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Episode 203: New Year's resolutions, Pleasure Trap, Health questions
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hmm today we start the show off with an article a study called surviving and thriving the fundamental social motives provide purpose in life now this is a 17 page article with five different studies so I'm gonna try to go through it briefly but it might take a few minutes so this is out of the Department of Psychology and Arizona State University and it was published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin so just a couple of quotes from the article saying that prior research has provided two key insights that underlie this current study one is that evolution by natural selection has probably not shaped humans to experience well-being or meaning rather feelings of subjective well-being ought to be systematically calibrated to one's fitness so this study the authors write that they take the theoretical building block that evolved motives should exert a causal influence on purpose and life and they're saying that humans are unlikely to have a general all-purpose fitness calibration mechanism so instead they suggest that we're likely to have a number of separate systems that gauge success in particular domains that correspond to challenges and opportunities that our ancestors faced now as I was reading this article I was like man this is all sounding so familiar I wonder if they've listened to you doctor laughs dr. Hawke so hmm so anyway the authors continue saying that this might mean that we gauge success separately for satisfying non social physiological needs protecting ourselves from physical attacks making and keeping friends winning respect in our social circles acquiring mates keeping mates and then successfully caring for our offspring and other relatives so from this for the for the article they took the theoretical perspective that not all the motives might promote purpose and life in the same ways so they essentially investigated which motives influence purpose in life when it's pursued and if purpose in life ultimately tracks pursuit of fitness relative and goals then the pursuit of the fitness relevant goals should increase purpose and life so the these were five studies that were done to investigate the relationship between these fundamental motives and purpose in life so study number one and examine the relations of purpose in life to the fundamental motives that people credit for driving a self chose an important goal pursuit so instead of measuring the motives that people would pursue to find purpose in life the study measured the motives that people are actually pursuing and they found that and the zero order correlations revealed that disease avoidance affiliation and kin care related positively to purpose in life and the observed correlation of disease avoidance motives and purpose in life were not predicted and the predicted link with status did not emerge so study number two examine the partial correlations between the motives and purpose in life among college students and the reason they they looked at college students was they were saying that people did not necessarily in study one people may not necessarily know what it is that's driving their behavior so so so it's unlikely said a layperson would know and report that status concerns would motivate the pursuit of say a graduate degree when it's really just their intellectual curiosity that drove them there so the hypothesis for study number two was that affiliation status and kin care motives would be positively correlated with purpose in life before and after controlling for personality and the result zero or correlations revealed that positive relationships of purpose and life with self-protection affiliation status and kin care and this pattern held after they controlled for personality and among those in a committed relationship purpose and life was not related actually to mate acquisition but positively related to mate retention which is kind of what we would expect to study 3 they sought to replicate the correlations of fundamental motives and purpose in life on a wider sample of adults and there hypothesis was that the higher amounts of self-protection affiliation status and kin care motives would predict a higher purpose in life and the result was self-protection affiliation status and kin care had zero order correlations with purpose in life and after they controlled for all the clea only affiliation status and kin care motives predicted the higher amounts of purpose in life and so they that suggests a reliable and unique relationship of purpose in life with affiliation status and kin care but that individual is motivated to pursue affiliation status and kin care motives tend to have more purpose in life so study number four they were testing causality in the three fundamental social domains now there's I think they said there was seven social domains but funding prevented them from doing all seven so they only could do two or three of them so the hypothesis was they expected kin care to have the largest effect on purpose and life status to have the smaller effect and mate acquisition to have zero effect it turns out that the results show that the correlations among fundamental motives and purpose in life echoed those in the previous study that that purpose and life correlated with kin Care R equals 0.282 and the status which was R equals 0.189 but not with made acquisition which was a negative 0.059 and study number five they wanted to replicate study number four with pre-tested confounding variables that assess how the randomization of these variables and there were several hypotheses but essentially the results was worth at a planned comparison of the three combined motive conditions with the control condition of turned-up non significant results in the expected direction and hypothesis number two showed no significant differences