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Episode 67: About Dr Lisle Part 2, Myths of Moderation when making health changes
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good evening everybody it's Nate G along with dr. Doug Lyall on the beat Eugene's podcast so last week we played the first half of an interview from Andrew Taylor's spud fit podcast we got to hear how dr. Lyle actually became involved with evolutionary psychology and how he came to think about these ideas that we talked about on our show now the interview takes a little bit of a different turn so for those of you who don't know dr. Lyle is actually a well known speaker in the health world as well as being an author of the pleasure trap mastering the hidden force that undermines health and happiness so this week we're gonna listen in on the second half the interview where dr. Lyle actually discusses what health has to do with evolutionary psychology etc but this is this is clearly a different animal because it's coming from a different perspective which is human nature yeah there's a human nature and the better you know human nature the better you can understand its struggles and the roots of its suffering and when you do you can engineer strategies that are much more successful than conventional strategies for reasons that conventional thinkers would never even think of yeah yes that's that story about the divorce is really really interesting to me because while you were talking about that I was relating it to my experience with food yes so this whole idea of the potatoes the idea was that I wanted basically synonymous with a divorce I guess now that I've listened to that story and see that I had a relationship with food that was unhealthy yes I was relying on food for enjoyment Comfort emotional support and and because of that I was making bad food choices so the whole idea was to remove emotion from my choices and bring it all back to logic yeah and it sounds like that's basically what you were trying to do with your patient there yes to help her see her relationship from a logical point of view and that's exactly what I was trying to do with myself and food to stop making decisions based on my emotions that I've had a bad day I need some chocolate cake to help me feel better it was suddenly not suddenly but I worked hard and then I had this realization that all of the problems that I thought food was solving it was actually causing and once I could get that clarity of thought then I didn't have to worry about making bad choices anymore because the it was just obvious to me what I should eat rather than having that like the internal debate was gone then yes fantastic yeah so anyway that was it while you were talking about that I was thinking the same thing of course do you bet hey dogs come to visit there you go dog nature all right so yeah can we go on to the moderation yes because like I said that was that's my favorite chapter I've read in any book ever oh my god really just solidified things in my mind when I read that chapter that was the first chapter I read of the book I didn't read it right right right very good the yes that was a interesting chapter because we had written the book and the the the and actually an editor had come back and said there's kind of something missing and there's a there's some I don't know what it is and but it's right about here if something doesn't follow yeah and and Alan looked at this and said well we he kind of came up with the notion of that moderation was something that we needed to explain an attack as a concept and so then we came up with the myths of moderation which is that there are false assumptions in in the concept of the myth the moderation or the concept of moderation they the concept of moderation has a reason why it is such a powerful concept in general and that is because it is so true with so many domains so so many domains of humans of human problem-solving the right move is to take a moderate position because the moderate position reduces the likelihood of extreme error yeah okay and so as a result you generally you better extraordinary evidence if you're going to take an extraordinary position you better be extremely confident and you better have your risks mitigated all over the place or you cannot afford to take an extreme position so the so we recognized that in terms of human nature the right thing to do is sort of computer check which means we check her out what everybody else thinks and make sure we're somewhere near the middle and that that's actually dog doing dog nature so this is this made makes complete sense and so this is why this is such a powerful argument against anything that looks as strange as the diet we would recommend yeah that everybody's doctor at just today and this I get this at least once a month yeah well I have some parent wife husband said are usually a parent talking about how they've got a teenage child or an adult child who has an eating disorder and the problem is is that the professionals that are talking to them are saying listen that vegan diet is part of your disease yeah okay and you are thinking very strangely and we have to fix you and make you essentially more conventional in your thinking yeah now the truth is is that the person may well have I wouldn't exactly call it a disease I would call it they've got some screwy circuits in their head when they have eating disorders yeah and they are interesting circuits that I could talk about another day yeah it's not a disease process it's a it's a it's a it's an unusual circuit arising out of juxtaposition between a natural obsessive also disorder and the modern horrendous social costs of people being fat yeah that's how you wind up with an eating disorder the you couldn't have had an eating disorder 200 years ago because there wasn't a fascination with that yeah it's only a modern