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Chef AJ: MAGIC WEIGHT LOSS TRICKS | Losing Weight Not Your Mind with Dr Doug Lisle
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friendly because you never know when there you go aj that'll ring us in hey everybody and welcome to chef aj live i'm your host chef aj and this is where i introduce you to amazing people like you who are doing great things in the world that i think you should know about today's guest is one of our favorite and most popular guests he's been gracing us with his presence monthly often with dr jen hawk who was not available today i'm sure you know who he is that's a big clue this has been an amazing day for me i feel like a kid at disneyland to be able to talk to both dr mcdougall and dr lyle on the same day it's like having cake and ice cream at the same meal how often does that happen so please always consider either being on my mailing list or emailing us your questions in advance because whenever it's a doctor and especially when it's dr lyle we've got we've got questions going back for months i do my best to monitor the live chat but with all the people watching it's not always easy and if you can't get enough of dr lyle tonight's his podcast 8 30 p.m pacific time it's called beat your jeans there's over 200 episodes a new episode coming every other week and now he has his own membership group it's like three dollars a month you can get for three dollars nothing but you can get live q and a's with him and dr hawk and there's also a huge free section on the website at esteemeddynamics.com so please welcome back we love them dr doug lyle yeah now you have previously been broadcasting from hawaii look you don't look like you're from hawaii today but you are wearing a hawaiian shirt that's i'm getting ready going back uh i i spent the last couple months here with my i brought my mom home and just took care of a bunch of uh dental problems and stuff like that and so we're gonna go back on saturday so i'll be going out there for a few weeks wow you are so lucky well you know i always say all my problems are mental or dental so at least that's what um we have so many questions i am not sure where to start so let's i think maybe i'll start with this one there's sometimes the the prelude is a little bit long but what they say is usually very good so i will speak fast so that we can give you all the time so trisha says dear dr lyle your talk last week to the feel fabulous group was mind-blowing i think it was one of your finest explanations on how to lose weight and why most people do not maintain their weight loss i think everyone should watch it i've watched it five times already art smelly face as a follow-up to that lecture i would like to know if and how people can safely incorporate foods without gaining weight i have so many co-workers who do a no starch or low starch weighing and measuring program who do lose weight but as soon as they stop weighing and measuring or add starch they gain the weight back of course and then they blame the starch similarly most of the women in our group lost weight eating a zero over fat nut seed avocado diet so is there ever a way to reincorporate some fats and starch without gaining if in fact the way you lost weight was by omitting them it's really a good question so we'll we'll uh yeah we'll cover some of the same kind of ground we covered last time on the field fabulous group uh and that is that i think we're going to call this weight loss magic tricks or there's a perfect question for that we just made up that name for fun because we knew we'd talk about weight loss the um but partially ketogenic diets are a magic trick there's a couple couple ways of their magic tricks uh one way is that by by taking carbohydrate out of the diet you slip into ketosis which what that is that's a phase where your brain now has to change over from glucose which it's designed to burn uh has to change over to fat which is ketones so that's uh that's how that works and and so as a result interestingly enough it's a strange state for a human being to be in in other words it's not a state that is sort of typical for the organism it's an extremely typical state that our ancestors might have been in a few times in their lifetime for a short period of time what uh what happens in ketosis so very often they'd be in ketosis when they were very ill so uh when you're ill you you don't you don't eat uh there's a natural anorexia that goes with being sick and so if you're very sick you don't eat and when you don't eat you go through your glycogen stores in a day and when you go in your glycogen stores after about a day you're out of glycogen and so as a result you'll start burning fat because there's no more carbohydrate in you it's gone glycogen is the is the sugary substance that all of the carbohydrates that you eat turn themselves into and it gets stored in the liver and the muscles but you've got about a day's worth of storage typically and so once you go through that that you know a couple thousand calories worth of glycogen you are now on your own which means you're now gonna start cannibalizing your fat which is precisely what it's there for so often what goes along with this for for whatever mysterious reasons that we can speculate uh we can speculate intelligently about this but one thing that goes along with being in ketosis is that you're not very hungry um so you can see why nature might put that in there if you are sick enough that you don't want to be eating so the we don't want to essentially when you're when you're sick and you're not eating what you're eating is you're eating purified food in the form of fat that you already metabolized so you don't have to use your stomach to digest the food you don't have to use your liver and your kidneys to excrete the sodium and detoxify the food etc no all you have to do is just sit there and your body will go into the closet of storage your fat storage and start eating this stuff that's already been purified and it's sitting you know on your body ready to be used in case of an emergency it's like an emergency supply closet and so uh when you do that it's it's very uh it would be advantageous for you to when you're sick like that uh that that ketosis process uh it comes along with the reduced hunger drive so it turns out that if you do a bizarre thing like a ketogenic diet it's no surprise that you can lose weight so you you put the body in this very bizarre unusual state of ketosis and then you you ride that ketosis to a lower hunger drive staying away from carbohydrates as if the plague because if you start to eat carbohydrate then you'll go back to glucose metabolism and that will fire up your hunger drive again okay so it's sort of a it's almost like making the food so unpleasant that you hardly want to eat it sort of what it's like it's not actually what happens people still want to eat their beef jerky when they're in ketosis but it's a little bit of a weird