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hey everyone and welcome to chef aj live i'm your host chef aj and this is where i introduce you to amazing people like you who are doing great things in the world that i think you should know about well we have one of our favorite guests on today he often comes on once a month and we're so thrilled to have him here and when we have a doctor in general and dr lyle in particular on the show you guys have to send your questions and it's the only fair way to get to them we have questions going all the way back to september that we didn't get to if we have a chance we'll get to the questions in the chat but please send them in because then they get priority please welcome dr doug lyle it's always great to see you it's our first time this year oh great to see you aj all good thanks for having me all right well you are the best you are i always say the greatest mind of the 21st century or at least the greatest mind that i personally know how's that would you accept that all right here we go so this is from kaylee and um i had a guest on name mark shatzker who was talking about the biggest loser the television show you're familiar with it where people you know and and he was also uh talking about another guest the herman poncer who was a doctor that talked about the show how these people gained their weight back basically and he said that the contestants that lost large amounts of weight gained it back due to a brain body disconnect even if the calories were maintained or even if they were eating less calories and still being active and she wanted to know is there any research on how to get off get out of the post weight loss brain is there a way to reset your brain and body so they're on the same page yeah i don't think that's true in other words uh we we find that the following has been true over and over again at the mcdougall program and the true north program for the last you know 30 years and that is is that uh when when people eat the diet that we say then they start to slim down then they go home and then they don't eat the diet we say and then they gain the weight back and then they come back and supposedly the brain body disconnect that leads them to having excess weight miraculously that problem disappears when they enter santa rosa into one of those two programs it's like the the uh the physics vortex of the universe because they start to eat the food again they start to lose weight again so yeah i don't uh i don't buy this people are always uh looking for the miraculous you know physiological backflip somehow takes place and uh and there's a superficial logic to this which will not hold if we follow the logic a little bit further through and that is the notion that when animals if they lose a great deal of weight then they're simply going to get more efficient okay in other words that there's going to be genetic changes and epinephrine changes now suddenly the physiology organism is so efficient that now when it eats you know a normal diet it gets fat well i want to point out the absurdity of that from the standpoint of biology the uh there may be a short-term uh process that could result from something like that and it wouldn't surprise me if there were in other words if you are a rat uh that that for example is eating a normal rat chow diet out there in the field and you're at a normal weight and then suddenly you wind up for the next few months in a situation where you've lost 10 or 15 percent of your body weight then it wouldn't surprise me at all that you would get more efficient okay so otherwise you would do all kinds of things to compensate for that and then it may be the case that when the when the old diet returns in other words we we no longer have a bad season and you know the worm turns and things are back to normal if you go back to the original diet that had you at an appropriate weight it may overshoot you by five percent okay and this gets this is going to get physiologists of the world all excited about this like oh that's the reason why everybody gains the weight back after they lose much weight no listen to what i'm saying the it would make sense that there would not be an automatic immediate readjustment to something that would be a biological adaptation so for a short period of time maybe a few months even that little rat might maintain on what is now their what was their original diet they might maintain five percent a higher body weight uh in other words as a as an efficiency defense against the fact that they just went through a famine now how long is that going to stick around well probably some intermediate length of time and then it's going to go back to its normal equilibrium why wouldn't it the whole point was that that equilibrium could be moved under drastic conditions and then it could be moved back when the drastic conditions are removed so the notion that that somebody loses a bunch of weight and first of all by the way such an adaptation would be legitimately a biological advantage if you went from a normal weight in a normal food environment to a very low weight in an extremely deprived environment okay then it would make sense but actually i don't know that it makes any sense at all for somebody that's 100 pounds overweight which is a totally unnatural state if they then lose 100 pounds why would the system want to get more efficient now it's possible that you could it's possible that there are but there are interesting little genetic mechanisms that say wow we've lost a hell of a lot of weight let's get more efficient but you know it's going to be not only it will be a moderate effect if it's there at all but also be short-term everybody somehow thinks that that's going to be some permanent state of affairs why on earth would that be so i defy anyone to show me any research that shows that this would be a long-term effect or that the effect would be really substantive relative to the weight gain that these people regain so i could see someone losing 100 pounds you know potentially getting all the way down to let's say somebody should be 125 pounds and they're 225 and they go all the way down to 125 okay the um well let's suppose they do that incidentally let's talk about how they would do that by the way folks if they're on the biggest loser they're going to probably put them on i don't know some kind of bizarre shake diet that's going to be way low in terms of calories and they're going to be in a state of semi starvation and intense exercise and they're going to do that and they're going to lose that 100 pounds very very quickly under essentially semi starvation conditions well i could see reasonably how you could have a biological mechanism uh that would turn on and say whoa we need to get more efficient we may starve to death why why would we suddenly be stopping at 125 pounds that doesn't make any sense it's like we could continue on in this problem okay so it would make sense to me that under such a drastic elevator drop uh that you could actually turn on an adaptive mechanism that would create a degree of increased efficiency the system possibly uh you know dialing down immune function you know down temperature regulation who knows how it might work uh but it wouldn't uh