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Chef AJ: Healthy Living LIVE | Interview with Dr Doug Lisle
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well your noon everyone and welcome to healthy living live I'm chef AJ and it is my honor pleasure and privilege to interview dr. Doug Lyall if you're not familiar with dr. Lyle you must get his extraordinary book that he co-wrote called the pleasure trap you might know him from his weekly podcast which is called beat your genes fellow GE and es if you're new to his podcast at least listen to episode 161 he did an episode a few weeks ago where he talked about a pleasure trap and an ego trap which was probably the best explanation of both that I've ever heard you can listen to his podcast live every Wednesday evening at 8:30 p.m. Pacific time and you can also find the replays or even listen to it live on iTunes blog talk radio Spotify probably stitcher by now he's has over 160 wonderful episodes and where else can you find him at the mcdougal program where he's the psychologist at the lipid program and at the true more health center so thanks so much for being here dr. Lyle oh it's a pleasure AJ always it's been it's been far too long since we've done one of these live so if any of you are familiar with the real truth about weight loss summit that just took place over 11 days absolutely free dr. Lyle was one of the three poor experts and I've so many wonderful comments about you I'm gonna take a screen shot but I'm gonna just read this one that came in yesterday from Stephen Turner he says Doug Lyle always manages to say something that gives me kind of a gut punch always worth listening to so people really loved you and even though the Sun was airing live the interviews were pre-recorded so it wasn't like we could just ask the speakers questions in real time so we have now over 4,500 comments on the page which obviously I'm not going to ask you you know 4,500 questions but there are even a few topics on the summit that that many people came full with with some confusion and I thought maybe you could shed some light on that so sure whatever the first one so dr. Garth Davis who is a well known plant-based of bariatric surgeon in North Carolina did a wonderful talk and one of the things he was articulating is that people aren't fat because they eat too much fruit I'm not diabetic because they're eat too much fruit and he's never had a patient come to him for gastric bypass because they ate too many apples and he started talking about the book Genesis which is something I learned from Donna mcdougal and his maximum weight loss book which I talked about in my lecture and a lot of people were confused like they realize that people on the summit weren't all the hyper conscientious in that cases that find you and me these are people that this may have been their first entry to this topic or plant-based eating and so the comments were looks like well I can't believe that I can eat all the fruit I want and not gain weight I can't believe I can eat all the potatoes I want and lose weight so people are asking really is is it is DeNoble ippo Genesis true is it true that human beings really can't convert carbohydrate to protein and that this way of eating that we recommend is if dr. lawanda said in the summit almost like a magical buffet of food because people were saying well can I eat all the dates I gotta lose weight well dates are not a whole natural food they're dry enough Ohio caloric density so it's just wondering if you could touch a little bit on this de novo lipogenesis and assure people that they really can't eat a lot this way and not only not gain weight lose weight well let's uh let's try to get just the basics here let's just touch on the basics the the most the most important issue in in weight management is going to be it's going to be just overall calorie density that's really the fundamental issue and it's gonna turn out that we now have I've got probably the first evidence hard core evidence coming from the observation of hunter-gatherers in East Africa that the average calorie density of those people is 700 calories a pound so that's you know we've been aiming it we've had previous data you know between 550 and 600 that we've been thinking about was probably about right looks like we under shot it a little which is fine and it's undoubtedly true that that that throughout the world in world history there's been a range of calorie densities that a given group of people's has had the thing that probably it's rarely been much above 700 and it's probably never been as high as a thousand in Maya might have been but it would have been rare so it's going to be that essentially the human digestive say she ate mechanisms are going to work really well somewhere around 700 they'll work really well at 600 they'll work well at 500 though 400 they may not work that well at 300 300 calories a pound you may not be able to eat enough to sustain your your body weight mm-hmm optimally you may be really on the really thin range and we may find that at 300 calories a pound a lot of women get so thin that they that they lose their fertility wouldn't surprise me at all the so we we aim somewhere in our in our area around 500 600 but 700 now books is safer than I thought so I want to just briefly step through the foods that everybody's so concerned about so people are concerned about fruit because of its high sugar but it's about 300 calories a pound they're very worried about potatoes potatoes are 375 covers a pound rice is 500 you start to see that that all of all of the starches range from the squash is an oatmeal down around 300 up to the Rice's and grains around 500 in other words they are all below the fulcrum point of 700 covers a pound so the we can see that that there's no reason for us to be worried about restricting these undoubtedly in the history of America and the discussion about potatoes and weight what confused people is that people eat a lot of potatoes they tend to eat a lot of gravy and they also eat a lot of sour cream and a lot of butter when you put those things on your potatoes that isn't the potato that's making somebody fat it's all the fat that they're putting on the potato so but we can see the basic logic that that it is a calorie density isn't the only factor here it's just by far the major factor so there's other factors for example whether the food is cooked whether the food has been pulverized into a powder reconstituted in other words a food that has been ground up like a smoothie for example a fruit smoothie is not the same thing as the whole fruit it's close its close but it is actually a more fish mechanism for getting calories then the whole fruit and therefore it's effectively probably 10 to 12 percent more calorie dense so a smoothie is really a figure at 330 calories a pound where the whole fruit or fruit salad would be 300 obviously neither one of those is a problem because the fulcrum is at 700 so this is you know the the the conversion ratios and rates about what what is converted into what in the body those things are being