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Chef AJ: What Can Fasting Do For You (The Fasting Escape) - The Ego Trap | Interview with Dr Doug Lisle
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totally fine I can move this thing out a little bit there we go and we're also good out here yeah we're live on shipping yes hello she comes perfect okay I already got two people yeah two people watching chef in July all right I'm gonna go bring everybody in all right guys it's dr. Nathan from fast escape we are here with dr. Doug Lyall he's gonna do a live live show for us a live talk and so just stay tuned and we're gonna start in just a few minutes that's right all right got everybody that's right [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] all right this is our superstar over all right thanks everybody for coming out tonight oh thanks everybody for coming out tonight little short presentation and so today if you guys have any questions at the end of the talk just raise your hand and we'll do a QA versus the budget all right there's a long-standing debate over the last 10 or 20 years that I've been talking to people like John McDougall and certainly my good friend Alan Goldhamer Jeff Novick and all kinds of folks chef AJ the and that is should people attempt perfect and is that the right way to do things because that would in principle give your palate the cleanest best shot and maintained the highest sensitivity with your palates so that you could remain on a clean and narrow a healthy path that's sort of one notion the other notion would be just trying to make some positive changes and don't attempt to try to be perfect just essentially don't don't set the bar too high just try to morph your way one wave at a time towards a healthier lifestyle so this is sort of two different ways of looking at things the we'll talk a little bit about the sort of the merits of bold philosophies and then we'll also talk about some problems that will arise one of this that we're not paying enough attention to either direction now first of all when it comes to learning anything it's going to be the perspective of morphing or or changing a bit at a time it's going to be the way things get done so this is precisely how it is that you learn to walk it's the way you learn to talk it's the way you learn math it's the way you've learned to ride a bicycle it's the way that you learn everything you actually learn everything through what we're going to call a series of successive approximations you do it a little bit and you do it a little bit better than you do it a little bit better and then you do it a little bit better that's how it works that's why we're waiting for another documentary by Brian this is how it is that people learn and grow and that's so it would make sense to say there would be a very reasonable process to say let's you know begin by making a few changes in a healthy direction and start to substitute some healthy foods from unhealthy foods that you're doing and let's move your diet and lifestyle towards a more more successful way of doing things and and it gets there when it gets there just as I guess some people are on a hurry and have their baby walk but I don't know why it's like how long will it take to walk well however long it takes so I had people like my kids really special you know the other mothers are jealous but my kids just walking and seven months dr. Lila I'm just telling you seven things like well okay nobody knows nobody cares because it doesn't really mean anything whether your child walks to seven months or your child walks at thirteen months the truth of the matter is is that eventually this happens and all normal people will wind up doing this and the same thing is true talking so I've had a young lady whose husband but was very worried about their daughter because their daughter almost talked around fumbly language that nobody could possibly understand all the way past two years old and I can tell by the child's understanding than the child's decision-making socially that the kid was plenty smart there's like no no shortage of brains and comprehension there but the kid was talking gobbledygook no I with a great deal of interesting and appropriate inflections of voice that would go along with what she was seemingly trying said so she was sort of upset and concerned she'd act upset and concerned with her gobbledygook and if she's being a friendly that hurled her gobbledygook would be friendly petting the cat so this way I was completely confident that what was ever was going on inside that kid's head was fine but I think I could see that the child could have had excellent language comprehension and was producing something we just didn't know what it was and then spontaneously at about two-and-a-half years or so suddenly it started to get clearer okay and now everything was fine and clearly language function was it was all on board the whole time the so these are just sort of individual differences in learning curves about how things are going to work and we don't worry about these and I would normally worry about someone going through a process of making some positive changes and then well I'm having trouble no no worries we'll just stay here for a little while and then we're going to try to incorporate something new and then we're going to move forward etcetera and we do that for a while it's kind of like each other yep do you have to learn for it to juggle two and then three and when you get really good at three then you can do four etc that's just how it's done the on the other side of this you hear the voice of dr. Alan Goldhamer okay and he's saying well they don't tell a lot of holics just changed a beer and wine okay yeah that's not that's not gonna work and I want so anchoring down on the other side of that argument is the concept that you have to be absent in or be successful now the let's let's try to figure out why that that idea even makes any sense at all yeah and the reason why it makes sense is because of a concept called addiction so addiction is a is the notion that there is some kind of stimulus that is not normal give it to the organism it's going to be what we call super normal so it is it's hyper activating a circuit and in particular addiction is going to be particularly potent when it's hyper activating for exampie the pleasure seeking or pain avoidance circuits so there are other circuits that you can a dict so you can have someone addicted to I don't know effectively you could have them addicted to Prozac so they wouldn't they wouldn't know that they're addicted because they wouldn't crave Prozac but if they went off prozac they would start to feel the effects and the effects could be relatively profound and then if they've got back on the Prozac then those negative side effects would go away so the brain is in fact addicted to attend depressive medications that's and other such a traumatic issues as well but it's not the same kind of addiction as when you have a motive that is being stirred motives are being stoked with respect to pleasure seeking and pain avoidance so and those two things are actually exceedingly close they have a very intimate relationship in essentially in a way neuroscience or the way the way neurology has set up the so for example endorphins are going to mu-2 pain but at the same time in sufficient concentrations they're actually pleasurable so when a person is eating when they're finished eating they're releasing endorphins it's essentially an anti-anxiety experience that's it has a moderate pleasure to it just in the dish just to process it's a signaling device saying that you just did something that increased your likelihood of survival the same thing is happening at orgasm so an orgasm is a signal that you statistically increased your likelihood of passing on their genes so for our