4.21.16

I have to give some quick shout outs here.  This week has been an awesome week in the Support Group and the Coaching Group.  Just amazing things were going on there. 24/7 we got folks all around the world in there.

We’ve got to go through this week’s leaders.  At the top of the list: Raina, crushing it.  You are doing so great in the Support Group.  Congratulations.  Raina’s actually been bumped up to Level 4 SANity due to her amazing contributions.  So thank you, Raina.  Thank you, Megan Williams. Of course all the SANE Coaches.  Lynette Stork, Kate Boscoe, Donna Wilson, Lue Buckmiller, and Laura O’Reilly have just been this week’s leaders in the SANE Support Group and thank you to everyone else who has been participating there.  If you do not know where I’m getting this information from, go on the Support Group and click on the Activity Tab, you can see all sorts of fun stuff there.  So please check that out if you haven’t already.

As always these calls are recorded and you can see them by clicking on Stay Motivated in the bottom of your Ignite Program.  This one will be up in about 48 hours.  I have a special announcement at the end.  So make sure you stay all the way till the end.  Speaking of going in depth and of some new stuff; we’ve got some good stuff to cover this week and again I love the direction this time together.  This is to get we’re not going to be covered on the podcast.  We can’t cover it anywhere else.  It’s just for you, just for the inner circle here.

The first thing I wanted to cover today was Ketogenic Diets.  We’ve got a great question submitted in that says a lot of people swear by Ketogenic Diets saying they can’t lose weight any other way.  Is that really a better diet than others?  How is that different from SANE?’

There’s going to be a common thread throughout.  Raina posted a link.  Thank you so much, Raina.

What’s up Kate? I didn’t realize you were here.  What’s going on?

There’s going to be a common thread throughout our conversation today. As we’re going to go 90 minutes or until I pass out.  It is starting to get warmer here in Seattle.  I can’t have my air conditioner on while we’re recording.  So we haven’t had the Jonathan pass out before 90minutes yet, but it might happen this week.

How does SANE relate to different dieting techniques?  Is SANE a diet?  Ketogenic, stuff like that.  It’s a bunch of questions and a bunch of things that run through that area, so let’s jump into it.  And I’ll answer the Ketogenic Diet question here in a second, but especially as we have so many new Family members joining the SANE Ignite Program which is amazing and I’m so happy to see that.

You may even get these questions personally when people see that you are changing your lifestyle and you tell people that I’m going SANE. They go like, ‘How is that different?  Is it like Weight Watchers?  Or is like South Beach or is it like Paleo?  Is it like Atkins?’

The key distinction that it’s really important for us to make.  Let’s make some quick definitions at the very beginning.  Weight Watchers for example, is different than Atkins.  If you think about it, it’s different from Paleo, in the sense that Weight Watchers isn’t a diet.  There’s really no such thing as a Weight Watcher’s diet.  What Weight Watchers offers is tools and meal plans, a point system and coaching that will help you to eat fewer calories.

Bottom line: They can call it a point system, they can call it whatever they like but at the end of the day is a Diet-Agnostic Program that revolves around the philosophy that you should eat fewer calories.  They are going to try to help you to do.  It’s not a criticism.  It’s trying to tell, what is Weight Watchers.

You’ll notice it’s also why Weight Watchers is also sometimes offered at companies.   Like a company will generally not subsidize you going on an Atkins Diet or the Paleo Diet, but Fortune 500 companies sometimes will pay for people to go on Weight Watchers and will help them to give the option to help people go SANE.

The reason that companies will do that is that Weight Watchers isn’t a diet.  You could be on Weight Watchers and you could be a vegan.  On Weight Watchers, kind of and be Paleo although that would be hard.  That’s because again, Weight Watchers isn’t a diet per se, it’s a framework that helps you to count calories, if that makes sense.

So you have frameworks and philosophies and Weight Watchers is an example of one of those.  Then you have veganism, kosher, halal, vegetarianism – things like that.  Most people wouldn’t call those a diet.  You would say, ‘I’m on a vegetarian diet.’ But you wouldn’t say on the context of, ‘On what new diet are you on? Oh, I’m on the new vegan diet for 21 days and then I’m going to go off it.’

We somehow seem to understand if you’re kosher, or halal, or vegan or vegetarianism.  Maybe we should call those lifestyles.  It’s just a way that people eat.  It often doesn’t involve a lot of will power.   Another really interesting distinction for us to think of.

Weight Watchers is going to have a lot to do with will power supporting you to eat less.  Weight Watchers is essentially a system that is designed to help you exert will power, to tolerate hunger in a lot of ways.

But if you think about kosher, halal, veganism, vegetarianism – will power is a very minor point.  For example, it would actually take more will power for the vegetarians to eat meat than it would take them to not eat meat.  Not eating meat is pleasurable for them.  So it’s not really a will power thing.  We don’t really call it a diet in the traditional sense of when we say, ‘I’m on a diet.’  It’s more of a lifestyle. Weight Watcher is kind of a philosophy.  It’s a program, it’s about will power.  It isn’t really a diet in the traditional sense. Then we have things like veganism, kosher, halal, chicken really aren’t diet.

Then we have things that are straight up diets, like the South Beach Diet, the Atkins Diet, the 17-Day Diet, and the Paleo Diet.  Paleo starts to go a little bit close to the vegetarianism.  The thing that really sets them apart is they have pretty regulated rules.  Of course kosher and halal definitely have some rules associated with them as well.

There are many different ways you could do Weight Watchers.  One person could be on Weight Watchers eating much different types of food than another person.  In fact, in some ways Weight Watchers is the best option for you if you just want to eat anything but only 1200 calories of it, Weight Watchers will help you do that.

You can’t do that if you’re Paleo.  If you’re Paleo there are certain things that you should eat and shouldn’t eat and that’s it.  If you’re low carb; same kind of thing.  One person’s low carb diet isn’t going to contain a bunch of white potatoes, while another person’s low carb diet does.  Same thing with South Beach, same thing with the Dukan Diet, things along those lines.

So I think it’s pretty clear that those diets are temporary.  There are set of rules that your try to live by.  People who are on those diets, they are going to look pretty similar.  But even like vegetarianism – *Joe Firman* has a great point he talks about Junkatarians where it’s a person who doesn’t eat meat. But for example, a Snickers bar doesn’t have meat in it.  Or Pringles don’t have meat in them, but it’s junk.  So you can have a non-meat included diet and be a vegetarian and your vegetarian diet could look totally different from someone who is eating a SANE vegetarian diet.

Now we come to SANE.  The reason it’s hard to define SANE is because it actually has characteristics of all three of those categories.  So let’s look at Weight Watchers.  SANE – at least the way I describe it to our investors, the people who I owe a lot of money to – is think about it as Weight Watchers and changing your life through the quality of what you’re eating, rather than the quantity of calories you’re eating.  Meaning we want to go to Fortune 500 companies and we want to say, ‘Look, if you want your employees to take control, encouraging them to eat fewer calories but from any source.  Weight Watchers is the right program, because it’s diagnostic.  It will help them to eat fewer calories.  But if your employees would rather try to change their life by eating an unlimited amount of foods that are proven to heal the body lories aka focus on quality rather than quantity, then SANE is going to provide the coaching, the meal plans, the support, the tracking – everything you’d need in an agnostic fashion to do that.