worked out better all the time by research so carbohydrate will in fact convert in fact it won't convert as efficiently as fat will convert into fat but it will convert and that's why a lot of vegans when they when they eat a high carbohydrate diet that is processed carbohydrate bread crackers popcorn is essentially a very dried carbohydrate at 1400 hours a pound these are ways to keep weight on people and those carbohydrates will convert at some level of efficiency into fat so we are eating a diet even if it's carbohydrates which are very friendly to the body in terms of their general toxicity so they can be very healthy let go a healthy bread can be a healthy food but the problem is it can be 16 1700 calories a pound because it's very dry and it's also pulverized and so these are ways for healthy conscious vegans to be carrying extra weight on themselves and and be sometimes mystified as to why because they believe they're reading very healthy food they are eating healthy food at a biochemical level but they're not eating the optimal food or the best strategy for optimum weight so those are some of the issues but I hope I think all everybody is getting clearer and clearer on as we go forward well great thank you so much so one of the things people were also concerned about on the summit was this concept of nutrient density and so somebody had posted on the Facebook page a bag of these Masaki sweet potatoes which are my favorite you can get them at Trader Joe's they're delicious they're similar to the Japanese sweet potatoes at the longest-lived people the Okinawan eat something like 72 percent of their calories from the whole three pound bag has less than 1200 calories I eat a whole bag a day less than because less calories than a bag of M&Ms at the movie theater and this person was all freaked out because some blood wasn't even a medical blog was like oh he's don't have as much nutrients as the orange ones and so I can't eat them anymore and so we got a question from a really sharp guy who was watching in with Vic he's a college student he's 21 years old he's a big fan of yours and he is a hyper conscious nutcase self-professed and he says dr. Lyle it's amazing to me to see everyone worried about developing all sorts of deficiencies like fatty acid deficiency protein deficiency calcium deficiency etc even though there are no documented cases of these and the scientific literature or they're always worried that they're not getting all the nutrients they need when in fact the real problem is we live in a country where people are suffering and dying from diseases of dietary excesses I remember you saying somewhere that our brains are evolutionarily designed specifically to fear and worry about deficiencies not excesses and I found your insight into this fascinating could you please talk about this and then maybe also talk about why we don't have to be worried about what color the sweet potato is why bark when you have a dog this young man said he's exactly right this is a I just love to hear these words coming from somebody else yes the hopefully the echo chamber has started yes we don't need to worry about deficiencies there's there's one deficiency that John McDougall worries about which is b12 there's two deficiencies that dr. Alan Goldhamer worries about which are b12 and vitamin D and past that you don't really have any evidence to be worried about much of anything so the let me think about how to say this the the body is beautifully designed to deal with nutrient deficiencies there was it well if it turns out that somehow by chance your diet is relatively low in some nutrient but the DNA knows how to go about recycling and conserving that nutrient so that you don't wind up with a deficiency so the only real deficiency that human beings ever had to be concerned about would have been just enough food that was the problem and so I do believe that the human mind is designed to be worried about essentially being deficient in food that's a hunger Drive and has a very strong predilection to be thinking and scheming about food now I believe that that sort of culturally it's easy to translate that worry about getting enough food into getting enough worried about worrying about constituencies of food so ever since we started learning about that there was constituent parts of food that everybody has been worried about those constituent parts in the last 150 years the discovery of the protein and then finally vitamins this is now got people obsessed about getting enough the young man is correct you don't need to be worried about getting enough the fascination with with new with nutrient density to me is totally misplaced I believe that you could eat what we would consider a very nutrient deficient diet quote unquote and be fine the the issue is I think for example a diet of just potatoes would be outstanding and then if you fed America just potatoes people would get way healthier than they are now and any nutrient deficiencies that would result would be few and far between and they would be minor so this is and obviously you could get rid of those deficiencies by throwing in a stalk of broccoli every now and then and then it's over it's not even close to a problem so this is this is the the problem that we have is a is a natural problem being mapped on to modern knowledge in other words a natural problem I've worried about the efficiency in general of starvation and then we map it on to starvation for vitamin B for b12 for these six for C for e for D whatever it is essential fatty acids okay pretty soon hyper conscientious nutcases are worried about deficiencies and everything they're worried about deficiencies of purple phytochemicals for God's sakes so we got to make sure that we get enough of those this is just totally ridiculous yeah it's understandable in other words I understand the nature of the psychology that is driving it but it's misplaced this is what I call looking for health in all the wrong places but less you want to look for health as as is the young man suggested getting rid of dietary excesses essentially re-establishing appropriate natural balances to your diet when the diet is way out of balance then that then then there can be problems but people's diets now the balanced problem is not efficiency the balanced problem is excesses chiefly of excess calories so excess calories in general is actually probably the biggest single problem and and I believe excesses of animal protein as well as heated oils are probably the the other other problems that are causing imbalances in metabolic process and resulting in health compromised nice thank you dr. mcdougal had said on the summit that there's never been a document in case of fatty acid deficiency but we have a young lady Tami asking do we need to supplement with DHA and EPA I think that it may be possible that if you were to be eating an extraordinarily lean diet in other words you you just ate super lean super low-fat foods and potatoes and and I don't know maybe asparagus and um fruit if you had an extraordinarily lean diet that never touched an