3.31.16

I’m going to take some very specific questions and I’m going to provide very specific answers with very cutting-edge science and then I’m also going to try to generalize them. So I try to do this with everything. So if you hear a question and you’re like, “Ah, this doesn’t apply to me, off.” Please, don’t turn the session off. I’m going to give the specific answer and then general principles so that you’ll know how to handle really kind of any SANE situations moving forward because we are here for the long term. We’re going to go for about 90 minutes or until I pass out, whichever one happens first. And so far, the 90 minutes has always happened first, but who knows as it gets warmer and warmer and warmer. If you just see me sort of fall out of frame and you realize, “Oh, I guess the session ends.” Well, if that happens give me 30 seconds. I might get back up. So yes, and hopefully it’s interactive, it’s fun, you have a good time, you feel much love and if for any reason we do not cover something please, know the support group is available 24/7, 365 with amazing SANE certified coaches. I’m also in there whenever I can be and it’s awesome and it’s amazing. So I just want to make a few quick announcements because holy moly, I’ve been personally waiting for this to happen for almost a year. This involves—let me just back up here. You are the only people in the world other than well, the SANE team, so people outside of like the employed SANE team this is first, and this is ever disclosed. I am going to give you first time access to things, the web page is not even done and I’m incredibly excited about it. So one of number one questions we’ve gotten and that I’ve gotten personally for literarily the last like five years is what do I do for salty and crunchy cravings? What do I do for salty and crunchy cravings, right? So we cover all over the program all these options for what do you do for sweets, you can make sweet substitutions. We’ve got a bunch of SANE recipes, we actually just added a bunch more. We know how to do that, we know how to do fatty recipes, healthy fats.

So we’ve got sweet covered. But like the crunchy, salty that one is, “God, what do you do?” I mean, of course you can do like olives and pickles and natural beef jerky, but it’s still not—like, what? I want potato chip, I want pretzels, and I want all that stuff. All right. So after much haranguing with the United States Department of Agriculture we finally got approval for what we are calling and I am announcing for the very first time ever and it is available. What I’m going to do is actually provide a sweet discount for everyone. It’s our SANE Craving Killer Bacon Crisps. So check this out here. This is pretty awesome. I mean, this is—I’m going to post a link here and this is totally, this web page is not done at all and I will provide this link afterwards somehow, but I just wanted to give you first look at this, it’s not done. We can cover more details in the support group, but we’ve had people literarily craving. What do I do for my crunchy cravings? And I’m going to send out like some crazy discount. You guys are part of the family, this is not about me, “Look, I’m trying to promote this and make money.” This is about, because you’re part of the family I want you to know about this first, the webpage isn’t even done, but it is functional, so if you do want to check this out, you can. Just let me give you a quick high level why I’m so excited about these. So from a nutritional perspective what we’re talking about here 100 percent natural two ingredients. Okay. Sixty percent protein, meaning what SANE Cravings Killer Bacon Crisps are it’s sort of a SANE alternative to popcorn. You pop them in the microwave, you’re looking at in a one ounce serving you’re looking at about 17 grams of protein, you’re looking at four grams of fat and the majority of that fat is monounsaturated fat—that’s the same fat that’s found macadamia nuts or olive oil or olives that is incredibly healthy and they’re scrumptious. No added flavors, no added nothing.

So again, I can’t provide all the information in here, but I want to say you’ve heard about this and if you’ve been with us for a while I’ve been alluding to these things. They are USDA approved, they’re not available to the public yet, this is sort of a hidden web page that I provided and I just want you to be able to have first look at them. So let’s talk about it more later, but I wanted to give you a quick heads up. So they’re available, more info to come and I’m so excited for you guys to try them. I think you’ll love them and I’ll send like a coupon code and a bunch of other fun stuff as well.

So anyway, I’m excited about that. Hope you’re excited about it too because they’re actually not going to be available for the public in large part for a while because obviously I’m sure there’s a lot of questions—I see some questions coming in now. I want to make sure we have like awesome documentation and everything to provide questions to those, but we can cover it in the support group in more information, but I wanted to provide you with a link for early access and I will also send out a coupon code to because this is not about, “Everyone order them and I want to make a bunch of money.” It’s just about hey, I wanted to give you a first look at it because we’ve been asked for this for like five months. So they’re delicious. I eat them every single day and they are the SANEst way if you have crunchy cravings in the world to address those. So I’m very excited about that. A couple other announcements, if you’ve noticed on—thank you, Cynthia. If you’ve noticed on the site we actually rolled out the ability to log your meals directly on the website and we now expanded that, so you can do that more granularly which is cool. We made some enhancements around the @ symbol in the support group. So you can @ someone’s name and then they get notified and all fun stuff in their email inbox which is really, really neat. A bunch of other new stuff coming, a bunch of dessert recipes have been posted. I think we have like dozen Chocolate Velvet Cupcakes, a bunch of other goodness up there as well as bunch of new and diverse breakfast recipes. Those have all been in the last week. So we have been buys over here, so please, make sure you check out the recipe section there because there is a bunch, a bunch of new stuff. So I hope you’re excited about that stuff. Because that’s crunchiness, we’ve got—you can crunch while you log stuff on the website and get some new recipes.

So that is exciting. Lots of good stuff. And just an immense amount of questions. I already see some. What if I eat kosher? These aren’t going to be a good fit for you because they are made from pork, so I apologize for that. Oh, I’m sorry. I tried. We’ll try to come up with something better in the future, but for right now the best we can do is what we’ve got. I apologize for that. Let’s go ahead, we’ve got some questions in here and we’ve got some questions that were written in. All right. Here. So Kate. You say eat more, is it possible that one can be eating too little, too few calories and if so, how do you figure out how many calories is good for one’s body and goals? Kate, that is a great question. All right. So I’m going to try to do something different this session. As you know I go soap box and I spend like 35 minutes on questions and we only get to three of them. I’m going to try to go a little bit faster if that’s okay because we have a lot of questions. Kate, it is definitely possible to eat too few calories. As a general rule of thumb if your energy levels are suffering—I mean, you can do sort of base metabolic rate calculations and so on and so forth, but energy is a really good sign, energy and appetite.

I mean, if you’re constantly hungry or if you’re chronically tired that either means that you have a shortage of calories coming into your body or that your body can’t make use of the calories that are already within it. So what I mean by that is that you have someone who’s struggling with a significant amount of excess body fat. So 100 pounds of surplus body fat on their body, I mean, these individuals still get hungry and no one’s ever really thought to ask the question, “Well, if you have a 100 pounds of fat already in your body—right, that’s 350 000 calories why does the person who’s storing excess fat ever get hungry?” Because they actually already have food inside of them if you think about it, right? Obesity is much deeper from a metabolic level than the mainstream leads to believe.

So if you’re low on energy it means you’re either taking in too few calories or your body’s not able to make use of the calories that are already in it to store—excuse me, it’s storing them as fats rather than burning them as energy. So the general rule of thumb I would say is you know, you want to do basic SANE framework, you want to make sure you’re doing your vegetables first, your protein second and your whole food fats thirds. You’re not going to overeat calories from vegetables and proteins that’s just not possible because vegetables don’t have enough calories in them to over eat and protein is very inefficiently used by our body as an energy source. So what you can do is if you are suffering with low energy you’re going to want to try to experiment with—we talk about eating between three and six servings of whole food fats per day, you want to look at where you’re at on that spectrum. And for example for someone who is already lean they’re going to be closer to six and if they’re lean and really active they ay even be going above six because they need to get more calories. Whereas if you already have a lot of fat stored in your body you might be on the lower end of that spectrum. So in short, it is absolutely possible to eat too few calories and what you need to do is just judge by your energy and judge by your body composition and make sure you’re getting your vegetables first, your protein second and then you’re toggling the amount of whole food fats in terms of servings.

