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Chef AJ: Moderation v Abstinence, Environment v Genes More | Interview with Dr Doug Lisle Dr Jen Howk
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hey everyone and welcome to chef aj live i'm your host chef aj and this is where i introduce you to amazing people like you who are doing great things in the world that i think you should know about my guests today are a regular feature on chef aj live they try to come on at least once a month when they can they're none other than the dynamic duo of dr doug lyle and dr jen hawk who are writing a long-awaited book together on self-esteem that we look forward to they're the co-stars of the beat your jeans podcast that airs wednesday night on blog talk itunes stitcher all kinds of platforms at 8 30 pm pacific time they have a wonderful website together where they can each do private consultations it's called esteemdynamics.com and dr jen also has a virtual village which we can tell you about where she has her own little like fireside chat group that i'm a member of it's really wonderful every saturday where we can talk about things that we maybe can't talk about in an open forum like this and they're here to answer your questions or priority please sign up for my mailing list we don't spam you we just tell you who's going to be on the show so you can write us back and that's the best way to get your questions answered other than doing a personal consult which i highly recommend please welcome back dr doug lyle and dr jen hawk always great to see you great to see you aj yeah yay it's awesome to be here all right well so um it wouldn't be all right if i asked you guys a brief question i know i talked to you a lot but i never really get to ask my own questions because there's so many but this has been coming up a lot on the show we live in a time now with a lot of inclusivity uh sensitivity towards racial sexual and gender issues and i noticed this mostly in my acting classes that i take now on zoom or even in person coming up stunning acting for 40 years and you pay the money you take the class but now they send you these pages like the things you have to sign like non-harassment that you've got to be sensitive with your language and and i understand that and i'm willing to do it and you know now we don't call the guy the gal or the guy that delivers your mail we don't say mailman we don't see stewardess or waitress and i'm wondering why the medical profession hasn't caught it up i have a lot of doctors medical doctors on the show and when they're talking about their experience they'll say i'm a fellow of the american college of cardiology i'm a fellow of the american college of lifestyle medicine the male doctors don't seem to mind that term but when i'm talking off camera with the female doctors they don't particularly like the term fellow and i'm wondering why in medicine that term is still being used especially in this day and age yeah well jen it's funny because i was trying to anticipate where that was going like where where you were kind of going to lead with it and i didn't immediately land on fellow like fellow didn't immediately i'm pretty sensitized to the the direction that language has changed like this but i haven't that's new to me that's a new one um so yeah i mean i think you see doug can chime in here but you see this across every field i started seeing within academia you know over a decade ago now i started to see the sort of tendrils of critical critical thinking critical theory um which started in the legal realm and has moved into the social sciences and the humanities and now into kind of the culture at large and a lot of that is um a long time coming and you know sort of uh well well-deserved representation across a lot of fields where people have been marginalized um and in my opinion a lot of it is a little bit uh performative and excessive and uh people are finding things to complain about because we generally live in a world where there's not as much to complain about as maybe other generations have experienced and so i think it's a little of column a little of column b um as for the specific question around fellow i just haven't heard any discussion in medical circles or um the circles that we run it in general of that being a concern but i i guess it doesn't surprise me uh given what i know of of what academia is like these days um that that would come up as part of a conversation i was very proud to call myself a fellow when i was one a couple of times that was a there was a real um term that designated something meritocratic and important um and i i never once thought of it in a gendered way uh but i'm not surprised to hear that that's happening now so well you never hear anybody saying for she's a jolly good fellow do ya i i can't say that i have now so maybe it's not the most inclusive term what do they prefer we use instead if it's a fellowship um that when i talk to doctors you know in groups they don't always say the truth but when i've talked to female doctors they they go i don't really love that term but the male doctors are like oh yeah no it doesn't mean this but the first two definitions in webster's miriam are gender specific like like in actors they call male and female actors and actresses they're all actors yeah that happened a long time ago i remember that happened even when i was involved in high school theater 20 years ago so um yeah yeah i don't know doug do you have anything any other thoughts on this no i think it's a fellowship of the ring too you know sort of perfect lord of the rings like there were women in the fellowship there were you know there was sort of it was never part of this it never fell under this broad gender critique that we see but well i need to you know if you have to call people they when there's only one of them i don't see why this can't change too this this makes more sense to me i never understood how you can be of a when you're only one person well that's about neutrality i think that's about people who are not identifying as either male or female and so they're most comfortable with sort of an ambiguous term um sometimes they sometimes a completely um different pronoun entirely so that's a whole that's a whole other conversation yeah i don't even know what a pronoun is so on to the next challenging question all right so this first question is from rhonda i attended the nha conference and saw your wonderful talk meaning dr hawk's talk pop talk wow and about moderation it was wonderful but immediately after dr joel fuhrman gave the exact opposite point of view i found it very confusing how do we know who is right and who we should listen to he said food addiction is tremendously powerful and the insidious damage from the way these foods are designed to hook people like drugs is horrible and the only way to break the illicit love affair with these substances is with enforced abstinence i just want to make it clear that this idea of baby steps in the right direction or a cheap diet where you go on and off healthy eating inevitably inevitably leads people to failing and is the trigger the inability for people to adopt this 100 creates the difficulty the reason that people are failing because they never transition their taste buds and never get the ability to enjoy the food as much as they're always in a position of stress having to make a decision you need to find a way to set up your life where you're not going to keep going back and forth between eating healthily and unhealthily continued exposure even in small amounts are addictive triggers that derail your ability to do this consistently and helpfully the dabbling of going back and forth adds so much stress to your life keeping you in constant stress and constant fear and is the reason for your health demise it's so much easier when you commit to doing it 100 and jump in with both feet thoughts oh goodness where to begin so the reason i gave the talk at the nha that i did um it was first of all i i really tried to make it very clear during the talk several times i kind of stopped and said don't misunderstand me here look let me make my message really clear this is not a moderation message i was really not trying