Home 🏠 🔎 Search


Bad Transcripts
for the
Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Chef AJ: Prejudice, Compassion, Binging, and Suicide | Healthy Living LIVE! Interview with Dr Doug Lisle
an auto-generated transcript


To get a shareable link to a certain place in the audio,
hover your mouse over the relevent text,
right click, and "copy link address"
(mobile: long press & copy link address)
 


well hello everybody I see there's a lot of people there and welcome to healthy living live I'm chef Amy Ginny and before I introduce our guest dr. Doug Lyall who is back by popular demand I have a very special announcement to make if you're familiar with the book the pleasure trap it is now on audio CDs it's really big it's an 8 CD set and even if you have the written copy of the book I really recommend to get the audio because it's not an easy book to really understand but somehow when you listen to it it really rings true and a lot of these principles are driven home right now it's only available on audio CD through Amazon but very soon the publisher is going to be releasing it on audible but my special announcement is is that dr. Doug LaBelle and the co-author dr. Alan Goldhamer are going to be appearing together very soon in free live webinar where they're going to discuss some of the principles in this book and to celebrate long-awaited an audio so to find out how to be part of that free live webinar you either need to be signed up for the mailing list of the True North health center which you could do is health promoting calm or the publishers website which is book club not Co the show notes or if you're on my mailing list it ito process com we'll be letting him know about this webinar you'll be able to be both dr. live and dr. gold hammer together which never happens except in Vegas and I hope you'll join us where you can ask them questions live so back to to delay or Leslie saying two of my all-time favorite people Thank You Leslie so my guest today back by popular demand is dr. Doug Lyall who is not only the co-author of the pleasure track but the psychologist at both the True North health center and the mcdougal program The Living Program both located in Santa Rosa California he is the founder of the website esteem dynamics calm where you can book an actual consultation with dr. Lisle and if that weren't enough he is the star of the weekly podcast called beat your jeans Enes and you can listen to that live every Wednesday night at 8:30 p.m. Pacific time or through iTunes and BlogTalkRadio and there's over 100 archived episodes so now I get to shut up and listen to dr. Lao the rest of the hour thank you for being here again dr. Lyle and welcome what a pleasure thanks for having me AJ people just love you dr. Lyle and guys don't forget shared this broadcast in real time so the doctor will want to keep coming back every month and answer some of your question which I have so dr. Lao we have a wide variety of questions and a lot of these I think real find interesting or I hope you'll find interesting and some of them that I'd really not heard you answer before so let's get started all right no date it's a little long you might find it in to dear dr. Lao growing up my parents smoked after my dad had his heart attack he kept smoking but my mom continued to smoke until her death and for the rest of her life all they did was bicker about her smoking five pounds and have kept it off for over ten years now the problem is I have become very judgmental of fat people even though I was once one of them when I was fat I never had ill-will toward fat people but now I'm very critical of them and I won't even date a girl who's overweight is this normal there such a thing as a reformed after saying okay unfortunately you froze up for a little bit so I missed some of this but what I heard was that he grew up in a home where both parents smoked and there's a lot of acrimony over-over the mother smoked smoking out for the dead quit and that also then he himself had had a weight problem and he lost a great deal of weight and now he finds himself in in seemingly a similar judgmental view as maybe his father had after his father quit smoking do I have that about right absolutely okay the it's it's not uncommon for people that have been that has struggled their way through some kind of process like this to essentially essentially disown their own previous self and essentially put themselves in the camp of the people who are who are you know ahead of the game and looking down at the other people like I'm no longer in that group that that tells us how painful it was to be in the previous group and how relieved the person is about having escaped it somehow it's almost like they want to put further distance between themselves and that previous identity so I can understand you know why this would happen what what can I say about this other than step step one is the self awareness that this is happening and all that I can tell you is that I think all of us have this tendency or we're going to have a tendency to categorize people that have the upper hand versus the lower hand and we we like the winners we want to identify with them be with them etc and so myself I have no doubt that if we were to look through my history from the time I was a little kid to now we will find an in-group out-group the the winning team is better than the losing team the better people they're smarter they're better looking they're more cool I want to be more like them etc all undoubtedly because I'm a human I will have divided up the world into those two camps along a number of dimensions the and so what we what comes with with some thoughtfulness about this is that in fact there aren't two camps there's a continuum and that many of these people that struggle so much are overwhelmed by by the problems and the challenges associated with whatever that struggle is and with the the more insight or the more sensitivity we have about about these continuum continuum excellence or the continuum of disaster when it comes to human life the sort of the more the more we are going to see this as this sort of subtle individual challenge they G each individual house I can just tell you you probably couldn't have a better education in this than being a psychologist