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Chef AJ: Healthy Living LIVE with Dr Doug Lisle on Emotional Eating
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all right ah people are here already dr. Lao this is so exciting they're already asking if a replay will be available yeah absolutely and we'll put it on YouTube as soon as possible maybe one of you guys can type in that you can see us and hear us and we'll get started Wow lots of people online already terrific because we did announce this all right so I would like to wait for that one confirmation like yeah can hear yeah do the one time that I don't that they'll do it yeah I'm interviewing dr. Doug Lyall on emotional eating absolutely so I there's always a little bit of a delay from when they hear us til they you tie so I'm just gonna assume they can see us and hear us and get started so hey everybody and welcome to healthy living live I'm chef AJ and my guest today is none other than my favorite guest of all time dr. Doug Lyall he is the co-author of my favorite book of all time the pleasure trap you can see that I read it because there's lots of little notes here and he signed it wonderfully to me you you made a beautiful inscription and then dr. Goldhamer writes to AJ you aware of the pleasure traffic you know very very very good personal the dr. Lisle is also the psychologist at the True North health center in Santa Rosa California and at the mcdougal 10-day living program also in Santa Rosa California he does a weekly live podcast called beat your genes GE NES which you can listen to live every Wednesday at 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. Pacific time and you can even call in and ask questions I've done that which is great and there's almost a hundred episodes now that are archived at blog talk radio and on itunes that you can listen to and if that were not enough he has a wonderful website called esteem dynamics org or you can watch wonderful videos and listen to audios that he's produced as well as sign up for a personal consultation he puts a few appointments aside for week for crazy regular people like me so welcome dr. Laos thank you so much for coming back so soon oh great we're so excited because especially now with the MacDougall webinars on hiatus it's will need to hear from you at least once a month so today we're going to talk about emotional eating and one of the reasons I wanted to discuss this is because recently at the live altima weight loss conference in Las Vegas dr. Lyle presented some new material on what he calls the cram circuit why people overeat at night and often binge at night and in that talk he said something that kind of threw me for a loop and he said I am on a one-man mission to prove that emotional eating is not the reason the people struggle and I didn't understand that there was no time to ask him during the talk so I booked a session and for an hour he explained to me his take on emotional eating which is very different than every other so-called expert on emotional eating or book I read on emotional eating so I'm gonna let dr. Lyle talk about this but before we do I want to show you a t-shirt that I had made just for this interview in the interview I was telling dr. Lyle about some of my personal clients that go off plan because of circumstances that they say are stressful or emotional because they say they have a history of emotional eating or trauma or and by the way I'm not minimizing anything in your life if you've had sexual physical abuse or trauma of any kind so have I and I'm not that's not what we're trying to talk about here what we're saying that's not the reason you're overweight today and it's not the stress in your life that's making you go off plan and gain weight or be overweight today so I was giving him various scenarios of what people were telling you the reason they went off plan and he started laughing hysterically and I'm like I don't get it why are you laughing because some of them and it by the way of course if somebody dies we're not laughing at that he wasn't laughing about but some of the reasons were akin to the ones you gave in grammar school that my dog ate my homework kind of thing and I said and he finally said to me said look there's no such thing as stress eating or emotional eating only excuse eating and so Janine elder of potato wisdom a graphic designer designed this t-shirt for me to wear today in honor of Doug Lyall and before you get all mad on me I'm gonna let him take it away I'm gonna shut up until he's ready for the questions that I've gathered in advance thank you dr. Lappe emotional eating is it real is it a thing what is it alright let's once there's several different ideas that come under emotional eating so the great philosopher as long as we got sir argues or new experts and then and I think at the the context about stance to that silence said follow that people are mystified as to why it is they overeat and eat rich and just booze when they know about it they know what part of their mind doesn't want my discipline and so it's big about why this is happening isn't that worse way to move from us all so let's suppose we have somebody because somebody even serve your forty Consultative Council and and in or what to do but that's intelligent intelligent nettings militant because days drug them and they fumble and they stumbled and they get back and now they're five years I don't know why but makes sense for them to try to understand what they there's a puzzle and that is why am i doing something and there is quote self-destruct excel and so mystery mystery as people as people answers and because it's thanks thank it seems plausible that there's some terrible easier he's why I'm doing different things if you're if your leg is broken that something terrible must have happened to break your leg and if you're permitted Asian wire then there must be being careful in your motivational system in order for this to take place so it is possible in principle that people have problems so first of all we're going to look at the diplom in ways that people use the term emotional leading emotional eating one of them would be hence in positive or negative emotions in a given instance and that drives them incident that's one that's one more explanation than a nose or one description the other description is that people are systematically of eating stuff destructively because they have deep emotional problems that from earlier in their life histories when they were 16 this or that happened and therefore that's why I'm eating a bunch of junk food now etc so there's two different ways that we could reasonably discuss the concept of emotional eating one would be that I get emotional in the current circumstances and that drives me to eat or number two I have deep-seated emotional problems and I'm somehow medicating myself in some haywire way in order to soothe some of these deep puzzling hurts now I don't believe either one of these has any weight to them I think the second one the deep one is totally ludicrous and I think the one about emotional eating in the in the moment when we're having attention about intense emotions of some kind is almost always ridiculous but it sometimes can have a little bit of truth to it now first of all let me explain why it is that we're gonna try to understand this this puzzling problem of why people eat self-destructively then this is the very interesting scientific this is a great empirical question besides it the question about why this is happening this is an extremely important lesson because we're looking at a species now that has control over its own food supply we're finding it doing something that's rather puzzling which is that they're over feeding and stuffing themselves so they're eating very rich automatic foods that are causing chronic diseases and they're doing it even in the teeth of knowing what it is sufficiently doing differently some of them most of them don't know that they should be doing things differently that's some of them new and the ones to do very often struggle staying out this of this diet diet lifestyle so that's an interesting question and it's