Jonathan: There’s a question here submitted that says, is it important to be consistent with the amount of deep green veggies I eat? This is hard to do especially while traveling overseas. Suggestions.

It’s great to be as consistent as possible with SANity. The more often you can be SANE and a huge part of being SANE is eating vegetables. The more consistently you can eat vegetables the better. One of the coolest things about going SANE and the longer you go SANE the more you’ll notice why progress versus perfection works. Think of your metabolic system a lot like your immune system.

If you have a healthy immune system, if you temporarily catch cold, it’s not the end of the world. While you might get sick for a little bit your immune system is healthy. It will work to resolve that problem over time. You can never avoid all bacteria and all viruses. That’s not possible. What you can do is you can keep your immune system as healthy as possible so that when things do go not according to plan aka viruses and bacteria, you can recover quickly. Think of your metabolic system the same way. If you have a healthy metabolic system a little bit of inSANity isn’t going to break the system. It’s just like a little bit of cold.

When we heal the system itself, if we go a little bit inSANE, you are not going to gain 25 pounds overnight and your HB/A1c levels aren’t going to go whack overnight. That also helps to explain why it seems like children can get away with eating inSANEly whereas, as we get older it seems like we can’t eat inSANEly and get away with it anymore. What is actually happening there is not that children have some unique genetic gift. In fact children, I would argue, they need the most protection against inSANE foods and the most focus on SANE foods because their bodies are growing.

We know this. We think about like the smallest forms of children which will be children that aren’t born yet. We know that nutrition for those fetuses is extremely important yet somehow the media tells us that as soon as the child passes through the uterine canal and is in the real world that now it’s like burgers and French fries and chicken nuggets are healthy for them aka a children’s menu and children cereal is essentially the section of the menu and the section of the cereal aisle that is the most inSANE.

The people who need the most protection and who are most sensitive to nutritional distress are the same people who are targeted by these corporations. It just blows my mind and in20 years we’ll look back on that and say, how did that happen as we understand more and more of what these foods do to children. The point is that if a child has only been exposed to inSANEity for five years. Let’s look at the standard American diet. The standard American diet is about 60 percent processed inSANity. Maybe the body is resilient, the body can recover from things so just like if a child scrapes their knee, the child’s knee heals faster than 50 years later.

Your skin, if you get cut the older you are the longer it takes to heal. For a child, if they’re exposed to a little bit of inSANity, their metabolism can heal that quickly, but then as we get older, if I’m getting 60 percent of my calories for 40 years from inSANEity that is like a metabolic immune system to combine the metaphors it’s just worn down. At that point, we smell a cheese cake and we gain weight because our metabolic system is broken. The reason HIV and AIDs are such a heartbreaking disease is that it attacks the immune system itself. If your immune system is out of commission, a cold can kill you, but if your immune system is okay you can bounce back from that. As you go SANE, as you heal your metabolism, if you have to travel for example or if you go to a birthday party or it’s Thanksgiving or if it’s the holidays, there’s a little bit of inSANEity you’re going to bounce back from that.

That’s why progress versus perfection works. That’s why this is so about being patient and taking time to heal. It also explains why it seems like children can get away with eating [Inaudible 00:31:29]. They are not getting away, they are sort of stealing from Peter to pay Paul. There’s only so much inSANEity that our metabolic system can take. After a certain number of years of that inSANEity it just builds up and breaks down. Hopefully, that is helpful. Lou has got a freezer so that’s excellent. Jean has a question. Oh yes, Coumadin regulations [Inaudible 00:31:54] need to know if you have suggestions about to keep these green consistency while traveling.

Jean I am going to, if you don’t mind, this is going to get again to the territory of your primary care physician. My high level recommendation is like when I travel, what I do is I use Garden in my Glass and a bunch of stuff from the SANE store extensively because it’s very hard to eat greens on the go. It’s very easy to take powdered greens on an airplane. Then salad bars at grocery stores are one of my good friends so those are sort of ready to eat bars at grocery stores. Then whenever I have a chance at a restaurant I’ll get a big salad. Hopefully, that’s helpful.

