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well hello there everyone and welcome to healthy living live the first time this year backed by ever popular demand is none other than dr. Lisle dr. Doug Lyall is the co-author of the most wonderful book the pleasure trap the psychologist said both the mcdougal live in program and the True North health center in Santa Rosa California and the star of the weekly beat Eugene's podcast that airs every Wednesday night at 8:30 p.m. Pacific time on itunes blog talk radio and now unspotted i you can even call in and ask him a question live if that weren't enough you have an opportunity to see him in person this year at the live altima tweet loss conference along with dr. cole hammer and dr. campbell so here to answer your questions is our very favorite guest dr. Doug Lyall hi dr. Lyle thank you so much great to see you we love talking to you so many people Cathy and Julian valeria here guys don't forget to share this broadcast in real time with your groups and pages because it just helps more people let's see the brilliance of dr. Lyle so dr. Lyle this first question was actually left over from last year but I think it's perfect for this time of year especially when so many people make new year's resolutions that they probably have already forgotten about the girl says I'm not gonna say her name because she didn't give me permission she said dear dr. Lyle what is the best way to implement a regular exercise program for someone who's basically been inactive their entire life I don't have any physical limitations I just hate to exercise I even hire a dog walker to walk my dog I eat what many would consider an A+ diet and have good sleep hygiene but for some reason I've never exercised and because I'm not overweight I've never felt the need or the drive to I just turned 50 and I'm scared about functional fitness as I age if I don't start doing some kind of movement but I just don't know how to get smote abated to start exercising and to keep exercising take it away dr. Lyle join the club I wouldn't exercise either so in fact I remember you and I talked about this years ago AJ that there's a time in your life when you weren't an exerciser either it's all right absolutely not till I was 52 yes so this is a very good question I'm inherently lazy and I wouldn't exercise if I didn't like to play basketball so that's that's the only reason that happens and all the things that she's talking about like functional thickness worried about it I've go through the same thing so if you know I really ought to go to a Pilates class I ought to do this I don't know if I'm ever gonna do it as long as long as I can go out there at white ball I think baby seems like they're fine now you know what I would do is the following I wouldn't I wouldn't essentially plan on turning over a new leaf and instituting something of any significance in your life because you probably won't do it other words you're not going to join a gym and then start going down there three or four days a week and work it out for an hour and then making this part of your life routine that probably won't happen but what could happen would be something that would be a little bit fun okay so if you could if you could do something that would be a little bit fun that might work so something that can be fun can be to put on music and dance for example or exercise to just do calisthenics to some music so and so what I would do is I would get yourself an Alexa or whatever so that you can put on some music easily easily enough and then make this about a 10-minute daily routine that way it's no big deal you don't even have to get into any exercise clothes we don't have to make a big deal out of it at all all we're going to do is we're going to actually do some very very modest Cal calisthenics with appropriate rest so that we're not getting too tired I in between we don't need to be gasping for breath but what we want to do is we want to be working some of these muscles fairly vigorously for you know ten minutes a day if you do do this just you know two or three good songs probably three probably you know let's groove by Earth Wind and Fire something cool okay so put some put some music on there and and therefore you get to listen some music that you wouldn't actually get yourself organized to listen to but now we have a reason to get the music on and moving and you don't need to have anything you can do it in your socks are in your tennis shoes and you don't have to you can do it in your street clothes it doesn't have to be any big deal and this is a way to start to do this process and the one thing that I'm always trying to encourage people to look for the most important probably individual psychological insight that you can ever have is to understand the self-esteem mechanism and how it works so the self-esteem mechanism is the result of an internal audience that all normal functioning humans have I always laughed but that we did this the audience is essentially a critic in the broadest sense of the term in other words it could praise you or it could criticize you if you're dr. Goldhamer when it whenever you walk into the room that gives you a standing ovation this was he was born with the world's most benign and Terrell abeyance that's just how that works but most in this have an internal audience that is essentially pretty fair so it sounds like this this lady is having an internal audience that's saying hey you know Ann or Judy you're kind of doing so so okay on this dimension like you're doing a good job with your diet that you kind of said so probably not that athletically tone not that strong I'm starting to worry about your fitness in terms of your your strength and flexibility and things like that mm-hmm this is legitimate so at 50 this is not a problem but you can you can see how people move as they age and I watched I watched my mother change dramatically from 75 to 85 at 75 she she walked vigorously and had no problems at all by 85 she's not walking very well she's shuffling along real carefully I've attempted to get her to do some things a little bit differently but you know people are it's hard to get people to change their habits well one of the most striking things that I ever learned in a seminar was watching JP so I was back about three or four years ago when we were down in that house in Los Angeles AJ and I watched a JP give a a one-hour lecture on fitness and I you know I don't recall ever learning as much from a lecture as I did it in that format seminar the I learned about why it is that old people shuffle and I learned how it is to fix it and so he went through a but essentially if you were to get up and dance around for 10 minutes to some music just moving your feet around and doing some calisthenics you would achieve what it is that he was looking for which is essentially a an integration between you know it's sort of a mind-body connection for getting a little bit out of balance and this is what doesn't happen when people the people age and they walk like my mother they don't when they just walk around the block it's good good exercise and it will do you good but what it doesn't do is it doesn't catch you and get you off balance and if you're not routinely getting off balance then as you get older you fear falling and when you fear following what happens is is that you get extremely careful about your movements and you take very short steps so that you can keep balance because you fear actually the moment where