’re feeling) because [blank].” “I’m feeling this emotion because of this reason.”
Take a second. I really want you to think about this because that’s part of what makes this work. You’re going to overcome that emotional hijack. Chances are, you might be not — emotional hijack usually happens when something bad happens or something undesirable happens and then we don’t have someone or something to buffer that. If something really bad happens to us but our best friend is next to us and our best friend can just be like, “Hey, it’s cool, man. That was really inappropriate of that person to do to us but it’s okay.” That in and of itself can help us.
But if we don’t have that right now or right in the moment, we feel stressed; we have that happen; emotional hijack. We need to, one, get support. We need to not be alone. When someone’s going through extreme stress and heartache, I think we all know, the last thing for that person is to be alone. But we don’t just want to be around people; we want to be around people who support us and share our values. We need to do that in a way that’s going to shift our focus from our emotional hijack to our neocortex or the intellectual part of our brain. How do we do that? Emotional hijack — SANE Support Group — coaching and support group.
I am feeling very [blank] because of [blank]. Think about this. What really caused it? Dig in. What is the underlying cause? “I’m feeling [blank] because of [deep underlying cause] and now I want to — specific; again, please don’t just say “eat” because that’s awesome. Like, great, let’s eat a bunch of non-starchy veggies. Chances are though, you’re not like, “Oh, I had a terrible day at work. I just want to crush some broccoli.” Because if you do, that’s awesome. You can eat all the broccoli you want all day but by identifying very specifically the emotion you’re feeling, the cause of that emotion, and what you want to do to address it, we can help you. Your SANE family members and your SANE coaches can help you with each and every one of those points.
So next time you have that emotional hijack, we are here for you as your SANE family and your SANE-certified coaches. “I am feeling [blank] because of [blank] that makes me want to eat [blank],” where the last blank cannot be “food”; it has to be very specific because then we’ll also dig into, “Why that specifically?” Is it specifically ice cream? Why ice cream? Why not toast? Why not donuts? Even just thinking about it — thinking about it intellectually in a supportive loving place is going to transform the way you address that situation. So hopefully that’s helpful. That is the homework. Hopefully, that is helpful and let us move on to the next question. Please let me know if you have questions about that one. It’s a super important topic so I really appreciate you bringing it up.
Some more questions came in and this had to do with sickness.
“Should we do SANE differently when sick? Lay off exercise? When should you resume again?” I loved this question because it ties into everything that we’ve talked about here today. I know some of this is like, “Jonathan is just going crazy. What is up with this guy? He is insane?” I promise you, there’s a method to the madness. That’s why I say, “Let the call wash over you.” Maybe watch it back again because you’re going to see it all ties together. It all ties together. It’s very easy. I feel very blessed and very fortunate to have worked with such amazing SANE-certified coaches and so many amazing researchers over the past fifteen years because when the truth — it does; it all fits together. It fits together beautifully because it’s true and it makes sense. That’s the cool thing. That’s why it doesn’t contradict itself. Anyway, thank you for being here because it’s always — this is the highlight of my week for sure.
“How do we do SANE differently when we’re sick? Do we lay off exercise? When should we resume again?” Extremely important question because it ties back to stress. When we’re sick, which in this case, let’s say we have the flu because we know from previous calls, if we’re suffering from diabetes, if we’re suffering from chronic weight gain, that is a sickness. It’s something that we need to treat as a medical issue. It’s a recognized medical issue by the American Medical Association. Metabolic dysfunction is a major underlying disease and that’s why we need to focus on healing.
When we understand that what’s going on in our brain and in our hormones and in our digestive system is a sickness, it’s a disease, and that disease and sickness has been caused by the toxic environment that we live in and the misinformation that we’ve been given about weight loss and health. Once we understand that, we’re certainly not going to starve our way to health. You’re not going to get better if you have the flu by starving yourself; we know that. We know that we’re not going to get better if we need to heal from stress.
Should you do SANE differently when we’re sick like lay off exercise? Even in that question, there is a spot-on assumption that if I’m sick, if I’ve got the flu, I probably shouldn’t go run five miles. Should I? Exactly. When you have the flu, your body has got that hand tied behind its back. We’re under stress. There are invaders. Whether it’s bacteria or viruses, there are invaders in our body and our body is trying to fight those off. When we exercise too much, when we eat inappropriate inSANE foods, this causes stress. It causes a form of sickness. Diabetes is a form of sickness. Metabolic dysregulation is a form of sickness. Absolutely, if we have another condition on top of that such as the flu, such as a cold, the last thing we need is more stress. We need to replace stress with self love, period.