a it's one that that calls for investigation to try to understand the causal influences now in the pleasure trap I I discussed at length what I view as the major causal influence as to why this problem exists and that is not that the person has some deep-seated emotional problem that is driving them to eat rich food instead I say simply that it was seeing a widespread population wide problem that is taking place this basically species water then it makes sense to try to figure out whether or not there's an instinct that is actually driving the behavior and it in odd instinct and onset of circumstances if you have an instinct that was consistently self-destructive now it turns out that there's a very simple explanation and the simple explanation is is that the instinct says eat the riches fit in the environment that's because the whole process of life is the process of the transformation of energy into the DNA multiple so literally life throughout the animal kingdom Europe and actually in the architecture of plants and how plants work everything about them is built and brilliantly according to design to actually transform energy into DNA as efficiently as possible so you're going to see that animals throughout the world are going to be unbelievably efficient with this that's why they have firm when the cold that's why they sleep when they're they curl up in order to serve energy that's why if they're a predator they go out to the weakest lonely isolated at the injured that's why they always prefer their food soften in other words there's all kinds of [Music] there's all kinds of reasons why that animals feel about doing the things that the way they do things and when we then introduce another variable that conserves energy for an animal and that is that if we make the food rich if we make the food higher in calorie density then they're always going to prefer that so all we have to do to figure out why people are doing what they're doing this is all we need to do is wear a rich food it into a rat cage and have it light side by side with the normal rat chow and we see which food the rats eat and the rats always and in fact they so much prefer the rich food but they will eat the rich food exclusively and if you in fact let them eat it exclusively for a month when you quit their healthy rat food back in the cage they leave in fact the average will happen will not useful for clean it once you reintroduce healthy food it'll just sit right there and essentially critic us this sort of a change in the dietary path so we we see this huge sweeping explanation that doesn't just explain what we see in humans it explains what you see all over the animal kingdom it explains what happens in plants but the way that some plants mutate so they can grow faster in the forest so then they get to the link so essentially instead of going back and trying to figure out scratching our head and scratching her chin and being mystified as to why someone would behave self-destructively and eat rich food when they know better all we have to do is reach for the most obvious sweeping universal principle in motivation and say they're doing it to conserve energy thank now so that is explanation number one and the way they're going to know to conserve energy is going to be that the food is going to taste better because the the taste mechanisms inside nervous systems are going to be ingeniously engineered to essentially push out more pleasure as a signaling device for the animal to let it know when it's doing something that's highly energy efficient so a chocolate bar and a piece of celery should not have the same reaction to an animal and it doesn't and so because there's a 30 x factor of difference in calorie density of food you should find a massive increase in Medivation which is why when anthropologists paddle out the amazon basin to try to get trinkets to try to figure out how fabulous people live they don't bring celerity they bring Snickers bars today that's how it is if they're going to get the natives all excited so you're trying to understand why a human being in the modern environment than those betters eating a Snickers bar just try to ask yourself why that Amazon guy is going to get in trade his favorite piece of jewelry for a center spot it's the same reason now that explanation Alan Goldhamer and I explained it nauseam in the bush macaque and in the last 15 years we've seen all kinds of other people jump on board and basically explain the same thing so there's been many investigators that have said the same thing so as you as you grasp that explanation we start to push other explanations off the table so if we're trying to understand the phenomenon we begin with saying well what do we think we know do we have any variables that actually protect this behavior can we see it in other populations and can we see it in other animals and the answer is overwhelmingly yes we have front and center we have an excellent a shoe it's taking a tremendous amount of the of the variance of the the mystery away now that isn't enough that it's also going to be the kid is that let's let's look at cigarette smokers yeah so if anybody does things for emotional reasons and they use drugs for emotional reasons then we would expect that cigarette smoking would fit right into just as much as anything else so it's going to turn out that you have you know 40 years ago you have about half the population with smoking cigarettes but then what happened was interesting is that there became concerns about secondhand smoke and it's going to turn out that laws were changed and pretty soon it wasn't the smokers right to smoke because in fact it went printing on the rights of others so laws changed in the United States and then pretty soon and you can't smoke the buildings so an interesting thing happened as a result of this and that is that that the majority of people that were smoking stop smoking this is profound change in human behavior why did they reduce their emotional upsets and hurts all of spontaneously population-wide from all the things been their childhood their their fixations at the old stage of development because of an incomplete medical process that took place between them and their father as dad we finally happened they finally rid themselves of being weaned from the breast too early and therefore fixated at the oil stage development that's why they are smoking cigarettes no what happened was is that it got to be just too much trouble to get in the elevator to go down eight stories to go outside and hang out with the other smokers were smoking ready and then get back up the elevator and do it all over them no and so what happened is people started skipping it instead of going every hour to get a smoke started going every second out and then they went every third out and then pretty soon what they did was they broke the conditioning paradigm and then they decided well what the heck I'm not even gonna smoke at all and they got out of the trap dang so that's actually what took place on no cultural wide psychological healing took place it caused a bunch of people to stop smoking what happened was it became a hassle all behavior is actually taking place in the context of cost-benefit analysis of different what we're going to call pressures okay so there's going to be a very strong pressure in animals to eat and humans we're not going to eat you know once a week like big cats we're gonna be eating kind of a lot of times during the day because we're heavily like a herbivore weren't omnivore but we like to eat multiple times that's how is the remedy fence so it's never going to be too far from the human mind to say you know what he a good idea to eat something and then we're going to tag a little another little extra sentence on it you know it would be a good idea to eat something and while we're at it let's make sure that it's the richest fit in the environment okay so once you see this you start to realize of course this is what people are going to do people are going to eat rich food they're going to eat it repetitively they're going to eat it and there's some force inside the nervous system it is consistently