Late Night Munches, Distracted Eating, A SANE House

Carrie: Hello, lovely people out there in podcast listening land. This is Carrie Brown and I have with me, Mr. Jonathan Bailor.

Jonathan: Good day to you, Carrie and to our lovely listeners in podcast listening land.

Carrie: How are you, sir?

Jonathan: I’m well. I’m excited.

Carrie: What are you excited about?

Jonathan: I’m excited because we’re going to start off the podcast talking about something that I have very strong opinions about and I think you do, too.

Carrie: Is there anything you don’t have strong opinions about?

Jonathan: Yes, baseball, for example. I really don’t care about baseball.

Carrie: Snap! Because baseball equates to exercise.

Jonathan: No, actually there’s quite a few things that I care about, like there’s a bunch of this nuance stuff but anyway, what I think I do care about, Carrie is late night munchies.

Carrie: Uh oh. Do you get the late night munchies?

Jonathan: Carrie, I think the listeners know this but I’m not pro emotional eating but I’m one of those kind of people that believe that eating is intrinsically emotional to, so to say, like stop emotional eating is just not…

Carrie: Realistic.

Jonathan: We are emotional, if that was possible, we would just eat mush.

Carrie: We would be like cows.

Jonathan: We would just eat mush all day long and I do, after a late long, long, long, long day, there’s nothing I look forward to more than going home and just getting down with my sanity and that’s all happening post 9:00 pm in the evening.

Carrie: What do you eat?

Jonathan: Well, a couple of things. One, I’m doing all right from a health and fitness perspective so to all those people that are saying that if you eat after 9:00 pm, somehow magically that breaks your body in a way that eating two hours earlier wouldn’t, false. The other thing to keep in mind…

Carrie: I’m looking at him, people. I can tell you, he’s not fibbing.

Jonathan: The other thing to keep in mind is that joy is an important part of life, right?

Carrie: Hurrah.

Jonathan: If there is something that just gives you so much freaking joy, just find the smartest way to do it possible, right? Like…

Carrie: What gives you joy, Jonathan?

Jonathan: What gives me joy is, I love sweets and I love chocolate. I love it. I’ve had a sweet tooth my entire life. My whole family does, and I’m a chocolate chocaholic. So I’ve always, I’ve got to have and I’m a volume eater, Carrie. You put that together and you think I should weigh 500 lbs.

I really love sweets, I love chocolate, and I am not one of those kinds of people who can say, “I’m just going to eat this Hershey’s Kiss and I’m good.” If I eat a Hershey’s Kiss, all that does is make me want to eat 30 Hershey Kisses. It does not make me feel better. It makes me want more.

Carrie: If I saw you eat a Hershey’s Kiss, we would have to get a divorce.

Jonathan: Here is what I do, Carrie. I say, “What is it that I’m actually craving?” If I feel like I’m craving Hershey’s kiss, what I’m actually craving is cocoa, that chocolatey flavor. I’m also craving something sweet. I go to Carrie Brown’s blog or I make one of my little concoctions, where I take something like cocoa powder base, sane sweetener, either a Greek yogurt or some egg whites, or something that fluffs it up a little bit. Throw some ice maybe in the Vitamix, throw some cinnamon. I find the components and I find sane ways to put them together and I’ve got my bowl of sane ice cream or whatever I’m doing, I take some berries, I blend it up or I get a big bowl of sugar snap peas, I know that sounds weird but like if you’ve had fresh sugar snap peas, they’re the freaking bomb. They’re delicious.

Carrie: The key here though has got to be this is so much simpler and easier if you make your house sane.

Jonathan: Absolutely.

Carrie: If you get rid of all the insane stuff, you are forced, and I don’t mean that in a bad way but if you get home and you have the munchies and all you have is sane ingredients to choose from, your brain will create something for you to eat.

Jonathan: Brilliant point. It will create that and if all you have is sane material to work with, you’ll paint a sane portrait.

Carrie: If you have insane stuff in the house, I guarantee you will eat that.

Jonathan: Absolutely.

Carrie: Get rid of all the insane stuff from your house, your life will be so much simpler and easier.

Jonathan: Find…

Carrie: You’ll get very creative.

Jonathan: You’ll get very creative and find a few ‘go to’ things. I make this bread pudding, again I…

Carrie: There’s no bread in it, people.

