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Episode 76: Dating mind-games, Binge-eating
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all right good evening everybody dr. Lyle how are things going with you today good good good hear your voice mate excellent okay well we've got a couple of questions we've got a question about a couple who was looking on to get some advice about their relationship we've got a question today about a previous podcast which was podcast number 25 what she says versus what she means and the listeners asking about some of the mind games that sometimes get played in dating got a question about some binge eating and then I got a question with regards to catfishing but before we begin to these questions we actually have a caller calling in from Canada so Tom did I get your name right Tom how you doing today I'm fine thank you thank you very heavy on the show oh really look a great time whereabouts are you in Canada I live in Ontario aha got it all right well it later are you weird with that a little bit later over here then where you are yeah that it is you got it well tell us what's up where can what can we try to answer for you tonight okay well I I have a very competitive nature and what I found about myself is I will endeavor to learn a sport or a game and I will become totally absorbed in it and it just it fascinates me in the intricacies and I'll study and I'll work away and and I mean it can be like a year or two years I get really into it but eventually I become self-destructive and I ruined the whole thing for for myself for the people that I've garnered relationships with in the sport and and it doesn't seem to be sport specific I can screw up anything and and so it's very frustrating because I like to be less competitive and enjoy the stuff and not self-destruct but it seems it's it happens every time mm-hmm okay well let's let me get a little bit from you about what we mean by self-destructive so tell me what you mean by that okay I I would I would enjoy it but I get so performance driven that I IND so competitive that I'm not no longer even having fun myself and the desire to win or overwhelms my good nature and and it overwhelms my common sense and I end up just driving people away because I'm no fun to be around I'll give you an example I took up golf when I retired and I shouted golfing and I ended up golfing like five days a week I took professional lessons and and I gulped and I gulped and I gulped and I slowly saw my scores coming down but the better I got the more I alienated people around me until the point is I even I didn't want a golf anymore I eventually quit golfing and had to walk away from the sport but that is just one example mm-hmm yeah okay well I would say there's a few things that that are happening here but one of them is a process that has gone on repeatedly with you is going to be what I call self calibration and so what you're doing is you are your niche picking and this is what this is what people do is they're trying to find out what essentially from a to get very abstract on you so people could see how we solve these problems what the what the system or the nervous system is built for is it's actually built to try to make decisions that opt about optimized survival reproduction which means they optimize gene survival which means really it's all about the the most economic or most effective or efficient utilization of energy and so in the case of a human the the target of that energy esteem mostly so human beings are going to increase their likelihood of of having useful friends increase their likelihood of of mating and increase their likelihood of their their children being successful to mate by virtue of raising cachet in the village about the quality of their genes and the quality of the goods that they can produce and then the quality of their of their word and their ability to help others that might be in need etc friendships and so as a result what people do is they advertise in order to secure those relationships and to be as competitive as possible in search of those relationships because the better the more genetically valuable we should say those relationships are which we are going to say better the the better those relationships are the the just by definition those are going to be more more valuable for genes survival so what we're going to do is those good relationships those good people beautiful women handsome men great friends and lucrative trade propositions those those three domains of human interest are obviously under a great deal of competitive attention that is what people are competing for are or they're competing for esteem in those three domains and so as a result the people have to advertise and those advertisements are you know many many different ways for people to advertise those things so short skirts fake breasts tinted hair fancy watches etc bumper stickers that say love everybody be kind of a universe etc there's an infinite number of methods that people use in order to advertise effectively their gene quality so one of the things that happens is that in men specifically men are actually designed by nature to to actually demonstrate their hunting capability and sense abilities and so that's what sports are sports are methods for demonstrating those potential values to the village and to mates and and so as a result men compete and they don't compete particularly nicely in other words we're talking about gene competitions here my genes are better than your genes therefore the great looking girl over there ought to be mating with me not with you so what we're going to do is we're going to have this thing called a contest and in that contest we're going to display this and we're going to find out whose genes are better that's exactly what sports are and so what's going to happen is that men are going to find out that they're there there's going to be a lot of different genes that might be useful when it comes to both hunting and protection it's not just brute strength even though brute strength is very very impressive because brute strength will solve an awful lot of problems and when many many competitions in nature so that's why the handshake is a very big deal you know in human society because a hand simple handshake simple grip strength of a male's right hand is a very high predictor of their overall athleticism and so and therefore it also torso strength and therefore it's a very good predictor of what male would defeat what male in a wrestling match so so what however it is not the only way quickness judgment coordination these things are all potentially very useful in terms of hunting so hunting we're not going to be wrestling grizzly bears to the ground we're going to be stalking them we're going to be trapping them out thinking them and then we're going to be throwing spears into them and we better throw accurately and and so all of these types of genetically mediated capabilities are going to be important for the village to assess the relative genetic quality of the individuals involved so as a result and not just genetic quality also what it is that they have learned specifically about this particular domain that winds up being important for our ecological circumstances so it might be fishing if you live in Madagascar but it might be spear-throwing if you're in you know the Arctic tundra or something so as a result different different subcultures are going to wind up with slightly different problems throwing spears is a very big deal and has been a big deal for hundreds of thousands of years and that's why the human male has evolved spectacular hand-eye coordination the ability to throw something about as heavy as a spear you know with velocity and accuracy in order to not only kill other people but kill wild game