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Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Chef AJ: Dr Doug Lisle Dr Jen Howk on Instagram Addiction, Masks, Introversion,Adoption Calorie Density
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i even took a shower for this all right hey everyone and welcome to chef aj live i'm your host chef aj and this is where i introduce you to amazing people like you who are doing great things in the world that i think you should know about today's guests are a regular feature here on chef aj live we love having them on as often as they can doing q and a's maybe even once a month when they're available sometimes they're separate sometimes they're together they are dr jen hawk and dr doug lyle if you don't know them they are the co-stars or they're both stars but together they do the wonderful beat your jeans podcast they have a website called the steamdynamics.com where you can get amazing free content and a little bit of paid content for just a kittens that you can do some live interactions with them and get exclusive videos uh dr hawk now has her own thing going that i'm a member of it's this really cool virtual village maybe she'll tell you about where you go live with her every week in a small group and she also has a new youtube channel hawk block and together they are writing a long awaited book we love having them here please welcome dr doug lyle and dr jen hawk it's so good to see you cool aj great to be here well thank you okay so let's get right into the questions we always get so many questions when you guys are on and believe it or not a lot of them are more like in the realm of what you would expect on beat your jeans so that might be kind of fun for you to not have to answer the same old question every time about uh weight loss although there are a few of them so we'll start with this one that i thought was really interesting let me find it i've never if you've ever answered this one i certainly haven't heard it it's from brett thank you for taking my question i'm a big fan of the beat your jeans podcast and since you can no longer call in live i'm hoping to get my question answered here i am a team leader for a large company and my job requires me to give presentations and teach others how to give presentations confidently and competently often using techniques like role play or improvisation in the training i love my job and i'm good at it but because of the nature of it people always mistake me as an extrovert my company offers a lot of perks for team building such as a bowling league a softball team tickets to very desirable sporting events to which i politely decline because these are overwhelming for me i don't mind being around a lot of people and interacting when i'm being well paid but when i'm off the clock i prefer to spend time alone or with one friend at a time engaging in quiet activities like reading or listening to music i try to explain this to my colleagues that this is nothing personal but then i'm an introvert and i just require a lot of solitary downtime to recharge my battery because my job requires me to be on all day they don't believe me and say but you're so friendly and outgoing you can't be an introvert so my question is how do you politely convince people that you're an introvert when they constantly mistake you as an extrovert well i don't know what do you think jen what comes to mind well i think you and i both kind of have this problem right we're actually both of us are more introverted than people tend to think that we are and i've been in the same exact situation where i've had jobs i've worked as um you know a fundraiser or some kind of schmoozy job where i spent a lot of time when i was on the clock being very extroverted and very social i think the question he's not necessarily asking the the relevant question because i think the question of how to convince people that you're an introvert you've already done anything that we could ask you know whatever we could suggest you've already done it you've explained very clearly and simply that this is just who you are and these are your boundaries and this is what you need so i think it's less a question of how can you convince people or communicate this and more how do you just deal with the fact that people are not going to acknowledge your personality or or give you um the boundaries that you're really asking for and so some of that may be that you're just more bothered by it um and and you have a distortion your a little bit of emotional instability or a little bit of um it just disturbs you that people kind of aren't getting it that there's they're putting this pressure on you and putting you in a situation where you continually have to say no and that's uncomfortable um and uh and then the other strategy that comes to mind would be you know some sort of what we call a big louis which is a big fan for the for the introvert to get out of things to to blame some force bigger than yourself so um you know you can't you would love to stay after work but unfortunately there's just this this other demand that you can't get out of so i think you're in a situation where it's really those those two things just kind of um managing your own emotions around the fact that they're gonna continue asking and you're just gonna have to continue saying no um and or coming up with better excuses that may or may not be necessarily completely true about why you can't do it because they're not going to stop asking there's there's no way that you can magically communicate um that that you have this personality quality that they're just not understanding because people just are have blind spots around that all the time so those are those are kind of the parameters that come to mind for negotiating that as far as i'm concerned but what do you think doug yeah sometimes uh uh one other thing that comes to mind for me is just say i hate people and just sharp angle the whole thing yeah so yeah that that and so you can say it when you're smiling and trucking yeah i would but i hate people okay and so that actually you hit him over the head with that it's a friendly way of doing it but it's actually a way that's so shocking that it might actually sink in so that's uh that's one more permutation about what you might do that's what i would do yeah i hate people can't stand it okay that they they're not going to take that personally at all and they'll soon stop taking personally the fact that you're you seem to be rejecting all extracurricular social things and so that that's one way to get that message across can't extroverts and introverts learn to coexist yeah they do as the introverts find places withdrawal to and and do so in a way that isn't uh that doesn't you know sort of hurt the extroverts feeling i know you know uh jen and i know somebody uh i would say our friend larry but that might be pushing it you you have all responsibility for larry oh that's very clever just things will happen in the future but uh we have a friend named larry who's actually quite extroverted and he has had to learn over the years that the answer is now yeah and he still doesn't take it easily but i think he takes less offense he always takes i think a little bit of offense but the answer is no no can't do it no i'm not gonna do it no no no but they you know they're irrepressible and so therefore uh they have to get used to us that's how that works particularly if there's some disagreeableness combined with the extroversion so it's really like extroverts per se are not such a problem for introverts but disagreeable extroverts who are getting really pushy and like what's your problem i know you're free i know you're so our our mutual friend larry has a trick that we both detest