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Chef AJ: Anorexia, Regifting, Embarrassment About Weight | QA with Dr Doug Lisle Dr Jen Howk
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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 my guests today are very popular features on chef aj live they try to come on at least once a month when they're available they are the dynamic duo the co-stars of the beat your jeans podcast which airs wednesday night at 8 30 p.m pacific time on itunes block talk radio lots of places actually and they're writing a long awaited book together i hear there's a title in the works but we're not allowed to know it yet but hopefully that'll come out very soon and they have a wonderful website steamdynamics.com where for the cost of a cup of coffee you could become a member and get privy to exclusive content and q and a's please welcome them to the show dr doug live and dr jen hawk it's always great to see you guys yo it's great to be here how are you i'm good you're so nice jen i mean dr hawk sorry jen is fine okay well i try to i mean because i called dr lyle doug in real life but i feel like you know when you go now no no no no it's all good okay sometimes we call him ddl though that's like his acronym doctor i know i call him that if i have to make a note in my calendar that's how i always represents gdl yep how are you today dr lyle good all is well great well so we have some questions actually eight that have been submitted in advance and you know if you're watching live and you have a question know that both of these fine doctors do private consultations but we do give preference to people that took the time to write it out in advance so uh we have a variety of topics but i'll start with this one and i didn't get the ladies permission to say her name so it's better to say anonymous and then you know than not so she says my question is around dating while eating a whole food plant-based diet i'm 5'5 inches tall and 125 pounds so my weight is not a problem and it's easy to get dates using the swipey apps however eating out is far from ideal i have to try to plan around the dinner and if i eat sufficiently beforehand my stomach sticks out and looking knocked off is not going to attract any high quality mates if i try to eat after the date it tends to be really late and now vegetables aren't as appetizing i'm trying to go on two to three dinner dates per week and this is messing with me both mentally and from maintaining compliance on this program luckily the following day i bounce back and stick to the food plan so i haven't put weight on under these circumstances in the past couple months but the whole process is stressful and i'd appreciate any advice so i don't die alone but stakes are probably not that high yeah i don't know who who wants to take this one doug yeah i mean i can say a couple of things we can both jump in probably i i would say this this sounds like somebody who listens to us regularly there are a couple of cues in this question um that i i have a i have a hint that this is somebody who knows us and so kind of familiar with a lot of what we talk about um and one of the rules here it sort of depends on what you're up to what your dating agenda is so if you're looking for a parabond i don't think there's any great harm in flying your freak flag early and often with this kind of thing and so if you're gonna go out to dinner with this person and you're considering them for a serious pair bond go ahead and signal that you you're a little bit of a weirdo when it comes to your dietary preferences and you're gonna do the best you can at the restaurant and you haven't had anything to eat beforehand or you didn't eat so much that you're you're feeling unattractive when you go out that's a whole other separate situation we can we can tackle that separately um but uh i would just you know go in hungry ready to have dinner on it on a date and and do the best you can with what's available on that menu and if that requires a little bit of a conversation like hey by the way i'm sort of a weirdo and i eat a little abnormally so i'm going to make some demands on this menu here and he can't deal with it too bad he doesn't qualify for pair bond anyway if you're if you're seeking casual mating the strategy is a little bit different um and we we could talk about that but i don't get the sense that that's what's going on i think it's it's really just about coming to terms with making your requirements clear pretty early in the process it's going to save you a lot of heartache and a lot of trouble and if he if it's too much for him then he's not not enough man for you it's sort of where i would come down on that nice yeah i can't imagine like at this stage in my life if i had to deal with that with my diet the way it is i just don't i was just a junk food vegan when i was dating and that nobody cared about that yeah i mean i found in my own experience with this that they you're going to have huge individual variation with how they respond and actually tells you a lot about the guy with how he responds and so if he if this is a deal breaker and he gets all fussy and and particular and and calls you a diva for this kind of thing he's probably not going to be a great match on a lot of other things um and so i found mostly that what you know when i would declare this sort of thing ahead of time and you don't even really have to do it ahead of time i mean i guess that has some bearing on the restaurant of choice um but uh they would go to great lengths to try to accommodate and and would feel if anything sort of bad that they weren't eating the way i was eating and it was like no no it's really it's not about you i'm just sort of really unusual this is just one of my weird quirks you know i'm just a quirky girl um and too bad you just like let let him feel i'm i get very disagreeable on this topic that's like yeah she does totally reasonable no totally reasonable you're you're in uh so uh if you're getting three dates a week you you obviously are a very attractive person you're in a position of power use it you know uh the uh john wooden uh used to say when he was uh trying to tell coaches hey you've got a bench use it you got some star player that's being a pain in the ass put him on the bench okay so you have a tool and that tool is that uh if if you are sufficiently attractive to a given guy that you are interested in and you're interesting enough to be a to be a serious parabon player for him you've got a tremendous amount of power so in no way do you need to uh back off and fiddle around and just be deceptive or anything else no exactly that's ex i i concur 100 with jen go straight at it relaxed and in a you know pleasant fashion and forget about it this is no issue just do it your way yeah do you think that people that are vegan especially for ethical reasons and non-vegans ever make an ultimate love match because the reason i'm asking is because you see the questions in our group that i ask later on where there's so much dissension because of differing way of eating not sure say that question say your question again aj what well when some people become vegan for different reasons now it's more there's often environmental reasons or health reasons but back in the day it was really were vegan for ethical reasons that was the only thing we knew about and in the group that i run that you often speak in we see so much dissension in marriages for people that eat differently and they wish that their spouse would eat differently and i'm just wondering can can a mixed marriage like that ultimately be successful oh yeah i think that's that's cool like i mean go go ahead doug yeah there's no uh this is uh this is not a central issue the central issue is is the nature of the personalities