12.10.15

All right. We might be live. I’m not 100 percent sure if we are live yet. We’re getting there. We’re almost live. It’s the final countdown.

All right. We’re live and I think you probably heard me when I didn’t think you could hear me.

Hopefully, you’re not hearing my singing. We’ll see. All right here, we’re doing a little housekeeping here. Forgive me. All right. Yes.

We are here, we are live. And we are going to get started here in a moment.

If you can hear me, we’ve got some people chatting, we’ve got new technology in place. If this is your first time here. Some chats are visible to me, some chats are visible to everybody. That is awesome. That is cool. Hopefully you can see me a little bit better. You can see my ears better. You can hear me better.

If you were here with us last week, you recall I was not at my best. I had lost my voice, but reference a famous song, “What was once lost, has now been found.” Hopefully you can hear me a bit better this time around and I’ve got a bunch of great questions that everyone sent in, so thank you so much. We’re going to crank through these because there’s a lot of them here, which I love, which is always good to have too many than too few, but that’s usually not a problem.

Awesome. So we will get started on some housekeeping here in a second. Just going to let some other people join in.

 

All right. We have a bunch of questions and of course we’re going to record this, so if people miss a bit, it’s all good. Hopefully, you’ve seen the recordings. If you for any reason don’t have the recordings or don’t know where to find the recordings within your Ignite Program, go down to the bottom of the screen, there is a section that says, “Get and Stay Motivated,” or something along those lines. You’ll find all of our group coaching sessions there, so that will be awesome and wonderful. We’re two minutes past, so let’s be prompt, because we have lots of questions here. So I’ll get started with the standard schpeel for housekeeping and then we’ll jump into the questions.

 

All right. So standard schpeel. Got to say that we cannot give medical advice here so everything that I’m going to say here is intended to be extremely helpful, but please understand that I cannot provide medical advice, nor should you ever receive medical advice from anyone other than a qualified individual medical professional. In fact, if anyone gives you medical advice and it is not your primary care physician that is something you want to be careful about because they don’t have your full medical history. It can be very, very dangerous.

 

This is going to be fun and super informative, but I can’t provide medical advice and please note that we are recording this session and it will likely be transcribed so that you can access it easily in the future. So please do not provide any super personal identifiable information that you wouldn’t want shared. Let’s try to keep it on a first name basis, if that’s okay.

 

Based on feedback from previous sessions, we are still doing everything we can to break these sessions up so that we have a smaller group in this session so that we can get more of people’s questions covered and more of that personalized attention. We are going to try to do that as long as we possibly can. Obviously, January is the single biggest month for health and wellness things. We’re going to keep these awesome. If these ever aren’t awesome, you can let me know directly.

 

If you’re part of the Ignite Program, you’ve got my cell phone number and I appreciate how respectful everyone has been about that. I’ve actually not gotten any appropriate phone calls and just let me know. We’re here to serve you. I’m here to serve you. You are part of the ultimate inner circle. You’re part of the SANE family. The only reason I’m here, the only reason the whole SANE team is here is because of you. So if anything is not living up to your expectations, including me, definitely let me know. I’m actually going to be with my parents next week, so you can let them know too. My mom will scold me. There was a show we did with my mom. So, smaller, more intimate, as long as we can and if this is your first time with us on one of our group calls, welcome.

 

Thank you so much for being here. If it is not your first time, thank you for coming back. Hopefully, we’ll live up to your expectations and as always, there are at least three goals for our time together today. One is to make sure that you know that you are not alone and that you’re part of something that is proven and something that is extremely positive and a whole community that is actually 17 time zones now, which is neat.

 

All around the world for people that are tired of nonsense, people that are tired of starvation, people are tired of the same things that have failed us over and over again and are ready to leverage modern science to live better. I want to make sure you know that you’re part of that, that you’re appreciate, and that you feel that momentum and that passion moving forward. So, that’s goal number one. Sort of like the hug goal. I want to make sure you feel hugged and supported because that is an extremely, extremely important feeling supported.

 

There was some questions about that and how to get support and such. It’s very important on this journey to wellness. Please do not try to do it alone. And I and we and the SANE team and your entire SANE community are going to help to prevent that at all costs.

So hug goal.

 

Second goal is that you have some actionable feedback that you can take away and put into action right away and the third goal is that you have a good time. It’s got to be fun. We all know that starvation can work. If you eat 500 calories per day, you will lose weight, but it’s not fun. It’s not sustainable and therefore, it doesn’t work. We want to live a fun, happy, sustainable life, so let’s have a good time.

Actionable knowledge, sense of community and belonging and passion and excitement and also fun. If we do not hit all three of those goals or if I don’t hit all three of those goals, please let me know via the little survey I’m going to send out after today’s session.

With all of that said, let us jump into the questions. We have a lot of questions that were sent in ahead of time and if you don’t know what I’m talking about when I say questions that are sent in ahead of time before these calls, I send out a scheduling survey. When you go in there to vote on times and dates you can submit questions. You can also submit questions here during the session, but I can’t always get to all of the questions submitted during the session. Of course, you’ve got your SANE concierges, your SANE support group and future calls. That is all really good stuff.

 

With that said, water. And if you think my face looks blue, you are not seeing things. My face is blue. I have one of those blue lights because I’m here in Seattle and Seattle in the winter time, there is no sunlight so now hopefully my face looks a little better and a little bit less blue. Sorry, I forgot to turn that off.

Questions. All right. So the first question, and I wanted to start with this one because it was the first one that was sent in and I want to go in the order that we got them. To reward promptness.

I’ve started to exercise Eccentrically, but I have never really been much of a gym rat. How hard is hard and how do I judge the quality of my exercise? So this is a fantastic question. So thank you very much.

There’s a couple of things I want to tease apart and one thing that I didn’t mention yet. Please remember in this call and in all of our sessions, while some of these questions may seem very specific and they may not seem like they apply to you, my goal is to take even the most specific question and make it apply to everyone. How is that possible? We’re going to take it and we’re going to answer it, but then I’m going to show how it ties back to the core SANE principles that apply to all of us.

 

What’s really neat is that’s the differentiator, right? In a SANE and Eccentric lifestyle, you are learning, this is teach a person to fish rather than give a person a fish approach. It might seem very specific, but when you see the answer and how we got to that answer, when you tie it back to the overarching SANE and Eccentric principles, it’s going to help you to establish that sense of mastery, in terms of how you move your body and how you feel your body, that way you’ll be successful long term, like mini-case studies.

 

This one for example, how hard is hard in the gym? How do you measure quality? I’ve never been much of a gym rat. Absolutely. The general principle here is just like SANE eating is all about quality and the results we get from SANE eating is directly proportionate to the quality of our SANE eating. The same thing applies with exercise and this is a really, really important distinction and we haven’t talked about it for a few sessions. So when I come back to it for a bit here, this will actually going to answer another question that was sent in, which is how I’ve tried everything, how is this different?

 

There’s only two ways to change your body composition and to change your wellness at the simplest level.  The first way is quantity. You can exercise more. So you can take the current exercise that you’re doing that has gotten you to wherever you are today, and you can just do more of it. The same thing with food. You can manipulate quantity. So you can take the types of foods that have gotten you to where you are today and you can eat less of them. So that is the eat less exercise more approach and when individuals say they’ve tried everything, what has been my experience over the past decade is that when individuals have tried is dozens of variations and spins and sort of gimmicks on the quantity based approach to both the eating and exercise side of the equation. Whatever it’s called, whether it’s a Weight Watcher’s point system, or whatever it is, at the end of the day, it’s saying the end goal is to produce quantity of calories you’re eating and then the exercise recommendation is to increase the quantity of exercise that you’re doing and it’s usually focused on calories, so fewer calories in, more calories out.

 

Now, there’s another approach and this is the approach that we’re talking about here, this is the SANE quality based approach and this is why it is so effective and this is why it provides hope for so many people because whereas nothing has worked in the past. What’s not working and what is proven not to work in 95.4 percent of us is the manipulation of quantity.