female and orgasm statistically increases the likelihood pregnancy and for a male it's pretty well necessary okay this is how this is going to work so that those are going to create what we're going to call an endorphin storm up to that time what we're going to see is we're going to see a different pleasure chemical or a close you're seeking chemical called dopamine so the activate activation of the dopamine pathway is essentially a device that tells the organism to close the distance between itself and a stimulus that's that is a survival reproductive value so you are when you're eating and you're excited about the eating that's actually the dopamine circuits so they're going on saying keep closing the distance keep closing the distance keep closing the distance so when boy meets girl he's wanting to close the distance that's how that's working so the so that's an excitatory euphoria and then once the distance is closed and the deed is done whatever it is then there's a relaxed euphoria either post eating or post orgasm etc or even if you're very cold and you get your hands in front of a fireplace there will be an endorphin an endorphin response that will take place and that will also take place if you take a hot shower so the same same kinds of things will take place obviously at lower concert-ready lower concentrations yeah so the problem of addiction is the problem of what we're gonna call supernormal stimuli so stimuli that are more intense than the organisms was ever designed to encounter and never did encounter in the wild so no creature ever encountered a bottle of scotch in the wild the closest thing they ever encountered would have been some fermented fruit on the vine and once in a long while there will be fermented fruit on a vine it's extremely rare in nature but it will happen the reason is is that almost always in any habitat all the fruit is clean cleaned off the vine when it's right that's that's essentially that's how that's going to work their bugs won't be missing it and the birds won't be missing it I need a real the bears so once in a blue moon that will happen and so once in a blue moon you will find some birds they'll get drunk get out there there are some sort of cool professors with long long wavy hair that wear sunglasses drive sports cars that will say hey this is part of nature this is how nature supposed to be you know we're all supposed to be getting high no that's actually it's totally wrong the birds are never supposed to get high they're never supposed to get drunk because when they are they're under extraordinary compromise by predators they're in trouble they're much more likely to not only be eaten but they're also likely to make catastrophic mistakes and run hunt first into a tree and break a wing so no this happens to be a juxtaposition of the nervous system that was designed for an environment where there isn't fermented fruit and the moment the the momentary chemical alteration of a grape vine the leads to bizarre situation where an animal can get intoxicated this is it just so happens that their nervous systems are susceptible to this and they're going to like it because it's going to hyper activate the dopamine pathway and so as a result certainly they would like it but it but it's just advantageous and it's not something that they're actually design and defend themselves against and so animals are not designed themselves to defend themselves against supernormal stimuli and so for hundreds probably thousands of years in South America people have been chewing coca leaves but the and they noticed a little bit of a high lanius lift that would come with probably akin to half a cup of coffee and so what's it until 1855 that cocaine synthesize over there and then it would be more than a hundred years before they figured out how to make crack okay so now by the 1980s you have young you have people losing their lives and in destroying their lives behind a single puff of crack pipe because the intensity the experience is so extraordinary that they will now chase it for the rest of their lives however those long those lives are so that is supernormal stimuli and that's what Alan and I call the pleasure drop so the pleasure trap is is the problem that an organism is not designed to be handling stimuli that are above the norm enough among the normal bell curve mountains that's supposed to get so when it gets too intense there's this extraordinary signal of the dopamine pathway telling the organism this is what you should be doing and it will drown out alternative signals that are not sufficiently loud to compete so a drunk bird may see a predator and it may feel a little bit of fear but it's not feeling enough here okay it's it's literally not getting enough of a signal to guide its behavior to safety and the pleasure trap by its very nature when you have supernormal stimuli what supernormal stimuli are going to do is that they're going to they're going to morph behavior in in some way they're going to cause a recalculation of the individual as to what's in their best interest and it's going to those calculations are very likely to be a distortion of what is their best interest okay so so here we have we have the pleasure trap and of course the most widespread pose it's going to be food there's the most devastating widespread closet robbing think that ever visited a population was tobacco so by the mid century 20th century America tobacco was Eva Curtis like I think between forty and fifty percent of the adult population or habitual smokers in the United States so you'll hear a lot of statistics about how we keep getting a little bit older and a little bit older and and how and cancer rates are dropping or heart disease rates are dropping and so you'll you'll you'll hear it sometimes if you'd if you read that the papers were thinning care which I occasionally do before I get discussed it and then just I want I want to microphone Brian we're supposed to and that is that they'll they'll start patting themselves on the back that statin drugs or anti hypertensive medications or new procedures for cancer no no the truth is is that smoking rates have brought smoking rates dropped significantly between 1970 and the year 2000 and as a result of very substantial rates of dropping and smoking as a result now people are living longer because those diseases are not are being stoked by a lifetime cigarette smoking so that's what we're watching is we're watching a continued sort of asymptotic tail and effect as as that as those effects become you know essentially into the baseline the population now which is I think between 15 and 20% of the population smokes and probably always will okay so from from here on out that's probably what we're looking at but for why we're still going to have evidence that medicine is is helping and mostly most of that help is going to actually simply be because the smoking rates the per capita amount of years the people that smoke is continuing to drop with every year the passes okay and it will for a while the but cigarette smoking was an extraordinary deficit pleasure drop and so the dopamine stoking process of nicotine is significant enough to actually grab ahold of the nervous system and not know the person doesn't want to let it go keeps wanting to close the distance between it and the nicotine and and as a result of this it's you know it's the cost of cigarette smoking per capita so of an individual was spokes somewhere around eight to ten years of life so it is an extraordinary expensive pleasure trap and it's it's a whole not more more problematic than than any other widespread thing that you're going to see whether it's alcohol or or even you know animal food or processed food or anything else those things are not as devastating as smoking sort of pound for pound yeah yeah but they're bad enough they're pretty