so one of the things that um that jen and i have come to realize i think is a is actually a revolutionary idea in psychology i don't i don't believe that i've ever seen anybody write about this but we we are and will and that is uh the fact that personalities are genetic is known so that's widely known among elite people in behavior genetics and we try to share that here so you're not changing your child's personalities by you know whether or not you're drinking in front of them or whether or not you know you yell at them or whether or not they there's bad kids in the neighborhood or anything else turns out that you know things are pleasant and unpleasant in your development but it's not influencing the personality the so when two people meet and there's a romantic process the those two people are genetically fixed their personalities were genetically fixed at conception okay and so 32 years later they're still genetically fixed the uh people will talk about how oh no i changed over time no actually your circumstances changed you didn't change particularly so your uh that's a longer discussion about how modifiable humans are but their personalities are actually not modifiable so therefore it's going to turn out that a relationship between two people is genetically determined okay now that is a new idea so in fact the relationship is genetic okay so now we get to the heart of the issue so the relationship and its dynamics are not about issues like whether you eat animal food or don't eat animal food it's about the dynamics between the two individual personalities and so if you have a personality that is unyielding on that issue in other words they feel so strongly and the other person absolutely doesn't and they don't find the other person sufficiently interesting or valuable or attractive in order to uh in in order to accommodate uh go through some moderately uncomfortable accommodations then you have an inherently conflicted situation so uh i i wouldn't actually and to everybody's different it would not bother me to live with somebody who eat animal food wouldn't i mean it wouldn't uh it doesn't it doesn't hit me in the same way that it probably hits jen i know jen's got a bigger uh animal rights ethical chip than i do uh it doesn't it isn't that i'm not concerned and sensitive to animal rights issues i just don't have the same level of militancy that's an individual personal genetic phenomenon okay and so as a result wouldn't be any problem okay so the uh if a person had a problem with me and doing what i was doing they're absolutely going to be ruled out just because what i'm doing is totally rational sensible it's integrating what it is that i think is valuable for my own personal best interest you know and uh and if they don't want to do that or they have different standards in other words it's not whether you're this way or that way it's always a matter of a continuum okay there's a few people that are anchoring down the 99 plus percentile on the healthy living continuum but actually the vast majority of people that i know are anchoring down the top 10 10 that's what they do when they're serious and they care about this and it means a lot to them they're in the top 10 percentile that's what they are they're not they're not absolutists okay there are a few people but they're rare they're rare and individuals and i wouldn't even dream of trying to find a life partner among one of those rare individuals that that would be a ludicrous i'm not one of those rare individuals so as a result all i'm trying to do is to find someone that finds me interesting and is respectful of that and i will if i find them sufficiently interesting this is not a deal-breaking thing for me that it might be for somebody else why genetic okay so if people are finding a conflict in their relationship you know 16 years later when mary bell figures out that she's an ethical vegan and ginny is not and now they're betting heads they're not betting heads over this issue they're betting heads over inherent personality conflicts that exist in the relationship per se so that's what the the this conflict literally uh as john wooden says the game doesn't build character it reveals it that's that's how that goes so then if somebody is a ethical vegan they should maybe just ate vegans because then they won't have this situation say that again if somebody truly was like a linda middlesworth then they should probably just date vegans so they don't have to deal with this right because probably linda uh is not someone who has the same kind of natural flexibility on this issue that i do and i don't know the genders i think just i don't that'll deal breaker for me um and and so another another genetic piece of the game here too is that uh you know for me a lot of it is discussed it's sort of i i am so i'm like i'm motivated by ethics and so if if somebody uh you know motivated my health too but it's mostly rooted in ethics and i'm not having anything to do with eating animals and if somebody's you know eating animals around me we have a real kind of moral ethical difference in our approaches like what we value same reason i would have trouble dating someone with wildly different politics or wildly different hobbies you know it's just you're not on the same page with what's important in life um but the other big piece is that women are much more um beholden to feelings of disgust for for really valid reasons throughout evolution we're much more susceptible to infection we're much more susceptible to infection during certain phases of our cycle so you can present us with the same disgusting phenomenon at different points in our cycle and we'll be more disgusted in our ludial phase in our follicular phase um and so it is that it can be much more of a deal breaker for women than it is for men and i think that's pretty common if if you're if you have a deep aversion to a certain type of eating you you can't cohabitate with that type of eating fair enough um it limits your pool and that kind of sucks and it makes a difficult process even more difficult but not impossible right i remember i met charles over 30 years ago and i had already been vegan for such a long time and i said you know if you want to eat meat then you eat meat but the house is vegan the wedding's vegan if there's kids they're vegan and you know after a while you know how guys are it's just like they go i mean at least he did because i'm making the food what's you know it's what's he gonna do break out the grill so but you know elizabeth who's watching live says but being vegan it's not easy to date any suggestions hey it's not easy to date period so yeah yeah not a uh this is you know actually being vegan is a is a it could be an ethical flag which is an important thing and you can't get you can't run away from that or it's a health conscientiousness flag which is also fine uh in other words if you're as jen says if you're leading with that and we're and we're leading with it any cross-examination is about it is about you know a hypothesis about uh health you know health conscientiousness and you know i don't uh i can remember a couple of arguments i got into on a couple of dates but i can tell you why because i wasn't that interested anyway so if i got cross-examined and then i started to share a little truth and then i i remember getting pushed back on that and thinking you know what i'd rather win the argument to get a second date so that's how that works [Music] that tells you something very important about how that evening is going to go yeah yeah but trust me if i was more interested i would have been a lot more flexible so well that's the this is the key point for women in particular to understand so let's put on our little evolutionary psychology hats like if the guy is not willing to meet