Jonathan: Hey, what’s up, everybody? Jonathan Bailor and April Perry, and we are back. And we are recording a SANE show and we are so thrilled that you are with us here today. April, how are you doing?

April: I’m doing great. So excited for the whole world to go SANE! That’s my mission.

Jonathan: I love it. What is on the agenda, or in the mailbag, for today?

April: I have a whole mailbag because I’ve been collecting the questions. I have a lot of questions that come in because people are starting to get super excited about SANE. Real quick, I need to tell you. Alia came home from school yesterday. She said, “Hey, mom, I’ve got a couple of friends who have been watching me for the past year or so, and they both told me today, ‘Alia, we want to do what you’re doing.’” They want to learn all about SANE. I thought that was awesome. You have a big fan club growing here at the high school. Are you pretty excited about that?

Jonathan: I love it. I’m going to start doing the high school gymnasium motivational speeches.

April: Seriously, if you come to our area you’re just going to be surrounded – fans wanting your autograph. It’s kind of amazing.

Jonathan: I want to do it one-direction style. I want to see glitter posters, like, “SANE! Oh my gosh, SANE!”

April: We will do that. Oh, you know that song, “Fame! I’m gonna live forever?” We should do it as SANE! Wouldn’t that be awesome?

Jonathan: We’ll do a remix. I love it.

April: Yes, we’ll stop now, and we’ll go into the questions. We’re going to start with one about exercising. We had someone who said, “If my goal is to heal my body and my hormones, am I doing more harm than good if I exercise more often?” Because they understand, SANE is all about, eat more, exercise less, we don’t need to be doing weights every single day. But what if someone really wants to do more, so maybe swimming or extra weight-lifting? We talk about being active, so I would probably say, swimming, walking, yoga, all that kind of stuff, I roller blade all the time. But can you clarify on that, how much exercise is too much where we are actually going to harm ourselves or be starving our bodies calorically? Give us advice on this.

Jonathan: It really depends on what you are doing for exercise. Let me give you an example. My brother started boxing as a hobby and as a way to get exercise at one point. So, is taking shots to the head repeatedly from a very strong person a good way to get additional exercise, and is it good for you?

April: I’m trying not to laugh – yes, getting hit in the head repeatedly.

Jonathan: We think, “That’s crazy!” But when you think about one of the most popular forms of exercise, which is jogging on pavement while cars drive by, what you are doing is you are breathing in exhaust from cars while slamming your body thousands of times against pavement and concrete, it’s kind of like you’re boxing your entire body. However, if you said, “Hey, I really like swimming and palates and yoga and roller-blading and things like that,” yes, that’s fantastic. If you could do yoga every day of the week I would say, rock and roll. It’s totally about what type of exercise it is.

April: I have to add a little plug for yoga. Alia is taking yoga. She is a sophomore in high school and that is her P.E. She is doing yoga three days a week. Honestly, that girl is in such good shape. She laughs because she’s not flexible and she says, “I’m the one in the back always falling over when I do the tree pose.” She is so funny. But it has been awesome for her, so I’ll just share that. I would like to do yoga, but I haven’t started yet. I’m doing tree pose right now, though, as I am standing here recording.

But let’s talk about weight-lifting, because I have a friend who is just a phenomenal weight-lifter. She is ripped. You walk in her house and she comes with the tights, and you’re like, “Oh my God, you are so muscular.” And she loves to lift weights. If somebody likes lifting weights, how would that even fit into your life, though? Let’s say I do eccentric exercises on Tuesday and I push it hard, so my muscles are hurting for a full six days. I’m not there yet, but I’m getting there, I’m getting stronger. Then what would you say if I said, “Hey, my friend is going weight-lifting on Thursday and she wants me to come and do more weights with her.” And these are 20-pounders. What would you say?

Jonathan: Yes, there are a couple of ways you could weight-lift more frequently. As you know, it would be physically impossible to do eccentric exercise frequently simply because if you tried to do it with the same amount of weight that you did before, you would not be able to. And over-training when it comes to resistance exercise is very common. You just get sick, because resistance training is so intense that if you overdo it you’ll get the flu, you’ll get tired, because you are literally tearing your muscles, in a healthy way, but that’s how they grow back.

But to be clear, you could resistance train every day of the week if you split it up, and there are people who do this. “I’m going to do my arms on Monday and I’m going to do my legs on Tuesday, and I’m going to do my bench-press on Wednesday, I’m going to do my back on Thursday.” There is an inverse relationship between the intensity of exercise and the amount of it that you can do, so they would do more sets and more exercises with a lower level of intensity rather than doing fewer sets and fewer exercises with a higher level of intensity.