 

With SANE and with Eccentric exercise, we are taking a different approach. It’s not just the different spin on fewer calories in, more calories out quantity, it’s entirely different approach that’s focused completely on quality. Quality of food we’re taking in and quality of exercise. And by doing that, the beauty is it’s not that quantity doesn’t matter, quantity does matter, but by taking control and care of the quality of what we’re eating for example, the quantity will take care of itself. I’ve said this on many group coaching sessions before, but it’s worth saying again.  I’ll tie it back to the exercise question too.

 

When you get the quality of your eating nailed, the quantity of what you’re eating will take care of itself. It is impossible to overeat when you’re eating a properly formulated SANE lifestyle.  It’s just not possible and it’s also not possible to do a lot of exercise if we’re exercising with the right quality because the quality of our exercise, the intensity of our exercise is reversely proportional to the quantity of it that we can do. So let me unpack that a little bit and I will bring it back and answer the question of how hard is hard and how intense do I need to exercise when I’m exercising Eccentrically.

By way of analogy, not that you should do this, but if I were to say don’t do this, ever, but if I were to say, go outside and just sprint as fast as you can for an hour straight. You would say, that’s ridiculous, I can’t do that. I could sprint if you want me to, but a human being can only sprint as hard as they can assuming they’re not an Olympic athlete for maybe 10 or 20 seconds. Why is that? It doesn’t mean we can’t move our body for an hour. You could walk for an hour, but you’ll notice that the harder the physical activity, the more intense it is, the less of it you can do. That’s why you can only sprint for ten seconds, but you could walk for an hour or more. Why that is, is quite simple. There is a fixed amount of energy in our body and in our muscles and when you sprint for ten seconds, you just blow through all of that energy whereas when you walk for an hour, not only do you not necessarily blow through all of that energy, but in fact if we dig really deep into our muscle physiology, you’re actually at such a low quality or intensity of movement that you are not only depleting your energy super fast, but you’re actually giving your body time to refuel itself.  This is why we can sort of walk almost indefinitely or talk almost indefinitely, of course within limits.

 

So how hard is hard in the gym? Why are we talking about this and how do we know, how do we increase the quality of what we’re doing at the gym? The way we increase the quality of exercise, the way we increase of eating is by increasing the SANE, vegetables, proteins and fats, obviously the higher quality of those 16:43, the higher of our SANEity of our eating.

 

Now, with exercise, what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to increase the intensity and the way we increase the intensity of our exercise is by using more of the musculature in our bodies. So not only more of our muscles, our big leg muscles for example, rather than our smaller arm muscles, but using more of the individual fibers within those muscles. We talk about this way more in the actual Ignite Program, so we won’t go too deeply into the biology, but the more force that your muscles have to generate, the more of the actual fiber is within your muscles that are recruited and as you can imagine, the more muscle fibers that are used, the faster energy is depleted and that’s why for example, when you sprint, the reason a sprint is different from walking is your legs are just hitting the ground with more force. They’re smashing against the ground, propelling you forward versus when you walk where your legs are just gradually touching the ground. So with more force, is generated my more muscle fibers firing and that requires more energy to be used more quickly and therefore, you have to stop more quickly.

 

Exercising less, exercising quality. The easiest way to tell or to judge the quality of your exercise or how hard is hard enough or how intense is intense enough is how long you can exercise for.  Let me give you an example. If you can do an exercise for a long time and frequently by definition, it isn’t that high quality because if it was, you wouldn’t be able to do it for a long period of time or you wouldn’t be able to do it frequently and that’s a great irony of some of these at home exercise programs that claim to be so intense, whereas in reality, they are just very risky, they have you jumping all around and you can hurt yourself, and we know they can be hard, but they can’t be that intense because if they say, hey do this six days a week for 60 minutes at a time, anything that you can do for 60 minutes at a time isn’t that intense. You can’t sprint for 60 minutes at a time.

 

When we train Eccentrically, what we do is as safely as possible, we recruit as many muscle fibers as possible so that we trigger the greatest hormonal response possible and we know we’re using enough resistance when we have to conform to the duration, recommendations and the frequency recommendations of Eccentric training.

 

What I mean by that is you could say how much weight should I use on Eccentric leg press. How hard is hard enough? The way most Eccentrics should be done is you generally try to lower the resistance for ten seconds. The ten seconds isn’t arbitrary. It’s not that you just pick an arbitrary weight, but you try to lower it for ten seconds, the ten seconds is very meaningful, because you want to pick a weight that is physically impossible for you to lower for longer than ten seconds. You also don’t want to pick a level of resistance that you lower in two seconds. You effectively drop it if someone were to put too much resistance on your body and you were to try to resist that resistance, but it just knocked you down immediately, that’s one second or a half a second, not ten seconds, that’s too much resistance.

 

We want to be at the level if you’re doing for example, an Eccentric push up, where you are using enough of your body weight so that you’re slowly lowering yourself down and in fact you’re not even trying to lower yourself down, you’re trying to not move, but the resistance is forcing you to move over the course of ten seconds. So, if at 11 seconds, you’re still holding the push up position with no problem that means there’s not enough resistance. The quality of your exercise is determined by the amount of resistance that you’re using and the amount of resistance that you’re using it has hit the sweet spot, where it balances safety, and efficacy when lowering the resistance, that’s Eccentric, the Eccentric contraction, takes ten seconds.

 

If you were doing a bench press because it’s easy to illustrate on this video and you said, okay, I have a bench press or a pushup, chest press, we’re all at different levels, I’m just trying to illustrate the biomechanics of it and someone put too much weight on the bar and you said okay, I’m going to slowly lower this down for ten seconds, it would just fall. You wouldn’t be able to lower it for ten seconds and if there wasn’t enough resistance, you’d just say, okay, I can just hold this here for 30 seconds. If what you try to do is hold that top position, and despite your best efforts, it just lowers itself down, slowly lowers and after ten seconds you’re at the bottom, that’s the right level of resistance.

 

To answer the specific question, how hard is hard enough? Hard enough is with all your focus and all of your concentration and all of your effort, after ten seconds, you have been forced to complete the Eccentric portion of the movement. If I were to say, I’ll give you a million dollars, if you hold it for one more second, unfortunately, you shouldn’t get the million dollars, because it should all be spent on the ten second lowering and the way you will increase the quality over time is simply by increasing the amount. Your muscles will get stronger, they will overcompensate, and then you will be able to handle more resistance during that ten second duration. So quality from an exercise perspective is measured in terms of intensity and muscle fibers used and the intensity and amount of muscle fibers used is determined by the amount of resistance used and you are using the appropriate resistance when the Eccentric portion of the movement you complete it in ten seconds and you couldn’t possibly take more than ten seconds to lower it and it’s also not so heavy that it just falls right on you.

 

That is a long winded answer to hard is hard at the gym and remember if your soreness is also a really good proxy. A lot of exercise that claims to be intense will tell you that hey, you need to do this today, and you need to do it again tomorrow and you need to do it again the next day. That’s not how your body works. If something is really stressful and remember that stress isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s a you stress, which is a good stress and distress which is bad stress. The proper kinds of stress is actually how anything grows, the better we get at math, is by taking ourselves to our limits and then we get smarter and then we get better at math. Only through stress that biological organisms grow.

 

What we want to do is if a form of exercise is recommended to be done very frequently, it’s impossible if you use the proper level of resistance to do Eccentric training frequently, so that’s another good measure of if you’re at the proper level of resistance. If you were to do the at-home Eccentric exercises and then the next day, you’re wondering, can I do these again? If it’s physically possible for you to do them again, it’s a great indication that you didn’t actually activate the necessary muscle fibers because if you did, it’s just physiology that certain muscle fiber is the most forceful type, take a long time to recover.

 

You’re going to experience some soreness. It’s not necessarily a fun form of exercise, but it is so high quality and it is so safe and the results are so phenomenal that I think you’re really going to like it. You know you’re doing it hard enough when one putting safety first, you’re at that ten second mark, so six repetitions of ten seconds and you can’t do it frequently, so that once or as you’re getting started at most, twice per week. If you can do it more frequently than that or you can do it for a longer period of time than that, that’s when you know you need to add more resistance. Cool?