state okay now the thing is so that's one way that the ketogenic type that works the second thing that happens is that when you go off your off carbohydrates and you start to you head towards a diet that's going to cause ketosis what happens is you'll burn up the glycogen store well that you have about a pound of sugar in you along with it when you burn that pound of sugar up or that kind of glycogen you will also release two pounds of water so you will very quickly drop three pounds or so almost immediately within a day or two as going on a ketogenic diet you can imagine how exciting this is to people okay this is without even making it a low sodium diet so if you're really clever uh the ultimate weight loss magic is to drink like slim fast so if you drink slim fast um you you also get rid of the sodium and by getting rid of the sodium uh you are now going to diurese away a bunch of water and you might lose seven or eight pounds in a couple three days you haven't lost any fat uh but that you've lost weight weight loss magic okay now so on the other side of this let's suppose that you have been eating a ketogenic diet for a while that's what you've been eating you've been avoiding carbs you may not be in ketosis all the time but you're in ketosis quite often every once in a while you slip up and eat a piece of pizza and get out of ketosis but you've spent a lot of time in ketosis over the last six months and you drop 25 pounds now the one of the problems is is if you start to eat any carbs what's going to happen you're going to start to you're going to put glycogen in your liver and when you do that you're going to absorb water so literally within a day or two of you resuming eating carbohydrates several things are going to happen number one the hydrodrive is going to return in full force number two you're going to have glycogen storage and number three you're going to have water absorption so your weight's going to go up and you're going to panic and you're going to do what blame the carbs okay so of course your friends that are doing a ketogenic diet every time that they break that ketogenic diet they're going to quote gain weight they're not looking at long term they're looking at it short term within 72 hours they're up three or four or five pounds and they're panicked okay but reasonable uh if you don't understand what you're looking at if you don't know the math and you don't know the whole process you're just looking at the scale and you're like don't don't bore me with the details doctor i know what i know and i just gained four pounds in two days when i started you know when i ate when i ate potatoes like dr mcdougall says yeah you you if you ate those potatoes like you said if you eat a healthy diet you may be up four pounds but you're down five ounces of fat you're actually leaner than you were okay but your liver is carrying a bunch of glycogen you're absorbing more water and as a result you step on the scale and you're 156 instead of 152 and you say the hell with this okay this is why this is hard to do in other words it's hard to close your your ears and close your eyes to all the noise out there because ketogenic and diuretic type diets are short-term you know dazzling and and yet and they can even a ketogenic diet can actually work even though it's you know i personally can't imagine doing it it's i feel nauseous just thinking about it actually if i think about well i'm gonna sit down and eat four four eggs for breakfast it's like you've got to be kidding me just a big globs of fat uh you know that i i know what would happen my stomach i would i would feel nauseous but people get used to it because uh by eating very high fat diets they will then release more bile they will adapt to it and they'll get used to it and they can kind of [ __ ] along there and kind of feeling mediocre not too great but they can they can survive so um anyway that's i forget i don't know if i answered the question yeah did i answer it pretty well yeah um you answered half of it well the other the other part was she was saying that at least a lot of the people in my group that follow like a strict mcdougall esselstyn we like myself they lost weight with no overt fats no avocados no nuts no seeds and they when they try to add them back even in measured amounts they gained weight so they wanted to know because you always say run an experiment is there a formula for reintroducing them for example like if an ounce of nuts is 200 calories then do you consciously just say okay i'm going to take 200 away from the vegetables or the fruit or the starch because the experience is even with seeds the scale is creeping up because they've been so long without any fats yeah um i would say the following is true i would say probably very very few people have ever run that experiment of everybody who said they've run that experiment one out of a hundred actually ran it okay so uh what will happen is if if you get loose you get loose and pretty soon we're eating that butter okay we're not we're not eating two ounces of raw or cooked nuts without salt pretty soon uh uh you know that that's probably what's happening so let's suppose in principle but that let's suppose the question is dead on honest so a person has lost 42 pounds they've gone from you know 173 to 131 say it's 130. so now they're they're at a pretty darn good weight they're looking good they've done it the right way they've eaten a bunch of healthy food of low calorie density things are going well so now they say okay um gee i'm not really sure i want to spend the rest of my life eating a diet that's you know 10 fat i'd like to make it 20 fat so i'd like to have every now and then i'd like to have a little tofu every now and then i'd like to have a little avocado every now and then i'd like to have some nuts you know what's the deal and so what i would say is exactly what aj just said you had an experiment so let's talk let's [ __ ] talk through the thought experiment and see how this would work so let's suppose we added 200 calories a day of fat which would be a lot so we would up the uh average person's eating a couple thousand calories so 200 calories of fat would be increasing the fat percentage of the diet by 10 so we probably go from 10 to 20 so still a reasonable fat concentration for the diet so we wouldn't expect that the human animal would be overweight uh eating such a thing so let's now let's now look at this so if we added um boy to get 200 calories of fat you'd have to eat a pound of tofu i mean it would be a lot the uh to get 200 calories of fat i don't know how much is in an avocado you might have to eat half of an avocado probably at least so um so let's suppose we start eating a half an avocado a day there's 200 calories in there let's suppose the uh if that uh now what i would argue is you are uh avocado at 200 calories of avocado is um about four ounces of food avocado is about 800 pounds so we're now eating a quarter pound of rich food we're putting that on our