Home 🏠 🔎 Search


Bad Transcripts
for the
Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Chef AJ: Dr Doug Lisle on Weighing and Measuring Your Food
an auto-generated transcript


To get a shareable link to a certain place in the audio,
hover your mouse over the relevent text,
right click, and "copy link address"
(mobile: long press & copy link address)
 


hi everybody chef AJ here and welcome to healthy living it is my pleasure as always to talk to our next guest which is dr. Doug Lyall one of my favorite people on the planet to talk to because every time I talk to him he says the same thing but in a different way with little nuances where I just learned so much if you're not familiar with dr. Lisle he is not only the co-author of one of the greatest books ever written on any subject it's called the pleasure trap he's also the psychologist at both the mcdougal live in program and the True North health center both located in Santa Rosa California and dr. Lyle has an amazing website wwm dynamics with an S org where you can watch amazing videos for free on the lectures that he gives at places like the mcdougal program and true north and you can even sign up for a private consultation with him so please welcome my friend and colleague dr. Doug Lyall hello hi there AJ pleasure to be here you have such a nice shirt on today we both are wearing purple just like we did not call each other so so dr. Lisle I've talked to so many times you did a wonderful presentation off the cuff through Facebook live in Atlanta that we've had like 5,000 people watching so far and commenting on but I wanted to focus if possible on one subject that just keeps coming up in my practice because a friend of yours and mine dr. Goldhamer our colleague and friend referred somebody to me a few weeks ago and she was a woman who had followed a food plan through a food addiction program for 11 years which is a strict weighing and measuring program so what I wanted to talk about today is just in general the efficacy of these food addiction treatment programs that require weighing and measuring for the rest of your life and I'm not here to bash any program because guys if it works for you please keep doing it but dr. Lisle I probably get 100 emails a day and at least 20 of them are from people that are in these programs that are being driven crazy they can't do what they relapse taking their weight back and they can't sustain it so I want to see if maybe there's an alternative approach that might work for some of our people watching but this is first time dr. Goldhamer actually referred somebody to me so I was very honored but I didn't think I could help her and my first reaction was well this is a dr. Lisle question because she had said she'd been following a food addiction program for 11 years and did very well she was able to maintain her her weight-loss but now she found out probably through forks over knives through the hole about the whole food plant-based diet and specifically about the most health-promoting version which is the one that dr. Goldhamer recommends and I recommend which is not only whole food plant-based but free of sugar oil salt and flour and she said well I'm not addicted to broccoli so I'd really like to let go of weighing and measuring but I'm scared because she had done this for 11 years and so my first instinct was to tell her to have a consultation with you and then my second instinct is was to say what you often say is well let's just run an experiment and let go of it for 21 days and see what happens but I realized that she was very scared to do that so what I said to her I said I said I'm going to talk to dr. Lisle about this because I don't know the answer I said but my instinct tells me maybe you could just not weigh and measure your vegetables because nobody could ever get fat from eating non starchy vegetables they're 100 calories a pound so maybe you could still keep weighing and measuring your food but just just to kind of put your toe in the water just don't measure your salad anymore or your raw vegetables and see how that works now dr. loudly food plans on these food addiction programs are slightly different but they're always very regimented three meals a day no snacks generally you have to report it to your sponsor the day before which like I'm on a plane how do I know what I'm going to eat you know or how hungry I'm going to be they don't seem to make accommodations for people's activity level for people's age or weight or things like that so to give you an example of one of the food plans this may not be this young lady's food plan but like for one of my clients that I'm working with now it's four ounces of protein whatever that means I'm guessing some kind of animal protein because the food addiction people do still believe except for one person dr. Jonas lund who's I think a wonderful resource that you have to not be you can't be vegan and overcome food addiction there's animal proteins the only thing that's going to work so it's four ounces of protein six ounces of a starch or grain assuming you're a goal weight which I guess could be like rice or sweet potatoes and seven ounces of non starchy vegetables so that is 17 ounces of food per meal which is 51 ounces of food per day dr. Lisle I eat more than that each meal so I'm going to shut up now and just let you talk about the efficacy of weighing and measuring does it work who will it work for and is there a better way - because I basically just listened to you when I needed to lose weight and to me that's the way you do what dr. Lisle says you do what dr. Goldhamer says done but go ahead yes we're going to we're going to take a wide-angle lens to this problem so that people can can feel confident about the logic okay so first of all no animal on earth weighs and measures its food so that this is a this is an utterly human activity today so this is very useful to understand this say that there are you know four thousand species of mammals and there's exactly one of them that's weighing and measuring its food all right so right away that should make us suspicious why why are we doing this the answer is because they're overweight right so let's get this straight so we've got three thousand 999 species of mammal that are not overweight we've got one that's overweight and it's solution is to weigh and measure its food which was not something that the other three thousand 999 mammals are doing right so right away I've got a problem with weighing and measuring that is entirely inconsistent with animal behavior and Bailey apparently agrees with you cuz she doesn't wait ha ha ha right on cue exactly so the UH so this is a an absurd concept and it doesn't there's just simply no logic to it yeah now the what we're going to do though is we're going to look at the fact that you can see how people got here and they got here because if they eat association on the foods of the reading then they then they wind up gaining weight and so they're they're not going to do that there we go that was the culprit the job and so as a result of this what we have is we've just simply got people going down the incorrect pathway so human beings have a remarkable ability to override what it is that they want to do and to to essentially use their willpower to try to grit their teeth and go another direct so this makes us very it's possible for us to go to the dentist and put up with somebody clamoring around in our mouth and scratching our gums and making us uncomfortable we can do this in a way that other animals can't do it then they can't we can't communicate with them and tell them hey this is for your own best interest we're going to do this it's going to be uncomfortable now they'll just freak out they can't do it human beings can do that so human beings can do uncomfortable things if they're instructed that it's in their