Am I Doing SANE Wrong If I‘m Not As Thin As I’d Like To Be? #SANE

Jonathan: Hey, what’s going on, everybody?  Jonathan Bailor and April Perry.  We are back with another SANE Show and actually have Part 1 of a two-part epic saga that will begin today because it was actually very, very cool last night because my delightful co-host, April Perry, whom you have not heard from yet but is there — don’t worry, she’s there.  She’s going to come on soon.  I’m just too excited.

She called me very transparently and very awesomely last night with an issue she’s been dealing with which I immediately said, “April, oh my goodness.  If you are brave enough and kind enough to share this on our next recording session, I think it could literally save people’s lives; at the very least, save their sanity.”  So we’re just going to rock and roll on that.  I want to just tip my invisible hat to April because we’re going to open the kimono psychologically a little bit today and that takes a lot of courage and I hope you find it helpful.

April Perry, welcome to the show.

April: On that note, no pressure.  Okay, I’m literally shaking for this episode and I don’t want it to turn into, “Who is April?  Why is she over here?”  I have tissues because this is super-emotional for me, super hard for me.  It is bravery.  I know there’s a lot of really nice people out there on the Internet; there’s also a lot of mean people so sometimes I have a hard time opening my heart.

You know what?  You’re right.  If this can help someone else who’s going through the same thing that I’m going through, then it’s worth it and I trust you, Jonathan.  Our family trusts you.  That’s why I’m here.   Do you want me to just start sharing my story?  Give a synopsis of what I called you about yesterday?

Jonathan: Please do, yes.  Just rock and roll.

April: Okay.  I’ve been SANE for about two years.  Jonathan has totally healed me from having to count calories, from having to worry about if I’m eating or not or doing math at the dinner table or worrying all the time about what I was eating, if this is the right thing to eat.  I feel like SANE has completely transformed my life which is why I’m the co-host here which is why I’ve helped create the SANE family’s program, why my daughter has gone SANE and totally changed her body and her life.  Jonathan has deeply impacted my life for the good.

A lot of what we’ve talked about in previous episodes has been, “Jonathan, what if I want my body to look better?” or “What if I need to be in better shape?” or “What if I want to have better results from going SANE?”  A lot of our conversations have been, “Okay, April, if you really want to get these unnatural results, you’re going to have to do something unnaturally.  You’re going to have to spend more time at the gym or you’re going to have to eat differently.  It’s going to take some time and energy.”

For the most part over the last several months and couple of years, I’ve felt like I’m in a good spot.  I’m healthy and happy.  My doctors aren’t concerned about me.  I have very few sick days, if any.  Life is really good.  So that’s kind of our baseline.

I had an experience recently where I was talking with a friend who is extremely slender, I think probably about my same height but probably, I don’t know, forty pounds less than I am — extremely slender.  I admire this friend a lot.  She said to me, “Hey, April, if you do what I do with my diet, you could lose your weight.”

Now, I wasn’t really talking about weight even at the moment so my initial response as a female is, “So does she think I’m fat?  Do I look fat?  Do I look like I’m super overweight?  Am I doing SANE wrong?  Have I completely missed the boat on this?  What’s my problem?  Why is she saying that?  Why do I need to lose weight?”  All this starts going through my mind and I kind of went into panic mode, forgetting everything I’ve learned from Jonathan over the last two years.  Sorry, Jonathan.  I did.  It just kind of all of a sudden hit me.

I thought — and she was saying it with such love; it wasn’t critical, it was just like, “Oh, would you like to lose that weight because you could do what I do.”  So I had that little issue go on and then I thought, “Well, let me look at what you’re doing.”

She’s eating SANE foods.  It was like vegetables, nutrient-dense protein, whole food fats, some fruit in there.  I mean, she had some grains but I could replace them with vegetables.  I thought, “Okay, she’s eating SANEly.  Maybe she knows how to eat SANE better than I do because I do have extra pounds than she does.”  So I thought, “Well, maybe she knows something I don’t know.”  So I thought I would try it.