Jonathan: I can’t cook like Carrie cooks just because that’s just not my style, but I have, I take coconut, I take cocoa, I take a sane sweetener, I take eggs and egg whites. Those are basically the four ingredients and I either combine them with ice and make an ice cream or I combine them with a certain level of water or an almond milk, make pancakes, I bake them. On the weekend generally, I bake like freaking pounds of this stuff, but it’s more like a cakey consistency and I tell you, being able to sit down and have a freaking like encyclopedia, well that’s a little exaggerated, a quarter of an encyclopedia worth of this thing which tastes a heck of a lot like chocolate cake, topped with a strawberry ice cream, which is extremely sane.

It’s made with egg whites, frozen strawberries, ice, xylitol, and guar gum. I am sitting down, guilt free, eating a freaking chocolate cake with strawberry ice cream on top and I feel great. When I finish, I’m satisfied., I’m eating emotionally and I’m happy on all levels.

Carrie: All goodness.

Jonathan: It’s goodness. It’s like you don’t have to be abstinent, just do it safely, just be safe and smart about it.

Carrie: You will come up with stuff if you have nothing insane to cook with. You will but we now, I have a bunch of things that will fit that bill that you can whip up in five minutes over on carriebrown.com. There’s a whole bunch of ideas there if you need a starting point, too.

Jonathan: I love having those options. I love also knowing that, don’t think of the color blue. It’s what I’m thinking of right now. The idea, just saying in your mind, “I can never do this or I cannot experience this experience anymore” is a recipe for disaster. Not only can you, I would argue, not only can you experience it, but you can experience an even greater feeling because it’s like buying a beautiful outfit that’s also on sale.

Not only did you get a great outfit, but there will be this mental level of satisfaction. Let’s say, but I’m not about to geek out too much, but let’s say there’s an outfit that’s $300 on a scale of one to ten, then you find an outfit which is a nine and you find it for 65 bucks. You’re going to feel better with that $65 nine… You’re going to be like “I got like 90 percent of the value there and I was smart about it.” I would argue it’s not about deprivation at all.

Carrie: You’re clearly not a woman.

Jonathan: Well, that is true.

Carrie: Clearly not a woman.

Jonathan: Why do you say that?

Carrie: Every girl out there in podcast land is going, “I want that $300 one!”

Jonathan: Well fine, maybe that was a bad analogy. You understand my point.

Carrie: Yes. I…

Jonathan: Now, I have to go eat emotionally.

Carrie: The game I like to play is, in this instance is “I get to eat as much as I want as long as it’s sane.” How sane can I make something so then I can just eat forever? I don’t feel, I don’t get into it thinking this is about what I can’t have. It’s about how much of this yummy, sane stuff can I have? That’s how I approach it. Of course you get full and you’re satiated and you don’t end up eating much, but I go into it with that mindset.

Jonathan: Carrie, it’s worth…two things. One is I will also stress the importance of what I would call intermissions or rest periods. For me, Carrie and I are very different. I’m 190 lbs, 6 ft tall male, and so I just eat more in general and I also used to be very, very into body building so I used to eat a lot. Folks know my story, I used to eat 6,000 calories a day so my body is conditioned to eating a lot of food.

However, it is very important to note that it takes time for satiety signals in your belly to get to your brain, telling you that you’re full, so even if you are in like a, I keep speaking from experience, like all I want to do is eat, nothing else. Just eat food now, eating, eating. I’m like, “Okay, that was a delicious three bowls, I want to have three more.”

Stop for five to ten minutes, just do something like go run around the block. Just for 5 to 10 minutes, stop. I find, not all the time, 80 percent of the time. 10 minutes later, I’m totally, totally satisfied and in fact, if I didn’t wait that 10 minutes and I did the second batch, that’s when you’ll then like, “Oh my God!”

Carrie: Then you feel crappy.

Jonathan: You don’t feel satisfied, you feel bad. That doesn’t mean take a bite and then wait 5 minutes. It means do your thing within reason. You’re not going to feel like, to the tip top and you’re going to be like, “Oh man, I want to feel that tip top feeling. I want to feel that. I want to feel satisfied” Just wait 5 to 10 minutes. Frequently, it will fill itself up. Does that make sense? Some tips from an emotional volume eater who manages to stay healthy and relatively fit.

Carrie: Yes!

Jonathan: More of sanity.

Carrie: What else?

Jonathan: What else? How to stop boredom from becoming overeating? Often times, when we’re bored, well, might as well just eat.

Carrie: That’s not a good question to ask me because I’m so busy. Boredom isn’t even on my radar, ever. My to-do list is so long and I’m just like that. I’m just, it’s not me. I have bright shiny objects syndrome and I’m just, me and boredom, no, never.