which is that he will he will text us and if you answer the text he'll immediately call you because he knows that you're there it's like i i know i know you're free because you just texted me so it's the kind of it's the it's the seizing upon the vulnerability that puts the extrovert it just makes you completely as an extra or an introvert um you want to retreat even more when you get pushed like that so um yeah yeah i've been in that situation with friends i've been in that situation with with uh with work relationships and i'm not a super introverted person i'm just more introverted than i than i appear um and often very often because the nature of my job is very extroverted so whatever job that has happened to me for the course of my life so people make these inferences and you just have to kind of get comfortable with the the realization that they're just never going to get it people just never get it they do they have we call this egocentric bias everybody is filtering the world through their own self-understanding and what's comfortable for them and what makes sense to them so they can't understand why you could you could do one thing when you're on the clock and then not want to do that later in the day or they you can tell them oh i need to recharge but that doesn't actually make sense to a true extrovert they can't it's it's it's just words that don't have meaning because they don't have that experience in their life so they can hear it they'd be like yeah yeah yeah i know you said that but but tonight we're doing this thing so um it's just you you're it's it's greek to them yeah there you go well just because you answer a text doesn't mean you can answer a phone call because sometimes i'm in a class or i can text but i really can't pick up so i don't think he knows that do you think though that what what i'm reading into the question is almost like why is it that people assume not every introvert is a wallflower that sits there quietly but people seem to assume like this happens to me all the time because if you have an outgoing personality or a job they assume well you can't be an introvert because you're able to give a presentation johnny carson was an introvert yeah yeah so it's difficult for for people to understand that this is a range if you were a 99 percentile introvert you probably couldn't be a performer uh but you could certainly be a performer at 80th percentile conversion so this is a you know that's something that as jen says it just doesn't people don't rock it and uh and so that's sorry that's just part of the misunderstanding and that's why i hit people over the head with a bizarre looking like i didn't just make that up that's standard for me okay so people know the mcdougall program doug's showing up two minutes before the lecture he's not gonna begin it okay and the answer is you know i understand that's just not what i do and uh people know that if i'm at a conference i'm not mingling with the people it isn't that uh i'm above it or that i feel like uh the the people are not important enough it's me i'm not interested in talk it's torture for me i can talk all day long if jen and i are talking or h.a and i are talking we could talk talk talk there's no no end to the one-on-one that if i'm if i'm at a dinner thing and there's six other people and we're thought this is a chore okay well they don't let you mansplain [Music] one-on-one it's so much easier dinner with six people they're all trying to jock you for position getting into the conversation it's like where's your cd they're like screw this oh my goodness actually what's actually transpiring just to defend myself because i'm thinking about what everybody's experience is yeah so that that is psychologically taxing for me to do that so if i haven't heard or said anything to the person on my left for six minutes i need to then figure out a way to include them and then it's that person and it's that person so it's actually it's it's like i'm running group therapy and it's a bunch of work so i always avoid it i rarely get trapped yeah the last time i was trapped was at aj's in las vegas i was trapped for a little while but i got i managed to get out or too long but that that sort of attending to the dynamics of the group that is a very classic introvert quality um and that is something else that a a true extrovert cannot understand because they're not they're not putting themselves in the mental space of everybody who's sitting around them in a way that an introvert just naturally does they're just out they're just like ah it's a show you know it's just we're just we're just sharing we're sharing energy and you're telling me stories and i'm telling you stories and it's great and however it goes it goes but the introvert is very much attending to the inner experience of everybody else just like they're attending to their own inner experience and it's exhausting so and again it doesn't have to you don't have to be super introverted to to be that way i am that way and i'm right in the middle of the bell curve so um this is you're when you're dealing with true extroverts they're not they're they just are not seeing the world in the same way and they're not paying the same cost for that same interaction that you are yeah all good right people are saying i love these two together the dynamic duo and i think the pandemic has really showed everybody what they were an extrovert if they didn't know before okay thank you sean asks if the biological imperative of life is to reproduce and pass on your genes where does adoption fit in when people adopt children even of a similar ethnicity they clearly are not passing on their own genes but the genes of the adopted children so what would the purpose of this be from an evolutionary perspective might there be some reason that would benefit the species or is it just altruism the reason i ask is because sometimes you see species where the mother has been killed and the mother of another species will actually not only nurse the animal but raise it even though it's an entirely different species i would love to hear your thoughts on this well jen if you want to talk or do do i talk no you could go ahead that sounds you you've got more uh breadth of understanding with the swim than i do i can chime in as needed yeah what there's going to be is you're going to see that that the value of mothering or protecting some little creature that's nearby you is going to uh going to be essentially a hormone-driven mechanism inside of an awful lot of animal life it's not going to be true centipedes and sharks but it's going to be true of a lot of creatures and particularly true creatures that are what we call uh k strategy reproducers in other words they reproduce very few creatures so for example uh penguins so the emperor penguins that you know one precious egg is super super important baby they go through incredible trials and tribulations to reproduce one creature uh if that egg gets loose on the ice you'll find the men fighting over who's going to sit on it that's not it's not because they're being altruistic it's because it might be theirs and therefore therefore their genetic trip wires basically they're not so sophisticated as to uh to take a blood assay and a genetic test before they sit on it there's no time all they do is evolution says what's the best guess and the smartest guess is get on top of that egg as fast as possible because exposed for two minutes it's dead so uh in the same way you're going to find cross species adoption is going to be when some human sticks a little cat inside of the inside of a bunch of puppies so there's been an artificial process of adoption that takes place there that can happen but that's because it's tricking the mechanisms of the mother