SANE LIVE: Nutritional Therapy and SANE

Next question is a good one. One that I like hearing because it is the opposite of the conventional dieting mindset, which is great. So the question here is, ‘Does the SANE lifestyle require eating all that food. I am 68-years old and just don’t eat that much, although I am probably 20 pounds overweight. Is it sufficient just to eat SANE food when I am hungry?’

There are three phrases in this question, and all three of them allow us to not only answer this question but talk about some really important stuff. I want to just that the batch of questions that we got this week-you guys and gals, actually mostly gals, the SANE Family is 100 percent awesome and within that awesomeness, it’s about 80 percent female and 20 percent male. Just some interesting statistics on the SANE Family, if you’re curious actually. The median age of a SANE Family is around 50. In case you’re interested, that’s the demographic breakdown of the SANE Family. As of this morning, we did a team exercise on how we can better tailor our message to individuals and that was the data we discovered.

Anyway, this individual is a wonderful member of the SANE Family. ‘Do I have to eat this much food. I don’t eat this much. I’m 20 pounds overweight. Is it sufficient just to eat SANE food when I’m hungry?’

So I’d like to go from specific to general, if that’s okay. The specific answer is ‘Is it sufficient to eat SANE food when I’m hungry?’ Absolutely, yes. I do not want you to ever be uncomfortably full, just like I do not want you to be uncomfortably hungry, unless you’re exercising eccentrically then I want you to be extremely uncomfortable for a very short period of time in a safe way. I’ll talk about that separately, it’s a good thing. That’s what triggers growth.

Is it sufficient to eat SANE food when I’m hungry? Yes, with the caveat that we do-since this individual said, ‘I’m 68, and I don’t eat that much although I’m probably 20 pounds overweight.’

Again this is what led me to dedicate the past fifteen years and the rest of my life to this. It is individuals who are just like this. My mother is like this. All the people I worked with fifteen years ago when I was a personal trainer were like this. Where the reality is that they are not eating that much and they are still overweight. My mother who is 68 or 69, she doesn’t eat. She visited me. I’m trying to give her food and she said, ‘Not hungry, not hungry.’ She is probably in a similar position to the individual who is asking the question here in terms of her weight.

So how do we explain that? If you’re eating a thousand calories per day, that’s what I can imagine my mother eats per day you would think that you would be starving on a thousand calories per day. Yet the weight still remains.

That’s why SANE exists- to get to the root of this problem. The root of this problem is we do need to heal some dysregulation. The technical term for it is metabolic dysregulation. It’s caused by a lifetime of stress, yo-yo dieting and inSANE dietary recommendations, that are put up on us which trigger our brain, our hormones, and our gut to regulate our weight inappropriately. If we’re eating only a thousand calories we could still be a hundred pounds overweight. Is it sufficient to eat SANE food when I’m hungry? Yes, if you’re getting the requisite amount of non-starchy vegetables. The non-starchy vegetables are key. Otherwise, we’re not healing.

This is a mindset shift here. In itself, the following mindset shift can save your life. Literally. SANE food is therapeutic. Think of it as nutritional therapy. The conventional dieting approach is to take in less food. If food is therapy and if food is medicine-which it is, then taking in more of the right type of food is therapeutic. We do need to go out of our way to make sure that we get those double-digit servings of vegetables.

If you just don’t have room for them, smoothies are very helpful. If you just can’t do smoothies, you could do the powdered super foods available at the SANE store.

If you don’t want to do that, then please make sure you listen to the entire thing I’m about to say next. The first part of it if it’s taken out of context, is completely inSANE. If you can’t do smoothies because the fiber fills you up too much, and you don’t want to do the powdered super food. They are using only green leafy vegetables. Juicing can be helpful. Because you are going to still get a lot of the vitamins and minerals from things like kale, spinach, Swiss chard, arugula, so on and so forth. But it’s not going to fill you up at all because there’s no fiber.

However, the only context, the only reason I would ever recommend juicing is if it’s one hundred percent green leafy vegetable. And two, if it’s impossible for you to take in enough vegetables through whole food vegetables. Smoothies are whole food vegetables. If you’re taking the whole food, that could be helpful. Especially the protein’s really essential.