significant so if a person had to make a choice today about whether they should be stopping focusing on stopping smoking or they should be changing their diet or healthy diet I would tell them and I have don't even worry about your diet your job in the next six months is to see if you can beat this problem because this problem is a monster okay yeah however for those of us that don't have a problem which most of us don't the problem of the pleasure trap with respect to food is major it's it's the next man up it's the next biggest thing and has profound implications for our self-esteem with respect to our physique and how does that we feel about ourselves it has effects on us professionally it also has effects on us physically just in general not not only carrying extra weight from processed food also the the effects of animal food and other processed foods on the insides wearing away at the cardiovascular system you know increasing the statistical likelihood of cancer all kinds of things so and the problem is because the food is super normal that it's above the normal of intensity or sugar fat and salt what's gonna happen is that people are going to have a hard time staying away from it so now the question is is that difficulty the same thing as for example the addiction alcohol yeah because we can see after half a century of investigation about trying to treat alcoholism we know that trying to treat it by a morphing a little bit at a time by trying to cut down but it doesn't work okay so if you have somebody that's now qahal if it's it's drinking you know two bottles of wine a day the solution isn't to say well for the next four weeks how about if you go down to a bottle in three quarters and then after that we'll go to one half quarter and etc and Jian just you know six months we will morph our way out of this problem just like a baby learning to walk okay now that would seem on prima facie that would seem to be unbelievably reasonable way to approach this it is reasonable it's just that it doesn't work and there's a reason that it disappoint and that's that the pleasure trap is not a normal problem if it were a normal problem if we're learning how to try to learn how to build skyscrapers in the desert we would do it through successive approximation and then we would first build a two-story structure and then a six-story structure and then we would learn how to do it okay no matter what we were trying to learn how to do we would do it through successive approximations but when it comes to the pleasure trap or something like alcoholism we say you have to go all the way the perfect immediately that's the way you're going to do it and if you try to do it any other way pure loading your own gun it's not going to work very well the way to do is to go all the way to perfect and try to stay there as long as you can if you fail then we go right back to trying to be perfect that is asking an unbelievable thing out of a nervous system we couldn't ask it out of any other animal okay only a human could have the possible capacity to leap past a set of successive approximations and reach for the flag immediately and say I'm going to do this even though it's extremely difficult but I'm going through withdrawal symptoms I have tremendous signaling telling me that I should be going back here and indulging in this I've got a whole learning system built around dopamine hyperstimulation that's telling me that this is the right thing to do and instead I'm gonna go against those instincts and do what you say to do which is to do nothing don't touch it okay as you can imagine it's not very successful it's not very successful okay it's for robic as hell when people do it but it's not very successful and the reason it's not very successful is because you in order to be successful you have to do a learning process that is not successive approximation you must immediately grab for the flank your baby has to go from crawling around on the floor to walking in a day not go through successive approximations okay why do we have to do that you have to do that because the material itself that we're trying to deal with is disrupting the brain that is attempting to stop the use of it that doesn't happen in any other learning system if you are learning to ride a bicycle and you fall it hurts can you imagine how hard it would be to learn if you rode a bicycle every time they fell it felt great yet an orgasm how would you how is it that you never learned how to ride a bicycle [Music] okay so you can see oh this is a very interesting problem it's like whoa this is completely different than any other type of problem in the human ever basis and it is so this is why you know Alan will look at this and say you got to go for the flag that's what you're going to do and why because he's seen many people tried to go out successive approximations and film however that doesn't mean that that's always the right way to do it because it turns out that there's a flip side to any kind of attempt to change one's life for the better that is has a significant threat in in undermining our mission so the pleasure trial undermines our motivation because we fall off the bike and feels good that's a problem right this other problem is what I've termed the ego trap the ego scribe takes place when when we have the when we have people for example from the outside that believe we can do something but we don't believe we can do it so we have a young person that has been that it's show promise in math and so his dad teaches him math and he gets a he's in half and now he gets up to the sixth grade he goes to the seventh grade now turns out now for the first time they have math team and he's been known among his peers to be really smart about and so he's so he he takes a little test for the math team and he managed to get on the math team now he doesn't know they don't tell people their scores they just tell you whether you're on the team or you're not on two so he's one of 10 kids it's on the math team so he knows however that the math has does not necessarily come that easy to him and his dad has been tutoring him so he knows stuff that the other kids don't know and he's got a head start but he can actually see in his class that when the teacher asks questions about you know arithmetic issues or other little problem said he's a little slower than a few of the other kids but he does understand it if he does get it and he can do the computations but he's not as quick as said the top 10% of his class but he managed to make the math team why this is dad's tutored in manures Who ahead and so he knows some concepts that the other kids don't know and so he looks really fancy even though he's not that handsome okay so now he's going to go into a math competition and he probably doesn't want to do it and the reason he doesn't want to do it is she's about to get shown up and so this is so this is about the time when he tells his mom was sick to his stomach and he can't go to the thing there's some way that he wants to get out of us you know most of us have been here so you know in one way or the other so I've talked to people that talked to a lady that that in her young life was a there's a fine artist and she believed she was a painter and so she was known among her friends to be a painter and I think she majored in in fine arts in college and had a degree and dad got married I think had kids I don't remember the whole story but her husband did well in life and she was and so in retirement with the kids gone her husband built her an art studio out of the back of the property she'd always wanted to paint and when she came to me she had that art studio had sat there for three years never gone out there yeah ever spent any time out there had some materials out there but had never actually done anything and the reason is is that she felt that she