which is really important so it's going to turn out that in the modern environment human beings have invented a number of sports and those sports are all built they are all very sophisticated ly evolved culturally evolved Fitness indicators golf being one of them so golf for example has it's no accident that Golf is both about about power and coordination so you have to be very strong to swing a golf club with enough speed in order to hit the ball a long ways and the way we're going to organize courses is we're going to make it so that you must hit the ball a long ways in order to excel at this task however you're also going to need to be accurate because this is going to be a measure of not only how fast can you throw the spear but can you can you hit anything with it and so the golf club is going to actually accentuate errors by how how many degrees is your is your club phase off of square when it meets the ball so it you can immediately see considerable differences in coordination and those differences in coordination are very important when it comes to who hits the Moose that's going 40 miles an hour and who doesn't in this that's going 40 miles an hour so so it's not just the club head speed and it is also dexterity coordination timing all these things and not only that golf wines have being another fitness indicator which it winds up also being a fitness indicator of strategy so you have to be thinking through your moves carefully and you have to be thinking about the entire context of your round when you're in a competitive round against other people in other words it's all there's all kinds of considerations through our long-term planning patience mathematical probability assessments being made this is really a hell of a sport and and there you know therefore people are fascinated with it but notice that nobody has ever been fascinated with a golfer who did not hit the ball really solidly in other words you just never had one nobody has been excited about a pure finesse golfer who you know just doesn't hit the ball very far so Scotland was one hell of a golfer he was a beautiful iron player and a miraculous around the Greens but anyone a US Open and he was extremely respected among his peers but he never made anybody weak in the knees and the reason why is that we know ultimately as a humans we want big strong alpha that can crush the ball right so that that's what's going on here so what we do as males is we niche pick we figure out where we have if we are potentially as a ethically and potentially 70th percentile golfer but we would be a 50th percentile prizefighter then we're going to head towards golfing rather than fighting and so if we are very tall and thin we're not headed to football we're headed to the basketball courts so everybody figures out where they're where am i highest in the percentile of the genes that are necessary to excel at a given sport and we drift towards those sports which are going to be consistent with our potential greatest strengths relative to our competitors and so with yourself you dragged your bag of assets and liabilities to golf for example and you did this sounds like several times in your lifetime and your competitive nature basically made you invest a great deal of time and energy in in these things because you were determined to climb these hierarchies and therefore advertise your genetic superiority and what would happen is that you would eventually what will eventually happen is that you will hit what's called you know in mathematics an asymptote in other words you you will finally get no better so LeBron James is no better than he was a year ago and a year ago he was no better than he was the year before that so by the age of age 30 LeBron James basically hit his apex and he didn't get he's not getting any better he's not getting any worse either so he's he's working extremely hard but he is treading water relative dues abilities he has maximized the abilities in that potential nervous system and body the now the same thing happens to you effectively so once you've hit the asymptote and another hundred hours of effort is yielding you a tenth of a percent I'll maybe increase of it abilities you start to you know you're hitting the constraints and at that point you know if you're very competitive you can be frustrating and particularly if you believe if you've got if you got this competitive nature by the way doesn't come from nowhere you're going to be somewhat disagreeable so if you look on the bell curve we're going to find you too well you know this is this is the show of no BS so we're going to tell like it is as best we know so you're that competitive nature is going to come from the left side of the bell curve at least somewhat disagreeable and one of the features of that is is likely to be here we go a little narcissistic in other words slightly this is this is very characteristic of you know Kim edited people they just believe they're going to get better and they believe that they can beat some people that they've got in the crosshairs they think they can crawl over the top of them and get higher in the dominant hierarchy if they if they were sweeter and they had less testosterone they wouldn't have those feelings they'd be like the girls that just want to get along and not bother anybody and be sweet okay but that's not what males do males have tremendous prizes that await them if they get to the top of dominance hierarchies those prizes are multiple mates with minimum investment of low mutation load mates that are you know ie highly sexually stimulating so that's the prize that sits at the top of the evolutionary ladder for the human male and those prizes are considerable it looks like in the Stone Age environments men the men that are outstanding at these kinds of activities on average may have as many as 25 children typically whereas men that our average might have eight so you can you can imagine that that we all come from a long line of male ancestors who on average got way more than their share of the mates so we have but every generation has to face that the average guy starts out with 50th percentile abilities typically statistically and yet he has a psychology that says by god I'm going to climb the hierarchies and I'm going to client climb over some people's backs and we're going to see if I can get to 25 children instead of 8 children and so this is this is the mentality that sits inside of the average male and as we go to a slightly testosterone side of the bell curve ie mildly disagreeable - more disagreeable - significantly disagreeable as we move that direction the determination and the effort and the energy that will go into that process becomes greater and greater so this is what you've done you are born with a with a gene the set of suite of genes that say we are going to get to the top of the hierarchy and what you what you sort of don't realize but you sort of do know is that the the goal of this is to to achieve world genetic domination haha this is actually what's inside the system and by world genetic domination that means be the fanciest most sexually appealing individual that you possibly can and potentially dominate the local valley and wind up with more children and grandchildren than everybody else to Genghis Khan and so this is this is what drives you and this is what when you get if you if you got essentially just a little more testosterone that you go over some interesting social lines you're fine with pissing people off and the heat of the battle and and essentially being pretty nasty now Michael Jordan is was notorious for unbelievable trash-talking and and so is Joe Montana and it isn't that these aren't really decent people that have great friends and and have loyal long-standing relationships and all kinds of stuff but you know what