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Chef AJ: Chef AJ Live! | Brand New Q A with Dr Doug Lisle
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hun well hello everybody and welcome to this very special live broadcast with our favorite resident psychologist who has been such a dear friend and supporter of the ultimate weight loss program nun under then as we call him DDL for short dr. Doug Lyall thank you so much for being here to answer everyone's questions so appreciate it my brent was ready as always great so thank you guys so much for being here I'm gonna take myself off screen as soon as I answer the first question because we'd much rather look at dr. Lisle so the first question is from Amy and she says I have no problem putting down salt sugar and flour but I have an extremely hard time letting go of oil I do not have an issue with nuts because I'm allergic to them I love guacamole when it is available but I do not search it out oil is my downfall why am I so addicted to it and how can I let it go well you're addicted to it because it's the highest calorie substance on earth so that's our problem and if we look carefully we would generally find that it isn't the oil all by itself it's usually in combination with some spices and you don't just take you don't you're not addicted to taking a bottle of olive oil just open it up at the top and guess what so it's the fact that it will raise the overall fat content of whatever food is that you're eating by a lot so if you're eating some food that is you know if you're eating a potato potatoes 1% fat but if we make it in french fries then suddenly we've turned those calories into maybe 50 or 60 percent fat so you're signed by nature to like the taste of fat not in isolation or else people will just you know take a little beetle scoops a lard but it's actually in combination with other chemicals which is how its found in nature so the problem is having is the problem that the whole world asks which is that once you discover oil what are worse things up and makes it far richer and therefore you're going to life is better it's it's a super normal stimulus and the way out is the same way out for every super normal stimulus the way out is through an abstinence process where you get rid of it and you have to brace yourself for the fit that your nervous system is going to throw so whether you're trying to get away from heroin or cigarettes or alcohol or coffee or oil it's all the same process so the nervous system throws a fit it throws a fit in relation to how intense the stimuli is that it is that it has been dealing with in terms of its disruption to to pleasure chemistry so something like heroin has a little morphine the opiates have an extremely intense response and therefore the nervous system it has to embrace itself or that extraordinary response and therefore it sets up essentially neurochemical defenses against that the same thing is true with cigarettes so you you don't you don't just put down cigarettes your your nervous system has essentially engineered a chemical defense against nicotine and so it is racing itself or the nicotine women you did it when it hits you and if you don't smoke the bracing is still there and that bracing or neurochemical defense against the nicotine is what we call craving so the same thing is going to be true in rich food so if you make the food rich your whole digestive system is being orchestrated by your brain the brain is expecting there to be very very rich food and so therefore it's bracing itself we're getting ready to deal with it if you don't give it to it it's it's going to be uncomfortable in the same way as cigarette smoke was uncomfortable if they expect to smoke and then they don't have smoke but the craving you know is very disturbing and it lasts for a given period of time minutes they would then occur and come and come and go in ways as the system says well looks like there's not a sitting right here and I made calm down and but then you know half an hour later why is this again like isn't this about time for a cigarette isn't this about where we expected it so that same kind of recurring anticipation will go on if you've been eating food with oil in it and it's going to go on for you know certainly at a fairly high level for a week or so probably by the end of week two it's that response has quieted down quite a bit that's what we're going to call extinction so you will have gone into an extinction process if you know so it doesn't mean it's always going away it just means that it's 80% god it's no longer the same level of craving but the cravings can still be there at a mild degree and then if you indulge them then you bring back this condition paradigm pretty quickly and the cravings get intense again so that's how it works and that's why that's why it works that way and that's just how it is thank you you always design the most caloric we concentrated food in the environment and oil is literally the most concentrated food ever created so thank you makes perfect sense so Michelle wants to know why does she feel compelled to eat bad stuff but only in private the car the garage with the wrappers always hidden you know it's interesting because my mother was morbidly obese and we never saw her eat I mean I mean Evan we saw her eat but she never could never figure out what she was eating to be you know 400 pounds and then you know when she died we found all these like McDonald's wrappers and you know things in in her car so this is a great question and I'd love to hear your answer sure I worked with a pair of psychologists actually a social worker a psychologist in an office and they were both obese and at lunch they would go into the refrigerator and they would bring out a head of romaine lettuce and some Tomatoes and they would wash the lettuce and I remember I remember them tearing the room in love sleeves off and saying what beautiful s I think you know where this is going like there's no way these women were supporting under pound overweight bodies on romaine lettuce that's what wasn't happening this was in the prison system that I worked out for ten years one day a colleague of mine was working in and one of their one of those two one of these ladies offices and we're seeing your client in there just needed an office space and this lady psychologist didn't have any anywhere else to go so she was in she was in this lady's office and she came and told me she said man if we ever have we ever have a siege where you know the prisoners riot you need to go into Miss LeBrons office cuz let me tell ya if you open that drawer look at the pen you better be ready for what you're gonna see okay so obviously and compassionately we can look at the situation that makes