7.1.16

I love doing in these sessions stuff we can’t do anywhere else, which is deep, cutting-edge, interactive Q&A that is nowhere else. Nowhere else in the world. Nowhere else in the Ignite site. Not covered in the wonderful – I mean, this is hard to say because pretty much everything is covered in the SANE Certified Coaching Support Group, but there are some things that are just more perfect for live interactive sessions like this. That’s really what I want to focus on. So, if you have questions, or follow-up questions on stuff we’re going into, please post them as a question, like Raina did, because sometimes I can’t see all the chats.

But what’s up Leslie, and what’s up Kate B.? I love it that it’s Kate B. I actually went by John B. for a very long time when I was at university because so many people were named John or Jonathan. So, what’s up Noreen? What’s up Julie? What’s going on everybody? Gina is in the house! We’ve got lots of folks here tonight, which I love, because it is June 30th. Just to prove that this is live for when people watch the recording, because yes this is being recorded, and it will also be transcribed, so please keep that in mind. If for any reason you lose you connection, or you have to leave early, or you can’t make a future session, these are all going to be recorded and transcribed, and they’re going to be emailed to you within 72 hours. That’s great because you can actually send in questions beforehand, so you can interact even if you’re not actually here.

Wednesday SANE Certified Coach is here! I love it! And it’s July 1st in New Zealand, Raina is telling me. So that’s exciting, and it’s going to be July 1st here in the United States tomorrow. It’s going to be July 4th here in the United States this coming weekend. So hopefully everyone’s got a SANE Independence Day planned.

Gene says that I’m frozen and everything has stopped, but I’m sorry Gene. Hopefully we’ll get you back. If for some reason you can’t hear, just go ahead and disconnect and reconnect, and hopefully it will come back to you. Please let me know if you can’t see or hear me. I think Gene, I don’t know if it’s just you, but we’ll be here. Keep trying to come back. Hopefully it will work out. Make sure you have a wired internet connection. If you’re not wired into the internet, or if you have anything else running, which could be taking up internet bandwidth, that sometimes is a helpful thing to shut off.

As always, I want to welcome everybody and I want to give some quick shout-outs to the individuals who have been on the leader board this week in the coaching and support group. If you haven’t been there, right after today’s call please log into your Ignite program. Click on Coaching. It’s all over the place. It’s in the menu at the top, it’s down on the middle of the homepage, because it’s such a critical component of your program. You can follow up with Raina, your SANE Certified Coach, Wednesday, SANE Certified Coach. Lori and Rebecca both SANE Certified Coaches, as well as all your other friends and family members.

I’ve got to tell you, this is one of my favorite, favorite parts of the program because you are not told enough by the media, and by everything else out there – everyone wants to talk about eating, about exercise – myself included because they’re very important. But the social, emotional aspect of this is equally as important. There’s so much love and science in support there, so please jump in there ASAP after today’s call. And, when you’re in there, there’s all sorts of badges, awards, and gamification to make it fun.

I want to give a shout-out to this week’s leader board. So everyone’s doing a great job and I want to give a special shout-out to the SANE Certified Coaches, as always, and also Linda Bear, Megan Horton, Josh Simon who has been crushing it! Nice job Josh! And Kelly K., you get bonus points for having a last name that I cannot pronounce. So I’m so sorry Kelly. Sandra Ewing and then oh my goodness! Stephanie you’re killing me here! Good old Stephanie is a lovely SANE family member whose last name I can never say. Stephanie R., hopefully she’s here. So thank you so much Linda, Megan, Josh, Kelly, Sandra, Stephanie and all the members of the SANE Ignite family.

A couple of quick other announcements and then we’ll get started. We’re going to go for 90 minutes, and until I pass out, but that’s never actually happened, so hopefully we’ll continue that up. It’ll be interactive. We’ve got some cool stuff that we’ve never covered before that I’d like to cover today. We’re going to go pretty deep into it, so hopefully you’ll have some questions to interject. And I did want to announce two big cool things. First and foremost, I’m very, very excited to share with you that we just rolled out a brand new, cutting-edge search technology on your Ignite website. So as you know, your Ignite program has a lot of stuff in it. This is a lifetime program, so we want to make sure that you have everything that you’ll ever need for the rest of your life, and I want to make sure that you can get to that content very easily. So because of that we actually built a customized way to search through all that content in one place.

So, it’s your SANE Concierge, it’s been totally revamped. If you look in the upper right-hand corner of your site, after this call, and you click on the little magnifying glass, you’re going to see a totally new search experience. What is really cool is that it’s going to search across all the different content types that are in your Ignite website, and even things like video and audio, because we get those all transcribed. For example, if you type in the word “bacon” you’ll not only find recipes that contain bacon, but you will also find group coaching calls where I answer questions about bacon, or videos where we discuss bacon, or articles where we talk about bacon. So you’ll see all that great content, and that’s brand new, and it’s very exciting and sexy. So please do check that out. You can filter by content type. It’s a lot of fun.

Secondly, following up on last week’s call – this is real-time – there was some excellent feedback. I was wearing my SANE hat – we’re working on some new SANE goodies. In fact, I have a new SANE shirt on here, I don’t know if you can see that. But the suggestion came for SANE bumper stickers and I’m happy to announce that if things go according to plan, and if the printing company doesn’t fall off the face of the earth, we are going to have SANE bumper stickers, and I am going to do everything in my power to get everyone some free SANE bumper stickers. So expect that in the mail. Hopefully I’m going to figure out a way to do that, but we’ve got those in route, so now you can have on your car – you can have a SANE car! That’s very, very exciting!

All right, rock and roll! We are ready to go here. The one quick disclaimer that I’ve always got to give, is the only thing – the only thing that is off limits – everything else is on limits, you can ask me any question you want – is medical advice. We cannot do medical advice because it is against the law to give medical advice over the internet, and it’s also very dangerous to get medical advice if you don’t have time to really provide a detailed medical history to a qualified medical professional. So please, never, ever accept medical advice from anyone that does not have complete access to your medical history, because that is really important. So, anything except medical advice we will dig into. It’s going to be awesome. Gina, yes, I will try to go a little bit slower. And do remember please, all of these sessions are going to be transcribed and recorded, so you will have access to them afterwards, which is always good.

So I’m going to start to jump into some of the questions that were written in. And Gina, the good news is I usually go slower once we get into the content. I’m just so excited as we get started. So please remember, if you cannot make these calls, in the scheduling survey that goes out, and even in the registration email, you can click on a link in there and you can provide your questions beforehand. So I had some of those questions that came in and I’m going to knock those out because they are good questions, and I also have some stuff that people have been asking for a while and I want to get into it in-depth in today’s call. So hopefully you can provide some great follow-up questions, because sometimes it gets a little lonely up here and I like to have some interaction.

First question is from Stephanie R. It has to do with raw eggs. This was posted in the SANE Certified Coaching and Support group, so please jump in there if you’re not in there, because it’s awesome! Stephanie was asking about something she saw on her Facebook feed, which has to do with cooking eggs. We know that eggs are a SANE food, but this has to do with cooking them and it talked about a well-known but controversial doctor who said that scrambling eggs was the worst way to prepare eggs because it oxidizes the fat in them, or oxidizes the fat and/or cholesterol in the eggs. The overall question had to do with the SANEST way to prepare eggs and a little bit more information on oxidizing fats, because that’s a term that’s been thrown around a lot in the media. Again, please forgive me if we go a little bit deep in these calls that is the point of these calls. So if it’s like oh, this is super advanced, that’s ok. This is recorded. You can come back to it later, and a lot of the stuff that’s very common, a lot of the stuff that will help you get started, that’s already in the program. So we’re going to do a little bit more advanced stuff in these calls, but please don’t let it intimidate you.