I want to be very clear. I want to be very clear. When I say “self love,” I don’t mean, “Hey, I’m 350 pounds. I am tired all the time. I get made fun of daily. But you know what? I accept that.” That’s not self love to me because we’re talking about self love; not resignation. All of us deserve better than to be tired all day. All of us deserve better than to die twenty years sooner than we should. All of us deserve to see our grandkids and just to be here and to fully live life. Depending on your belief system, we only get one shot at this. True self love is to say not, “I’m okay with being type 2 diabetic” but rather, “I’m type 2 diabetic and I’m not going to get better by shaming myself. I’m not going to get better by further stressing myself out. I deserve better. I deserve to spend the time and the effort needed to heal.”
If you have the flu, if you were sick in the traditional sense of the word, hopefully no one who matters in your life is going to say, “Mary, you have 102 degree fever. You are so selfish for sleeping a little bit longer and taking care of yourself. I mean, how selfish is that? That is so selfish, Mary. I cannot believe that you, with 102 degree fever, would have the audacity to prioritize getting eight hours of sleep per night.” Can you imagine someone acting that way?
What does the voice in our brain do to us — at least me; and maybe you’ve had the experience too; I bet you have because I hear a lot of people — I’ve been doing this for a long time where, if we are prediabetic, if we do struggle with long-term weight gain, we have a disease. I swear to you that you are worth taking the time and the effort required to eat an abundance of non-starchy vegetables, nutrient-dense protein, whole food fats, or low-fructose fruits to go into your Coaching and Support Group every day — every day — even if it’s just for five minutes. Going into your step-by-step program; taking that time — that is not being selfish. You deserve better. The world deserves the best version of you.
“Should you do SANE differently when you are sick?” Yes, you should. One, we need to all recognize — and this is not bad news; this is good news — once we all recognize that the reason we are here now is that we have been lied to and we are living less of a life than we’re capable of. We are all facing a certain form of sickness that’s been imposed upon us by shame and starvation and ridiculous body image messages and by starches and sweets and toxic crap that’s been marketed to us as healthy for years. That has made us all sick, twenty-four/seven/three-sixty-five.
Then occasionally, we get extra sick. We get the flu to the extent that we are currently suffering from a disease, to the extent that we are currently suffering from sickness, to the extent that you are suffering right now. More suffering equals more self love, period. You deserve it. The people who love you will support you in doing that. If they don’t, we’ve got to ask a question. It’s probably bigger than what we’re in here to do but we are all in the process of healing. When we take on that mindset, it frees us.
I know so many people, whether they’re parents or whether they’re super — whatever they’re dialed into — I don’t know if they’re like, “I’m super passionate but my family –“ or “I’m super passionate about the sport” or “I’m super passionate about this job” or “I’m super passionate about all those things.” “I don’t have the time to eat this way” or “I don’t have the time to sleep more.” You’re not being selfish.
You’re not being selfish; you’re healing. If you had the flu, I hope intuitively you would know that you’re not being selfish or you’re not misspending time by sleeping a little bit more; by taking in a lot of fluids because we know that if we’re sick, we’re not really living our lives and not really anything else matters until we get back our health. We need to take that mindset on globally, period. We need to give ourselves permission to do that and it’s not being selfish.
It’s the most selfless thing you can do because you at your best is what we need in this world. The solution to all the problems you’re facing and that the people you love are facing and that the world is facing is that we don’t have enough people that are fully alive. We’ve got a lot of people who, I think it was Thoreau maybe, I don’t know, he said, “We’re living lives of quiet desperation.” So many of us — think about that term — “quiet desperation.”
Yes, you should do SANE differently when you are sick. It should be a top priority because every other priority in your life will be better served when you are at your best. There’s actually — you’ve probably heard of this guy named Aristotle. A long time ago, Aristotle has a really cool definition of self love. If you do want to do a search on the Internet that will be helpful, search for “Aristotle and self love.” Just type those words in together. Aristotle has a really cool definition of self love.
