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Chef AJ: How to Be Proactive and Healthy During the Holidays | Interview with Dr Doug Lisle
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one well hi everybody look who I have in the house it's our favorite person our favorite psychologist dr. Doug Lyall who's doing this special edition of a Thanksgiving Q&A just for you guys I know it sometimes takes a moment of a delay for you to tell us that you can see us and hear us but if you can that would be helpful because I want to always make sure I'm broadcasting to the right page instead of some random instant pot groove or something like that so pretty sure oh yeah I've starting to see people so just know that I can't see your name in the comments that I can see your comments if you want to try to ask questions live but we have quite a few sent in so let's get started right away dr. Lyle so one of the overarching themes that I'm seeing right now this time of year maybe you are - is that this can be a difficult time of year for people they people that have eating issues or health issues it sort of shines a spotlight on the fact that maybe they eat differently and it's a it's a time where they can be prone to a slip or a relapse because they're around so many tempting foods they're in a different environment maybe they have family problems and then they have to be with disagreeable family members who are now shining a spotlight on their eating or maybe they're single and they wish to be married so for a lot of people this is not a joyous time of year and could you give us any words of wisdom on how to navigate these holidays and and not completely derail our health goals and our life goals because of the fact that it can happen I would say if there's one that there's one simple mental process and that would be to to keep up a vigorous exercise program through through January and the reason why is is that you know what's the post Thanksgiving you just go ahead and indulge fine but if you're back at the gym on Friday several things happen number one you'll feel like you're full of food and you don't really need to eat that much on Friday and when you workout you your self-esteem will get a nice boost from from what could be an internal audiences sort of discussed with you on Thursday night so that that's fine and so the same thing is going to be happening with any holiday parties or anything that you're getting into where you're indulging and you're you're you know that you're yours the system is going a little slack but as long as you get back in the gym the next day and you worked out hard then you'll know that you are not just letting this go so what what we're really trying to avoid here is an all-or-nothing mentality which can can really derail anybody ship so if you've been doing a good job and now you start the holidays and you're running this sort of you're running an artificial cost-benefit analysis so the cost-benefit analysis in your mind looks like this you know I'm committed to this I really need to do this lose weight look better change my romantic life or prospects you know just feel better about myself all of that is on one side of the equation on the other side of the equation is the pleasure trap and the allure of you know getting along with other people and essentially celebrating okay celebrating the fact we're not all out in the cold you know in the middle of Siberia 15,000 years ago as winter approaches now we're safe and warm we've got plenty of food around and we got people around that like us and and it's like okay you know no matter no matter what struggles we have we've actually got it pretty good and so if our biggest problem is that we've been eating too much the last 10 years and we're overweight that means you've got it pretty good okay as I said as a creature goes that's not the worst thing that could have ever happened to so what you have won by joining chef AJ as you basically said listen I'm committed to doing something about this and turn it around the other direction and so if you've been working at that we have a you know it takes a lot of determination and focus to make that happen and then what will happen is come holiday season the whole point of the holiday season is to say the harvest is in we can relax we've got some friends here so we're not facing the winter alone and we're gonna make it it's going to be fine and in fact we're in good shape that's sort of the joyous feeling of the whole holiday season is that we're ready we're prepared and we're going to be able to get through this next you know a couple three months and so so we're celebrating celebrating a much the hard work and preparation that went into us being safe and so that the problem is is that that celebration runs directly counter to what it is that you're trying to do in chef AJ's group and so as a result you can essentially have a what what seems like a fork in the road and and and there's there's a joke in here somewhere into about that fork but the point is is that let's not look at it as a fork in the road let's look at it is you know you relaxed your grip a little bit and you may bend bend you or your own standards a bit so we do not take it as a fork in the road we don't just say well then just forget it all the way to the first of the year that's a mistake okay instead what we're going to do is whatever wherever you meander off to if you're back in the gym the next day it will be a reminder about what it feels like to have moved yourself and your fitness forward as well as your self-esteem mechanism basically watching your excellent effort and applauding you and your self-discipline in your effort so that that will temper your you're essentially indulgence and and that will and keep you from having from sort of kicking over the table and having an all-or-nothing attitude where we just sort of quit for a while so that's the biggest thing that we want to do is to avoid this notion that come Thanksgiving weekend will just you know we're either on the program or not on the program and if we're not on the program we're just indulging for the next five weeks that's a mistake so let's not do it and instead the the focal point of that can be can be in exercise you know you know every second or third day at least you know for for the next five weeks that will help you keep your focus and earning the self-esteem that you need to maintain at this time that's great dr. Lyle I think that's good advice for anytime somebody might have a slip or relapses to up the exercise don't don't limit the starch no the expertise make sense exactly great okay so this is a question from someone who is a who is a physician and she says she how often has to work four to five days 12-hour shifts and she does really well with her food bringing the food staying on plan during the stretch of time however on the last day of these stretches of work when she's mentally and physically exhausted when she gets home from work and all the work stress starts easing she then loses control and feels like she's treating herself and behaving like life is without