Home 🏠 🔎 Search


Bad Transcripts
for the
Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Gustavo Tolosa: QA Session with Dr Doug Lisle Can you oversleep Binging, Ego Trap, Craving and much more
an auto-generated transcript


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


welcome everyone I am Gustavo tolosa and I'm the webinar host for dr. mcdougal Thursday's series of webinars and today as usual on the second Thursday of each month we have our very special guest dr. Doug laia and we're very excited I see everyone logging in please tell us where you're coming from I can already see that and always glad to see you I'm glad to be back in country I was in Argentina for five weeks and I arrived today so welcome everyone I'm very happy to be back and I want to welcome dr. Lyle how are you doing that's fine yeah okay well you're gonna have to get some sleep right after telling dr. Lyle is thirty three hours without sleep so but I'm doing fine dr. Lyles how are you doing good good I was well there now next week it is it yes and this next week there is the attend a immersion program writes for the mcdougal I think we start at the end of next week yeah next and not yes not this Friday by the follow me okay and of course you always give several lectures very good well I look forward to seeing you then this time I can actually make it so today we have some questions that people have turned in would you like to just jump in okay and everyone please feel free I try to give a little bit of priority to people that have emailed the questions because of course they took the time to do it and you can always do it by emailing it to webinar at dr. mcdougal calm but please feel free to put to write questions in the chat box and we'll do the best to cover as many as possible so dr. Lyle I'm going to put you it here on the big screen and I will turn off my camera and I'll just read the questions as we go a lot so here's the first one dr. Lisle would you say that it is best to keep your goals to yourself or to tell other people about them on the one side it seems that telling others about self-improvement goals may help to keep a person accountable however there seems to be evidence that the neural chemistry of the brain can give similar rewards to having actually achieved the goal when reality we have it yet so when we discuss goals with others we may be tricking our brain and impeding progress what is your take on this issue well somebody's looked into it probably a little deeper than I have it sounds like I actually think that in general it's a good idea to keep them pretty private the I think the most important issue is that the goals that we set in principle are not goals for outcomes we set goals for process so what we what I mean by this is that the goal is we should be setting or what I call mini goals for miniature goals they're the goals that we're actually going to do every day so we don't set a goal of losing 50 pounds we've set a goal of eating three starts meals a salad and some fruit and getting some exercise okay so that's what I call the starch targets so we and we try to hit eighty percent of those for example in a week so we have six goals a day if that's how we will set it times seven days a week we've got 42 miniature goals and the goal is to try to hit 80% in a week now that's a goal that we are in complete control of you are not in control of whether or not you actually lose 50 pounds to the next year that's outside of your control but the goal is we want to set our goals that are within your control and that's that's how I look at this and whether we share them with other people or not is not the important thing the notion of sharing goals with other people to pressure ourselves and doing things I think is not a good idea we may share goals with people that are close to us that we show them or we may explain them kind of what it is that we're up to if they're obviously close to us but the notion of trying to embarrass ourselves into self-discipline I think is not a good idea I think you're better off instead setting little miniature goals having a little check sheet or some kind of a a grid where you watch your own progress at what you've achieved in terms of those goals rather than what we've achieved in terms of outcomes so this is process versus outcome and I think that's a very much a key towards essentially stoking the self-esteem mechanism which is paying attention to not how much you achieve that how diligently you act and so you don't you don't need to achieve great things but you do need to have a reputation with yourself that you have built over doing a good diligent job a good solid job when you do that your internal audience basically will will pat you on the back and encourage you and give you a good self-esteem wind at your back and that that is more what we're after than trying to chase an outcome dr. Lyle there is a question here and someone asking I don't know who Robert Wright is but dr. Lyle any comments on Robert Wright's new book yeah Robert Wright is written a new book I think it's about mindfulness meditation the utility of that practice with respect to human happiness Robert Wright is a very intelligent guy very thoughtful a really deep thinker this is not an area that I know a lot about I think I think it's easy enough to apparently this has been a very good thing for mr. Wright himself and many people that practice daily meditation or do meditation often will report a lot of benefits for themselves this I think sometimes leads to an ego centric bias that this would be a great thing for everybody I have a I have an intuition about this after talking with many people about this and that is that I think that people that are extremely conscientious and maybe get