Magic Laser Weight Loss, Healthy Weight Gain, and Being Too Full

Jonathan: Hey, what’s up everybody. Jonathan Bailor and April Perry and we are back at it with another SANE show. How are you doing today, April?

April: I am doing fantastic. It’s a great day. How are you?

Jonathan: I’m doing well. I’m excited. We’re going to have a multi-dimensional show today. We’re going to rapid-fire mailbag style.

April: I love the mailbag because I get lots of mail, lots of emails and people ask me very specific SANE questions that I have no idea how to answer. So, I just put it on a list for you.

Jonathan: I sometimes love these April, because sometimes we have these big macro-conversations like how do I make my kids go SANE? I’ve got a hard question to answer, but if it’s should I eat avocados for breakfast? I could help you with those kind of questions that are really specific.

April: You’re good at helping us with all of the levels of questions, which is what I love. I’ve been introducing you to my friends and telling more and more people about SANE. One of the things I tell them though is I say Jonathan has always been able to answer my questions. There has never been a time when I’ve come to you and said, okay, Jonathan, I have a question and you have no idea. You might tell me there isn’t an exact answer or I might need to do a little more research, but you’ve been able to answer all of my questions, so you’re the go-to guy. Thank you.

Jonathan: Can I just give you a quick global point speaking of that? I was having a conversation with some members of our SANE inner circle we call the Ignite family. We do some live coaching there and we came to a distinction, which is really interesting. When you think about it, when it comes to changing your health through the way you eat, there’s really only three buckets of options. There are only three things we can do if you think about it. One is we could make healthier choices. We could choose to eat healthier food. That’s one option. Another option is we could choose to not eat food. That’s the starvation approach. The third option is we would actually eat less healthy food. That doesn’t make any sense at all. How could eating less healthy food possibly make us healthier? It can’t.

Eating no food or less food, I could see how intuitively that would cause me to lose weight, but don’t I have to eat? Again, we have to remind ourselves of that. At the end of the day, all we’re doing here at SANE solutions, on the SANE show is we’re re-defining, we were given a template for what healthy eating is in the 1960s and we’ve since discovered that most first attempts it wasn’t perfect and that over the past 60 years, if evolved, what we know to be healthy and all we’re saying is use science to eat healthier food, and eat more healthy food. That’s so obviously true that it’s cool. We can answer any question you have because it’s simple and you eat healthy food. Go ahead.

April: Well, the thing is, that I feel like you know how to keep simple, simple. I think a lot of people complicate it and they don’t know what healthy means and that’s why I love you have the education and the science behind it because these are answers according to Jonathan Bailor and what you learned in elementary school and high school. This is years and years of study and being in the industry and being a trainer and being all of the different sides of it. I think there is a lot to simplicity. You find someone who can teach simple simply…that’s pretty fantastic. That’s our goal today. Sound good?

Jonathan: In the words of Mark Twain that said, “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.” So we’ll try to keep it short and simple.

April: I received a couple of emails on this one and there is a question about laser treatment to get rid of fat loss. You and I have podcasted before about things like diet pills or some surgeries or things like that. Something that’s non-surgical, a laser treatment. Dr. Oz was on his video showing and demonstrating how a person lays on a table, they have these lasers, they shrink the fat cells, they make the fat go away and the person will lose a few inches guaranteed within a couple of weeks’ time. It seems pretty fantastic and it’s not even surgery. It’s just a treatment with lasers.

My friends have seen things like this and this is the question they ask. They start out by saying, “I totally believe in SANE and I want to live SANEly, but what if I get into SANE habits and then I go get this laser treatment to kind of jump start it and help me lose all of the fat? Then I kind of get back on to a SANE lifestyle forever and just keep living that way? Is that safe? Is that okay?” I just didn’t know because I’ve had no experience with that. This is something I’d love to turn over to you.

Jonathan: That’s a great question and especially there are two versions of the question and you’ve mentioned them almost accidentally I think which is it safe, is one question, and is it okay, is the second question. So let me talk about both of those. Let’s use a more extreme example than the laser surgery. Let’s talk about gastric bypass or lap-band type surgeries. Those are very common nowadays unfortunately.

The question, if you get gastric bypass surgery because you believe that it will allow you to lose weight without going SANE, I’m being serious, it’s sad, but you will die. Literally, you will die because what will happen when you get gastric bypass surgery is they shrink your stomach so that you can’t eat a lot of food. Your physician will tell you, after you get gastric bypass surgery, you have to eat very nutritious foods because you’ll be eating so little food that if you don’t eat nutritious foods, you will have nutrient deficiencies that will make you sick and if not treated, will cause you to die.