So you could be Paleo SANE, just like you could be Paleo Weight Watchers.  You could be kosher and you could be SANE.  You could be low carb and you could be SANE.  Technically you could even be higher carb and be SANE.  You would just pick SANEr higher carb options.

SANE is like Weight Watchers in that sense that it provides framework and a toolset.  It’s also though like vegetarianism, kosher and halal in that, one person’s SANity can look very different from another person’s SANity.  It is a spectrum.  It really is so as you know by now.  Hopefully not a temporary thing.

The shortest period of time we now make the SANE Ignite Program available is one year.  We really encourage people to stick with it for life.  Just like you’re not vegetarian or vegan, or kosher, or halal for 21 days or 7days.  You’re that way for life because you want to be healthy for life.  If you do something to become healthy, you can’t just stop doing it.  You stop doing it, you stop being healthy.

SANE is in that way more analogous to vegetarianism, when you think about it.  My dream is that someday you’re going to get on an airplane and you’re going to – maybe this doesn’t work on airplanes anymore because they  don’t serve food – let’s say you’re doing on a cross oceanic flight where they do actually serve food or you’re going through an advance stage and have a dietary restriction.  Usually you can say things like gluten free, vegetarian, vegan, kosher, halal, hopefully someday SANE will be on there.  So in some ways it’s like that.

The one thing it’s really not like I think is a diet, because it can be interpreted in so many different ways.  We talked about you can be SANE and be a vegetarian.  You can be SANE and be low carb.  You can be SANE and be an endurance athlete.  You can be SANE and be a fitness competitor.  What we would do is we would simply show you the science and help you to adopt mindset that’s going to allow you to pick the most satisfying, hormonally unaggressive, nutritious and least efficiently stored as body fat foods within whatever subset of foods makes you feel the best, and is compatible with your lifestyle.

That’s why it’s hard to define SANE, because it’s not really a diet.  It can look different depending on who you are and your circumstances, and that’s okay.  We didn’t say that person’s SANity is wrong.  I think the best characterization is a Weight Watchers 2.0.  It’s the next generation of an agnostic program that is going to teach you not how to more effectively count calories and eat less, but how to more effectively maximize your SANity through the quality of foods you’re eating.

The reason I wanted to start with that so I could talk about Ketogenic Diets and what’s the situation with Ketogenic Diet and some people say they can’t lose any other way.  Is that diet really better than others, how is it different than SANE?

Questions like this come in all the time.  We can’t compare a Ketogenic Diet to SANE, because you could be a Ketogenic vegetarian.  You can’t really say which way is better to lose weight?  Vegetarianism or a Ketogenic Diet.

Actually you could be on a Ketogenic Diet and have nothing to do with weight loss.  Sometimes Ketogenic Diets are used for psychological troubles.  For example, people with schizophrenia.  People who’ve had seizures.  There’s a lot of research being done on putting these individuals on Ketogenic Diet.

Not for weight loss at all, but simply because when the body starts feeling it’s of ketones, which is why it’s called the Ketogenic Diet it’s a byproduct of when you’re burning fat rather than sugar.  That obviously changes the way your brain works, because it’s essentially like taking a car and switching it from unleaded fuel to diesel.

It’s about more than weight loss.  A Ketogenic Diet can be very effective for weight loss if it doesn’t lead to over eating, if it provides an abundance of essential nutrition, and if it provides a hormonal environment that restores your ability to burn fat, as we talked about a few weeks ago.

There have been lots of peer reviewed studies done in an isocaloric fashion.  What I mean by that is we’re going to take one group of people, feed them 2000 calories of a low carb.  Take another group of people, feed them 2000 calories – the same number – of a moderate carb diet.  Take another group of people and feed them 2000 calories of a higher carb diet.

These are not done on some internet chat room.  These are done in controlled environments.  The university study’s been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMMA) so on and so forth.

As a general rule of thumb, the diets which get more of their calories from healthy protein and healthy fat, consistently result in greater fat loss – notice I didn’t say weight loss, I said fat loss – than do diets with the same number of calories but from higher sugar sources.  Because at the end of the day, carbohydrate – we’re not talking about fiber, we’re talking about starch and sugar – is not super helpful for fat loss.

‘Is a Ketogenic Diet better than another diet?’

This is why the follow up questions are great, because I want to use these questions to get deeper that the tertiary stuff you can read on the discussion board, or read on a blog post on the internet.

There is no such thing as the best diet.  There is only the diet that will enable this person with this goal to reach it most effectively.  The reason I am so excited and passionate about trying to instead of saying, ‘Eat this on Day 1 for Meal 1.  Eat this on Day 2 for Meal 2.’  Because I guarantee you that approach will never be the best diet for you or for anyone else.

Nobody has as much information about what makes you feel good and look good and perform your best, than you.  So the best thing that any program could ever do for you – this is what we do and this is what we continue to do despite people continuing to tell us, ‘Just tell me exactly what to eat’ and then sometimes cancelling because we won’t.  Don’t cancel, we want to help so much.

The best way that anyone can help you in the long term is to help you help yourself no matter where you go or where you are.  If we can teach you, here are the food that can fill you up the fastest and keep you full the longest, just objectively, measurably, scientifically here are the foods that are going to cause the least hormonal chaos and help to restore your body’s ability to burn fat.  Here are the foods that are going to provide you with the most essential vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fatty acids that’s the an- nutrition.  Here are the foods that are going to be least efficiently stored as fat on the off chance that you over eat them.  That’s the e.

You will be able to formulate the most effective diet to burn fat, to increase performance, to make your skin look better, to make your hair look better, to make your brain work better.  And to be able to do that for the rest of your life and to be able to do that for your spouse and your children.  Leave a legacy, because you will actually know how to make those optimal healthy choices for you, because you will have true knowledge and true understanding.  That’s a really big, important distinction.  True knowledge and true understanding.

Just a quick anecdote.  You’re like, ‘What is not true knowledge?’  There is a story and I don’t know if it’s just a story or if it’s an anecdote.  There was a Nobel Prize winner, a hundred or so years ago, before there was wide spread media.  So people did not what this individual looked like and this individual is going around the country and he had a chauffeur. He was going to give speeches.  After he’d given hundreds of these speeches, his chauffer obviously attended all the speeches with him.

Once the Nobel Prize winner who had a greater depth of knowledge than anyone else in the world on that subject was sick and couldn’t give a lecture.  He asked his chauffer if he would give the lecture on his behalf.  By that time he’d heard the speech hundreds of times, the chauffer had the speech memorized.  He had heard so many questions and the Nobel Prize winning answers to those questions that the chauffer was essentially almost like a computer.  He has this list of answers that the chauffer knows and if the question comes in, the chauffer can answer.

So the chauffer not only gave the Nobel Prize winner’s presentation but conducted a thorough Question and Answer Session afterwards.  Then went on to do it for two or three weeks.  Everyone thought that the chauffer was the Nobel Prize winner, because the speech went on without a hitch, and that chauffer was able to answer all the questions that came in.  But that chauffer actually had no idea what he was talking about.