If you are 68-years old I want to make sure that you are maintaining your lean muscle tissue. It is important for all of us, but it is especially important once we’ve hit menopause and andropause for men and beyond. Extremely important.

If you’re always full, really try to focus. Don’t be uncomfortably full, but do know that those vegetables are really very important. Do know that protein is really important. So if you have to go and get the whey protein, the clean rice protein and the clean pea protein- to do a liquid feeding it is important. Simply because if what you’re doing is: I’m just going to continue to eat, when I’m hungry; I’m going to stop when I’m full; I don’t eat very much; I’m still 20 pounds overweight.

What that’s telling me is that we need do to more to heal your metabolism and the only way you can do that is to increase the quality of that limited quantity of food that you’re consuming. That’s why then those vegetables and proteins become so important because these are the essential components of the SANE lifestyle.

As long as you are eating at least 1200 calories per day which I hope you are, especially if you are only 20 pounds overweight. Getting the sufficient vegetables and proteins should be easy. Just like after someone has gastric bypass surgery and the stomach is tiny. They can’t eat a lot. They don’t eat optimally SANE they can die from nutrient deficiency. It happens every year. People go and get a gastric bypass surgery done, or any sort of gastric surgery and then they don’t modify the quality of their eating. Then they come down with nutrient deficiencies. I even had a personal friend who had a gastric bypass surgery and then had to have it reversed. It totally destroyed their life.

Anyway, if you cannot eat a lot of food it is okay, but it’s extremely important that what you do eat is extremely SANE. And can I just say how much I love questions like these, because the mindset of: ‘Hey, not am I not eating a lot of food and not gaining weight but I’m eating a lot of food and it’s helping me lose weight. And in fact, I can’t eat all this food, and I’m losing weight.’

How much different of a mindset and a dynamic is that: ‘Food is therapy. More of it is better.’ Thank you for the fabulous question here. Hopefully, that was helpful.

Here we’ve got some questions coming in. I see the big red question marks. Janet says I think it’s Ja-net. If it’s Ja-nette—smack me. But I think it’s Ja-net. There is this thing about me. Reading sometimes can be kind of hard for me. Not that I can’t read. Ja-net versus Ja-nette wouldn’t think it would be hard for me to tell the difference but sometimes it is.

Okay. ‘I’m getting ready to take my family on a cruise. What do they do and who do we tell we’re pre-diabetic?’

We used to book ours through Costco because we love Costco. And no, I do not own stock at Costco.

When you make reservations for dinner or whatever, you can just tell them, ‘Hey, I’m pre-diabetic. So anything like starches and sugars, I better be very careful about them.’

You can also tell them, ‘I’m lactose intolerant.’ That’s very helpful too.

Often times-not that there’s anything wrong with cooking with butter at home- but sometimes in restaurants and such, they do things. A restaurant is in the business of making the food as delicious as possible. It’s not that butter is bad. It’s just that the restaurant is going to indiscriminately use butter and cooking oils.

Just tell the front desk of the cruise. Then when you’re at the buffet, there is an abundance of them on a cruise. You’re in total control there, which is excellent. You really get your money’s worth. When you go on a cruise and go to any buffet you’ll notice that they always put the inSANE stuff right in the center because that’s the stuff which is really cheap for them to make. They want you to fill up on that bread and that rice and that pasta and those sweets. You’re going to go right head over to the seafood, the delicious meats and the vegetables and all that kind of fun stuff. Really just enjoy a lot of that. It’s delicious and awesome.

I love cruises. I love all-you-can-eat buffets because it disproves ‘You go on a cruise, you gain five pounds.’ Not the case if you go SANE. You go on a cruise; you’re going to have a great time. Enjoy a lot of really yummy food. Hopefully, that was helpful.

Bobby has a question here. What’s up, Bobby? ‘Hey Jonathan, could you talk a bit about what modifications one needs to do SANE eating if you are dealing with Metabolic Syndrome. I am wanting to reverse it, the best way. I’m at 46 if that makes a difference.’

