There is plenty of research that shows that eating three meals a day is good and then there’s some research that shows eating six meals a day is good. And some research that shows the benefits of intermittent fasting. And it might be good to intermittent fast for a little while and then to stop intermittent fasting and so on and so forth. The thing we know for sure is that the quality of what you eat determines the quality of your health. So what I would do personally, what I would recommend is that there’s no question that there are some benefits to fasting. There are absolutely benefits. Proven metabolic benefits to fasting. So if you choose to fast every once in a while and it works for you that’s awesome. If you’re an athlete, or if you’re trying to maximize fat loss while maintaining lean muscle tissue then eating frequently is going to be a priority for you because you want to maintain that anabolic state. You want to help your muscles recover. It’s hard to say is it SANE. Technically it’s sort of NA, it depends on what you’re eating determines whether or not it’s SANE.

What I would say personally is that if you like the results you’re getting keep doing it. If you don’t like the results you’re getting that we can maybe mix it up a little bit and if you have some specific goals meal frequency becomes a lot more—I can help a lot more with meal frequency if it was just you know, is this good or bad totally depends on your goals. But if it’s working for you and if you’re not ravenously hungry then yes, I would keep doing it. Absolutely. And just making sure you’re SANE. Though one thing to keep in mind though, if you want to make sure to maximize metabolic healing that you’re getting the double-digit servings of vegetables and that’s you’re getting at least three 30 gram servings of protein per day. So with that said that will impact meal frequency, right. Because if you for example, if you have to eat 12 servings of vegetables in four hours that’s going to be hard. It might cause digestive issues.

So my personal recommendation would be we’re prioritizing the quality of what we’re eating first and that might dictate a little bit how frequently we eat just depending on your tolerance. For some people, if they eat more than three servings of vegetables in a sitting the amount of fiber is going to cause them digestive issues. For some people, it’s not an issue. So just balance that and the bottom line is, at the end of the day—some people get surprised when I say this, but what I think doesn’t matter. I mean, hopefully, it’s helpful, but what matters is what’s working for you and that’s why I want to be here to empower you and I want the entire SANE family to empower you to use proven science to find something that works perfectly for you.

And Ashley, this is a perfect place to do the eyeglass analogy. So I’m going to do it now. I was going to do it later, but I’ll do it now. So the eyeglass analogy. All right. I have terrible vision, I have a very powerful prescription. And maybe you can empathize, but let’s say you go to an eye doctor and you go into the eye doctor’s office and you say, “Doc, my vision is blurry, can you please, help me?” And the doctor looks at you and she has glasses on. She takes the glasses off of her face, puts them over, and sticks them on your face. And says, “Hey, Ashley, or whatever your first name is, does that help?” And you say, “No, doc. My vision’s actually worse now. And I’m getting a headache, what are you doing to me?” And then the eye doctor says, “You’re ungrateful, just try harder.” The eye doctor probably wouldn’t say that, but that is actually what some people say when the sort of, “Here’s what I do. Now, you do exactly that.” doesn’t work. You know, that’s kind of the point of analogy here. The eye doctor had great intentions of saying, “Hey, look. This works for me, maybe it’ll work for you.” And the eye doctor actually even has science on her side, meaning that while it is true that her eyeglasses might not work for you, it might actually make the situation worse there is a perfect prescription for you that a physician or that a trained scientific expert can help you find, but the key is that we have to personalize that prescription just for you.

Whether it’s correcting your vision or correcting your metabolism, but here’s the key thing, and one thing I want to help protect you from, there’s a lot of information out there on the Internet that would make you think that like personalization is extremely important. I think eyeglasses are a great example of this, right? Taking someone else’s eyeglasses of their face and putting them on your face is probably not going to help you see better, but here’s the key thing: the reason and this is sort of sound strange, so just stick with me for a second, my prescription makes my eyes clear for the same reasons that your prescription will make your eyes clear, meaning that at the end of the day the human eye, the biology of the human eye is the same. Now, we might need slightly different angles of our lenses to correct it, but like the way the retina reflects light that’s the same underlying biology. So that’s why we can say things like non-starchy vegetables, nutrient dense protein, whole food fats, low fructose fruits because at the end of the day every human being is 99,9 percent genetically identical. That’s from the Harvard Medical School. So there is some variation there and that’s why we need to personalize, but for example, the non-starchy vegetables, nutrient dense protein, whole food fats, low fructose fruits, that’s like hey, glasses. If your eyes are blurry we can find the pair of glasses that will work for you.