avocado and never touched a nut of any kind would it be possible when you didn't need any oats because oats have about 15 percent fat so if you had an extraordinarily low-fat diet do I think it might be possible that you might be able to get some small small minor-league symptoms not essential fatty acid deficiency per se but but that you would function better if you had a little bit more yeah that's possible and so what would you do then if you really didn't want to eat a nut or an avocado and you didn't want to eat any oatmeal well you could take a little bit of flaxseed and put it in a coffee grinder and then sprinkle it on your salad okay if you did that if he took a teaspoon of that a day and did that that would solve any any and all possible essential fatty acid deficiencies that would ever come up so that's that's a solution I don't do such a thing because I'll need a few nuts and I'll eat a few avocados and I'll need oatmeal so I'm not worried about it yeah I think the real problem is the worrying about it I haven't added any fat to my diet in seven and a half years but there's a blood test that I get every year at my annual physical called the essential fatty acid profile and it just keeps getting better and better but I do eat I do so but you know dr. MacDougall talked about that Kon potato study where somebody ate nothing but to a couple actually ate nothing but potatoes for an entire year and they actually had to add oil to it because they couldn't get enough calories and they had no nutritional deficiencies so yes that makes sense in other words the it's very hard to engineer deficiency the the real health problems are excesses so but deficiencies are the worry that that's the natural worry the species as you can imagine no animal in nature evolved they worried for having eaten too much but every animal in nature has a constant omnipresent fear of not getting enough and so that that's why we see the fascination with this is how you get Prevention magazine this is how you get the supplement aisle off the health food store that drives the vast majority of that that's the most profitable place in the store so you can imagine that this is also what drives the literature in the health arena what's driving it is everybody's worried about deficiencies just efficiency worry I'm gonna what when they dairy me again that there will still be a crushing fear of deficiency in a society that is massively overfed and and that that's because we will never we will never be able to pull this concept out by the root because it's rooted in human natural history and were designed to be making this mistake Wow well thank you so much so this next question came from many people watching the summit and I just want everyone to know that when I ask this question it's not because I'm trying to put one doctor against the other or be in a camp or disrespect anything that was said on the summit but it did create a lot of confusion and that is two knots and again this is deficiency so we have two ways to look at it first of all well some of the speakers were strongly believing that we need nuts justjust for health just for survival without them die prematurely and being more at risk for things like Alzheimer's heart disease and strokes and so that created some fear in people that had trouble eating nuts because they found because remember this was the real truth about weight loss summit and there are people like myself that find that we could not lose weight with nuts or even with any added fat and so it created a lot of fear in people so this is a two-fold question do you believe that we absolutely have to eat them for optimal health nobody will die sooner a heart disease dementia and stroke and how do you feel about them for weight loss or is it okay to be on the no added fat diet and I'd like because people are this is what people worry about right okay first of all about the first part is whether or not nuts are useful in terms of reducing your risk with respect to of heart disease etc no they're not so the there are no better and no worse than any other whole natural fit so the notion that the nuts have any documented protective effect over and above the fact that they would replace in some people's diets they would replace for example meat and cheese and so forth so as a result if a person has a high net consumption there they are going to be eating foods that are going to be they're now going to be subtracting out other rich foods out of their diet and the rich foods that they're going to be subtracting out are gonna be steak and cheese so you have to statistically control for that fact when you look at any of this evidence when you when you look at the evidence from a more comprehensive scientific perspective you'll find that there's no evidence for any special powers of nuts to help you with respect to vascular disease for example so that that's a misunderstanding I actually know the research that that people are excited about there and I understand how is that that a that an individual could come to that conclusion by looking at that research but that's because that that analysis has not been done in a comprehensive fashion from the standpoint of statistical inference and when you as a former stats professor I looked at that question carefully and the answer is definitive there is no there is no evidence at all in fact it's it's more strong than that in other words the it the evidence is quite quite substantial in other words the question has been looked at quite carefully and there is sufficient enough precision in the the ability to analyze the problem because there has been so much data collected on the problem that there is no question that there is no special power of nuts okay so it's not simply that I can say that there's no evidence to support it I can say that there's tremendous evidence that makes it very clear that there is no special utility of nuts to to help your cardiovascular health okay so that problem we can put away now the the next question was about nuts and weight and that's our our a high calorie density food they are the highest nuts and seeds or about 25 or carries a pound typically so they are the highest calorie dense food in nature for humans and so actually I think in nature in general I don't believe that there's anything else in nature that I don't believe would for termites is higher calorie density in other words would I think should be it's probably thousand calories a pound if you're a termite so because wood wouldn't have fat in it the way that the way that the nuts and seeds do so I believe that that actually if we start thinking about whale blubber that's gonna be probably if you're a shark and you eat whale blubber that's probably higher calorie against it even nuts all right so I'll quit speculating back at different gallery densities the the truth is is that that nuts and seeds are gonna be the the highest calorie density plant food that you're ever going to have the opportunity to eat as we would expect then we wouldn't expect them to be immune from the fact that the higher calorie