uh but the point of this is that i don't necessarily see that i would expect this to happen under a situation where people were not in a starvation type condition trying to crash their weight down in other words if they were eating a normal healthy balanced diet to satiety and as a result of that the excess weight were being slowly and relentlessly uh essentially reduced then that i would expect there would never be any such adaptive mechanism that would be turned on okay so all of this speculation about this and occasional observation in rats under short-term short-term effects is completely and utterly unoppressive and it's nothing that i've ever observed in humans so i observe that when they come back to the vortex they lose the weight again and they they don't come back fatter next time they you know they if they came in the first time at 200 pounds and then wound up that was down at 160 then oftentimes what i will find you know nine months later is there 185 pounds what because they split the difference on their what was their previous diet and then they made some improvements at the mcdougall program or or at true north and when they went home they're not as bad off as they were before they're eating a little bit uh less rich diet but they're still they quote regain the weight why not because of some miraculous efficiency that took place as a result of the quote deprivation from the weight loss no turns out that their their weight is now at an equilibrium with respect to the diet that they're eating now they come back and they eat a healthier diet again and miraculously in viola we're back to 160 pounds and then when they leave god knows where they wind up if they go all the way back to the shitty diet that they began with they'll go back to 200. if they maintain the diet that we tell them to maintain they're going to sit at 160 or whatever you know if that's ideal i mean so we can we can all sit here we're staring at an example of this so chef aj you know 10 years ago was whatever she was 184 pounds or whatever the deal was and chef aj worked her way down to the one teens and there she sits okay eating to satiety without any miraculous increase in her ability to efficiently you know creep her way back up to 200 pounds as a result of some newfound efficiency that has taken place it's a miracle over biology so anyway that's what i think of all these things these are really good questions by the way because of the superficial logic that sits over the top of them uh but the superficial logic is in fact superficial and if we dive down one layer further into the logic it all falls apart so right and also with the biggest loser one of the things they were really stressing is this is like a really egregious amount of exercise and my guess is when when they were off the show they probably weren't doing that either right yeah that's i mean the whole thing is uh this is why my attitude i mean it makes great show and obviously it's great theater because people are so fascinated with wow what's going to happen to your appearance change you know what what could that pretty person or handsome person look like they only dropped you know 200 pounds wow look at that swan you know being born of course it's great theater and and it speaks to the human potential that sits under anybody that is uh sitting on a substantial excess weight but the solution to it isn't the draconian bizarre things that they do the solution is to what we do i'll let this thing happen naturally by taking your diet back to a natural history and letting it regulate itself and then we're not going to have any problems but people don't like that dr lau because it doesn't happen very quickly now i have a woman that started in the pandemic uh in in about may of 2020 at about 285 and now she's 140. okay so uh what what is that we're like i don't know 17 18 19 about 20 months later hey if you're 140 after 20 months as far as i'm concerned that's fast enough so it's you know let's not let's not be in any rush we're only doing this once right it took me 27 months 27 months and then we're done i am done i know it's been 10 years thank you dr lyle if people would just listen to you they would have success so we've got a question from natalie is there such if there is no such thing as stress eating and emotional eating why do i tend to eat more and eat more calorie dense and processed foods when i am stressed or sad or angry yeah i think that uh you're not paying very closely attention to the to the research there so you're you're noticing that because you have a theory that that's true uh but if we actually watch people and what it is that they eat and when they they eat more rich food when they're stressed they eat more rich food when they're happy they eat more rich food when they're bored eat more rich food whenever they feel like eating more rich food and the cost-benefit analysis rings their little belt so i keep in mind that that you're you're not you're not inherently designed to be suddenly choosing to eat richer foods when you're stressed it doesn't really make any any sense at all there's no there's no biological underpinnings to that and there's no observation that that's going to be true so the um there's no there's no research that supports that anywhere so essentially uh what what's going on is is that you have a theory that lays down over the top of it and i wouldn't uh i wouldn't i wouldn't rule out the possibility that okay let's keep something in mind the the cognitive dissonance that is natural to uh to staying out of rich foods is is uh is sort of an omnipresent force on your nervous system and the i can imagine a labyrinth of motivational trickery that goes on inside your mind one of them which is for example in other words you've you've essentially got a the voices of your ancestors are whispering you constantly telling you eat the richest food it's the sexiest thing you can do eat the richest food it's the sexiest thing you can do that's how you maintain your health and your fitness and your sexual attractiveness in a stone age environment you ate the richest food in the environment don't eat the least rich food in the environment in order to stay thin for god's sake you're going to be so rail thin and you're on the border of starvation and you're not going to have any estrogen cues and you're not going to be attractive for god's sakes or if you're a man you're going to be skinny you're not going to be able to have enough musculature in other words you're going to be in trouble starving animals don't look attractive so you're the for both your survival and reproductive success both of those things line up perfectly with the uh motivational system or instinct that tells you eat the richest food in the environment so that that advice is always there it's not it's never shutting off okay so the fact that uh and so if we we put any animal in the circumstances that's exactly what we're going to do i mean how many times you have to look at it with your own pets you know with my own pets if i put down little cat treats they go for they they go for the cat treats they're richer inevitably that's what's happened they'll follow me around and stick a paw in my achilles heel trying to get my attention to get some