To that point, let’s talk about oxidation, eggs, oxidizing cholesterol, and let’s talk about all that fun stuff! So let me answer the question simply first, then I’ll give you the big scientific background. Hopefully then you can provide me with some real-time questions. The high level question here is, is it true that when you scramble eggs you can oxidize the cholesterol in the eggs, and more importantly, what does that mean and why is oxidation bad? I think that’s a great question because we hear a lot of terms like oxidation, or electrolytes, or anti-oxidants. We don’t necessarily know what they mean, and while that is kind of okay, it’s actually sometimes not okay because those terms can sometimes be used to manipulate us. For example, you have sports drinks which say they have electrolytes in them. If we just think electrolyte is a term for universal goodness, where the more of it you take in the healthier you are. We might think that a sports drink, which is water and then high fructose corn syrup, but has electrolytes in it is good for us, when it definitely is not.

So please remember, the addition of something good into something bad doesn’t make that bad thing good. So putting a vitamin pill in a can of Pepsi does not make the can of Pepsi nutritious, even though now it has 100% of a bunch of vitamins and minerals. We want to look for things that provide us with an abundance of nutrition without a bunch of other nonsense. So otherwise we fall victim to all the tomfoolery that takes place with like breakfast cereals, yogurts, and so-called nutrition bars, where a bunch of processed garbage is mashed together. Then synthetic vitamins and minerals are added on top of it, and it’s marketed as a good source of X, Y or Z, but it has a bunch of other toxic nonsense in it. So fortified doughnuts are still not going to be doing too much good for our health.

So like the term electrolyte, even vitamin or mineral, we sometimes hear the term oxidation. Oxidation, unlike electrolyte, is used as a negative. Something’s being oxidized. So what does that actually mean? Then I’ll answer the actual question about eggs. Oxidation is just when a substance reacts with oxygen. It’s a chemical change. So a simple example of oxidation is rust. When metal reacts with oxygen it can rust, or oxidize. So rust is metal oxidizing. Now that may or may not be a useful metaphor, but that’s actually what’s happening in real life with metal. But, we can have other things other than metal oxidize, or change because they react with oxygen. For example, fat or cholesterol, which is a form of fatty acid can be oxidized when it is exposed to heat. As a general rule of thumb, when it comes to nutritional things we actually don’t want them to oxidize. Oxidation is not a good thing when it comes to fats.

So, a couple places where that applies to your life… First, you may have heard of poly-unsaturated fats, or PUFs, or Omega-6 fats. People in the Paleo community for example talk a lot about this, and they talk about how poly-unsaturated fats are potentially very unstable and they’re very easily oxidized. What that means is they’re very sensitive to heat and it is true that oxidized fats are not good. We do not want to eat oxidized fats whenever possible. Oxidation from a nutritional perspective generally happens when certain substances are exposed to heat. We’re going to tie this together beautifully don’t worry. One of the reasons that people in the Paleo community, and now just the mainstream nutritional community, because it is just science, are advising against cooking with poly-unsaturated fats, such as a safflower oil, or some of the seed oils, such as a vegetable oil, as they are very high in poly-unsaturated fats. Poly-unsaturated fats are very sensitive to heat, meaning that they will oxidize much quicker, or at much lower temperatures than say a saturated fat, such as coconut oil. So this is why you’ll generally hear me and your SANE Certified Coaches, and everything in your Ignite program saying that if you need to heat an oil, it is much better to heat a health saturated fat, because saturated fats based on the hydrogen, blah, blah – that’s too much science – they’re less likely to oxidize or you’d really have to expose them to really high heat before they oxidized. But it is 100% true that any and all fats can be oxidized if they are exposed to high enough heat.

This is part of the reason why fried food is bad to you. To fry food you put it in an oil that is heated to such a high temperature that the fat is almost certainly oxidized. That is very, very much not good for you. The general way to avoid eating oxidized fats is to minimize food’s exposure to heat. That doesn’t mean you should only eat raw food. That’s actually very unhealthy in certain contexts for sure. But, we can take simple steps to protect ourselves from oxidized fat.

Some of those steps would be when in doubt, cook things less. So cooking, heat in general denatures food, it can destroy vitamins and minerals. For example, vitamin C is extremely sensitive to heat. So for example, there’s common teas that are sold which they say this tea has vitamin C in it. That’s a wonderful idea, except for the fact that if you brew tea in boiling water, the boiling water will completely destroy the vitamin C. So it doesn’t matter if it has vitamin C in it if the heat destroys it.

As a general rule of thumb, low and slow is the way to go when it comes to cooking. And it rhymes! So, if you’re ever in doubt, if it rhymes that means it’s true. As the presidential campaign is reaching its climax here in the United States, if it rhymes it’s true. We’ve got all kinds of funny stuff going on around here. So when in doubt, low and slow is the way to go from a cooking perspective. Then if you do need to use an oil to cook with, you do want to focus on oils that are healthy forms of saturated fats. Coconut oil is ideal from a cooking perspective.

Now eggs, how should we prepare eggs? What’s going on with the oxidation? If you’re frying eggs. If you put your stove on the highest heat possible and you just fry the egg, literally frying it, yes it can oxidize. Now, a couple things to keep in mind is the fat found in eggs, quite a bit of it is coming from healthy saturated fat. So keep that in mind because saturated fats are more difficult to oxidize than any other form of fat. So if we take a healthy form of saturated fat, such as an egg, and we cook it low and slow – here’s more of an advanced technique… so low and slow, plus if you can avoid the food’s exposure directly to the heating element – sorry, those words didn’t come out right. For example, cooking a piece of meat like with a blow torch would be exposing that meat directly to the heat source. Now, contrast that with poaching an egg in water. If you poach an egg in water, the heat source is hitting the pan, then the pan is hitting the water, then the water is hitting the egg. So there’s many levels of indirection there.

So low and slow is the way to go. When it comes to cooking in general you want to cook with healthy saturated fat oils when possible. Then try to avoid having the food hit the heat source directly. So poaching and broiling. Low and slow, poach and broil, boom! That’s like the one-two punch. Bam! Bam! At least in the United States we often use a lot of oil when water will do just fine. It doesn’t really work with eggs per se, but for example if you’re cooking salmon, or any sort of fish. Poaching, or just putting a little bit of water in the base of your pain, that can go a long way, and you might not even need to use any oil. It also helps with oxidation.

So, to answer the end question – then I see a lot of follow-up questions coming in here – is it possible that frying an egg could oxidize the fats? Yes, if you’re exposing it to a very, very high heat. Does that mean that eating raw eggs is the way to go? I wouldn’t say that’s necessarily the way to go. There are some risks associated with eating raw eggs. I think a happy medium, if you’re saying what would be the sanest way to eat eggs? Let’s cover what we’ve talked about so far. We’ve talked about low and slow. We’ve talked about not exposing the SANE food directly to the heating element. And, we know that when it comes to sanity, bulk cooking saves us so much time and money, and it’s convenient. So convenience is important. What I would recommend as the sanest way to prepare eggs is to soft, medium, or hard boil a bunch of eggs all at once. That is not exposing the eggs directly to heat. You can do it low and slow. Then, those eggs are portable. You don’t need any silverware and you can take them with you anywhere you go. Let’s call it nature’s perfect 100 calorie snack pack. So the Oreo and nonsense snack packs, those are nonsense. But a little egg has actually less than 100 calories usually. Most normal eggs are about 90 calories, and they are a brilliant filling source of healthy whole food fats, and also have some very high quality protein in them. So low and slow boiling of eggs is the ideal way to prepare eggs to avoid oxidation.

