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Gustavo Tolosa: Dr Doug Lisle, PhD The Cram Circuit - the story of binge eating and overeating
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hello and welcome everybody I don't want to say good morning or good afternoon or good even him because I know there are people logging in from all over the world so but welcome and we're very happy to see everyone logging in and I'm Gustavo Tolosa and today as every Thursday we have live with dr. mcdougal but as you know the second Thursday of each month we have our special guest dr. Doug Lyall I know that a lot of you know him and you know how wonderful his lectures are we can sit and listen to him for hours I just want to say a few words for those of you that are new here that dr. Lisle is the psychologist for the mcdougal wellness program and for True North health center both in Santa Rosa California and dr. Lyle has lecture at Stanford Cornell and other universities and is the co-author of the pleasure trap and he is also the founder of a program that is called esteem dynamics and you can visit this wonderful website at esteem dynamics org which we will type for you in the chat box and dr. Lyle has a website where you can get more information about these ideas and also you can have you can schedule phone consultations with him and that is the website is Team Dynamics org and you can also reach him directly by email at dr. Doug Lyall at yahoo.com and I will type that in the chat box so we want to welcome you dr. Lyle how are you doing today yeah very good good to see you and today we have a treat for a lot of people this is going to be the first time that they hear this this presentation and let's get going then are you are we ready I'm ready to go let's go all right very good so we're going to use this wonderful technology that we have or our fingertips and get started with the PowerPoint presentation let me make sure that is the pralaya that is set right okay here we go excellent okay folks this is called the conditioned cram and I believe that this is going to be an extremely useful idea to understand this or people that do one of two things number one binge eating I believe that this is going to be a major key to understanding binge eating disorder and also just general overeating a lot of people that become the MacDougal direction or whole natural foods direction do quite well for a lot of their day and then very often in the evening they will eat a lot of calories maybe at dinner or light after dinner in a couple two or three hours post dinner it doesn't have to work that way in that pattern but it very typically does and so a lot of people are sitting on an extra 10 20 30 even 40 pounds or whatever it is that they that they're struggling with it's not uncommon for us to hear that people might have been a hundred pounds when they started they've lost 50 or 60 pounds they're doing quite well but big stalled and one of the reasons that they stall I believe is because of what I call a condition cramp so we're going to now understand something that we have not explored before and so we're going to go on a story to get this clear so everybody knows what all this is about here these pictures but we'll go on to the next picture go ahead Gustavo send me the next slide all right so this begins with a story of the different types of animals this is obviously in Australia I don't know what big cats are on Australia there's somebody to tell me but that's a koala bear up there eating eucalyptus leaves obviously now if you're the there's three types of animals with respect to food there's going to be verbal Wars carnivores and omnivores and if you're a koala bear and you're in Irbil obviously you wake up in the eucalyptus tree and you just start eating and you are surrounded by food and that's going to be the same thing if you're some Thompson's gazelle on the African savannah you wake up in the morning and you are surrounded by food and so where many herbivores getting enough food is simply not an issue at all food is kind of almost uninteresting yet it's just everywhere and so you just get busy chomping away and chomping away and you're gonna chomp all day long that's not an uncommon situation for an overworld if you're a carnivore your relationship to food is completely different so the carnivores food is not all around you it's in fact scarce you have to it's very difficult to run these herbivores down and to get them and they're well defended against you they can hear you coming they can smell you coming they could see you coming they can feel you coming in just like literally in vibrations in the ground and they are they are designed by nature to escape you and so your job is to try to pick off the young the sick the slow the isolated or the injured in one way or another now the big cats for example in Africa well typically they're very unsuccessful as hunters they only the only or succeed about one out of ten serious attempts so trying to run another animal down that's enough for them to eat but they only eat about once a week on average so that means it's not uncommon for them to go longer than a week week and a half three to two weeks between meals so you can imagine that when they do make a kill they cram it in they get every bit of it that they can get down their bullets and so this is a very different relationship to food that is going to be true in a typical herbivore so you can imagine then that omnivores are going to be somewhere in the middle that sometimes they're going to be behaving like herbivores sort of chewing away a low calorie density food and then once in a while they're going to get into richer food and they're going to get very excited about it and when they do you can expect that they're going to cram it in if it's