okay so that's how that works now when it comes to human adoption uh it is also tricking the mechanisms of the mother in other words if you put if you put a child close to you there's a very good chance that it's either your child according to your uh basically genetic check mechanisms or that it could be uh in our stone age circumstances it very often would have been a close relative so there would have been a lot of genes most of the children that are not raised by their parents are raised by what we're going to call a second degree relative i.e an answer and uncle you know first cousin etc so in fact it isn't altruism at all at the genetic level it is what we call straight selfish gene theory in other words the um uh you you need to be trying to protect uh members of the species that might be carrying your dna now in the modern environment the fact that human beings want to do this and choose to do this and they know full well that it's not their dna uh what's happening there is that uh like it would be the equivalent of saying well why does anybody ever kiss what would be the point okay uh kissing doesn't reproduce dna so why why don't we dispense with it and the answer is that kissing is actually part of a host of reproductive strategies that have to do with uh actually probably testing each other's dna and also checking about whether or not people have a decent immune system because they've got rotten teeth and they smell in other words there's a lot of reasons why evolution built in pleasure mechanisms to that process so it's part of the process of reproduction okay you can't just go right to reproduction you have to go through a process associated with reproduction and so in the same way that what adoption does is it's tripping the evolutionary mechanisms that tell us specifically women okay that they are in fact engaging in mothering processes that is part of reproducing their dna so you get to have a facsimile process of part of the process of reproducing dna without it being your dna and people this would be equivalent to saying why would why are boys so interested in playing sports okay well that's because sports is associated with the processes of status attainment in the village which would lead to the increased statistical likelihood of mating success so even though that may not be true in the moderate environment at all and you're looking at a bunch of eight-year-old boys on your street playing softball and you're saying really is that really involved in the reproductive success and the answer is yeah according to the dna inside of them it is okay so i've spent huge amounts of my life uh learning and playing basketball i'm incredibly fascinated with learning how to shoot better as jen can attest to she's had to have me mansplain about tell me about your shooting technique i've even gone so far is to show her you know what i mean so the point is is that why because that's a process that is naturally involved not basketball specifically but athletic competition and advantage is uh very uh much part of male dna quality demonstration and therefore i like it okay so you're designed to like things that are part of processes that increase dna survival i think you'll see a lot of people like to sing uh singing is part of demonstrations of dna quality so the uh i i've done a bit of singing in my time never got me any action okay but but that doesn't mean that i don't like it okay and so in the same way that mothering is a process that feels intimately associated with dna reproduction so even though it's not what it's doing is it's tripping evolutionary mechanisms so that is actually the story of adoption wow thank you that was great all righty shannon says in a previous youtube video i saw you mention that it takes about 72 hours to eliminate the initial taste cravings after eating highly processed salty oily sweet foods after having been abstinent from them how long does it take for the self-esteem to recover from this hit doug has parameters on this yeah first of all 72 hours is not scientifically determined when you look at when you look at actually taste preference data that goes all the way out to four months so however my observation personally is that and the way that you could draw the line anywhere but here's there's there's a difference between being having cravings for example activated by memory versus cravings being activated by direct sensory experience so um i will never not have a craving for a piece of greasy pizza if i walk by a greasy pizza parlor and i smell it that that you're never going to get rid of because those are that's a direct sensory hit on the nervous system telling you that high calorie food is right there in the office okay so that there is no evolutionary there is no cleanliness process that will ever stop that from happening the issue is how often are you thinking about it and feeling cravings towards doing you know towards finding it and that answer is going to be enormously dependent upon how long has it been since you had something like that because your memory system goes through a decay function so the longer you go without something the less you think of it so like like jen is has been absent from alcohol for how long now uh seven and a half years seven and a half years like i mean i'm sure it occasionally flips past your mind but that's probably about it worse than almost always in reference to a direct uh reminder so it occasionally i i don't know that it ever just comes to mind it's if i see it on tv or if i walk past people drinking on a sunny patio or if i see a wall of it in the grocery store there's something that is that's triggering my memory of it yeah right got it that's very interesting so it's it's so long ago that your mind literally isn't calling up the file okay the uh and so that's how that's gonna work so my issue about three days is three days clean there there is a pretty decided difference in the vividness of memory and how intense it's going to be so probably a lot of times in the stone age if there's rich food on sunday there wasn't any left by tuesday or wednesday it was one okay so the sort of hyper fascination with it and the recirculating memory systems oh wait a second i wonder if there's any of that rich stuff left i wonder if any of those those nuts that so-and-so you know offered to the tribe are still around you you kind of if there hasn't been any for three days then your your nervous system recognizes that it's probably not worth putting up a red flag and waving it okay so that's that's the decay function if you saw gone with the wind last night you're thinking about it a lot three days from now you'll be thinking a great deal less than you think about it today so that's that's the nature of how memory is going to be working here so that's why i say that now the self-esteem issue i'll let jen talk about that that's a that's a separate and completely different issue than the sort of craving memory cyclical process yeah yeah i would amend my earlier answer too to say that you know the the craving for anything calling it a craving is a little misleading but i have had um thoughts of alcohol pop into my head completely unbeaten when i have been in a situation where i'm getting a lot of what we call failure feedback so so if you're in a really down shitty place in your life and and things are really really bad you're you're automatically your nervous system is always asking the question what is the next best thing i could do to advance my successful genetic reproduction in this moment um so that's why we say it's like it's this sort of oscillating sex food sex food sex food kind of thing that is going on in your head all the time but if you're in a situation where you're you're you're feeling very down