was not going to be able to live up to the expectations of her friends yeah whatever it is that she produced that she didn't have the kind of chops that they should thought she had so what was she doing she's procrastinating sir procrastination is the hallmark of this problem there's a couple other reasons you procrastinate one of them is you're just flat-out overwhelmed you got fifty seven things on your list and you just keep putting something off because it's just not high enough priority but when it comes to things that would be important to us there'd be important personal goals if we're procrastinating the odds are this is the reason the odds are the reason is is that somebody's somewhere alive or dead gave us the signal that they expected us to achieve at this level and our intuition is is that we may only be able to achieve at this level when you have this situation between the expectation here and your ability or our intuition is here then this is sets a forth a motivational trap the trap is is that if I do my very best and I achieve this level I will actually be exposed as someone who does not have this little chops and therefore I will lose status okay when you lose status that's that we've got a little word for a device in our head that that hurts it's called our ego and so if you apply for five jobs and you expected to get and you don't get any of them you come home and you tell your spouse about this stuff on there you go okay some girl you know who's sort of a pretty attractive but not super star so then the coolest kid in school starts flirting with her she goes and tells her friends that was good for my ego okay so that's the word we use about this feeling of this status feedback or astein feedback we get from others and if we're in a situation where we feel like others believe we should be able to achieve this but we only think we can achieve that if we know that's what the situation is or we've assessed that's what we think the situation is then it's going to turn out that we are in a crossed ination dynamic the right thing to do is to fiddle around and not do it because if we fail we're going to lose that status and we want to hold on to that status for as long as we can so this is why you know it's notorious in the boxing arena or for the champ who isn't sure that they can beat the number one contender to fiddle around and hide behind lawyers make all kinds of demands and everything else under something okay so that that's typical so this is not it isn't just artists and not just little kids and math classes it's everybody's always in a situation trying to figure out what do they think that I can do versus what do I think that I can do and if I if I'm not sure that I can do as far as I think that they think I can then I'm in that trap and a plastic example with the alcoholism so a classic example this trap is that somebody's had competent smart reasonably emotionally stable well-liked productive human and they've got an alcohol problem and their spouse or their friends or their family or the parents say come on just put down the bottle and what they're doing is is that they they believe in the person they've seen the person's confidence and so they don't see why this should be that difficult they don't see this as setting the bar as unnecessarily high they think they're setting the bar you know at a substantial achievement but they believe the person is fully capable about treatment and one of the problems is because they don't have the problem themselves they massively underestimate the problem if you're not a person who is genetically susceptible to alcohol then you don't know what it feels like to have the alcohol type or activate the dopamine pathway and cause an addictive process you just don't you have no intuition for this so as a result surrounding that individual can be expectations that would say well come on Joe man when he just going to do this so Joanna has tried to break that problem for 15 years quietly silently sometimes going to AAA or whatever and then trying for a while but failing repeatedly why tough problem there is a problem problem people never solved and so as a result if she gets reassurance from the outside world that they would expect her to solve the problem but she herself believes that she is unlikely to be able to solve the problem she is in an ego trap it's very likely if you do your best you will fall short of expectations and now they're gonna lose tell us so what is it that people do they inform the community that they are not trying so they say don't judge me because I'm not trying yet also tomorrow that's what they do okay same thing happens with people that have weight problems with diets can't change me now cuz I'm not on my diet yet I'm gonna start my diet next week okay that's what that is it's the same process that's going on as the person been able to lose weight before and keep it off no why because it's harder than you think there's slender friends so I don't have any idea they have no intuition about this because it turns out that pretty much most Americans are eating pretty much the same food some people are 150 pounds overweight some people are 75 pounds overweight some people are 30 pounds overweight some people are no pounds over the way what accounts for the difference genes some genetic differences they're not actually individual differences in the people's eating behavior because most of America is eating pretty much the same thing so the slender people look at the happy people and say well Joanne you're smart enough to do this you're smart as I know my job I've watched you with your kids you're a great mom I see how diligent you are and go to church what's the problem just push your pushes the bottle away right if you're not calling and just push the pasta away if you have have a weight problem but it turns out that's not what it is it turns out that actually that problem has to do with cell signaling mechanisms this tiny that if you eat to food too rich some people are going to be overweight some people weren't but what if you actually try to get out of trial you try to get out of the trap and you'd hold a natural affinity that's something nobody does the friends the slender friends who are so sure that all you need to do is push yourself away from the table are totally ignorant they have no clue what's actually happening they themselves couldn't or wouldn't do this and so it's exactly analogous to the situation we're down the hall okay and so as a result what happens people procrastinate they fiddle around and they say they'll start tomorrow and then they sometimes make a fart attempts and once in a while they make a major attempt and then when they fail they've now convinced themselves that they can't do this and then when people say oh joy just push yourself away from the table what do they do yes I know I'll start tomorrow you know what does I start tomorrow look like it's called Weight Watchers I'm not actually doing anything we're just watching today this is the culturally accepted thing doesn't matter if you haven't lost any weight and you're 447 pounds it doesn't make any difference because you're on Weight Watchers and you are doing what you're supposed to do okay now so what is the problem that we have we've got two problems that essentially you can consider that caramely I can't think of cartoon yeah so unfortunately all we get is science drawn it's how boring is that today the on one end if we set the bar very low we what we do is we minimize the ego trap and we maximize the pleasure problem so I have client once that was five foot four and 338 pounds and came to me for a year and didn't lose an ounce frustrated client frustrated psychologist everything was fine equilibrium and one day I finally said to her why don't you just eat something that is natural how about breakfast why