Carrie: Hey everyone, we are living the Smarter Science of Slim. This is Carrie Brown and Jonathan Bailor talking to you about living the Smarter Science of Slim.

Jonathan: We are talking, and we’re talking about FAQ’s.

Carrie: More FAQs.

Jonathan: Frequently Asked Questions.

Carrie: We love FAQ’s.

Jonathan: They are questions that are frequently asked to us.

Carrie: I love to answer, them because it’s very real. This is, we’re not making up stuff you want to know. We are actually answering stuff you want to know. If you have been listening for any length of time, you know I’m all about being real.

Jonathan: Yes! We’re real. Speaking of real, I want to talk about real athletes, and we don’t really talk about athletics very much at all on this podcast; and because of that, there are questions on what about athletes? Does SANE lifestyle and eccentric lifestyle apply the same way to athletes as it would to non-athletes? The answer is no, it doesn’t, because an athlete is not the same as a regular person so it’s very, very different. Just like an athlete trains differently than a normal person, an athlete also needs to eat differently than a normal person and just like a golf player would do different things than a shot putter, same thing applies with diet and exercise.

SANE eating is not the same for athletes as it is for regular individuals, nor is eccentric exercise. Let me do a high-level overview of the differences. With athletics, athletics are skill-specific sports. If you want to learn how to shoot a basketball, you should practice shooting basketballs. I’m going to drop some knowledge on our listeners here.

Carrie: I thought you’re going to come out with something really profound, and I was just getting ready to learn something; and then you said shoot basketballs. You’re Awesome!

Jonathan: When you do eccentric training, it well make you better at eccentric training and it will make you stronger and healthier in general. It’s a bit like just… If you’re smart, and you take a philosophy class and it’s makes you smarter, you will be better at everything. That’s great, but if you want to become a great accountant, you should take accounting classes. It’s a very specific skill. If you want to learn how to become a heart surgeon you should practice doing heart surgeries.

Being good at calculus will make you smarter, that’s good, but it wouldn’t make you a better heart surgeon; so doing eccentric training will make you healthier. It will make you stronger. It will make you more cardiovascularly fit, which a lot of people don’t know but is very much demonstrated by the science. However, it will not make you better at hitting baseballs, it will not make you better at hitting golf balls, and it will not make you a better marathoner. Those are all sports specific skills which you should train for in a sports specific way. Makes sense?

Carrie: It makes absolute sense. It also reminded me how I will never be doing any of those things, but I understand those people out there who need to know this stuff.

Jonathan: For eating, the biggest difference here is, and it’s actually not that different, so the foods that are SANE for non athletes are still SANE for athletes. There are a couples things here. I don’t want to geek out too much, because I don’t think a lot of athletes listen to our podcast because there are specific podcasts for athletes. Athletes are much more active than everyday people, so athletes just need to eat more; so my recommendation for athletes is to double down on your whole food, natural fats.

Things like coconut, things like cocoa, chia seeds, flax seeds, some nuts, seafood, just go to town on that stuff. If you’re an endurance athlete, I did a bonus podcast with Ben Greenfield, wonderful triathlete, a couple weeks ago and researchers Volek and Phinney have a book called The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrates Performance. It’s brilliant with lots of emerging research around how this idea that ‘you need to carbo load on starches and sweets is just false.’ It’s just like biomechanically false.

You do not need to do that for your muscles to function, but you do need to take in more energy because you’re expending more energy; so for optimal performance you might need to do that, and for explosive movements. For athletes such as football players or power lifters, your body uses different, let’s call it sources of energy for different things. If you’ve ever heard of the movie called Fast and Furious, any of these kind of race car kind of movies, where they have the car runs on gasoline, but you can give it the NOS or the nitrous; and it would go faster for a very short period of time.

The body works similarly. We run, we run, we run, but if we need to expend a massive amount of energy really quickly, our body is going to use “sugar” to do that; so before someone performs an explosive exercise, eating simple sugars in the form of fruits, for example, would be fine for you. If you need to recover from intense exercise eating like sweet potatoes or things you wouldn’t normally eat can be beneficial, but these are very specific individuals with very specific goals.