What ended up happening is, after about sixteen hours, I was so hungry — like, sick hungry — to the point where I couldn’t focus on my kids, I couldn’t focus on anything; I just kept thinking, “How many hours till I can eat again?”  I felt this panic and that’s why I called Jonathan because, all of a sudden, I was thinking, “Jonathan, I’m trying to get better results but the information I’m being taught is leaving me feeling awful but if I stop doing what makes me feel awful, then maybe I’m just going to keep gaining weight or maybe I’ll just never look as good as people think I should.”

All this just started going in my head and so I just called and said, “What question could we even discuss on a podcast that could help me deal what I’m dealing with right now because I feel awful.”

There you go.

Jonathan: April, again, I really want to appreciate explicitly your willingness to share this because I know it’s hard and I know that you are not the only person who has these feelings.  The key for me in what you just said is this friend, who with all the love in the world, she said, “If you do what I do, you can look the way I look.”  In saying that, she was judging your success relative to, or judging your body structure relative to hers.

April: Yes.

Jonathan: So there is an assumption there that she looks correct or better than you look.  I think we can definitely get into — it’s very simple on how to look any way you want.  I can tell anybody very simply how to look however they want.  The question though becomes — you shared with me some information about this friend and about what she does to look the way she does and without getting into too many specifics, I will use the male version of this conversation to just be kind of respectful to everybody.  Hopefully, that will be helpful to folks.

Imagine that I, as a male — and let’s be general here that men want to build muscles and females want to burn fat.  Hypothetically, let’s say that that’s the way this works.  Guys want to build muscle and women want to burn fat.  Not one hundred percent true but just for illustrative purposes.

Guy who wants to build muscle — Jonathan Bailor — goes out with a friend who has an unnatural amount of muscle.  Say he is forty-five years old, he’s older than I am; he looks phenomenal; he’s just built-up muscle; looks like the “Rock” Dwayne Johnson.  I’m like, “Man, you objectively look good.”  Probably by some people’s standards, objectively, you look better than I do with your shirt off and in a bathing suit.  He says, “Jonathan, you could look the way I look if you do what I did.”

Then I said, “Well, what do you do?”  He says, “Well, I take steroids.”  I know everyone might be like, “Oh my gosh.”  But it’s incredibly common and there’s a small variation on taking steroids which is called hormone replacement therapy which is becoming more and more and more common.  Of course, I could look like this guy if I did what he does.  The question is, Is it worth it to me to do what they’re doing to get the results that they’re getting?

Notice that, April, neither you nor I, we’re not making any value judgments.  We’re just saying that of course, there are things we can do to look a certain way but what we have to do is, we have to take responsibility and it’s not easy and this is why we have to surround ourselves with people who share our same values to say, For a guy, is having big biceps when I’m forty-five worth shrinking my testes?  You can do it because if you take steroids, that might happen.

What a woman might need to ask herself is, If I’m in my forties or thirties and I’ve had three, four, five children and I want to do other things than focus constantly on how much I’m eating, what do I want?  Do I want to look healthy and not have to think constantly about what I’m doing or do I want to be skinny — unnaturally skinny — and be hungry and feel miserable or is there a third alternative?

This is what I get so excited about about SANEity, which is, Can I surround myself with information and people who understand and believe that beauty is not defined in females by being able to see one’s ribs and is not defined in males by having big arms?  It’s about much more than that and it’s much more proportionate to health rather than physical appearance.

I know it’s pretty esoteric but if people just want to know, as guys, how to get big muscles, I can explain that to you in sixty seconds but it’s not fun and it’s not enjoyable and it’s not something you can sustain for the rest of your life and it’s not healthy.  If females want to know how to have very low body fat percentage for the rest of their lives, I can explain how to do that in sixty seconds but it’s not going to be something that’s going to make you happy.  It’s going to make you skinny but it’s not going to make you happy.

