How To Pick Between Healthy and Happy

Jonathan: Hey everybody, Jonathan Bailor and April Perry, back with another SANE Show. April, how are you doing today?

April: So great, I am standing up for the first time during a podcast. I’ve recorded hundreds of podcast episodes and I’m standing, it’s pretty awesome, you inspire me.

Jonathan: April is on her feet, ladies and gentlemen, I love it.

April: Yes, excited.

Jonathan: Alright, so I’m very excited about today’s show April, because it’s actually a follow-up. The last show we recorded we talked a lot about 80/20, we talked about what is the right way to do SANE, to go all in, to not go all in. There’s a couple of questions really related to that, and I really just want to focus on this. At the core of a lot of these questions, is this concept of – I’m trying this, I’m trying to be healthy, and it’s not making me happy, right? Like I’m doing this, and I’m not enjoying it. Why would I try to do something that’s healthy if being healthy isn’t actually making me happy? Have you ever heard anyone say anything like that?

April: Have you been in my house, do you have any idea what is going on in my house? Yes, absolutely. Okay, for example, I used to show my love to my family by making tons of treats and breads using white flour. I would buy white flour by the 25 pound bag, and I would go through it quickly and have to replenish all the time. So I would go to Costco, Sam’s Club, I am loading up with huge bags of sugar and white flour – that’s what I did. I didn’t see anything wrong with it, I just thought well that’s what everyone else is doing, why not?

Now that we have switched our diet a lot of my family members are saying, hey what about all that joy we used to experience with all the food? Or we went to the movies as a family last week, and the kids are like, did you bring any candy, or are we buying any candy? Like, of course not. So we didn’t eat any candy in the movies. It was fine, but yes, there are definite parts when you are not living a life that is normal, that is full of sugar, a lot of times that source of happiness that other people used to receive from sugar, that you used to receive from sugar, isn’t there anymore. You have to figure out well what am I doing now? Do I want to be happy, or do I want to be healthy? That’s tough.

Jonathan: It’s very tough, it’s very tough that we – the even tougher thing, I think, is that we live in a culture and in a world that positions us to have to ask this question of do I want to be happy? Or do I want to be healthy? At the end of the day, those cannot be mutually exclusive questions.

April: Or the human race would just die off, right?

Jonathan: Absolutely, and that’s absolutely true if the single, one characteristic of any species is that it is designed, or engineered, or evolved, whatever your belief system is, to not die. When we say you’re healthy, all we’re saying is that you are not on the road to dying prematurely, and if that makes you sad, we need to pop up a level and say what’s going on here? I think the macro thing – we sometimes treat healthy eating as somehow different from other areas of life.

Now let me give you a concrete example. We all time – we talked about this on other episodes – here’s this trick that’s going to cause this incredible health and fitness result in an unbelievable amount of time. You’re going to lose 17 pounds in two minutes, you just take this thing that a doctor on television who recommended it. They’re like, oh that can work. But if someone said, hey I can teach you the piano, or I can make you become a lawyer, or I can get you your CPA license. Or you can become like a really good mom in 15 minutes, if you just do this one trick. We know that’s not how life works.

There’s other things in life, I’m sure – I’ve never been a mother, and I will never be a mother, but I’m sure there’s elements of being a mother that aren’t fun. If you define fun as like the emotion you experience.

April: I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Jonathan: If happiness is defined, if in your mind the word “happiness” means the emotion I have when I ride rollercoasters, or when I take a hot shower, or when I get a massage. Then you’re like, oh my life isn’t happy. Taking care of my children doesn’t make me happy, studying doesn’t make me happy. Doing most of what life entails doesn’t make me happy. I think we need to pop up a level, there’s a bunch of philosophy and deep metaphysical stuff here, but there’s a couple of different types of happiness. Let’s be very clear, there is happiness after eating sugar.