 

All right. Now, this next one is very, very common. So I love this. We haven’t talked about it for a while either. And I’m going to paraphrase because it’s rather long, but I understand the basic principles of SANE eating. I have lots of substitution happening here and how do I eat all of these vegetables? How do I eat all of these veggies and then there’s a reference here to Garden in my Glass, it looks like this individual is from the UK, the SANE store Garden in my Glass, superfoods, are incredibly expensive to ship overseas, so sorry we’re working on that by the way. So to paraphrase this question, the question is, how do I eat more vegetables without using any sort of superfood powders. Can you help me?

 

Yes, so absolutely. This is an area that we are very much working on because it is extremely important and in fact, it’s the single most important aspect of the dietary component of a SANE lifestyle and that is double digit servings and non-starchy vegetables and it’s also the area where I think not only most people struggle with, but is the number one cause of slower results than individuals would like. It’s so unfortunate and so common that the double digit servings of non-starchy vegetables per day goal isn’t simply being hit and I can tell you right now, the number one thing we’re doing to try to help with that and the number one thing you can do to help with that is green smoothies.

 

So this does not require any of the super foods from the SANE store, those can make it quicker, but in fact, no matter what, you’ve got to be doing it with fresh and frozen vegetables too. So we’re in the process right now, maybe by the end of the year, definitely sometime in January, you are going to see over 100 new SANE green smoothie recipes added to your recipe collection.

 

We’re always adding new recipes and in fact, our goal is to break 1,000 recipes in 2016. We have a lot of cool stuff planned for 2016, but a big part of that is going to be 100 plus SANE smoothie recipes and this is really, really important.

SANE green smoothies are the trick, they’re the secret to eating all of those non-starchy vegetables. Just speaking from experience, unless you plan to just sit down and eat vegetables all day long, and your jaw is going to get really tired, you’re only going to get that many vegetables into your body if you blend them.

 

We have to help, I, and SANE has to help you do that because it’s a mind field out there. You go to the grocery store and you look at their green smoothies, flip over the nutrition facts and you will see first of all, a bottle that you think would be one serving, is two or three and then you look down the bottle and this is my figurative bottle, and you see first of all, two or three servings where you would expect to see one and then you see sugar, and that’s at least 20 if not 30 grams. So then you take that and then you multiply it by the number of servings and you say this 16 or 20 ounce bottle, which by the way is $5.00, it contains 70, 80 grams of sugar and of course, on the front of it, it says no sugar added, but your body doesn’t care. When you’re trying to heal your metabolism or just in general, added sugar is terrible, but sugar is the problem. If you’re taking in 70 grams of sugar, whether that’s from grape juice or Coca Cola, it’s still 70 grams of sugar.

 

You might be saying, okay, I’ve got to drink some green smoothies, so I’m going to go to the grocery store and I’m going to get some of their Naked or Odwalla, green smoothie or I’m going to go to Jamba Juice or I’m going to go to Emerald Smoothie and I’m going to get some of their green smoothies. Those smoothie places are even worse. You almost always find their green smoothies are really apple juice, which is the most concentrated sources of fructose in the world, which is no good, mixed with three leaves of spinach. I’m exaggerating a little bit, but what we want to do and what the SANE green smoothie recipes will show you, is we want to create smoothies which are as high in vegetables as possible and as low in sugar as possible while also being palatable. Just taking pure kale and blending it with water and drinking it—remember that whole sustainable and enjoyable thing I said at the beginning that is not going to be sustainable and enjoyable.

 

At the same time, of course, we’ve got to find that balance where for example, doing smarter exercise isn’t necessarily enjoyable, but because it only takes 10 or 20 minutes, we can do it and then as we actually get better at it, we don’t mind it so much. So not everything in life is going to be a birthday cake. There are going to be some things that are a little bit of a challenge, but as we overcome challenges they become more enjoyable.

 

What we want to do with green smoothies, and tie this back to the question of how do we eat more vegetables, is we have to have recipes and we have to have a general formula we can use to make not juice, I don’t want us to juice, I want us to use smoothies because I want us to eat the fiber and the whole food green smoothie. So while we’re working on these recipes I want to give you the general formulation that you can use right now at home and before I get into that recipe and if I forget to talk about the recipe, please someone post it in chat because I don’t want to forget to give you the formulation.

 

Two quick notes, one is that I’m intentionally saying smoothie, and I’m intentionally saying blend, which is not synonymous with juicing. Remember that at the end of the day, SANE eating, the thing that determines whether or not or something is on the SANE end of the spectrum or the in-SANE end of the spectrum, is water, fiber and protein. Those are the three common denominators that increase satiety, decrease aggression, increase nutrition and decrease efficiency. More water fiber protein, good, less water fiber protein, bad.

 

Fiber, is eliminated by juicing. Bottom line. And it’s pretty much understood universally now that whole foods, not the grocery store, but the whole food. Like eating an orange versus eating the juice from an orange is better for you, due to reasons that we do not understand yet, but there are synergistic effects found within the whole food that are not found in components of the food.

 

So, when I say blend, I mean blend. Juice is not the same as blending, so I want you to blend and investing in a good blender is one of the best investments for your health that you can make. I’ve tried garbage blenders. A long time ago, back when I was at university, I had a junkie blender, one of these ones you can get for $25.00 and I was drinking a smoothie and I was drinking it real fast and I was just slamming on one gulp, just take it all down, but something told me about half way through the smoothie, just stop. This is part of my morning routine. I would just down the whole smoothie, but this time I didn’t.  When I was lowering the glass, I noticed something shine, a shimmer in the glass, which is unexpected when drinking a green smoothie. You wouldn’t expect a metallic shimmer. It was actually one of the blades from the blender, believe it or not, had broken off and was in the smoothie, which is obviously not good. Getting some iron in your diet is a good thing, but not jagged blades of iron.

 

So, that’s not the real reason to get a blender. The reason to get a good blender is because as you’re blending things like vegetables, green leafy vegetables, kale, spinach from romaine lettuce, as you start doing things like throwing shredded coconut in there, chia seeds, when you put a peeled lemon, the consistency of the smoothie matters. The difference between a smoothie and juice really starts to fall apart when you have a really good blender. If you take a really good blender, such as a Vitamix, I don’t work for Vitamix, I only say this because I’ve tried Revel, I’ve tried Waring, I’ve tried Blendtec and I’ve tried Vitamix. To me there is no comparison with Vitamix, at all, bottom line. They’re loud as heck, but they blend the heck out of things. I would recommend getting a Vitamix. There are Vitamixed that cost $600.00. That’s ridiculous. You do not need a $600.00 Vitamix. Frankly, the reason the Vitamix works is because of its motor and its blade and the motor and the blade are the exact same on certified reconditioned models. So there’s a link in the SANE store if you down the left hand navigation, there’s stuff on amazon section and there’s a link there where you can go to the Vitamix website and you can get a certified reconditioned Vitamix shipped to you if you buy it through the SANE store you get free shipping, and it’s $329.00, which is not a small amount of money, but it’s not $700.00 and it comes with a five or seven year super duper warranty, where if anything happens, you send it to them and they fix it and they send it back to you and I think it’s worth it. If you break it down by the cost per year, it’s $50.00 a year and when you look at what it’s going to do for your health, it is worth $50.00 an hour. So, it’s a great investment and it’s super helpful while you’re going to be making the green smoothies I’m going to talk about in a second.

 

Now, back to the recipe. The general formulation of the recipe and that is something I’ve been working on both just for myself as an individual and scientifically and through many, many case studies for a really long time. I’m really excited to start getting these recipes out there because there is no high vegetable, low sugar, high SANEity recipes out there and they are going to be available to you as part of the Ignite family, is included as everything will be because you are part of the Ignite family.

 

Here is the general formulation. You want to start with non-starchy vegetables, but the key is there are certain non-starchy vegetables that work way better in smoothies than others.  The ones that work the best are going to be spinach. You can use frozen spinach if you want. Fresh green leafy vegetables is often the way to go and you can buy them in bulk at Costco, organic is great if you can afford it, but it’s not required.  I would rather you eat 12 servings of conventional green leafy vegetables than 3 servings of organic related vegetables because it’s cost prohibitive. You have to get that quantity of vitamins and minerals and fiber.