or you're having a very bad day or you've had a bad experience that this is where something like emotional eating is valid because i will i will sort of cycle through what are all of the options of all of the different things i could do to make myself feel better um and alcohol will occasionally float to the top of those options if i sort of uh you know if i've had experiences walking through the grocery store and it's like you hear the little voice that says oh get the get the vegan pizza or get the get this junk food or get this pleasure trap food and you run through all of those options and it's almost like the devil sort of reaches into its pocket and is like well have you thought about alcohol like i know it's been a while so that is something that can happen um and and people will have the same sort of process with pleasure trap food for sure so the idea that we we do emotionally eat in that sense so you know sometimes we we people will say oh what you say emotionally eating doesn't exist it does exist in the sense that you're trying to solve a survival problem all the time survival and reproduction problems all the time and if that is the most that that is the most sort of uh benefit-rich low-cost option available to you you're going to think about it and you're going to crave it so that's that's that process um self-esteem is interesting i mean doug has actually had he has experiences with with working with people who have had self-esteem kind of come online almost immediately after getting on track um you know almost to the point where they didn't actually have to do anything to to prove to themselves that they were back on track just the idea that they were getting back on track was sufficient to to make them feel really good about themselves um and i forget what the long end is was it like 27 days 55 days so there you go so but that's very far out on the bell curve for our experience of working with people usually people who are are very diligent i'm thinking of just my my experience with clients most people four to five days um and certainly within a week a week of really being on track making good choices not slipping up paying attention tracking your progress all of those kind of giving yourself a little giving your self-esteem mechanism a gold star for your good behavior six days in a row of that should be for almost everybody more than enough um i i can think of of one person that it's about two weeks that i work with that's about how long it takes um and another person for whom it's like two days but that's that's kind of the range um and then there are occasional outliers who are you know immediately or 55 days so this is it's just all that is is you being proud of yourself it's how long does it take you to give yourself credit for doing the right thing and and to acknowledge the in in your internal process that you're proud of how you're doing um and so there's individual difference and variation on that just like there is on everything else yeah beautiful beautiful that the uh i hadn't quite thought about that is that there's some genetic mean and by the way how quickly you give yourself credit is going to be genetically built that's uh though the allen gives himself credit before he doesn't got out of bed this morning yeah so yeah so it's probably it's probably sort of a week plus or minus a week is probably going to be 90 plus percent of the humans on earth that would make sense to me that if you have if you look at how you feel about other people and what they're doing like if you've got a sloppy roommate and they've irritated the daylights out of you for seven months but they decide one day to get their act together and they clean up the whole place and you're still suspicious that two weeks later it's still really clean you're starting to feel like wow this is different something has changed okay so uh that that's kind of the same kind of reputational process that would go on externally between two people is very similar to the one that goes on internally between you and yourself so you know a couple of weeks of excellence will get everybody's attention the uh not not necessarily doesn't give you a permanent blank check it just changes how what you think about what you think tomorrow is going to look like somebody does 14 excellent days in a row at work that has been actually a sloppy and a slacker up to now but now they do 14 days now at day 15 you're not thinking oh they're probably a slacker that they're going to goof off you're thinking i think there's a good chance they're going to rack up day 15 that's what you're thinking because you can't stop yourself from doing that because the that mechanism is making inferences about perceived probability so that's why if you do three days in a row by the way three days in a row of perfect uh perfect behavior around food is no joke um i have been uh dealt with many people who could not do a day and and would not so getting past day one and then actually executing day two and then doing three days in a row that proves something important to people about themselves okay that that took some real doing okay so there's a difference between that and then falling over you know at the end of the in the middle of the day on tuesday and having the snickers far out of the machine it's like no you you didn't earn the esteem you did a half-assed attempt and you you didn't uh pin together the the self-discipline necessary to actually earn the esteem and then you don't have it okay reasonable so the uh but that as i i would stand by a few days as jen is saying four or five days is a lot that it doesn't seem like very much that's why we're excited about trying to explain this to people because your how you feel about yourself can change pretty quickly and how you feel about yourself is an enormously big factor in how you experience life and it's it's uh it's under our nose pretty close to it uh to to be turned around and and what it requires is this kind of diligence and commitment to i like people to be curious about feeling that in other words rather than oh i'm supposed to really do everything right so that's how i'm going to somehow lose 80 pounds someday now i want you to be curious about how different you will feel about yourself in less than 100 hours so instead of being on the couch uh for 100 hours in some psychodynamic therapists office over the next year and having to cost you ten thousand dollars why not just do a good job for the next four or five days and let's see what that does for you that's where we think the real magic is great thank you all right here we have from kira i heard you both say on a recent members q a that when somebody comes to therapy and complains about being unattractive it's because they have received signals that they are so how do you account for people that are truly physically beautiful but think they are unattractive or who are at a normal weight but think they're fat surely they can't be getting signals that they're fat and ugly um it's a little different gent jen uh i have many different thoughts about that but i just like to hear you wind out on a little bit for a while yeah i i think it's it's a lot of this is coming down to personality traits you know we have we have this term of affection that we use with a lot of people we call them high conscientiousness cases or hcnc so we've used that with uh on the show before so you if you're a highly conscientious person like extremely conscientious um and this is uh if you've heard us talk about the big five personality characteristics you know we don't really have time to get into all of them today but we have lots of information on our website and elsewhere about this but one of the most important measurements of of your personality is