more of those cat treats uh and those cat treats have higher oil content and they have higher calorie density no surprise okay this is like little kids eating the tops off the cupcakes the uh it's like you know that's that's what people are gonna do you're watching animal instinct so the uh so to to then try to come up with an explanation as to why it is that you're doing this naughty thing it is it is a fruitless activity and you are chasing down psychological reasoning that makes superficial sense but it actually doesn't make any sense at all but why would you know why would i lean towards you know when i'm more stressed i lean towards rich foods you're leaning towards rich foods all the time like you never stop leaning toward rich foods that that that is your biology that's an omnipresent force that is never going away there is no higher yogic plane that you're supposed to be at that is the secret trick for you to not have this issue this issue is an omnipresent force in every animal nervous system from the beginning of time up to the present day there's no exceptions okay now so the question is well what about the gurus that can do it well good for them they're freaks in nature i'm looking at one right now with their hair of course there's a few percentage of people that have you know really extraordinary self-discipline and can manage to consistently go against that call okay but aj will tell you that's no exception in other words if there's sort of richer food walking around her environment it starts to rattle her cage too and uh my good friend jennifer morano alan goldhamer's wife you know what was was really useful uh for us as we were talking through and writing the pleasure trap telling us about her internal experiences about all kinds of things okay cravings different times of the month you know it was actually really really interesting to have a a very bright you know self-aware lab rat that could talk and one of the things that she told us was the day when uh her her daughter brought home ice cream and stored it in the freezer down in the garage for a party that was going to be a few days later and and uh jennifer knew that it was there and she told us it was crossing her mind every 10 or 15 minutes for a week that was really interesting you're talking about someone who's highly disciplined who lives in a household where there's no junk food in the house okay and cooks healthy food every day long we'd sit at dinner you know i'd get i'd go go out in the morning i come up from my basement cave that i don't have me strapped into to write the book i'd come up there and there'd be oatmeal leftover i was always the last one up because i'm a late night in the late razor and so uh everybody else had eaten their oatmeal or long sense out working and i'd eat the oatmeal that was left and then there's leftovers around there for lunch and then there's uh jennifer's cooking uh dinner clean clean clean clean clean 365 days a year three times a day it's clean a thousand out of a thousand is what's going on in that house and that's what's going on in terms of jennifer murano's history and then suddenly the the teenage kidlet put some haagen-dazs ice cream in that freezer and it's just banging that stuff well let go of it okay it's like wow look at that okay well what is that it's not a lack of self-discipline stress emotional eating no it's opportunity and instinct is what's happening so even if there was something about you that made you particularly more susceptible to eating junky food or rich food when you were stressed it's not really relevant because the truth is that propensity is there all the time it's really not a relevant psychological question the reason we get these questions is people are both perplexed by why this is so difficult and they're embarrassed when they transgress okay and my attitude is don't be best embarrassed when you transgress don't look for bs psychological psychobabble excuses look for the fact that your environment intersected your instinct with opportunity and then you got into trouble so oh you're so stressed and then you ate the junk well what exactly did you do did you get in the car and drive six miles to the store or wherever it is and then go in there in the middle of the night in your pajamas and then buy a bunch of stuff you know you know be at the checkout stand shuffle through there wait for the other people get it all bagged come home open it up and then eat it the answer is no you didn't do that you went into the pantry okay well what's it doing in the pantry we've yeah we we now have solved the mystery uh i had a uh a guy i won't use his last name i think i can remember it but his name was doug that's why i remember him and he was in uh i worked of course in a maximum security prison with some of the most you know awful people in the world and this guy was one of the most awful people and to the great frustration of our staff this guy somehow what he had been caught for he was only behind bars for about seven years and we could see that he was going to get out and we're all hoping that somehow he would commit you know yet one more crime and wind up with a three-strike case and i hope he did okay he uh against you know some other poor inmate and the the the person survived it point is is that this is a bad guy and uh he said he had so many tattoos on his face it was hard to actually look him in the eyes because there's so many tattoos on him and uh that doesn't mean somebody with tattoos all over the face is necessarily bad i'm just giving you that creepy feeling that you had with uh robert de niro in cape fear okay that's the creepy feeling you got looking at this guy and one of my fellow psychologists made a comment and you know it doesn't translate well 15 years later but i'll never forget it he goes if doug h his last name if that guy gets out all he has to do is twitch and he's going to commit a felony it's like man did you just encapsulate the truth on that guy that guy twitches and it's a felony he's literally there's no way that guy goes 24 hours without committing a felony okay that's that's that nervous system that's a lot of us with around rich food if we twitch we don't need any big stress if we twitch we're going to commit a felony that's just happens okay so let's make sure that the felony isn't anywhere close to you because if you twitch we're gonna have a problem and then people then we wind up with wider issues uh like well i've got people in the house etc these are difficult challenges so uh but don't don't go looking for the solution in a place where all your life is de-stressed your life is going to be full of stress the very nature of life itself has a stressful processes that are constant and there are actually deep reasons why that's true so looking for a nirvana where everything is on an even keel where you don't feel uh stress time pressured or anything else like this is actually a place that doesn't exist um doesn't even exist in the shaolin temple by the way uh there are there are stress political issues time pressures performance pressures you know etc click issues there's stress in the shaolin temple folks so there's always going to be stress and uh the reason why it is that we struggle isn't because