Basically, he makes an argument that to take care of oneself and to be the best version of oneself is the most selfless thing that we can do because it allows us to best serve the world and to serve those around us because when we are at our best — I hate to use this because everyone uses it — but what do they say to you on an airplane? In case of an oxygen issue or depressurization, put on your own oxygen mask first, then put on the oxygen mask of people around you.
If you’re sick, whether it’s the flu, whether or not it’s metabolic dysregulation, whether or not it’s anxiety, whether or not it’s depression, or whether or not it’s just the suboptimal life that all of us face because of the toxic nonsense that we’ve been exposed to for the past forty years, putting your oxygen mask on first is not selfish; it is selfless because it will allow you to do everything in your life better. Should you do SANE differently when you’re sick? Yes. It should be on the top of your priority list because every other priority will fall into place so much more simply when you’re eating. Your exercise, your sleep, your social support, and your self love are on lock.
I know that’s a lot to cover those five categories but that’s why we focus on the big things. We focus on the big things because we know that we can’t do everything and we don’t need to do everything. We need to get the big things right in the big categories and enjoy amazing long term benefits as a result. That one got to me a little bit because that is a big issue I hear people dealing with all the time, all the time, all the time.
Let’s see. We’ve got fifteen minutes left so please, if you do have some questions, please send them in now. I know I’ve been going off a little bit so far here but hopefully it’s been helpful. Sometimes I get really dialed into these topics and I know that they have a huge opportunity to change your life so I hope it’s been helpful. Please let me know if you’ve got some follow-up questions. We do have some time here at the end.
Laura Scowgie actually posted something in the Support Group recently which was really cool. She loved the idea of — obviously we are always after whole foods, focusing on whole foods — however there are foods that are even super foods. You’ve probably heard of acai berries and there’s usually some sort of magical fruit — whether it’s goji or mangosteen or acai berries or even blueberries or pomegranates. You hear kale, which isn’t a fruit but, kale or shard or you hear these certain foods that are celebrated as more than just foods. They’re defined as super foods.
“Is that a real thing and can we talk about maybe one super food per week?” We absolutely can. One of the reasons I just haven’t done this in the past is I didn’t want anyone to get the impression that this was any sort of sales pitch or anything along those lines. Please know that this isn’t. People always ask, “Jonathan, what do you think about supplements? What does the science say about supplements? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” There is no supplement that will do for you what whole foods will do.
What’s cool is, there are not only whole foods like spinach but there are foods, say, thin cell wall chlorella or certain forms of mushrooms or certain fruits which are not available at your grocery store and are — it’s like what supplement should be. When people talk about supplements, they’re like, “This thing is super powerful. It’s extra powerful.” Well, there are foods, super foods, that are extra extra powerful. Of course, we do provide those in the SANE Store, store.SANESolution.com.
Laura asked if I could cover one of these per week. This week, I wanted to cover actually my favorite, which is Garden In My Glass, which is something that we actually spent a huge amount of time putting together. What it is, is it is a combination of over twenty of the most therapeutic super foods on the planet. I strongly, strongly recommend it as something that you could use to help heal yourself. Now, if finances are an issue, again, it’s not like you can’t heal your body without Garden In My Glass.
Look, I promise you, clearly Garden In My Glass is not the solution to the obesity epidemic because we didn’t have an obesity epidemic prior to Garden In My Glass existing. But what we do have now, we do have an obesity epidemic; we do have this chronic underlying inflammation in our brain and in our hormones and in our gut; and we have a severely depleted farming system where we can go out of our way to eat vegetables. You know what? We’ve got crazy lifestyles; we’ve got soil depletion. Some of us might find faster results or better results if we can augment the foods we find at our grocery store with foods that we can’t find at our grocery store — things like acai, mangosteen, thin cell wall chlorella, spirulina, wheat grass, so on and so forth.
Sometimes people say that’s overwhelming, “it’s too much, I’m on a budget, that’s just too complicated and I don’t want to stress myself out.” Garden In My Glass is the one thing – if you want to try super foods and if you’re interested in them — we took twenty of the most powerful ones that our research has shown — peer-reviewed clinical stuff — all natural; doesn’t have a bunch of artificial vitamins and minerals in it; sweetened with a little bit of stevia. Here’s the catch. Here’s why you know it’s good. It does not taste good at all. There you go. It is therapeutic.