salad so i think we can all agree that if you were to eat such a thing it's going to detract from your hunger drive all things being equal so you will not eat exactly what you're eating before and then we're adding half of an avocado if we add a half of our avocado we're going to subtract something else okay so i don't know maybe the the gut would be so stupid is to not know the difference between 200 calories of avocado or a quarter of a pound of avocado and a quarter powder of less so a quarter pound of lettuce would only be 25 calories so let's suppose that the gut was that stupid which it's not but let's suppose it was that would mean that you would now be start to systematically overread on 175 calories a day so if you were to do that at the end of a month you would have approximately 5 000 extra calories you would have consumed which means you'd be up about a pound okay so if anybody has said okay i left the rest of the diet entirely the same i added half of an avocado a day and i gained one pound in a month okay is that what i'm hearing reported no that's not what i hear reported what i hear is i gained 10 pounds well how the hell did you gain 10 pounds you didn't gain 10 pounds from eating half of an avocado the the maximum amount of weight that you could have possibly gained by that would have been a pound and a quarter and so something else is going on right now so probably many something else so let's let's uh so the way what i would tell people to do is if you're serious and you're worried about this and you've done an excellent job and you're down to where you would want to be but you want to see what the latitude is in the system my guess is the latitude's pretty good uh for whole natural food adding a natural source of fat like an avocado for example uh so let's suppose we did that now let's suppose we did uh let's take a wild guess as to probably the worst case scenario for that avocado probably the worst case scenario is that the brain can't tell the difference between an avocado and a potato okay now i don't believe that's true by the way there's outstanding reason to believe that the brain absolutely knows the difference but let's just suppose that it doesn't know the difference so the potato is about half the calorie density of the avocado so that means that the 200 calories a day of avocado is replacing 100 calories a day that we eat from the potatoes so 100 calories to the positive so we should start absorbing calories after after 60 days we should have absorbed at most 6000 calories which would be a pound and a half so if it turns out that you are literally and consistently uh after two months you're a pound to two pounds heavier as a result of it having introduced half an avocado a day for the last you know two months then you would say oh well looks like it looks like that's what's happening looks like my equilibrium on a somewhat richer diet is going to be a little bit higher so now we'd say well how much higher could it go and the answer is we don't have any idea uh if you gain that pound and a half that may be the last pound and a half you would ever gain off that strategy so we would go another couple months and another couple months we may find that you sit at 131.5 and it doesn't move and that that pound and a half of more fat is essentially the price you pay for having half of an avocado in your diet forever okay nobody could possibly tell you what would happen the uh i can i can argue that it is unlikely very unlikely that half a half one avocado a day could result in you netting a five pound weight gain over the next year that that would be extremely surprising to me if that that kind of dietary change could result in that amount of change in your in your body configuration but it could uh it's possible and we don't know your own individual genetics genes will determine whether or not adding that half of an avocado causes no change at all which is very possible or it causes an extremely subtle change which is also very possible or it causes a market change which would be very unusual and surprising okay so that's that's the notion the notion is uh if you want to add uh some source of higher fat food that it seems appealing do it in a limited amount and run an experiment and let that experiment you know run its course for a couple of months and really take a look at it so do it the way that i would suggest you always do with your weight which is to to measure in this case i'd probably measure four days in a row before i did it or at the beginning i probably uh four days in a row take the average wait a couple months then measure four days in a row again take the average again and let's see if there's any difference well i always say if it ain't broke don't fix it and that's not an experiment i'm willing to try for myself and you know dr lau you mentioned that the keto diet would not appeal to you you know i've i've been hosting or interviewing doctors for a gi health summit that's i'm hosting that's going to be next month and i had no idea that even if it was all that they say it was for weight loss and diabetes reversal that apparently for gi health it is probably the worst thing you can do for your microbiome is to eat that way so sure another reasonable so again speaking of weight lisa says dr greger posted a video a week or two ago about epigenetics of being born in the womb of a fat mother versus a thinner mother claiming that it was the state of the mother's womb and not the genes which determine obesity is that true and if so i'm screwed no that's not true so the uh yeah i actually saw that video and i normally wouldn't have but a doctor friend of mine saw this and said hey what about this this looks really interesting the um a lot of times when when a someone is doing a lot of research so michael mcgregor is a is a prodigious reader of literature and uh when he does that what he'll do is he's he typically reads abstracts so just to let people know uh what that is uh when when a scientist publishes an article what they do is they publish uh at the very front of the article they have a paragraph and in that paragraph they summarize the article and its findings so it's usually i can't remember what an abstract length is what they're allowed to do different journals do it differently but it's typically oh maybe 150 words something like that so might might be 200 words it's not much it's like half a page and it's usually printed in small it's printed different than the rest of the article and that abstract is actually um that abstract can be published all over uh the internet so if you go to the national library of medicine and you look up studies you don't get the whole study you get the abstract and so the abstract is a is a way to summarize findings so that if people are looking for something uh that they're interested in they can read the abstract and see if that study uh looks like it it just you know it's discovering what it is that i'm interested in so undoubtedly somehow