or social worker or you know etc in other words to be in the helping profession anyway it will challenge every single one of your pet prejudices and you will you will learn that each individual is exactly that that they're an individual that that belongs to several groups in terms of their identity and some of those groups are are the winning cool side of the group and some of those groups are the not the winning side and also people that have ever worked with with really disadvantaged people now I guess I would say a an education comes with handing out free meals no matter what those meals are on Christmas Eve somewhere and I have people that do that every year the with with the notion of seeing looking in the eye the people that are really struggling and and understand that that through a variety of factors people wind up being in the losing side in a way that they don't want I think I'm reminded of a of the absurdity of this there was a comedian that it died about 20 years ago or so his name was Sam Kinison and he he was really a very funny guy he was extremely talented his his shtick was to be outrageous and yelled and I think he became missed he electrified the comedy scene overnight with a stick where he was yelling about how absurd it is for people to for the people in Africa to live in deserts like he was screaming at them go go to where the food is and it was funny okay and and we had to we had to if it didn't talk to tickle your funny bone you weren't normal but had you ever been to Africa and you'd ever watched those people in real-time you'd realize they don't have any choices and and this is a tragedy one of my one of my friends actually worked in Africa in again with a major international consortium working on water the problems of water and it turns out the problems of water in Africa are huge and very difficult and under all kinds of political pressure and and engineering pressure and financial pressure and a great many people in Africa live in huge garbage dumps their whole lives where there really is hardly any water at all and so kinnison's humor although you know because we are a part of it and we aren't there and we get to live on the winning team where we have everything and of course it seems so obvious to us how to do things it's not so obvious and in fact it's impossible for many people so this this realization that people aren't into two camps the winners and the losers what they are they are at the Super Bowl I suppose but in real life everybody sits on a continuum and they also sit on a continuum in multiple groups the and so the - so you your identity is actually a function of a whole bunch of things that you belong to you belong to a quilting group and your best quilter even though you may be the one with the biggest weight problem yeah but you may be envied and admired for that or whatever else maybe you're a great singer so you the people looking at people as mosaics and rather than as a single issue of their identity no matter how no matter how troubled some that identity is or the part of that that it is you you start to appreciate just how complex and varied people are in in my career I worked not only with many many underprivileged people in my career but I also spent 15 years in the criminal justice system and if there was a group of people that is consistently consistently disparaged its criminals and with and I've often heard well just lock them all up and throw away the key and that that could only be said by somebody who has never been in the prison and never talked to 50 people because if you've had and you heard all their stories you would have enormous compassion and you would find a lot of outstanding people and their character logically and believe me you will find some people that you hope never see the light of day get it so making a mistake there's a reason we have prisons and those there are very good reasons for prisons but there are also there's also reason for compassion and mercy when we understand that each of these is an individual they are they are extraordinarily individual in there there are people that I never want to see again and there's people that on the outside they could count me as friend and so this is this is part of having to step back and understand that sometimes when we're very judgmental it's out of fear and in the case of prisoners it's mothers being afraid of everybody with a criminal record which they don't need to be and on the part of the person that was previously fat it's like please don't judge me as one of those people I want to divorce my identity from those people as fast as I can because I hated being one of them and that hated being looked down on that's the reason for that is the brutality of the modern environment over our physical appearance and this new problem that we have call the weight problem understand that this problem really just emerged in the late 20th century for goodness sakes this is a this is a new phenomenon of course you could say well Henry the Eighth had the problem but Henry the Eighth ate like modern Americans he was eating a bunch of processed junk food other people throughout history as we as we eat something closer to our natural history this simply wasn't a problem so now we have this problem sprung on people in the modern environment now all over the world but happened first in America and we're seeing now the first and second generations of people struggling with this horrendous thing that we call the pleasure trap and as we as we understand this is just like prisoners they're the closer you look they're all you know buried and they're they're all that in each individual in this particular characteristic for example in prison about whether they were convicted or not convicted of something is really it maybe the most obvious thing about them about while they're in front of you but it's on the least important thing when understanding who they are character logically I had a young man to go off on this topic I had a young man who was serving a life sentence for murder and of course when you read the file instantly you're thinking of well he's what a bad guy and he has tattoos and he used a gun and and then you find out that he lived in a very rough neighborhood and his sister have been