So we can find the combination of non-starchy vegetables, nutrient dense protein and whole food fats that will work for you, but maybe the time of day will vary. Or maybe how you prepare them is going to vary, or maybe how much you eat at once is going to vary, or maybe the ratio of carbs to protein or carbs to fat is going to vary a little bit for you. So that’s why I really love that analogy because the underlying principles are going to be the same for all of us, but what works for me or what works for Nico or what works for Cheryl isn’t necessarily going to work for anybody else because we are unique in that way. So hopefully that analogy is helpful and if anyone ever tells you, “Hey, just do what I do.” then you can think about that like say, “Hey, just put on my eyeglasses and maybe it’ll help you see better.” So hopefully that’s helpful. I like that analogy and it’s actually inspired by Steven [inaudible 00:38:05] so I always want to give him credit when I say it. So let’s see here. Let me go ahead and jump over to the question that was written in and I’m going to jump back to the live questions if that’s okay. But hopefully that was helpful and that analogy was good.

This is a great question here. SANE and vegan. Can’t you get enough proteins through vegetables and nuts? Superfoods and servings and then, do you count herbs and spices? So I can definitely answer at least two of these questions. I’m not sure about one of them. So the first question is can’t you get enough protein through vegetables as nuts. This is a really good question because it allows us to ask a bigger question, which is what is the definition of enough protein? So enough protein for what? And this is something that I think is really helpful about this thing in the program is we talk about like a SANE mindset. And let me give you an example of a SANE mindset. Switch. So often times we will hear that whole grains are healthy. And the reason we hear that whole grains are healthy is because there is an assumption that we have to eat grains and that whole grains are more nutrient dense than refined grains. And that’s true. It is true that whole grains are more nutrient dense and are SANEr than refined grains. But it’s also true that a shorter cigarette is better for you than a longer cigarette. Smoking one pack of cigarettes per day is better for us than smoking two packs of cigarettes per day.

The reason I give that analogy is that it sort of uncovers a way that nutrition has been misrepresented to us. The way that nutrition has been presented to us is that one thing is better than another thing then it is objectively good or it is objectively helpful. And we know that isn’t true. I think we can all agree for example that smoking one pack of cigarettes per day is objectively better for you than smoking two packs of cigarettes per day. That doesn’t mean it’s good. So we have to really always keep in mind it’s not a question of like are we eating enough proteins it’s are we eating an optimal amount of protein for our health or for our goals. Not is this healthier than that, but is this healthier than anything else I could be eating right now. And that’s, for example, one of the reasons I really stress the vegetable so much is I so often see starches crowding out vegetables. I actually had the opportunity to have a conversation publicly with the former spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association, and this is one of the few remaining associations who maintain the position that eating grains are required for optimal health.

And I mean, this is the position which top medical institutions are saying it’s not true. It doesn’t mean that grains are toxic, it just means that saying that you have to eat grains to be healthy asserts that grains contain some sort of essential substance that is not attainable through any other food. And that’s just not true. In fact, everything that grains do vegetables do and way better. Like more fiber, more nutrients, way less negative impact on hormones. So the question is always not necessarily is this thing better than this other thing, but is this thing the best thing we could be eating right now. And here for the proteins, through vegetables and nuts you know, can we get enough? Well, the question is what is enough? Our goal here, the only way we know if it’s enough is if we put enough in the context of a goal. So enough in terms of daily recommended allowance by the government which was a standard that was established like 50 years ago to ensure that soldiers who went to war didn’t die of malnutrition, that’s one goal.

