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Chef AJ: What is a Healthy Weight Loss Plateau | Interview with Dr Doug Lisle
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i'm your host chef aj and this is where i introduce you to amazing people just like you who are doing great things in the world i just want to apologize for coming out a little late today we're having some connection problems so if that occurs during the broadcast please bear with us and we will reconnect immediately my guest today is no stranger to my audience in fact i think i've interviewed him more than anybody else and if he was afraid he'd be watermelon because you just never get tired of him and every time i think there's nothing else to talk about you guys send in a bunch of amazing questions so there always is something to talk about with him his name is dr doug lyle he's the co-author of the pleasure trap the psychologist at both the mcdougall 10-day program as well as the true north health center and he has an amazing website called the steam dynamics where you get a lot of free content and for less than the price of a cup of coffee some really amazing new exclusive content as well i just watched the new video yesterday as a matter of fact please welcome back dr doug lyle thanks so much for coming back i do appreciate this so much oh it's a joy aj it's great you are just you're just so fun it's just like we really there's always something to talk about isn't there you think there isn't but there is starting with let's see some of the questions are really good so i'm not sure what to start with but i'll do one from last time that we didn't get to and this is from maria and she says in the living wisdom true north in the living was in true north health videos dr lyles spoke about the impact of a whole food plant-based diet on cancer which is largely unknown i'm wondering what dr lyle thinks dr campbell's work has done for the field since i know he also speaks very highly of dr campbell is the china study worth reading and if so why uh it's a lot of different questions and um i would say that the china study is absolutely worth reading it's a great book the um i would say that um i i would my opinion about what i see about the connection between diet and cancer uh has changed uh since i wrote the pleasure trap and i um you know let me let me tell you how how it has changed the dr campbell's work uh a lot of it a lot of it that was so exciting was done in the laboratory and it was done by making by using toxins to start cancers and and then see what would happen with diet with whether we had a vegan diet or a or an animal foods diet and how much animal food etc the results were really really interesting super uh super compelling the however there's a difference between a naturally occurring cancer that we don't know the reason why it starts exactly and a cancer that we manipulate into an organism with with a known toxin and so it turns out that the the control that we were hoping it was being demonstrated by those dietary changes is not as great as we thought it was now we don't we don't understand all the reasons why so now we are 20 years uh past that research and i would say this about plant-based diets in cancer they give you better odds they're going to reduce your odds not trivially it's going to be probably on average it's going to be maybe a 20 percent less uh likelihood of any given cancer uh it's pro it's good the greatest impact is probably going to be on the digestive cancers just because that's where the more toxic food is in more direct contact with the body tissues and therefore doing the most damage the same reason that cigarette smoking will cause all cancers or not all but vast majority of human cancers will be increased with cigarette smoking but the biggest thing that's going to hit is the lungs because that's where the toxic products are having the most concentrated effect so i think that uh however it would be a mistake to think that you are bulletproof with respect to cancer just because you're eating a very healthy diet and so that's why we still want to be smart about making use of diagnostics and modern medicine when it's indicated so modern medicine is a you know full of promises and not a lot of good delivery in general but it's going to turn out that modern medicine just like the rest of the world economy and the human adventure uh makes a tiny little bit of progress every year so just as your car is a better car in 2020 than it was in 2000 in the year 2000 so i had a camry in the year 2000 and that same camry 20 years later is a better car it's very similar the car in 2000 was pretty good in fact it was very good but not quite as good in the same way that cancer treatments and cancer diagnostics i have chipped away and gotten a little bit better and a little bit better no big revolutionary advances in almost any area but if you personally are facing cancer uh you don't rule out modern medicine and you don't put all of your faith in a you know in a natural foods diet but you would always do the natural foods diet you want to give your your body uh and your your odds the very best possible push that you can uh so food is not magic it's important and uh so we want to you know we want to mute down the the overconfidence that people may feel as they have heard and read the china study and heard generally things being claimed uh in the natural foods arena for the power of food with respect to cancer food has a nearly perfect record uh with respect to cardiovascular disease so this is uh i was speaking with caldwell esselstyn at one point and he said you know he was glad that even though he would have been a surgeon who had performed an enormous number of cancer surgeries um when it came to doing his own research and and encouraging an exploration into the value of diet that he chose cardiovascular disease and he said you know i could have chosen cancer both of them are big problems cardiovascular disease is the bigger problem it affects more people um but he says you know it it wasn't clear to me which was going to be the most promising they both looked good but i chose cardiovascular disease and it turns out i'm glad i did because it turns out that if you're coaching people on very strict diet with respect to cancer you would have some degree of success but it would not be anything like the success that you see in cardiovascular disease so that's how we look at it we look at it in cardiovascular disease it's diet above all and the doctor is a very very distant second place with respect to cancer your you know the oncology you have to really look at what it is that they may have available uh and you also though in other words you look at these things more evenly you're going to take a more serious your cardiologist wants to put a stent in you and he's going to he's rolling his eyes at the diet that guy is we're going to avoid that guy and you're going to talk to uh one of these one of our great doctors in the plant-based world and you're going to start chewing your your salad okay that's how you're going to fix that but when it comes to cancer you have to have a more even-handed and open-minded approach towards medicine because we do not have the checkmate solution in the plant-based community all