April: I appreciate you saying that.  I think that that’s absolutely where I need to start because I think it wasn’t even so much that I thought, “Oh, I really want to lose a lot of weight.”  That really wasn’t even on my mind that day or that week.  I was actually feeling pretty happy; like, I was feeling fine.  I think a lot of times, especially as females, I think we size each other up and I don’t think it’s even a conscious thing; I think it just happens.  I think in what my friend was saying, it was essentially —

I know she didn’t mean to hurt me but I think it was essentially saying, “If I were living inside your body, I would want to do something about that.”  I think that’s where it feels — it’s hard to hear that from anyone and especially when you maybe have some insecurities or you feel like, “Yeah, maybe I could look better.  Maybe I’m doing something wrong.”

But it did also bring up some good questions that I want to cover today because I don’t want it to just turn into like, “Okay, April, every time you feel like your body isn’t where you want it to be, you just need to sit back and say, “It’s fine, it’s fine” because maybe there are some things that I could easily be doing to optimize where I am that would help me to feel happier and lighter.

One of the things that I do have to say — Eric talked to me for like two hours yesterday.  He was so great.  He sat with me and he said, “April, who are you trying for?”  That question actually came from my friend who lives in Oahu in Hawaii and she said, “In Oahu, the women don’t get all dressed up and do their hair and makeup and wear high heels and walk around the island.  If they do, the other women look at each other and say, “Who is she trying for?”  I love that because the culture there is, “Hey, you get up; you get dressed; you hug your family; you maybe go snorkeling; you enjoy your time.”  You don’t have to get all primped and prepared because you’re not trying to impress anybody.

So when Eric asked me that yesterday, “Who are you trying for?” I’m like, “Really he loves me, which is the most important thing, but I feel like there’s just still some things inside myself.  Whether it’s because of the media or whether it’s because of my friends and because this past year, a lot has been growing in my business and I’m in front of a lot of people.  There is just a lot going on where I feel like I want to look and feel my best.  I want to know if I can do it through SANE or if I just need to say, “This is the best that I’m going to get” and I just need to stop working towards it.

I’d like to hear your response to that and then I want to go into some specific questions because I have them all written down.

Jonathan: You can do it through SANE absolutely.  In fact, you mentioned your friend.  I mean, she is eating SANEly.  She is just doing it with a level of priority that we’re not.  Any professional bodybuilder or any professional athlete or any professional fitness competitor is revolving their eating around non-starchy vegetables, nutrient-dense protein, and whole food fats.  Depending on how much they exercise, they may add a little bit more starch in there but that’s because they’re exercising so much.

April: Okay.

Jonathan:  Put it this way.  No human being on the planet will ever get better results eating inSANEly than they would eating eating SANEly.  The only question is, if we want to maintain an unnatural appearance, you will need to execute SANE eating at an unnatural level.  I will give an example of what, for example, a fitness competitor would do to look the way they do because it’s very, very simple; it’s just not easy and it’s not enjoyable.

Here’s what you do to become a fitness competitor if you’re a female.  Four to six times per day, you would eat a serving of an incredibly lean source of protein — either a can of tuna fish or like a boiled chicken breast.  Yes, this is going to sound disgusting because they’re not eating for taste; they’re eating for results.  A very lean source of protein along with non-starchy vegetables and then either one serving of whole food fats or, depending on how much you’re exercising, you would do potentially a little bit of starch but usually you would only do it on certain days.

What you have is just a very plain one serving of nutrient-dense protein, one serving of whole food fats, and like three servings of non-starchy vegetables.  You do that four times per day, once every four hours, no exceptions ever.  That’s what you do.  You carry around Tupperware containers with you when you go to restaurants.  You carry around Tupperware containers on a plane.  That’s it.  If you do that, you will radically drop your body fat percentage and you will look however you want to look.

However, most people do not want to do that.  In fact, even fitness competitors don’t do that consistently; they do it pre-contest and then they go — you’ll have contest weight and then regular weight.  Often times, even fitness competitors don’t do that.  The only people who often do that year-round are people who may, on some level, if you actually look at the definition, have an eating disorder because the definition of an eating disorder is eating preoccupies one’s life.  That is a disorder.  We are not living to eat; we are eating to live.

Think about SANE, looking normal and healthy over here, which is, you eat non-starchy vegetables, nutrient-dense protein, whole food fats, and low-fructose fruits in that order and you treat yourself occasionally.  You eat when you’re hungry; you stop when you’re full.  That would make you healthy and at a normal weight, based on all your other factors in your life.  Then if you want to take that and eliminate taste from the equation completely and say “I just want results”, you work towards four to six plain meals per day consistently always and then you just pick where you want to go on that spectrum.