maybe very obsessive about doing things very perfectly and essentially take on a lot of pressure from from the world and its demands those people may benefit more than some of the rest of us I'm not that conscientious so quite frankly I don't carry a lot of stress so the notion of mindfulness meditation you know what I've certainly tried this sort of thing it doesn't it's no great benefit to me that doesn't mean that it might not be great benefit to someone else so I think it's an individual issue and if people are feel some stress and stressful discontent in their lives and they are people that in particular carry a lot of that kind of tension then that that may be a very useful thing to try and they may benefit very good thank you another question that was emailed to us says I would like to ask the pralaya if over sleeping or sleeping in general would or could be considered a part of the pleasure trap it is easy for me to get caught in cycles where I oversleep and then all I want to do or all I think about is going back to sleep a lot of the time I consider having to wake up and get going in the morning the worst part of my day perhaps my waking life is just unfulfilled yeah I don't think so I don't think that human beings can over sleep so I think that actually I'm quite confident of that so you could oversleep in principle if you drugged yourself to sleep that if you are sleeping a great deal there's reasons for that and that there's biological reasons that are allowing that to happen you can sleep is essentially think about sleep sort of like a on there you can think of it as a gas tank or gauge a gauge on your gas tank that you can be full if you're full of sleep then you you have what we don't have any of what we're going to call sleep debt sleep debt is what happens as soon as you awaken in the morning even if you're fully rested you start to essentially go into debt with respect to your sleep what you're actually doing is as you're as you're waking processes go through the day your neurons are firing and you are robbed you're actually creating debris metabolic debris in the brain and so the brain is getting polluted now don't be alarmed by this the same thing is happening you know you know if you pick up an apple and you wiggle your arm a little bit you're polluting the muscles in your arm just a little bit it's perfectly capable of sweeping this up and cleaning it up but this is what's happening so the brain is getting a little bit more polluted with every minute that passes during the day and then finally there will come a time when you become very sleepy and that's telling you the brain is very polluted and when you sleep you then start the cleanup process and you're designed to sleep unless you are disturbed you are designed to sleep until that cleanup process has been completed when that process is completed you will wake up and you won't have a choice as to whether you wake up there's no way that you can go back to sleep if you're fully sleep satiated so if you if you wake up and then you feel sleepy and then you go back to sleep that's because the cleanup process was not completed on now you can function with a lot of sleep debt obviously so 10 hours into your day you've got a lot of sleep debt in your functioning fund you can also have only partially paid back your sleep debt so as you as you go to bed at night let's suppose you stay up till 2:00 and you get up at 6:00 at that point you are carrying sleep debt into the next day you're tired and sluggish and you will not be as sharp cognitively and you will want to go to sleep that's because the system is basically telling you if there's nothing really important to do that we must attend to one of the most valuable things we could do would be to sleep okay and to clean up the brain so that's that's what's going on so there I don't believe that you could sleep too much this is a slight disagreement between dr. MacDougall and I he has pointed out that the push to get people to sleep more is often being in the press is often motivated by drug companies that are trying to get you to take sleep medications he's absolutely right about that so on that we have no dispute the when people are sleeping a great deal it's very often the case that they're under some significant psychological stress that the brain is working very hard and it's tired and it's it's grinding on some very Titanic problems for that individual there's large choices important things to deal with or they may have experienced significant losses of some kind so they may be depressed and the system is take you know essentially going through a process of reorganization a lot of data and therefore there's a there's a lot of debris and a lot of struggle so the in the final analysis one of the things I'm hearing that could be true is that the person might not be going to bed on time and they might be sleeping late and they might even be waking up and sleep debt and then wanting to sleep some more the for people to be out of phase with a normal sleep cycle is pretty normal today this all started with Thomas Edison so for a hundred years now we've had you know in the early days there's only people that could afford the electric lights which were expensive but now electric light is is unbelievably cheap it's like 150 thousand the cost that it was the light was 150 years ago so light is now cheap and there's computer screens with all kinds of interesting things on them and people essentially by exposing themselves to bright lights into the night time they block the melatonin production which is which is necessary for you to fall asleep and so as a result people are staying awake longer and then they are not getting long good quality you know sleep cycles they wake up the next morning