 

Spinach, romaine lettuce or kale.  Kale is the one you should try last because it doesn’t work at all if you don’t have a really good blender. It’s also the most bitter of the group. You can try things like a Swiss chard, arugula, mixed greens, but the general rule of thumb is the more sturdy the green vegetable it is, the more experienced with green smoothies you’ll want to be because the more robust the vegetable is, kale for example, is much more of a robust leaf than romaine lettuce is. Take collard green. Collard green is firm as heck versus romaine lettuce which is flimsy. The firmer the vegetable is, the more difficult it’s going to be to blend, so the more high quality blender is required and two, the more bitter it’s going to be. If you’re just getting started, spinach and romaine lettuce are a great way to go. And you want to use the general serving guide we always talk about. A big double handful, like this, that’s one serving, and that’s loose, so of course, you’re going to pack it down in the blender and this is the key, right here.

 

If you were to try to take three or four giant handfuls of spinach like this and just sit down and eat them as a salad, you are quickly going to say, 12 servings of vegetables, get out of here, that’s not possible. If all you take away from this call is I am going to start drinking one of the types of green smoothies Jonathan described here per day, and I’m going to work my way up, that in and of itself will radically change your life and is worth the cost of admission.

 

You’re going to take this much spinach for simplicity purposes, take it in a smoothie jar, pretend this is a smoothie jar, don’t cut your fingers off, obviously, but just smash it down into the smoothie. Smash, smash, smash. Another one into the smoothie. Another one into the smoothie. So you have four minimum, four giant handfuls, smashed down into the smoothie. So what would have filled up a giant bowl, because you smashed it is now in your smoothie like this is the base of your smoothie, about that much of it is mashed down green leafy vegetables. You can do more if you want, but let’s just start with four giant double handfuls because that’s going to give you four servings of vegetables. Each one of these steps is a trick because it’s taken a long time to come up with this and this is a big deal.

 

The internet has a lot of information on it, but what we’re talking about here is just not. All of the green smoothies out there are sugary garbage.  You’re going to pack that down, then the next thing is we need to figure out a way to not taste terrible without adding a bunch of sugar. So there’s three really neat ways to do this. If you can tell I’m excited, I’m taking a long time on this one because it’s so transformational and it’s actually not available anywhere else right now, so I want to make sure you get the first look at it.

 

We have our green leafy vegetables in there. We’re at four servings of green leafy vegetables and that in and of itself, here you go, right there, drink one of those with breakfast, drink one of those with lunch, drink one of those with dinner, that’s 12 servings and done. Right? Powerful stuff.

 

Anyway, you’ve got your vegetables. How do we make that not taste like garbage without adding a bunch of sugar? Sounds like it’s impossible, but it’s not.

 

Trick number one, is lemon. Lemon, lemon, lemon. Lemon is miraculous not only in terms of its health benefits, in terms of its alcoholizing your body, detoxifying your body, but the acidity of the lemon just cuts the bitterness especially of spinach so powerfully and one lemon only has one gram of sugar in it.  If you’re SANE scoring which I hope you are if you’re tracking your servings, you don’t even need to count a lemon as low fructose fruits because blueberries for example, a serving has 9 grams of sugar in it. Blueberries are good for you, but you don’t want to eat ten servings of blueberries in a day, that would be 90 grams of sugar. You can eat ten lemons if you want. That’s only ten grams of sugar. Lemons, you can just eat unlimited amount of lemons. And they detoxify, they are great. So you take a lemon, you peel it, and you put it in a smoothie. You want to take two lemons, peel them, and put them in a smoothie. You want to take three lemons, peel them, put them in a smoothie. That’s all good. Lemons for everybody. When life gives you Diabetes, drink lemonade. That doesn’t make any sense. So we’re going to add the lemons in there. The other thing which is sort of like lemons, lemons could also be fiber, Vitamin C all sorts of good stuff is undistilled apple cider vinegar. That’s really important, undistilled apple cider vinegar and it’s not distilled apple cider vinegar. Undistilled apple cider vinegar. You know you find the right stuff when it’s dark brown and when you look at the bottom of the bottle, it’s cloudy, because that’s called the mother. I don’t know why. It probably has to do with the distillation process and undistilled apple cider vinegar tastes like apple cider, without any sugar in it and it’s also fabulous for you, Bragg, in the United States is one of the most popular brands. I get mine on amazon, or course you’ve got it in another section in the SANE store, which is just I personally took, I went through Amazon, I found all of the stuff that either I use personally or that I’ve tried and I’ve liked. I put it in a little amazon store and you can just buy it on amazon and that way it’s all curated for you.

 

The upside of vinegar is there, it’s Bragg apple cider vinegar, getting on amazon is the cheapest place to find it and so you put one or two tablespoons into your smoothie. Again, adjust it up or down, but the acidity of that vinegar sounds like it’s disgusting, but when you add it in the context of these other flavors it really is helpful.

 

The next thing, so you’ve got your green leafy vegetables, you’ve got your lemon, you have your apple cider vinegar. Cinnamon, extremely important and don’t be afraid to add a little bit more than you would normally. Cinnamon you just sprinkle. Start with half a teaspoon and work your way up. You want to have a decent amount of cinnamon and then not only does it help with the flavor, but it’s super therapeutic from a blood sugar perspective, good stuff. Cinnamon is more than just a spice. It has highly therapeutic properties. So you’ll put some cinnamon in there.

 

So now we’ve got green leafy vegetables, we’ve got cinnamon, we’ve got apple cider vinegar, we’ve got lemon. Now what’s cool is the longer you’re going SANE, the longer you’re doing green smoothies, at some point, that right there maybe with some ice in it, will be enough for you and I know you’re like, that sounds disgusting or maybe you’re not, but put it this way. The first time an individual drinks beer or wine, they usually thinks it tastes terrible, but obviously those are very popular beverages.

 

As you become accustomed to the taste of bitter of the vegetables and you get that lemon, that apple cider vinegar, that cinnamon flavor, at some point that might just be the baseline of your smoothie right there. I don’t expect that to be the baseline of your smoothie as you’re just getting started. So as you’re just getting started, we do need some more sweetness in there to make it palatable and then what you can do is all of the ingredients I’m about to list next, you can start to scale those back and scale the vegetables up as you reset your taste buds and re-sensitize your tongue to the taste of sweet.

 

As you go more and more SANE, you’re going to be taking in less and less artificial sugar, you’re going to re-sensitize your taste buds to sweet, so just like someone who over abuses alcohol, and obviously takes a lot of alcohol to give them an effect, if you are used to eating a lot of sugar, it takes a lot of sugar to give you the taste of sweet, but as you reduce your sugar intake, you’re going to eat a baby carrot and go oh, my gosh, that is sweet, or you’re going to eat, this is the coolest thing, when you experience this, pat yourself on the back because that is awesome. When you eat a raw almond, and you can sense sweetness in it, that’s a cool day when you eat a raw almond and you say, never realized that raw almonds are kind of sweet.  We’re going to work our way to that point.

 

So the next thing we’re going to do in the smoothies, we’ve got our vegetables, we’ve got our lemon, which is free, we’re going to add some low fructose fruit. So we’re going to do lemon, but sweeter, on the spectrum. So what is a lemon, but sweeter Jonathan? A lemon, but sweeter is an orange or a grapefruit, so a grapefruit, not as sweet as an orange, an orange is probably the sweetest of the citrus fruits and as you know, citrus fruits do fall in the low fructose fruit category. Orange or grapefruit also strawberries, great option and you can mix and match these. Strawberries have a super powerful effect on the taste of the smoothie with a very minimal sugar and cranberries. Another great option. Of course, you get rid of the pits and such, but these are fruits that have very strong flavors and generally an acidic taste, but very low sugar and that’s why they pair well.

 

So the lemon is nonnegotiable, kind of, because I need that acidity in there for you, but then strawberry, orange, grapefruit, cranberries, there’s a few other options, I can’t think off the top of my head, but those are great and you’re generally just going to want to do one serving, two if you need to, but I’m going to tell you why you might not need to here in a second. Got your lemon and then maybe you put peeled orange, maybe you put half a peeled grapefruit, maybe you put a cup of frozen strawberries and frozen is totally fine when it comes to fruit, it can actually be helpful. You probably don’t want a warm smoothie and you’re going to blend your smoothie for at least two minutes because I want you to make sure it’s totally purified so you can really enjoy it and drink it without getting clumps.

