Get a SANE Family and Give Yourself Permission Not To Be Perfect

Table of Contents

Learn the exact foods you must eat if you want to finally lose weight permanently. Click here to download your free Weight Loss Food List, the “Eat More, Lose More” Weight Loss Plan, and the “Slim in 6” Cheat Sheet…CLICK HERE FOR FREE “HOW TO” WEIGHT LOSS GUIDES

Real-Life Insights and Takaways

  • Working to have a healthy body is more of a pain point for some people than it is for others.
  • Our society has invented the concept of “kid food.” There was no such thing as “kid food” prior to WW II.
  • In many traditional cultures that don’t eat a processed Western diet, the kids eat the same foods as the adults.
  • The definition of “kid cereal” is the kind of cereal that is full of sugar.
  • We as a culture have to understand together that a calorie is not a calorie, and that what is defined as kid food is usually the opposite of what we should be feeding children.
  • Cigarette smoking rates are lower than they used to be and as a society we are better at discouraging children to not smoke. This proves that as a society we can make promote healthier living.
  • Billionaire dollar advertisements are targeted at children to get them to want sugary, processed foods.
  • We may underestimate our kids and think they are not smart enough or disciplined enough to refuse processed foods.
  • Truth campaigns let people know that they were being tricked by cigarette companies. As children and adults learn they are being manipulated and tricked with addictive and toxic substances to get them to buy processed foods, they will want to stand for their freedom to be healthy and happy.
  • A global values driven mission can change the way families live, including their eating habits.
  • If you have ever gotten your kids to do something that isn’t necessarily accepted as a whole by society, you can consider how you did that and infuse those same values and behaviors with respect to eating.
  • Educate your children about what is going on. You don’t want to trick your kids into healthy eating.
  • You can talk to your children about what causes diabetes or how your pancreas works, etc. while you are making lunch in the morning or driving in the car together.
  • You can figure out how to make small changes in one area of your life and make slow transitions.
  • You can’t avoid all second-hand smoke, but if you’re body isn’t inundated with smoke and toxins your chances of getting lung cancer are greatly decreased. It is the same with the kind of foods we put into our bodies.
  • The issue is that kids today are getting 70% of their calories from junk food.
  • You can avoid a lot of problems, just by having quality food in your home.
  • We often have a tendency to “catastrophize” and we feel like if we can’t do something perfectly then it’s not worth doing.
  • There are many people online that are sharing positive solutions for good, (i.e. Super Healthy Kids, etc.). Positive peer encouragement from others can help our families make healthy choices.

—NEXT ACTION—
Identify one thing you can change in your household this month. (i.e. Not buying soda for one month.) Focus on small improvements over time instead of feeling overwhelmed by big changes all at once.

