Key Takeaways
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Real-Life Insights and Takaways
- How do you know if SANE is for you?
- If you have tried to exercise more and eat less, then SANE would be a good fit for you.
- If you are tired of being hungry and not having energy then SANE is for you.
- SANE focuses on long-term metabolic healing vs. short-term weight loss.
- Long-term metabolic healing means we heal the underlying neurological and biological causes of obesity, low-energy, and diabetes.
- You are never too young or too old to eat the most nutrient-dense and hormonally healthy foods on the planet.
- Most weight loss programs market the ability to eat all the junk you want; but just to eat less of it. It doesn’t work and is counterproductive.
- SANE is a shift from calories or points and focusing on the quality of food you are eating and preparing for your family.
- By eating SANE, we are getting back to “normal” eating habits.
- If going completely SANE seems overwhelming and you wanted to adopt just one SANE habit, the first thing you could change is to drink a SANE smoothie each day. In one blended whole-food beverage you will experience 80% of what SANE can do for you. This is a positive goal rather than a negative goal.
- When you tell yourself NOT to do something (i.e. not eat certain foods), that will lead to frustration and failure.
- If you say “I am going to drink one SANE smoothie per day.” You can do this along with your family and if you do it consistently and feel the results, you will want to do more.
- Train yourself to put good food in your body first, then there is no need to rely on willpower.
- A weight-watching lifestyle is all about willpower and that is why it doesn’t work for the majority of people.
- The opposite of will-power in a lifestyle change context is habit. With SANE, we establish simple habits around what you need to do, rather than willpower around what you can’t do.
- What is a in a SANE smoothie: a SANE smoothie is really low in sugar (single digit sugar content), extremely high green whole vegetable content (not just the juice, the whole food has more impact on your digestive system and on how your brain works), and then a nutrient dense clean source of protein which helps preserve lean muscle tissue, keep your appetite at bay, and helps you to develop calorie-hungry lean muscle tissue.
- How did human beings who lived prior to knowing what a calorie was (prior to 1970’s) have a radically lower rate of diabetes and obesity than we have today? The answer is that they ate food when they were hungry, stopped when they were full, and treat themselves on occasion. Today the majority of 40-60% of the calories people eat today come from packaged, processed, nonsense which is marketed as “healthy.”
- When you eat a SANE diet it can’t NOT work. Your body will burn fat when you eat properly.
- Part of SANE is becoming familiar with your grocery store,
- There is nothing wrong with going to the gym, but we will often spend a lot of time at the gym, but not spending time cooking in the kitchen or grocery shopping.
- At SANE there are programs, tools, and superfoods that can help you to get faster results at sanesolution.com to use for help. If you don’t need any help then you can just eat non-starchy vegetables, nutrient-dense protein, whole food fats and low-fructose fruits in that order and you will be SANE.
- We need to take responsibility for our family’s health and not rely on food manufacturers to take care of our family’s health.
- To learn more about Jonathan’s mission with SANE, view his TED talk, “Can Superman End Diabetes?”
- Jonathan’s experience as a personal trainer helped him to realize that it was not an effort problem or that people just needed to try harder. He then spent 15 years digging deep into health research which led to him write The Calorie Myth.
- Sometimes we feel like we’ve failed, but we just haven’t been given the right information.
- SANE works with doctors and researchers who are doing cutting-edge research and that is the basis of SANE.
SANE Soundbites
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- 1:18 – 1:30, “Anybody who has tried to eat less and exercise more and has not been thrilled with that process or thrilled with the results, SANE would be a good fit for them.”
- 2:36 – 2:55, “We don’t want short term weight loss. We can do it. We’ve all done it. What we want is to heal the underlying neurological and biological causes of obesity and low energy and diabetes and that’s what long term metabolic healing is.”
- 3:06 – 3:16, “You are never too young or too old to eat the most nutrient-dense, hormonally healthy food on the planet, which, at the end of the day, is all we’re advocating.”
- 4:22 – 5:15, “Weight Watchers makes their money by selling low-calorie processed packaged food so they are actually not in the business of telling you to eat healthy whole food; they would go out of business if you ate healthy whole food. They are in the business of telling you to eat less; often times, just fewer points and then selling you processed packaged unnatural food that is based on that point system. No, they’re not actually advocating eating healthy whole food; they’re advocating eating less of frankly everything. If you look at their marketing, that is what they say is so neat about their program. They say, “Look, you can eat all the junk you want; just less of it.” It’s like, “You can keep smoking; just smoke shorter cigarettes.” That’s unfortunately why it does not work and is in fact counterproductive.”
- 5:30 – 5:43, “[SANE] is a shift fundamentally from trying to diddle with the quantity of calories or points you’re eating and focusing more on the quality of food you’re eating and preparing for your family.”