environment in the same way you couldn't have a hand-washing compulsion the fortunes before the dawn of germ theory yeah as soon as you have the germ theory then the obsessive people by nature start obsessing about germs yeah so in the modern environment young and women in general but young women in particular obsess about fat why because if you're fat you lose status and sexual attractiveness so therefore if they're hyper conscientious by God they're gonna make sure that they're not going to be fat and now we wind up with an eating disorder why because if you eat the conventional foods you will wind up fat yeah and so as a result what do they do they restrict like crazy and now that that is in fact the genesis of eating disorders yeah now so then they go to treatment and what do they get they're told no no no your men once in a while the ones that I hear about are the ones that are very fastidious about eating very healthy food yeah and then when they go to treatment they're being told oh well you're out of line you need to learn to eat chocolate shakes and relax and have a cheeseburger and the and of course these people are saying no that is absolutely untrue and there they are digging in their heels and they won't move and everybody thinks they're crazy yeah truth is they're not even the slightest bit crazy and so I forget what your question is I got lost we were just talking about the moderation the myth of motorized moderation yeah exactly right so the point is is that the just because you're in an extreme position doesn't mean you're wrong yeah okay and so it turns out that we knew it was very clear to us that we are correct about diet yeah now we can we can argue with John McDougall over a little bit of salt and we can argue with with Caldwell also stand about a little calorie here in a calorie there yeah Essie wants everybody choking down a bunch of kale yeah and we're saying we don't really care so there's slight disagreements of emphasis among those of us that treat people yeah but the truth is we know we're right because we see sick people get well we'll see very sick people get very well yeah and we do this in a way that every MD that ever comes to work for us always says this is a miracle I never see this happen in my practice yeah and it's a joy for them to be a medical doctor and actually watch sick people get well yeah and so we of course know we're on the right track we have tremendous evidence that this is true and so we know that our position isn't even the slightest bit strange yeah we just that it's so much different to what it's extremist the mainstream that got crazy okay and so we recognize that the mainstream is extreme that there is no diet that wrote looks remotely like the mainstream diet anywhere in nature yeah so we recognize that our diet there could be variations on a quote natural diet that would be reasonable to debate and to look at yeah people the inclusion need or not occlusion meat is a very interesting topic and open to empirical and theoretical discussion but what is not open to discussion is chocolate shakes Donuts ding-dongs licorice and Coca Cola raisin not real and so we we know so this is this is where we begin the myths of moderation that of course you would want to take a moderate position when you don't know any better and you don't have any evidence and you better just check the village because the village is going to be the house of wisdom and that you're gonna try to head to the middle and so unfortunately we have a world of extraordinary ignorant in the very highest levels of academia responsible for training medical doctors yeah okay so there's an incredible disconnect I remember one young physician said to me I have have an enormous textbook on nutrition that I have to memorize an incredible amount of stuff and I go through this entire thing and yet nothing has talked about diet diet is very yummy they know a tremendous amount about the cell biology what happens when you put vitamin K you know in a system but nobody ever says well then what on earth should human beings be eating yeah that's not even in that book and so of course you know there's this disconnect and our position is our diet is incredibly reasonable and there's another thing that we're getting to here but our diet is incredibly reasonable in the natural history in the context of the natural history and we also see something else which is that the biological systems in human beings normalize they get out of pathological territory when you feed them this diet so we know that we're not being a bit unreasonable the the the other issue that Allen has made a big deal of is the notion of what about a little bit of this and a little bit of that yeah and this is where this gets interesting I've had a lot of feedback from are surely a bit of chocolate cake once in a while or Otto right now yeah this is this is where and Alan and I we part ways a little bit here yep and for interesting and different reasons than than conventional reasons Alan is very hardcore so Alan's attitude is you freaking toe the line you do everything right don't get one inch out of line because if you do it's gonna just be more difficult for you and so there really isn't any place in Alan's playbook for anybody saying let's give a little bit of wiggle room yeah okay now I understand his thinking and that thinking is actually accurate when it comes to the biology and psychology of the pleasure trap specifically yep so it is in fact easier to quit drinking altogether than it is to cut down to a couple shots of scotch twice a week yeah if you're an alcoholic you're better off with zero yeah and so Alan's position there is not assailable now when I read that chapter I that my thinking seemed very logical to me it seemed a little bit preachy but it seemed clear and crisp and right and I was perfectly happy with it and I'm happy with it to