SANE Soundbites

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  • 3:57 – 4:35, “The concept of kids food is that a concept that we’ve invented. There was no such thing as kids’ food prior to World War II. Kids ate what adults ate, and a lot of traditional cultures that don’t eat processed western diet, there is no difference between what children eat and what adults eat and in fact, one of the things that makes me the most upset is that the people in our world who are the most dependent on proper nutrition–kids food is garbage.”
  • 5:10 – 5:41, “We, as a culture, need to hopefully, we understand that a calorie isn’t a calorie anymore, and first we need to understand that because otherwise it’s just like don’t feed your kids too much and you’re fine. Now, we know that. Unfortunately, we live in a culture where the term, “kids’ food” and what you should feed children is literally the opposite of what you should feed anybody, especially children.”
  • 5:43 – 6:31, “I was reading a biography on Ronald Reagan and he shared a story that the butcher gave him a piece of liver. The butcher said take this home and feed it to your cat. Ronald Reagan didn’t have a lot of money at the time and so his mom cooked that for the family dinner and they were grateful to be able to have this liver to eat. If you fed liver to my children or to any children nowadays it would be like a crime. What are you doing? Why are feeding children liver? Things have totally changed. Not only are we not eating really healthy foods, but it’s this whole separation between what the adults eat because adults want to be healthy and what the kids eat, because oh, the kids can just take it because they’re little. That’s really common.”
  • 7:38 – 8:08, “We need to tell people who permit sugary crap to get marketed to our children that that is not appropriate because if a child sees 47 advertisements about this is great, it’s fuel to play. You can’t win against that. They’ve got a billion dollars working against you. We need to change the system itself.”
  • 8:17 – 9:10, “I was actually just talking with Alia, because she’s a sophomore in high school right now. I was asking her, do a lot of your friends at school, are they smoking? Is that happening? She said, mom, “We’re not dumb.” Even though in our family and our religion we don’t smoke, she just said, in general the friends around her, know that smoking is bad for you and there’s not a lot of smoking going in general. That gave me a lot of hope for society. She said people think that high school kids are really dumb, but we’re actually not. We are actually really smart. We’re actually really savvy on what’s going on and what the trends are. I think sometimes we underestimate our kids and we think that oh, yeah, they couldn’t possibly learn how to eat healthily because they’re so weak or they’re not disciplined enough and that’s just not true.”
  • 9:35 – 10:19, “Then the truth campaigns came out and what they found is that hey kids, cigarette manufacturers are trying to manipulate you. They’re tricking you. They’re being deceptive. And that really resonated. And we found that was a good approach. I think as our kids and adults start to learn that they are being manipulated and tricked with addictive and toxic substances, substances which are as addictive, substances which are as toxic as cigarettes, that you’re not going to take my freedom away from me. You’re not going to take away my freedom to be healthy and happy.”
  • 10:55 – 11:50, “There’s a lot of things that entire families, adults children, do, which are different than what society as a whole does. And you don’t do that with like a list of top ten substitutions. It’s a global values driven mission. Yes, we can’t necessarily make all of the political change we need to make on this episode, but if there is anything that you’ve gotten your kids to do and to like doing that isn’t normal, that might be a good place to start to see what you did there and to see if you can sort of infuse those same values or those same behaviors when it comes to eating. There is a lot of things, other than eating that we’ve figured out how to make our kids behave differently than other kids. How can we translate that learning into eating?”
  • 12:27 – 12:45, “There are a lot of ways you can have quick lessons. I’m not talking about taking hours and hours of doing this. I’m talking about while you’re in the car, while you’re running car pools, while you’re making lunch in the morning. Just making it go along with your daily life. When you educate your children and just explain some of this to them, they naturally are smart and they naturally want to be better.”
  • 12:48 -12:55 – “Jonathan always says, progress over perfection, just figure out how to make some small changes in just one area of your life.”
  • 13:33 – 14:00, “Now, what we started doing when they come home is we’ll do a smoothie and we’ll do a big salad. I’ll chop romaine and some kids like tomatoes and some don’t, some like cucumbers and some don’t. red peppers a lot of the kids like, so I get the big romaine lettuce in the middle of the table and then I have little bowls of chopping for the salad and we have a little salad bar right when they get home from school. Do you know that every single one of my kids will come in the house, grab a bowl, fill it full of salad and have a huge salad?”
  • 16:08 – 16:50, “You can’t avoid all secondhand smoke. You are going to breathe in air pollution. Something is going to happen, but the body, if it is just not inundated constantly, with toxic gases will not get lung cancer. It’s a vibrant healing thing. So again the goal here isn’t that, they can’t trick or treat anymore and they are not allowed to go to birthday parties and if they drink a soda I’m a bad father. The goal is like you’re saying, yes, they might still eat some junk food at school. Okay, but maybe they won’t eat as much at the house anymore because it’s not at my house and I have a salad bar now.”
  • 17:31 – 18:02, “The issue is that kids today are getting 70 percent of their calories everyday from crap. So it’s not be perfect, it’s not about never eat cookies, it’s about stop buying soda. Don’t have soda in your house and if your kids get riled up about it, they’re not going to go school and buy a 2 liter and just pound it. They’re going to drink what’s available to them. So let’s just make some steps in the right direction maybe.”
  • 18:28 – 18:51, “We can sometimes have a tendency to catastrophize things. There’s all of these things that aren’t perfect and unless I can take care of all of them it’s not worth doing any of them and I think we need to watch out for that kind of thinking because to say until I’m going to be perfect, which may or may not even exist in most context in life, I’m not going to do anything?”
  • 23:06 – 23:23, “So if your goal is just to make small little improvements over time with a smile on your face, rather than everything at once, I’m bad at being a parent. I think you will be so much happier and healthier.”

