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Chef AJ: What to Know About Antidepressants | Interview with Dr Doug Lisle Dr Jen Howk
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aj live i'm your host chef aj and this is where i introduce you to amazing people just like you who are doing great things in the world that i think you should know about today i have not one but two amazing people and when i look at the roster of all the wonderful guests i've had over the last 150 or so days they have the number one and number two spot for the most appearances and there's no mystery why because we never tire of them they're so they're not only brilliant doctors but they're fun and they're funny and they're scintillating and we just we just love having them on and so we're so privileged that they're here before i actually introduce them i want to thank elsbeth for this beautiful shirt that she gifted me apparently i'm wearing the same t-shirts over and over so people are starting to send me real clothes so i really do appreciate else but because you have such beautiful tastes and so i love this shirt and also i'm doing a special lecture for the holistic holiday at home today it's still time to register at 2pm so i want it to look extra nice i also wanted to thank linda for this beautiful hand-drawn i think dr hawk might want one of these because she has well actually dr lyle has pets too so uh her i believe it's her niece that drew this so we're going to get this information on the maybe that did this and maybe have her on the show so thank you guys for all the gifts the best gift you can give me is just watching the show and subscribing on youtube because i'm almost at 100 000 subscribers now and apparently i get like a button or a plaque or something so without further ado please welcome dr doug lyle and dr jenn hawk hi there aj hey aj how's it going uh it's great it's so great having you both together because this is sort of like a beat your jeans podcast but visual there you go excellent yeah because actually people say they really do like seeing you as much as they like hearing you okay so i am going to start with the first question and guys you know if you're on my mailing list you get priority because you that's just the way it goes so i think a lot of women struggle with this and uh i know dating is often a topic you discuss on beat your jeans so this is from chiquette and she says i have too many disadvantages when it comes to dating my whole food plant-based sugar no sugar no oil sorry chef aj i'm still using salt that's okay it's just one more stick i'm adding to my own wagon i'm a 44 year old single mom the kids see their dad here and there but not too much my kids still need a babysitter when i'm going out and i'm a full-time student with a low income adding to that i'm less witty and funny in english but at least i'm good looking i probably will have a session with you in my next payday but until then when we finally pass the first barriers i usually don't get to the second phone call after the single mom full-time student is revealed and going out for dinner is in the air i would suggest we might go out for coffee but the truth is i have nothing to eat outside and the whole food plant base is my second barrier any advice well i mean where do you want to start jen uh well i could i could start with just my sort of general overview as someone who's been in the trenches of my um very very uh successful yet highly challenging protocol for dating successfully online so i can i can get into that if you want to jump in as well um yeah so the general idea and if if she's a beat your jeans listener people have kind of heard the spiel before but i'll i'll do it anew for uh this broadcast is the the dynamics of of meeting people online and dating are you want as a female you want that first encounter to be very sort of low stakes so you don't want to be planning a dinner date for that first encounter so you can just rule that whole sos free liability off the table you don't even have to bring that up in conversation until you get you cross the threshold to the point where they want to go on another a dinner date with you the first date should just be like a coffee date it should just be it's basically think of it like a screening to see if you even if they if they qualify to advance to the next stage for a date um and so there are a lot of things to keep in mind but you're essentially you're looking for the person for whom your your issues are not an issue and it's really just a numbers game it's you you were in the business of kissing as many frogs as possible to get to your prince so you're gonna have to meet a lot of frogs and expect that most of the guys online are frogs nothing against frogs i don't want this to be like an anti-anti-vegan screen you know the frogs are some of my best friends but that you you want to essentially be putting yourself in front of as many of these candidates for your romantic affections as possible and rule them out very quickly um and let them rule you out very quickly and that means that you just want these to be very brief little dates where you're not getting too deep into anything that might be an issue for them or anything that might be an issue for you you're just getting to the point of seeing if there's enough of the connection that it's worth having a second date um and you you will you will know that pretty quickly even if it's just a coffee date so i always recommend that women you know be open to meeting guys that you may not be immediately really attracted to online a lot of women make this mistake where they're i actually just saw some data the other day where men swipe that they super like women like 65 percent of the time on something like tinder and women swipe that they super like men about four percent of the time and so you need to kind of meet the guys at the level that they're playing the game and be open to to meeting guys that you may not be super into right away because you never know um once you have a conversation with him if he might be a lot more attractive in person than he is initially when you're just looking at a gender profile and if he's not then all you've done is you've gone in on a coffee date and you give yourself a hard out always always say hey there's somewhere i've got to be in an hour whether or not that's true it doesn't matter if you turn out to really like him and you want to keep hanging out you you pretend the thing got cancelled but you want to have the hard the hard stop in place so you don't have to rely on yourself escaping the clutches of some frog that you need to get away from so that's the general that's the general overview of how i would approach that don't worry about things that are going to drive them away until you get there and when you find the guy who's sufficiently excited about you it's unlikely to be as much of an issue as you think it is that's great thank you you bet i can't i can't add anything to dr hawk that's it how's dating going for you dr lyle oh you know how that is aj but so many people love you you have your pick of all these people oh that's silly no all right all right okay so it's funny how life imitates art because this some of you may know i'm hosting a gi health summit i'm in the middle of doing the interviews and this question is it's incredible because you've interviewed 20 doctors and this has never come up but it's it's really actually not about gi so much as something else i think you'll like the question dear doctors thank you so much for doing these shows i really appreciate your time as much as i loved your podcast i prefer to see you answer questions on video rather than to just hear you talk i was wondering if you could please speak about the efficacy of antidepressants for off-label use are all psychotropic medications dangerous and to be avoided at all costs or does it depend on the type the dose and how long you are on them for i have