best interest and so that's going to include weighing and measuring your food so people are doing this thing even though it's completely a natural behavior and they're doing this and they think you know they're being told by you know lean intelligent people that this is the way to do things and so and it makes intuitive sense and in fact it will work so if you want to override your instincts about eating as much as you want use supreme willpower to do this and be very uncomfortable for the majority of your existence then then a few people not very many but a few people with extraordinary motivation and unusual personalities can manage to do this and actually eat less than they would want consistently and keep their weight lower than it would normally be given the diet for the reading this is an unbelievable way of doing things um I would I would say that this is the equivalent if you had an animal like Bailey and you had her on a on food that was unnaturally rich so she would gain weight is it is it she is a she and echo that happened when I first adopted her I was giving her the wrong food and she did gain five pounds and when I fed her the right food she lost the weight there you go okay so one of the ways we could have had Bailey lose this weight uh if we were concerned about this and we thought that this was unhealthy is that we would simply feed her the same rich food but feed her half of it or two-thirds of it and we would find some amount that was just the right amount to keep her in what the vet said would be an ideal way meanwhile Bailey would be incredibly upset constantly thinking about food in eating food at the park because she was so hungry and spend scavenging yeah in cat poop exactly ever it took all right so this is uh this is absolutely no way to treat an animal and it's no way to treat yourself and so the solution then is to bring the camera back and realize the will now wait a second none of these creatures in nature ever do weighing and measuring they never try to override their hunger Drive they always eat dissociation repetitively throughout their life in the same way that they breathe the CCA ssin they sleep to satiation they drink water to satiation this is what they do okay this is why you have satiation mechanisms satiation mechanisms are unbelievably sophisticated they're uh they're primarily located in the hypothalamus and they're designed by nature to keep you not only alive but keep you optimally healthy so they could have you breathing one percent more than you're breathing right now but it wouldn't do you any good or one percent less that would be any good either so the oxygen requirements for humans are are within extremely narrow parameters and your respiration rate rises and falls automatically to try to keep it there so the same thing is true with your hunger Drive and so people look at the world they say well no that's not true or they say it's not true for me and yet you and I know that if people move into True North health center remarkably they can eat association and if they're overweight they lose weight and and if they are at about ideal weight then they stay the same yeah and what they don't have to do is wear measure their food because we now have the animal in its natural dietary habitat right so the solution is to get into your natural dietary habitat the solution is not the way measure your food I believe you were on the panel one that I moderated in Atlanta or one of the events and a question like that was answered and I believe it was you or Baxter Montgomery concurred that that the only reason a human being would have to make weight and measure their food is because they're not eating the right food and on these food addiction program plans they're required to have one tablespoon of oil per meal well right there that's you know I'm bad at math like 54 grams of fat what they're required to have a day in fat is more fat than I eat in an entire probably two weeks almost and you know they just don't understand calorie density they don't understand plant-based diets and the I think the only way to not be overweight on a non whole food plant-based diet is really to weigh and measure your food and and it just seems like I don't know where it came from dr. Lyle I do remember my mom who was morbidly obese going to Weight Watchers you're counting calories but it never worked or and it seems like the the recidivism rate is very high with these programs you only hear about the success stories same with alcoholics amant Anonymous you only seem to hear about the success stories and I don't know if you're familiar with the work of dr. dr. Lance notice who wrote the sober truth but he talked about how these 12-step programs in his opinion do more harm than good but that what works about them is the camaraderie and the Brotherhood and being in a support group but the tool just seems to me completely unsustainable - I mean I've never weighed and measured my food and I probably more than anyone so I mean it is a way if you want to do it but it just seems very stressful and limiting and really not necessary because if you're eating under the hunger Drive won't you get cranky and hungry and then eat more like - give me an example I injured my back on September 10th so for three months I've been wearing this very restrictive brace and I eat pretty much the same thing every day for lunch Elliot probably two pounds of roasted sweet potatoes and a pound of broccoli and it's a huge plate of food well with this brace on I couldn't finish because I was mechanically being restricted and so I felt full but I was still hungry and so what would happen then is I would have to eat then finish it in two hours instead of all in one sitting but I just can't imagine eating under the hunger Drive and and I think that if they're eating the wrong foods like oils and animal products and processed food they're not going to be satiated anyway so you want to talk about what they should be eating so that they don't have to weigh and measure their food of course so human National History we ate a variety of foodstuffs from from raw vegetable material but might have been 100 calories a pound all the way up to nuts and seeds and 2,500 the most of the time we were eating foods of quite low calorie density the reason why you can tell this is because you can tell how much food it takes associated human so typically a human will be satiated on five pounds of food a day that'd be an unusual amount so you say these people are eating 17 ounces three times because a day 51 ounces which is not to me pounds about three pounds so that's really on the light side of it so so therefore I would expect that they are eating under under the Hydra Drive but if they're and the way it is that they're they're feeling okay is that we're dumping a little oil in there so we're getting some rich food in there and the people that that's more for their taste buds to make the program popular now and of course some ignoramus that maybe the dietician that is actually giving us the the breakdown that program thinks that they need oil for their essential fatty acids and no doubt that's probably honest ignorance but it plays beautifully into what people want so as John John McDougall has famously said people love your good news about their bad habits so everybody wants to hear about how they need you know a tablespoon or whatever it is it's rating at least two teaspoons for me and some of them are a tablespoon per meal so it's like 100 calories just from fat you can have an entire pound of sweet potatoes for the same amount of calories that these food addiction programs are telling you you need in fact absolutely and so human beings never eh well this is not part of our national history obviously if there were there'd be little bottles of oil out there in the world and there aren't the