Ironically, that’s the same happiness, if you look at it scientifically, the same part of your brain lights up as if you were to just snort a line of cocaine, or if you were to do anything that just hijacks the dopamine and serotonin senses in your brain and gives you a small burst of happiness. I bet when you achieve a wonderful goal, or you see your child smile at you, you feel a totally different feeling. We call it happiness, but it’s something other than that, I think.

April: Yeah, I’m so glad you brought this up. Actually there was a report that was done a few years ago that took the mom world by storm, a little bit. I run PowerMoms.com and I remember reading this article that said they’ve actually done studies of parents and shown that people who have children are less happy, than people who don’t have children. As mothers, we’re all sitting there thinking, what on earth? Who is putting this report together, and what are they out there saying?

Because yeah, you look at your life, and I think there are a lot of parts of being a mother – there are many parts of being a mother that are not exhilarating. I mean my children get the stomach flu sometimes. They came to me in the morning, my two boys were totally playing out in the water yesterday, got soaking wet. They both brought their tennis shoes in soaking wet, put them in the dryer. Both of them came up to me this morning and said mom, our shoes aren’t fitting right, and they’re all weird and the insoles are coming out. I’m sitting here staring into my two sons gross tennis shoes, thinking this is not how I wanted to start my day. That was not something happy.

However, if you were to ask me does parenthood, does motherhood, bring you joy? Absolutely, oh my goodness, but you have to look at the whole picture. You aren’t just looking at the one component. I think this is where you’re going, which I’m so excited about. It’s the same thing to me with health. There are so many times where yes, it takes time and effort to blend my green smoothies, to chop vegetables, to think deliberately about what we’re going to have for dinner. To make sure that I’m preparing meals that are healthy for the whole family.

But when I see my 15 year old daughter fitting into size zero pants, and her body is naturally slender and she’s confident and happy, rather than being 25 pounds overweight, like she was last year. Oh my goodness, hello – I will do anything to provide that for her in a healthy and safe way.

Jonathan: This gets so deep April, because if you think about what we – so what is marketed to us as happiness, and what you and I, and our savvy listeners know brings them joy. I love that distinction – let’s say there’s ephemeral happiness, like oh that was fun, then it goes away. Then there is lasting joy – two very different things. So what you generally hear about on television and what food advertisers bring to you, and what sugar peddlers and drug dealers offer you. Basically anything that makes someone’s life go off the deep-end and turn out terrible, is too much of that short-term, ephemeral happiness.

So if we say, right wellbeing healthy doesn’t make me happy, you’re trading short-term, ephemeral happiness, that will make you, I promise, it will make you sadder in the long-term, right? Taking heroine will make you feel better in the next five minutes, you’ll feel fabulous, there’s no way it can’t, that’s what it does. But it will kill you in the long-term. So it’s like how can we help empower ourselves to say just because I don’t have those little bursts – like you said, I’m a mother, I’m doing something more meaningful, I’m doing something bigger, I’m part of something that’s deeper. Getting our lasting joy from that.

April: So I love what you refer to as cold-state decision making, versus hot-state decision making. We need to make decisions in a cold-state, when we’re not emotional, when were not just starving, waiting for something to eat, something like that. Where this is helpful health-wise is let’s say you sit down at the beginning of the year, New Year’s, and a lot of people do this and they think, what kind of a body do I want to have this year? How do I want to become more healthy this year? That’s when people are making really rational decisions. Yes, I want to exercise, I want to eat more vegetables, I want to make my health a priority, perfect.

So part of it is reconnecting with those goals on a daily basis. I mean I have to review those goals of what I want to become every single day. I want my business to thrive, I want my family to thrive, I want to have an awesome marriage, I want to be able to have a healthy body – not in that order, I kind of threw them all out. But I’m just being able to connect with my highest priorities every day, the priorities I decided upon when I was in a logical state, that’s really, really important.

The other side of it is we need to make it easier to be happy in the process of pursuing these really crucial and important goals. For example, that’s the work that I’ve been doing for families at LearnDoBecome is it’s all about strategies that make it to be a great parent. There are so many parents who are up all night, who have kids who don’t obey, who have no organization in their home, they have no systems in place to make their homes function. Then they’re wondering why they’re miserable. You’re thinking, well of course you’re miserable, you’ve got chaos all over your house.