a care these are the time she cannot control what she eats and and doesn't have the willpower to control it anymore how does she overcome these situation this sounds very similar to the people that say they do really well on vacation and then the minute they get home boom right this is a there's a little a little bit about this is this is what I call you know holding your bladder on the freeway I've always been I've always been fascinated running at Los Angeles that if there if there was X amount of you know X amount of excess between me and home and therefore I could count how long it was going to take to get to to the bathroom then I was fine that had I have had anybody ever said when I got there oh no it's gonna be another five minutes and there's no way kind of held it together okay so it's there's like a we have sort of a mental clock about what we can stand and when we get to the end of it we want to just relax the tension and so so I understand this and I would say I do my sleuthing for this fine doctor that would say hmm you can't control when you want to get home and just relax what's the problem because there shouldn't be anything in the home that we tempt you okay so so what the story is actually a little different than we here which is there's some tempting things in the home that she resists or he or she resists for quite a while and does a great job and then when they get to the end of their difficult week when they're home and relaxing then their guard comes down and what's there was tempting stuff so that doesn't mean their being a bad kid it just means that they're setting themselves up for a situation that's difficult to hold it together if when they came home there wasn't anything but healthy food around and the action actually had to haul themselves to get in the car and go to the store oh now we're putting a bunch of barriers up okay so when go back to rule whenever I don't know what to say I always go back to rule number one let's let's make sure we've got the environment under as much control as we can and see see what transpires from there I don't think I never disagree with you I know for a fact that her environment isn't completely clean and it just makes it when she has no willpower that's that's the easiest time to have a slip you know absolutely because she rolls she has made her work environment clean she doesn't she no longer goes to the hospital cafeteria she only has her food so yeah yeah that's kind of what I said but maybe if they hear from you this is a good place to put in a little hopefully a way to clarify and understand the way I think about things for whatever that's worth that's what I call emotional eating today emotional eating is when you're at the end of your rope in terms of willpower you're you're now tired you're in either a celebratory mode or you're in submission mode because you've been defeated by something and basically essentially the fatigues of life have now drawn down your locale and so when your world down that's when that's when we go to rich foods or treat foods then it's it that's because finally the force field that is needed for us to keep keep up has now been weakened and that that's that's what I call that's what I think all emotional eating really is about is that phenomena I love that you said that because there were questions about so this is perfect are there ways to improve procrastinating in decluttering our homes and throwing away stuff without regret what you want to do is you there's a what you do whenever I try to pull my Mettler you know has has lost a lot of her memories so she's she's in sort of an early Alzheimer's patient but the personality is still there she still knows who you are chef adjey oh my god and so I will I can't help it I'll start to try to tell her a story to to make her crack up and she can always catch me because she can read my facial expressions and knows that I'm about to tell her a big lie and it's about to do that I was gonna say what you want to do is you want to get your going to the foss and get your hand good and wet and then then stick your finger an electrical socket and burn up a few neural circuits then you got a chance okay the truth of the matter is is that this is just part of a you know this is a part of that conscientious obsessive nature that is part of some people's genetic code and so the there's all kinds of funny little reasons why people have this and it was it is genetic the but it's interesting to look inside people's minds that are that have these issues and I'm I'm fascinated sometimes by some of the logic because I see the same logic in myself except that it's so much reduced because I don't have the problem but you see see the same thinking like I could be using this later or what a waste or you know it essentially just a vague sense that the is a bad bad decision resource management and so the I I don't have that problem so my father did my father just gathered tools and went around the garage sales and gathered thousands of tools that he never used that he thought was just an incredible deal and he couldn't let him go and my attitude was you can never find them when you want them anyway and they keep them beautifully organized down for you at Home Depot and so if you ever need one you can you can go down and buy it okay but no different mentality sort of a acquisitive instinct an acquiring instinct that is certainly part and parcel of fairly normal human function so anyway what can I tell you sorry I don't have anything to say other than your facing this is a you trying to beat your own genetic code and I would say that there's a few things that can be useful they can be useful to to hire a friend not ask one but hire them so that you've got money on the clock too that you have a trusted friend to stand by you and reason through these processes and and throw things that have trash that's one thing that you can do but you know there's other gimmicks the but pretty much you're stuck with it once say I think in one of your beat your jeans podcast dr. Lila procrastination the people do it just because then maybe they eventually won't have to do the thing that they're procrastinating oh yeah I think I get off track I was I was talking about the course kind of hoarding stuff mmhmm yeah well the question yeah well it was kind of a dual question because I wanted to know other ways to improve procrastination in decluttering our homes but I thought no one's heard you talk about procrastination in general is normal because then maybe if you procrastinate enough you won't have to do it right that'd be a slightly different issue okay so I got like I'll try yeah procrastination in general which decluttering your home is sort of mix between sort of acquisitive instinct and procrastination so both of those issues are probably at play with that questioner that procrastination in general is the others there's three general reasons for procrastination and they're there they're interesting each one of them in their own right and the first one is what I'm going to call strategic fiddling and that's just fiddling around because