we are overstressed it's because we are over challenged by an environment that we weren't designed to handle okay and so uh to the extent that you personally struggle with this which is a uh basically 99 of people i don't know what people there is a huge percentage of people that are effectively helpless in the face of this this is uh this is too hard of a problem for the vast majority of human beings to solve so uh my my friends you know i kind of know that they know this that they partly don't know it so when we come to the colin campbells and the call walls and the john mcdougalls and the dean ornish's you know the when uh when they want to reach people and they want this message to get out and they feel this urgency to do so i i hope that they understand that they are inherently talking to a very small percentage of humanity i don't think a lot of times they think so i think a lot of times they think that in fact if people were to just learn this and we would teach it in school then you know we could really make a big change and we'd have a huge hand change in the health system and the environment because everybody would do things differently no they wouldn't okay no that that is a that is actually not possible and it's not possible because the environment has now been substantially radically altered to the point where the average member of the species is now has uh challenges behavioral management challenges that they cannot solve okay this is um uh this is the equivalent of a uh of a little kid put them on a little high bar you know uh to go across a little jungle gym and there's little kids that can get across there and there's all the kids to camp and so there's a lot of little kids you know i think i was probably one of those little kids mostly a long time i couldn't get across that bar so i'm dropping down in the sand oh well you can get it back back and try again uh but the but the truth is is that there are things that are beyond uh the average person's capacity to do uh that would be calculus for example so calculus is beyond the average mind so if you were to say well gee couldn't you could you teach them this if you started early enough no no you couldn't do it in other words the uh the average human mind the the concepts of calculus are beyond the average human mind to be able to grasp you have to be at a certain percentile level of native mathematical ability in order to grasp calculus that's not uh very few people can dunk a basketball okay so uh that's probably uh one percent of men at the peak of their fitness in this lifetime could ever dump a basketball on a ten foot hoop uh it might be one in two hundred uh but but it's that it's probably one in a hundred okay so there's nothing defective about the other 99 they just reached their limit it's a we put an environmental uh as challenge in front of those individuals and that there there's a limit and very few of those very few males can reach that limit we dream of reaching this limit we want to reach this limit we would love to reach this limit all irrelevant the truth is that the challenge is beyond the genetical capacity of 99 of males at the peak of their physical condition in this life they cannot dump a basket okay the uh in the same way the vast majority of human beings cannot stand up to the pleasure trap it doesn't matter how much you educate them doesn't matter how badly they want to get out of the budget trap doesn't matter how many times they try doesn't matter what miraculous educational process you give them it's not going to happen okay that's not jaded that is a psychologist with 40 years of clinical experience and a wealth of knowledge of behavioral capabilities inside of humans that understands this animal and understands what it's uh it's up against okay so those are challenges you will never designed to have to face and the fact that you struggle mightily with those things and try to figure out why you're deficient that is the the argument of the pleasure trap is that you are not deficient it is the environment that has gone undergone the monstrous change and is asking you to dunk a basketball and you may not have the chance to do it now the people that are listening to this audience are not in the middle of the bell curve on average we are we are obsessive fascinated curious nutrition interested and highly motivated okay what does that mean for us as a group it means that it's more than one percent to get there quite a few of you can get there okay but there are many of you who in order to get there just like there's an awful lot of young men there's a few women in the world that conduct a basketball but not many physiology but there's uh but there are uh there are a number of young men that could dunk a basketball if they really worked at it okay they're close okay and if they go to the weight room and they plan and they exercise and they get coaching and they go through a process that in other words maybe one percent can dunk a basketball now in their prime but if they really worked at it there might be three percent there might be some people that are really close but they don't typically optimize their potential okay that's what we're doing here so there's a certain percentage of people that can do this and we're trying to get the word out to people that to give everybody the opportunity to try and then furthermore once you are interested and you actually want to try we don't know how possible this is going to be for you so this is not this doesn't mean that you're broken any more than a young man who can't you know i would love to have dunked a basketball and so alan and i used to go to the grade schools where the baskets were on the eight feet and we just dunk on those back we'd just have a great time pretending we were dunking on a real basketball so it was fun and it's exciting but of course we could never dunk a basketball fair enough okay so we try so if you want to lose this weight you want to take over your health you want to get in control is it theoretically possible of course it's theoretically possible uh what are your circumstances then are you doing everything you can do to optimize the opportunity to do that okay um then then it's laid out before you and it's theoretically possible yeah it may not be actually possible because your personality uh and your circumstances may be such that that you know that you you never successfully string together an outstanding uh string and actually get this under your belt not easy okay no shame in trying okay no excuses about stress about when we stumble truth of the matter is this environment is dead set against you and it requires remarkable uh remarkable motivation a remarkable set of circumstances and remarkable personalities to pull this off not an easy thing to do and no there is no shame in playing basketball doing the very best you can and being the best player you can and still never dunking okay if you do a good job at this and you get this 80 and you wind up 30 pounds overweight you lost 30 and that's where you wind up and that's as good as you can do relative to your family your circumstances your personality your extroversion your openness your agreeableness if that's where you wind up that's where you wind up you made