how conscientious you are um and a lot of people most people that are drawn to an sos free plant-based lifestyle are just by definition very conscientious they're very they're very rule following they want to do the right thing they're very they're very diligent by nature they've probably accumulated a lot of success in their life they probably have a really good credit score they probably have a retirement account all of these kinds of things that are proxies for high conscientiousness but one of the things that high conscientiousness does is it it gives you this feeling that it's never good enough it's it's just never good enough and the there's this sort of um the the fear of failure is outsized relative to the actual threat that it poses so people who are extremely conscientious 98th 99th percentile conscientious people they are overestimating the worst case scenario that is facing them with anything and they are underestimating their own value in a lot of ways um and and they just are never feeling like they're they're thin enough they're pretty enough they're they're just never good enough um and so this doesn't come from their mother telling them that they were never going to be enough or that they were never going to be good enough this is just inherent to their genetic makeup um and so i think a lot of people who find themselves in that situation even though the external world might be giving them perfectly good feedback uh they they there's their internal audience and their self estimation of of their own value is totally haywire and distorted because of their personality quality so this is why personality can be just as distorting as getting sort of bad information from anywhere else in the external world and it's why we talk about it so often another personality distortion that will really kind of cause people to undervalue themselves and their worth is high agreeableness so if somebody is extremely agreeable they're they're sort of a doormat you know they sort of allow other people to chisel them and take advantage of them and they're very conscientious that person probably has a very low estimate of their own attractiveness of their own value at work um they they feel like they need to give give give give more more and more more more they need to be better they need to put in more time um to to get the kind of value that other people do people who are walking around feeling like they're god's gift or just they tend to be more disagreeable people um a little more narcissistic and so you can plot these sort of in in relation to what kind of feedback would be necessary from the outside world to like what would a narcissistic person need to hear from the external world to feel like they're getting positive feedback that they feel like they could take to the bank well one person saying oh you look nice today well yeah i sure do like that's i absolutely i uh thank you that i thought so um where it where a super high conscientious super highly agreeable person could could have somebody at the grocery store say wow you were just you're the most beautiful person i've seen in this town and they wouldn't quite believe it because it just doesn't jibe with their personality priors so it doesn't really the the sort of objective data that you're gathering from the outside world is interacting with the personality baseline um to produce your your estimate of your of your mate value and everything else so it's really kind of a complicated picture and and you see that most people who are very attractive know it so that's because the most people that are very attractive are average in terms of conscientiousness and average in terms of agreeableness so they're on average they are close enough to the middle of the bell curve that how they feel about themselves is reflecting what other people feel about them pretty accurately and that that's why it's so hard for some guy who's at five to get a date with a ten because almost all tens more or less know the pretense okay that's why you'll see people marching down the street at the mall and you can say well there's a pair of eggs there's a pair of sixes there's a pair of nines in other words you can you can tell that sorry about this this is but the truth is it's true and so there's all kinds of scientific evidence that supports this so the uh obviously there's all kinds of mismatches in the world but generally not why because most people's personalities are not distorted in this way okay but you are but you are going to find uh some of the times some of what jen's talking about if you happen to have a personality that is um that is distorted in this way you might wind up essentially giving giving away the story to some degree okay now you still have your i mean what let's suppose you're an extremely attractive man or woman you are going to have options so people will hit on you and you might as well take the one that is more appealing to you which is probably the more attractive one which is why even in that case uh people tend to be paired up with people who are similar it's called a sort of mating so this is well-known phenomenon in biology so however the the feelings that people are reporting and what this person's reporting is a question jen has completely nailed it and so people will tend to think that the world of psychology has tended to think but if you're attracted but you're insecure it must be as a result of things that have happened to you in the past not true okay or anything that happened in the past that was having an influence today would have been something that just happened this last week okay you got dumped by your fancy mate because you're a fancy mate and now suddenly you're not feeling so fancy that's called on the rebound all right so but pretty soon your self-confidence in that domain returns to its natural genetic trajectory very quickly and so so pretty much when we see people like you're describing uh having the issues that they have jen is completely a diagnosis uh from from my perspective and all of what the evidence says it's it's because you're on hcnc and you're probably pretty agreeable and that's what's doing it that's great thank you we have a question about salt from terry is it really true that salt can be as powerful of an appetite stimulant for some people as both dr goldhamer and dr alvira claim i'm a bit overweight and i don't eat out but i was continually sprinkling a little sea salt or coconut aminos on top of home-cooked food i was eating only fruit non-starchy vegetables wet starches but i was eating enormous amounts of food and couldn't stop until i hurt i could eat four quarts of compliant food a 50 50 plate in one sitting and still wanting more but only stop because i physically hurt now that i finally have given up salt and coconut aminos i can stop eating with food left on my plate and sense fullness instead of pain and i don't crave anything after i'm done with my meal and i'm very pleasantly satisfied after eating it's such a peaceful feeling is it possible that for some people salt could really be that powerful of a trigger oh yeah uh not only can be that i know for a fact that it is so uh it's usually not so salt is usually not something that blows past normal society mechanisms but there are people for whom that is absolutely true without a doubt so yeah just you put this to the the true north kitchen test i mean i i never saw anybody fail to lose weight at true north eating eating as much food as they wanted to eating past the point of satiety um you know it just doesn't happen um and certainly nobody ever gained weight at true north that i that i ever saw um and so not to say that it's not possible but when you get truly sos free you know there's there's no uh you know you don't even