you may not have to do it so people will fiddle around sometimes with their bills hoping that PG&E will just sort of go broke and that they that they don't actually ever have to pay the bill which of course you're going to that there's a there's a procrastination instinct inside of some people that will have them fiddle just in case you don't have to do it and that's true with term papers that's true projects at work that's true with you know all kinds of things so that's a that's an adaptive way but that's certainly I did around and don't file my taxes on time because I keep mythically hoping that the United States government is just gonna something's going to go wrong and I'm not gonna have to file taxes but of course you always have to so the that sir procrastination is a is actually just a normal method to try to take advantage of the fact that something that you have to do in theory today you might not have to do tomorrow so we're gonna fiddle around and hope that something is going to transpire if we actually watch that in real time it happens all the time so I know I now have my eagle eye out for it and I'm I'm more strategic than I was probably in my younger life when I didn't have it as a principle I was just doing it on instinct now I will try to look at things and kick them down the road and not do them if there's a chance significant chance that I think that it's that it may never happen okay so that's one thing the that's perfectly reasonable the the second thing is is the ego trap so the ego trap is a destructive process by which we procrastinate on major and important life goals because we feel like we may not be able to live up to the standard that we or others have set for us and so that's a that's a problem that's a sickening feeling that we feel like we're kind of ducking out on life and not really making the most of it and embracing of the challenge because we we legitimate ly feel the threat that we're going to lose the steam so that's a you know that's a thing that I've talked about often and that's a major problem that that that you know people can can use some good counsel and support or or just exposure to these ideas that you can see them on my website that we try to this is what my webinar called the slow fast way is all about with respect to weight loss in January 2016 the MacDougall webinar series it's there for free it's the story of getting those expectations reasonable so that we feel good about ourselves as we take whatever positive steps were able to the the third possibility for procrastination is going to be what I call system overload so that's when when there's so much crap in your life too many unopened open loops and too much of a mess that you literally cannot figure out where to start and so as a result you'll see people literally spinning in the middle of a room because they keep seeing problems everywhere and they can't figure out the mind is looking for the cost-benefit analysis on the first course of action it would be the most effective more important place to start and it literally can't figure it out it's like a ball of yarn that you're trying to unwind you can't find the end of it and so that's that's when the system is it's essentially overwhelmed because it it keeps coming to the conclusion that it can't figure out the answer to where to start so it needs to spend more time figuring and people can can basically get caught into figuring the loop okay now when when your house is uh is cluttered and it's a mess and you're procrastinating on doing anything about it it's very likely that you are in number three that you're you're in fact in an overwhelm you're you're essentially an overwhelming loop that you can't even figure out where to start and you can see how this could get much more difficult than exasperated by a person that has an acquisitive instinct okay so they've got just too much crap in the house and it's very difficult for them to get started anywhere they keep spinning around and can't figure it out so what the way I like to try to do this is to you know believe it or not actually the ego trap can get involved here because they can they can actually you can have all three sources of procrastination actually triangulating on the same problem like this so this is very interesting that the person can be procrastinating and fiddling hoping maybe one day when they're gone the house will burn down but they don't have any pets and they'll never have to clean up this mess okay number two they are ego trap they're not sure that they can do it it's a little overwhelming okay and number three they're in an overwhelm but they know where to start and so all three of these things can can be sort of spinning around causing a paralysis a way to do this is the way we attack the ego trap is by sending a very low bar okay so some of the times what I'll do is I'll have people you know have a box it could be a plastic box from from Home Depot or it might be a cardboard box doesn't make any difference but they have a cardboard box and their job is to all they got to do is fill the cardboard box and then they're done for the day okay so there they may do this you know once a day it would be a good idea if you're trying to I'm underwhelmed you know basically get your environment clear your job is suggest to clear up a small space they so whatever it is so we begin Alan Goldhamer who has never had this problem by the way he he would talk about how what people need to do is essentially whether you're running a multinational corporation or cleaning out the closet your job is just to begin and get something done okay so this is uh I can remember from reading I think the Lord of the Rings one of the little goofy quotes from Mohammed land was the job that takes the longest is the one that's never started and so it's it's about finding some way to get yourself started in for me but I have people do is set a very small goal for how it is that they're going to start and very often what happens is once you meet that goal you you reduce the ego trap because you know that you can now beat the goal and it starts to get exciting and then we start to essentially stoke an achievement cycle where we get rolling we've all felt that we've all felt I don't know some neat freaks have never been here but I've been here where my my living surroundings were a mess there's the mess on my desk is too much and I'm basically stopped because my mind is effectively spinning and I'm overwhelmed okay but if I'll just start to do anything whatever it is and I get just a little bit of reduction of the chaos then that starts to stoke an achievement cycle and then I get on a roll okay so I had a roommate 20 years ago that we called that having the cleaning bug bite like suddenly once you get rolling then you just get rolling okay but when you're just sitting there and overwhelmed you're just sitting there in self pitying misery and nothing happens that I've never heard that the job that takes the longest is the one you never start that is brilliant someone said 15 minutes in the morning at 15 minutes in the evening to clean tidy