The next question here that was sent in was, with why is it important to drink copious amounts of water, what does it do in the body? There’s a couple of reasons why drinking water is super important. One is it creates a state in your body known as hypo-osmolality. What that means in English is just that the balance of certain substances inside of your cells and outside of your cells changes such that it is actually easier for your body to pass fatty acids out of the cells and burn them for energy. In order to burn fat, you’re literally taking triglyceride, which is the technical term for fats stored in your body and it needs to leave the cells go into your bloodstream and get burned. When you drink a lot of water, that process is easier for your body to do.

Water also helps to eliminate toxins. When you’re going SANE, you’re going to be taking in a lot of certain nutrients. It helps to process urea out of the system. It helps with protein metabolism. It helps like with the fiber and not feeling certain senses of bloating because it helps to eliminate waste more readily. I would say the third big reason is it makes it easier not to drink a bunch of inSANE nonsense. If you’re thirsty, it’s a lot harder to say not to inSANE soda. If you’re really thirsty, but if you’re not thirsty at all. Beverages or liquids just like solids, we talk about eating so much good food that you’re too full for inSANE foods. The same thing applies with liquids. The idea is to drink so much water or potentially things like green tea or white tea. Green tea is very common and very good that you’ll just true full for other things.

Hypo-osmolality makes it easier to burn fat technically. It helps with the digestion of foods and the elimination of certain substances and then it also makes it much easier to avoid inSANE beverages. That was a much cleaner answer than some of my other answers. Hopefully, that was helpful. All right, Jean looks like my previous answer helped you so I am hopefully happy to hear about that.

Emotional eating. All right, cool. We got some questions coming in here now about some of the emotional stuff that I alluded to in our last session. I really need your help now to help me to not turn this into a giant lecture because when I get going, it’s hard for me to stop. These are things which if I write another book, one of them at some point is going to be purely about the psychological aspects of things because that’s always been a passion of mine. I can go on about this forever.

A couple of things about the emotional eating and just emotional aspects of SANEity. First, let’s talk about emotional eating specifically. The emotional eating. There’s two aspects to it. Emotional eating is essentially a certain type of chemistry takes place in our brains that makes us feel a certain way. This is by way of example, forgive me if this is sort of obvious, but it’s a good example, why do people take things like opiates, like heroin?

Heroin is such a terrible drug because it is extremely addictive and it’s really good at what it does. It’s terrible for you, but what I mean that it’s really good at what it does is heroin creates a state in the brain that is euphoric. My father is an addictions counselor as is my sister. My sister and father tell me these stories of addicts. The state in a heroin addict’s brain is so intensely positive that they will literally and heartbreakingly harm their child to achieve that psychological state. I’m not saying this to make this a sad call. What I am saying is that our emotions are a set of chemistry in our brain. There are opiate receptors, there are chromamine and dopamine. Don’t need to get into that here.

When we are triggered to eat emotionally, the trigger for that is usually there’s an environmental or psychological cue which then causes the release of certain hormones and neurotransmitters in our brain. Why did I give the example of heroin? Heroin is an example of an opiate and things like morphine, OxyContin, and sugar are opiates. They bind certain receptors in our brain. This is not technically accurate, but it’s a metaphor to think of it. It’s almost like I am sad or I am anxious receptors open up in the brain and like sugar or other opiates, they can come and say, no, you’re not. It’s like, oh, I feel better. That’s kind of what happens with those substances. When we want to eat emotionally there’s at least two aspects.

One is there’s a certain type of brain chemistry that takes place and it’s sort of like these receptors open up and say, feed me with happiness. Basically, I am sad, I’m stressed, I’m anxious. Feed me with happiness. That happens. Our brain is in a certain state. Often then we need to find a way to feel these things. Now the reason it’s important to understand that as there’s a stimulus, there’s a response, and there is a response to that response. Stimulus, response and then our response to that neurological response. All right. Let’s unpack each one of those.

Stimulus. Sometimes we can change this sometimes we can’t. We can address emotional eating for each three of these components and this is really advanced stuff. If this isn’t helpful or if I’m going too deep or just anything if you have thoughts post them in the chat box. For example, I have a boss that just makes me crazy. That can be the stimulus which then causes us to go home and say sugar fills that.

Having a junky boss might not be something we can do a whole lot about, but that is the first area that we can look to address. We can identify the factors in our life that trigger these neurological states. While we might not be able to change all of them, we might be able to do two things. One, is we can try to change some of them to avoid the negative stimulus. We know for example that one of the ways that we differentiate adults from children is if you have a baby, a baby is like, I’m hungry. I’ll just cry and panic and there’s no like baby is like hunger, stimulus, response is cry immediately. Same thing with animals that are not as intelligent as human like a deer.