 

Now, the next thing is if you need more sweetness, you can add sweetness without adding sugar and this is where your SANE sweeteners are going to come into play, whether it’s Lo Han Guo or stevia, oftentimes people sometimes struggle with those because people are just not familiar with it. A safer bet, Lo Han Guo and stevia, we don’t sell stevia in the SANE store, but you can get Lo Han Guo there, is your Erythritol or Xylitol. I would prefer you to use Erythritol for smoothies, Xylitol works better when baking, but your Erythritol is SANEer. It’s natural. It has minimal if any digestive consequences, and it is not going to cause any hormonal chaos at all.  You’re looking at maybe a tablespoon of Erythritol and you can start with a teaspoon and work your way up, one teaspoon at a time, and then work your way down. I don’t want you, I’m not saying eat more Erythritol, I want you to eat ten servings of Erythritol today. No, no. Erythritol is a little bit like a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. So SANE Mary Poppins says, a spoonful of Erythritol helps the green smoothie go down, wow. Yes, we’re recording this. I’m going to have to watch that over and over again.

 

A spoonful of Erythritol helps the green smoothie go down, so you’re going to start with a tablespoon of that. At that point, there’s a lot of other bells and whistles, we can throw some green tea in there. That’s another way green smoothies rock. Is you can hide stuff in them that you would otherwise would never eat.

 

So let’s say you don’t like the taste of green tea. I think we talked about this in the last group coaching session. That’s fine. Take tea leaves and actually put them in your smoothie. If you have a good blender, it’s going to blend them up. You won’t even know they’re there. You have your green tea. Done. Ginger is fantastic to add to smoothies not only for the health benefit perspective, but also from a taste perspective. It helps to cut that bitterness. I’m going to stop now because I think I’ve given you a lot on smoothies and more will be coming.

What’s the general recipe? It’s a little bit like paint by numbers. The first thing, pack it in at least two, up to four, six. I don’t care. You can’t eat too many vegetables for all intense and purposes. Pack it in to the bottom of the blender. Then you peel at least one lemon, possibly two. Then you’re putting in some cinnamon and you’re putting in apple cider vinegar to taste. Start with a teaspoon and work your way up. You’ll stop adding it before you do damage to yourself because it will start to taste terrible.

 

Then as needed, you’re going to add sweetness in the form of low fructose fruits, citrus or berries, with strawberry or cranberry being some of the best berries and oranges and grapefruit being some of the best citrus fruits. Then if you need more sweetness, you’re going to add Erythritol or you can just use Erythritol and not the low fructose fruits. So whichever you prefer in terms of your SANE scoring and tracking.

 

Then, after that’s all in there, you get the water in there, blend it up, another advantage of the Vitamix, you get a plunger, which helps you to sort of push the things into the blades which could be good because when you have that many vegetables, you turn the blender on it might not blend everything immediately, so you kind of need to press it down and then you let your blender run. So you want to throw some ice in there because I want you to blend this for one to two minutes. Most people think that’s crazy talk because if you’re using conventional blenders, if you run them for that long you’ll burn the motor out, but when you have a really good blender, you can even make soups in them, meaning that you just take raw vegetables, put them in the blender, blend it for five minutes and the soup is literally boiling because the blender is so powerful. So with the friction it actually heats the contents of the blender so because of that you want to add some ice because I don’t think you want to drink a warm smoothie. So you’ll throw some ice in there and you will be good to go and one caution, the good blenders are loud. Just maybe wear some earplugs, listen to some SANE recordings, and listen to something because it will be quite loud. Holy moly, that was a long answer to the question of, how do I eat 12 servings of vegetables, and I can’t use the superfood powders.

 

Let me talk about that in a second too. There’s your answer right there. Let’s say you’re not eating any vegetables with breakfast, which is the time that most people struggle to eat vegetables. You can eat two to three servings of vegetables with lunch pretty easily, and everyone can eat two to three servings of vegetables with dinner pretty easily. That right there is four to six servings.

 

If you add two of the green smoothies I just mentioned to your day, you are at ideal levels of vegetables, done. Done. No pills, no nothing. Done. Taken care of. If you want to go to super SANE levels, you’ve got maybe six to eight servings of vegetables that you eat that you like the taste of vegetables, eventually you sauté them, and then you’re drinking two to three 8 ounce green smoothies per day, that’s giving you another nine servings of vegetables, that’s how you do it right there, done. And as you get more advanced with your green smoothies, put some ginger in there you put cinnamon in there, you throw some other super foods in there. You’re getting a level of nutritional therapy that is literally otherwise impossible, unless you just want to chewing food all day.

 

I’m seeing some questions coming in about super foods in the SANE store. You should not be getting all of your vegetables from super food powders, not because nutritionally there is anything wrong with it because they are not, the spinach powder that we sell in the SANE store is spinach with the water taken out. That’s it. so it is spinach, however, there is the volume that you get from eating the non-dehydrated version of the food is important because we know from a satiety perspective we do need to physically fill up your stomach, so satiety feeling full has two major components. One is gastrointestinal stretch so how much your actual stomach you need that I feel full. My stomach is at volumetric capacity.

 

Then there is the type of food you eat, protein and whole food fats triggers the hormonal signals necessary to feel satisfied. So there is a difference between feeling full and feeling satisfied. I bet you’ve experienced this where if you were to just eat a giant bowl of spinach, I’m just going to eat vegetables and nothing else, and you would feel full. You probably wouldn’t feel satisfied. Like almost that whew, that was good. Like that feeling you get often saturated fats give you the sense of fullness if you eat chocolate and there’s like I feel satisfied. Your stomach might not feel full, but you’re like, I’m good, I’m satisfied, but we want both of those. We want fullness and we want satiety and if all you’re eating is powdered super foods, you aren’t going to get that sense of fullness and I want you to have that sense of fullness so think of the powdered super foods as a way to super charge your vegetable intake and as a way to take in vegetables that you can’t get otherwise. You’re not going to find thin cell wall chorale, which is incredibly nutritionally rich at the grocery store. You just can’t, so the only way you can get that nutritionally therapy is through the powdered super food and the same thing applies to any other powdered food.

 

It’s great when we can tie questions together. So there was a question that came in about the differences in protein powders. We’re talking about powdered anything. You’ll see this in the SANE store.  You should not be getting more than two servings of your daily nutrient dense protein intake from powders and it’s not because they are some nutritionally inadequate. They’re not. they’re great. This is truth and hopefully you’ll understand why this has to be true because it’s from a business perspective.  My best interest in your success because unless we’re successful, unless we as a world and the craziness that is causing more, I’m sorry sidetrack, McKenzie, one of the most prestigious consulting company in the world, released a report earlier this year and they estimated the global economic burden of just the badness in the world and all armed conflict was 2.1 trillion, tobacco was 2.1 trillion and then obesity was 2.0 trillion, so like third on the list, all violence, tobacco, I believe and I think it was poverty. It’s right up there. We need to solve the problem. It’s in all of our best interests to solve the problem, to be SANE, to be successful, my point is, I don’t want you to eat all your protein in the form of powder you buy from SANE. I don’t want you to be eating all of your vegetables in the powder you buy from SANE. I want you to use those powder super foods to help turbo charge and to help you when you’re in a pinch, but we’ve got to and I need you to heal your relationship with whole food and it’s going to take some more time. It’s going to take a little bit more time in the kitchen, but we’re taking that time away from the gym, we’re taking the time from being sick. We’re taking that time away from wasting time and money on eating starvation dieting that doesn’t work and let’s not forget the time we’re going to get back because our brain is functioning.

 

If you could have just 30 more IQ points, you’d be surprised how much more time you have because you can just solve problems faster. If you’re in a great mood and have high energy all of the time, we’ve only got 24 hours in a day, all of us do, but I think we can all agree that a person who is happy, a person who is mentally turned on, a person that has a sense of passion and vibrancy, a person who is not in pain, they’re going to be able to do more with that 24 hours than someone who isn’t.