It was a little bit like your thermostat in your house can sort of  ‘feels’ like what it’s like to be too hot or too cold, and it will react, but it doesn’t actually understand what’s going on that can’t think critically.  The chauffer was the same kind of thing.  While the chauffer may have had a list of 200 questions that the chauffer could answer with no problem, and he could give this 90 minute presentation with no problem.   I think we all agree that the chauffer is not the Nobel Prize winner.  And he does not actually understand what he or she is talking about.  If that chauffer was then asked to do something new, he would be in a bad position, because they don’t actually have a true understanding of what the Nobel Prize winner did.

The challenge many of us face is for us to be healthy we have to understand at the basic level we don’t need a Ph. D in Exercise Physiology.  We don’t need a Ph. D in Neuro-Biology.  We don’t need a Ph. D in Gastroenterology.  We don’t need a Ph. D in Endocrinology.  We don’t need a Ph. D in Nutrition.  But we do need to have a baseline understanding of what’s essential for human health and happiness.  How do I take that?  Once I understand that and apply it to my life.

I know it’s super tempting to just be like, ‘I’m just going to do the Paleo Diet.’  But anyone who actually does the Paleo Diet and has success with it isn’t doing the Paleo Diet.  They’re doing Mary’s specific adaptation of the Paleo Diet that she has been experimenting with for 3 years and has finally found the formulation that works for her.

So that’s what SANE is.  If you’re going to try to be Ketogenic, we’re going to show you how to make the SANEst choices with the Ketogenic lifestyle.  I can tell you isocaloric fashion when you get more of your calories from protein and fat.  You will, as we talked about in the previous Call, experience the spontaneous reduction in intake and your appetite will re-regulate itself, and you will correct your hormones faster.  Because of that and also usually because of the increased protein intake, you will lose more fat pound for pound.

So to the question, ‘Is Ketogenic Diet best?’

It could be. I personally would strongly recommend that you get the majority of your calories from healthy whole food fats and not from sugar or starch at all.  That’s actually the way SANE would work out of the box, if you did double digit servings of veggies, 3 to 6 servings of nutrient dense proteins and then 2 to 6 servings of whole food fats.  You would not be eating Ketogenic Diet, because some people need to go under 30 grams of total carbohydrate, including fiber per day, but it can work.  So hopefully that was helpful.  It’s not too esoteric but it’s really just a key distinction.

Here’s another way to think of it.  If food lists and meal plans and someone just telling you what to do worked, it would have already worked.  I’d say that with the most love ever, because once you understand that it will radically change your life.  There is no other human being in the world who can take care of you, like you can.  Even if you have cancer and you don’t take ownership.  Of course you need the doctor, you need the SANE coaches, and you need an oncologist to help guide you.  When you take ownership for that that is *Holy Molly.

We used the analogy of driving in the Master Class.  If you just completely outsourced everything to your GPS, imagine that your GPS couldn’t adapt to traffic and it couldn’t adapt to road closures.  You would get in wrecks because you actually don’t know the rules of the road.  You don’t need to be a race car driver, but understanding generally like the gas pedal’s here, this goes here.  You should change your oil every once in a while.  Understanding those things allows you to get from where you are today to anywhere you want to go and to get across any Vs in the road or curves in the road. You might veer off for a little while, but you’ll find your way back.  That’s what we want to do with SANE.

Be SANE kosher.  Be SANE vegan.  Be SANE halal.  The only thing that is incompatible with SANE is weight watching.  Weight Watchers aka the Point System aka ‘Fruits are unlimited, there are no points associated with fruits.’  Just like flawed incorrect science that tells you the only way for you to have more success long term is for you to exert more will power, to be hungry and to literally watch your weight.

Please don’t watch your weight.  Watch your kids grow up.  Watch your career blossom.  Watch your goals come to life.  Don’t watch your weight.  You are not going to be looking back on your life wishing that you spent more time watching your weight.

The only thing that isn’t compatible with SANE is flawed science and shame and the reliance on will power, because will power cannot work long term.  That’s just science.  Will power is a fixed resource.  Believe it or not there is actual, legitimate research showing that people you go on a calorie counting diet are more likely to cheat on their spouses.

You might be saying, ‘Jonathan, that’s crazy.’  But first of all, it’s not me.  It is the science.  It’s the research.  You say, ‘How is that possible?’  It doesn’t matter if the will power is being expended resisting extended inappropriate advances from someone who isn’t your spouse or your partner.  Or that will power is being spent reading calorie count in a data table.  When your will power reaches a low, it’s going to be hard to make decisions that are in your best interest.  We have to be super conscious about where we’re spending your will power, because there are things way more important – if we need to expend our will power – than fighting through hunger.

You might say, ‘But Jonathan, SANE eating does require will power.  It’s going to take me some effort to eat more vegetable.  It’s going to take me  some effort to get over this headache that I have over my right eye, ever since I’ve stopped eating sugar,’ which was, let’s say, seven days ago.

Here’s the good news, though.  Starvation requires more will power over time.  Think about a fast.  Fast is starvation literally, it’s just a euphuism.  It’s called intermittent fasting rather than intermittent starvation.  It’s really just a euphuism for starving yourself.  You can fast for one minute.  That means you say, ‘I am not eating for one minute.’  Easy enough.  Right.

I can fast for one hour pretty easily.  Still pretty easy.  You can fast for 8 hours.  Fast for full hour, that a little bit harder.  As you go on and on and on it becomes harder and harder and harder to fast.  Eating less requires more will power over time that’s why it will not ever work if the quality of your life matters to you, which I bet it does.

The reason SANE for changing the quality of your diet will work, if you stick with it, as it requires less will power over time.  Meaning while it is easier to eat 1200 calories on Day 1, than on Day 100.  By Day 100 you’re going to be tired and crabby.  You’re body is going to slow down, you’re going to have chronic headaches, and you’re probably going to be clinically depressed.  Eating 1200 calories and starving yourself on Day 1, but it’s really easy on Day 100, because you look at the scale and you’re dehydrating yourself.  You’re starving yourself of the pound in one day and you’re like, ‘Success.’

When you go SANE the first day of not eating sugar is the worst.  The first week is worse than the second week.  Anyone who is here on the call with you, who is with you who’s been going SANE for over a month can tell you the longer you eat green vegetable, the more delicious they become.  The longer you go without sugar, the easier it is to avoid.

With SANE it requires will power at the beginning.  Just like for a vegetarian, it might require a vegetarian some effort.  The first month they decide to become a vegetarian, they might still have some craving, but after a while the will power goes away.  That’s why SANE works.

The only thing SANE is not compatible with is shame, it’s never going to get you where you want to go.  It’s not compatible with shame.  It’s not compatible with starvation.  Starvation requires more and more will power over time which to live.  And it’s not compatible with junk science, or we shouldn’t even call it science.  Other than that we’ve got a lot of flexibility to find your SANity.  Hopefully that’s helpful.

Julie asks a good question. She asking: ‘How do you feel about testing for individualized diet?’

Julie, this is a very new area.  There has been very little peer reviewed research done on this.   And it there are without question, we know there are severe differences between us.  Here’s one example.  This is about me personally.  I’m just a weird, neurotic, super disciplined person.  I was always this way and it was weird. When I was in college, I was like, ‘I’m going to major in this and this,’ and that’s what I did.

I dated one person prior to meeting my wife.  The second person I dated is my wife.  I don’t know if I’m on the autism spectrum, who knows.  Why am I saying these things?