this day however and the years since I actually suspected a problem and I wrote about this problem actually in the the endnotes in the pleasure trap I talked about a phenomenon that I have termed the ego trap and I'll talk about this in the book that I'm writing now that God knows Windell be good I was gonna ask you later that is that it's going to an important concept in the book is what I call the ego drop yeah now the ego trap people might start thinking about Doug Lyles the trap guy like you got the ego trap of the pleasure trap what other trap is there no these are the two traps yeah okay these are the two great motivational puzzles for human nature they are different okay the the pleasure trap is unnatural it is not a natural trap this is why it's so devastating because we are defenseless in the face of the pleasure yeah we have not faced it throughout human history until really the last 50 maybe 100 years right so you're talking about essentially supernormal stimuli we've had it for 10,000 years but not in the magnitude yeah now you have every chemical under the Sun available to just about everybody in a way they can they can hyper activate the put dopamine pathway or endorphin pathways yep and so we've got a tremendous quantity of addicts in one form or another so this is a big problem obviously the however there is an a secondary problem that can come about in a variety of contexts but one of the context is in the pursuit of perfection around health and so this is this is what I call the ego trap and let me describe it to you and you will instantly see the pattern and you will then see that this is a devastating pair of snakes that operate together and they're very difficult to get it right okay the human motivation is designed to try to earn esteem from other people that's how we're built yeah and so it's gonna turn out that you try to earn esteem from living up to or surpassing what other people's expectations are of you so if you're a great tennis player and you're going out and the finals of Wimbledon and everybody expects you to win then when you win it's good cuz you've affirmed it but you haven't gained yeah okay and so if everybody expects that you're almost certainly not gonna not gonna win then when you don't win you haven't lost very much but if you're not expected to win and you win you have a tremendous game yeah and if you are expected to win and you don't win you have a tremendous loss yeah so it's going to turn out that the expectations that the world has of us are calibrated to what it is that they know about us and so we're gonna have those same kinds of expectations for ourselves so what we have is we carry within us a set a calibration as to what we think were capable of accomplishing and what and that resonates with what the world probably thinks we're capable of accomplish them and when we do better than that we get a pride of gaining status and when we do worse than that we lose status so an example that you won't know about because it's Australian football but last year the Western Bulldogs they finished the season seventh or eighth from the ladder and then in the finals they went through and won the grand final which is like the Super Bowl yes suddenly everybody loved them yeah and that's because they came from a long way back and won and this everybody went crazy and everybody's second best favorite team was the Bulldogs all of a sudden right was happening yes correct okay and so now I want you to think about the following situation back on the Savannah I want you to think of a young man who's 16 or 17 years old he's just got on the edge of maybe being able to mate and he's just big enough and strong enough he's about ready to start to be a hunter and so he got us out on his first hunt and he gets separated out oh I lost a little bit of context everything about this guy is average average athleticism average smarts average clever you know everything about he looks he looks average this guy's headed for an average mating career with a couple of average children average okay now he goes out on this hunt and he comes across a wildebeest with its foot stuck on a snake hole and it takes a rock and knocks it over the head and then he goes back about 40 feet and throws his spear into it then he drags his home till it's big story okay so now there's big feast and everybody's thinking wow you know Thor over there we thought that he was average but looks like he's you know special yeah so now to the to the young women of the village she's not looking like a five he starts looking like a seven or an eight yeah okay so now what's happening is he is now the expectations of the village are above the truth yeah and this is extra esteem that he doesn't really have he doesn't hasn't really earned it but he's got it yeah okay so if we had that situation what we're gonna now find is that when it's time to go on the next hunt it's time for him to sprained his ankle today before he will actually self-sabotage yeah yeah okay and he's designed to do this because if you self-sabotage something happens and it doesn't call it transpire you get to hang on to the status for longer yeah okay so actually this is fantastic because you literally find that the human being is wily enough to be engineered he's engineered psychologically to self-destruct yeah oh you bet okay now we're gonna keep talking because now we're gonna bring it into the modern context yeah so now we're in a little small town in the middle of Iowa where they only have like 32 kids graduate from this high school every year and so for the last five years you know they've had a few bright kids but this year we got a real bright kid and every he's been the brightest kid for years and so everybody thinks that this kid's gonna go to Harvard so he's been talking about this since he was in the eighth grade and so they're all expecting him to do