to tell people to have a weekly cheat day or to plan on cheating at all i i was going again and again to the importance of doing the best job that you possibly can for any number of reasons i mean doug and i have talked about this a bunch of times it's really important for your self-esteem process your internal audience all of these um kind of processes that happen psychologically where you need to observe yourself doing the best you can and if you're sort of planning to fail you're likely to fail to some degree i was coming at it the reason that i i wanted to present that alternative perspective was one not of you should plan to to embrace moderation but that moderation is going to happen for most people that most people it's it's wonderful to strive for perfection the reality is that very few people can pull off perfection indefinitely for the rest of their lives um most people who have been in and around this plant-based world or or any kind of um you know dietary compliance world at all they struggle they have periods of time where they're super super compliant and it's all really easy and they're doing really well and then they have other periods of time where it's not it's not as easy they're not as compliant they're having a lot of trouble getting back on track so are we what kind of message are we trying to give to those people that was who i was talking to i was trying to say it is not the end of the world if you have gone off plan here all you need to do is course correct that was the kind of the the general overview that i had the the gist of the talk the it's not the exact talk that i gave but it's the script and i re-recorded it it's um on a video that i'll be putting out for my patreon folks probably today or tomorrow so if people really want to hear it for themselves and missed it at the nha uh they can they can hear it that way too so the the message is we are all imperfect for all of these reasons of how the pleasure trap operates how different personalities operate um it does not make you a less valuable or worthy person if you haven't managed to be perfectly compliant of course it's easier if you never go off plan of course it's easier if you don't give in to temptation of course it's easier if you neuro adapt and and don't put yourself into this back and forth position that people will do that's great if you can do it but not everybody can do it and it doesn't mean that you are a disaster or a failure or that you have to be ashamed or anything at all other than you just have to get back up and keep going so that was the message i don't think that dr fuhrman could disagree with that so so it's interesting that he would come on and sort of disavow me in that way great dr lyle do you want to add anything to that because we actually have two follow-up questions on moderation versus abstinence as it's just a coincidence well i could add a lot it's kind of like uh if you sort of attack my position i'll defend myself but if you attack my best friend here you're gonna get blasted yeah um uh as the as the author the principal author of the pleasure trap uh what what dr fuhrman says there that's a direct quote is that a direct quote yes she she actually did a correct direct quote from his talk very intelligent thinking it it is uh reminiscent of the thinking that comes out of alan goldhamer's mouth which had a big influence on the way the pleasure trap was written and you can see that i filed it down uh a bit when we were writing because i was already aware of something that would take me many years to actually formally crystallize and that is the and you see me actually one of the reasons jen and i uh are jen and i at this point is because of a single note that i put in the back of the pleasure trap uh a paragraph that it's a miracle because it's a message in a bottle that happens to now reach my uh my lifetime colleague now yeah about the thing that i termed the ego trap and uh my little discussion that was in a footnote uh in in the pleasure trap uh jen read it and said wow that is something very important and it stuck in her mind and therefore she was willing to listen to some of my other things that i had to say about life that she didn't agree with well very fortunately the uh what what that commentary that we we just heard from dr fuhrman which is like i said it's not inconsistent with the message that we would have read 18 years ago uh as the pleasure trap was published or that you would hear from alan but it is in fact uh it has a has a naivete and has an obtuseness to the the thinking there that misses out the fact that there is a an opponent process between the ego trap and the pleasure trap okay so in other words the uh think of it as the following if think of you as looking to uh jump over a high bar if anybody ever had to do the high jump in junior high school you there's a there's a feeling that if it's so low then there's no improvement in your in your skill there's no challenge and therefore you're not even gonna you're not gonna accomplish anything that would be that that's intuitive eating the two of you eating is eat whatever you want just eat what you feel and then that's going to help you well intuitive eating success is exactly zero now it's not it's not zero psychologically because people actually amazingly feel a little bit better about themselves they set the bar so low and they managed to accomplish a nothing uh absolutely nothing but somehow they if they will at least self-report that they feel slightly better about themselves even though they have no success at all so i don't think that's really the right way to goal set here's the other way not to goal set don't put the high bar up at six feet when i look at that thing and i feel like there's no way i can go over it okay if you put the bar up there guess what if you say well that's how you learn how to high jump doug well then i will never high jump okay you say okay well guess what we'll put it down to four feet i go up to four feet and i'm not even close getting over the bar how excited am i gonna be about high jumping now the answer is i've high jumped for my last time i won't be back okay that's the ego trap and if you say oh but you're supposed to that's how you do it in fact that's the only way to do it it's like well guess what i won't try that sport i'll walk away and i'll just quit because you've just humiliated me by putting the bar up so high that there is no honor and no utility in giving my best effort and lowering the bar down to a level where i can do it those two things in this particular case this is a particular case an addictive process where these two processes are working in direct opposition if we get it too low the person remains in the pleasure trap if we get it too high they're in the ego trap and they quit okay the correct understanding okay so it's not a debate i have no interest in debating people that don't understand enough about psychology to be qualified to be giving an opinion okay the truth of the matter is these are direct component processes and you have to thread the needle jen's talk was a highly intelligent experienced discussion about how it is to thread the needle between those two opponent forces okay any other opinion on this is ignorant and mistaken and wrong and potentially dangerous okay so no the uh the correct way to look about this is that the ego trap and the pleasure trap both must be respected and when we are giving advice to people who are struggling with this we have to look at them as individuals okay we have to understand their personal individual capability just as if we were a coach trying to help somebody learn how to hide jump okay so some people we put it at two feet some people we could put it at three feet a remarkable athlete we could put it at four feet okay but in every case people have their limits and to put the limit at at uh 100 compliance for perfection for the rest of your life is insanity okay so let me tell you further why it is that that is flat out wrong because i have been involved with thousands upon thousands of people who have succeeded to varying degrees by adopting the mcdougall program and have lost 30 pounds have gotten off their medications but would they like to lose