How To Make SANE Work When Nothing Else Is #SANE

Jonathan: Hey, what is going on, everybody?  Jonathan Bailor and April Perry and we are back in action with another SANE Show.  How are you doing today, April?

April: I am doing actually really well today.  The month has been a little crazy but today is actually one of the happiest days I’ve ever had, which is great, right?

Jonathan: It is great.  What’s been going on prior to today?

April: Well, it is actually leading into the show we’re talking about.  Life happens.  I get it.  I don’t want this to be a complaining show or anything like that because I recognize that there’s a lot of great parts of my life, as everybody has great parts in their lives; but you have things that are hard.

Prior to this, last time we talked, it’s where I had finally dialed in, taking SANE to the next level.  I was feeling better than I’d ever felt before, which is awesome.  I’m still totally dedicated, doing great, but this month has kind of thrown me for a loop.

I’m going to walk through five things that happened this month that were super hard and talk about what you and Angela would have done in that situation because, literally, that was going on in my head.  When something would happen, I would think, “Oh, darn it.  How am I going to be able to figure out how to eat all my vegetables?  How can I figure it out?”

I thought, “Well, Jonathan and Angela would figure it out.”  Like, you guys would just figure it out.  So I did pretty well but I think I could have done a lot better.  I am super excited to talk about it today.

Should we just start with number one?

Jonathan: Let’s just start from the top.

April: I’ll give you the report.  I know we haven’t talked for a long time.  Okay, so first is just something super normal.  I travelled to a multi-day conference.  Basically, I was in conference meetings from morning till night.  I didn’t have a lunch break because I was actually signed up for this lunch-time coaching so I was in these lunch-time meetings, where they had vegetarian options but they didn’t have SANE options.

I feel like that is one of the trickiest things that you can tell people — gluten free or vegetarian or whatever but you can’t really say SANE.  It had a few little vegetables and a little bit of maybe, I don’t know, fruit or something like that, but they didn’t have protein or whole food fats or anything like that.

I know packing your own food for a conference is great but I actually didn’t have a car with me and I’m in this big conference center and I’m thinking, “Would Jonathan and Angela just take a big cooler and fill it up with vegetables?”  I mean, I did bring kale in my computer bag and added it to the salad and brought some almonds.  I mean, I felt a little silly.  I had some protein bars.  But if you looked inside my computer bag, you would have just seen a whole lot of vegetables and random stuff.  I felt a little silly and I ran out of food partially through the conference.  So what would you do in a case like that?

Jonathan: Whenever I travel, I do try to break down the SANE foods into their component food groups and I don’t carry around a cooler.  What I am going to recommend is what I do when I travel — this is not what I would recommend if you’re not traveling but it is what I do when I travel.

April: Yes.

Jonathan: When I travel, I say, “I’ve got to get my non-starchy vegetables.  I don’t have access to refrigeration.”  That’s when I use powdered vegetables — things like “Garden in my Glass.”  That’s why we created them.  That’s what they’re perfect for — when you don’t have access to fresh vegetables.  I don’t carry around a green water bottle but I do, for example, have — like, I start my morning in the hotel room with three servings of Garden in my Glass.

April: Okay.

Jonathan: I might take a Ziploc baggie with three more servings and have that in the middle of the day.  Then I have three more servings at the end of the day so that I’m at nine servings of vegetables, no matter what.  For my protein, I’ve got SANE Meal Bars.  This show isn’t like an advertisement for our SANE —

April: That’s okay.

Jonathan: This is why we created it.  This is what I do.  This is what I recommend and is way helpful for people.  So I would eat a SANE Meal Bar.  That’s what I have with me for my nutrient-dense protein.  Then for whole food fats, I would take baggies of raw nuts.  That’s how I get through traveling.

April: Okay.  If you have the Garden in my Glass in a Ziploc baggie and then you just take a water bottle with you and pour it in that or just get a cup of water at the conference.  What would you do?

Jonathan: That’s correct. That’s what I would recommend, and mixing it with a plastic spoon.  If you are very advanced, you can just put it directly in your mouth without inhaling because then you’ll do the cinnamon challenge with Garden in my Glass and you’ll choke horribly so I don’t recommend that.  That is what I do because I have been doing it for years.

April: Oh my gosh, so funny.  All right, so that was helpful.  That was one of the, kind of, easier ones.  Not too bad but, yes, I found that I was struggling a little bit.  I had been working to get hotels that have a fridge.  I’ve been going and buying broccoli and buying kind of the foods I enjoy eating a lot and so that’s been working pretty well.  I do get stopped in every airport for my cold cucumbers that I have stuck in my bag.  They’re always wondering why I’m traveling with cold cucumbers.  I know; kind of random.