phenomenal on his board scores because he's so much smarter than the other kids in this school right now this kid is is soaking in the sious team you always get straight A's his parents think he's gonna go to the Harvard and it all feels great now except that he takes a practice test on the board scores and turns out he scores very high very high but not Harvard high so he can tell that he is not Harvard material yeah and he practices quietly when nobody can find out and it turns out he doesn't improve that much and by gosh you know he's he's gonna be a great student at the state university but he is not Harvard material yeah well not let him in now what this kid is very likely to do on the night before the boards is to get drunk in plain sight of everybody yeah you see because this way they say all Jorge he could have gone to Harvard but he got drunk drunk the night before the SATs can't imagine why he did that what it what an idiot because he's so brilliant okay yeah this is how he holds on to the status is by self-destruction now so it's gonna turn out that this is what I call the ego trap the ego naturally wants to gain status through achievement like our young hunter and like but it's gonna turn out that if events transpire that the the village somehow gives him more status than he deserves then he's put in a position where he cannot live up to expectations and as a result he will sabotage his own behavior by saying by sabotaging in a way that they can say he can say look you can't judge what I'm capable of because I didn't do what I can okay and this was the threat that I would watch people get into when Alan would put the bar too high for healthy living yeah so Alan we put the bar he'd say why don't you just do it to Alan it's simple because he's unbelievably naturally self disciplined yeah so Alan when he found this information it was like child's play to him yeah and so he and it's so powerful and useful that his attitude is look just do it this way it's the easiest way don't quit keep teasing yourself with the pleasure trap yeah and so he sets the bar here and the problem is even though he's accurate that it is the easiest way to do it in sum total yeah the problem is is that it may not be doable for people yeah because there's too many challenges people have too many different motivations too much temptation and basically they just can't do it yeah and so as a result they quickly find out that they can't do it and when they find out that they can't do it but they're expected to do it then they start to sabotage themselves okay and so now this is this is this is what I call this is the route this is the very interesting self-protective route of procrastination yeah this is why an alcoholic this is not talked about in drug drug and alcohol addiction that we could talk we they talk about the pleasure trap the dopamine surge all kinds of things but they don't talk about the fact that the alcoholic is actually embarrassed of trying and failing yeah and in fact what they do is they procrastinate that's all the time with the people that write to me and say I said I'm thinking about trying this potato thing you know I'm not here to say everyone should do it oh but I always get people wrong I'm thinking about and think about so why are you thinking about it instead of doing it yes and I say because I'm worried I'll fail yes what's happening so the the what's interesting is the following if we were so an example of this so I started to find this out you know years ago 20 years ago I was sniffing out this issue and let me give you an example of how I fixed it so if I had a kid I had this happen more than once where I'd have some young person thirty thirteen years old come into the office with their mother who was all upset because I hear on the phone that the kid is very very smart but he's flunking out and the parents are worried that he's doing drugs or some terrible thing okay and so they come in and and dad doesn't come even though he was supposed to come because dad doesn't wanna hear some psychologist tell him how to raise his son so mom comes and now all animated and worried and so mom starts talking to me about how Jimmy's just so smart he's so so creative he's just brilliant well actually dr. Lara is a genius you know I mean this is the sort of talk that comes out of a parent and he's a straight-a student well the truth is the kid got straight A's once in the last three years the kid is very bright yeah but he's not a quote straight-a student this is not falling off a log and it's not a fait accompli yeah okay so the kid is over rewarded by his parents his parents actually think the right thing to do is to tell him you could do incredible things you can do anything you can do incredible incredible incredible incredible they think that this is helpful for the kids self-esteem they don't understand it's actually destructive okay they don't actually understand that they're they're actually causing a problem yeah now the thing is what the kid does the kid sees but if he does his best they're kind of disappointed and even they'll say just do your best and then well if you fall shoot for the stars and if you if you fall a little short you'll get to the moon okay so this is the motivational mentality of the average educated human this is what you're gonna hear in Tony Robbins this is what you're gonna hear and Zig Ziglar this is what you're gonna hear in motivational speaking and it's actually bad it actually doesn't work and it's a psychologist that doesn't talk to big crowds to whip them up in a fury but I talk to individuals very dabeli that are struggling I can tell you that the solution it's completely different than any happy talk the solution to that child's dilemma is when I kick the mom out of the room and I tell the kid hey I know what's going on you don't have to tell me that kid will look at me like I'm