For me, when it was all the eating aspect, when it was just about me and changing my health, that part was easy.  When I wanted to get big – if you know my background, I wanted to be a big bodybuilder, that’s what my background was in the competitive fitness arena.  I would drink – I’m not kidding you – I would take tuna fish, beans and oatmeal.  I was trying to get big and bulky.  I would blend it in a blender pre-Vitamix, it was chunky.  I would drink that.  That sounds crazy but if you actually go into the body building world, people do crazy stuff. But when I discover more and more.  If you’re not a neurotic bean and tuna fish drinker like me, some of this mindset stuff is so critically important.

Is personalization of your diet important? Yes, it absolutely is.  On the other hand most true things in life.  It’s yes, and no. Here’s what I mean by yes.  We know that people can have huge variation in terms of what’s going to make their body healthy.  Easy example of that are allergies.  Peanuts are right in the middle of the energy spectrum.  I eat peanuts fairly frequently.  Unsalted peanuts are delicious.  I like them.  And because you have to take them out of their shell, they are hard to overeat.  Good. Works well for me.

If you have a peanut allergy.  That will kill you.  So you’ve got someone who doesn’t have a peanut allergy, homo sapien.  Same species. And someone who does have peanut allergy.  One of those person eats it and dies.  The other person eats it and smiles.  That’s an example of how personalization can become very important.

For example, if you have kidney problem, you’re going to take a different approach to green vegetables than someone who doesn’t have kidney problems.  However, anytime something like individualized testing comes out, what you will also come along with it lot of junkie stuff.  A lot of, ‘Okay, you took this test.  Now, I’m going to charge you $8000 to give you all these magic pills and potions and powders.’

When in reality – here’s what I think the sweet spot is – here are things which don’t vary between people at all.  As a general rule of thumb, human beings do not thrive above 400 degrees.  There is no human being who is like, ‘At 400 degrees outside that’s when I feel my best.’

There are some common similarities.  Some people might like it a little bit warmer.  Some people might like it a little bit cooler.  But at the end of the day there is an optimal range in which human beings are happy when it comes to temperature outside.

When it comes to food we do know that a general template of vegetables first of the non-starchy kind, then protein, then whole food fats.  And why? Because foods that satisfy us more are of course better for us than foods that satisfy us less.  Foods that don’t cause hormonal chaos, are hormonally healing are better for us than foods that throw our hormones at a whack.  Of course that’s true.  That’s true for everybody. There is no human being who does better with their hormones messed up. It is true.

Same thing with nutrition.  Human beings do better.  It’s not more vitamins are better than less, too much is also bad.  It’s diminishing marginal returns.  But more nutrient dense food is of course better for us than less nutrient dense foods.

If our goal is fat loss, foods that are less efficiently stored as fats are going to be more helpful than otherwise.  Why am I saying this?  Here is the beautiful middle ground.  Aristotle back in the days said, ‘It’s not about being not angry, it’s about only being angry for the right reasons, at the right time and the right amount.’

Finding that balance what Aristotle called the Golden Mean.  It might be really helpful yes, to go to a credible medical practitioner who then isn’t going to try to up-sell you with a bunch of pills.  Get a little bit of personalized nutrition information and then apply the SANE framework within that.

You might find for example that, ‘Holy Molly these kinds of non-starchy vegetables are going to be way more compatible with my unique physiology then this other set of non-starchy vegetables.’ But I promise you that you will not find ever is that Cheetos are more compatible with my physiology than non-starchy vegetables.  You’d be like ‘Okay it’s obvious, I get it I know.’

I don’t know how much personalized blood testing for nutrition costs.  I hear so often, people willing to spend thousands of dollars on this new formulation of some special powdery thing, or this new personalized testing  but then when you talk about organic vegetables and grass-fed meat and they are like, ‘Oh, that’s too expensive.’

I want us to always keep in mind that we only have a fixed amount of will power.  We only have a fixed amount of time.  We only have a fixed amount of financial resources.  Whatever we can do to find the sweet spot to maximize those resources. I think it’s super important.  So if you can afford personalized testing to help you refine that SANE framework you can be helpful.  But please don’t let it distract you.

For example, if you have to take money away from buying foods that we know are healthy for us, that are SANE for us in order to do that testing then I wouldn’t.  But if you do have some spare cash and are able to spend it without compromising the SANity that’s going to apply to everybody.  Then it might be a good option.  Hopefully that is helpful.

Alright cool.  I love it.  Thank you very much Julie, I appreciate that.  Suzanne, Donna, thank you, thank you. Sometimes during these calls when we do the more of ‘Me doing my cutting edge new stuff’ it’s less interactive.  So I do appreciate some feedback.  If you feel like, ‘Jonathan you’re going off the ranch here.’  Please tell me.  That is very, very helpful.

There are a bunch of questions written in terms of ‘What do I eat at restaurants?  What do I do at business lunches and dinners? What about a wedding?  What if I work outside of the office and my days are 16 hours long?’

That’s exactly right.  Think of all those questions.  Yes, that’s incredibly confusing.

If you don’t understand the baseline rules.  Think about it.  If you don’t understand North, South, East, West and you don’t know which pedal in your car makes it go and which makes it stop, or you don’t understand whether or not you should drive on the right side of the road or the left side of the road.  What could otherwise be so simple and almost unconscious–How often do you drive some place and think to yourself, ‘How did I get here?’  You have internalized the rules of the road so deeply that you can do it without thinking.

I promise you that the same thing can happen with eating.  I call it nutritional serenity and it’s exactly what happens, when you go SANE, when you learn the underlying science.  When you live it and you think of it in terms of 6 month intervals.  Not like where am I going to be six days from now, two weeks from now?

Six months from now is my goal.  Six months from that is my goal.  What you will do is you’ll develop habits and a mindset, where just like you can drive from where you are to work.  Think about someone who has no idea how to drive.  They don’t know what a car is.  They don’t know the rules of the road.  How confusing and crazy would it be to try to take that big piece of metal and to drive it 20 miles with all these other pieces of metal flying at it?  That would be crazy.  You can do it literally without thinking.  How is that possible? It’s possible because you understand the rules.

You can do the same with food.   You absolutely can.  It takes time and it takes getting used to.  When you understand the rules nutritional serenity. What do I do in the plane?  What do I do at the wedding?  What do I do at the bar maids? What do I do about this?  It’s Halloween.  It’s Christmas.  Then it’s a year later and you’ve been SANE and you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s Christmas.  Okay.  Maybe I’ll eat a little bit of food before I go.  And maybe when I go and I’m there, I’ll focus on the vegetable platter.  I have to get on the plan and maybe I’ll take a wrap on the plane.’

You’ll just be able to go through this thing like it’s second nature, and it will be second nature.  It’s so exciting when you get there.  I promise it is so neat.  It will change your life forever.  The lack of that is why long term success is hard.  It’s not hard to lose weight short term, we’ve all done it.  Stop eating.  Go on a diet.  Go lose weight.

But the problem is can’t do that forever.  What you can do forever, is eat in abundance of the foods that are proven to feel great, make you look great, and they’re delicious.  It’s not like some crazy talk.  SANE foods you’ve got sweet, salty, savory, bitter, **umami, all the flavors.  They’re all there.  You can enjoy all of them.  You just have to make some substitutions.