those guys were downright mean the there was a young man there was a pair of Jordans the played for the LA Clippers was Ron Harper and Ron Harper was one hell of a basketball player and was an all-star and putting a big numbers the same time Jordan was and Jordan had Ron Harper in his crosshairs and he was vicious to Harper and he made sure he basically beat him bloody to get complete domination over the sky now ironically the Bulls wind up trading for Harper became a teammate and they won titles together yeah so it all was okay alright but at some point when I was reading about this story I thought wow what price victory you know I'm saying this is this is what it takes to be the most famous athlete of the last 50 years is it takes a unbelievably disagreeable vicious determined psychology and this is not a place for nice guys or even Pleasant people okay so now can you be damn good and be pleasant yeah there's a few of them but not mostly and the people will report when you're around professional athletes they are unbelievably competitive and they have no problem basically elbowing everybody's ego and the teeth and it's like if you can't take it then you don't belong here and this is what you're looking at with hyper testosterone ization so I think that really the answer here is that when they passed out the genes you got a lot more than your share of testosterone and this led you to constantly seeking some place where you could shine and dominate so you would go up these up these learning curves with a very determined fashion inside your head and would drive you to make the most of your abilities and you would hit finally the asymptotes I think that would get frustrating for you and and you were still determined to to basically climb over the backs of a few more competitors and in doing so you can get yourself pretty unpleasant so I think that's more or less your life story yeah I would say that's that's it you're very accurate in what you're saying about stuff the Dale culty becomes so because of my behaviors and and and my self-discipline and let's say by disappoint in my disappointment and where I ended up on this scale it becomes a very self-defeating kind of a thing because I'm going to am I not going to end up driving away potential mates because I'm because I'm out of sorts I mean I mean yeah I mean certainly we want to look at this this this winds up being an issue of beat the genes so we have to we have to back up here and even though your personality is your personality per se is not really modifiable but that doesn't mean that you can't you can't engineer or some novel behaviors and see how well they work and reassess those okay and you're you're going to find you know this this is actually the story in Hollywood of many characters of this nature that the morale of many of many great stories is yeah competitive is one thing and we admire it but also also being magnanimous and having humility is is another and sometimes people are surprised positively by just how well the world will respond to you even if you are viciously competitive to you if you will turn around and admit some vulnerability and some humility about things people will like you huge you know this goes all the way back to sergeant York you know the famous conscientious objector turned war hero in World War one this is this is the story of that process and that that story's been told many times and it's one that you know should get your attention here in your retirement is that competitive yes and and certainly you know we we feel the testosterone and the drive to be excellent but we we need to sprinkle this with a a dose of humility and a dose of our of our natural vulnerability this is the self-effacing part of this is I have to tell you this is what made Ronald Reagan a beloved political figure is this guy had the ability to he was competitive and he was determined and he had very tough talking but he would also turn around and laugh at himself and and so this is a this is a useful thing for you to know and when you do it intentionally if you want to experiment and watch for opportunities to do this when you do it watch the response carefully and if there if you get the right moment where the response comes very nicely and very warm towards you because they see the vulnerability and the willingness to be humble that can be very reinforcing and actually take you on a path where that becomes something that you look to do inappropriate and too take take some of the take some of the tension you can be let me give you an example of this in academia in academia being a vicious bastard that is that is essentially smarter than everybody else and puts everybody's face in it that you can be tolerated in academia behind that but you're never loved never okay so the Richard Dawkins tells the story in one of his books about about an American that comes to lecture in England and in the lecture he he basically explains to his host people that about essentially how the host had gotten it wrong and the host the the BRIT congratulated the guy and thanked him and said I can't yeah it's just essentially fabulous now to understand because I spent a lot of my life trying to understand this and I didn't understand it I want to thank you it's a relief to understand Wow doc said the whole place rises and collapsed their hands read okay for that kind of humility so keep that in mind that there there is nothing quite like that and it wears also very well on people that are tough if you will keep in mind a beautiful reversal that that you ought to be looking for from time to time that will that's the most that is the most probably attractive thing that you could ever that you could ever think about and execute okay okay well listen thank you very much I've got a little bit of hope as I forge ahead here then in my professional sports career very good very good anyway thank you so much job you got it alright good luck thanks Tom thank you very much for the call really a priest you excellent all right all right there well else we go so a question yeah a question actually floated in my mind as you were saying this is yeah you know as when males are going through this if they are younger they have more testosterone and they decrease testosterone as they get older so are they just more likely to be able to beat their genes in this regard as they get older because of the lower testosterone yeah I'm sure that's true the you can yet that's just it's probably not any adapted process here you know I mean it's just that it could be though you could see a possibility that testosterone levels might have essentially faded down as it was less and less likely for males to win contests and essentially it became smarter for them to just be pleasant you know I mean politicise become more popular and and the math status in that way rather than through sheer physical domination so that's actually a very interesting hypothesis that I never considered until now but it's a but it's an interesting one and has some merit okay all right onto onto our next are our first question guesses from our listeners with regards to her boyfriend and her okay dear dr. Lam my boyfriend and I have been together for just over a year we're both 27 we've got compatible values and personalities our sex life is very good and we generally communicate well and get along and enjoy each other's company however our esteem dynamic is completely unbalanced I feel like I'm always lifting him up and expressing my affections but he doesn't reciprocate all he says is me too or I love you he doesn't express himself and expect me to just assume everything is okay however his lack of communication makes me scared that he is not actually committed to me he's never told me why he is with me or what he hopes for the future we haven't had any