That’s why they’re called essential vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and fatty acids. They’re called essential, because if you don’t eat them it will cause death. There are countless surgeries every year that have to be reversed because if an individual who gets a gastric bypass surgery believing that this will cause them to not need to change what they’re eating, they will have to go get the surgery reversed because otherwise, they will die of starvation, they will die of malnutrition. A lot of these things, is it safe, is a separate question that I don’t feel qualified to answer because I’m not an expert in the long-term safety of gastric bypass surgery. I’m not an expert and I haven’t seen any peer-reviewed research around the long-term safety of laser body sculpting.

I will say generally that when anything that seems to promise a lot of results really fast, often has side effects in most areas of life. Anything that says you can make a lot of money really quick, with no effort, usually doesn’t turn out really well. Anything that says you can someone to like you in five minutes, it’s like we try to trick systems that usually doesn’t work out very well. If getting this laser surgery was safe and if seeing the difference in yourself in the short term, then gave you the motivation you needed to go SANE, well, then it very well might be a net-positive. The same with gastric bypass surgery. I’ve known people personally who it was almost like someone who had a drug addiction needing to go to a rehabilitation center and to be physically locked away for a number of weeks so that they could get control back, but then they have to make the lifestyle change. They needed a pattern-interrupt to get them started. I can’t speak to the safety of these things. I don’t know the safety of them.

I will give you two pieces of advice. One is do not do them. If you are doing them, instead of going SANE, consider doing them if you really, really think that there is no other way to kick-start your SANEity. At the end of the day, you will only have long-term results in health if you eat healthy food and that’s all we’re saying to do, but if you need physical help, starting with that, there are some kind of extreme things you could do. I don’t know how safe they are. You have to work with your physician on that. Hopefully, that’s helpful.

April: I think that is really helpful as far as a similar thing that I was thinking and I’m glad to hear it from you. One of the suggestions that I would add to it is if your plan is, let’s say in two months, I’m going to get this laser sculpting surgery and then from then on, I’m going to eat SANEly. What I would suggest is that you don’t get the surgery until you can consistently eat SANEly so you know you’re going to do it right when it’s done. Get into the habit right now and then maybe get in the habit for a couple of months and then even assess it if you want it.

I didn’t have a ton of weight to lose, but I found that as soon as I went SANE and this is what I’m hearing in honestly in every email, people might not see all of the results they want right away, but they always say, I feel so good. I already feel so much better. I think that’s what people are going for is this relief. They want to feel better and I think that a lot of those results are going to get when you go SANE and then you can make the decision as far as what you’re going to do after that. I think there is so many positive benefits that come once you really put into SANE what you want to get out of it, and if you know you’re going to continue afterwards, you’ve got to be in the habit now because if your habit right now is to grab a candy bar every time you’re hungry, that urge is not going to change just because you had some procedure done.

Jonathan: That’s exactly right, April and you had some other questions in here which I think are great that I want to answer specifically, which is how long will your body actually stay that way? There is no steady state when it comes to biology. We’re always changing in some way or another. So this maybe will make sense. We’ll see. There will never be a side effect free drug that will prevent cigarette smoke from damaging your lung cells. That’s what cigarette smoke does. If you put a match underneath a piece of paper, it will cause it to burn. That’s what happens. Sugar, processed carbs, Trans fats, there is nothing that you could do to your body that will make those things not hurt you.

Back to your point about the habit. What I can guarantee is safe is the foods that are provided by mother earth, that I’ve kept us safe and healthy ever since humans existed and if you keep eating those, you’ll keep feeling and looking great. Everything else hasn’t stood the test of time. You could try it, but I don’t know.

April: I think you provided a couple of great food for thought there. Let’s go to the next question in the mailbag. This one says, “My doctor says that my child needs to gain weight. My child is very athletic, has a high metabolism, is always hungry. My child doesn’t like whole food fats very much. I know we’ve talked about that. The doctor is actually prescribing high calorie junk food.” This something that I’m hearing often and I actually in the show notes here I gave you a picture of a flyer from my hospital because my child needed to gain weight. This has the hospital’s name on it, it says high calorie food choices and pretty much everything on here is totally in-SANE. It’s Cheese-its, cheese filled crackers, potato chips, granola bars, French fries, fried vegetables. There are some things on here that are SANE, but when my daughter was in the hospital and needed to gain weight, they gave her ice cream shakes like all day long. What do you say to the this?