That’s a general rule of thumb we can apply across the board to food. The reason ¬– just to wrap it all up and then I’ll answer questions – that there’s been a lot of talk about Omega-6 fats is because for example, things like a flaxseed oil, which can be very healthy. Flaxseed is so high in poly unsaturated fats, which are the least heat-stable fats. If you lived where I live in Seattle, Washington, where most people don’t have central air, and the temperature in your house in the summer gets to be maybe 80 degrees, unfortunately, if you have flaxseed oil just sitting in your cupboard it can oxidize, which is not good. This is also why I recommend that you keep your nuts, which are a brilliant, SANE, whole food source of fats in your refrigerator or freezer.

Nuts are actually a great example of oxidation. If you’ve ever bought nuts and you’ve just put them not in your refrigerator or freezer, or in your cupboard like most people do, you’ll notice that maybe after two weeks the nuts actually change. They get like a white coating on them and they don’t taste as good. That’s actually some of the fat in the nuts, the poly unsaturated fats in the nuts oxidizing just from the exposure to room temperature levels of heat. So that’s why refrigerating and freezing the nuts is great. The more poly unsaturated fats that are contained in a food the more important it is to protect it from heat.

That is also why you don’t necessarily want to cook with olive oil. Or, if you’re going to, you want to make sure you’re keeping the temperature at 350 degrees or lower, simply because olive oil is predominately mono unsaturated fats and those have a higher likelihood of being oxidized than a saturated fat. Wow! Lots of science. Stephanie, I don’t know if you expected all of that science, but hopefully that’s helpful and we got some practical stuff in there too.

Let me go ahead and take a quick look here at some of the questions that came in. Kelly’s got a great question about sleep. Gina’s got a good question here. What kind of fat is butter? Laura, that’s a great question. I don’t know off the top of my head. I would assume that it’s saturated fat because it is solid at room temperature. That’s another good rule of thumb. If a fat is solid at room temperature it is more than likely predominately mono unsaturated and saturate fat. Poly unsaturated fats are liquid. The more the poly unsaturated fat it is its liquid and its melting point is at room temperature or lower. So that’s why it’s liquid at room temperature.

I’m sorry, I’m skipping over certain questions to get to the questions that have to do with the questions I just answered. Then I will go back to the other questions. Vera, I’m not sure if I’ve seen your name before, so welcome! How about over easy so the yolk is not… absolutely Vera. Keep in mind, again, the key thing isn’t to say, “Oh my gosh I’m not going to eat eggs anymore. I’m not going to cook eggs. I’m scared.” Eggs are really good for you and they’re one of the sanest options for breakfast, very convenient, one of the sanest sources of whole food fats in the world, and a great high-quality source of protein. So over easy, just bring the heat down a little bit. You can cook the yolk, again it’s low and slow. If you hard boil an egg the yolk is completely cook. But, because you’re doing it low and slow, because you’re not exposing it directly to the heating element, it’s all good. So please, please do not let this scare you off.

Let me know if you have any more questions about oxidation and rust. Let me get some of the questions here that came in. Kelly says regarding sleep. What’s up Kelly, I never said hi. Would you say getting 5 hours a night, then a 2 hour plus nap during the day meets the same recommended sleep of 7 to 8 hours? There’s two types of feedback and advice I can provide. One is I am communicating to you peer reviewed clinical research that has been done and is fact. For example, telling you that eating a certain amount of protein causes muscle protein synthesis, blah, blah, that is something that has been tested in a laboratory. It always happens, it’s just science. You drop a rock and it falls. Gravity. Science. It happens all the time.

Then there is based on 15 plus years of research and all the work that I’ve done, what is my educated hypothesis? This is going to fall into the educated hypothesis arena. Really, the key thing here Kelly is you want to do what works for you. I know I say that all the time, but if 5 hours at night and then a 2 plus hour nap is something that you can do for the rest of your life enjoyably… Let’s say that it’s not as good. Hypothetically. This is an important SANE mindset thing. This is very, very important. Let’s say that there was proven definitive science that said no, 7 plus hours of sleep at night is a 10 out of 10, then a 5 hour rest at night and a 2 hour nap during the day is a 6 or 7 out of 10. That isn’t the case. There is no data. That’s just an example for some SANE mindset stuff. But let’s say that was true. Let’s say that I could tell you Kelly, everyone else on the call, and everyone else who’s watching this later, if I could tell you that the science is unequivocally clear that sleeping 7 hours a night is a 10 out of 10, and that sleeping a shorter amount of time at night and some during the day is a 6 out of 10… A 6 out of 10, consistently and enjoyably for the rest of your life is way better than a 10 out of 10 for 7 days or 2 weeks while you grit your teeth, then get stressed out, and stop doing it, then you’re at a 3 out of 10 because you’re like I can’t do this. I feel bad. I’m going to give up.

I know that might sound strange, but I know personally, and I know with the hundreds of thousands of people that I’ve been so blessed to work with over the past decade plus, that is a very, very common thing for me to do to myself, and for a lot of us to do. Which is, we try to do perfect. We try to do that 10 out of 10 and we might be able to do it for a little bit. But because it’s not something that we can enjoy, because it’s not something we can sustain, and because we’re trying to go from maybe a 2 out of 10 to a 10 out of 10, and that’s like trying to run a marathon tomorrow when you haven’t ran a mile today. We can’t keep it up and then we regress and maybe even go back further than when we started.

This is the secret. After all of my research, all of my personal experience, this is one of the secrets: The secret is consistent pretty good is astronomically better than perfect for 2 days, fall off, then New Year’s Eve I’m going to do something else. This yo-yoing is so bad for our health and for our psychology. So Kelly, the non-answer – no, this isn’t a non-answer. This is a good answer. I would say first and foremost, from a SANE psychology perspective, 5 hours at night then 2 plus hours during the day, if that is something that you can do for the rest of your life, enjoyably and consistently, even if it was slightly less SANE than 7 hours of sleep at night – if it is something you can do enjoyably for the long-term, then it is the saner option for you. Because consistency over time matters way more then like right now it’s a 10 out of 10. The only way that anything works, not just sanity – if you want to become better at playing the piano, you want to learn how to paint, if you want to develop a loving relationship, if you want anything it’s just consistency. It’s all about consistency. That’s really important.

For the question specifically though, there’s a critical threshold of sleep that we need to get for it to be meaningful so we hit our deep REM sleep. So if that nap is 2 hours long I do think that’s going to be very helpful for you. Now, if you said can I do 5 hours at night and then 6 20-minute naps, I would advise against that. But I do think a chunk of 5 hours and then a chunk of 2 hours, or like if you can do 90-minute chunks, or 2-hour chunks, it is very likely that you are still going to get that complete sleep cycle, and therefore get the SANE rest you need. Hopefully that gives you a specific answer as well as a more general way of thinking that will hopefully help all of us. I know myself included, I often need to remind myself of the long-term consistency is way, way, way more important than short-term perfection, if that makes sense.

Let’s see what other questions we have. Kelly says, in the SANE smoothie recipe book, why is it recommended to add an additional serving of non-starchy vegetables for each tablespoon of garden in my class? If I’m understanding my question correctly Kelly, and please let me know if I’m not, Garden in my Glass is a serving of starchy vegetables. So the super foods that we sell in the SANE store are all measured in terms of servings of non-starchy vegetables, nutrient-dense protein, whole food fats. For example, a tablespoon of Garden in my Glass is a convenient portable way to get a serving of non-starchy vegetables. So, if you have a smoothie, with spinach, kale, and you want to increase the amount of vegetables, you can add a tablespoon of Garden in my Glass. Each tablespoon counts as a serving of non-starchy vegetables. For example, like the SANE meal bars, that’s a serving of nutrient-dense protein. Cravings Killer Chocolate Truffles, that’s a serving of whole food fat, so on and so forth. Hopefully that answers your question.