available so when we look at this this looks an awful lot like how human behavior would be and in fact how we know human behavior was we've had as many as a hundred and seventy five hundred gatherer tribes under observation in the last 50 years by anthropologists and what we have found is that the pattern of behavior is for a large amount of the calories can are going to be eaten a significant amount are going to be raw they're also going to be eating cooked tubers or the starches late in the day as the the women folk typically it's their job to make sure that the that their their family survives by digging for tubers or doing it whatever it is that they're going to do to get a hold of starches those starches are going to need to be cooked and those are going to be the mainstay of those people's survival however the men are going to be out hunting typically and they hunt communally so they hunt as a group the the woman's gathering of food is actually very capitalistic in other words when they gather their own food for their own tent for their children and their man but when the men are participating in hunting that tends to be a communist ik activity in other words they are all joining in together and whatever is killed at the end of the day it is divided up among the people in the tribe this is very typical pattern for human nature so this animal food is going to be typically the richest food that humans are going to eat now there are other sources of rich food there's nuts and seeds but they're not going to get very many of those there's also honey that they occasionally will find Richard Wrangham and Harvard has told us that the honey may have been a fairly substantial caloric resource for hundred dollars maybe as much as ten percent of caloric intake or so maybe maybe not though so the the main source of rich calories that would have happened by the meaning rich meaning the very most chlorophyll a dense food that people typically would have eaten on a recurrent basis would have been neat now I know that my friends in the vegetarian world might raise their eyebrows at this observation but this is in fact what is consistent with what it is that you're observing in an anthropological studies so this isn't to say that this is the ideal way to eat but it's the ideal way to eat if you have you are facing potential starvation so our ancestors widened their palate away from just vegetable matter and included hunting as a major calorie resource and when they did that the amount of resources that they would get from this this way of doing things was highly variable so the herbivore resources the the plant resources would have been fairly constant you just have to go out there and start digging and start chewing but the the animal food would have been hidden this and so as a result what's going to happen is that usually there would be a modest amount of animal food available in any given week but once in a while there would be a big kill and when there would be a big kill human beings would have crammed in other words when there would be animal food is typically about 800 calories a pound where the starches are 4 to 500 calories a pound or so and the vegetables are 200 and the fruit is 300 and the raw salad greens are 100 so animal food would have been a rich important source of calories and when they got a hold of it once in a while they would get a hold of a lot of it and when they did it would make sense to cram it it's also interesting and consistent with this hypothesis that that he observed that among the great apes it's going to turn out that humans are the only great activists or substantial amounts of fact we're the only gradate that hunson eats a substantial amount of animal food this would make sense that if you have a a major source of variance in your caloric intake is going to be coming from something as capricious as hunting that it would make sense that you would need to store fat in order to buffer you against the vicissitudes of hunting and that look appears to be exactly what has happened so keep it now that you have a cram circuit and that cram circuit is going to say that if once in a while it turns out that we come across or have access to a rich caloric resource in this case meet that 800 carries account then you should cram it in past normal society it should be a relatively rare opportunity and we would then want to force that in past normal comfort zone keep in mind also that the modern processed foods are far more calorie dense than 800 calories a pound so a peanut butter sandwich on more than almond butter sandwich on Ezekiel bread which may be biochemically very healthy that is still a 2000 calorie count treat and so we have to understand that we would be highly motivated to cram in that sort of food past normal satiety all right and also keep in mind that we would cram it in that circuit would be active every day so whenever there is a an opportunity to cram in fruit that's rich we should be taking advantage of it that would be the normal instinct that we would expect to reside in human nature alright your stop on go ahead give me the next slide all right so we're going to come back to that issue but first we're going to visit someone very important everybody knows who this is of course you can read Russian this is Ian Pavle or Ivan Pavlov this is the famous Russian physiologist who won the Nobel Prize in the early nineteen hundred's for his discoveries in digestion digestive process and particularly with respect to the neurological processes involved in digestion and salvation and all these reflexes and and finally in learning theory so this is the father of modern learning theory and Pavlov I came about this actually mostly by accident he was wanting to study the salivary glands in dogs and every but every he came up to