up five days a week keeps things manageable that you know you do you think doctor a lot of the reasons some people don't make lifestyle changes is because maybe they feel that they'll just die before they get heart disease cancer or diabetes yeah I think you know I have to say I feel like I watched my father do this and and you met him AJ you met him after he was as serious troll and but I watched him fiddle and he knew he was in trouble and he fiddled anyway and so part of it was procrastination none of it was ego trap some of it was just our meanness and cussedness but that a lot of it was essentially a lot of it was just strategic procrastination and fiddling and amazing fiddling all the way to a heart attack after the heart attack that was his wake-up call it's like he managed to survive and then he got busy and did a really good job for about a decade okay so he really got you know a decade that he almost didn't get but so had he not gone off the floor and not had the information that we have available he would have gone the way of most heart patients and he would have not had a decent you know he lived in other 16 years and I would say a dozen of them was very good the and he earned those through through excellent behavior and then he then then he didn't care you know at some point and just sort of let it go the but yeah but i but certainly in his 60s i watched a person who was knowledgeable but procrastinating okay almost like well let's just see if I never have to do this and amazing I if it was astonishing to watch it but that was that was the implication that I got from our conversations and watching his behavior and fortunately he got a wake-up call that he survived yeah I think it's human nature I didn't make any dietary change of Sigma frequently until I was too fat to walk when I broke my knee so I think it's I think it's human nature yes so this is this is I'm gonna paraphrase this one it's long in it but I understand the question so basically what she's saying is she follows the program which is ultimate weight loss is basically MacDougal maximum weight loss TrueNorth diet it's fruits vegetables whole grains legumes without the overt fats and no sugar oil flour alcohol salt and she said lost her weight she's lean she can eat all she wants and maintain the weight her question is is how do you incorporate foods of a higher caloric density without gaining weight because her experience is is in and I believe this person because she's an HCMC a hyper conscious uncage she says even as small measured amounts like a half an ounce of nuts a tablespoon of seeds a piece of Ezekiel bread a quarter of an avocado whenever she adds these things back in and she's not binging or overeating her weight goes up like five pounds so I guess it's a question about caloric density is it possible if you lose your weight without these items to then add them back without gaining weight because it seems to be pretty common experience with the women adding these foods back no it's not possible in other words if death yeah that's your genetic structure that that's what's happening and that's what's happening so that people there's an underlying question that she's not necessarily asking which is an extremely common delusion in a weight loss so let me let me shed some light on a very common delusion I just ran into this sometime in the last couple of weeks a couple three weeks here either a time at Google program or a train or with with a patient I can't remember the patient only that I recognized that they were very intelligent I can remember that they were very intelligent and I was surprised at this delusion and this is this is this questioner here is whispering a similar thing the notion was once I get down to my goal weight by being very diligent then aren't I going to be able to eat this other food and the answer is No no we the whole point here is that mm-hmm when we're searching for what I'm going to call equilibrium so you're searching for an equilibrium where your weight lands on a specific behavior pattern that's why very often when people ask me for advice on what is it this should be eating lose weight I first want to know what they're willing to do long term I want to know what what is your diet and lifestyle what you know what would be your preferred way of eating what would you be willing to do and if it's exactly what they're doing then of course that's ridiculous because it means that you're not ultimately going to change you can starve yourself with a water fast and lose 42 pounds but that it means you're headed right back to where you are because you are at the equilibrium now then your current dietary pattern earns for you that's just what it is so the first thing I'm interested in doing is finding out what the person is willing to change and so we talk about that and we figure out how would they be willing to probably an estimate live the rest of their life are they willing to live for example without nets and avocado being any substantial and part of the diet are they willing to live without bread being substantial part of their diet if the answer is no that I'm going to need to have some bread in there and I'm going to have a few nuts or avocado or then I'm like okay then then we're gonna build the healthiest diet we can with those things in there and then we're going to see what happens to your weight and your weight winds up wherever it winds up and so maybe you have thirty pounds to lose you make some very interesting your good changes but you remain to have some stuff in there that we would consider overly rich and it turns out that you lose 15 of those 30 pounds ok fair enough that is the equilibrium that that diet will achieve if you then come to me and say yes but I don't like that extra 15 pounds how about if I cut that stuff out and I fast and I do I do that and I lose 215 pounds so I said yes and then could I then add that stuff back in of course you can add it back in but you're gonna wind up at that plus 15 pound equilibria then you laughed okay so people somehow think that they can get down to a weight and then somehow defend it okay and I don't know and then they're going to add these other things in but somehow they're not going to gain the weight that would be implied by a new equilibrium with the richer food that doesn't make any sense so the only way that you could do that the only way to defend it under those circumstances would be to eat under 100 Drive and now we're we're losing weight but we're losing our mind and so so the the answer is what we first want to do is number one know what we are doing that is led to the equilibria that we have equilibrium that we have and then we need to make the changes that we believe we are willing to make for the rest of our lives so then we make those changes and we see what they guess okay if they get us everything we want great if they don't get us everything we want then we have to look at that whether or not we're willing to make more changes so this is why I'm not crazy about people going on an extremely strict diet to get down to a goal weight and then