michael came across this abstract maybe somebody sent it to him and he read it and it was very exciting i i happen to read the article because uh my doctor friend a psychiatrist friend of mine said hey what the hell okay so i saw the abstract and the abstract said exactly what michael reported so michael was essentially reporting on an abstract the uh the abstract uh you also have to remember that uh occasionally i mean not not typically uh it depends depends on the writer the scientists that are involved the journal but typically abstracts are they're kind of uh because a lot of times that's what's going to be out in the in the cyber world and in the science world is the abstract rather than the whole study the abstracts tend to be like little advertisements okay so it's kind of like they're they're waiting they're waiting at the crowd uh trying to get people to read the abstract uh because then that's how the study itself is going to get publicity so it's uh not past some scientists to make their abstract sexier than the truth okay that uh i'm not saying that that's happens all the time but it happens fairly often so i i would i if i had hazard to guess i would say one out of ten abstracts that i read is downright dishonest in other words if i actually go and pull up the steady the the steady does not support what was said in the abstract and what the abstract is is a is a gross exact exaggeration and and basically fraudulent okay and uh like i said one out of ten is that way where you you walk away and you say that's disgusting uh of course what they said they could support it in a fist fight they could support it in court but they were actually fraudulent about how they they advertised their what their findings were um most of the time they don't so if you read an abstract by a guy like colin campbell that abstract is going to be a beautiful narrow lead it's gonna be like i don't know three attorneys and a judge wrote it like okay we it appears that in our findings it it is possible that we may see that plant-based you know may provide some benefit that's how colin would write an abstract after he had a pretty interesting finding that that looked legitimate so uh in this particular case the authors were basically fraudulent he was completely absurd there's no truth to this at all so uh michael i think uh is my would surprise me michael reads so much what he does he reads the guy probably reads 700 i don't know 700 abstracts a day 300 abstracts a day he's looking for extremely interesting things and uh by doing he's kind of like uh somebody that roams over the earth looking for something shiny and interesting and that's what he wants to report to people because that's what's exciting and interesting to look at that's how you discover new things but in this case he he turned he didn't know it but he turned over a fraud so no there's uh no support in that article for what is it they said it's a bogus report a lot of people are saying they had very tiny mothers and yet they ended up overweight so yeah yeah it's uh no it's it's just uh it just turns out that this is the a buzz word of our day in popular science is epigenetics uh and it's a it's epigenetics processes are grossly misunderstood uh they and it turns out that no it doesn't matter the womb uh the state of the individual the womb that you're in what matters is the genes of the person who is the fertilized egg who became you that's where all the action is uh for good or ill oh i want it to be a different answer every time you say well it's genetics i want a different i'm going to just keep asking until one day you give a different answer so one day i'll just say the other ojj just to so you have a good day all right good so um this is a question from xena who we all know and love and she wanted to ask it after you ended your talk a wednesday last week because that was so brilliant and she really got me thinking because now i'm thinking in terms of a chef she said she says is concentration of flavor directly related to calorie density so we were talking about how if you take oatmeal water in a banana and make oatmeal it's oatmeal it's all right it's good if you like oatmeal but you take the same ingredients and make it a waffle now you really really like it and you were saying something to the effect of that adding or removing water to the oats or any food changes the calorie density and the more calorically dense gives us more pleasure but she wondered if it was also the fact that when you remove the water you also concentrate the flavor and when you add water you dilute the flavor so is it the concentration dilution of flavor another aspect along with calorie density that causes people to prefer more of these dried out foods like like dried fruit versus fresh fruit because as a chef i think about that dr lau like we'll take vinegar which i don't really like and then we'll boil it boil it boil it so that now instead of six percent acidity it's four percent acidity thick and sweet and now we love it yeah um yeah i know xena i want to kiss her on both cheeks okay the that is what's happening so by when when you say you're concentrating the flavors what do you think the flavors are caused by flavors are caused by the calories so that that what do we what do we think is activating the receptor in your tongue it's sugar for example so if we boil the water away water absolutely is a dilutes the flavor so this is precisely analogous to i think we all we can all remember sometime back in our history where we sat with our mouths wide open and when we found out about coke syrup it's like oh my god they bring in those big old tanks to the to to the to the soda fountain store whatever it is and they hook it up and that's pure coke syrup that's what coke is and then you add water to it and that's what coke is it's like yeah that's exactly what coke is okay so and if we think about coke where we we have uh essentially double the concentration of the coca-cola syrup and you're gonna be like oh my god that's unbelievably sweet it's way off the chart and then think about what it's like if it was only half as much coke as it was supposed to be on the water we're like god you could barely taste it see so you're this is precisely what's going on with your the flavor sensing mechanisms the concentration of the calories is a paramount issue there are other things that cause flavor reactions other than calories but the primary mechanism of course would be calories or else human beings could be easily tricked into loving and being excited about food that has no calories if you can figure that out folks go for it you can figure out corn chips uh greasy corn chips with something on it that looks like cheese and it has no calories in it go for it okay that is it's so interesting because catherine says removal of water and concentrating flavors is one of chef bravo's trademarks so i guess that's how he's making the food taste good there within the limitations he has i wonder if