I used the term earlier called Metabolic Dysregulation. That is a synonym for Metabolic Syndrome. It is sometimes called Syndrome X. The good news, Bobby is no, there are no modifications you need to make to SANE eating to deal with Metabolic Syndrome.

Metabolic Syndrome is a constellation of metabolic issues which usually happen at the same time or frequently at the same time. And they all have the same cause that’s why they happen in clusters or in constellations as research papers like to say. The solution-only modification I would say, in any context in which we are trying to do to treat a medical condition, so for example if we are trying to manage diabetes, or get to a point where if we are on diabetes medication and we want to drop our A1C levels so our primary care physician may someday take us off that medication. This has happened countless times with individuals within the SANE Family. Cholesterol medicine or heart medication or any kind of medication and so forth.

In the SANE lifestyle as we know that it’s very flexible. Process rather than perfection pace. If you want to eat inSANEly sometimes, then eat inSANEly sometimes only. But just like anything else in life, the more you put into it the more you get out of it. If you want to really grab that syndrome by the hand and shove it out the door; same thing with diabetes; same thing with hypertension; same thing with risk for cancer and all those kind of things.

The only modification I would y, is to treat in lifestyle like a medical intervention rather than something like my Mom’s approach to SANity. My Mom’s approach is fantastic. She does not have any medical condition. She’s fine with her energy levels. She’s fine with her physical appearance. SO she says, ‘I like to live SANEr. I eat more SANEly than I did in the past.’ But sometimes she eats Cheetos, because she loves Cheetos. ‘The value I derive from eating Cheetos outweighs any cost that I have experienced today, and that is totally fine.’

However, if my Mom got diagnosed with Metabolic Syndrome, and she would go like, ‘Jonathan, what modifications do I need to give to my approach to get rid of Metabolic Syndrome.’

I would say, ‘Mom, if you want to get rid of a medical condition, then we need to treat this like a medical condition. We’re going to do some nutritional surgery on your body. We’re going to take it very seriously. So we’re going to focus on the most nutritional vegetables. The deep green vegetables. We’re going to focus on the most nutrient dense proteins. We are going to try to eat more of the meats, even if that sounds weird. Not more weird than cracking open our chest and doing open heart surgery.

‘We’re going to avoid that so we might do some things that seem a little bit strange. We might eat liver, we might figure out a way to cook liver. And by the way that’s delicious. We might eat oysters, clams, mollusks, and things that I’m not going to get on a ‘Good Morning America’, because America would go like, ‘Oh that’s crazy!’

‘But hey, is that any more crazy than having a colonoscopy-not that it is crazy, but if I were to describe the medical procedure, you’d go, ‘It sure seems a bit extreme!’

‘Modifications are just that, you’re going to want to optimize your SANity because you’re going to want to approach this with the mindset that, ‘Of course, it’s all about progress rather than perfection.’ ‘

In this specific case, if you want to revert a medical condition. We’re going to treat it like therapy. We’re going to treat it like a medical intervention. And we’re going to give it that level of priority. Hopefully that’s helpful there.

Let us see, ‘What modifications we need for low thyroid?’

Janet says, ‘Smack.’ Hopefully that’s a smack of the hand, rather than the smack of the face or the smack of the posterior.

‘What modifications are needed for low thyroid?’

Well, for low thyroid the biggest thing we need is two things. One, if you’re not exercising smarter that is extremely important. Chronic, moderate intensity high impact exercise such as jogging, absolutely can cause thyroid habit especially in females, such as chronic jogging and things like that.

We just have to understand that any kind of physical activity that we do-if we take up boxing as a hobby, it’s going to give us exercise but there are going to be some side effects. They include head trauma. If we’re going to run long distances, yes that is going to exercise our heart a bit, but it’s also going to suppress thyroid levels. It just does. That’s a fact. So, strength training smarter exercise is going to help with the thyroid levels.

The other thing as I would say is there are some specific super foods that do help with thyroid health for sure, and sea vegetables. Most people would be like, ‘What is this guy talking about? Sea vegetables?’