I remember when when we finished the poster trappin and we were trying to promote it and a lot of people weren't interested in hearing a message which did surprise us in in we had no despair over this Alan Goldhamer comments to me about a year later says you know we had written a book called the chocolate diet would have been successful apparently somebody wrote such a book unless honey and so you know no surprise so yes people need to know that I'm sure there's other examples of this concept around it would be many but I will for anybody out there that happens to be a golfer I will give this example too and that is that a golfer said don't know what they're doing and they're just learning when they grab the golf club they will grab it very tightly and this is called strangling the club they're so tense about it they're so tense about how to move this club that they just contract their hands very very hard around that club and a golf pro will immediately see this and you can see it from a mile away there's no way you can swing a golf club properly by having a tight grip you have to have a very relaxed grip in fact with outstanding golfers sometimes they'll let go of the club and it'll go flying behind them because their grip is so relaxed this is how we want to live with respect to our food we want to be very relaxed about it we want to not go we want to be essentially cooking too much food we want to be eating as much of it as that you want and not worrying about when we're going to be looking at the clock so we can eat again to get rid of our raging hunger drive we want to have a very relaxed grip on the concept of how much we're eating the only place where we have a grip is on what we're eating and so that's that is the solution to this problem it's the solution that every animal on earth uses and human beings simply need to mimic their animal brethren and they'll be fine yeah you know I would love to interview or at least talk to whoever invented these food plans but I can't seem to find the history of that because I don't understand how it's a one-size-fits-all how Princeton's an ultimate weight last we of a gal who's 4 foot 10 and we have a gal who's 6 foot 2 so how can even if it is correct amount of food which I don't believe it is yes how can you give one plan to the same sex the same weight the same age and then what about when you exercise on days that I exercise I'm a lot hungrier so it seems to me when you're doing some kind of external control you're you're you're never in touch with how you're feeling and I don't know how you feel about this dr. Lisle but to tell people they happy three meals a day and no snacks I mean I can't eat in the morning I don't get up somebody don't get hungry till two or three o'clock so should I just make sure that I'm eating that 70 i I just I want to understand this guys I'm not trying to criticize your program if it works for you but I get so many people for whom it didn't work and I want to help these people realize that there's another way because they are very scared to start weighing and measuring they're scared to let go and they're scared to stop weighing themselves another thing that you and I think that you don't need to do if you're following the right diet the diet Tata True North they've had 30,000 patients come in their doors over 30 years not one of them has gained weight those that needed to lose weight has lose weight and a true north I mean this is what helped me is is well working with you and True North seeing that every Slim employee there took two not one but two 11 inch plates at every meal with food piled is high and they were all thin and I'm like I want I want to do what they're doing and when you do what they're doing you will be slim well I did have an intern who came in about 15 years ago um pretty young lady and she came in and she has lost a little bit of weight she came in a little bit heavy well lost a little bit of weight and then stay there she still had more weight to lose it was clear to her that she had more weight to lose and and she was quite frustrated and so finally after about 3 or 4 months she asked to talk to me and she said listen I'm doing everything perfectly just the way we do here and I clearly had 10 pounds to lose you know what's going on and I said well tell me what it is the treating she's oh just just what's out in the kitchen and so then she told me what was on her salad what was on her salad was a huge handful of nuts all kinds of raisins dates and avocado okay so we had a little bit of lettuce there but essentially what we had was a dessert I mean and of course she was healthy as a horse because that is all healthy food hey uh but but it was too rich and so as soon as I had her back off you know put half a ball on avocado and half the amount of nuts on there then she lost weight so this is this is how this works so of course even within the realm of natural foods different people have to be a little mint bit careful about just how rich they make that bid but but this is the way to go folks I mean this is you simply but behave according to your design and we don't have to do this the other things that you're saying are absolutely correct that that I never have a plan about what I'm going to eat that day in terms of amount or even when so I a chapter in a dr. Wayne Dyer had a book he had several books but one of his early books he made an interesting comment that I liked which was first be a good animal and so in this way you eat eat when you're hungry you eat as much is it that you want instead of other words just learn to trust this and dr. Dyer I'm sure wasn't aware what to eat so he didn't understand the importance of that but if we add that general message to our knowledge of what is that we should be eating then we can let go and not be strangling the both one and that's that's we want to have a nice relaxed wing in this life and that's how we're going to do it well you know the food addiction people say that it's important to eat it structured times because that's what's going to keep you safe from that overeating but to me it teaches you to overeat because why would you eat if you're not hungry and it really want to understand this but I don't this is because they don't understand right so what you're doing is you're you're listening to people who are working with people and are and themselves usually are impassion or they wouldn't have been in this line of work and that have struggled themselves and they're lost and so the only thing that they have found anybody that ever started a program like this and sold it and made it their life's work they themselves are probably very hyper conscientious regimented individuals and so they may have actually executed a plan where they override their instincts repetitively and they are the one of the three and 100 that can actually successfully do this I even though it's torture their whole lives so the answer is no being that they're making a massive mistake and and incidentally to the extent that they foods that are inconsistent with health they're their limitations of those foods are not going to save them from a progenesis or cancer right the works there there's you eat your certain few ounces of fish or whatever it is that you're eating every day and you're statistically increasing your likelihood of tragedy it doesn't matter if it's limited so the you know the we have the answer the answer is to be eating a predominantly or exclusively whole natural plant foods diet or something very close to that so a minimum of processed foods and if we stay right there your people will be very successful and the the another thing that I would speak about for a few minutes would be when uh what I'm gonna call mirror monkeys if you put a monkey in front of a mirror or constantly I look at them yes it's so curious about