It’s like I hear something, I run immediately potentially right into traffic whereas, as an adult human, If someone would ever say like, act like an adult, don’t act like a child, what they are saying is in between these external stimuli which then causes a neurological response it’s like in some ways the more of an adult we are, then bigger that gap is.

If you think like some of the greatest people in history like Margret Thatcher or Mother Teresa or Jesus Christ or Mahatma Gandhi or Abraham Lincoln or Rosa Parks, one of the things they’re famous for is something happened, like a stimulus happened. Miss Parks, get to the back of the bus and her brain was like, I’ll go crazy, and she was able to take a step back and say, I’m going to choose my response.

Mahatma Gandhi when he was treated in a certain way he chose his response. Jesus Christ is really powerful examples of, “forgive them, father, they know not what they do, turn the other cheek.” I just got stabbed in the side and my response is to forgive you. These are people, it wasn’t that they didn’t have [blup] happening in their brain, it’s that that [blup] happened in their brain, maybe it happened a little less, but they then develop this uncanny ability to choose their response after that.

Why did I say all that? I said all that because step number one is like for example if we have a junky boss, if we can possibly change teams that would be great, but there’s an old saying which is great one which is worth writing down if you haven’t heard and that is, no matter where you go, there you are. I’m going to say that again and this applies to me almost more than anyone I know I have my own insane that I deal with, no matter where you go, there you are, or everywhere you go, there you are.

In addition to trying to take ourselves and remove ourselves from objectively toxic environments which we should do, there’s also ways that we can take to use other people’s language cultivate our own garden so that when those things happen they have less of an impact on us. All major religious traditions have ways of doing these things like saying, give it to God.

Buddhism has examples of this. There’s ancient philosophy such as stoicism or Daoism where their whole point of stoicism, for example, is the domestication of emotions to increase that gap between stimulus and response. If you want to go totally secular, like Stephen Covey all that stuff. His whole thing is between stimulus and response there is a gap and in that gap, the quality of our life is determined. That’s paraphrasing him directly because I think he’s absolutely awesome.

All right. There’s avoiding the negative stimulus then there is the ability to choose our response to that stimulus. Victor Frankl is also another great secular teacher of this. He’s an Australian psychiatrist who survived two concentration camps and lost his entire family in the concentration camps and then yet went on to create a fantastic life and then developed his own school of psychotherapy by basically saying, I can choose my response to any stimulus even being subjected to the most horrific atrocity a human being could ever be exposed to. If you haven’t read, “Mans Search for Meaning,” it’s a fantastic book.

Emotional eating. Avoid the stimulus in the first place whenever possible. Then we need to cultivate our gardens so that we can react with love and compassion and forgiveness to those negative things when they happen. That’s its own thing, which maybe we can get into some other sessions. I have thoughts and I’ve done a lot of research about that, but my professional claim to fame is not psychotherapy or psychoanalysis. I’ll sort of leave that to the other experts.

All right. There’s avoiding the stimulus. There’s managing a response to the stimulus. When we say manage our response to the stimulus that’s essentially saying that instead of it going blup, and like wide open maybe it just goes [blup]. Let me just unpack this a little bit.

If you’ve ever been sick for example, you’ll notice that when you’re sick or when you feel like garbage this happens a lot more easily than if you’re feeling great. This is why physical health is so tied to mental health because when you’re sick or tired, anything, the dog barks. Whereas, if you’re feeling good, something objectively bad just happened. That’s okay. The sun will come out tomorrow. You can kind of deal with it. That’s one of the reasons why physical health is so important to emotional health, but now let’s get to the third step. Then I see some awesome chats coming in and I’m going to read those but I’m kind of going crazy right now so I got to finish this before I lose it.

There’s avoiding the stimulus, there’s making the stimulus do less of this and more of this. There’s also some spiritual, secular and psychoanalytic ways of doing that. I personally think awesome stoicism is awesome and I think that [Inaudible 00:47:22] is awesome, I think Stephen Covey is awesome, I think there’s a lot of other good stuff too. Then the last part is no matter what, this is still going to happen. Sometimes this is good. We’re people so at some level we always have this. We’re never satisfied. The reason that human beings are the most dominant species on the planet in many ways is because we’re never satisfied. We’re like we can make this better, we can do this better and then we have progress and then we have electricity and we have Google hang out group coaching calls like this so it’s very cool.