Cool, it looks like I’m caught up on the live questions. Please feel free to chat in if you’ve got some live questions. I’m going to move on to some of the questions that were written in here. This question also has to do with smoothies. Please, if it don’t get to one of your live questions, just post it again. Just copy and paste it, because sometimes I lose track. There’s a lot of stuff coming in here, I see some of the stuff, and there’s some extra stuff that I see that not everyone else sees. So please forgive me if I miss that. Just post it again because I don’t want to miss anything.

This is a question that has to do with smoothies. It says I’m actually against drinking green smoothies. Half your digestion starts in your mouth. I’m solving this by eating my smoothie and using half the low-fructose fruit I would put into it anyways as chunks, so I have something to chew on. Your ideas on this? I think the general question has to do with is there a downside to drinking smoothies because digestion starts in your mouth.

It is absolutely true that digestion starts in your mouth. That is for sure true. The advantage to smoothies – so this isn’t about better or worse. The reason smoothies are great is because they are very convenient, they’re portable, and sometimes for individuals who do not have time to for instance, sit down and chew 12 servings of vegetables per day it is very difficult for some people, both in terms of time and just amount of chewing. Then smoothies can be a great option. But certainly smoothies are not required. They’re just a tool that we can use to make it easier and more convenient to take in vegetables – and possibly, this is for me personally, and I know for a lot of folks as well, a way to take in vegetables that would be impossible otherwise. What I mean by that is raw vegetables with nothing added to them.

So, to try to eat spinach, just straight spinach, nothing else. Not cooked, not salted, nothing else on it, for a lot of people is a non-starter. However, if you take raw spinach and you put it in a SANE green smoothie, with some low-fructose fruit, maybe some clean whey, maybe some slimming sweetener substitute, it is quite delicious. Your kids will enjoy it, you can refrigerate it, you can do it in bulk on weekends, and you can take it with you in the car. Now you can take in raw green vegetables and maybe you would never ever do that before. So it’s not about better or worse, it’s just about being a convenient tool for a lot of people.

Also, one of the things I like about smoothies as well is they give you an opportunity to play a little bit. I love not only the super foods that we provide as accoutrements to your smoothies, but smoothies are a really powerful took for you to just combine a bunch – you could put therapeutic doses of cinnamon in a smoothie. What I mean by that is cinnamon is very good for you. It can be very helpful with your blood sugar regulation, but only at certain doses. So if you just sprinkle cinnamon on something that’s not enough cinnamon. Yes, cinnamon is good for you, but we know for example, with medication it doesn’t do anything until you reach a certain dose. So if you want cinnamon to really have an impact on your blood sugar, you need to take it in a therapeutic dose. Now, if you just tried to eat a tablespoon of cinnamon, very bad things will happen. In fact, people tried to do that. It was called the cinnamon challenge, and it was quite the rage on YouTube for a while because it is extremely dangerous and it reacts with your throat, and it causes you to look like a dragon that’s breathing fire. Poof, you get a cloud of cinnamon that comes out the other end.

But, it’s very easy to put cinnamon, and to put apple cider vinegar, and to put whole green tea leaves, and to put acied [0:38:11] berry. To put for example, kelp or seaweed, things like how am I going to do that? How do I add that to my regular daily routine? Not super easy, but with smoothies it’s like you’ve got this canvas where you can just get your Vitamix or Blend-tech, or whatever kind of high-powered blender you want to use, put it all in there, blend it up and see what comes out the other end. So, all good if you choose not to enjoy smoothies, I just know for a lot of folks it’s very helpful but it’s not required.

Gina has a question here that has to do with low-fructose fruits, which I had mentioned briefly there, so it’s a great time for that. She says, “I have heard that there’s a connection between eating fruit, fructose, and gout. Can you speak to this?” Gina, so I don’t actually know personally about a connection between fructose and gout. I can tell you that fructose is called fruit sugar, or it is often referred to as the sugar you find in fruits. Fructose is found in a lot of other things, obviously high-fructose corn syrup, but even things like agave – agave is 90% fructose, so it’s marketed as a healthy sweetener because it’s natural. But in reality it has more than twice as much fructose as high fructose corn syrup. So, just because something’s natural doesn’t mean it’s healthy. Agave is the perfect example, along with tobacco, which is 100% natural. Doesn’t mean it’s healthy. So we’ve got to use natural plus science together equals sanity.

Personally, as a general rule of thumb, too much fructose and too much fruit, if you are struggling to lose body fat, is not a good idea in general. While I don’t know the clinical science between fructose and gout, please don’t eat a lot of fructose if your goal is pretty much anything. One of the challenges with fructose – there are instances, for example where sugar – this is going to sound crazy, just stick with me here. There are some instances where sugar, certain sugars, can actually be very good. These are very limited cases, but let’s say you’re running a marathon. Then for example, taking in glucose, which is like fructose, an –ose type of sugar – glucose, ribose, lactose – lactose is the type of sugar found in dairy products. These sugars are metabolized very differently by the body. For instance, taking in glucose or ribose during endurance training can be very beneficial for that training. Now fructose not so much. So even in an athletic context, fructose is not an ideal source of energy.

So, if we’re going to take in fructose we want to take it in in the form of low fructose fruits. The fruits that are lowest in fructose are enumerated in the Ignite program in the very first step-by-step course. There’s an extensive food list in there and low fructose fruits are all enumerated. But as a general rule of thumb, berries and citrus are the lowest fructose fruits. Not only do they have less fructose, which is sugar there’s just no need for it. Fructose is not essential. There’s nothing essential about it. We’ve heard about essential amino acids, essential fatty acids, essential vitamins, essential minerals. There’s no such thing as essential sugar. It just does not exist.

So if you’re going to eat fruit, then you want to go with berries – strawberries, blackberries, blueberries, raspberries, or acied (0:42:02) berries if you can find those, and also citrus. So things like oranges, grapefruit, limes, and especially lemons. Limes and lemons are just fantastic. They’re wonderful additions to your smoothie. They’re incredibly alkalizing for your body, and they do wonders for the taste of smoothies, because the acid in them cuts some of the bitterness that you’ll have in the green vegetables that you’re adding to your smoothies, and that can be extremely helpful. So I would strongly recommend, even if you’re not a big fruit eater.

Here’s research, so this is fact. The more you yo-yo dieted in your life, the more fat that you have to lose, the more fat you will lose if you focus more on nutrient-dense protein, whole food fats, and non-starchy vegetables. If you need calories you’re going to get those from your whole food fats, not from your low-fructose fruits. Now, if you’re a 22-year-old athlete, sure. Getting more of your calories from sugar because you’re just burning it off doing your intramural sports that’s fine. But the older we get, the more we’ve yo-yo dieted, the more fat that we have to lose, the better off we’ll do – clinical research – if we’re getting the majority of our calories from whole food fats rather than from sugar. So even in that case, I would recommend you still eat lemons. An entire lemon pealed has 1 gram of sugar in it. You’re going to get more sugar than that in some vegetables. So lemon is just unlimited. The more lemon you can eat the healthier you will be. It’s a brilliant source of vitamins and minerals, extremely low in sugar, and it’s beautiful in your smoothies. Hopefully that is helpful.