perfect sense the the pleasure trap is the pleasure craft you're just as AJ just said we're drawn to eat the richest for food in the environment no supplies if however we live around people that understand the reason why we're having that problem is because we're eating food that's too rich and we are trying to to essentially advertise that we're aware of this that we're working on everything that can be done and we are diligent intelligent and conscientious about what we're doing then what we that means is is that in public we lay out little strips of romaine lettuce your comments about the beautiful s and meanwhile when we disappear into our office for a tea bags a Halloween candy okay so that's what this is and very understandable I understand that this individual is struggling with this the pleasure trap is no joke very difficult to quiet down its its influence and so all you can do is you know keep keep trying to put more healthy food in you to crowd out the other food and and hopefully you can get into what we call a deep groove where are your visits to the rich food are minimized great thank you dr. Lao and people are watching all the way from Tokyo and they say they love your laughs you look like Ellen Alda when you laugh I know that is it's so cute so jane says how do you break a habit of snacking it seems to stem from anxiety and or lack of sleep there's really not a problem with snacking per se there's no reason for you to not eat a snack and if you're anxious you may you may feel the desire to chew and eat something and the a little bit of an orphan from eating a little bit of food they pong you down a bit that's fine it's not like it's not like those calories are not being catalogued they are being they're being reported dirty perfectly in your service so it's not as if let's suppose you need a snack and two hours later you were doing a food diary on your day and you forgot the snack in there so you added up calories and you don't need 1,900 calories and then you went one way then you're like I forgot bats and that's right that was 200 carats Kotlikoff okay relax or a nervous system didn't forget yeah you you that means that you will eat 200 calories less and then subsequent 24 hours after having eaten that snack than had you not even met so the the sort of lay public's notion is that snacking is a naughty thing there we should only be eating at meals and that we should you know take care to not be snacking this is totally ludicrous and makes absolutely no sense whatsoever no animal behaves this way animals don't don't monitor their intake and and make sure that they don't overeat by consciously paying attention to not eating you know and making sure they only eat at certain times that's completely ridiculous yeah so snacking is never a problem the problem that's always the same problem what are you smacking it's it's the content okay that's the issue so if you're snacking on healthy food not a problem that's being appropriately reported and given given full credit in your nervous system if you eat overly rich food your your nervous system may not be able to actually understand what it ate in terms of its full calorie value and you may that may contribute to you systematically overeating so that's the issue is snacking never worry about it the it is probably the case that you are probably healthier if you already need seven times a day than eating three times a day okay so that that is what the research evidence would suggest how big of a difference not much by far the biggest difference would be what are you eating and so just pay attention to what you're eating make sure that whatever you're eating is healthy food and don't worry about when you're eating it well how many times or frankly how much yes thank you and that's why I didn't want to ask the questions that we've had about intermittent fasting because I know that you say it doesn't matter when we eat how much we eat but just what we eat sir yes that's correct the yeah intermittent fasting is is a concept that has no scientific support for the notion that it's going to help anybody reduce the amount of food that they I think that anecdotally once in a while it may be a useful concept accidentally in other words not not because intermittent fasting is useful per se but because it may in occasional cases it may interrupt a pattern of cramming and a conditioned cram it may assist people in counter conditioning or extinguishing a condition cram powder so but the problem is the condition cram it's not the eating window okay so yeah the concept of a feeding window being a useful useful idea in order to helping people limit their food intake etc this is just makes makes absolutely no sense it's contrary barbecue right I mean some of the people are saying it creates something I don't know a toughie gee or that will live longer or you know maybe it'll just seem like it and I know this is the people are getting excited about this notion of effectively toxicity and they're they've read Walter Longo jumping up and down about fasting I I think it's it's safe to say that we know more about fasting than anybody okay it's very clear I think Longo's done some interesting rat research with chemotherapy drugs and good for him and you know I I applaud research and science to try to improve our understanding but we know more than anybody knows about this topic okay and we see that an extended water fasting you will get your get value the notion that you're going to get a bunch of detox taking place because you cram the feeding window into seven or five or 11 or whatever the hell it is hours a day and therefore you increase the detoxification process and this is going to help lengthen the like life the animal is sir it is 100% speculative it has no no support whatsoever so that's completely different than the notion of more extended fast that would be outside the normal ranges for the analyst eating pattern that would result in a Deanna ketosis that would take place and now start a process of detoxification which is what takes place in water vessel so if someone we're going to make the case that you know twice a month they were fast for two days and that they that they believed without you know that they have research evidence that this was mildly improving some some you know health parameters that they were measuring I would I would believe it I would believe that the effect would be mild and I and I would believe that but I wouldn't be surprised about that effect if somebody came to me and said I believe I've got evidence that by having a person not eat for sixteen hours a day as opposed to not eating for twelve hours a day but the additional four hours of not digesting food by by lengthening the length of time between feeding