a chronic gi disorder that i have not been able to resolve and my gastroenterologist wants to prescribe them as a neuromodulator to improve visceral hypersensitivity improve brain gut dysfunction and improve gi motility i have several fears about taking the medication all the people i have known on these drugs do not seem happy to me they seem like they have a very flat affect and some are even joyless and robotic a few people i know on these drugs have gained weight or not been able to lose weight right now i am considered to be a happy and slender person and i don't want to take medications that could jeopardize either of these things i would appreciate any advice you could give me thank you and this is from sylvia well expertise sure um not not that i'm an expert uh with respect to anything in in gi specifically but the my my general take on on medications for anything like this is that they would be a last resort and so remember let's let's make sure we know that there's people to consult with beyond your gi doc and let's make sure that we we've weighed in i don't know who the gi doc is and whether or not they're um you know whether or not they're knowledgeable in alternative approaches uh but that's why we have people like michael clapper in the world and that's why we have uh we've got docs at true north uh that are uh knowledgeable in in this sorts of things so there may be other consults that you want to do before you follow the advice of someone going down that road um also i understand that the doctors and and medical research finds out that sometimes you know something that they some pesticide that they were using to kill mosquitoes and the amazon turns out to be good for i don't know and china you know i mean they're always finding they're finding some other reason why some drug might be useful and they think that they see that it's useful etc um and maybe sometimes it's true but i think it's um i think it's a dangerous road to be i mean we know that these psychotropics are problematic and so to to use those to try you know it's a creative idea and the gi doc isn't thinking the way i think about the problems of the psychotropic medications so he or she is thinking along the lines of hey you know if it's an antidepressant you know that's not true that's not a bad thing and that won't hurt you any uh he's been told that he or she has been told that this is harmless and just might boost your serotonin and it could be that the effects of that have actually found to have an impact on gi processes you know that that is precisely why i'm concerned about things the notice notice what they're suggesting there's effects all over the place it's not like these things are are are targeted to you know uh mood regulating systems they're they're generalized all over the brain they're impacting systems all over the place and including oh gee look at this sometimes this will knock a knock something back a little bit into line that where you're having a gi problem so my way of thinking about these these things is that kind of like they're a pesticide you know you're you're gonna bring them into your system and they may kill something off that is convenient that it's dead but at the same time they're killing off a whole bunch of other stuff but we're not so sure we want to be touched so the medication to me in general is always you know medication and surgery are always the last resorts the first resorts is have we exhausted um our understanding you know we have we mined the minds of the world uh that are knowledgeable well enough to know that that we are backed up against a corner and then even if that's true what do we think the cost benefit is and so uh even if we get to that point my my attitude would be well if you really have a gi problem that is really disturbing to you and this is considered to be the only uh reasonable approach that might have a shot at it yeah then you might try it short term very and let's just see what the cb or the cost benefit seems to be but like i said i think i think i've said about enough i think that the notion is this is the last resort not just something that is benign and we should just try it because it seems reasonable and convenient that i would do a lot more homework before i would uh go down that road that's great thank you do you recommend that everyone read that book the anatomy of an epidemic to understand more about the effects of psychiatric medications thank you aj yes i that that was sort of the subtext there absolutely uh thank you for saying that correct in other words before you're ever going to go on any psychotropic medication or have anybody in your family go on this or friends yes you should read anatomy of an epidemic so that you in fact have informed consent uh until you've read that book you are not informed because your doctor is not informed and so uh if your doctor was informed almost certainly they wouldn't be prescribing it so the uh so go down that road first and see what you think right because i think one of the biggest problems and not to judge people for being on them because i was on them and that's actually how and why we met 10 years ago was always trying to get off them is that many people once they're on them they cannot get off them at least not with severe side effects and difficulty sure absolutely yeah anything you want to add to that dr hawk nope that i think he's he's covered it well and um you know i'm not a psychologist i just play one on tv so i'm not a position to comment on such things anyway i love that you said that i know that's so funny thank you all right so this uh this question that i have from michelle is a variation of a question we get a lot and i think she does understand your ego trap concept and if you don't guys episode 161 if you only listen to one episode of beat your teens she'll listen to all of them if you want to understand the ego trap versus the pleasure trap but we hear for some people from whom that first bite is like the alcoholic taking the first strength they spiral out of control so she says my biggest challenge is how do i stay away from the first fight of a sweet trigger food because it literally does spiral me out of control and into binging and how and how can i stop feeling sad and depressed knowing that i really can't eat that food anymore unless i want to keep bitching so it's a combination is that she can't seem to have the one bite but then when she abstains then she feels sad and deprived so another trap yes that's good jen why don't you spin on that for a minute and then i'll i'll catch any little straight straight thoughts sure yeah so yeah it's a two two part question and it's going to be a similar situation for any kind of addictive substance and this is a very individual question so um everybody is a snowflake with what they're going to be sort of addicted what their trigger foods are or what their trigger substances are and if you know that something is going to send you down the rabbit hole as a trigger food you just need to get to a point where you regard that food as an absolute no-go it's it's you you equate it with um you know just poison or not food or whatever whatever sort of cognitive gymnastics you need to do to make that thing off limit and everybody has a big part of the journey with this kind of thing is discovering and being very honest with yourself about what those things are and and they're really they're truly very different for everybody so like i i have you know i've done my battle with alcoholism a lot of people who are watching this know that i used to be an alcoholic i've been sober about seven years and a first drink of alcohol for me is absolutely like i i have trained myself to think of um i have a fatal allergy to alcohol essentially that's that's my my cognitive relationship to that substance um and you don't necessarily have to go quite that far with food although there's there you know it's not the worst idea to do so if there's