a dog with a plate of food the dog was already salivating and so Pavlov couldn't figure out how he was going to be able to do this and be able to see the initial action and unfortunately the fortunately he he knew that he was somehow associated with the food so he started to try to sneak in the lab very very quietly so the dogs wouldn't hear him coming but the dogs could always hear him coming and so they always had started salivating before he could get there he this work this was a major inconvenience to his studies and he started to consider the possibility that maybe if they associated him with the food maybe he could get them to associate something else with the good instead and so he started to ring a bell while he presented them of food and he came upon what we now know as classical conditioning which is one of the most important studies or most important scholars in history of all science so we're going to look at the next slide your table well is we're going to learn about classical conditioning okay so don't be afraid this takes us to a math class this is a an XY axis where the y axis is the axis that goes up and down and at the top we are going to label that salivation and the bottom axis the one that goes from zero out to the right that's called the x axis and what we're going to record there is conditioning trials and so we're going to see every time we present the dog with food and we ring the bell we're going to see what happens to the dogs elevation and we see that the very first time that we ring the bell and present the dog with food that there's no particular salvation because the dog doesn't know that the Bell means anything so we can see from this graph at the very first trial that our little dog Baird is not salivating because this is the first time you serve the bell and so therefore he does not know that the Bell is associated with food but we see that the second time he can start to associate this and so he's salivating a little bit and as we see on succeeding conditioning trials he's getting the hang of this that he's essentially associating with the Bell with food and so by the tenth conditioning trial he now his his nervous system effectively has completely associated the Bell with food and therefore he's salivating at a maximum level as he fully anticipate that he's going to be fed by ringing the bell so this is as we connect those little dots in and draw a curve this is what's known as the learning curve and the learning curve is used in to chart out many different types of animal learning including human learning but this is where it started it started with Pavlov in the late late eighteen hundreds in early nineteen hundred's okay so we're gonna skip forward about 80 years now and we're gonna look at a another brilliant man and this name is Shepard Siegel and he's still alive he say this an older professor emeritus I believe at McMaster University in Canada the this is one of the grand figures and money theory so let's look at something that he discovers using tabla bian thinking to solve a fascinating problem and the problem that he solves is heroin overdoses so Seagal is puzzled why heroin overdoses even exist and that's because heroin users are experienced with with heroin and they also the heroin is also expensive now in the 1970s and 80s and so it doesn't make any sense that anybody would overdose the when I was a kid thinking about these problems we would always say well you know somebody gets drunks off the street and they don't know what the percentage is and so therefore they could you know it could be purer than they think it is so the accidentally overdose Siegel's thinks you know that's ridiculous if anything it's less potent because it's so expensive that they're going to cheat and they're going to fill it with flour and sugar and everything else under the Sun so he does not make sense to him that their own users would overdose sort of by accident so now he's going to go on a mental quest is he's going to figure this out so the first thing he thinks about is he thinks about the salivation in Pavlov's dogs and he thinks about this anything so you know what let's not call this Pavlov called the salivation of reflex and he says you know let's not think about this is a reflex let's think about it is what we're going to call a compensatory response so if you think about the organism being in a state of homeostasis that anything that you do to it shoves it out of homeostasis and then to want to shove its way back and so food will shut that dog out of homeostasis and so the system is getting ready or preparing itself to shove itself back to homeostasis by getting ready to digest food and so so far that just seems like a relabeling of the clock of an idea so we're instead of changing things from a reflex I will be calling it a compensatory response but pretty soon this is going to open up new thinking in conditioning theory that's going to be very important so for example let's suppose that you work in a cooler and so your first day in there you've got your parka and you've got your hat and you've got your gloves you go in there and you work all day and it's 24 degrees in that cooler so the next day that you come to work what's going to happen is is that as you're in the parking lot walking your way into work your temperature your body temperature is going to start to rise a little bit because it's anticipating that it's going to face the cold the third day it's going to happen again and the fourth day that's going to happen again and you will go up a pub lobby and learning curve whereby you've been there two or three weeks and when you're in the parking lot your your hands are getting very warm even before you even enter the building that is kebabian conditioning and this is not a reflex this is a