- 7:30 – 8:14, “We now live in a world where one in every three children are overweight and we actually renamed adult-onset diabetes to type 2 diabetes because it used to only be found in adults but now it’s also found in children. What we’re doing, what we’re advocating with SANE Solution is essentially to eat the way we ate before the obesity epidemic. I know it sounds crazy. You go to the doctor and you say, “Doctor, it hurts when I raise my arm like this.” And she says back to you, “Don’t raise your arm like this.” It’s kind of what we’re saying. We’re saying if you eat the way we ate prior to us having all these problems, you won’t have these problems. That’s the way we ate for the entirety of human history. So we’re actually just getting back to normal.”
- 8:44 – 9:47, “If someone just wants to kind of start and figure it out, what would they be doing? What kinds of things would they be changing? What would maybe be the first thing that you would suggest?” “The first and only thing that they would need to do is drink what we call SANE Smoothies because, by doing that, that is an embodiment in one beverage—in one blended whole food beverage—you will experience eighty percent of what going completely SANE can do for you and the beautiful thing about it is that it’s a positive goal rather than a negative goal. We can talk about the psychology of that in a hundred podcasts but when you tell yourself and your mind to not do something, that will lead to frustration and failure for all sorts of proven psychological reasons. Rather if you say, “I am going to drink one SANE Smoothie per day,” you can do that; everyone in your family can do it; and when you do it consistently for twenty-one or thirty days, you are going to feel such a difference that you’re going to want to do more.”
- 11:35 – 11:50, “The opposite of willpower in a lifestyle change context is habit. What we do in a SANE lifestyle is we establish simple habits that are around what you need to do rather than willpower around what you can’t do.”
- 12:05 – 13:27, “The three biggest distinctions are what would make a SANE Smoothie. First and foremost is, the smoothie is really low in sugar. Ninety nine percent of all the smoothie recipes on the Internet, smoothies you can buy at the grocery store, smoothies you see at smoothie chains have more sugar in them than three cans of Coke so they are not healthy at all. You’d be better drinking a single can of Coke than drinking one of those smoothies. Very low in sugar—when I say low in sugar, I mean single digit sugar content—and that’s naturally occurring sugars, the sugars found in fruit, or low sugar contents. That’s number one. Number two is, extremely high green vegetable content and whole grain vegetable; not vegetable juice—whole green vegetable, because we know that eating whole foods, not just the juice from foods, has a much more powerful impact on your digestive system and also the way your brain works than just juice ever would. Low in sugar, very high in veggies, and then often times, we’re going to want a nutrient-dense clean source of protein in the smoothie as well so that it helps you to preserve your lean muscle tissue, helps to keep your appetite at bay so you don’t have cravings, and also helps you to develop strong calorie-hungry lean muscle tissue which is so critical to your long term success.”
- 13:52 – 14:33, “How did every human being, prior to us knowing what a calorie was in the mainstream, which would be every human being who lived prior to the 1970s have a radically lower rate of obesity and diabetes than we have today? The answer is, they ate food when they were hungry and they stopped when they were full and they treated themselves on occasion. Now you’re saying, “Well, that’s what we do today, isn’t it?” No. What we do today is we don’t actually eat food. Forty to sixty percent of the calories the average American eats is not coming from a food if you define food as something you find in nature. It comes from packaged processed nonsense that’s oftentimes marketed as healthy.”
- 15:03 – 15:19, “If you eat as much healthy real whole SANE food as you want whenever you want, you will effortlessly stay slim and avoid diabetes. If that sounds too good to be true, it’s actually too obvious to be false because that’s what every single person did prior to the obesity and diabetes epidemics.”
- 15:59 – 16:53, “Prior to [SANE], the only time I ever saw any change in my body was if I starved, I was at the gym every day, I was weighing myself, I was like on it, and it was bad. So I’m super excited about this. If you try it, you’ll see because one of the things that I’ve loved that you taught me, Jonathan, is that you said, when you eat a SANE diet—and we’ll describe more about what that means in a minute—it can’t not work. The way your body is created, your body will burn fat because that’s how your body is made. When I finally learned how my body worked, now if I ever feel like, “Oh, I want to be healthier or stronger,” I just know, “Okay, what would Jonathan tell me to do?” and I would just go do that and eat those foods because I get results every single time. I don’t see it the same day but I feel it immediately and then I see it soon after.”