don't you just have some oatmeal I don't care if you put Count Chocula in it I don't care if you drive it and honey do something but just I needed some fiber in that woman I don't know how it's no sense to me there was no fiber in that diet maybe some pickles often in-n-out burger so anyway the after over several months what happened is that she went down to about 260 so she lost 70 maybe 265 something like that she lost about 70 pounds and then she stopped yeah I don't know like that's any chance we can get some corn on the cob in there like just see anything no we'd never make another change and she said it and now I look like all the women in my daughter's like swim blood group I'm fine now now I'm not the outlier I'm fine how's that the only change why pleasure drop so what did i do I took it down to where it was so low but I got routed the ego drop and she was actually you know I'd had the bar way too high okay we got an exchange she's got a deuce let's try to figure out what you do for breakfast let's try to do something out we'd be super lion so let's try to get some stupid things for dinner forget it never happened expectation was way too high I finally rolled in a frustration I ruled the expectation down as low as I could to make one move and she did it it's incredible okay she did it and that's all she did why not enough to get around the post trap the closer trap kept you know just too much of don't duration the palate wound of essentially keeping the person in that in for fair enough that's as far as we got the over here if you if you said it perfect so you come out of true north and you said okay that's it you know no sugar no salt no well nothing all steamed vegetables fresh fruit you know eat the orange peel and whatever do it perfect right so we rather than one inch out of mine if we do that what will do is we will actually minimize the pleasure drop so in a few weeks what's gonna happen is that power will be really sharp which means that there will be the minimum amount of sacrifice will be coming this your food will taste very good now the trap has not gone away it's not zero so if you stick some C's candy in there believing the system's going to fire up just fine but it still is a minimum sacrifice however that's just part of the problem there are other parts to the trap other than taste preference processes for example energy conservation this this is being perfect it's not easy energy wise there's a lot of hassle it's also rough socially yeah how I said we're going to deal with all that so the pleasure trap is I've defined it in our book is actually multi-dimensional this is just a quarter of it which does taste preference mechanisms if you go all the way perfect you've actually solved that problem list effectively but what you also do is you maximize the likelihood of some failure in other words this makes some failure super easy almost inevitable dissipate so unless you're some kind of freak I know a few balance of free jumping edge a supreme seven billion people I think I can name four so we know what that means because so this is not not likely not very many people will do this indefinitely for their whole lives they're gonna go destruction a little bit now they're not gonna go so far that direction that they're going to be all the way down here in the closure drop but they're going to wobble here and if they wobble here one problem is that they set the bar here now there can be shame and there can be a feeling that you didn't you didn't stay up to standard that somehow the expectation was that this is how you're supposed to do things if you set the bar that high then you maximize the life with it that the ego trap actually gets you and this I will watch this happen I will watch people that will go away from True North and they'll say I was perfect for four months and then whenever my sisters and shed its barbecue chicken and then it just all went down the drain and then when was that three years ago my god so for three years you just like tossed in a towel and just cried uncle that's exactly what happened and they're embarrassed they don't want to come back they don't want to talk to any of us and they don't even don't even look at our websites okay they don't want to be reminded of that that they fell short that they were second-class citizen and that their incompetence and lack of willpower got exposed I don't like that so I don't like any sanctimonious language that sets people up for the ego trap or once them how many signaling at all that expects that this is what is that we should be doing I don't think so okay the I will actually tell people that one of the wise things that they can do potentially is actually plan that they're not going to be perfect so once a week one meal you plan that you're not going to do perfect okay that way you can kind of look forward to it all week and now you don't feel like well what am I going to be on my diet now we're not well kline in the little steel chute and then we're going to walk you into the your wife see on the other side okay no that's not what I want people to feel are we have to begin with the end in mind on any project and the end that we seek is to be healthy and fit that's the end that we seek okay you don't we don't seek to have a special little pyramid put on her head it says that we're a member of a cult who did something that is almost impossible that's not the point I don't know maybe that's somebody's point but it's not my point my point is for people to do well okay the question is could you do something like that or is that telling an alcoholic one bottle of wine a week interesting question isn't it now this would go to how intense is the food stimuli relative to alcohol and the answer is it's exceedingly unlikely for it anywhere anybody anywhere near the normal curve for taste responsive 'ti that there would be an effect on the brain that would be equivalent to the effect of a bottle of wine on an alcoholic it's just not the same level of magnitude okay so there's the of all of the people that have ever benefited from the knowledge of healthy eating the overwhelming majority of them are not perfect or close they made significant changes a lot of times they morphed their way as I did so I started out I'm working my way way from an animal flush and I did that for about five years and then finally by my late 20s Alan talked to me again and gave me a took me to the woodshed for a while and explained to me the different products were just as bad and I remembered that conversation I was in in the kitchen in Charlottesville in grad school and I remember him saying products are just as bad it's just MacDougall says because of liquid meat he says I think they're worse my god I've read the books how did I miss that you know I just started ignored it why too much you know it just was one to one to many things one to many changes so then I started morphing out of that and we leave that one on to lazily cook so I never cooked with oil so I never do that but the animal food had to go and then the dairy products went and then I wound up more or less where I am today that's where that's where we are 30 years later but it was successive approximations and I'm nowhere near perfect I don't seek it what I see is I seek to do well okay I seek to keep my diet somewhere up here to where my palate is sharp and I really enjoy healthy food like I really enjoyed the food tonight particularly corn on the cob and the sweet kids okay or the yams the so whereas a normal person would say oh you ate yams without better on them or corn on the cob without butter like I sometime in the last three years I saw somebody put butter all over corn on the cob so one of these little shocks like oh yeah I'm the outlier that's the that's the normal person that's how normal people eat corn on the cob which is amazing but that of