something that is going to get you in trouble every single time and so i with food like i can take or leave a lot of things that are huge trigger foods for people like you could put me in a room with boxes of donuts and i wouldn't i really wouldn't care that's really not my drug of choice um but you you put a like a plate of um of chips and salsa in front of me at a mexican restaurant that's very dangerous that will send me into the into the rabbit hole so everybody needs to you know pay attention to to what causes trouble for you and then it's just it is this process of kind of mourning the loss of that food and acknowledging the fact that you just you can't it's not something that is safe for you and it's not going to be safe in any amount if you were that kind of person who has that kind of response to it um so one of the things that i will recommend that people can do is that you can you can use your own inbuilt disgust mechanisms which evolution has endowed you with very powerful aversion and disgust mechanisms to avoid eating toxic poisonous terrible things and if you associate something that is very that is a real troublesome trigger food with sort of disgusting things and i'll leave that to your imagination to form those associations um you you can really create a deeper version in yourself to stay away from that thing so that's one technique that people can use but um and there there are others and we can talk about those and doug may have some as well but i mean really it's just uh you are changing your whole orientation toward away from oh a little bit is okay and oh next time i can just have a little bit and i'll be okay just like i had to with alcohol and realize that no a little bit is not okay like just because you get away with it one time the next time you don't and this just requires a lot of rigorous honesty and confronting this thing um and then and then realizing that yeah you're you're going to live a life without that thing and there are a lot of other things that you can eat and drink instead but that that experience is just not a not a safe one for you it doesn't contribute to you living your best possible life and and so the trade is maybe not something that you would you wouldn't necessarily want to make the trade but your genes have essentially forced it upon you because that substance is not something you would have had access to in the stone age it is just a feature of the modern environment so you know will i trade the fact that i have to avoid alcohol and certain trigger foods for the fact that i live in an advanced democracy with lights that turn on and off and clean water that doesn't give me cholera and all the other sort of benefits of advanced civilization that happen to also give me a very abundant super-rich food environment yeah i'll make that trade it's it's not ideal but it seems fair in my estimation so that's generally how i how i approach those tradeoffs but i'll i'll let doug answer because i know most people are here for the dr lyle show and not not true that's not true at all and actually just to follow up on that little comment and that is that uh when jen and i have have given birth to what we call the living wisdom library uh which is a section on our website and one of the the reasons why i wanted to do this is i i wanted the whole plant based world and anybody that that knows me to get access to this extraordinary mind uh so now this is sort of a way to introduce dr hawk and people just heard in that answer just how comprehensive and and terrific her thinking is and our website is really about using a lot of the principles that that she and i are have developed for making better decisions uh not just about these issues that we're talking about here but really to expand those issues to things like you know how do you make the decision about whether or not you would take medication for that gi problem how do we go about that process of making that decision and for things like dating and for things like relationships in general career family kids etc that's what our our place is for and so as people can see [Music] jen has a magnificent way of explaining things uh that that really cover all the bases i would add one thing though that's why it's a good team thing i could sit on the sideline and then some one little thing to curse of it which of course she knows and aj knows deeply and that is that in the question we have the issue of g when i just take one thing you know then then i get into trouble uh-huh how did that happen exactly how was it that we were in front of that open package of whatever it was how did it migrate into our house through what process did it get into our shopping cart in other words so often there's been a scheme and so it didn't just happen and we didn't just tumble off the cliff very often there was a chain of decisions that slowly maneuvered the person into that situation and then of course the extraordinary process of the pleasure trap is once we're you know once we tease the system it's hard to put the genie back in the bottle so uh i'm always i'm always slightly have a little slight amusement of gee i just don't know if i take one chocolate chip cookie i just don't know how i'm going to stop and i'll eat the whole package it's like well where did the package come from okay that was not a spontaneous decision uh generally so very often those are calculated people walking closer and closer to the fire and finally burning themselves so let's let's make sure we the square one is let's make sure we take care of our environment uh and not try to fix ourselves once the once the dam breaks so dr lyle i happen to know this individual and in her case she does not live in a clean environment like you said she has two two sons and a husband that don't eat this way but the interesting thing is she had been food sober for something like 130 days and the slip actually occurred outside at like a barbecue where she ate yeah once again preparing for the environment putting ourselves in a barbecue situation uh i mean this doesn't mean we have to we don't have to be dictators of ourselves but but we need to be smart and and as jen has said many times you know part of uh recovery is relapse it's like you learn you learn oh that's a problem i better be better prepared next time and that's you know part of the journey is learning sometimes uh spraying toe by spraying toe we learn how to walk over this landscape and your your first line of defense is protecting the environment and keeping stuff out if at all possible but you know it's it's not reasonable as many people have observed many times you know it's a one thing to be sober from something like alcohol because you don't have to eat you don't have to drink every day but with food you have to eat every day and i i understand that i know where people are coming from but at the same time you know i i quit drinking when i was living with people who were brewing beer they were like there was always beer around there was always alcohol around they were brewing and it's just it's it the whole process of saying no to a supernormal substance is so evolutionarily incompatible anyway you were asking so much of your nervous system to turn something down because for the entirety of human evolution it has been the correct thing to do to engage in the supernormal substance and so you're you're really asking a lot of yourself to to stay sober from anything whether it's a trigger food or a alcohol or anything else and so obviously you want your environment as clean as you can but just if it's not um it's not the end of the world you just it's going to be a little harder for you and you're just gonna have to i i think people expect this to be they want to figure out a way to make it easy and comfortable and it's not going to be easy and comfortable you're going to be white knuckling um your way through the first week of a clean compliant diet after you've been down the rabbit hole of