you where you are and accommodate you it means he is not you know the language that we use over rewarded by you and you want that male to be over rewarded by you i.e he can't believe he's on a date with you he's so excited about you you've got a lot of room for error you're not trying to to prove your value to him in the same way that he's trying to prove it to you from an evolutionary perspective so this is only going to be a successful stable pair bond from the beginning if he's really really really excited to be on that date and that means he's going to have more just like you would if you were in that situation you would move closer to you know hit what you perceived as his demands of your behavior so if he's not showing any willingness to accommodate you and to say okay do whatever you want to do i'm not going to be shitty about it then you're signing up for a world of hurt with this relationship and it's probably not going to be a stable pair find in the long term right a lot of people are commenting in the chat how they find it's not appealing or even disgusting kissing somebody that eats meat yeah meat mouth yeah yeah total deal breaker for me and it really sucks to be a deal breaker um but it's it's it it is what it is and if that's the situation then just accept it and accept that your pool has been limited and that that's just that's how life is most people have some sort of deal breaker that limits their pool so this is what yours is nice well here's kind of a fun question i've always wondered this myself especially living in la my whole life being exposed to this it's from rose and she said i've always despised my birth name my parents gave me a bizarre and made-up name that was impossible to spell and even more impossible to pronounce at 18 when i became an adult i had it legally changed to rose why do parents torture their offspring like this narcissism true yeah the uh the just some some uh grandstanding on the part of the parent the uh or you know it doesn't wouldn't have to be narcissism it could also just be weirdness in some way so i have a a friend who was given a an acronym for a name and it was a very interesting one and um really smart guy neat guy his dad was a smart guy but definitely asperger's like and so so behind that we got barwick uh back your reason with equal courage oh christ [Laughter] i wouldn't name a cat that does there you go so uh yeah i mean my my parents i mean my my sort of hippie birth name is guinevere i've got this crazy hippie name and it's not because they were narcissists because they had you know really just particular circuits that were enchanted by certain mythological tales and you know is his personality um but when you're when you're purposely giving your child some kind of inscrutable name that everybody for the rest of their life is going to screw up and it's not rooted in some kind of you know real strong interest or religion or there's there's no good reason for it then you're just looking at uh the the parent trying to feel more important because people are going to have to ask them about the name a lot interesting cool thank you so this is from natalie what would be the most effective way to help our smart beautiful headstrong 28 year old daughter deal with her eating disorder it's heartbreaking to watch this and we want to support her in the best way we can she has a bmi of 15. she feels amazing and is able to work efficiently and says she is thinking clearly and has never felt better she only drinks lots and lots of fruit juice eats fruit in a little salad and claims anything else makes her feel tired and slows her down when she cooks for her husband she will taste the food but discreetly spits it out what is our best approach or do you have plant-based eating disorders professionals you can recommend many thanks for your guidance um uh for for this question i would uh i would recommend either talking to me or jen and so the uh there is there's some definite logic that can be super interesting for people to learn uh if they don't want to talk to us because they don't like the plant-based this and that dance they want to talk to dr shan geisinger that's g-u-i-s-i-n-g-e-r and she's a woman super knowledgeable in eating disorders we we have great respect for for shan and her work we think it's path breaking and pioneering however i uh think that there you can improve upon what she does by integrating it with really healthy health nutrition uh healthy nutrition which you know can't know everything and shan's not knowledgeable in the mcdougall gold hammer furman you know uh esselstyn campbell genre so she just she doesn't know about that stuff so but she absolutely knows the psychology of this so if the daughter is not into plant-based nutrition and you know finds that already offensive and intrusive then i would i would send her to shan geisinger's website and have her um have her look at it because the the reasons for that anorexia are fascinating and uh and so we will we'll leave it there if it was binge eating i would send her to justina freeze uh who's gonna be on she's on with aj on saturday saturday justine is on the show saturday so uh so anyway but that's that's how i think i think that's about right if you're the parent there you could read read uh shane geisinger's work on her website and then don't push it hard don't sell these things too hard you you suggest to your daughter this looks kind of interesting i thought you might you might might be worth a few minutes of your time to look at it okay try to gently put it under people's nose you don't try to jump up and down okay uh but shane geisinger i believe has diagnosed the underlying roots of anorexia and so the the girl is in a trap it's a very fascinating and um incredible uh trap and once you see it it can be it can be helpful for people once they understand what the trap is uh it can it can be helpful to steal their courage to uh to move move against what is in fact a fascinating and self-destructive instinct i went to the website and i see are the biological changes of anorexia adaptations or dysfunctions yeah yeah yeah you'll you'll probably hear some about this from justina maybe this weekend but but yeah these are these are adaptive mechanisms and so anorexia nervosa is the tripping of an adaptive mechanism which is a revolutionary idea it's clearly accurate and the um this is this is a completely different thinking than you're going to see anywhere in anorexia treatment so some anorexia treatment uh works without knowing why it works which often happens so in the history of science and engineering people figure out could they just do things and sometimes it works and they have no idea why the um immunology for god's sakes so the uh so anyway but this is uh now no a better understanding of the mechanics of why this problem exists is there and i think it will be helpful even for the parents to understand what the what situation the daughter's actually in great thank you maybe i can interview her sometime i know that this particular individual is an ethical vegan so that's kind of interesting thank you and i know the lady that wrote the question knows both of you and likes you very much but wasn't sure if that was your terrain so thanks okay and this is a funny one from barry a company keeps making mistakes with my reward points i've already redeemed them and i've called them and emailed them several times to tell them it's a mistake but they don't rectify it should i just spend the points i'm highly conscientious and afraid i'd feel guilty oh they gave you extra points yeah just spend the point yeah there's a there's a way you know in the in the monopoly game the famous card is bank error in your favor collect 200 that's not going to happen because they've got computer situations so the uh