encouraging this so now we are still scratching our heads over the mystery why are people doing this answer they have instincts to do it and why are they eating such rich food answer it's the richest food in the environment and it's not expensive and it's not difficult to get to well gee if they know that they should meeting better food that would be lower calorie density but they should be choking that food down instead of the richer food and they know that it really would lose weight look better feel better be healthier why should they be doing that well the answer is there's no instinct to do that not only that if they're gonna eat the healthier foods they're gonna have to go to a bunch of trouble the last I saw I have not seen since high school a vending machine that had apples in it and there was one on my ground and I eat a lot of apples out of that vending machine when I was high school student but I don't think that vending machine is there now so any any convenience food that you're going to see anywhere it's going to be under your hands it's going to be a rich food that's what it's going to be so at best the healthy food is going to have competitive rich food because wherever they're going to have food they're going to have rich food you're going to have me a little bit healthy food what's why are you going to choose your animal instincts are going to say choose the richest food so this is the story that we tell them applause our cup we tell the story of why you know what is this terrible problem that people are having why are they so self-destructive do they have deep-seated emotional problems is this why it is that they're doing this terrible think of themselves the answer is no it's not they're simply following their animal instincts doing exactly what it is if with a program you could do and the fact that they know that they've got some information that tells them that isn't the right thing this is basically like telling teenagers to wear a condom I mean good luck to you hey do some teenagers wear some condoms some of the time yeah well forget teenagers go out there let's raise hands and we'll put our heads down and raise hands so that we can't identify people but I mean let's let's talk to to a bunch of 25 34 year old people and let's just see how many condoms are getting use right now the so now we're going to go on to a couple other things and then we're gonna we're gonna circle back around with some of these issues about emotional stuff and I'll take questions but the issue is that we're trying to be scientists here and trying to understand the phenomenon of self-destruction so we start to see that ah it's not so self-destructive it's in fact following instincts that are telling the organism what it is it should be doing and then people are following those instincts that seems entirely reasonable that was explaining the problem then we're going to say not only that it's the easiest thing to do in this environment because all the naughty stuff is around and it's cheap and the dip and the healthy stuff takes much hassle ah that's another issue and then we're going to go for something else and that is if you're one of the people that know what it is that you should be doing the problem is is that that creates psychological pressure and that psychological pressure is if you are so smart and you wear these books and you know that you should be doing and you're 35 pounds overweight the problem is is that you can feel like you are not likely to live up to expectations but the reasonable expectations that you might have for yourself would be that you would be able to just do this just execute this this new lifestyle you should just be able to do this well it turns out there so there is actually a deep curious emotional meditational process that can stop you from doing this and this is what I call the Eco trap and that is that if you feel like you need not be able to do this but you feel like other people would reasonably expect that you should be able to do this then what you will do is you will you will enter a a procrastination cycle where you will basically be telling them I'm going to get to it I'm going to get to it I'm going to get to it now we actually have in the United States a very large corporation that has essentially made million living on this problem it's called Weight Watchers sir Weight Watchers is not the business of helping people lose weight that's actually not their business their business is helping people defend their stocks their business if you are overweight in the United States you can just simply tell people in your environment yes I'm doing Weight Watchers and that says I'm actually doing what I'm supposed to be doing and this gets people off your back they are that is the business they're in and I can't believe that they don't know that that's the business around since all the science indicates that they have a net effect it's zero on anybody losing weight so the so of course they know the best their business so they essentially make their their prescriptions to be to be pretty easy to do and and yet you are doing what it is that you're supposed to be doing so in any event it's difficult to do this it takes energy it also takes unusual discipline to go against the pleasure trap consistently the pleasure trap is a tricky unnatural problem that once you let your foot off the gas and let it back in then you react well mate to the rich food now healthy food doesn't taste as good now we've got a fight on our hands all of these things are part and parcel of the actual forces that are causing this problem now these forces don't seem like they're a good enough explanation for people they're not a good enough excuse and so it's going to turn out that there is an excuse there's a trump card that people can use that can help them defend their status against the inferences that other people might make about why it is that they're having troubles and in our population this problem is very disturbing and unfair and that is that the most almost all the thin people in the world actually don't deserve that Fitness by anything until it's horrific not just by virtue of their genetics they they can eat crap with both hands almost every in person you've ever seen is eating crap with both hands and they just happen to be dead that's genetics the and essentially the people that are overweight are not doing anything differently in their diet and lifestyle then the people in the United States that have been there are a few rare exceptions so there are some thin people that are only in by virtue of their exceptional self-discipline so chef AJ is one of those people but the does represent this represent probably one percent of the Splendor people that you will ever ditch will ever run into so as a result if you're overweight you you actually wind up getting signals or inferences that other people have about you that are untrue like for example you're not very conscientious you're not very self disciplined you don't have a lot of self-respect okay these are these are little inferences that will come essentially bubbling from the slender part of the world that thinks that they're all cool and that they think they've got their act together and that they think they're wonderful and what's good what's the matter with you okay so and you're thinking to yourself what is the matter with me why do I keep eating rich food why do i sabotage myself you know that oh why am I doing this I keep shooting myself in the foot and that is a that is a mystery and the explanations of saying well actually I was designed to eat rich food just like every other animal and it's a real hassle the really healthy food but then people are going to be saying what's the problem just push yourself away from the table it's not a problem at all just don't be a plan there are total cluelessness as to what is involved here sets you up for a problem and that is what what it's going to require to pull this off and what it is that you've got the energy to do and the commitment to do an embedded ation to do in the teeth of all the counter motivational processes of your own biology it's a more difficult