sexually assaulted by a man in the neighborhood and he confronted the man and the man said yeah I'm going I'm going to do UN and I'm gonna do yet and your whole family okay Wow he went to the police nobody was interested haha okay you start understanding wait a second what is it that you did what he did was he took a he got himself a gun and he shot through the guy's apartment house door as a warning don't come after my family well a bullet went through that door and killed this man on the other side so the when I look at that when I heard that situation he was about 36 or 38 years old when I met him and he had been a model prisoner and he'd been in prison for 20 years since he was 18 years old when he did this so that young man was released about two or three years after I met him so he's finally released after serving about 23 years this this young man that I met and we came to know quite well was an outstanding person and everybody could see that he was so again the the thing that is most obvious that he's incarcerated for a murder and that he's sitting in a prison is not the most important thing about it most important thing about someone that you see that's 50 or 60 or 70 or 100 pounds overweight isn't their weight okay we have to be able to look past that and understand that in every person's experience they're each struggling with a a modern tragedy and each of one of them is probably fighting this problem pretty hard as hard as they can just as prisoners do and they make the best of their days that they can so yeah I can say is that I understand this problem I understand we're really talking about the nature of prejudice and we're talking about the how difficult it is sometimes to leave those prejudices behind if you were once prejudiced against and you essentially did are trying to disown that part of your identity and I would just said hey embrace it you know you were yes yes you struggle with a break weight problem for all we know you'll have an aneurysm and you'll have a little circuit go wrong in your head and you'll be obese again for no fault to be right and so and if that's true we would hope that we would we would come to understand that each of us no matter what characteristics we show the world we're all far more complex and who we are character logically is an awful lot more important than what we look like wow that's sort of like Martin Luther King's I had a dripping speech honestly that was so profound no compassionate people loved it he loves the idea of looking at people as Muslim and explaining that that a lot of judgement is makes a lot of sense yeah and I think it was a great question that this guy actually was aware that he was doing this and I think your answer will help a lot of people good something beautiful the next question from Bonnie but before I ask it I want to add that what she's saying has a lot of people experienced the same thing in our group that have lost weight when they started eating less again I feel like we came that that would have been a great ending the last question if everything will smell is not important but anyway so dr. Lyle are some people predisposed to gaining weight from eating fat even if it's only an ounce of nuts a day I lost a significant amount of weight on a no added fat diet and was able to easily maintain it for quite some time but because of my strong both heart dementia I got scared hearing the doctors say we need to have these healthy fats for our brain and heart for the last 14 months I added an exactly one ounce of walnut made no other dietary changes anything compounds is it possible that some people are like Jack Sprat and just can't do that without being bad you really think that nuts make us look longer and help their lives you know I don't think the Mets help you live longer than healthier lives so I think you need some source of essential fatty acids and in general a normal dietary pattern of a of a natural foods vegan diet will satisfy that without any problem now the the craze about about nuts and adding nuts in I in my estimation I have actually looked at this evidence as has the Cochrane Collaboration and even if you you you will always find individual studies that are highly suspicious that will point toward some wonderful thing about nuts but the beauty that in Cochrane Collaboration is they they attempt to try to ferret this out and look at the cleanest best studies that are available and the last time I because studies they found no benefit of nuts consumption over any and the other healthy fit so is there enough noise out there that we should be listening maybe Alan Goldhamer will take about I think about a tablespoon of flaxseed and he'll put him in a coffee grinder and then he will sprinkle their ground-up flaxseed on his cereal in the morning and that's what he will do that's going to be a lot less calories than an ounce of nuts so and I think that that is that is an easily sufficient solution to anybody's worry that they may be deficient in essential fatty acids so is it true that individual difference is good I don't know about five pounds over that period of time with respect to that much nuts I blame that kind of weight change on those nuts alone that that seems that those two things don't line up quite square however are there individual differences in sensitive people are going to be with rich source like nuts yeah they're all and so I'm not saying to not eat an ounce in that today but if you are finding that if you're eating an ounce and that's a day and two or three months later you've gained a few pounds and you can't notice any other changes in your diet that you know of then I would definitely take that's away I wouldn't be eating anything there is nothing that I eat in order to get nutrient X nothing okay I don't eat oranges for vitamin C I don't eat carrots provide them in a I don't need anything for anything what I eat is whole natural foods and I don't worry about it the the nutrients now need me back walk this back just a hair and that is that there are individuals with specific problems in terms of their own particular digestive process and digestive physiology and possibly even pathology and so there's a time and place for what we might call nutritional medicine where some doctor actually tries to