Jonathan:  There are two things that SANE does -– we provide education, like we’re doing here, and then we also provide super foods because we’re not huge supplement fans; we are huge fans of foods that are so nutrient-dense in the natural ratios that our bodies are optimized for that we want to take in those at a therapeutic dose.

Is a multivitamin a good idea?  Yes, I would definitely think a multivitamin can work.  My preference would be if -– so obviously we’re doing as much as we can with our non-starchy vegetables but, for example, there are foods that are more analogous almost to a vitamin pill because they’re so nutrient-dense that you just can’t find these at your grocery store.

Things like wheat grass, spirulina, beef liver -– which I know that sounds delicious but a lot of these — Acai berries -– some of these more exotic fruits -– my preference and as evidenced by what we do here at SANE in the SANE store is that you would be way better served getting therapeutic doses of nutrition from naturally concentrated sources such as our Garden In My Glass, for example, which is a combination of over twenty of the most nutrient-dense superfoods on the planet.  We just take the water out and powder it down for you and what you’ll notice is you’re going to get a large natural dose of vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, and your urine isn’t going to change color because those vitamins and minerals are going to be provided to you in natural ratios.

The other thing to keep in mind is, more vitamins and minerals aren’t necessarily better.  This applies to exercise as well, which we’ll talk more about later.  Think of vitamins and minerals and exercise and all that stuff like medicine or anything else.  It’s not that more penicillin will heal you faster if you have a disease which is treated with penicillin; it’s that the right dose of penicillin is optimal.  The same thing applies with vitamins and minerals.  Is it possible to get perfect ratios of vitamins and minerals just eating what you can buy at your local grocery store?  That can become quite a challenge based on soil depletion and pollution.

If you’ve read some of the research around, for example, if you look at the vitamin C content in an orange nowadays or a conventionally-farmed orange versus an orange found thirty years ago or that has been grown without pesticides or without depleted soil, just the amount of vitamins is very different.  Again, a vitamin pill is a good insurance policy but please keep in mind that there’s a lot more that goes into optimum nutrition than just vitamins and minerals.  In fact, the longer we go, the more we understand the things like phytochemicals and certain enzymes that help stimulate gut bacteria.

We are really, really just starting -– I mean, we understand a little bit about vitamins; we understand a little bit about minerals, but we are just starting to discover all of the mysteries that are found within whole foods.

Anyway, is my long esoteric answer to say, “Hey, multivitamin -– it’s a good idea but if what you’re really after isn’t so much like “I want to take a multivitamin” but rather, “Jonathan, is there a concentrated insurance policy that will help me make up for the inevitable sub-optimalness of the modern food supply?”  Yes, that is definitely my crazy translation of that question.  Then my strong recommendation would be to enjoy concentrated superfoods rather than a multivitamin that has synthetic vitamins and minerals in it that are also in, let’s say, inappropriate doses.

There’s also important things to keep in mind where, if you overdo it with certain vitamins and minerals, it becomes counterproductive; they can block the absorption of other vitamins and minerals so it gets really complicated really quickly unless you stick with the brilliance that we find in nature, which is take beautiful nutrient-dense SANE foods, get the most safe and concentrated sources of them, and enjoy those in green smoothies.  That’s like the ultimate multivitamin if that helps.

Hopefully, that is helpful.  Let me jump into some of the questions that were written in here really fast and we’ll sort of rotate back and forth, if that’s all right, because we’ve got some great questions written in.

One of the first questions I wanted to talk about is we actually have an awesome member of our family here in the coaching and support group and she’s asking us just some wonderful questions and talking about various goals and, “Hey, I want to get to a certain level of body fat percentage.”  I wanted to really quickly -– I don’t know how familiar everyone is with -– first of all, you probably know by now, if you’ve gone through the program at all that well, weight is the metric that everyone loves to track.