super normal food it's going to suck you're going to have massive cravings it's going to it's going to be hard and i think people just need to sort of embrace that and and lean into it as part of the process and expect that it's not just going to be one and done that it's probably going to happen multiple times because relapse is part of recovery and you're just going to get smarter as you go along so um yeah but i'm very sympathetic to anybody who's in that situation this thing that she mentioned because i hear this a lot from people they say well if i don't have xyz i'm going to feel sad or deprived i honestly don't understand that when i've asked dr goldhamer that question he says well that's because they're addicts when my husband developed a heart condition and the doctor said he could no longer ever have coffee alcohol or chocolate again and he wrote it on a christian prescription pad he goes oh okay like he didn't grieve so and when i've talked to food addiction people say that grieving is actually the withdrawal so i really don't understand this and but yet a lot of people say oh i'm going to be so sad if i can't have it like i'm i'm sad when people die not when i can't have a cookie yeah i think there's a uh that description of course there's some um there's some frustration there that it's also useful to understand that there's there's an awful lot of of ways to experience experience great satisfaction from eating and so the the easy way is to go for the modern supernormal stimuli that are going to just bang that system unnaturally and of course we understand that but the truth is is that uh when you get healthier and your your palate is is cleaner there we have to you have to understand that it's the concept of boundary lines so there are there are places in the world that i'm not gonna go because i think that they're too dangerous uh and so those are countries and probably streets in the united states that i'm not gonna walk down not that i might not be curious as to what's there or might be exciting or interesting it's just that i think it's too dangerous and in the same way so you can have a great deal of freedom in the world but you have to have boundaries on it and this is the same concept you have great freedom uh a tremendous uh repertoire of things that we can have now we have a far wider repertoire available to us than ever before in history so we have you know fruits and vegetables and things coming in from all over the world so you have a huge variety of potential but we have to accept boundaries if we want certain good outcomes and that's all and is there some grieving maybe there is but at the same time we have to look at the glass from the other direction which is that it's more than half full and uh and so embrace the fact that we have great opportunity and yet we have to accept boundaries that's just the way it is great thank you so here's another question about binging but this is from a guy which i i know it exists but i don't hear about it a lot so i'd like to ask you matt's question and he starts with thank you for continuing to host live interviews with some of the most interesting people mills or youtube your interviews are the highlight of my day and i often look forward to them thank you as someone who has followed a whole food plant-based diet for four years i initially lost a lot of weight following this diet so much so that people around me started to worry about my health i was extremely active and was very strict regarding my diet but the food is so filling so i never got particularly starving due to the high amount of fiber fast forward to today i am now about five kilos heavier and i have lost my defined abdominal muscles and some muscle definition from reducing my training and increasing my calories so my family are off my back about my low weight but i have developed a binge eating habit which is hard to stop every every meal i eat far too many calories as i seem to have the mindset that i'm too skinny even though i'm not that hungry i force down whole plant foods like beans grains and potatoes my weight is now 64 kilos i don't know what that is in pounds i'm 1.81 meters tall how do i stop this self-destructive habit my family is also worried about my bloating because as a relatively slim guy my stomach is so blatantly inflated when i eat a lot of veggies and salads that they tell me nobody should eat that many raw veggies and they stop buying vegetables so i don't have access to them they want me to eat small calorie dense meals all day and snack on junk like them please help me tell them i have an eating disorder and should stop being feeding wait does he want us i can't please help please help them tell i don't know i'm not sure if he's asking anyway man if you're watching clarify that last sentence because i'm not saying i'm not sure if he thinks he has an eating disorder if the family does all right doug why don't you pick that one up but piggybacks on some of the things you were talking about on a recent um recent show with aj so right i mean this is a this is uh for all the people out there that struggle with their weight loss these are these are the fortunately he's talking in in european units so people don't know quite what it is that he's saying but this man is tall and thin and he's built very much like me uh except that i never had those definition abs that he's talking about the um and so what i would say is that uh he's in he's in the enviable position where he can eat to satiety and he's not getting fat and so the um it sounds like he's sort of uh backed off of a of a really uh sort of rigorous routine that has led led him to be super fit and now he's merely fit uh but it sounds like he's something on the order of six feet and in the low 140s something like that the um so what would i say about that uh i would also say that that oftentimes uh sometimes people that are trying to lose weight need to be on a low calorie dense diet and it winds up being a pretty high volume diet so that's what chef aj does an awful lot of people do a lot of our docs at true north do this and and that's a perfectly reasonable and healthy way to go and it's also a way to go for people who are struggling with who naturally are very thick and have a lot of weight to lose it's a it's a good and healthy direction it's a high water content high fiber content diet however um what he's going through is kind of interesting and that is that um uh he's he wouldn't seem to be the morphology and the the genetics uh that needs to to go that route and he doesn't need to be eating small meals that are high calorie density but it wouldn't hurt him at all to uh to take a take a a a tip from from a dr greger or dr fuhrman that might say hey what's wrong with nuts okay so in his particular case uh i i wouldn't i wouldn't discourage him from having some higher uh calorie density foods in his diet that would probably cause him to eat then less volume and he might be more comfortable because it sounds like sometimes the high amount it feels like he's cramming but actually all that he's really doing is he's eating to satiety and maintaining a very reasonable weight a very reasonable low weight uh but it feels to him like he's cramming food in but actually what that is that's the hunger drive just saying that's how much of this food we need in order to be in a reasonable healthy equilibrium so uh which is exactly where he's at he's at a very reasonable healthy equilibrium right now but in order to get there for his genotype on a on a uh on a low calorie dense diet it's a lot of food so uh that isn't that's neither good nor bad there's nothing pathological about what's happening here but if he wants to be more comfortable and not have that feeling that he's cramming um he's cramming in order to maintain basically a solid decent weight if you wanted if you want to uh change that up a little bit move towards some foods that are a bit higher in calorie density and and uh