get your paws on the balsamic in the kitchen because they they have you on the no list um then there's it's just not stimulating in the same way that just a little bit of balsamic or a little bit of salt or a little bit of hot sauce or these things just they dial up the palatability by some percentage points that it's going to make a big difference to a certain percentage of people great well thank you so much so here's a question on calorie density that i really don't know how to answer and it's from sandy dr mcdougall recently sent out an email about calorie density that has me confused it says that research has shown that most people can eat freely of foods that are about three to four hundred calories per pound or less and not gain weight and that people can consume relatively large portions of food that are between 400 and 800 calories per pound and still lose or maintain their weight depending on their individual activity levels and metabolism and at an intake of foods with a caloric density of 800 to 1800 these should be limited because they can contribute to weight gain and interfere with weight loss and the foods over 1800 calories per pound should be extremely limited as these foods can easily contribute to weight gain and obesity and greatly interfere with efforts to lose weight then he goes on to say that the american cancer institute and world cancer research fund recommends lowering the average caloric density of the american diet to 567 calories per pound what i don't understand is how to figure out your average calorie density without having to count calories it seems to me that you would never be able to include foods like nuts or bread or a glass of wine and still maintain an average calorie density of 567 calories per pound okay um first of all of course you could because let's uh let's trip our way through a quote hyper healthy diet for a minute and let's just take a look and see what it looks like so let's suppose we take a pound of salad so that's 100 calories and we have a pound of steamed vegetables that's 200 calories we have a pound of fruit that's 300 calories so now we've got 600 calories we've got three pounds of food now we have two pounds of starch on average 400 pounds so now that's that's uh uh that's now 600 and 800 is now 1400 calories we've eaten five pounds of food okay so we've eaten 400 uh we are now under 300 calories a pound whoa we're nowhere near 567 calories a so i've just eaten what looks like a true north diet i'm actually starving because i'm actually only at 1400 calories the average woman is going to take about 2 000 calories the average man is going to take about 2500. so the uh so you can see that the um that if you ate all those things which would give you sort of an a plus in in the healthy vegan world we'd be at five pounds of food at whatever that is 280 calories a pound um and we would have had 1400 calories and it was 600 calories short okay what are you going to do with those 600 calories well i don't know yeah that person might have a glass of wine and some bread and butter on it even then the average calorie density is not going to get to 567. so the uh so if you actually add this up and look at what it looks like uh 567 is actually a pie in the sky number that i that i it is just a guesstimate on a part of a whole lot of you know different ideas the actual direct evidence from header gatherers in the wild is that the average calorie density of our species is probably more like 700 okay so that's that's a whole nother notch over from 567. now 567 is just as good a guess as any and here's my point don't count your calories your job is to eat uh to eat all natural foods we know what the what the red and green lines look like so uh the basic philosophy that aj has encapsulated here makes perfect sense in other words all kinds of things below 600 calories a pound you should need to be thinking about you eat those societies as much as you want over and above that just as dr mcdougall is saying you should have your eyebrow up okay so dried fruit is going to be 1400 calories a pound so you should be thinking about that if you're going to eat whole wheat bread you know that's going to be 1600 calories a pound if you're going to put nut butter on anything i.e that should be extremely rare because that's about 2500 cards a pound so if you spread nut butter on bread you've now got a peanut butter sandwich 2000 calories a pound that's very unusually rich for our species how do i know that it's unusually rich for our species because if a woman ate one pound of food at that rate uh and thought she was doing a good job because she only ate this tiny little bit of food today she only ate one pound of food instead of three or four pounds of food which she was designed to then she would have eaten 2 000 calories in that one pound and guess what she's going to be hungry so now i think that that story is just about right when you start getting above 1800 calories a pound you are talking about almost entirely unnatural food the only natural food that is that is north of 1800 calories a pound uh is is nuts has to be nut related that's what has to be natural food his oil is up there but that's not a natural food so yeah my attitude uh richard rangan uh believes that probably somewhere between five and fifteen percent of our calories came from honey uh not vegan but it's basically pure sugar at 1800 calories a pound that's a lot so in other words maybe our ancestors ate 10 of their calories from honey uh so a couple hundred calories a day that would drag up the average calorie density a significant place uh from you know 4-500 calories a day to push it up 100 calories a pound by having a small bit of very high calorie density food that's going to move us up the chain a little bit our ancestors by the way ate meat and they eat quite a bit of it and meat is typically about 800 calories a pound we are attempting to worm our way around that by by getting away from the problems the health problems that come from the meat that the uh a a healthy diet is not necessarily without anything that is you know the red line or wherever that line is 567 you can't eat everything below that red line and get to 567 on average you're going to have to be eating something above the line in order to the fulcrum to be at 567. so that's why my attitude is you know be smart be reasonable i'm not against avocados i'm not against a few nuts um the and i'm not against the use of for example uh sugar on my oatmeal why because it's a trivial amount of calorie density at 1800 calories a pound now if you're trying to go sos free uh for for important reasons for you for weight loss could be wise for you because you you might may have essentially a sensitive metabolism that's just so efficient that if you ate what i ate uh you might be some amount of overweight and you don't like it that's fine so we the the ultimate low calorie density diet is kind of the true north chef aj process that interesting comment by mcdougall is he's allowing people to peek up north of them and to say listen this should be boundary lines here's where you want it to be you want to baste the diet around the 400-ish calorie pound starches that's where we want the bulk of our calories coming from we've got fruits and vegetables associated with that but if you peaked up here and have other things so in the standard mcdougall diet will definitely include pasta if anybody's ever been to the mcdougall program you're gonna see pasta salads okay now what is that well pasta is 900 calories a pound so but remember pasta with broccoli in it is going to average us down into 600. okay so or pasta with tomato sauce and broccoli that's going to be 600 calories a pound now we're back in the zone so the notion here is