Everything here in your SANE lifestyle is about nutritional therapy. All SANE super foods are designed to be taken with a SANE smoothie. Please do not just take them with water. They’re disgusting. My job and the job of the SANE family and the job of your SANE team is to help heal you naturally; it is not to add a bunch of synthetic chemicals to make greens taste like Kool-Aid. I promise you. If you want to drink Kool-Aid, drink Kool-Aid. If you want to heal your body, take Garden In My Glass, put it in your smoothie; it’s going to turbo charge it. Again, do not — do not — take Garden In My Glass instead of eating vegetables that you buy from your grocery store, period. That is unacceptable. Do not do that.
If you’re on a plane and you have no alternative, sure. Eating Garden In My Glass is better than doing nothing. But I promise you, you will get radically better results healing yourself by combining super foods such as Garden In My Glass, which is the blend of the most effective super foods, with your smoothie, period, end of story. I do not want you using it as a replacement. I want you to use it to take your whole foods to the next level by taking your beautiful SANE whole foods and augmenting them with super foods that you can’t buy at your grocery store. Hopefully, that’s helpful. That’s why I love it. That’s why we did it. That’s why myself and my whole family and everyone in my family gets it and takes it and loves it and it’s been really helpful for us. Hopefully, that’s helpful for you as well.
Then I wanted to close today’s call with — so we already covered our homework. Our homework is about, again, taking — I don’t want to say the word “forcing” — strongly encouraging ourselves to not go this alone; to really make sure that we’re leveraging our SANE Support Group and especially, maybe when you feel like reaching out the least is when you need to reach out the most. When you have that emotional hijack — please write that word down because even knowing that word or being able to label what you’re experiencing in the case of emotional eating — “I’m experiencing an emotional hijack. My emotions are trying to hijack me.”
Even that language gives you control back. No one wants to be hijacked. Previously, your mindset may have been “I am angry.” Now your mindset will be “I feel angry but I realize that I am being emotionally hijacked.” That is a totally different mindset because now you could say, “I’m being hijacked. I don’t want to be hijacked. I’m going to do something about that because I’m freaking awesome and I deserve better than being hijacked and I’m going to make a change and the way I’m going to do that is by getting help and support from loving qualified people so I’m going to jump in the Support Group and I’m going to describe what’s going on and honestly, I’m going to help other people too because I’m going to jump in there.”
You know what is a great way to feel better? Helping other people to feel better. Even if you really don’t feel comfortable sharing what you’re going through, help other people with what they’re going through. I know you might be saying there is no better way to learn something than to teach it. There is no better way for you to feel better than by helping other people feel better. I promise, we can literally hook you up to a brain scanner, an fMRI machine, and when you are kind to someone or when you are supportive to someone, if you are feeling angry and someone else is feeling angry and you jump in the Support Group, you don’t even want to share why you’re angry but you show love to someone else who’s angry, you will be less angry.
It’s this beautiful thing called mirror neurons in our brain. You cannot be good or loving or SANE to another person without accruing benefit to yourself. It’s literally the gift that keeps on giving. No matter what, even if you’re not a big sharer, when the emotional hijack happens, go into the Support Group. Either share or contribute to someone else, it’s going to help you so much, so much, so much. That’s the homework. Again, please check out your step-by-step program. Five to six steps per week; absolutely key.
Stacy does have a question. “Do I have to drink smoothies every day?” Stacy, you don’t ever have to drink smoothies if you don’t want to. The key is eating double-digit servings of non-starchy vegetables. A lot of people find that to be a lot easier with smoothies. The key is — the only thing you have to do is, if you want results, you have to, to the extent that you want results, you have to be patient because your body needs time. It needs time to heal. You have to eat non-starchy vegetables, nutrient-dense protein, whole food fats, and low-fructose fruits, in that order, period. How you do that — we’re here to help and you will learn more and more about it in your step-by-step program but this is about you.
This is about personalization and that’s why all the other nonsense out there does not work. There is no “one size fits all.” You will achieve success for the rest of your life the day that you see this as a lifelong journey of personalization and of support and of love. That is the difference. It’s that foundational learning and that mindset shift of — it’s not “Do I have to drink smoothies?” Stacy, you don’t have to do that. No way. If it helps you, please do it. If it stresses you out, don’t do it.