And I’m sorry, I’m getting beeps here. I need to turn this beeping off. Go away, beep. So Kate, hopefully that’s helpful. We have lots of Kates here. So everyone is named Kate, it’s Kate Day. All right. So Cynthia’s got a great question here. She says how long does it takes to get used to eating a SANE amount of vegetables? I always felt that the fair number of vegetables [inaudible 00:18:27] a SANE amount of vegetables, not only am I full all the time, but I don’t feel like eating. I also feel a bit bloated. Should I just persist eating the SANE amount of vegetables or should I work them in more slowly? Cynthia, you hit the nail on the head there. So yes, going from—I bet no one here is probably eating the standard American diet or we wouldn’t be here. The standard American diet contains zero servings of non-starchy vegetables. So I bet if you’re here now you’re probably eating at the very minimum maybe three or five servings of non-starchy vegetables per day. My strong recommendation, like everything else involving SANEity is gradually making progress. So try to eat like one to two more servings of vegetables per day per week. That was sort of confusingly stated. So if you’re currently at five servings per day for the next week try to do seven. And for the week after that go up to nine, for the week up to that go up to 11 at the most. So escalate by two servings per week to give your body some time to digest. That’s really going to help with bloating. The other thing that’s going to help with bloating is to make sure that your servings of vegetables is spaced out across the day.

And just by way of example I think we can all agree that if you were to eat one pound of spinach in a sitting that’s going to treat your stomach and your digestive system and what you might do in the bathroom a lot differently than if you ate a pound of spinach divided into four servings throughout the day. So not only is it the total quantity of vegetables you’re eating, but you need to break them out evenly across the day because if you just sort of bombard your system with that much fiber can cause problems. Let’s also not forget about the rate that we’re actually consuming the vegetables. I am guilty of this very much which is I make a green smoothie which contains three to four servings of vegetables in it and I drink it, just boom, like I drink it in one shot. Four servings of vegetables in your stomach in 30 seconds is a lot different than four servings of vegetables eaten slowly over the course of a meal which is hopefully like 15, 20 or 30 minutes. So you’re looking at gradually increasing the vegetable intake over a matter of weeks. Then you’re looking at spacing it out evenly throughout the day and then eating those vegetables slowly when you are eating them. And if you’re still bloating just try to take in a little bit of something that’s acidic when you consume those vegetables.

So it could be lemon juice, it could be apply cider vinegar. I know I’m going to sound strange, but it’s actually quite delicious when mixed with water, un-distilled apple cider vinegar. So those can be some very, very helpful tips and that’s an excellent question, Cynthia. So I’m going to jump over here real quick. Lot of questions were written in. So I’m going to try to crank through some of that.
First question here is I don’t know how to measure serving sizes and I live by myself so the menu sizes are huge. Do all the sizes [inaudible 00:21:22]. So how to measure serving sizes is covered in your either first or second step by step course, so please, check that out. If you still have questions afterwards please, post them in the support group. The support group is a great place to say like, “I ate this. How many servings of vegetables, proteins and fats is that?” It’s a wonderful resource for that. So please check that out. Do all the sides freeze? Yes, everything, every SANE recipe can be frozen. Of course, results may vary. Sometimes the green leafy vegetables don’t freeze like Romaine lettuce freezes horribly while spinach can freeze very well. As a general rule of thumb though, it’s all freezable. It’s just some things may or many not be as robust afterwards. And in the meal plans we intentionally quadruple the recipes often times. So if you are able to just take the recipes, divide them in half or divide them by four that can if you’re just cooking for one be very helpful, but again, I love freezing, I love cooking in bulk. We do that intentionally because we find that over the long term it’s super, super helpful. But again, that’s something we’re definitely, definitely able to help out more in the support group.

Next question here is that the exercise FAQ, frequently asked questions, talk about doing cardio intervals in addition to smart eccentric, but it doesn’t talk about combining exercises with another strength training workouts. Is it okay to do eccentrics once a week intervals, a week in strength training, body lifting then on off days? Awesome question. To summarize. Can I just add eccentric exercise to what I’m already doing? The general rule of thumb here is that in term of like what can you do I mean, you can do anything. The question is; what is your goal. If your goal for example is to train for a marathon you’re going to exercise much, much differently than if your goal is to be a powerlifter which will cause you to train much differently than if you have fibromyalgia and you’re trying to walk up the stairs without pain which is much different than if you’re coming back from an injury. So anyway, my point is that the type of exercise we do is perfectly tied to the goal we’re trying to achieve.

So eccentric exercise is the exercise prescription to heal your metabolism as efficiently as possible via an exercise modality that literarily anyone can do and can be done for the rest of your life. Because it’s incredibly low risk. So if you do other exercises already and you enjoy it and you’re getting great results you can absolutely sort of add eccentric exercise to the mix. If you’re doing a bunch of other physical activity two things will happen though, the eccentric exercise will be harder to because you won’t necessarily have the energy needed to do it and then it may compromise your ability to do your other forms of exercise, but the question is always what is your goal? If your goal is the metabolic healing that’s really the primary focus of SANE then eccentric exercise and smarter interval training are the most efficient ways to do that. Now, if your goal is to have fun with some friends eccentric exercise is not the way to do that. If your goal is I love going to the gym so I want to go five days per week then you know, you’re probably going to do something else.

So yes, I mean, you can try to do eccentric training with a bunch of other things. Be careful not to over train because eccentric training is very intense, but you might want to just think about like, “What are my goals with exercise?” And which of those goals is most important. And it’s not like one form of exercise is better or worse it’s just what’s better, a fire truck or Toyota Camry? Well, if you’re going on a family car trip and you want good gas mileage Toyota Camry is going to be way better than driving a fire truck. But if your house is on fire a fire truck’s way better. So we got to just look at our goals and then take the appropriate exercise for that. Eccentric exercise is not the best form of exercise it’s the best form of exercise for long-term sustainable safe metabolic healing. Other forms of exercise are good for other things. If that makes sense, I hope it does.

Let’s see. Other questions here. Kate, clarification on the determining of fat. I am lean and slender except—I’m sorry, something else just happened. Except the stubborn bunch of body fat in all of my middle. So would it be eating the amounts of fats that’s closest to three for a leaner person or six for [inaudible 00:26:32] body fat? So great question. Bell fat specifically has a lot to do with your hormones, lots to do with your hormones. We see all the time—right, you’ll see people who are otherwise very, very lean, yet they still have fat on their belly. So there’s not a proportionate distribution of fat throughout the body, it’s specific and it’s focused on the belly. What’s usually happening there, like it’s a clearly not a caloric imbalance issue, if a person just had a surplus of calories, they’re going to have fat pretty universally distributed on their body. But when you have selective adipose deposits such as on the belly that’s a hormonal problem. And that’s why for example the beer belly isn’t an urban myth. When we drink alcohol it actually, especially in men suppresses testosterone production and increases estrogen production and because of that selectively deposits adipose or fat tissue in the belly. So that’s why you can often see men who have incredibly skinny legs, incredibly skinny faces, incredibly skinny arms and even the hips, butt, everything is thin, but then their belly sticks out very far. That is a hormonal issue there and in fact, an exaggerated example of this is when insulin therapy for diabetics was just first being introduced they didn’t know to vary where the insulin injections took place. So individuals would just consistently inject insulin at one place. And what would happen is since insulin is a fat storage hormone, it doesn’t mean it’s bad, it just means that it causes energy to be stored and utilized, that people would develop fatty deposits where they injected insulin. This is if you do an image search on the Internet you can see the pretty weird photos of a couple of generations ago just injecting insulin in the same place, multiple times per day for multiple years would actually selectively deposit fat in the injection location. So again, it’s a big hormonal issue.