If you can put some strategies in place to get organized, to help everyone understand their routines. To really work together collaboratively, all of a sudden you’re feeling amazing joy out of your family life, which otherwise could be completely chaotic.

Jonathan: Building off that April, there’s two paths, and this I think is a really key distinction that’s going to help our listeners. There’s two paths that I can guarantee you will not lead you to lasting joy. One is a constant focus on short term happiness, I think we know that, right? Go look at any addict, there’s a constant focus on short term happiness does not turn into something positive. So a constant focus on short term happiness will make you sad long term.

Now the other thing, and this is really where the two worlds intersect, is giving up short term happiness, doing something that will not actually bring you long term joy and fulfillment, aka starvation dieting would be a perfect example. When you starvation diet, you’re giving up short term happiness and that’s not fun. No one’s arguing that that’s not fun, that isn’t fun. But what’s really not fun, is giving up short term happiness and then feeling miserable long term.

So we really want to avoid that too. We want to avoid giving up short term happiness and not getting any benefit for it. Like investing your money is great, if you make the right investments. It would probably be better to spend your money on cars and planes and trips, versus putting it into stock that’s going to just completely deteriorate and not make you any money. But now, we have science, we have proof, we can say – in the past you said, I’m just going to eat fewer calories, I’m going to give up short term happiness, and it made you miserable long term.

That’s baggage, it’s not your fault, but this isn’t that, this isn’t the same as that. This is, like what you’re talking about with parenthood, it’s proven, it’s human nature. When you feed your body with more of that which makes it thrive, yes, in the short term, right now, there might be a little bit of a reduction in that animalistic-type pleasure. But fact – long term, you will feel more joy. Do you think that’s fair?

April: I think that’s more than fair. I think that’s wonderful. I think this just relates to the basic principles that I’m trying to teach my children, the basic principles that I live by. We were just having a conversation the other morning with my kids about choice. Saying yeah, everyone has choices, everyone gets to choose whether they want to choose goodness or whether they want to choose things that are bad for them. I went through and talked to them about specific scenarios. I said, do you know that there are some mothers who leave their families? There are some mothers who say, you know what, I’ve had it, the kids are crazy, the house is a mess, my marriage is stressful, I’m done. The mothers just walk out and leave. I even read an article one time about a mother who said, I’m a better mom if I just Skype my kids once a week for 20 minutes and I don’t have to be there for every day.

So I shared this with the kids and said what do you think about that? It would be a lot easier for her not to have to be in the middle of family life, but is that a good choice? Is that going to help her, is it going to help her children? My kids are naturally like, of course not mom, we don’t want you to leave us, and yes we’re sorry that we’re fighting, or whatever. I of course never threatened to leave them, but it’s just looking at the choices that we get to make every day. When you are a committed parent, when you’re committed in a marriage, when you’re committed to making right choices, and those are promises you make to yourself and often involving a higher power. Those aren’t things that you just go give up because you see this short-term “happiness” that is available to you.

I mean of course everyone has their own values and has to apply this to their own lives and what matters to them, but I think far too few people sit down and actually identify their values and then look at their lives to see if they’re living according to those values. When you just take a few moments to do that, then whether it involves changing what you’re eating, buying less sugar, spending more time with your kids, even when they’re wining or fighting. Those decisions are getting you where you want to be long term.

I feel so grateful now, after being married for 17 years and having four kids, that I can look back on the last 17 years and see how every single choice I’ve made every day to keep going, to keep working, to keep trying, has brought beautiful results to my family. Especially going SANE, I can say it’s been over a year now that I’ve been eating completely SANE, like 99 percent SANE. I can look back and see how my life, my energy, my body, my family has changed for the better. Has every day been totally easy? Not at all. But is it worth it? I would say absolutely yes.