April: Can you ever over-eat vegetables?  That’s one of my questions.

Jonathan: No.

April: Okay.  No matter how many vegetables I eat, it’s not going to make me heavier or store more fat.

Jonathan: It’ll make you bloated.  If you eat sixteen servings of spinach, you will get bloated and have to go to the bathroom constantly but it is not possible to take in so many vegetables that you store surplus fat.

April: Okay.  Another question that I just — I feel like these are just awful for me to go through, so thank you.  I want to know if I have a problem with portion sizes.  Here is why.  I’ve actually gone through and read most of that book “Mindless Eating” where they talk about things like if people have a bigger plate or if they send the soup in a tube under the table into the bowl, people just kind of keep eating.

I don’t know if I’m eating too much.  I mean, in a SANE lifestyle, is there anything that would be helpful for me to measure out?  Not vegetables but the proteins and the fats — would it be helpful for me to do a little better job measuring that so that I’m more in line with what the SANE eating optimum levels are?

Jonathan: Fats would be the only area I would be particularly concerned with, assuming you’re eating nutrient-dense sources of protein.  If you’re eating ground crap conventional beef, which is not SANE, that would be in ‘Other Fats’.

April: Okay.

Jonathan: But it’s very easy.  People just say, “Oh, healthy fats” so they put four tablespoons of coconut oil in the pan with their eggs.  There’s no reason to ever cook with four tablespoons of coconut oil.  It’s not needed and it’s not healthy.  That’s also why oils are considered “other fats” on the same spectrum.  We have to be very careful though when we say, “Am I eating too much?”  There’s a wonderful book called, I think, “Why Diets Don’t Work”.  It’s by Dr. Sandra Aamodt or something like that.  Brilliant.

The whole book talks about deep science that is very consistent with what we talk about in SANE eating and just reiterates you have a set point — which we’ve talked about — and like, having children affects your set point, the lack of sleep affects your set point, environmental toxins, age, gender, various medications — they all affect your set point.  If your goal is to look thinner than what is your set point, you could be eating too much at a much lower caloric threshold than “Am I eating too much to look normal and healthy for who I am?”  I’ve seen you and you look normal and healthy for your life circumstance.

If you want to be slimmer than you currently are, you will need to get more precise with when and how much SANE foods you’re eating and with the type and quantity of exercise that you’re doing and potentially consider taking certain supplements which may not be ideal for your health but will slim you down.  Those are the three areas that you could work with.

April: Okay.  So what I would love to do is, I have one more question for this podcast.  Then in the next podcast, can we pretend like I just met you and I want to actually talk about how much I weigh, what my goals are, and you could give me a prescription.  Can we do that?

Jonathan: Absolutely, yes.

April: Okay.  So my last question for this podcast is, Is it possible to eat too often on SANE?  Let me preface this because I know the whole benefit of SANE is that you eat when you’re hungry, you stop when you’re full.  Here’s what I’m noticing.  Sometimes I am eating because it’s like, “Oh, I normally eat at this time” where, in talking with my friend, I realized I should really ask myself that question, “Am I really hungry right now?”  Because if I’m not hungry and I’m just eating because other people are eating or because there’s food out, then really I’m not eating when I’m hungry and stopping when I’m full.

Do I really know when I’m full?  Because that’s the other thing.  I feel like as I’ve been talking with other people about how they really do limit how many times they eat and they limit how much they eat, it’s because if they’d had a stressful day or they’ve had a lot going on in their lives, they might just eat a lot more, not even knowing, and they might eat more often, not even being hungry.

I feel like that’s something I just haven’t even thought about for the last couple of years.  I’ve just been eating whenever I felt like it because I was eating SANE foods but I’m wondering if, being a little bit more mindful of that and drinking more water to see if I was just thirsty or was I hungry or having more set times to eat would be beneficial for me or would that just not have any effect?