As you hopefully know by now, weight is not the ‘be all, end all’ metric.  In fact, it’s very easy to do dangerous things to lower your weight in the short term that will cause long-term weight gain.  If that sounds strange -– like, how could what I do to lose weight in the short term cause me to gain weight in the long term -– just think about your own history.  If you’re like ninety-five percent of members of the Ignite family, chances are, you’ve done what you’ve been told in the past, which is you’ve restricted calories, potentially exercised very aggressively.

Let’s call this the biggest loser model of weight loss because it’s what we see on television and sometimes it’s encouraged in programs like Weight Watchers.  That will cause short-term weight loss but, as I’m sure you’re learning hopefully in your step-by-step program as you start to understand the science of SANE eating is that when you starve your body, you cause some very troublesome changes in your metabolism, in your base metabolic rate, in your ability to burn fat, in actually the way your brain perceives fullness versus hunger.  It can also damage gut bacteria.  It can damage your hormones.

One way to think about it is, while you’re doing it, as long as you can tolerate starving yourself, you will lose weight.  But then if you ever just go back to eating a normal amount or if you ever say, “I’m tired of being crabby and hungry and feeling deprived all the time”, so if you go back to what you were doing, you will not only regain the weight you temporarily lost but you will gain more back.

What just happened in that example?  Well, what just happened in that example is the very method you used to lose weight short-term caused long-term weight gain.  The reason I’m even bringing that topic up is, tracking weight can potentially be a slippery slope.  What is sometimes much more helpful to track is body fat percentage because there are dangerous things you can do to lower your body fat percentage too but it’s harder to do it unsafely because, for example, you could just dehydrate yourself; you can starve yourself to lose weight; but if you dehydrate yourself and starve yourself, you won’t change your body fat percentage.

In fact, your body fat percentage may go up because one of the things your body does when you starve yourself is it will burn off muscle tissue, often times before it turns off fat tissue.  You might say, “That’s crazy.  Why would your body do that?”  Well, if your body believes it’s starving -– and I think we all know that muscle tissue burns more energy than fat tissue -– or if your body has a shortage of energy, what does it want to get rid of first?  It wants to get rid of the muscle tissue first.  So if you just starve yourself, yes, you might lose weight but you won’t lose body fat -– excuse me, your body fat percentage -– which is the ratio of lean tissue to fat tissue won’t change because even if you do lose some fat, you’ll lose some muscle as well.

Anyway, body fat percentage is really, really important so what I wanted to cover here is, What are some expectations around what are reasonable body fat percentage goals, what do various body fat percentages look like, and what does it take to get to those levels of body fat percentage?

I’m going to try to share my screen so I hope I don’t break anything.  If the sound cuts out or if it looks like everything broke, please don’t hang up or disconnect because this should work.  Stick with me here.  Please don’t hang up and I’m going to see if I can share my screen.  Just give me one moment here.  This is truly interactive.  Hopefully, I don’t have anything super-secret here on my screen.  All right, so let me go ahead sharing of my screen -– okay.  Present to everybody -– okay.  Hopefully, you can see a sort of SANE body fat percentage cheat sheet on your screen.  If you can see this, please let me know.  This is something we actually just created today so I’m sure it’s going to get shared in the support group.

It’s actually in your step-by-step program already so you can check this out afterward but I want to talk about it briefly here so please, please let me know if you can see this.  If you can, what I want to show – yes, got it.  Everyone can see it.  Awesome.

What I want to talk about here is, if possible, we’re going to stop focusing so much on weight loss.  We’re going to focus a little bit more on body fat percentage.  For that to even make sense -– and again, this is available in your step-by-step program right now, I believe.  If you go to your step-by-step program and you click on the very first course, ‘Orientation’ or ‘How To Use Your Tools’, there’s something about, like, how to reach your goals.  This is in that.  It’s very, very, very, very important to keep in mind that SANE eating can lead to any level of body fat percentage except sort of morbid obesity when done properly.  So if your goal is to go from forty percent body fat down to twenty percent body fat, SANE can do that for you.