experimenting and seeing what they can get away with because the loss of self-esteem and the loss of you know organization and regulation that goes on very often winds up with them gaining all their weight back there so that that's the wrong direction to do it the right direction to do it instead is to decide what am I willing to give up and what do I think I'm not willing to give up and then give up what you're willing to give up and get on a program that you're willing to do for the rest of your life and then we will find out in the next few months where that takes you if you are not happy with where it takes you then you got a decision to make okay and the next step in the chain is okay what's the next thing you're willing to okay and then we find out what that does so in in essence what I'm trying to do is what we try to do with children or prisoners or anything else and that is we try to have the maximum freedom that we can allow and still get what we want so in prisoners we don't want to imprison them and and punish them unnecessarily and throw them in some awful place like more of the Flies that's not what we're trying to do what we're trying to do is we're trying to incarcerate them and have their behavior organized but we would like to give them as much freedom as possible we can't give them cell phones we can't have their people bacon cakes and put files in it so there's all kinds of rules that we have but we would like to give them the most freedom possible that we can give them as Scylla College the ball that's how we run the prison system in the United States okay and the same thing is true raising your child we want to give your child the most freedom possible and hang out with their friends and go here and do this and do that but we have to have limits on that freedom in order for their own safety okay and that is exactly the way we want to behave with respect to diet and lifestyle I want you to have as much freedom as you you know of the freedom that you would like with respect to your dietary choices however we need to find out what different amounts of freedom result in and so we don't give our drunk beer-drinking fifteen-year-old the car keys today if we're trying to get thin and healthy we want to have instead of standards that we are willing to try to get that we're going to try to implement find out where they take us if it's not good enough for our other important goals we make further changes if it is good enough then we're done and we never had to get any more drug coming you know so that's how did we look at that I love that you said draconian I remember once I believe I was interviewing dr. Pam Peake who once spoke at the mcdougal program and she called our way of eating a draconian I don't you know word much and people are saying this is very helpful your response is amazing absolutely brilliant while you rock dr. Lyle so if I hear you correctly you're saying if what we do is not sustainable then the changes are not going to be permanent right so so so that's why I always tell people to pick the least restrictive diet they can do that will give them the results they want because I think people in general they go on a diet but they're not continuing that diet like we see it a true north they water fast and they come back a year later heavier than a year ago or they do a juice fast so pick something that you think you can do for the rest of your life that you enjoy and but but but if also remember correctly you're saying the people very genetically so it is possible that some people need a lower fat or a cleaner diet lower in caloric density to to maintain a lean weight not everybody can be eaten bread and nuts and avocado and be as lean as they would like to be that's correct another thing that's a good thing to do if you can do it and not everybody can which is to sometimes it's good to have an experience where you're clean enough for long enough that you can really see what it what the real price is to giving things up and so this is we're going to a turn org or Nathan Gershenfeld fascist did which is the introverts paradise that's for people like me drew anarthas for people that don't don't mind out with 50 people around to talk to Nathan's place is very intimate and quiet and and it's a different kind of experience but in both places the idea is that that you know you don't have to do the cooking and you don't have to go to the grocery store and you don't have to make the choices and what happens after a period of fasting is that you get excellent food that you now see very often people when they have that experience there that they not only feel better as a result of the fast for example whatever the fast is the but they also then when they're repeating the they get they get too acquainted with how good healthy food is possible to feel and to taste it for them and now suddenly giving up a lot of things that they weren't willing to give up now seems very much very doable so that's why you are correct that very often people try to be overly severe on themselves and then they crash and burn or they think that that's the way to in some ways that's why we don't like to even call this I mean like the word diet anywhere near what we're doing or we're simply trying to have a lifestyle you know a lifestyle choice about how it is that we eat that's what we're doing when you start the minute we have diet in there white underneath diet in a semantic network by any semantic network cognitive psychologists would be restriction okay that's what diet means is restriction it's like no no that's not what we're trying to do we're trying to say this is going to be the lifestyle pattern that I'm gonna live and I'm not on a diet this is how I'm gonna live that's a this is not a temporary phenomenon this is a permanent orientation and so what we want to do as you said is we want the least restrictive permanent orientation that we can that we need in order to get the results that you want yep like Jody's saying thank you for defining emotional eating Iraq you hear the words you rock a lot when you tear about dr. Lyle people think you rock you do rock so this is a follow-up question from Mary she says how important is it to stop eating when you're 80% full in regards to achieving the health and the body you desire I don't think it is the I would I would say I will have a little caveat around the corner here because there's a I believe there's a reason why that can be a useful there's a place in there for you there's a useful location for that idea and it's the same location that that the intermittent fasting is is hitting but for different reasons than anybody's thinking the big problem that I see is what I call the conditioned cram so it's where people have have essentially a lot of people eat a great many calories between 6:00 p.m. and midnight interestingly enough when you study humans in their natural environment ie 100 others you will find the same phenomenon they so this is not this isn't just modern humans being indulgent this looks to be a very common pattern for our species that the foodstuffs that we would typically be able