One of the best things about SANE eating is that you can enjoy every taste (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savory/fatty) in abundance while lowering your setpoint. In your Setpoint Diet you will enjoy setpoint-lowering sources of all the flavors while eliminating any food cravings and addictions.
Let’s start with your SANE approach to burning fat with fat thanks to your discovery of whole-food fats.
These are foods found directly in nature that contain more calories from fat than from protein or carbohydrate. Nuts, seeds, eggs, olives, and avocados are good examples. Oils are not. If you’re trying to figure out whether a food that gets most of its calories from fat is a “whole-food” fat, just ask yourself: Can you find it directly in nature? Nuts, yes. Olives, yes. Vegetable oil, no. Olive oil, no (gasp!).
The Setpoint Diet puts a premium on whole-food fats because they contain everything that’s nutritious about the oil—and more. Far too much attention is paid to oils, while the whole foods they are found in are ignored despite being unequivocally better for you. Oils are previously whole foods with all the water, fiber, and protein processed out. Why is the media praising processed forms of fat with all things SANE stripped from them instead of heaping accolades on their far more therapeutic whole-food origins?
One of the neatest things about getting most of your calories from whole-food fats instead of starch and sugar is that this alone fundamentally changes the way your metabolism works, transforming your body from being good at storing fat to being good at burning fat. When you eat these whole foods in place of starches and sweets, your body starts to prefer burning fat for fuel instead of sugar. As you go SANE and get smarter about physical activity, you begin to burn more calories than you take in—but you won’t feel hungry and your body isn’t slowing down. Why? Because it’s full of nutrients and still has plenty of its preferred fuel. Sure, the fuel is body fat sitting on your hips instead of bread that just passed through your lips, but why would your body care? It has enough nutrition and enough energy on hand to keep you at your best.
Just the opposite happens if you regularly eat starches and sweets. Calories from sugar and starches slow your metabolism and shift the body into a fat-storage mode, resulting in increased hunger and cravings.
If you burn more calories than you’re eating, your body looks around for its preferred fuel source—sugar (remember, starch means lots of sugars mashed together)—but doesn’t find any. This deficit makes it demand more sugar and you experience this as crazy carb cravings. Even if you’re able to fight through these all-encompassing cravings and hunger pangs, you know what happens next: Your body burns fewer calories.
But what if there’s still a sugar shortage? Your body turns toward burning vital muscle tissue.
Eventually, it will get to burning body fat—but why not skip the whole “feel hungry and terrible while your body cannibalizes your muscles” part? Far from making you heavier, eating whole-food fats instead of starches and sweets enables you to healthfully burn body fat.
I know that it can be hard to let go of the theory that fat is bad for your waistline and for your health. Good news: Modern science (versus outdated myths) proves that it is not bad for you. Whole foods—which are generally SANE foods—contain fat. Whole foods were the only thing our ancestors ate for 99.8 percent of our history. How could the only foods available to us for 99.8 percent of our history harm you? If anything, you will thrive on foods that contain fats.
Then there is the crazier theory that fat is fattening. This has never been scientifically demonstrated, despite more than a billion dollars’ worth of research attempting to prove it. Indeed, researchers have proved that some types of fat help burn body fat and boost health.
Almonds—a SANE whole-food fat—are a good example. In a randomized study of 48 volunteers with elevated LDL cholesterol, Pennsylvania State University researchers demonstrated that eating 1.5 ounces of almonds daily burned belly fat, plus reduced artery-clogging cholesterol over a 6-week period (Berryman et al. 2015).
Diets high in fat don’t make you heavier. In fact, among European women, the data show that the more dietary fat women eat, the less body fat they carry. And any attempts to limit supposedly dangerous saturated fats by increasing carbohydrates just make health matters way worse—increasing triglycerides and decreasing healthy HDL cholesterol, raising glycemic load and insulin levels, and increasing the risk of diabetes, diabesity, and heart disease. Harvard researchers stress that the greatest hope related to fats in the diet points not to decreasing them but to increasing them: “Studies and… trials have provided strong evidence that a higher intake of [omega-3] fatty acids from fish or plant sources lowers risk of coronary heart disease” (Hu et al. 2001).