a nut like he doesn't know what's going on cuz you know what the kid himself doesn't know what's yeah okay and I say listen the reason why you're having this problem is I know your school and I know the parents are the other kids in your school and you might have been able to get a spur for but the best you're gonna be able to do now is season B's because the truth of the matter is your classmates their parents are doing their homework for them and they're doing the writing projects for ya and if your parents aren't doing that they're not doing their fair share and so you know what you can just kiss a goodbye because all you can get is season B's and you know what everything that your parents are promising you if you get A's I'm gonna give them to promise if you get 1/2 C and half B average and that's how we're gonna aim this thing and those kids look at me like I'm an idiot like I'm chopped liver that they're gonna just take okay yeah they're excited is it can't believe it and then I bring the mom in and I explained to them about the man the kid on the Savannah and getting the bar too high yeah that their kid is actually self-destructing because he can't live up to expectations so that kid on the Savannah saw it as interesting that takes me back again to something in my life yes of it so I was an elite junior kayaker marathon kayaker I want a couple of Australian Championships I was quite good but as I got older I started putting on weight and I wasn't as fast I wasn't in the top three anymore I was more like getting into the top ten and then I just stopped racing yeah and that made me think that yeah maybe maybe what was going on there was that if I stopped racing then I can say I'm a really good kayaker because the last time I raced I was really good right but if I kept on racing maybe I would have been in coming 20th or then 30th and then I couldn't say I'm really good anymore right so yeah so yeah there you go you bring up things from my past exactly how that worked okay and so the also you can also start to see that you may not have the chops to do something extremely well and you may want to do other things you know there's more than one thing going on but probably a big reason was exactly what we're saying yeah well for me I definitely think I I had it in me to do better but this wasn't able to get my weight down to an appropriate level where I would my body would be allowed to perform at its best right go right back to the mom yep so I explained this to the mom I explained that what I've now done is I've lowered the bar so when I lower the bar and tell the kid he call he can get his half-season half B's the truth is now he's insulted it's completely different yeah so instead of over flattering them and putting them in a trap where they can't reach expectations I lower the bar low enough that they that they think that they're that I'm insulting them that of course they can do much better and of course in every case the kids wind up fired up and they can't wait to prove the idiot psychologist wrong and they come back with excellent grades and I tell those parents don't you dare say when those good grades come in look I told you you could do this tell them instead dr. Lisle says that sometimes kids get lucky okay yeah that's where we want them we want them right in that situation where they're still earning status by beating expectation I'm gonna take it the kids noting the room while you're talking down so and I have a wife after wife saying oh my god I wish my husband were here because the truth is is the natural parenting or friendship or psychotherapy is to say you can do it you can do it you can do it it's all about this instead it's better to say I'm not sure you can do it yeah okay if you say well I'm not sure you can do it they're like oh so if I really try and I fail I probably haven't lost any status but if I try and I succeed I have definitely gained status because you two weren't sure that I could do it yeah so this is actually the place that we want people yeah and so that this is why the this is where moderation comes into this because when I set goals for people I even though I understand that the concept of moderation in general around this is fundamentally mistaken the cleanest food is the best food and the cleaner we are with the food the less of the pleasure trout force we have because we're not teasing the circuits like an alcoholic with scotch yeah we know that this is the cleanest shortest distance between the two point however if we set the goal there we run into the problem of the ego trap yeah okay and so instead what I do is I set it down to what I call 80 percent yeah so I set it there at 80 percent so the person can look at this and say I think that I can do that yay so I have what I call the starch targets and the starch targets are starch starch starch fruit salad exercise you know the six starch targets that we set up every day we have a check sheet that goes for six times seven days or 42 starts targets yep I would email this so you can put it on your website I don't have it on my website because I don't know how to do website but this is what I've seen you're you what are they code the PowerPoint presentation I very professional power blind press yes if you haven't seen a presentation by Doug it's it's every slide is uh like drawing on a whiteboard and then taking a photo is that how you do it I just do it right with a felt pen on a sheet it's quite quite entertaining actually it's very low-tech stuff so in fact we could whip one up now with this stuff that's on the desk yeah yeah but anyway the notion is is that for a person to set a goal that they can actually feel in their gut that they could do that could probably do okay now we don't set it so low that it's not a challenge and we don't set it so low that it's not gonna help us morph out of a pleasure trap so 80% is no