progress and you got you got to congratulate yourself for that um thank you for being the bearer of bad news but but telling the truth and i so appreciate you telling dr morano's story because i think about that all the time when people say well you know my husband brought into pizza and i couldn't resist it and i'm like well dr morano can't resist it either so you know environment environment environment and you know it's funny because you and dr goldhamer often sing the same tune because i remember once telling him how frustrated i was that people couldn't do it because i felt bad and he said just because not everybody can be in the nba doesn't mean we don't teach them how to play basketball and that we don't love it and we don't get a lot of benefit out of it okay i would say the vast majority of people that i ever saw go through the mcdougall program got some benefit okay not many they were able to adopt it with a high level of compliance where they wound up they lost all 50 pounds and they kept it off forever that is not typical that doesn't mean that a great deal of progress isn't made by a lot of people so you do the very best you can and when you slip and stumble uh focus most most carefully on the environmental factors that were associated with it rather than the intra-psychic factors that we are going to hypothesize okay that that's that's where my focus lies environment not intercepted that's super a super important distinction thank you uh susannah says great explanation of emotional eating i finally understand thank you dr lyle and hey they're better off trying than not doing anything i mean having some success is better than not having any i would imagine it could be a lot better it'd be a lot better do that yeah great thank you well here's a question from amanda i think she's watching live but she did submit it thank you why do women stop seeing their friends often once they get into a relationship is it due to personality evolution both or neither i notice that too like once a girlfriend gets a guy you never see her anymore well the the uh the truth of the matter is you're watching the cost benefit uh shift in the person's situation so uh that that would be like saying uh you know why did steve martin stop doing stand-up comedy after he started stop started doing movies the answer is he made an awful lot money more money on movies and he you liked he liked the result better fair enough okay so i think that uh obviously the a person's life when it comes to their time and energy this is a this is a fixed quantity so you're you only have so many hours and you only have so much energy and you only have so much satisfaction that is solved by social processes okay so social processes there are you know a few a few needs that are being met by social processes one of them when people quote get together with their friends what they're actually doing and they don't know that they're doing it is that they are reaffirming that they are a member of an insurance scheme that will protect them in case of tragedy now you don't realize that when you say hey you guys want to get together and shoot some pool on friday night you're not thinking consciously hey i'm going to get together with my buddies in in steve's garage and we're going to reaffirm that if the apocalypse happens we're all in it together and we're going to take out our shotguns and defend our street now you're not thinking that consciously at all but that's actually part of what is actually taking place there is we what attracts you to other people for social process is the reduction of anxiety of a low-grade anxiety that says i need to have insurance i need to have a village that i'm connected to that i'm in good standing with and by hanging out with friends and interacting with them we are getting a reduction of that anxiety as we get an affirmation that we are liked or loved and that therefore if uh big trouble breaks loose we are in a position to be defended by the resources of the pack now that sounds bizarre but that is absolutely what is what is an under that is the main underlying value that sits under friendships okay so we don't know that it's there but that is actually it's it's the tectonic plate upon which friendship moves now the uh the uh so so now when some a woman meets some guy you could you could argue the other thing from the other side how come when guys get together with a girl that's all they want to do is hang out with her and they don't want to hang off their buddies anymore same thing same situation exactly in other words your your social needs and cost benefit on a variety of relationships is simply being run through a cost benefit analysis and if it turns out this this girl basically is saying hey well now that i'm hanging with this guy i feel pretty safe okay so i don't need to go to the cost of going to all my my girlfriends and hanging out with them to get my little ticket punched that i'm going to be under secure circumstances because i actually feel like i'm under very secure circumstances okay so i feel like i'm really valuable to this guy and this guy affords a great deal of protection and he's got an extended coalition that i found out about call his family and his brothers or his friends etc and i've met them and we don't hang out with them much but i'm under his protection and he has a he has a an insurance scheme already in place and therefore you know uh i can now hang out with him and why am i hanging out with him because he's more interesting and uh has some extra bells and whistles that you guys don't have there you go so rather than sort of uh i've heard this kind of talk ever since i was a kid obviously we've all heard it as some kind of lamenting pathology and misinvestment of the female that somehow she somehow gets cornered or bamboozled or socially conditioned or some some other bizarre explanation loses her identity uh all this kind of thing about why it is she just hangs out with her boyfriend and no longer with her friends and just abandons her friends now she's just running an evolutionarily sensible cost-benefit analysis on her time and energy that's all and so and and he and everybody else and all such circumstances is always doing the same thing so the uh in the same way that that um if you if you make a new friend and that new friend is actually in principle a better insurance policy than your old friend then you will find that you very may well start to spend more time with a new friend than the old friend okay that is a cost-benefit analytic you know situation so uh yeah entertainingly you know about four or five years ago i was uh as i was getting to know dr jen park and i was for those of you that have ever listened to her it's a uh she's an intellectual roller coaster okay so there are uh or it might be it's it's like the talking to her is like being in a lamborghini without a windshield you know driving around actually better behind your toes because she just said three things in a row and i'm still processing the first thing i'm not sure i understand the vocabulary the second thing and the third thing she says i'm gonna have to come back and ask her later because i lost it that's what it's like but it's very exciting if you can manage to keep up which