than they know and it's a more difficult and than you know and you know that when you've tried to scale it you you've slipped doesn't you're slipping doesn't this is surprised me at all I'm astonished that anybody ever gets out of this truck okay so here's what happens is that because if they're on misses their own puzzlement of this self-destructive pattern and one of the trump cards that they can use and hold up to the world's to say I was damaged early in life that's why I have this problem this isn't my fault this isn't something wrong with me that I'm doing this has nothing to do with my own lack of intelligence or punch interests no self-discipline sort of that's not what's going on somebody damaged me and that that's what happened that is an enormous ly satisfying explanation on a variety of levels and this is a as defense now I'm not saying people are consciously going to discuss offense but it is a beautiful status defense the it is incorrect today it is an incorrect explanation as to what the real dynamics are the situation and so this is why I'm on a one-man crusade you know Alan will talk about this but he doesn't really care I am I'm the psychologist and I've got the other psychologist chirping around talking to people about their eating problems and why it is that these have to do with relationships with their mother or father thinks about familial thirteen or eight it's ludicrous doesn't have anything to do with it and so what happened what it has to do it is exactly what we see with the rats in the cage now there's more so if we start if you're a scientist and you're trying to figure out their reasons why something happens there is a concept called the proportion of variance that is explained so for example if you're trying to look at that somebody had heart attack or people have heart attacks you could say well you know if people smoke cigarettes that influences that so that's that's a significant influence then there's also you know rich diet so there could be maybe animal proteins are also associated with this so that could be a problem but it's cigarettes are a problem and it's also possibly a problem that smog might also do some of that same kind of damage so therefore maybe smog in Los Angeles which is more than smog in Alaska you know that that that could be responsible okay now that is a plausible explanation and it is worthy of investigation to try to figure out does that does the particulate matter in the smog in Los Angeles actually do enough damage to to the human being that it winds up causing problems in the arteries and then winds up increasing the statistical likelihood of cardiovascular problem it's interesting question the answer is now doesn't it's a great question and it's a reasonable question any answer is now okay so you actually go you you figure out how forceful the given variable is to try to explain the phenomenon that you're looking at when people have tried to cause emotional intensity events to see whether that influences people's eating it turns out they can't find it all right so there's one thing and then just look at reasonable explanations of what emotions are and what their purpose is so if the young girl see some cute guy and she's all excited does the next thing that happen is the nervous system says oh my god I'm so excited Jimmy B smiled with me I gotta go eat okay no her nervous system says go talk to her friends about Jimmy B and how cute he is and I would be really fun to go out with him that's what she's designed to do without a mission if you're a Dallas Cowboy and you just ran and got a touchdown in front of a hundred thousand people and your team is coming back and again you're all excited you know you don't say oh my god I'm so excited give me a big turkey leg right now I'm just so excited smell what happens and I'm a negative side I have two gaps and sometimes they got to go to the back and one of them is so skittish if I don't get her in the box on the first one it's going to be a big problem so if I don't get her in the cat box does she then go man I am so upset that guy is trying to put me in that cat box take me to the bat I know what I need to do I need to go eat there is no way okay emotional responses are logically and biologically cooked up to certain behaviors and we're going to find that emotions are hooked up to very there they are prescriptions for behavior and the prescription isn't go easy okay if you're you're feeling lusty the prescription is flirt and sex if you're down and depressed it's go cry and try to and see whether or not some friend has a solution okay if you are scared like my cat it's get away what from what it is scaring you your emotional responses are designed by nature to drive behavior that will either in emotions are essentially signaling devices or opportunities or threats in your environment with respect to your biology and so when you're anyway you're like oh I'm really angry I just had an argument I'm gonna go eat no it's not really that's not how it looks your eating behavior is never too far away from anything in your life because you're an an omnivore that is heavily verbal or birth remember with a sweater Republic and the point is is you're going to eat many times a day so no matter what it is that you happen to be feeling about no matter what it is pretty soon after that we're going to be head and looking around for some food that's Nestle okay so that to be cooking up your eating behavior would be an emotional event like oh my gosh I have a big meeting with my boss earlier today no wonder I'm eating a bunch of chocolate three hours later it's got nothing to do with it okay these are these are unrelated activities so the experimental evidence is not shown when we try to shock people into emotional intensity that it winds up and that people do a bunch of eating that they haven't been able to demonstrate that it's also the case that that we can not only do we not have to search for the problem there we can see the problem manifest all over any animal experiment anytime we want all we have to do is put rich food in the environment that's what all the animals go for they get fat they get sick they don't want to eat the healthy food simple as that I mean if we want to see what causes people to work their way out addictive processes it winds up being environmental control like we make them not be able to smoke inside the building and then pretty soon to stop so when we piece these all these things together including the issues of the condition that I talked about in Las Vegas and I talked about on the condition crown webinar that I did for mcdougal what we see is that when we're trying to analyze this problem we see some major understanding and forces that actually explain the phenomenon though is with the word observer we observe self-destructive eating behavior we observe that people are eating rich foods and too much of it consistently and it's inconsistent with their goals and what it is that part of their mind wants them to do which is to be a semi Asst to be thin to be healthy the the explanation that people will reach for is typically mistaken this is very much the case so remember you know a couple thousand years ago three four thousand years ago well actually six hundred years ago people believed all kinds of things about the motion of the planets and it wasn't until people like Kepler came along and then Newton that they really then understood how this work okay once you understand how it works we no longer see the planets as gods that wander around the the universe and are upset with each other at cetera no we get rid of that we understand that these are very basic forces from the others in the same way we don't need to excavate people's psychologies to try to figure out why they use self-destructive eating behavior we don't need to do that all we need to do is we need to say okay you're a human that means that there's a human being you're an animal and as an animal you would want to eat the richest food in the environment and if it's in the environment and it's really really hard to get to and healthy food is really easy to get to then you probably want