dr goldhamer knows that he's concentrating flavors yeah it probably depends on what you're concentrating so uh if you're concentrating something that would start out at at 300 calories a pound and we're concentrating it up to 500 that's kind of probably what happens when you bake an apple okay so you bake an apple and you're gonna get rid of some of the water and you're gonna do some other things too but the point is is that you're going to make that thing sweeter because essentially you're concentrating the sugars with less water to dilute it so yeah hopefully chef bravo is staying within reasonable boundary lines i i don't if it was you or dr goldhamer or both who say the more concentrated the calories the more dopamine is released but things like oil has 4 000 calories a pound it's not sweet right right but you you have sensors for detecting fat and food and it causes uh dopamine reactions as well so it's not the same we recognize uh very much the the excitement of sweet but we're not as conscious of the reaction of fat except that you are if you're careful so that's why for example you you actually like like the subtle feel uh for example of avocado so it's a it's a different kind of pleasure uh in there but it's there okay and so also if this weren't more true than for example french fries would not you know french fries fried and oil would not have any greater excitement to the system than french fries that were you know were just baked uh and they most definitely do so that's it's it's part of the system actually i think it was about 2005 or so uh john mcdougall sent me an email he sends me an email now to correct me so he sent me an email i think about 2005 this was a couple years after the post trap had been written and the pleasure trap i was arguing that sugar fat salt were activating dopamine structures and uh i was speaking past the data except that i was just using uh both observation of humans as well as as well as just common sense uh from evolutionary standpoint to believe that that was true and so he he wrote to me and he said hey there's no there's no taste for fat and uh so he he had said that quite a few times and then about four years later he sent me an email and said you know without an apology the point is in 2005 he was he was trying to inform me of something that was long held quote known to be true which is that there's no fat receptors in the tongue uh i think i'm i'm guessing at the dates now aj but about three or four years later he sent me an email update saying oh no they found it okay so it's like ah just like i just like i knew they had to be there uh it's kind of like if you if your cat is is uh prowling around the refrigerator underneath the refrigerator and moaning a little bit and sticking her paw under the thing you better believe there's some living thing under there whether you could see it or not okay and the same thing is true of humans in their and their voraciousness about high-fat food there had to be a mechanism in there and it was going to be very similar to a mechanism for sugar only different and we just hadn't found it and now we found it it's so funny because uh many of us watching love something called california balsamic and and and you you've actually one of your friends likes it too but dr goldhamer not allowed not allowed even though his wife likes it and we'll use it not aloud not allowed too much pleasure you know he's smelling a rat yeah i think people have heard uh a story i probably told this two or three times over the years uh where uh i went into a fresh choice where al and i always used to eat lunch across from the old true north help uh outpatient center in roanoke park that's where we always hate lunch we have lunch there every day and so al and i almost always went over there together uh at noon but sometimes somebody had an appointment and once in a while you're over there by yourself and i went over there and they had a um butternut squash soup and said vegan on it and i got the soup and and i it was like great i'm like man that is really good soup and i went back to the office and said allen they had soup over there better not squash he goes it's not vegan and i said i it says vegan right on the thing he says yeah i took one taste of it it was too good i went back in the kitchen and asked him and they put cream in it only alan you know what i mean i i was just i was happy to be blissfully ignorant of my new grapevine but not alan he's he's gonna he's gonna sherlock holmes is gonna figure it out he's like both the calorie density and the pleasure police yeah he's just he's just the police that's it you know i wasn't going to ask this but now i think i have to because it's similar but different and this is from ken who says what is it about starch that is so satiating vegetables and fruit i can eat them until the cows come home and feel mechanically full but not satiated i have a feeling you're going to mention calorie density but it seems to me there's something more because even when i eat foods of a higher calorie density say chips and guacamole or ezekiel bread and nut butter i never feel as satisfied as when eating potatoes rice and beans yeah that's actually a very good question i'm not sure we know the answers to it but i'm going to answer with the best guesses that i have if you eat chips and guacamole you're not eating uh what happens is that you pretty soon overwhelm the fat receptors in your gut and you're feeling a little ill okay because you just you just chunk down too much fat more fat than you're used to and so as a result your your stretch receptors are really not uh are not really banging that hard you haven't eaten that big of a quantity of food um so that that's why i would argue that that's the recent starch starchy wet starches rice beans potatoes some big old hearty soup with with that you know rice and corn or whatever that sort of thing that kind of food is a good intermediate level calorie density that sort of meets the system similar beautifully relative to its design so when you eat a pound of starch starchy carbs and some a couple of good you know good size bowl of soup for example that has not just vegetables in it but it's got a bunch of potatoes and rice or something like that the i believe that what's what's taking place is that the nutrient reception mechanisms in the digestive system as well as the amount of stretch reception uh that's involved uh that that all is coordinated into basically saying okay we've had enough whereas if you were to just eat the same poundage of vegetables uh let's suppose we just you know i i will occasionally uh just eat a whole bunch of brussels sprouts yeah i might have to see like seven or eight of them in a row the um if i do i can feel the stretch reception and it's certainly knocking down the hunger drive but i may not be really satisfied in other words i'm hungrier than that and the reason is i may have eaten three quarters of a pound of food but it's only 150 calories and