April: Can you do both?

Jonathan: You could do eccentric leg press, and then go off and do another leg exercise. You’re not going to be able to lift a lot of weight with that other leg exercise because your muscles will be fatigued.

April: Does it do anything for you?

Jonathan: Now we’re asking two questions: There is a question of can I do this, and is it okay? And there is another question of is it harming me or is it helping me? Yes, you can do it. Is it better to do more? No, it’s not. It’s like trying to make boiling water hotter. Once water is boiling, that’s as hot as it’s going to get. So, once your muscle fibers are torn, more medicine isn’t better. It’s about the right dose. But if you like doing it, if you wanted to just do some light weights and feel a good pump and feel the blood in your muscles, you could do that. You just want to be very careful not to over-train.

April: I think that makes sense. So, if there is a boot camp or a body works class at my gym, where you honestly have five-pound weights, eight-pound weights, you’re with friends, you just want to have music and do some stuff, you can.

Jonathan: Absolutely. If you just like to exercise you could do heavy squats, but then after you finish doing heavy squats, you’re not going to do another crazy, heavy thing. You would say, “Okay, I’m going to go do some lunges with my body weight. And then I’m going to go do this other thing.” They are called back-down sets, but we don’t need to talk about that.

April: This is helpful, though, because sometimes people say, “I just want to be up and exercising every day, and I feel like Jonathan is telling me not do.” And I think this is really important to clarify, no, Jonathan is not telling you not to exercise. But what I love is that when I’m eating really, really SANEly, when I am exercising eccentrically, at least once a week doing all of the weights as heavy as I possibly can, I hear your voice in my head saying, “Make it an 8, make it an 8,” As I’m lowering the weights and ready to curse. I don’t curse, but I was a little [Inaudible _00:08:20_].

As long as I’m doing those things, then if I can’t make it to the gym every day, or if I don’t get out to exercise every day, I don’t put that guilt on myself anymore. I used to think, “April, you’ve failed! Not only have you been impatient with your pre-schoolers all day, and you weren’t really kind in the middle of the night when you got up with the one who wet the bed, but you also didn’t even make it to the gym and exercise!” It sounds ridiculous saying this out loud, but that’s what I used to say to myself. I was literally up two or three times a night with kids, running around all day chasing kids, changing diapers, doing my work, trying to balance everything, and then at the end of the night I would say, “And on top of all of my failures, I also didn’t exercise. And I ate too much. Let’s just have some more ice cream.” It was ridiculous.

Jonathan: You’re exactly right, April, and I just want to clarify one thing, because you said people might have the mindset, and like you said, you have a little voice that is kind of talking to you, making you feel that way, and people might have a little voice that says, “Jonathan is saying I can’t exercise a lot.” Let me be very clear. You should do what helps you to achieve your goals. If your goal is, “I really become happy, and I am happy with the results, and it makes me emotionally satisfied to go to the gym and not do eccentric exercise,” then keep doing that.

I am only here, SANE is only here, so that if you are not happy with the results you are getting, and you want to make a change, we can help you make that change. We are not saying that if what you are doing is working, that you should change it. I will never say that, and I have never said that, and if what you are doing is working and you love it, I salute you, I give you a huge high-five.

April: I think you said that beautifully. And honestly, I feel like the biggest change for me was not exchanging exercise for sleep. That was huge, because I thought that was what was important, and my goal was to exercise every day, but then what I had to do to achieve that goal was sleep an hour less, which was putting me to five hours, or something like that, and it was really making me tired. So, I wasn’t happy. And now, SANE helps me achieve the bigger goal, which is long-term happiness and wellness and nutritional serenity.

I think that was awesome. Ready for the next mailbag question?

Jonathan: I’m ready.

April: All right. What is a good SANE alternative to sports drinks? My kids play basketball. I have three in basketball right now and they are always saying, “Hey, mom, you want to buy me Gatorade?” And I say, “Guys, that’s just tons of sugar, I’m not giving you a ton of sugar.” But then people talk a lot about sports drinks, saying this is really important because of the electrolytes. I don’t even know what an electrolyte is. Can you help me?

Jonathan: There is a really funny movie called, Idiocracy. It was directed by Mike Judge. It’s in the future, and the world has been taken over by people who are really not particularly intelligent. No one drinks water anymore. There is this big conglomerate which makes this stuff called Brondo. No one knows what it is, but they do know that it has electrolytes in it, and because it has electrolytes in it, they say, “It has electrolytes in it, so it has to be good for you.” And the crops are dying out because they start watering the crops with this stuff because, well, it has electrolytes in it!”