figure this thing out and think it through with you and have you run experiments and find out you know what what may be off in you and where we may need to change combination of things there's a time in place for that so I don't want to I don't want to throw out all of nutritional medicine behind this answer however if we're talking about a normal functioning person who we don't know have any pathology that we're worried about this diet related and all we're looking at is the issue of should we add nuts to our to our life to make ourselves healthier I would say there's at present there is no compelling evidence whatsoever and in fact the the best minds in science on the question have looked at this question and have judged that as of this date there is no evidence to support any of the Pro nut Lobby it goes on so is there anything wrong nuts no I never think negatively about myself eating nut is there anything right with them no I never think proudly of myself when I chew up a nut nut is just another source of whole natural calories that you eat feel no more proud we're devastated about it than eating a banana you didn't want it and if you can afford the rich calories which I can I happen to not be crazy about nuts but if you can and you can maintain a nice healthy weight great if you can't and you're somebody that easily puts on weight which many people are and that's our or the RIT nuts and seeds are the richest natural source of calories for humans in the world and so we can expect that our ancestors rarely got into these things and when they did they were for short periods of time so the notion of a constant supply of nuts 365 days a year it's undoubtedly inconsistent with our natural history and I wouldn't be at all surprised if there's a subset of individuals that if they do that then they're gonna wind up carrying more weight than they want so that's that's how I think about that topic Wow thank you that was brilliant and people are saying how brilliant you are so we have a couple of questions about binging in previous interviews you've talked about how in countries where there isn't enough food you never see binging and you don't see it people that don't have a history of dieting or restricting particularly starches so the question is actually is it safe for somebody who is currently binging to do a long term water fasts and would it matter before also your that also this is vomiting Wow okay so if we're talking about binge eating and or possibly related to bulimia this is now its own its own kind of creature and I think I think the center of both of these characteristics actually the there's going to be two layers of this the first layer is a fear of fat they which is the driving force in eating disorders so that is sort of level one so this is a helpful help for this involves pretty serious education about the notions of calorie density and a balanced diet etc just so happens this book arrived so there's a there's a good good place with a whole bunch of recipes in there so that's where we would go that's sort of step one for our eating disorder is education and options and with really built around the issue of calorie density so the pleasure trap discusses calorie density as do other people but to have a whole book around it and really hitting the center of this with weight loss I think this is a great addition for people this is going to be very helpful for people with eating disorders now the second part of this is something that you we've talked about before but maybe not quite head on about this specifically which is classical conditioning so this is people can condition themselves to cram eating and then what can happen is is that they can essentially be anticipating that they're gonna cram and essentially crave cramming so we've I think we've done a webinar and this before AJ yeah I don't want to roll this out also I did a whole slideshow webinar for MacDougall it was done in September of 2017 with Java and I and so we walk people through what I call the condition cram and I also gave this lecture in Las Vegas at our at our effect the and so this is this is another major source of this is the classical conditioning pattern it's essentially a pattern that it's set up so binge eating and with or without bulimia gets set up behind the fear of being overweight restricting food then then winding up being very hungry and then binging and the binging itself winds up getting an extra force behind the fact that it gets classically conditioned so this is a whole mats now would we ever use fasting to break the mess we might we might not it it would might depend upon the individual what they can do what they want to risk what their history has been with this before I've had people that have been injures that have come to churn or and have done well I've also had vendors that have come to true north and it hadn't been in quite a while before they came and then they fasted and then once they started refeeding they started engine hmm though this is this is kind of dicey business and of course I only found out about it in retrospect after the bench at our the horse was already out of the barn their words I didn't know going in we had a problem because if we knew going into a fast the person out of inching history and we were worried about it then we would be exceedingly careful in the repeating and we would we would try to essentially acclimate the nervous system back into a normal eating flow and not let them go crazy now allen has so much confidence Alan Goldhamer has so much confidence in human instincts around healthy food that he doesn't worry about that and I think once in a while we wind up stepping in it behind this because we weren't paying attention and we have so much confidence in post fasting and that in the person's instincts show ability around healthy food to do the right thing but that wouldn't be the case potentially with a Binger who who has a classically conditioned history and essentially we trip over we reignite a classically conditioned pattern so the answer is I think that fasting can be a good thing and I think that sometimes but I think it's a it's a potentially disruptive and potentially dangerous thing if it's not handled well so if you if you want to do such a thing to try to