Jeanne has an exercise question: I’ve started walking 3 to 4 miles per day. I’m 70. Rock and roll Jeanne, I love to hear that. Shin splints are making it hard. I don’t want to quit, it helps with my stress and better sleep. How do I prevent shin splints? Jeanne, one of the biggest things is just giving it time. So shin splints, part of it is there’s a muscle next to your shin, which has probably not been activated for a long time if you’ve just started walking. Shin splints will go away over time. You can do the standard icing of them to temporarily relieve them, but the general rule with shin splints is don’t stop. The reason you’re getting shin splints is because the relevant muscles have not been used very much. So if you stop you’re just going to reset it a little bit. So you obviously don’t want to do it too much so you can’t walk and you’d fall down because your shins hurt so much, but shin splints are almost like growing pains. I don’t know how to better describe it. But, you can ice them, compression, if you need to take Tylenol or something like that to help, within a week, at most two, it will probably go away. If it doesn’t I would recommend talking to your doctor, because if you keep it up it should go away as your body gets used to it.

Another example of this kind of is if you start resistance training at a gym and you do like a leg press, or you might see people squatting with a bar on their back. For example, if you’ve never done that – people will take what’s called an Olympic bar. It’s a big metal bar and it has a pattern on it and they’ll set it on their back. You’ll see people putting hundreds of pounds on a bar that is sitting on their back. If you’ve never done that before – first of all please don’t put 100 pounds on your back – but it’ll be extremely uncomfortable. But after a while you get used to it. So it’s a similar thing like playing the piano, any new physical movement can cause some level of discomfort. You of course want to monitor that, but ice, maybe a little bit of Tylenol, and kind of work through it. If it doesn’t go way in a week or two then you might want to talk to your physician. But kudos on walking, and if you’re walking on a hard surface, like on pavement, that could be contributing to it. So if you have the ability to walk on a softer surface, such as grass or on a paved track, or some treadmills for example give when you walk on them, that can be helpful as well. Hopefully that helps a little bit.

Sandra, any comment on white versus green tea? I heard there may be a risk to ingest too much white tea, but it may be better than green. So, green, white and black tea interestingly enough all come from the same plant. The difference has to do with how they are processed. White tea is extremely good for you. White, green and black tea all have different good things about them, different types of polyphenols, different types of anti-oxidants. White tea is a great source of anti-oxidants. White tea is very expensive, so generally I recommend green tea simply because it’s more affordable and accessible for most people. Also to consume it at a therapeutic dose, white tea may be cost prohibitive. My recommendation for many of you who like white tea and you want to drink a couple cups of it a day because you like it, you’re fine.

One thing to keep in mind with a lot of this, the canonical example is mercury in seafood. So certainly there is some seafood that has mercury in it and if we can avoid that that’s fine. What we really want to protect ourselves from is feeling like there’s just no option. It’s like oh man, seafood’s got mercury in it and this has got this problem with it so you can’t do that, and meat is contaminated, but… so now I’m going to be a vegan. But if I’m a vegan then I’m eating soy and wheat and corn, which are total mono-crops that are GMO’d and pesticided up, so now I can’t eat plants and I can’t eat fish, and I can’t eat meat. And the water’s contaminated so I’m just going to sit in my room – but then the air is contaminated too so now I have to be in a bubble. So we have to protect ourselves from some of this stuff and I think a good way to think about it is there’s always good and bad to everything. Everything. Drinking too much water can kill you.

It’s like what is the threshold where it starts to matter? You can overdo it with anything. You can overdo it with green or white tea. You will accrue so much good way before you reach any threshold of any bad that I would strongly recommend drinking as much white and green tea as you’d like. Then to more extreme examples like what about mercury in seafood? I think this is such an important SANE mindset thing because seafood it so good for us. It is just so omega-3 fatty acids, it’s better for the environment, it is leaner, the protein is more easily assimilated by the body. But then we hear mercury, there’s pollution in the ocean, like there’s pollution in the ground, there’s pollution everywhere. So we’re never going to avoid pollution. The key question to ask though is if you look at the leading causes of death in this country, mercury poisoning? Heart disease, that’s a pretty big risk. Cancer, that’s definitely a problem. Diabetes, huge problem. So, is mercury poisoning? Like, if we know that eating seafood radically reduces your risk of the top 10 causes of death… I don’t know if anyone’s ever died of mercury poisoning. I don’t know, maybe it’s one or two people a year. So if two people per year die of mercury poisoning, and a million people die per year from diabetes… if the thing that kills two people per year can be used to prevent us from getting the thing that kills a million per year that’s where the cost benefit comes into play. Right? I’m sure a couple people die every year because they drank water and the water had some contaminant in it and it killed them. So by the mercury logic we wouldn’t drink water. But hopefully you can see the cost benefit there.

So give yourself that permission to focus on the big things and getting those big things right. If you’re drinking green tea, if you’re drinking white tea, if you’re doing anything and you go on the internet and you search for risks of insert anything. Risks of breathing air. Risks of drinking water. Risks of eating spinach. You will find all sorts of lists. Interestingly enough, if you type in health benefits of smoking you will find that there are some health benefits for smoking. For example, there’s some research that suggests smoking can help prevent or combat Alzheimer ’s disease. Who would have known? Does that mean we should smoke? No! Because the bad outweighs the good. The point is that ying and yang, there’s two sides to everything. We just want to focus on the things that have way more good than they have bad. Green tea, white tea, and seafood, I’ve kind of lumped those altogether, definitely fit in the way more good than bad category.

Kelly has a question here back to the SANE smoothie recipe book. As an example, the blueberry sunrise – Kelly, do you mind if we cover this in the SANE support group? Just because I’m not sure if everyone on this call has access to that book. So let me know if the SANE support group can’t help out and then we’ll get you taken care of. But if you don’t mind I think the SANE support group can be a lot of really great help there.

The next question that was written in has to do with SSRI. So this is a big one. This is one I wanted to spend a little bit of time on here. Why do SSRIs slow down my results with SANE? If you remember back to when you did your SANE results planner you saw that saying, “Are you on insulin or SSRIs?” It matters and it’s something you were asked about.

SSRIs are a very highly used substance. It stands for Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor. These are a class of drugs that help with certain psychological conditions: anxiety, depression, things along those lines. If you haven’t checked it out already, use the new search function on the site and search for the term brondolo. Also search for the term anxiety and search for the term depression. There’s a bunch of great resources on the site. Brondolo is the last name of Dr. Elizabeth Brondolo who’s a leader in the research arena around SSRIs’ impact on weight.

The reason SSRIs have an impact on our weight is as you know now, hopefully from going SANE, this isn’t just about calories. What’s it’s about is the system in which the calories are processed. So, if you take the same quantity of calories and you put them in the body of a 16 year old male, and you take the same quantity of calories and you put them in the body of a 75 year old, post-menopausal female who has diabetes and has weight-cycled 10 times in her life, that same quantity of calories is going to be treated very, very differently. The answer is not to just take the quality of calories and drop it. The answer is to heal the system that is processing those calories.

There’s three really big components of that system. More than three, but to simplify: You’ve got your brain, which is huge because your brain controls everything. It also has a huge role on the amount of weight that you’re storing on your body. It has to do with when you feel hungry, when you feel full, things along those lines. Then you’ve got your hormones. Your hormones are how all the different aspects of your body communicate with one another. Just like I’m speaking English here, your brain and your gut, for example, speak hormones to one another to communicate things. There’s also things like neurotransmitters and yada, yada, yada, but not super important for our conversation.