Jonathan: For what it’s worth, while we’re talking about traveling, there are some vegetables that travel better than others.  The more hardy the vegetable is, for instance, cabbage — red cabbage is super hardy.  When I say hardy, I mean, if you keep them in your fridge, you can keep red cabbage in your fridge for a while and it still tastes good.  Things like kale, for example, is much hardier than Romaine lettuce.  It just feels hardier.  It’s sturdier.  If you’re going to travel, hardy vegetables like a kale or cabbage travel very well.

April: Okay, and those might get through the airline detection way better.

Okay.  Second thing, I did have a fall on my roller blades and totally bruised my tailbone.  My puppy was running in the other direction and I just hit really hard.  I couldn’t walk for about, I don’t know, a week.  It was really hard for me to walk.  Doing eccentric weights is totally out of the question because I was in such pain.

If you have an injury, what do you do with the weights?  Like, even lifting anything with my arms was hurting my tailbone.  I couldn’t do anything.  Now I feel like I‘m about ready to get back but I’m kind of nervous because it still hurts when I sit down.  I’m worried about that.

Jonathan: You focus on getting better.  If you have the flu, for example, “I have the flu.  Should I go exercise?”  No, not at all.  Exercising is putting additional stress on your body that will cause your body to then super-adapt and become stronger.  But if your body is already being stressed, either by an injury or by a sickness, it is not time to add additional stress to that mix.  Remember, SANE is all about healing.  If you need to heal, like, if you’ve fallen below normal because of an injury or an illness, we’ve got to take care of that and get you back up to normal first before we ever even think about going super normal.

April: Okay, so I don’t need to feel bad that I’m not at the gym.  I am starting to do some yoga and I’m doing more walking now.  So that’s good?

Jonathan: You should never feel bad about allowing your body time to heal.

April: Okay.  Thank you.  I love that information.  Everybody from Jonathan Bailer, there we go.

Okay, number three.  I got a concussion, which is super embarrassing how it happened.  I was at a sock hop with my kids and there was this crash.  Anyway, it was pretty bad but I ended up bouncing my head off of a hardwood floor.  I thought I was okay but then, after a couple of days, I realized I wasn’t.  I was in bed; I was probably lying down for about ten days.

What’s hard about a concussion is that they ask you to go on brain rest so there is like no TV; there’s no reading; nothing.  You are just lying there, focusing on getting better.  Now, also there is nausea that went with that.  When someone is pregnant and nauseated or sick and nauseated or going through chemotherapy — I mean, there’s lots of reasons why someone could feel nauseated — but what was hard is that vegetables really sounded awful to me.  So the only thing I could eat was, like, oats or sweet potatoes.  I mean, my focus was not on my waistline or any of that; my focus was on getting my brain back because it was scary not to be able to use my brain well.  Even just picking out projects, I could not.  My brain just did not work.

I am still grateful to be back and feeling good.  But what do you do when you’re going through nausea?  I mean, the same thing — just do the best you can?  Because I was like, “Oh, I wish I could eat my vegetables” but it just did not sound good at all.

Jonathan: It’s really important to keep in mind that the point of SANE eating, the point of everything that we’re doing here, is to serve you and to make your life more enjoyable and to allow you to rock your mission.  So if at any point in time, making SANE efforts causes stress or makes you feel like you’re doing something wrong or bad, that’s — we’re eating to live; we’re not living to eat.  Unlike the neurotic calorie-counting approach, which again is shame-based, it’s all-encompassing.

We’re in here for the long haul.  This is not about yo-yo dieting; this is not about going down, up, down, up, down, up.  Things are going to happen in life.  Think of it like the stock market.  Everyone talks of the stock market — don’t check your stocks every day.  You put something in the stock market, leave it alone for forty years and it’s going to trend up.  This is the way I like to talk about my life and the way I like to talk about my SANEity and even when people ask about, “How’s the business going?  How’s your life going?  How’s your SANEity going?”  I say, “Ups and downs; trending up.”

That should be, I think, our goal — ups and downs; trending up.  Right now, the Dow dropped seventy-five points.  That’s fine.  Let’s not let it drop seven hundred and fifty points with a bunch of shame and negativity.  Let’s go up and down and just make sure we trend up.