tired and all the thinking about out the day is getting more sleep than these coffee etc so we get some get some cycles there but sleep itself is not a pleasure drop and so no be I don't believe that this is a problem dr. Lisle I've heard before people say I need to catch up on my sleep so is it really possible to catch up on sleep or the hours that you lost a lot no it is possible to catch up so you're you're essentially talking about a brain that is has debris that it's that it's tired and it's exhausted and as a result it needs to clean up so there are people that live their whole lives and sleep debt that they essentially stimulate their way through their life with caffeine and cigarettes for example very common so you can you can Adrenaline's a brain with stimulants and you can keep pushing it and then when people go to sleep they only partially recover it's like saying you know there's somebody's house that's just never clean it you know every once in a while they make it they make a half-hour effort and they pick up some stuff but there's still smoke cat food you know at that corner so you know and yet you could also see people's houses that are immaculate that's what that's what happens to people mentally when they have very regular sleep cycles and they're sleeping to satiation repetitively then they are they are fully alert in and maximally capable cognitively and they will feel as good as they can feel given other other parameters yeah so you you can definitely be short of sleep and you can definitely catch up I had a Silicon Valley executive who was was the head of a startup company that for two years they burned their way through their their venture capital so they were everybody was working unbelievable hours because they desperate to try to win the big prize and get rich and it didn't work as most of them dumped so they were you know extraordinary hours everybody was pushing hard as if they were in warfare and then finally it was about sometime in December it was probably about the year 2002 the whole thing went bust and they had to close it up and he was number one depressed and number two exhausted and I told him just keep sleeping walking eating decent sleep take a little exercise not much at cetera he did this and he continued to be fatigued and not in very good shape until April and one day he called me up and he said I'm done I'm caught up I caught up last Friday I could I woke up for the first time in four months and I actually felt good neck up fully rested he says I wasn't sure until three more days went by and now it's clear I'm caught up so it took this guy for months to catch up his sleep debt before he felt normal again so yes I kept your sleep so would you say that the ideal situation would be that we would go to bed and then sleep until we're done and so the body tells let's not put a alarm clock and have to get up that would be the ideal just like every other creature in the history right right okay so yes human beings definitely have engineered an unnatural situation with respect to their sleep and they are paying modest but not trivial prices as a result of this so when you don't sleep as much as you want you do not feel as energetic you don't feel like exercising when you don't exercise you have you're carrying more stress carrying more stress you think you should do mindful meditation but maybe during that mindful meditation you fall asleep we saw the problem that's right okay so look I'll get our that's very good someone is asking here and the live chat should sick people I guess she means people that are going at some kind of health condition sleep more it they probably will in other words you you're not you're not trying to sleep you just do so you try to remove barriers to sleep so you will if you need sleep you will naturally sleep but you can put you can put stimuli whether it's noise or light you know jangling phones somebody cooking food where you can smell it cats pawing at your eyeballs there are there's all kinds of things that can disturb your ability to sleep but if you need to sleep you can as long as you remove those impediments and so yeah you don't need to try to do this what we need to do is have a nice quiet safe temperature comfortable place we're in the dark and if we have that and you and you are there and lying comfortably you will naturally fall asleep if the mind needs to do so right another person here says do you have any suggestions on how to deal with others around you who think that you're now too thin after you have been on a whole food plant-based diet after over a year my weight is sin within normal range but those who have expressed concern are overweight right right what you would do I would probably in the spirit of being very non-confrontational with people I would probably say that that you know that my doctor says it's fine for now and but that if I if I lose much more then we're going to need to look at some things a little more carefully but but my blood and all my health parameters actually look good so it looks and my doctor says it's fine blame the doctor and that it's fine but the doctor so has a little bit of concern if it goes any further and then we can maybe shut them up this is just this is one way depending on your personality and who those people are but that's about as non-confrontational as we can get there would be other answers get asked doctor another answer yes if we leave it up for a dr. Michel oh okay so dr. Lisle how can a whole food plant-based diet help with those in recovery from addictions to alcohol and other drugs well I'm not so sure that it is that helpful I think I think there is a addiction has a has its own has its own set of problems and the Whole Foods plant-based diet I don't think is directly