So your brain, hormones and your gut. Your gut is your second brain, so it is how you – if you think about it, your brain here, it helps to take in the outside world through your five senses. So taste, touch, smell, hearing, seeing. It takes stimulus from the outside world, processes it and then acts based upon it. Your stomach is similar in a lot of ways. Your stomach is taking in inputs from the outside world and processing it. Doing something with it. There’s a huge amount of intelligence, and I use that word intentionally, going on in your gut. We’re learning more and more about that over time.

So when we look at an individual who is chronically struggling with excess weight we see characteristic, or similar differences in the way their brain, hormones and gut function than someone who is naturally thin, for example. So the answer is not to take the individual who’s struggling with their weight and just restrict their calories. The answer is to say how can we take the biology, specifically the brain, hormones, and digestive system of an individual who struggles with their weight, or hypertensive, or is struggling with blood sugar regulation, diabetes, and how do we heal that.

That’s a lot of context. SSRIs act on a lot of areas of our brain that have to do with appetite and body composition regulation. So the easiest way to describe this is SSRIs essentially increase your body fat set point in a dose dependent manner. That’s of course heart breaking because our body image can be a huge source of our emotional state and I get in detain in this with the interview with Dr. Brondolo. But unless we treat ourselves with compassion, and unless we have social support, and unless we’re in this for the long-term holistically – that’s why the SANE approach is so important. Part of the reason we may be using SSRIs may have to do with something with our body image, for instance. We then go on an SSRI – or let’s say it’s not and we go an SSRI medication because of some tragedy that’s happened in our lives. That SSRI medication in a dose dependent fashion will cause fat gain. It will.

Just like for example birth control pills. It’s changing the hormonal composition of your body. That’s going to have an impact. The same thing with insulin. If you go on insulin therapy we can look at controlled studies and we can say we have one group of people. We take them, we hold the top quantity and quality of their calories constant, physical activity, everything else stays constant. You have them go on insulin therapy. Because insulin is a hormone that helps your body to store fat they store more fat. It’s changing the way that overarching system works. SSRIs do the same thing. There are also substances that do the opposite. For example, omega-3 fatty acids can lower your body fat set point in a dose dependent manner. Meaning the more you eat, obviously to a point, and unfortunately cigarettes – cigarettes do lower the body weight set point. They give you lung cancer so it’s not a good thing to take in. But nicotine, because it has a stimulating effect, can lower the body weight set point. That doesn’t mean we should smoke cigarettes, quite the opposite is true. But you will notice that when people quit smoking sometimes they do struggle with their weight, independent of the fact that they may start craving other things.

So SSRIs have a really strong neurological impact. Because of that it almost inevitably will cause some level of fat gain. That does not mean that if we’re on SSRIs we don’t have hope. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Because when we take a SANE approach, and we have SANE expectations, and we’re in this for the long run, we can always do the best we can with the hand that we’re dealt. Just like if you’re 75 years old, you probably have different visual goals than if you’re 25. We need to take on the mindset that if we’re on SSRI medications, whether short-term, medium-term, or long-term, it might just be a question of adjusting our expectations a little bit. Once those expectations are adjusted, one of the beautiful things that can happen is that unconditional self-love, unconditional self-acceptance, and that incorporating a SANE lifestyle as much as we possibly can – that in and of itself can help with the psychological causes of the need for the SSRIs in the first place. What a lot of people find, and what a lot of research has shown is that with the help of your doctor, with constant monitoring of your doctor, as you start to go SANE and you heal your body, your need for medication can go down over time. Over time with the consultation of your doctor. It’s extremely important with the consultation with your doctor.

But it is extremely common for individuals who are going SANE, who are on insulin therapy, their blood sugar levels get radically better. Because of that their doctors have to lower their insulin dose because if they don’t they’ll have too much insulin and then they’ll have another problem. Same thing with hypertension. Same thing with anything regarding a set point or homeostatic regulation in the body.

So the fact is if you’re on SSRIs, if you’re on any form of medication that has an impact on your brain or your hormones, birth control is another example, insulin therapy is another example, it is going to raise your body weight set point. However, everything else you’re doing as part of a SANE lifestyle, in terms of the way you’re eating, living your body, you’re thinking, you’re sleeping, the way you’re getting loving, caring, social support in the SANE support group and coaching group. The way you’re treating yourself, the way you’re thinking long-term instead of short-term. These things will so radically change every aspect of your body and so radically heal your body and your mind that you may, in many instances, over time – remember, in the SANE lifestyle we’re here for the long-term. So we measure success in 6-month intervals. Six months from now things are going to be way different and way better. Six months from then things are going to be – if you do SANE consistently at a place that you can’t even imagine right now.

This hits really near and dear to my heart because my family has been blessed with very good physical health, but this is a private call and I’d appreciate it if you keep this private, but within my biological family there are lots – it’s almost like every other person has struggled with severe mental challenges and has been on like super high dose SSRIs, hospitalizations, dark things that we don’t need to talk about here. So I have personal, personal experience. I myself have never been on SSRI medication, but people who I love most in the world have.

I won’t mention names, but there’s a very young member of my family who’s on extremely high doses and she was struggling with her weight very much. Her doctor changed her medication – and she’s very young – she’s not counting her calories, she’s just eating what her mom’s serving her. Just by the type of SSRI and amount of SSRI that’s being prescribed to her changing, she went – just like studies you’ll see in the Calorie Myth Book and on the Ignite website – no change to the way she’s eating. None. Medication changes, boom, right back to a healthy body composition for her age and gender. So she didn’t get 6-pack abs, and 6-pack abs aren’t natural for most people, but just that tweak there made a huge, huge change.

It’s definitely something we don’t want to let depression or anxiety get worse. In fact, being here in the SANE community, going SANE with your diet, can be one of your number one tools against anxiety, against depression, giving yourself love and support. By doing that, whether it’s SSRIs, insulin, or any form of medication, what you will find – it’s just science. This is what I can tell you with certainty, working with your physician, working with your physician as they detect the underlying changes that take place with the SANE lifestyle to hormones, so on and so forth, your physician will accommodate the positive changes that are happening in your body with changes to medication. Because if they don’t the medication will actually end up doing more harm than good. A good example is insulin. If your blood sugar is fine, taking insulin can kill you. It’s too much insulin. So the same thing can happen in all areas.

That’s why this is so much more than the scale. Please throw your scale away. This is about a global healing that is so important and it’s so encouraging. That is why I say with the most love and commitment that I can that if there’s one favor you could do for me – you’re watching this now – is just please give yourself time. What we’re talking about here is not some 7-day cleanse.

I’m going to be very honest with you here. When people go SANE, just like with anything, there’s a refund period. We always want to be loving, caring, and fair to people and it breaks my heart so much – this is where my anxiety, and not depression because that is a very serious thing, so it’s not depression but it’s definitely anxiety – when I see people who I know can be so deeply helped stopping because in 21 days they haven’t lost 21 pounds. It literally causes me to want to cry because there is no sustainable healthy way to lose a lot of weight in a short period of time. I promise you that’s not what you want anyway. What you want is long-term health and happiness.

So, if you have diabetes and you go on a protocol and your diabetes isn’t gone in 14 days – of course, that’s not the way the body works. If you’re trying to become a beautiful painter and you start with no knowledge of how to paint, 14 days later you’re not going to be a great painter and you’re not going to beat yourself up about that. You know it takes time. What we’re doing here is likely healing 20, 30, 40, 50 years of bad information and damage that it has caused to your body. So if you would please give yourself the gift of measuring your progress on 6-month intervals and focusing on progress rather than perfection, I promise you it will change your life.