Finally, because of our fear of fat, there has been a decline in the proportion of fat in our diet, partly because food manufacturers rushed to create “low-fat” foods, which were really loaded with carbs specifically engineered to use taste to make up for the lack of fat. Tellingly, this dietary blunder has been accompanied by the largest spike in obesity and disease rates in history. Research from Harvard Medical School blames the decades-long emphasis on dietary fat reduction for having distracted us in the fight against the true causes of obesity (Ludwig 2016).
As you begin to eat whole-food fats, you’ll start limiting your consumption of “processed fats.” These include vegetable oils, butter, margarine, mayonnaise, bottled salad dressings, sour cream, and so forth. Again, all these fats, particularly oils, are processed derivatives of whole foods. They contain no water, no fiber, and no protein and are therefore not substances you need to eat. They just aren’t SANE.
Take soybean oil, for example, whose consumption has skyrocketed about 116,300 percent over the past century. It is not a whole food and is actually a highly refined product of soy—which can block the synthesis of thyroid hormones and interfere with metabolism, both of which can elevate your setpoint.
Are you thinking: But what about olive oil and coconut oil? Aren’t we told they’re good for us? Yes, but that’s relative to other oils. Think about this in the same way you think about whole grains. Whole grains are better than refined grains, but that doesn’t mean they are good for you. Same thing with oil: Olive oil and coconut oil are much better for you than other oils (soybean, corn, vegetable, and so on), but whole olives and whole coconuts are dramatically better for you than any oil. Why? Thanks to their higher water, fiber, and protein content, whole olives and whole coconuts are more Satiating (good), less Aggressive (good), more Nutritious (good), and less Efficient (good) than the oil extracted from them.
If you really want to throw a wrench into what the Internet says about “healthy oils,” it’s interesting to compare them to sugar. Specifically, how is sugar produced? Take a whole food that contains sugar—say, sugarcane—and then process it until all that’s left is refined sugar. How are even “healthy oils” produced? Take a whole food that contains oil—olives, for example—and then process it until all that’s left is refined oil. Does this mean oils are as bad for you as sugar? No. Does it mean that you can lower your setpoint faster if you get your fats from whole foods instead of oils? Yes.
Stable natural oils such as coconut oil and olive oil are fine when used sparingly for cooking, but whole-food fats are best for eating. Need a little oil to make your non-starchy vegetables delicious? All good. Simply keep in mind that anyone telling you to eat a tablespoon of coconut oil per day rather than eating more coconut meat may be more interested in selling you coconut oil than in your health!
Although there are many healthy sources of whole-food fats, some are especially beneficial. Rising to the top are cocoa/cacao, coconut, chia seeds, flax seeds, eggs, avocados, and olives.
Cocoa/cacao and coconut are wonderful ways to indulge your cravings for sweets. Beyond their deliciousness, these foods are health and fat-loss powerhouses. Natural and undutched cocoa/cacao is one of the richest sources of antioxidants, polyphenols, and flavanols (hard-to-come-by healthy things) in the world. By contrast, dutched or dutch-processed cocoa/cacao has been treated with chemicals and has lost much of its health benefit. Cocoa is also packed with filling fiber and essential vitamins and nutrients.
Coconut is home for a rare therapeutic type of fat: medium-chain triglycerides (MCTs), which have been shown to boost metabolism. MCTs are burned up rather quickly in the body for energy. And coconuts have fairly strong antiviral properties.
Flax seeds and chia seeds are rich sources of fiber, vitamins, and minerals, and are useful sources of omega-3 fats, extremely beneficial fats that have been shown to benefit almost every aspect of human cardiac, metabolic, and neurological health. Keep in mind that flax seeds need to be milled into a flourlike powder in order for your body to be able to use their abundant nutrition.