between motive conditions and number three the simple comparisons showed that the effects on purpose and life were non-existent in the status condition nearly significant in the mating condition and significant in the kin care condition and the fourth hypothesis was that status motive was not significantly higher the status condition than the combined other conditions the contrast was 0.59 and made acquisition was not higher in the mating ssin than the combined other conditions so the results the results were that they replicated a causal effect of writing about mating and kin care but not status and the post test showed that the manipulations did not affect amount of fundamental motivation per se suggesting that motive satisfaction feelings may have increased the purpose in life now through this whole study as I was reading the the conclusion the results discussion the last paragraph really spoke to me just based on everything that I've heard from you dr. Lisle and you dr. Jen Hawk which is the authors write that the current work might seem uncomfortably reductionistic to some because it claims that humans lofty perceptions of purpose and life partially reflect their pursuit of mundane social goals but is that really reducing anything viewed differently the refining suggests that humanity finds purpose in doing what comes naturally yeah we're watching Jen who recently escaped academia we get to watch how carefully and how tentatively people have to gently push forward any any evolutionary theory into the ring like really what which Arnall is it in personality and it's not the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Social Psychology Bulletin yeah so yeah they even have to hedge it back carefully in that like it's just these tiny little baby steps that are fundamentally saying yeah humans aren't motivated by grand goals that's not where their purpose comes from their purpose comes from a systematic process of daily achievement toward competitively relevant activity so yeah okay very very carefully and like that it's partially related no actually dude it's entirely related every single flicker of every little whisker of every animal that ever lived was aimed at survival of reproductive goals period yeah so it's really all there is I say sorry yeah but but but this is and so all of this sort of junk survey data that he has in there and that they're sort of grinding away correlation coefficients and seeing if it's supported here supported there yet I applaud the fact that they're even collecting data on it and then they're like very scared you know I don't know like a scared child you know showing dad that there's a worm in the garden like that it wasn't supposed to be there it's like you you've talked about this in the pleasure trap before and you said it was the like a Buddhist in the Vatican right mm-hmm yes this is a Buddhist in the Vatican approach super careful really careful it's amazing to me that you know you having read the adopted mind in 1982 that here we are 28 years later the adapted mind that was obviously massively more confident and revolutionary in its tone 28 years ago now 28 years later finally in a this is a mainline journal the personality and social psych I think I think I have a pub in that way back in the day okay this is a standard APA journal so the so here we are just ever so gently tipping a little tiny pebble into the pond so that it can be discussed I mean I can't fault it the but whoever this person is good for them they've gone and done some work but you know this isn't David buss David buss wouldn't talk this way and he wouldn't be so tentative but they did went go out there and collect data here's another way you could do it instead of gently asking people these things why don't we just go and go to the go to the mall and get some data on what people buy okay let's find out what they're actually doing with their money which is effectively their time let's find out what they're doing or do a Content analysis on what's on television right so let's find out you know what people are watching and what the what the content is of those things and what we're gonna find is we're gonna find a very short direct line between evolutionary problems and what it is that people are fascinated with so yeah the so it's interesting they talked about seven social things god knows what those are I mean the it'd be kind of interesting to look at their taxonomy but for me I see a few so I see friendship romance children relationships in with us and workplace decisions on the other side of the equation either customers or bosses etc they're with somebody who's hiring us and trading with our or effort our efforts for money and and then finally I would call that finally would be pseudo esteem so it would be generalized status where people don't don't know our work directly but they have some notion of Hooters that we are and what we are noted for good or bad as a result of reputational transmission of information I don't know that there's any other relationships between people that people pursue I believe that there's one more which would be theoretically enemies or rivals that that's another relationship we could have with other people but yeah fair enough so there what a surprise so when we start looking at you know that what people are pursuing it has something to do with their evolutionary design the fact that they are so tentative is really eliminating and how absurd it is that we are tentative here tells you something about the the massive anti biological and is frankly anti logical influence that has infected two social sciences for 100 years so there's Department yeah cheering oh they're just Cheryl what I'm 70 guys actually we've got full oh it's very impressive I don't know what's going on there's a rare moment we should all just sit back and bask yes no interesting is in one of the studies they had a citation talking about how the some fundamental motives are framed as preventing