compensatory response your body is getting ready for the shock of this and it's pairing in advance this is where you see these these old guys up in the I don't know in the Alps that jump in these mountain lakes that are freezing now we know why they've been do it they've been doing it every day of their lives and they essentially have a condition convinced story response that is they're walking out there towards the water their body temperature is all revising and preparing for the shock so this is a little bit useful so now we're going to use this to think about addiction process so a heroin user the first time they use it it blows the system away it rocks them completely out of homeostasis and the nervous system basically realizes we can't have that happen that's but that's a bad thing so the next time they use the system is already engineering a compensatory response literally biochemistry is getting ready to neutralize the heroin and it will and if you continue to use the heroin user won't even hardly be able to feel it so they have to increase their dose and as they increase their does then the compensatory response is going to be in is increasing so this winds up being an arms race between the increased drug drug use and the compensatory response and you can get to a point where the compensatory response is extreme the system is extremely well defended against whatever this is whether it's alcohol heroin or anything else under the Sun and so now an interesting thing will happen suppose that the heroin users in their in their room at night eat and they're fiddling around with their little spoon in there and their needle or however it works and then you can imagine that that the suppose that they thought they had some heroin but they don't so now what we have is the compensatory response is very large and as being raised in the organism preparing for this but what there's no heroin to meet it so what's going to happen is the organism is going to be in a very uncomfortable state and that uncomfortable state the condition convinced or a response Shepard Siegel says that response is what we call so cravings is as we later be shown by later research cravings are significantly a great deal of what craving is is nothing other than a conditioned compensatory response so now Seagal is going to go on so for example with the dog salivating if we call that a conditioned compensatory response we realize that if we ring that little bell and don't feed the dog that dog is going to be craving the food because his condition compensatory response makes life uncomfortable for him because it's disturbing his neural chemistry and it won't settle down until the food meets it now we're going to go on because Siegel is now going to essentially solve a mystery and that is suppose that you are you've been using heroin and you have a major condition compensatory response to defend yourself against it and let's suppose that you typically use at night in your room under dark conditions and then it turns out that you know in one morning you get up and you go to hit the streets and it turns out you run into some friend and he says hey I've just got some Aryan one you want to go use it in a in my car and you do this but you were not ready for this in this different set of situations so as a result you do not activate the condition convinced or a response and when you use a normal amount of heroin for you with no condition response to defend you you can die and so this is this is an extraordinary discovery by Shepard Segal you've got this thing through conceptually and then he tested in the laboratory with rats and it it works perfectly this is exactly what happens he conditioned the set of rats for 30 days of heroin and then he put them under different conditions different lighting and sound and however it is that he did it I forgot how he did it but he put them under different conditions use the same amount of heroin and the rats died so this is an extraordinary discovery about the see of conditioned compensatory responses and also understanding that this is what craving is and this is how this works okay so now we're going to look at what's called an extinction curve so we're going to go back to our dog and we have now conditioned our dog that every time we ring the bell he's having a conditioned compensatory response he or she and so we now know that that is what craving is so the dog is is craving the food because he is generating an internal biochemical response that essentially is anticipating the food and it's disturbing to not get the food to neutralize that response and so now what we're going to do is the very first time this is now we've conditioned the dog for I don't know a month or two and now what we're going to do is we're going to counter condition the dog so on trial number one of extinction we're going to ring the bell but we're not going to give them any food and so we would expect that the craving would be pretty high in those circumstances and it is so it's up to over to ten but now something that's going to happen very interesting but the second time we hit the bell and don't give them any food we might expect it to go down a little bit to essentially mirror the learning curve but that's not what happens what happens in fact is that the craving goes up and the third time we ring the bell and don't give the dog food it goes up some more so this little bubble that you see at the top of this graph between 1/3 for conditioning trials this is known as the extinction burst this is a a normal feature of animal learning when an animal has been rewarded that this system essentially throws a tantrum where it cannot it expects that it's going to get this resource but it's not going to get it and so this is this is a fascinating characteristic of learning because