joke it's not easy to get your life organized that you do things 80% correctly it's not easy at all and so when people do this what I want them to do is to be checking these boxes and essentially as they run a record and they can see that it's happening they have an internal audience which is what I'm gonna call the self-esteem mechanism yeah that is watching their behavior and as they watch themselves produce a set a record they their internal audience starts to say you're not kidding around you're actually doing a good job yeah doesn't do it give it to you the first day folks and it doesn't give it to you the second day but by about 10 days in your internal audience starts to look at this and starts to say this is not a fad for you you are actually making changes yeah and this rise of internal regard that comes as to what you found yeah from your journey yeah yeah and that what people don't know is they may be overweight they may be sick they made me miserable and they may feel like their life is a wreck but what you don't and then you may feel that you have to get a fancy job because that's what your friends have done or you have to get a fancy wife or husband because that's what your friends have done or that you have to lose a bunch of weight and look great and that's what your friends have done and that's what fancy people have done and that's what you're gonna have to do in order to feel good about yourself but ya know what that is an enormous mistake the truth of the matter is you don't have to do any of those things because let me explain this is not happy talk now this is the truth about human nature this is an instinct that resides inside of human nature yeah but if you start to do something that is worthwhile diligently okay if you start making a move towards improving your health and your fitness and you are diligent and I don't mean that you work tremendously hard at it all day but I mean that you work hard at it for the parts of the day yeah but it's important to do so if you do this on a consistent basis and when I say consistent I don't mean six months I mean 10 days in a row yeah if you go ten days in a row you have natural instincts that are watching you they are they are essentially they're what in philosophy is gone by the name of consciousness or self-consciousness the cognitive therapist still called it the internal critic okay this is an internal mechanism that observes our behaviors and so nobody else in the world has to be watching if you eat a jelly doughnut but if you do you feel disgusted with yourself yeah your internal audience saw you do it okay your internal audience if you cheated on a test to get by your internal audience knows that you cheated yeah and so this is your internal audience is watching it is a pitiless judge you do not have to impress it with your accomplishments but you do need to impress it with your effort yeah and that is what the internal audience cares about the external world cares about results and you care about the external world so your attention focused on what will they think when they see me in a bathing suit that is how we think and we think that the only way to feel better about ourselves if we're a woman that needs to drop 30 pounds we think we're not going to feel better about ourselves until we lose the 30 pounds and George ceases in the blazing suit and says wow Sally you look great but it turns out that's not true what we are missing in an important concept in psychology that is missed is the most important thing is how you feel about yourself and that has less to do with the accomplishment and more to do with your diligence now the accomplishments is important the important that you see that there's progress being made so you know you're on the right track but what you don't know is that in 10 days you can feel unbelievably better about yourself long ahead of dropping any substantial where anybody says anything your internal audience can say Wow Sally this is no joke you are really doing this yeah and essentially this is the self-esteem mechanism Nathaniel Branden said 50 years ago that self esteem is the reputation you have with yourself so of all the kinds of things that he said about this and all the the fumbling that he did because he was he was in an earlier time in psychology and he didn't have the tools that we had today but that is one of the most succinctly important insights that he came out of that mind yeah self-esteem is the reputation you have with yourself and you can change that reputation in a matter of days you can't really JIT in one day you can change it in one day so don't expect the first day to give you any big payoff but it is an investment that will pay off much quicker than you would think yeah I really really relate to that because I've said plenty of times that the first two weeks were hard yes and by the end of that two weeks I started to notice an improvement in my depression yes and I started to feel like it was getting easier yes it was a struggle to eat only potatoes for two weeks but really it was pretty smooth sailing after that for the rest of the year right but once I got through that period and also another thing that I've said plenty is that you know I've you mentioned Tony Robbins before I've spent plenty of times in the morning like talking to myself in the mirror you're great you can do this you can do anything you want no that's a positive self-talk that people talk about all the time and never did anything for me but the thing that really helped me with my depression there's probably people have been helped by that self-talk before but for me it's all about action yes soon as I got through that two weeks and I've really done something here this is I've done something I didn't I didn't think I would last two weeks let alone a whole year I want a try for you but I got through that and I was like this is