adult relationship talks and it feels like we're just still casually dating I'm scared that he just wants to enjoy the perks and then just waste my reproductive crime only to dump me eventually for someone else but I try to swallow my fears as best as I can but they seem to always eventually bubble up to the surface and then we get in a fight I've tried repeatedly to him nicely and ask him to meet my need for esteem signals but he doesn't acknowledge this need as legitimate and he thinks I'm being abusive because I'm quote demanding validation and then starting fights when he's already under a lot of pressure with work end quote I've never really intended to start a fight but he always responds with aggression to my expressions of fear and sadness and I'm hurt and shocked that he called me abusive and I really feel lost because I've never intended to hurt him only to express my feelings and asked for us to work together to achieve a better esteem dynamic in our relationship but every attempt just ends up as a fight and I'd end up looking like the bad guy is there a way to get past this issue I love him dearly I want to stop being so volatile I've been stable on past relationships when my partners were equally expressive and I felt like I knew where I stood but with him I'm an anxious mess constantly trying to gauge his commitment level he says he needs some time together without any drama in order to rebuild safety and Trust but how can we avoid drama when I'm already trying my best to swallow my fears and failing dr. Lisle am I being unreasonable how can I try to talk to him about this without him taking it personally and thinking that I'm attacking him is there any hope for us I tried to read it in the voice that sounded look oh my goodness all right all right folks this is this is this should be bronzed for all time you know I mean they should find this on the rosetta stone from our century the this is a classic email that that is describing this woman's angst about her situation and she even she's even used our term that I invented this team dynamic actually was invented by my good friend Larry Gatlin listening to me talk about the steam processes the this is this is a of one of these really hard situations to be to be very fair and not to be I'm just laughing at the at the stereotypic nature of it not it not at the people involved the people that are involved are are in a difficult set of circumstances and there will be different difficult choices and processes in their future this is this young lady is walking on eggshells and she is clearly what I do for folks when they're in front of me is I draw a bell curve that I call the dynamics of desire and the dynamics of desire is a bell curve of the dynamics in men and women relationships and you could you could probably draw it for same-sex relationships as well but the point is that just for the standpoint of simplicity and and basic biological theory I want you to think of it as a heterosexual a bell curve that within it holds all sexual die sexual relationships that take place between men and women on the left side of the bell curve you want to call those male massively superior on the right side of the bell curve you're going to say female massively superior when when then when we go a little bit from the left we go towards the middle to some degree say one quarter of the way across the graph we're going to call that male somewhat superior dead center in the middle of the graph we're going to call it an even deal and which is usually incidentally the female slightly superior when we go to the right of that we're going to put female substantially superior and then all the way to the far end of the bell curve where there's only a few relationships taking place is where the female is massively superior now the the and the far left side of the graph this is going to be what we're going to call the he-man strategy so this is where the the males are massively superior to the females in terms of their heterosexual cachet and what's going to happen is that the females are going to be chasing the males this is you know the the beer commercial they did with Brad Pitt you know 15 years ago where he was at some party and people saw him and then everybody's following him then he has to go through something and he goes out the back door he just walked along the street by himself mr. cool all by himself because he didn't want the hundred and seventy five females that were trying to chase him down okay because he was just so awesome that is the he-man strategy so the he-man strategy means that the male is not committing anything they're not interested in committing anything they don't even want to know your name all they want to do is make a sperm deposit and move on okay so that's the he-man strategy that's throwing hotel keys to Elvis onto the stage that's what that is now not very much human mating takes place under those circumstances but there's a little bit of it under the bell curve a few percent of meetings are taking place behind that as we move across the bell curve we move up to the right and to where now we're still on the left side of the bell curve this is females or the males somewhat superior underneath this we're going to call this the casual mating strategy and so this is the male not wanting to commit basically provisioning the female with some resources but not a lot of resources typically not a lot of resources relative to what it is that he has or could and he's definitely not interested in committing in long term because he feels like he is a better genetic deal than the female and so this is this is where this relationship is everything about what this woman is describing is in the casual mating strategy now the fact that they've been together for a while and that they're dating exclusively and maybe living together I don't know what they're doing but the point is is that we may be pretty close to the middle of the graph which is a true love strategy where it's a very even trade but this is clearly not an even trade he is not interested in committing which is a standard behavior for males who feel like that they can get a better deal he he is not interested in having a discussion about it he feels that such discussions are quote abusive which is incredible he never talks about the future which the whole point to a female mating selection choice here if she's not chasing a he-man the whole point is to be trying to secure resources protection and provision for her future possible offspring now if she's saying we'll wait a second up I have no intention of having children so what your nervous system was sculpted in the Stone Age with neural circuits that are absolutely thinking exactly the same way just like every female ancestor you ever had and so as a result the female is designed by nature to be reading cues of males as to how into them they are how concerned about the female psychology are they how reassuring does the male have to be in order to have the female be happy and the female and the male is trying to read those cues and signal them now it is true that once males become very comfortable in relationships that they've secured their mate they dial down the amount of energy that they are there they're going to use to express this the level of their interest and so it's sometimes hard to get a guy to cough up and I love you out of them you know sometimes etcetera particularly heavily testosterone as males that don't have a lot of soft edges it's not easy to get that kind of talk out of me by the way ah lower testosterone levels make you a lot nicer in fact I love you too doctor oh yeah here you go in fact you know people don't know actually a requirement of getting into clinical psychology school as a male you know females can just get in because they're basically