Jonathan: It actually hits home with me, April. If you recall from my history, that was actually what started me on this journey is I couldn’t gain weight and I wanted to be a big strong body builder, fitness person like my brother and we sometimes forget that there are people who buy weight gainer, like powder. How does their body even do that? The one thing we have to keep in mind, like if there are some other foods on this list that you have here, for example, are baloney, hot dogs. I’ll tell you how to gain weight in a second. We also have to keep in mind that it’s always cost benefit. For example, we know nitrates are bad. We know processed meat is bad for us, so is the weight gain more healthy than the nitrates are toxic? That’s the thing to keep in mind.

The other thing that’s important is so the idea is, how do we gain weight without harming other aspects of our body? How do we gain weight without burning our pancreas out. How do we gain weight without causing bad cell replication that could increase cancer risk? How do we do those types of things?

You can absolutely gain weight by eating a cafeteria diet. This is how we fatten rodents in labs. We feed them this, we feed them junk. We feed them exactly what you shared, hot dogs, hamburgers, and biscuits. The reason it makes the animals heavier is it causes inflammation in their brain, it causes changes in their digestive system, it destroys gut bacteria. It changes their hormone level and it elevates their set point. It elevates the weight that the body thinks they should be at and that’s not what we want to have. At the end of the day, the short answer is here is don’t do that. Don’t use toxic things to try to gain weight because you’re going to hurt yourself. Whole food fats are the safest way to do this and if your children do not like eating them I would mix them. Imagine instead of eating a gallon of ice cream to try to gain weight, take one cup of low sugar or no sugar added ice cream, I think Breyers has ice cream which has like six ingredients in it so it’s fairly natural, put it in the blender, put a bunch of coconut milk in there or macadamia nuts or avocado. So you’ll take a little bit of not-super SANE, and you’ll use it to flavor 1,000 calories worth and put some coconut oil in there. It’s not hard to eat calories. As we can probably all attest to. I would use a little bit of something that’s sweet to mask the taste of high calorie healthy whole food fats.

April: I’m going to actually start working on this with my daughter. You met Grace. She is actually surpassed me in height. My first child to become taller than me. She’s a baseball player. She’ll maybe have two to three hours of basketball a day and she says she is always hungry and all of this SANE food is not filling me up. so it’s been challenging for me to help her because I want her to be full. I want to make sure I’m taking care of each of my children and she doesn’t need to lose weight and I want her to be healthy at the same time. What she is asking for is a lot of in-SANE foods. She says, look the doctor even told me, look at all of these unhealthy foods I can eat. I really appreciate that. I’m guessing I can Google and I’m sure other people are out there doing a similar thing, I just haven’t known what to search for.

Jonathan: The other thing to keep in mind is also in this instance, we talk about SANE is the acronym for the four factors to determine the quality of a calorie and we, when we generally want to lose fat, we talk about how we want to eat high satiety foods. Foods that fill us up quickly and keep us full for a long period of time. We know without a shadow of a doubt in the scientific literature that protein and fiber are the most satisfying things we can put into our body.

For example, healthy oils are going to have no fiber in them and they’re going to have no protein. For example, the type of smoothie you would eat if you’re trying to burn fat would be vegetables, super high in fiber, also a good decent source of protein, as well as some protein in there, it would be like the opposite if you’re trying to gain weight. You would want no fiber, you would want whole food fats and you’d want to pick whole food fats that are low in fiber. So avocados are on this list. Avocados are very high in fiber. They are great for you, but super high in fiber, whereas a macadamia nut or for example, coconut milk, versus eating an entire coconut, not that you’d eat an entire coconut, but you try to find the sources of healthy fats that have minimal fiber in them, will allow your daughter to eat more of them.

April: Okay. All right. I’m excited to try that out. We’ll find some good recipes. All right, next question. There is not a ton of information here so I think we’ll focus on what we can. Essentially, a husband and wife are becoming more SANE and they’re not getting results as fast as they want and wondered how carefully they need to count their protein with each meal? Kind of saying, if I’m full and I don’t get to the amount of protein that would trigger the muscle protein synthesis do I keep eating and if I’m full, that maybe a good question. Is it better to eat less if you’re full and not go for the optimal number of grams of protein or is it better to eat beyond behind full, overeat in order to trigger it, what would you say?