that I have evidence this is self supportive I would say now you're smoking crack there's no way okay and so right right now no such evidence exists totally theoretical in speculative and it's an absurd proposition that should be should be viewed through the lens of nothing other than then wild speculation that one day may find out have a very very small effect size and probably won't it won't even think most to the effect sizes that we would look at that we would be observable the difference between say a pretty healthy diet and a very healthy diet so no I think it's a bogus idea just give up on the whole idea great thank you someone lied though is asking is stopping eating at a certain time before bed a good idea for sleep even if it's not for intermittent fasting or weight loss I don't think so I don't think that there's any support for that the I think that might be interesting I'd be willing to to look at any at any evidence that suggested otherwise I think it's going to be hard to find any evidence at all that that goes anywhere I mean it doesn't make sense to me that this would be an unhealthy process why would it be unhealthy for an animal to eat before it goes to sleep if it has the ability to do so makes no sense well I would say just from somebody that suffers with things like reflux in IBS then our guest renter ologists have told us to have three to five hours oh that that makes sense if you've got if you've got asked about reflux so you got you've got some problem with the esophagus so you've got a you know just in the same way that I would tell you to put some bricks under the head of your bed and raise it up three inches to help the reflux as well in other words so if we're going to be mechanically addressing the fact that we've got a pathology then there's absolutely reasons to do things differently that's an entirely different argument than saying that there's a general species wide health advantage we're doing that there's no health advantage from raising the head of your bed per se okay so but if you happen to have acid reflux it can be fabulous could be extremely useful technique great thank you Jeanine says what is the best way I explain to friends and family what food addiction is or the pleasure trap without saying that they too are food addicts the word addict really puts up a wall and from what I understand about the pleasure trap we are all addicted except for the rare person my parents are not obese but they are not slim either but I'd bet a thousand dollars that they would not be happy if I took away all their processed food are they food addicts by definition or just stuck in the pleasure trap or both well let's talk about this the pleasure trap is really the story of addictive process around food that's what it is now addiction so let's let's uh yeah Aristotle said 2,000 years ago before we have an argument let's make sure we define our terms so the problem is is that that that words can lock us in to to a position that is that is what we're going to call discrete rather than a continuum so that's why we say someone is tall we don't say you're six foot three point two seven four seven three with a bar over at inches today that's not what we say we say they're tall that's what we do we don't say someone is fat you know we don't say someone oh he can run the 40-yard dash at four point six three q47 it was his last time no we say he's very fast that's what we do so we use words to communicate with each other and in in that what we do is we turn what we're going to call continuous variables into discrete variables all short so instead of giving everybody height in centimeters okay so in the same way addiction is a categorical term okay it's like wow you're either addicted or you're not addicted and it's like well now wait a second what are we trying to say here what we're trying to say in the pleasure trap is that supernormal stimuli will create a process where the person's motivation to pursue it will be out of balance with their best interest that's what we're trying to say the more potent the disruption or the more potent the supernormal stimuli is the the greater of the of the intensity of the response they and therefore the greater the possibility for an addictive process so incidentally just because it's super normal doesn't mean you're going to be addicted to it it has to be something super normal that catches the pleasure Catholics okay so it's going to have to be something that is a hyper stimulator of the dopamine pathway or the hyper stimulator of the absorption pathway something that hyper and stimulates your bruising response you know what I mean because we put you in a machine that pummels you you're not going to be addicted to that even though it's a super normal stimulus right now so so now we're going to look at food and is this lady's parents are they quote addicted well are they having a supernormal stimuli that is essentially causing them to chase a pleasure response that is doing you know directing them towards food that is not in their best interest yes that's true if we were to simply point that out to them and say oh well it turns out and you'd be better off you would feel better look better live longer and have less possibility of debilitating disease if you need this food instead what would their response be don't want to do it why don't want to give them the pleasure why because I'm used to eating food that is super normal and micro activates the dopamine pathway ah you're addicted okay that's what we mean by the pleasure truck the pleasure traffic generalized term that is description of the disk of the the addictive process the so yes food the modern food supply is addictive it's addictive mildly it's it is not as addictive cigarettes people's equals were withdrawal symptoms from getting out of nicotine or more intense than they are from getting out of rich food it's said the same order of magnitude you know to be in there I think cigarettes are tougher cigarettes are not as tough as someone struggling with alcohol alcohol is quite a bit tougher than cigarettes people that have gone through cigarettes will swear up and down it's the hardest thing they ever did but that's because they didn't get out of an alcohol alcoholic problem that's a lot harder okay so people that have worked with addictions of all ranges understand this and you know I've spent career treated many many people of addictions of literally I think every time that you would Noah and and I can tell you that the hard drugs are by far the hardest thing that there is liberty or the alcohol comes plus the eyeballs pretty tough and then then cigarettes are way easier a completely different order of magnitude and then underneath cigarettes you got chocolate