related to it other than that possibly just reducing the hyperstimulation of the whole system the addiction whether it's addiction to process or concentrated foods or whether it's a more heavy-duty addiction to some kind of drugs or alcohol there are there are essentially there are learning patterns that the individual must go through and when they go through those patterns essentially as they walk their way across a divide that we're going to call withdrawal as they go through this and the withdrawal is is much more difficult depending upon the intensity of the stimulus that they are addicted to so if they're addicted to opiates it's going to be a much harder walk if it's cigarettes it's much easier but it is still problematic if it's Milk Duds it's still not trivial but it's obviously nothing in the same class with dealing with say an opiate or cocaine or anything like that or alcohol so it depends upon the intensity of what we're talking about of what the addiction process is that the person must actually grit their teeth and be willing to go through several days of where the body is going to fight them essentially what's happening is is that when you when you pull a a intense reward out of the out of the individual or the animals environment when you stop rewarding the animal when it's expecting to be rewarded and that reward if it's a hyper hyper reward like cocaine methamphetamine alcohol even for some people cigarettes heroin oxycodone etc anything that is a higher reward then the system fights you because the system is adapted to it and it expects to get it and in nature when an animal is adapted to getting a reward if they don't get it they are designed by nature to fight for it designed by nature to put out a lot of energy to reclaim it so this is the this is the process early in recovery that is so difficult that's why a number one is extremely hard day number two is very hard day number three is very hard day number four is very hard for many things day number five is such now suddenly not as hard okay and now day six is easier so as we go through these processes this is a phenomenon in in learning theory that we call extinction and this this is a process people have to go through so if you are trying to extinguish your addiction to cigarettes I'm not so sure that Whole Foods is a particularly important thing I don't think it's a bad thing I think it's a good thing but usually I tell people when you're in trouble you focus on the one big thing first and let's not try to do everything at once right right understand dr. Lisle when I summon here on the live chat is asking is there any data regarding diet MVPD borderline personality disorder I don't think so not not to my knowledge the borderline personality disorder at this moment in history is best treated by what's called DB T or dialectical behavior therapy which is a style of cognitive therapy that has been adapted to to the problems of folks with borderline folks with borderline the fundamental problem that borderline is just a natural emotional instability these folks are are not this is not bipolar disorder this is not some big sweeping mood disorder this is this is just a person who is when good things happen they're more excited and when bad things happen they're more devastated and when they have been treated unfairly they're very easy to get angry in other words they're just like the rest of us except they're more volatile and that makes relationships difficult and it makes it makes life more difficult and so the treatment at this point the most scientifically accepted treatment is a form of cognitive therapy that tries to mute or teach the person how to mute down some of these extreme reactions whether or not a I believe actually that healthy diet and lifestyle has been shown to be helpful with respect to bipolar disorder which is not dissimilar in some of its characteristics in other words bipolar disorder where people can become very excitable in manic and then they could become very depressed this is a genetically mediated dysfunction of mood regulation it appears that it's a very useful thing for people to have what regular sleep cycles healthy food and exercise these appear to be a very useful way of helping manage this I believe the same would definitely be true of borderline folks if we could get them to to adhere to such a program the truth is is that it's very difficult to get very Abell people do here in such a program so to take a more excitable or more volatile personality and get them to do it you know it would be good for them doesn't necessarily mean that we're ever going to be able to pull that off it does speak to the issue that if we had more natural circumstances where people had to get to sleep because there weren't any electric lights they had to exercise regularly because they had to go get their food and the only food that they get eat was whole natural food and they were a member of a village that they you know where people were around them that were they had a deep shared of shared faith deep sense of shared faith I wonder really how how wacky a typical borderline might be the answer is maybe not as volatile as we see today so unfortunately the borderline characteristics lend themselves to getting into some hot water in the modern environment that we all get into but for the water for them probably is a little hotter right right very good thank you dr. Leone here's a question from the someone who emailed us and this person says if the audience in your head is evaluating you who is the person that is telling you to give in to your binging instincts oh well the the binging instincts are are probably a derivative of the fact that we're an omnivore and that as a result of that you have to understand there's