Jonathan: No? Maybe it’s not so much boredom but just, a good example is maybe people who are just like sitting down and watching a movie. Most of them don’t eat popcorn while they watch movies because they’re hungry. They eat popcorn while they watch a movie because it’s like a fun complement to the activity that’s going on.

Carrie: You know I don’t have a TV, so I don’t watch movies.

Jonathan: Carrie! You’re not relating to the listeners!

Carrie: I know. I’m trying but…

Jonathan: Again, well this is going to sound like a broken record here folks, but for example…

Carrie: You can be movie man.

Jonathan: I will be movie man because my dear Angela, my wife, and myself are very, very boring people, I think. Simple. I’d like to call it simple, I don’t want to call it boring. I like to keep life simple as you know from…

Carrie: I’m too busy inventing recipes to watch movies.

Jonathan: My point is that Friday and Saturday night, literally every week, NetFlix is what my wife and I are doing and I love the whole popcorn and movie dynamic although I don’t like the insanity of popcorn. Again, you just find sane alternatives whether it’s Carrie’s suggestion of beef jerky, whether it’s just sugar snap peas. I know it sounds lame but they’re very delicious.

Once you start getting into vegetables, you’d be surprised how much you start to develop a taste for vegetables and how much a bowl of vegetables is actually quite satisfying. I know it sounds a little bit silly, and certainly it wouldn’t be my first choice, but soy nuts, if not processes to the nth degree and gmo’d up are a great alternative if the choice is between popcorn and let’s say soy nuts, soy nut’s a good option. The only reason I’m not including nuts in that list is to sit down and eat nuts for two straight hours?

Carrie: Yeah, that’s a lot of nuts.

Jonathan: That’s going to be a lot of nuts and I don’t actually think you would do that based on satiety but remember that we are not always being totally rational and it can just be a force of habit…

Carrie: If we’re focusing on the movie…

Jonathan: Exactly, so just keep that in mind. Again, it’s not like anti-nuts, it’s always smarter. Eat more, smarter. Eating when bored, maybe not bored, just when doing other things.

Carrie: Distracted.

Jonathan: When distracted.

Carrie: When it’s not a meal time and you’re snacking when you’re distracted can be dangerous but again, one of the things that will make it easier for you is if you have nothing insane in the house, then you can’t go there. You will find something sane to snack on.

Jonathan: I love that you said eating while you’re distracted, Carrie, because I think this is an opportunity so often when we’re rushed or distracted, I noticed, that’s when individual sometimes make very insane choices, like I’m rushed at work, so I’m just going to grab a piece of pizza and whatever. If you’re going to go insane, I think it’s best to go insane when you can really enjoy it. If you’re not really going to be dialed in to what you’re putting in your mouth, that’s actually a great opportunity…

Carrie: To eat vegetables.

Jonathan: Right! I mean think about it, really. If you have one opportunity, if you have one eating occasion during the day when you can actually eat something and just like sit and eat it and savor it, that would be the time to slide the furthest down the sanity spectrum. Not when you’re not even really, because you’re doing that for enjoyment, so if you’re not even able to enjoy it, it’s like listening to your favorite song when you have ear muffs on.

Just stop, wait until you at least have you ear muffs off, and that’s, it’s conscious eating. If you’re going to eat a cupcake, don’t just, you walk into a meeting and you see cupcakes. You just ate a cupcake and you got like a sliver of satisfaction out of it. Make the cupcake worth it. Eat something else during that time period because you’re not thinking about it anyway.

Carrie: If you have a choice, don’t eat the cupcake.

Jonathan: Certainly, yes. Yes. It’s just all about make it worth it if you’re going to do it.

Carrie: We’re going to have some listener take you out of context and say, “Jonathan Bailor wants your sweet cupcakes.”

Jonathan: Well, it depends. If they’re made out of, for example the recipe I described earlier…

Carrie: If they’re my cupcakes.

Jonathan: Yes. In fact, the thing I discovered earlier Carrie, we got coconut in there, we got cocoa, we got eggs, we even maybe have a little bit of protein powder in there, that’s just sanity right there. I love it.

Carrie: If you’re eating cupcakes, people, make sure they’re sane.

Jonathan: Sane cupcakes! All right Carrie, so you’ve touched on this a couple of times. What we have in our house matters a lot, but how can, is there a way to organize the food in our house so like obviously, sane food only, if at all possible. How are we storing that sane food? How are we presenting that sane food to help optimize our sanity and save ourselves time?