the system is actually designed to be trying to to take on 500 at a meal so i feel like now i'm a little light okay because essentially the brussels sprouts are half the calorie density that would have been uh you know would have been the same as had we have the starches in there so i think uh i think it is uh calorie density is the fundamental issue i think that it's being hidden when i understand what you mean if you eat high fat foods they can be not satiating in an important way it could be i think that what happens is that you get a confused satiation when you eat high fat foods you have fat receptors screaming that we've had enough carrots uh we have essentially stretch receptors and saying no we haven't had enough and i think that's a that's a bizarre cognitive dissonance that each of us has felt when on an empty stomach you chunk down a chunk of vegan chocolate cake and you feel slightly sick and you feel like yeah i'm not really hungry anymore but at the same time i'm somehow not satisfied and that's because that chocolate cake might be six ounces uh you ate six ounces of a two thousand twenty five hundred calorie pound food so you you ate a thousand calories but you're really not satisfied because it was only six ounces of food and so i think your your uh the overall system which is designed to use both nutrient reception and and the stretch reception is now not essentially sending the same signal these independent neural circuits are actually confused and they're causing a sort of a bizarre experience that just doesn't doesn't gestalt out to write okay so that's what i think is happening and i think that starches do that beautifully so uh this is why incidentally uh this is why i think sometimes sometimes i believe there are some people for whom a very low fat starch based diet will cause similar confusion in other words they will i think if i i could be wrong but i talked to so many people and i try so many experiments with people that are struggling with different aspects of this and i have had success with some people who cannot seem to get satiated on a starch-based diet until we add something like four ounces of tofu a day okay so four ounces of tofu tofu is only 400 carbs a pound so four ounces of tofu you know it's a nice little chunk of tofu but it's only 100 calories but what's in those calories is high fat and high protein so what that starts to mimic uh because it's not a starchy carb it starts to mimic meat okay it's looking a little bit more the macronutrient balance looks more like meat and so you can imagine that the genetics of different people around the world and just different genetics generally from person to person it could be the case that the satiation mechanisms might be essentially crying for a higher level of fat and protein if the genetic lineage if the genes happen to wind up that way and so i've had success in having people add a modest amount of tofu uh to their diet not fried tofu don't get everybody get excited the uh but by by adding uh by adding some toke to the diet i've seen that calm that system down and have people essentially now reaching satiety on a starch-based diet but now we've added a little concentration of fat and protein to the system uh and we didn't use nuts so we didn't want to use something that was 2500 calories a pound we wanted to use something that was 400 or so and uh and by doing that i've had success had similar successes by using modest amounts of avocado so similarly some people can feel like they can't shut the loop but they can shut the loop if they use a little bit of avocado so it's exactly the same principle and the same mysteries are involved with the individual differences in how the satiety mechanisms work with respect to different macronutrient configurations yeah that's great it's fascinating i wonder if some of these people though are just not eating enough starch they people you know they still seem to be a little afraid you know right that aj i'm glad you said that because i i would say nine out of ten calls this is how they start i've watched your videos i know it all i've read the book and and then within three minutes i'm hearing that they're worried that they're overeating starches and what we've got is we've got calorie dense stuff all over the diet okay and so they're staying away from the starches here here's a very classic pattern of the highly conscientious vegan and that is thinking that the diet is is really vegetables that that's you know salad vegetables and a little bit of fruit because fruit might be a little too rich and too sweet too much for treat so we better keep it down you know the heroic behavior is eating the vegetables and the starches i'm allowed to nibble on it but you know i'm overweight and everybody in the world says that the searches are the cause so i try to limit those well now we got a problem okay then the next sentence uh when i'm really kind and therefore clever about getting the truth out of them the next sentence is well i get in trouble with vegan pizza okay why are we getting into trouble with vegan pizza because we're really not at satiety with the vegetables and we wind up with a gnawing desire for higher calorie density foods and because we uh felt like the starches the wet starches are taboo we then we throw up our hands in moments of weakness and now we're chomping on dried carbohydrate okay so dry carbohydrate the concept of wet and dry i mean it's known to all the docks but uh i i may be the one that emphasizes it the most the uh and the concept of wet versus dry starches needs to be an important distinction that people understand it's a very big deal so you know there's a a lot of folks we're also genetically designed to be trying to maneuver our diet to higher calorie density it's relentless okay it's it's uh it's like a dog trying to get to a dog treat like they're not going to give it up and so that's why people will get air dryers air fryers and all this kind of stuff and they're trying to turn their lower you know they're trying to turn their potatoes from 400 calorie potatoes into 800 calorie pound potatoes and they like it a lot better yeah etc so the the solution is you know is not an easy one it's your diet needs to be surrounding large piles of wet starch we need to be eat those things fearlessly and eat them as if they are going to the main be the mainstay and backbone of what it is that we're having and we don't limit them so i forgot about this you were talking about yesterday on the show so i don't know if you remember sandy plewes she's this adorable girl from australia she met you in february she's a vegan blogger and she was on the show making potato waffles and she introduced us to her pet bunny named buster the cutest rabbit ever and she was saying and in somebody live said does he eat pellets because i guess rabbits there's some kind of like processed food that rabbits sometimes eat she goes well he eats them you know like every other day and she said that calorie