For us, for people listening to this podcast for Carrie, for myself, we really don’t need to worry about this. The take away though, is that if you are an athlete or maybe you have a son or a daughter or a niece or a nephew who’s an athlete, they’re going to need to do things slightly differently; but it’s not a far departure. It’s a slight tweak on SANEity. Basically, it’s going to be more whole food fats, and you continue to have your high-quality protein and maybe a little bit more of higher sugar fruits and a little bit more of nutrient-dense, starchy vegetables such as sweet potatoes. Make sense?

Carrie: Yes.

Jonathan: Cool Beans! Next one, gastric surgeries.

Carrie: Yikes!

Jonathan: Bam, Bam, Bam! A lap-band all that kind of fun stuff. Carrie, before I get into my Science-ness…

Carrie: No, I’ve never had the lap-band.

Jonathan: It’s not what I was going to ask you. I was wondering if you had thoughts, and it is a touchy subject because usually, this is a last resort for individuals often times so…

Carrie: Thoughts are, most what I’ve read about them is that long-term, they absolutely don’t work, and a lot of them are very, very dangerous.

Jonathan: I’m going to speak less about efficacy or lack thereof just because, I think maybe, looking at it… We talked in a previous podcast about the professor who lost 27 pounds eating Twinkies and blah, blah, blah, blah; and I think I want to change the dialogue about gastric surgeries, because what is gastric surgery? Gastric surgery is making your stomach smaller. It’s technically not. There’s different ways to do it. I get that, but basically it allows you to eat less food.

The amount of food we’re eating is not the problem, so if you ask me what I think about them, my first question would be, if you’re an individual who has a food addiction and cannot control yourself, well then physical intervention may be needed, but it’s like truly a last resort. It would be like taking a alcoholic and tying their hands behind there back because that’s the only way to get them to stop drinking alcohol.

It’s obviously not the solution to the problem, because they cannot walk around for the rest of their lives with their hands tied behind their back; however, there may be times, like we’ve all had times when we’re a little bit off the ranch and someone literally needs to hold us and say stop. I think there’s a moment in our lives, and it may not be for food, it may be for some other issue, where we really need a physical intervention. When we talk about gastric surgeries, it is a physical intervention. We’re literally saying, you can no longer put this food in your stomach; and if you do, you can die.

It is just kind of raising the stakes a little bit. I don’t know. It’s a little bit like sprinkling arsenic on inSANE foods in your house, so it’s like, if you eat it you’re going to die so you better not eat it. I would encourage us to… hopefully folks, I’m being sensitive here because I know this is a very sensitive subject for individuals, and I know people personally who had terrible experiences. I have a coworker right now who is going in to have a lap-band reversed, because if you saw this individual she didn’t look particularly healthy before she had the surgery; but now she looks even worse from an emaciation perspective.

She literally can’t eat food, like they broke her body, and so it’s not a pretty thing. I also know another individual who it is their saving grace, because it enabled them to get control. They were just out of control, and it forced them to stop and then they were able to move forward. I think for some, it can be very valuable. I think it’s a last resort. I think before we head down that last resort, we have to say the issue is not the quantity of food you’re eating. It’s the quality of food you’re eating, and if we don’t solve that problem then let’s say we don’t solve that problem.

If we don’t solve that problem, then I am against gastric surgeries because if the point of gastric surgery is to force you to eat less of an already nutritionally inadequate diet, that will kill you. It is making you malnourished. It is forcing you to malnourish yourself. The answer is not taking nutritionally inadequate diet and force someone to eat less of it. It is, ‘let’s do everything we can to just eat a more nutritionally adequate diet and let the body heal itself.’ Get a counselor. Get a buddy to follow you around for a week to help you.