Anyway, so what are electrolytes? They are chemicals that you need in your body to produce energy and to function. You have vitamins, you have minerals, you have phytochemicals, you have electrolytes, you have salts, you have fatty acids. The point is, they are things which your body uses during exercise that you do need to replenish. For example, studies are clear that if were running a marathon and all you drank was a lot of water, you wouldn’t be in good shape because when you sweat, your sweat contains salt. And what you are replacing that with is something that doesn’t contain any salt, so you wouldn’t develop a salt imbalance and you would become dehydrated even though you were drinking a lot of water.

So there is science behind while exercising, to maximize athletic performance, which is its own goal – maximizing athletic performance and not getting diabetes are two totally different goals – there is an amount of simple sugars, there is an amount of salt, and there is an amount of electrolytes, and in certain cases, amino acids, that would help to optimize performance. Things like Gatorade and Powerade have gone the way of corporate nonsense because they are sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup.

If you are really dialed in to endurance exercise-type things, people take glucose packets, because like we said, there are different types of sugar, and high fructose corn syrup is not the type of sugar you would ever want to take in for athletic performance. You would want to be taking in things like glucose or ribose or other simple sugars that are actually used as energy. So, to really answer the question, no, current Gatorade and Powerade, anything that is sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup does more harm than good, I think.

April: So then, what would you drink instead?

Jonathan: It depends on what you are doing, I guess. The idea that just because I have a physically demanding job I have to drink a sports drink – people have had physically demanding jobs for a really long time before sports drinks.

April: So, if we are eating a full SANE diet, and just drinking water, and we’re healthy and feeling good, there is no problem.

Jonathan: Absolutely. There is absolutely no scientific evidence or historical record that says you must drink something other than water or things found directly in nature in order to have maximum human health.

April: Okay, because I think people are thinking, “Well, how am I going to get my electrolytes? What am I going to do?” And what you are saying is, eat SANEly, drink water. There may be some other situations, if someone is running a marathon or doing something else.

Jonathan: Let me be very clear. If you are doing something unnatural – running a marathon is unnatural.

April: Working is not unnatural.

Jonathan: Correct. If you want to do unnatural things, you have to do unnatural things, which sounds like I’m saying nothing. If you want to run 26 miles, you’re going to have to do a bunch of crazy, unnatural stuff to do that. You’d be taking glucose packets, you’d be doing all kinds of stuff. If you want to have abs when you are 65, that’s unnatural, so you’re going to have to do unnatural things. If you’re just kids playing outside…

April: Shooting a ball.

Jonathan: Or adults, you don’t need intense athletic performance-enhancing substances to help you do that. Your body is brilliant and will take care of you.

April: I love it. Thinking back to if we or our children are doing what has been done by humans for years, building a house, moving rocks, all these things, chopping down trees, anything that is physical like that, people have been doing that forever, and never had Gatorade. Same thing with our kids. Honestly, I take my children to basketball. They’re just kind of running up and down the court for a while, they sit down, they’re not even working up a sweat, necessarily, and then they think they need Gatorade. This is really helpful. I’m going to have them listen to this episode.

Jonathan: And April, can I give kind of an anecdote?

April: Yes.

Jonathan: When we talk about things like Zipfizz, Gatorade and Powerade, these are only options for a very privileged minority of people in the world. There is even a huge number of people in the United States that participate in very vigorous athletics. I went to a very, very poor Catholic High School. The idea that during our 98-degree, with 100% humidity, Columbus, Ohio, in full pads, two-a-day football practices would have anything else but water out of a hose provided to us would be ridiculous. That was not even an option. We couldn’t afford it. I’m not talking about, I walked to school naked in the snow both ways. But sometimes, these things are a blessing, maybe, for a small minority, but they’re not required.

April: All right. I think that’s incredible.

Next question. We’re going to talk quickly about digestive issues that come with increasing vegetable intake. Talk a little bit about this. This one was kind of up at the top. She said, “I felt great my first week drinking green smoothies, but not so much anymore, so I’ve cut back, having had digestive issues, having a lot of spinach, romaine, carrots, bell peppers.” So when you’re all of a sudden eating a ton of vegetables, what do you say if someone is complaining about having digestive issues? Do they just stop?

Jonathan: The way you phrased that was perfect, when you said, “All of a sudden, I’m eating a lot of vegetables.” That is the problem. What we need to do is, the average American consumes less than one serving of vegetables per day, so if we’re used to taking in fewer than 10 grams of fiber per day, and then the next day we take in 70 grams of fiber in three hours, we’re going to have very, very big problems. Very big problems. What I would strongly recommend is increasing your vegetable intake by maybe one to three servings per week, gradually working your way up.