- 17:20 – 18:08, “You definitely do need to go to the grocery store. That is very, very important. Becoming more familiar with the grocery store and becoming more familiar with your refrigerator rather than your pantry and more comfortable in your kitchen. Often times, we’ll throw time and money at the gym. There’s nothing wrong with going to the gym. I go to the gym. I enjoy going to the gym. It’s fine. But we won’t just throw time at the gym—just exercise more, just exercise more—and then we say, “We have no time to go to the grocery shop” and we say, “We have no time to cook.” At the end of the day, is it too good to be true? No. You have to cook more and you have to grocery shop more and it’s going to take a little bit more time in the kitchen but the new you that will result will be able to do more and at a level that you’ve never imagined.”
- 18:30 – 18:53, “When it comes to SANE, of course we have all sorts of programs and tools and super foods and things like that that could help you to get faster results—that’s all at SANESolutions.com—but those are all things that you could use for help. If you don’t need any help, you eat non-starchy vegetables, nutrient-dense protein, whole food fats, and low-fructose fruits in that order and you’re SANE. It’s that simple.”
- 18:54 – 19:52, “One of the things that just came to mind as you were talking about that is how much my life changed once I did switch more of the hours at the gym to more of the hours in my kitchen because not only did it help me not—I don’t like going to the gym. I hate going to the gym. I’ll go if I have to but I just don’t like it; don’t get a lot of joy out of that. One of the reasons I don’t love going to the gym right now is because I’m missing out on being with my children at home. I found when I started doing more in the kitchen, I chopped vegetables more with my kids. We started investing in better knives. We got better cutting boards, more cutting boards. Now it’s not uncommon to see three of us sitting around the counter with our own cutting boards, chopping things together, preparing food together. I can really be with my family. That’s when my kids open up; that’s when they’re talking about stuff going on at school; that’s when I’m helping share my values with them and helping explain why I believe what I believe and helping my children decide what they believe, which is really important.”
- 21:40 – 21:56, “What I hope is on your agenda, is: “What I physically put inside of myself and inside of my family is important; therefore I am going to take responsibility for that rather than trusting Ronald McDonald to take responsibility for that.”
- 27:10 – 28:18, “One thing I do want to be very clear on is that everything that I talk about, everything that we advocate at SANE Solution is actually not me. My mission in life and the entire mission of SANE Solution is to bring to you and to simplify the most rigorous peer-reviewed academic research from all sorts of esoteric areas like neurobiology and gastroenterology and endocrinology and just—it’s complicated. We work with top doctors and researchers at Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins, UCLA, the Mayo Clinic, the Cleveland Clinic—not people that are on television; not people that are rocking the Spandex and it’s all sexy and wonderful; but rather the people that are actually in there doing cutting edge research and take that and simplify it and systematize it so that you can put it to work in your life. I am the mouthpiece for thousands of much smarter researchers and scientists. I just want to make that clear.”
Read the Transcript
April: Hey, everybody. It’s April Perry and Jonathan Bailor back with another episode of the SANE Show. Are you so excited to record today, Jonathan?
Jonathan: I’m so excited because I get to wear my geeky—because my other mic broke and I was actually thinking about putting my retainers in and just fully mess up my appearance but we’re making it work. We’ll make it work.
April: We’re excited to be able to hear you and see you today. We’re going to be talking about the “who”, “what”, “when”, “where”, “why”, and “how” of SANE. I know a lot of people are coming across this podcast and coming across SANE Solution and might be wondering, “Well, what is it? Can you just help me understand if it’s for me and what it even entails? And is it something that takes a long time? How do I even do this? Do I need to go somewhere? Can I do it from home? Why is it that April and Jonathan are even doing this podcast? What is the motivation behind it?”
I thought it would be kind of fun to take people through and do kind of an introduction even if you’ve been around for years. Does that sound good?
Jonathan: That sounds great.
April: All right, so let’s just start with the “who”. Who do you feel this is perfect for? If someone is coming to SANE Diet, how do they even know if it’s for them? What would you say?
Jonathan: Anybody who has tried to eat less and exercise more and has not been thrilled with that process or thrilled with the results, SANE would be a good fit for them.
April: Okay, I love that. That was really me. I was your target market where I found you through the podcast and I was tired of being hungry. I was tired of trying to be a mother and starving myself at the same time, thinking I was doing the right thing to try to lose weight. Also, I think we need to mention that this is not for people who are looking to lose twenty pounds by Friday. Right?
Jonathan: That’s exactly right. We focus on what we call long term metabolic healing, which we can unpack if we want, versus short-term weight loss. They are very different things.
April: Yes. Let’s take a moment. What is long term metabolic healing? Because you don’t hear about that in most weight loss promotions.
Jonathan: That’s the thing that is somewhat elusive for all of us, right? Let me give you a specific example. I bet 99.9 percent of people who are watching or listening to this have lost weight at some point of time in their life. So we all already know how to do that; we’ve all already done it.