Jonathan: You used a really important word there April, which is “committed” and “commitment”. Two things I want to add – first is we always talk about folks going after their goals, and what works for them, and this isn’t going to apply to anyone who’s listening to this show, because you wouldn’t be listening to this show if it was. But if your commitment is tomorrow I want to just feel as much pleasure as I possibly can. There are people like that, there’s even a whole philosophical school of thought called hedonism, which is just like experience as much pleasure as you can, as quickly as possible, and don’t think about the next day. That’s no one listening to this, but if that is your commitment, that’s you’re commitment.

Let’s talk about the word “commitment”. There’s another word that’s used a lot when it comes to eating health-fully, that’s “cheat days”. Do you ever cheat Jonathan? What do you think about cheat days? Can I go insane on occasion? This gets back to commitment and purpose and meaning. So think about someone who’s on this seven day cleanse. Now think about that on one end of the spectrum in terms of commitment. Then think of someone who’s a vegan, or kosher, or Halal, or any deeper meaning, dietary lifestyle.

So someone who’s on a seven day cleanse, you ask them are you going to cheat? That is a logical question for them, when you finish the cleanse, I don’t know. Would you even ask a vegetarian, like hey do you ever feel the need to cheat and just eat bacon occasionally? Or someone who’s kosher, it’s not even a valid question because the people when you make that deeper commitment, is it okay to cheat on your spouse occasionally? Well what’s…

April: Some people say yes, you have to decide what you’re committed to doing, yeah absolutely.

Jonathan: What are you committed to doing? I think that’s the key thing. With sanity all we’re trying to say is, if you have a commitment to I want to get the best results for the effort that I put in. That’s what sanity can offer you – sanity can offer you the best results for the effort you’re willing to put it. Is it okay to cheat? I think that if you go SANE, within six months, you won’t even think that’s a logical question to ask, because you won’t need – you don’t feel the need. A vegetarian doesn’t feel the need to cheat on being a vegetarian. I’m sure everyone who listens to this podcast doesn’t feel tempted to cheat on things that they’re deeply committed to, because they’re deeply committed to them, because it brings them so much long-term joy.

So that’s why that focus, like if there was a next action, if we could distil this very metaphysical, almost spiritual podcast down to, it’s are you focused? How much of your day is focused on things that will give you long-term joy, versus things that will give you short-term happiness that may have negative consequences long-term? If you’re thinking to yourself, I want to be healthy, but it’s not making me happy, just start to ask these questions. What are you committed to? What is your long-term goal? I don’t know, I think that will help you to start to redefine and see that happiness versus healthiness is not a false dichotomy, and it can’t be. Does that make sense?

April: Yeah, absolutely. I think once we start to identify what the next action is to take, I think it’s honestly making a list of your commitments, and deciding what am I committed to doing? Now I’m not saying everyone out there should have the exact same priorities that you do, or that I do. I mean no, of course not. Everyone is going to have their own opinions, that’s clear out there, just go on social media and post anything that you believe in, you’ll find thousands and millions of people who will disagree with you. That’s just how the world goes.

What I love is that we have this ability to sit down and to be able to make our choices. I have a series of choices that I made, some of them very early on as a child. Never doing drugs, for example, was a choice I made way early on. I don’t even think about it, it’s not even an idea to me. Being completely loyal to my husband is another one. I’ve told God I would die before I would cheat on him, I just care about him so deeply and I want our family to be strong forever. So as I’ve made specific decisions, and I’m not apologizing for them, I’m really happy – they bring me joy long-term. It’s just that phrase “long-term” that I think we need to remember.

That’s why I’m so committed to SANE because it’s something I can maintain long-term. To be able to say I’ve been SANE for a whole year and not ever had to take a break, or I’ll have to go on some cheat days, or go switch things up a bit because SANE is getting old and boring. No, I’m learning new recipes, I’m learning new ways to make my smoothies, I’m learning new ways to help my family, it’s pretty amazing what’s happening. Do I still have a long way to go, and am I still progressing? Yeah, absolutely. But it’s looking at the long-term and making that the way you run your life. Then you can’t help but thrive, personally, professionally, in your physical development, your financial development, in every area of your life. SANE starts to make a huge difference.