The point here is that cutting calories is not going to fix, and it’s definitely not going to fix that underlying problem, but the metabolic healing that’s going to happen by eating more of the right kind of foods to help reregulate those hormones is going to help to burn off the belly fat that is unnatural. Now, to be clear, some level of fat around the midsection is natural. Having a six pack for most of us is not natural. So that’s another important thing to keep in mind and I know we’ve talked about before, which is here with the SANE approach we’re after natural, long-term health, slimness and happiness. Having a washboard stomach, washboard abs if you’re a 72 year old woman is completely unnatural. So, if you are optimally healthy and optimally SANE and you’re 72 you will not see your abs and that’s okay. Because that’s not natural. So that’s the other thing that you have to just keep in mind is also the balance between if our goal is a natural sustainable level of fitness, that’s very different than what I am now calling the professionally fit. So we see some people that are these like fitness models. There’s nothing wrong with that, but we have to just understand that that’s their profession and looking that way is not only their life’s work, but is also more important to them than their health. It’s like a boxer or another professional athlete does all sorts of destructive things to their body so that they can perform something else very well. Fitness can be the same way. If you look at bodybuilders who take steroids like they’re very lean and they’re very muscular, but they’re doing that at the expense of their health. So it’s not always the case that the leaner you get that the healthier you get. In fact, the opposite can be true if we do unhealthy things to lean out. But to answer your question around belly fat. Belly fat is definitely a hormonal issue first and so, as we continue to go SANE, exercise eccentrically and give our bodies time to heal hormonally that’s really going to help there.

So remember, if you have a question please, submit it as a question. You can just copy and paste it because it’s otherwise hard for me to see, I’m sorry if I missed your question if it wasn’t posted as a question, but I’m going to jump in here to some questions that were written in if that’s cool and then I’ll come back to the live questions because I love me some live questions. So there is a one word question here that just says cravings. And yes, that’s a big issue. And it’s such a great issue that it’s covered in detail in your step-by-step. There’s multiple modules that cover cravings and if you search cravings on the site we go into huge detail in it and in fact, if you look in the archives we spent almost 40 minutes in a previous session on cravings because I really wanted to go over the top of the science, but that’s one of these things where it’s so important and it’s such a big problem for so many people that it’s covered in detail in your program. So I want to make sure that you enjoy that and that after you go through that you have some specific questions that we don’t cover there, we don’t cover in the support group I’m happy to help you here, but really the most cutting-edge stuff is going to be there in the program.

Next question here it says, I believe Jonathan Bailor, boom, Jonathan Bailor. I believe Jonathan Bailor is taking the multivitamin nutrients from Calton Nutrition. I was wondering how and when he is taking it because the Calton suggest to put one tablespoon of oil in it which is less SANE of a food. So I was wondering if it’s okay to keep taking the multivitamin twice a day with one tablespoon of oil each time. Good question. The sort of general version of this question is most vitamins—well, not most vitamins, I would imagine all vitamins contain both water soluble and fat soluble vitamins and if you take in fat soluble vitamins without eating any fat they’re just going to come out in your toilet bowl. So I don’t take nutrients any more from the Calton’s. I have since decided to get all of my nutrients from whole foods and that includes the super foods that are available in the SANE store just because of soil depletion and other issues of our modern food supply. And the fact that I cannot find thin cell wall chlorella or things like acai at my local grocery store. So instead of taking any form of synthetic vitamins I try to get all my vitamins and minerals from whole foods in natural doses in the context of a whole food.

And part of the reason for that is just like you said here, just eating tablespoons of oil is not at all something I recommend, but when you eat the nutrients, vitamins and minerals in a context of a whole food they’re going to be presented to your body in the context in which they’re supposed to be consumed and therefore be utilized much better by your body. And the easiest way to see this, the easiest way to see this is if you no matter how much SANE, natural whole foods you eat and even if you go super SANE and you try some of the super foods, powdered SANE super foods you will never have fluorescent urine. And if you take almost any sort of vitamin supplement you will. And the reason you have fluorescent urine when you take a vitamin supplement is because the vitamins are synthetic, they’re not taken in the context and in the ratios in which they’re found in nature. Because of that, your body doesn’t absorb them and it’s just excretes them out. So you end up with expensive urine. Whereas like you will never have a situation in which from eating in abundance of whole foods your urine turns fluorescent, just won’t happen. Because your body is able to make use of those vitamins which is cool. So hopefully that helps.

How do we get 14 portions of non-starchy vegetables, six portions of protein, fat I have no problem with? So the vegetables from—just the key is to get three servings in each meal. So breakfast, lunch and dinner, three servings a pop and with breakfast that could be as simple as having a green smoothie or having some vegetables scrambled with eggs or things along those lines. Lunch, you got a salad or a salad as a side with whatever you eat and dinner, it’s usually it’s just a side of big vegetables. That in it of itself is nine servings of vegetables right there. If you throw in one or two green smoothies you’re at 14 servings. So the key thing is just to make sure we’re eating at least three whole food meals per day. Each one of those meals is going to contain between two or three servings of vegetables and then if we’re going super SANE and we’re going double digit servings of vegetables we’re going to incorporate some SANE smoothies into our lifestyle, some SANE green smoothies, blending them up and then if you want to you can also add SANE super foods to your smoothies and very easily get to a 14th serving by using smoothies, SANE super foods and whole foods at every single meal. So boom, that’s my answer to that one.

Let’s go here. A couple of other quick ones. Why do you prefer whey protein versus defatted beef protein? I don’t prefer whey protein to defatted beef protein. I think they are both fantastic. The reason I don’t provide a clean defatted beef protein—maybe that’s why this individual, I don’t—I apologize if I ever said that whey protein is better than defatted beef protein. I don’t think that. The question may be because in the SANE store we have clean whey protein, pea protein, rice protein and hemp protein and we just can’t find a good clean source for defatted beef protein. So defatted beef protein is great, and in fact if you want to go super advanced, desiccated beef liver, which is just dried out beef liver—most of us know that organ meats are incredibly nutrient dense, but it’s very difficult to find and prepare delicious organ meats, at least in the United States. So if you want all the B vitamins and other goodness that’s found in liver for example, you find, there’s a company called Beverly International which sells the product called Ultra 40, which are just dried Argentinean grass-fed beef liver in little tablets. Each tablet is two grams of protein because it’s just protein. It’s very convenient. It sounds disgusting, it’s not meant to be delicious, it’s meant to be nutritious. So yes, I don’t prefer whey protein. It’s just a different form of protein that does different things as well. Beef protein is a different form of protein that does other things well.
All right. So Candy has a question. She says what do you think of super food powders for smoothies? I think they’re great. We got 80 of them available in the SANE store. I personally would recommend using them in the context of a whole food smoothie. You’ll never hear me say, ever, and if you do call me out on it, “Hey, use something that I sell instead of eating whole food.” Ever. Ever, ever, ever. Even though the stuff that the SANE store sells is whole food like powdered spinach is just spinach that has water taken out of it, I want you to be eating whole foods. I want you to be get in the habit of eating whole foods and I want you to enjoy the satiating benefits of eating whole foods. Like, we need to get out of the mindset of like hack, “I’m going to hack my body.” We need to feel our body and we can certainly use science, of course, to help with that. How do I get 14 servings of vegetables per day, that’s just like it’s too bulky to fit in my stomach? Yes, maybe you put one or two servings of whole food vegetables that you get from your grocery store in your smoothie and then maybe you put a tablespoon or two of Garden in My Glass, sweetens it up a little bit and gives you some vegetables that you can’t buy at your local grocery store and some fruits that you can’t buy a your local grocery store. So I think they’re great as addition on top of whole foods, but I had people ask me like, “Jonathan, it’s actually less expensive for me to just take your Garden In My Glass green powdered vegetable powder than it is to take the time going to the store, buying vegetables, should I just do that?” And my answer is no. Like if your sole source of vegetables are powders or if your sole source of protein is powders I would encourage you—I mean, that’s better than not having vegetables, but I would really encourage you to start with whole foods in their natural form first and then use everything else as a way to take it from great to spectacular. Or if you’re on the road, or if there’s nothing else available.
Motivation, craving sugar and caffeine. Dealing with resistant teenagers. So I’m sorry I don’t know what the actual question is, but I can imagine that dealing with resisting teenagers would be very, very challenging. When it comes to eating SANE for your family lots of great resources there in the program and we’re certainly happy to help in the support group. If you’re on the call live now please, let me know specifically how I can help and I would be happy to. Adapting eccentric exercise for a person who’s very overweight, out of shape and has arthritis, is it possible? Absolutely. Eccentric exercise is actually optimized in a lot of ways for people who are just getting started because it’s so slow and controlled. So the key thing that makes exercise hard for someone who’s struggling with arthritis or who is very out of shape or is very overweight—like let’s look at the opposite of eccentric exercise or something that’s super high impact, moderate intensity exercise such as jogging, if you are arthritic and have 60 pounds of excess fat on your body, essentially jumping up and down on pavement is without question going to do more harm than good. Absolutely going to do more harm than good. But with eccentric exercise that is specifically designed to follow your body’s natural motion paths and to do that in a very slow and controlled fashion. So as you go through your step-by-step program—I think it’s the first course on eccentric exercise. We actually have doctor Kathy Bertel who I believe—I mean, she acts like she’s 35 so it’s kind of hard to tell, but she is a MD who might even be in her 70s, I don’t know because she seems to transcend age, and she’s definitely—there’s a video in there where she shows how to make some awesome adaptations of eccentric exercise. But remember, eccentric exercise is specifically designed to provide you with the most muscle stimulation with the least negative side effects. So it is perfect in that context.