a lot of times i can manage to keep up for a little while the that displaced some other conversations with some friends that that i had and i remember uh telling jen i was flattering her i said hey listen i only have 100 000 hours left to live but you know my god you you know you're going to get a few hundred and she goes oh i'm gonna get a lot more yeah and it turns out she was right like her her intuition about how valuable i would find talking to her was better than mine okay as far as i was concerned she was uh upstart upstart kid you know what i mean just getting her degree done and smart and everything but hey i got i got basketball conversations to have you know alan and i got a lot of shooting to do well it turns out al and i have a little less to do and i got a little bit more a lamborghini driving to do with jen hawk so that's that's life we we shift and and move our resources around according to our own unconscious calculations as to what's actually in our sum total best interest uh and there's no shame in that either and there's no pathology in it great thank you so much um a question from keisha can you ask dr doug lyle how do you keep a happy marriage if you can't get any sleep because your husband snores when i try to shake the bed to wake him he gets angry so i go into the spare bedroom which is an uncomfortable bed and sleep and he still was angry i'm pretty sure going to a specialist is out of the question i tried earplugs but got bad ear infections and still haven't fully recovered i don't know what else to do boy you know uh that's it that's a really good question and and so they were we're getting cornered by a bunch of a bunch of uh seemingly constraints so for example we may be constrained by his personality that somehow he's offended uh which is too bad you know what i mean uh the uh one one thing sometimes people that are snorers actually don't know what it's like to be in their presence so i would record it uh i would record it and feed it back to him so he knows just what it's like to be lying next to him uh that that might be a useful uh strategy to say this is why i go into into the other room uh this is what i'm not being unfriendly but this is what it is that i'm putting up with and so that might be useful the another thing is um uh whatever it is that's causing his snoring problem it is possible it could be repaired okay so he should be talking to an ear nose throat specialist whoever the best person is on that dimension some people that snoring is it isn't path and mnemonic for big trouble in other words we're not sure he has any significant trouble but he said increase likely risk for sleep apnea ultimately as the architecture of his throat may be built in such a way that is you know just like a bulldog or a breed that should never exist by the way because these poor little things can't breathe uh very well i mean they people may think their throats are cute uh but they are but the these poor little things struggle mightily because they're in a natural breed and as a result they have huge percentage of sleep apnea it's a rough life to be a bulldog the um it's a rough life to be a human that may not be able to sleep cleanly and breathe effectively in their sleep and of course it could be that the person also has you know a lousy diet it's inflammatory therefore it turns out that their their apnea or their snoring is worse than it would otherwise be possible maybe they're motivated maybe they're not i.e we start running into our slam dunk constraint so that's another issue but perhaps they might actually be motivated and so i would talk to uh an ent person your guy may not be motivated until he hears himself okay uh but the uh but that an ent person might actually be able to to look at however severe the condition is and say listen we have a procedure that might actually help you okay so sometimes people there are surgical procedures tonsil removal there are things like this that actually it may be worth it and you have to look at you know everybody needs to look at the cost benefit uh of what such solutions might look at so yeah i understand you've we have a problem with reality uh reality level number one which is that he has a problem with his with his breathing at night we have a reality problem number two is his personality okay so or his his attitude towards the situation so the whether that attitude is firmly based on just a disagreeable personality or whether or not it's based on a lack of knowledge and a misunderstanding of what would be fair that is a whole different thing that's why we might use a recording for feedback because someone who is inherently fair but just doesn't understand the situation may suddenly have a very different attitude about not only the magnitude of the problem but what your necessary fix would be which is that i can't sleep in the same room with you i know many husbands and wives who have who are still attracted to each other and are still intimate with each other they can't sleep in the same room uh for ex for not only this reason but for other reasons as well some people are are are such that they don't like to be they don't like to sleep with another person makes them uncomfortable uh and so these are these are things to approach sort of as rationally and as dysfunctionally and as openly as possible in a problem-solving mode and but if we run into a personality we run into a personality okay and then that person can't dunk on this problem it means this is the problem that it constrains uh this person's life experience if they can't manage to maneuver around it so uh depending upon what that situation looks like after you think about those things you may want to arrange a consult with me to talk over any any strategies if you feel like what you're really running into is a personality problem and you're not sure how it is that you might best navigate it because that could be tricky and it might require some individual uh a lot of individual detail for me in order to strategize my way around a disagreeable personality okay all right i love that strategize your way around a disagreeable personality that's a book we need to have written by you perfect best uh safar says excuse me i did a program for a book called overcoming overeating about 11 years ago help me let go of diet mentality and to stop overeating binge eating and compulsive eating almost overnight in doing the program there was a possibility that you would gain weight which i did a side bonus was that i enjoyed not receiving as much attention from men and quote felt safe unquote that i was no longer part of the disgusting gawking and reactions that i saw men doing to other women after a year or so i lost the weight somewhat effortlessly something i've noticed is that i keep gaining back some of it i'll lose weight start attracting more male attention start feeling frisky get my feelings hurt by some man and then gain the weight back not as much as i had gained initially from the program but i will put on weight that may have slipped off sometimes without me even trying why do i keep gaining back weight that seems to be triggered by a negative outcome with a man even though being larger is painful for me on many levels it also seems like a safe