The problem is, that’s not actually what we want. We don’t want short term weight loss. We can do it. We’ve all done it. What we want is to heal the underlying neurological and biological causes of obesity and low energy and diabetes and that’s what long term metabolic healing is.
April: Okay, I think that’s brilliant. Is there any age that shouldn’t even consider SANE? Are you ever too young? Are you ever too old? What do you think?
Jonathan: You are never too young or too old to eat the most nutrient-dense, hormonally healthy food on the planet, which, at the end of the day, is all we’re advocating.
April: Okay. Okay, that feels doable. Hopefully, everyone who’s listening is like, “Me. I’m the who.” I want you to care about your health. That’s why I’m here podcasting with Jonathan because I was taught so many times how to lose weight by people who don’t care if I’m healthy and who don’t care if I’m thriving; who just think I need to look a certain way. Jonathan is not that way, which you’ll come to love in a minute. Okay, we’ll talk more about it.
So let’s just talk about the “what”. We got a little bit into it about this long term metabolic healing but, as far as what SANE entails, you talked about eating the healthiest food. Well, don’t other weight loss programs do that too? I mean, you go to Weight Watchers or Nutrisystem—aren’t they talking about nutrients and aren’t they talking about eating healthy foods too? What’s different about SANE?
Jonathan: Ironically, they’re not. If you actually look at Weight Watchers and Nutrisystem and even Jenny Craig’s business models—not to get too economical here—but most people don’t know this but Weight Watchers was bought by Heinz. Weight Watchers makes their money by selling low-calorie processed packaged food so they are actually not in the business of telling you to eat healthy whole food; they would go out of business if you ate healthy whole food. They are in the business of telling you to eat less; often times, just fewer points and then selling you processed packaged unnatural food that is based on that point system.
No, they’re not actually advocating eating healthy whole food; they’re advocating eating less of frankly everything. If you look at their marketing, that is what they say is so neat about their program. They say, “Look, you can eat all the junk you want; just less of it.” It’s like, “You can keep smoking; just smoke shorter cigarettes.” That’s unfortunately why it does not work and is in fact counterproductive.
April: So what you’re actually doing is helping people learn how to use what’s in their own grocery store—foods that are available in their local areas—to be able to eat more healthfully. Is that right?
Jonathan: That’s exactly right. It’s a shift fundamentally from trying to diddle with the quantity of calories or points you’re eating and focusing more on the quality of food you’re eating and preparing for your family.
April: Okay, so we’ve talked a little bit about the “who” and the “what”. As far as “when”, we’ve talked about how it’s never too late or too early. Is this something though that I should wait until I’m ready to dive into a diet mentally? I mean, is this something I should only start on New Year’s Day? Is this something you start when you’re getting ready for bathing suit season? Is this something I may actually need to prepare for?
Because when I did past diets, I would have to really mentally prepare. I’d be thinking, “All right, I’m about to start a diet on Monday. Let me eat all I want this weekend so I can kind of get that out of my system.” What do you find is most helpful for people? Do you have them put thirty days on their calendar? Do you have them give themselves a six-month window? What’s the timeframe that you usually give people and how do you usually inspire them to prepare?
Jonathan: This is really person-dependent because there are some people who love to just jump into something and say, “All or nothing.” For example, I’m an all or nothing person. I can’t do anything half-hearted. The more you know me, the more you’re like, “Yep, if we say we’re going to do something, we’re either going to do it or we’re not going to do it.” So that’s me.
A lot of people aren’t that way. My mother, for example, is the opposite. She would much rather take baby steps. It really depends on who you are as an individual and whether you’re going to take baby steps or whether you’re going to go for it all at one time. The key thing to keep in mind is that you’re just getting back to what’s actually normal. Let me unpack that really quick. Some people look at SANE eating and they say, “Oh my gosh, this is so—my kids’ lunches will be so abnormal. They’ll be so much different from what every other child is eating.”
Of course, we now live in a world where one in every three children are overweight and we actually renamed adult-onset diabetes to type 2 diabetes because it used to only be found in adults but now it’s also found in children. What we’re doing, what we’re advocating with SANE Solution is essentially to eat the way we ate before the obesity epidemic. I know it sounds crazy.
You go to the doctor and you say, “Doctor, it hurts when I raise my arm like this.” And she says back to you, “Don’t raise your arm like this.” It’s kind of what we’re saying. We’re saying if you eat the way we ate prior to us having all these problems, you won’t have these problems. That’s the way we ate for the entirety of human history. So we’re actually just getting back to normal.
April: Okay. So this whole process of getting back to normal—I think if I were going to say, “Well, let me just start baby steps then.” Let’s say I was a little concerned about it because, to be quite honest, I think one of the biggest challenges is people who are really raised on or maybe addicted to processed foods and sugar. It’s hard to give that up right away.