and let's see if we can make you a little bit more comfortable so that's that's what i would have them do well thank you any thoughts on that dr hawk nope i think that that covers it very beautifully as expected great uh we are going to go from overeating to over exercising the question is from sandra how much exercise is reasonable how do i stop over exercising i'm a hyperconscientious nut case and i get compulsive with exercise to the point of injury i've had stress fractures in both my feet and my vertebrae from running over the past two years what is the best way to moderate why do i keep doing this knowing that injuries are inevitable well jen why don't we start with you and then we'll just open it up to different thoughts yeah i i mean i i would just say that it sounds like she's answering her own question by self-identifying as what we fondly refer to as a hyper-conscientious nut case so she is she's speaking to a personality characteristic that is genetically determined we've talked about this a lot with you aj and elsewhere about how personality is essentially just as genetic as eye color or how quickly your fingernails grow and and one of the things that is person that is determined in your personality from your genes is how conscientious you are how much conscientiousness is really like how much you worry about getting things right how much of a perfectionist you are and often that translates in real life situations to how much of a workaholic you are how much like how devoted you are to a particular routine how um exacting you are about getting your diet exactly right and you know hitting hitting certain targets that you've set for yourself and so she's identifying as this type of person and it's it's going to be tough for that type of personality and that kind of nervous system to develop a more kind of reasonable relationship to something like exercise which has all kinds of benefits um but probably not beyond there's there's a point uh an inflection point where you're doing more harm than good so you know half an hour a day of vigorous exercise is great um it may vary a little bit depending on your particular situation your particular needs what what you actually uh what you're looking at health-wise but if you're if you're killing yourself at the gym every day and you're really like drink you're basically trading your enjoyment of your life for some um attainment of a physical ideal with this kind of exercise regime that is just personality distortion that's the fact that you are a super conscientious person who is if a little bit is good then more must be better um and so the the way to tackle this is to really kind of um you know get some very clear information and collaboration with somebody about what would be a good program for you so you can kind of tap into that that need to follow the rules but a good program that is limited and that is reasonable and then you can hit that target without falling into that trap of feeling like i need to over fulfill the plan so if my doctor says i should exercise for 30 minutes a day i'm going to be an a plus plus plus student and exercise for an hour and a half a day extra hard and really really deplete my my physical existence in the process so just sort of setting those setting those parameters of something that would be ideal for you and then being able to kind of follow that rule is probably probably the best plan for you in combination with just the the awareness that you've got a voice in your head that is telling you to do a lot more than you actually need to do not only to be successful but to optimize the whole process that you're doing more harm than good by overdoing it essentially is this what they sometimes call exercise bulimics it could be um yeah that that's there's i think there's a difference between a hyperconscientious person who is really just trying to do the right thing and do a lot of it and you know do do sort of like um you know really if if a little is good then one must be better versus somebody who's using exercise to counteract the effects of a binge or to to burn a bunch of calories or to to imagine that they're burning a bunch of calories in that process which you're actually not by the way so that's another another thing just to put in your um in your tool kit that you know the little readout that you see on the elliptical machine at the gym means nothing that is not actually representative reality uh we know that now it doesn't mean that there aren't lots of good reasons to exercise there are cardiovascular benefits stress reduction all kinds of things but you're not there's not a a one-to-one relationship with a magical little readout um and how many calories you're actually burning that's just that's it's magical thinking um and so there are people who might occupy both of those spaces but i think the use of exercise would be distinct in those two cases nice anything you'd like to add dr lyle yeah i would add a little something and that is that um one of the things jen and i talk a lot about it in in our counseling with people we try to encourage this sort of problem-solving strategy which is uh to run experiments and so the what what is generally driving this kind of behavior is fear and usually the biggest fear is that i'm going to gain weight so the the hyper-conscientious nut case is worried about gaining weight and they're worried if they back off their extraordinarily intensive exercise routine at least when they're doing that they're saying to themselves well i'm doing everything i possibly can to mitigate the fact that i eat and so what we want to do is we want to uh the and of course as jen is perfectly describing that is that is a result of having a personality that inherently is has distortions in the way it thinks the uh you don't learn those you know cognitive therapy would think that maybe you learned those distortions you didn't learn them they're actually in you that's why we call you hyperconscientiousness which has magnificent benefits in many ways to be that vigilant but but this is one of the times when it's counterproductive and so the way we try to back away from some of the most severe consequences of having that personality is to uh have the guts to run an experiment and to find out if we back off that routine uh as jen is talking about let's let's take a routine that's a lot more reasonable and let's do that and try to stick to that because that's what an a plus student is and what i would like to to say is okay at least we're going to say that that's an a plus student for say a month or six weeks and if we can get a person to do that for a month and it turns out they didn't gain five pounds then they're not as panicked okay because they're uh like i said fear is a lot of times what is driving i mean fear comes natural to the hyperconscientiousness case that's what conscientiousness is is it's an anxiety that we're not doing things perfectly and therefore we're going to have losses in this case the loss would be a gain it would be the loss of their their trim perfect you know physique and so we need to we need them to discover through a disciplined process of experimentation where they aren't locked in forever they don't have to make a long-term decision that this is what they're going to do they can make a short-term decision that we're going to run an experiment to get information and in that way in the running of experiments is it is the way that we can sometimes get this kind of a process to unwind and get them to a reasonable place excellent thank you so this next question is from anonymous and it is my whole family is deceased and i am stuck in grief what can i do to move on are there foods that can make me happy yeah but they're going to get me in the pleasure trap too that question again yeah so the person says my whole family is deceased and i am stuck in grief what can i do to move on be a lot of things we could say but jen what do you think um yeah a