It’s just, please, before you physically alter your body in a potentially irreversible way, just try to eat so many non-starchy vegetables. so many whole food fats and so much nutrient dense protein that you’re just too full for the other stuff. If you’re still craving the other stuff, just try Carrie’s recipes. The freaking muffin she makes are fantastic. I promise that you can’t eat the things Carrie’s making and not just say, “That’s fabulous.”

It’s delicious, so I’m sorry if I’m rambling here; but I’ve seen really bad things happen, and there’s also good things happening with them and I just think, if they’re presented to you as, ‘here’s a way you can eat less,’ then obviously I’m against them; but if they’re presented as a last resort to someone who just cannot get control, then maybe but only…

Let’s put it this way. Someone who has a gastric surgery, it is even more important for them to go SANE because now they can’t eat a lot of food so the food they eat has to be five star SANE, otherwise, they’re going to malnourish themselves. They’re going to break their metabolism, and then they’re… I hate to use this word, but then they’re really screwed. If you make your body such that it will run on 800 calories per day, if you ever stop eating 800 calories per day…

Carrie: You’re going to put on pounds per minute.

Jonathan: Pounds, and you’re going to be super unhealthy because it is incredibly hard to get sufficient nutrition. When I say nutrition, I mean vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids in 800 calories per day. You’re going to have to eat so SANEly that it might make you insane, because we all need a little bit of insanity in our lives. When you go in that gastric arena, you’re playing for keeps; because if you do it, it’s even more important that you change food quality.

I would argue that if you can change food quality, you wouldn’t need to do it in the first place; so to summarize, you either change food quality — you don’t potentially don’t need to have it done — or you have it done and change food quality anyway or you have it, done don’t change food quality and you’ll end up worse off than if you never had it done.

Carrie: You will, you’ll end up worse off. It’s very sad. I was actually… I don’t have TV as you know but, I was at a friend’s house over the holidays and we watched a show about a morbidly obese woman who literally could not get it under control, and she had the surgery. Not much longer afterwards, she died, and she left six daughters. It was the saddest thing. It was the saddest thing, but of course reducing the quantity was not the thing that was going to make the difference.

Jonathan: Yeah it is. I do think it is a useful analogy that there are individuals who are addicted to food. If you are addicted to drugs, sometimes you have to go into a facility where they prevent you to from getting access to them.

Carrie: They still have to fix the psychological addiction. It’s the addiction that’s the problem. I get that you have to cut off the supply of drugs or alcohol, or whatever, gambling or whatever it is; but you still have to fix the addiction, which is emotional, psychological, mental whatever it is. If you don’t, they could be in rehab forever. When they get out, they’re going to go back to where they were.

Jonathan: Yes, so it’s really, and that’s… Carrie just nailed it in many less words than it took me, and that’s if you want to be healthy and fit, you have to solve the underlying problem; and if getting a gastric surgery enables you to do that, then do that, but if you do that in an attempt to like bypass fixing the actual problem, you are going to be worse off than if you had never had it done.

Carrie: Eat SANE foods!

Jonathan: Eat SANE foods!! Let’s get happy again, because that was so sad. That was a more serious, sad portion of the podcast. We’re going to be happy now.

Carrie: Yes, I’m genuinely just desperately sad for people who are in that situation.

Jonathan: Especially, and I think a lot of them just don’t know about this alternative. They just think they have to stop eating food, because that’s what we’re told, we’re to just stop eating food. What’s your problem? Just stop eating food, that’s ridiculous, like telling the smoker, well, just stop breathing. Just breathe less. What’s your problem? No, it’s not that I am breathing too much, it’s that I’m breathing in the wrong things; but no one told us that for food.

Carrie: Eat SANE, be happy!

Jonathan: I love it, I love it. Well, on a happier note Carrie, I wanted to share with you a secret. I have been doing my own…

Carrie: News flash! Jonathan Bailor secrets!

Jonathan: I’ve got a secret. My secret is that I’ve been doing my own little experimentation in the kitchen.

Carrie: Oh heaven help us.

Jonathan: I have come up with, per your recommendation around, I’ve never really used baking powder before so, I started using baking powder; and I started using guar gum and I have come up with a SANE pancake recipe.