Also, while I love chia and flax, remember that the omega-3 fats found in plants (alpha-linolenic acid [ALA]) are 5 to 10 times less helpful than omega-3 fats found in animals (eicosapentaenoic acid [EPA] and docosahexaenoic acid [DHA]). Yet another reason to enjoy seafood every day whenever possible. In fact, animal-based omega-3s are literally therapeutic… that is, you can actually get a prescription for them!
Now let’s talk about eggs. Holy moly. If there was an award for most confusing food, eggs would get it… until now. Here’s why: Eggs are high in cholesterol. This had been the source of all the confusion. Fortunately, the research community has recently achieved cholesterol clarity. Eating SANE amounts of cholesterol is in no way, shape, or form bad for you. Thanks to that scientific fact, eggs become simple. They are a superfood. Think about it like this: One egg contains everything needed to create a life. What other food can we say that about? Eggs stand alone and are super SANE whole-food fats.
Then there are delightful whole-food fats like avocado and olives rich in setpoint-lowering monounsaturated fats. A 2013 study, published in the Food Science and Nutrition Journal, reported that avocado eaters are slimmer, with thinner waistlines, and have normal levels of cholesterol. Olives contain healthy fat that helps to lower LDL or bad cholesterol and increase HDL or good cholesterol in your blood (Dreher and Davenport 2013). Remember, everything that makes olive oil “good” and so much more is found in whole olives.
Just like with non-starchy vegetables and nutrient-dense protein, you can pick your favorite whole-food fats from “optimal” and “normal” categories. Optimal simply means that the food supplies the maximum amount of nutrition per calorie; normal is still SANE but yields slightly less nutrition per calories.
(Uniquely Nutritious superfoods)
Avocados
Chia seeds
Cocoa/cacao
Cocoa/cacao nibs
Coconut
Coconut flour
Coconut milk
Eggs
Flax seeds
Macadamia nuts
Olives
(Most raw nuts and seeds)
Almonds
Brazil nuts
Cashews
Chestnuts
Hazelnuts
Hemp seeds
Kola nuts
Pecans
Pistachios
Pumpkin seeds
Sesame seeds
Squash seeds
Sunflower seeds
Walnuts
For better setpoint lowering and maximal health, eat 1 to 6 servings a day of whole-food fats. A serving of plant fats such as nuts and seeds is generally a small handful or 3 tablespoons. If the nuts are mashed into butter (natural almond butter), a serving is the size of a Ping-Pong ball, or 2 tablespoons. When combined with NSVs and nutrient-dense protein, a serving of a whole-food fat is filling. Most people will stop eating naturally at 2 servings in a single sitting, anyway.
Here are other examples of serving sizes:
½ cup of coconut flour
¼ cup shredded unsweetened coconut
2 cups SANE coconut milk
¼ cup chia seeds
¼ cup chocolate bites or cacao nibs
¼ cup flax seeds
½ avocado
Note: You can eat “unlimited” olives and cocoa. They’re so nutritionally dense and satisfying that you can consider them a “free food.”
I’ll go out on a limb and say that 99.99 percent of people have been told setpoint-elevating misinformation about fruit. This is all caused by “experts” being sloppy with language. They tell us “eat more fruits and veggies.” They treat fruits and veggies as one food group. At the risk of stating the obvious: Fruits are not veggies.
For example, grapes contain 24 times more sugar per calorie than kale. If you get “five a day,” as the common adage recommends, from the fruit grapes, you will become diabetic as you bathe yourself in the same amount of sugar found in three full-sized cans of Coke! If you get “five a day” from the vegetable kale, you will take in essentially no sugar. Fruits and veggies are not the same, and your body and health will never be the same now that you know that.