you may stumble and then you can't move your foot quick enough out wide to catch yourself and your muscles aren't strong enough to catch yourself by having essentially an irregular misstep now if your regular missteps would have happened routinely in the Stone Age because people weren't walking on flat concrete they're walking on an uneven terrain constantly there were lives so you'll see little old people in the Stone Age villages at 80 years old they're still incredibly spry and another thing chase JP talked about is that they don't have chairs in stem egde so they have to get up off the floor and it turns out that's a very big deal to keep your muscles strong in that dimension so it's a very good idea to I'll start with older people to actually have them do the exercise of when they're sitting in a chair get up out of that chair about ten times in a row just do it over and over again to exhaust those quadriceps to get them stronger even better if you can still do it and you know you're 50 we should be getting up off the floor so that would be a good thing to do get up off the floor dance get down sit down on the floor again in between would catch your breath get up again okay so this uh but by dancing around or making these irregular movements even better of course would be to walk on an uneven train so if you're in a place where there's a height that you can go on even once a week and you go on that hike for 45 minutes or so that's superb now I don't live in a place like that and I wish I did I live in a flat place so there's no there's no real way for for me to do that but but I go play sports that cause of your regular movements I'm trying to get my mom to do some irregular movements but if you're 50 years old and worried about this put on some music and dance make it Pleasant or just you don't like dancing just exercise and do calisthenics to it in this way this is how you can slowly build up your muscle tone and at the same time again the most important issue here is to to watch your self-esteem rise if you do this for 10-15 days in a row you'll watch your internal audience start to take you seriously and start to give you some respect that you're actually being diligent enough to go to the trouble to do this that's it won't be a big standing ovation like some people but it will be a mild lift so how it is that you feel about yourself if you make this investment and I think that's what happened with you AJ is when you started walking started doing this after a while it became part of a little of a little snowball that once you started to do it you like the feeling probably that came from inside that you did it and now you got kind of appropriately or very healthily addicted to that feeling and now you don't want to miss it and it says does that sum it up pretty well well I think for me because I suffer so terribly from anxiety that it's it's like the medication that I used to take but it's much more effective and I'm wondering if you can address that especially for all our viewers that have panic disorder anxiety why it's really so important to not only do exercise if you have those conditions but to do them daily and vigorously because I it changes my brain it changes my personality whether I exercise or not yes that's all that's actually a good additional thing to talk about in our questionnaire here that wasn't talking about that but for many people particularly in in UWL and the plant-based world with people that take it seriously they tend to be my favorite diagnosis type of conscientious metathesis they just are okay though I just talked to one this morning so the tected two this morning one yeah actually I talked to two so the two people I spoke to this morning we're both HCFCs and that's that's what draws in our world and so it turns out that the hyper punch in just individual by nature is essentially overestimating worst-case scenarios and spending a great deal of time a fairly high level of anxiety which is going to be to serve low-grade adrenaline baths keeping them worried and keeping them didn't and so one of the nice things that happens when you exercise is they will drain that off the anxiety in a stone-age environment wasn't about you know worrying about you know whether the luminary got an an or homework assignment you know that's whatever it is that my H DNC's worried about or they weren't they they weren't worried about whether or not you know there's enough vitamin eat well or well in this soup other words that's not what they were worried about they were worried about things that that could be solved through a muscular action they're worried about predators they were worried about going around and looking for predators they were examining the screams of their children and making sure that there was laughter but that the in fact wasn't a predator grabbing a kid or Warrick's or a or threatening a child so your your ancestors when they had anxiety it was anxiety that would be making it possible for them to be more athletic by having adrenaline to essentially stoke the abilities of their musculature to fire and get them out of trouble when we have anxiety today we it's you know it's from the IRS for god sakes the great predator [Laughter] point is is that there's nothing you can do in terms of your muscles to fix it so and so you a lot of times don't think of it so you don't even though you're having adrenaline wanting you to dissipate or improve your circumstances through muscular action there's no intelligent muscular action to do because it's not a muscle a muscle level threat so what we can do to dissipate our anxiety is to sort of routinely get up and stretch and use your muscles and vigorously use them for a short period of time and that can dissipate a lot of adrenaline and make you a lot more comfortable so people that are for yourself I know you like to actually legitimately workout and then that can carry over for a while some other people sometimes can benefit from essentially doing short bursts of exercise you know 20 times a day and 20 times a day they can essentially drain off you know every half an hour that just even two or three minutes of relatively intense calisthenics sort of drain the adrenaline off of them and make them more comfortable for the next half hour so exercise has you know multiple benefits and and so incorporating it in a way that's simple and see it doesn't require a gym membership and fancy clothes and then running the gauntlet of everybody else looking at you and what you look like and then having a shower like forget it don't bother if you're one of those people who likes to do that great but if you're not let's start incorporating some daily exercise with much simpler much shorter forays into this arena great thank you all the hyper conscientious nut cases are commenting that they appreciate that diagnosis now we were thinking of getting t-shirts made in Vegas with your photo and just saying I'm a hyper country it's just that case so we think that would add Jeannine elder if you're watching we need you to design that as soon as possible great thanks dr. Lao so here's another question so uh the person that wrote the question I only say the name if they say I can so as she says I've heard you say that our personality is fixed and it cannot be changed I recently heard dr. Goldhamer say that if one is not highly conscientious we will find it very difficult to delay gratification and more likely to indulge in short-term pleasure seeking self-indulgent behavior