okay that's what you got the you know coffee is right in there along with very similar the so I think I mean caffeine is probably as a dopamine impact about the same level as a piece of coffee pitch so the yeah that's what this is that's how to look at it it's it's mildly mildly addictive but that doesn't mean that the effects are mild if you're with your eighty pounds overweight and you've had a heart attack you know you're in trouble and you're having a hard time giving up the rich food you know but the degree of the addictive response is not intense it's just enough to keep you in the trap hey and that that's so that is what we're talking about you still there yeah Souter Oh oh my god you didn't move and I thought you okay want to interrupt you thank you okay terrific and a trap it is indeed so dr. Lyle what is the best method for teaching children to prefer whole natural food in this modern environment completely withholding processed foods if possible or will the restriction eventually lead to rebellion later you know I I would just in your own house even kids healthy food I'd be feeding them things that were I wouldn't be trying to have my kids SOS free that that's that's put in the bar way too far it's so so discrepant from anything else that they're ever going to eat your job is to try to get a lot of healthy food in your kids yeah I wouldn't have junk food in the house that make sense but the but neither would I not have I wouldn't say what we're not going to have peanut butter and jam in this house and in Ezekiel Brett because it's too because it's artificially concentrated into your which no I wouldn't do that the have healthy food in the house your what we're trying to do is we're trying to see to it to these kids Felton cleaned up his little toxic waste dumps from just extraordinarily unhealthy diets myself personally my parents didn't know any better and I was raised on a conventional food my parents were probably worse than average on my mom was a very disinterested cook and therefore she was never going to make a salad and she was never gonna steam up any vegetables you know so I ate a pretty high animal food dominated diet and I had appendicitis by the time I was 13 the you know this no surprise it was this was a very very rich diet the was I going to say about this now you know not great for you not great to have it's that much that much trouble well I could he kill me literally so had there not been a a modern surgery an ability to diagnose that and sterile technique that happened to be discovered in the 1960s or 70s it's like now I would have been dead what do you know about that our very possibility could have died of peritonitis at 13 years old so the so the food is you know obviously we don't want kids with big-time nasty pathologies because the diet is so bad make sure the diet is decent make sure it's quantified healthy because it don't worry about fine details at all and the notion that we have to that this is where the notion of addiction this is why that word is problematic and you'll watch me raise my eyebrow about it and walk away from that concept I will say that rich food is addiction addictive like okay I'm trying to single the people that addicted not addictive this is a dichotomy we're acting like these are discrete issues rather than a continuum it's a continuum of supernormal stimuli of which foods are at a very mild level you don't have to think oh my god I can't you would not want your seven-year-old experimenting with heroin you wouldn't want that nervous system to put up there something like that and we wind up with a heroin addict for the rest of their lives okay that's not the same thing as food it's not anywhere close to this so your children you know when they get up and move away in their 20s they're gonna make their own choices and they are certainly going to be exposed to rich food all along through their lives so it's not like oh my god I didn't want them to have that this is going to be like heroin they're gonna be addicted no don't think of it that way your job is to try to make sure that the a healthy enough diet that their diet is with their healthy kids and when they go away from home they're used to eating a lot of healthy food they're going to make all kinds of different choices but you want them to know what's healthy and what isn't hopefully and but we don't want them we don't want fear-mongering going on - to the point where they roll their eyeballs with their parents like you've got to be kidding I have some french fries or if I have a hamburger I'm gonna die cancer heart disease now I don't think so and they're right if they look to the left and they look to the right they look at everybody in the Sun the people are eating garbage in there they're fine okay so you're not going to terrorize your child you want to have a reasonable concept that you can then which is that in the long run these aren't a good thing we try to stay away from them try to eat healthy food instead and we feel that you know and I feel better and they'll feel it they'll feel the difference and there we point out the correlation coefficient as to what it feels like after you've eaten a bunch of rich food versus when you beat healthy food it feels different and so we educate them we sort of point that out they'll experience it and for the rest their lives they'll have a little conscious internal barometer that they'll be able to notice and hopefully without any fear mongering they will their their long-term choices will be reasonably once that's how we want to handle it okay I think sometimes dr. Lyle the problem is for some of our members having even healthy rich food is a problem for them right and so it's not that they're trying to deny their kids peanut butter jam in Ezekiel but they're the ones that are getting into it too often lady apprenticeship yeah okay great and every individual has to manage that conflict their own way okay so you know that well it's not it's not it's not confused the issues okay so there's no great damage from your kids eating some modest quantity of even conventional food that's not going to be any big problem but if the problem is with you then and that's something that that's something that has to be factored into how does that we run a household right I think the managing of the environment is the hardest part and from what I understand from you there's not just one way to do it it's going to depend on the individual personalities and that might be a reason that somebody would want to book a private consultation with you because my answer which is just get divorced it's not very helpful said well I'm just kidding I'm not saying that but but you know me I'm kind of black and white and it's like just don't allow