rein in this or any other eating disorder make sure you tell the folks that are in charge that this is an issue as you come in I don't try to slip it past them or all right make sure that it becomes part of what what the team is aware of so true north is more than happy to to listen carefully to this and make sure that I would know from what true north is it's so busy these days it's hard to get in take so long to get in so fortunately if you're interested in taking a time out for fast there's now a new opportunity in Southern California actually near where AJ is dr. Nathan Gershenfeld who's a good friend of mine and was a staff doctor at true north for several years he's very capable in this procedure is now opening a very boutique small lovely new facility it's called fasting escape comm and its people it's going to be opening here in in July and this is another place for people to go it's very reasonable to have a supervised experience in water fasting and a time to get away from it all and get healthy so anyway that's the story on fasting and and in binge eating so it's a you know it is a potential tool but it's one that we have to use carefully thank you I just put the link to fasting to stay calm on the screen in case people want to see it and I believe you're actually going to be speaking there sometime in July I will I really am proud of him for opening this place and I told him when he when he did this I promised him for a couple of years that we've been talking about it that if you open it I will make sure I had come down and support you so I'll be I'll be looking forward to meeting the folks that terrific so this is completely not about diet that's the next question or or overweight todd has written a question about suicide what do you think of the phenomenon of suicide contagion where the news widely publicized as a school or a celebrity suicide and then more follow why is it that celebrities who seem to have everything a person would want he calls them the three FS fame fortune and family would kill themself and when someone with young children like both the celebrities in recent news just isn't that selfish okay let's see the first part of that question was I forget I mean well he said dominant lucite didn't because it made killed herself and it was widely publicized and then almost Italy another celebrity know themselves and this was saying that maybe they shouldn't be publishing so many graphic details about suicides because then more people will commit suicide yeah you know this is this is one of the inevitable byproduct tragedies of free society so as is well it's been said a million times for freedom isn't free and so as a result of this we're going to have bad things that happen as a result of a free press the the bad things that happen outweigh the good things that happen we don't want to live in a totalitarian dictatorship where they control the the news that would be a bad way to live but when we live in a free society we're going to get things like this happening and the the author of this question is correct this is a this has an aspect suicide and other things have aspects about them that we're going to call social contagions and so there is a there's an imitative mechanism in people that is you know it's part of our humanity to imitate and it's part of our humanity to imitate people who are successful and so about the last thing we need is successful people doing you know self-destructive or destructive things and so these are gonna happen I don't I don't think it's probably a lot of suicides will follow as a result of anything like this suicide is a is a very quite rare tragedy that takes place under usually a very very complicated set of circumstances the two to chastise someone committed suicide is again I think a mistake the we never can walk in that person's moccasins and understand all of the reasons that came to that conclusion just because this this is a perfect example a very opposite type of example or a very different angle of to what it is that I was discussing earlier about who a person is and how complicated they really are and that they're a mosaic you can be young beautiful famous rich and have the world by the tail seemingly but it turns out that you can be miserable and for reasons that are that are completely mysterious to your genetics and your own individual personality I remember as a young man one of the one of the shocking suicides there was to it actually really surprised me as they would any young man looking to try to get a date Freddie Prinze it was just incredibly handsome and funny and had a beautiful smile this guy had a this really tragically low self-esteem and he took his life and another one was the an actor that I'd loved literally my favorite show on television at this time was called alias Smith and Jones and the actor was Pete duel and I loved that guy is his suave dark handsome smooth card playing you know he was he was just a he was like a little hero to me and and when he when he took his life that that was a shock for me so we won't know ever what was going on inside those people's moccasins I've of course as a clinical psychologist in my career I've talked to many people that were in very very dark places and and as a result of that you you can't quite figure out these people someone who gets there very often it's just built differently than the rest of us we you know if you've been in dark places yourself with most how we most most people have contemplated taking their life at some point and they've consummated it not trivially but maybe with with some real thought okay they emitted woods there's people get in a tough spot now they almost never take action but those did you okay and a good friend of mine did by the way at a close friend one of my very best friends took his own life and it this is where you learn that people are walking you know someone who is struggling is walking their own independent road and they they come to a conclusion in just four place and they make a decision so my friend wasn't under the influence he was in a very tight spot personally and you might not have ever escaped it and he made that decision and we all took a deep breath and and you know our little social circle had a major earthquake in it and this