if this is me do I just throw my hands up in the air and give up what concrete advice can you give a less conscientious person for staying out of the dietary pleasure trap okay well this is this good very good question and let's let's let's try to explain that there's a lot of misconceptions that can come about when I start talking about psychology it's very very easy I actually thought through the other day that in my conception of how psychology works is so different than the mainstream that even a psychologist listening to me would walk away a little bit puzzled and wouldn't be quite sure what it is that I was saying because it's effectively so radical the odd but it's right I mean that it's radical doesn't mean it's not true the yeah your personality isn't subject to change that doesn't mean your behavior isn't subject to change it means your personalities that such exchange those are two different things and so let me tell you what that means so if you are if you are sort of average conscientiousness not that careful with details that you're open to experience and therefore you like to experience that the cornucopia of existence and you don't want to leave anything on the table between now and the time you die you want to then at all if you're if your social extroverted and then you are also pretty agreeable you have a prescription for failure in this arena it's going to be very very difficult for you to walk the narrow path even eating a diet dominated by whole mental food it's just not in the cards now the the question is could you possibly rig the deck yeah you could you couldn't rig the deck but it would be very difficult for you to do so let's talk about where you would put your time and energy on this you wouldn't put your time and energy in psychotherapy trying to change yourself so standard psychotherapy meanders around a vague goal and the vein goal comes about from some serious misconceptions about the genesis of human struggles and the nature of human personality so throughout the 20th century the two dominant theories of personality first of all let's back up with just a second here EJ let me explain what personality is beyond if you were to to study medicine there would be a textbook called Grey's Anatomy and so Grey's Anatomy tells you is the story of what the kidney is and where it's located what the liver is where it's located you know what did the bicep is where it's located and those things are located in the same place of every person on the planet so if you go over and study medicine in Taiwan they don't tell you that the kidneys are actually where the thigh is you know all human beings have the same fundamental design despite the fact that they come from different areas the world they may look differently on the outside but on the inside the kidney is a kidney as a kidney is a kidney and it's in the same place it has the same little tubes connected to it and once you goes here and the other tube goes there and that is the kidney that's Grey's Anatomy that's general Anatomy for human beings comes in two types a male and a female learning there will different anatomical processes when you're a little kid etc so this is the that's what I'm going to call general anatomy and physiology now once you've done that and you go to a doctor school and you become an expert in kidneys and you try to help people with a kidney function now you're a nephrologist now you're extremely interested in the individual differences of the kidneys in fact from your standpoint as a nephrologist every single kidney you look at is different some of them are super healthy some of them aren't so healthy terribly diseased etc and so you're looking at this thing and they're all different okay some of them aren't that functional but it's in a 97 year old person you're like you know what your kidney is pretty darn good it's doing just fine that won't be our limiting factor of your life it's going to be something else so the individual difference issue that's what we're going to call personality so all human beings have very similar psychologists just is to have extremely similar anatomy and physiology in other words the the mind works pretty much the same in everybody and they come in two types basically male and female so the female mind is slightly different than the male mind but they're very clear they're clearly different so they have different mating search images the female as a as a female mating search image that has a male a banana in her head as a little picture looks like George Clooney or Justin Bieber depends find out what how old you are the and then if you're a male you've got a little picture in your head that looks like Raquel Welch or whoever it is and so these so the mating search images are different and there's some other things that are different but the male and female just as male and female anatomies are very similar male and female psychology sir very similar with some differences now so what we're really interested in is is another interesting feature just like the nephrologist is interested in individual differences in kidneys we are interested in individual differences in people so even though we know they're all basically the same the truth is is that they have some individual differences that are very interesting and they're important just as individual differences in kidneys will tell us whether or not one kidneys in trouble and one kidneys great so it is true that the individual differences in personality will tell us who's going to be a good salesman door to door salesman and who isn't so let me tell you what a good door to door salesman is extraverted low conscientiousness okay that's what that's gonna where you need somebody that isn't it doesn't have the truth stuck to them too carefully and it is also very extroverted and is seemingly and seemingly intermediate or agreeable it seems pretty agreeable pretty agreeable willing to agree to things and tell you what's what you want to hear isn't too concerned about the truth and is very extroverted that's a good door-to-door sales person okay so if you are introverted highly conscientious and and very disagreeable you will make a terrible door-to-door sales person this is never this is just never going to happen so I mean is they is they they say gee could you think that you guys could maybe do a little help me with the solar panels you know on a Sunday you'd say no we don't do that ma'am not possible now if our people don't work on the weekends isn't there any possible to have an exception no ma'am not possible this is if you're disagreeable highly conscientious and introverted you are not going to make it in the sales arena so you need to have your own unique personality just like you have a unique kidney in a unique part that is the new notion of personality and those personality differences each and every one of us have profound consequences for what happens in our lives now psychologists for the last hundred years starting with Freud and then moving on to the UPS Skinner the two major think of but sort of major domains of thought in psychology about the nature of personality they've had somewhat different views but in the extremely similar an important wettest so the psychodynamic view is that early childhood experiences have enormous impact on your personality ie why it is that you're different from other people why is that you the introverted versus extroverted why it is that you would be conscientious or unconscious why is it that you would