lot a lot of different things i mean the sort of the the question about food that can make you happy that's an important point just in sort of the larger context of this whole conversation that there's a real difference between pleasure and happiness that this is you know the the pleasure trap makes this point but i want people to really kind of understand that the the short-term pleasure that you get from some super normal food is not the same thing as you know enjoying your existence and deriving as much happiness from your daily life and your relationships and what your you know the goals that you're setting for yourself and moving toward them those are very different processes so there really isn't any food or any drug or anything that can make you happy it can give you a fleeting sense of chemically induced pleasure but that's very very distinct so um i mean it's it's a you're dealing with a really hard situation and i don't we don't know the specifics here and so it's kind of hard to to really talk about what you're what you're telling yourself about the situation and you know what what is really causing the distress for you or how recently this happened or anything like that um but not knowing any of the details um i i would just say that this is you're there's a pro you've got to be kind with yourself with this process of adjusting to a different reality and recalibrating to the fact that you're in the world alone without your family um and that this happened in a way that you you didn't want it to happen and that you're facing a reality that you wouldn't have chosen for yourself but it is where you sit and it is what what the world looks like now going forward and there's no reason to expect that you're going to adjust to that new reality really quickly it's going to it's going to take some time while your nervous system uh pop repopulates itself with information about what that means for for who it is that you are and how you spend your time and um everything about your daily life and so i i would just urge you to be really compassionate with yourself and to not you know not rush the process recognize that this is a very natural thing that you're going through that everybody loses um people and animals that they're close to and we we would hope that you don't you know it's it's not um tragic and premature but sometimes it is and um that it's it's a difficult thing and we have all the empathy in the world for you but that it time time does heal all wounds as you sort of get more distance from the the mind continuing to return to this thing is the most relevant situation in your life you you just need time and experience to teach yourself that that is that is not the case that there are other things worth living for and other relationships that you can build from where you are now um and so that's you know we've talked we actually talked about this on the podcast fairly recently that people have this kind of um notion that if they move on too quickly that they're doing a disservice to the to the people that they've lost um and i i completely understand where you're coming from with that but that is a little bit at odds with that that process of rebuilding your life and reforming those connections with the people who are here now so you want to make sure that you're not um you're not approaching your bereavement process from that kind of distorted thinking that you're you're doing the you're doing the people that are gone some kind of favor by um you know immiserating yourself by mourning them for a very long period of time and not reaching out to other people and engaging in other behaviors and hobbies and all of the all of the things that make up the stuff of what we enjoy about life um so that those are those are generally the the tracks that i would take there give yourself time and um distraction in the best sense of the word great i just want to say carla says this is her first time ever hearing you dr hawk and she thinks you're amazing and there's somebody watching named michael greger that says i love dr hawk and there's also another vegan rock star watching robert cheeks so thank you all for being here dr lyle did you want to say anything about grief because i hear that that's a reason so many people fall off it's like they do great on the program and then a loved one a pet a relative dies and then they that gets the seems to get them back in the pleasure trap very quickly uh i i think that i think we've said enough uh jen hawk doesn't uh just play a psychologist on tv she plays a fabulous psychologist on tv thank you it's very great i just want to make very clear that i'm not even playing that's like i'm playing a life coach that i'm not i am in no way i'm not a clinical psychologist there's been some misunderstanding about that so i'm not i'm not a real shrink i just um i i like uh approaching the main problems in life from a point of view that is useful all right you both do a great job so here's a question from christine and i hear a variation of this all the time families especially when the the home is it's uh they're divorced she says i share 50 50 custody with my kids three and seven with my ex who feeds them a steady diet of cheese fat cheese fast food and candy virtually no plants they never have a chance to neuro adapt and do not want to eat any whole food not even plain white rice or potatoes so how much value is there in continuing to fight this constant mealtime battle i do not keep any junk in the house for my benefit as much as theirs but i've i've started dreading dinner i'll tackle that one yeah i think that the following is true this is uh uh this is we could we could call this how bill gates got rich uh bill gates got rich with a concept that he that he formulated that he openly shared yeah he's called it evolution not revolution so uh people rolled their eyes when windows 95 came out because it was full of problems but the truth is then i think they updated it by 97 or 98 they just kept making it a little bit better and didn't you know didn't sweat it in other words just they did what they could uh they had an awful lot of tremendous challenges in a time of the computer industry where things were moving very fast and so by the time you get done with something it was already obsolete and so that that was the challenge they had and his attitude was we're just gonna do what we can and then we're just gonna move on to the next thing and we're going to do what we can then evolution not revolution revolution would be um we're going to try to you know slap the x around knock some sense into his head change the kids diet and have the kids be the only kids on their block or in their city that are eating a really healthy diet okay that would be the revolution uh evolution would say we're gonna take what we can get and what we're gonna do is we're going to morph uh the food in your own house in a way that they'll eat it that's better than they would be eating at their at your ex's and that they would be eating in probably any other house that's all that we can do and we're not going to worry about it the there's been to some degree not huge but there's been some fear-mongering in the whole foods world about children and eating and the impact of their early diets this is a derivative of some some very understandable thinking uh that human beings have about the concept that that so bends you know bends the twig so grows the tree the notion that early events are weight weight the fate of the organism very very heavily because they're early and they they cause a directional encapsulation this is not true okay so this is a this is a huge mistake in in understanding your your child's diet and health behavior between ages three and four is no more important or impactful on their long-term circumstances than your than their diet between ages 27 and 28. a year is a year is a year okay so this is uh this is uh counter to a lot of human intuition so you know the