is you know I think about him this is now 25 years later and not a week goes by that he doesn't cross my mind so do I blame him or I'm angry with them or was it selfish I think each of those feelings will pass but most of what passes my mind is that I just didn't understand how desperate he was so now I never I never criticized that decision I just I just have enormous compassion for it I'm seeing the whole other side of you today I love not that the not love well is there anything that we can do if we suspect that friends or loved ones are contemplating this because I too had a friend commit suicide as well as a cup and the funerals for suicide there are so it's so different and they're just not pleasant and is there anything we can do the signs to look out for you know the truth is is the predict thing this is your ability to predict it is zero and so you might you you predicted only in retrospect so in retrospect there are signs that you will never you will never know and my friend actually was in trouble and and months before he made some noises about this and he actually told me if I ever do this nobody will ever see it coming amazing so and so he he actually cloaked that decision for several months so this is this is psychologists have been poring over evidence with huge statistical studies trying to look at this and psychology school we learn what we're supposed to be looking for but the truth is when you look at the stats you're not looking for anything you're looking for a needle in a haystack class all we can do with people that are close to us is is is when we know they're in trouble be is supportive and warm as you possibly can and if they're struggling with something and even if they get there they're their struggles seem annoying and frustrating we still we still just give them warmth and acceptance and and let them talk it all through and let them know that they're really valuable and that's all we can do is keep signaling to them that they're valuable that's the that's the best support that we can give them I think and we have a lot of deep questions today the next one from Sean wants to know what is the best way to help someone recover from a severe trauma or PTSD we had two members of our group recently had their dogs killed that are both experiencing this by the way yeah PTSD is what it really is is it's a it's a it's an instinctual defense system for your best interest so PTSD is a is anxiety is what it is and it has a lot of components to it so such that when you're in similar situations to whatever the trauma was you will feel pretty profound anxiety and you can actually feel that anxiety even in situations that are that are only superficially similar so you might be watching a movie of a trauma that's similar to what you went through and that's enough to cause you great anxiety the and so if PTSD has a purpose and the purpose is to educate the organism that that we cannot and we do not want to accept a loss similar to the one that we had and so therefore we're going to warn you with a five-alarm fire when we getting anything that looks even remotely close to this so what PTSD actually is is it's an automatic avoidance reaction and it's one that is not meant to be missed so people's PTSD levels range from obviously extremely helpful to so profound an intensity that people wish they didn't have the reaction itself the all I can say is that that in general what we want to do when someone is suffering for PTSD is you want to this is what I call sort of the bandwidth problem and that is that you want to reduce down the total amount of stress that the person has and more generally in all aspects of their lives the that this would include for example let's suppose that you drive kind of a small car that you thought was cool and it's easy to park in downtown Los Angeles but you have you have PTSD just in general maybe you were III have no idea what would be even our friend with the dog and that the the person is literally anxious quite a bit even in their car okay because there there's sort of amped up a lot more and their life is just edger they're not sleeping well etc the if you're in that small car on that small car causes you anxiety in those freeways and you feel like sometimes Oh can't see you and their big SUVs but I would tell you to get a bigger part and the reason for that would be to dial down the total amount of anxiety in your life now you might say well that's ridiculous I'm only in that car 20 minutes a day well then it's not worth it but if you're in that car an hour and a half a day and you're under a lot of tension in that car and repeatedly is raising your anxiety level because you're in some mg then then do something about it other words I want to look at somebody's general life experience and I want to do things that are involving reducing down the stress level in general so that might be for example maybe they are there one of these people that's always late to work and where they're always on the line and they're under a lot of pressure there then you need to change your habits and you need to lead leave 15 or 20 minutes early you need to go to bed earlier get up earlier get on the road earlier and therefore we're not in that hype state all the way to work because we actually have plenty of time so these are these little strategies this is what I'm looking for obviously the ultimate in PTSD treatment is what we call exposure and response prevention or re exposure so we go to the places where the trauma was but we go with friends and we go in broad daylight and we look at the whole scene again and kind of allow the mind to wrap its way around the fact that it could have handled maybe things differently that they understand how they did handle it and why and now we try to learn something from it okay so I had PTSD trivial PTSD for many years you might my nightmare might not even call it PTSD but it lasts to this day and that is I was on a freeway coming west on 4th of July weekend and into the Bay Area and then I turned south on the 101 freeway and started heading south but I had a very dark set of sunglasses on heading into the Sun ended setting Sun and so when I turned south my my glasses were way too dark and I missed I was glancing up at the hills and I miss somebody