another 30 sure are they partially in the pleasure strap still yes they are is their life better and will they live longer and happier as a result of the efforts that they are making absolutely without any doubt okay so this is in no way is an all or nothing message responsible intelligent or accurate okay so that's my statement and that's the kind of talk you get out of me when you slap my friend okay and i i i can totally see your point and there are actually believe it or not two questions that just are similar to this because the the problem that for example this health coach named hallie says how do you get someone out of the ego trap without sending that back into the pleasure trap in reference to food addiction for very open agreeable and highly not highly conscientious personality types how much leeway can they safely have before they will find themselves battling the addiction again because of the binging and craving so that seems to be the problem with the balancing of it because he said you've had people get off their medication and be healthier but the people that are really trying to be very lean they can't always do it with the little cheats here and there let's uh let's get some statistics in here so we understand what it is that we're actually dealing with um time for some parameters okay so let's uh let's let's understand that according to i believe the american heart association um 20 years ago one in 2 000 americans was following a heart-healthy diet 20 years later it's one in thirty five hundred okay so if anybody has any wild guesses as to how difficult this is to make any significant positive change i think that one in two thousand to one in three thousand is a pretty good way of estimating what it is that you're up against this would explain dr fuhrman's consternation and frustration in other words if you're a doctor that's fighting this you feel like well there's gotta be one damn solution and that solution is you just got to be perfect okay i understand why he thinks the way he thinks that's exactly how alan goldhamer thinks okay but they they also don't understand the nature of the ego trap being the individuals that they are they are not particularly psychologically minded nor are they nor do they do any side kind of psychotherapy nor have they actually thought through the nature of this problem and so they don't actually understand there's a twin-headed monster and they're only trying to attack one side of it okay so the problem is very difficult and the question that your person is asking is a very good question and the answer is is embedded in the answer that i said before that is that every single case is different and it is not the case that we would expect that most people would ever be able to have any substantial effect here i wouldn't expect that that would be true we are asking the whole point of writing the pleasure trap was to explain that this is not in any way of personal failing but in fact what we're asking i i call it the hidden force that undermines health and happiness the pleasure trap that those two words should hit you pleasure trap one of them gives you a nice warm feeling of something that's drawing you in the second word is like uh oh i've been deceived and i'm in trouble and i may be dead that is exactly why that title is the way it is so we we do not expect people to manage this even with considerable effort we would expect that most personalities would not have either the circumstances or the genetic chops to take it on is it possible for some people yes and you've heard me say this a hundred times i'm usually motivated unusual personalities okay that's what you get when you have a thing called the american heart association that whose guidelines are very loose reporting to you that that there's some total impact on america is zero okay so less than zero yeah the answer yeah the answer to the question is nobody could possibly know including you and your client even with considerable experience so what you must do is you must run experiments okay you run experiments as intelligently as you can figure out how and then you hope for the best that's what i've been doing for 25 years and you expect that it's going to ebb and flow so i think this is one big piece that people just can't accept is true for most people or they they want to be the exception to this but for most people even if you do have this kind of unusual motivation unusual personality that doug is talking about it's you're talking about a marathon of life where you're going to have periods where you're really on it and then you're going to have periods where you're not so on it and and i think this is universal i mean the whole i i came to this talk and framing it the way i did from personal experience and from talking to so many clients who have had this over and over and over again and one of the ways i i called the talk rethinking the pleasure trap because reimagining the pleasure trap because getting out of the pleasure trap the pleasure trap is this hidden force that undermines health and happiness but aiming too high setting yourself into this ego trap and feeling all of the shame and all of the guilt and all of the misery and all of the unworthiness and the like oh i'm just gonna you know not even participate in the world and i'm not a full person until i get back to it until i'm back on plan until i'm back in the groove this is bs like this is you're the same human you're just going through a different phase where this is not working as well and you you still know how to do it you're just not always able to apply it for any number of reasons um and so we're this is you know i believe in evidence-based medicine i also believe in reality-based medicine and reality-based psychology and that's what we're that's what we're really trying to do here is just take people as individuals and meet them where they are and and try to go from there rather than holding yourself to some universal standard that some people are able to achieve under either very unusual personalities or great duress or both um and it's it's just a terrible thing to set yourself up against um to make that the the standard for your worth of a human you know i i can be like gold hammer and furman but i don't tell people that they have to be that i've always said do the least restrictive plan that you can do but that will get you the results you see but sometimes a more liberal approach doesn't always get them to where they say they want to be does that make sense very true aj i i couldn't agree more with that i think you that you have uh that that that that philosophy is a hundred percent consistent with the way i think and it seems completely completely reasonable and so that and that and you that's why you have to learn by doing you know we we don't you don't run until you can walk and you don't walk until you crawl and you don't crawl until you you've been around the field a little bit so the truth is it's a process and we don't go from zero to 100 in most cases and as jen is pointing out as you know people known she's talked about her her history with the addictive process that this is a this is a wandering odyssey that you can expect the learning curve associated with something so difficult and uh anybody that's struggling in the middle of this should in no way declare that you know i either have to have to be perfect or not or i just quit you know i just had one of those i just had one of those this week and the lady was so relieved when she uh heard on the other end of the phone that i was not being judgmental nor was i laying down the law that you know because she had done very well for a few months and then she had backsplit it's like yeah that is exactly how it is that we would expect something like this to go so now she's inspired uh because not not a big part of the inspiration was the was the feedback that no you're not fundamentally flawed and you've actually done pretty well and so you've got a lot of pieces in place here we're just going to now aim for doing doing a little bit better and see what we can learn that's all learning curve you know you know i'm abstinent but i don't think a lot of people realize that those of us that can do it it's not