nazis used to say that if i get a kid for the first seven years i can turn him into a good nazi uh by doing you know make him do terrible things it's not true you cannot you cannot change a child's character in the first seven years at all there's no there is no impact from those experiences on what they will be when they're 27. so don't fear the fact that your children are eating some trash because if you look around the world and look around the united states you're going to find that people that eat trash their whole lives have an average life expectancy of 80. okay so we can relax there's plenty of time to unwind the damage if your children want to do that when they're 25 years old so the uh we're not we're not doing irrevocable uh you know dangerous this is not an irrevocable dangerous process it's just mediocrity for a while but it's not going to have a significant impact and whatever is done in those early years can be unwound and fixed by the body and by the beautiful healing concepts and the gen capabilities of the genetic code for the rest of their life so your children's health is actually in their hands uh their long-term you know enjoyment of their existence physically and their health will be in their hands completely from the time they leave home to their last day on earth so it's not gonna be up to you and it's not your responsibility to be worrying about this all we want to do is we would just soon have them not suffering and have their noses snotty and sick and you know have extra problems and be overweight and have all the constellation of stuff that would come with having a lousy diet in these first 18 years so what do we want to do let's just make sure it's not as bad as possible let's do what we can to mitigate uh the process so if we're going to feed them veggie burgers on whole wheat buns with with uh uh would it ketchup and pickles then we do it and that's evolution not revolution uh let we're gonna feed him uh spaghetti and we're gonna if you to have little chunks of soy meat in there so it looks like a meatball these are the kinds of things that we do evolution not revolution and we take what we can get and we're not going to worry about it anything for you to add dr hawk no no not at all that was beautiful okay so here oh my here is an interesting question i'm no come on phone don't do this to me now not when i've got these oh boy okay i'm gonna try to remember it oh because uh it's from denise and i'm gonna i'm gonna paraphrase because my phone is acting funny now but basically what she's saying is is she's somebody that really controls her environment and that up until covid there was no options for delivery except for maybe one place and now since coven literally every place including 7-eleven delivers 24 hours a day and so she's gained 15 pounds and she knows she can take the apps off her phone but she doesn't sounds anyway so what does somebody do now that with a clean environment but how do they stop now that it's very easy to get anything she wants 24 hours a day because i guess where she lived before there was one option it was a pizza parlor but she's vegan now literally everything will give her food 24 hours a day and through apps and and it didn't used to be like that yeah well the mouse figured out how the the maze worked and now we got a problem totally yeah well the first thing you could do is take the apps off your phone that just puts one little barrier in between you and 711 delivery so um yeah i mean this is this is why uh this is why we talk about the pleasure draft your were designed by nature to figure out the shortest distance between you and the richest food in the environment so you can't beat yourself up over the fact that that you that this is this has occurred and that you have you know you've wiggled yourself right into the trap uh we have to do all the things that jen was talking about you got to white knuckle it we have to go against against these instincts and grit our teeth and and see the see the the bounty of our world from the from the standpoint of half full rather than half empty uh as we take these things out of our our daily fair and put healthy things back in you've got to approach this like it's not a normal problem this is not you did not evolve with it doordash in your world and it's not it's not something that you should be expected to solve normally through a normal process like willpower so you you have to confront supernormal with supernormal so yeah first thing you do is you delete the apps but you don't just delete the apps you delete your account so you know it's easy to delete the app on the phone yeah but you go to that website and delete the account so you have to go through the whole process of re-registering and doing the whole thing so that's another little channel factor to make it less likely to use the app and then your next line of defense if you get your little mouse that works your way around that maze is that you uh you de-link your credit cards so you know you have to like put put back in the credit cards and do the whole thing and if it gets to that point only have as much money in your on your debit card or your credit account as you need to get through the month so you can't just be you know charging this imaginary money on your doordash account or your instant card account um that you actually have to pay for things in cash and so that that's another little little barrier so if you have to like de-link the credit card chop up the credit card so you don't know the number demo get them get the bank to issue a new one with a new number like these are the kinds of things that you actually have to do to if you've got if you're if this is what you keep getting back into and this is where you're stumbling and this is the problem like how creative can we get about how to prevent yourself from accessing that resource right to the company and ask them to ban you yeah say like i'm abusing your system see i don't let me re-register like i'm i'm not allowed to re-register like these these are the depending on how extreme it is after you've gone through the process of trying the easy way just delete the app and white knuckle it and see if you can make it through that most people that's going to be enough but if it if it continues to entice you then you just gotta get more creative and a little more you know draconian beautiful this is uh this is this is what we call wisdom and there's a reason why we call it the living wisdom library uh that we that jen and i have is that wisdom is the uh in life when you have decisions to make there's gonna be a series of problems in life that we call wisdom forks where where your instincts are telling you one thing that you recognize the likelihood that the instincts are telling you wrong and this is at the heart of the serenity prayer that you want the wisdom to know the difference and what we're what we're attempting to do is to use our now deep insights into psychology that are now available uh and have been available now for about the last 30 years as a result of major advances in our field and the the notion is can we find ways to out-think these instincts when they're pulling us very hard are there essentially problem-solving strategies that make us wiser the um you know a young person can be smart and they can have great judgment but they're not going to have wisdom i don't care who they are uh even alan goldhammer who is born wise uh wasn't really uh and so you're you only get wisdom through usually experience and usually the hard way the uh what we're attempting to do is to try to uh with our with our new understanding is to essentially use principles just like jen is talking about which is a principle of channel factors it's a principle of putting up every obstacle possible when you are battling an instinct that is ferocious and dominant and actually has been critical for human biological success forever uh and so what are we gonna do yeah i just had a