If someone did just want to start—I mean, maybe someone does just want to dive in with—that’s what I did. I was ready to just dive in. If someone just wants to kind of start and figure it out, what would they be doing? What kinds of things would they be changing? What would maybe be the first thing that you would suggest?
Jonathan: The first and only thing that they would need to do is drink what we call SANE Smoothies because, by doing that, that is an embodiment in one beverage—in one blended whole food beverage—you will experience eighty percent of what going completely SANE can do for you and the beautiful thing about it is that it’s a positive goal rather than a negative goal.
We can talk about the psychology of that in a hundred podcasts but when you tell yourself and your mind to not do something, that will lead to frustration and failure for all sorts of proven psychological reasons. Rather if you say, “I am going to drink one SANE Smoothie per day,” you can do that; everyone in your family can do it; and when you do it consistently for twenty-one or thirty days, you are going to feel such a difference that you’re going to want to do more.
April: Okay. I actually just had an experience with that recently because I came home from an activity and there was something from SANE that was in my kitchen—I forget what it was but someone had brought something and it was sitting there on the counter and I thought—oh, I think it was around the holidays; it was a plate of something—and I was like, “Oh, that looks really good.”
In my head, I’m thinking, “Oh, I think that would taste really good” but I thought, “Well, let me do what I know is right first. I’m going to go get my SANE Smoothie.” I had a smoothie; I had some additional vegetables; I think I made a big salad; I had my protein; I ate all of the food that I needed to eat and then I looked at that and I really wasn’t hungry and I had no desire for it. I think when we can train ourselves to put that good food in first, then there was no willpower associated with it.
I didn’t even have to think twice. It was like, “Well, I’m just not even hungry for it. I don’t even have that need to snack or that need to eat the sugar.” That’s been so helpful for me and I think that that’s one of the biggest differences in going SANE is that I never have to sit and think and breathe and say, “Don’t eat. Don’t eat. Don’t eat.” I actually get to enjoy a lot of really good food.
Jonathan: That is a key distinction between, for example, a SANE lifestyle and a weight watching lifestyle. A weight watching lifestyle is based on willpower, period. That’s why it does not work for nineteen out of twenty people because, yes, if you can white-knuckle it and if you can eat 1,200 calories a day, I don’t care if it’s 1,200 calories of McDonald’s.
You see this happen every five years. Some university professor somewhere will eat 1,200 calories of junk and say, “I lost weight. Look.” Absolutely. No one is refuting that starvation causes weight loss. What we’re saying is that willpower and white-knuckling it is not a healthy or enjoyable way to live. The opposite—I don’t know if that makes sense but—the opposite of willpower in a lifestyle change context is habit. What we do in a SANE lifestyle is we establish simple habits that are around what you need to do rather than willpower around what you can’t do.
April: Yes, I love that. Maybe we should also explain just for a moment what kinds of things are in a SANE Smoothie. We kind of left that vague. What’s a general idea or general principle behind what goes in? I know there’s a ton of different options but what would you tell someone?
Jonathan: Three biggest distinctions are what would make a SANE Smoothie. First and foremost is, the smoothie is really low in sugar. Ninety nine percent of all the smoothie recipes on the Internet, smoothies you can buy at the grocery store, smoothies you see at smoothie chains have more sugar in them than three cans of Coke so they are not healthy at all. You’d be better drinking a single can of Coke than drinking one of those smoothies. Very low in sugar—when I say low in sugar, I mean single digit sugar content—and that’s naturally occurring sugars, the sugars found in fruit, or low sugar contents. That’s number one.
Number two is, extremely high green vegetable content and whole grain vegetable; not vegetable juice—whole green vegetable, because we know that eating whole foods, not just the juice from foods, has a much more powerful impact on your digestive system and also the way your brain works than just juice ever would.
Low in sugar, very high in veggies, and then often times, we’re going to want a nutrient-dense clean source of protein in the smoothie as well so that it helps you to preserve your lean muscle tissue, helps to keep your appetite at bay so you don’t have cravings, and also helps you to develop strong calorie-hungry lean muscle tissue which is so critical to your long term success.
April: Now, is it actually possible—and I already know the answer to this question but I’m just going to ask you because I know people are thinking this—is it actually possible for me to eat healthy foods as much as I want of the right foods and still see changes in my body? Don’t I have to starve in order to lose weight?
Jonathan: I’ll answer that question with another question, which is, How did every human being, prior to us knowing what a calorie was in the mainstream, which would be every human being who lived prior to the 1970s have a radically lower rate of obesity and diabetes than we have today? The answer is, they ate food when they were hungry and they stopped when they were full and they treated themselves on occasion.