we have is a is an assist okay thank you and you know what about fasting though sometimes for cancer hasn't dr goldhamer had some success with certain types of cancer yes so but uh those those are lymphomas and uh it's not complete success he's had intermittent so he's had some people have been successful some people have not um the successes have been notable in the fact that they've been more successful than you would expect by chance by quite a bit and lymphomas are a are different than a lot of other cancers just the nature of their cellular structure makes them more amenable to something like fasting and so i'm not uh i was talking to an oncologist at one point that i described this effect to her and she told me you know we talked for a good while and she said you know the more i think about it it doesn't surprise me when i really think through what you're saying and how this would all work it doesn't surprise me that that this might work with the lymphomas that's going to be different with other tissue in the body that's cancerous so there's things that we would expect it to work for and things we would expect expected probably not to work for so the lymphomas would be particularly uh conducive and and anybody that has a lymphoma uh that they're uh you ought to look into that as an adjunct you know it's interesting that this question came up today because just last night we saw a documentary that's going to be released soon called the food cure where there were certain patients from as young as six months old to to elderly that actually did for they were able to overcome their cancers with with food but i'm sure that's not everybody so exactly i have no doubt that it improves your odds uh but people need to not be uh we don't want people ignoring uh either diagnostics or treatment when it may be actually really scientifically supportable and so that's uh you know that's why dr mcdougall said hey get a colonoscopy once that when you're after 50. okay so uh he looked at the evidence i would actually go beyond that and say that i hate colonoscopy i had it done once uh only because a friend of mine had a very serious cancer scare with his colon and i thought you know what let's not let's not be too cavalier here so uh i had to call i'll never do it again because i'll i the stuff that you have to swallow is tastes like rat poison and so i will never do that however you can use the tests that they have available that uh that you can just use stool sample tests and those things if you do those every year those are those are a better solution than a colonoscopy and so you just let those uh you just have that keep track of something like that uh very very simple very very cheap that's a good way to monitor yourself or you know uh digestive cancers better though to just you know obviously the most important thing to do is just eat healthy if you eat healthy you're gonna be reducing your odds a lot however keep track of that a little bit you know when you're when you're 50 or over you ought to have an eyeball out for that one because that's that's one that it looks like they can fix okay so i'm not so interested in in cancers that i know that they don't have any chance for that they don't have any um they have absolutely no way to treat so if you have those situations i'm not going to go monitoring myself for some cancer just because they they know how to monitor it and we're going to monitor it and forget it you don't have any choice to fix it anyway but when there's cancers like skin cancer and colon cancer those are two things that they have very good uh treatment odds on and so as a result of that those are things that you should be monitoring and try to take that risk out of your your personal cancer equation nice you know it's funny when they were showing what they were feeding the patients with cancer to recover charles and i are laughing they're saying well that's just what we eat every day that's amazing i'm glad to hear that somebody i did such a documentary i'll have to look at that that's great aj yeah i hope to have the filmmaker on very soon because i think it's being released in the next couple weeks so this uh person has to remain anonymous and it's interesting because i i think this might be a rare disorder but i actually knew somebody when i was 19 that had it can you please ask dr lyle to speak on chewing and spitting disorder it is killing someone very close to me chewing and spitting disorder uh i've known that people i've known people that chewed their food and spit um i didn't know that they called it a disorder yeah i think it's a form of anorexia because the person i knew that had it was one of the first males that had anorexia and he would eat a lot of food but he was anorexic because he never swallowed the food right right and so um what what what does what the person is doing is is that this is it it's just that it's just an anorexia and uh so it's just a particular um particular pattern of behavior so many anorexics might weigh in measure their food within a gram they might do that they might get 25 000 steps a day in that may be another thing that they do and another thing that they'll do is chew and spit okay so the um and so what they're doing is they're feeling like they didn't really eat the food but they're surviving on the fact that as you chew and you do some swallowing you're getting some calories and so a lot of times they'll chew up relatively high calorie density foods maybe peanut chocolate bars and things like that uh and so in doing so they'll they'll have very little fibrous material that they'll swallow but they're they're essentially on a on a concentrated caloric liquid diet that's kind of what it is that they're doing so um uh it's you know you could say it's killing the person but it's probably isn't in other words they've probably been doing it for years and they continue to survive and struggle along uh it's obviously a severe anorexia case um you know anorexia is it what anorexia is folks is it's obsessive compulsive disorder and it's almost always in women uh it's not entirely but it's almost always and that's because uh what this is is this obsessive fear over getting fat and so and what that is is that that's a um what what you're looking at is extreme hyper-conscientiousness uh with respect to a threat to the person's status and so what what you'll find hyperconscientious people do is they do unusual mitigating risk mitigating behaviors so for example if they're worried about germs they'll wash their hands 50 times a day if they're worried about their house getting broken into they'll check they'll check the locks 50 times if they're worried about the house burning down they'll check the stove 50 times all you're looking at is reasonable behavior except it's being taken to extremes and so that's what it is and it's a derivative of a hyper-conscientious nervous system not easy to treat they say that ssris help but i don't believe it um i i would never trust farm really with anything the the best treatment is going to be cbt type treatments those are never going to fix the problem they will only occasionally they'll have the person mute it down for periods so someone who is anorexic uh is essentially their their their nervous system is not disordered um