hard for us if it was hard for me every single day i couldn't do it but maybe it's my personality but also my environment is set up that way and i don't think it's hard for dr goldham or those of us that can pull it off it's it's pretty easy he lives inside a salad bar i mean you can't get a more optimal environment and i think part of what gets people too is that you know this is a very universal experience with people i talk to it's not hard when you're in the groove this is very common for people to be doing really well and they have this kind of moment where they start to get arrogant like what was the big deal like this is the easiest thing in the world why isn't everybody doing this and they forget that they're blocking this the really narrow narrow path um and how easy it is to fall off this is the metaphor of the the narrow path through the very shallow water that you're very likely to stumble and find yourself ankle deep in that water but you're only ankle deep you can always get back on the path it's just a very narrow parallax little path um and it's easy to get over confident and and think oh i've got this like i have this dialed in i'm never going to struggle with this again and then so when you find yourself you kind of on the other side of that um maybe the the second time third time the seventh time that really starts to do a number on your psychology and you do start to feel like there's something wrong with you this is this is what i call the i know what to do why can't i just do it cycle and this kind of messaging that comes from these these faints of purity is is really can be really detrimental to people when they're holding themselves to that standard and it does contribute to feeling like well screw it i guess i can't do it i guess there really is something wrong with me so i just might as well give up um and that's not the you're you're walking this narrow path where you're going to stumble a lot it's going to work sometimes better than it is other times and this is life this is this is the ebb and flow of life and there's nothing there's nothing wrong with that there's nothing wrong with you right i always say you're always one bite away from either falling in the ditch or getting back out yeah and i will tell people and i and i said at the nha um you know i i am going on eight years sober from alcohol and the pleasure trap's harder pleasure trap's way harder because you're navigating this terrain in a you know confrontational way every single day you're just using so much more bandwidth to make good choices or optimize choices and um and you're you're navigating this food environment that is constantly trying to lure you back in with variety with abundance i mean even if you're eating a whole plant based diet there's there's a lot of little you know quasi early triggers in there that can start to suck you into other other processes so um you know and it's progress it's it's people will you know this is this is the relapse as part of recovery idea and as you go through this throughout the course of your life the relapse becomes less detrimental it's usually shorter in duration when it comes to getting back into pleasure trap food but people most people should expect that it's going to happen from time to time it's going to happen because they got out of the groove because of life circumstances they you know the a quarantine happened a family member died something something has interfered in their usual routine and it's going to disrupt them and it's going to take some time and effort to get back to where they were there's nothing fundamentally wrong with them for for going to low-hanging dopamine when when things got a little rough or for any other reason i think it's an important conversation we should have this talk from time to time because people need to be reminded you know dr lyle dr goldhamer often teases you about your carrot cake indiscretions and that he's going to live longer because you don't eat as perfectly as he does but if you wanted to could you i mean not that you would need to but like is it would it be hard for you to to do an allen diet for whatever reason you were we'll put it this way let's suppose that i had was given a serious cancer diagnosis okay uh that then the day that happens then i would be eating like fermented goldhammer okay but when i look at the stats the statistics on that um there's no evidence that it would help me there's just a mythical theory that it might okay so it's the difference between what it is that i do and what it is that they do there's really no evidence under the sun that there would be any appreciable difference at all uh however is it is it in theory is it consistent that there might be some small advantage yeah might be a very inconsistently small advantage i can tell you we're now 40 years into this and i can still whip allen at basketball and i can also say he has not closed the distance all right so so far so good nice well thank you so we're going to switch gears get away from the pleasure trap and the ego trap and i find this a question from josh i don't know if you've ever answered something like this kind of interesting and rather poignant because i knew someone actually in this situation he asks in terms of overall life happiness and self-esteem is it better to be a has-been or it never was and i actually knew i don't want to say the name because i you might know this person but a person who is quite famous great question i know i love it too because i i knew somebody that was very famous at one point in their life in a entertainment capacity very very famous and then they weren't and they had to take like a regular job like at an establishment where you could see them and some people recognize this individual and they did not seem very happy when they were recognized and would look down and i always wondered like is it better you know is it better to have loved and lost or never to have loved at all i think it's better to be a never was but doug doug can chime in yeah i i actually can remember uh exactly that that situation that um my wheels are already spinning about how it is to what the accuracy is is that and we can immediately talk about well how long were you somebody and then how long are you not somebody and how often is it recognized and how much money did you make when you were somebody that you still get to live off of and what's your personality with respect to the whole thing in other words all of these things are part of it including if you were it never was uh or are you a narcissist that's incredibly pissed off your whole life because you never got your day in the sun so the the question cannot be answered uh as a as a as a blank uh check it is completely and utterly individual however it's a hilarious and entertaining question because it's one that we never thought ain't never thought it's great it's a great definitely the the clients i talked to who were husbands have a harder psychological time than the never was's they're they that we have some never was exceptions who are miserable with their never wasness but they are they are sort of entitled narcissistic times and and so it's it's not like they've been you know it's it's it's not a laboring earnestly in obscurity and just never being recognized in the same sort of way that we would classically think about it but the husbands there's this real sort of um uh yeah i had it and i lost it i squandered it and i can't get it back because the circumstances aren't the same and i'm not as young as i was and i'm not as hot as i was and um it's it's it really gets to people so just looking kind of at the numbers i i have a lot more husbands struggling than never was yeah but i might they might be over represented and then i'm in the people i talked to too i just remember reading an uh uh an interview with george picard and um towards the you know this was obviously breakfast with tiffany's big big actor handsome guy and um and then he was in trouble like financially professionally and everything else as he was probably approaching you know is 60 years old and uh and he was right up against it planning he was going to have to do dinner theater which is a huge breakfast got the call and got