If your goal is to go from forty percent body fat down to eleven percent body fat, SANE can do that but whether or not you’d ever want to do that or whether or not it’s reasonable to have that as a goal, I don’t want to ever say anyone’s goals are unreasonable but I think it’s really important for us to keep in mind what is not only realistic but healthy because there is a huge difference.  Hopefully, for example, you can see down here, a male at three to four percent body fat and a female at around eleven or twelve percent body fat is -– these are individuals who temporarily do this to get onstage for a competition or for some sort of a photo shoot and even they don’t look like that except for about forty-eight hours because it requires doing some really dangerous things.  It’s not a natural level of body fat percentage.

In fact, if you look at the research for females, the essential level of body fat percentage -– meaning that, core bodily functions will start to shut down if you dip below this or even sometimes in this range.  When females start to get in the ballpark of ten to thirteen percent body fat -– for example, menstrual cycles will stop; all sorts of other bad things will happen –- and of course, for men, since men don’t have breasts and so on and so forth, they can have a lower level of fat but most people are surprised to see, especially females, that to be quite fit -– quite fit –- you’re looking at about twenty-four percent body fat.

For a man, you’re looking at about seventeen percent body fat.  That expectation also varies by age because I think we can all agree that an extremely fit sixty-five-year-old should not look the same as an extremely fit twenty-five-year-old.  If you’re seventy-five and see six-pack abs, that’s probably not healthy.  What we have here is, when you look at the research, a pretty clear breakdown of where we would want to shoot for, which is usually in the fit range and then how that varies according to your age.

Now, the thing that’s really cool about SANE eating and any lifestyle change is -– this might sound a little bit funny but the more fat you have on your body, the easier it is to lose.  We experience what’s called diminishing marginal returns with fat loss and actually with weight loss in general.  I’m actually going to stop sharing my screen now because hopefully everyone has seen this and it looks like Raina actually posted this already so you can possibly open it up in another browser tab.  Let me stop sharing this here real quick.

Hopefully, my face is coming back up on your screen.  If you don’t see my face, please let me know.  What’s really important to understand here is, one, there’s a lot of hope because with most things in life, like I think one thing we can all probably wrap our heads around immediately is resistance training.  Even if you’re not a super resistance trainer right now, if you’ve never lifted weights in your entire life, I bet you can imagine that the amount of strength you’ll gain right when you get started, like in that first month, you can make so much progress so quickly and then if you want to take it even further, your rate of results is going to get a little bit slower.

It doesn’t mean you can’t continue to improve but think about it like an Olympic athlete.  Once an Olympic athlete is at an Olympic caliber, they’re looking at shaving hundredths of a second off of their mile time whereas someone who’s just getting started with running, for example, if they shaved a minute off of their running time, that’s totally possible.

The three things to understand -– one, tracking your body fat percentage is going to be way more helpful from a long-term health and fitness perspective than tracking your weight because it’s very easy to do unhealthy things to lower your weight temporarily; it’s more difficult to harm yourself if your goal involves body fat percentage because things like strength training, things like eating protein, things like making sure you’re drinking enough fluids – these might not do you any favors in the immediate term when it comes to your weight; long term, they do great things for your weight but in the immediate term, they will help your body fat percentage.  That’s the first thing to keep in mind.

The second thing to keep in mind is that the more fat you have to lose, in some ways, the better -– is one way to look at it because going, for example, a one percent change in body fat, if you’re starting at forty percent body fat and you want to go to thirty-nine percent, is astronomically easier and faster than going from, say, twenty percent body fat to nineteen percent body fat.  No matter where you are, it’s important to focus on body fat percentage.

If you’re just getting started, I want you to be excited because you are going to see rapid decreases in your body fat percentage if you follow the same program and if you practice eccentric exercise.  That’s going to help drop your body fat percentage while also increasing lean muscle tissue so that helps both aspects of the ratio because if you just lose fat or you just go muscle, that’s not going to help the ratio as much as if you do them both at the same time.

The other key point to keep in mind is that once you do get down to, say, for example, the fit-level, which you saw on your screen, to get to the fitness professional level, you can do that with SANE eating.  Anybody who looks like a fitness professional or a fitness model is almost certainly eating SANEly because it’s nearly impossible to do that without eating SANEly.