Read the Transcript

JONATHAN: Hey, what’s up everybody? Jonathan Bailor and April Perry and we are back with another SANE show and we’re going to talk about a topic that’s going to be a lot of interest to people and I’m going to try my best to help with it, but April, you might throw me under the bus a few times.

April: We’re going to have a good time. Here’s the problem. We’re going to talk about this. Jonathan and Angela are awesome, SANE professionals. They’re amazing. They came to our house and visited my family and just watching them in action, it was like a dance. It was amazing. How they prepare food and how they think about it and how they put together everything. It’s beautiful. For those of us who are struggling to start going to SANE, it’s not a dance. It’s clunky, it’s not attractive, it’s frustrating. I’m living in it right now. Here is just a quick story who are brand new to the podcast.

I’ve been SANE about two years. My daughter, Alia, who had been 25 lbs. overweight has also been SANE for about two years. She’s lost all of the weight, amazingly happy. Both of us feel like our bodies have changed. Our lives are so much better than they’ve ever been. We’re healthy and happy. SANE for life. Hashtag, sane for life, right? So, it’s [Inaudible 00:2:18] and we’re in a great spot and SANE solved a pain point for us, which was we had calorie apps on our phones, we did not eat after a certain time at night. We were hungry a lot. We were trying to exercise everyday and life felt very stressful. For us, SANE is a life saver. We love it.

Then we have other family members who don’t have the same pain points. I have three other children who are younger, who don’t ever need to count calories and the doctors are like, they’re great. Healty body weight, healthy kids, never sick they feel great. I have a husband who loves eating the comfort foods that he grew up eating and wants to be more SANE, but it’s not a pain point for him like it was for me.

I’ve been receiving some questions from email of people asking me questions like how is SANE going to work for my kids who are used to things like granola bars, fruit snacks, crackers, cakes, all of this stuff that you get school, at church? I’m really worried that my children are going to then binge on sugary items, or they’re just going to use their own money to buy treats instead of using it like for real things. Then she says, what about sandwiches, toast, tortillas or like I’m worried. She said I’m worried I’ll have a lot of tears and fits and anger about not having food that they like. She said I love your insights. So Jonathan, why don’t you start?

Jonathan: Solve this massive cultural society problem because that’s what it is. So let’s take a step back. The concept of kids food is that a concept that we’ve invented. There was no such thing as kids’ food prior to World War II. Kids ate what adults ate and a lot of traditional cultures that don’t eat processed western diet, there is no difference between what children eat and what adults eat and in fact, one of the things that makes me the most upset is that the people in our world who are the most dependent on proper nutrition, kids food is garbage. The definition of kids’ cereal is basically the sugary crap, excuse my language, but I get really upset about this, versus the adult cereal, which is high in fiber. This in and of itself I cannot solve this problem. We, as a culture, just like we’re saying, hey, we don’t have maybe enough oil to keep wasting it in all of these different ways. There is not one person who can solve the problem. We as a culture need to say, we need to be more friendly with the environment. We, as a culture, need to hopefully, we understand that a calorie isn’t a calorie anymore, and first we need to understand that because otherwise it’s just like don’t feed your kids too much and you’re fine. Now, we know that. Unfortunately, we live in a culture where the term, “kids’ food” and what you should feed children is literlaly the opposite of what you should feed anybody, especially children.

April: I was reading a biography on Ronald Reagan and he shared a story that the butcher gave him a piece of liver. The butcher said take this home and feed it to your cat. Ronald Reagan didn’t have a lot of money at the time and so his mom cooked that for the family dinner and they were grateful to be able to have this liver to eat. If you fed liver to my children or to any children nowadays it would be like a crime. What are you doing? Why are feeding children liver? Things have totally changed. Not only are we not eating really healthy foods, but it’s this whole separation between what the adults eat because adults want to be healthy and what the kids eat, because oh, the kids can just take it because they’re little. That’s really common.