haven ineffective yet still i would add in the negative feedback i get from women when i am slimmer and smaller is painful too but you've touched on that many times and why that is thanks for all you do yeah women are brutal when you lose weight we could have a whole show on that yeah this is it this is once again a um uh this is a very popular psychodynamic explanation as to why it is that people struggle with their weight in other words oh you must be protecting yourself to protect yourself against sexual process no i don't think so i think that that in order to stay on a very healthy track on a very narrow line it requires uh really remarkable motivation a remarkable motivation a remarkable personality and so this is a this is dunking a basketball okay it is uh it is very it is difficult to do and is not often accomplished now so now it turns out that we reduce that motivation by a hair okay so now we're not quite as motivated so let's suppose there's some girl in town and i'm some you know 17 year old in a small high school and there's some girl i'm really interested in impressing and i'm i'm an athlete that just might be able to dunk a basketball and so i'm working like crazy trying to figure out a dunk bad basketball and i'm working at it and i'm working at it and actually i can actually do it a few times under just the right conditions and i'm hoping that i'm going to get a condition in front of the high school you know in a game in our little small town you know if i can just get that done then my goodness i might impress this girl i might get a date okay so now i'm highly motivated to make the to to do things as well as i can possibly do them for a positive outcome now it turns out that the girl's dad gets a new job in indianapolis when they move away now there's nobody in a little tiny high school i'm interested in now how motivated am i not as motivated okay so i'm not going to continue to make the difficult choices to actually keep on a straight and arrow uh so therefore i slip away that is actually what's transpiring here so that notice how different that is than a more a more evil and exciting looking freudian explanation that says ooh i don't want attention from men because it's so uncomfortable so let me eat and get fatter so that it reduces ludicrous absolutely no way no all that's happening is is that if it if it does make you uncomfortable and more anxious to be thinner under and under more attention then you still like a lot of that attention don't tell me you don't okay it's just that your motivation is reduced by the fact that there's some downside okay every celebrity finds this out they find out that when they hit great celebrity they love that celebrity that's one of the reasons they do it okay that's why they climb some mountain to get to wherever it is that they got to then they find out there's a downside it's like oh man what a hassle okay not that i've ever had the hassle but the point is is that you you can understand that it would be hassle there are downsides to this as well as the upsides okay and so there therefore you can see that there's mixed there can be mixed motivation so that's what you're observing here is you're you're not observing some fantastical self-destructive motivation you're just you're observing a reduction of the exquisite intense unbelievably rare set of motivational processes and self-discipline that it would take to be successful with this if you twitch it just a little bit you're gonna commit a felony okay and that's that's what's actually transpiring very good question and i'm glad i got a chance to answer uh answer it from someone who's lived it and uh and potentially slipping into a misunderstanding of herself and uh and a very very reasonable misunderstanding by the way uh but that's but but hopefully that clarifies what my uh what my hypothesis would be great thanks dr we have lots of questions in the chat about dying hair and psych drugs but i do always go to the submitted ones first of which we have two left one is on calorie density one is on regret do you have any options of which you'd prefer oh just go let's try to get involved okay so the first one on calorie density is from kim and she says so the idea is to have ample food which is naturally less calorie dense than the processed junk food most have become addicted to i can grasp that can you please explain to me is the idea that we stay in a permanent calorie deficit or is it the combination of high water high fiber natural foods helping in giving us the ability to eat ample calories at a maintenance level and also maintain a slender body effortlessly so long as we are eating behind the red line or am i just overthinking the whole thing i'm concerned that due to many years of being in a calorie deficit i may have damaged my metabolism and need to reverse diet out of this as i'm finding that i am now starving all the time and my weight loss has plateaued would appreciate any advice from anyone yeah of course we don't know all the details uh of this situation so there's there's too many so let me just tell you in principle and i'll answer it in principle um first of all i hear one thing and and this is partly partly because you folks are are in aj's group and aj uh is extremely fastidious and very careful because she's one of these rare motivated people that intends to dunk as long as she can okay but remember you don't need to eat everything to the left of the red line the red line is what the fulcrum is or the average calorie density of the diet that we don't want to go over so wherever ages got that line and there's some people that have hypothesized about mine and said 560 calories a pound and urban pond sort of thing sits at 700. nobody knows okay and the uh but what we do knows something like that so let's just suppose i think a in a very in a very uh reasonable gas let's call it 500 calories a pound 500 calories a pound to me is is not a particularly draconian lean diet in other words if uh so if i were to eat a pound of salad a day and a pound of fruit a day and a pound of cooked vegetables a day and a pound of starch a day that that would be starch should be 400 the fruit would be 300 vegetables would be 200 and the salad would be one heaven so what is that four three two one that's 10 right divided by 4 pounds 250 calories a pound whoa that's not dense enough okay we're we've eaten a thousand calories we'd have to eat eight pounds of that we'd have to be two pounds a piece of those and 88 pounds of food a day in order to get a couple of thousand calories which would be a reasonable amount that is a so we ate everything left at the red line but look what we did we've eaten a diet that's way way low in terms of calorie density so we're eating massive amounts of food so we we want to we want to look at that thing and eyeball it more reasonably uh and you know probably head more closer to 500 calories now the uh i can't remember exactly what the question is from running all over the place but the answer is the problem that that we're not trying to the the idea is that that if you are already overweight there are homeostatic drive systems that don't want you to be overweight the only reason you're overweight isn't because you've eaten too much food