you would definitely never have to count your cowards you just have to make sure that a large quantity of your food is coming from exactly the very tight low low uh low calorie density foods that are ideal and then if you're sprinkled with some other things your average is still excellent okay whether it's excellent enough for you depends upon the results you get but counting calories isn't there isn't a right amount of calories per pound to eat in this life that you you could eat a diet of 400 calories a pound you could eat a diet at 600 calories a pound you could eat a diet of 500 calories account you could obviously also eat a diet of 700 carbs a pound okay the um however if it starts to get to be a thousand calories a pound i think we start looking at big problems and so that that's how that's how i would see this uh questions jen what did i miss any any other follow-up questions on that no i think that was that was very comprehensive yeah it sounds good yeah yeah so you're counting calories in the sense that you're you're assigning a general value to the category of food and you're playing with the lovers with like how much volume do you need to feel satiated versus what's the density and if you need more volume you need lower density so you just need to move down the scale so you can everybody is going to adjust those two things depending on their personal physiology and what works best for them so you there is no sort of magic number or specific equation that we can give any one person well jen and maybe some people don't know you've lost at least 100 pounds i believe and you didn't you know weigh and measure your food and jennifer who's watching live is saying well is there anything wrong with measuring or tracking your food intake if you're aiming to lose weight i mean i it this is this is so you know when we ask these kinds of like general questions these sort of like um you know is is it okay to can i do this you always have to look at this from a very individual perspective so if you are a person who wants to include a few really high calorie dense things in your diet and you kind of can't be trusted to to limit that accordingly um so there there could be if you want to have some dates as a snack or um i've talked with you before about my my uh weakness for the dried mango from costco which is delicious but i have to be careful about that it's it's easy to eat way more of that than than i would want to in terms of its calorie density so i don't weigh and measure it but i definitely sort of eyeball it i'm like okay all right i can have a small handful not not half a bag um and so if this comes down to like where can you self-regulate what is a trigger food for you and what's not um and how much calorie density are you really playing with so you really have to the first rule of this whole game is you have to know thyself yes that makes sense thank you uh luisa says i think i'm addicted to instagram do i have to stop or is there a way to moderate my use of social media i'll let jan talk about that i i have been i have had several clients with this issue in the last couple of months people who are are completely completely addicted to social media so this is no small thing i mean people are losing their entire days and months and years to this this thing um i you know i take a pretty hard view of it i think you do need to completely quit at least for a while so i think you you can't just for people who are truly describing themselves as addicted to social media i think you have to get the data of of being free from it um to understand what how what what is really the toll of this thing on you so my last remaining addiction is um is coffee so i drink coffee every day my my cup of black organic coffee um but i i have tried to quit coffee enough times that i recognize the addictive pull this thing has on me so when i go cold tofu on on coffee it's miserable i get headaches i'm exhausted i feel like i have the flu it's really really rough and so that's telling me that the difference between being free of the substance and being on the substances there's this there's this real powerful addictive process here so you owe yourself the information that you're going to get from from going cold tofu on this on this thing so if you just kind of dial it down a little bit you never really know what it feels like to be free of this and for a lot of people that i talk to they've never lived without it there's a real generational divide um with people who have just grown up with computers and smartphones and social media and they don't really know what it's like to just spend a lazy summer afternoon with a book sitting outside where you know i'm sort of like the last generation standing who had that experience um and so you know give yourself the experience of just getting free of it for 30 days and and see what it feels like so then you can proceed from there to determine whether it makes sense to try to do just a little bit or not i would say if you have if you if you want to try to moderate your usage there are tools to enforce that in your in your daily life so you can't really count on yourself just like you can't count on yourself to stick to an sos free diet if you have snickers bars or pizzas sitting around your house there are a couple of apps that i use that i really like a lot that will lock you out of these things you cannot access them on your phone or on your computer for either certain periods of time during the day or you can only go on for a certain number of hours a day or however you want to set it up you can go to some sites and not others so i'd look into those and install them and and you know put some actual teeth behind your conviction to keep yourself out of this because it's i mean i i've talked about social media many times and how detrimental it is not only is an addictive process that's keeping you from how you might like to spend your time in energy in other more productive ways but um also kind of the darker side of data analytics and the ways that these things are changing our politics and the way that we talk to each other don't talk to each other and don't understand each other and can't find common ground and common narratives anymore and so participating in that is is feeding the beast in a way that might if you if you really look into it might not be something that you want to do so i highly recommend the documentary the social dilemma um if you're interested in that and it can give you a nice little kick in the pants to uh take a break from social media as well so i loved that documentary i had no idea there were apps that could uh limit your uses it's almost kind of like putting a lock on your refrigerator oh totally i couldn't get anything done if i didn't have the the one for my computer is called freedom that i like a lot um but there are others there there are some of them are free some are paid some of them work in slightly different ways but um there's there are a lot of options out on the market now great thing do you think you guys have time for one more question i say the most controversial one for last faith was a question about masks and and the question isn't like are they good or are they bad she wants to know why the people that are against them are so against them more so than the people that are for them you don't see at least you don't at least what i've heard of is the people that wear them um don't yell at the people that aren't wearing them as much as the people that are against them actually belittle the people that are wearing them at least in some parts of the united states well i tell you what i i've been walking around the united states just like other people and i've never seen anybody yell at anybody okay so uh i've walked