the crap in and I know it's easier said than done with some of the people in their complicated relationships so they would probably need to speak to you privately about how they're gonna uniquely manage their environment so that they can get their needs met and also accommodate the other family ah yeah that's a tough one so Carol's yeah Carol says if I fully and wholeheartedly believe that a whole food plant-based diet is the best diet on earth why can't I stick to it if I believe exercise is definitely good for me why don't I do it why don't I do what I know is good for me and why do I continue to do the things that are harmful yeah well the reason is is that what's your what your mind is your mind is a device or running cost-benefit analysis and that that's what a brain is of an animal an animal an animal's brain is precisely nothing other than a cost-benefit computer that's what it does and so that cost-benefit computer on obviously it has to have a way to analyze costs and it has to have a way to analyze benefits instead way to analyze costs and benefits is with pleasure and pain that's that's more or less for this and so you know there's other aspects to this but fundamentally that's exactly how an animal nervous system works it's more complicated than that and that so gazelle that's eating grass on the African savanna it's it's got it's it's experiencing the pleasure of eating the grass but it looks up in the seas of cheetah three hundred yards away and even though that cheetah is not causing it any pain now the animal has the ability to to run the statistical possibility on that and therefore a certain amount of disturbing psychological experience or feeling will arise in the system that we call anxiety and so it will run the anxiety against the pleasure of the eating and it's brain is to run the calculus about which should be vomit okay because there's two decisions we either stop eating or we keep eating now that's the choice now so you can see what the mind is the mind is analyzing probabilities it doesn't know that it's doing it and then nono Thompson's gazelle can do math but what they do is that they do the equivalent of math sounds sounds magical it sounds like that it's like it's impossible how could it do it it does it in the same way that you have a speedometer on your car okay so there's a formula in physics called distance equals rate times time and so if you were to measure how far the car has moved by by measuring the size of the wheel and how fast it goes around and then three in the last two seconds you went you know I don't know 87 feet then it could calculate if you had a computer that could do this which we do you could have a computer then we'd say ah you win 56 miles an hour of the last two seconds okay and then 2 seconds later you put on your brakes and you only look 42 months 42 feet and say ah you're going 30 miles so you can have a speedometer that worked that way but that's not what we have it on a car what we have in our car is a trick okay well we have is a device that has your wheel goes around it generates an electric current and the electric current the higher the amount of current the faster you're going the lower the crime slower you're going so what they do is they simply plot that the the intensity of the current on an analogue scale and if the current goes is that high but it knows you're doing 70 miles an hour if the current is about there it knows you're doing 50 and if the currents there at those you're going to 15 there's no math no mathematics no nobody's computing distance equals rate times times it just works okay it's what we're going to call an analogue computer you could also call it a bag of tricks so what the nervous system is of all animals is they are bags of tricks that's what there are now somebody like me will explain that there cost-benefit analytic engine but they're a very sophisticated computer but that's not you know no computer scientists would say what do you mean where's the computations and I would say ah the computations were then an evolution and what this thing simply has what we're going to call feelings okay so it has feelings and those feelings are the evidence of the computations that are nothing other than a bag of tricks is it analyzes probabilities and the feelings that you have or things like pleasure and pain as well as the anticipation of the pen you are not designed by nature to be worried about having a heart attack thirty years from now because the food that you're eating is too rich nope you're not designed by a nature to know that if you're eating rich food you're going to be overweight and you're not going to look good in a bathing suit next summer and you know maybe your meat leaves you know these are not heart heart parts and parcel of the computational systems that are embedded in that Brent they're not in there okay so what can you do you can also learn things that are connected to each other that are bizarre okay so you can somebody can tell you oh the rich food can make you overweight the newly oh well I don't want to be able to wait so maybe I don't which fit accepting your nervous system says that the rich foods the most valuable thing in your environment it's the number one problem in nature was death by starvation so therefore you're yeah but mechanism is extremely good at analyzing the richness of that food and it's going to encourage you to go after it yeah you know it gave to the exclusion of other foods right into the teeth of dangerous circumstances including Matt cheetah together okay so you weren't designed to make the decisions that we are asking you to make that's the problem you were designed for an environment of scarcity we were designed by nature to follow your instincts we are telling you don't follow your instincts you aren't designed to want to exercise you are designed to try to avoid exercise that's what every animal loves that's why every predator goes after the width the weak the sick the slow the isolated to be injured they do that automatically because we're trying to avoid exercise I think they're trying to get the most energy ie food and calories for the least amount of effort that's what they're trying to do so nature and animal nervous systems are being run by the principle of the conservation of energy that's what they're designed to do that includes you that's the reason why you want to eat the rich food even though you know it's not in your best interest long-term it is always in your best interest long-term for every other one of your ancestors except maybe your mud okay so the instincts in you are telling you eat the rich food leave the vegetables and the fruit behind okay the instincts are telling you don't exercise for God's sake sit right back