Jonathan: That long-term focus, again, I love that you tied this back to your spouse, Eric, who I’ve had the pleasure to meet, he’s a great person.

April: He’s so cute.

Jonathan: He’s a great, great dude. When you find the right person to spend your life with, it’s worth the short term sacrifices because the long-term gain is there, because it’s the right person. If you find the right financial investment, like giving up some money now to invest it in the long-term, make sense, because it’s right and it will yield dividends.

The challenge with health, like you said, is you’ve been given 50 different things, and none of them have ever worked. So the concept of giving up something short-term for something long-term when you’ve been lied to for so long, is so hard. But that’s what we’re here to tell you is that doesn’t have to be the case anymore. If you want to do a little bit of short term tradeoff for long-term gain, you’ve got the science, you’ve got the common sense results in SANE eating that says, if you’re ready to do this, if you’re ready to make the long-term commitment, we can promise, it’s just science, that you will achieve that long-term benefit. Which I think is really exciting.

April: I love that you just said that. What just clicked to me is that we’re often afraid to commit to something that we don’t trust. I think that’s what it comes down to. The reason why I have no problem announcing publically that I will remain loyal to my husband is because I trust him. I trust that he’s going to be there for me, just like I’m going to be there for him. If I didn’t trust him and thought he was going off all over the place and he didn’t want to be with our family anymore, I would feel hesitant about making that commitment because I wouldn’t want to put myself out there.

I think that’s what happens with SANE, is a lot of people might read your book, or they might start listening to podcasts. They might think, maybe I could go SANE, maybe this is the solution. But they’re so used to not being able to trust people, not being able to trust the advice out there, that they’re afraid to commit. So I just feel like part of my purpose, or part of my role and why I’m here podcasting with you, is as someone outside the equation. I don’t work for Jonathan, this isn’t something that – yeah, he’s just hiring me to tell you all how great SANE is. No, not at all. I believe in this and I believe that this is something everybody can trust. So I tell all my friends and family, you can trust SANE.

I received the most beautiful complement – there’s a friend of mine who had been working with you and a while ago as we were doing the SANE kind of focus group. She posted on her Facebook page, said hey Jonathan and April have this new SANE Families program. I got to participate in their work, I think it’s awesome, you should totally go check it out. A common friend that we had posted a response and she said, I trust a hundred percent anything that April endorses, and I’m going to go check it out. I just felt like that was such a complement and I’m willing to put my name on the line. Each person has to decide where am I going to put my support, what am I going to back? I don’t put my name on the line for very many things, but for SANE, I absolutely do.

Jonathan: I so appreciate that April. For folks who are new to the program, the reason there are amazing people like April, or even me, this isn’t Jonathan Bailor’s magic diet program, as you know if you’ve followed this for any period of time. I spent 15 years looking over 13 hundred studies, and I’m not a doctor. I was a personal trainer 15 years ago. I spent most of my professional life as an engineer at Microsoft. What I did, what I was able to do because I’m a geek, is to look at unbiased, because I didn’t really have any public persona back in the day. I didn’t need to defend any previous positions, just to say look we were presented with some dietary stuff in the ‘60s, a lot of stuff has changed since then.

What are we doing? At the end of the day it’s saying hey, what foods provide us with most of what’s essential for human health, and what food don’t? When you eat more of the foods that provide you with what you need to thrive, and less of the foods that are addictive and toxic, you live better. I mean, don’t take my word for it, you don’t need to take my word for it.

April: Go do it.

Jonathan: Don’t take anyone’s word for it, just do it and experience the results and look at the science. It’s all there and it’s pretty amazing. So thank you so much April, this podcast has been helpful for me, so hopefully it’s been helpful for our listeners as well.

April: Absolutely, thank you Jonathan.

Jonathan: Alright, everybody, I hope you enjoyed our time together as much as I did. Again, Jonathan Bailor, April Perry, remember, stay SANE.