It does take some getting the hang of it.  Cooking with coconut flour is very different from cooking with wheat flour.  You don’t have the gluten there to hold everything together.  But you know what’s awesome?  You’re here.   You’re not going anywhere.  The first time you cook it doesn’t work out–All Good!   It’s all good.  Just try it out again.

Eventually, where it might not work out the first time.  It might not work out the second time, but it might work out the third, fourth time.  Then when it works out once.  That’s all you need, because then you can create that recipe over and over again, and it’s beautiful.  That’s why that long term mindset is so helpful.

Deborah, asked a good question:

‘What common mistake do people make on SANE solution that prevents them from achieving their goal?  Eating too much fat?  Eating too much protein?’

Deborah, I think Raina answered the question perfectly.  It’s none of those things.  It’s the mindset.  The single quickest thing to make yourself inSANE is to have a mindset of short term perfection, rather than long term and continuous progress.  Please write that down.

It has nothing to do with eating too much of this or not eating enough of this, or not taking enough of this supplement, or not doing enough of this specific exercise, or not getting his specific test done, or not spending enough money on this thing.  It has to do with demanding that your body does something that is physically impossible,   and that reminds us something that’s physically impossible a fundamentally change in heal instantly and perfectly.  It cannot happen.

The only way success is achieved in any area of life is with gradual continuous improvement.  If you want to get better at the piano, there’s no trick.  You get a good coach and program.  You will not get better at the piano if you’ve got the best tuba player in the world teaching you.   If it’s not the piano, it isn’t going to help you.

Last week we talked about, if your goal is weight loss and you were taught to eat low calorie and low protein, high sugar and starch diet.  That’s a little bit like someone handing you a tuba and saying here’s how you get better at the piano.  It’s just the wrong approach.

It’s just like if you’re in Ohio and you’re trying to drive to Florida.  And you point your car north.  I don’t care how fast you drive, but you aren’t going to get there.

It’s like in education.  Even the best teacher in the world can’t tell you how to become a great piano player.  She can guide you.  She can help you to become the greatest piano player you could ever become as fast as possible.  I bet it took Mozart less time to learn the piano than it would take me, because Mozart probably just wired a little bit differently than I am.  I definitely am, because I’m not good at playing music, or making music.  I’m also terrible at drawing and baseball.  Those are the things I’m very bad at.

To be very clear, it’s not saying I’m not going to try.  At all.  What you’re trying at is I’m not trying to lose 2 pounds today.  Because that’s not up to you.  That’s up to your body.  That’s a result.  You can’t always control the results.  You can control the process. You can control the mindset.  You can control how many servings of vegetables you eat.  You can control whether or not you come to these calls.  You can control whether or not to take notes during these calls.  You can control whether or not to work through the Step-by-Step Program in order.  One step at a time.  That’s what we can control.

When we do that and when we focus on process, on progress and on the long term.  Can I keep this up?  Where am I going to be if I’m doing this a year from today?  Not a week from today.  A year from today.  That will radically change your life forever.  I promise.  No questions asked.  Absolutely not.

There is not one human being on the face of the earth who if after a year of eating more non-starchy vegetables, nutrient dense proteins, whole food fats , exercising smarter, getting more sleep, reducing stress and learning how to adopt the SANE mindset will not permanently change every aspect of their life.  It just has to happen.  It’s just like saying, if you woke up every day and spent two hours practicing the piano; in one year would you be better player of the piano?  Absolutely.

Would you be better next week?  No.  It could be up and down.  You could botch your piano recital in three months, but you can say without a shadow of a doubt, you will be better.  In fact not only will you be better but it’ll probably be super easy for you to get up and play the piano because then it will be a habit.  Then you can rock and roll.

It gets easier over time.  That’s just how the rule works.  Starvation, shame, will power – those things don’t work long term.   That’s why we need the more SANE solution.  That’s why we need science.  Hopefully that’s helpful.  Man, that stuff is so exciting.  That’s really where the differences come into play.

Let me do some questions which you all have written in.  Let me get a little less esoteric.  Question that are really good and haven’t been answered.  Not that any question is bad, I’m sorry.  Questions which are uniquely suited to be answered in this context versus questions which are best if left for other places.

This one says:

‘What are some example foods that you could be classified in more than one category?  Would nuts and seeds be tracked as protein and fats etc.?  I have been trained to track my macro, so it would be easier to map your method to if it fits your macros.’

There are a couple of paragraphs here, so I’m going to –it is a good one though.

As a general rule of thumb, if what you’re containing has every chunk, I normally say 30 grams of proteins because it’s a general rule of thumb.  But it’s between 20 and 30 grams.  This is worth writing down.  This is how we do this for the SANE recipes. For the serving of nutrient dense protein, but you might for example as this individual rightly points out.  You can eat something such as a fatty piece of steak which may very well have 30 grams of proteins in it.  It may also have 30 grams of fat.  What would that be?

What we generally find is that a serving of whole food fat – again it always depends on your body size – we’ll talk about this in the Step-by-Step program, so it’s like Lesson 2 of the very first course.  A serving of whole food fat is often 50 calories, if you’re very small, or if your body size small would be very small, small frame.  It’s close to a hundred calories, if you are a very large person.  Line Backer in the NFL (a football player) would have 200 calories, for example a serving of fat, let’s say 150 calories.

So if you’re eating a fatty piece of steak and it’s got 300 calories coming from fat, that one piece of steak could be one serving of nutrient dense protein.  Then if it’s a fatty steak we probably do a serving of whole food fats and other fats, because that’s no really an optimal source of fat.  I wouldn’t get too hung up on it tough.  It’s really only meat that ever causes that issue.

It’s very hard to find fish that’s fatty enough, and which is anything other than just nutrient dense protein.  Even the fat is so optimal.  Omega 3 fat is categorically different than saturated fat, in what they are used for in the body.  They are much more analogous to a structural component.

One way to think of macro-nutrients is that sugar and carbohydrate is pure energy.  There is no part of your body that is made of that.  You are not made of sugar anywhere.  You are made of protein.  All of your tissue is a composition of protein and fat.  All of your cells are made out of protein and fat.  Your cell wall is made of fat.  Your brain is full of fat.  You muscle is protein, your skin is protein.  So you are made o protein and fat.

Protein can’t be burnt as energy.  It cannot.  If you overeat protein, it can converted into glucose and then get burnt up as energy.  But protein is *energy.  Protein is pure structural component.  If you have carbohydrate that is pure energy.  Or you have fiber that is not even energy that is just digested.  It’s excreted of the body and used to feed gut bacteria.  And you get fat which is in the middle.  Fat can’t be burnt as an energy but it’s also a structural component.

Anyway, there are certain source of protein that may contain some fat as well.  You my categorize it as a whole food fat which is grass-fed or wild-caught. If it’s conventional beef and probably counted as other fat, because that fat is going to be very different in composition from fat you’d find in grass fed meats or in sea foods.

Nuts and seeds are just straight up whole food fat.  It would not be possible to eat enough nuts and to get up to the level of whole food fats.  You can’t get to the 20 or 30 grams.  So that’s just pure whole food fat.

The same thing applies to non-starchy vegetable.  There is no non-starchy vegetable that would crossover categories. A recipe which is an amalgamation of many different foods.  All your SANE recipes have got some protein, some fats, and some vegetables.