Then the question just becomes, I’ve tried to minimize the just total toxic stimulus in my life. Then I’ve worked to manage my reaction to that toxic stimulus now when I do want to go [blup] and put a little bit in here how can I do that with things that aren’t going to make the situation worse? How do a lot of people do this? Drugs, sex, alcohol, other terrible things. Then negative thing happens, more bad things happens, downward spiral not good. Try to avoid the bad thing, try to minimize its impact.

I see some chats coming here. It’s about using SANE sweets, it’s about saying, okay, I am about to binge eat. I am just going to go eat a whole lot of food, but before I do that I am going to eat a half a head of cabbage.

No seriously. I am going to give myself permission to binge but before I do that I am going to make a giant pot of broccoli and I am going force myself to eat it and I’m going eat half a head of spinach, I’m going eat a giant green smoothie or I’m going to eat a bunch of celery or a bunch of sugar snap peas. I am just going to eat a bunch of vegetables. Why are you going to do that?

That in some way it’s going to take care of some of the volume that needs to take place and it’s going to make you some SANer choices after that. When you want to react to the emotional eating, again, I know it sometimes sounds a little bit silly, but like Anthony Robbins who has some great teachings as well, he had this advice that he gave in a tape that I listened to of this in the early 90s. If you’re feeling really bad just like jump out of your chair and just say something like, I’m so happy my feet don’t stink, and just like go, I’m so happy my feet don’t stink.

You’ll notice you can be super grumpy. If you do that it’s crazy and it’s artificial, but it will at least temporarily change your state. It’s also something that you could sort of say, okay, I’m like I’m actually going to do that because it’s so crazy and ridiculous, I can remember it so if I’m in an emotional state I need something that’s not just like subtle thing. I need a big thing, big blinking flashing light that I can listen to because of my brain is half off. I’m in this emotional state. The big jump up and wave your hands around from an inSANE eating emotional perspective, it’s have on hand a go-to vegetable that you will just eat a whole heck of a lot of before you eat anything else. Then ideally, the other stuff you’re going to eat is going to be SANE sweets. It is very hard to eat a lot of inSANE food if you put a pound of cabbage into your stomach beforehand.

Then what happens is actually you exceed your vegetable goals. We’re getting into the advanced stuff here. If want to feel great about yourself, if you’re feeling really bad and you’re about to do something that you think you might regret and you not only avoid doing that thing, but instead you do something that furthers your goals. A lot of people use exercise for this. They want to go crazy, but instead they go to the gym and they exercise. That builds up a huge amount of self-esteem and self-confidence because not only did I not drink alcohol or have unhealthy sexual relations or take illegal drugs, but I took that negative and I turned it into a positive. I know that’s not easy. I know sometimes it’s going to be something kind of crazy to jolt us out of that state, but hopefully, that is a long answer and is at least there’s some bits nuggets of helpful wisdom in there for you.

All right. What we’ve got here. All right. Looks like we’ve got some good stuff here. Chocolate is good for us. Yes, they are good.

Please give me some feedback. If that was not helpful please let me know or if it wasn’t and you want me to move on, please let me know too because it’s great feedback. Hopefully, that helps though with some of the emotional eating because again, it’s going to happen. We need to look at it holistically. We need to look at it SANEly, sanely, and say how do we tackle all three components of it. Hopefully, that is helpful. All right. Next question here.

The good news is that we already answered this one. This is that my biggest challenge is that my family, my husband and my 8-year-old does not wish to eat this way so I feel I have to prepare two meals. I’m also very limited with my time. I get home very late in the evening and I have very little time to make it dinner plus homework with my son. Dinner doesn’t always get the attention it needs. This has been a big challenge for the two plus years I’ve been trying to do food the JB way. Great question.

The cooking in bulk can be very helpful here. What I find is sometimes there’s what we call modular meals. Let me give you an example of tacos. You could make tacos and the taco meat and the guacamole and the sauce and the lettuce and the tomatoes. If you want to put some sautéed peppers on that.

What you can do in that case is like, one, you can try to convince everyone else in your family to go SANE. We can talk about that or instead of having to cook meals the base of the meal is the same and then maybe you have a taco salad and the other members of your family eat traditional tacos. The same thing can even apply with things like burgers.