Carrie: Please tell me it’s infinitely better than your last one. Please.

Jonathan: Well, guys, it’s not really fair here, because this is amateur talking to a professional but let me tell you briefly about my SANE pancake recipe because it is very, very good.

Carrie: Jonathan, your interpretation of good when it comes to food and mine are miles apart.

Jonathan: It is true. It is true, but for those listening to the podcast who define good the way I define good, which also has to do like ease of preparations, things like that; so here’s what I do. I will use either eggs or egg whites depending on my goals for that meal, and I will use coconut, totally unsweetened coconut, and I will use a casein based protein called UMP, which is available in the SANE store, which is yummy. I use actually the cookies and cream flavor, and then I use vanilla. I use cinnamon,. I use baking powder, and I use guar-gum and some Xylitol and some water.

Carrie: He’s a convert, people!

Jonathan: I put that in the Vitamix for two minutes, because the coconut is not relatively large, and it turns it into a complete liquid. Put some coconut oil in the pan, put that on there, and it’s good eating, Carrie. I had my wife Angela try it. Who was like, “Get those away from me, because I don’t want to eat all your pancakes.” They were good. They were really good.

Carrie: I am going to have to make them now.

Jonathan: There was no syrup necessary, because you can just put enough Xylitol in it to make how sweet you want and it was good.

Carrie: Let me tell you people, his first pancake version, Oh, my Lord!

Jonathan: I can even expound upon this, and then you can make chocolate pancakes. Just add cocoa to the recipe. Generally, add a little bit more Xylitol if you want them to taste sweet, but I’m telling you, Carrie, it’s good. You better watch out. You’ve got some competition!

Carrie: Yeah, like you have competition me getting biceps like you. That kind of competition, all right, bring it on!

Jonathan: Fair analogy, and while we’re talking about recipes, Carrie, remember you were telling me — I think the listeners might be a little interested in this — how the distinction of when you use flours, like a nut flour versus sunflower seeds and just when you use different flour-like substitutes and the reason you use the different ones. Does that make sense?

Carrie: Kind of.

Jonathan: Well, why don’t you try to make, clearly I don’t know what I’m talking about here, so help me communicate what I’m trying to communicate. Or is this just a complete loss, because the patient died on the table or can we bring in the expert?

Carrie: I really don’t know what you’re talking about.

Jonathan: You said, I used, because I wanted this recipe to taste fluffier than another recipe, so I used sunflower seeds instead of something else. That’s what I’m talking about.

Carrie: Yes. I just did this. There is no formula. I just made it up ,and I just experiment with things. I see if it works, and if it does, goodness, and if it doesn’t then I’ll tweak it until it does.

Jonathan: Can you tell our listeners, for example like you informed me for example, if you have a concoction you’re experimenting with it, like I’m not a big recipe person. I still haven’t done any of your recipes, because I don’t like being told what to cook.

Carrie: Right, but you sure like to eat them when I make them, don’t you?

Jonathan: But I like having guidance. For example if you want to sweeten something, Xylitol is a good option, and I like to know if guar gum if you want it to have a little bit more consistency, a little bit more of a thicker feel to it, add some guar gum to it. I can do it. I can take that principle, and apply it; so, I was hoping… for example, you have, despite my repeated encouragement, not used coconut flour as much as I would like you to; because it has certain characteristics.

Carrie: Jonathan, there is a limited number of hours in the week. Coconut flour things is on my list, I just haven’t got there yet.

Jonathan: But what I’m asking you to describe to our listeners, folks talk about needing physical intervention here, just kidding.

Carrie: Jonathan, stop. You are getting the timeout sign here. Baking is science. What you do generally speaking is assembly. It’s not cooking. It’s not baking and assembly and baking is very different. It’s not as easy as switching out coconut flour for regular flour.

They behave completely different. Coconut flour is like blotting paper. It’s sucks up liquid. I can’t give you a… there is no formula. It’s trial and error. That’s why it’s just easier for everyone to just go make my recipe, because I’ve done all the hard work. If you want to spend days and days in the kitchen having failures, then go right ahead.