to get during the day on the fly would be raw and therefore low calorie density and only at night at the at the end of the workday both hunters hunting and gathering when the gatherers are gathering gathering stuff that gathering stuff that they're gathering rather than nibbling along the way is going to be the starches that you're going to cook and so you're not going to be lighting fires all day long you're going to light one fire and you're going to light it at the end of the day so at the end of the day if they have any meat they have meat they have otherwise starches that are cooking those starches and so you're eating a great deal of calories at the end of the day this was a this was noted by Richard Wrangham in in his book Catching Fire very very interesting a story about the nature and importance of fire and understanding human human development the and a lot of research in there about what human beings are doing today when there are hundred other situations so I'm not surprised that people are comfortable at the end of the day sitting down and eating a lot of food the problem is is that they were never designed to have essentially an unlimited access and not only that artificially rich food so what we had was we had access to rich food at the end of the day ie meat potatoes except as vegans we're not eating the meat so we're eating the when I say potatoes I mean that as a proxy for all starches so whether we're talking rice beans potatoes corn oats etc so those being the richer foodstuffs we wouldn't be surprised that people would be you know pretty vigorous about making sure that they got a good amount about they don't need to stop at 80% there but what they do need to do is walk away we're on the kitchen when you're done because you should be done for the day and instead what happens is we have a spit that a neural circuit a survival circuit and it encourages to cram very rich foods and actually even be pretty ferocious about it so for example you'll see this kind of cramming in in carnivores because the food is so rich and rare that they need to be very aggressive about making sure they get it and if there's a lot of it they go ahead and cram it because they may not have that opportunity again so human beings are going to get aggressive when there's rich food around they're not necessarily elbowing people in the face but they are certainly eyeing the doughnuts in their counting who got how many and they're making sure that they get their share and if anybody lowers their guard they're gonna take the extra one ok so and they know they don't have to be hungry to do it we could have a full stomach but The Cramps instinct basically says if we're in an unusual opportunity situation go ahead and cram right past the point of normal society now this is where you can get this notion of well wait a second shouldn't just stopped at 80% and the answer is actually not 80% 80% of full is actually full you're fully satiated the truth is is that you've got extra ability to cram more food in there if it's rich enough and it's worth doing it if it's rich enough and so that's why quote dessert is is cramming in a bunch of 25 calorie account 2,500 calorie counting food on top of the 500 calorie pound starches because it's worth cramming in there even if it makes you a little uncomfortable okay and so this in the instinct to cram would have actually been an instinct that would have been extremely useful for our ancestors to activate once a week once every two weeks once every three weeks whenever there was rich food suddenly available in abundance somebody took down a knee-high okay and now we've got honeycomb and now makes sense for a video to you know get their share and if there's extra go ahead and eat it even if you're not hungry so the extra excitement of eating behind particularly rich foods will drive people to eat past normal satiety mechanisms now the problem is that's fine the only problem is we're not designed to do it every day and when you start doing something every day then the system becomes classically conditioned to those conditions it anticipates that's going to happen and as a result that braces itself to get ready for it and the way it braces itself to get ready for an onslaught of rich food is to secrete a bunch of digestive enzymes and get you ready and if you secrete a bunch of digestive enzymes to get you ready when you're already full then what's going to happen is the feeling in the nervous system is going to be that you're hungry even though you're not hungry the better you're going to interpret this it's going to be uncomfortable and it will only that that that that enzymatic situation in your digestive system will only go back and feel comfortable when we put a bunch of rich food in there to neutralize it okay this is the classical conditioning of the cram circuit and so this is the story of the 80% pull you don't need to worry about eating 80% full if you sat down in front of your dinner and it's appropriate vegetables and appropriate calorie density starches etc and you eat and tell your fault and it's not until your 80% full I want you to need to tell your fault but then I don't want you going back from cramming that's the problem the problem is not the the the rice and the vegetables that you're going to cram the problem is to the almond butter sandwich then you're going to cram afterwards okay that's where people get in trouble and that's where we actually need to be going when I'm not there for well it really comes down to what you said from day one when I met you like 10 years ago that the number one rule for healthy living isn't is you have to work harder on your environment than you do yourself and no junk food no rich food in the environment because all they had was you know potatoes rice beans fruits vegetables it's gonna be a lot harder to cram that's all I don't understand about this Japanese phenomenon it's called hairy Hoshi boo eat til 80% full because the way I look at it is if I'm 80% full I'm still 20% hungry so I just I don't know I guess maybe pop some people would say I overeat at every meal but I don't get these people to say well I am free not potatoes in that game way not potatoes I don't really see it well I'll tell you what there are a few individuals in the world not many there are they're low and percentages that are that are that are outliers on that dimension okay and so they're going to exist and so we I don't want to discount the fact that they're there but 95 plus percent of all the people that you and I will ever talk to they're needing lose weight aren't anything like that and that that if we we get the diet down to reasonable calorie density levels that you should be able to eat completely comfortably just like every other animal in the wild so that is that's what we've consistently shown at true north you it's consistently shown that everybody's had these things Nathan girls fellows have this fasting escape we've got a true north mcdougal program how's it you've seen it obviously in your practice in your your organization AJ everybody's seen this where we're win up when