density the foodstuffs are the more fat the animal will store on its body so as a result we would expect that if you add nuts - somebody's diet that their overall you know fat profile is going to increase and that's how that's going to work so if you eat a few nuts a day then we would expect all other things being equal we would expect you to be slightly have slightly more fat on you now let's suppose that you eat announcing that today because you're worried about some kind of a nut deficiency problem if you were to do that that would be little enough nuts that the ability to detect a difference in your body weight would be very difficult to do and after a year of such a practice we might find that you're only one pound heavier and that may be what it is that you sit at you know indefinitely if that's your practice if you add two ounces and that's it might change it might be two pounds heavier overnight before we don't know okay so now we start to wind up with interactions with your personal genetics and it would be impossible to determine but we would know for example if take a hundred people and we would suddenly have them each eating two ounces in that today and where they had previously not eaten so we would find that statistically the average a year later those people would be heavier they would be a little bit fatter probably not a lot because that would be a lot of food but it would be enough it would increase the average calorie density of their diet because the calorie density of nobody stuff is 2500 carats of panel so even somebody that's eating trash with both hands their calorie density their diets probably 1,200 care this account so if you add a little bit of nuts we're gonna start dragging it up to 1300 and we're gonna add a little bit of body fat so that's the story on that sigh I have no objection to nuts I will tell people that if they are overweight in their attempting to lose weight and get very fit that that may be one thing that they're probably gonna want to sacrifice or at least largely so along with any other high calorie density food that they're reading more processed food in no circumstances would I ever tell somebody that they needed to eat nuts in order to reduce their vascular threat now that's a that's a misunderstanding that hopefully we can we can lay that with the rest well people are still worrying not just about the stroke risk for heart disease risk with the dementia risk and the water jet risk because that's what they're being told Debbie sank she started skipping nuts and to me she she can tell the difference but do you think that the weight loss is the same for everyone so in other words are there people that just will lose weight quicker and easier without the fat because if you're eating fat I mean isn't it easier for body to take the fat if you're not eating fat from your body does that make a difference um I don't think of it that way you just think of it as overall calorie density balance so if you're it's not about whether you're eating fat or not eating fat per se it's about whether or not you're the overall calorie density issue is involved and also how much a person is eating so our our point here you can lose weight eating a very high fat diet if you eat two bits of it and then you why are your jaw shut and you you feel like you're starving to death you can do this people people do do such a thing the what we want to do AJ is we you and I have always talked is we want to lose weight without losing your mind yeah you want to simply eat a calorie density balance of your diet that is consistent with your natural history so it feels very comfortable that you're that you're not fighting the hunger Drive and yet the calorie density of the diet is low enough that that it's probably but 700 or lower which means it's basically full of whole natural foods and not a lot of rich foods in that in that arena so that we wind up getting lean and fit and yet we're comfortable so that's the the issue is not actually but dr. Alan Goldhamer died at true north is actually a little higher fat than the MacDougall diet interestingly enough so the Alan's a little looser on some of the fat content and yet both of those diets will work fine just because they're both within the parameters of the natural history of the species so I'm not too worried about about some of the fine details here I'm interested in getting the big picture right if we get the big picture right we'll be fine it's just the people that I work with that lost weight not eating nuts when they reintroduce them they all gain weight and so I think of something like myself who hasn't had not seen avocado in seven and half years yes I started including them because I was worried I was going to die prematurely or get dementia I would have to take something else out of my diet and I'm thinking I don't want to I mean I don't want it less potatoes or less sweet potatoes or less rice so it just seems that when you're eating foods of a higher caloric density you can't eat as much food yeah so duh however you're designed by nature to be comfortable the higher calorie density foods impact Society mechanisms more more intensively than lower calorie density foods so as a result yeah you would be able to eat less food if you eat foods of higher calorie density but you'd be satisfied in doing so the the problem begins when the overall calorie density of the diet it's to be higher than that of our natural history at which point the the satiety mechanisms aren't going off soon enough and so you can only compensate so far for a diet that is very overly high in terms of its calorie density the system won't won't allow you to be comfortable on one pound of food a day if it's 2,000 calories a pound fitted so for example a peanut butter jelly salmon which is 2,000 calories a pound and most women burn about 2,000 calories a pound if they were to eat one pound a day at peanut butter jelly sandwiches they would not be completely satisfied now they'd be close and they wouldn't notice it from day to day but what would find what they would discover they were doing if we watched them very carefully is that they probably start eating 2,200 2,300 calories a day so they wouldn't actually be completely satisfied on the 2,000 well as if we we dial the food away from the peanut butter jelly sandwiches and take them back to 700 calorie pound fair instead of 2,000 CARICOM fair now the reading almost three pounds of food a day now they're comfortable and they're not finding themselves reaching for an extra two or three in their calories so that's that's the issue issues essentially carry density so everything comes down to calorie density really knows about higher calorie food because doctor shintani who actually I don't know if you know this it was so fascinating he bought dr. MacDougall's practice for $1 he was just wonderful to me he said that people feel more satisfied with that because of the greater caloric density that's I think there's anything specially satiating about fat it's just that it's a higher Lori that's food right so for example you would feel