Jonathan: All right! Well apparently, Carrie has all the proprietary information and can’t tell us what to do with it. Fine!

Carrie: I’m just being practical.

Jonathan: What I learned from what Carrie just said…

Carrie: I’m just trying to save you a lot of pain.

Jonathan: Is that coconut flour is more absorbent than other flours or something like that.

Carrie: It’s not more absorbent, it’s like the Sahara desert.

Jonathan: All right coconut.

Carrie: It also doesn’t have the same structure.

Jonathan: Moving on, moving on.

Carrie: Look, Jonathan, you stick with the geeky, science stuff that you’re brilliant at and leave the cooking to me.

Jonathan: I will do that, so moving on.

Carrie: You’re allowed to make your pancakes.

Jonathan: Thank you very much, and I’m very proud of my pancakes. So Larabars, and more generally, they are these… I think most of our listeners will know the answer to this question, but there are these bars that are all natural. They’re made with dried fruit. They are dates, and they are all natural. They’ve got recycled packaging, and therefore you’re being a eco friendly person when you buy them. Carrie, this is T.M. Carrie, trademark Carrie Brown. She made a point in an earlier podcast, which is, look on the label. If it has double digit sugar, don’t eat it.

This is bottom line. It’s really that simple like bar, shake… I don’t care. If you look on the label, and it has double digit sugar, don’t eat it, and if it has single digit sugar, look at the serving size. If the serving size is so blatantly not a realistic serving size, like if it’s half a cookie and it has only 5 grams of sugar; and if you’re going to eat four cookies, then it’s really the math there. I forgot the first number I said, but the point is, just look at the sugar content. That will tell you all you need to know.

Carrie: Not only that though, if you’re seeing sugar at how many grams per whatever, also look at the ingredients and make sure that none of that sugar is added sugar , i.e., honey or maple syrup or glucose or maltose or Maltodextrin or whatever the heck… It’s not just because dates… Larabars have no added sugars, no caloric sweeteners in there, so that’s all goodness, so then you’re just left with how much sugar the dates are providing but that’s different.

Jonathan: Yeah, but don’t let the fact that it is in bar form somehow make it like this is better now. Dry fruits are inSANE. They’re generally higher sugar fruits with all the water taken out, and therefore, SANEity is determined by water, fiber, protein, so they’re less SANE, they’re less filling and if you put them in bar form, it doesn’t make it any more SANE.

Carrie: The sugars are concentrated, I think is what Jonathan’s trying to say.

Jonathan: Exactly!

Carrie: You’ll know, and Jonathan, too, uses a handful of raisins, and you’ll notice I have cranberries in a lot of my recipes. But we are not talking about you not throwing cranberries on your salad to make it more delicious. That’s all good. We’re talking about eating a cup full of raisins because you like them.

Jonathan: You’re just using them as a snack.

Carrie: Right, or these bars that are essentially dates seems to be the big thing in bars, that would be inSANE.

Jonathan: Exactly! Using them as a seasoning almost, like using them with cheese, using the cheese as a seasoning, rather than, I’m going to eat cheese and using dried fruits as I am going to top this with dried fruit rather than…

Carrie: I’m going to eat with a cup of raisins.

Jonathan: Dried fruits, yeah, exactly same kind of thing. We even talked about oils. If you’re using oil as a lubricant in a pan that’s fine, but don’t eat tablespoons full of oil.

Carrie: Right, and I admit, this is confession time. I eat cheese. I just will eat slices of cheese, but that I’m fully aware that in and of itself is inSANE, and so I do that consciously. I know the result that I’m going to get from doing that.

Jonathan: Let’s be very clear, especially when it comes to cheese. There’s two different paths of SANEity that people can take, because we’ve already said we know we’ve got to eat our non-starchy vegetables, and we’ve got to eat our nutrient dense proteins. Then there is whole food fats and low-fructose fruits. One could say, there is a lower fat, higher fruit version of SANEity, and then there is a lower sugar, higher fat version of SANEity.