be agreeable or disagreeable so the notion is that through some complicated dynamics between you and your parents your personality performed in a way of sort of in a response to the environment that you found yourself in similar but different is social learning theory that dominates academic psychology which is the notion that you imitated other people or that you reinforce or punished for being certain ways and so that the people in learning theory have been extremely confident about this because they see that reinforcement and Punishment makes a big impact on behavior people so they assumed that it would make an impact on lasting impact on people's personalities both of these theories are wrong they are both wrong at the core there's just no truth in them it turns out that the research evidence overwhelmingly implicates genetic variation as being the source of your personality so I mean that doesn't mean that you're that you're learning history doesn't have any influence on your life it does but it doesn't influence your personality so let me give you an example suppose that when you were nine years old you went to Mexico for vacation and Cancun and you loved it okay this doesn't change your personality so when your boy I really want to go back to can Tim like I loved it in Cancun I love the crystal-clear water I want to go there that experience didn't change your personality it just discovered something about you that you remembered and you want to repeat and that's what it did and so your knowledge of your environmental exposure and what you've been exposed to influences your understanding of the environment but let's suppose you went to Cancun and you didn't like it okay it means like well the experience didn't cause you to like it and it's change your personality even if you're reinforced with M&Ms every 15 minutes by your mother for being all and so on the beach it didn't change anything okay you still went home and said boy I ate a lot of M&Ms but I hated Cancun and I never want to go back didn't change your personality at all okay and so the this this has been you know psychologists today don't understand this that's because the typical psychologist is not educated and the research literature on this topic you're but it's clear that your personality you know I've got two cats sitting outside that door cats have been with me since they were kittens and they're the same oh it's okay these two these two guys haven't changed two girls actually they're very different in their personalities and they've been treated by me since there are little kittens and nothing has changed I think that's okay and parents do the bad for children these poor children it's like 30 you know they're away they all grow up in the same household and sometimes they're pretty similar is the genes worked out that way but sometimes it didn't work out that way at all those genes are incredibly different okay and that's just how that works so now leave me I don't know now on Goldhammer since he was age nothing has changed okay is always the same so of course people learn and their understanding the environment changes so as you as your exposure to the environment and your understanding of the environment is altered that will alter your behavior so so Alan now knows that instead of selling cinnamon toothpicks for kids on the playground that he used to do now he has people water fast gets more effective way to do things it's fine same personality so you if you have a an adventurous personality and you have an agreeable personality in the social personality you're in trouble okay so you do not have the perfect perfect personality for this problem any more than our disagreeable introvert clock highly conscious introvert as it's going to be a door-to-door sales person so people will come to me and say well what the heck am I going to do about this okay and for the dorm the drummer salesperson I say you're not going to be a door-to-door sales person that's the we've got you in the wrong environment we need to put you in an environment that works for you okay if you are an open to experienced person and in your kitchen there's all kinds of stuff there because your husband likes Fritos and your kid likes mayonnaise and a tuna fish sandwich and everybody's got little scooter pies and if you've got an environment and if you're open to experience and you're not that conscientious and you're social and agreeable and you've got crap all over your environment you're in trouble right now Alan Goldhamer could live in that environment without any problem he would that the temptation would barely register on that nervous system but that's because he's not open he's not interested in finding out what that scooter pie tastes like now I would but that little scooter pie in my in my pantry I'd be thinking I think I know what it tastes like it's marshmallow with sort of the cheap chocolate covering and a graham cracker and I don't think I'm gonna like it that much and if I eat it'll be real soso and then my god will feel a little weird afterwards that's what I think is going to happen but it would happen I'd have to check okay so don't put me in an environment little scooter pie because that's going to be a problem and in the same way don't don't don't throw that for disagreeable introvert lightly conscious person to the wolves and trying to get him to sell you know I don't know some bogus encyclopedia on the doors or deal it's not going to work so for yourself you cannot change your personality but when you can do is you could change your environment so I can take that introvert and put him in a library okay and I can have him work at a library and his disagreeableness won't be too bad okay you know when he could you can be just as scribble and not be tell people Shh but you do everything properly and he's in a nice quiet library and yes good life so we now put him in the right spot okay so look to put yourself depend upon what your personality is look to how it is that you need to place yourself in environments that are going to be more conducive to your success that's what you want to do and that that's the you know so for example oh I don't know even if you're if you're open you better get a bigger repertoire of healthy treats so that you don't get bored okay so Alan can have brown rice and broccoli with you know carrots for dessert that's fine for him but it's not fine for me so I have to live with the wider repertoire of foods that's that's how it's going to happen the and if your social just you know this is it eww all are your people Alan's not social I'm his only friend he and his wife Jennifer his kid guard so that's it he doesn't have to worry about these problems the your social then obviously you're going to need to develop techniques to actually be happy essentially friendly and easygoing with people why this is while you don't go along with everything that they do not get into arguments whip down etc that's what all my videos and everything are about about getting along without going along he essentially swimming in an environment of other people that that you may want to be in but but do a pretty good job of staying your program but that's essentially not changing the personality that's changing your understanding of the social environment about how it is that you can manage it by essentially having you have additional information about how to smooth your way through a very specific social challenge okay some psychologists would say well what the heck