themselves and they'll hang around the mirror and keep swinging around and going back and peeking at it this is what people on weight loss or weight management programs do is a lot of times they are addicted to peaking at the scale and what we want them to do is to to understand that the proper way to look at at weight would be really on the order once a month but what you would want to have a behavior pattern that you were planning to do and then execute that behavior pattern so in this case it would be to loosen the reins on what it is that you're doing and then let's sit back and find out what happens in a month if you if you do this let's get rid of the oil that you're eating everyday oil is the number one culprit that I always see when it comes to excess weight on people the there are other culprits but that is overwhelmingly the number one culprit is people are getting their snip into oil somewhere and people on these kinds of diets are pouring the oil into their diet so we remove the oil we relax the grip on what is the people are reading and then we sit back and we watch for a month and we don't you know actually what I to do good science on yourself or wait a good thing to do is to measure yourself three consecutive morning's say any of a month and then take the average and so now we have essentially a pretty good baseline and then a month later we do the same thing we measure three days in a row and we take the average and typically we're going to see well if people are going from a higher density diet to a lower density diet they will tip their weight will tend to drift down if they go from a lower to a higher their wave is going to drift up but one of the things that they don't need to do is to be restricting intake we don't what we want to do folks is we want to find out how much trouble were in let's what we want to do is we want to start out with a vision of how we would like to live and that the way we'd like to live is to not be restricting your diets or intake we're good insects and so as a result we might as well find out what you're up against and so I encourage people to take a month experiment and to to do what it is that we would tell them to do and at the end of the month find out where we are and if it turns out that you're in the same place where you started not bad then we didn't have to like hold our breath and panic at every meal and weigh and measure anything and we wound up in the same place if it turned out we lost a little weight great the odds in this gaining a little bit of weight which is people's great fear is is extremely remote and it's important to test it it turns out that oh my goodness you gain two pounds which would be pretty surprising two pounds to be 8,000 calories of tissue in 30 days I would be very surprised if that would happen but if it did we understand how easy it is to take it off and so as a result it's worth the experiment to find out rather than spend our lives ripping the club right because it seems like they fear that loss of control and yes and that that seems to be where they would have to talk to you I can't help them with that I can help them with the food I can't help them with the fear that they have of letting go of that control you know it's you north where you work and where I get to work sometimes coming up they have a 24 hour salad bar yes is available 25 hours a day with huge offerings of every kind of non starchy vegetables and fruit and then three times a day hot food appears maybe a so some starches like potatoes or rice or beans and some non starchy vegetables and then over in a corner on a tiny tiny table they have a tiny food scale tiny tiny one like a postal scale with some nuts and seeds for people like me that would go crazy and so that's the only thing that that they don't encourage you to measure them but it has that there and I don't have a problem if people have a problem with the hyper palatable foods like nuts and want to see what announces because like you said this example you gave of the lady people can oh you know overestimate or underestimate but when I don't understand about the food addiction plans is why you would limit non starchy vegetables to seven ounces a day these foods can be as low as 67 calories a pound this is where all our nutrition is why would you ever I can understand telling people no not a lot of animal products or oil you better be measuring those or not but why you would ever restrict a food like non starchy vegetable the idea is we want it at least according to dr. gold hammer eat as much of those as we possibly can for satiation for health yeah just sheer ignorance yeah and its really their ignorance is deep and profound they do not understand what it is that we understand they are not they don't have a wide-angle lens looking at this as a as a worldwide animal biological problem that animals have to solve they don't understand that human beings have the same magnets and equipment in them as all the other animals and therefore we do not have to consciously solve this problem any more than our drug does and so the and so they are way lost and and in in quiet despair the only thing that they come up with is conscious control and this is uh your you are correct to be astounded at the level of ignorance here and this is what you know I wrote this in the buzzer trap 15 years ago that the vast majority of weight loss experts have no idea what's going on that ignorance remains true today nothing has changed 15 years later and so I actually will omit that some of these actually not necessarily some I will submit that Weight Watchers specifically is which is I'm sure the last I checked away in measure type of yet well they do points but what right thing is is now non-starchy vegetables finally are unlimited finally yeah right but wait wait watchers in general and Weight Watchers food etc this is this is going to go nowhere so people are not going to be successful typically on this and the research evidence indicates that when they when weight people do Weight Watchers programs nothing happens however um and there's a lot of Weight Watchers junk food oh yeah find them little process for the bars oh sure but it has Weight Watchers on it and I really think that Weight Watchers is is in a different business than people think that it's in I really personally see Weight Watchers as in the business of defending people's esteem but that really they are in the status business in the same way that Mercedes Benzes G's Benz is really not in the car business their religious status business they're selling a car that that has these little luxury appointments in this cachet and advertising that are really showing that hey I can afford to waste thirty thousand dollars oh my god I'm will be up I mean it's it's not a whole heck of a lot different than a Toyota Camry but we you know it is a little bit different certainly but not much and and then we make it $75,000 and it indicates that we were wealthy enough to waste that money if anybody's driving Mercedes right now you know Doug don't take any offense but this is the business that they are in and there are the same thing is going to be true for in the clothing line so at Neiman Marcus you know this is it's this is the business of defending people's status and so in the same way that Weight Watchers is not in the weight loss business if they're truly the weight loss business they they would have been recognized as an abysmal failure and they never would have made money and they would have gone broke no question about this the fact that they are so widespread and commercially successful tells you that they are not in the weight loss business they are in the status defense business and so what they are is they are the the publicly acknowledged Bowl place where if you are overweight if you tell your family and friends that you