So for example, if our goal is sort of lower and it doesn’t die of malnutrition then there is a certain amount of protein that would be enough to not die of malnutrition. But now if we want to ratchet that a little bit and say our goal is to actually heal our body and to enable our body to rebuild itself from the inside out through a process known as muscle protein synthesis well, then we know that there are certain amino acids that have to be at a certain level in our bloodstream to activate something called the mTOR pathway in our brain which triggers our body to start rebuilding itself because our body says, “Hey, look I’ve got enough protein to use it for non-essential functions.” Because your body rebuilding itself, becoming even better than it was before, that’s like not only not dying, that’s—I mean, to maintain calorie-hungry muscle tissue that’s a calorie hungry process. So when we say enough protein the amount of protein we’re looking for is the amount of protein that’s going to help our body heal itself. And to do that we need those 30-gram doses and the challenge with trying to get that much protein through vegetables and nuts is just that you would have to eat 2000 calories of nuts to get—just from nuts, just to get that amount of protein. Because nuts, for example, are like 70-80 percent fat.

So to try to get protein from something which is 80 percent not protein by way of sort of an exaggerated example it can be a little bit like trying to increase your vegetable intake by eating carrot cake. It’s kind of a silly example, but if you think about it well, like carrot cake does have vegetables in it, but it doesn’t actually mean that’s what we should use if we want to increase our vegetable intake. Now, this isn’t to say that as a vegan or a vegetarian you can’t eat a SANE optimal amount of protein, you absolutely can. But we are going to need to do supplementation there either with p-protein, hemp protein or rice protein all of which are available in very clean variations in the SANE store. And then yes, vegetables, things like spinach, most people don’t know this, but gram for gram spinach actually has more protein in it than some cups of beef. But again, the amount of spinach you would have to consume to get 30 grams of protein will probably make your stomach explode. So I would advise against that, but yes, we want to look at sources of protein that get more of their calories from protein than from carbohydrate or fat because if we don’t do that then if our goal is to increase our protein intake, but the foods we’re eating to do that are more carbohydrate or are more fats than they’re protein well, that we’re actually doing is increasing our carbohydrate and/or our fat intake and protein’s kind of coming along on the side, if that makes sense.

So that’s for example, sometimes you see in recipes we talk about egg whites in addition to whole eggs, it’s not because whole eggs are bad, it’s because whole eggs are 64 percent fat and the egg white of the egg like that’s what makes up the protein. So if you’re trying to increase your protein intake a whole egg is primarily going to increase your fat intake whereas if you just ate the egg white which is about 90 to 93 percent protein that’s going to increase your protein intake without increasing other stuff even more. Hopefully, that makes sense. But yes, as you know, some of the most amazing SANE success stories come from vegans and vegetarians who make the SANEst choices available within that framework and then we just might need to do some plant form of protein supplementation. The second question here was super food and servings. I’m not even sure what that means, but the good news is that if you go into the SANE store and you click in the How To Use, at each page it says like how to use, it breaks down the servings and it says like one tablespoon of Garden In My Glass equals one serving of vegetables. So that’s there. And if it’s not please, tell me. I’ll make sure that it gets there. So I always try to get better.

And then do you count herbs or spices? No. That’s another great question. So is it SANE? Is an herb or a spice SANE? They don’t, it’s sort of like saying is water SANE, it’s NA. Something has to have calories in it for us to determine whether or not it’s SANE because again, SANE is the measure for the quality of a calorie. So since herbs or spices are calorie free we can’t call them SANE. We also can’t call them inSANE. Same thing for water. But I can tell you that herbs and spices as a general rule of thumb, they’re a great source of polyphenols, they are great sources of other—like cinnamon is fantastic for blood sugar regulation, turmeric, curcumin, there’s a bunch of great stuff. As a general rule of thumb, herbs and spices are absolutely the way to go. Like just crush it with herbs and spices because especially when you use herbs and spices instead of sauces—sauces can be an inSANE nightmare. You get these—even things that you would think would be healthy like a marinara sauce you see it’s just high-fructose corn syrup, sugar added, trans this, hydroxyl, methyl. Herbs and spices man, they’re the way to go. So be careful with sauces and absolutely love those herbs and spices. Great stuff. I mean, add cinnamon in like bog doses to your smoothies if at all possible, super helpful with blood sugar. So hopefully that helps.