they're just hyperconscientious so we wouldn't call someone who's seven foot tall disordered we would just call them extremely tall we don't call someone who is hyperconscientious you know disordered we just say that wow you're out there on the extreme we can call your behavioral disorder if we want um because we can say hey it's clearly you know a lousy cost benefit analysis for your life so if you're washing your hands 50 times a day you're wasting a lot of time and energy and you've got a lot of anxiety and that's what what's going on there however and so what you can sometimes do is by a treatment process the person can maybe wash their hands 10 times a day instead of 60 and things are better they can check the stove four or five times rather than 50 times so you can mute it down but you will never get rid of the underlying issue because the underlying issue there isn't a disease there isn't a disorder all there is is a place on a bell curve that that individual happens to sit so our our children spitter is just this isn't chewing and spit disorder they can call it that but all it is is anorexia okay and the anorexia can kill people uh in other words your hyper conscientiousness you can imagine in principle if you um anorexia is a is a bit of a unique ocd variant um and it's a very unfortunate one in the sense that you know you can rub your hands raw but it's not likely to kill you okay and you can check your stove a million times and that's not going to kill you either but anorexia is a particular ocd variant that could and it doesn't usually in other words it's rare to have an anorexic death but they happen and um and so what would i tell the person i would tell the person hey your your best odds is to get a very kind stable cbt therapist uh to to make a connection with that therapist someone who's extremely patient and not not pushy you know if you have an inpatient uh psychotherapist with anorexia you're going to have a turbulent situation that's not going to be in that patient's best interest okay and the reason why that's true is that anorexia is going to test the patients of any therapist you have to you have to understand that you're dealing with it essentially an ocd condition that is never going to go away all we're going to do is we're going to try to figure out strategies to help you mute it the great fear that anorexia is is trying to defend itself against is fat so um and so that that's why they're that's why they do what they do they'll restrict like crazy they'll exercise like crazy uh they will eat very low calorie density foods if they get that figured out some of them may do a variant of eating and vomiting that's bulimia we act like it's a different thing but it's not it's all the same thing it's all exactly the same process that's going on the fear that the person is feeling is legitimate just like there's a legitimate fear of germs and a legitimate fear of burning your house down and a legitimate fear of leaving your door unlocked there's a legitimate fear of getting fat so the anorexic looks around in uh 21st century america and sees the enormous physical and psychological price that women pay for being overweight uh the prejudice the the the reduction of attractiveness the reduction of romantic options the reduction of of you know even business and professional and friendship status all of these things are are very significant prices that both men and women pay but men women pay more and that's because uh women's women shape has been an important and important evolutionary like a cue as to her fertility i.e whether or not she's pregnant so when women are overweight they look pregnant when they look pregnant they are are uninteresting uh generally to males not always but in other words in general there's a much muted interest that reduction of status is very discernible in interactions that you have with other people and so that is uh the the anorexic being a hyperconscientious individual is determined to not have those losses take place for them and so as a result that hyperconscientiousness gets translated into uh one of the more bizarre extreme uh ocd variants that you're ever gonna see and the most dangerous i believe so the um so yes yeah yeah it's not likely killing this friend but it is certainly compromising their health it may eventually uh i mean an anorexia person might die at 72 instead of 82 because of general systems failure at some point behind a long-term chronic deprivation but they're generally not dying at 45 and they're generally not dying at 55. um they're not actually not generally dying at 72 but so it's probably not killing the person it might be uh if they're if their weight is so low then we know what has to be done they have to go inpatient you have to be force fed through a feeding tube okay so if that that's not where they are then our job is to get them to a very kind extremely stable non-psychodynamic therapist the last thing we need the last thing that an anorexic needs is to have a psychodynamic bs being put at them as they look back through their childhood relationships with their parents and we see a pattern of a child that is desperate for control because there's this or that issue this is nonsense it has nothing to do with it and yet many patients have to suffer through and their parents have to suffer through a cross-examination and an aura of suspicion that there's been some kind of an abuse process or some kind of untoward psychological dynamic processes in the home which has led to this it isn't this is a misunderstanding and a legacy of void the uh no the issue is natural personality variation that's what it is and for the psychologists in the world that don't understand that natural personality variation is genetic that they believe it's acquired through learning experiences you can then see why they would look back down through childhood issues trying to figure out why did this child become such a control freak okay it must be that somehow they didn't have control in their home so this is a compensation the the things that the freudian and psychodynamic and new age trauma people think is superficially plausible in other words it seems to make some kind of sense but it's just wrong it's just not true that's just like a false understanding of the the moon is made out of basalt as opposed to something else it's just a mistake and so it's a mistake that is very uncomfortable and unpleasant and unproductive when you take that mistake into a therapy room with anorexic okay so that's why we want a cbt person that doesn't have that kind of stuff rattling around in their head very patient essentially trying to guide the individual towards running little experiments against their worst case scenario fears and seeing whether or not the data from these experiments will actually help improve the situation that's precisely what we do with hand washers we get them to run short-term experiment experiments to find out whether or not they actually are going to die of ebola they touch your door okay and so sometimes when they find out they didn't die of ebola they they essentially can improve to modest degrees well just to read a nice comment from dr daryl woodruff who's watching live he says doug is the best of the best i couldn't agree more and when you