nobody you know they might have miscounted in the old days the window but that's not going to happen the um however you have to understand that that there is a limited amount of accuracy in the world's processes and so there is an inherent degree of error and so you're you're occasionally you're going to occasionally be on the winning side uh you're going to be occasionally on the losing side of these sorts of things so when you're ever on the winning side if it was a little person with their little store i would i would definitely return it and really doubt but if it's you know costco different story particularly now that he's done his due diligence he tried you know yes but yeah no i i don't see that i would i would beat your genes by overcoming your intense conscientiousness here and just uh chalk it up to good earning some good karma somewhere along the way nice i know that when a bank makes a mistake though and they do find it they make you pay it back yeah and and so that might be part of the concern i think that's unlikely to happen and even even if it is then you've got a really good case that it's like well i you know i cried like what do you want from me i don't think they're going to extort kashmir in the you know afterwards actually probably in the last 20 years i've probably uh i've probably been involved in maybe five exchanges where there was an error in the change uh where i was benefiting yeah or even when i was when it was wrong the other way that was trivial and yeah so a few times you know in my early life i would point this out and finally at some point by the time i was about 40 it's like you know what they're not actually happy about me pointing it out yeah like i'm i.e hey stupid you gave me you know you gave me a dollar too much it's like so now i just forget it this is this is the instacart rule so if you if you order from instacart or grocery delivery you know some percentage of the time they screw up your order you know they they don't they like where are my apples my apples aren't in the like you charged me for them um but then some percentage of the time you you get a bonus they just give you something that you didn't order or they they don't uh charge you for something that they wound up getting that was on your list and so it all seems to balance out and the grand calculus of the universe and so i just that's it's a long game you know about 20 years ago i found three hundred dollars three one hundred dollar bills on a street where i was i was a professional dog walker and i was really elated because i was really needing money at that time but i felt so guilty i literally knocked on every single door i didn't say did you lose 300 cash but i said did you lose something significant and so what it was you know what was it and and nobody did so i felt okay taking it there you go yeah i had to knock on every single door on that one stream because i kept thinking well what if it was the gardener and then he couldn't pay his rent and see my first impulse if i found that much money on the sidewalk was that i was being secretly filmed by some social psychology grad student trying to figure out what i was going to do that is so funny this is a little controversial so if you don't want to and ask it i mean answer it don't but it's it'd be interesting to hear your answer this is from coach bill dear doctors do you feel that it's fair for transgender women to compete in women's athletics if so then is it no longer women's athletic i'm a retired college tennis coach and i'm so glad i don't have to deal with this no i don't think it's fair in other words i i don't think if by that we mean a person who was male and now gets transformed biologically and is now female competing in females athletics now it's absolutely unfair it's ridiculous and it should absolutely be banned it's uh this is uh the the male is that has a completely different physiology and capability of females and and the bell curves certainly overlap you know i wouldn't i wouldn't even want to play basketball against serena williams i should back me down and dunk over me apparently or apparently the girl can dunk so you know that there's a there's a bell curve overlap okay and so the the fastest woman in the world uh would not uh finish in the top 50 of the of the uh ncaa division one you know trials for males much less the olympic games for god's sakes so this is absurd to have girls who are competitive and desirous of you know winning distinction and they want to have competition with each other and they they have their own hierarchy okay and so we're we're not going to blend this into one uh one hierarchy that is ridiculous and so i think it's absurd uh that this is going on and i think they should put a stop to it immediately it's gonna be interesting it's a problem with the political correctness and whether or not anybody has the guts and judges have the guts to step into this they should though uh this is a very clear cut issue as far as i'm concerned and it ought to be settled they're wait i mostly agree with the sort of essence of that but i think there are a million legal battles to be had around the edges of it because you are you know there are there are many degrees of what constitutes a transgender female um and so there's there's sort of a uh you know a self-identified high school boy who decides at age 16 that he identifies as a female after going through puberty and going through the whole process and is kind of re-identifying as female in a strategic sort of way or what could be a strategic sort of way versus um you know uh kids that have different there there are many different i'm not an expert in the biology of this but everything from intersex to kids that go on puberty blockers early who have um put themselves at some sort of larger disadvantage and that the regular biological male would have so there's there's nuance and this will all be sorted out with a lot of legal battles it's going to be a mess it's going to be in courts for a long time i don't i don't think it's a total cut and dried issue because gender is as no longer a straightforward cut and a giant issue in any any regard so um very compliant i wish they would teach like a gen this all new stuff for dummies class because i'm in i'm in classes now in l.a through zoom and you know when people like were asking me what my pronouns were and i'm like i i don't know i don't and this has never been taught to us old people you know yeah it's um the goal post move every day i i saw something instructing me today that not only not only do you need to know uh if you're in a teaching position sort of what pronouns somebody prefers to be called this has been sort of the direction things have been going for a long time but it's very important to not misuse their pronouns depending on the context in which you're using them so that the individual may have a pronoun preference in the classroom but it's not okay to use those pronouns if you call that individual at home because they may not use them at home et cetera et cetera et cetera so this becomes almost impossible for people to navigate and um at some point i think the pendulum of sanity will turn into some degree um but we're we're living in very interesting times with this issue maybe we should just call people by their name unless their name was one of those weird ones that their parents made off all right this is a this i don't think we've ever had at least knowingly a teenager write in and this is a very poignant one so it has to be anonymous i am 14 years old so i don't know if it would be possible to have a private session with either of you so i'm hoping chef aj will ask this question on my behalf in the fall i will be going to a private school where the parents are asked to volunteer in the classroom one day a