here don't do anything if you don't have to and it sinks we're telling you to sit in front of the TV with a with a box full of Ding Dongs okay and ignore the apples and the pears and the bananas that you have on the counter like forget eat the box of Ding Dongs until you feel sick and for God's sakes don't go upstairs to brush your teeth like just forget about there's wait until those teeth or tell you go to bed then struggle upstairs little later and you know do it then but don't don't go to any extra effort okay because we only want to go upstairs once you've got it so this is you which this person's writing here struggling with this of course you're having fun that's why the closure travel is written it is written too as a message to say the reason why we are self-destructive isn't because we've got psychological problems doesn't mean that we are badly designed doesn't mean that we are people with flaws all all of the opposite is true we are almost perfectly designed there's nothing about our histories that are causing this problem in terms of our personal histories or tragedies the reason why you're having trouble doing this is because you're going against every instinct that's in you that's the book okay which is why what we have to do as AJ will say repeatedly you control of your environment so the only thing that's in that environment are good choices okay and as far as exercise goes you know you kind of have to want to find something that has some secondary appeal to it so if I if I always having to quote go to the gym and exercise I'd never do it okay I know and I go to the gym to play basketball which is something that I like doing and I like to score everybody say well there's no like God like that yeah theoretically out there there's some date that I might have some day where I could say oh I can play basketball and she'll say wow really and I watch you sometime I'm like yeah why I don't need that oh my god that's hilarious that so that that's what's going on inside it heads or even the exercise at the rid of it has some pleasure seeking mechanism circulating around in the back of the the Berggren that's that's that's great so speaking of exercise there's actually two questions on exercise they're very similar solving them both Andrea says she's having a difficult time getting into an exercise routine and would like any advice on how to establish one that she can stick to for a long time and Joelle asks what is the best way to create a habit like exercise or meditation for example and what is the best way to go back quickly to this habit when we have to interrupt it for example because of travel yeah I would say that exercise is is best done every day which is different than a lot of people are doing it so what people are doing is that they're you know a lot of times the same well I'll agree with Jim three times a week this is not a smart way to do things what we want to do is we want to have exercise to be a daily practice that so it is there's not a question of whether we're going to exercise today or not the answer is yes we're going to and therefore it's not something that we're tacking on to our day it's something that it's a we don't do this with respect to eating and we don't do this with respect to brushing your teeth and say well I don't know am I gonna brush my teeth tonight or not no that's not how we do it we're just going to do it and so so therefore we're gonna make the time for it and we're gonna make it sort of a daily priority so it doesn't have to be a long thing it'd be 20 minutes walking around your block it could be 20 minutes if you put the dance music on you know maybe before okay so there's some time that's convenient enough the doesn't have to be this huge deal but you know 15 minutes a day 20 minutes a day get yourself some exercise and do it daily the bats that's the best strategy if you're someone who has never incorporated this into a routine other people will find things that they love to do that's that's ideal so it's not a sign of duty like tooth brushing you know I'm saying and shaving and things like that there's things that we do that are sort of dutiful processes and for some of us you know we're not that interested in physical activity and it's just going to be a beautiful process fine they make it a 15 to 20 minute a day beautiful process and find some way to make it Pleasant if you listen to a podcast while you're doing it or maybe you'll watch you know some TV or maybe you'll just listen to some music you know find some way to to make this process more more pleasant but yeah I would say that the number-one thing is we're not tacking it on it's not meant to be an optional thing it's meant to be a daily a daily practice that's you know if it's not a daily practice if you're thinking oh I'm going to really work out hard three days a week and then take three days off no don't do it that way work out moderately so that you're not exhausted every day you know we're sore and you can't do it the next day yeah we're gonna work we're going to simply work these muscles and work this body moderately or a moderate period of time doesn't have to be long that's the daily practice of exercise there's no reason not to do it you put on some music you know I'm saying put on some music and dance and do some calisthenics that you need out for 20 minutes and listen to some Beatles or whatever it is that you you know will get you're moving the that's how to do this thing I love it that you said it must be a daily practice and I agree with you because that's when I watch all the juicy stuff on Netflix I only let myself do it when I'm on the bike and that bike gets done I think if people would attach their television to their exercise equipment they and that would be the only way they could get to work the TV I think everybody would be exercising with every beam it could check their email you know if they're so that's kind of cool thank you cat asks or well she says dr. Lyle has spoken in the past about situations in which he has procrastinated in academic settings and it turned out to be a good thing because the duties he was being asked to perform became obsolete or irrelevant but what makes us procrastinate when it comes to our health and eating for example I'll cook something later I'm busy having fun right now but later you're starving so you make a bad choice because you're too hungry to cook yeah it's the same process your the fascination you're fiddling around and not wanting to impose a cost on yourself because you you may not have to you mean you need get away with it so it's the same same strategy exactly our minds are not very good at being able to sort of read the cues so people will craft innate paying their mortgage in the same way