happening I'm doing something and this and then that's what I started to think like yeah maybe this self-talk thing is just a lot of crap maybes we've just got to do things if you want to be proud of yourself then you have to do things that you're proud of yes that and that is beautifully said and that is exactly accurate the truth is is that you cannot talk yourself into feeling better about yourself you must observe yourself improving in your actions in order for you to naturally start to think and feel better about yourself yeah your judgement of yourself is not subject to your PR campaign it's only subject to an honest evaluation of your effort okay and the beauty about this folks is that not only is that true that the system itself has no choice in fact if you earn it through diligent effort your self-esteem will in fact rise I guarantee it yeah because it's in fact the nature of the neurological mechanisms that are part of human nature if you in fact earn this by digging what I call the grit mine self-esteem is made through grit it's made through making good choices and making them again okay and making them in the force at face of temptation to not do the effort if you in fact go through the process and pay those prices you will find an increasing internal audience that does not criticize you and does not talk you down it is not an internal critic and the way the cognitive therapy believes it is cognitive therapy teaches that you talk back to the internal critic in these ways they actually even though some of their techniques are useful they're fundamentally misconstruing the psychological architecture of human nature the truth of the matter is is that the internal critic is not a critic it's an audience and that internal audience is impartial and it will watch you and it will start to shift what it says about you as it observes you change your pattern yeah now that's how it works yeah fantastic oh there's another yeah you just you keep on hitting the mark with me here tingles down my spine it sort of leads me onto another thing which I've been telling all the people that I work with in my outfit challenge group and the very few people that I've coached is that stop looking at the scales for for confirmation of whether you're doing things right for me it's all everything is all about behavior and if you need a measure of success then you're what you said about your starch goals and what I've been saying is you know if you if you get through a day of eating only potatoes or if you're eating a whole food plant-based whatever it is that your diet but if you get through the day give yourself a tick yeah through the week give yourself a tick yes and if you just repeat the positive behaviors over and over and over again the results are going to take care of themselves you don't need to worry about it what you need to do is focus on getting the behaviors right okay this is this is exactly where what we're trying to do is we're trying to actually have people become Buddhists yeah Buddhist philosophy is focus on the process not the outcome yeah now the problem that's where it came from familiar actually yeah I'm reading Buddhism now the the the the problem that I have with Buddhism is that it's a beautiful ideal but humans are humans humans seek competitive esteem feedback from other people that's why we do it in the first place yeah now the fact is is that the Buddhist philosophy and their instruction here to focus on the process rather than the outcome yeah is beautiful because the truth is that's exactly the right way to do this yeah in other words when I say the process of what I mean is the little outcomes of the day I'm talking about the things we don't set goals folks that you don't have control over so that you have control over whether we ate a starch and ate a salad and exercised you have control over that I don't have control over whether you're gonna lose 25 pounds by summer you don't have to but because you don't know your own physiology you don't know what it's gonna take so why set it as a goal yeah the correct goal the way to set goals is to set goals of over which you have complete control then we don't need anybody else's opinion and we don't need a break out an itch er so we sit there like a Buddhist and we get lost in the process okay and we find our self esteem being strengthened and our internal self regard better as we do the process well then then of course because we are not animals without a higher consciousness that's lookin around the corner we cannot just become a an animal lost in its process we as human beings peak around the corner and want to see evidence that the process that we're doing is related to the outcome that we seek yeah we can't stop this and we shouldn't okay but we need to be patient yeah okay we need to be patient with ourselves patient with outcomes and the truth of the matter is we needed to be following people that have knowledge and wisdom to actually lead us down the correct path and the truth is this is the correct path this is the right way to handle the food problems of your own personal health and weight and fitness these this is the way we do it any of the variations that are closed whether it's engine - whether it's a potato diet whether it's MacDougal whether it's Allen's TrueNorth you know whether it's where John McDougall says it doesn't make any difference we're all like within 5% of each other yeah and you can apply it to any area of life absolutely if you want to run a marathon if you want to be a good runner don't everyday judge how fast you're running just did you get up and go for a run if you did then you're on the right track that is exactly right and so this we we try to don't don't let are wobbling towards the outcome worried about the process yeah we just do the process and we know quietly that as we start to see any incremental improvements just