month i am freaking out because i am embarrassed by my mother if she is morbidly obese i never have friends over and always meet them other places i have learned from watching you that is genetic not her fault but it is unlikely that she'll ever be able to do anything about this she's a good person and a good mother and i've never expressed how i felt to anyone before and i feel ashamed that i even feel this way but i do and i don't know what to do about the guilt i also live in fear knowing that my knowing my genetic potential that i could end up like her and i'm afraid i'll develop an eating disorder no one seems to talk about the effect that obesity has on family members so i was hoping you could address this are my feelings normal or am i just a terrible kid oh well you're not a terrible kid no doug you want to you've talked about this a little bit before and i've i've heard recent shows even with aj so you know we have this um this is an interesting problem so where where the central conflict is is between i assume this is i can't tell whether there's a boy or a girl it's a girl but well unless the name was one of those it's it's a girl several things to several comments i would make first of all the um a person's weight is highly predictable by their genetics but it's not determined by their genetics so there's a difference so so you no matter what your genetics are your future is not cast in stone it's actually under your control it's just that if you have the genetics to be obese uh in the modern food environment then you're going to have to not live in the modern food environment and then you're going to be okay so let's let's get that out of the way first the um now so the conflict here there's uh the conflict is really uh that this girl is that has got a situation that's gonna be dicey for her to manage she's under a lot of tension here she would like her mother she'd like to conceal her mother because her mother is a social liability okay the um now so what we have is we've got a conflict between the girl and her mom and she sounds like her mom is a very nice person and so it's not like the the two of them are inherently conflicted this is a very interesting problem uh in a super fascinating one for a teenager a young person to be writing to us about the uh uh what we would want to do in principle is we would want to look at look at different solutions that you know that are in front of us so the uh we one of those solutions is to raise the issue with your mom okay one of those solutions would be to ask your mom to have a to have a session with either jen or i where you could be a part of it okay so you wouldn't have to tell your mom what it was about you could bring it up in a session with a you know with someone who's wise about counseling and it could be you know therefore we can help uh facilitate that conversation and to sort of think that through okay the um so that's there there's a that one option is that your mom shows up or or that you your mom either shows up or she doesn't show up so we don't get the option of her showing up 10 and then find out in other words we're going to either have it be 10 100 or zero so unfortunately this is not one of these things that we can do matters of degree what we can do though is that we can have the conversation with your mom that that is a that is a legitimate uh process and the the truth is is that your your mom almost certainly unless she is completely clueless which is exceedingly unlikely your mom is very much aware of this okay and so she's aware that she is a social liability to you on the basis of her appearance we don't know how concerned she is about it um probably pretty concerned about it and so as a result this isn't going to be some shock out of left field to have this discussion now uh in that discussion you will learn some things about your mom in other words you'll learn about how she sees it how hurt or embarrassed she is about this existing situation um and we can essentially have between the two of you and a third party is sort of problem-solving discussion about this and we the good news is is that we're not under serious time pressure um because if it's a once i guess the parents they volunteer once a month so it's actually yeah so it's not going to be happening pretty soon this fall so we've got some time between now and monday so to have this discussion and sort of get this get this issue out on the table and so therefore you know there's a sort of shock value i don't think your mom would be shocked about this i think she's probably worried about it herself uh and likely is and doesn't know what to do herself about this and so the uh so we would we would think we would have essentially a problem-solving session where we looked through all angles of this and and a big part of the problem here is the tension that's inside you about expressing this that that's a that's an internal tension where you have guilt associated with it you have frustration with it you you feel sad behind it there's a whole constellation of feelings as you uh you also are you know would very much like her to not be there to conceal her at least in the early going uh when you're in a brand new school and so this is you're sort of not wanting to have this uh social liability right in front you know right front and center um all of these things are sort of part and parcel of this discussion and you know it's uh you know we would have to we can't know what the right solution is until we hear from all parties and all parties express where it is that they're out at and we kind of walk our way through all in our imaginations all the ramifications so that's that's what we do when we have a heart problem but it's a it's a it's a wonderful thoughtful and important question uh in your life and so i'm glad that you wrote to us for help we normally would not ever talk to somebody uh we don't accept people that are under 18 uh for counseling that we would accept somebody under 18 with the parent uh if you let us know yeah in other words yeah so uh let us know about that and then we'll go from there yeah i would just that's that's all great and i think it's you know facilitating a really complicated and difficult conversation is at the heart of the answer to this question if there is an answer i would also just give the context that being embarrassed of our parents is a time-honored tradition um and and you may feel a little bit differently once you get into the school year and you see the other parents um and you realize that maybe it's you're you're not as much of a social pariah as you kind of anticipate that you're going to be and other other kids are going to be embarrassed of their parents for their own reasons some of them are going to be because they're also overweight some of them are going to be because they were i i was mortified when i was 14 because my father came in during homecoming week um and uh completely cornered my beloved um freshman english teacher with regaling her of embarrassing stories of his obsession with russia he'd been traveling to russia and i cowered in the corner and just couldn't believe how aggressive he was and how he wouldn't shut up and how she was my favorite teacher and i wanted to show her off and i wanted him to see how proud she was of me and all of these things um and so there are lots of things to be embarrassed about with your parents and all of your peers are going to have similar issues and you may just naturally calibrate as you observe that you're not at the bottom of the pecking order um it may it may be a more acceptable so if you can kind of put it off for a month until you get a little bit of a sense of the uh where where you fit in um and then have the conversation grounded in a little more of that data of what your situation