And we actually have another question that was posted in the support exercise that they said I would answer here and that was can you do eccentric exercise on a trampoline? And I think the short answer is unfortunately, not. So I want to pop out a level here and clarify what eccentric exercise is because I think there might be just a little bit of confusion, especially as we’re getting started. Eccentric exercise isn’t like a different exercise. For example, most of these DVD programs that you see sold it’s like, “Oh, there’s this new movement that you’ve seen before and if you move your arm in this way specifically it solves all your problems.” And of course, it doesn’t and those are all scams. What eccentric exercise is, is it’s just every exercise you’ve ever done in your life has an eccentric component. Every movement you make has an eccentric component. What I mean by that, and I apologize for—I think we’ve covered this before, so please, bare with me if you heard this already, but it’s really important. So if you’ve got your muscle here, so if you contract your muscle here. I’m flexing my muscle, look at my muscle. I feel like an idiot. All right. So if you contract your muscle that’s the concentric movement, when you extend, see how the muscle is extending that’s eccentric. Concentric contracting, eccentric, concentric. So any time your muscle extends that’s called the eccentric contraction. So every movement has an eccentric and a concentric component and there’s also isometric. So if you were to just hold a movement, like if you’re pressing against something, you’re pushing, contracting, you’re lowering back down, eccentric extending and then if you hold this that’s isometric.

So every movement that the human body can make has really three things, contraction, concentric, extending, eccentric or of holding the position, isometric. So we say eccentric exercise, what we mean is just that your muscles like if you the same biceps movement and we were to put resistance on hands and go like this, this muscle, my biceps can handle about 40 percent more resistance going like this. So for example, if I should go like—if I could curl a 100 pounds then I could more than likely extend down a 140 pounds. I couldn’t lift, I couldn’t contract a 140 pounds, but I could extend. That’s just because it’s like having a dominant versus a non-dominant hand. If you’re right handed you can just use your right hand more effectively than you can use your left hand. Your muscles actually generally generate force more effectively as they extend than when they contract. So we say eccentric exercise, what we mean is just take existing physical movements and make sure that we focus on where our muscles are the strongest because when we do that we can actually activate more muscle fibers and we can get a better benefit. Going back to the biceps analogy, right. If I were to stop when I could no longer lift weight I wouldn’t have completely fatigued this muscle because if I can’t lift the weight that doesn’t actually mean the muscle is completely fatigued. Because I could still lower it.

So as you learn about eccentric exercise it’s must making sure that you maximize the amount of resistance you use while you lower down rather then like a new exercise. If that makes sense. So that’s why the exercises I show you in the program squats, push-ups, things like that, that’s not a new exercise, but what is new is how you perform the lowering motions that you maximize the amount of muscle fibers used. So how does that relate to a trampoline? One, a trampoline, part of eccentric exercise is moving very slowly on the lowering portion because that’s again going to maximize force. I’m not really sure how to move slowly on a trampoline, I’m not super familiar with trampoline based exercises, but it just seems like if you’re using a trampoline the idea of taking a lot of resistance and moving it very slowly—like one of the general principles of eccentric exercise is you only want to exercise eccentrically when balance is not required. Because the goal of eccentric exercise is not to enhance balance, it’s to metabolically heal you. So we would never want to do eccentric exercise with like a one-legged squat. Because you might fall over, you might hurt yourself, and if you hurt yourself there’s no form of exercise getting done. So I think you can maybe make your trampoline based exercises more eccentric by performing the lowering portions slower, but I don’t necessarily think trampoline is the optimal context in which to perform eccentric exercises, if that makes sense.
That was a lot. All right. So we got some good questions here that were written in. Susanne, what do I think of Fiber One cereal? I would strongly recommend against it. It’s a bunch of artificial nonsense and I would strongly recommend that you get your fiber from vegetables just because. Please, let me know if you have more questions, but that for me is an easy answer. I would strongly recommend against Fiber One cereal, I would strongly recommend that you get your fiber instead from vegetables. Easy enough. So let me know if you want more on that one. All right. So it looks like Susanne may—again, guys I’m so sorry if I missed your questions. Please, just post them again using the question versus the comment bubble, so I can see them. I apologize.

Debra, I’m having trouble with caffeine and green tea, is there any disadvantage of using decaffeinated green tea? Great question and there is no disadvantage. So the EGCG, the active component, the very strong polyphenol found in green tea is not negatively effected by the decaffeination process. Excellent question. Absolutely, decaffeinated green tea is a fine way to go. Fantastic question. AM says, I’m a practicing orthodox Jew and as such need bread from flour made from one of the five grains, wheat, barely, spelt, rye or oats at least one day a week three times on that day. So I think your question might be maybe which of those grains I would recommend the highest. If it’s not please, tell me because that’s the question I’m going to answer. So I’m not super familiar with those grains. I would pick the grain that is the highest in protein and fiber per gram. So it’s not wheat, definitely not wheat. I could tell you definitely not wheat. I’m not a huge fan of grains for a couple of reasons, but we can always say what the SANEst grain is. I mean, we could say what’s the SANEst anything, what’s the SANEst ice cream, what the SANEst candy bars, what’s the SANEst grain. The SANEst grain is going to be the grain which calorie per calorie, so look at a 100 calories of wheat, a 100 calories of barely, a 100 calories of spelt, a 100 calorie rye, a 100 calorie of oats, whichever one has the most protein and fiber in a 100 calories—you have to compare by calories though, you can’t compare by cup because they have different volumes. So comparing one cup of flour to one cup of spinach isn’t the fair comparison because the flour is all compacted down. So you have to compare by calorie. So just compare a 100 calories of each, and this is actually great rule for anything. You can tell if one thing is SANEr than the other by calorie per calorie, whichever one has more protein, whichever one has more fiber and then whichever one has more vitamins and minerals that’s the SANEst choice. So hopefully that is helpful.