A live question here from Ashley. So I want to answer that. What’s the best way to break through a plateau? More protein, more veggies or no dairy, fasting one day a week? Ashley, unfortunately, it’s not an easy question to answer without knowing a lot more about what is causing the plateau. For example, if someone is like 10 pounds over what they think is their desired weight and they think that’s a plateau that’s very different than if someone had a 100 pounds to lose, is down 50 and has stalled at that point. The easiest places to—so, in the first case just keep in mind that the closer and closer we get, like the leaner and leaner we get the slower that—to try to get from 40 percent body fat to 30 percent body fat is much easier than getting from 30 percent body fat to 20 percent body fat. And if you have any doubts in your mind let’s just keep going. Going from 20 percent body fat to 10 percent body fat and then from 10 percent body fat to zero—like you can actually see your body wouldn’t let you go to zero percent body fat. Right, that’s where the set point. I’m talking about homeostasis, the body automatically regulating itself. So your body is going to try to keep you at that healthy point. So just keep in mind that the closer you are to that healthy point you’re going to see a little bit of diminishing marginal return.

And sometimes our culture can train us to think that like having abs isn’t the healthy point. It’s not necessarily unhealthy, but that is—the natural healthy state for most human beings isn’t being able to see their abs. So assuming that’s not the case, assuming that we’re sort of further away from our ideal weight, the plateau absolutely, I think just like in the quantity model we would say, “Oh, you’re at a plateau. We’ll just even eat fewer calories.” In the quality model, we really got to look at the quality of what we’re eating. So is there a way that we can increase the vegetable intake? Are we getting the three, the four, the five 30 gram servings of protein evenly spaced out throughout the day, are we getting those whole food fats, is there any inSANEity? Because of that little bit of inSANEity if it’s that two or three cookies at night might be fine if you’re at your goal, but if you’re plateauing that spike in blood sugar right there, that could be causing some problems. But there are also things not even related to diet. If we’re getting four hours of sleep per night at some point the body’s just going to say, “I’m not going any further. I’m not going any further until I have sort of more time to heal.” And it may also involve how much we’re moving. Like do we need to increase the quality of our exercise?

So, Ashley, this is something that I think we can dig into in way more detail for you in the support group. The plateaus are talked about on the Internet as being a thing, as if there’s sort of a thing in our brain which says, “At this point, I am just going to stop.” And the science is like—there’s no such thing as your body saying—like your body has a set point, right. So based on all the different inputs that we’re putting into our body: stress, sleep, medication, quality of our eating, quality of our exercise. This is going to establish a set point for our body weight and that’s going to be regulated by our brain, by our hormones, by our gut bacteria. So to break through a plateau it’s a little bit like the more we put in the more we get out. And in the old calorie counting model what a calorie counter would say is if you plateau at 1200 calories and one hour a day of jogging, you need to cut that down to 800 calories and do two hours per day of jogging. Now, of course, the problem with that is that it’s not only horribly unhealthy, but no human being could keep that up for the long term. So as soon as you stop doing that you’ll gain all the weight back and more which is worse for your health than if you never did anything. Yo-yo dieting is very bad for us. So what we need to do if we’re sort of at a point if what our body has reached homeostasis at what we perceive as a plateau is we need to look at all those elements. We need to look at stress, we need to look at sleep, and we need to look at the quality of our eating. And instead of saying, “I’m going to eat fewer calories and burn more off.”, we say, “How do I increase the quality of my sleep? How do I reduce my stress levels? How do I bolster the loving relationships that I have in my life? How do I maybe eat more green leafy vegetables rather than like carrots?”