But no. Things like seaweed and kelp, to which you’d go like, ‘Oh wonderful, Jonathan. Next time I go out and eat, I’m just going to get seaweed. How do I do that?’

A perfect example of where the SANE store comes in handy. We do. Personally, I haven’t been to a grocery store that sells kelp, or specifically rockweed kelp which is some of the most iodine rich kelp on the planet. Supplementing your diet with sea vegetables-if you can find it in your grocery store rock and roll, if you can’t find them at your grocery store we have them in their purest form. We have powdered them for you in the SANE store. Rockweed kelp is my favorite and there’s also [inaudible 32:54] seaweed powder which taste as good as they sound. I just want to be transparent.

Hopefully the love that the SANE family has for its members is clear in the sense that we will provide food that tastes terrible. Powdered seaweed does not taste good. Some things in life don’t taste good. It’s medicine, food as medicine. So I’m not going to go in there and have a formulation that contains a bunch of other nonsense in it because if you want to do something that tastes good we can do that separately. I want these SANE super foods to do their job. I don’t want to fill them with a bunch of other nonsense. That’s a little side note there. ‘Look, I’m going to provide you with something that I openly will tell you tastes disgusting but works really well. The goal is to heal you, not to delight your taste buds.’

Now we do have some things that will delight your taste buds but I’m confident that with over 1400 recipes we’ve got there, there are plenty of ways to delight your taste buds. Here we’re trying to heal your thyroid so we’ll try to make sure you get some sea vegetables like kelp and seaweed-very high in iodine. It’s not an iodine supplement. I’ve said this before and I will say this again, I’m not a huge fan of supplements. I’m a huge fan of If-you-want-to-supplement-your-diet-with-iodine-what-we-need-to-do-is-find-foods-that-are-high-in-iodine-what-we-are-going-to-eat-more-of-those-whole-foods, personally.

Do I need to make use? I cook my greens for low thyroid? Yes, there are oxalate issues, so on and so forth. It depends on your results. There are pluses and minuses of both. My recommendation is eat a lot of vegetables. Eat a lot of sea vegetables. Work with your primary care physician to see your progress.

In general, we should not be eating all raw vegetables or all cooked vegetables. We should be doing a little bit of both. Cooking does some positive things to vegetables, and also does some negative things to vegetables. A little bit when we come to the financial stuff, we want to diversify.

Same thing here. When it comes to the food we’re eating, we want you to diversify. Eating six servings of spinach is not as good for you as eating one serving of six the different green vegetables. Even if some of those green vegetables like Germain lettuce are objectively less nutrient than spent spinach. They have different nutrients so we want to diversify.

Same thing with preparation. We don’t want to eat just raw vegetables because cooking does have some advantages that go with tomatoes and blah-blah-blah. So we’re going to diversify in our preparations and in the types of foods we’re eating to maximize our nutrient. Hopefully that is helpful.

Next question, ‘What is your opinion on intermittent fasting to help control insulin levels and weight?’

Thank you for this question, it’s a great one. There was quite a bit of chat this week which I love. If you’re not in there please get in there, because it is awesome. Two things; it had a lot of talk about insulin. There you go. One, insulin is a great example of how quickly the nutritional dialogue can change. Up until about 15 years ago, in the 1990s it was all about weight watchers. Weight watchers was growing in revenue and everyone was like, ‘Counting calories is a good idea.’

Now, of course it’s been 25 years since the nineties, can you believe that. We have adults that were born in the nineties. That doesn’t make any sense, but I digress. Now everyone is like, ‘Insulin, insulin.’ My 15-year old nephew knows about insulin.

Insulin has a really negative stigma associated with it. Let me be very clear. Insulin is not bad. Any more than estrogen is bad, or cortisone is bad, or testosterone is bad, or adrenaline is bad, or any other hormone is bad. These things are not bad. Insulin is a great example, based on the way it is portrayed in the media. Especially on the internet, which is always a fun place to get nutritional information. If someone says, ‘Hey I can wave a magic wand and I can reduce your insulin levels to zero.’ I think a lot of us would think, ‘Great. Insulin is bad.’