essentially what this does is it defends the organism against a resource in this case food which very often would be the resource the that if it is expecting to get that it essentially should be getting according to the conditions the conditions look like they're perfectly conducive and it looks like we should be getting food if we don't get it then we should fight very hard for it because there's a good chance that the food is very nearby so I want you to think for example of a little bird that lives in some place where there's a river and there's a big bend in the river and one day this bird discovers there's a bunch of worms there and so it eats them like crazy and then the next day it feels a craving for those worms and it comes over there but there's no worms so it comes back over there with a little different time of day and about four o'clock it wanders over there and sure enough there's a bunch of worms and so the next day wanders over there at 10 a.m. and there's no worms but it has this craving at about four o'clock and it turns out it goes over there and there's the worms again so it goes up a learning curve that after a while it figures out that at around four o'clock there's going to be worms there and so it doesn't have a watch it's just watching the Sun and it doesn't think this thing through consciously like humans it just feels a craving all of a sudden at that time of day that it might be a couple hundred yards away doing something else and then suddenly it feels this craving to head back over to that area of the river and there it is and there are the worms and this is a this is exactly how learning system works now you can imagine that this goes on for three or four months and then one day it goes over there at four o'clock and there's no worms so it's pretty upset but after a while the craving goes away it searches around for the worms and it goes away and it goes about its business comes back the next day at the same time and now the craving is worse so now it starts scratching around in the mud it gets its little claws knee-deep in the mud because it's determined the system is basically saying those worms are very likely around here somewhere so keep looking okay so then what we're going to see is the next day it's going to get even worse pretty soon it's gonna be digging its little beak down in the mud looking for this so this is us tearing apart the pantry like you know those those vegan Reese's are somewhere in here err are that this is this is the extinction verse this is the frustration of an animal not wanting to cry uncle on an important research that that somehow is now disappearing so now you can see that over time with succeeding trials that are not reinforced that this this system is going to go into extinction this is simply because of a cost-benefit analysis that the brain is running as it is it's realizing it appears that the resource is gone this is exactly what you would see if there's a bank robbery and there's a silent alarm and so in some employee has hit the silent alarm and as the robbers leave the bank 30 seconds later the cops show up and they say oh they're on the street so we're going to grab everybody they can throw them up against the wall because there's a really good chance those resources are still on the street but half an hour later they're not and that's because they're going to realize it's not worth looking for it looks like they're gone and this is exactly what extinction is so over repeated trials the organism conditioning process will go into extinction now that doesn't mean it's gone it just means it's quiet now the so this is exactly what we're going to go through with cigarette smoking for example we're going to possibly condition cigarette smoking then what's going to happen is if the person tries to quit the nicotine withdrawal the craving which is a conditioned compensatory response is going to be pretty acute and those people will never get past the extension curve if they do get past the extinction curve they're in way better shape after a week or two and then unfortunately out there in the distance somewhere is a little spike and that little spike is called spontaneous recovery and that was noticed by pow-block more than a hundred years ago but for some reason all of a sudden out of the blue there would be some serious cravings perk up now let's see why this would be the reason would be if you're that little bird and you've learned about those worms pretty soon you keep going back and checking but there's no worms so it pretty well goes into extinction and the cravings get to be very low but once in a while the nervous system ought to kick up some cravings at a higher level so you might not have checked on those worms for two or three weeks and then suddenly you're this little bird and suddenly you just get this craving it's not super intense but it's intense enough for you to go over and fly over to that area and just check the reason why that would be smart is because if the resources where ever there once there's a good chance that those resources might come back someday so you ought to go back and check and animals do and so that's called spontaneous recovery and you can imagine that if that bird goes back and checks and there's worms there then we know what's going to happen the next day he's going to be right back there the next day so he'll be right back up the learning curve maybe not all the way the cravings may not be as intense as they were when he had consistently found the worms there but they're going to be up substantially so he might be halfway up the learning curve and if he's not doing anything better that next day there's a good chance he's going to go back and hit see if those worms are there subsequent day if there aren't any worms there or if it's