naturally psychologists but males actually they will they will check your testosterone levels and they want to make sure that they're sufficiently low and they will also do a physical exam because they you're only you know should only be people that have one gonad know that did allowed in I thought you were serious about race and I was like wait they really do blood tests do you so anyway I was explaining this to two to one of my clients one point in a relationship where the male was very dominant and the female was frustrated with his lack of sensitivity explained that he it'd be more like me again because you know and psychologists said just one gonad and he said god I've got three [Laughter] that wound up being an all-time therapy moment for all of us so point here is that this guy is is seeing this woman as less than than he is and he's behaving in exactly this way and he is absolutely willing to to enjoy her company and her sexuality during the absolute prime years of her optimum physical attractiveness here at 27 and he is absolutely planning to plow that field for as long as it's available and then he's absolutely looking to wait until he gets more secure in his professional career is kind of amass more resources get greater displays and then trade up I don't think there's really much doubt about it and so this is not a guy that feels like this woman is his destination mmm this is a this is a woman who is in love with this guy and she definitely loves more than he does and she's in trouble so yeah if you're listening to this I I really can't see I mean what you're describing is such a a perfectly integrated and honest description of what it is that we would expect all of these things are hanging together and I would say that you got a lot of thinking to do you're 27 years old so you've got you got plenty of time you can burn some more time on this thing you can see if it turns around you can drag into counseling with some therapist with some you know an Afghan you know on her couch and a knitting needle and you can talk about how your communication needs to get nicer and better and how he needs to say sweet things but I'm telling you right now these signals are leaking all over the place and so take take a hard look at that over the months to come and and realize that you are designed by nature to seek situations where that male is consistently and repetitively flooding you with evidence that you are it okay you are the one you are it and he has no interest in in not talking about the future he wants to talk about the future that that's where you that's where you need to be to optimize your happiness okay interesting all right yeah that's interesting that you said this is regardless of whether or not a woman consciously wants and doesn't want to have kids as she's designed by anchor to get this and she won't be happy unless she does yes absolutely you're not an excellent all right so we have a no that one all no well I'm I'm gonna add one more thing to this the this is just just an additional indictment of this relationship I want you to realize that we are already in trouble in the modern environment with children marriages etc as for reasons I've talked about on other podcasts that the relationships that were designed to have is we're basically got a five-year chip and we're trying to make a 50-year decision this is an enormous pressure on on relationships and and it's a you know it we are set up for struggles demoralizing compromises and quite a lot of people limping through this life with a fair amount of romantic unhappiness in in the Stone Age it isn't like everything was wonderful but they had some things better than we had they not everything they had closer knit communities which was nice and fortunately it was those close knit communities was you couldn't you couldn't change when you had a jerk in there and you couldn't you couldn't bail out of a situation where you've been humiliated they really remembered it forever but one of the things that they had was that they weren't expecting people to be lifetime partners for 15 20 25 years that was not the expectation it might be when in psychology we were looking for a guide that listed them so much that you would stick around for a few years in provision offspring but they're not figuring that they're going to stick around 15 or 20 years so we now are actually trying to make extraordinarily long-term decisions with nervous systems but we're not built to be making decisions that long wrench and and so I would say that if you're going to be making these enormous ly big decisions particularly young and life like this that you had better these situations better be awfully good they better be really superior before we sign on that dotted one okay and because these have enormous long-term implications for people more so than they did in the Stone Age and so a situation like this that is not ringing true the female feels over awarded therefore she's in love door so we she wants to hold on to this relationship because she feels over rewarded and now via that that situation is very enticing for her and it's keeping her there yeah but this is aid this is a problematic set of circumstances and it has the earmarks of you know even if she is successful in running the sky to earth that he's not as successful as he expects to become and therefore you know five years from now he relents and marries her and now you know with her biological clock ticking if he had that much conscience that he was going to do that he might not want to do it but do it anyway and this is no prize for her to have this happen so you need to be in very good circumstances you don't need mediocore psychological circumstances no matter how fancy the frosting may be on that cake alright let's go on to the next question okay next question is actually from a different different perspective from the male's perspective and this is not these are not listeners that are that are in the same relationship this is just a different question altogether okay right dear dr. Lisle I've been listening to one of the previous podcasts number 25 what she says versus what she means and in that podcast the woman says something like oh my God look how often this guy's texting me he's such a creep and what she really means is guys still find me attractive look how fancy I am and dr. Lisle you went on to give three wonderful explanation as to why she might say this the first is that she's signaling to her partner that other guys find her attractive which would make her partner see her as more you also touched on the notion that she could be trying to hit some jealousy circuits the question is is this really a good strategy to use because from what I've read females are more attractive when they're alone in a picture versus when another male is in the picture with them and arguably a woman courted by more males is perceived as less appealing and would be potentially more problematic to attain with the level of attractiveness not being in the equation in my particular situation I feel like dumping a female who keeps mentioning her male friends and even exes excessively throughout our one-year pair bond until finally her quote/unquote games were reaching their limits I believe she felt over rewarded in our relationship and she wanted to signal to me that she's a hot commodity in the marketplace but it just got to a point where enough was enough so my question is is a female strategy of talking about her other suitors or ex suitors to her current pair-bonded male actually a viable method to increase esteem signaling from him a very good question and this guy's got it all analyzed correctly the the question on the table is is it a good strategy and the answer would be this it's a strategy and so the this clearly an evolved strategy inside of