harm like disease avoidance whereas others are framed as acquired gains so like you know pursuing a mate but they said it makes a difference as her people essentially they work longer at tasks that are aimed at gains than those that are aimed at preventing losses in other words playing to win is better than playing not to lose well you know that all depends on whether or not the Romans are attacking your fort okay so this is entirely context dependent we're talking about a bunch of middle-class kids in a university setting yeah they're not they're not having to play defense they're not having to make sure that they don't starve to death or they're infected by termites or something they've got a very cushy existence and they are obviously able to in a relaxed fashion turn their attention towards trying to rise in in dominance hierarchies so yeah that's all that's all fine but I mean we have to back up and look in context that's true and then those college students wouldn't necessarily be avoiding disease in the same way that's someone who's made six through seventy or forty or fifty with high blood pressure not a void therein and then they're in a medical place in their life where they're they're absolutely situated toward advancement toward improvement and and like Doug saying dominance hierarchies so their whole life is built around that so that's gonna be borne out and in these results but yeah you check back in with them you know in a couple decades when they're trying to avoid their relationships and their health issues and avoid everything else that has gone wrong with them and it may look very different all right well speaking of health issues speaking of health issues now we are now our first live show of the new year of 2020 and aside from bad 2020 jokes yeah hindsight's always 20/20 it turns out I guess now now everyone's kind of be starting their New Year's resolutions so our first question is where do new year's resolutions come from why start something on January 1st or Monday or you know whatever it is versus any other random day yeah I'll jump in here because I've gotten a lot of questions about this recently and talked to a lot of people who are making resolutions and wondering how to how to best make resolutions I think the reason that there's a there's that there's a collective move toward this is because it lowers the it essentially is a little bit anti ego trapping in the sense that the expectations are a little bit lowered because everybody's transforming their lives today everybody is turning over a new leaf and nobody really expects anyone to make good on it so that in addition to the fact that this is just the kind of culturally agreed-upon first day of the new year fresh start we're finally going to take some action on all of those those competitive goals that have been following us around and and that we've been acutely aware of for the last 365 days this is this is it this is when we do it so I mean there's nothing magical about January 1st I don't think it has anything to do with the the astrology of the Capricorn season or the phase of the Moon or anything like that I think this is just a this is just a cultural moment and it is it's very much like you can this is the one time of year where you can go in and announce to the office that you're you just signed up for a gym membership and and you're gonna do things differently this year and people don't hold those expectations against you the way that they're going to the rest of the year because it's just a New Year's resolution so you can have a high expectation for yourself but you kind of have this this comfort of knowing that you're you're in a position where you could outperform people's expectations and there's not much more motive than that that's the opposite of the ego trap when people are expecting more from you than you think you can deliver so this this at least it starts off with a nice little motivational boost that gets a lot of people going of course it doesn't really last very long for most resolutions because most people are making resolutions that are objective based not process based but that's a that's a whole other question well that's well maybe we can talk about having another show that's a yeah I want to hear more about that yeah well I mean yeah well actually you know what let's talk about the process based goals yeah this is objective based goals yeah I mean that's really the that is the that is the heart of any goal setting and any motivational process but particularly if you're if you're trying to make a successful New Year's goal is people fall into this trap of linking their objective to all of the external esteem that they think that they're going to harvest when they accomplish that objective so they're gonna lose a hundred pounds and that's gonna make them much more attractive as a mate and it's gonna make that you know more more popular at work or whatever they're anticipating this big competitive payoff to accomplishing the goal so they have an objective base goal you know make a bunch of money or I you know get a promotion or lose a bunch of weight or whatever it is and the the it's important to have these goals and it's important to be very specific about them that's part of the motivational magic is to is to have a very specific competitively relevant goal because you're not gonna feel the motivation to accomplish anything unless it is unless it carries some sort of significant payoff with it in terms of what it's going to do for your your projected esteem situation in the future so it's not that having objective base goals are necessarily bad but the problem is that most people stop there so they write their little lists and they make their little resolutions and so we can we can just do weight loss for an example because that's obviously the most common resolution that the people have because it's the most competitively relevant problem for a lot of people probably most people so they