So if someone waved a magic wand and made your insulin levels zero, they would have a name for that. It’s called Type I Diabetes. Type I diabetics don’t produce insulin. That’s why up until Insulin Therapy was discovered, and awarded the Nobel Prize. Babies would just die of starvation, because they had no insulin that would allow them to get energy into their cells. So, insulin is not bad.

This is just like cholesterol is not bad. Your body produces LDL cholesterol, the bad cholesterol to patch up inflammation on your arterial lining. In that context-don’t worry I’ll come back to insulin-saying LDL cholesterol is bad, is a little bit like saying, ‘There’s a house on fire over there and there are a bunch of firefighters over there. The problem is that there are too many firefighters. We need to reduce the firefighter level.’

The firefighters are not the problem. In fact they are there to help an objectively negative situation. A house is on fire. The issue isn’t that there are too many firefighters. The issue is that the house is burning down. And I know you’d all be like, ‘Of course.’

That is exactly what is happening with cholesterol and your arterial lining. Your arterial walls are on fire, they are inflamed and LDL cholesterol comes and sticks to them to patch them up. This is an over simplification. Once they are healed HDL grabs the LDL molecules and recycles them. That’s why I say HDL is the good cholesterol and LDL is the bad cholesterol, but you can see that it is false, because LDL is doing what it’s supposed to do. It is patching up holes or inflammations in your arterial lining. Of course there is a thing called VLDL which is very low or very small LDL particles which can get stuck, blah-blah-blah.

Cholesterol isn’t bad. Cholesterol is created for many purposes throughout the body. Dropping cholesterol levels too low is showing to be co-related to cognitive dysfunction because you need cholesterol for your brain to function. It’s the same thing with insulin.

Bad things happen with our cholesterol levels when we eat non-food, inSANE food products, which causes our arterial lining to become inflamed, which causes a huge amount of LDL to get produced because we have a huge amount of inflammation that the LDL needs to go address.

The LDL is not the problem. The LDL is the body’s proposed solution to patch up the damage caused by inSANE eating. Of course if that patching becomes too big, it blocks the artery. But the problem isn’t the patching. The problem is the thing that needed it to get patched in the first place which is the inSANE food.

Same thing happens with insulin. Insulin is great. Insulin is the key that allows your selves to use sugar. Your selves need to be able to use sugar to fuel themselves. If you don’t have insulin, you’re Type I diabetic. Insulin is not bad. What is bad is nonfood that spikes the heck out of our insulin levels.

The goal is not to demonize insulin. Insulin is key. We have to have insulin or we will die. The goal is to keep insulin at natural levels. The way we keep insulin at natural levels is to eat SANEly.

The reason I went on this rant, is because this is a great question, ‘Should I intermittently fast to control insulin levels?’ My question about intermittent fasting, I would argue in some context, is a euphemism for eating less. It’s a way that people on the internet that say they are focused on food quality, can promulgate eating less. They don’t say, ‘Eat less.’ They just say, ‘Don’t eat for 16 hours.’ Then they call it intermittent fasting. There are health benefits to intermittent fasting. There are health benefits to intermittent fasting-things like [inaudible 42:37] and recycling cells and blah, blah, blah. I personally would not recommend intermittent fasting as the way to help control insulin levels. The way you could control insulin levels is not eating less.

This is an awesome question and in fact it’s the awesomeness of the question that is getting me all amped up. So thank you, this is a great question. I’m sure someone told you this. Being told to intermittently fast to control insulin levels aka being told to eat less to reduce insulin, is a little bit like being told to water your garden less to get rid of weeds.

Yes. Watering your garden less will get rid of weeds, but the problem isn’t that you’re watering your garden too much. The problem is that there are weed. How do we get rid of the weeds without killing everything?

Intermittent fasting is the same-Don’t eat anything. Of course if we don’t eat anything in order to bring our insulin levels down. But that’s not sustainable. What we want to do is we want to focus on eating foods that don’t spike the heck out of our insulin.