Jonathan: There’s a couple of questions here, like you mentioned April, the first is not they’re not seeing results as fast as they want. How fast should we see results is an interesting question in and of itself, which we’ve talked about in other episodes, but for the specific question of protein intake, you should intentionally try to eat over 20 grams of protein in a serving and unless you’re trying to eat protein from quinoa eating 20 grams of protein is not hard. If you’re eating actual sources of protein, things that get most of their calories rather than fat, so for example, most people will think nuts are a good source of protein or beans are a good source or protein. Beans are 80 percent carbs, nuts are 80 percent fat, so if you’re trying to eat something that’s 80 percent not-protein, to increase your protein intake, it’s almost like eating carrot cake to increase your vegetable intake. You can eat 20 grams of protein in a half-can of tuna fish. It’s not a lot of food. If you’re not able to eat at least 20 grams of protein, I would examine what is in the meal, because I would say every time you eat, you do want to eat at least 20, ideally more like 30 grams of protein.

April: Okay. All right. I think that’s helpful. Let’s go to Question #4. I thought this was really a cute question. Can you overdo it with drinking smoothies? My kids and I drink a lot of smoothies and I found we’re not drinking just plain water as much. If I wanted, can I just drink the smoothie Jonathan recommends? Mostly spiniach, protein powder a small handful of fruit instead of water? What would that do to my diet? Kids love smoothies with added bananas and strawberries. That the only way she could get them to eat healthy greens, does replace a lot of water? So I guess that’s a good question. We were talking about drinking a lot of water. If you’re drinking a lot of smoothies, there is water content in there, but is that an issue? Do we have a need to be worried about that?

Jonathan: It’s not an issue. We talked about drink eight glasses of water a day and I talk about drinking green tea and I talk about drinking green smoothies, the liquid, the vegetables are 80 percent water. If you don’t believe me, take a lot of Spinach and then put it in a pan and cook it down so that all the water leaves it and you’ll see that 90 percent of the Spinach goes away and all you’re left with is just a little bit. So when you’re drinking 16 ounces of a vegetable smoothie, you’re actually drinking 13 ounces of water or something like that and the rest of it is smoothie. As long as you’re drinking a lot of non-toxic or highly caffeinated liquid, you’re good to go.

April: Okay. I love it. now, I have one more question. I think we have a couple of minutes. This is one that is submitted in our SANE family’s Facebook group and she said, “I’m stuck in a rut. I’ve made so many improvements since turning SANE. I’ve made incredible leaps in my diet. I eat more vegetables than anyone I know. My kids drink green smoothies like there is no tomorrow. I cook and batch freeze meals like a boss. I started eating salads every day. I cut out a ton of sugar in my diet.

I’ve actually gained 5 lbs. since I’ve started and still have about 25 lbs. to lose. It’s frustrating because I need to be at my goal weight so I can have a better chance at having other babies. I love the SANE plan, and the freedom it brings. I’m not perfect at it, but for all of the drastic changes I’ve made, I wasn’t terrible before, I haven’t seen much improvement and it’s really been getting to me. I really need a carrot, figuratively speaking. I know JB says be patient, but it has been so long.” Already I know you’re going to say, don’t use the scale. We’ve had this discussion and I know that you told me you don’t need to be a dictator, but that we can’t use the scale because we’re hydrated and we’re doing our weights and we’re getting stronger and I’m off the scale. I know we’ve talked about progress versus perfection and giving it time and taking our time with it and not expecting immediate results. We’ve also talked about SANE versus SANEer, like if you’re going SANE and you’re eating the serving sizes or the serving amounts are designed by SANE, then you should be seeing results. What do you say in this situation because I feel for her?

Jonathan: Absolutely. So there’s a couple of things. There was quite a bit in that. There’s a couple of things where I heard I’m eating more vegetables than anyone I know, I’m cooking in bulk like a boss, which is excellent and what I actually don’t know is what she’s eating. This is where I diverge from what some people think I’m saying. What some people think I’m saying when they hear the title of my book, the Calorie Myth is that calories don’t exist. They do exist. If you’re an average sized female who is not active and lives a stressful life and doesn’t sleep much and are currently eating about 3,000 calories per day and the standard American diet and you start eating more vegetables and you start cooking that standard American diet in bulk, you will not lose weight.

April: Right. Okay.