somebody who's quote had problems finally buckles down at some point and actually faces the music and does when we say suddenly they're successful sometimes the success is slower than they bought because we're finding out that we've got a more tenacious nervous system and a more thicker genetically nervous system than we thought or that we fear you know we it's worse than we thought so there are there are forty pounds overweight there really haven't been that far out of line but they're just far enough out of line that they have to do great they got to do basically a plus work in order to wind up with a B+ ok but that's what's going to happen so they start doing a great job and they start losing two-thirds of a pound a week be certain losing three pounds a month ok and they're frustrated they're like hey this isn't how it's supposed to go I heard that this is supposed to be two pounds a week and it's like well not for you you know not for you them you're you're a little tougher tougher specimen and so this is this is what we're trying to do is we're trying to get people to understand that I don't believe that you have to restrict the hunger Drive unless you're in a very unusual human and I know you know I've met many people know I've met a few I have to tell you I I know III can I can think of two right now that I've met and maybe a third I think three that I know that I can trust so but you know you're talking about somebody that's talk to I don't know eight thousand people so the point is is it's going to be a rare situation so make sure that you look carefully at what's on your diet sheet before you blame eating starches to satiety this is a good chance that something else on that sheet that's the problem I'm so glad you said that I appreciate that once I interviewed dr. mcdougal and they said all dieters are liars because you know it's like the question that we asked before about the lady who really had to keep it pretty much low calorie density to not gain weight they blame the potatoes but they forget about the Ezekiel bread you know and and and the nut butter and so so just you know be honest so we're gonna leave diet for a minute and go to a topic that I don't think I've ever actually heard to discuss and I do listen to your podcast beat your jeans every week and tomorrow being Thanksgiving people are often going to be with family members that maybe they don't have the best relationships with or have some history with and this is a question on forgiveness so she says Janice says I had a co-worker a friend betray me two years ago I have to be with her at work now a half a day every day five days a week I'm able to function at work with her but I'm having difficulty forgiving her as a result I'm very unhappy I would like some tips on forgiveness I don't trust her and I'm a card-carrying HCN see I'm angry with myself for confiding in her and thinking we were friends when obviously we weren't so take it away forgiveness yes that's a that's a tough question to try to give a broad answer to the reason is is that everybody's situation is completely individual there say when you've had something like that happen the the truth is is that all people all the time are doing what they're doing because they're running cost-benefit analysis so it can be a surprise to us when we've been effectively betrayed in other words we we had an agreement or a tacit agreement and we expected that that would be upheld and it turns out that it wasn't and so now what we were we are hurt and we will make Boehner bowl and and we're angry and so what these emotions are is they are actually designed by nature to not forget that is the point of having those emotions the reason why the emotions system works that way is it would be the equivalent of you walking across a field to your aunt's house you know in I don't know Palm Springs and one day you is dusk and you get got bit by a rattlesnake and so now don't think that you ever walk as carelessly to your aunt's house again in fact you may never walk in the dust again across about that expanse for that very reason and for the rest of your life you're going to remember dangerous they don't do it so that's why you have those feelings the feelings are actually there to essentially code a memory system that tells you that you were you were made vulnerable and you didn't expect it today and so as a result because you didn't expect it you clearly didn't understand that there's a vulnerability and because you didn't understand there was a vulnerability you got yourself vulnerable okay and so this is so the memory system is there to sear it in to make sure that you don't make the mistake now so there's a couple of ways to look at this remember that there's a player on the other side like this and they did what they did for whatever reasons that they did it and sometimes there are circumstances where they actually had reasonable reasons why they did what they did now they were self-interested reasons and they sacrificed your best interests but they were not actually completely unreasonable and so this is very often the case in you know romantic relationships or within families of a family business dispute or friends very often the person on the other side was not sort of ruthless and self-interested they in fact just had a vision of the circumstances that was fifteen degrees different than yours and so they did something that really hurts you and made you vulnerable amid you angry and etc but at the same time sometimes it's very useful if you can't let it go but it's stirring there's a point in time where it may be worth what we would call confronting it but it's not quite the same as confronting and so we're not accusing and confronting and demanding an apology what we're doing it or giving forgiveness because you can't do that it has to come from your heart it can't you can do it mechanically but that won't do anything sometimes that kind of a forgiveness process will work only because the other person does the following that I'm going to suggest that we can get to from another method which is to explain okay to explain and apologize because very often they they didn't understand the damage that they were going to do you in your your feelings of exposure and vulnerability and they got careless and self-interested and they have their reasons for it possibly you wouldn't even know this because you can't see the causal chain but they might have actually been retaliating against you for some little slight that that they had that they had received from you previous to that and so that that in fact yeah so sometimes when we confront them and we say listen I haven't been able to let this go and it really bothers me because I feel like you know we were at a better space than this and I feel like you wouldn't have meant to have this happen to me but this is what went down and I'm just I can't seem to let go of this and I just wanted you to if you can explain to me what happened and kind of why you made the choices that you made I just I just want to understand and I'm not I'm not here to criticize and I'm not here they forgive