were describing the therapist who is patient and runs experiments it kind of reminded me of you yeah in other words what i do first of all dr witter i just love that guy hi it's great the uh i uh running experiments is absolutely a concept that i that i have adopted from cbp i was trained as a cpp therapist uh actually what i do is fundamentally cbt it's just doesn't look like the cbt that other people see and that's because cbt is there has no underlying theory of motivation uh at all it just doesn't it's just sort of a vague set of concepts that that cbt therapists have noticed uh from the 1950s on that people seem to have distorted views of the world and themselves and that cbt therapist tries to attempt to get people to challenge those but cbt therapists don't know for example and don't think of the world in terms of survival and reproductive problems so they don't think of the world in terms of competitive problems in mating friendship uh trade and then in family dynamics they don't they aren't seeing the world through biology and so essentially what it is that i do and now dr hawk with me what we do is we're we are translating cbt general concepts uh and informing cbt with this more biologically accurate understanding of human life and its processes and when we do that we wind up with hopefully something that's better great yeah it's interesting you said about anorexia being ocd because i've known quite a few and some of them were overweight or obese but some of them that i've met never started out overweight you know what i mean right right they just have the ocd chip interesting yes you see a lot of it in the entertainment industry yes of course you would yeah yeah terrific well this is kind of a fun question from keith if the purpose of life is survival and reproduction why do people bother having sex when they're no longer able to reproduce other species that have been spayed or neutered or passed to reproductive age do not have sex so why do humans keep doing it yeah there's um first of all men never are unproductive potentially so that so we can we can take 50 percent of the question and put it to the side because men could always reproduce the um so now we're only talking about women so uh so women have an unnatural excuse me an unusual thing in nature where there's a long period of time when they can't have children towards the end of their lives now that being the case we see we see why that that would be uh the we can hypothesize why that took place uh in human natural history it would be because uh if if a woman's potential lifespan might have been 70 to 80 which it undoubtedly of course was the bet but by age 46 she would have had her last child probably so the question is what do we do in the last 30 years well first of all one thing that we're doing for the last 30 years is that we're raising the last child so let's suppose the last child you have 42 might have been very typical so let's say we go 42 and now that kid is in real hot water for needing a great deal of attention for 12 14 years so we can see that she is still needs to be alive and well for the next 14 up into her mid-50s so now we're going to see that that it doesn't make sense for her to be fertile past 42 but it makes sense for her to be sexually interested past 42 because a big part of being a female sorry to say is to try to get resources out of males and so the way we get resources out of males is through female sexuality so you're gonna so the male doesn't know when you have lost you know when your last viable egg has passed he's just looking at you and looking at your wrinkles and looking at your shape and he's trying to figure it out and the thing is is if you can bluff him in other words if you can you can be concerned about your appearance and use cosmetics and try to do your hair fancy and try to etc drew have have nice fashion all of which would have happened in ancient times that what would have happened is and and if you maintain sexual interest after you are no longer fertile for a period of time that would be the possibility of bluffing that mate into sticking around continuing to have sex with you thinking he's unconsciously thinking he still might impregnate you while he helps raise the last child that you had together okay so now we can see why there would be interest at least for that period of time now after that period of time the um the the same kinds of motivations would still exist uh but they would probably be muted and that's exactly what we see so we see that female sexual interest you know drops off pretty substantially between 55 and 80. it's not that it goes away to zero uh the machinery is still there there's still some uh some degree of motivation but it's not it's not nearly what it would have been at 35 for obvious reasons the um it could it could also be the case and we don't know why uh it could be the case that they are still attempting to possibly get provisioned uh possibly provision for their adult children from from that same male or mate so you can see reasons why female sexuality could linger in a muted in a muted uh fashion uh in into late life and it does however you will also see that if you were to survey people at 60 years old males and females you will find that males are far more interested in sexual activity at 60 than females are okay so that that is true and of course that makes perfect biological sense because the survival and reproductive cost benefit analysis for sex at that point is quite a bit different for the female versus the male the male is absolutely still viable uh the female no longer is and so therefore we would expect her sexual interest to be muted in sort of strategic okay and so if you think about this from a game theory perspective which is what my my friends in theoretical biology do all day long they model these things on computers and try to figure out all kinds of things about human and animal nature if you think about this the male and i'm not talking about humans i'm talking about male in nature versus female in nature you would expect that the male in nature is designed by nature to attempt to try to get sexual activity for as little cost as possible and you would expect that the female is trying to essentially allow sex to happen for the highest possible payoff this is exactly what these two things are the game mathematical game theory behind this dynamic is perfectly understandable it is precisely the relationship that you have with your insurance company your insurance company uh wants you to pay the highest possible premium and pay out the least possible claims they have a whole claims department that is all you know going to snarl at you and uh they have investigators to try to find out whether or not you're trying to cheat them you're keeping track of people who have cheated before or had suspect claims histories in other words they are in conflict of interest with you that doesn't mean that you can't do business you do do business state farm has a whole bunch of my money and i've never filed a claim okay i've been driving for four plus decades i've owned many cars i've provisioned quasi step children in their cars and paid all kinds of state farm bills for half a century and that i haven't gotten a nickel out of those people that doesn't mean