Jonathan: Because you’re still kind of overconsuming calories and not having the other aspects happen. What we have to look at it very holistically, so it’s very difficult to say, if this individual has added three servings of protein and ten servings of vegetables to their diet, but has made no other changes to it, then they’re probably not going to lose any weight. We need to do two things to lose weight and some people might say, I can’t believe Jonathan is saying this. We have to flood our body with nutrition and we have to ensure that our body has the need. The body has to have the need and the ability to burn fat. The calorie counting model falls down because it assumes that everyone’s body has the ability to burn fat, but now we know that if we have metabolic dysfunction, if we have hormonal dysregulation that no matter how few calories we eat, if our body doesn’t have the ability to burn fat, instead of burning fat, we just get tired and sad and our body runs slower to conserve those calories. We need to have the need and the ability to burn fat. If you are still consuming more calories than you are burning off, and you haven’t fully healed your metabolism yet, you’re not going to lose weight.

April: I was just looking back at that. I copied it for you in the notes, but she said a cut a ton of sugar in my diet, but that maybe means there is still sugar in the diet.

Jonathan: I cut a ton of sugar, there might be starches and things like that. Let’s be very clear. There is a difference between improving your health and reducing your weight. We have talked about this before. I know that if you took a blood sample from this courageous individual that their bloodwork, their cholesterol levels, their A1c levels, their hormone levels would all be improved because the addition of vegetables with no other change in your diet, will make you healthier. Vegetables do not have the magical slimming power. They will make you healthier and they will help to displace in-SANE foods because they are very satisfying, but we need to do two things. We need to eat more of the right foods in place of those other foods. We need to make sure we’re physically active. We need to look at our sleep. We need to look at our stress and then of course, there’s the time element.

There are only two things we can do, April. We can improve our quality of what we’re eating, or we can stop eating. I promise you that stopping eating has been proven not to work and especially if you’re trying to conceive a baby, please do not stop eating. So all we can do is continue to make efforts to increase our SANEity. I would say, please just keep going on the same journey because the only other route won’t never work because it’s starvation.

April: I really love that and I actually responded to her. I’ll just read to you what I wrote because I feel like I could relate to her. I just said, “Right now, after being SANE for about two years, I am not skinny. I’m very normal, but I’m not as slender as I think I should be. Because I’m kind of like the SANE poster girl, meaning Jonathan’s co-host, I sometimes wonder if I’m doing this wrong. I’m not a fitness model. I still don’t love wearing a bathing suit in public and if I could lose 25 lbs. I would love that, but here is what I do now.

I’m never hungry. I’m nourishing my body with the best foods I can buy. I am fully hydrated. I can lower more weight than ever before at the gym. I am happy and optimistic. I have tons of energy. I’m setting a good example for my kids. I like to be romantic with my husband. I focus my energy on living my mission and not being hungry and I have super low risk for Diabetes, obesity, and Alzheimer’s. I have so much more time than I did when I was running every day and then here’s the thing you have to remember. If you chose to do something other than SANE, would you get better, long-term results? Because sure, you could starve yourself and lose 25 lbs., but would you be happy. Could you starve yourself forever? SANE is the first lifestyle that I can trust. It’s not a quick fix and it won’t make you unnaturally healthy which is what so many of us want, but is the best thing I know and we’re here together in this group to encage each other to keep going. There you go.

Jonathan: It’s beautifully said, April and the only thing I’ll add to that because that is a ten out of ten right there is in the question, which you kindly posted for me see now it says, “I’m not perfect at all, but for all of the drastic changes I have made, I haven’t seen much improvement and that has been getting to me. the thing that I would so almost beg because it is a question of life or death, if improvement which in this context is only being judged by your weight, if you reduced your risk of getting cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and Diabetes, dying of a stroke or dying of heart attack by 80 percent, is that improvement?

April: That’s amazing.

Jonathan: I think that is improvement. If you have more energy and if your skin glows and you have mood swings go away, your depression, you go off your depression medication, are those improvements because if they are, you have seen improvement. That’s so important.

April: Absolutely. Okay. So any final words Jonathan. Any next-action you would suggest for this mailbag we just put together?

Jonathan: It seems like for a lot of these things the focus as always is going to be the long-term versus the short term. There is all kinds of things in all areas of life that we can do to achieve short term results, but I think our goal is long term and because our goal is long term our approach has to be long term. So as a next-action, that’s the question to ask yourself. Almost before you do anything and maybe not even just with eating, am I in this for the long term and if I am, is what I’m about to do going to serve me in the long term or not and I think that could transform your life way aside from what you’re eating.

April: All right. Another standing ovation for you Jonathan. That was fantastic. Thank you so much and thank you for those of you who have submitted your questions and for those of you who are here listening. We hope that you’ll share this show. We hope that you will teach this to your friends and your families. We are thrilled to be able to have you here with us. Have a great day and remember to stay SANE.