essentially three types of animals in the world there's going to be an herbivore a carnivore and an omnivore and herbivores are typically not going to cram that's because an herbivore wakes up in the morning and there's food all over the environment and their job is to just start chewing leaves and they chew those leaves all day long whereas carnivore for example for example a chimpanzee will eat for six hours a day we've actually put a clock on them then we know that they are chewing for six hours a day the carnival or alternatively definitely crayons and so when you the big cats for example will typically eat once a week so when they make a kill they cram that food in so that's a very different way of getting energy so we have this very slow regular low-density calories versus very periodic and capricious high-density calories in amounts and so you can see that these are two very different ways that that Nature has engineered animals to go about their business now the omnivore is letting the difference so nan Devore is doing evolve and so we would expect to find essentially cramming meditation sitting inside of an omnivore that when opportunity would present itself with high-density calories we would expect that there would be an instinct that would be activated that would that would encourage this behavior so I believe that this is going to be true of humans so I think that humans being an omnivore I don't think there's any doubt about that the I think that we are optimally vegans probably are pretty close to vegans but that doesn't mean that that in our natural history that was the best solution to the problem of survival the problem at survival is not the same problem as the problem of maximum longevity and maximum health in that longevity so our ancestors really weren't concerned about what we were going to be like at 82 they were concern about making it to 22 and as a result if that is your main focus and your main problem then you want to widen the palate out and include as many diverse foodstuffs as you could possibly utilize even if those foodstuffs have some problematic you know side effects so the animal food would have been something that given things would it eaten periodically and when they would have gotten their hands on them they often would have gotten them in large amounts and so as a result this is going to be what we're going to call feasting which is a you know appears to be a worldwide you know pan cultural phenomenon of human nature so once in a while human beings are used to getting into a a situation where there's a lot of rich food available and they'll cram okay now you can see the problem and that is that when you have rich food so we're not just talking about animal food now we're talking about processed plant food that is unnaturally rich you can see how did this very same instinct and omnivorous instinct would cause people to cram even though they are not meeting food in other words even after the whole point of a cram circuit is to eat more than you want even after you food situation so if you're going to put unnaturally rich foods in the environment repeatedly and have them ubiquitous you're going to have people cramming even though they're not hungry so that's not a person in our head doing that that's a that's an ancient survival instinct that is that is speaking to you and it's it's basically saying one of the smartest things we can do right now even though we are completely full and satisfied with healthy reasonable food one of the smartest things we could do to increase our likely the survival is let's just go crammed in a couple of peanut butter sandwiches okay so peanut butter sandwiches at 2,000 calories a pound are considerably richer than the meat that would have been a target of human cramming meats maybe about 800 cars a pound so we have now manufactured supernormal stimuli that would entice the cram circuit even though we're fully satiated so I think that's the fundamental issue and I think in future webinars we're going to discuss this in great detail about how this is all put together in a in a behavioral system so but this is just one one component of it but there's a behavioral system that gets gets activated and supported by this sort of pattern and so that that's I think the rid of this that's an important component of it right right well very good I think you were mentioning before we came on air that you wanted to do a few webinars on this topic that's been we're getting production riser all right right okay some another viewer right what books and/or authors would you recommend to learn more about concepts in evolutionary psychology that you reference so often and the big five aspects of personality openness to experience consciousness extraversion agreeableness the probably that the finest introduction to the whole whole field is by robert wright who we spoke spoke about earlier today he wrote a book 20-some years ago called the moral animal and it's a it's a masterpiece so it's a it's a beautiful introduction to this way of thinking about psychology this way of thinking about psychology is the notion that each kind of creature on earth has a unique body that is adapted to its psychological niche and it also has a unique type of mind that matches it so a shark has a shark's mind and a horse has a horse's mind so they don't learn to be a horse they just are and and the same thing as true humans so humans have a unique body and you need a mind to match it and so the human mind is uh is its own totally unique compilation of design design features that make up what you and I would call human nature and this is a in sharp contrast this is a very different theory then dominates and did dominate 20th century psychology which was dominated by the concept