Does this mean all fruits are off-limits? No. It does mean that if you think about fruits as “vegetables with WAY more sugar,” your setpoint will thank you. Now, as with every other type of food, not all fruits are created equal. Some fruits, such as acai berries and goji berries, are much lower in sugar and much higher in setpoint-lowering substances than other fruits.
A little higher in sugar, but still SANE are common berries, citrus fruits, and certain melons. However, fruits such as bananas, pineapples, grapes, and watermelon are best thought of as nature’s candy. They are not SANE.
But wait! Don’t all fruits contain vitamins? Yes. However, if you add a vitamin pill to a glass of sugary soda, did you make the soda good for you? No. And the similarities to soda don’t stop there. Ever heard of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS)? It’s the primary sweetener in soda. Guess what the primary source of sugar in fruit is: fructose. Guess what form of sugar is particularly damaging to your setpoint: fructose.
Glucose and fructose act much differently in your body. While glucose passes directly through the liver and is used by any cell in the body, fructose can stick around in your liver and get converted quickly into triglycerides—a fat in the blood that’s made when you consume excess sugar (including fructose). High levels of triglycerides are associated with abdominal obesity, diabetes, insulin resistance, low levels of high-density lipoproteins (the “good” cholesterol), and a higher risk of heart disease.
Fructose has been found to have a strong fat-storing effect on the body. Research conducted at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and published in 2008 demonstrated the surprising speed at which human bodies turn fructose into body fat. For the study, researchers fed six healthy volunteers three different breakfast drinks—one containing 100 percent glucose, one containing 50 percent glucose and 50 percent fructose, and the third containing 25 percent glucose and 75 percent fructose. They also ate a carefully controlled lunch over several weeks.
The researchers then measured the conversion of the sugars to fat in the liver. They also looked at how the morning drink influenced the metabolism of foods eaten later in the day. What they found was intriguing: “Lipogenesis”—the conversion of sugars into body fat—increased significantly when the breakfast drinks contained mostly fructose. Also, when fructose was eaten with fat or before fat was consumed, the fat was more likely to be stored rather than burned.
Those fruit carbs (fructose) entered the body as sugars; the liver took the molecules apart, and put them back together to build fats. All this happened within 4 hours after the fructose drink. As a result, when the next meal was eaten, fat eaten at lunch was more likely to be stored than burned (Parks et al. 2008). Fructose is very Efficient at becoming body fat, and worse, it makes everything else you eat more Efficient at becoming body fat, too!
Also, HFCS can trigger leptin resistance, as reported by a study in the American Journal of Physiology (Shapiro et al. 2008). It also contributes to insulin resistance and neuroinflammation. Your hunger signals can get mixed up as a result. You may overeat the wrong foods and ultimately elevate your setpoint.
The bottom line is that to lower your setpoint, lose all the weight you’ve ever wanted to, and keep the body from storing fat, enjoy low-fructose fruits instead of high-fructose fruits.
Same optimal versus normal deal here. Optimal are fruits that contain the least fructose and the most nutrition. Normal are SANE, just not as SANE as the optimal choices.
(Least sugar, most nutrition)
Acai berries
Goji berries
Mangosteen
Noni fruit
Purple aronia
Lemons
(Berries, citrus, and others)
Apricots
Blackberries
Blueberries
Boysenberries
Cantaloupe
Casaba melons
Cherries
Cranberries
Grapefruit
Guava
Honeydew melon
Limes
Nectarines
Papayas
Peaches
Raspberries
Strawberries
If you enjoy fruit, stick with 0 to 3 low-fructose fresh or frozen servings per day. If you can do without fruits, fine. In fact, if you are trying to lose 50 pounds or more, it is a good idea to skip fruit completely. There is no biological reason to eat fruit as long as you are consuming enough non-starchy vegetables. There’s nothing essential in fruits that you cannot get, and with a lot less sugar, from NSVs.