I’m going to go really quick. I love this by the way. This is like the most rapid fire we have ever gone in a session before. So I’m curious to hear your feedback. Definitely less esoteric in this section. I love esoteric answers to questions, but we got a lot of questions to get through. So here we go. Let’s keep going. How to eat when I’m away from home? Fabulous question. In fact, so fabulous that there is just abundant, abundant resources. Please, continue to crank through your step-by-step program. It’s covered in huge, huge detail. There’s amazing recordings. Like with any other stuff in your step-by-step or if you go to the eating section of the website and you type in like travel or away from home, or in your SANE concierge like thousands of words because again, it’s that that I’m not covering it here because it’s not important, I’m not covering it here because it’s so important that I cannot do it complete justice on this call. It requires many videos and many exercises—I don’t mean exercises like physical, I mean like mental and that’s why we cover it in detail I the program.

All right. So let me do one more written in question here and then I’ve just got a bunch of questions coming in here. This is great, man. Boom, boom, boom. We’re knocking the questions out, I like it. All right. So this next question here is three questions. Three questions for the price of one. Managing menopausal insomnia and hot flashes, are there any nutritional hacks? I fall asleep fine, but I wake up an hour later and toss and turn for the rest of the night and sometimes hot flashes are a bit overwhelming. [Inaudible 00:51:42] have run across, would that help without resorting to hormonal therapy? So to answer the first question, no, there are no hormonal tricks or hacks that I found. Sleep is an area that is extremely important and actually, keep your eyes out because over the rest of this year we might be partnering up with one of the top sleep doctors in the country to put together some really neat stuff coming out because sleep is something that actually I struggle with a lot. So I’ve tried every hack out there and I hadn’t yet found—and I’m not a fan of doing hacks in general because we want to heal versus hack, but I mean, sometimes sleep is one of those deep—you know, it’s a little bit like saying, “How do I hack my marriage?” Having a solid relationship with another human being is very nuanced and there’s many things involved in it so there’s no real like trick or hack. And some ways sleep in a modern world has become really complicated because we’re constantly stressed, there’s hormonal factors.

So I mean, what I found with myself is like I’ve tired everything and at the end of the day it’s like, “Jonathan, why are you anxious? What’s going on?” And until I resolve that I’m not really sleeping well. So this might also be something your primary care physician can help you with a little bit, but definitely no hack that I know of. I mean, obviously you can try Valerian, try chamomile tea. A SANE lifestyle will help you sleep. Physical activity will help you sleep. Eating a nutrient dense diet will help you sleep, not being overweight—about 80 percent of people who are overweight suffer from sleep apnea even if it’s not diagnosed. And that’s going to destroy your sleep. So eat SANEly, exercise eccentrically, have loving relationships in your life. Let’s start there and then like if that doesn’t help we can try to go a little bit more advanced, but those three things is going to get your further than any hack ever could speaking from experience.
What is the best way to SANEly fuel while training for a marathon? And then there was another question about this in the support group this week. So the string recommendation is read a book called The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance by a Volek and Phinney. It’s a dense academic book, but it will tell you an immense amount of science and strategies that show you how especially when it comes to endurance athletics fat is a better fuel source than sugar because as you know, you can’t really store a lot of sugar in your body, you store fat in your body. So if you need a lot of fuel eating clean sources of fat such as macadamia nuts or coconut or coconut cream are going to be excellent ways to fuel yourself. It is going to take a while for your body to shift from burning sugar to burning fat. So you are going to experience a bit of what some people call like a low-carb flu for two to three weeks while your body makes that adjustment, but it will make that adjustment, and like the studies that have been done on using fat as your primary fuel source, not just for life in general, but for athletic performance and long duration athletic performance or endurance athletics is phenomenal. So please check out The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance, it’s a fantastic book. And yes, just make sure you’re getting the balance of your calories from whole food fats. And understand that it’s going to take anywhere from two weeks to a month. Like, you’re going to feel like garbage when you stop eating all that sugar and you start getting your fuel from fat for endurance training because your body has to make that adjustment, but once it makes that adjustment you’re going to be good for the rest of your life. So that’s very helpful. And you’re not going predispose yourself to diabetes because that’s a thing that a lot of us forget about is it’s awesome to be physically active, but if what we do to fuel our physical activity burns out our pancreas then that’s not particularly helpful for us in the long term. So that’s a good thing to keep in mind. And hopefully that is helpful.

Let me see, we have some great questions here coming in. What liquids can be used in green smoothies besides water? You can use coconut water is a decent option. Mary, can I ask you a follow-up question? Are you just not wanting to use—like water is the preferred source because I’m not a huge fan of—I mean, green tea is great, but if you’re just trying like you can put coconut water in, you could put coconut milk, you could use rice milk or almond milk if you wanted to, but these are not whole foods, they’re all derivations of a different food. So yes, you could. Could you maybe just give me a little bit more information on why? Is it just the taste thing or some thing else I hopefully can help for? And Raina, actually already answered that. So great job, Raina, nice job.
Bonnie says, if my goal is to heal my metabolism and lose weight and I have a desk job, besides eccentric once a week, what else? How many times a week on a stationary bike you showed in the video? Great question, Bonnie. So remember, when I say exercise less, but smarter, what I mean is less of the conventional type of jogging and destructive high impact nonsense like that. Ten thousand steps, like moving, if you’re at a desk, if at all possible, get a standing desk. Like standing, walking, moving your body, 10,000 steps, that’s incredibly important. Being outside, being in nature, movement, things which our ancestors did that aren’t like exercise in the formal sense. I mean, nowadays I feel like sometimes our borough around exercise is gotten so low, we say that like walking is exercise. And walking isn’t exercise, walking is being a person. Walking is movement. Exercise is something very specific that we do, it’s almost unnatural—that doesn’t mean it’s bad. I mean, what we’re doing now is unnatural. It’s incredibly unnatural for us to be talking this way. It doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing, it just means that I would recommend a huge amount of natural movement that works with your body, that human beings have been doing for a really long time, as much of that as you possibly can and then we’re going to supplement that with a little bit of high, high intensity, but very safe and slow eccentric training and then once, possibly twice per week of the smarter interval training. And then if you want to do things like yoga and Pilates, these very low impact restorative exercises those are fabulous, fabulous options as well. So hopefully that helps.

Mary asks what kinds of salad dressing can I use? Mary you can use any kind of salad dressing that doesn’t contain hydrogenated oils or added sugars. My recommendation would be to go on the Internet and type in diabetic friendly salad dressing or low-sugar salad dressing or all natural salad dressing. And then to find ones that have ingredients list that are maybe six items or shorter and all of the ingredients are pronounceable and none of them are sugar. So like oil and vinegar you can make at home, you can use lemon juice, but at the end of the day, we just want to eat stuff that doesn’t have a bunch of toxic nonsense in it. So the good news—I mean, there is more and more people nowadays that understand the quality of food is so important and unfortunately now one in every three of us are diabetic or pre-diabetic. So natural and low-sugar options are becoming more and more common. So your best friend for this is going to be the Internet because what your local grocery store may have is going to be of much smaller selection than what you can find online and since most of these salad dressings they can be shipped you can potentially buy things online and really expand what are the options that are available to you.