not there for reinforced then the sub sub subsequent spontaneous recovery flips become less and less intense over time this is why people after 10 years of being dry as an alcoholic the spontaneous recovery blips are very very low and they can actually go into a bar and someone can pour them their favorite drink right in front of them and start drinking it and they'll probably be okay the cravings will be very slight because essentially they have never reinforced the spontaneous recovery so this is you can see how dangerous this is in terms of habits that we don't want let's take a look at this with respect to our problem what I'm going to argue here and there's evidence for it is that human beings were designed by nature to cram because there are natural omnivore they would have crammed only the rich food they're not going to cram grapes I don't know people that are cramming grapes after dinner that's not typically what people cram people are cramming processed foods that are above 500 calories a pound there are a few people that might actually cram even potatoes that's possible those rare binge eaters out there that will do so and and this is what's going on now but most people when they cram they're cramming richer foods after dinner and the reason why they're doing this is because they have an instinct that tells them that that's one of the most useful things that they could do to ensure their survival this would not have been a problem in the Stone Age when you would have occasionally gotten access to rich foods and once in a while you would cram but here's the problem today if you have access to them every day and you cram every day then you condition a cram so what's going to happen is is that you actually go up a learning curve and you wind up with guess what cravings or cramming even after you're full and in fact it is most likely that the most reliable conditioning cue that would tell you that it's time to cram will not be a bell it will be your own distended stomach so your own distended stomach wine set being a very good predictor of the fact that we are going to be eating some more in a while because that's the two things that run together so as a result literally in a cruel twist of fate your own satiety mechanisms being full winds up being a conditioning cue to tell you that you're probably going to be creamy soon and so this this is a strange set of affairs very you know very problematic obviously to get out of this if you know what you're looking at now people have heard this talk now put the times in different places and they they say oh my god you know what are we going to do about this well look the truth is is that the the difficulty of getting through an extinction burst and getting any kind of conditioning process to extinction depends upon the potency of the substance that we're talking about and so if we're talking about morphine or heroin it's exceedingly difficult to get through the extinction curve the the cravings are extraordinarily intense and painful if we're talking about alcohol it's also very hard it's not as hard as I'm working working in heroin but it's extraordinary difficult extinction bursts to get the RAL qahal doable but hard okay the then we go down on the food chain to cigarettes cigarettes are pretty hard they're not they're not as hard as alcohol but they're pretty much and we see that the cost benefit of smoking changed dramatically when we made people go outside so they smoked in a high-rise building in 1985 well they can't smoke in irise building by the year 2000 and so it winds up not being worth the trouble to actually go down the elevator go outside hanging out with other smokers for 10 or 15 minutes and then come back in and go up to your office it's just not worth the trouble and so as a result the cost-benefit analysis wound up essentially teasing people away from cigarettes and they were able to get through their withdrawal processes and quick now I would submit that a condition crown circuit is probably about one fourth is intense as that's how cigarettes in other words that it's just in just intense enough like you'll feel it and if this is something that you've been doing you the first few nights you will be a little bit frustrated and you will be wanting to cram and it will just seem like a good idea and after all if it's healthy that you're climbing on branding on your planning on framing on air popped popcorn what's wrong with that answer is biochemically nothing but the problem is that's this cramming is what's responsible for people being overweight the it's not the calorie density of their general diet it's what's happening after they're already full and they're cramming in some extra food repetitively and they crave it if they don't get it so you've got to get through the extinction burst and not only that you have to watch out for spontaneous recoveries that will also someday just feel like a good idea of cram now this helped me understand something that always puzzled made in a bigger program and that is people would go away and tell me they did great for eight months they come in March and they would do great until Thanksgiving and then Thanksgiving all the wheels came off and I was puzzled for years by this because the notion was they got into rich food and then they rediscovered the taste for and then they went crazy the problem is is that the taste neuroid a patient problem is not that capricious one bite won't warm gets you completely off the rails but the cram circuit is going to be different so at Thanksgiving you know the taste notification takes a while takes repetitive administration's over you know a couple of three weeks to adulterate your taste buds so it's the same way it takes you a few weeks to recover from being in trouble and you get out of the pleasure