to eat the rich food but if the rich food is really easy to get to and that healthy food is difficult to get to then we can overwhelmingly expect that this is what you're going to be eating not unless you Institute superb environmental control and you do that with a heck of a lot of motivation and you do it over and over again beautifully then we're going to find that maybe you can get into what I call it beep good ok so that's my discussion about emotional eating see that's how I look at it and I and I and I'm frustrated not with people that that reach for these explanations but I am frustrated with my work with psychologists and other commentators of some expert level that are selling this idea that is very palliative to people's Briz digas because they're they're mystified and a set and Barriss their inability to execute on this and they're looking for an explanation and that kind of explanation and solves them of the the truth and the truth is sorry folks this is difficult and it takes not typical determination to do this it takes a typical intermission and with slender people in the world don't understand this but I understand it ok so my reason why I'm forceful about this is that I don't want people looking in the wrong place this is like that moment in Raiders of the Lost Ark where they realize that the other guys are looking in the wrong place and they're all excited ok the if you are looking in your emotional life and emotional history to try to understand this you are looking at the block place look in your refrigerator look in in your plan for the week look at where your behavior pattern and what it is that you are doing consistently are you prepared to have healthy food around white within your reach easily and are these rich foods are they also within your reach easily if that is your situation you are in trouble okay and that's a much better situation than most people have most of the time so that's why that's why I want people to focus on on knock not get lost and sold on an explanation that actually doesn't have have any explanatory power in it is is a seductive explanation but it's an incorrect and in it yet it keeps people in a trap rather than fighting their way to to a better life alright now I'll take questions okay may I make a few comments or I guess unless thank you me so because I've been I've been monitoring the feed and people are writing how brilliant you are they love you Marcy just made a great comment that you can't get well in the environment that made you sick and that sort of supports what you said you know seven years ago the first time that I hired you to speak at one of my conferences it was January of 2012 and that wonderful video losing weight without losing your mind can still be seen on YouTube I think it has like like almost a million views now you said something there that sort of sparked my interest in this when you said people are not overweight because they have emotional problems they have emotional problems because they're overweight and I didn't want to believe you because I myself somebody having emotional problems that's why I talk to you almost every week and I had a very abusive childhood while every not every trauma but many traumas and you used to say things to me like you know cuz I said well you know my father was psychotic he would beat my dog and I would eat you know the cookies and you said to me well is that the only time you eat the cookies I said no I hate the cookies all the time I like the cookies and and and and you had mentioned that there's plenty of offend people you know eaten fruit out there and there's plenty of you know plenty of I forget what it was about Cinnabon there's plenty of people that are not stressed that are you know going to Cinnabon and eating and things like that and it's been percolating over the years but I realized that I I believe you are right because you've known me for seven years and my psychology hasn't changed very much has it and certainly my past hasn't changed no but what has changed is the food and the environment yes and like somebody here posted well that if the richest thing in my environment is yams that's what I binge on well there those are 375 calories a pound knock yourself out and and so that's why I appreciate so much what you said about the environment because I try to explain to people that's the number one predictor of their success I've been saying ad nauseam if it's in your house it's in your mouth and yet they write me every day on the on the private Facebook group they say they relapsed and so it often you know obviously I I'm not saying it's not traumatic when your dog is sick or your mom I'm not saying that at all but they always give a reason for the relapse and it's you it's often something traumatic but sometimes it's things that that are you know you and I don't want to seem laugh at but they're like I mean they're reasons but we look at them like you know that's a reason you know you went off plan and so what I say to them is before I even comment on the situation I said where did you get the food and in 99 percent of the cases and they're there there have been a couple of exceptions where people have claimed they've gone out for it but 99% of the time it's it's in their house you know you're and and one of the things you've said before - as you said that that people don't eat or overeat for emotional reasons they take drugs for emotional reasons and it I don't see a lot of people overeating on okra emotional eating on on eggplant or you know binging on broccoli slaw it's always the hyper palatable highly caloric foods usually full of sugar fat and salt and I believe that these foods do have an in some people an addictive process or at least a drug like process because my feeling is is if you binge on carrots so what it's but you know I want to share with you I look this up in them there is no diagnosis for emotional eating right now in the medical literature or at least it's not in the DSM there's not one for food addiction yet or even compulsive eating binge eating disorder is there but according to the medical literature the definition of emotional eating is the practice of consuming large quantities of food usually comforter junk foods in response feelings instead of hunger but I think it's the usually usually junk food it's I think it's almost always junk food right and so yeah there's a few things about this let me let me interrupt sure of course you can move the needle on your emotional state by eating anything including Richmond okay the but most of this that's not what's happening so the and that's not the big problem the problem is is that your nervous system sits constantly running an algorithm and the algorithm is what's the most productive thing that I could do in the next instance that's actually the job of the nervous system of all animals and food is one of the most important problems it's typically the most important survival problem if you're a prey animal you have to constantly be vigilant against predators but human beings weren't largely a prey animal typically and so human beings don't have a tremendous amount fear that the guides their their nervous system in the way that other animals you know small animals do and so as a result of the most important consistent were current algorithm this running inside of human beings is and be kind of a good thing to get some big be kind of a good thing to get some food it's like it's just cycling around there there's nothing wrong with this right and remember that it's cycling around and cycling around and and so if you might be a little bit bored you're like what would be the most productive thing to do to increase my statistical likely to survival reproduction hmm no exciting made around here make a news on me so what about food is there any food around here let's see yeah I'm really not hungry but if there's any rich food around that would be worth cramming in there even though I'm not hungry these are instincts this is not self-destruction this is not emotional eating this is just the the nation of instinct that's all it is all right so that's very different so I want to take this