Now you’re saying, “Well, that’s what we do today, isn’t it?” No. What we do today is we don’t actually eat food. Forty to sixty percent of the calories the average American eats is not coming from a food if you define food as something you find in nature. It comes from packaged processed nonsense that’s often times marketed as healthy. Just look at that healthy sugar-packed cereal because it has artificial vitamins and minerals infused in it. Even the word “healthy”—that’s why we don’t talk about healthy in SANE; we talk about SANE.
SANE is actually an acronym for what really determines if a food will help you or harm you because nowadays healthy food is often times addictive and toxic processed nonsense and if you eat any of that, you’re going to struggle with weight for the rest of your life.
If you eat as much healthy real whole SANE food as you want whenever you want, you will effortlessly stay slim and avoid diabetes. If that sounds too good to be true, it’s actually too obvious to be false because that’s what every single person did prior to the obesity and diabetes epidemics.
April: I think that’s a brilliant way to put it. I didn’t believe it until I tried it. I heard you talking about it and I thought, “Okay, it makes sense, especially when you talked about eating double digits of non-starchy vegetables” which we’ll get into in a minute. What happened was, I just started noticing I was never hungry; I was always feeling full and satisfied and happy; my clothes were fitting better; I had more energy; my family was noticing I was happier; and then when I looked at “after” photos six to eight or ten weeks later, I couldn’t even believe there had been a change. I just never felt hungry.
Prior to that, the only time I ever saw any change in my body was if I starved, I was at the gym every day, I was weighing myself, I was like on it, and it was bad. So I’m super excited about this. If you try it, you’ll see because one of the things that I’ve loved that you taught me, Jonathan, is that you said, when you eat a SANE diet—and we’ll describe more about what that means in a minute—it can’t not work.
The way your body is created, your body will burn fat because that’s how your body is made. When I finally learned how my body worked, now if I ever feel like, “Oh, I want to be healthier or stronger,” I just know, “Okay, what would Jonathan tell me to do?” and I would just go do that and eat those foods because I get results every single time. I don’t see it the same day but I feel it immediately and then I see it soon after.
Jonathan: That’s exactly right.
April: Okay, so let’s go and just talk quickly about the “where”. We talked about how you can do it from wherever you are but do you have SANE stores? Do you have to get together with a group? Do I need to go to a boot camp? Do I need to go check in on a farm somewhere? How do I go SANE if I just really wanted to get started? Then we’ll get into the why and how in a minute. Besides SANESolution.com, is there any place we need to go or anything we need to do?
Jonathan: You definitely do need to go to the grocery store. That is very, very important. Becoming more familiar with the grocery store and becoming more familiar with your refrigerator rather than your pantry and more comfortable in your kitchen. Often times, we’ll throw time and money at the gym. There’s nothing wrong with going to the gym. I go to the gym. I enjoy going to the gym. It’s fine.
But we won’t just throw time at the gym—just exercise more, just exercise more—and then we say, “We have no time to go to the grocery shop” and we say, “We have no time to cook.” At the end of the day, is it too good to be true? No. You have to cook more and you have to grocery shop more and it’s going to take a little bit more time in the kitchen but the new you that will result will be able to do more and at a level that you’ve never imagined.
Even if you’re taking an additional three hours per week on food preparation, if that takes you from an efficacy level and from an energy level of a four to a nine, you’ll be able to do more in three fewer hours per week than you ever could have before because it’s a bit like turbo charging yourself.
When it comes to SANE, of course we have all sorts of programs and tools and super foods and things like that that could help you to get faster results—that’s all at SANESolutions.com—but those are all things that you could use for help. If you don’t need any help, you eat non-starchy vegetables, nutrient-dense protein, whole food fats, and low-fructose fruits in that order and you’re SANE. It’s that simple.
April: One of the things that just came to mind as you were talking about that is how much my life changed once I did switch more of the hours at the gym to more of the hours in my kitchen because not only did it help me not—I don’t like going to the gym. I hate going to the gym. I’ll go if I have to but I just don’t like it; don’t get a lot of joy out of that.
One of the reasons I don’t love going to the gym right now is because I’m missing out on being with my children at home. I found when I started doing more in the kitchen, I chopped vegetables more with my kids. We started investing in better knives. We got better cutting boards, more cutting boards. Now it’s not uncommon to see three of us sitting around the counter with our own cutting boards, chopping things together, preparing food together.
I can really be with my family. That’s when my kids open up; that’s when they’re talking about stuff going on at school; that’s when I’m helping share my values with them and helping explain why I believe what I believe and helping my children decide what they believe, which is really important. Number one, it’s given me a lot more time with my children.