more satiated on on one ounce of fat than you would on one ounce of carbohydrate okay but the issue is that that's really he is correct there but that's that's not the fundamental issue that we're looking at because the question is whether we are more satisfied on half a pound of food or a quarter the food and the answer is well it gets complicated okay we have to now add in the calorie density because if it's a quarter pound of fat versus a half a pound of carbohydrate it's gonna start to get close that's what's going to happen but what we'll find is is that if the overall calorie density of the diet starts creeping up past 700 what we're gonna find is that people will start to systematically overeat and that's what being fat is having excess fat as a result of the systematic of reading the person in other words just I don't believe in the conscious regulated regulation of food intake I think that that's an absurd concept weighing and measuring etc just doesn't make any sense to me it's not done by any animal in the animal kingdom and it was never done by humans until the 20th century so the the concept of needing to consciously monitor your food intake is as ludicrous as the notion of being able to consciously monitor your oxygen intake so we don't want to be in the game you can do both by the way you can you can pay attention to your breathing all day long and try to not take a deep breath you could do such a thing but it wouldn't do you any good in the long run because pretty soon you're going to slip into unconscious consumption of oxygen in the same way as you're fitted so you can be fastidious as all hell but sooner or later you're going to slip into unconscious consumption and so it's really going to be whether or not the nature of those materials the nature of the food enables you to unconsciously regulate accurately and that's really what the issue is and so the issue is is your diet higher than it should be naturally in terms of its calorie density if it is mmm you better have good genes or you'd better have genes that can that can manage that or else you're going to get excess weight I love how you said on episode 161 of the beat your genes podcast that only 1% of people that are thin earned it and that people that have never had this problem do not understand the difficulty of it I mean all your work is great but episode 161 if they gave Oscars for podcasts that episode everybody must listen to I've listened to it seven times I'm not kidding it's it's brilliant so everyone please listen to that and also please stay till the end of the broadcast because dr. Lila I actually have a an announcement that we'd like to tell you so just just to recap if I got this right that's for a whole natural food they're healthy but they're of a high caloric density and if somebody wants to eat them that's fine but they don't have to feel like they must eat them for longevity or prevention of any of these diseases and that could carbohydrate bits are not evil as worthless as we a lot of people feel that nuts are the superior superfood and that we should be eating those instead of things like potatoes rice etc what all correct it you've got it great okay so I'm gonna get to a question that came in because we have some speakers well at first of all no one said caffeine was good on the summit it's just the degree of some thought it was actually worse than others in the reason so we had a question dr. Lyle what is it with coffee what is the attraction to it and why am I having difficulties letting go of it I really do not even like the taste I switch to decaf for three days so far any suggestions or alternatives and so the people are having a really hard time letting go of caffeine and work it's not a health food so take it away right what what caffeine does I mean it's there's a multitude of effects of caffeine but the but the couple of effects that were interested in is it there's a specific neurotransmitter adenosine I believe that this what the name of it that that causes you as it builds up inside your mind as you go out go through the day it causes you to feel sleepy that's its job in other words it's a signaling mechanism yeah it's essentially like hmm let me think about this let's suppose that you there's probably there's many such mechanisms in nature but what's the you had a device on your car that could measure the dirtiness of your oil and so we don't have that yet but you know that could be coming in the future the that as your oil gets dirtier and dirtier from the from the work that it does to try to keep your engine clear and lubricated that as it gets dirtier you find you a little meter goes on and tells you that your oil is getting too dirty and now you've got too many particles in there and now the oil is not able to do its job to stop the wear and tear from the little particles that are circulating in the oil from debris well your brain also gets dirty so the longer you run your brain in a day you're essentially dirtying up the oil and as a result what's gonna happen is you need to know you need to have a device to tell you that you're actually that your brain is dirty it is essentially polluted and that device is adenosine or you know what somebody's gonna say that idiot doesn't know how to pronounce it pronounce it the but the point is is that it's this it's a neurotransmitter that is a signalling device to tell you that your brain is dirty and the way you fix your brain the way you get your brain clean is to go to sleep and that's what happens when you sleep it's a time for your brain to clean out and does a bunch of other things sleep there's a bunch of other things that we now understand that we didn't know 20 years ago but it's a chief mechanism of sleeping is the cleaning of the brain and so when you use caffeine it blocks the action of adenosine what it does so you don't feel it so you don't feel sleepy even though your brains dirty so you can see what kind of a problem this is this is the equivalent of if you have a sprained ankle that I give you a painkiller in your ankle so that you can't feel the spring so you walk on a foot that's damaged when naturally you wouldn't be walking on it now we can all see a reason why this could be useful so for example if the Romans are attacking your fort and it's incredibly important that you stay awake and don't you know that as a century then you could see where coffee would be a good idea because you would keep you awake even though your nervous system was telling you that your brain was dirty and you should go to sleep you could make use of that except you have a perfectly good chemical for that anyway it's called adrenaline so you have a pressure at work or some big thing and yet you're short of sleep that's okay yeah if depending upon how important the issue is your nervous system will kick out sufficient adrenaline to keep you awake to the appropriate amount of time to run a cost/benefit on how important is the issue versus how important is the sleep and you know when you when the brain becomes sufficiently dirty when you've gone 22 hours and your