it hasn't been worth it okay so the male female dynamic is is one of the essentially a deep biological economics process and so the uh so we would exp uh so that that same process just changes its form as you age it wouldn't mean that the female would uh would say well gee i'm never going to have a sexual thought on my head and i couldn't care less and i don't want anything to do with it nope we would expect uh aside from we would expect that it would still be there in the engine because it might be useful now uh as we i want to make make another appointed just for entertainment to try to to try to just share some you know additional perspectives with with our people that ways of things that i might not have said things before in order to understand human psychology you have to understand that there's two giant parts and i think of them as the earth and the moon so the earth is the general principles that guide all people the moon is personality differences or individual differences so the the earth would be like your doctor studying the kidney and everybody's kidney works the same it has nephron cells they filter sodium it was everybody's kidney in one way it works the same and it's super complicated to figure that out okay once you figure that out within that then you can be a uh a a nephrologist or what do they call those folks that that you study individual differences the individual differences are not complicated relative the general processes the general processes are extremely complicated the individual differences wind up being little variations on the general processes so figuring out nephron cells and how they work and how they filter the blood was unbelievably complicated figuring out that some people have more nephron cells some people have less that's pretty easy and that tells us the story of a lot of the story of high blood pressure and kidney malfunction okay so these are two things the earth is general psychology the moon is individual differences you can't understand the whole dance of human nature or life unless you understand that there are both okay they work together they're interrelated so when this question about sexuality comes up you have to understand there's a lot of women that are 65 that are super uh sexually interested in red hot we're gonna those are those exist in the world they're just not as common as the men would be because the general psychological principles of those dynamics are going to hold throughout the species the individual differences we can't understand what we see without understanding that those are true i have met both men and women who have almost or no sexual interest in life at all it's just simply sort of not in their engine the um and yet i've met more women where that was true than me okay i have met both but i i would say it's three to five times more often that that that description of life will come out of a woman that makes sense okay that makes sense because of the underlying game theory that builds the whole system in the first place women should be in principle defending the eggs and defending their sexuality and trying to optimize resource flow as a result of each sex act the males should be far more active far more opportunistic and attempting to get as much as they can for as little effort as possible that's how it basically works and then we throw individual differences on top of that we draw age processes on top of that and we get the whole story all right that is fascinating you know i used to be about 20 years ago an activity director a retirement home and it was amazing how sexual everybody was and if there wasn't a suitable partner of the opposite sex that they went with what they could find you know what they say if you can't be with the one you love right love the one you're with so very good so okay okay um this is from randy dr lyle i believe i've heard you say or perhaps it was dr goldhamer that the more concentrated the calories the more dopamine is released in the brain who figured this out when and how if this is true then i don't understand why people aren't just drinking pure oil as it's the most concentrated source of calories if you eat enough calories from whole natural food can you still get as much dopamine as you would from calorically dense processed foods or high-fat plant foods and are there any other ways to get dopamine that won't make us fat okay a whole bunch of questions though so the um the uh one of the sort of great discoveries in neuroscience was finding out that that dopamine was this huge chemical signaling mechanism for what we're going to call reward in other words uh the the creatures designed by nature to move around in order to get critical resources for survival reproduction and we it needs a signaling device to tell it when it's been successful and it needs other signaling devices to tell when it's been unsuccessful so uh if you if you bump into something and it feels good then it's probably good for your survival reproduction if it turns out that it feels bad it's probably bad for it and there needs to be a signaling mechanism to tell you that so if you if your skin rubs into a rose bush and you feel the thorns you should feel a little anxiety and avoidance reaction coming in other words it's instantaneously processed in the brain it's done through the use of neurotransmitters so there's an activation of circuits that takes place as a result of you feeling that pinprick from the royals bush uh if a masseuse takes his or her her i guess hands and sort of starts to massage you and it smooths out over your skin you may like that feeling uh probably because that feeling is mimicking you know the tenderness of sexual activity or your your mother soothing you etc in other words it's a it's a signaling process that actually uh indicates safety or attraction so in other words there's uh so you are and and that is going to take place through a neurochemical cascade that's going to take it's going to be activated as a result of that specific stimulus now so one of the great discoveries was that dopamine and there's other there's other reward chemicals as well but there's a major place in the brain called the dopamine pathway and that when in particularly uh food or sex hits the organism the the dopamine system becomes more active that makes sense and um and so it it it's a and it causes a different kinds of pleasant feelings depending upon what's happening so you don't feel the same way um when you're having sex as you do when you're eating chocolate okay it's a different uh those are different sensory processes but they both result in dopamine being flooded so in other words that's a way that the brain is basically helping organize its memory systems and basically say hey that's we were we were in that location under those circumstances and we got a reward we had something happen that increased our survival reproductive uh capabilities and so that actually helps the organism map and remember where there were resources in the environment under what circumstances okay so that's how this works now we obviously if there's a little bit of a reward there's going to be a little bit of dopamine but there's a little more reward there's going to be a little bit more dopamine and if there's going to be a huge reward