Jonathan: It would be beneficial for sure.  To be very clear, when we talk about SANE eating, we talk about “eat when you’re hungry, stop when you’re full.”  Implicit in that is “eat when you’re actually hungry and stop when you’re actually full” because, as you said, we don’t encourage emotional eating; we don’t encourage getting over full.  There’s the cover of the book and then there is the actual inside the book where we go much much deeper.  It’s absolutely the case — mindful eating.

When we talk about SANE, we talk about a set of foods to eat, period.  Then we talk about the SANE mindset which is, if you want to make eating the sole focus of your life, it’s totally fine; we’re not here to judge.  We’re just here to say you don’t have to make eating the sole focus of your life and you can look great — you might not look the way you want to look.

Just like no matter how many times I do bench-press, I will never have my chest muscles – the way they are attached to my shoulders, if you look at myself and you look at my father and you look at my brother, we don’t have big chest muscles.  If you look at YouTube videos, you’ll see fun comments about that, like, “Hey Jonathan, do you ever work your chest muscles?”  There’s nothing I can do about that.  I could get chest implants and then I would have bigger chest muscles but I’m doing the best with the hand I am dealt.

Without a question, SANE is not saying, “Hey, just eat SANE foods.  If you get emotionally stressed, use SANE foods as a drug and enjoy them.  No, no, no.  We definitely want to be mindful of what we’re eating always and we want to see food as therapeutic but I do want to celebrate the fact that if anyone gets the awesome opportunity to meet you and you are in the state that you’re currently in and they understand who you are and what you’ve gone through in your life and the fact that you can just be like, “Yeah, I just eat food, whatever.  I don’t really think about it.  Sometimes I eat way beyond when I’m full; sometimes I eat when I’m not hungry; and I’m still able to look this way.”

People would be like, “Holy crap.  I would think most people, if they don’t pay attention to their eating at all like that, that’s why seventy percent of Americans are grossly overweight or obese.  So you’re able to really not think about this at all; great.  Yes, if you want to look super great, you’re going to have to think about it a little bit more but it’s pretty cool that you can look great without thinking about it at all.

April: I love how you put it into perspective.  I think that’s really helpful.  As we get ready to close this podcast, I’ll just share one more story that just made such an impact on me and I just hope that those who are listening can hear the logic and the compassion in your voice and what you have to offer the world that’s so unique.

I have a friend who’s in the SANE Program and she said, “This is the first time I feel like someone has actually cared about me and my wellbeing and not just how I look.”  I feel like that’s huge right there but, just the final story, I’ll share here.  Then I’m super excited just to talk a little bit more about what I can do and what I feel excited to do because I’m starting to get some ideas in the next podcast.

It was with Alia.  After I’d had this conversation with the friend, I didn’t tell Alia how I’d felt hurt or kind of judged or how I felt inadequate.  It was probably my own issue; it wasn’t intended to be that way so I don’t want to say it in this way.  I just said, “Hey Alia, I’m thinking I want to get some better results with SANE because I just kind of have been eating SANE but not really thinking about it as much.  So here’s a few things that I’m going to change.  I’m going to try what my friend has been doing.  This is the first day — day one.

Alia said, “Oh, that sounds like a great idea.  Sure, let’s do it.”  It sounded super logical.  So Alia comes along with me and the two of us do it together, which is actually really fun having my sixteen-year-old daughter here with me to kind of go through it.  So she ate probably, I think, it was half as much as we normally eat.  We literally cut it in half because we eat a ton of vegetables and I have five egg whites.  We really minimized it.  She ate about half as much as normal and then she went off to school with a lunch that was half as big as normal.

When she got home, she got home right during the afternoon when I was ready to call you, I was so frustrated.  I said to Alia, “Forget it.  This is ridiculous.  I am so hungry.  I’m so frustrated.”  She goes, “Oh, Mom, I was going to tell you the same thing.”  She said, “I got to school.  I was hungry by the time I got to school.  And then I had a test.  I couldn’t even think during my test.  I have such a headache right now.  I’ve got to eat dinner right now.”