In terms of all food, they are only going to cross categories when they add conventional fatty meat.  Other than that they*in one category.  So hopefully that helps.  When you are on 150 calories you count that as serving.  We talk about a table spoon of oil, that’s usually right around in that ball park.

There are no guidelines on grams of carbs in a typical serving of non-starchy vegetables.  We’re not a gram counting type of lifestyle.  It’s because we can’t.  That’s the only thing I’ve seen from a scientific perspective that is meaningful. Meaning that your body really doesn’t treat 20 grams of fat different than it does 10 grams of fat.  Your body doesn’t treat one serving of 30 grams of sugar differently than it would treat 215 grams of sugar.  It doesn’t work that way.

We do now have new research that shows that your body is going to treat a certain intake of protein differently.  Even then try to measure the grams of protein you’re getting from whole food.  It’s very difficult.  Unless you’re eating a can of tuna fish which says 15 grams of proteins per serving.  How many servings per can? Two and a half or three.

Otherwise the guideline is the size of your palm.  But the reason the grams are highlighted in a protein context is because it makes it very easy for us to avoid myths around proteins such as ‘Nuts are a good source of proteins,’ or ‘Beans are a good source of protein.’

Our goal is to eat 25 grams of proteins and you look at your cashews and say, ‘Oh my goodness!  To eat 25 grams of protein from cashews, I need to eat 3000 calories of cashews. That’s probably not a good thing to do.’  And it’s not, because they are not a concentrated source of protein.

It totally depends.  Non-starchy, green leafy vegetables have a much different carb composition than other types of vegetables and that’s not going to make the difference long term.  Hopefully that’s helpful.

If you’ve got follow up questions here Live or in the Support Group.  But that is a great questions.

You can have fatty conventional meats that you would need to count as nutrient dense proteins potentially a serving of other fats, but there is no other example of, ‘I eat nuts, it’s whole food fats.’  It’s one whole category.  Clean and easy.

Suzanne says, ‘I like the app, but are there any plans to let us enter food and let us count the number of veggies, protein etc. I have a hard time figuring that out?’

Suzanne, we do have some enhancement plans for the app.  It is a very difficult computer science problem to determine the servings.  We’re trying to figure it out.  Serving size is dependent on your body size, so we’d have to know your body size.  Then we would have to somehow know the size of the thing in the picture, which is very difficult.

It’s very rare for a meal to contain more than 4 servings of vegetables.  If it’s a little bit of vegetables that’s one serving.  If its vegetables that fit like this, that’s two.  If it’s overflowing with vegetables, that’s three.  So it’s either of small, medium or large.  Vegetable’s done.  So you now know how to score.

With protein it’s the same thing.  If it’s the size of your palm, it’s one serving.  If it’s two palms its two.  It is very difficult to eat three servings of proteins in a sitting.  So done, easy.

Whole food fat – same thing.  If it fits the palm of your hand.  We’re trying to work on is to help identify the SANity of individual foods.  Which is SANEr, blue berries or strawberries? Some of that is very hard.  We’re also working on that in terms of.  Looking at a picture and knowing how many servings it has, I’m almost worried that a computer would do it worse.  We’re going to continue to work on it.

If you’re eating SANEly and you’re focused on the SANE food groups. Vegetables, proteins, fats and low-fructose fruits.  It should be fairly easy over time.  The choice is usually 1, 2 or 3 for vegetable, 1, 2, or 3 for whole food fats. 1 or 2 for protein, and 1 or 2 for fruits.  People don’t sit down and eat 4 cups of blueberries.  It’s another kind of mindset.

In the calorie counting mindset, it’s all about precision.  ‘Oh my Goodness, I did not count my calories precise enough.  If my calorie count is off by 10 calories per day over the course of a year.  It adds up.’

In the SANE lifestyle it’s like, ‘Is there one serving or two of vegetables?’

Are you eating more vegetables?  If you are, rock and roll.

If your *score is 3 and when in doubt if you want to make the most of it as possible score it as 2, and you can eat more vegetables in the future.  Worst case scenario: You are underscoring your vegetables and then you eat more vegetables.  So that’s good.  A lot of interesting stuff on that one.

Intermittent fasting and Ketosis.  This has come up in the Support Group a couple of times, and I wanted to talk about it a little bit.

For people who are not familiar with it, intermittent fasting is not eating for a period of time.  Formally that was called starving yourself.  Or I’m skipping lunch.  Maybe you can empathize with it, if you have people in your life who don’t eat breakfast, they would often skip lunch and would just eat at night.  Those people didn’t realize it but they were intermittent fasting.  They ate all of their food within a 4 hour window in the evening.

There is research that shows that intermittent fasting has some benefits.  One of which is topology where your body starts to recycle certain proteins.  There are also challenges with intermittent fasting.  If you eat all of your food within 6 hour window, eating 12 servings of vegetables is going to be very hard.  That’s a huge amount of fiber to take in a very short period of time.

Meal frequency is a function of SANity.  If for example, if your goal is to develop calorie hungry lean muscle tissue, you’ll need to keep your body in what’s called a positive nitrogen balance.  That means it’s not cannibalizing muscle, it’s healing and repairing muscle.

Feeding your body with nutrient dense protein every 4 to 6 hours  maximizes that. If you want to eat 12 servings of vegetables a day and you do not want to be a bloated *you do not want to eat more than 3 servings in a sitting.  That’s just a lot of fiber. This is why the macro view is so important.

If we know we need to eat 12 servings of vegetables and we know we want to eat 4 servings of nutrient dense proteins – how do we do that while we intermittent fast?  We can’t.  It’s just not possible.  Might intermittent fasting have some benefits?  Maybe.  Are they better than the benefits we’re going to get from a long term sustained SANE lifestyle?  Look, I think intermittent fasting is a very advanced technique that some people can use to create advantage.  I personally would not mess with it at all.

If you see a basketball player who is able to shoot a basketball from half court and make it, like Harlem Globetrotters who are doing all these tricks and stuff.  It’s just not something at all you should be thinking about.  It’s a distraction.

Does your body go into starvation mode?  Yes, it absolutely does.  There is no body builder or athlete in the world who intermittently fasts.  It’s going to compromise their performance.  They want to stay in the positive nitrogen balance so they can perform well.  They do not want their blood sugar to plummet.

There are will power experiments done all over the place with judges, where you take criminals that are up to parole hearings and when the judge has low blood sugar they are more stringent and they don’t let people out on parole.

Being hungry changes the way you interact with the world.  I personally think that life is hard enough.  You don’t need to be hungry.  Hunger isn’t healthy.  It’s like holding your breath.  Maybe there is some advantage to holding your breath.  I don’t want to hold my breath and I don’t need to.

Eat in abundance of a whole delicious food.  That would be absolutely my recommendation.  The question isn’t are there benefits to intermittent fasting – there can be.  The question is: Do those benefits outweigh the costs and the mental burden and complexity that they introduce into things?

I would focus less on when you eat, radically.  I would focus radically more attention on what you’re eating.  You’ll see way better results.

Deborah asked: ‘Are there any guidelines regarding eating late at night?’

There are none.  It’s completely a myth.  Eat non-starchy vegetables, nutrient dense proteins, whole food fats, in that order.  The problem with eating at night is that some people use fixed resource.