So hopefully that is helpful. Yes, Mary. And there could be some sugar. I mean, it’s all cost benefit. So if you’re going to get—even some of the SANE recipes. We get questions about this on the site, you know you might have a SANE side dish which has 12 servings and calls for two tablespoons of table sugar. If you’re like, “Oh, he’s putting table sugar. Holy moly, it’s all a lie.” But when you actually do the math and you see that per serving you’re looking at two grams of sugar this is not something that’s going to be of metabolic consequence. So remember, I mean, there’s pollution in the air, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t breathe. I mean, some stuff is unavoidable and some stuff is actually good. I mean, what is an immunization? And immunization is a low dose of a disease so that your body can fight it off. That doesn’t mean that we should intentionally eat low-dose inSANEty because it helps our body. It doesn’t, but the point is that our body is resilient. So if there’s a little bit of naturally occurring sugar, I mean, even the SANE super foods, they have fruit in them so they’re going to have some sugar. So it’s just trying to avoid high dose concentrated added sugar if that makes sense.

All right. So a couple other questions here written in, actually not a couple, a lot more. So I need to keep going. I might pass out on this call. What is the best eating strategy for third shift workers besides time and type, before bed snack or drink to promote best daytime sleep? I’m so sorry, I don’t actually know the answer to this question. I’ve never seen peer reviewed. I try to only share things that I’ve seen proven in research or that I have personal experience with and I don’t have a lot personal experience with this and I haven’t seen peer reviewed research around it. So I don’t particularly know why it would be any different for a third shift worker than it would be for anybody else. There is nothing what is recommended by a SANE lifestyle is universally beneficial for everybody because it’s just eating food that is the most satisfying, causes the least hormonal chaos, provides you with the most nutrition and is least efficiently stored as body fat. If you work first shift, second shift, third shift, not at all, all the time, those foods are still the best for you. So if you’re on the call live please, let me know if there’s like a specific question deeper, but I would say standard SANE lifestyle should take care of you as would of anyone else. If that helps, I’m sorry. I’m trying, I’m trying.

All right. Quick on the go meal options. So yes, that is the huge issue and covered in detail in the program. So please, dig into that. What is the most difficult thing to do when going SANE? I think, what I’ve seen after years and years and years of working with people to do this, the most difficult thing actually has to do with mindset. It does not have to do with like any vegetables, protein, fats, eccentric exercise, that stuff is easy compared to taking on the mindset of what we’re doing right now is curing a disease. Right, obesity is a disease. It is a diagnosable, medical condition. This is not Jonathan Bailor saying this, this is the American Medical Association saying this. And to treat that disease we need to treat it like we would any other disease, we need to treat it with compassion, we need to treat it with caring, we need with science, and we need to give our body time to heal. And the way we do that is look at abundance of nutritional therapy. And so it’s going to take time and it’s not about counting calories, it’s about flooding the body with nutrition. To me, after 40, 50, 60 years of hearing the opposite of that that we just need to try harder because we’re morally flawed and we’re lazy or something, that mental shift is the hardest part I’ve seen, but it’s also the most transformative because once you can wrap your head around that, and I actually have a bunch more stuff I want to share about that, I don’t know if we’re going to have time to get to it in this session because we have so many great questions. But as we do have time to cover it, I really want to get into it more because once you understand that obesity is a disease it changes the way we treat it and it changes the way you, more importantly treat yourself. And it moves us more towards a model of gradual, long-term healing and compassion rather than short-term starvation and shame based quick fixes. I think that’s the hardest part is making that mindset. Personally, personally, personally.

All right. Let’s jump back into some live questions here. Oh, goodness, all right. So how to compare the grains? Where to get that info? So just type in a 100 calories of blank into Google and Google will provide you with the nutritional information. It’s pretty amazing. So type in wheat, nutrition facts or barely, nutrition facts into Google and you’ll get your answers which is neat. All right. Looks like Mary, Raina’s got some good questions and answers for Mary. [Inaudible 01:05:13], Raina. All right. So Bonnie, why would you use sugar, premade soups, non-fat items in your recipes, yet no coconut sugar or raw natural honey? So Bonnie, it’s just a cost benefit thing. So just because something is natural or unnatural doesn’t mean it’s good or bad. Taking penicillin is somewhat unnatural, that doesn’t mean it’s bad for us. And tobacco is 100 percent natural, that doesn’t mean it’s good for us. So as a culture, we have a tendency to—right, in the 1980s and 1990s it’s like if something was low-fat it was good for us and that then caused nonsense, right.

Then it was something is organic or natural, it’s good for us and that’s just not true at all, right. I mean, you can have organic—and you see food manufacturers using this all over the place, right. They take like agave which just calling—I mean, people can eat whatever they want, it’s just—high-fructose syrup which is unnatural, and it is unnatural has 42 percent fructose in it, 48 percent fructose. And people say it’s called high-fructose corn syrup. Agave, natural, organic, has 90 percent fructose in it. So if fructose consumed in high doses is bad for us, if that’s what the science says, which it kind of doesn’t matter if the fructose is coming from natural or unnatural sources, and it’s coming in twice of high of a dose from agave than it is from high-fructose corn syrup then agave’s not going to be the way to go. So what we always try to do is we try to balance what the science says about whether or not something is actually going to be harmful for us, and to be clear like coconut sugar is not—if you’re otherwise healthy, like if you’re a healthy person that is not struggling with diabetes, you’re not struggling with insulin resistance and you want to use a little bit of coconut sugar that’s awesome. I mean, no judgment from me, it’s all good. If you’re getting the results that you like eating coconut sugar or raw natural honey that’s totally fine, but if you look for example, at the scientific research about some of the hormonal implications of some of those sweeteners—and just to be clear a non-fat item—again, I think just the question is judging whether or not something is—what we’re here to do is to eat the most satisfying, unaggressive, nutritious and inefficient foods in the world. That is what peer reviewed scientific research has shown to be the most beneficial for us to heal our metabolism.

Most of those foods are natural. But just because something is natural doesn’t mean it’s SANE and just because something is SANE doesn’t mean it’s natural. There’s all sorts of things that aren’t—I mean, I’m not going to keep saying this, but I think they’re—right, what we have to be very careful, like in the 1990s it was if it’s low-fat it’s healthy. And we saw what that caused. If it’s organic it’s healthy is the new thing and that’s just not true. You can have organic candy bars—and you see that all the time. You go to Whole Foods and they still sell garbage, it’s just all natural garbage and that’s unfortunate and that’s the difference we try to do with SANE is like there’s no way to fake it. Something either is highly satisfying and we can measure that, it either does or doesn’t cause hormonal chaos, we can measure that. It either does or doesn’t provide essential nutrition and it either is or isn’t efficiently stored as body fat. And that’s sort why a sort of a SANE lifestyle gives us that comprehensive view. And again, if you want to use a little bit of raw honey that’s cool, more power to you. If you’re getting results that you like. So it’s not about judgment, it’s not saying that’s like evil or bad or you should never do that, it’s just about saying we have to be very focused on will this thing help me to achieve my goals versus is this, is it paleo is not—if you can eat a completely paleo diet and eat lard, honey and white potatoes that is a completely paleo friendly diet. And it will kill. And every paleo advocate would probably tell you that if you ate that you would get sick and die.

Because just being paleo isn’t enough, it actually has to be born out by science to be nutritious and healthy. So hopefully that helps. I apologize if it doesn’t. Please, let me know if it doesn’t. I’ll try to do a little bit better job.