there's going to be a huge dopamine so that's exactly how that should work and that is how that does work now god knows who figured it out i mean there's there's been a huge amount of animal experiments uh looking at these things for 30 years the uh this is how they figured out drug addiction they found out that the drugs were hyper activating these pathways so they found out that cocaine was high hyperactivating dopamine pathway uh they found out that the opiates were hyperactivating the endorphins pathways so it was as if you had a big endorphin process take place naturally big endorphin processes take place naturally for example at orgasm so orgasm i don't think is a dopamine cascade i believe that's an endorphin cascade so that's gives you that relaxed euphoria afterwards that's another type of experience that educates the organism that it was in a good space for some survival reproductive benefit in that case it's reproductive you'll also get an endorphin cascade as you digest food so the digestion of food also is telling you that's good remember where we were and what we ate and how it was etc because we need to remember that because we just increased our likelihood of survival as a result of doing this so so the uh so of course it's going to be the case that the more concentrated the food the the more valuable it is for your survival and therefore the bigger hit that the systems are going to take and the more activation of those pathways the um now the question is why wouldn't you just drink bottles of oil which would make sense the answer is is that the sensory systems are built in such a way is to sort of maximize their action when you are mimicking the limits of the organism's natural history what it would have come into contact with past that point it's it's it's actually such a hyper activation it's not even pleasant so you can imagine um so for example um the hyper uh you you could take a stimulus device for example for sexuality and hyperstimulate uh sexual tissues and it's painful or it's overwhelming and it's unpleasant okay you could but you could also see that if you increase that stimulation above what you might normally get oh now it's we're in really a sweet spot that what we might call the bliss point so that's this is precisely what has happened in the food industries the food industry has looked very carefully by using a bunch of people uh as test subjects to look for the place where the food is seasoned and concentrated to a level that optimizes the dopamine and endorphin responses i.e the bliss point now the bliss isn't it isn't a point it's an area of typical stimulation for the average person that so a frito is pretty well at the human bliss point for uh salt and fat and in the crunching sensation the uh a lot of chocolates are pretty close to the bliss point where the sea's candy is getting really close to the bliss point now notice the candies are different and there's individual differences and preferences there but they pretty well over the years been able to triangulate on how to maximize the bliss point ben and jerry's ice cream etc now when you get past that uh if they added a bunch of oil to ben and jerry's ice cream it would now take us too far it's it's too hyper stimulating it's like your rock music that you love it at 103 decibels but at 107 your ears hurt and you literally no it's no longer exciting okay so that's the answer to the question that that you're you're only built the the sensory systems are built for a maximum load that they can take if you go past that maximum load it's not interesting okay it's actually avoidant and disgusting or you will pull pull away from it okay so that's how that works i forget the guy that person had a whole bunch of other questions but that was okay well thank you yeah so here is one from barb i've heard you say before you eat something unhealthy to eat something healthy first but if you do that won't you ultimately be taking in more calories by eating both the healthy food and then the unhealthy food oh um no this is really good thinking that this is um not understanding that your caloric intake is um it isn't a day-to-day thing it's a year-to-year thing so you have to think about your caloric intake not on a specified length of time but understanding that it's a continuum that we can in principle we could in principle chop it up by the day but that would be a mistake because your body actually isn't acting on it on a day-to-day basis it's a more continuous process so if you need a tremendous amount today you will eat less tomorrow you don't start out the new day with a with a white board that erases everything and says well now we start from scratch that is not how it happens uh you you maintain greater storages overnight as a result of the food that you ate yesterday and that influences your hunger drug today so we don't think in terms of of oh how much did i eat today and oh i eat a lot of good food but i eat too much good food no that would be that's a mistaken understanding of the process so what you need to do is you need to understand that the only way that an animal will systematically over overeat in other words how if we look at the animal's behavior over say a month what will cause an animal to overeat and it will not be uh even if i force fed an animal um whole natural foods so let's suppose i did that through some bizarre device okay if i did that and then i quit force-feeding them obviously so i didn't continue i could in principle continue to force-feed an animal uh which is just a disgusting thing to even think about but let's suppose that i force-fed my pet hamster more than he or she wanted to eat today uh by 10 10 or 20 calories they didn't really want to eat it it couldn't be induced into it but i forced it okay now let's suppose i did that what would happen is that that same hamster would eat 20 calories less over the next couple of days in other words their system would be finding an equilibrium this is exactly the same way you can hold your breath if you want but you'll catch up in the next minute okay uh or if you hypoventilate then what's going to you know if you take a bunch of big deep breaths right in a row then what's going to happen is that you're going to breathe less over the succeeding 45 seconds as you essentially system comes back down to homeostasis okay so so if you uh so i consider any healthy thing that you eat it's not not on the unusually rich food that would have been rare continuum in other words honey something that people think it was natural meat was something that they that was natural nuts was been something that they were natural those are three natural rich foods but they would have been limited okay so they people would have got what they could get out of them but they wouldn't have been a lot of calories so they would have drifted the average car density of the diet a bit higher uh but the people wouldn't have been in a position very often to uh to get large amounts of those so let's suppose for example that that we are talking about some intermediate amount of intermediate concentrated food like rice okay the uh idiom or white stone apple if i eat an apple right now and then i have a defined dish that that the cook makes and it's exactly the same amount of calories every day