April: Yes, I love that because I didn’t start diving into ice cream and Ding Dongs and any of that kind of stuff; it was just more like, “What can I do?”  I wasn’t feeding myself.  I mean, Eric was waiting on me hand and foot, bringing food.  “What do you want for breakfast?  What do you want?”  He was taking care of the whole house and I just felt like, “I can only do so much.”  Okay, thank you.  That was really helpful.

One of the things though I did learn was that the SANE foods that I eat give me so much energy.  I didn’t realize that by cutting out my vegetables — because my energy had dropped a ton and it was kind of towards the end of the ten days and I was feeling like, “Oh, I could get up and running again” but I just said, “Hey Eric, I feel so sluggish” and he said, “Okay.  April, you’re going to go make a spinach smoothie.  Go drink a big spinach smoothie and get your SANE foods and start eating that again.”  I did and it was amazing how, after ten days without a spinach smoothie, by drinking one again, I felt immediately so much better.  I guess you probably would have predicted that, right?

Jonathan: One hundred percent.  The other thing to keep in mind — and again, I am not saying these things to be self-promotional; I’m saying them because they are factually true.

April: Promote yourself, Jonathan.  I’m all for it.  No problem.

Jonathan: I’m saying them because they’re factually true.  There are instances where, either someone is not hungry or they feel nauseous or even in the case of a gastric bypass surgery where their stomach has been shrunk down to a minute size, therapeutic doses of nutrition will help you, period.  No matter what’s going on in your life, if your body is looking to heal itself —

People will say, “Oh, you have a cold.  Take this over-the-counter super emergency vitamin C supplement” because vitamin C will help you to overcome your illness.  Well, to the extent that that’s true, an abundance of whole food nutrition concentrated down is even more helpful because that’s nutrition presented to your body in the form factor with all the other co-factors that make it most effective.

If you are nauseous, or if you’ve had gastric bypass surgery, or if you just don’t have an appetite, there are options around things like powdered super foods which will unequivocally help to heal you because they will provide you with whole food nutrition.  The only thing to watch out for is, a lot of them are nonsense; a lot of them have artificial trash added to them — and that’s part of the reason, again, we created things like Garden in my Glass in the SANE Store where it’s just things like thin cell wall chlorella.  Even if you’re feeling great, you can’t go to your store and buy actual thin cell wall chlorella to eat.  These are foods that are therapeutic.

No matter what’s happening with your life, whether you are traveling, whether you have a certain medical condition, proper nutrition will always help you to get out of that faster.  If you can’t do it via things you bought at your grocery store, there are powdered options.  Just be careful because that industry is unregulated.  That’s why we created the SANE Store to help you out with those things.  It’s just something to keep in mind.

April: Okay.  So if somebody wanted to learn more about what you’re offering there, what they do, how they can get them, there’s just instructions on how to eat them, a tutorial?

Jonathan: Yeah.  I mean, again, they could just pop over to SANESolution.  They can find all the information on everything.  I don’t want to make this about that but I do — people say, “Why do you sell these things?  You’ve sold out.”  No, not really.  I mean, this is what I do personally and I found that there is a lot of garbage out there so I want to provide a good version of it and these are just context in which they fit perfectly.  I know we did not plan to talk about this but it comes up.

April: I love that.  The thing is, I’m willing to invest in my health.  I just don’t know what the best resources are.  I just think being educated on what I can eat and what will help me and what resources are out there, I think that’s helpful for anyone.  Then you can make your own decision on what you want to do or where you want it buy it — just knowing that something is there to help you.

Jonathan: I think it’s really also important to focus on when and why we use these things because, again, sometimes people get really confused and they’re like, “Oh, so you’re saying I don’t have to drink green smoothies now; I can just eat powdered vegetables all day.”  No.  No, that is not what we’re saying.  What we’re saying is, if you’re traveling or if you can’t do the other things, these things can be a wonderful replacement in that context and then a supplement in other context.

April: Okay, all right.

Number four — I can’t believe all this stuff happened to me in the same month.  Number four, our refrigerator totally broke.  Our refrigerator has worked fine for like twelve years but, yes, it broke on Sunday.  We had a repair person come in Monday.  All these problems are happening in parts.  They’re still not here.  It’s Thursday when you and I are recording so we have, like, a whole week with no fridge.  When you have four children and a busy life and no refrigerator, it’s tricky.

This is what I did.  I had a frozen turkey in our deep freezer.  I put that in the freezer, which is now just like a box, and stuffed all the food in it around the turkey so I’ve got that like a big ice block.  We went and bought ice.  I had two big coolers.  I’ve got all of my lettuce and kale and vegetables, celery and everything, packed in these coolers.