course that is what how they do it the you know so were the freaks now where are we trying to name it trying to be here this is where this is a reasonable place to be and so for anybody I've had people that essentially needed to start here okay they this was this was too hot and they needed to go home from the mcdougal program or don't need to go home from turn north and they needed to make several good changes is what they needed and we needed to have kind of an agreement about what would be reasonable and they needed to try that out and see whether they could defend it and they felt like they could and if they were to do that that would be a substantial victory there is no perfect spot on this continuum these two our opponent processes this is a bizarre situation in human evolution the there isn't anything like this the you don't have a situation where where motivational strategy is going exactly counter to another motivational strategy that's it's not natural to have to fight about it like this what makes it in a natural battle is pleasure truck the pleasure trap is the unnatural problem okay the ego trap is a natural problem scan the environment this is what it is that you think that they expect of you if you don't think that you can do it then procrastinate that's that's a normal strategy for humans that keeps us you know humble and keeps us paying attention to what other people think of us and when we when it starts to slip down to where they now think less of us now we're motivated to show them that they're wrong okay so this is this is how this works so the the ego trap is something that we can usually manage clinically quite easily I can talk kids out of the ego trap that have been stuck in it for three years I can talk them out of it in ten minutes about that that's because it's a natural problem and once you get to the solution of the natural problem it unwinds you know just like you just fixed it you just undid a knot the combo lock okay plugging the trap isn't like that pleasure trap is an unnatural problem that's incredibly difficult because exactly against human nature it fools human nature okay that's why I want my tagline of our book is mastering the hidden force that undermines health and happiness it's a hidden force it's not part of your nature to even identify it notice there okay it makes it very tricky and it turns out that it works in opponent-process to the ego trap in a very particular difficult way that the the easy the lower you set the standard the easier it is for the person but the more the closer crowd so look at how this works with alcohol if you set it too low they'll never get out the truck if you set it up here which is where you actually need to set it they're very often going to be in the ego trap and for estimating it's exactly what we see okay so this is this is a schematic of the actual dilemma we vets so what I came up with my eyeball estimate about what it is that I think that most people need to do I set it out here and this is what I call 80% and I have a little sheep called starch targets and it search targets that you know you email that around you post it on the website she puts it on your website now the it's a it's a its ID and it's a little sheet if you have six checks boxes a day and those checks boxes it's starch starch starch fruit salad and exercise and there's a grid so you've got seven days for a week so you've got 42 check boxes and your goal is to hit 34 out of 42 for the week that's the idea you're not going to exercise every day that's okay okay I tell people exercise 10 or 15 minutes ahead don't have to make a big deal out of put some music on and dance ok dance okay all right so that's so that's what you need to do for exercise that's fine there's not to be any more elaborate than that so you don't have to go to the gym and put on your clothes and do something fancy the don't have to get a salad every day I don't get a salad every day it's too much hassle so yeah I get fruit every day because it's not hassle so I always get that check mark and then I'm looking to get the check marks of the starch meaning that my meal is based around starch so tonight buy corn yeah I had sweet potato or the yam my meal was based around starch and so was everybody that ate dinner tonight so he would get it you did check for that if you had an apple today you get a check mark for that and I'm gansan let me get a check mark for that for isn't bad 5 is better than 80% so in other words if we do this repeatedly what we're going to find is that if a person's health and their fitness starts or more in the right direction and they keep their palate good enough that they keep out of the closure trap good enough that they continue to like healthy food this is notice what isn't on here I don't subtract points for the fact that you made something nada no all I I want you to get credit for and learn and incorporate doing the right things that's what I want you to do we're not worrying about perfection we're worrying about getting behaviors that you can repeat because you've done and you can do them again okay yeah I'm not that interested in errors I'm not that interested in slips and mistakes I don't really care the reason is is that if we get a diet that's built consistently around starch being the main component of your meals and we put some print salad and exercise in there we're gonna get there okay we're gonna get there you're gonna make a lot of progress yeah strangely not even coming from from Ajay's folks at which I'd get a lot of call from her folks who are probably the most the most diligent and and most you know fastidious and conscientious and alert group that I ever hear from the even those folks I will hear about what I always consider the number one mistake in in diet and health and that's starch I can't believe that we're still talking about this I don't know ten years up in a starch solution and after many of us have read multiple MacDougal books the truth is is that's where that's the center of the solution as we push the starches in rice beans and potatoes of corn and oats as we push those in we are pulling other things out right if we fear putting these in we're gonna get hungry and we're gonna be richer food that's what's gonna happen we're either gonna get dried starch on and start using referring to are always wet or cold water baked potatoes corn on the cob oatmeal day even pasta is wet you want the starch just to be wet when they're dry when it's cookies crackers Larabars etc those things are all 1500 to 2000 it's about super-rich these things are always between three and five hundred covers account they're wet they're what you were designed to eat and eat as much as you want and be perfectly healthy yes tremendous bad press I also think there's something else that can go on with the starches and that is that people are sometimes desperate and they've experimented with a lot of things so they've expended spermatid with keto and so if they'll do keto what will happen is they'll take away two starches other diet they'll take away the carbohydrate what happens is they'll dump a pound of glycogen of their liver and with it along with that we'll leave two pounds of water out of your body so literally in 48 hours if you switch from a starch Center diet to keto diet you'll drop three pounds just a water in glycogen and you'll say well there's the proof and then if you go back and you you I don't know you listen to a MacDougal webinar and have us yell at you and then you're like no no like this is some what I should do so then you go back and you eat yourself some potatoes or rice or beans and now two or three days later you're three pounds heavier because we put the glycogen in the water back in you so you're like no that doesn't work so there that's a huge you know mind game that goes on with this so I think that's