at lunch but i eat an apple before lunch and and i'm conscientious enough that i and i'm intimidated enough by what the cook thinks but by god i eat that 600 calorie tostada lunch even though uh i'm actually i will find that i'm not interested in eating the last bit of it why because that might be a normal satiation process for me on an empty stomach but i don't have an empty stomach because i just ate 150 calorie apple okay but let's suppose i cram it in so now i now i've got 750 calories in there over this last hour where normally it would be six and in fact six was satiation but i ate past satiation now what happens have i now eaten more calories no i haven't what's going to happen is that those 150 calories i will eat less 150 less calories over the succeeding 24 hours in other words as we look at it as a continuum it's going to be in imbalance so every bit of healthy reasonable calorie dense food that you eat is a victory because it's displacing or making you less hungry for any of the crap that you eat so the notion that well if i'm going to eat crap what i have to do is not eat the other food because then i will eat less calories as a mistake okay that uh you think you are thinking that that's making sense because it seems to be making sense today over a four hour period but the truth is today our four hour period means absolutely nothing because there is no such thing as a four hour period the entire hunger drive in your behavior pattern over the next several days is a dynamic that will be influenced by what you do in the next four hours it's not a truncated open and shut case though that we then start over so if you eat healthy food before you eat the junk food your the whole point here is here is you're likely to eat less of the junk food because we've displaced a lot of your hunger and we've displaced it with food that was appropriate to the organism so that's the goal here in other words if you were going to eat a pint of ben and jerry's vegan ice cream but instead you ate half a pint then even though we may have eaten more calories because we ate i don't know a big plate full of potatoes and then we ate a half a pint you're actually better off than had you eaten the whole time so if you ate the full pint that's not that much stretch reception so therefore three hours later we're going to be back eating eating something else and now when we look at the whole situation we eat a pint of that stuff instead of pathology okay why did we eat half a pint because that hit satiation after we'd eaten a bunch of food that wasn't as rich that was appropriate so the notion here is forget about trying to think about this very short term think about it year by year over the next year how is it that can we can minimize how much of any artificially rich food that you eat the answer to that question is don't start eating that stuff when you're hungry if you start eating that stuff when you're hungry you're going to eat an awful lot more of it than if you start eating any of that stuff once you're already full okay so the game here is if we as we look at the problem we look at it over a long period of time and over the long period of time we are vastly better off if you're ever going to get into any anything chunky eat something healthy first because we will displace how much of the junk that you're eating it's how much junk you're eating is the problem not how much food you're eating well thank you so this question i know you've answered in our private group guys if you're interested in feel fabulous you can have two weeks for free dr lyle does a q a every month and i know you've answered it there but i don't think you've answered it to a wide audience and lynn says i've heard dr lyle say that not everyone needs to do an a plus diet to achieve their goals and that a b diet might be just fine well i agree with him because i've resolved all my medical issues and lost a large amount of weight on a b diet i still have 30 pounds to go have you seen many people completely achieve their weight loss goals while doing a b diet instead of an a diet oh yes many okay so that that's uh that that's within the bell curve of the human genotype okay so when you look out at the world folks you're going to see you're going to see a lot of young people that are thin but when you start seeing people that are 40 and 50 you're going to see less of those people but they're there okay you just go to the mall and look around you're going to see quite a number of 40 year old men and women are thin so let's just talk about the women for the moment because we're not generally looking at the men too carefully why because people don't care as much about them about their [ __ ] so the thing is is that uh of 40 year old women we're probably going to find that 15 of them are thin okay so uh that's genetic those those people didn't earn that they're just born that way now so now it's going to turn out that if we take a bunch of people of the remaining 85 percent that have weight problems and we take little tiny we take a few of those people from all the whole spectrum of the other 85 percent and we start feeding them say a b level diet in other words a huge improvement over what it is that they're doing so so now instead of being a conventional eater which is causes the the average female to gain two pounds a year between her 16th and her 36th birthday which the average american female is is 40 pounds overweight by her 36th birthday now if we take said person average person and we start feeding them a healthy diet there's going to be more than uh in other words now we're not going to have just the 15 thin people we're gonna have some more how many more well it's i i'd have to eyeball it but probably another 10 or 15 percent of people uh that have weight problems would probably reach uh ideal weight it was excellent ideal weight on doing a b diet and probably 75 to 85 percent wouldn't okay and that's where this person is so this person has the genes they caused her to eliminate you know she got rid of a bunch of health problems which is great she definitely made significant dietary changes had all kinds of success lost however much weight that she lost but now she's stopped at that being you know 20 overweight probably is what it is and so that that means that her diet is probably still about 20 too rich so she's probably at you know 750 calories a pound instead of 600 calories a pound and she's not sweating it which is fine uh but but probably she you know if she goes to b plus we don't know what's going to happen there's we don't know if she'll go from 30 pounds overweight to zero don't know probably not uh if a b diet guts you to 30 probably b plus guy gets you the 22 and an a minus diet gets you to 15 and an a diet might might get you all the way to zero so that's probably what it is if you have done a b diet legitimately and you're 80 pounds overweight you're gonna have to get an a plus diet probably to get down to 10 pounds more than you want okay that's genes so uh genetic variation is a huge factor in this equation that is rarely talked about by by anybody but me and jen hawk right but this is but this is true well all i can tell you dr lyle is when it comes to certain things genes suck jeans [ __ ] with certain things there's no question