Jonathan: I can sit here and say, you can make crackers with flaxseeds and you can make granola bars with this, but that is not going to solve the problem because just like everyone is saying, what happens when they go to church or what happens when they go to school or what happens when they go to the snack machine on their own? Here is how we solve this problem. Believe it or not, the rates of children smoking cigarettes has gone down, like as a society, we’ve gotten better at discouraging children from smoking cigarettes. It’s possible to make society wide change in terms of what kids put into their bodies.

April: I’m glad you said that. Go ahead.

Jonathan: So the solution to this problem isn’t to just make the cake with coconut flour. You should do all of those things, but until we can vote with our dollars, there’s a lot of food activists out there, Michael Poland, [sp?] 7:35, Michelle Simon, [sp?] 7:36, Jaime Oliver, [sp?] 7:38, myself to some extent, we need to tell people who permit sugary crap to get marketed to our children that that is not appropriate because if a child sees 47 advertisements about this is great, it’s fuel to play. You can’t win against that. They’ve got a billion dollars working against you. We need to change the system itself.

April: Okay. Obviously, we’re not going to do that in today’s podcast, by the end of the recording, but I’m really glad you compared it to cigarette smoking. I was actually just talking with Alia, because she’s a sophomore in high school right now. I was asking her, do a lot of your friends at school, are they smoking? Is that happening? She said, mom, we’re not dumb. Even though in our family and our religion we don’t smoke, she just said, in general the friends around her, know that smoking is bad for you and there’s not a lot of smoking going in general. That gave me a lot of hope for society. She said people think that high school kids are really dumb, but we’re actually not. We are actually really smart. We’re actually really savvy on what’s going on and what the trends are. I think sometimes we underestimate our kids and we think that oh, yeah, they couldn’t possibly learn how to eat healthily because they’re so weak or they’re not disciplined enough and that’s just not true.

Jonathan: You’re exactly right, April and think about smoking. It’s a great example because when smoking was first introduced into the mainstream, it was presented as harmless. There were doctors in magazines saying smoking is good for T-zone, and then we learned that it was bad and then it became almost like the Garden of Eden story where it was the forbidden fruit and we were like, it’s bad, and that just made kids want to do it more. So then we realized that it wasn’t the right approach. Then the truth campaigns came out and what they found is that hey kids, cigarette manufacturers are trying to manipulate you. They’re tricking you. They’re being deceptive. And that really resonated. And we found that was a good approach. I think as our kids and adults start to learn that they are being manipulated and tricked with addictive and toxic substances, substances which are as addictive, substances which are as toxic as cigarettes, that you’re not going to take my freedom away from me. You’re not going to take away my freedom to be healthy and happy and it’s not just about eating 1,200 calories of fruit snacks, which if you thought that as a child, or as an adult, it is really hard to make this change because I think what a lot of kids and adults do is they say I’m going to skip breakfast and I’m just going to have a can of coke and a bag of Cheetos and it’s 3:00 p.m. and I’ve only eaten 400 calories so I’m on the right track.

The other thing I want to bring up, April, is you actually said something good. You had mentioned the term religion, which I think is important to bring up, because there is a lot of instances whether it’s veganism, vegetarianism, being a Mormon, being Kosher, Hallal, there’s a lot of things that entire families, adults children, do, which are different than what society as a whole does. And you don’t do that with like a list of top ten substitions. It’s a global values driven mission. Yes, we can’t necessarily make all of the political change we need to make on this episode, but if there is anything that you’ve gotten your kids to do and to like doing that isn’t normal, that might be a good place to start to see what you did there and to see if you can sort of infuse those same values or those same behaviors when it comes to eating. There is a lot of things, other than eating that we’ve figured out how to make our kids behave differently than other kids. How can we translate that learning into eating?

April: I love it and I know there’s two things I know do work because I’ve been doing them in my home. Number one is to educate my children on what’s going on. When you just try to trick them, like these cauliflower potatoes are actually mashed potatoes. If you’re trying to trick them, kids are smart and they’re going to say yeah, whatever mom. You can’t trick them. When you say, hey people, let’s sit down and we’re going to have a lesson today about high fructose corn syrup. Let’s talk about it. Here is a little video. There is tons of stuff on YouTube that’s geared just for kids, or let’s talk about how your pancreas works or let’s talk about what causes Diabetes. There is lots of ways you can have quick lessons. I’m not talking about taking hours and hours of doing this. I’m talking about while you’re in the car, while you’re running car pools, while you’re making lunch in the morning. Just making it go along with your daily life. When you educate your children and just explain some of this to them, they natuarally are smart and they naturally want to be better.