presentations four hours from now it will finally have you go to sleep even though it's very hard for you to go to sleep because you're full of adrenaline but the mind will be brilliant at finding that cutting point and deciding you know what your brain is too dirty you're now becoming dysfunctional go to sleep okay now however you could subvert that with coffee and you could block the action of that and now what's going to happen is you'll wind up with compromised abilities and it's an inefficient way to go what's happening so that's one thing that's going on so people don't like the feeling in the morning that they're short of sleep they're short of sleep because for various and sundry reasons the electric light bulb and interesting things to look at it on on lit lit screens have kept them up past an appropriate bedtime now they're short of sleep and now they feel sleepy their brains dirty they're starting out the day with a dirty brain and so what are they going to do and some of our brains are dirtier than others but the point is is that you're starting out the day with a dirty brain and it doesn't feel good and you're being encouraged to go to sleep by your biology so what do we do we go to Starbucks and we block the action of Vin Sun and now you feel better but actually you're operating on a dirty brain this is you know this isn't the greatest way to live it's a effectively artificial adrenaline and is it is it terrible no it's also addictive in other words once you once you do this over and over again the the the brain obviously gets used to it and anticipates that it's going to have it and then builds up defenses against it because it wants to operate around any kind of chemical action like this whether it's morphine heroin you know teen or it's caffeine which the brain will try to wrap its way around and figure out a way how to defend itself against it and as a result we wind up with tolerance and so then what's going to happen is if you frustrate system by not giving it the drug winner that expects you're going to go into withdrawal it's not going to be pleasant so which rahl effects are going to keep people in the trap and it's going to be sometimes hard to break an addictive cycle like that that's the pleasure trap caffeine is a minor-league version of the pleasure trap it's not particularly damaging it's you know now we're gonna discussion between myself and my co-author you know Alan Alan could could could recite for you a litany of evils associated with caffeine I won't in other words on the grand scheme of things this is what I call one of the minor sins so it's a little bit of a problem but it's not nearly as big a problem as that she's sandwich Wow okay it's just on the on the summit we had some doctors giving some evidence why it can cause people to store body fat and since this was a weight loss someone trying to give people other tools that the places to look you know if they were still struggling but it doesn't seem to be help for people that's interesting idea I never thought of that and never occurred to me that that would be true so this is information I've never heard before I can see the possibility of a chain reaction looking as follows I could see how research might suggest that that would be true the possibility of chronically sleep deriving people behind caffeine use when people are chronically sleep-deprived they are they are less active and less likely to exercise and as and they're probably more likely to reach for stimulating fits so I can see that caffeine use would be more comprehensively and subtly disruptive to healthy living and as a result and thereby contributing to weight gain but how caffeine specifically would act on that bad that's outside my knowledge okay well I'm gonna see if I can get you a copy of that talk maybe you would look at it and look awesome so while I well I while you were talking I googled the calorie density of whale blubber and wood just so you know if you're trying to lose weight you'd be better off eating wood because it's less than 1 kcal per gram they said it's between zero and one whale blubber on the other hand is 247 calories per ounce or three thousand nine hundred and fifty-two calories per pound so it's it's right up there with oil it's a hundred percent fat so we don't regular fabulous now we no definitely don't recommend it so there was a comment live I can't find it right now but this is the same thing as one of the questions we have somebody was talking about cravings and for that I actually recommend they watch your crammed circuit lecture which is available both on my YouTube page and dr. McDougall site but this lady says this is a question about self sabotage dr. Lisle dear dr. Lisle I find I sabotage myself several times a week with salty tortilla chips and guacamole or eating out or oil and salt are embedded in the food what are good ways to work on self sabotaging I would just say don't eat out yeah I mean she's asking the the question it's a it's a good question but the but I can't give you a snappy answer because the truth is is that the problem is comprehensive that's why Alan and I wrote a 240 page book on the problem the you you're designed by nature to seek out the richest food in the environment and so the you're designed to actually run a cost benefit on how much energy you're gonna put out to seek out how rich your food so you can imagine for example the following scenario if there's a if somebody has a fruit salad in front of you but over you know 20 feet away somebody's baking up some potatoes and beans and you you are you're sufficiently hungry you're just not feeling like nibbling on something you actually want something more substantial so the fruit salad does it doesn't have the richness of the potatoes and beans that are being cooked and so you find yourself drawn to and you'll get up off your Duff and walk over there and see if you can get some of that okay that would make sense the higher calorie density will draw you to put up physical action in order to get it now let's suppose that there's a tree on the other side of the river that grows Snickers bars so it's a snicker straight and Snickers bar tree that's 2,500 calories a pound on the Snickers bars and they you have traded with the people down the down on the other side of the river from time to time it's a 17 mile hike to get to a crossing but you could in fact swim across the river now you're you're not in the river is pretty cold so it's kind of unpleasant but that's not the biggest problem the biggest problem is that there's piranhas in the river so question is you know you might get lucky that you've seen animals swim the river and not get attacked by the piranhas but you've also seen some animals in the river that did get attacked by the piranhas so now the question is you you can see that the Snickers bars are in fact in season you can look across the the 40-yard River and you can see that they're there and they're nice brown wrappers with the blue lettering I think yeah so the question is will you swim the river to get a Snickers bar and the answer is