they say oh I want to I want to lose 50 pounds this year and this is great but then they get into you know week two and they haven't gone to the gym for a couple days in a row and they've gotten into some indulgent food and they feel like well whatever I guess I missed the boat this year and I didn't do it because they didn't set up what the daily fundamentals were going to be on a regular basis to accomplish that goal and the little fundamentals that are that are the process or what you really need to be a tuning yourself to because that's going to give you it actually goes back to that article that we're talking about that article is saying the sense of purpose and joy in life is very linked to progress not not a not achievement per se its progress toward achieving something really important and so that's that's what we're wanting to orient ourselves to in the process of any kind of New Year's resolution so instead of you know asking yourself whether you've accomplished the outcome of a goal you're looking at whether you did the basics that are eventually inevitably going to get you to where you want to be today and this this initiates the whole self-esteem process which we've talked about a lot in other episodes and that really is kind of a whole separate question that the the process of developing pride and your ability to take action towards something that is competitively important for you really is the secret of feeling fulfilled and feeling like you're making a meaningful progress toward a goal so that's that's essentially what kind of New Year's resolution you want to have and how you should reframe your new year's resolutions if you want to not hit your first roadblock and turn the table over dr. Lisle can we get a comment from you yeah yeah exactly this is exactly how I view it and so what I this is I mean the the risk of being redundant I'll just sort of put it in my own words which is that what I want people to do is I want them to become fascinated with the mechanics of their self-esteem mechanism and what what Jen and I want to do is we want to separate out the self-esteem mechanism from the self-confidence mechanism and the esteem mechanism those are three different mechanical devices inside the brain so the self-esteem mechanism is the internal audiences feedback to the self as it observes your efforts it's essentially a moral quality feedback device that's different than the excitement and motivation that comes from the the self-confidence or self-efficacy mechanism which is tracking your successes tracking progress that thing is very potent because it's running it's a derivative of cost-benefit analysis on on whether your improvements are lining up to the efforts well and whether the efforts look like they're paying off the and then finally the big payoff is the esteem that we're aiming at that comes from other people when they observe our progress so three different psychological events three different types of feeling all of them are our feedback devices for different components of a human project of a human competitive effort so the one that the Jen and I are inherently fascinated about and we want our clients to become fascinated about is the one that is completely ignored and that is the self-esteem at all it's been quiet and it's it's by far the quietest and most subtle but it's the one that if you are actually going to try to take on a big goal this year this is the one that you need to learn about so I was just speaking with a man today that very bright affable capable smart successful and he's a hundred plus pounds overweight and this has been this way for an awful long time and he's you know he was all ready to dig in and find out the magic for me about what what you know what's the Guru say about this and what the Guru said is we're going to do very simple things and you're going to do them perfectly this week and maybe you will and maybe you want and most people want but so that I started hearing excuses about you know how how challenging his work is and and you know isn't isn't the issue the the stress of the work and how he doesn't deal with stress well and you know etc did the emotional addiction blah blah blah I said no it's got nothing to do with it this is the fact is is very few people have a combination of conscientiousness and motivation that is it an intense enough level to battle against the pleasure drug it's just not it's not common and so to do this on an outpatient basis and to do it well enough with respect to you or to do an outstanding job so that you can react Lemaitre tastebuds so that the price is not very high for eating excellently healthy foods consistently it in order to accomplish that very difficult to do and the the way that you would accomplish it is watch very very carefully for a beautiful feeling that'll take place probably within a week of perfection and that feeling is self the self-esteem mechanism so for his whole life for as long as he can remember there's been an internal audience chirping disgust at him and he's been told by legions of other psychologists that those that those negative self-talk SAR the reasons why he's self-destructive okay that is a total reversal of causality the reason why he's got the internal negative voices is because he is being self-destructive okay it's not the other way around and so it's going to turn out that if he behaves in an excellent fashion with relentless self-discipline at the end of a week he's going to find essentially like sunshine for the first time in his life and he's never seen it before that the clouds will go away and the Sun will come out and there will be a brilliant blue sky and on the inside of his brain the internal audience will say you know well done Neiman well JA good excellent job this is no joke youyou went you've gone a week now again as Jen was saying hey he's still he's a hundred and three pounds overweight not a hundred and five there's no difference that anybody in the world