The other thing they’re doing is just being professionally cognizant of stuff that I -– so let’s put it this way.  If your goal is to be a concert piano player, the amount of effort -– you can do it.  Frankly, the types of techniques that you will learn to become a concert piano player are the same. It’s fundamentally the same behavior to become a concert pianist than it is to become just someone who can play the piano at parties and entertain people in a fun way.  If you want to become a concert pianist, you are essentially going to have to prioritize all activities that involve piano playing above everything else for hours and hours and hours per day.  It’s not like you’re really doing something different; it’s just that you’re doing more of the piano stuff at the exclusion of everything else.  This is why Olympic athletes go to a camp and that’s all they do.

SANE eating is done in a sustainable, enjoyable way; eccentric exercise done in a sustainable, enjoyable way will absolutely get everyone on this call and everyone in the Ignite Family to the Fit Level for your age.

Depending on your age, depending on how many times you’ve yo-yo dieted, depending on whether or not you’re taking things like insulin and SSRIs, depending on whether or not you’ve had children, depending on the levels of stress in your life, depending on how much sleep you’re getting -– that could take shorter or longer but it will absolutely get you there if you give your body enough time to heal.

To go from fit to fitness professional -– think about the name there.  Fitness professional -– people who look that way are professionals.  It’s what they do for their job.  They’re meticulous about it.  They’re not like, “Oh, I drank a green shake.”  Not that there’s, “I love drinking green shakes,” but if you ask a fitness professional what they ate today, they’ll say, “Well, at 5:02 a.m., I ate this many ounces of chicken breast and I ate this many leaves of lettuce” and it’s all perfectly proportioned and they carry it with them in Ziploc baggies and when they go out to eat with friends, they bring their own food.  I mean, it is their job.

You can achieve any level of fitness you want while eating SANEly.  The question is just one of goals.  I think for most of us in the Ignite family, our goal is long-term nutritional serenity.  What I mean by that is, we want to eat to live; not live to eat.  Meaning that, if you really want to see veins in your abs, that’s awesome.  You might need a professional fitness coach to help you get there because it’s really, really an ambitious goal.  Just like if you wanted to be a world-class pianist.  What SANE will do is, give you that template that we can all enjoy and that will give us a way to not prepare to get on stage for fifteen minutes but to enjoy a way of eating and exercise and a mindset around eating and exercise that we can keep up for the rest of our lives because we’ve all lost weight, we’ve all done thirty days of this, twenty-one days of that, twelve weeks of this but our life isn’t twenty-one days long; it’s not thirty days long; it’s not twelve weeks long.

What we’re after is long-term health and happiness.  SANE can absolutely get you there.  The leaner you want to be, the more you’re going to move away from “Hey, this is like an enjoyable fun thing that I can do on autopilot for the rest of my life while I focus on maybe my family or something else.

The more you want to look like a fitness professional; the more it’s going to have to become like a job, which is all good, and you don’t have to do something different.  I mean, the real reason I want to talk about this is, I sometimes think that people will have an impression that fitness professionals have some sort of secret.  They don’t.  I come from the bodybuilding world.  I did natural bodybuilding for a while.  There is no secret.  There are illegal things but steroids aren’t a secret.  Speed and various amphetamines aren’t a secret.  Things like creatine for muscle building isn’t a secret.  The secret to people who have ripped abs is the same secret as a concert pianist or a world class Olympic athlete.  They spend all their waking energy on it; that’s the secret.

Hopefully, that’s helpful.  I just think sometimes we see these images and you see these expectations and they make us feel in a way which is less than I think we deserve because I think most of us are here to -– put it this way.  When our time has come; when our time has finished here on this earth and we’ve moved on, I’m not sure we want our friends and family sitting around saying, “Man, remember Sally’s abs. Those were just the best abs I have ever seen.”  I’m not sure if we choose to have a tombstone, we’d ever want it written on it, “Mary had toned arms.  Here lies Mary with her toned arms.”  Not that it’s bad to have toned arms.  It’s great to have toned arms but what we want to propagate here in the SANE family is, just like you don’t have to really think about driving.

