The SANE Story

Once upon a time there was a skinny geeky little boy who wanted to be Superman.

He looked up to his big brother, a strong football player. He wanted to get those same big muscles so people would look up to him, too. Every night, he would sit at the dinner table with his football player brother and his super brainy professor parents, dreaming of the day he, too, would be tall and strong, a “big man.”

Yet as the birthdays came and went, he grew taller and lankier but not bigger and stronger. He tried everything to become big and strong—he read every book and magazine, he tried every exercise routine, he followed every meal plan available. He met with nefarious people to try pills, powders, and potions, all in hopes of finally becoming a big man. Yet he was so discouraged when he looked in the mirror. He didn’t want to remain the skinny geeky boy forever—he wanted to be Superman.

The kid read and studied, devouring health and fitness magazines and books, listening to big, strong men like his brother talk about how to get big and strong. To earn his way through college, he decided to put some of this hard-earned knowledge to work, to try to help other people change their bodies, as a personal trainer.

And every day he would eat more, trying to gain weight—to become bigger.

And every day he would ask his clients to eat less, so they could lose weight—to become smaller.

He worked up to 6,000 calories a day, not doing any cardiovascular exercise. And he would gain not one ounce.

At the same time, his clients would eat 1,600 calories and work out a half an hour a day. And they would lose not one ounce.

So he cut them down to 1,400 calories and increased their workout to an hour a day.

Then down to 1,200 calories and an hour and a half workout every day.

And still they would lose not one ounce.

The boy grew distraught—where could he go from here? Would he have to eat 7,000 calories—and his clients 700!?

With every calorie they cut, his clients felt more and more miserable—achy, angry, and even depressed. And the boy did, too. His heart was broken. He could not help himself. He could not help others. What was going wrong?

In his private moments of frustration, the boy blamed his clients. “If they could just eat less, they would lose weight—what’s their problem? They just need to try harder!”

One day, while he drank his sixth shot of calorie-packed olive oil of the afternoon, the truth revealed itself to him in a blinding flash: What if some big strong man somewhere was thinking the exact same thing about him? “If that skinny geeky kid could just eat more, he would gain weight—what’s his problem? He just needs to try harder.”

The boy felt a tremendous sense of sadness and failure—how had he not seen the truth before? How had he been torturing his clients for years, subjecting them to restrictive diets and misery, all in the name of the exact same logic that wasn’t working for him? How could he have inflicted that same calorie-based brute force torment and heartache upon them?

His mission had been to help people feel healthier and better about themselves but all he was doing was making everyone—including himself—sicker and sadder.

He was overwhelmed with regret—and he was determined to make it right.

He went back to his professor parents, to ask their advice. He told them about the countless hours he’d spent reading and studying and applying what he’d learned—yet he wasn’t able to help any of his clients, or even himself.

“Son,” they said, “remember what we taught you about any type of information: ‘Consider the source.’”

Either he had the wrong source of information, or the information itself was wrong, or both. The “truth” in which he’d placed all of his faith, the standard fitness industry tale of willpower-meets-calories-in-calories-out-meets-try-harder, clearly wasn’t the whole story—and might even be the wrong story altogether.

His parents said, “Son, you and your clients are not suffering from an effort problem. You are all trying really hard. What you have is an information problem.”

So the boy threw away everything that he knew, and started fresh. He drew upon his geeky roots, and began a new journey that took him deep into the foreign and little-traveled lands of jargon-packed scientific studies and mind-bending academic journal articles.

During his journey, the boy discovered that everything he’d ever been taught was gospel as a trainer was disproven in the scientific literature. Every single thing he thought he knew was wrong.

The more the boy read and the deeper he researched, the bigger the gap he found between what he had been taught and what the science said. He wandered into the depths of the human brain in neurobiology papers. He was dazzled by endocrinology, the delicate interplay of hundreds of hormones. He explored gastroenterology, the role the gut and digestive system have on health. He looked at any and every study that might help him answer the burning question: “Why can I eat 6,000 calories and never gain weight, while some eat 1,200 and never lose it? How can we all get the body we want without struggle and suffering?”

The boy was no longer interested in fighting against the body; he wanted to transform the body. He wanted to change the way the body processed calories all day, every day, automatically. He wanted to improve the system itself, rather than using barbaric supplementation or starvation to torture a system that wasn’t working correctly in the first place.

After more than 10 years, 10,000 pages of research, 1,300 scientific studies, and countless conversations with scientists, the boy emerged from his research journey reborn. The opinion-centered, willpower-driven, calorie-focused boy was now a science-centered, research-driven, food-focused man.

For the first time, this man realized a stark truth: He would never become Superman. His genes simply wouldn’t allow it. However, he also realized a truth that freed him and changed his life forever: While he might never become Superman, through modern eating and exercise science, he could become a super man, the very best version of the person he was born to be.

He had discovered an approach to burning fat, developing lean muscle, and optimizing health that turned calorie-counting upside down. He had found thousands of studies that proved the culprit was not the calories in the food, but the food itself.

Only high-quality, healing SANE foods could unclog the body’s metabolic sink, which had been jammed with low-quality, damaging, inSANE food-like products that were keeping people fat. Only SANE foods could sweep out the toxic inSANITY, regenerate cells, rebalance metabolic hormones and digestive bacteria, and make people healthy, lean, strong, and energetic again. Only large quantities of delicious, whole, healing SANE foods were powerful enough to reset the body’s entire system and allow the brain to get back to balancing calories automatically—just like it does in naturally slim people (like himself).

And once he knew this truth, the man could not wait to share it with the world. He recommitted his life to helping people achieve their weight loss goals with data and facts, rather than hurting them with fairy tales of starvation dieting and binge eating.