are doing Weight Watchers then it's showing that you are conscientious and you are intelligent and you are emotionally stable therefore you have a good solid personality and we should not we should not look down on you because you're overweight it is a desperately needed status defense because people people have considerable penalties that they pay as psychosocial a as a result of being overweight in our culture and pretty much any culture so it being overweight indicates that there was something wrong and that what it's wrong isn't your brain and it isn't sure your it isn't your personality and it isn't sure your health what's wrong is is that your diet is bad and as a result it but people don't necessarily make that inference they make the inference that you're a slob ok because you effectively look sloppy it makes it look like you're not conscientious it makes it look like you're not intelligent essentially it makes it look like you're not with it and you're not sharp and that you've got emotional problems in fact a lot of psychologists believe that that's true but you have emotional problems and that's what's causing you to to be overweight which is absurd ok so the exact opposite is true the the psychological problems are the result of having the weight they're not the cause of the weight and as a result of this people then do something to try to deal with the psychological pain that the weight is causing and what they do is a bit of weight watchers to mitigate the status loss that is associated with having a weight problem you will not fix the weight problem you will fix the status loss associated with the weight problem as best that you can and it's a it's something but we have a massively better solution which is to fix the wake up right yeah job it's and it can be fixed working with you or dr. Oldham or even considering the ultimate weight-loss program just going to true north you can see that it's possible it's for sure and you had many people you had spectacular successes aging with people that have been in your group and people whose lives have been out completely and utterly transformed without weighing or measuring a single drop of food you think about it dr. lout you know it's sort of like to tell somebody with a weight problem they need to weigh measure your food is like telling an alcoholic it's okay to still drink but just drink a measured amount of alcohol well that doesn't work I mean until they get the food right I don't see how it's going to work because if you and I weighed and measured our food to seventeen ounces a day with what we ate we would starve yes start oh yes we would because we're not eating to assess oils we're not eating you know I'm you know all those hyper palatable hyper caloric foods we need to eat more food and until they understand calorie density I don't think they're ever going to be able to break out of this restrictive weighing and measuring mindset you know what's what is also interesting about this students what you and I are talking about and what is that we understand is counterintuitive it makes sense if you're overweight you're eating too much it the notion that there's a differences in calories of the foodstuff is is not really that obvious to people so that that's really not part and parcel of good thinking and here's what's really on poor parcel of the thinking and that is they cannot imagine that there's a factor of 30 difference in the calorie density 840 when you think of vegetables at a hundred in oil at 4000 calories per pound it's a forty fold difference you're not supposed to be that good at math I wasn't thinking a little bit oil very good but you're absolutely right it is actually forty to one and that is a that is such so extraordinary to the notion that if you had essentially you know a cubic inch of food here and you thought that that was and you knew what that was going to do to your stomach and your situation and then you realize there was something else it was 40 cubic inches of food it's like wow but those are the same and the answer is yes those are the same in terms of their calorie density excuse me toward towards of their net calories and so that notion is is very counterintuitive it's so counterintuitive that to get to where it is that you and I live psychologically with respect to food it actually took a surprising amount of learning and you had to challenge your your sort of natural thinking about the subject and and and learn and grasp the fact that there are some realities here that didn't come easily but once you get those realities in mind and if you are afraid of them then I would recommend that you you test them you actually check ok give yourself a nice a nice check take 30 days and find out what happens by doing it this way and find out whether or not there's anything to fear from not gripping the club the club so tightly every time I did one of your experiments and I was afraid I actually ended up losing weight because I was afraid because I was afraid well I'm like okay well you can eat potatoes and not be fat but definitely you can eat rice and you would have me do these experiments and you'd say well you're gonna do it in the most you gained as a pound or two but every time I did what you said I'd end up losing weight I think you said something really brilliant once about how there's no gazelle on the African savannah but sitting there worrying about whether they should eat one blade of grass or two and you follow that up in a recent interview where you said there's no correct amount of food to eat Reiter's day for an hour and that really helped me because sometimes I think I still over eat whatever that means or maybe right you know and I'm talking about whole natural food I you don't guess vegetables whole grains legumes I do not eat any sugar flour chocolate alcohol nuts seeds or added oil or animal products so my calorie density is 550 calories per pound or less and so I was under the impression from dr. rules as I could eat and live in them as much as I want as often as I want until comfortably full well occasionally I eat a little bit past comfortably full if the potato is particularly good like oh my god I overate but then what happens is I just takes a lot longer for me to get hungry sure you know no animal no animals brain could possibly solve the problem of what is the right amount to eat right now it's not solvable now for exactly the reasons that you just talked about the right amount for what for two hours for two hours and 13 minutes for two hours in 27 minutes and whether that's going to be 5 degrees colder then I just sit like what is the right amount of food there there is no right amount of food there is all there is is the right amount of food over an extended period of time so there's a right amount of calories to eat this week but there's not a right amount of calories to eat this morning and so as a result we never have to worry about those times when we overeat or we need a tremendous amount of food because we're really hungry notice actually there's never a time when if you're eating whole natural foods you are going to eat a huge amount of calories but if you were to eat some very ritual natural foods and you were to quote eat overeating quotes the truth is is that you would be you would have essentially high amount of glycogen storage and you would not be hungry for a good long while sometimes people will do that if they eat a fair amount of calories in the night time they are they are not hungry until noon and exit no problem just be a good animal follow your instincts and there's nothing to worry about well believe it or not people still worry about eating starch and one of the things that I find look you know I don't want to say because I don't want to offend people that this is what works for them I'd love to interview the people that founded