past several thousand people in the last four months and nobody's i've never seen anybody make the only person i ever saw a comment i was uh i think i was walking along the the street in in lahaina in hawaii and some lady walked by telling people that there was a cop around the corner citing people for not having their mouths so they better have their mask on that that was the only thing that i've ever seen happen so uh and my experience can't possibly be unique so whoever it is that's commenting that there's a big deal and the people are yelling uh i think the i think if we actually sat down with uh with an appropriate scientific uh process and we made little tally marks how many times anybody confronted me and said anything i think there's a very very tiny number of tally marks on anybody's sheet so um i think that you know people are kind of i don't see that this is polarized in terms of how nasty anybody is on either side of this question i think that people have their opinions and they have their feelings and occasionally those feelings come to to for in some social interchange but i i don't know jen has anybody given you any crap one way or the other or you giving anybody else any crap one way or the other nah nah nope uh i a flight attendant mentioned it once in the middle of a flight like yo you need to keep your mask up um after i'd been drinking my coffee [Laughter] so uh and but that was the only time i have i have talked to a lot of people who have reported that they've had they've had but but i've had just as many who have said that it's gone both ways so i've had people who were wearing a mask say that they were harassed by someone who was anti-mask i've had people who were anti-masks say that they were harassed by people who wanted them to put a mask on um these are even if we did sort of average out all of these anecdotes i think we're not looking at we this is this is to go back to the conversation about social media you've got to understand that you're getting such a an echo chamber effect with with the selection bias of these incidents where everybody's got their camera everybody's going to record anything that looks like it's escalating in any direction because it's going to get them more status on social media by sharing it um and then the algorithms take over once it's shared where that video gets gets so many more views than just a video of absolutely nothing happening on the street whatsoever so this is all driving advertising dollars it's algorithms feeding each other and and feeding on literally feeding on outrage so the the more outrage anything posted online can generate the more successful it is going to be that almost defines what is going to go viral um and so so you're getting a picture of the world that's being fed to you through those incentive processes which does not necessarily represent anything that has to do with what's going on out there at all so um and and that can coexist with the fact that you may have had one or two experiences um or you know the the people i've heard this from tend to live uh it's it's instructive that your experience was in lahaina they tend to live in very touristy areas where the clashes are more visible so there are people who are traveling to the touristy areas who don't want to wear their mask because they're vaccinated or they they just are ready to travel they're done with lockdowns um and they're running into locals who might be a little more a little more conflict over say hey this is my home um and a little more risk-averse so i i think controlling for those situations in general most people just wandering around out there not having this kind of thing happen on a regular basis yeah your dirty looks don't count yeah three looks diana i also think that if we looked and we did a tally mark uh confrontations uh we're gonna find that the confrontation it isn't a matter of what position somebody has it's a matter of their particular personality so you're going to find disagreeable hyper-conscientious nuts on both sides are going to escalate conflict uh and that that's that's who it is okay so um you know you don't if you're hyper conscientious enough it's like a dial on a stereo how much trouble and how much bass if you're super conscientious you don't have to be too disagreeable before you're pretty upset okay so uh but but if you are quite conscientious and pretty disagreeable those are going to be people that are going to be speaking up and if you add some extra version to that now now we've got some now we've got some voice that is going to be of the of the hundred incidences that will take place today in elk grove a city of 165 000 people there will probably be a hundred such incidences it will be 60 40 or 50 50 and just who's confronting whom about what the um but at the end of the day each of those hundred instances at the root is going to have a personality generating it not humanity okay humanity people are people are getting along fine pretty well minding their own business feel a little bit uncomfortable with people doing things different than they would do but we don't have a crisis over this we just got a few noisy individuals that's i would i would say if you if you really broke it down i mean doug and i are in an interesting position because we talked to people on all sides of this issue and and they're reporting their experiences and i i i think it would really be about 50 50 in oh i i was wearing my mask on a bike trail and somebody yelled at me about it or i was i was out minding my own business on a deserted beach and someone came up to me and told me i needed to be wearing a mask so i i totally hear both both versions of those so it's 50 50 split but it's 100 the people who are initiating those interactions are disagreeable people so it's it's all the the bottom 25 of the of the disagreeable continuum that is causing all of this trouble i would say uh with the possible exception of some as doug is saying uh the the sort of hyper conscientiousness and um fear fear of contagion and risk sensitivity that sort of masquerades i get i get a i get a real gold star for that pun but masquerades as uh disagreeableness so high conscientious can sometimes look like uh disagreeableness because people are just very concerned about doing it right and getting the rules right not not screwing up so um so that might be going on too but it's a small percentage of the population either way that's that's fascinating i love how you guys filter everything through personality because colleen was commenting our personalities can change just like our taste buds and i know you guys don't agree with that maybe next time you come on you can talk a little bit more about that but i think the answer is to just get rid of all the disagreeable people that's a somewhat disagreeable view aj the only thing is if we do that then we get rid of me and dr goldhamer is that that's how much you can change your personality that's how much you can change it okay you cannot change your personality at all what can change is your information therefore your understanding of the environment that you're in so you will see people change uh as a result of new information but their personalities don't change at all they are what they are ah well thank you guys i just i just so enjoy talking to you guys you are so so scintillating we have one question left on sleep but we'll bring it back next time and hopefully we'll get to see you guys again i really appreciate your time and your expertise great good to see you we'll see you next time so great to see you and thanks all of you for watching another episode of chef aj live please come back tomorrow when my guest is ingrid newkirk from peta thanks
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