little a little concept jen has like seven right there it's like wow that's how we're gonna do it okay that's why we call this living wisdom it's wisdom for real life problems that uh that we face today and incidentally when we talk about alan he hasn't signed up for i was gonna say he could gain a little more wisdom if he would sign up at the living wisdom library but last time i checked he even though we've got i think we've got over a hundred people from aj from that have come um from your group but yeah it's too too too much wisdom for alan goldhamer to handle apparently well you guys really consider signing up it's less than the price of a starbucks and it's fabulous the the exclusive content and even if you don't do that please go to steamdynamics.com and just check out the free content because it's amazing dr lyle everybody says this they love your laugh and they love because you put your head back when you're laughing i've always been self-conscious of it but it just happens anyway so i'm glad people liked it they they love it do you guys have time for one more question or would you just like to end it now it's up totally okay okay one more right we'll never get through everything so i'll save them and again for priority questions you gotta subscribe all right this is from julie how do you shift your mind from viewing this lifestyle change from being my punishment from being fat and out of control i'm one month into no sugar two months into no oil but much longer as a vegan i've lost 150 pounds so far but still have about 70 to go i'm starting to berate myself that my fat loss has taken so long and if i could only eat and behave like a air quotes normal person and have more self-control then i wouldn't have to be so strict with deprivation i know it's not a healthy mindset but it's how i feel um i want to say a few things and i want to have jen comment on this the first thing when i hear about that kind of performance i'm in awe okay that that is in that is an incredible achievement that is almost never done by anybody so one of the things that's happening is because this this lady has was born with 98th or 99th percentile genes that lead her system to be incredibly efficient at storing fat um she lives in a world that's full of fatty food and so if she even eats anything near normal she's going to look very abnormal and so what has she done she has done in brilliant work okay not just good like that that like i said i'm in awe of that so one of the things that she's got a distortion on is that she is absolutely not understanding what how magnificent her journey has been and what what uh what an extraordinary genetic handicap in this case there's nothing wrong with her genes her genes are just great at getting every morsel of energy out of every bite of food that there is those are spectacularly great genes they're just not great genes for this environment um so that's the first place that i would go is to to to try to get some perspective over the fact that um that her journey has been a grand and brilliant odyssey the fact that it's difficult from here is is hey sorry you were just you know this is this is like i don't know like being born with uh with with with a great gift or a great challenge you know if you were born seven foot two uh it would it would be sort of an amazing thing but it also would be uncomfortable in many ways or six foot eight even so the um so this is just uh she's got some unusual challenges but she's meeting them uh in a in a tremendous fashion so give yourself great credit and the fact that it may be a hard and bumpy road a difficult road from here to continue and we don't know the person with those genetics we don't know where they're going to land they may not land and what people would say is trim and fit they may land a little thicker than that even with great work because those jeans are are uh unusual jeans you're in in your you're not gonna fit in that well if you're a guy and you're six seven it may be amazing that you're not quite one of the guys and so this is uh you have to be super diligent uh to get down into a range where you're gonna be real happy you have to do a plus a plus plus work in order to get an a minus and uh my hat's off to you because you're doing an incredible job uh jen finally yeah no i mean you're touching on it but i would just i would just add to that the idea that you've got this arbitrary goal in mind that might not be where you're going to get to even if you're doing an excellent job that's a that's again that's a feature of the fact that we live in an abundant environment and all way so you know you're not going to necessarily if you've got those genes getting to your stone age weight requires being in a not only a stone age environment with the type of food that's available which is the type of food that you're eating but the quantity that would have been available so you're not scrounging around for whatever twigs and berries you can find every day you've got a supermarket full of very biochemically nutritious food and you can actually optimize nutritionally with a whole abundance of all of this wonderful food but that might keep you at a slightly higher equilibrium than it would have been in the stone age when you were hungry all the time um and so making that trade like being really mindful about the fact that you're making that trade off and that yeah maybe you're going to be 10 or 15 pounds heavier in the modern environment because you can eat as many potatoes and as much you know rice and beans and carrots and kale as you want um when you would not have been able to in the stone age it's the same kind of food different quantities still eating to satiety in both cases but in the stone age situation you would have been very much more constrained by the environment so you're healthier now even though you might be a little heavier because you've got access to that food so i just always want people to have a really realistic notion of that and also about the process being glacially slow and and probably full of a lot of vicissitudes and it's it's not a smooth easy process at all ever um and so just you know again lots of patience lots of self-compassion um and a realistic orientation toward what it what it's going to look like even if you're doing everything right yeah that's great it's interesting people don't beat themselves up for how long it took them to gain the weight but yet they beat themselves up for how long it's taking to lose the weight yeah always yep yep well this has been amazing i mean obviously we can get to all the questions people are asking you guys to come back once a month if you're able to do it lots of questions on covet and psychological ramifications of wearing masks especially for children so hopefully you guys will come back next month i know we have a special joint broadcast next month with dr hawk and a mystery guest so you'll just tune in to see who that is you guys thanks so much you are just my faves and i just you know it's these are the kind of things you have to listen to more than once just to really glean the knowledge of what you're saying so we really appreciate it thank you aj it's enjoyed being with you great great to be here aj have a have a great week great and thank you guys so much for watching now tomorrow the show is at a different time because i screwed up and that's okay because it's a superstar you don't want to miss this we have questions that were all submitted by medical doctors because it is dr walt terwillit he is a rock star in the world in general but in the nutrition world specifically so we are going live at 9 00 a.m tomorrow for dr walt willett followed by another excellent presentation from a superstar doctor a true north name stephanie peacock so please tune in and thanks again to my two favorite psychologists and non-psychologists always a pleasure we'll talk to you soon aj thank you aj bye
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