This is how stuff gets manipulated.  We are unfortunately the victims of extended games of telephone.  Research will show one thing and it goes through 15 media outlets.  It’s a game of telephone in the sense like ‘Sara has brown hair,’ turns into ‘The Sahara Desert pink monkey…’ So you’re like, ‘Wait, what?’  It’s the same thing here with eating late at night.

Research shows that will power is a fixed resource.  You wake up in the morning.  The will power stores are high.  You go throughout the day; sitting in traffic, people are being annoying.  You might be starving.  Will power; whoop.  It’s nine o’clock at night­.  You’ve had a stressful day.  You’re tired.  You’re will power is at its very lowest.  You open the refrigerator.  Nothing’s cooking up ready for you.  So you say, ‘Enough of this.’ You open the freezer, grab the tub of ice-cream.  You open the cupboard.  You grab those sugar chips.  And you say, ‘I’m in it to win it.’

People historically have made much more inSANE eating choices in the evening.  Not because it’s bad to eat at night.  It’s fine to eat at night.  It’s just that our will power is generally lowest at night so it can be easy to make poor food choices at night.  But as a general rule of thumb, no.  When you eat does not matter.

There’s a lot of research to show that late night eating can be beneficial.  What you eat is what to focus on.  Not when you eat it.  That will radically simplify your life.

A great question here.  Rebecca who is one of the wonderful SANE coaches brought this up.  This has to do with re-feeding and what happens when we starve ourselves.  This is really important.  I want to discuss it here, because we can have Q&A if you want.

If you are coming into a SANE lifestyle or if you are talking to somebody who is going into a SANE lifestyle and they have been severely restricting their calories, without concern for what they are eating.  It’s just like, ‘Eat no more than 1200 calories from any source.’

Weight Watchers literally advertises this on the internet.  There is nothing off limits.  See this trans fat, high fructose corn syrup saturated donut–Hey, it’s only two points. Or whatever.  If you skip breakfast and lunch you can eat that.  Anything fits, which is true I guess.

I don’t know how many points cigarettes are, but they are not good for us.  To the extent that we can avoid smoking them.  That would be my recommendation.

If you are coming to SANE or you know anyone who is thinking of going SANE, if you go from a 1200 calorie starvation diet to eating SANEly, you’re going to be eating more than 1200 calories.  When you start to go SANE you might actually see that in the short term.  Think about when you do anything in life.  When you try to do something great, if it’s to get a degree or to become great at music, develop anything of meaning.  At the very beginning you might actually be like, ‘Why did I start doing this?  Studying stinks.’  It’s not fun at the beginning.

At the beginning especially if you start weight training, you’re going to start to develop calorie hungry lean muscle and tissue.  That can actually cause weight gain.  You’re going to start dehydrating yourself.  That can cause temporary weight gain.  You’re going to give your body the fuel it needs to heal.

So yes, if you’re going from a 1200 calories of anything diet to spontaneously and effortlessly eating 1800 calories of nutrient dense protein, non-starchy vegetables and whole food fats you might – because you’re taking in more calories and because you’ve starved yourself – see temporary weight gain.

This is going to sound strange, but that’s not ‘SANE’s’ fault.  That’s the fault of starvation dieting.  It’s not because, ‘Oh, you went SANE, you gained weight.’

The things that’s so nefarious and terrible and heart breaking about starvation dieting is one, it’s impossible to keep up long term.  Period.  Unless you’re a fitness model and your entire job depends on it.  Even those people, look at them when they stop being fitness models.  Doesn’t work out.

When you starve yourself, bottom line, and this is not controversial, your metabolism slows down.  Your burns off muscle tissue.  Your body selectively hoards fat.  It thinks it’s dying.  It thinks it’s experiencing a famine.  So it’s going to conserve calories and burn off muscle tissue.  Muscle tissue’s taken up too many calories.  It’s going to slow down your brain function, it’s going to kill your sex drive.  You’re going to be cold, because your body is trying to conserve heat.  So you starve down and yes, you’re going to lose a little bit of weight.  But if you ever stop starving yourself.  It has nothing to do with going SANE.  It’s just that you’re not starving yourself anymore.  You will see rebound weight gain.

Take a standard American diet and starve yourself, yes you will experience temporary weight loss.  Maybe.  But you’ll feel tired and crabby and sick.  It’s no fun and it will fail 95.4 percent of the time.  That’s the actual proven statistics.

Then when you stop starving yourself you will gain all that weight back as fat and weigh more, and it will become harder for the rest of your life to ever lose weight.  You will see studies like this in the Step-by-Step Program, where they can’t do this to humans because they wouldn’t be allowed. They took animal and they weight cycled them.  Every single time they are weight cycled it becomes harder and harder for animals to lose weight.  If they do they gain it back faster.

When you stop starving yourself and go back to a conventional SANE eating you may experience temporary weight gain.  But that weight is to be expected and will correct itself naturally and automatically six months, one year down the line permanently, because your metabolism will be healed.

This is what breaks my heart.  If you have starved yourself in the past, ever.  You stop and you gain a lot of weight back.  You are on the freeway and your foot is on the gas pedal, going 60 miles per hour.  You take it off the gas pedal, the car slows down.  Only 100 calories.  Of course you’re going to lose weight.  What happens when you stop?  You gain a huge amount of fat back and it’s heart breaking.

But if you stop starving yourself and you go SANE, one, you’ll minimize the weight gain and over time you will heal the damage that that starvation caused.  You will re-train your body to burn food rather than to store it, because it won’t be programmed for famine.  It won’t be deficient in nutrients.  It won’t be protein starved and needing to burn off its own muscle tissue.  And because of that it will be healed and sustainable long term.

You will enjoy as much food as you like.  That doesn’t mean you could eat 15000 calories per day, and because you wouldn’t want to do that.  You will be comfortably full, you will be eating an appropriate number of calories effortlessly and automatically, because when you feed your body the right type of food that’s what happens.  That’s what we observe in every other specie of the planet.

When you take any other species and you feed them the foods that they are intended to eat, they don’t become obese, ever.  When you feed humans the foods they are intended to eat, they don’t become obese, ever.  Ever.  But you feed humans ‘Food’ aka processed products that they’re not intended to eat.  They do gain fat.  Then of course you can starve them and they’ll lose weight, but then what happens afterwards.

The biggest thing is the mental aspect.  If you come in and in the first week of SANity you’re like, ‘If I don’t lose 2 pounds this doesn’t work.’

My heart breaks because that mindset is the number one thing you’ve got to overcome.  Once we do, it changes everything and it gets incredibly exciting.

It’s about healing.  It’s about repairing.  It’s not about hacking.  It’s not about short term.  It’s about that long term healing.  That is extremely important.  Hopefully that helps.

Raina of Julie’s question here.

One other thing that I want to cover here on this call is a little bit more emotional.  There are a lot of questions that have been coming in recently about the emotional aspect of these things.  If I just want to lose weight faster I just want it to happen now.

There is no secret to fast weight loss.  There is not even a secret to fast weight loss that is not harmful.  If you just eat green leafy vegetables and lean nutritious proteins, everyday, 4 to 6 times per day.  And that’s all you eat and you’re physically active.