Number two, I’m even thinking Eric and I are going to be empty nesters in about eight years, nine years. We don’t have that much more time till we’re empty nesters. If I ever wanted to even hire someone to come to my home to blend smoothies, chop vegetables, or wanted to buy some of that stuff pre-made, I can hire that kind of stuff out. I can’t hire someone to go to the gym for me and exercise for me. So just even looking at your life, if you’re running a business and you’re trying to use your time well and hire things out, you can hire out someone to blend your smoothies or prep your vegetables and that’s just going to give you more and more time.
Jonathan: And it’s also a powerful mental distinction. I think a lot of us take for granted that the act of eating—let’s hop out a level—you’re putting things into your body. To say, whether it’s you, whether it’s you and a partner, whether it’s you and a family, that you are going to trust some multinational billion-dollar conglomerate to have your health and wellness and what you put in your body as their top priority is just not true.
It’s not saying they’re evil; it’s saying their business and therefore, by definition, their motivation is to minimize their costs and to maximize their revenue. They have no concern for your health and wellness. They’re not trying maliciously to kill you; they just don’t care about you.
April: Well, it’s clear. I mean, think about the people who are making Fruit Roll-Ups. I’m sure in the meeting for Fruit Roll-Ups, it’s not like, “So, how is this going to affect people’s health long term?” Right?
Jonathan: Neither positive nor negatively; that’s just not on their agenda. What I hope, I pray, is on your agenda is what I physically put inside of myself and inside of my family is important; therefore I am going to take responsibility for that rather than trusting Ronald McDonald to take responsibility for that.
April: Love it. Okay, because we’re getting ready to close up, I want to talk a little bit about the “why”. You shared often on your website a little bit about your story. Maybe, could you just give us the shortened version as to why you dedicated your life to this? What was it that got you inspired to create SANE and to help people do this?
Jonathan: There are two very formative events. One is already covered in TED Talks if you just search for my name, Jonathan Bailor, and TED or “Can Superman end diabetes?”, you can learn about that story involving my grandfather. The other story just has to do with the fact that I had—continued to have—the opposite problem most people had.
When I was growing up, I was and continued to be a naturally thin person so I wanted to gain weight. I wanted to be a college football player so I went out of my way. I took hundreds of dollars of supplements before they were regulated. I did all kinds of crazy things. I ate 6,000 calories per day. I became a personal trainer. I’m eating 6,000 calories per day. I’m counseling people who are wonderfully accomplished adults. I’m eighteen, nineteen, twenty at this time. I’m putting them on 1,200 calorie diets. I’m eating 6,000 calories. I can’t get bigger. They can’t get smaller. I had to answer a question in my own brain that this clearly isn’t an effort problem.
They are successfully eating 1,200 calories and not getting smaller. I am successfully eating 6,000 calories and not getting bigger. So it can’t just be, “Just try harder. You guys need to try harder to eat less and exercise more and I need to try harder to eat more and exercise less.” It just didn’t make sense so then I quit being a trainer.
At this point now, fifteen years digging deep into academic research across all sorts of different categories and that resulted in the New York Times bestselling book and now, SANE Solution, which really presents the past forty years of modern research that explains why naturally thin people are naturally thin and why other people struggle with their weight and how we can bridge that gap and help everybody’s body to work more like the body of a naturally thin person.
April: I love it. Really, I didn’t even know I was looking for SANE. I was just looking for a way to lose weight. I had four children. I was getting into my mid-thirties and I thought, “Oh, what can I do? I’m so tired of starving.” I wanted to be better. I think that’s what most people want. They want to have energy. They want to feel healthy. They want to look better. I had been listening to all kinds of podcasts.
In the meantime, my daughter, Alia, was really struggling with her weight. She was thirteen years old. She was overweight, probably at least twenty pounds—twenty to twenty-five pounds overweight. Both of us were starving together. So after counting calories every day—we used the calorie counting app, we were so hungry and I was always feeling down on myself.
Really every day, I was down on myself because I would starve throughout the morning and then I just couldn’t do it anymore and I would eat and then I would go to bed feeling like I had totally let myself down and I just felt like I am just – I called myself all kinds of names internally. I labeled myself as being weak and being awful. Then I heard Jonathan on a podcast. It was like a weight loss podcast but he was on there and he was talking about eating double digits of non-starchy vegetables and he explained about long term health and wellness and started talking about what we should actually be eating.
I listened to his podcast and then I went back three months later and I thought, “I really liked what that one guy had to say. That really made sense.” I went back and listened again. You had a podcast. And so, I was quietly listening to the SANE Show for months until finally I brought Jonathan on my own podcast at Power of Moms and started just doing work with him to help families get into this because when I find something that’s a game-changer, I have to tell people about it. I have to let people know. If I help something that helps in productivity, in strengthening a family, how to discipline children, whenever I learn things that just solve my problem, I want everyone else to know.