that they procrastinate you know filling out some silly form that probably isn't going to matter and they will they will do that and it turns out that yeah hey the mortgage so now we're up against climb wise we're rushing around and we'll worry about whether it's late and everything else on the side so people sometimes you have to consciously recognize that there's things that are going to happen and that it makes sense to actually attack those things early it's actually things that are going to happen that are necessary for them to happen and that will happen if they are duties that you're going to have to do the ideal strategy for those is to do them immediately the reason why that's true is that you want to maximize your flexibility in the remaining time therefore things that you don't have to do that are not necessary you will find yourself Tooley fiddling and you'll fiddle along and ingenious payoff matrix what let me explain the logic of this so that you understand how your brain works and then we'll circle back we'll have this problem the you could let's suppose that you're a student and there's a paper due at the end of november and it's like a twenty page term paper it's this big deal okay and it's like twenty five percent of your grade and this is what you're going to do so in that thirty days let's suppose it's November first so November first you get the assignment of what you're supposed to write on so November first you could go home and you could write this thing you can spend the next three days takes a three days to write it so you just knocked out November 1st November 2nd of November third and you did this thing now pretty good feeling this it's done so now the rest of the month you get to optimize your behavior so if I don't know Elton John comes to town you know and your friend and says hey can you want to go you can say yeah I can go it's my works done I don't have to and there's nothing else I have to do so you sort of optimize your flexibility by getting everything you can get done out of your hair however what you've done is you've actually you've done this sub-optimally and the reason is is that there's some chance in the next you know three weeks that we'll find out that we don't have to do this paper it turns out that the process boy people are having such time such a tough time you know it's now it's the 12th of November or probably nobody's hardly done it so you know what I'm just pulling out out of the class you guys have just got too much to do well what if you spent three days doing it you'd be like God a [ __ ] of procrastinated then I would have had those three days like you wouldn't have had to spend them doing this so what you're the mind does is it actually will fiddle for a while and it will give it a chance to find out whether or not we're going to get a break now you can see the problem you you could fiddle all the way to 27th of November that would give you three days left you have maximized the opportunity for this thing to go up and smoke and not have to do it but now there's three days left in the month 28th 29th and 30th you don't have any choice you have to do this paper now it's gonna take the next three days now Elton John comes to town and you're friends sisters tickets too bad it's your favorite artist you really wouldn't want it to go it's the last two or it's a lifetime experience you don't get to go why you should procrastinate it too long now the human mind has a sense of this so it fiddles pretty close to the end to optimize the opportunity of taking advantage of the fiddling and then it starts hustling when it starts to get up against it okay that's that you'll observe this in yourself this is an ingenious algorithm that that sits inside at the human mind now what we want to do is we want to conceptually divide divide this now so that device doesn't get confused into things that we're going to have to do versus things we may not have to do so things that you're going to have to do the the best strategy is to attack them get them out of the way as fast as you can you're going to have to do them anyway we might as well do it right now and therefore we get to optimize our life experience with you with the remaining time that's a good way to do it otherwise what I'm going to say is fiddling for a while okay fiddle for a while let's give ourselves some chance to watch this thing go up in smoke so I might fiddle till the 15th of November at which point 50% of the opportunity of this thing going up its smoke has passed so now with each day that goes on there's diminishing returns of procrastinating and an increasing cost of procrastinating because now what if there's a great backpacking trip that's going to take ten days and it's just some incredible people and there's some you know cute girl or guy that I'm interested in they're going to go on that backpacking trip and now I can't go because I don't have the ten days is available you see so what you want to do is you you want to conceptually say this is a fiddling thing that I may not have to do so let's fiddle for a while to give it a chance and then once we once we get to something like a halfway mark then it's time to assume that we're going to have to do it and just go ahead and attack it and get it out of the way that's really the best way to run your life now the what will happen is with healthy living you never have to do it you never have to do it okay so you get to procrastinate fiddle if you want to and that's a problem nobody's going to push you there's no deadline there's no huge cost and so this is this is when we have to get our act together and realize about wait a second it's a priori because if it's a priority and we really want to do this is we want the benefits then the right way to do it is to attack it okay that means we get organized and get it done we have a different attitude about it so we don't it's not like fiddle around and we're gonna fiddle around a procrastinate and worry maybe we're not gonna have to cook after all it's like now that's the wrong attitude attitude is are you going to do it or not and if you're going to do this if it's a priority and you want to do this then we need to attack it and get in there get your kitchen organized if you're sitting around worrying about whether or not you're going to get your act together and cook tonight you'd be doing instead is to go into the freezer and pull out that frozen soup that we made two weeks ago and put it in the microwave that's what we need to be doing we need to have you know we're in that state we already have to be ready for this position so that's why this is a you know multifaceted you know education and and operation in order to organize your environment and give you behavioral options