is that and change the individual difference or the person now I haven't that that person won't be able to translate or transfer that idea to scum a new domain in their life they won't do it okay the we can choose specific words that are very specific types of social challenges where we're ready for it and then we can learn what it is that we're going to say and that can it's going to help us get by okay so that if we're agreeable we can find a way to say no to things but we better you know essentially have it scripted because it won't ever come naturally so that's the idea is that change your environment you can make yourself a little bit more effective within the environments that you're in which is essentially changing your understanding of the dynamics of what sits under that environment and its demands so if you've got a boss it's a pain in the neck you can figure out how to flatten okay and and you might you might actually be able to dial down some of the hassle but you're probably not going to translate that technique easily to the jet world in general that you're probably just a little bit at a time get a good at dealing with one specific kind of this situation that it repeats over over again so you know work on work a lot harder on place it the easiest thing to do is to place yourself in environments that are conducive to success get out of the door-to-door business and get into the library and in this case get your environment really cleaned up and get agreements with people that are in it that we're going to keep it clean so that you can have a better chance of success this is absolutely marvelous because I never said when I when I maybe we have to work harder than we do ourselves and so if I understand you our personality is fix but we can change our behavior and we can change our environments so perhaps if we're a little bit less conscientious if we go to a place like true north we don't make bad choices yes yeah so the way we get behavior change is generally to change the environment okay so you you so for example our person that isn't doing any exercise and fifty and feeling a little bad about it and a little worried about it if we change her environment by essentially recognizing and repeatedly finding a way to get the music on in her house okay so now what we've done is that's why I said buy yourself an Alexa if you don't have one or if you've got a little stereo system or something that'll work real conveniently we want a situation where it's literally no hassle to get the music guy now once you do that what happens is now you've effectively changed your environment because before you had done that you didn't think about music in the environment and there wasn't any music in the environment so there was nothing encouraging you to move but if we have now changed that environment slightly or even your understanding like okay well there's the stereo I never use it there's a bunch of CDs yeah I haven't even turned it on in a year but now we put a CD on that you or a CB on that you like and we and we turn the thing on so they won't have to turn it on we leave it on all the time and so now all we have to do every every morning is we just hit the play button on that CD and and now we're good to go and now we're up and moving about three songs in a row we do our 10 minutes that's a change of the environment today so we didn't get you to dutifully start exercising when you didn't want exercise we shifted the environment slightly and made it more fun and pleasant okay and then that and we made it easy to get there rather than this is the year that I'm going to go down at Gold's Gym you know I mean and I'm going to start working out really hard four days a week very unlikely that you're going to do that much more likely that we could do a small shift of the environment and that will cause a behavior change that is positive and start a little self-esteem a little self-esteem snowball that that continues on in an addictive life pattern that we didn't have to reach in your character and try to rewrite who you are we just shift in the environmental situation a little bit that's what we want to do well I love that you're saying this because I'm the biggest believer that environment is a huge determinant of success in my apartment the only seat there is in front of the TV is on the spin bike so if you want to watch TV you have to spin and the only food here is whole natural food of a caloric density of 600 calories per pound or less so I'm not extraordinary I just I've built my environment to support this so dr. Lau so many of the women in the ultimate weight loss program are highly agreeable people pleasers and where they struggle most are in these social situations where someone made non-compliant food just for them now they can't change their personality but they can watch your your video getting along without going along or read the chapter and in the pleasure trap and they can actually like a Salesman almost learn scripts so that they don't have to ingest toxic food but still be the sweet agreeable person that they're known for being yes absolutely yeah I've had people contribute to my ways of dealing with things over the years because they've listened to me and they'd come up to me and they told me things that they'd said and they were saying things that work for them and so I have many of them and all kinds of them would work and with with varying degrees of sort of honesty and directness so mm-hmm one of them is I had one lady said oh I just tell everybody I'm allergic okay she's too agreeable otherwise she would get pounded so by saying oh no she's allergic that's it and she looks good down the Lord done dad that's how she did it now other people say I can't say that then I have a big cross-examination or I don't want to deal with that I don't want to lie okay so another thing some he said whenever they offer anything she says no thanks maybe later them very quick agreeable you know not just now maybe later then gets rid of the problem and then if they come at her again does it again half an hour later and maybe later just that fast that's probably enough to get rid of a huge amount of pressure that would take place and you have you have done almost nothing there's been almost no compensated situation then there's all the stuff that I could all do so yeah that you know it's a little more a little more direct a little more honest a little more it takes a little bit more assertiveness which it I sort of naturally have so but it's not but it's pretty soft it's pretty slimy drives MacDougal crazy he can't stand it he doesn't like any like ah a tissue but he understands that his personality is very strong and and obviously he would he wouldn't be subject to any social pressure at all but you're absolutely right many of our people are very agreeable and they need to be ready with quick little devices or wiggling around this pressure because all that it's going to take is for them to hesitate like a deer-in-the-headlight now they take a scoop of somebody's cottage cheese or macaroni and cheese now they're in trouble yeah I mean and now there now now they've got a little battle on their hand and their self-esteem takes a hit and the closer Travis stove and now now we're now we're in some hot water so yeah we want to be ready and you can't change your personality but you can prepare for moments to put yourself in a better position you know I don't know if I ever shared this with you dr. Lyle in January of 2011 dr. Goldhamer