of learning theory now learning theory has much about it that is true so human beings learn a great deal and animals can learn a great deal but what learning theory missed quite frankly was they missed how much was already embedded in human nature so a cat learns where the food is and learns what the can opener sounds like and learns which owner you know is more likely to feed and learns about the features of landscape that are important for cats like it learns which cats are in the neighborhood when they come out there's there's a great deal for the cats do learn and just as humans do but there's a great deal of cats that makes them a cat that has nothing to do with anything they learn so they they purr they meow when they greet you if they know you they'll stick their tails straight up that's what I call flying friendly flag that's what they do okay they like to be scratched under the chin there they're a carnivore they like that kind of food they're not going to be interested in your grapes or your bananas so this is a great deal of what a cat is is already in the system in fact you cannot understand a cat by learning theory you have to understand that you're looking at a cat this was the the cataclysmic mistake that learning theory made and trying to understand human nature and they thought that they were just looking at a very sophisticated learning Shin that it learns to be a human and they were mistaken you know more learn to be a human than a cat learns to be a cat what you learn is you learn a tremendous amount of details about your environment so you are a 21st century human or a 20th century human you know about the landscape from that perspective as opposed to Estonian Schumann or human living in in Tudor England okay so there's a great deal that you do learn but there's a tremendous amount that you don't learn and Robert Wright's book is an outstanding introduction to a major revision in psychology and our understanding of what a human actually is and the moral animal is a is a superb superb work that introduces that he doesn't know a lot or much about personality at that time personality is is beautifully discussed by an academic psychologist Jeffrey Miller in a book called spent and so those those two books I mean there's other books that I could recommend but for most readers the moral animal is no easy task I mean it's not super difficult but and it's easy he's a very fine writer but it is it you know when I say it's an introduction I mean it's got like introduction to calculus okay this is this is pretty sophisticated and it takes you a long way in the understanding there are books that go deeper and our are more detailed than that Jeffrey Miller's book is is probably more readable than them the moral animal but it's a beautiful adjunct as it explains the importance of personality and how many of our decisions in the modern environment too are close to where we worship to where we go to school to what we study to the music that we listen to to who our friends are the cars that we drive all of these things are actually emanating from genetic individual differences inherited in personality and so his discussion of this is fascinating it's also a little wacky but that's because Miller is a little bit that way but he is he is also a brilliant man and those two books together give you a very good introduction of this perspective dr. Lisle it take maybe three more questions than men well college day life and here's one that says from an email can you please explain the ego trap yes the ego trap is a is what is my name for this motivational dilemma the ego trap is what happens when the when the person has picked up cues from their environment that other people have more confidence in them and their ability to choose something than they do themselves so let me give you an example let's suppose that you're the heavyweight champion of the world and there's a challenger that you believe by looking at the tape that you don't think that you could beat them so if you're the heavyweight champ you want to hold on to the status as long as you can sooner or later you're going to have to fight this guy but you don't want to do it so the ego trap is when you you stand to lose more status than you have to gain if the whole world thinks that you're going to beat this guy but you think they're not going to beat this guy then it's advantageous of you to procrastinate okay the same thing is true if you are a very bright young person and your parents say that you're brilliant and that you ought to be getting straight A's but you are not sure that you can get straight A's and maybe you cheated on a couple of little tests to get straight A's last time and you're not going to do it again where you got lucky or a friend helped you or some teacher gave you a break that you didn't tell anybody about just because they knew how important it was to your Ruby kit okay but the bottom line is is that you don't really expect that you're going to be able to continue to pull this off so it might be in your best interest to not try at all and just go ahead and get a bunch of C's and B's and which point your parents will be saying but you're so brilliant you could get straight A's and this is the way to make sure that you can maintain that status is to make sure that you don't try at all and they get very clear that you're not trying so this is a this is a what I call motivated self-destruction and so this is a very very curious problematic issue in human affairs and it can trap can be set not only from direct cues from the outside from your mother but those cues from the world can actually migrate their way inside your own head whereas the world is giving you cues that they think that you're brilliant you're a brilliant