the a-team and it just completely resurrected his entire life career finances and everything so like your one thought it could have been james coburn you know sorry about that the mistakes the uh apparently james coburn was being considered and the two of them highly similar you know what i mean both outstanding perfect they'd be pulled well casted either one of them that they you know flipped the coin and now we're we're the a team instead of dinner theater such as hollywood i think it's harder if you think about that has been what do we mean by that like what what is the what is the entire socioeconomic status length of the fall you know i'm saying and that uh for some people it could be stunning and for some people it might be well i was here now i'm here i've still got i still got quite a bit of status but not nearly as much as i had before yeah at every uh every retired nba all-star has to put up with that you know but sort of like gary coleman the actor that was on different strokes ended up by being a security guard that would be like an example in some people's eyes of a fall from grace but with um this is a very funny comment from jessie she says i'm an overachiever i'm a has been and it never was but i think about if you're a never was there's still hope because think about grandma moses didn't start painting until she was 90 of ruth clara peller that got that where's the beef commercial in her 80s ruth won an oscar in her 80s so i feel like if you're a never was that doesn't mean you're enough you're not a never will be yes that's that's my general intuition i think even if you are you can be either of these as long as you get yourself back into i mean the solution for both to sort of restore happiness and order to your nervous system is the same um and it's to get realistic about your expectations and to get yourself in an improvement process toward improving your station in life and moving toward a realistic goal um and so both of those people no matter what the scenario it's that we we actually are going to get them happier putting them on the same sort of path i think the never was is more naturally inclined to find that because they they do still have the hope and the optimism so they're more likely to be out there grinding away hoping to be discovered than the husband who is more likely to be cynical and in an ego trap about it but that that doesn't mean that you can't have both of those effects on on either side so beautiful like i could have been a contender okay now switching gears we have a question from cheryl on sleep is being a night owl or a morning bird truly genetic how do you convince the loved one about the importance of sleep when their night owl refuses to wind down at night until after midnight spending time watching news or sports or doing puzzles then finally gets to bed at one or two a.m and has to get up at seven for work is there anything a spouse can do to inspire him to recognize and acknowledge the importance of sleep and get him to change i'm worried about his brain and later cognitive decline i'll let the the resident nidal answer this i don't know that there's any convincing of anything uh the person obviously has a kind of a job that they can manage to down a cup of coffee and and get through the thing uh yeah and they're almost certainly not working a job that requires any major muscular effort uh if they did they wouldn't be staying up till 12 or 1 o'clock so the you know guys that are out there building brick walls and and our in our framing houses uh these these guys aren't staying up till midnight so we we've got a white collar type of person that all they have to do is sit in a chair with one eye open they've probably been doing the job for a long time so that they can do it half conscious and um you know that's probably what's going on and that individual is just running a cost-benefit analysis uh they're getting just enough sleep to sort of get by and function and that's good enough for them i i would say the um uh possibly the yeah i don't think that there's any convincing them of anything uh the information is the is the cause of change uh new information is the cause of change that's not likely to be in a printed book for a question like this it's more likely to be experiential and so i would say uh going to some you know remote cabin for a four-day weekend sometime or three-day weekend sometime where where there isn't any tv and isn't any wi-fi and so you know we wind down and what we have is conversation and then maybe a book and at that point it's not that stimulating keep your eyes open particularly an individual like that is chronically sleep deprived and they get to bed at 10 and then they wake up at seven after nine hours sleep and they feel better than they felt in months so an experiential process uh would be the best way uh to to try to feed that concept into somebody's nervous system great all right well you know we come back to food always do from susan this time what is the difference between food addiction and binge eating is it important to understand to accomplish or maintain weight loss feel free jen all right well i feel i feel like you've probably spoken on this before in a more eloquent way i mean i think that binge eating is a behavior food addiction is substance dependent so i i you're not when you're talking about the continuum of addictive substances you know you can you can imagine a line where you you start off with things that are not at all addictive i.e full natural food no nobody is binging on broccoli um and if you are congratulations keep at it you know that's that's a that's a good life choice but no one's no one's binging on whole plant foods for the most part we've all heard stories of people who say that they can binge on potatoes etc um that's that's kind of a different conversation we might get there but but in general whole natural foods whole natural plant foods um you're not binging on those because they don't have addictive properties as you move up the continuum of addictive property like any any kind of substance it's a it becomes more unnatural so you start to dehydrate those foods you start to you take a potato and you put it in the airfryer you turn it into hashbrowns nice crispy hash browns you um start adding flavorings to things you're making it more addictive even though it's still recognizable as a whole natural food a uh air fried hash potato found potatoes with oil-free sugar-free ketchup that's much more kind of concentrated and has more addictive properties than the original potato that you find dug out of the ground um and you just keep moving up and you start to get to all of these chemicals and substances that are extracted um really unnatural representations of what they originally were so you get to caffeine you get to nicotine you get to alcohol you get to all of the other drugs and they get progressively more addictive as they are less representative of something that you would find in nature for the most part we can all think of some exceptions that we could you know magic mushrooms that we can throw out there um but that's generally how it works so you're not in the food realm you're just not going to binge on something unless it has that sort of addictive hold on you so the food addiction is really just uh binging on these these foods that have been processed beyond the body's ability to regulate them in a normal way and that's going to vary tremendously from individual to individual everybody has different trigger foods everybody has different points at which certain things have addictive properties and others don't some people can have a very responsible relationship to chocolate donuts but not to chips and salsas some people can have a can try cocaine and not be interested in it at all but they're gone the first time they try heroin so these are individual circuits it's individual brains that are responding to substances in different ways um and yeah this is this is all about the environment and again kind of just course correcting if you find yourself getting sucked into some kind of super normal uh you know unnatural food situation that you're binging on then there's only one thing to do which is to correct it it's to