both males and females so the idea this is this is I've talked about this previously this is what I call the fish trick that the fish will even do this this is the notion of that that other members of the species are signaling value by their choices that they're making and so therefore we try to - we try to indicate that other people are finding us very appealing etc this is the idea held books do this New York Times bestseller well who the hell cares what does that mean about am I supposed to think that that means that this is a great book well that's exactly what it's supposed to mean it's supposed to mean that a couple of hundred thousand people thought this was a good book so you'll probably think it's a good book too so this is this is a standard marketing process that goes out throughout the animal kingdom this is being used and so yeah this is a strategy that females were used and you can see that it's got its limits and it also you can see that also act that it's not going to work very well most marketing strategies are going to have a little bit of leverage in them but usually not a lot of leverage so a little bit of leverage obviously if we if we try to push too hard about how great the new tide is pretty soon everybody's thinking you know come on this is the 17th time I've seen the new tide like how much better and new and improved can it get so you can try to to use these strategies and people do and animals do but it's not going to really enhance your other gene displays that much and so it wasn't enough in this guy's case to to make this girl think that excuse me to make him think that this girl was hot stuff he analyzed how hot she was by looking over the goods real carefully and knowing what he had had before comparing what he'd had before and what he thought he could get versus what it is that he had ran that differential equation and then figures out you know what it is that he feels that's uh that's what he was doing and her gamesmanship might have helped her get a little bit of leverage of times to create some anxiety but not much and so that's about what you would expect you know I mean you can you can only you can only frost it so much and and make it you could only make something a little bit fancier by some fancy marketing not a lot fancier and so it is a strategy but it's not a strategy that's going to have that much push in it so yeah I know why that work that way yeah you can go ahead will some of the guys all the time and all the guys some of the time but you can't fool all the guys all the time set beautiful you got it that's exactly what's happening there all right so we're going to turn the ship a little bit we got one more time for one more probably more if you the one about yeah we'll do the one of my binge eating and then we can leave catfishing for next week all right so well before we get to this question actually this is this is a question that's most likely from from a person that dr. Lisle you and I know pretty well this is a chef AJ she is a plant-based chef and we've known her how long have you known her probably a lot longer than I have there were great great information she's been through a heck of a journey with with her her on health and so always really appreciate questions that are coming from people that she's introduced to the podcast sure alright so dear dr. Lyle I have questions and this is not from chef AJ this is from living like from one of her her okay drew daughter Lyle I have a question about I'm sorry yeah go right ahead oh okay go ahead dr. Lyle I have a question about binge eating I understand that process food with sugar oil and salt can lead to this but I seem to be having more of an issue than I did before since I adopted a plant-based diet three years ago and I know it seems to be driven to I know I seem to be driven to eat more food and these are foods I never would consider overeating the past but I'd like to beat my genes and find a way around this food nightmare at least with the plant-based diet I can likely stay fairly healthy overeating a bit but I'd like to tame this and be able to use food as fuel without the stress of overeating this does not allow for eating pleasure when you feel compelled to binge but it just makes me worried and stressed about food why do i binge eat okay hmm well alright we're going to we're going to take this on and it's going to be means it's a little bit of a long show but we'll just have to choke it down for anybody that's still listening the there would be many different angles by which people could analyze the problems of binge eating this is my take on it sort of at this point in my career and my career's going to be a little different than other people that have looked at the problem because they're sometimes they're looking at the problem you know from their own perspective and that perspective and experience is going to be different than mine now my perspective looks like this binge-eating it looks to me to be a binge eating and consistent overeating that takes place a lot of times in the evenings for people this looks to be a result of a few different factors that that now have triangulated on humanity and let's look at what they are and how it is that they work so one of the things that that I believe to be the case is that I believe that our ancestors ate a fair amount of meat and meat would have been you know about 800 calories a pound I'm not saying I think it's a great idea to eat it that's not the point here the point here is that I you know it's no question this was a major part of human natural history and so the other plant food that people would have eaten most of it would have been 500 calories a pound or less so would have been vegetables fruit and tubers particularly buried in the ground in Africa which we eventually use fire to be able to break down the starches and utilize so those tubers typically would have been 3 to 400 calories a pound or so so this is so most of the material human beings would have eaten would have been south of 500 cows a pound it appears that they used some honey might have been 5 or 10 percent of their calories maybe that's you know 1800 calories a pound but relatively rare probably significantly responsible for human sweet tooth and they would add some nuts and seeds up there at 2500 calories a pound but pretty rare so the most consistent high-density food that human beings would get that would be very valuable would have been meat now meat from our evaluation of hunter-gatherer tribes today 175 of them that have been under investigation they don't eat large amounts of meat they eat some of it and obviously it's different around the globe depending upon situations but one of the things that we have seen is that very often they might not you might not have meat for several days and then they get some and it's divided up among the tribe it's not a lot and then once in a while they make a big killing and maybe once a month and so maybe you get a big killing and when you get a big killing what what is worth doing is that that animal is going to rot and so what people will do is that they will eat past satiety of their normal association mechanisms so this is going to be what I call the cramming instinct or the crammed circuit now you're not going to find this probably in a koala bear these eucalyptus leaves because all the eucalyptus leaves are the same but in a human that's an omnivore that has high variance in the amount of calorie density of the food you've got lettuce on the one hand 100 calories a pound you've got nuts on the other 2500 there's a 25 to 1 ratio of the calorie density of the food so you better believe that there should be a cram circuit in there that if you get the very rich calories which are going to be relatively rare if you get you access to a large amount of them