writer because you wrote some bestseller when you're 27 and now you're 47 and you haven't done anything in 20 years every time you sit from that computer and try to write you don't feel like doing it and that's because your internal audience is actually now taken up the cues from the outside and the internal audience is actually setting the bar too high and expects you to show it show your genius to to your internal audience as you sit down so you don't want to do it so the ego trap can be sprung from outside from directly from outside work and also migrated its way to the internal audience to whether this is what Weider's block is a writer's block is the fact that the person has too much of a reputation either with other people or with themselves that somehow this is going to be the genius is going to flow from their fingers and yet they know that it's not going to happen and so as a result they're motivated to procrastinate into fiddle okay so that is the ego trap and I watch the ego trap get sprung when we set the bar too high for people changing their diet myself and then it gets overwhelming that's why I wouldn't tell somebody that is trying to quit smoking that they should also you know exercise and eat healthy and do all these other things it's like they can start to sniff that that they're not going to be able to do it and so we can put them in the ego trap and then they kick over the table and just continue to procrastinate don't do it so the the way out of the ego trap is to get the goals very reasonable not trivial they have to require enough effort that the person actually enhances their self-respect by beginning to make the efforts but they do not need to be set high they need to just be set high enough to feel the process of making progress happiness as a mood state is a direct direct reaction to evidence of progress and so that it's important that we understand that's what will after war after moods of happiness we're not necessary to aim at sublime achievement we can all we need to do is to get started and start making progress that is our way out of the ego truck okay here it is what is a good recommendation to get past the craving for chocolate seems like the meat fried foods and cheese was not an obstacle for me quite like the chocolate has been but I assume that other people have this the opposite problem that maybe chocolate it's not a problem and maybe fried foods are I don't know but what but what do you think about this particular case chocolate is the hardest when there is because it's the number one food craving on earth notice that in nature you're never going to see in any significant concentrations you're never going to stage see sugar and fat in the same bite never going to happen okay so this is an unnatural combination of chemicals sugar and fat and salt all have unique pathways it's into the pleasure pathways so when you eat sugar and fat at the same time whether it's chocolate or ice cream something like this you are actually activating two pleasures pleasure intensity systems simultaneously in a way that it was never supposed to so of course the system gets used to this and gets conditioned to it and it doesn't want to give it up so it's the same addictive process as anything else you must go through a process of fighting for extinction the system will fight you tooth-and-nail it's not designed to give up any kind of reward so when it's been rewarded and rewarded and awarded and awarded the last thing it wants to do is to walk away you can imagine an animal that every every day at six o'clock you come and you you put some good food out for it and then you set it down there and it jumps away and then you do it again and again and again well after 100 times on 101st time you don't you come you come out there and you give it an empty bowl what do you think is going to happen what's going to happen is that that creature is going to be pretty upset this is my cat's when I'm rattling around in the kitchen in the morning and they fully expect that they're going to be getting a can of cat food soon and I get distracted and busy and Gustavo calls me on the phone and he's got some issue what is any kind of delay and I start to hear it okay and what that's what you're hearing you're hearing the the learning system of the animals say no way don't you dare pull this reward away from me and that agitating feeling is what it is that you have to go through now if I go down there ten times in a row and I fiddle around in the kitchen and I don't feed the cats in the morning and then I feed them two hours later than that that whining and crying in a setting this will be much reduced to exploiter and so it'll still be there but it'll be way less and that's exactly what will happen with chocolate so the first few days or the system is going to fight you two weeks later the system will be generating far less of that craving it'll still be there but it will be you know down 20% 25% it won't be nearly the issue this is what everybody goes through with any addiction whether it's alcohol cocaine cigarettes you know methamphetamine doesn't make any difference the same problem exists and we have to traverse that that process very good the kind of thank you now okay to finish the webinar this is a question that I have it will be so kind forgive me you're you know you're inside it has to deal with it deals with the fact that well I think everybody here in the audience knows and of course you know the trajectory of dr. Mutulu he has been practicing medicine for you know 50 years has written dozens of best-selling books he is a brilliant physician and you know one thing after another I mean he has videos and newsletters and it was extremely reputable physician yet we have several times people that I