today can you do better can you get it out of your environment can you do your best today and maybe you'll be successful and maybe you won't but the the remedy is the same all you can do is to try to do your best today if you don't do your best you try again tomorrow if you do do your best that's great your self-esteem is going to thank you for it but either way you've tried your best either way you've course corrected and you're going to just do that as many times as you have to to continue on your journey of life great thank you thank you there are some questions in the chat about anorexia and doctor lyle i believe and doctor hogg covey as well refers to dr sean geisinger for anorexia correct and she will be a guest on the show this saturday at 11 so come with all your anorexia i haven't met her but i've talked her on the phone she seems very nice and regards you guys very highly okay so we have two more previously uh committed committed questions submitted questions one is from sheba is there something in human evolution genes that explain why many fear events that are unlikely to happen for example death by covid19 and young people more than they fear more probable events for example accidents injuries cancer or other diseases how can people beat their genes to reduce their fear and i sent you guys an article recently about how they're recommending kids under the age of 12 are getting the to get the coping vaccine now because of the variant because some are actually being put on ventilators so maybe you can talk about fear in general well um what what all behavior is so um all all experiences the way your brain is going to work these are all part and parcel of they're all derivatives of cost benefit analysis so your your mind is designed as an extraordinarily sophisticated accountant and what it does is it actually decides even what it's going to spend time running a cost benefit analysis on okay it's part of the cost benefit analytics that it does so when people quote can't let something go or something's bothering them or they've got a memory from 30 years ago that they keep cycling around that's because the brain is is is uh estimating that it's worth the mental energy to keep cycling around it because it feels like there's something important for it to still learn so when it comes to fearing anything uh anxiety whatever we want to call this this feeling it's a feeling that we we are could be facing a loss it's all it is so the the ultimate loss would be life either yours or someone important to you um so that's going to be a cause of a lot of fear i can also be a fear of the irs for goodness sakes a surprise little thing comes in your mailbox it's like what's that that can't be a good thing so uh anxiety fear etc is is nothing other than the result of your mind running cost benefit analysis and on environmental inputs and basically saying this looks like it could be dangerous and anxiety uh is a or fear is a reaction to tell you that there appears to be enough threat that it's going to be worth the energy to organize an avoidance strategy that's all it is okay so whether it's coveted 19 or it's the it's the the the uh you know loch ness monster doesn't really make any difference every individual brain simply analyzes the evidence as best it can as accurately as it can possibly figure out how to do it it analyzes that evidence and it and it will result in a feeling that feeling incidentally doesn't have to be permanent uh it should not be permanent it should change with the evidence okay so as new evidence comes in you know when i was a when i was five years old and i would see a floppier dog you know running towards me that was you know 15 pounds i might have been afraid of it okay so now now that i'm four times bigger and 10 times older uh now i'm not afraid of it so it depends on what that dog looks like and uh etcetera and then who it is that's walking the dog in other words my brain is more sophisticated at making that uh cost-benefit analysis now than it was before so something like covet is very scary there's tremendous amount of press about it uh an awful lot of people experience a great deal of anxiety many people have died from this so when we hear all this information the typical human brain is is very much attempting to try to do what trying to do a cost-benefit analysis okay so a ten-year-old child has no possible way of running a cost-benefit analysis uh that has any mathematical sophistication to the problem at all so as a result what they're going to do is they're going to rely on trusted adults so they're going to look to what it is that their parents seem to think and their that their feeling they're simply going to be the way the way animals work is they they don't just run their own cost-benefit analysis they will also look at what we call con specifics in other words other members of your species they will those are going to be the most useful informative sources the better yet would be trusted members of your species okay that would be even more important this morning i was outside with my cat that likes to patrol the outside and the big garbage truck came along to pick up the stuff now that cat i was watching carefully that cat started very was very afraid and i i walked towards the front door and he walked with me and he was trying to read me okay he was trying to figure out is dad actually anxious or is dad fine and when we got a little a bit of shelter and it did not appear that i was in any anxiety at all then i could see his anxiety drop by 75 percent within that six or eight seconds okay so that makes sense even though the truck was getting closer and the noise was louder that cat has a has a computer checking algorithm in it that it's going to look around and see what the other guys think okay so that's what's going on with with covid and vaccines and 12 year olds being pitched of course there's uh remember whenever anything is a value proposition is being pitched the only reason somebody's offering you something is that they're getting something in return somebody somewhere is getting something in return uh if you're getting a vaccine shot so it may be free to you but it wasn't free somebody's making money off of it so there's a uh there's there's reasons not just in this arena but in all arenas for the use of deception to basically alter people's cost benefit analysis so that they'll do things like buy a used car with a bad transmission buy swampland in florida it's supposed to have great promise uh there's also honesty and advertisement that people uh uh well-meaning and straightforward are telling you these are organically grown grapes and they in fact are and it's a straightforward legitimate value for value trade so deception uh and and misinformation and miscalibration uh uh potentially lead to mistakes in running the cost-benefit analysis on any value proposition that is inevitable so it's no surprise to me that we've got people little people very anxious about their survival about something that has got a tremendous amount of uh oppress and a great deal of adult consternation legitimately uh but to my way of thinking about my look at the evidence i look a bit and say why on earth would i ever absolutely a 12 year old child the evidence to date at this moment would tell me that the cost benefit on that is very uncertain and clearly not i'll tell you what it is and i don't know what it is but i can tell you what it is not the cost-benefit analysis on that question is not known okay that is an unknown cost-benefit analysis and so my my attitude towards this would be i would not be doing that until i know when i know and i've had appropriate amount of science an appropriate amount of data analytics can tell me that it is uh in the best interest of my 12 year old to get it then i would have them that i would tell them to get it but until i know that i'm not telling them anything of the time any thoughts about that dr hawk no i think that's a a beautiful summary we certainly we've talked quite a lot if people are interested in um more on this we we talk about this on my my show hawk blocked which is um on my patreon channel and sometimes if it is published publicly um if not on youtube then on my odyssey