is that the diet that you've eaten is unnaturally rich in terms of its calorie density and therefore you're over fat okay if we get the diet back down to our natural history 500 calories a pound or so if we do that the body will naturally regulate its way down we don't have to be in a quote starvation mode or a deprived mode at all so when aj for 27 months dropped 54 pounds she was not attempting to quote lose weight by eating less than she wanted well entire point was to eat to satiety consistently and not and not be and then in my attitude as hey i don't remember the conversations exactly but the attitude is hey it lands where it lands i don't know where it's going to land i don't know if it lands 135 pounds or 145 pounds 125 pounds i had no idea that it was going to land us in the teens i didn't have a clue okay all i knew is that hey it'll land wherever it lands and so what we want to be doing is just eating and uh what to the modern world is an extremely lean diet modern world they're eating a thousand calories a pound because they're eating a bunch of super rich unnaturally rich food including for example a peanut butter sandwich you know peanut butter sandwich trees in nature uh you say well what about if it's aren't there ezekiel bread peanut butter sandwiches in nature no and a peanut butter sandwich is about 2 000 calories a pound which is two and a half times the calorie density of steak okay and the steak that you even get today is higher in calorie density than than any kind of wild game would have been 10 000 years ago so the point is is that we do not uh we don't want people to be in any kind of semi-starvation state at all uh we want them to be eating intermediate level calorie density at satiety in other words don't try to be quote pushing your self away from the table and eating less and just let this thing go wherever it goes and wherever it goes is where it goes and if it turns out that happens to wind up you know 30 pounds overweight then we've got a conversation to have about why that is and it was that that's an interesting thing that's happening to you uh that is relatively unusual maybe not super unusual but relatively unusual in other words so sometimes uh we find out that person is actually really eating 700 calories a pound and we need to move them to six okay and the difference between being at 700 calories a pound which you could have a healthy diet at 700 but it may turn out that with your biology and your age and your gender uh and your activity level that it turns out that 700 calories a pound lands you 30 pounds overweight but 600 calories a pound literally leaves you no pounds overweight and that may be the difference okay so the calorie density issue is about getting the calorie density to a level that allows you to eat comfortably without worrying about counting and fretting and and dieting and then letting this thing letting this ship go wherever it goes that's the idea okay all right one last one one last question from melissa and guys if you want your questions answered please consider having a private consultation i'll put the link in the show notes below or send your questions in advance and if dr lau comes back next month we'll get to them can you ask dr lyle how to live without regret and not dwell on things i still think about decisions i made long ago and others that aren't so long ago that are inconsequential and i would like to learn how to move on i'm still obsessing about this great i got on a college test that wasn't fair and my conversa i mean like it's like 40 years and i'm still doing that he gave me a b and i didn't deserve it yeah i'm afraid if that's what's going on you you have an obsessive nut chip and there's nothing we can do about it to the best of my knowledge the uh the there there may be some kind of bag of tricks that some cbd therapists have tried to figure out over the years and maybe they are useful i know that uh occasionally i'll get a little uh music in my head and it will rattle around and i can't get it out of my head and so i will actually consciously and deliberately have to shift uh shift the song that's in my head there's something about the the other song that's just a little too catchy and i may not even like it you know it's but it but it won't stop the the the mechanism won't let it go and i have to actually con you know directly shift shift it off of there and maybe even play other music to shift it off so i think those are the kinds of things we can do for some of those things sometimes uh depending upon what we are being bothered by the the reasoning is different there's actually a there's a principle or there's a loss that has taken place and we actually haven't quite identified the reasons that for the loss and we're not sure whether or not we have some responsibility and so our mind is actually got an open loop as it searches for a principle and won't let it go it keeps thinking it may be profitable to figure it out so sometimes people have made a decision and that decision uh you know resulted in the substantial loss of some kind and they are rattling around still in there still in their noggin 20 years later and it and taking up a non-trivial amount of time and energy that's a that's what i call an open loop and sometimes you need uh you know consultation with somebody like myself or jen that can actually help us reason down through what is your brain searching for you know what because it's feeling vulnerable that it could make the same mistake again because it can't figure out why why the mistake was made and so it's a very interesting process and and i have been able to close you know quite a few open loops on people over the years uh where that's happened but aj's thing with that grade you know we've just got we just got a student that's like all bent out of shape and here we are that there there are folks that are that are in inherent spinners okay and uh that their mind is built to continue to go back over things looking for this would be the same kind of mind that would fold napkins super precisely in other words in other words let's make sure we get everything right you can imagine if there's been some moderate loss the bat mind can't quite exactly figure out what all the parameters were it's the same process as something that is obviously an open loop with a more normal folk but it's actually happening more often because we're we're looking at somebody that's at the upper reaches of the bell curve for that kind of obsessive characteristic so i've got turns out i'm surrounded by these people in my life [Laughter] so the uh i have not been able to help them particularly so such as life that's so funny because i am a spinner and my favorite musical group is the spinners coincidentally so this has been so much fun dr lyle thank you so much and we are we we don't have any backlog now so if you come back again we can start with a fresh group of questions fantastic great aj thanks for having me as always it's always a pleasure and thanks all of you for watching another episode of chef aj live please come back tomorrow when my guest is ms fit vegan jeanette dinofrio and she'll be doing a cooking demo happy new year dr lyle take care
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