 

It’s going to take a little bit more time to eat whole real foods, in terms of clock time, the quality of your time, what you are going to be able to do with the time that you have left is phenomenally greater, phenomenally greater. To tie this all back, the primary way to do that is to get that vegetable intake up, the easiest way to do that and I would argue the only way to really do that in an optimal level is through a green smoothies and green smoothies do not require any SANE super food. I think you can have the best smoothies in the world if you add the SANE superfoods on top of what we talked about, but it’s absolutely not required and of course, here’s the second thing about smoothies, the ones we just talked about, they’re basically pure vegetables. That’s not what you would want to eat for lunch because it’s not a complete SANE meal. You have to eat your vegetables, you have to eat your proteins, and then to some extent you have to eat your fats. I say to some extent because for some individuals they’re going to get really full and the vegetables and protein and if you’re storing 100 lbs. of excess fat in your body already, even though you’re not eating fat through your lips, once you heal your body it’s actually going to be metabolizing and eating fat that’s already inside you.

 

So there are smoothies that you use to increase your vegetable intake, which is what we just talked about. Then there are green smoothies that you use, as a meal. And they need to be complete SANE meals then. These are the smoothies that you can get a little bit more elaborate, so you say, okay, I’ve got that base and the base is unchanged. You need your vegetables, right?  Now, you need protein, so that’s when you’re going to add either a clean whey protein, a clean rice protein, a clean pea protein , those are my recommendations, hemp can also work. I would not recommend soy protein. There is a question about various protein powders and also I want you to get some fat in there and the best sources of fat in smoothies and this is another great thing about smoothies is how else are you going to eat shredded coconut? There’s cereals and we’ve got recipes on the site that you can check out, but honestly, some of this stuff, Jonathan wants me to eat more salmon, I can see how I would do that. I can see how more salmon could be incorporated into my life pretty easily, but now when you start saying things like eat more shredded coconut. What am I supposed to do? Fill up a Ziploc bag full of shredded coconut and just eat it? No you’re not. You can add shredded coconut to your smoothie. And what’s beautiful about adding coconut to the smoothie is coconut is an awesome source of some of the healthiest fats in the world, medium change triglyceride, the healthy form, the healthiest form of saturated fats, and coconut is incredibly rich in the flavor umami, which is one of the core flavor components that yields that sense of satiety.

 

MSG which is terrible and we should never eat it at all, MSG is essentially synthetic umami.  Refined sugar is a refined source of a taste, table sugar is a refined source of the taste sweet. MSG is a refined artificial source of the taste, umami. That’s why it’s added to food which is otherwise disgusting because when you just process corn and wheat you have to add other stuff to it or it doesn’t taste good. But there are of course natural sources of umami, shiitake mushrooms are a wonderful source of umami, and coconut is a very, very rich in umami, so when you add coconut to things, so if you’ve ever had curry or anything with coconut in it, it’s got that rich, decadent, oh, my goodness and if you recall and this is how I know nutrition can be confusing, that’s why I’m so happy you’re here with me and with us so we can clear this up for you. Coconut is a perfect example of how this stuff can become confusing. It’s like 10 years ago, 15 years ago, do you remember coconut oil when the Center for Science of Public Interest, movie theaters were popping popcorn in coconut oil and they’re like oh, my gosh, it’s pure saturated fat. It’s so terrible for you. Oh my goodness and fast food restaurants were frying French fries in coconut oil and then they said don’t do that, saturated fats are bad for you, use trans fats instead. Oops.

 

It turns out that the worst thing ever and that coconut oil is actually of the oils, one of the healthiest for you if you have to use an oil to cook with, coconut oil is one of my preferred choices, but whole food coconut, holy moly, great to add to smoothies, to add some healthy fat in there so you’ve got your base of the smoothie, you want to add some healthy fat in there, so you’re going to add a serving of shredded coconut or you’re going to add some avocado. Add some avocado to smoothie may sound weird, but it gives it a creamy texture so good and why is avocado good? Avocado is extremely high in monounsaturated fats, which is super beneficial. They’re the same kind of fats which are supposedly olive oil is so good for you.

 

Olive oil is high in monounsaturated fats, but, avocado is even higher in monounsaturated fats and it’s a whole food, it’s got a lot of fiber in there. So you’ve got your vegetables, you’ve got your lemon, you’ve got all of this stuff we’ve talked about, plus you’ve got your coconut and/or you’ve got your avocado and then you’ve got a source of protein.

 

I don’t think any of us want to put some salmon in our smoothies. I don’t think any of us want to put some chicken in our smoothies. You can use things like unsweetened Greek yogurt, but honestly, the easiest and most concentrated way to increase the protein content of a smoothie is going to be through a protein powder and of course you know we have some on the SANE store which of course are going to be my recommendation because it’s just pure unadulterated grass fed whey or pure unadulterated pea protein which is my preferred source for non-animal protein. It’s extremely rich in amino acids for a plant source and it’s actually super, super high in certain key amino acids and also rice protein can work. Just make sure, please make sure protein powders can be nonsense, just like green smoothies retail can be nonsense.

 

You go to your local grocery store and you look at their protein powders and you see that they ingredients list read like a box of Twinkies. It’s got nonsense. I’m just trying to buy protein powder and instead I’ve got an ingredients list with 15 things on it. They don’t make it easy for us.

 

Whey, pea, or rice are great, if you can fine casein protein that’s clean, that would be another good option. I haven’t found any personally and hemp can also work, but that’s a general formulation. Hopefully, that’s helpful.

 

There’s another question here that had to do with whey versus other forms of protein. Let me answer that one real quickly and then we’ll wrap up this part of the question. There have been many questions answered at once. The primary forms of protein you’re going to find in powder form commonly are whey, maybe casein. Whey and casein are just the two proteins that are primarily found in milk. A nursery rhyme, Little Miss Muffin sat on a tuffet eating her curds and whey. It’s whey protein, it’s the actual protein in milk, so there’s whey and casein. Those are the two proteins found in milk. Whey is a faster absorbing protein, casein is a slower absorbing protein.  And you can find powdered egg whites. Powdered egg white protein is a great source of protein, it’s just harder to find.  Of course nothing is better than just whole food protein. Whole food, humanely raised meat, seafood, especially things like mollusks, those are great.

 

From a plant perspective, there is soy. I do not like soy protein. There is a bunch of, especially for men, there’s phytoestrogens. I personally would not use soy protein. If you need to use soy protein, you can use it. my recommendation to you as a valued SANE family member is to not use soy protein. If you want plant protein, use pea protein, use hemp protein or use rice protein. They all have different amino acid profiles. My preferred one is pea. Next on the list would be rice and hemp would probably be tied. Last on the list would be soy. Those are the primary differences. From a workout perspective, whey is great, pre and post workout because it’s going to really absorb very fast. I would recommend against eating whey right before you go to bed because whey is going to cause a bit of an insulin spike. It’s one of the best proteins in the world. I would just recommend not eating it right before you go to bed. So that’s all of the different forms of protein. That is good stuff here.

 

Some of these questions kind of go together. We’ve just talked about smoothies, we’ve just talked about eating a lot of vegetables, we’ve talked about eating protein, and what has been written in here, is a comment which we’re all adults here, so we can talk about it and this is a great topic to talk about here is it’s not one that is sexy to talk about in public. And that is let’s call it what we need to call it, gas. Flatulence.

 

I’m going to be very straightforward with you here. There are two things that can be a primary cause of flatulence. One of them is vegetables, the other one is protein. So if you don’t do what I’m about to tell you to do because there is a way around this, a SANE lifestyle when not tempered with what we’re about to discuss can become a bit smelly unless until you get used to it. Obviously there can be solutions to this or else SANE would not have gotten off the ground. It’s hard to say how transformative not needing to take Diabetes medication is anymore, it’s hard to say how transformative it is to love what you see in the mirror. It’s hard to say how transformative it is to regain energy and mental capacities that you haven’t felt for 20 years, but feeling bloated and gassy is not fun. I want to be sensitive to this and I know that this individual who is courageous enough to ask this question is not the only person who is feeling this literally. I want to give you some really important tips here.