The second thing that I found works is Jonathan always says, progress over perfection, just figure out how to make some small changes in just one area of your life. I’ll give one example where we’ve had huge success and I’m so thrilled about this and it gives me hope that I can continue to have success. We used to buy graham crackers, animal crackers, pretzels, all of that kind of stuff in bulk, major bulk, I had huge bins full in my pantry. My pantry was filled with crackers and stuff. All of the kids would come home from school, but the boys in particular and they would sit on the backyard swing with a book in one hand and a box of graham crackers in the other and they would shovel, it was shoveling crackers and pretzels and stuff into them. Now, what we started doing when they come home is we’ll do a smoothie and we’ll do a big salad. I’ll chop romaine and some kids like tomatoes and some don’t, some like cucumbers and some don’t. red peppers a lot of the kids like, so I get the big romaine lettuce in the middle of the table and then I have little bowls of chopping for the salad and we have a little salad bar right when they get home from school. Do you know that every single one of my kids will come in the house, grab a bowl, fill it full of salad and have a huge salad? I feel like a pat on the back for that. That was a big deal.

Jonathan: I’m giving you those pats right now. I think that’s pretty amazing.

April: I mean just starting there, educating the kids and then slow, slow transitions, I feel like that’s a place to start and a place to breathe. We’re getting there, but I think what ends up happening and Jonathan I’ll tell you where my weaknesses are and I would love to hear what you would do because I have no doubt that your kids are going to be eating very SANEly. I have no doubt because it’s just going to happen. You’re going to have healthy foods available. You’re not going to buy a bunch of junk. You’re going to practice what you preach. I wished that you had teenagers right now, so I can be learning from your teenagers, but I’m going to be your guinea pig.

Here is where my challenge lies. My challenge when I’m tired. If I’ve had a long day. If I’ve been working hard, if we’ve had a busy schedule and I haven’t had a chance to go to the grocery store. We’ve hardly had any food on hand and then someone drops off a plate of cookies or something like that. I don’t even know what to do. Just have the cookies, just forget it. we’ll try better tomorrow. That’s one area, so what do you say about that?

Jonathan: I think you answered your own question, when you said I’ll try better tomorrow because I think there are sometimes when how do I, there is no food in the house, and all that’s available is cookies. If you have to choose between your kids starving and going to bed hungry or eating cookies, they’re probably going to eat the cookies and we can make the cookies with coconut flour, when someone else brought those cookies over to your house. I don’t think our goal for ourself should be stuff like that never happens, because things like that are going to happen and it’s fine. Even to use the smoking analogy. You can’t avoid all secondhand smoke. You are going to breathe in air pollution. Something is going to happen, but the body, if it is just not inundated constantly, with toxic gases will not get lung cancer. It’s a vibrant healing thing. So again the goal here isn’t that, they can’t trick or treat anymore and they are not allowed to go to birthday parties and if they drink a soda I’m a bad father. The goal is like you’re saying, yes, they might still eat some junk food at school. Okay, but maybe they won’t eat as much at the house anymore because it’s not at my house and I have a salad bar now and maybe I also do things like you said, April, which is educational. I think most teenagers care about how they look. I think that’s probably a fair statement to make. So if you can somehow correlate how you eat with the way you look, which I think you can, you could even take the vain approach to getting your kids to eat a little bit better. I think as long as the goal is remember, we always prior to World War II, eating the grandma ate, grandma served pie, they had juice sometimes. The issue is that kids today are getting 70 percent of their calories everyday from crap. So it’s not be perfect, it’s not about never eat cookies, it’s about stop buying soda. Don’t have soda in your house and if your kids get riled up about it, they’re not going to go school and buy a 2 liter and just pound it. They’re going to drink what’s available to them. So let’s just make some steps in the right direction maybe.

April: I wish that those that listen with audio podcast could see your arms moving around. This is entertaining Jonathan. It’s awesome. What you’re saying is totally true.