no you're not so are you tempted yes you might be tempted you don't want to even let your children know what a Snickers bar is like because you don't want them going in the river after this forget about the province so the question is not how it is that you sort of get rid of this this tendency because you're going to be drawn to high calorie density foods for the rest of your life that's just part of the nature of all animals to do that question is will you work hard enough at setting up your environment to make it statistically less likely for you to act on that very often this is what aj is talking about don't go out to dinner which means you want to have competitive food already in the house that's easy easily available so that when you have the impulse to to taste tortilla chips and and beans and guacamole then you've got it all ready at home so you've got tortillas there and you've got beans there and you've got avocados there and you may have some low-sodium salsa there so you can actually get that taste and it's going to take you 10 minutes or so to get that all together but you can do that and and make that competitive so even though going out has a lure that it's saltier and it's richer and it's fatter and that you don't have to do anything except sit and there's a pleasant ambience of people around talking in other words there's and there's margaritas and there was there's things that will also draw you there but what we want to do is to make it as competitive as possible to make healthy choices and so you start by setting up your environment in a way so the healthy choices are highly competitive with the pleasure trap and in doing so you make a chance for you to get in a nice groove great thank you so we have a question from somebody watching live I took a screenshot because I can't see worth a darn anymore from Brooke and the part that I'm really interested in is the last sentence because I hear this a lot but she's saying I should pay Jay I really wanted to ask you a few questions but I have you answered I've lost an amazing 80 pounds following your book but I also used intermittent fasting or I ate only in a four-hour window usually from 6 to 10 however I know I need to have more of a gap between finished eating and sleeping my problem is that once I start eating I can't stop so she's afraid if she starts earlier in the day she won't stop like if I was answering this question I'd say that that's a ridiculous window and that's what's making her not be able to stop because she's because even dr. Goldhamer said he is really against this one meal a day phenomenon that people are having such a narrow window but I hear this a lot from people so I can't discount that that even people eating whole natural food without the nuts in the avocado that they feel like they can't stop eating when I talk to them it's usually because the starch is too low and they're trying to just fill up on fruits and vegetables so what do you say to broken what do you say to these people that claim then on the diet we recommend they just can't stop eating once they start yeah I would I think you you've got all these little elements in that and what you just said you talked about a lot of things we probably have we've got a conditioned cram circuit so we would I would suggest that person go back and watch that that webinar that I did with I think that was Gustavo back in the fall of seventeen I think this one that was I can't remember that should be on the mcdougal website the so she's conditioned to cram circuit by by every night she's eating a great deal in a short window what do I think about intermittent fasting not necessary not particularly useful the I think that I think the utility of internet and fasting is a concept when people have used it and it seems to have worked it's been predominantly to chop off a conditioned cram circuit kind of accidentally is how that's worked so I years ago when I was a youngster I read a book by dr. Wayne Dyer and I don't remember what which it was it might have been your erroneous zone sir might have been pulling around strings I can't remember it might have been a third one the that he said something in there that struck me as really useful and that he said first be a good animal and I thought good for him is I mean this was before I knew much I knew a little bit about nutrition at the time but not much but basically he said you know you healthy foods you know eat when you feel like eating don't eat when you don't feel like eating go to sleep get some exercise etc what he's really speak was speaking to is the notion of getting a decent balance and so that's how I would inform you about how to deal with this the what I would suggest to somebody that's trapped in trapped in an unusual thing like like the skels doing if she's heating four hours a day and she's probably eating pretty intensively those four hours a day if it's working for you and you're comfortable with it then I'm not too interested in disturbing it I'm not interested in telling you that it's the wrong way to do things it's a way to do things and if you're comfortable and it's successful as long as you're eating healthy foods then this is not a problem it seems to me that you might be more comfortable distributing your calories out across the day and not eating so intensively in one shot maybe maybe not most people are more comfortable eating two or three times a day maybe more just and as well as long as you are eating whole natural foods to be a good animal and simply follow your instincts as far as that goes you don't need to be pushing your food within a feeding window that doesn't make any sense I want to point out that that's that would be inconsistent with animal history you won't see animals do this they don't eat in feeding windows the koala bears don't say oh it's 2:00 in the afternoon that said we're done it's a penis okay so they follow a natural rhythm so try to establish here for yourself the natural rhythm and that's how I would tell you to go about that problem okay thank you I think we have time for one more question before the big announcement it's from Kiki who's watching live she says do you believe in this new disorder of orthorexia because so many of us that eat this way were told that for so long I think orthorexia that's the notion that people are just overly fascinated and worried about what it is that the reading is that google it but I think it's good Kancha snis or maybe they feel like it's an eating disorder because we're so focused on what we eat and what we don't eat right I think that's what it is the now what do I think about that the would you like it right now it's saying it's a term for a condition that includes symptoms of obsessive behavior in pursuit of a healthy diet or the rec suffers often displayed signs and symptoms of anxiety disorders that frankly co-occur with anorexia nervosa or other eating disorders yes you can you can describe you can describe a lot of these behaviors under the umbrella of OCD and so the CD is a it when we can we can call that a disorder because it's you call