 

This is going to be another longer answer. I’m sorry if I don’t get to your question here, but hopefully you’re getting a lot of value from these longer winded answers. I try to give you everything that I can on these calls and sometimes it’s just coming out, I don’t want to filter it. I don’t want to stop because I think it can help you.

 

One of the things that’s come up in othe recalls and that you’re going to hear about in other places are intermittent fasting or meal frequency. There are various reasons why you should or shouldn’t eat frequently. When it comes to a SANE lifestyle, eating four to six servings of nutrient dense protein and eating double digit servings of non-starchy vegetables is essentially nonnegotiable from a I want results perspective.

 

If you don’t really want results it could just be like hey, I’m pretty happy with where I am, cool, that’s fine, but you cannot eat as much vegetables, you can kind of cut back on the protein, but if you want optimal results those are two things which are a bit non-negotiable.  Why is that important? Here is why that’s important. If saying I want to eat a dozen servings of vegetables and I want to eat four or five servings of nutrient dense protein, that pretty much tells you that you need to eat more than once or twice a day, otherwise, if you’re eating once a day, if you’re intermittent fasting or eating once a day, please don’t eat 12 servings of vegetables in one sitting. You want to talk about gastrointestinal distress, eat 12 servings of vegetables in one sitting. Not a good idea. 12 servings of vegetables consumed three to five servings at a time, more towards the three end of the spectrum as your digestive system is getting used to it, way different results in terms of gas and in terms of bloating and in terms of time on the toilet than vegetables consumed all at once.

 

Here’s the top level secret. Protein and vegetables will not, unless you have a pre-existing digestive issue, they will not cause digestive distress if you don’t mega dose them right from the start. So eventually, a couple of months from now, when you’ve been SANE for a while, you could absolutely, you should never eat more than two servings of protein at once. That’s not good for you. That’s too much protein at once, your body can’t make use of that much protein. You’ll be able to eat one or two servings of protein in a sitting, no problem.  You’ll be able to eat probably up to six servings of vegetables in a sitting. Not that you would necessarily want to do that, but you could and especially if you start using some of the super foods, you can do that quite easily. That’s not going to be a problem. You have to gradually work your way there.

 

If this is your first week going SANE, I hope you haven’t gone from the average American, no one on this call is average, so you’re probably at this point, the average American eats zero servings of non-starchy vegetables per day. so obviously you’ve taken the goal, you’re part of the SANE family, you are obviously not typical in any way, shape or form, so you’re probably higher than that. You’re probably at least at four or six I would guess. If you try to go from four or six to 12 in one day, you are going to experience gas and bloating. If you try to go from zero servings of protein that contain 30 grams of protein or more, to 6 servings of 30 grams of protein in a day, you’re going to experience gas and bloating, but if you gradually work your way up to those numbers and if you split them out, so you never want to eat less than one serving of protein at a time, because that defeats the purpose of the whole muscle protein synthesis and hopefully you learned about that within the program.

 

As you’re starting here is a general rule of thumb. One serving of protein maximum of three servings of vegetables at a time. Split that over the course of the day and then as you get more advanced, you can essentially double that. So you could go up to two servings of protein, never exceed two servings of protein. It’s just not necessary and up to six servings of vegetables in a sitting.

 

That’s the trick number one is just space out the ingestion of those things. Other things that can help, obviously making sure you’re drinking enough water, apple cider vinegar, also another great thing that helps with digestion, lemon, anything that’s going to help with the acidity naturally in your stomach can help with digestion. So if again, if you’re just getting started, if you’re not used to eating vegetables, if you’re not used to eating protein, you’re going to get lemons and you’re going to get apple cider vinegar anyway for your smoothies, blend a lemon peeled and maybe some apple cider vinegar, drink that along with your meal, that’s going to help with digestion. Honestly, those two things right there breaking out your vegetables and protein and adding apple cider vinegar, done. Problem solved and please report back if you don’t mind, if it doesn’t do it because it’s 100 percent over the past five years for me to split that.

 

Now, having gas, we all understand that that means like okay, I have gas. We’re all obviously going to flatulence, burping is not bad, it’s a natural thing. Sneezing isn’t bad, you’re going to and you should fart occasionally, but obviously we don’t want it to be bloating and uncomfortable. So don’t expect to never fart nor should you, it’s good for you just like you should burp, but that will help to keep it at a sane level.

 

Penny had a good comment here, how many grams of protein is a serving? Penny you said where do you find this information? Just in the step by step program within the Ignite step by step and then it’s like the overview, introduction course and then it’s like the first or second course, it gives you the basic breakdown of servings, food groups, serving size, if you can’t find it, just post something up in the support group, we’ll send you the link directly. I want to make sure you’re taken care of there. Again, it’s between 20 and 40 grams of protein is a serving of protein and generally if that’s sourced from meat or fish, the general rule of thumb is that’s going to be about the size of the palm of your hand and it’s important to note that.

 

Here’s an example of why so muchof the nutrition information out there is nonsense. How in the heck can someone say that a serving of chicken is four ounces? If you’re a 6’6,” 300 lb. professional athlete wouldn’t you think that four ounces of chicken is different to you than if you’re a six year old girl or a 75 year old female? There’s no servings relative to you. They’re relative to your body size and your body type. It’s just insane, it’s four ounces a serving. It doesn’t make sense. Four ounces is not the same for an enormous human being as it would be for a small child. So a serving of protein, nutrient dense protein is about the size of your hand and hey, that’s really simple and hey it solved that problem instantly because a six year old girl has a much smaller palm that that 6’6” professional athlete does. That will take care of the servings right there and in terms of the actual macronutrient content, that will yield generally a piece of meat or fish that is a size of the palm of your hand, will generally yield between 20 and 40 grams of protein and a gram measurement is important because it also helps you to escape from the mythology out there that things like beans, and nuts, are good sources of protein. They’re not. It’s not to say that they’re in-SANE, but a good source of protein is a food that gets the vast majority of its calories from protein. If a bean gets 70 to 80 percent of its calories from carbohydrate, it’s carb. Doesn’t mean it’s bad. It’s just means it’s not a good source of protein.

 

If we want to eat 20 or 40 grams of protein and we’re trying to do that from quinoa, we would have to eat 1,200 calories worth of quinoa and that’s way too much quinoa to eat. Just like if your goal is to eat more vegetables, you wouldn’t say I’m going to eat more carrot cake, yes, carrot cake has vegetables in it, but it’s not a concentrated source of vegetables. So we want to eat concentrated nutrient dense sources of protein, and those should provide you about 20 to 40 grams of protein within a serving size of the palm of your hand. Hopefully that is helpful stuff.

 

All right. I am so sorry if I’m not going to get to your question here, but I have a lot of energy for this call. So far we’ve had an opportunity to really dig deep in some stuff and I hope it’s been helpful. I know you’ve gotten some really actionable things. Let’s try to do a couple of more here and just remember a quick bit of housekeeping, this is the last coaching call for the year before the holidays happening, but of course, we’re going to pick these up right away in the New Year and of course, in the meantime, the support group is always there for you and we’re seeing some great questions coming there. The support group is a great place to get help with. Hey, is this SANE? Here is what I ate for breakfast. How should I SANE score this? I found this at the grocery store, here’s a picture of the nutrition label. Is it SANE or not? Imagine you just had a magic gene that could answer, what about this? Should I eat this brand of spinach or this brand of spinach? Here are the nutrition labels. That kind of stuff. The support group is super helpful with those kinds of things. Let’s keep going here.

 

Thank you so much Penny and Laura, I really appreciate that. I see some other private comments coming in so thank you. I really, really do appreciate that. I’m super excited for everyone to see those smoothie recipes.

 

We’ve actually subconsciously, I try to do something different just to be transparent, I try to do something different before this call. Generally, I try to not plan these calls because when I don’t plan, new things happen and things that are special happen just like you and I were to go out to dinner, which hopefully, we’ll have some live events, hopefully in 2016. You don’t want to plan what you’re going to talk about over dinner because you want it to be spontaneous, you want it to be an event, you want it to be something cool that’s never going to happen again. And that’s what I want these sessions to be, something that’s spontaneous and cool.