You will essentially be doing what fitness competitors do.  You will spontaneously and accidentally eat 1500 calories per day.  You’ll be full, because those foods are filling.  You probably won’t enjoy what you’re eating too much, because it’s not going to have much variety.  But you will lose fat very quickly.  You will be taking in protein.  You’re not going to burn off muscle tissue.  You’re eating an immense amount of vegetables; you will provide your body with essential nutrition.

So it’s not hard even to healthily lose fat quickly.  But it’s not enjoyable.  So we’ve got to find that balance.  If you need to lose weight really fast for medical reasons.  Here’s what I would recommend.  Tuna fish provides you with essential fats, essential proteins and green leafy vegetables.

If you look at what fitness competitors do, that’s basically how they eat.  Green vegetables, lean proteins, every day, 4 to 6 times per day.  They eat that.  No exceptions.  No like, ‘Oh, but it’s Thanksgiving. Oh, it’s Easter. Oh, it’s Christmas.’  That’s what they do because it’s their job.

There are things about all of our jobs that we don’t like, but we do them anyway because we’re professional.  Being a professional means you just do it.  You just take care of it.

What we are after with the SANE lifestyle is if you want, you can hire go to gym, get a body building instructor and they will put you on a very regimented healthy nutrient dense diet.  It will make you not enjoy eating.  I’ve done it and it works.  Then people talk about cheat day, and what did you do after your body building competition.  ‘Oh man, there was a cheese cake factory and I crushed in an entire cheese cake, and I ate fried chicken all day.’

I don’t want to eat in a way that even talks about cheat meals.  Does a vegetarian or vegan say ‘I can’t wait to cheat on my diet?’

I don’t want to cheat on anything.  I don’t want to be in a relationship where I feel a need or the desire to cheat.  I use the term relationship intentionally, because we have a relationship with food.  We have a healthy, loving relationship with food and we find that right balance of pleasure and they are the same.

I know you’ve experienced this sickness is not fun.  It’s not fun to be discriminated against because of our body size.  That’s not fun at all.  If you want to be a fitness competitor, that’s fine.   If you want to *that’s fine.  But what I want for you and what you really want for you is to have a really loving healthy, long term relationship with food.

Just like you’re not going to develop a healthy, loving relationship with another human being in which you’ll never be like, ‘Is it okay to cheat?’  Why would I want to cheat?  I’m so happy with this person.   It’s going to take some time and it’s going to take some effort.  But it’s worth it.  Same thing applies with food.  It’s going to take some time and be a balance between having some discipline, and having some enjoyment so that you can keep it up.  But man, it’s worth it.  It’s so worth it, over the long term.

The comparison between the relationship with people and relationship with food and this ‘How do I lose weight?’–No one’s allowed to ask that question again.  Eat green vegetables and tuna fish, or lean chicken breasts.  That’s all you eat for every meal all the time.  You’ll lose weight very quickly.  If you want to lose weight really quickly and go back to being regular SANE, you can do that.  You won’t keep it up long term, because it will make you miserable.  It’s not enough variety to be enjoyable.  But that’s how you do it.  Done.

So, instead of focusing on eating 1000 calories of junk to lose weight fast, you would eat such high quality food at such a regimented routine that it happens.  It will require too much will power to be sustained.  There is no person I’ve ever met who effortlessly eats like a fitness professional.  They don’t.

There are vegans and vegetarians who eat that way effortlessly.  There are plenty of people who have been SANE for 3 years or longer, and are SANE without even trying.  There are people who eat Paleo without trying.  There are people that eat low carb without trying. There are people that eat kosher without trying.  There are people that eat halal without trying.

That’s our goal; to find a way to live without trying anymore.  Back to the driving analogy.  We want to spend our conscious effort and attention on things other than thinking about food.  Not weight watching.  It’s not about weight watching.  It’s about life experiencing.  We’re not here to watch our weight.  We’re here to experience and enjoy life.  That’s what I want us to do together.  I want a SANE program to do it for you to enable you to learn and *the underlying knowledge.  You can do the stuff second nature and if you can do this.  It just becomes fun and enjoyable.

It’s like buying clothes that are beautiful and are on sale.  That’s a beautiful dress, and I saved 50 percent on it.  That was a delicious brownie and it was SANE.  It was made with coconut flour, it was made with Xylitol.  It had coco in it.  It had coconut in it.  It had optimal source of fats.  I had my cake, and I literally ate it too.

I was SANE and I don’t need to cheat on anything.  I’ve achieved nutritional serenity and that’s the difference.  Long term sustainable.

Two last questions coming in here.  We’ve got two minutes left.

Deborah, ‘So eating SANE will reset your weight point through your genetic weight set point?  Or can make it lower than what my genetic profile predicts?’

Great question.  Your genetic research determines about 40 to 60 percent of your weight.  You can’t change your genetics right now.  There are three basic body types.  Endomorph, mesomorph, ectomorph.  This has been in the medical literature for many years.  Endomorph tend to be a bit stockier.  Mesomorph is in the middle.  Ectomorph is a bit lankier.  There is nothing an Endomorph can do to become and Ectomorph.  It doesn’t work that way.

Just like some people are really good at music.  This doesn’t mean that people that aren’t good at music can’t become better at music.  It would certainly be a disservice for someone who isn’t Mozart to hate themselves until they were Mozart.  They might not ever become Mozart, but they can become a beautiful, incredible musician.

What SANE will do is help you to achieve the greatest most beautiful version of yourself that your genes allow.  The greatest athletic coach in the work will help you become the best at that sport that you can become.  Not everyone can be an Olympic gold medalist.  That’s not sad.  It’s real.

We all have things we can be brilliant and great at, and I know you have an abundance of things you can be brilliant and great at and SANE will help you to achieve the brilliance and greatness that is unique to you.

Fran says: ‘If you just eat SANE food and don’t count servings is that okay?  My clothes size is dropping.’

Absolutely.  That happens over time.  The counting is something that a lot of people get started with.  Then ask me how many servings of vegetable I eat in a day.  No idea.  Ask me how much I weigh.  No idea at all.  I have no consciousness.  Because it’s just automatic.

Donna, I don’t know what happened but you got restarted.  The recordings are available, so hopefully you can catch the end of it here. I want to thank you guys.  This is the last bit of work I’m doing.  I look forward to these calls so much.  Much of what I’m doing is not as related to eating and exercising as I’d like to get the SANE message out there to save the lives I know it can save.  Having this time with you; people who I know are committed to this and to serving beautiful and empowering.

I’m going to be out for the first time in two years for the next two weeks.  It’s going to take me a week to get back in the swing of things.  Celebrating my 10 year anniversary with my lovely, lovely wife.

But it’s all good and everybody is going to get an additional 4 weeks.  You’re actually going to get even more group coaching.  There is going to be a delay here.  I wanted to close out my time just again thanking you and saying I cannot wait to jump back on these calls.  Please know that you will get an additional month tacked on as an ‘I’m Sorry,’ for being gone for three weeks.

Your SANE coaches are going to be taking great care of you.  I feel so honored and blessed to be able to go this journey with you.  I will be on a cruise and I plan to take some good photos and videos, showing all the SANE food.  We love going on cruises, because it allows us to just eat in abundance of SANE food.  So I can’t wait to share it with you when I get back.

Again blessings, and thank you so much for going on this long term empowering journey with me and with the entire SANE team.   Again thank you so much.  This will be posted up in about 48 hour.  And have a good one.  See you in a few weeks.  See you later.