this system to find out why and how it came to be but a lot of the food addiction experts and by the way none of the food addiction experts are teaching a plant-based program that's hold food plant-based without sugar oil salt except for dr. gold hammer and if they did that diet I don't think when measuring would be needed but one of the things they say is we have to limit starch because people that suffer from food addiction which is refined food addiction or processed food addiction they have carbohydrate sensitivity so we can't give them too much rice or potatoes especially at the beginning and and and so it you know they say like well if you're going to be vegan it's gonna have to be like nuts and beans I mean I can't eat beans for a particular GI reason and I don't eat nuts for because I'm I can't moderate them I mean I couldn't do their program because I would fail because that's all I eat is potatoes in rice and how do we get over this starch a phobia that people still have that they're going to gain weight because you can't gain weight from potatoes and rice right isn't that like the Nobel epigenesis we can't convert carbohydrate to fat how do we prove I mean I can prove it because I'm thin and that's all I eat I'll eat a three pound bag of sweet potatoes every day and so what we can convert carbohydrates fat not very efficiently I see okay and so yes but once again the ignorance is deep and profound the notion is searches are a problem I'm actually have no idea where this comes from but it may come from the notion that when people do eat starches of the potato it's a fairly large item and so people are looking at that and thinking that if you eat big things you get big so I'm saying I think it's really probably almost that simple B if you eat a big plate of rice you're going to get big and course this is not true and so the I am not actually sure where this this misinformation started or where it came from and it may have come from multiple sources across the last hundred years but it is is for endlessly mistaken we've got two billion Asians eating as much rice as they want not a single one on more fat the only ones that are fatter in Beijing or an oil all over their steak so this is uh this is a huge misunderstanding that that as we continue to learn more about human natural history and we continue to learn more about essentially the wiring of the brain and the palate and how it works we see more and more evidence of the importance of starches and that they have been around and they've been a critical part of human nature for more than a million years so the notion also that came out of Barry Sears in the zone which is that that we became star cheaters with the dawn of Agriculture and that this is an unnatural turn in the history of humans is mistaken so we can see that the human genetic code has been coding for Hamleys which is the enzyme needed to digest starch for a long time this goes back you know hundreds of thousands of years so we are we certainly ate a variety of foodstuffs I wouldn't argue that we were not we were vegans in our natural history we were not we currently believe that is likely to be the case but a whole natural food starch space vegan diet is probably the optimal diet for our species or it's very close to it the inclusion of animal foods while while the system can tolerate it looks to be something that is that is problematic it certainly large amounts and and possibly problematic and small amounts particularly if you've got any kind of physiological compromise the only research that has ever been shown to reverse a progenesis which is our our number one health mortality risk is going to be a vegan diet and so this is or near vegan Ornish got some reversal on a 97% vegan diet which was not as good as the results tellingly as the results that we had by Esselstyn which was a hundred percent so literally that difference may be a difference in in in what what the body needs to do when it's in that that type of corner the so my point is is that the the ignorance about not thinking essentially thinking that starches are somehow a bad thing is pretty incredible and I I have I possibly something that comes to mind for me just this speculation is that the measurement of blood sugars with diabetics certainly if you eat a white potato and you're diabetic you will see a blood sugar spike this is not the cause of the diabetic condition it's the result of the dye a condition and people resolve the diabetic condition if they eat those potatoes but sometimes this freaks out their doctors and it may freak them out so they may want to eat other things like squashes but the solution to the problem is not to stay away from sergeant's is to stay away from the high-fat food that is causing the insulin resistance that is in fact the root of the problem so there are some reasons why dietitians and doctors would that are ignorant and lay people that are ignorant are parroting around information that is that is deeply mistaken but they certainly are and that's why you know we are an unusual place where where people resolve these conditions eg satiety on they resolve diabetic conditions they resolve weight problems and they do not weigh and measure anything right and that that is the solution to this problem yeah I don't know any of the plant-based doctors or educators or programs it's this advocating that we we may weigh and measure your food you know in I don't know if a lot of the doctors in the plant-based movement just don't believe in food addiction or they doing other things they're not addressing it but do you have any idea why the experts include addiction that are not treating it with our diet style whole food plant-based without oil they seem to believe that animal protein is necessary and superior to combat this disease that you know plant protein and they talk about the brain chemistry and the carbohydrate sensitive I mean I don't you know I'm not a doctor but it rice cigarettes yeah so I think that this you it's sounding when you really get down to it that this is this is a very a myth based little subculture and and we they parrot one one myth after the next and it never gets challenged by anybody within their their domain and they go about this is one of these issues where when things are superficially correct in other words they appear to be correct they essentially satisfy human explanatory needs like eat small food get small a big food get big bear simple things of this nature and also it's also notable that the human preferences would be de cheese indeed slices of ham other words on toast yeah with mayonnaise so as a result of that people are going to want to hear good news about their bad habits and they're going to have these superficial understanding the mirror monkeys will if they eat a big bunch of food they get on the scale they've now gained a pound and a half cuz they just ate a pound and a half of our food where's that they eat six ounces or seven ounces or whatever ludicrous little measurement they have then when they step on the scale they've only gained seven ounces so as a result they're using an incorrect method to try to assess this process and as a result these these myths perpetuate so I cannot tell you how many people have told me things like oh no I can't do that because when I did that I gained two pounds you know in two days it's like it's impossible you could even possibly gain to Constitution in two days you can easily gain five pounds of fluid in two days in fact at the True North health center I think our record was somebody lost 18 pounds overnight okay so they came in obviously bloated on a high salt diet they went on a water fast their kidney caught up they dumped a bunch of sodium and they literally were on the toilet all night long they dropped 18 pounds in about ten hours conversely we had a woman