And I’d already made dinner in the Crock-Pot.  She pulls it out and she’s like, “I’ve got to eat.  I’m starving.”  I apologized to her the whole night.  I just said, “Alia, I’m so sorry.  I’m so sorry I did that to you.”  It wasn’t like I did it to her but I felt like if my own inadequacies or my own feelings or my own perception of where I’m lacking is then being projected onto someone else to maybe magnify some feelings of inferiority that they might have in our society which then causes them to be less happy, to be hungry, to not be able to focus on their life or their tests or have joy.  I can’t live like that.

That’s why I’m here with you.  That’s why I’m even talking about this because I want people who are starving and hungry to know that there is another option and, yes, they might not look super skinny but I feel like, as a society, when we start to say, “That’s okay.  There’s something that’s more important than that.”  I mean, last night, when I finally ate dinner, I talked to you and you said, “Go enjoy your dinner.”

So I went and I enjoyed my dinner.  I played songs on the piano for like forty-five minutes.  My kids were all playing around me.  I sat on the carpet with Grace and we were wrestling with our puppy.  She’s six months old now.  It’s super fun.  We had this wonderful evening and I was full and satisfied and happy and not thinking for one second when I could eat breakfast or saying, “I’m not going to eat.  I’m not going to eat.  I’m not going to eat.”  I lived like that my whole life.  I was just so glad I felt like, “Jonathan, you’ve given me my life back.”  Thank you.

Jonathan: My pleasure, April.  I know we’re out of time but I just have to add one thing to that.  By the time this show airs, this will be old news and we’ll have a different world and this is, in no way, shape, or form, an endorsement or anything like that.  We live in a world today — first of all, there is no man out there who ever feels the way you just described.  It is the last shred of women as second-class citizens that we are carrying around in a society who now actually has a woman running for the highest position in the world.

If it helps at all, if it helps at all, I see this societal construct of a female has to carry around this burden in her brain of “if I don’t look supranormal — no guy that I know is — like, if a guy is thin or muscular, people are like ten bonus points because it’s assumed that men don’t have that expectation put upon them.  But if you look at the press around the female who’s running for president, there’s always talk about appearance; there’s always talk about this.  That literally sickens me because if you just look — it is absurd.

It is absurd that core to the female — the definition of being female in our culture is — I mean, I’m sorry, we’ll have to wrap this because I don’t want to get too into it but no one will say, when you first see a picture of a man, you’re usually not like, “Oh, he looks great.”  But even the way we complement females is like, “Oh, you look great” or “Wow, she’s beautiful.”  The concept of that physical appearance is the number one priority in a female’s life is misogynistic and degrading.

If it helps, any person who makes you feel “less than” because beauty — external, superficial, misogynistic beauty is not your top priority; I would recommend that you tell that person to get in a time machine and go back to the 1920s because we’re in the 2020s almost — not the 1920s — and I and no other rational human being — and please don’t subscribe to this podcast if you disagree with what I’m about to say — should define the quality of a female by her physical appearance.

Anyway, I’m going to calm down and we’re going to talk more on the next episode.  But if you’re a female and you’re listening, your value is not defined by your appearance and if your man and you’re listening and you ever make a female feel like her value is determined by her physical appearance, you’re not a real man.  That’s all I got to say.  I’m excited for our next episode.

April: You’re awesome, Jonathan.  Do you want me to close up?

Jonathan: I will just say one last thing.

April: Okay.

Jonathan: All that said, if you want to be a jacked dude, that’s cool.  And if you want to be a jacked woman that’s really thin, that’s cool.  Just please don’t make anyone else feel “less than” because they don’t share those values.

In the next episode, if you are one of those people who does want to get better results, that’s cool.  I love seeing veins in my abs.  That’s a priority for me.  But I would never make anyone feel less than because that is not their priority.  If you want to see veins in your abs, then stay tuned because in our next episode, April and I will talk a little bit about how you can see veins in your abs.  How does that sound?

April: I don’t know if that’s quite my goal but, yes, let’s move towards that.

Jonathan: All right.  Well, thank you, everybody, for joining us.  As you can tell, this has been an awesome episode and it’s only Part 1 of 2 so be sure to tune into the next show.  Until then, stay SANE.