Mary, I take one tablespoon of MCT oil every morning is that okay to do? Mary, if it helps you it’s okay to do. I personally would—MCT oil is completely inSANE because it’s a processed substance, it’s providing now essential nutrition. I would much rather you eat the whole food coconut, but again, I’m not—I don’t want to disappoint you in the sense that like what I say about MCT oil does not matter. What matters is that MCT oil makes you feel great and it helps you to reach your goals keep doing it. If I say that peanuts are a good snack food and some has a peanut allergy they shouldn’t eat peanuts because if they do they’ll go into anaphylactic shock. So what I can tell you is that MCT oil is not at all SANE because it has very low nutrition, it’s very easily stored as body fat, it does have some beneficial characteristics to it, but just by way—I mean, everything has beneficial characteristics. It’s always a question of cost benefit. For example, I was doing some work with Professor Gary Wenk over at the Ohio State University and he’s shown in his research that they’re finding that smoking cigarettes seems to help combat Alzheimer’s disease. But that doesn’t mean smoking cigarettes is good for you, it just means that the human body is an incredibly complicated thing and everything we put into it probably has some good and some bad. The question is, is that ratio where it needs to be. So the question for me Mary, if the MCT oil is helping you reach your goals go with it, if your question is, is it SANE, the answer is no. But what matters most is that it’s working for you.

All right. Debra says, how will I know if my metabolism is healed? That’s a great question Debra. There’s no short answer for how you’ll know how your metabolism is healed. The closest thing is that you will no longer have to think about food or your weight. What I mean by that is when your metabolism is healed you will operate like every single human being who lived prior to all this calorie counting nonsense, which is you’ll eat when you’re hungry, you’ll stop when you’re full, you’ll have energy, you’ll die of natural causes. Remember that term? Like we don’t use that term anymore because we all die of diseases nowadays because of all the toxic substances we’re putting into out body. People used to just die of natural causes. They wouldn’t really age, they would just get older and then one day they would go to sleep and not wake up. Their body just says I’m done. So how do you know when your metabolism is healed? You know your metabolism is healed when you eat when you’re hungry, you stop when you’re full, you don’t have severe cravings and you’re at a healthy weight. That doesn’t mean you have six pack. Six pack is unnatural, six pack is actually unhealthy. If you’re a female and you have a six pack you’re not going to have a menstrual cycle anymore because it’s not natural to have that low of boy fat percentage. So you’re at a healthy body weight, a healthy level of energy, a healthy sex drive, healthy, natural mental focus, healthy appetite, healthy satiety and you can focus on everything else in your life, you’ve achieved what I call nutritional serenity. That can take, depending on how much you’ve yo-yo dieted, your age, that can take anywhere from months to years to achieve, but once you achieve it it’s something that you can maintain for the rest of your life. So it’s actually very, very exciting thing.

Got some questions written in here. I’m going to try to crank through a few more of them here. The leaky gut and vegetable in bulk. I think we kind of covered that already because we’re going to eat the vegetables slowly and in smaller portions spread out. I see that I have to eat 20 to 30 grams of protein at a time to benefit my body and I’m using a green smoothie in A.M. with a lot of veggies, how fast do I need to drink it to get protein benefit? Do I have to be ingested in 30 minutes, one hour? It’s a good question. That’s a good question. So yes, so we want to eat 20 to 30 grams doses of protein to trigger a process in our body known as muscle protein synthesis. Really good question here which is so if I take in 30 grams of protein for example, over four hours versus four minutes am I still going to trigger that result? And the answer is no. This is a great question to ask. The reason, or how muscle protein synthesis gets triggered is there are certain amino acids that reach a certain level in your bloodstream and when that happens hormonal signals hit what’s called the mTOR pathway in your brain—we’re getting really scientific here. And that tells your brain to fire off more hormones that triggers the development and the repair of cells and metabolic healing muscle tissue. So you want to try to eat the protein from like start to finish probably within the half hour. So you want to take in 20 to 30 grams of protein from when you start eating to when you finish eating in about half hour. So if you’re going to drink a smoothie gradually over four hours I would recommend making that almost like a pure vegetable smoothie if possible when you’re trying to take in your doses of protein. Let’s do that consciously at meals within—you know, don’t ever just pound it, it’s never good to just be like boom, with food. You want to take it in slowly. So five minutes is the shortest period of time and then you know, anywhere from five minutes to 30 minutes is probably great.

Mary, I make a large smoothie in the morning and it takes all the way to lunch to finish drinking it, is it okay to take that long to drink a smoothie? Depends what’s in the smoothie, Mary. Hopefully what I just said helped. I think consuming vegetables like that is fabulous. I mean, for some people that’s kind of the only way they can take in the requisite amount of vegetables because it’s much more gradual, the amount of fiber, so on and so forth. Bit if you’re going to do that try not to put a bunch of protein in that smoothie because the protein is just not going to do what you want it to do if you drink that slowly. If you have a question I’ll miss it, if you don’t post it as a question. So please, try to post it as question, use the little question thing in the chat box.

But Vera says, when I drink Bulletproof Coffee for breakfast I’m not hungry for six or more hours, is coffee with coconut oil and butter, and is this okay? So the reason that bulletproof coffee makes you full is because it’s super high in calorie. I mean, if you take—I love Dave Asprey, he’s a personal friend of mine, if you take 700 calories and you eat it for breakfast you’re not going to be hungry. It doesn’t matter if it’s in the form of bulletproof coffee—I mean, it actually does matter because if you drink bulletproof coffee and then you don’t eat vegetables for the next six hours it’s very difficult to be SANE. So my recommendation is like we want to eat an abundance of vegetables that’s priority number one. The reason I personally—SANE is different than the Bulletproof diet, they’re not the same things. Dave Asprey is really about helping people to achieve super human cognitive performance and Bulletproof Coffee may or may not help with that, but there’s no secret to Bulletproof Coffee. Bulletproof Coffee is taking coffee which is a stimulant, caffeine is already an appetite suppressant, and caffeine will suppress your appetite, so will cigarettes. Doesn’t mean they’re good for you. And if you take an appetite suppressant and a stimulant and then you add 700 calories to it you’re going to be full for a very long period of time. Now, if our goal though is to eat an abundance of whole healing food and we need to space that out throughout the day you can see how that’s probably not the best idea for SANE lifestyle. So again, it’s all about your goals, but a Bulletproof Coffee is not SANE at all. Your breakfast recommendation in a SANE lifestyle is going to be something that’s heavy in vegetables, then you got that critical dose of protein and some whole food fats definitely.

The question here about where do we find the list of other sweeteners? So in general, if you can’t find something I apologize for that please, post in the support group, we’ll get you the link immediately. Debra asked can I make smoothies the night before and still have the nutrition? Absolutely, Debra, absolutely. I make all my smoothies on weekends, literarily. If you look at my refrigerator on Sunday evening you can just see containers of green smoothies. So yes, you can absolutely do that and the question, and I think this is a really important mental distinction, the question is not—right, the question is what can you do for the rest of your life? This has got to be something that you can enjoy forever. So even if a smoothie is three percent better or you if you drink it right after you blend it, what’s better? Having a three percent better smoothie that makes you late for work and stresses you out because the kids are screaming and you’ve got to turn the blender on or saying, “Look, I’m going to make all my smoothies on the weekend. I’m even going to freeze half of them and that’s something that I can do and I’m not going to get stressed about it.” I mean, there’s a great example of this, a wonderful member of the SANE family had a awesome question this week, she said she got the SANE meal bars and that they were—she has some dental issues and she needed to soften them. So she wanted to put them in the microwave for 10 seconds to make them softer.