or anything else on this I'm just here to get an understanding because because it's it bothers me because I think differently about what I think that you you know should have should have done does the same way and there are there are ways that we can you can ask it and that they may be able to tell us and they may they may apologize and they they may or they may not maybe they get defensive but if we're careful about how we ask it that it's essentially a question that is bothering us that we don't understand rather than an accusation looking for for an apology if we keep the right stance we may learn something that's important and they may gush out with their guilt and their apology and that may make a big difference and then when they do that you will now find yourself in a position to forgive them because they they're now explaining to you that they're a better person than the person that crossed you okay so that's one way to go about it the other way to go about it is to whenever we have made ourselves vulnerable and we've been hurt in such a way the the other way to look at this is there-there's famous quotes and I wish I I wish I had it that I could find it somewhere I'm in fact I could find it in this room if I was willing to stop this thing for a minute I would find it um I think I can incent him I believe an American or English author sometime about a hundred years ago might have been Alexander Pope and what what you said was it is impossible for a man ultimately to be cheated by anybody but himself and we read that it seems trite and ridiculous but let me explain why it is that there is a part of this that is true and then if we can embrace that part of it we can learn something super valuable and this will help us quietly forgive the person on the other side of this and that is that if we realize that one of the reasons we got vulnerable was because we were needing something out of that relationship and in meeting and we asked for something but somehow the way that thing was configured was that we were not we weren't understanding that meet let me give you an example let's suppose that you were a co-worker and you had frustrations with management into some third party and all this sort of stuff and you desperately wanted to to process your frustration it would be a reasonable thing for you to do it would seem reasonable because you would be looking for another pair of eyes on the situation to give you feedback whether you are being unreasonable it would make sense that you would do that however you have to know that you're making yourself vulnerable under those circumstances and there would be another way to try to get some counsel or to get some inputs on that situation that would not involve that vulnerability then in fact if we backed up and we said no wait a second is there anybody else in my life that I could explain this situation to there could give me possible counsel on this that would not be involved a vulnerability and the answer is probably yes and if it's not then look on your insurance plan and go find a psychologist or counselor okay now when we realize that that there was another way to go about getting what it is that we wanted that didn't involve that person or putting them in a position where they could hurt us then we start to realize when I wait a second I have some culpability in this okay doesn't mean I'm at fault it just means that I'm partly responsible for how this one went down and when we start to realize wait a second partly responsible for this then that is a good thing to realize because that means I can make a better decision in the future so it's not simply a matter of they're a bad person and they did the wrong thing by me it's more like wait a second I didn't necessarily use the most careful judgment and I I jumped to conclusions about how safe this was and I didn't necessarily use other options to try to get what I needed there would have been much safer okay this is particularly the case with respect to a given set of problems that I call market crisis so very often we try to shortcut and get things cheaper and not plain pay market prices and when we do that we wind up with trouble and people disappoint us betray us one way or the other so if you're trying to you know your brother-in-law is a mover and he he told you he was going to help you move and it was going to be a deal because he's your brother-in-law and then the day comes and then he he does wrong for you he does wrong by you and doesn't show up or flakes out you asked for it yeah you asked for it because you weren't paying market prices and because you didn't pay market prices you wound up with a with an inconvenient or a vulnerable vulnerably problematic betrayal those are going to be super common when we don't think market prices so be on the lookout for your own tendency to take shortcuts in any endeavor whether it's getting help on some social complicated situation at which point you may need to invest in a counselor to try to help you rather than talk to some friend there's a little too close to the action and could use that information in their own best interests at some point that might cost you okay so that's the this is the time of year where if there's been grievances with significant people in your history there's there's two ways to go one way might be in one way is to let time pass and they in some watch it reduce in its importance the second way is to confront gently but openly about trying to understand why this happened the way it did and see if we can come to a better understanding the third way is to understand also to look inside yourself and realize wait a second I'm partly responsible for what happened okay and with the realization that we were partly responsible no matter how out of line the other person was the fact that we were partly responsible for getting ourselves into that position is one of the most important insights that we're going to have because with that we will find a bit of forgiveness for them that will give us some peace of mind but the greatest part of the peace of mind will be that we will feel less vulnerable because we'll realize no less and learn okay and I won't make that same type in the state as easily in the future so now that I understand why that happened the way it happened and that I was partly responsible for that I can improve my decision-making in the future Wow that was great I was looking up the code I think it might have been Ralph Waldo Emerson yes the cheating quote that you mentioned this was great thank you so much dr. Lyle if you guys didn't get your question answer today dr. Lyle will be speaking Wednesday at 5:00 p.m. Pacific time to the feel fabulous over group and we will ask it then thank you so much this is such a great Thanksgiving gift to all of us hopefully everybody will have a happy healthy relapse free day tomorrow and I wish you and your family a very happy Thanksgiving as well dr. Lyle thank you thanks for having me AJ I didn't know people are there any time we love you okay guys take care [Music]
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