one reason I think that's probably that maybe the biggest reason that drives all of the continued mysticism around this now the truth of the matter is that starches are very very low calorie density they're at the low end of the scale for what people would have ever used to survive and so therefore we can eat them you know with without any concern at all you eat them to satiety and you read to survivin repeatedly as many times a day as you need to in whatever eating window you want to eat them in so it doesn't make any difference you're you're an animal that was designed by nature to actually seek out richard boots and the starches and you often got those but you don't need them okay we don't need the problems to come up with the rich of innocent searches so our ancestors ate a lot of meat ate a lot of honey those are rich foods we don't need to eat those foods if we avoid those foods we're generally going to be better off and if we do those things well what that means is that we can eat large amounts of starches and we're going to need to in order to reach the vital so but we sure as heck don't need to fear the starches the the best evidence that we have to date on the average calorie density of what human beings in the 110 or gatherers state the 700 calories a pound okay the starches are they start at a starting squash at about 300 they go to oatmeal at 325 to go to the potato family 375 they go to beans at about 400 and they go to rice about five it's okay they're all below what our ancestors ate on albums so there is ZERO need to avoid these things and when we do avoid them because if we fear them and what happens is that hunger Drive kicks up and what do people reach for they reach for rich food that's what they do and that's where the trouble starts so that's why what I care about is people getting in the habit of morphing their diet around starts in our diet with whatever fruits and vegetables and salad and everything else that they want around that but that's what I want them to do and if they'll do that we are going to move the right direction and we don't have to be perfect we just have to be good make sense okay well any questions yes is done but her own body she gains weight on starches and can't lose weight no matter what right why is that is there a certain body type she's probably just looking at three days she's looking at the same three days so she what she's not doing in there steaming Li likely that the following is taking place that she's not running this experiment month month okay so that's what you have to do the truth is is that people using the scale on a day-to-day basis sort of in a week - we basis are are asking to develop what I call superstitious behavior the they wind up believing all kinds of things that have nothing to do with the truth the truth of the matter is if you are on a very healthy diet you are likely to lose maybe two ounces a day that's it problem is is that you two ounces of fat that that's about like you lose you know you are exceedingly likely to be gaining and losing two pounds of that so your what's actually happening the real process I mean losing of two ounces today is totally obscured by the firework show that's going on with all the other variables in your body anyway most of which is water but you've got water changing from day to day you've got fecal matter changing day to day you've got the like kitchen source changing day to day you got the amount of urine that you're sitting on for it's like you've got so much variance from day to day you should not be weighing yourself day today you should be weighing yourself three times at the beginning of the month - taken the average okay because that's a pretty good out and then weigh yourself three times at the beginning of next month to take an average if you're three pounds lighter you're really three pounds lighter okay if you're really no no lighter you really didn't lose any weight today if you're two pounds heavier you're probably two mounts heavier okay which means you didn't need another story that's what that means yes [Music] yes no question so this is everybody has to look at their own nervous system and sniff out their own inner alcoholic around fit okay so there may be foods that are not a good idea for some people they begin to because they'll spin them and do a mess usually that's not going to be the case but oftentimes people do have something so we need to need reasonable boundary around those things yeah that's a good question and then also with that with the procrastination and the people that are in our lives that have this you know idea that you just can stop and write all that stuff yes aren't we lower like it's there because I always feel like I feel so beaten up well yes I know I can't reach that right underneath it's like I still feel lower I don't ever feel like are they just paying attention anymore is that what you say it's up when you're putting your hands does that mean it no this is what their expectations of you oh okay it's not that they're above you they expect that you should be able to reach this I like their about me yeah you can also feel that as well because if they don't have the right they've got a figured out this is a this is actually interesting that you mentioned this because that that adds a devastating angst to the ego drop so here you are a person that's respected in all other dimensions okay that's why they think you could handle this problem right so they actually are looking at you from 17 different angles and they say you've got this one problem but I've already seen you manage so other everything else so well but of course you could have that problem how tough could it be and the answer is guess what it's super tough most people never beat it and you didn't happen to be endowed with the genetic trap inside your head so you don't have a clue okay so this is it's almost the equivalent of someone with stutters so someone who's centers and everybody's playing come on Jim just spit it out it's like really if I could just spit it out I'd spit it out I don't think I'd spit it out are you kidding me I've got a neurological abnormality in my freaking brain that's all and so in the story but if you're on the other side of this y'all come on spit it out okay so this is the Cantus is how the ego trap will drive the stutterer to just speak quiet not saying just you know pull your head into your tortoiseshell and the same thing will happen whenever whether it's good drug and alcohol addiction or whether it's weight management and diets this will cause people or whether it's art students or some kids is supposed to be a genius and he's supposed to go to the Ivy League and watch him crash his GPA watch him find a way to undermine his own success because he's feeling the crushing burden of the ego truck so that's why whenever I hear sounds the smell like the egos rap I want to speak up okay that's why you know Alan can't help himself this is where he wants to put the bomber I understand that yeah he's seeing people fail because they didn't put the bar high enough so I buy okay but I've seen an awful lot of people fail because when they when they went to here for a weekend then they said oh wow I don't have what it takes and I can't do this and I just can't do this thing so the hell with it I'm I have seen that 400 times in my career and I know that if they get a good job for a period of time they can do a pretty good job indefinitely okay if they were perfect for four months I know they can be 90% of perfect for the rest of their life I know that that is exceedingly likely to be the case because this isn't the same as alcohol or heroin okay it's a muted version it's more like coffee it's about the same level of coffee can people get off coffee and stay off coffee definitely yes if they go back and have a cup of coffee or they addicted