that left True North health center after a long fast and had done extremely well and they went to San Francisco and a meal at a French restaurant and 24 hours later was nine pounds heavier Wow all this all upset yeah okay and so people believe that when you look at the scale on a hourly basis it's telling you the truth about what's happening in the process it is telling you nothing of the kind it's like essentially trying to assess the direction of this year's stock market by looking at what's happening in the next hour it is a useless way to analyze the problem you must analyze the problem if you're looking at the stock market a month at a time don't look at it a minute at a time so we unfortunately uh some people very concerned about solving this problem will get very analytical down to the level of happen whether I eat this thing or whether I gain weight in the next sixty minutes and this will lead them into a big trap of thinking that big food causes them to be big when in fact big food causes you to be small absolutely one of the things the food addiction programs teach which I personally believe in is the abstinence from sugar and flour because I think those are horrible foods for our sent our brains and just but they're just too calorically dense but what I don't understand is there when they talk about how some people are addicted to volume eating and that they'll say well there are people that will eat a pound of carrots be it and I think part of it is well number one they're not getting enough food on their food plan but number two I don't see people binging on carrots unless a they're not eating enough starch or B they're just not eating enough food so they pick something like carrots I mean I don't see people to go to true north you need our diet having the problem where they're overeating on non starchy vegetables I mean it doesn't seem possible to me so they say and again a lot of this you're saying are miss that I guess that when we overeat just in general doesn't even matter what it is that our stretch receptors something happens where there's more serotonin so they say that people get addicted to volume eating and that is why we must rein it in and tightly weigh and measure our food three meals a day and n report it how do you report what you're going to eat before you eat it and and if you don't you don't have integrity and a lot of people come away with shame and they feel like they fail because they can't do these rigid programs and I want them to understand there's nothing wrong with you guys it's the program trying another program once again ludicrous okay ignorance profound indeed animals have to just the amount of food intake that they that they eat that they have according to the calorie density of their natural diet so the calorie density a natural diet will shift with the seasons it will it will shift with with the foodstuffs that are available and the animals will obviously always tend to be looking for higher calorie density foods in their environment but sometimes those foods are not available and so they have to wind up scavenging and eating grasses for example that are less calorie dense than the grasses that were here in the summer and as a result of that what's going to happen is they're gonna have to eat more so they're gonna they're going to eat more so satiate the satiation point is going to be somewhat different depending upon the calorie density of food that you're eating the notion that your stomach is so stupid and that your brain would be so incompetent is that if you were to eat large amounts of food that it would you would then stretch out and not be able to rebound appropriately etc and therefore you would be an overeater for the rest of your life no matter which it is ridiculous I mean this is just completely a horrendous logic and and completely nonsensical from the standpoint of biology the the only problem that we face is that we can fool the receptor sites with unnatural food unnatural food is what pulls the receptor sites not whole natural food not whole natural starches there's no way there's no way I have never seen a quote volumeter on home actual food I've seen people that eat a heck of a lot of food but those people you know go from 300 pounds to 180 pounds eating enormous amounts of food because they're now eating a food that is consistent with a natural history right and a lot of times you know people on these plants they don't have a problem with salt and I find that when you saw it's very easy to overeat food that's salted it's not very interesting to eat plain food which is basically what I eat I don't eat salt at least not intentionally and and since these food addiction treatment programs don't have a problem on salt they're going to eat more food it's going to stimulate their appetite yeah some degree I like salt salts a little bit of an open question so john mcdougall and Alan Goldhamer will disagree a little bit there and I think that I think the truths a little bit in the middle yeah maybe you could vary from individual to individual and I also think that that you know these guys aren't necessarily disappered I think that those you go through periods where if you go from a lower sodium diet or higher sodium diet it's going to be hyper palatable for a while until you have issue a to that's all level and the same thing is going to be true if you go from a higher sodium the lower sodium diet you will systematically more aggressively under each yeah because the food will Monty palpable and so there will so the there's rapid shifts that will take place there that will underscore everybody's point but the truth is is that in the end I think that people sort of habituated to the sodium level and system actually does a pretty good job of dealing with the hunger Drive with respect to that chemical Alan Ellen's got his own interesting reasons for wanting to keep people on sodium and John is less concerned about those reasons John's more concerned with more global major changes and so these are these are the stylistic differences between two florists yes haha and they're both lined up I'm struggle for that nobody'll watch this or everybody will watch this and then I'll be like you know I and again if you are somebody that is a the leader of a weighing and measuring plan I would love to learn more about this and maybe dr. Lao maybe you can have a friendly debate with them because I really want to understand some of the logic like for example don't exercise because if I know doctor if one definitely promotes exercise and she's my of all the food addiction people I love her and I love dr. Pam peak and I think they're wonderful women I know doctor if one does do weighing and measuring but what I like about her is she does say now we can do this vegan as she helps vegans that want to do that and that's fine if you want to do in weighing measuring please do it but the ones that say don't exercise because if you exercise you'll deplete willpower and then you won't be able to do weighing and measuring your eleven out you know seventeen ounces of food every day and my understanding is the best thing you could do to recover from an addiction or lose weight the first self esteem and other reasons is is to exercise oh yeah that's just uh again that's just a lack of understanding of human psychology and the nature of the problem that you're facing absolutely you want to exercise but you can imagine a trap that you're in if you're weighing and measuring your food and a one-size-fits-all program and you are essentially already working over time with the starve brain trying to override the hunger drive and then we add exercise to that we add even greater calorie deficiency to that situation that is a horrendous recipe for certain failure so of course the entire thing is k-wire and the entire concept has to go yeah thank