came to my home where I teach cooking classes and this was before I understood that like peanut butter was not acceptable in his realm and even things like cocoa powder so two of the 10 recipes had that and while the girls were serving him when he came to those two recipes he said no like he didn't even say no thank you no you know he just wasn't going to eat it and I feel that if we had asked him why he probably would have said something like because I don't want to get fat and sick like you so you know when I say to people in these social situations it's something like oh that looks really good but you know I've been experiencing a lot of explosive diarrhea lately and you've got a white couch so I'm just gonna pick that's what I say so what me okay so this question is based on last month you talk brilliantly about the pleasure trap ego trap how it's basically a Chinese finger trap walls young lady writes dr. Lisle can you recommend a way to be abstinent from foods that are troublesome for you without getting yourself into the ego trap I find that if I include even small amounts of sugar and flour and sometimes even salt I will get food cravings and overeat immeasurably so that I don't reach my health or weight-loss goals how do you advise people who are very vulnerable to the effects of specific foods to avoid them without kicking over the table well this is sort of it's it's a good question but it's but on the one hand all I can do is reiterate the truth and and that is that these two problems are our opponent dynamics and so the higher you put the bar or the pleasure trap the closer and closer you are you already getting swallowed by the ego drug and the and the lower you put the bar for the pleasure trap the more indulgent you become the easier it is on the you go traffic is it's a goal that you can reach reasonably the problem is you then will Stoke enough pleasure trap cravings and adulterate your tastebuds enough but it will be very difficult to hold on to a reasonable level of compliance minimums so these two things are naturally and they weren't supposed to be this is a totally unnatural problem by the way the the ego trap is a natural problem that arises from time to time in human nature where we've been given too much credit or something and the expectations are now too hi and we feel the pressure of not being able to live up to those expectations and so what we will do is we will then sabotage our our behavior yeah or aren't our goal efforts in order to make it clear that we were not trying so this is the quote kid that's been told he's brilliant making sure he gets locked the night before the SATs so so that he when he doesn't live up to the expectations he hasn't really lost that much stats so this is a natural natural maneuver that is that comes to human nature the pleasure trap there's nothing natural about it where the trap is a totally completely created mess that human beings probably first figured out in the last ten thousand years you know alcohol was probably the first pleasure trap were one of the first ones they ever discovered as centuries went by and the millennium went by you know they eventually discovered opium which was a disaster for China the for a long time and and then you know one by one when we find cocaine by the lady by 1850s and so and then by 1980s they figure out how to turn it into crack for god sakes so you you start to start to see that these are unnatural problems and therefore what's being called upon is the level of self-discipline to refrain from these things it is not natural so once a person look if the person has a higher response of dopamine or Dorf into some specific chemical morphine cocaine etc they can be exceedingly difficult to get out of it that can be a tar pit now while the foods that we know are problematic have similar characteristics they aren't they aren't the mind-altering substances that alcohol is to an alcoholic it would be it would be disrespectful to people that have struggled with alcoholism to call it the same it's not the same it's but I like to call it addiction like it's it's it's no joke and this this person is saying hey but I get even a snootful this stuff it's very hard to stay out of it now that's the Smith all of it is not causing the mind-altering mess that an alcoholic experiences when they drink it is not the same so I don't I don't have the same level of compassion and a feeling of creeping despair with this problem I do have some condition and I also understand that that a you got to take some this is this is a serious price that you need to pay most people don't need to pay it fully they they need to do it a good job and not a perfect job they can lower the bar so that they are they are not chronically in an ego trap or waiting the spring but in this case of this individual it's it's their perception that they cannot do it ninety five percent that if they do it that five percent its Stokes an alcoholic like obsession and behavior pattern that is that that they can't really now what is quote the solution there isn't one the the solution is a a relentless focus of detail of environment in order to if you're going to be not just an A student but a perfect student you better study the material like nobody else that's what it's going to take and even then that may not be enough so if you're going to break the back of alcoholism it's going to take unbelievable focus to do it it isn't it done half house okay it's not done pretty much most of the time do a pretty good job no you have to change that that's why the 12 steps and the process is involved in a that they describe in a not the days for but the point is the processes that they describe the descriptions that have come out of the last century of Na or eliminated they are talking about an extraordinary commitment and major changes in a person's environment they have to give up their old friends okay they need to get right with themselves they gotta have to go confront all the shitty things that they did on the outlaw ism and try to essentially get their sole point they have to be relentlessly focused okay they have to use sponsor and social support etc etc and this is no I mean this is an all-encompassing deal their person that is similarly determined to try to you know and has possibly an alcoholic level response to processed food if we require a similar level of commitment to the environment you don't have to go bare your soul who the things that you did when you were on a sugar binge if she didn't do anything weird on sugar binge okay but what you must do is you have to have the same level of relentless commitment to have in your environment between and a you don't go hang out with people that are drinking and test your test your resolve you don't do it that bad you know that suicide and so in the same way you got it you're gonna have to this person's question and the answer is if you are that susceptible to the pleasure trap you then you're that susceptible enclosure trap and you have to you have to grasp every scrap of control that you can by having an environment that is subscribed in Arabic compliant that's how you would do it that makes so much sense and once again it comes back to the environment because it does seem not everyone but there are people I meet that are in the group that seem to be very sensitive or vulnerable to the effects of these processes specifically like sugar and flour and once they once they figure it's not a problem of sugar it's a problem with