looks like that could be a good way to approach it too i don't know what kids are like today but my mom was morbidly obese and i got teased a lot because of it and it wasn't fun so i feel for this person so that maybe she'll make a session thanks yeah this one's about uh social norms and i've actually asked the doctor lyle wants a similar question i know how he feels but this has a little bit of a twist on this one from anne marie i have a friend who gave me a thoughtful gift a lovely scented candle i was highly allergic to it so i regifted it but of course i said thank you and now she has followed up that gift with more products with that scent to which i am also allergic she is coming to visit and she's going to see that i don't have any of the candles or room fresheners or products anywhere i wish i had told her the truth at the beginning so what is the best course of action now and in general if someone gives you a gift that you are allergic to oh man yes oh man that that sucks that's right up there with like you don't know the person's name and it's too late to ask i think you just you have to you've got to fess up i mean if she's coming into your home and and she actually asks about it which would be a little bit rude um you know she may not say anything um yeah but i i think that's become sort of a you know i really didn't want to say anything and i just wasn't sure how to handle this and i totally i i feel terrible about it and it's been keeping me up at night but i just have to tell you that the scent really bothers me and i'm allergic to it and i i just didn't i never felt like i could be honest with you and now here i am and just kind of vomit your truth and hopefully she's a good enough friend that she can be resilient to this hiccup in your friendship um and if she's not again this goes back to kind of the first question like if that's a deal breaker and your friend turns into a total because you don't have her stinky candles around like what kind of friend is that you know it's sort of like this what's the friendship really based on at that point would it have been better if she just said it right away that this was such a thoughtful gift i love it but i'm allergic to it probably all things equal but most of us have been in that situation where you run the cb in that moment in your cost benefit analysis and you don't think you're the the you know you're never gonna have to pay the piper for a little social white lie like you just say thank you and you never think oh i'm going to be this is going to be inspected in my future it's my my gratitude for this gift is now going to set the bar for every recurring gift that i'm gonna get from this person and then they're gonna come check up on it in a couple of years you're not thinking in that sort of way at that time so it's perfectly rational in the moment to people thank you it's beautiful and and pretty soon you've dug yourself into a hole that's really hard to get out of but but i think most friends would understand if you were in that situation if it were your friend you would understand so um if she doesn't then that you know houston we have a problem i don't know maybe doug has a different approach doug's more doug's more finesses these things more than i do sometimes we're exterminating the house so we have to meet somewhere else that's good that's good yeah that's enough with that eventually for some unforeseen reason i really wish we could hang out at my house that it's just it's not habitable at the moment so oh well who knows no that all sounds fine i i probably would have put a stop to it after the second yeah yeah i wouldn't have said anything a second once it's a trend yeah that's the trend maybe i would wait for three i probably would me knowing myself who sends you gifts i mean i get gifts from aj i get cool t-shirts but jen you never got me anything yes i have see this is the truth people is that who keeps track anyway certainly not me you know i don't forget when my first book unprocessed came out in 2011 linda middlesworth wanted copies for all of her children and two of them aren't vegan and so i signed the book and then i was the true north and somebody asked me to sign a copy of my book and i always signed it on a particular page and it was a book i had signed to linda's son the same one so you can get bet guess who called that person up right away see because i i would be like the candle giving friend you know all right fair enough i would bust the person okay uh here we go um nicole says do thought does thought always precede feelings if so how do you account for situations where you get sad or even cry when watching a sad movie or hearing a sad song i'm not really thinking about anything at the time yeah uh let me explain so the way the way the mind works is your you have uh i'll try to not drag this out too far what happens is if you're if you've got your senses are a way to try to help you uh orient you towards opportunities and threats in the environment and so what there is is that there's a continuum of value so there's something up here that is the most valuable thing in the environment uh and there's something down here that is the most dangerous thing and so the things that are in the middle are things that are neutral they're value neutral they're neither going to help you nor they're going to harm you so your feelings are going to be derivatives or they're derived from your ability of your mind to recognize the the inputs on a continuum of value so if you're listening to a sad song yeah so the the concept there where people are a little bit can get confused is if they read the the the ideas for example that come from cognitive therapy or some simplistic psychology psych 101 text that's trying to keep it overly simple so there's always been an argument in the literature or like thoughts primary or feelings primary and you know so there's been arguments between bob scions and george mandler and uh emotion theorists forever about this i'll go all the way back to william james okay so the first great american psychologist okay so the um wasn't he at harvard jen i think he was yeah but the point is is that your your feelings are definitely preceded by something that you would call thought but not conscious thought so the thought that we're talking about are very deep uh wordless algorithms that evaluate stimuli okay so the um so you could be you could have you could walk by a bookstore and look in the window and then start walking down the street and then suddenly feeling you're feeling a little modeling okay and you like to the best of your knowledge there is you're not thinking about anything but what's happening is is that oh i don't know it's there's something about that that process that is activating some some a feeling of oh the the the days of the bookstore are gone and you know i remember when it used to be really cool to go in there in other words you're it's calling up a bunch of memories and that they haven't even hardly arrived in consciousness yet but what's arriving what's activated a bunch of uh as activated feelings is an analysis that our environment in a feature of the environment has reminded us that our overall environment has changed and from your perspective for the worse and part of that could also then activate um you know the the feeling it's essentially the feeling that you get in listening to don mclean's american pot it's the it's the story of a passing of an age okay and you could get that just by looking in a bookstore and seeing the people walking around and it's not like the people before uh in other words they're they're not sitting in a little corner it's dead it doesn't look the same it doesn't look like the little shop around the corner and so and so you and you you can see that maybe doesn't look