about that other things i like them for you know it's interesting because when you spoke to feel fabulous last month you reframed it in a way that when people are at a plateau you actually called it a behavioral equilibrium which i thought was fascinating instead of a plateau that's so good aj and and this is something that this is one of these little things that rattles around in my mind i wish i could get clearer to everybody um there is no such thing as a plateau people people have all kinds of magical thinking about this like well i lost 50 pounds and then i hit a plateau and i'm still 50 pounds overweight i just somehow it's my body stop losing weight no no that isn't what happened what happened is is that that dietary change that you made let's suppose that you should be 150 pounds and you are 200 pounds but you were 250 pounds and so you went from the standard american diet to a b diet and over the course of you know six months you you dropped 50 pounds that's not an uncommon result from a very significant dietary change a major improvement a real commitment to healthy living but it was a b level okay so that's what a lot of people can and will do and so now we get there and it stops and the person's a little mystified they're like wow i'm doing the same thing i've been doing for the last six months but the weight loss stopped okay well if you talk to dr phil uh he thinks that you hit a plateau or anybody any any other educate uneducated person like this no you haven't hit a plateau your behavior and your and your body finally hit an equilibrium okay so you the as soon as you started to make the dietary change at 250 pounds 250 pounds was being maintained by a certain calorie density diet and lifestyle let's suppose that you were at a thousand calories a pound so now you started to include a bunch of healthy food but you're still having some rich food but now you're at 800 calories a pound so as a result of that you started shedding weight but you don't shed all the weight that you're gonna shed in three days do you you're like well of course not you know a diet takes some time well how much time the answer is it takes the amount of time necessary for your body weight to reach an equilibrium with what your behavior would dictate and i can never know what that point is but we'll find it so if you with the one one woman that i remember her numbers from my outpatient practice she was at 336 pounds she started to eat oatmeal and she went to about 260. so then it stopped and i'm like well why don't we give up the pizza and the ice cream for dinner oh no i don't want to do that well she had reached your equilibrium and then that's as far as that dietary change is going to take place because at at you know an 800 calorie pound diet that individual is going to be x amount overweight so let's suppose that that 800 calorie pound diet uh is going to take that person from 250 slowly or quickly down to 200 and that's going to stop because that's where that genotype is going to land at 800 calories a pound okay it's not it hasn't reached a plateau if we now ship that diet to 900 calories a pound what's going to happen back up to 225 okay what if we shift it to 850 oh it's a 215. what if we shift it to 750. oh now it's going to lose weight down past 200 it's going to be at 187 okay what if we go to 700 well then it's going to go to 175 or once 172. well what if we go to 650 well then it's going to head down to 165 pounds well what if we go to 550 oh well then it arrives at 150. okay your your weight is just a result of your behavioral equilibrium okay so it's not that your body has reached some resistance point i'll hear this magical thinking like what my body just seems to want to be body doesn't seem to want to be anything uh your your body morphology is just a derivative of your genes and then the behavior that you put on it it doesn't want to be it doesn't defend extra weight just do anything to the kind okay the uh if you if you that's just magical wacky thinking no it's uh your behavior reaches equilibria okay that equilibria will dictate your body morphology so if you change the behavior suddenly we are out of equilibrium and we don't know where it's going to stop so that's why you know i when aj went on her journey many years ago i had no idea where it was going to stop i knew it would stop somewhere she's not going to wind up at 90 pounds okay i had no you know she's five foot six or five seven not gonna be 90 pounds i don't know where it's going to stop but i was pretty sure with what she's doing it wasn't going to stop at 160 pounds like no that doesn't make any sense biologically body is still gonna genetically going to be engineered to keep shedding weight to get you down to an optimum for your health that's where it's going now some people say well my optimum health is 5 4 and 135 apparently because i'm doing everything perfectly but i've got more fat on me than i want well too bad it's jeans okay 5'4 135 may not be aesthetically ideal for before you or the modern media environment etc but it may be actually a health optimum for your biology that could be true i've seen people where that was true i've seen people that were five five 145 and looked great absolutely great okay those are they're just you know strong solid curvy whatever it is it's like hey that's it sorry you might want to be 135 but your biology and your genes are telling you that on an outstanding diet sorry you're 145 that's just how it is so uh you will eventually reach an ideal equilibrium yes all right uh dana says i love this man so much you know dr lyle how dr mcdougall often says it's the food and he actually sells t-shirts that says that do you want me to get you one that says it's the genes well the problem with that is that that uh that that can be so easily misunderstood and a guy like dr mcdougall might actually take offense at that because in other words we're trying to explain obviously that environmental inputs i.e it's the food is what we can do okay the the added thing that i'm trying to say is the genes limited you know i mean the genes are dictating how this game winds up playing out but sometimes if we but an overly simplistic view of its genes would cause it to act like i think your your life is genetically determined which of course it's not it's not what i'm saying i'm saying that your life has genetic constraints and so uh that being so in other words what i'm trying to tell you in a long short aj it's a cute idea but i think it's it's laden with trouble so we'll skip the passage okay well that people are really appreciating this and things saying they love you so much and they learn so much from you and we are so blessed that you are coming back next month it's already been scheduled this time with dr hawk on sunday september 13th so thank you so much dr lyle it was really wonderful talking to you great pleasure thanks for having me aj okay bye-bye bye oh guys come back at 2 p.m i have another show today with someone you don't know she is as smart as she is beautiful she is a plant-based gastroenterologist who you don't know yet but you will her name is dr janiece lassner and she's going to be talking about some amazing topics take care everyone bye bye folks
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