A serving of a piece of fresh fruit is roughly the size of your fist. Other measurements include:
6 strawberries
1 orange
1 apricot
½ grapefruit
½ cup of berries
¼ melon
1 tablespoon of powdered superfruits
For many people, eating nothing more than a cup of berries or a handful of cashews just makes them want more berries and cashews. This can lead to hunger. Eating an optimal amount of nuts and low-fructose fruits is easier if you combine them with NSVs and nutrient-dense protein.
The best way to do this is to think of whole-food fats and low-fructose fruits as scrumptious SANE desserts, and there are plenty of them in the recipe section. You can use nuts, nut flours, seeds, seed flours, cocoa/cacao, coconut, and berries to make SANE cookies, fudges, pies, cakes, ice cream, milkshakes, and other SANE treats that will satisfy any sweet tooth after an NSV and nutrient-dense, protein-rich meal.
Another critical point to remember: Studies show that you are more likely to lower your setpoint if you favor whole-food fats over low-fructose fruits. If you are extremely clogged, even the small amount of sugar in berries and citrus can slow your setpoint-lowering efforts. You can make surprising changes in your body, especially at the beginning of your journey, by limiting even low-fructose fruits.
Before we can wrap up our conversation about sweets, we’ve got to cover added sweeteners. It seems like every other day, food corporations come up with a new name for these setpoint-elevating monstrosities. For example, all of the following are basically sugar, from your setpoint’s perspective:
Agave nectar
Barley malt
Beet sugar
Brown sugar
Buttered syrup
Cane crystals
Cane juice crystals
Cane sugar
Caramel
Carob syrup
Castor sugar
Confectioner’s sugar
Corn sweetener
Corn syrup
Corn syrup solids
Crystalline fructose
Date sugar
Demerara sugar
Dextran
Dextrose
Diastatic malt
Diastase
Ethyl maltol
Evaporated cane juice
Fructose
Fruit juice
Fruit juice concentrates
Galactose
Glucose
Glucose solids
Golden sugar
Golden syrup
Granulated sugar
Grape sugar
High-fructose corn syrup
Honey
Icing sugar
Invert sugar
Lactose
Malt syrup
Maltodextrin
Maltose
Maple syrup
Molasses
Muscovado sugar
Panocha
Raw sugar
Refiner’s syrup
Rice syrup
Sorbitol
Sorghum syrup
Sucrose
Sugar
Syrup
Treacle
Turbinado sugar
Yellow sugar
Memorizing this list isn’t important. It is important to know that any form of caloric sweetener—other than the four safe sweeteners we’ll cover in a moment—increases your setpoint. Your body does not care where sugar and sweetener calories come from. It’s also important that you protect yourself from misleading “natural” marketing. Unnatural high-fructose corn syrup is 42 percent fructose. Natural agave nectar is about 90 percent fructose. Tobacco is also natural.
When it comes to sweets, I eat them daily, and you can eat them daily, too, while lowering your setpoint. All you have to do is practice “safe sweeteners.” You do this simply by focusing on four fantastic and all-natural options: stevia, luo han guo (monk fruit), erythritol, and xylitol. The first two are natural herbs with a sweet taste. The last two are sugar alcohols found in fruits. None of them elevate your setpoint or do anything harmful to you as long as you enjoy them in their pure form. Most of what you will find on store shelves has a tiny bit of one of those four along with a bunch of inSANEity. We can help you find pure sources at SANESolution.com.
In terms of which to use when, if you are baking, use xylitol because it cooks like sugar. For everything else, use erythritol unless you already like stevia and luo han guo. Stevia and luo han guo are great, but most people find them hard to use, as they don’t work, look, or taste anything like sugar. We’ll cover this more in the cooking chapters, but by using these safe sweeteners and other SANE substitutions, you can “SANEitize” all of your favorite foods and never feel deprived while lowering your setpoint. You can have your cake and eat it, too (as long as you swap the sugar and flour out for SANE substitutes)!