relax continue to get lost in the process that's what I call being myopic ya don't look too far deep in the future just just look to the next little section and know that it is completely legitimate and valid for you to be having your your imagination peak out into the future and and take a peek at the grand thing that we're trying to do of course that's true you cannot talk that out of yourself there's no way that you should okay but what we do want to do what we do want to borrow from the eastern philosophy is as much as we can lose yourself in the process that is the best way to run this journey yeah and I guess that sort of happened by accident for me because every other diet I've ever done my goal was like I said I wanted to lose weight that was what it was all about right in this one it wasn't a diet because I wasn't trying to lose weight I was just trying to change my relationship with food so I didn't have a weight-loss goal instead the goal was to go a year of eating only potatoes right so I didn't care what the scale said of course I was happy when I saw them going down yes but my focus was get through the year evading and potatoes and whatever happens on the scales that's just what happens and exactly what I'm trying to say yeah by accident and you know the whole thing that's beautiful yeah because this when you see all these things line up quote by accident we now can look back and see that of course these principles are absolutely a play and it gives us great confidence that we have the right strategy okay so I'm very big on the concept that when we're trying to attack any goal whether it's trying to do a good job opening a vegan restaurant or whether or not we want to become a fighter pilot the right thing to do is the goals that we set we set the right strategy okay we set the right strategy and the truth is if it's to become an Olympic rower we set the right strategy as we vaguely are headed for something over here in in the future yeah we set the right strategy and we set the sub goals and our job is to be myopically working towards those goals on a daily basis your job isn't to do something magnificent it's to do your daily work yeah and as we do this we find out where it goes and wherever it goes this is the the philosophy of the great American basketball coach John Wooden who said success is the peace of mind that comes with knowing that you did your best job yeah okay that is the peace of mind yeah okay so it's not about winning of course you would love to win but the point is did you earn your self-esteem yeah that is the point self-esteem must be earned yeah you can't trick it you can't give it to somebody with a medal that they didn't deserve it doesn't matter if a million people cheer you and you didn't actually do the job that you know that you could have done okay the your internal audience is neither fair nor unfair but it is Nicholas it is pitiless so it's an athlete who wins by taking drugs probably doesn't have great self-esteem No what they have is they have a haunting little problem and that they may get great esteem from the world yeah they may get riches they may get fame they may get great heterosexual success you know whatever it is that comes with this victory yeah but the bottom line is that they don't get self-esteem yeah guess what your internal self won't give it to you yeah okay it is it is a absolute relentless honest mechanism yeah and it will give it to you what you deserve fascinating all the way so we're probably gonna wrap it up now we've been going for an hour and 20 minutes yes I've got through like a third of the talking points that I had on jotted down on my pad here but maybe we'll finish with one last thing I this is obviously not a mainstream topic that we're talking about so what can we do to make this go more mainstream you know I don't I'm not sure because I'm personally not that interested in that okay the I'm beyond the process I think that's on the process you know I've learned that what's important to me are the people that I personally have contact with yeah and that there are struggles even though there they are personally convinced and they know what direction they want to go that is a very hard to go this is a this is a rare this is an extremely difficult problem because we're not designed by nature to solve the pleasure trap and when you couple the pleasure trap with the ego trap you have an extraordinary combination of potential self-destruction yeah so you have repetitive failure repetitive attempts then completely kicking over the table and quitting the whole thing you see this whole repetitive nightmare in the histories of everybody that you're ever gonna talk to about these problems yeah so the my job is to the person that's in front of me or the people that are listening to me my job is to give them the very best guidance the very best pathway to success that I can I'm not worried about the whole world I'm worried about the people in front of me yeah they collectively in general yeah good ideas drive bad ideas away yeah and so these are good ideas that I've seen in my short life I have seen these ideas become much more broadly appreciated yeah the they are we actually are asked to speak to much bigger audiences than we ever were before 30 years ago we are now not whackos we are actually respected and in fact even a scientific community finds us a little bit intimidating you know I mean 30 years ago we were a joke now we're not a joke we're actually sort of the gold standard that everybody's worried that that we're gonna cannibalize their treatment yeah okay and so the world is changing and long after I'm gone it'll still be changing in this direction and so I'm not I'm not worried about rushing it I'm worried about doing as good a job as I can with the people within the reach of my voice
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