 

I did something a little bit different, I just sort of slightly prepared for this call in the sense that traditionally I would just look at the questions for the very first time, right now, live, and I would read the questions and spend a bunch of time reading them and then answering them and reading them out loud. What I tried to here is Joy, who you may have worked with in the support group, she actually kind of summarized the questions for me and that’s why I’m able to kind of tackle them a little bit more and I’ve tried to weave some of them together to give a more narrative that would be helpful for everybody. Hopefully, that’s worked. If it hasn’t let me know. That’s the cool thing.

 

I like to share sometimes seemingly random personal information during these sessions, but I hope no one thinks this is lame. But one of the things I love most about my wife, who is also my best friend and my business partner, is she is just so reasonable. She’s one of those kinds of people who if we don’t agree on something, the one thing we agree on, is that we’re going to keep at it until we figure it out. Honestly, to me, I trust things like that. They matter a lot in a relationship, but just knowing that you have people together that have promised, I’m going to honestly give this my all until we reach a solution. Unless I die, or unless there’s an act of God, we will figure this out. Bottom line. And I think that’s why she’s awesome and that’s why I love her even more now than seven years ago when we got married. Been together for about a decade and why am I telling you this? The reason I’m telling you this is the SANE Ignite family is and will continue to be that way for you. If something isn’t clicking, or if something isn’t exceeding your expectations or delighting you about these calls, about the recipes, about the step by step program, about the mobile application, nothing is perfect. But what I can promise you is that we will continue to do everything and I personally will continue to do everything I can to get there. Is it perfect now? No. Will it ever be perfect? No. Will any of us ever be perfect? No. But I can promise you and I hope this sort of SANEer you become, like all embody this, that every single day, I can promise you that I’m going to take a step in the right direction, that SANE is going to take a step in the right direction to better serve you, but I need your promise, I need your help with that to tell me, something isn’t going the way that you want it to go. I need you tell, I need you to say that in the support group, tell us, tell us how we can get better. Tell us how we can make these calls better, but hopefully, you’re like Jonathan, stop talking about this, everything is fine, but if it’s ever not, I just want you to know that we’ll make it that way and I want to emphasize this because I think it’s a powerful thing, for all of us to embody in ourselves, which is, am I eating 15 servings of vegetables per day? No. That’s okay. What I want you to promise yourself is that you’re just going to work on that. You’re can’t promise to be perfect and you shouldn’t promise to be perfect and I can’t promise to be perfect and SANE can’t promise to be perfect, but we can all promise is in our heart of hearts, that we will just do everything in our power to make progress and to strive towards that state.

 

In everything, are you eating perfectly SANE now? No. That’s fine. Just moving in the right direction. Are you exercising perfectly Eccentrically now? No. But moving in the right direction.

 

I have no idea why I started this rant, but just continuous improvement. Continuous and never ending improvement. That’s the goal and I think that’s such a powerful mindset because so often we say, I’m not perfect. I’m not where I want to be right now, I so I’m going to stop or I’m going to give up.

 

Look, the fact that you’re on these calls, it’s December 10^th and you are here with me talking about wellness during a time of year when a lot of people are just eating sugar cookies and drinking eggnog. So you’re rocking. Okay? Just continue, just gradual progress. That’s my little rant.

 

We’ve got time for about one more question here. Let’s do this one. Access to seafood. So you can be optimally SANE without ever eating meat. I know people might be listening to this and say, what? I thought eat so much meat. Absolutely not. As you get more familiar with the SANE program and you go through your step-by-step course, you’ll see that seafood is actually the preferred source of protein, not that meat is bad, it’s just that seafood has a lot of good trace minerals in it, you’re going to find omega 3 fatty acids when you eat things like mollusks, which are like oysters and clams, just hugely nutrient dense. And the question here okay, how do I get at that or this individual lives in the Midwest of America and so they don’t have ready access to seafood.

 

Here’s the coolest thing and again you can find this in the Amazon recommendations that I have linked to. This is not something that SANE sells because it’s not like grocery store food, but we can point you in the right direction. Canned seafood is a godsend when it comes to convenient and expense of seafood and please, like the Internet, is a surprisingly great source for grocery shopping. I know that might sound a little bit silly, but if it’s canned, like if you’re looking for canned salmon, canned tuna, canned clams, canned sardines, canned oysters. Oysters, holy moly. So good for you. Super high in zinc. If you’re trying to work on hormones, oysters, the reason they call them an aphrodisiac, is they highly influence your sex hormones and that is always boosting up those testerone levels for men, boosting up those estrogen levels for women, not a bad thing.  You’re saying Jonathan, I know you live in Seattle, they know about the fish markets, you have access to seafood, but what about the rest of us? Honestly, the vast majority of seafood I eat is actually canned because I’m cheap. As I was telling you earlier, about hey, we’re going to do everything we can at SANE to get better. For what it’s worth, I haven’t taken a salary since I left Microsoft to do this full time. That’s what I mean when I say, we’re going to pump all of the money we can back into making this successful for you because as you are successful, your example is just going to freaking radiate out and we know that’s going to cause other people to join the SANE family.

 

The point is, I’m a cheapskate and I have to be because I don’t have that income. I buy a lot of seafood online and at Costco. In fact, you can get these again, I’ll refer you to the SANE store, which then will refer you to Amazon, but you’re going through our links so it helps to support SANE and we really appreciate that. Canned clams, canned oysters, canned tuna, canned salmon, mix that up, obviously you need to season it. It’s not something you want to eat on its own, but that is a great option and in fact, believe it or not, if you go to Costco you can’t buy wild caught salmon. They just don’t have fresh wild caught salmon, period. They don’t. They only have farm raised salmon. So if you want to be optimally SANE and you want that wild seafood, sometimes the only way to get it is canned or frozen. Costco for example, they do have the salmon patties that are frozen and they’re just natural salmon with some seasonings in it. They are wild caught and Costco does carry wild canned salmon.

 

You might say why is it that a place like Costco or just generally it’s easier to find wild seafood canned or frozen than it is to fresh. The reason it is, is they can mass fish a big influx of salmon so they get fresh Alaskan salmon and you if want to get that to people fresh, you need to get that to the grocery store as fast, but if can’t and freeze it then you have more time as a food distributor. So often, those highest quality forms of seafood are easier to find and way more economical when you buy them canned because it’s more economical to go get a bunch of wild Alaskan salmon, can it or freeze it, and then sell it because you’ve got all the time in the world to distribute it rather than if you were to keep it fresh. That is how to access seafood which is the optimal source of SANE protein, but anywhere in the world and also cost effectively as heck.

 

On that note, hopefully, this has been one of my favorite calls as of late. Not that I didn’t like our other calls, I love our calls, but last week’s call my voice was a little bit hit, but this has been great.

 

Please submit those questions, keep those questions coming in. when the survey goes out, you’ll see the next survey in January and have a wonderful SANE holiday. This is just a special time of year. I know it can be stressful, but I just want to wish you a wonderful SANE holiday. I want to thank you for sending in these great questions.  This is like family time of year and I mean it when I say, you’re part of the SANE family and again, I know I say this a lot, but I’m going to continue to say it a lot, because it’s 100 percent true. One of the highlights of my week is having these calls because myself, everyone on the SANE team I have never met harder working, more dedicated committed group of people than the SANE team. That’s why they’re part of the SANE team. And the only reason we have the opportunity to do this and we’re so fired up about doing this is because of your support. So thank you. Honestly thank you so much and I know you too are working intelligently and you are working to promulgate SANEity throughout the world. Thank you, thank you, thank you for your support, for supporting us, for being a shining example for being as Gandhi said, “Being the change we want to see in the world” and please have a blessed, wonderful holiday season. Always remember the goal for this call was to give that virtual hug to make sure you know you’re part of a proven, supportive loving family and community and I hope I’ve done that.

 

Another one of the goals of this call is to provide actionable steps as well as general knowledge and we’ve got some really actionable steps on this call so it was great.

 

The third one is to have some laughs and have some fun and I hope we’ve done that. If we haven’t please let me know via the survey I’ll send out after this. The recording will be up within the next week or two. Have a wonderful and blessed holiday and again, thank you so much and I will see you in the New Year. Have a SANE New Year. The SANEest New Year ever. Thank so much everybody. See you later.