that had cut in front of me and slammed on their brakes and so I was in a little car and I didn't have any time to make any decision at all my wife at the time was with me and so we were in a very small car and I had no choice but to jerk the wheel to the left I had no idea what was over there I had a vague idea that there was space I had no choice if I didn't do that we were dead so I jerked the wheel slammed on the brakes and I went into a huge skid like out of a movie where I skidded and and the car stalled 180 degrees turned into traffic on 4th of July weekend with people coming at me at 70 miles an hour ok so this all happens in a matter of a few seconds and my first the car was stalled and the first thing I thought about was turning lights on off and on really quickly to try to get the attention of the driver so I could see it it wasn't working and incredibly luckily within about 30 seconds a big police cruiser came in walled off the freeway thank God I've never complained about a ticket so ok the like have at it whatever I owe you guys my life and and so this is for since that time that was 30 years ago to this day I don't like driving with other people because to me they all tailgate everybody in the world tailgates and and because I got caught essentially tailgating and it almost cost me my life my PTSD is now seared into my brain and if I'm not like 8 or 9 car lengths back then I'm not far enough so this is what PTSD is for it usually goes through the K function which it does in my case it is decayed slightly it hasn't decayed that much in 30 years and some people if they've lost a loved one or they've lost a pet or they have been assaulted they may they will never be the same they may never be the same but the PTSD level reactions will generally go through a decay function over time as the person makes modifications learns it's safer and then lives their lives in a way that keeps this anxiety down we can't rush it though and incidentally I might make a comment where I could be wrong but I don't think so I think I found evidence of this there was a great deal of quote PTSD coming back from the Gulf Wars and this was a big concern to the American military and so it and this is apparently real and of course I roll my eyes as someone who worked with Vietnam veterans for a long period of time when I heard that the Gulf War veterans were coming back and having a bunch of trouble I was rolling my eyeballs like you've got to be kidding me like what you guys went through isn't even remotely similar to what these guys in Vietnam went through and so how could we be having so much of this PTSD well first of all I haven't walked in their moccasins so we start there second of all I believe that we now have evidence that a lot of the immunizations and medications that these young men were exposed to to go over there I've had horrendous consequences and and so they I believe that a lot of what they're suffering from is due to due to the medical interventions and their medical preparation for their service so I did this is now now now we don't know what to do and so now we're scrambling some of this because I think I think some brain damage has been done as a result of of the medical preparation which is just horrendous I mean this is it's just part of part of that the price of ignorance and sometimes they can be you know if you could the decay function decay function oh yes a function is is the fact that you your your fears tend to go in a slope and they'll come down so I'm not after a year I was not as edgy in the car as I was after the first week and then after five years I was an edgy as I was that very year go through a decay function ie extinction if you if you listen to my cram circuit talk your PTSD will go into a decay function but it will then hit some level where the brain considers it reasonable and so if the loss was great and the threat still exists in the world you will still remain vigilent with this anxiety reaction and so what we want to do is we want to do everything we can to mitigate that general level of anxiety through everything that we know you know sleep exercise healthy food all these things that we do too and actually and then really smart things like now I Drive bigger cars and I have wide berth consistently this is how I keep that anxiety down Wow gently it's my number one fear in life isn't that interesting like I'm not afraid of heart disease and cancer I almost never think of any of these things my number one fear of life is an auto accident when I was a kid it was being eaten by a shark it's just very different if you guys come to the live ultimate weight loss conference in Las Vegas dr. Lyle is doing a bonus day Friday where you can ask him questions as you can see he knows a lot more than just about diet that's what he gets asked to talk about I'm almost afraid to ask the next question because it seemed kind of judgmental and then so maybe a better question would be how can we be more compassionate when we have these these these types of questions that I'm getting like why do people do this and isn't this bad and isn't this wrong how do we become more taller and more compassionate you know not sure I think that we've all got it in us and all that has to happen is you have to confront people with real limitations and you find it instantly so the I've watched this many times I've been kind of surprised at myself I will I've had times when some clerk on the other side of of a of a dispute whatever it is it's seemingly giving me a hard time and oh my god I can tell you one that was it was really really interesting so if there's ever a time to feel like you're not in a fair fight and you get to bring all of the ammunition you've got it's buying a car okay so I went into a car dealership sometime in the last couple of years I went into a car dealership and I was going to go in there to to buy help one of my I have little little people that I help him like and I was helping the little person buy a car and so so I cor said when and they're loaded for bear knew what the car should sell for and knew what the math was and I went in there and I wasn't going to take any prisoners and so at the end of the day the salesman is out of the game is I'm Way too tough for them and of course now