Hi! I'm your SANE concierge. What can I help you find today?

To Cleanse Or Not To Cleanse?

with The Biggest Losers Jay and Jen Jacobs, and Jonathan Bailor


Jay: Hi Jonathan, I want to talk about numbers and science which is little strange for me because I am not a numbers guy and not a science guy, but I will tell you from being on the Biggest Loser, besides the scale being one of the things that was the number that was important to me. Throughout the entire show, we were given all kinds of medical input and advice and this is actually my readout on the Idexx [indiscernible 00:00] machine at the very end of the show, my last readout and I had started the show at 50.9 percent body fat and I lost half of that. I ended up leaving the show at 24.7 percent total body fat which is still not great, but it’s a lot better than 50 percent.

So, those are important numbers to me on the show and then kind of learning about the Smarter Science of Slim and everything that you are doing is science based. You and I talked about this before, there is a paradox between you tell us not to measure and really just to eat SANE, your body will take care of itself, which I agree, it makes sense, but I know I am still recovering measuraholic and there are things that the numbers really mean something to me.

It helps guide me like my personal best of running a 5k or marathon or anything else and then what I had done was it’s been a year and a half since our finale, it’s been a year and a half of time living a regular life, no [indiscernible 00:00] nothing other than whether I do good or bad on my own and I wanted to do some metabolic testing, I told you I was going to do that and I know you don’t really necessarily believe in metabolic testing, but from a science side it was kind of cool because when you do that you get back these really — I got pages and pages and numbers with all kinds of words and names and stuff I don’t really exactly get, but the good news from that was as I told you on my last video because I have been pretty much eating SANE for the past — really a year I guess, it was about a year ago that you and I started talking about this and I really got serious with it probably six months ago.

Because I have been eating SANE overall, Derek Johnson of New Metabolism, he said my blood work is like an A+ which is really because of the quality of the foods that I have been eating. So, you know it means I am about full disclosure and I wanted you to know that starting next week, I am going to do a 14-day cleanse that Derek had put together, I don’t know if you can really see this, but it’s got cleansing powder, there’s protein powder, there’s supplements, they go along with this. There is a flush here that’s really a high fiber flush, there is a digestive enzyme, we used to take digestive enzymes on the ranch all the time and there are some other supplements here.

So, I just wanted you to know that the cleanse overall is really based upon still SANE eating, it’s really eating vegetables clean, there’s a few smoothies here that are based upon adding some of these particular ingredients, but I am going to look at it as a way to kind of reset what I have been doing and I just wanted to share that with you. I am going to also share with people online so they have some point of reference. So, it’s fun. I got to tell you what? I love getting the numbers, you have got me hooked on science, it’s helping because I have come to understand that it’s not just the scale, the scale was fine, but it’s really the quality of your health inside your blood, your organs, and I think you would agree that eating SANE overall is one of the things that is going to keep us living a better life for the rest of our life.

So, anyway, next week I am restarting this 14-day cleanse and then I will transition back into eating totally basically the same program, the Smarter Science of Slim program. So, that’s the latest and I will keep you posted Jonathan. Talk to you soon, bye-bye.

Jonathan: Hey Jay, I am so happy to hear that you have got what sounds like an excellent motivating kick-start program set up. I think a lot of the things we see around us today is more modern techniques of cleanses and pills, powders, and potions. If those are effective in terms of motivating us and they actually help us, of course I would never criticize anything like that, but for some of us I know they can sometimes make things seem complicated and I just want to remind us really quick that these pills, powders, and potions can’t be required for long-term health and fitness and the reason we know this is true is they didn’t exist prior to the obesity and diabetes epidemics existing.

Of course, this isn’t meant to imply that they are the cause. One could make an interesting case that they might be, but it’s simply to — if we look at the data, like if we look back at 1890, the rates of obesity were about 3.2 percent, today they are about 40 percent, and today we have more pills, powders, potions, cleanses, gym memberships, scales that tell us [indiscernible 00:00] information, we have more information and more tools at our disposal than we ever have, yet we have a bigger problem than we ever have.

What my research shows is that ironically the key is not in more complexity, it’s not in some new technique, it’s in fact in simplicity and simply getting back to eating high quality SANE foods and if we do that, we will fundamentally enable our body to run the way it was designed to run, to keep us healthy and slim naturally as we have done successfully for hundreds and thousands of years and as every animal in nature does and if we do that and if we keep slim simple, we can enjoy lives of accidental health and fitness much like our grandparents did and again the key is not to say these other approaches are bad. If they are helpful for us, and it sounds like it’s being very helpful for you, then keep it up.

The key thing to keep in mind is when we talk about measurements or numbers, there is one really important number to keep in mind and that’s since 1980; 1980 is really an important inflection point in terms of us starting to go to gyms and starting again these pills, powders, and potions. Since 1980, the worldwide rate of obesity has doubled. That seems to be pretty compelling data that the answer is not more of what we have been doing. In fact, instead of doing more of what we have been doing, maybe we need to look back and see what we were doing before we had this problem.

Before we had this problem, there basically were no gyms and very few people [indiscernible 00:00] and in fact no one knew what a calorie was let alone counted them. So, if what we are doing is working for us, let’s keep it up and that’s excellent. If what we are doing is not working, I would encourage us to try to live a life of what I call to be simple slimness which is to simply focus on eating SANE foods whenever we are hungry, to stop when we are no longer hungry, to stay active and to exercise intelligently for just few minutes a week. If we do that, getting back to the numbers and the science and the measurements, we will see that the measurements that actually matter. When I say actually, I mean actually impact our day-to-day lives.

The number on the scales does not impact our day-to-day lives at all. We are the only people in the world that know it and frankly it has no bearing on anything. The measures that do matter are waist circumference, are triglycerides, are cholesterol, are fasting glucose, are resting heart rate, things like that. Those are all targeted and those are all improved when we eat non-starchy vegetables, nutrient dense proteins, whole food fats and low sugar fruits.

It’s not about avoiding foods, it’s about eating the right kinds of foods and it’s about tracking measurements and numbers that actually matter and if we do that and it sounds like that’s exactly what you are doing, we will heal ourselves metabolically and we will achieve lives of simple slimness and I know that sounds too good to be true, but all we need to do is turn the clock back about two generations and that’s what everyone did. We can do it again.