density works even with pets she was saying that when she puts lettuce or cucumbers in buster's pen he eats it and he enjoys it very much but if she gives him an apple he has no more interest in the cucumber and lettuce and then when she gives him the pellets he has no more interest in the fruits of vegetables like it seems like all species can sense this absolutely this is this is uh when you back the camera up and understand what you're really looking at from let's suppose we were some i don't know we were a morph of technology and alien intelligence and we weren't even a living thing okay and we're flying around space and we hit earth and we we now see we've seen life for the first time in 17 million years on our journey what are we going to see what we're going to see is all of the different species are going to have a a characteristic that we're going to call energy conservation it's going to be very interesting they're going to they're going to have all kinds of very sophisticated mechanisms to conserve energy that's what that's that's the only way those genes are going to survive is by being incredibly crafty so one of the things is going to be don't chew it if you could choose something else that had 10 more energy in it don't waste your time so uh having extraordinary detection capabilities for the uh for the calorie density of foods is a universal feature of animal behavior so it is that fundamental feature that characteristic is the reason why world the world has the weight problem it has pure simple end of story okay the world didn't wind up generating parent child offspring conflicts in 1985 that resulted in a fat 35 year old today okay uh we had parent offering spring conflicts in 1920 people okay in case in case people didn't know uh we treat children better today than they were treated 100 years ago so no this all mushroom clouded uh over the western world and now it's reaching all around the world as technology uh improvements make processed rich food more possible and cheaper and you know essentially cheaper and better and easier and faster so that is the problem and so what's that what's happening is that all of the food manufacturers are essentially obeying the marketplace which is in fact the mediation in the genetic code okay so that that is the that is the arbiter of the marketplace and so the genetic code says what's richer i'm going to eat that and there is in fact a limit or else everybody would just be going to the butter section or the oil section of the grocery store just buying bottles of oil and chunks of butter there's a there's a point at which the you overwhelm that organism system because it's such a bizarre stimulus it's kind of like your favorite song there's a there's a level of which you can listen to it and then you go five decibels past that and it hurts your ears so that's what happens when you get the food too rich but we've got the food basically up between somewhere but most almost all the food people are eating is somewhere between a thousand and three thousand pounds a pound real typical food is a couple thousand calories a pound that's incredible you know you you look at a hamburger a hamburger has the the meat is probably a thousand calories a pound it's it's richer than natural meat because it's been bred to be fat so it's probably a thousand calories a pound the mayonnaise is four thousand calories a pound the cheese seventeen hundred carrots a pound the bread is seventeen hundred dollars a pound the uh it's like okay well the hamburger and the cheese and the bread and the mayonnaise all of those are adding up to an extraordinary high calorie density food that wouldn't have been anything like our ancestors would have eaten it's interesting that you know i can i can remember something i just remembered i remember my dad and i saw i saw this a few other times here in my life from other people there is a habit that i i don't think exists today or as often today yeah is that if you're making a sandwich of something my name is peanut butter uh that my dad would take would take the stick of butter and cut these huge thick chunks and put that either on top of the bread or under the under the thing i can't remember like adding these huge chunks of butter to the thing and it's like that's how you made a sandwich it's like oh my god like i never did that no i don't recall doing that once or even trying it the uh but the fact that a human being could do that that they could add a bunch of 4 000 calorie pound butter to a sandwich to make it better that's how you make a sandwich you know they got slick with it they made it then they did it with mayonnaise those people that that won't eat whatever it is unless they squirt a whole bunch of mayonnaise on it what are they doing they're just lifting the calorie density of that whatever it is that they're eating you really quite profoundly uh yeah a teaspoon of mayonnaise on your hamburger uh at 4 000 calories a pound that's driving that calorie density up with the whole shmo by probably 200 calories a pound just all by itself so yeah the rabbit the rabbit knows that should have been a good chapter title crap i should have called it the rabbit nose yep you can't fool you ca you come out you can't fool no money you can't pull no bunny you can't feel nobody can't school nobody you know the county fairs are perfect examples of this where they take snickers and they deep fry them or they'll take a krispy kreme donut make a cheeseburger deep fry it they're perfect concentr uh perfect example of that you know it's funny because bailey is a small dog and she's gained like two pounds so she has a little bit fat belly now so the vet asked me to put her on a low-fat diet so to lower the caloric density of her meals we're putting in things like a little organic brown rice and steamed carrots so what does she do she takes her bowl like takes her mouth flips it over and disgusts and then picks out all the good pieces absolutely yeah well where does where does salt play in because salt has no calories but it does add flavor so that people want to eat more in some cases yes that's true and so salt is because it's an essential nutrient that is not easy to get in nature particularly when you get away from the sea uh it's going you know it's an essential nutrient so you need it so animals are uh are designed by nature to be sort of very motivated to get salt and be pretty excited when they get it and so that helps them not forget where the salt is located so unfortunately uh what happens is that this can be a driving force it could be a contributing factor to binge eating because people that would normally not binge uh will binge because of uh putting sodium on food it will over excite that thing and then they wind up with whole cascade so that's a that's a key certainly an important thing to understand if you've got a binge eating problem it's also a problem for you if you if you are struggling with your weight and one of the things that you're