in abundance you should cram and human beings definitely would have had this happen repeatedly so it makes sense to have an instinct that would cram when the rich food was available now so now we get people that are eating you know really healthy vegan diets and they're 500 calories a pound of food you know at less is dominating the landscape and then what's going to happen is there's some other food they're not eating eight hundred calorie pound meat but there's some food in the refrigerator that is vegan food and they think it's healthy and it's like nut butter on whole-wheat bread okay fine pretty good biochemically not a problem but if they eat this that's about 2,000 calories a pound so it's more than twice the caloric density of the meat which would have been the main resource that would have even caused the evolution of the cramming circuit so you're going to have a situation where people have nightly access to something that they would have only had access to once a month which is high high amount of high-density calories now we're going to add to this something else and that is that a hundred years ago more than a hundred years ago Russian physiologist by the name of the in Pavlov was struggling with a problem he was ironically investigating and so he was having a problem that he wanted to look at the salivary glands and how they worked but he couldn't actually look at that because by the time he opened the dog's mouth the dogs were already salivating and I was frustrating the living daylights out of Pavlov and so he realized that that it was him because he fed the dogs they associated him with food and so by the time he got there they'd already thinking that they were going to get fed by him and so they were already salivating so what he did next was he tried to sneak in up sneak up on the dogs but the dogs were always noticing him they could tell they could tell he was coming they could hear him so it didn't work so one day he gets the idea that what he's going to do is he's going to he's realized the dogs are quote associated with him were conditioned themselves to him with the food so he decided to see if he could conditioned them to something else instead of him so when he fed them he hit a bell and he did this over and over again and it turns out then he could hang out in the lab he could look in their mouths look at the salivary process because they were only going to start salivating when he rang the bell so he he discovers classical conditioning and for this he wins the Nobel Prize in medicine and now the what happens next so we notice a couple of things now that we have something that happens over and over again that's going to be important to the organism like eating if we do it over and over again what will happen is the system will actually have a response ready so that the organism is getting ready for the food and so that's a that's a set of what he calls reflexes etc okay and we can see that you can condition those to be released not by the food itself that you can condition it to something else associated with the food consistently in this case the bell or Pavlov himself so this is classical conditioning and he notices many other things about this he notices that if he stops ringing the bell or excuse me if he rings the bell and does not give them food then eventually after he does this for a while they will go down on what's called an extinction curve and eventually when he rings the bell they will not be celebrating anymore because so that's interesting now the third thing he notices is that in the process even when they're under extinction and so he's rang the bell 50 times and he hasn't fed them and now they're no longer salivating to the Bell that once in a while for no reason he's just walking around the lab and then suddenly a dog starts salivating like crazy that's called spontaneous recovery once in a blue moon that's just going to happen okay if it turns out that you were to feed dog then at spontaneous recovery you reinforce that spontaneous recovery and now you put the dog in the middle of an extinction curve it's no longer at the bottom of the extinction curve so let's suppose it took you know 50 trials to extinguish the the conditioned response you if you reinforced at a spontaneous recovery you might go back to trial 25 okay so now we're going to fast forward 80 years and we're going to come to the 1980s and many brilliant minds have spent time in the lab learning about conditioning process and one of those brilliant minds comes along and his name is Shepard Siegel is it McMasters university in Canada and Siegel is puzzled about a particular issue and that particular issue is heroin overdoses and so he learns that people that overdose from heroin apparently have low amounts of heroin in their bloodstream which is a total mystery and nobody really cares or understands it but Siegel was very interested in this and the more he thought about it he thought about Pavlov and he thought that maybe Pavlovian conditioning was the answer to this mystery so this is what Siegel was thinking if you give an animal or human a human drug heroin it's a fantastically disruptive chemical and the system knows that it's disruptive and if you if you do it a second time it will start to learn what on earth is responsible for this and it will associate environmental cue is with what's going on like maybe a needle and a little spoon and all this sort of jobs and so as a result what it will do is it will put Mount up a defense it will activate a defense what we're going to call a compensatory response to defend itself against this now this is exactly again to Pavlov's dogs that are salivating and getting ready for the food but nobody was thinking about this in terms of a compensatory response they just thought well it's dog food reflux etc but Seagal is thinking no it's a compensatory response it's basically the organism is trying to get back to homeostasis as fast as it can and if you give it a drug it gets whacked out of homeostasis and now if we give it a second time that animal gets ready and so what Siegel was thinking was that if you would repeatedly give an animal like a human heroin then it would it would condition compensatory responses to get ready for it but if you condition it in a specific area like under certain light or under certain environmental conditions a certain room and then you surprise the organism by giving it the heroin in a place that it wasn't used to then it wouldn't have had time to activate a compensatory response and you could overdose and die this is what Siegel hypothesized and then he ran the experiment and he proved that that is exactly what's happening so this is very likely what happened to people like River Phoenix and other people that they took the drug in unusual locations and they did not activate their compensatory condition response so now something else that Siegel realizes and that is that if you act if you let's suppose you're a cigarette addict and you've got cigarettes you got a cigarette you know packet and you're about ready to smoke and you are feeling the condition compensatory response ie the defense against the nicotine it starts to rise up into the system and then you fish around for cigarette and you don't have a cigarette the condition convinced story response is very agitating and uncomfortable and ladies and gentlemen that is what we call craving craving is a conditioned compensatory response it is the defense of the nervous system against what is going to happen to it that is a significant stressor that's going to knock it out of homeostasis so when you don't get a cigarette and you expect to get one you have craving and then if you get one then the relief for the craving is is is very important it's a very satisfying event for the system as the the the