sugar plus fat put together and that's because sugar and factor together unnatural combination there's no route that has in fat in it and there's no steak with a bunch of fat on the side of it that has sugar in it this is nuts that are high fat don't have any sugar I'm so sure and fat are an unnatural combination that only takes place in mammals when they're when they're when they're in their youth when they're using their mother's milk or their sugar and fat so these are independent neural pathways into a pleasure centers the brain and so they're after you've done drinking your mother's milk even as a human child you've had your last mouthful of food that would have full sugar and fat in it at the same time you're not going to happen will only happen unnaturally when some cook puts it together in the same thing but it is not a natural phenomenon and so when we put those together then we get pleasure trap stuff it's harder for people to stay out of it but sugar itself no I don't think so I don't think people will typically overdo it at all yeah and the evidence indicates that probably 10% of human calories came from honey wow that's that's sugar it's pure sugar probably ten percent of their calories so maybe more that's what it looks like when we look at current Stone Age hunter gatherers today that honey is a very big part of their environment and when I found this out I was a little astonished it's like oh there's where my sweet tooth comes from okay so it's a that's a lot more concentrated than what's happening in in fridge you know fruits got a bunch of fiber and water and fruits awfully sweet that's awfully good but honey six times as concentrated however the I don't see people typically crazy about sugar I see people crazy about sugar plus fat that's where the action is so keep in mind that don't necessarily be thinking the sugar is your big trouble it's the combination that's trouble and if you try to be too fastidious about keeping sugar for example you may find yourself you know frustrated and kicking over the table because that is a bridge too far and it's not even a bridge that your ancestors cross they weren't trying to keep out of [ __ ] where they were trying to get it but they never had a situation where they were getting sugar fat at the same time so careful so I will have people that that have big-time quote sugar problems and they're real frustrated with themselves because they're eating a lot of high-density calories at night after dinner but those high density calories are always sugar and fat so peanut butter and jelly sandwich so it's almond butter and jelly sandwich so what do we have we've got the almond butter which is fat and we got the jelly which is sugar so we've got a combination and we put it on 1800 Kerry pound bread these are the types of things that are hyper conscientious nut cases get into and then they when they try to get rid of all sort of attraction to sweet it doesn't happen doesn't happen for me so let me give you an example of something that isn't isn't too far out of line at all which would be take a bunch of frozen berries and put them in a blender so if you do that you've got an interesting supernormal stimuli to some degree but it's not high in calorie density it's a bunch of fruit and it's sweet and so this is not you know this is something that if you can have something like this replace and it actually essentially satisfied this sugar is seeking craving that maybe in your head but not indulge the sugar and fat supernormal stimuli that you that you've learned is there and that you could get the bitumen too if you do it repeatedly then you've got a that you've essentially you know petted the natural craving that's in you but not stoked and unnatural a combination of sugar and fat when you look at the things that people go wild over it's actually a sugar fat salt altogether so that's what you're going to get in some barbecued steak with barbecue sauce there's sugar in it there's fat in it and there's salt in it that's what's in a Snickers bar Snickers bar has by bad a bunch of sugar and it has a bunch of salt okay so you know that's a I don't know candy coated popcorn or whatever it is caramel popcorn you start looking at a lot of things that people get into they are out most of em or combinations of sugar and fat and often they're combinations of all three and so keep keep your eye on the ball here a little bit more carefully as to what you're more nervous system may not be that far out of line but if you if you walk it over into unnatural combinations that's where the problem is not necessarily your craving for sweet I couldn't agree with you more dr. Lau because the people I know that have slips or relapses on sugar it's not Twizzlers or gummy bears or sweet tarts which are high in sugar but zero fat its donuts and french fries and candies cakes cookies pies and ice cream because you said yourself on a previous broadcast that we were never meant to activate sugar fat and salt those pathways at the same time and in nature none of those three existed together in any food and even dr. Goldhamer said that people that we think of as great chefs all that means is they know how to hyper concentrate sugar fat and salt in the same meal to get us to to eat it so that's amazing I do have time for one more question or would you like to call it a day well no it'd be one more question but just occurred to me sometime in the last month somebody pointed this out to me I don't know who it was that french fries would catch up his sugar pencil like I never picked up the notion that the ketchup I never bothered me people have always asked me about ketchup and Gia's got a lot of sugar and I'm like so what this is not a problem they all put all ketchup on a on a veggie burger for myself and I'm not worried about a bit a bit but wait a second when we have french fries we've got a bunch of oil in there and a bunch of salt in there and then we put sugar on there with it now we've got this phenomenal con we got the triple play and so I thought oh there it is you know when we I'm sure that we'll discover a bunch more of them as we as our minds meander around this concept but we're going to find over and over again double plays are all over the place and triple plays are more common than I thought when we really start looking at that what a lot of people are reading a lot of them what they're attracted to it's tripled why peanut butter jelly sandwiches a triple but that there's there's there's salt in the peanut butter there's a bunch of fat in the peanut butter and there's sugar in the jam it's like it looks quite innocuous but what we really have is a is a major super and all the stimuli very good all right yeah absolutely next question Abbott baby yeah I call that the evil Trinity sugar fat and salt this is rather long so I'm gonna tear a phrase or read it fast she says I've often heard many of the plant-based speakers say that when you're attempting a dietary lifestyle change it's important to know your why I've even heard them say you need a Y that makes you cry do you think that people who have a strong motivation do better I've noticed in the ultimate weight loss program that the people that seem to have lost the weight and maintain that weight loss have strong weak reasons for wanting to lose the weight such as avoiding surgery or medication and those that wanted to lose weight to fit into a bathing suit or for their daughter's wedding always seem to gain it back so I guess the question is