Jonathan: I think that’s the key thing here, April. If we hold ourselves up to a standard like good ole bars and snacks and cakes and crackers and church events. My mother calls it, I think it’s an actual technical term. We can sometimes have a tendency to catastrophize things. There’s all of these things that aren’t perfect and unless I can take care of all of them it’s not worth doing any of them and I think we need to watch out for that kind of thinking because to say until I’m going to be perfect, which may or may not even exist in most context in life, I’m not going to do anything? Like this week, here’s the next-action. Don’t buy soda. Just stop buying soda. There is no reason to have soda in your house. It is poison. Please don’t serve soda. Your kids might eat soda somewhere else, but for now, don’t buy soda anymore and then maybe a month from now, we make one other little change and then a year from now, you’ve accidentally made a much healthier family.

April: I think it’s a wise way to look at it and I know for me, that definitely takes the pressure off and encourages me to bend, start working with my peers and I think what’s happening now, especially now that we have social media, now that we have so many amazing people online who are blogging about healthy eating, putting it on Instagram, there’s tons of different Instagram accounts you can follow. I follow super healthy kids. You can go through and see all of these people who are starting to make changes for good and I love what we’re doing as parents now is starting to have some positive peer pressure, to say, hey, guys what do you think about this as an after school snack and show people that looks so awesome.

In fact, I was just talking to a friend of mine and she said that she and her daughter went to this event and they needed to bring a side dish. They made flowers, out of little skewers and they took a little flower cookie cutter and fit it on cucumbers so they had little cucumber shaped flowers and they put special other vegetables on it and they made these darling flowers for this event, and they also brought brownies. They brought both. Those little flowers were gone like that. Everyone was so excited because that was awesome. Of course, I am not shaping my cucumbers like flowers ever, I’m not that kind of a mom and I’m about utility let’s get the stuff out. I’m very much a function over form kind of person, but I think this positive peer encouragement we’ll call it from other mothers and fathers and families, I think eventually that’s going to win out because there is just too much evidence out there showing us that what we’re doing right now isn’t working.

Our school has banned cupcakes on birthdays which I know sounds awful like a tragedy, but what was happening was every single child was having a birthday and every single child was bringing in cupcakes so your kids were eating cupcakes all of the time at school. The allergies and the mess and all of the stuff that went into it, so finally, they were like, you can bring a book, donate a book to the child’s classroom. I loved that idea because we have the power to shape society and that’s what you and I are doing on this podcast. That’s what we’re doing in our communities. We’re helping shape society and we can say, all right, these cookies, crackers, all of these starches are not good for us and here is some other options that we’ve figured out how to make. Let’s try this, people are smart and eventually, this is what is going to help save our society.

Jonathan: And you’re right April. It is already changing our society. We are already seeing these changes around cupcakes and oh, you’re serving soda? People understand soda especially it’s like come on, that’s not what we should be doing. I think at the end of the day, April, the next-action that I’m going to recommend here is a mindset shift of better, just focus on being slightly better. We’ve said it 15 times. We’re not going to solve this problem next week. It’s a deep societal thing that needs to happen. What we can do is this week we can identify one thing that maybe we can’t control what our kids do outside of the house, but we can control what’s in our cupboard. So like you said, maybe this week, we’re going to make one decision not to buy soda and people might get riled up a little bit, but I bet a month from today they’re not going to be still so angry that we don’t have soda. They’ll move on to the next thing.

April: They’re over it.

Jonathan: They’ll figure out something else to be mad at you for. So if your goal is just to make small little improvements over time with a smile on your face, rather than everything at once, I’m bad at being a parent. I think you will be so much happier and healthier.

April: Thank you Jonathan. I think that is very wise wisdom and for those parents who are listening and were thinking about going SANE, I challenge you, do it. make one small step this week, one small change that you can make in your life. You are a voice of authority for your children. They want to listen to you and they will listen to you and you have the capacity to not only create a strong family, but to create a healthy family that can be yours forever. Thank you so much for being with us and remember to stay SANE.

Learn the exact foods you must eat if you want to finally lose weight permanently. Click here to download your free Weight Loss Food List, the “Eat More, Lose More” Weight Loss Plan, and the “Slim in 6” Cheat Sheet…CLICK HERE FOR FREE “HOW TO” WEIGHT LOSS GUIDES
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