think have nerve to ask that he explains his position and and explains why this new diet that appeared yesterday of eating I don't know whatever tariffs for during the full moon why is that not as good at what he's been you know teaching us but what I mean what is why is it that some people don't take the time to read through all the extensive research and material the doctor until presents to us and they just want one explanation after another after each new diet comes in the market what would that's interesting interested me it is to me and I don't understand there are several issues and so we'll try to be the sink as I'm capable of that people that know me that's a challenge okay but one of the issues is energy conservation so somebody just wants shortcut they want to they kind of think that maybe he's white but about this and what about that and so they want to save themselves the trouble of actually doing an extensive literature review themselves second of all they may not feel confident to do that and so as a result and they may not be so they may not have enough scientific background they may not have the native intelligence to be able to make these decisions so essentially what they're doing is they're trying to find alpha so they're trying to find the leader that can that can guide them as opposed to use their own rational faculty and look at the evidence for themselves so this is what I call no independent method so they may not they may not have an independent method of figuring this out very well and so in so in fact all they're going to do is they're going to look to their friends to figure this out so we're going to look to other people see what other people have to say about this so and then going to listen and they're going to see what the group thinks now this isn't stupidity this is just partly human instinct and partly also people recognizing possibly their own limitations as well as possible laziness it's also part of individual differences in personality that can be involved in two things number one hyper conscientiousness which leads to a lot of anxiety and focusing a lot of tiny details and worrying about having making sure everything integrates perfectly but also the possibility of high openness to experience that that leads people continue to consider things that might be absurd so the on so there's many factors that they can go into people chasing their tails and of course if you're dr. mcdougal it can get pretty frustrating if you're any of these Giants it can get frustrating dr. mcdougal has a reasonable amount of patience yes he Colin Campbell has an unreasonable amount of patience so Colin Campbell is can be unbelievably accommodating to that kind of questioning so much so that I feel like I feel like screaming at him Colin just do what John does and just take a bite out of their neck and I've it done with okay so the but the truth is that like I said there's quite a few reasons why anxious or open or or not very intellectually self-confident people might be in a position where they are worrying and fussing and they also might not like the message that they might want to be looking for a shortcut somebody's got a surprise trick that's going to be the answer and so there are a whole host of reasons that go into this sort of Fiasco and that's why I don't recommend 50 books there's a few so I recommend the starch solution I recommend the the China Study and whole there's just just a handful of books that I mean even though there are quite a few good books now there's just some real standards it's like the the great music of the world there's a few but you know they just stand out and and so I just send people to those and if that doesn't satisfy them then they either didn't read too carefully they're too open for their own good and they're going to taste their tale anyway and or or they don't have the intellectual horsepower to integrate this and they are forced in their own anxiety to just keep asking questions and trying to find alpha and they'll never find it because there there isn't eight world acknowledged alpha in the skill you've got at some point use your own rational capability read what these tremendous researchers and doctors have accomplished in this in our in our little corner of the world and realize that their that their their evidence and their thinking is well integrated and we actually do know for the right thing to do right but thank you so much and I really appreciate that dr. Lyle we will see you next month on the second very girly and again appreciate your your giving us your free your time my great pleasure good to see everybody and and you get yourself some sleep yourself oh yes we're going to catch up with uh sleep and before we go I want to mention well the next week's ten day program is sold out but there is a three day intensive version of that program that is coming up soon it is listed on dr. McDougall website I would highly recommend everybody does that and also I wanted to mention because I will be there and I think I think it will be there too in Las Vegas for chef AJ's ultimate weight loss that event and I think dr. Goldhamer and many others so if anybody is interested in attending that I think chef AJ is offering up a $100 discount for that conference and we're going to have a grand time now that's going to be really easy so join us is I think the the code is Vegas 100 100 and can join us and I will be there because I will be broadcasting it live as well for those who can't go there in person right very good very good this has been a great time together and we will see all of you next week with back with dr. mcdougal and we'll see you soon dr. Lyle again back see you again thank you for joining us bye-bye
Back to the top
🏃     👖




Artist