What is the one missing element from any effort any of us have tried and maybe it didn’t work out? I guarantee you it’s consistency. I guarantee you. By definition, if you have the right information, which you do now when it comes to eating and exercise, and you do it consistently, it’s just science, it has to work. I am terrible at playing musical instruments. However, I know that if I had the proper instruction and I stuck with it I would get better. I’d probably never be Beethoven, but I would get better. But I can’t get better if I don’t give myself time to get better.

I need you to promise me that you’ll give yourself time to get better because with this information it will save your life. Bottom line. It can’t not. All we’re talking about doing is giving your body more of the essential nutrition it needs, things like sleep, safe movement, love, and support. It has to work and it will work if you give it time.

Anyway, I’m getting a little off track, but SSRIs hit home for me and I want more than anything – I, the entire SANE team, have dedicated our entire lives to saving your life quite literally, and the only thing that stands in the way of that happening is time. That’s it. The information is there, it’s just proven science. So please give it time, especially in the context of SSRIs because it can sometimes be doubly a challenge, but it will work out if you give it time. I can talk about that all day because it really hits home for me. So, I will not talk about it anymore and see what other questions came in and let me gather myself for a second.

All right, let’s move on to the next question. Gina asks – so sorry, looks like that’s not a question, I apologize. I’m sorry if it was. Oh thank you Gina, nice kind words, that is very, very kind of you. Next question has to do with children. How does having children impact my SANE results? That is a great question. First, let’s take a step back. It has definitely been talked about a lot that after you have a child, or I guess I can be gender specific here because men can’t physically give birth to a child. After a woman has a child there’s often, it seems like, your body has changed in a fundamental way and fat being stored on your body in quantities greater than you’d like, it happens more frequently. What’s going on there? Is that actually happening? Are we just imaging that? There’s three really important things to keep in mind because it is real. You’re not just imagining it. There’s nothing wrong with you.

When you have a child you are literally and figuratively giving part of your body to create another body, which is incredible. That takes a toll. Any woman who’s given birth, not just the actual birthing process, but creating life, you’re giving part of your life to another person and that’s beautiful and brilliant, and it does have a meaningful impact on your body. If you, for example, were to measure the hormone levels of a female prior to getting pregnant, then a year after being pregnant you would very likely see some lasting changes. Now, the key thing to keep in mind is that the same thing is true with age. So as we age our hormone levels change. For example, men have andropause, women have menopause. For instance, lean body tissue or muscle mass can decrease by 5-10% per decade if we don’t intervene. But if we intervene, while an 80 year old man cannot naturally have the same level of muscular development as a 20 year old. I mean you take an 80 year old man, same diet, same exercise, they will get different results because there is a different level of testosterone in those two men. That’s the reality. However, the 80 year old man can maximize the level of testosterone that would be healthy for an 80 year old man to have.

The same thing applies to females post-pregnancy. There are a lot of significant changes that take place in the body, but with SANE eating, and with exercise, we can revert those in most part to pre-pregnancy levels. I do say in most part because depending on your genetic heritage, having a child can cause a little bit of lasting change and I think that’s okay. I think if your body fat set point goes up 1% in exchange for you creating life I would tip my hat to you and say that I would think you made a fine trade off. Donating 1% set point increase to create another human being I think is a noble and wonderful thing to do and I think with the compassion that we talk about here in the SANE lifestyle that’s just fine.

The other thing to keep in mind is obviously having children can cause changes in sleep levels, can cause changes in stress levels, and those are actually way more meaningful in terms of long-term body composition than just having the child. So having the child, not the act of giving birth but of carrying a child can cause lasting changes. We can very much minimize the severity of those changes by being SANE during and after the pregnancy. That’s a huge, huge thing. Pregnancy is a very stressful time for the body, so if during the pregnancy – I forget which celebrity it was, but she sort of announced and celebrated how unhealthy she was during her pregnancy, gaining something like over 100 pounds, which of course we have to gain weight when we’re pregnant, we’re creating a life. A hundred pounds, it seems a little bit excessive and there’s quite a bit of research that shows that it is not at all healthy.

So one of the number one things that we can do when we are pregnant, or preparing to get pregnant, is during that time I would argue more than any other time in your life, that’s when sanity becomes the most important because your body is undergoing the most severe form of stress. It’s creating another life. So creating an ideal environment during that time is extremely important to minimize the lasting changes that happen after giving birth. Then of course after pregnancy, anything that we can do to maximize our sanity. Then of course during that first year there’s going to be some level of insanity that is unavoidable. Just like if you were going through a residency or any other temporary big expenditure of every aspect of your being, there’s going to be a little bit of a bump there in terms of insanity. Just making sure we’re doing the best we can in that instance.

So yes, having children does have meaningful hormonal impacts on your body. However, those hormonal impacts can be very much mitigated if we are as SANE as we possibly can be during the pregnancy and then afterwards. If that sounds like of course, but that’s also the case with age. With age, why is it harder, or why does it seem like it’s harder to seem like it’s harder to keep fat off as we age? The reason it seems harder to keep fat off as we age is as simple as our hormone levels change. When you think of the lifecycle of a human, before puberty our sex hormone levels are very low, right? Then we hit puberty and our sex hormones come up. Then as we reach andropause or menopause our hormone levels come down. So those sex hormones have a lot to do with body fat and have a lot to do with lean muscle tissue.

However, once we have reached puberty we can maximize the healthy levels of those hormones at any age, which of course are going to be different. It’s different at 70 than it is at 30, but you can still be an incredible, beautiful, powerful, brilliant, and strong 70 year old, and you can be even happier than you were when you were 30 if you hold yourself to the standard of I’m 70 and I’m going to be the best, most awesome, beautiful, empowering, and brilliant 70 year old in the world, because that’s who I am. I’m going to promise you that everyone else thinks that you are rocking it because between you and I, when you see a 70 year old trying to act like they’re 30 you’re like okay, come on. Own the fact that you’re 70. It’s brilliant. Like you see these people in their mid-30s and they’re acting like they’re in high school and you’re like come on man, you’re 30. That’s awesome! You’re 40, that’s awesome! You’re 50, that’s awesome! Love it! Rock it! Be the best 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 year old you can be. That’s who you are and it’s amazing. With sanity you can do that, be the best version of it possible.

That’s the short answer I guess to the child thing, and yes the answer to the follow-up question of is there anything different that I need to do while I’m pregnant while going SANE. I would say just the number one thing to keep in mind there’s obviously the standard recommendations of things to avoid while you’re pregnant. Just if you can give yourself permission, to you or anyone else you know who may be in this life stage, it is any help you can get to keep the sanity levels as high as you can while creating that life. The science is so clear. You are giving that new life a leg up. You truly are. People want to play these baby Mozart CDs and tapes, which research is pretty clear that may not do anything. But giving your new life a SANE uterine environment in which to develop, the science is shockingly clear will radically decrease that new life’s body fat set point. It will radically reduce their risk of diabetes. It will radically reduce their risk of hypertension, all these types of things. You can preprogram the genes of the person you’re creating.

By the way, dads or potential dads who are listening, this matters to you too. What you send over in your little guys are impacted by what you’re eating. So when your piece of the puzzle is SANE, you are literally giving that sanity, that leg up to the new life that you’re creating. So it applies equally to mothers as it does to fathers. It’s pretty amazing. We could have a whole session about the research that’s been done around pregnancy, but hopefully that is helpful.

There’s another question that was written in that has to do with medication. We talked about SSRIs. We talked about having children. Now also dieting history. This is another important factor because one of the many reasons that I, and your entire SANE family and team members, we get so excited about this – not from a rah rah perspective, although we are pretty rah rah. But if someone else knew what you knew they could not suffer. Unless some screw is loose, if you know something that science has proven can help other people suffer less and live better lives, so you want to shout that from the rooftops.