something a disorder because it's it's causing you more trouble minutes than it's helping you so that's that's what we would that's what we call a disorder so we we call something a substance abuse disorder when the use of the substance is now got the person's life out of balance to the level that they're not just having a glass of wine now and then but they've got a problem with alcohol so now we call it a disorder so the the gods of Psychiatry decree that something is a disorder when it's you know essentially more more trouble than it would be worth you could you choose not to have it the let me give you an example of another disorder so and some of these disorders are clearly sort of genetically problematic or otherwise pretty serious business so if you have schizophrenia that's called a formal thought disorder and that's pretty pretty rough okay that's a disorder the what they'll call disorders is a matter of a committee okay so now we've we've decided that that there's a that there's a committee of that were that would they say okay we're dealing with people that seem to be overly obsessive about the health of their food well if you were to have something that anybody would cause called a disorder that would appear to be about the most useful disorder that one could have okay okay and the fact that there may be a a sort of overweight self-indulgent wine connoisseur physician on the other side of this diagnosing it may be a rather entertaining for some of us that are taking a thousand foot view and looking down on this scene so I would say that it would be essentially appropriate for people today to be somewhat what do they call it orthorexia in other words we should all be more conscious and cognizant of our food choices and the impact on our health than we are as a population now that does that is it some though they're as useful to say that there are people where it looks like the the benefit from being from doing so is greater than the cost or that the cost is greater than the benefit yeah I think there is in the same way that there's people that are that are concerned about germs on their hands which is a legitimate thing to be concerned about but they're overly concerned and they wash their hands too much and we would call that obsessive compulsive disorder with a germ phobia and so and so yeah I I don't I don't deny that we can say that this is a OCD variant it's it's an extraordinarily benign OCD variant we wouldn't treat it the last thing we're gonna do is have somebody we could treat it we would try to treat it with knowledge and that's one of the things that I try to do is I try to explain to people that that the that healthy living is a very good thing but hyper healthy living is probably not going to benefit you very much past healthy living if at all so that these it's useful that actually a cure for orthorexia is knowledge so knowledge of understanding that subtle variances in behavior in health arena are not going to have any appreciable measurable impact whereas large differences will so don't get in the same way that OCD people need to learn that if they wash their hands six or eight times a day they're not going to get deathly ill but they're washing them 25 times a day and so they're they're actually chafing their hands and they're going to be better off if they don't they also need to you know knowledge is power that or they need to learn an experience that they can loosen the reins a little bit and be okay so yeah you could you could give this a name if you wanted to I would just call it I have my own name for a hyper conscientious nutcase and it and it turns out that my hyper conscientious nut cases are very often in and around food and I try to talk him off the ledge and realize it that if somehow a frito sneaks into their mouth every now and then that this is not a disaster and they're not going to die from it and it's also true that they'd very often they're not just hyper conscientious about that but they're hyper conscientious about other things as well they tend to be extremely responsible people in many dimensions and and spend and have a fair amount of anxiety about being perfectionistic so this all goes under the the Hat perfectionism and you will see perfectionism not only in orthorexia you'll see it in anorexia you'll see it in bulimia and you'll also see it in in in hand washers and people that check the stove 50 times before they leave the house this is a characteristic of my people near and dear to my heart hyper conscientious nutcases who I have to be surrounded about in my career and talked to one right now it's almost as if with this hyper country and just eating we've gone full circle because we started out talking about nuts nutrient density which is sort of an example of that something else to beware as it works yeah that's right 800 well you guys I have a really big announcement so if you really enjoy talking to dr. Lisle and having your questions answered by him what if you could do that on a weekly basis so what happened is I recently taught a 13-week class based on my book secrets ultimate weight loss and one of the weeks I was speaking on a holistic holiday and sea cruise and while I had internet I couldn't trust that it would be good enough to give a one-hour talk in the middle of the ocean and so I asked dr. Lisle to fill in for me and the class went nuts and they loved having him as a guest speaker and they said could dr. Lau please do this well I asked him and he doesn't have 12 weeks of his life to do this but he said he would consider doing a six-week course based on his book the pleasure trap and I'm gonna just put a link right here where you can register now there this class will be limited because we can only get a certain amount of people on this technology but it's really reasonably priced it's less than $100 for six weeks of having dr. Lisle teach this master class on escaping the pleasure trap based on his book you'll get a PDF of the book and you'll get to be with him for six consecutive Monday evenings at 5 p.m. Pacific time starting on Monday April 22nd part of it will be lecture based on the book and part of it will be Q&A but what's really great is that he is going to include material that he didn't have when he wrote the book so it's gonna be a fabulous class we have we have so many people registered already because we did open at first to the people in the class and almost all of them signed up so I hope you guys will check it out because I'm taking this because what could be a better way to spend Monday night so I thank you so much for doing this it's gonna be that's just another wacky fun AJ thing yeah yeah I'm always in right so if you're a hyper conscientious in that case we expect you to sign up immediately well thank you so much dr. Lyle it was great talking to you about these these things and thank you guys so much for watching I'm chef AJ and I make healthy tastes delicious but dr. Lyle makes it understandable don't forget to watch episode 161 of beat your jeans take care everyone
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