including in the diet is a fair amount of sodium now i'm not as down on sodium as alan is uh and that in other words there are a lot of people out there that that if they were to eat a very healthy diet but they had some sauce on things that they put that had some sodium on it a lot of people do very well with that so this is all winds up being individual differences in genetics probably a lot of your folks aj might not do well with that just because they they aren't just eating for help they're also eating for weight loss so i do run into many people where i'll counsel where they're they're eating this way and they've learned about this because they don't particularly have a weight problem but they have a but they have some other problem that they're trying to reverse and so i will tell them uh the most important thing we're going to do is we're going to get rid of the animal food and we're going to you know essentially eat a very healthy diet and but if that diet includes some kind of a spice process where you put some sodium in there i'm not worried about it okay given given your health parameters so sodium isn't the the big bad health menace that alan would like to say allen is the police you know what i'm saying if you if you if your car is parked you know one one inch over the line of in the parking strip it's a ticket so uh that's how he is but but uh this is this has been a long standing friendly debate between uh allen and john mcdougall uh for decades uh allen comes down on the side of you know no added sodium at all mcdougall comes down on the side of be reasonable and mcdougall's typical standard is uh a milligram per calorie and i think that for most people that's reasonable if it works for you great if it doesn't work for you and you you binge then be careful i have never heard you say that this is so great maybe one day we can talk more about binging because there's all these people now that are using all these well i don't want to talk about right now like these psychological techniques not you know about like saying that's why they binge because it's really interesting well first of all i got to say that i'm not sure ellen's the police i think he's more like the militia yes that's right yeah i'm the police i'm the police they're the police they're friendly you talk to the person right i'm you know and they can talk them away they can talk themselves out of a ticket with me he's like they're going to jail no matter what right you know dr lau this is fascinating about the salt and binging because i had a client like 10 years ago when i was doing the in-person programs that you often would speak through during skype and we would have the the people the different girls would make the dinners every week that like on scholarship and they were my recipes though and there was this one recipe that had like eight cans of these fire roasted salt free tomatoes in it and this person called me like several hours after the class said what did you put in the food i go nothing she goes well i on the way home i went to a a fast food vegan restaurant and i binge and i'm thinking you know she's just a blaming kind of person when i took the trash out that night the people that made the food used the wrong ones there was a ton of sodium in that meal unbeknownst to me and so she wasn't making it up yes yeah fascinating okay hopefully you have time for one more question on the different subject i saved it for last because it's kind of sad and especially because you love cats too and i like it yeah oh my god this is from a big fan of yours named heidi and by the way i'm very sorry heidi i'm going to be contacting you because i know you my beloved cat was put to sleep today he was my best friend in my family how long does grief take is it always a good idea to get another pet and if so how long do you wait before you get one any section any suggestions on how to get through this time i miss him so much already this is a day oh man um you know i could be scientific about this and tell you that it is actually very true the individual differences are huge so the uh and that that just appears to be the way it is a professor by the name of camille wharton uh researched this topic 30 years ago and it's clear that that's how it is the um it's also undoubtedly true you know you're gonna you're gonna miss some more when they were really special every pet's special that some pets are more special than others and so uh it can be hard so all i can tell you is that yeah you have uh i think you have sort of a natural clock uh when we lost we lost a cat in about 2009 and i was i was sort of not in a rush uh it took took a while i think uh it might have been for me a year it was it was two that cat had been around for i don't know 15 years and so i i was kind of in no rush i just i didn't want to to uh just get i wasn't ready and so about a year later i was ready and so then a new new kitten came into my life and now you know that then then i was ready so i would say give yourself some time i mean it might be true that you might be faster than that but i i don't think it makes any sense to try to try to just basically disrupt your own grieving process by running out two weeks from now and getting a cat i don't think that makes any sense at all i think you it's just like anything take it take some time you got to absorb it you got to just kind of uh move on you know go do things that are interesting get your distract yourself with with entertaining or interesting other goals uh and quietly your mind will sort of absorb this loss and then there'll be a time when you're ready so i could see that you know you might very well be ready in three or four months that wouldn't surprise me uh if i had to do it again i don't know i don't know i don't know that i'd do it any differently because it felt just right i was ready to welcome a new being after i had taken that year i think everybody's different i've never i never waited more than two weeks i just can't be without a pet you know yeah there you go what what a great example i mean here here we are we that's why i said you just can't i can't give you any direct advice about that you're just going to have to follow your own instincts on that one yeah oh you're it's so fun talking amazing and we have so many questions now on binging so maybe that could be a topic for a thing you know because it's a lot of misinformation on what causes it and what to do about it but i think you know the answer so thank you so much dr lyle it's been wonderful talking to you and thank all of you for watching another episode of chef aj live please come back tomorrow who is my guest oh i have a wonderful doctor named dr adina mercer and i know you're going to love her she works for kaiser and she's going to tell you all about how lifestyle actually matters on whether or not you get some of these chronic diseases thanks so much dr lyle we so enjoy you pleasure aj i'll
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