Dieting history is one of these things because yo-yo dieting, the research is now extremely clear. The reason I get so worked up about you giving yourself permission to take your time is because it is a fact – it is a fact – just as certain as if I take these pair of scissors and I drop them, they will fall every time. It is better for your health, and your weight, and your body composition, to never lose weight – listen to the whole thing – to never lose weight if whatever you do to lose weight you can’t keep up, and then you gain more weight back than you lost. Yo-yo dieting is worse for your health, psychology, and physical appearance than just staying at the same weight. That is very important to understand. It is critical to understand. Your likelihood of Alzheimer’s, dementia, depression, stroke, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, you name it. All of them are reduced if you never again do some trend diet of the week, which it’s not even marketed as something you’re supposed to do long-term. It’s 21-day this, 14-day that, 17-day this. That will, by definition, leave you worse off afterwards, and it will leave you worse off in a way which is not like I’m 5 pounds heavier I can just diet again and lose that weight. Remember, we’re talking about changes to your brain. We’re talking about changes to your gut. We’re talking about changes to your hormones. So just like we wouldn’t say hey, I’m going to smoke for 10 years, then afterwards I’m just going to stop, then I’m going to exercise a lot and that will cancel out what smoking did to my lungs. We now know that yo-yo dieting is kind of more analogous to aging, or it’s more analogous to carrying and giving birth to a child, or more analogous to being on powerful medications like SSRIs or insulin where yo-yo dieting can fundamentally change the way the system works. If you think about it it makes sense. It’s trauma. It’s traumatic to your body.

Think about having a terrible psychological impact. We’re talking about personal stuff so one of my cousins, you’ve probably actually heard of her, she’s been all over the news a while ago. Her name is Adrian and she was the individual whose leg was blown off during the Boston bombing and she was a professional dancer and she actually ran in the Boston Marathon this past year and is now dancing again with her prosthetic leg. She’s and incredible woman and it’s an incredible story. But the psychological trauma of some huge – trauma is trauma. So if it’s psychological – Adrian is a soldier and she’s incredible, but that trauma – aside from the fact that her leg is prosthetic – has a lasting psychological impact.

Trauma, starvation dieting is traumatic. It is taking your body and putting it in the state of crisis, whereas you know from hopefully going through the step-by-step program in your Ignite step-by-step plan you’re burning off muscle tissue, hormones are getting all out of whack because your body’s like I’m starving! This isn’t good! I don’t have enough nutrition. It is traumatic, and trauma leaves scars. That’s a really important point. Maybe you want to write that down. Any form or trauma can leave scars. That doesn’t mean we can’t get past it. In fact, there’s also things called post-traumatic growth, where sometimes trauma can cause us to get better than if the bad thing didn’t happen in the first place.

I think Oprah is a good example of this. Oprah is the queen of the world. She has accomplished so much and helped so many people. If you know anything about Oprah’s past it is terrible. So who knows Oprah would have been able to have done what she’s done had those terrible things not happened to her because maybe they caused some growth. There’s a book called “Anti-Fragile”. There’s a lot of research on something called post-traumatic growth. It’s good stuff to research, but the point is that starvation dieting is trauma. Trauma leaves scars and those scars they do initially change your set point. They can put some roadblocks up in your way. But again, it’s never a question of SSRIs, having children, yo-yo dieting. These are not questions of can you reach a SANE and healthy body composition and robust health and energy levels. You can. These things don’t mean you can’t. They mean you’re going to need to dial up the compassion, and you’re going to need to dial up the patience a little bit. That’s it.

Adrian had her leg blown off. Her body was scarred. It took her two years, but she ran the Boston Marathon. Two years prior she got her leg blown off. Two years of consistent work and Adrian was back at that very spot and she ran in the Boston Marathon. She couldn’t do that in two weeks. She couldn’t do that in a month. But in two years, she could do it. We may have trauma in our past psychologically, physically starvation dieting is a form of trauma. You can overcome that, but it’s not going to happen in 21 days or 14 days, but it will happen in 6-month intervals, in significant chunks.

So thinking of dieting history like you would think of certain forms of medication, like you would think of having children, like you would think of aging. It just changes the timetable. It causes meaningful change and that’s why we want to help people to avoid it in the first place. But if it’s already happened because you were given very bad information for the past 40 years, and it’s heartbreaking, but that’s what happened.

Just like 100 years ago we were told smoking wasn’t bad for us and that caused a lot of problems for a lot of people. Well in the 70s we were told all the nonsense about eating that wasn’t true. In the 80s and 90s and only now is science catching up. But if we just give ourselves time man we can go SANE and it can be pretty amazing on the other end of that.

We’ve got 5 minutes left and I think there’s one more question coming in here. It’s from Jeanne: is it late if you have yo-yo dieted and now will my chances for that bad stuff happen to me? Jeanne great question. In some ways we can’t – I forget who said this, but it was a very smart person at one point said that wishing we could change the past is not something that we can do. So regardless of what happened in the past here’s what I can promise you and here’s what science can say: You can radically improve every aspect of your health and it’s just science. It is a fact. No matter how many children you’ve had. No matter how many times you’ve yo-yo dieted. No matter how many medications you’re on, there is no better time, and there’s no better way to manifest the best version of yourself possible than today, and by eating an abundance of SANE foods, doing smarting physical movement, getting consistent loving support in your SANE coaching and support group, and hopefully from people around you physically as well, and from taking on a SANE mindset, and filling yourself with so much good that you don’t have room for bad.

What’s happened in our past can change the timeline, but what it won’t change ever is that you can stack the deck in your favor. So no matter where you’re starting from, doing this and doing it now, and doing it consistently will yield a better tomorrow than anything else. I think that’s really all we can hope for. That’s pretty awesome! We can’t change the past, but we can 100% certainty always, for everybody, 1 year from today, 6 months from today, 2 years from today, the rest of your life can be radically and permanently better if we give our body and our minds an abundance of what it needs to thrive, and so much so that we just crowd out that which is toxic and that which is nonsensical. That’s the whole SANE philosophy when it comes to food, movement, social support, thinking, so much of the good that there’s no room for the bad.

To close, let’s leave what’s happened in the past behind us and let’s celebrate that we have the greatest science and support and tool set in the world that will – it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when – transform every single aspect of your life. While our individual struggles may not be as visible as for example my cousin who had her leg blown off in the Boston bombing but then came back two years later and ran in that race, I promise you that if you gave yourself that much time, even if your metabolic leg got blown off by 40 years of yo-yo dieting. If you consistently and compassionately gave yourself the gift of SANE eating, thinking, moving and support, two years from today, probably sooner, you will run that metaphoric marathon of your own and it will be brilliant and incredible.

I so appreciate you allowing myself and the entire SANE team to coach you along that journey. This has just been a rocking session. I thank everyone for their questions. I’ll be back again next week and I probably won’t have any different merch to show at that time, but please see this as a starting point of support, not an ending point. Your SANE certified coaches and the rest of your amazing SANE family are available 24/7/365 in your coaching and support group. Please right now, right away go over there, maybe start chatting about some of the things we talked about today, keep the conversation going.

Again, I thank you with all my heart for giving us the opportunity to run along with you in this marathon. It’s not a sprint. It is a marathon. The finish line will be brilliant. We may never even get there because who wants to be finished? The process is the fun part. Thank you again for sharing your time with us, for blessing us with your trust. I look forward to chatting again next week. Thank you so much!