that are consistent with your own inherent for cross nation and laziness that will enable you to make good choices when the little procrastination ship is tugging at your your sleeve and telling you to go ahead and be a flight now don't do it give yourself a better option there that's a back-up plan that's how you want to handle this that's great I was thinking of the question what answered just a moment ago about making exercise really tablet if you did it every day it wouldn't ever be interrupted because of travel because you just did it every day yeah well you go to the hotel room and what do you do you put on your earphones you boot up your your music or whatever it is that you do and you do 15 or 20 minutes of exercise to that and it's done okay so there's just literally no reason I can get 20 minutes of exercise standing in the back of the plane yeah okay so this is a notion that this is a daily practice like brushing our teeth and you know there may be circumstances when you're injured or you're sick etc that you're not going to exercise that's fine but other will other than that no it's it's got it's a priority yeah yeah it's a good decision to just do it yeah I love it things I think we have time for one more question dr. Lao from Michelle she asks is self hypnosis helpful in creating healthy lifestyle habits and if so what's the best method yeah I hesitated on us for a number of reasons the reason is that many people have done if notice the dissent it's been helpful about the the reasons it's been helpful is not because of hypnosis is because there was a confluence of factors that led that to be a moment in their life where we started changing the behavior pattern and then it then it did okay so one of those things will happen your life has a lot of changes that take place and you will change patterns when circumstances change let me give you a fantastic example so the Surgeon General you know tearing his hair out talked about now I don't know nicotine was tougher than cocaine biggest force addiction so I don't know what the guys said this ludus the truth is is that as soon as they started making it so that you couldn't smoke in buildings and all kinds of people that worked in high-rise two started quit cigarettes so the the use of cigarettes in the United States went from you know 40% or so to like 18 percent across a couple of decades as state-by-state one at a time having led by California probably or ups or who knows the made of the illegal smoke inside of illidan's so we've got this too much trouble being so now oh what we're talking about hypnosis so the point is circumstance that can change so a person goes to hypnotist and they want to change something clearly they wouldn't be there and they're spending money okay and they're thinking this thing through and then they go through you know I don't know watch the watch go back and forth having a firm ation etc and then what do they do they go home and they do it right good for them the hypnosis have them do it no they've got a lot of momentum now and encouragement and expectation that they're going to do this etc so they do it oh god I did it okay then maybe the next day and then maybe do it the next day so now they've done it three four days in a row they've got some cravings or whatever but they pull it off so now what happened so they get through the extinction burst they start David Lee they get across the most difficult part of the river and so now they start to get into a groove did the hypnosis do it no didn't so there's there's no evidence anywhere in study of clinical hypnosis that indicates that this helps anybody change any habits stop smoking lose weight and anything else I'm son okay my life like I said I'm getting cornered by this question publicly because I don't want to take away the experience that people had when they've had a problem they went to a hip with this and they wound up they changed it and it's like well hell I went to a hypnotist and I'm better it's like I know it wasn't a hypnosis it was an entire confluence of factors that were going on in your life your mind was doing a multi-dimensional cost-benefit analysis thinking hard about making this behavior change okay you don't just a you know beast person with no bad habits cleaning this is a longer and they were hypnotist one day just for fun trying to get rid of the pain in their elbow and the hypnosis is well let me do I'll tell you what we're gonna do while we're at it and you get learn pain in your elbow why don't we deal with the obesity so let me hypnotize you so that you're going to eat last now we think that this is going to make any difference for snot there we can take the master hitting assists in the universe nothing's going to happen back the master hypnotist of the universe was a man named Martin Horne from the University of Pennsylvania one of the most brilliant men that ever walked dr. Horne had a PhD in clinical psychology as well as an MD and was a psychiatrist so it was the psychiatrist and a psychologist and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and dr. Martin Horne was obese and it turns out I had a we had a mutual acquaintance he was actually a brilliant diagnostician and and was the psychiatrist and was used in the famous case of the hillside strangler in Los Angeles Bianchi who had duped a bunch of other mental health professionals and Martin Horne lacked the code and put Bianchi speak and fire and wound up resulting in this condition phenom but my friend who had a weight problem said to dr. Warren does it work for weight which boy doctor or looked down at his own 150 plus pound mat and said I'm afraid not as far as that goes okay that's beautiful dr. Lyle everybody's been loving this so much and you know maybe with your permission this could even go on you know to wider audience if you bought and I can show it to you because it's it's brilliant as usual and maybe you'll come back for the next couple months once a month because you're you're so helpful to our people and thank you so much I'll put myself back on to say goodbye to everyone hey we're both wearing blue today very good and in that time you and Alan were both wearing black wow this is great twinsies so thanks dr. Lyle and thank you guys so much for watching and don't forget to tune in every Wednesday night at 8:30 p.m. to dr. Lyle show because one of your questions last night was answered by one of the people right here you actually answered it as the first question and you even said yes one of Ajay's people another hyper conscientious nutcase so that was very nice to get that shout out so thank you so much very good my pleasure AG's thanks dr. Lyle thanks everybody take care bye
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