that successful and so then your your mind is drifting to the fact that amazon has changed that space and all of that passes by and you have no idea why you're feeling maudlin but you are okay but so the feeling did not come first because a feeling can't come out of nowhere a feeling is a reaction to an analysis of a value judgment so it has to be on some continuum so not only are direct sensory information on a continuum so you look at something that looks beautiful or you smell something that smells good how can you smell something that smells scrumptious and not have a feeling okay so the reason why it's scrumptious remember why it smells scrumptious it isn't because it just smells scrumptious it's because there are molecules in the air of high density calories okay and those high density calories are being registered by deep wordless value judgment algorithms to tell you that that's valuable food that's why you're having that reaction so all of your feelings are derived from value judgments tracing what is causing those value judgments to be activated in your mind can sometimes be very tricky in fact it can be so complicated that basically psychoanalysis gets it wrong almost all the time in other words they're they're thinking the reason you're having a bunch of feelings there's all kinds of cocky maybe stuff uh in speaking for example of our anorexia problem earlier uh one of the most outstanding articles i've ever read in the american psychologist was by shane geisinger who in that article takes to task the entire history of analysis of what the driving force is behind anorexia and it shows all of the interesting ten percent of the truth cockamamie confabulation crap that has come out of psychoanalytic thinking uh and shows comically how absolutely completely wrong it was okay so that that's an example of people trying really hard to figure out what's going on inside of the mind of an anorexic and absolutely coming up empty and the reason why they're coming up empty is that the the wordless value judgment algorithms that are in the system are not necessarily designed to be arriving in consciousness so you don't necessarily know why you feel what you feel and you don't necessarily know why you're doing what you're doing okay that's one of the great mysteries of romance is that why two people can be i mean two possible partners can be objectively similar but one of them you are far more drawn to than the other and the and the reason is you know you can name some things but the truth is there's reasons that you can't even access it's not accessible to consciousness so that's a very long and somewhat academical answer to the question and the answer is yes there is a system of information processing and evaluation that always precedes feeling there would be one exception to that and that would be if someone would go into your head with an electrode and they would activate a neural circuit completely independent of the value judgment they are activating the circuit sort of in an artificial fashion that you know you can make that argument but even then the circuit that they are activating is a value judgment uh integrated circuit and that's why it is that you even have that feeling so that's how it works thank you anything you want to say about that dr hulk that was comprehensive and magisterial so i have nothing to add thank you i love that adjective magisterial oh that's nice okay so this is a i like this question from mark because he says you always talk about eating a diet consistent with our species natural history but what exactly was that diet whatever you could get yeah i think there is no this is one of the misnomers like there's there's no natural history i mean natural natural diet of the species because it really depended where you lived it depended what time of year it was um it depended on what what uh sort of you know the the what things would go in phases of famine and feast and so this really varied a lot but usually when we're referring to this we're just talking about a whole food diet an unadulterated whole food diet you're not processing things you're not dehydrating things you're not adding salt and oil and sugar and spices and balsamic reductions to things you're just eating whole food as close to its actual whole form as you can get it um and the natural diet of the species included you know animal food when we could get it we couldn't get much of it we were mostly eating leafy plants and occasional sad little tubers that we could root out of the ground um and that's what it was and when we could get some animal food we were pretty excited about it and it was short term and it really drove our sharing impulse as as social creatures um but yeah it's not it's not too complicated but it's very variant depending on particular geographical constraints i think it definitely wasn't processed food and it definitely wasn't processed animal products no no nobody i mean there's no way that anybody could have had access to those things so yeah and even you know eating a contemporary whole food plant-based diet like many of us do sos free you're still you're mixing so many different things that you're mixing flavors and textures and foods that are coming from different regions of the world and grown in different seasons and under very different climate conditions that you would never have been able to put together in an ancestral diet so if you really want to eat ancestrally you're you're eating a very bland um really you're very really struggling to put together some twigs and berries and the occasional shriveled little potato when you're really like a true north and you're not getting any of it in great abundance and so when people kind of hit a plateau or they get stuck with a whole food plant-based diet you have to keep in mind that you know even the ancestral diet of the species it's still not including rice and sauteed vegetables together at the same time like these we're still it's still we can keep moving the line of what constitutes super normal really really far out so yeah i understand you correctly there were no air fryers in the stone age so i'm told according to our best anthropologist that seems to be the conclusion yeah yeah fred flintstone managed to sustain obesity go figure all right yeah well he had many many resources a lot of mate value was those brontosaurus burgers i think all the emotional labor of the women around him too it's interesting because they had hairdressers in the phone stones too but anyways that was my favorite show growing up so susan says question for dr lyle and dr hawk i'm curious if personality differences are related to physiological differences in brain structures um uh and i would say the following is true it almost certainly is true the the question is what those are and we know something about that so the just in the same way that the physical differences between people the structure of your face is uh and what your face looks like is as a result of physiological differences so the the genes build the genes code for proteins and the proteins are the three-dimensional particles that wind up building you and so the uh that's going to be true for the neurons that get built and then the nature of the neurons and the the nature of their internal chemistry and how they work and their natural sensitivity these things are going to be gene variances so it's going to turn out that um each each gene that is responsible for building something in your brain uh there there's an alternative gene uh or a whole slew of them that are building a very very similar structure in somebody else's brain so for example everybody has a desk but somebody is built out of oak and somebody else has built out a walnut and somebody else is you know is built out of elm trades in other words they're