And then, green smoothies are great, but they are also a way to eat a lot of fiber very fast. People ask, how many meals should I eat per day? In some ways that is a function of, if you try to eat ten servings of vegetables in one meal, you’re going to have problems. If you eat ten servings of vegetables divided across four different timeframes, that is going to work a lot better. So, I would ease my way into it, I would break them into smaller batches. And then there are things like taking lemon juice or undistilled apple cider vinegar – these are very good for you, they make your smoothies taste delicious – and they naturally help with digestion.

April: Okay, that’s a great answer. There is just one more here at the bottom. I may have time for two more, we’ll see. Someone says, “Tomorrow is six weeks since I went SANE. I’m disappointed that I can’t tell from how my clothes fit that I’ve changed one tiny bit in my body size. I’m probably 90% SANE, a small bit of dark chocolate each day. I don’t weigh myself, but I’m looking at how my clothes are fitting and they’re just the same. AM I NORMAL? Is it normal that after six weeks I would see no change in my body. I’m trying to be patient, but it is hard. But I DO FEEL GREAT, so that is definitely a bonus, but please tell me if I should be noticing a change by now.” What do you say?

Jonathan: It depends on what we mean by SANE eating. I’m sorry to give these kinds of answers, but people who know what they are talking about generally give these kinds of answers. SANE is not, you’re doing this. SANE is a spectrum, so if I’m at the just getting started level of SANity, which would be something like six servings of non-starchy vegetables, three servings of protein, two to three servings of whole food fats, and then other stuff, then this would be absolutely normal. And it is awesome that you’re feeling great. That is going to happen no matter what.

However, if your definition of SANE is, I am eating exclusively non-starchy vegetables, nutrient-dense protein and whole food fats, in that order, so my numbers are twelve servings of vegetables, four to six servings of protein, three to six servings of whole food fats and that is all I’ve eaten every single day for six weeks, then I would say that that is not normal. So I need to know more about what the definition of SANE is.

April: So, this person may be eating SANEr, but not SANE.

Jonathan: That’s exactly right, and like you’ve said in previous shows, you’ve put it really well. SANE is not magic. The more you put into SANE the more you get out. Previously, the less you ate and the more you exercised, the more results you got. Those results were counter-productive long-term, but you did get more results. Now it’s, the more SANE you go and the higher the quality of your eating, the higher the quality of the exercise, the faster the results you will get.

April: I think this is awesome. I have one more cute story to tell you. Alia has a formal dance this Saturday and we ordered a dress online and we didn’t know if she was going to need a small or medium. We weren’t sure, we measured her, we didn’t know. Anyway, she went for the small because she didn’t want it really baggy. So we got the dress and when you zip it up, it’s zipped up. She looks great in it but it is a snug dress. And she said, “Mom, we’re getting ready for this dance on Saturday. I know a lot of girls aren’t eating this week because they want to look good in their dress. I’m just going to be blending a whole lot more smoothies and eating more vegetables.” It was just really cute to see her, where she knew, “Hey, I’m getting ready for this event, I want to look my best, let me make sure I have a whole lot of vegetables in my diet and that I am being really careful to eat SANEly.” Isn’t that a fun story?

Jonathan: It’s a super fun story and it really warms my heart, because her having the mindset of, “Hey, I want to see better results so I am going to pursue way more of the positive,” rather than, “I’m just going to not eat anything.” How different of a mindset is that? That’s so awesome.

April: I know, we’re really excited. Thanks to you, I think this mailbag has been a success. I feel happy, I feel excited, I feel like all my questions are always answered beautifully by you, and I really appreciate the time that you’ve spent. Thank you so much, Jonathan.

Jonathan: Thank you so much, April, it’s a pleasure, and I love the opportunity to answer these questions. I think the thing that is most exciting about questions like this is that there is an old saying that you can judge the intelligence of a person by the questions they ask. And these are fantastic questions and the fact that we’re asking these questions, versus how can I trick myself into eating tissues so that I don’t get hungry anymore? The fact that you are even asking these questions and making these strides, a year from today you are going to look back and you are going to have these questions and so many other questions answered and you are going to have so many wins under your belt, you are just changing the way you are perceiving food, and you’re healing that, and I think that’s fabulous.

So I appreciate that and I hope you enjoyed the show as much as I did. I loved the questions. And remember – stay SANE.