as a completely different explanation of that problem from an explanation that says I had a really rough period between 9 and 13 and I had some cousin that was abusing me and I I have thoughts about that to this day it's like yeah I don't have any doubt that you have some thoughts about to this day and I don't have any doubt that that's an unpleasant thing to remember and then there was an unpleasant thing to live through I don't have any doubts about that at all okay I don't have any belief but those experiences are causing you to eat chocolate at seven o'clock after you've had a big dinner I don't think it has anything to do with it and the reason I don't think so is you know find that behavior a more likely in people with those Abused histories that you haven't with people who have had wonderful districts the people with wonderful histories have exactly the same behavior pattern alright so this is why it is but I want people focus on what I believe is a pretty close taxonomy of the truth your pleasure trap the ego trap energy conservation social pressure possible condition cramps circuitry kram instincts that's what it is in an environment that surrounds you a temptation and plays into these instincts beautifully it is not a mystery why people struggle it is a mystery why anybody succeeds okay that is the mystery that is an extremely interesting mystery that Alan Goldhamer and I have been working on for 25 years and we are we have pieces of it we understand that personality differences are significant okay and so I shot a video 15 years ago or so called the perco personality we understand that the social environment is an unbelievably potent force in human eating behavior and so that's why I have getting along without going along okay we understand that that it is easier to manage this temptation if you get out of the taste neural adaptation problem that we call it buzzer problem so we have books and videos about that so we have analyzed components of this problem and there are multiple components of the problem and the problem is difficult the mystery is not why you stumble and struggle the mystery is why people succeed how is it that they can negotiate their way through this awesome set of forces that really will that can get them to a really good group can it be done yes can everybody do it no way no way I meet people that are joyous intelligent social sweet and adventurous and they love food and the react of the food and they're like dr. Lyle I'd really like to do this how can I do it and I'm looking at them and I will give them my best advice but the truth is you can't do it I know they can't do it I know the world that we live in and I know who it is that they are and they are joyous wonderful warm people that haven't had some terrible thing happen to them the reason why they're 80 pounds overweight is they are social and they are adventurous and they like to do new things and the idea of doing the same thing over and over again is just completely inconsistent with their personality and even if they started a new diet and their friends would attempt them they would have to say yes because there's just such warm friendly people and in their whole social environment it's just filled with food and people and and wine and bread cheese and souffle and it's like we're gonna take that individual out of that environment and turn them into AJ or Alan no chance not gonna happen okay and I'm realistic enough to know that isn't because there's a thing wrong with that person's personality or their psychology or their district there is nothing wrong with that person that is a lovely warm healthy very happy but frustrated with her 80-pound Oh from itself why is that happening pleasure trial modern environment social circumstances everything about that makes that person unable to actually walk this walk okay so the reason why we have this discussion is you need to understand and give yourself credit for the goal that you are actually setting and you need to understand that the goal is high bar is hard to reach okay if you don't reach it don't be looking in some cockamamy place the reason you didn't reach it little white in the eye of the causal forces that are in fact the problem and we have to work diligently to get increasing control over those forces as much as we can to get us to a place where we can do a good job consistently that's how we got to do it right okay you know now I want to if you don't mind just respond a few things you just said because when I think back the first time I saw you as a patient at true north in January of 2012 you actually did my personality we did that test together and I had no I I wasn't even seeing you for weight loss that was a whole nother year I had no idea that I was going to succeed so I think it's important to know who we are because I think it would be helpful for people if they knew they weren't gonna do it just to know that and then just eat as clean as they could to be as healthy as possible you know when people relapse and they use these reasons excuses whatever you want to call them because they sometimes have long stretches of compliance and and they sometimes lose weight are they doing this as an excuse because they really just want to go off plan anyway and now if they say well my dog died it's more socially like like for instance if you if everything was great in your life you were rich and had married to the man of your dreams and everything was perfect and you couldn't solve this problem but if you wait until the opportunity where something external happens and then you say well of course I had to go off plan is that sort of I don't want to make people feel bad but to it now I'm thinking that almost everything is an excuse because look I'm as [ __ ] up now as I was when I was fat I've had many people die I've had many trash and and yet I'm still able to do it I'm not trying to make people feel bad or diminish their stuff because they should have sessions with you to work on that but so when they wait until that moment of the shoot of all is that because they're looking for us like a way to then say well of course what I do know I would say I would call about a little bit different so one of the big things that causes mistakes is stress and and what stress is mostly caused by this time pressure so people people's lives it's not it's not difficult for people to get overburdened there there naturally remember the system is trying to constantly look for leverage to try to do things that are in gonna increase the likelihood of change survival now that sounds very deep in scientific but let me tell you what it translates to in the human life it usually translates into what I call esteem seeking okay so they try to go do something for Aunt Betty then they got to pick up the kids from school and be a good mom do that and they got to go do something for church then they got to take do that extra assignment then they're trying to get a master's degree then they're trying to look sexy for their husband as I go okay it's going to turn out but there's a lot of action in that nervous system and there's a lot of different demands a lot of time pressure okay so it's going to turn out that then time pressure will lead people to take shortcuts and when they take shortcuts now the we're not taking shortcuts in to waiting for the big potato to cook ah start cuts always headed towards the pleasure crop and so then once we started to nibble into the pleasure trap then we've got the taste neural adaptation problem the addictive nature of the modern food supply starts to drag people in the trap so this is how stress does it we don't go eat a bunch of crap because with stress what will happen is you get stressed and you get rocked out of your normal routine very quickly and if you get rocked out of that routine now you're in trouble okay so that's that's a that's not an excuse that's a that's an explanation as to how that that takes place and it takes quite easily you I've seen people not not just with food but for example with serious drugs drug addictions that they will on let me give you an example of how subtle this can be I had a man that