can see except one one entity his internal audience can tell okay and finding the the shutdown switch for the constant chronic internal negative feedback that the self-esteem mechanism will generate if you continue to do things that are subverting your competitive success or your health if you can find the shut down switch for that and you can feel it and see exactly what took place to shut it down what a tremendous sense of power over your own life experience to discover that switch so that's that's what we try to sell and if you can't do it on your own you try which I explained that I would not expect him to do this I learned enough about his personality he's pretty open to experience he's not super conscientious he's he's smart he's pretty conscientious but he's pretty open oops okay danger okay and so you may need help in that Square place like fast nice kid comes in that's that's what is you got to go to jail okay now in jails the inmates the the what happens is is that you get to go through a process of [Music] essentially watching what happens to your your nervous system and the react LeMay ssin of the taste buds not to mention some rapid changes in your health towards the positive and so the cost-benefit analysis now looks different after you've had some your significant successes after weeks course it's like oh because you're in jail and you're doing the right thing yes have to and then you know you you you hit the shutdown switch inadvertently and so you get a few days in yes that's right really diligent and really competent and you're that feeling of pride surges and you start to feel it this is this is what alcoholics call the pink cloud you know there's nothing magical going on with the pink cloud in early sobriety that people talk about in 12-step it's just the it's the perception that you've stopped the massive massive sabotage and you've turned off that chirping little voice of disgust and you're in your mind that is really upset with you because you've now turned the ship around and you were you were doing the basics toward what you ultimately need to accomplish there's a long way to go there's a lot of recovery ahead but you've stopped actively sabotaging yourself and that that results in an immense feeling of just pride it's just feeling really good about what you're doing and where you're heading yeah the beautiful thing is that in very short order the pride mechanism can go on through the self-esteem mechanism can go on as loud as it can ever go on okay in other words it that and it won't go on any louder it's just going it but it's a beautiful thing to shut down the internal criticism now other things will enhance the process so for example evidence that we're actually having success now that will influence self confidence and that influences energy is directed towards the problem also feedback from the outside world that they can see your success that's huge those are both way louder mechanisms the self-esteem mechanism is a quiet subtle internal governor and yet it's it's like it's like the atoms okay and the self confidence mechanism is like molecules and actual esteem from real-life people is like an apple it's a big thing it's like it's the big thing that seeking that the apples just made out of atoms that's what it's made out of and so if we don't understand what is the the fundamental roots of success then we're not very likely to be successful in the face of really challenging problems like getting out of the pleasure trap so yeah this is a great question this whole new New Year's deal I just love Jen's analysis that this is a time in a place that culturally that the ego trap is is muted it's fantastic I always I feel the same thing myself I feel latitude towards you know saying okay okay it's time to now you're gonna try to make some changes and I feel a little enthusiasm because I can feel the the muting of the ego trap around that so that's a that's a great insight and now this is a terrific time for people to take advantage of of that of that abatement of the ego trap counter pressure and yeah and this is also a good time that you know if you make a good run at something and you get stopped with respect to health kinds of issues it's a real good time to start plotting when you're gonna get some help and when you may want to go to jail thank you that's some wonderful answers and I really guys appreciate you promoting fasting escaping for for people who want to go to jail you can go to fasting scheme calm yeah there you go [Laughter] yeah we'd say we'd say positive things about true New Year's 2021 yeah that's me escapes quieter and nicer to north there's too many people buzzing around in too much traffic noise that's my that's my take I hear really good things about Nate's Nate skills in the kitchen as well you know we've been talking about New Year's resolutions and you talked about the number one resolution is weight loss and dr. Hawk you answered it the next question was why is it the number one weight loss why is the number one resolution weight loss and I think you answered it which is it's the most competitive it's the most important competitor problem yeah the next question is yeah yeah the most most relevant most the the one that people perceive that they could solve and they they get frustrated because they know in principle how to solve it and and they keep running into the inability to solve it so it sort of just dangles there like oh I can really get my act together this year so it makes itself more available as a resolution than other things that people might in you know at some level want to accomplish but they have no idea how to go about it or what it would even look like so this is something that that people you know very often have done successfully at some point in the past they've got some some sense of the process and it's obviously hugely hugely relevant to to competitive realities who spent particularly well for everyone but but for women and their