very similar and they're function but they're slightly chemically different and so yes so what you're looking at and differences in personality is is genetic in other words the genes are responsible how the genes uh the the variation i don't know even know exactly what the word physiological even means precisely but the there there's there are actually significant structural differences that are observable in people in other words you can actually see differences in people's brains and the differences in in the shape of the brain actually is correlated with some differences in how those people behave so you can see it on a gross level and we know that it's true on the microscopic level of how the genes are building these things because we can see the uh the the huge contribution of genes to individual differences in personality so yeah the answer is yes the question is exactly how that is done uh we don't know and it's so it's actually so inherently complicated but it doesn't even matter every every gene that has been found to be associated with a difference for example an extroversion um so if we find a gene that is very common like that particular uh that particular gene is doing something in the brain god knows what it is it's not as simple as oh it codes for more serotonin no that's not how it works so the um so we've got one gene that's sort of a an oak tree gene and we've got another gene that is a walnut tree gene and we find out that when the people have the oak gene oak version that they're more extroverted than the people that have the walnut version so now we might be saying okay well now let's find out what that gene does well i can tell you what that gene does that gene does something that is responsible for about probably one ten thousandth of the variance in the differences between people in other words the differences between uh people on that with as a result that that specific gene are infinitesimally small you have to have thousands and thousands of genes that slowly like tiny little grains of sand that you're picking up if you pick them up one of the time and put them in a little jar it would take you forever to get a spoonful of sand that's what you're going to that's how we are finding uh jeans and their impact on human personality it's one grain of sand at the time so but we know we can see sand and we can tell when some one sand is darker sand and one sands lighter sand it's like well you can you can hardly see it at the microscopic level but when we pile them all up in a huge amount we can actually see a difference this is coarser sam this is fine or sam same thing as true personality when you see you can see you know the differences in people and we know that the reason for those differences are thousands and thousands of infinitesimally small differences probably operating at different parts of neuron function so the the amount of gating channels that are open for a specific neurotransmitter on a given neuron uh how quickly they recycle a given neurotransmitter once it's been uh once it's been a neuron is fired all kinds of things and so uh that that is a a thousand years from now in in 10 centuries they may actually be able to model something that looks pretty good about figuring out the neurotransmitter and individual brain differences from the gene to the personality long before that right now we can already see it and we can already even tell even very very soon here in the next 10 years we'll be able to tell from uh from in individual differences in genes on a printout we're going to be able to tell how extroverted you are how introverted you are how intelligent you are how conscientious you are how open to experience you are in other words we're already going to be able to get the score and know what it is from your genes but we have no idea how the genes are doing it that that will take a thousand years okay so i hope that's a does that make sense jen yeah my it might not take a thousand years because of ai so the you know the latest thing that's blown my tiny brain is the um the i can't remember if i told you about the google inadvertently um while training algorithms to discover early markers of heart disease and retinal scans they they inadvertently discovered that the machine could tell the difference they it could it could predict the gender of the retinal scan with incredible accuracy 98 percent um looking at a retinal scan that no human can look at that and determine there's there's no prior for determining what gender they're looking at but the ai algorithm can and we don't know google doesn't know how it's doing it it can't look in the black box of the algorithm and figure out what it sees that we can't see um and so it's like this is how these things are progressing so it's able to predict quite a bit about you including your gender including your proclivity to heart disease um and that's from a retinal scan so we don't know there are all kinds of physical correlations that we're we're not um consciously picking up on there's this whole literature of um you know people are very good at predicting big five by looking at faces much more than chance so if you give people a series of faces and you ask them is that person agreeable or disagreeable is that you know which one's more likely to um have this job or to to have this characteristic people are very good at making those inferences and ai is is even better at them with all kinds of you know ethical and um social implications from that so uh yeah this is a big big opportunity to learn a lot about the species that it definitely it all starts in the brain wow thank you this has been great dessert you want to promote dr hawk i know you have this wonderful virtual village do you want to tell people about it oh sure uh yeah i mean every every weekend right now it's happening every when is it happening right now saturday afternoons throughout june um i have something called the virtual village which is just a group um of whoever wants to drop in you can you can join for a week or you can join indefinitely through my patreon page which is just patreon.com dr jen um and so the virtual village is just it's kind of like a half i don't know it's it's part group therapy part q a part just it's it's designed to be like a group of people sitting around a stone age fire just shooting the and catching up and asking questions and learning about life in each other and it's been a really really great group and we talk about all kinds of weird things aj drops in from time to time when she can and you just kind of never know how scandalous it's going to get now it's anything goes in that group so um yeah people are welcome to join great thank you so much dr lyle anything any parting words or anything you'd like to promote no i don't think so the uh i think i think we're good i think people know about the living wisdom library on our website is team dynamics and uh and they they know otherwise about us but hey this is this is our favorite place to come talk aj it's my favorite thank you and people are still waiting for the uh may 28 q a to be put up i know i've gotten several emails i just sent out an email to to the group that there's apparently some kind of upload problem when we had to re-upload it and now it's getting posted imminently well thank you guys we really appreciate you coming on and answering these somewhat difficult questions at times and we look forward to having you on the show as soon as possible thanks so much always great to be here thank you and thanks all of you for watching another episode of chef aj live please come back tomorrow when my guest is stacy heine and she's going to be making hash brown veggie cups with were not available in the stone age take care guys bye
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