is do we need a strong motivation do we do better if we know why all people including all animals the reason why they do what they do is they're running cost-benefit analysis and so the so that's also going to be true for any change the patterns of behavior that you do over and over again the reason why you do them is because of you have a classmen that analysis that keeps coming up with the same answer so you know I watch I watched some NBA basketball because I like it and I won't watch hockey because even though I might see it for a few seconds on SportsCenter it just doesn't capture my imagination now I'm never somebody who played hockey I didn't grow up in Minnesota I don't know who the great hockey players are and I don't care I know Wayne Gretzky that's it okay so the point is there's a reason why I still watch basketball and it's a cost-benefit analysis the the my mind that's why anybody does anything repetitively they're doing this so there's some reason why you go to work plan I want to go to work but the cost-benefit analysis is that I'm better off going to work they're not going to work so the CBE or the cost-benefit analysis is actually it is the most fundamental unit of psychology so the just like it's in the periodic table of elements in chemistry we've got these you know hundred and eight elements or whatever they are those are the building blocks of the universe that you live in and you can break them down further you can break them down into protons electrons and neutrons quarks but the truth is from the standpoint of trying to understand the universe you live in what's the most important thing to understand is the periodic table of elements the same thing with psychology then you can break down cost-benefit analysis further into sensations like you into a pleasure sensation intuitive that but really when you look at you know why why is it that you you want a spoon full of the sauce it's we sir there's a cost-benefit analysis that's going on the it's a you want that sauce and that tastes because it's the best case that you have in front of you right now and you just got through reading something else in here your your taste buds are a little dull about on that taste so now we're going to go over and taste something else and we're going to get it we're going to get that experience so and you're going to do that rather than get up and go to the bathroom because you don't feel like blowing it about but even though when you feel like it a little bit so what are you doing you're running a cost-benefit analysis that's what's happening so it's useful people turn to intuitively know this so when you talk about people that are theorists of change they don't they don't actually understand why I'm explaining here because they don't understand psychology of this level of detail the but underneath their explanation Switzer's more often superficial and legitimate which you are going to find is cost-benefit analysis that's what they mean by saying people the reason okay now the so the question is the remember that there's so what they're focusing on there is the benefit a G the benefits big enough then then you'll do it okay that's one place to focus but they are ignoring probably the most important part of the question which is the cost the cost benefit this is where we want to focus our attention on this problem because most people have a notion of the benefit okay they know well if they have not what what they haven't done is they haven't worked on the costs part of the equation the the the CBE is is is confronting you constantly with whether or not you should indulge or not indulge and the problem is the overall CB is dicey even when you're knowledgeable the overall CV is a money mess if you're pretty conscientious it starts to lean into maybe you should do it it's a guilt when you don't okay but the bottom line is is that the most important part of the equation that we can work with is not the benefit side of the equation we can we can explain what the benefits probably are but we're not going to and the of course it would be convenient to have a mild heart attack and and terrorize you but the point is is that that's not actually the side of the equation that's likely to be useful beside the equation that's likely to be useful is the class we get back to organizing your environment in such a way that it is more difficult to get into junk food and way easy to get into healthy food and we get up a learning curve at creating or putting together the healthy food so that it's really low cost it's actually more trouble to go get junk than it is to just do the healthy food that we got and we've experimented and often gone up the learning curve that we figured out what kinds of healthy foods we like located a little bit on guitarra and what kind of sort of a rotisserie we have to go on so that we can have these things for a while and we want to switch it over those things I eat openness you know and how and how to synchronize that with with the food that's available so the the really important thing isn't to stare at the CV and to look at that life and say oh well I'm just not that motivated when I am kind of motivated because I'd really like to lose this thirty pounds and I would like to be better than bidding sue but they're probably right and since I'm not terrorized over cancer heart disease then I just can't get myself to do it right but we are not going to influence the benefits side of the equation by talking at your screaming at you but what we can do is we can find that if you work on your environment on the cost side of the equation that if you can reduce the cost suddenly it's worth it it's the equivalent of there's a nice sweater at Macy's but you don't buy it until it's 25% off so if you've been looking at it and it's 60 bucks this I got and now I don't know and then you go there one day and it's like hey it's 45 I'm gonna buy it suddenly you're motivated okay so what we want to do when it comes to impacting behavior change on ourselves is to work carefully on the cost side of the equation make successful healthy behavior as easy as possible work on that carefully and you will find then the following process can follow you which is that once you start to do it then what happens is we start to experience the benefit rather than theorize about it and the experience benefit can be highly motivating where a theorized benefit might not be so highly motivating okay so you can snowball into a pattern of behavior that is very successful as a result of getting ourselves off the dime not not so much by being inspired about some theoretical benefit but rather being being nudged into it by altering the cost equation and putting healthy living and successful living on sale that's all one again wow that's so great it just seems that so many of the answers are they came down to changing your environment and that makes it easier to change your behavior so thank you so much fantastic and you guys want to see dr. Lyle in person please consider coming to the live ultimate weight-loss conference if you get your tickets by February 1st you can save 300 dollars and it's the only place that I know where you can see dr. Lyle and dr. Goldhamer appearing together so thank you so much dr. Lyle for your wisdom and we appreciate it so much and thank you all for watching another episode of healthy living I'm chef AJ and I make healthy tastes delicious because I have a clean environment
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