It is really hard.  I mean, the amount of vegetables that I consume each day and not having my refrigerator working — like, when I make spinach smoothies, I can only make what I can eat and store for that day; I can’t make a lot.  What would you do if your fridge broke for a whole week?

Jonathan: I can tell you exactly what I’d do because that happened to me three months ago.  Our fridge actually kept breaking for over two months.  In fact, it broke when we were both out of town and it was like ninety degrees in Seattle and no one had central air so we came back and it smelled like the apocalypse in our house.  We had to throw away all of our food.  It was all moldy and rotten and it was horrible.  Then they fixed it; they didn’t fix it; and finally, I fixed it, believe it or not.  I’m not a very handy person when it comes to — other than computes and nutrition.

Here is what we did in that circumstance.  The first answer is, in case of emergency, eat SANE convenience foods.  That was the answer, like, in case of emergency, break glass.  In case of you traveling, in case you’re sick, in case your fridge breaks, there are unrefrigerated options you can enjoy at store.sanesolutions.com.

Now, if you want to do not that, what we did is, we do have a deep freezer.  We have since bought a backup refrigerator.  Here’s the trick for that.  Ask your local fridge place if they have dented refrigerators that they cannot sell because we got a fairly — I mean, it’s not a fridge we would necessarily put in our house but it is in our garage and it was three hundred and fifty bucks delivered because it was scratched and dented.

April: Not bad.

Jonathan: So we got a backup freezer we got from Costco for less than two hundred dollars in the garage and then we were able to get a scratched and dented fridge for like three-fifty so now we do have that backup in place.  We didn’t have that backup when this happened so what we ended up doing was, we did eat more Chipotle and more Thai food than we normally would; but then we would blend smoothies, put them in the freezer, freeze them, use them as ice packs and coolers for the other foods.

April: Okay.

Jonathan: But again, it wasn’t perfect.  Like, we weren’t as SANE as we would be otherwise because other stuff was happening; but we would go from blender to freezer to cooler.

April: Okay, all right.  I’m hopeful that this is almost over — my fingers crossed.  We’re supposed to get it fixed tomorrow but, yes, it’s just things like that that happen and you just think, “Oh no.  All my goals –“  It’s okay.  We’re figuring it out and I love that.

Jonathan: A backup fridge is awesome.  If you have the reason to do it, it’s good.

April: As you just said that, I’m like, “Oh, I’d be happy to buy one.  It’s just, our garage is super full.”  I don’t know.  I’m going to look and see if we can figure that out because I think I need my own fridge — just for me, just for all my food for the week.  I would love to just prep in advance and have it all ready and I think that’s great.

Okay.  My next question is, we traveled.  For the holidays, we went to a friend’s house.  She called in advance, really sweet, and said, “Okay, is there anything in particular that your family won’t eat or does eat?”  I let her know we eat a lot of vegetables; we like healthy foods; but no allergies or anything.  She was an amazing hostess and had everything ready for us.

Now, I packed a cooler and brought a lot of my own vegetables because I didn’t want to say, “I eat a whole lot of vegetables.  Can you buy big bags of spinach?”  I just felt, I didn’t want her to have to go through a lot of extra efforts so I just brought a lot of my own stuff and I thought, “Well, I’m sure they’ll have a grocery store nearby and I can just go pick up some stuff.”  Well, it turns out they live in this beautiful area in the woods, totally far away from any grocery store.  We had so many activities planned together that there was never a time I could just say, “Hey, I’ll just head to the grocery store for a minute.”  It just wasn’t possible.

My question is, when you’re going to visit somebody, how much do you say at the beginning about what your needs are?  How would you kind of gauge that?  Because I just don’t want to be like that weird guest nobody wants to invite over because they have to buy tons of vegetables to feed me.  I also want to be able to eat healthfully because I feel best when I eat a lot of healthy foods.  What would you do there?

Jonathan: I would take a two-tiered approach.  The first is, you do want to educate them as kindly and politely as you can but understand that, from an A to an F, they’ll probably do a C or a B; so they’re not going to do an A and that’s okay.  The second part of my answer will address how to go from a C or a B to an A and you can do that on your own, where you can say, “I eat a whole lot of vegetables.  I’m pre-diabetic,” which is true.  You’re either diabetic or pre-diabetic.  There is no third state, by definition.  You’re either diabetic or you’re not diabetic yet so we’re all diabetic or pre-diabetic.