channel which is kind of a too hot for youtube sort of space so people can find that that's all linked from my website which is uh just jennhawk.com thank you and we have one more submitted question guys get on the mailing list that's how you get top priority and this is from a different susan if personality types are determined by genes instead of environmental differences how do we explain the negative impact on the personality of a child who has experienced abuse and deprivation in their environment um i don't know how do you feel jen uh you're e either way yeah you can go go ahead and start on it um yes um the uh this is kind of uh one of these questions that assumes facts that are not in evidence okay so uh when you're an attorney uh you you know in a court of law to be looking for exactly this kind of question and that's what you say to the judge you say objection uh the question is sims facts not in evidence uh no there are no no such facts and evidence so the the person believes there are such vaccine evidence because they've been published they've been published in critically in apparently legitimate sources like world health organization spending a bunch of money to examine effects of uh you know the correlations of ace scores with lifetime problems etc all of the research that you are that you believe that you are seeing such a connection uh has been done without controlling for the influence of the very genetics that i talk about and jen talks about and robert plummen talks about so we do not uh we don't know actually if we talked about extremely rare levels of abuse that would happen early in life that would damage the brain uh for example that is a different issue what we're really the curious issue that we're really talking about here is not physical damage to the brain we're actually speculating about informational inputs so the question is can informational inputs i.e screaming at you and telling you that you're ugly uh you know beating you physically but not actually damaging your brain so that would be an informational input so could there be uh informational inputs that would negatively alter the person's adult personality i do not believe that there's any evidence that credibly indicates that that is true so the uh i believe that that human beings are inherently resilient in that way and let me explain to you briefly why it is first of all like i said there's no evidence to support it uh despite a phenomenal amount of energy that has been put in by social science in the last half a century to try to find the ways the personality can be altered as a result of parenting styles parenting practices punishments rewards uh situational forces etc they've cut they have bowled a perfect zero uh in 50 years and tens of thousands of studies and thousands of thousands of nih grants and national science foundation and entire careers of the majority of developmental social psychologists and childhood clinical psychologists in the united states and around the world they have exactly zero evidence to support that position let me explain why it is that i never expect to find any substantive evidence the reason is the nature of memory and the nature of the purpose of memory so in just a few minutes let me lay this out your mind is designed to take in information from the environment and to have to be running a cost-benefit analysis on what that means so if that big dog with pointy ears and snarling demeanor starts chasing me right now um i know what that means that's dangerous okay if i walk uh into my kitchen i smell something fabulous cooking i know what that means so my emotional reactions are the result of an analysis of what these environmental inputs mean for me okay that's what it is my friend uh when when i saw jen's face uh when we just booted up i had a very pleasant internal experience there's my friend there's my colleague it's like ah it's a wonderful thing for me to see jen sometimes we talk on the phone but when i see her it's uh i have this i have this thing that i know that that's a valuable important and positive uh input for me okay now before i knew her that wouldn't have been true but now that i do know what's happening what's happening is that's a little different than smelling something in the kitchen because that's a direct result immediately into the brain that didn't require any memory system at all but in order for me to have that reaction to gen that's a memory system so the so your memory system improves your ability to make direct sensory evidence for the environment and turn it into accurate analysis so if you're a rabbit looking at a meadow you uh you you see opportunity out there because you can see the grass and you can smell you may may be able to smell some carrots okay and you can't smell any predators so the direct evidence tells you that it's telling you where to go for the carrots and and that it appears to be safe but if you had had um a for seven times in the last seven mornings you had woken up to the same scene except half an hour later a fox had appeared uh crouching behind the bushes and had almost run you into the ground and gotten you if that had happened then when you wake up this morning you don't just see this scene and have a direct sensory input you have a memory system that tells you the scene that you're seeing may not be accurate and right and so what happens is memory is an improvement about your ability to assess the environment but i think that you can understand how critically important so the rabbit no longer has the peaceful sense that it did before it ever saw the fox in that environment it now is more wary okay but you can imagine if it sees the socks box seven days in a row and then for the next two years it does not see the fox we can see that its memory system must update it shouldn't be as vigilant and afraid and wary and risk-averse uh on day 300 past the fox than it is on day three since the last time it saw the fox it doesn't do a memory system any good at all to have a memory get into it and not be modified by future experience to have such an evolutionary program inside of an animal is evolutionarily suicidal you could never have such a thing built and such of things are not built into animal nervous systems so therefore when you have bad things happen to you and you have an immediate sequelae that are a result post-traumatic stress disorder anxiety attacks whatever the heck it is you expect those things to continue on for a period of time that is commensurate with the accurate cost benefit analysis to whatever the threat was whatever it is that you experienced as a loss and the future stimulus characteristics in the environment that indicates that that is still present so a child that is an abusive environment is going to be towering and in fear and in misery for all of the years that they're in in front of the perpetrator and that they keep getting that action perpetrated that is true that is miserable that's criminal and that's bad will it influence their future personality no it will not okay it won't because as soon as they're in a new environment and there's new evidence and new relationships and new patterns of behavior all that's going to happen is is that their life experience changes their perceived probability those threats declines as it should relative to the stimulus characteristics if you're still under communist cuba and you're still getting your house shaken down and beaten up by the police then you should never uh lose your anxiety about the regime but if it turns out that you grow up and go away and get a job and get away from all the abuse etc then it should update if it does not update it's a incredibly dysfunctional design in evolution so what the research evidence shows very surprising to social developmental psychologists and clinical psychologists and surprising to all of us but actually it shouldn't be surprising in retrospect as we now understand the nature of the way the brain is organized we would expect the system to update and when we revisit that person 25 years after their abusive process we should expect to see their native personality interacting with an environment that is no longer particularly threatening at all and whatever that