mate value in particular so yeah very common resolution mm-hmm and so the next question is oh yeah dr. Lila do you have a comment of course you did the video that I've recommended and I have on the website as well losing weight without losing your mind and just a you know every time someone is willing to watch the whole video it's like they walk away just completely I wouldn't say sold because it's not a sales job it's it's really educated and the distortions surrounding weight loss are corrected mmm-hmm really is the only video that people need to watch and understand because it covers the whole thing and and it's you know has great art and it's funny and you're introduced by chef AJ yeah yeah the one thing that I would add to that which is a which I now know a major fact that I didn't know when we did that video you know seven or eight years ago and that is that you know I knew when I wrote the pleasure trap and when I spoke on that topic that genes were a major factor and I have a graph in the book showing that but now now I know that the genes are even a bigger quite a bit bigger factor than I thought as a result of Plumbing's work and so now I recognize you know what the truth is this is this is very you know pretty much I've been saying for a long time pretty much everybody in the culture eats about the same I mean there there are a few percentages of people that are super vigilant and really help oriented and probably a high percentage of our listeners are those people but just as a general population phenomenon pretty much everybody in the culture pretty much eats the same thing and the reason I say this with confidence is that I live in a city Elk Grove one hundred and sixty or seventy thousand people there's not one salad bar in okay we're not in I don't know rural Kentucky that's not where we are I'm essentially in the Bay Area yeah okay so and there is not a salad bar restaurant now so what obviously we know what people are eating here they're eating at Chili's they're eating it at Kentucky Fried Chicken there's McDonald's etc what we can tell what the reading because that's what's here so we know what people are eating which means that the vast majority of people are eating you know essentially what we call a standard American diet it isn't it isn't sixty percent it's not seventy percent it's 96 percent and so as a result when we see the variances in people's weight we're simply looking at genetic differences because the environment is effectively a constant so people that struggle with their weight it's like hey listen folks the thin people are not are not more emotionally balanced than you well they may be because they're not fighting that particular emotional problem the fallout that comes from the weight problems but they are but they are not more conscientious than you and doing a better job they are not more emotionally stable they're not less neurotic they aren't anything there's no difference in the personalities the only difference is some metabolic changes as a result of gene differences that lead one person to be a hundred pounds overweight in the next verse to be 0 pounds overweight those the reasons are genetic now so everybody's eating the same crap some people show evidence on their bodies most people do in moderate amounts some people in huge amounts and some people in none okay now so now we say oh wow is that the issue yeah that's the issue now that being the case it's not a sentence because the way out is to get out of the pusher truck like oh just do that so yeah so oh that's what it is oh okay so then they try it and then of course they fail and then they may try again or maybe they don't or maybe they go ten years goes by and then they pick up the old MacDougal program again and do it for like six three or four days and then they don't do it again and they shrug their shoulders and they feel defeated and overwhelmed and kind of self disgusted and etc etc right they have no idea what is just half transpired the truth is is that the pleasure trap is vastly underestimated and even people very close to us in this field people did Jen and I know Big Shot doctors they're thinking there's some underlying psychological mumbo-jumbo that is causing people to be unable to do this and they're mistaken there is no psychological mumbo-jumbo okay all there is is a ubiquitous phenomenon of the genes of the species being consistent with the natural history of all animals where basically people are taking every shortcut and headed to the rich food and to go against that on a consistent basis on a super consistent basis to keep a really clean palate and keep yourself you know aim true not easy to do so the percentage of people that will attempt that and be successful will be low the the crutches are here we we do everything that we can to is elucidate the the the difficulties Nathan has committed his life to having an inpatient place and so as Alan Goldhamer it's like hey listen chef AJ has everything that she can possibly do she's literally spit spit on her head okay yeah send everything possible so you know that's but but do not beat yourself up if you have struggled and failed for goodness sakes understand that this journey to go against your nature and to beat your genes in this domain is one of the most difficult seemingly it's unbelievably deceptive it is the ultimate greased watermelon okay so it seems like you can pick it up and then it slips away so the notion is we we that this is the whole eat less move more doctrine that's out there you know people people are like oh this is this is this is what Instagram tells people that they need to do its and so people have this falsely communicated sense that it's all willpower and then the the willpower fails and so they retreat to the psychological mumbo-jumbo because there's nowhere else to go so even if they do understand that the pleasure trap is a thing they they everybody thinks that they have the willpower they have the fortitude