you for saying that so you talked about in the book the pleasure trap which you guys have haven't read it's fat book and the Duggal program for maximum weight loss the only two books you need if you want to be slender I'm telling you don't eat any other books you talk about the mechanisms Association the stretch receptors and shoot receptors and calorie scepters not today you said they're located in the hypothalamus I thought they were actually in no no you got receptors in the stomach but the information is being compiled in the solution is in our bellies so I get a lot of people that say I don't know when I'm hungry I don't know what I'm full so is this a psychological thing is it I mean I mean how do you not know that I guess and what has happened to these people in life that they really don't know and that they can binge on 10,000 calories and not feel full or not I mean what is that one person said they you know they know it's not paying any attention right so what they're saying is I don't seem to know when I'm full because I'm fat so I must be overeating I must be going past and the answer is well you're if you're fat you're eating too many calories but you're not eating too many calories because you're eating too much food you're eating too many calories because you're reading just such concentrated food that your your sitiation mechanisms work automatically there was a minute when you stopped eating okay there was a moment when you had your last bite and that happens we're pitov lee throughout your week so don't tell me you don't know when you're full because you certainly stop eating so well I could've eaten more yes but you didn't okay so I don't know when I'm hungry well did you ever did you then forget to eat for a week clearly didn't Oh so we see that these things are actually under automated control you no more need to know when you're hungry and when you're full band you need to know when you need air these are automated processes and people are misunderstanding that we have to essentially take this unconscious process and make it conscious when you take an unconscious process and make it punches you're in trouble say we want to we want to essentially eat the amounts unconsciously you think that you want to be eating consciously is the content if we are in the Stone Age you would not have to be conscious about the content you would eat the content unconsciously because it would all be all natural foods okay but but because we have an unnatural environment that is the variable that we have to become conscious of not the amount variable that that is a state yeah because people often criticize me that I eat very quickly and that I don't eat mindfully but I mean I think there might be a good skill to learn but if it's for what I'm completely mindless eater yeah and the notion that you have to be mindful it is that this is the this is the the phrase of the day the the the great insightful higher plane of consciousness phrase of the day is mindfulness and people think that quote mindfulness about their eating is going to be something important to them it's nonsense okay the only thing you need to be mindful of is what you're eating everything else is automatic right that's what we need to do and you know what you said a moment ago about the concentration in the diet you can be a vegan and be fat eating whole natural food and what I proved with my 50 pound weight loss is I wasn't when I came to true north and met you and dr. Goldhamer in January of 2011 I wasn't eating sugar or flour or drinking alcohol and of course had almost 40 years of not eating animal products and I wasn't even eating oil but I was eating too many nuts and dried fruit and it was the concentration of calories because I wasn't eating large amounts but when you're eating high lauric hyper palatable food you can still be quite overweight and now what's so cool about the way I eat is I get to eat way way more food and I find that incredibly more satisfying than eating you know smaller amounts of hyper palatable food which you know works for me so uh so this this is great if I could just ask one more question on a different topic and answer it quickly because we actually do a whole nother episode if you want anywhere anytime about this but what what I hear from some people is when they give up their old comfort foods whether it's alcohol or or ant or cheese or pastries they say they feel a sense of grief and I and I I think that when I did that before I met you I do cry for like three weeks but I got over it so how do you how do you address this emotional stuff like when they feel grief or they feel fear of letting go of these weighing and measuring is there just a quick answer you I mean and they should have a session with you yes team dynamic or and it's incredibly affordable to work with dr. Lao privately by phone or Skype but but you know cuz I can't help them with the emotional stuff i but you know and they do feel like they're losing a friend when they let go of either a system of weighing and measuring or foods that were their comfort foods I have seen what what people need to do is they you need to understand that they they should run experiments in this life to see if they are missing a bit so we need to run experiments so you don't have to quote walk away from this torment forever what you need to do is you need to run an experiment to find out whether the cost-benefit of this this habit is actually worthwhile and so that's what you discover so you discovered that by essentially getting away from the richer vegan foods you you you certainly go through a process while you're while you are thinking about that and you're going to have some cravings during that process but then as as the as the entire experience unfolds you get to look then the cost benefit of this and that enabled you to then sit where you're sitting today where the cost benefit is overwhelmingly positive to have done it the way that you've done it so I keep an open mind about this I'm not anybody's mother and I'm not a sage that I can read into your mind and find out what its going to be the best life for you but I can tell you that there are systemic mistakes that we now see in a modern environment where people are compromising their health and their happiness behind very compelling traps and one of those traps is going to be rich food and that rich food I think even though course you're going to have some some consternation about letting it go what we want to do is is essentially tell our mind rationally is it inward the experiment is it possible that there's a better life on the other side of it and so that's what we do and we let the evidence tell us later whether or not it was worth it and that's that sound we want to look at okay well thank you so much I learn every time you talk I just learn more and more I think you should have a 24-hour show where it's just we can just talk to you all the time and again if you're following one of these weighing and measuring programs and it works for you who are we to tell you not to do it but so many people have been writing me on a daily basis struggling with them so we want you to know there's a different way and we feel a better way and you can certainly work with dr. Lisle privately in esteemed dynamics orgs consider the ultimate weight loss program or better yet come to true north health and santa rosa or the MacDougall program and see dr. Lilan and you can see him in person on February 19th 2017 along with dr. John McDougall and dr. Garth Davis at healthy taste of Sacramento and we hope to see there dr. Lyle a pleasure an honor privilege and always a joy talking to you thank you so much and thanks for watching healthy living I'm chef AJ I make healthy tastes delicious without weighing or measuring my food thanks everyone I
Back to the top
🏃     👖




Artist