Carrie: Buy in bulk, it saves a lot of money, saves a lot of time. I’d probably buy different things in bulk than most people with families because I’m single, so the things I buy in bulk are ground almonds or almond flour, xylitol, egg white powder, coconut milk, and then nuts. However, if you’re buying nuts, make sure that you keep them in the freezer because nuts are oily and oils go rancid. For nuts, things like nuts and seeds, I keep the bulk ones in the freezer and then I have out an air tight glass jar of what I’m using currently and I do the same thing for all nut products and seed products.

If you came to my house, I actually posted a post a little while back which actually had a picture of one of my kitchen cupboards with all my cute little glass storage jars with everything in there. Makes it very easy to see, makes it very easy to find, and it keeps everything as nutritionally valid as possible while you’re storing it, although, I don’t have a ton of pantry items because most typical pantry items are insane. A lot of, Jonathan and I, Jonathan’s exactly the same is the fridge is where your, most of your ingredients are in the fridge and freezer, not in your pantry.

Jonathan: Fridge and freezer, yeah. This sounds a little bit silly but there’s actually quite a few behavioral psychology studies that show this, that even the height at which things are, like that which is eye level is much more likely to be consumed than that which is not.

If you could put, for example, your non-starchy vegetables at eye level, that’s great and in fact, put like colorful things up front. Again, the more you can see this as a game, make it easy for yourself. Put the things you want to eat more of up front. Present them to yourself well. When you go into a grocery store, they put a lot of time and money in getting you to be insane.

Carrie: Right. They’re masters of marketing.

Jonathan: Yeah. Try to just flip that and actually, Whole Foods is really expensive, but if you want like, Whole Foods does an incredible job at presenting a lot of really healthy food really well. You’ll learn some lessons from that store.

Carrie: Yes, I was just going to say for people who are not in the States, Whole Foods is a supermarket chain, grocery chain. Not all whole foods are expensive, Whole Foods the store.

Jonathan: Oh, I’m sorry. Yes, the Whole Foods store is a good example of how even the sanest of foods can be presented in a way that makes them look as delicious, if not, and that’s a cool thing, Carrie. I think on some level, I don’t have any studies to back this up so this is Jonathan going more emotional and instinctual. On some level whole natural foods, when presented properly, when prepared properly are more satisfying and enjoyable than these synthetic garbage things.

I just think real human experiences, visceral, the amygdale, animal part of our brain has existed for so long and it is existed to crave those things, so let’s just use every avenue we have to tap into that. Let’s prepare our food deliciously. Let’s pick the right foods in the first place. Let’s present it, especially if you’ve got kids. Make it fun, make it colorful and just have a good time with it.

Carrie: Presentation is, there’s the adage, you eat with your eyes.

Jonathan: Yeah, exactly.

Carrie: It really, the way, and if you’ve seen any of the recipes on my blog over at carriebrown.com, I take photographs of everything. They are not doctored photographs. I want you to know that if you make the recipe as follows, it will look like that but it’s important that you take the little bit of extra effort to make it look like that.

Jonathan: Absolutely.

Carrie: It makes a huge difference to how it is perceived, especially if you’re alone in the household that doesn’t particularly want to go sane. It will help you enormously particularly with children if it looks appetizing. If it looks good enough to eat, they’ll probably want to eat it.

Jonathan: This is Jonathan going off the ranch again a little bit, but I think that this whole like honoring yourself, you’re about to take something and put it into your body. The more as a culture, we’ve moved away from like honoring that, from honoring food. It’s a pretty intimate activity. Spend a little time. I know it’s hard but college is hard, raising kids is hard, holding down a full time job is hard…

Carrie: Life is hard.

Jonathan: We all do things that are a lot harder, it’s just a matter of priority.

Carrie: The thing is if you eat sanely, if you switch over to a sane lifestyle, everything else will get easier.

Jonathan: I love it. Yes. You will literally have more time.

Carrie: You will have more time. You will feel better. You won’t be dealing with the same health issues. You won’t be having to take time off. You will have energy. You won’t be dragging, everything will be better with the effects of healing your body touch every single part of your life.

Jonathan: To use an analogy form the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, without question the most influential book I’ve ever read. It would be a bit like saying you have someone who’s sawing down a tree and they’re sawing and sawing and sawing and the blade is dull and like “I don’t have time to sharpen my saw.” The time you would spend sharpening your saw will allow you to cut down that tree so much faster than sitting there and rubbing a dull blade.

Carrie: And more effectively.

Jonathan: Absolutely.

Carrie: Not just faster but so much more effectively.

Jonathan: Absolutely. I love it. Carrie, I’m excited. Are you excited?

Carrie: I am very excited!

Jonathan: Listeners, I hope you’re as excited and remember this week and every week after, eat smarter, exercise smarter, and live better. Chat with you soon.