Driving’s a great example.  You drive places unconsciously.  You just do it.  You get in the car.  You don’t have to think about it too much.  You can go about your life.  Driving is really important.  It’s really important that you know how to drive but it’s not something that you’re constantly, consciously occupying your mind with.  There’s not a huge amount of willpower involved.  It’s just second nature.  SANE is all about giving you that second nature sense of empowerment so that you can focus your brilliant conscious energy on other stuff.  Honestly, that’s the difference.  The faster we want results, the lower we want our body fat percentage, the more conscious and meticulous effort it requires and the longer it takes.  Nothing wrong with that and it’s not -– there is no secret.  There is no other approach.

SANE eating is about more non-starchy vegetables, nutrient-dense protein, whole food fats, and low sugar fruits.  I can promise you that there is no fitness competitor out there who is at ten percent body fat for a female who got that way by eating sugar and starch.  She’s eating SANEly.  That ripped-up guy at the gym -– he’s eating SANEly but he’s doing that at the exclusion of everything else; whereas you’re doing it so you can include even more things into your life.  I hope that distinction makes sense.  I hope it’s helpful.  That was a little bit of an example of me going on my little rant but I hope it was helpful and let me pop back in here and see if any questions came in and then I’ll get back to some questions that were sent in.

Deborah has a question here.  “I’m not very hungry in the morning after drinking my coffee.  I also like to work out in the morning.  Should I drink a protein shake before and then after my workout, wait to be hungrier to drink a smoothie or should I just drink my smoothie with the serving of protein before my work-out?”

Goodness, Deborah.  That’s a good question.  Two different things -– one is if you’re doing intense resistance training as recommended in the Ignite Program, enjoying a nutrient-dense protein within twenty minutes of exercise is extremely helpful.  Independent of whether or not you’re hungry, it will radically help with reducing muscle soreness.  It will radically help with developing the lean calorie-hungry muscle tissue that we’re really after to lower that body fat percentage.  Think of it a little bit when you do -– it’s not all exercise.  I mean, going for a walk is not what I’m talking about.  I’m talking about intense resistance training as described in the Ignite Program.  Once you’ve done that –-

Forgive me if folks are already familiar with this but you’ve got your muscle fibers and when you exercise them eccentrically like we’ve talked about, you’re essentially taking them and kind of doing this so they kind of look like this.  That’s called hypertrophy.  What happens is, your muscle fibers tear -– in a good way -– and then they come back together stronger and sometimes actually a little bit larger.  Not in a big bulky ‘I look like a bulldog’ but in a more like ‘Hey, I’m toned and flabby and when I lift my arms up, they don’t move around’ kind of thing.

So by taking in that nutrient-dense protein, within twenty minutes of a heavy, intense eccentric workout, you’re going to give your body the raw material it needs really at that key sweet spot moment.  Think of it like your muscle fibers are like a sponge; they’ve opened up and they’re ready to take that in so that is important.

Really anything else -– so if you’re just exercising eccentrically for the goal that we have here on the SANE Ignite Program of metabolic healing, you don’t need to force yourself to eat before.  The only thing you need to do when it comes to working out is ensure you’re getting that nutrient-dense protein afterward and then just make sure you’re getting your servings of non-starchy vegetables and nutrient-dense protein and whole food fats throughout the day as you normally would.  Hopefully, that is helpful.

It does matter where you’re getting your protein source from in that case.  For example, clean whey protein is an excellent source of post-workout protein because it’s so easily digested.  It has what’s called the high biological availability; meaning that, your body can just take it and use it right away and use almost a hundred percent of it right away whereas things like peanuts or sometimes plant proteins have what’s called a lower biological availability so your body just can’t utilize them completely or quickly.