nicotine versus the conditioned compensatory response neutralized each other and it's a relief okay now so now we see an interesting problem that we have a human being that was not designed to be crowning itself with rich food repetitively but in the modern environment it can and so a lot of times will happen and as people might even need to help the healthy meals all day long and they'll eat a healthy dinner and they're really determined to lose weight and not have an eating problem and just be at peace but the problem is is that they've got a cram circuit that says we'll wait a second is there any rich food around this house is there anything in here is there any peanut butter nut butter almond butter handful of nuts a handful of bread toast you know what I mean so ice cream whatever it is cheese sandwich is there any rich food that your big words I'm ramming in sorry about that now it's going to turn out that they very often will repetitively cram and when you repetitively cram what are we going to get we're going to get a conditioned compensatory response and so now what's going to happen is that there are 15 pounds overweight struggling and they think they're doing really well and they are doing quite well they're working hard at this but the problem is is that if they try to be a good girl or a good boy and not eat after dinner tonight the problem is is that they're very likely to have a conditioned compensatory response and that response is waiting for the four or five hundred calories of rich food that they're about to eat and if they don't eat it they're going to have intense cravings and they're going to be having cravings even though they're not hungry okay now they very likely will honor those cravings which means they reinforce the process and they do the same thing the next night the next 700 nights in a row now if they do not do this if they understand what they're up against and they stop it then what will happen is is that the first night that they do this will be the toughest night that there is because the conditioning paradigm is strongest the second night will be the second toughest night and the third night will be the third toughest night and it will go down in a decay function a concave decay function like you see in any learning theory now the problem is is that 20 days later 21 days later 14 days later they can be down to extinction so now they're out of the woods if they will do this consistently but if they do it for four nights in a row and then the fifth night they hit a craving and they say oh what the heck I've been good and then they reinforced it guess what happens back up higher on the learning curve if they go 15 days and there are basically at extinction they could easily have a spontaneous recovery and suddenly they got a big craving and then if they go hit that craving and reinforce it boom they're back up the learning curve okay so this is what I believe to be the actual underpinnings of this problem and this makes this problem very difficult particularly mysterious and very confusing for people to deal with but if we understand it if we actually understand that what's happening here is this this is independent of the other problems that I talked about with the ego trap which is a whole different issue that also is integrated into this mess but the pleasure trap which is the supernormal nature of the stimuli means that just like heroin is very easily learned okay so the richness of the food is richer than the food and you would have gotten in your natural history so the organism is designed by nature to learn of its importance it's designed by nature to anticipate and remember this and it's designed my nature to not want to go through an extinction curve of not getting it in a very interesting study that was done in in about two thousand nine or ten something I don't know where this was done I'd forgotten what they did was they gave rats unlimited access to rich food fare and of course that rat ate like crazy and they got fat in a month but the next thing they did was interesting they then took away that food and they gave rats their normal healthy rat chow it turned out that the average rat did not eat for 14 days they just completely went on strike okay you can imagine these little rat paws basically flipping the bird to the experimenters like no I'm not eating that food okay well what is really happening here is that those rats are anticipating strongly this highly reinforcing stimulus and they're basically saying no I'm not going to waste my time digesting this one I think there's a good chance that I'm going to get food that's three times as calorically dense so that's that's how ruthless the situation can be and that's what a lot of people are up against with binging types of problems and so understanding that what's sitting under here is a cram circuit consistent food consistently rich food and a conditioning paradigm that is that is very slippery and will very easily spontaneously recover and then be reinforced if we're not careful this is quite a task but once you understand the components and you know exactly what to do it makes it much much more able for people to manage that to get out of this trap well that is alright fast explanation of cravings I've ever heard it just it just kind of put a lot of things in perspective yeah it's actually fascinating to learn about what's what's been learned in conditioning theory so for example if you have a person that works in a meat locker or on a fort storage locker you know cold cold refrigerator and every nine o'clock in the morning they're going to go there and go in the refrigerator and going to be in there for a couple hours it turns out if you go there and you expect to go in that refrigerator and you don't they say oh the refrigerators being repaired or something the person will get hot okay so there's a compensatory distress pot yeah okay the same thing will happen with the immune system okay so you can classically conditioned the immune system you can classically conditioned temperature regulation you can classically conditioned food and you can absolutely classically conditioned rich food in a crammed circuit and so that's a that that's what we're up against and so we have to you know knowing what we're up against knowing the day one is the hardest day day 3 is the third hardest day day ten is a hell of a lot easier than day one knowing that you can you can extinguish your way out of this because every single learning process can be counter conditioned there isn't one that cannot be counter conditioned they all go through an extinction curve knowing that the extinction curve will work in your favor is one of the most important insights that a person can bring to this problem and then what it what about understanding this process but being say in an environment where as they your spouse isn't on the same page as you they keep all these treats around the house where you can't exactly leave it well they've been it's welcome to my world okay so I had people talking to me from all over the place that are struggling with this and they they're beating themselves up for their own quote lack of willpower but they have no idea the amount of forces that are out to get them and how strong all the instincts are moving to to sort of keep them in the trap that's why I wrote the book the pleasure trap to tell the story and to explain to people that no you aren't you aren't self indulgent in empathetic and need you know so I call it the psychobabble to talk you out of this no what you are is you're an animal that's trapped in a very very interesting web of trouble and you we need to think our way out and understand how to get out and there's an awful lot of moves that sometimes need to be instructed
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