Maybe experiment with it; see if it’s helpful; but you don’t have to do anything ever. If anyone tells you “You have to do…”, that’s that stressful punitive mindset that’s toxic and it’s what has caused us to suffer so much. Please, please, please. You deserve better than that. Don’t let anyone tell you “you have to do this” or “you have to do that.” You deserve better for sure, for sure. Thank you so much for asking that question. It’s extremely important.
All right, to close up here, I was suggested — and I do love this suggestion — it is to close each one of our calls with a motivational quote or something. I am a big reader and I love reading and I have compiled many of these words of wisdom over the years and I selected some that I wanted to share with you today here. I hope it is helpful and I do think that it has a lot to do with what we covered today so I’m going to read these verbatim. I hope you like them. I will post them in the chat of course, as always. This is a great thing to talk about in the Support Group afterwards if you have a chance. Here we go.
This is actually a four-part one this week. It’s a four-part bonus. This first one comes from Wayne Dyer — and this was an amazing thing that he said, which is, “It doesn’t make sense to worry about that which you don’t have control over because you don’t have control over it so it doesn’t make sense to worry about it. It doesn’t make sense to worry about what you do have control over because you have control over it so it doesn’t make sense to worry about it.”
That about takes care of everything you could ever worry about. I love that quote when you think about it. He tells us that it doesn’t make sense to worry about that which we can’t control because we can’t control it so worrying about it doesn’t serve us. And it doesn’t make sense for us to worry about that which we can control because we can control it, especially now that we have proper information and proper support, so it doesn’t make sense to worry about it. If we don’t have to worry about things we can’t control and if we don’t have to worry about things we can control, then there’s nothing left to worry about.
I love that quote. I think it’s really empowering. I think we just have to make sure we have the support to do that and I think we need to have the right information and I think that that will also free us from that underlying stress and shame which causes so many problems.
This next question comes from — actually I don’t know the source — but it’s related. It is, “Courage is not the absence of fear but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.” That so relates to what we’ve talked about here today. I know this might seem a little bit intimidating. How am I going to do this? What’s going to happen? What if I fail?
We all feel that. I wake up every day and I say, “Oh my goodness, I’ve got to do X, Y, Z today. What if I fail?” You’re not alone. Courage is not the absence of fear but it’s the judgment that something else is more important than fear. You living up to your potential, you finally overcoming this metabolic monkey that’s been on your back for decades, is more important than fear.
The second to last is an acronym and this is — actually, I’m going to skip this one and I’m going to go to the very last one because I think it fits in better. We talked about not worrying and we talked about taking action instead now that we have correct information and we have correct support. I just want to highlight the support that you now have because you not only have the support of thousands of researchers — just tens of thousands of pages of peer-reviewed pure science distilled down for you in your step-by-step program — and also just an immense amount of love. You will never find a more loving and caring group of qualified wonderful people than you will in your Coaching and Support Group. Now that we say, “Hey, it’s not about worry; it’s not about shame; it’s not about not being scared; it’s about taking action – that is our homework. It’s taking action in place of that fear.
One of the ways that we’re going to be able to do that is — this is a quote from a book called A Course In Miracles, which is, “If you know who walks beside you on the way that you have chosen, fear would be impossible.” Again, “If you know who walks with you on the way you have chosen, fear would be impossible.” I want to tell you, who walks with you is the greatest scientific minds in history over the past sixty years, tens of thousands of pages of life-changing proven information — that is walking with you; the most loving community in the world; the most qualified community in the world is walking with you.
We’re walking with you with a sense of patience, a sense of self love, and a spirit of healing that will change your life and hopefully will make fear and shame impossible from now on because we’re here together on this call. If we’re here together on this call, that means you’re SANE for life. I so appreciate that trust and I so appreciate that opportunity to live up to it and I know your entire SANE family does as well. Thank you so much. This has been a pleasure as always. Myself and your entire SANE family so appreciate your support and trust.
Please jump into your step-by-step program. Jump into the Coaching and Support Group. Thank you so much for sharing ninety minutes of your time with me tonight. It’s been an absolute pleasure. I will see you next week. Thank you so much. Stay SANE.