If you’re doing a lower sugar, higher fat version of SANEity, things like cheese would be fine for you. If you’re doing a lower fat, higher carbohydrate for lack of a better terms version of SANEity, then you might be able to eat more things like dried fruits and may be even a sweet potato every once in a while something like that.

What you don’t want to do is eat a bunch of high sugar fruits and a bunch of non-optimal fats, so pick one or the other. Carrie goes lower carb SANEity, so just pick one and stick with it. Don’t go high, not optimal fat and high not optimal carb. If you do that together, you’re not getting very good results, so pick one.

Carrie: I can’t eat a whole bunch of cheese and a cup of raisins at the same time?

Jonathan: Yes, that would be suboptimal to say.

Carrie: Suboptimal.

Jonathan: What I need to say and I do a lower carb SANEity, so personally I don’t eat any low sugar fruits just because I really enjoy eating my whole food fats. I’ll put a cup of coconut in my pancakes that I just mentioned and not think twice about it and that just satisfies me more.

My wife, for example, just does the opposite. She really, really likes fruits and that’s fine. I know a lot of people who really, really like a little bit more of this nutrient-dense, starchy carb such as a sweet potato or taro but just be conscious. I think if you prefer the lower carb, higher fat path that’s fine take that but stick with it. If you prefer the higher carb but lower fat path, that’s fine but pick one.

Carrie: I would just say if you are like me, and you’re a huge cheese fan just know, just be aware, and be honest with yourself, that’s not going to further you towards your goal for that meal. That’s what I mean just be aware of the fact that it’s really inSANE on it’s own, but if you choose to do that.

Jonathan: Well, I think giving you more hope here, Carrie, because what I’m trying to say is that there is a version of SANEity where you could actually eat cheese. It just means you would have to be very, very sensitive to the amount of sugar you’re taking in; so for example, people who go on low carb high fat diets, this is like the phase one of Atkins and they’re called low carb high fat diets for a reason because you’re eating so few carbohydrates like sub 50 grams of carbohydrates per day, and you don’t need to eat more than a certain amount of protein.

You have to get the rest of your calories from fat, so you have to do things like cheese or put butter on things you normally wouldn’t do otherwise you don’t have enough calories. All I’m saying, is that if you are actually really ambitious with your goals, and you really like fat and you want to eat things like cheese, you can do that but you really, really, really need to watch out for the amount of sugar you’re taking in.

I even mean like Greek yogurt might be an issue for you, because Greek yogurt, while it has very little sugar on the grand scheme of things, if you are doing high fat low carb, it might be become an issue in that context. I guess I’m actually saying there’s hope, so if you really like that stuff, that’s fine. You just need to be even more sensitive to sugars, and if your goals are not ambitious, then you can be less sensitive to sugars. That’s fine, but I just want to put that ray of hope out there.

Carrie: Yeah, no I’m just saying be aware. Don’t slip into denial about cheese is SANE, or you know what I mean. That’s all I’m saying, is just be aware of what you’re doing; consciously make the choices you do. That was my point.

Jonathan: Yeah and I love what you said and don’t eat apples and think, oh it’s fruit. I mean it’s a higher fructose fruit and if you’re going to eat apples, that could be fine but you’re going to need to be more conscious of the other things you’re eating if you want to continue to make progress.

Carrie: If you don’t, if you’re happy with where you are at, then it’s all goodness.

Jonathan: Actually that’s the uber rule right there. Carrie hit the nail on the head. If you’re eating cheese and apples, and you feel great and you look great and your numbers are great, keep eating cheese and apples. If you’re eating cheese and apples, and things aren’t going the right way, well stop eating cheese and apples and start eating more non-starchy vegetables and nutrient-dense proteins. All goodness. Well, Carrie it’s been a blast as always, Jonathan Bailor, Carrie Brown we’re eating more, we’re exercising less but we are doing it smarter, and we’ll see you next week.

Carrie: See yah!