I'm dealing with the manager person and then I push him around and then pretty soon I'm dealing with the finance person and the finance guy comes over to me and I'm like a brother this guy's a veteran of 20 years of these kind of negotiations there's no way he doesn't know everything inside down you know upside down and inside out and so he and I started going at it and it turns out I happen to be pretty good at math and so I'm catching problems and I'm watching this sky and I'm thinking what's on the other side is a slippery slick half sociopathic person is living in that industry and is comfortable puller the wool over people's eyes so of course I'm beating him up and and I get pretty rough with him and he finally looks at me and he says you know I watched in his eyes he didn't know you didn't know and I'm looking at this guy who you know it's just a middle-class guy doing hard work doing the best you can of course there's some shifty stuff that goes on there but now I'm down to it and I realize he doesn't know and I actually felt that you know it's like wait a second don't be so assuming that the other person on the other side that is frustrating us or struggling in any way or is treating us badly is because they've got a bad attitude once in a while they do of course but even then usually there's some issues that they're going with on the other side so so anyway I little by little the older I get the more more compassionate I get and the more the more I understand people in their and their limitations people generally want to get along and they generally want us to like them and they want and they want to be reasonably fair and they just want to be what I call invited and included so that includes the people with with funny-looking handicaps let me also also point this out and this is also a useful thing to imagine from time to time and that is that when it comes to so many things that we see that may disturb us somebody has a funny laugh they talk too loud they interrupt they're overweight in other words all these things look like behavioral things and they should just be able to manage it the truth of the matter is is that they're struggling as hard as they can and you should look at whatever problem you're seeing as a handicap and if this was a handicapped person struggling to get to the door on crutches you would not be having the feelings that you're having you're having the feelings that you're having because we assume that people have command over their internal psychological experience and that when they look stupid is because they're being lazy and I'm conscientious and they're really smarter than that or when it looks like that they they should just be able to tighten up their belt buckle and push away from the table and eat healthier food we assume that they know the right information and we assume that they are have enough command over the pleasure trap that they could do this and we assume that we that they would be motivated and that they don't you don't already have some terminal illness and that they know they're going down anyway so why not eat some ice cream okay so we make all kinds of assumptions about people and you know the longer you live you're going to realize that each person you meet no matter how cool they are or how humble truth is they're just a struggling person that wants to be invited and included I actually had an incident I'll just tell well we'll maybe end with this incident I was in a store and I needed was late and I needed a an extension thing for my Apple and I it was he had it locked up you know one of those little things that's locked up Mike her goodness sakes people that's 1099 did we really have to lock it up well I suppose they do and so the clerk was a lady that was obese and she was helping some guy and it was taking a long time and she looked tired like she didn't really want to be there and I I looked at her through exactly the kind of lens you know the two lenses that you might look one of them was like oh boy she's not going to want to walk over here and help me this is gonna well I'm gonna get attitude and the so I'm annoyed I'm a little annoyed already and I figured that she'll do it but I'm just not looking forward to having to ask her to walk over and do this and at the other the other lens I look at her and I'm thinking this is a person who is late 30s hundred pounds overweight who knows what her we know that her life history now has been a heck of a struggle and how much prejudice has she put up with and how hard is her life physically now and she's working at a modest job here late at night who knows what and all this went through my head and I felt that compassion and so when I walked over to ask for her help I made sure that I gave her an extra smile and below and said how you doing okay and I I put myself in that space to try to be essentially inviting and including of something pleasant and she immediately lit up okay it was very interesting and then and I said oh I need your help I need one of these things oh sure no problem went over got it came back and rang it up and and when we're done I made sure to give her an extra now I'm actually feeling it because you're feeling the warmth of the esteem dynamic and as I gave her the positive feedback she gave me very positive feedback and I walked out of there thinking why don't I do that a little more often okay so there we go if you try it every now and then it may you might have these wonderful little gems of moments with people where you then you it reminds you that what people want is they just want some warmth and acceptance and sometimes all we got to do is give them a little bit and suddenly the world works a lot better if I didn't have some technological things to do here I'd be rolling my eyes out people are just in awe the content usually talked about I think really liked it and I would encourage them to listen to it again and I think you know it might be something I heard which is it's nice to be nice you bet yes and you are no we do anything all I've ever met so thank you so much for being here and thanks all of you for watching their episode living live I'm chef AJ I make healthy tastes delicious and dr. Lyle make compassionate thank you everyone
Back to the top
🏃     👖




Artist