had gotten alcoholism under control he was he was very organized and he he got him he beat this problem and I hadn't heard from him in two three years and he was doing great and then he called me one day and he said I'm in trouble he came in and what happened was where we live there's a 101 freeway goes from San Francisco up to up to san wizza and they were working on an off-ramp and they closed the off-ramp to his way home so he had to take the next offering and the next off-ramp took him past the liquor store that he had been avoiding for three years that had the specific drink that he'd like to buy and so he got off that after him and he did not get past that store right so it wasn't an underlying emotional problem I mean that is what happened here this is this is an addictive process and this guy was in a deep group he was in a beautiful deep group where he had his he had he had figured out how to stay away from his triggers and keep his environment clean yeah then he had many many operations about this when he would go to lunch he would he would make sure he put his hand over the over the wineglass very you know very successful guy so he went to a bunch of places like that and as soon as he would do that or where you turn the forget may be turned to blank glass upside down but I don't think he did well as soon as the waiter came I think he put his hand over because he didn't want it obvious and so he had had he had engineered a bunch of little solutions and they were working perfectly and they close that damn off-ramp and he was in trouble okay that's what it's like so this is why we want to we don't want to be in awe and feel like this is impossible it's not impossible and unlike alcohol it's also not so turbulent but if you fall off you mean it's app and enough to get back on but it's not the same level of pain in the neck so we keep fighting them we keep fighting them for what I call the deep groove and once you get in deep grooves you could stay there a long time and then if you get out of the deep groove remember don't throw up your hands and let the ego trap beat you and say we'll see I can't do it and then not try now a problem you if you get yourself into trouble then just roll up your shirt sleeves and and get back on and get back on quickly okay if you spend 95% of your life in a deep groove and 5% of your life having relapsed a little bit no problem this isn't going to be a problem but don't don't set the expectations so high for yourself but you should be able to handle this and then when you don't you basically say well I better not try that I better make it clear that I'm not trying both other people and myself that's a mistake there you understand that this is this is really a little markable thing that many of us are doing with our lives we're making consistently good choices not perfect not mean maybe AJ maybe maybe Allen you know Jim lemon there's there's some people out there that are extraordinary but but most of us do a very good job john mcdougall it's not perfect and then he told me when one day he's saying well I do a good job rather than a Clif Bar down that's like you know that's outstanding yeah that's actually funny that you mentioned Clif Bar because the first time I met dr. mcdougal he was speaking at the Jeff Nelson's healthy lifestyle Expo and they were giving samples of Clif bars and I actually saw him eat a Clif Bar so that is very so you're not telling tall tales out of school this is all this is all today and so I'm not so worried about that you I'm worried about the wholesale explanation but the reason why I can't do this is deep and mysterious and awful and terrible and it's like no it's not it's it's your environment is phenomenally bad right you want you are trying to you are trying to build a beautiful garden in the middle of the sewer okay so this is this is what the problem is is hard going it gets easier with discipline and the better you get it the skills but it's always going to be a psychological battle not because you're messed up because the environment that you're in is extraordinary and that that's what we that's what I want people to understand I think first of all I want to respect your time we've gone an hour I'm willing to go longer but also if you'd like to continue this we can do a part two next month because what some of the people are talking about you're not going to have time to answer now they're saying things like research shows that 90% of people that were traumatized are obese now well seventy like half the world is obese now whether they're traumatized or not so that might be something you could address next time because I know you have all the statistics on that I think my biggest takeaway from today says that there is bogus science published all over the plus so that that's a bogus statistic and this is not how it works so you will find bogus science all over the the abuse analysis the truth of the matter is that these questions have been looked at very carefully by top level statisticians and social scientists and the answer is no okay as you're saying AJ it isn't that there aren't people that have been abused that are obese the question is whether or not the difference in obesity between the people that have been abuse and the people that have been abuse and the answer is no there isn't any difference and so that's a so there are four that's looking in the wrong place right so this is this is exactly why I wrote the pleasure craft yep the scientific evidence said that the reasons why it is that people were self-destructive with respect to their food choices and pozzolanic disease was because of their abuse histories I would have written a different book okay I would have written an entirely different book the that is not the book that I wrote I wrote the book based on the evidence and the evidence is the reasons that people eat crap are the same reasons the rats eat the crap this is the nature of scientific investigation issue you build what is known as a nomological net it's a network of observations in theory that integrates the data and doesn't have contradictions in it the contradictions of the notion that abuse histories lead to people abusing drugs and alcohol or food okay doesn't square with the evidence and so since it doesn't square with the evidence it's in dead theory the we could never say on an individual case basis that that couldn't be an important reason on an individual case basis on a one in a thousand shot I can't rule out the best possibility that is not possible to a while okay I can't rule out the possibility that that the reason why cat ran into the closet after I'd chased after its try to put her in the box wasn't because it had something else that was causing it to have fear I can't totally rule that out all right the maybe it's smelling the skunk and I didn't know that and it ran into the closet just happened to be at the same time you can't completely rule out some explanation but you can rule it out on a population wide basis to give you that you can estimate how likely it is that the cause is there did someone actually have something wrong with their lungs in Los Angeles that contributed to a cardiovascular event as a result of smog it's possible but it's it's exceedingly unlikely since we don't see any differences between there and Seattle okay that's how when we go about scientific method whereas what do we what can we see and the differences of cardiovascular events smoking versus non-smoking we can find a massive effect that that variable and so that's how we do sciences we calculate how much force or explanatory power they give an observation house and predicting something else and the problem with people over eating and eating self-destructively is quite well understood by multiple components that are discussed today and the notion of abuse histories are undone childhood emotional stuff doesn't have the explanatory power anything close to that magnitude actually none at all yeah well one of the things you really help me with in today's broadcast which I didn't understand because I thought it was just the food addiction the addictive properties of the sugar and