I mean, there’s just the optimal SANE food groups and there are the regular SANE food groups. You can see those outlined in the first SANE 101 course. So hopefully that helps. I would not fast one day per week. I mean, if we’re fasting because we know about the benefits of autophagy and we want our cells to recycle themselves like that’s one thing, but sometimes fasting is used as a euphemism for starving oneself. And if we go on the Internet and we say, “Hey, I fast one day per week to help with my weight loss.” People might say, “Oh, okay, that’s—“ They’ll react one way let’s just say that. But if we go to our friends and we say, “Hey, I starve myself one day a week so that it helps me lose weight.” everyone would kind of intuitively say like, “Food is healthy. There is no—please, don’t starve yourself. Don’t concentrate all the starvation down into one day. Increase the quality of what you’re eating.” And then also give your body some time. You know, what might be perceived as a plateau might just be your body needing a little bit of time. Weight loss and metabolic healing aren’t linear. We like to think that things are linear. It’s going to follow this, “I’m going to lose this much, at this much rate and then it’s going to happen.” But again, we know that isn’t the case because if that was the case then we could eventually weigh zero pounds, which of course we never can. If your ideal weight is a 150 pounds and we start at 300 pounds you can imagine that at some point the rate of fat loss has to slow down because if it didn’t, once we hit 150 we just keep going until we weigh nothing. So that again gets into the science of the set point.

So hopefully that’s a little bit helpful. I apologize that there wasn’t like just do this and you break through the plateau, but on some level, hopefully, that maybe gives you some confidence in the SANE program because anybody who says like. “It’s this magic thing.” Hopefully, all of us here in the SANE family know that there’s no—right, what we’re talking about here is a medical issue. Chronic weight gain is like diabetes or like hypertension, it is a—there are underlying metabolic dysfunctions that we have to heal. The American Medical Association recognizes it as a disease. Just like diabetes and just like we went, “Do this and diabetes goes away.” The more we understand that the more we can give our body time, time, time to heal because that’s what it needs. So I’m going to cover in a little more depth later on if we have time, but we’re kind of running out of time. So I’m going to go a little bit faster here.

Cheryl has a question. If you go into the step-by-step program, she’s asking where do I find paper forms for the SANE app? The SANE overview, the very first thing, it says start here, there’s a section about the app, there’s a link in the lesson about the app that contains the link to the paper form. And just as a general rule, the more we can focus on just going through the Step-By-Step program one step at a time we’ve spent years putting that together in a logical fashion so that for example, you don’t try to use the app before you understand what serving sizes are. So we’ll explain what the serving sizes are before we get into that stuff if you go in a step-by-step fashion. So [inaudible 00:57:19] can be very helpful.

Let me sort of go through some questions here kind of fast because I did have some stuff that I think Ashley and I think everyone else is really going to appreciate because it has to do with the metabolic healing topic. So we’ll try to go through these questions really fast. If I don’t do them justice let’s try to do them in the support group. This is a great question here that says, in the video on eccentric squats I mentioned a burst based belly breathing dissipates cortisol in your muscle so you can do it longer. It is unclear in the demo whether the breath is in through the nose and out through the mouth or in through the mouth and out through the mouth. It has always been my understanding that breathing in through the mouth rather than nose actually raises cortisol, I’d like to hear more on this subject especially what studies support this theory. So the general rule of thumb here is you just don’t want to hold your breath. I mean, breath, however, works best for you. There’s quite a bit of research. So the way we talk about exercising is very different than the way most people exercise. So for example, if you’re taking 10 seconds to lower weight—like if you don’t breathe for 10 seconds while doing intense exercise you will pass out, your blood pressure will spike, you’ll blackout. So there is a difference because of this very specific form of exercise we’re doing we want to make sure that we’re breathing continuously so that we don’t spike your blood pressure. And it’s less about cortisol, but it’s about helping to clear the lactic acid out our muscles. So in that video, if I say something about cortisol I should not have.

So please, let me know if I did. I think I said something about lactic acid and blood pressure, but the general rule of thumb is you want to make sure you are breathing naturally and not holding your breath. And then as the exercise gets more and more difficult we naturally have a tendency to hold our breath. And then your face gets all red. So what a lot of people encourage, if you want to get really deep into the science, doctor Doug McGuff who wrote a book Body By Science is a great resource here, is you do sort of rapid breathing like that so that you again, you force yourself to not hold your breath and to be able to continue pushing. And by way of analogy if you think about another context in which human beings have to exert a lot of force over a long period of time giving birth is a pretty intense form of exercise and you’ll notice the form of breathing that takes place there is don’t hold your breath, keep breathing, keep the oxygen flowing through. So it’s the same thing here. Again, you want to make sure you’re doing something that you’re comfortable with, but the key takeaway is if breathing through your nose and out through your mouth helps you I would say that that’s fine.