for the rest of their life no they just got a little challenge okay and there are absolutely people who can have a cup of coffee now and not have it you know all over the place of their life so it's about at that level it's enough that needs to be respected it's not trivial but it also doesn't need to be feared and that's what I'm trying to have people feel don't fear this time they don't be intimidated by their respect it and that's how they want to look the problem okay yes yeah yes no problems we have you know yeah yes what's the difference between this and this yes almost no it turns out that you're within the thresholds for essentially all bodily systems yes thank you thank it's so good to have people live ask for questions because there was all these questions that I don't think I'd ask you know that I don't think of the answer absolutely okay in nature and in biology there's things called thresholds so for example how much Sun should you need well optimal Doug it turns out that since you're in Southern California it's just this thing turns out 17 minutes and 42 seconds like really what if I get 10 minutes today answer it's functionally equivalent okay so if you are here it's functionally equivalent it would be in principle what would be the optimal amount for you to be jog walking tomorrow right in the next year Oh 1.3 miles well what if we do half a mile what then answer pretty close and then 95% of the benefit see and so this is this is the notion here so we want to be good enough that we stay within the thresholds of the body's ability to deal with it and that's what this is this will keep people out of heart disease this will get almost all of the influence of anti cancer code see that we have with a vegan diet which is modest it's not huge the biggest thing that a vegan diet can do is silicon it can essentially rule out cardiovascular disease which is the biggest one it's also that along with that obviously it's going to be strokes and along with that's going to be type 2 diabetes and get your feet cut off and also you're going to be fit and you're going to feel good and you're gonna be highly functional so there's a tremendous amount of it here the difference between here and here this is a difference between yes yes yes probably true to some degree I'm sure it is true but it's also true to give me hungry so people people are always monkeying around this looking for the magic solution to being fit so they'll say things like this is was the big argument that made kogure Bailey rich the idea that you know getting fed getting strong that's the that's the answer because that's going to burn more calories while you sleep it's thinking a little coat or did you think of the following that if you burn more calories than you sleep then when you wake up you hungry of course it's as if that is it the brain is not interconnected and it's not reading all these things your your hunger Drive is is a piece of evolutionary wizard group that is looking at all kinds of multiple factors including what's the temperature in this room how many times did you go up the stairs did you step outside you know for four five minutes and get cool in other words the hunger drive is responsive to an unbelievably complex array of inputs including did you play checkers with your friend that you wanted to beat because you would have used your brain down or chartered you would burn a few more calories in so the thing is extremely sophisticated so you can't sneak past it five extra pounds of muscle that's burning the next 100 calories and then think that that's going to keep you slim it's never gonna work that way it's just simply going to up your hunger Drive by that same amount of calories so the solution is simply to eat the food of your natural history no matter how much exercise you do whether it's a lot or it's very very modest amount the hunger Drive will beautifully organize itself around that our solution is to be eating a diet that in its entirety is in a reasonable level of calorie density that is actually a gust solution it doesn't have to be 500 calories a pound or 600 calories a pound or 472 calories a pound it doesn't have to be anything it just has to probably be not very far north of 700 okay that's probably what it needs to be so that means you're going to have some rich things from time to time so high you pasta it's 900 calories a pound but I'm putting on there what tomato sauce which is 200 calories a pound and I put some asparagus in there which is $200 a pound so when I'm all done it's probably 700 cards account right in the kill zone for a hundred gather you know and I even like crammed down a salad if I didn't want it to lower my calorie density of my meal didn't get not going to have an ulcer over it so the idea is get it pretty good if we get a pretty good we should give sensually all of the health benefits I would say this will have people that will come to true or that will come to your fasting scape and once in a while and you're going to have buddy is very ill okay so they've got a kidney that it's down to 25% function at that point they'd better eat the way Nathan would tell you to eat their words tighter okay we better go to here or awfully close because we don't have a home almost any organ capacity to deal with anything outside the one's okay but that's a different issue so we've got any known serious pathology we need to take it all the way here at least to a point where Reese gets sick okay but otherwise all things being equal otherwise he's you know like like my little sister she is what's gonna it's gonna happen is mmm the reason why your sisters half the size individual genetic differences the reason why you're carrying extra weight isn't because we've got anything wrong with your satiety matters okay you say well I just don't feel full well feeling full is a vague concept okay it's not it's a lot like ol little thing goes off so that's it I'm full that's fine I have works it's fluid hey it's like well I'm full unless you bring out something really rich at which point I'm not alright so in other words it's meant to be a fluid concept so the reason why some some people carry extra weight most people do in the modern environment is because they're eating a diet that's north of seven hundred counts of mass that's why okay so now so that means no animal consciously regulates a cider drive other than a freakin human with not late 20th century with a calculator you're trying to measure thing called carriers it's insane okay the so instead what we want to do is don't even be thinking about imbalance don't be consciously trying to eat less don't do anything but what we do need to do is we need to be making choices about what we're eating so we need to have the diet essentially the consciousness is aiming the diet towards towards you know five to six hundred calorie count up food that's a meal when you look at it should look like it's 5 or 600 calories account that's what it should look like and so if it's jam on Ezekiel bread with Earth Balance that's not what that looks like it looks like 17 head okay I found red four thousand calorie count butter fourteen hundred Kerry John Jam that's what that looks like you know an almond butter sandwich well if I'm the better sandwich is two thousand calories a pound that's that's you know two and a half times the calorie density of steak okay that's how you wind up with vegan struggling with their weight is because they're eating better choices with respect to the animal kingdom but but the reading process very rich life that foods so our job is to just that's what you need to be paying attention to please don't y'all worry about your association mechanisms because they work fine okay alright [Applause] all right fabulous good all right thank you everybody for joining us
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