the flowers that were making people that were using these excuses reasons for going off plan they were trying to get back to the addiction but when you explain that stress causes short cuts that was very that was very helpful because that does make sense because if somebody in your family dies or something major happens you you are pressured in in many different ways and pulled in many different directions and that would make it more you'd be more likely to not prep your food or so that that was that was brilliant so I get that but you know you know now now Shirley says that since her son died she's gained a hundred pounds the doctor told her she's wearing her grief I mean is that just a coincidence sir well the that's and that's an interesting observation we don't know whether or not she's got records of this we don't know where that weight gain started okay the other words these are all these are all interesting yeah and I couldn't pop rule out the idea that there's some different kinds of circumstances changed and her life after that did she move did she change jobs okay did she get overwhelmed with the stress has taken care of everything that resulted as a result of that tragedy in other words there's an awful lot of questions there but the notion that she's wearing her grief is absurd okay that that is a psychodynamic and certainty and that that is if that were true we would see that as a species wide characteristic when people lost a loved one we would find that statistically people would gain weight at a faster rate than people at the same age etc that have not lost anybody and the answer is no you do not find out okay so that is an example again of a specific individual with a specific tragedy and the causal features of that specific tragedy and did it in fact have features of life changes that caused that person to get into trouble possibly okay is it wearing her greed know now that that's just a that's that's Jupiter is a God that is trying to stay away from hotel that is that is cockamamie explanation of the dynamics yeah knate knate our friend nature said grief has zero calories Shirley has said that nothing else happened so I don't want to keep you too long when I let's call it you'll come back right rather than answer the questions now but just one last question because so many these are like why does eating temporarily leavings IV and depression oh yeah would it be fair to say that since we know that 99% of the people that are overeating or eating emotionally whatever you want to call it are doing it on hyper palatable junk food I mean there's probably going to be an outlier that's and if they're doing it on carrots god bless them that's fine but would you say that that this does provide temporary relief from existential pain so for example the carrots are rice let's try and explain this after there if you eat hyper palpable food there is a that is an unmistakable reward but the system shifts in a positive direction because it's just reduced to the statistical likelihood of death by starvation it has told you that that is true by the pleasure activation in the dopamine pathway right that's true whether you're in a great mood or you're in a shitty minute okay it doesn't make any difference where we are in an emotional scale or what's been happening that is it that is going to happen so therefore it's always a perfectly reasonable idea to feed some crap so if it's around and it takes very little energy to get to it then we can expect that it isn't going to be too long before that person circles around to that action and takes it and so that's a of course people feel a look from this but they feel a lift they're just as likely to eat junk food when they're in an okay boot in a great mood and fantastic mood and a shitty mood and horrible mood all up and down the scale the notion that I was perfect and everything was perfect and then I had some bad thing happen I ate a but [ __ ] no no you just you take an honest chart every time you eat one of those little Newman's cookies that you've got in your pantry and let's just find out that if the only time that happened was the two times this week when you got some really bad news or we're going to find out whether or not it happened all over the emotional spectrum that's an example of not doing good science and people's intuition about this is again being heavily weighted towards the excuse making where where this is this is where your shirt fits in now why did I eat that box of cookies answer well I was having a bad day really what was the day like when you bought and did you eat the whole box at one sitting or you know I did you have any of them when you were in a decent mood so this is the utter lack of science but if we're gonna defend ourselves against what we reckon what we see as embarrassing transgressions then it's a hell of a good idea to blend it down mu and so remember with the down before the downloads were not for you to go eat downloads are for you to go as a signaling device to tell you to go fix the problem to cause the down mood so if you think that you're engineered by nature by anything else to fix it downloaded by go eating [ __ ] that's wrong that's not what happens people fix down lives in a whole variety of ways that are related to try to reduce the survival and reproductive cost of having a bad thing happened when when you give up a touchdown on the sidelines of the Dallas Cowboys you're like oh [ __ ] I better go eat a turkey leg now that's what those athletes are doing when they're losing the Superbowl they're consoling themselves by going and eating [ __ ] they're not doing anything of the kind okay they're gathering around their coach and they're like well what are we gonna do now that's what they're doing they're processing the negative process that's what's happened the girl flirts or Johnny Jimmy cell and so it turns her down for a day she doesn't go to the bakery she gets her friend on the phone Jimmy Stone so I asked her out for a date she doesn't go to bakery in her excitement that's not what happens daddy she will eventually go to the bakery because she goes to the bakery and that's where she gets a little moolah but she's not medicating that process that's just part of her life strategy all right so that's enough for one day right may I just make a closing comp comment and kudos to you and you don't have to say anything else you know in the 18th century there was a doctor named dr. Semmelweis and he noticed that women were dying after childbirth and he noticed that if you physicians would wash their hands which now it's standard you go to any doctor and they're washing their hands but back then physicians didn't wash their hands and he noticed that when physicians wash their hands fewer women died in childbirth and he was trying to get other physicians to do this and he was ridiculed and they said no and and now it turns out he was right and I'm not saying you're being ridiculed but is when as far as this topic is concerned you're a little bit of a lone wolf and what I want to say to you dr. Lyle is after this you've been trying to teach me this for six years and I've been sort of like I want to believe you but everybody's saying something different I'm now ready to join your pack there's no such thing as emotional eating just excuse eating yeah I know what AJ I don't want to be so blanket in uniform that's why it takes an hour or more to describe the nuances of what it is that I think right but I don't want people intimidated by things that have happened in their history and having them think that that's that's what's stopping them you're looking in the wrong place the treasure will be found somewhere else and we're trying to all of us trying to point people where the treasure really is and that is true north their own true north thank you so much I hope you'll come back thanks all of you for watching and please continue to share this broadcast right now and in the future and thank you so much dr. Lyle and thanks all of you for watching another episode of healthy living live I'm chef AJ and I make healthy tastes delicious
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