And she was saying I’ve heard that microwaving foods can damage them in some way, what are your thoughts on this? And like this is a perfect example of like the SANE mindset that myself and the entire SANE team, the Ignite program wants to help you take on because we need to look at this problem differently. The way our culture has taught us to look at this problem is like potentially the microwave hurts your food. So you shouldn’t microwave anything. And then we have protein bar which is good for us that we can’t eat unless we soften it in the microwave. So we say, “What do I do?” I am super confident that the stress that you will face from worrying if putting a SANE super healthy in the microwave for 10 seconds will hurt it, like the stress of thinking about that will you hurt you more than what the microwave will do. And that’s such an important distinction because like stress and worry, I mean, you want to get sick and diabetic and getting fat especially in your belly quickly be chronically stressed out. Always feel like you’re not good enough or there’s some other thing, “Oh, I used the microwave, I’m a bad person.” This water bottle might not be the perfect form of plastic, or I can’t eat food from a can because the can—like, all those things might be true, but you know what’s definitely true, beating yourself up constantly and always thinking that you’re not good enough will literarily kill you.

I think it’s at this point one of three Americans are on some form of antidepressant or antipsychotic medication. Not only is that heartbreaking, but those medications literarily elevate your set point. They have been clinically proven to cause chronic weight gain through hormonal disruption. So like having to sort of worry about getting these things perfect. I can’t use the microwave. Like eat your vegetables, love them, love yourself, eat your proteins, in abundance eat your whole food fats as need to fill you up, move your body and do that in a way that you love and that you can enjoy and that doesn’t stress you out because the stress caused by trying to be perfect will make you not be perfect. There’s a psychological term for this, it’s called paradoxical intention. Great way to think about it, here’s an example. You know the easiest way to not fall asleep—I’m sure you’ve all experienced this, is to lay in bed and be like, “Fall asleep. Fall asleep. Common, I got to fall asleep. Oh, my God, if I don’t fall asleep right now I’m never going to be able to go. Oh, my gosh, please, fall asleep, fall asleep, fall asleep.” The harder we try to fall asleep, the more awake we become. It’s paradoxical intention. The harder we try to do something the harder it becomes to make it happen. Or I have to speak publicly, “Oh, my gosh, I have to speak publicly.” The more I think about it. Don’t be nervous, don’t be nervous, don’t be nervous, and don’t be nervous.” It makes you nervous.

So if we can just focus on progress rather than perfection going through one step in the Ignite program per day, posting in your gratitude journal, saying am I eating vegetable first, protein second, nutrient dense protein third. That is going to do more good for you and dropping that stress level, reregulating your hormones, that’s going to do better for you than any like hack or trick ever could. And that’s why I feel so blessed that the acronym for SANE, satiety, aggression, nutrition and efficiency like I don’t know if it was fate or whatever, but like the term SANE, we just have to take a lower case SANE approach to this too because stress and worry and shame and guilt, those are more fattening than maybe any processed food on the planet. Because the hormonal chaos, the cortisol spikes, the sex hormones suppression, that stuff is toxic.

So I’m sorry, I got a little bit amped about that one, but that’s a big one there, so I hope that helps. Oh, goodness, we got seven minutes left. We got a lot more questions here. Let me see if there’s anything I absolutely have to cover today. I’m going to carry some of this over. And Mary’s got a question here, what can you use store bought hummus to dip your veggies in? Mary, yes. I mean, you absolutely can. I think a different way to phrase this question might be is it better to not eat vegetables or to eat vegetables that are dipped in store bought hummus? Like that’s a great example of the SANE—I want the SANE shift in your mind. Because I don’t think perfect exists because it doesn’t. So that’s never an option. Eating vegetables with almost anything—like deep fried onions to make onion rings it would be better to not eat the onion, so stick with me a little bit with me here, but like store bought hummus, even if it wasn’t perfect, or even like the salad dressing isn’t perfect—now, there’s some salad dressing which is just garbage, so if you have like an iceberg lettuce salad which—iceberg lettuce is not nutrient dense. We want green leafy vegetables, and you drench it with like a soy bean oil, cream nonsense. Like it’s always better to just not eat that, but if using butter and if using bacon drippings or lard or tallow or hummus helps you to enjoy eating vegetables and otherwise you’re like, “Oh, vegetables. Uh.” Like this scenario, “Oh, vegetables.” It’s got to be SANE, it’s got to be sustainable and it’s got to be enjoyable because if it’s not enjoyable it’s not going to be sustainable. The reason that every diet, all of us have tried that has failed us is because it’s like, “Eat perfect and your happiness doesn’t matter.” And first of all, perfect isn’t possible and that actually makes us not happy and because we’re not happy we don’t sustain it and because we don’t sustain it we yo-yo diet and then we end up worse off than if we never even started it in the first place.

So absolutely, Mary. Thank you so much for asking this question because it’s a great question to be the one of the one that we close on because we’re running out of time here, which is please remember, that the question is not ever like—we have to think more holistically or more SANEly which is if doing this thing which may not be perfect, which perfect, it doesn’t exist—like is freezing my smoothie going to maybe compromise it a little bit or if putting hummus because hummus is a legume so it’s not super SANE, if doing these things over the long term will help you to do the big things right then do it. One of the other wonderful questions that came in, Bonnie was asking about honey and coconut sugar. Are honey and coconut sugar super SANE? No, they’re not, but if using them in small amounts does not slow down your progress and it makes you happy and it makes you find a way of eating that is more SANE than what you’re used to man, keep going, that’s awesome. And over time maybe we can optimize it, but as you’re getting started that’s the way to go. So I hopefully think that’s helpful.

Candy says, to reduce my stress should I pack in my job and sell my kids? No, remember, I mean there’s use stress and distress. Use stress is healthy stress and when we do things like eccentric exercise that is intentional stress. You know, with no stress there is no growth. So the goal isn’t to avoid all stress at all. In fact, avoiding all stress would cause death because our immune system would shut down and that’s not good. So what we want to do is just make sure we have the positive—so you know, if we’re going to stress about anything, stress on the things that matter and maybe just not take on the mindset of healing and opportunity and one day at a time, progress rather than perfection. Understand, and I mean it’s just such a powerful thing like the stress caused by worrying about the blending of smoothies or the microwaving of protein bars or the hummus on vegetables, like these are awesome questions and it’s just so unfortunate that our society has taught us that—I mean, it is a fact that the stress caused by having that chronic sense of I’m not good enough, oh, my God there’s another thing—I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to use the Lord’s name in vain there, but oh, my gosh—I just get amped up about this stuff because it’s toxic. That constant pursuit and that constant nagging in your brain of like, “Oh, I’ve eaten too much. I need to count calories. I don’t look good enough. I didn’t do this good enough.” That is worse for you than anything else. So anything that we can do here during these calls, in your support group, in your SANE step-by-step program that—oh, my God. Said it again.

It all comes back around. Earlier someone wrote in a wonderful question what’s the hardest thing you’ve seen with making the transition to SANEty? And it has nothing to do with what you’re eating. It has to do with the mindset and we’re starting to cover some of that here, but I promise you that when you take on that lower case SANE attitude, when the mind becomes more SANE, SANE capital eating can really help with that, but oh, my gosh. I mean, when you combine these two things, upper case SANE with lower case SANE that’s when the game changes completely and I just feel so blessed and thrilled that you’re here to start or continue that journey with us and I so appreciate the opportunity. We are out of time. Ninety minutes and I didn’t pass out. I barely drank any water too just because we got so man great questions. So by the way, if I didn’t get to your questions I’m so sorry. Or if you think I didn’t do a good job I’m especially sorry. But please, post them in the support group, check out the support group if you’re not there already. It’s an amazing, loving place. Please, make sure that you do your step-by-step program one step at a time. So like, we spent so many years perfecting that, ordering that so that it’s going to give you what you need in the specific order that you need it. Some of these questions are great questions, but they kind of come later once we get some of the basics down. So thank you again so much and I so look forward to seeing you next week and remember, stay SANE. Thank you again and I hope this has been as much fun for you as it has for me. It’s definitely the highlight of my week, so thank you for all the wonderful chat and interaction. You guys rock. And I’m going to sing out now. See you guys later, thank you so much.
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