innate genetic personality was should be the personality that we now see as they interact with their social environment will they have unpleasant memories yes will those memories influence them in any way well only if the stimulus characteristics of the current situation give rise to it okay so if they're a single mom and there meet some new guy and that new guy smells like and sounds like and loses his temper just like their abusive father did they should have an anxiety reaction a protective reaction that would be possibly more acute than somebody that had not had those experiences but what influence does that have on how how they play on their tennis team how who their who their friends are now where they like to go on vacation do they like to go to the snow do they like to go to the sunshine no those experiences will have no such influence because it's not impacting their personality it's just a part of a memory system that in general would decline in importance over time and that's how it would work and that is in fact consistent with all known evidence of which i'm aware yeah this isn't we're not just hypothesizing a just so story here that fits our evolutionary framework and we know this from um there's a there's a natural experiment that emerges um to test this if you think about this how would you know if this was true you take identical twins who share the same genes and you raise them in completely different childhood homes and then you you track them throughout their life and you track their personality characteristics you track how likely they are to develop these pathologies that we intuitively believe come from abuse or come from these sorts of things that we would expect to um cause problems later on in life and and you find again and again and again that these twins have the same genes have very different environments and that the genes are telling the story of who these children grow up to be in in every way that we can measure regardless of what sort of environment they had so you have one twin who was raised in a very loving home with no abuse and another one that had uh you know some degree of abuse neglectful parents they have a much higher ace score etc etc you check in on those kids as they get into their 20s and 30s and 40s and the heritability of their personality characteristics starts to shine through just like doug is saying so there there are over 15 million of these pairs of twins that have been studied every single uh trait that you can imagine has been tested multiple times uh and uh this is incredibly robust probably the most robust evidence that we have in social science and behavioral genetics so this is not just our theory we're standing on the shoulders of giants who have put this evidence together um most notably as doug mentioned robert ploman whose book blueprint we refer to very often on the podcast and elsewhere um blueprint i think the subtitle is how our dna makes us who we are or something like that um was published in 2018 is a great primer on this topic yeah and a subtitle this very difficult for people to grasp because this is how dna makes us who we are not how dna uh determines our life experience right your life experience is different than who you are so if you lock me into a cuban prison my life experience just got really bad okay uh but you didn't change who i am uh from that experience so this is it's tricky for people to get their hand around these extraordinarily important distinctions uh but but uh with respect to the question uh i hope we've answered it probably for most people that that have not don't have not gone to the extraordinary problem of reading someone like a ploman and actually grasping and looking at the the amount of this evidence then it would be unconvincing uh and that's that's because the the correlation is so high for people who have come from abusive situations for example are very often coming out of a gene pool where there's a lot of loose wires so that person at 32 years old is having some trouble in their relationships and they're having some trouble on their job but they may be pretty smart but they've got some emotional instability and they're on prozac it's like yeah right they may be somewhat more problematic they're not anything like their abusive father but neither are there neither are they as normal and flat and boring as as sally next door whose works at the library why and the answer is they inherited some unstable genes and you're watching those as she as that lady talks through her problems in psychotherapy with her psychodynamic analyst who has no end of material to work with as she talks about her father who is very difficult problematic human okay but the truth is the reason that lady is struggling in the struggles that she's having now at 32 have absolutely nothing to do with her childhood and that is not only an indictment of psychodynamic psychotherapy and learning theory in general it is also an extraordinary challenge uh for people to grasp and we're not asking you to believe it we just simply know it's true and uh we know it's true because this is one of the great questions that human beings have ever attempted to answer in all of human history and the fact that the question actually has an answer and the answer is so shiningly clear and beautifully precise is almost unbelievable okay it's it's one of the great achievements of science and yet it is probably the least believed and least welcome uh truths and yet that truth is extremely important and useful when it comes to your own life because it helps you realize don't try to change your kids personality don't try to change your husband's personality don't try to change your own personality okay what we want to do is we want to create the nature of the relationships in a way that's as beneficial as possible but trying to change who they are yeah you might as well put your head bang your head against granite because it's not moving if there are people like me who like to nerd out on footnotes i i was on with you aj last summer i believe we talked about this and i had a presentation called getting past your past um why your childhood trauma doesn't define your life for some some title like that um and i wrote that in essay form on my website so people can read the essay and it has a bunch of footnotes that link to some of these resources and these scientific papers that back it up so um if you want to nerd out that that is there for you i just don't think this is the answer people want doctors they have some doctors including the plant-based doctors talking about the aces and well you've got it overweight but the diploma i i read his book i listened to it on audible and he said weight is like 70 to 80 80 80 the same it's the same heritability as your eye color um just to put that in perspective for people so the the difference the variation between two people and their weight is as determined by genes as the difference in their eye color so just try to get your head around that and this is this is profoundly heritable but yeah it's the entire therapeutic industrial complex that you've got a bunch of incompetent people who are are sitting down with people who are having problems and it's like well why am i having problems well what what makes sense what can we what can we connect to like did something in your childhood happen that maybe could explain why you're struggling today it's a model and it's just an incorrect model but a lot of people feel that it's intuitively correct they did have some crap happen when they were kids they do have some things that they can't manage to figure out in adulthood why not put the two together they seem to make sense there's plenty of books out there that confirm that that's true it just happens to not be true great well guys it's so great talking to you thank you so much for coming back on we appreciate your thorough explanation of these very interesting topics oh anytime it's always great to see you thank you and thanks all of you for watching another episode of chef aj live please come back tomorrow my guest is dr tinka barnes the show will be one hour later airing at noon pacific time thanks doctors
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