they have the motivation to defeat it that these these laws of evolution don't it don't apply to them and so so it's very it is very deceptive and this this is what it was part of the the ego trap process where people are just confused that they can't solve this problem because they they absolutely they have PhDs in the problem and they've been successful to some degree most people have been successful a few times and they've they've lost 20 pounds and then they regained it's like it's not like they don't know how to do it so what's the problem so contributes to enormous amounts of self-loathing and confusion and misinformation and retreat into excuses like psychological mumbo-jumbo which is gonna be the name of my next book anyway would you would you say that this creates an in-group out of a difference between the people with the skinny jeans and people who don't have the skinny jeans and so the people with the skinny jeans essentially are they're all saying the same thing even though it's wrong but but everyone's listening to them just because they look like they want to look like I don't know I wouldn't want to generalize I think that the the generalization I would make about skinny versus non skinny in this domain is that the skinny people are very likely to think that people that are struggling are essentially self-indulgent and and and you know essentially that that's the issue or if they're if they're further misguided and deeply misunderstanding the situation they're believing that they're that the people that have weight problems have underlying psychological dynamics that are that need to be addressed I mean this actually goes on at True North Bell Center we got doctors there that think that which is just unbelievably disgusting to me by the way yes people do not understand what is taking place here okay what's taking place is that essentially let me let me give an analogy we're gonna go and we're gonna take a hundred people out of I'll let him know Tuscany okay and so we're gonna take sort of middle Southern European genes to take a hundred those people and we're gonna put them in bikinis and boxer shorts or briefs you know and we're gonna take them down to Panama and we're gonna have them wander the beaches for two weeks with no shade okay now what are we gonna find we're gonna find some of them are burned to a crisp because they had some light light skin we're gonna have some of them that are gonna be moderately burned but have you know somewhat of a tan they had medium skin and then we're gonna have some of them that have beautiful gold and bronze because they had more melanin in their skin okay and we could say if we're one of the gold and bronze ones we could say what's wrong with your skin why are you so incompetent okay why do you have that sunburn what's the matter with you what are you psychological problems that you have what do you quote can't take the heat what happened to you and your child son in your childhood yeah okay see this is this is exactly what this is and so because it's it's just sufficiently mystifying it's just a little bit biologically complex and the evolutionary psychology that is involved in this problem it goes totally unappreciated by essentially everybody that we wind up with psychological mumbo-jumbo that looks just exactly like the Tuscany skin problem okay so everybody is subject to the pressure of the Sun some people don't wind up with much of a problem ie skinny people are eating crap with both hands so reading exactly the same crap how do I know because there's no salad bar restaurant in Elk Grove so I know if I go into Chili's I'm gonna see a bunch of skinny people they're chomping down the same crap as the people in the booth right next to him right so the problem is ubiquitous the outcomes are variants of genetics and in order for if you have the the weight problem ie you are a normal person than if you're eating a super rich diet you're going to get overweight just like the average rat if it's adding it overly rich diet it's going to get overweight the average person who's eating a super rich diet of the moderate affair is in trouble and in order for them to not be in trouble they're gonna have to do something unbelievably radical they're gonna have to go against the genetic code directly against it 180 degrees the opposite direction okay so is this gonna be difficult you better believe it okay what are the solutions the solutions are piecemeal and numerous they have to deal with great you know tremendous commitment and control over your environmental circumstances they have also specialized little things like taking breaks and go into rehab they have a lot of stuff is involved here okay so it's learning about the self-esteem mechanism and the relief from the self-loathing that comes with even short term determinate or determined excellence so there's a lot of pieces that go into this but when it comes to this you know most profound deep wide mysterious problem an the new year's resolutions that rise every year around it you know hey there's there's some things that you can do and there's and there's there's a true path towards how it is that you could have some success thank you for that dr. Hawk dr. Lyle alright so our next question speaking of these you know the the psychodynamic theories with regards to health problems our next question is on the same topic which is what do the doctors think about the work of dr. John Sarno in curing chronic back pain using education of how the mind works as treatment according to dr. Sarno childhood abuse can lead to rage in the unconscious mind and brain triggers TMS or that I believe it's tension Myositis mm-hmm Myositis syndrome or chronic pain to repress this internal rage and there have been hundreds of people who have supposedly cured their back pain and write about their story in his book healing back pain all that Doug just he's on a roll the Hulk has started to come out so let's just let it go oh my god