SANE solved my problem one hundred percent. In fact, I was just talking to my sister the other day. She’s a little older than I am and she struggled the same way I struggled for years and years and she said, “Jonathan and the SANE Solution healed me from her obsessive calorie counting as well.” Totally changed it where she finally can feel peaceful. And it changed Alia too where she lost ten inches off her waist, totally changed her life. So now my seventeen-year-old daughter is dating and getting ready for college and it’s so amazing.
It’s because of what I learned from Jonathan. The why that I’m here is I just feel like there are so many people starving out there, there are so many people who are feeling down about themselves, feeling like they’ve failed when they just haven’t been given the right information, and Jonathan has the right information.
Maybe we should transfer into the “how” now. I hope people are more excited and they want to learn more and come find out about SANE. So how do they get going?
Jonathan: Real quick before we actually get into the “how.”
April: Yes.
Jonathan: One thing I do want to be very clear on is that everything that I talk about, everything that we advocate at SANESolution is actually not me. It’s not mine. I know that sounds kind of strange—like, why are you talking about this?
My mission in life and the entire mission of SANESolution is to bring to you and to simplify the most rigorous peer-reviewed academic research from all sorts of esoteric areas like neurobiology and gastroenterology and endocrinology and just—it’s complicated.
We’re like, let’s work with top doctors and researchers at Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins, UCLA, the Mayo Clinic, the Cleveland Clinic—not people that are on television; not people that are rocking the Spandex and it’s all sexy and wonderful; but rather the people that are actually in there doing cutting edge research and take that and simplify it and systematize it so that you can put it to work in your life. I am the mouthpiece for thousands of much smarter researchers and scientists. I just want to make that clear.
April: I love that you’re humble about it too because I love that you’ve gathered things from people who have spent years and years in their lifetime studying but I like that you put it into a format that works—something that you could just tell me, “Okay, here’s how many servings to shoot for. Here’s what you’re going for. Here’s what to stay away from.” I can just go and check out what you have to say and really—
There’s never been a question I’ve had that you haven’t been able to answer in a way that really made sense to me but you’re also the whole philosophy of SANE—it’s not about trying to make anyone feel bad or guilty or saying, “You better be this size” or “You better look just like this”; it’s not about that. It’s about thriving as a whole person. That’s why I’m a hundred percent onboard and I have been for years because it’s not—
I’ve never before—I probably tried fifty diets. Never before was there a diet that didn’t feel like a diet; that was just like, “Oh, I just get to eat and here’s what I eat and here’s what I buy” and it’s just about changing habits and I feel healthy and strong and I never feel guilty if I’m not waking up at four a.m. to go running ten miles or if I’m not just eating this much food at a restaurant.
I can get a huge salad with my chicken or whatever I want, my whole food fats. I love it. I’m eating so much more. I’m in such a better mood. I was not fun to live with before this. I’m in such a better mood and my husband won’t let me stop doing SANE because he’s like, “You’re so happy.” I mean, if I wanted to stop, I could; but I don’t want to and he totally encourages me so it’s awesome.
Okay. So if people want to get started, I mean, they have the Quick Start Guide and the Blueprint at SANESolution.com, right? Okay, anything you want to say?
Jonathan: I would just pop over to SANE Solution and just two quick notes. It’s not “TheSANESolution.” It also doesn’t end in an S so it’s not SANESolutions.com. It’s just SANESolution. You’ll see at the very top of the page, there’s something that says Free Recipes and there’s something else that says Blueprint. You’re going to want to click on both of those and they’ll help you get started free of charge on your SANE journey.
April: Which is so fun. You’re going to be eating a whole lot more vegetables than you’ve ever eaten but Jonathan has some fun ways to make those smoothies make it work and you’re going to learn what protein you want to eat and what you want to stay away from. You’re going to learn what fats really are and which fats you don’t want to eat. It’s going to be so fun.
I think the fun of this is that when you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, you’re not afraid to work hard. This is something that I’ve noticed with the people I work with in productivity. I help people get clutter out of their lives. What I notice is so many people say, “It’s my fault I’m not doing a good enough job. It’s my fault that I’m not strong enough to keep all my clutter at bay” or whatever. Once you show them a path and you say, “This works. I promise it works. It’s so fun.”
When they see a path, people are willing to put in effort and energy in learning and reading books and no one’s afraid of this hard work; they just want to get results. They don’t want to get burned again and again and again. SANE is awesome. Yay. I love it. I love SANE Solution. I’m so glad you’ve been with us.
Thank you everyone for being part of the SANE Show. Have a wonderful day. Remember to stay SANE.