If you say, “I’m pre-diabetic” and then they’ll say, “Oh my goodness.  Okay, what does that mean?”  Then you can say — because if you give a medical reason, it makes it a lot easier and it’s true.  So, “I focus on eating a lot of vegetables.  I really enjoy things like meat, fish, eggs — things like that — and then I really like nuts and seeds.  Those work really well for me.
Starches and sweets — those aggravate my pre-diabetes so I try to stay away from those as much as I can.”

April: Okay.

Jonathan: If you can, you can sometimes say, “Hey, I’m happy to pop over to the grocery store.”  Like, if you’re staying with someone — for example, when I visit my parents, they just know we’re going to go grocery shopping when I get there because I’m there for more than one or two days.

April: Yes.

Jonathan: The second part of the answer is, you’re just going to need to supplement what they provide.  Think about it like it’s the same as the conference scenario, where you need to bring your backup non-refrigerated veggies or powdered veggies.  You need to bring your backup SANE Protein Bars and maybe some backup whole food fats like nuts and seeds.

April: And then, do you like get that out and eat it while you’re around the table with your friends?

Jonathan: No.

April: Okay, it’s just kind of like —

Jonathan: It’s like, I’ll pre-eat.  “Oh, we’re going to eat dinner in fifteen minutes?”  Okay, I’m going to go make my Garden in my Glass, shake it up in my bottle, eat a protein bar so that I can — also, I eat a lot.  I eat a whole lot because I am a naturally thin person, I exercise eccentrically.  I also just, even if people buy SANE foods, I eat an impolite amount of it so I don’t feel comfortable getting up for thirds.

April: An impolite amount of food — that’s really funny.  Okay.  All right, I think that that’s great.  I think that it’s been really a good month for me.  I feel like it’s helping me figure out — I mean, I am sure there could be other things that could come my way to make it harder but I feel like I really hit all of them and I feel excited moving forward.

Also though, our conversations we’ve had in the past podcasts, I feel a lot less stressed about it.  Like, I have noticed that I am not as hard on myself; I am actually enjoying my life more; I feel like my body image issues are pretty much gone, which is really awesome; and I feel like I am focusing more on being that instrument than being an object.  Just that mindset shift has really been helpful to me.

Lying in bed for all those ten days when I couldn’t do anything but sit there, you start realizing what really matters to you.  Now, what do I really miss about my life?  I came out of that and got rid of a bunch of stuff and essential-ized a bunch of stuff and I feel like it really helps me bring clarity.

Really, I realized I care way more about having a healthy strong body than looking a certain way.  Lying in bed for ten days really helped me realize that.  If I have energy to stand up and move and work and do things, a hundred percent, that’s the main thing I want.  Thanks for all your investment in helping me over the past several podcasts.  It’s been really life changing for me.

Jonathan: It is my pleasure, April.  I think it’s really important also for us to keep in mind, because I know there are these things called a shame spiral where things go poorly and then it’s like, “Oh, I’m doing bad” and then it gets worse and it gets worse and it gets worse.  Just one quick bit of science — because I think you captured the spiritual and psychological aspects so well in what you just said — is that, keep in mind that your body is incredibly resilient and adaptive.

Most of us, we’re struggling with diabetes or we’re struggling with obesity or struggling with metabolic syndrome because of chronic exposure, a.k.a. years, decades of exposure to toxic inputs.  You can go a week without food.  I’m not suggesting this but your body is an adaptive thing.  Just please keep in mind that nobody develops diabetes overnight.  You can’t gain ten pounds in a day.  These are things that happen over time.  As long as we’re trending up, as long as we’re trending up, we have a good reason to smile.  That’s excellent.  Hopefully, next month will be a better month for you.

April: Yes.  I think that’s a great next action — focus on the trending up.  I think that’s a beautiful way to put it because all of us can trend up.  No matter if you have an awful day and your fridge breaks or you’re injured or whatever, you’re traveling — I mean, there are so many things that could make it hard.  If you’re just thinking about it and you’re prioritizing your health and you’re applying the things that you’re learning about nutrition and the things that we have been talking about in this podcast, I think that’s a great thing.  That is a recipe for a great life.

Thank you so much, everybody, for being with us.  We’re so thrilled to be able to be a part of this with you.  Thank you, Jonathan, for all you’ve done to help me.  We have so much great information here at SANE and SaneSolution.com and the SANE Store.

I’m going to go do another look over there and figure out what I need to make next time so much easier.  Thanks so much.  Have a great day.  Remember to stay SANE.