Next question here.  Let me go into some of the ones that were written in.  Again, follow-up questions -– please post them.  Great questions here about Ancel Keys.  I’m not sure how many people are familiar with the gentleman by the name of Ancel Keys but he is the individual who, in the 1950s and ‘60s, popularized the anti-fat hypothesis.  Depending on if you were alive in that timeframe or not, you may actually recall he was on the cover of Time magazine.  He’s the individual who proposed the relationship between eating fat and developing heart disease, cardiovascular disease.

He is also the individual who started the craze around “Cholesterol is bad and we should try to minimize our total cholesterol.”  The thing that is troublesome or heartbreaking is, first, we now know definitively that that hypothesis is incorrect.  We don’t have time to cover all that science here.  It is covered in your Ignite Program.  Over a billion dollars of research, government-sanctioned research, has been conducted in an effort to prove that eating fat causes heart disease and every single test that has ever examined it has refuted that hypothesis.

What Ancel Keys did, which is kind of interesting and would never be permitted in today’s world, is he conducted a study where he collected data from twenty-two countries.  I’m actually going to share my screen again here because I wanted to share the actual data with you, which is cool.  Let’s try this one more time here.  Please, again, tell me -– I love the sort of screen sharing stuff.  It’s like we’re together.  It’s so much fun.  All right, let me know here if you can see my screen.  All right, I’m going to go ahead and assume you can because there’s a little bit of a delay here so please shout if you can’t.

What you’re going to see here on your screen -– the first chart here, Ancel Keys published a study where he collected data from twenty-two countries and he published a study where he said, “Hey, check out these six –“Hopefully, already an alarm bell has gone off where, if you have data from twenty-two countries and you’re like, “Let me show you the results.  Check out these six countries.”  So he picked these six countries and then he plotted them on a graph and according to those six countries, you can see here that the higher your percent calories from fat, the greater your risk of heart disease.

But of course, the question is, “Well, what about the other countries in the study?”  Actually, other researchers, later in that same decade, took six other countries from the same data set and showed that when individuals ate a higher percentage of their calories from fat, their incidence of heart disease deaths actually dropped.  If you actually look at all twenty-two studies in the original Ancel Keys data, there is no correlation -– none -– neither negative nor positive –- from a statistically significant perspective in the relationship between percent of your calories from fat and heart disease.

It was an unfortunate misrepresentation of data and a selective representation of data, which is no fun.  As you’re seeing now, it seems like every week, there’s a new article in the New York Times or Time magazine or a new book on the bookshelf that says fat is good for you and fat doesn’t kill you.  It’s very true that we should be getting the balance of our calories.  So the majority of our calories -– not the majority of the food we eat –- but the majority of our calories should be coming from whole food fats because when you think about the SANE eating framework, we’ve got non-starchy vegetables first in terms of volume, nutrient-dense protein, and then whole food fats.

Non-starchy vegetables really have no fat in them.  Nutrient-dense proteins will have some fat in them.  Whole food fats are predominantly fat.  We are going to be getting most of our calories from whole food fats but it’s really important that, just like we say a calorie isn’t a calorie, fat isn’t fat.  There are different forms of fat and we’re going to make sure we’re taking in optimal sources of fat.

Some of those optimal sources are what I would call therapeutic fats.  For example, omega-3 fats that are found in seafood, that are found in plant forms and things like chia seeds and flaxseeds; also small amounts in walnuts.  There are also fats like mono-unsaturated fats.  These are the fats that have made the Mediterranean diets so popular.  They’re found in olive oil but olive oil is not a whole food.  Everything that’s good about olive oil is also in olives.  Plus, olives have a bunch of other good stuff because they’re a whole food.

So yes, I would say olives are a fantastic source of mono-unsaturated fats.  Macadamia nuts are a fantastic source of mono-unsaturated fats.  Then there are what’s called short-chain fats, which are very difficult to find in the modern diet, but coconut is a fabulous source of those.  Those are just some examples of therapeutic fats.  Of course, there are fats that are terrible for us.  These are processed Trans fats.  We never want to eat those at all.