okay this this is like totally absurd alright so this is a hundred percent bogus now Sarno dr. Sardo I served sweet old guy God I'm sorry about the dog what's that I'm Motown's just very excited about our topics tonight I'm just is barking up a storm in the other room so I really I do apologize to the listeners I don't think it's just gonna there's nothing I can do about it unfortunately Motel just knows I'm on a roll yeah now there's numerous reasons why probably dr. Sarno bought about this the one reason was that that GI problems can absolutely be flared up as a result of stress but there's a reason for this there's it's part of our evolution design so if you're being stalked by a tiger or a you know essentially if you have anything that that looks like the predator prey situation or that's very threatening it's going to escalate adrenaline and dren illan is going to immediately stop digestion and it's going to if it's acute enough it'll cause you to want to pee and poop okay that's because you need to get lighter so that you can run and this is what's called being scared shitless alright so this can also when people have sensitive guts if they've got all sort of colitis or Crohn's disease or something like this if they've got IBS so when they get if they get agitated they get Adrenaline's then it can agitate their their bowel process so it's very clear that that connection exists so it's not too far away if you're sort of an open minded doc or a person you start thinking well what about everything else okay what about my what about my throat cancer maybe I needed to say things and I repressed that and that's why it is that I grew tumor in my throat you know because I had this pressed rage that wanted to come out about you know screeching about my how I was mistreated by my big brother or my mother or my uncle or my dad or who would whomever right so mm-hmm I want to point out that any of these cockamamie theories have absolutely no conciliatory why would evolution cause you to have a tumor in your throat you know as a result of a battle for you not speaking up for yourself where is there any biological interest served by this where where is there an evolutionary advantage to having back pain because you were abused in childhood and did speak up it's like insane okay this has zero conciliate with evolution it could not have been engineered inside human developmental biology it couldn't have been it's ridiculous okay and so the whole concept is ridiculous but it's not ridiculous if you're a Freudian and you've been influenced by Freudian thinking which of course she was influenced by Freudian thinking he undoubtedly had some friend who was a psychiatrist and they're kicking things around and he couldn't find the reason for the back pain and so turns out must be psychogenic which is a typical medical explanation when they can't figure out why things happen you know it happens to be that I know after having spent you know 25 years working in a fasting facility that I happen to know that people get really well from their blowback pain you know pretty quickly and water fasting which is something that Nathan will tell you because he's seen it yeah okay so I don't see exactly what psychological thing happened you know when we walk people down and strap them to the bed in the fasting facility and they scream about how their mother abused them that at the same time we're not feeding you know we're feeding them only water and miraculously goes away there they're releasing the trauma Doug don't you you have to you have to get on board with with the whole paradigm here right that they think if they showered enough and they and they talk to somebody and they really sit and they work through it and they break open the trauma pod then it's released and they're healed right and it's fine this is the process this is yeah this is uh this is Freudian crap folks this goes back to the late 1800s it has enormous popular appeal it is not true it's not how we are designed it makes no sense biologically and admit it as I have said before it's been one of the quiet little percolating frustrations of my existence of knowing full well that this is BS all the way down to the ground that there's no truth in it the quotes science and supports are no joke there is no science that supports us and so the that's like saying you know oh well they went and they interviewed a hundred of his people and 75 percent of and said they were better oh really the people that went to him believed in him paid him and then we asked them 10 years later yeah that's like asking people were you really adducted by the aliens when you said that you were yes I in fact was they had little they were little green men with little red antennae it's just what I said ten years ago okay so of course and that many you know there is zero scientific support for this there's no support for anything even remotely like it anywhere they all such theories are bogus and the the only the only thing that I'm happy about is the dr. Chan Hawk figured out why it's so hot and so that will become evident in you know the the parts of our work that she's going to be the expert end that she's going to be writing and our the book that we were co-authoring on that'll be out next year yes she's going to explain to the world why this is such a massive widespread delusion and so this is not to not to pick on dr. Sarno specifically you know well-meaning misguided miss educated uneducated individual perpetrating a typical utterly typical representativeness heuristic based psychodynamic bunch of garbage okay oh well you can get in line okay so but at least now I understand why this is so tenacious at a much deeper and more profound level thank goodness and my my New Year's resolution is to to make sure I tell dr. halleck thank you you know at least 50 more times for helping me see this clearly and we're going to show the world how it works
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