craft that's a tough problem but there's a different issue here with respect to the cram circuit this is Pavlovian morning and so if it's in extinction it's not on it is is quickly and easily recovery that's Alcoholics no literally one drink and put them in serious trouble and and in the same way I believe that what happens with people with the krenz circuit is that they get in a very healthy groove and they're doing a great job and they're not cramming for whatever reason then when they go to Thanksgiving they'll cram on Thursday night and then they'll cram on on Friday night and then they're going to cram on Saturday other words we can have a whole weekend of cramming so what's happening is is we're very quickly going back up the learning curve fully conditioning the organism and now they're going to have to face an extinction burst and they and an extinction process again and a lot of times they don't because they're demoralized and that they can't you can't manage to stay out of the sauce for long enough so this is now we now have an understanding of what it is that we're up against and a greater respect for it it's not that intimidating but it is it's a challenge and you have to know that it's in front of you this is for my career the last 20 years after Alan Goldhamer dragged me into this arena of the world has been about it's been a crusade to essentially argue against the status quo in our field when it comes to weight and weight management so people are told they've got psychological problems people are told that they've had bad things happen to them in their childhood that's why they're you know eating the way they're paying they're told that the reason why they're eating a bunch of junk in the present is because they've got stress in other words there's all kinds of psychobabble about this and my crusade has been to say no there's nothing wrong with you and what you're doing is completely rational and it just seems like you're really frustrated because if you're 30 or 40 pounds over way then it's having big consequences it seems like there's these big bad consequences which means there must have been a big bad problem to cause this and there isn't I'm not inside you the problems in your environment the environment is now so strikingly different than the environment that you were designed for that you are essentially set up to walk right into this trap and this is all of the features in science when we're trying to explain a some phenomenon there's a concept called proportion of variance explained or essentially in lay terms what are all the factors and how much of the of the question to the answer so when it comes to heart disease you know we could say oh well you grow up in Los Angeles you're gonna have heart disease because there's a lot of stress on the waise and there's some smog too so that that could hurt you well it turns out that those are fact those are known factors if there's any there's any explanatory power it's less than 1% the we're going to try to understand heart disease we're going to look at smoking and we're going to look at animal food those two things are going to be the things that essentially predict or responsible for the largest share of the explanation all right we're going to try to understand why people are in trouble with respect to their diets and if they overeat and they struggle with their weight or that they binge eat we're gonna start with the pleasure trap which is the fact that really rich food tastes better than food that is not as which that is a biological fact across all species and we have now created magic food super food that is overwhelming the system in combinations that it was never designed to have so sugar and fat in high quantities never exist in nature and sugar and salt don't exist side by side in nature and fat and salt don't exist side by side in nature so when you have a chocolate shape you are having sugar and fat in high quantities that that never took place and so you're essentially double dissing the pleasure pathways the pleasure travel all by itself is a huge explanation of the problem energy conservation the notion that animals are designed by nature they take every shortcut possible this explains a great deal as well so you can just go through drive-thru and all the prepared foods are really rich and really available in pretty cheap and so as a result natural healthy food is comparatively high energy expenditure to try to get to it and so that's a problem the now if that weren't enough we also have a social pressure so we are a highly social creature and so we are essentially built to be sensitive to this that would be enough a fourth problem that I've talked about in the last few years is what I call the ego trap and that is that if we've got a goal that's this really hard and it's harder than we appreciate it then when we fail we just kick over the table and quit and that's something that we have to struggle against with respect to healthy living healthy diet so those four things are enough but then we're going to add something else we're going to now add the fact that we now can understand the human beings naturally will cram their spirits and that the rich foods aren't just rich they're richer than the cramming food of our national history that peanut butter sandwiches 2,000 powers of pound it's two and a half times as concentrated as the meat but the cram circuit is designed around and so when we have crackers and veggie chips and things like this nature hanging around the house you can better believe that people are going to circle back around after dinner and they're going to cram in and other a few hundred calories because the nervous system is going to believe that that's one of the smartest things that they could possibly do and then the problem is is once it's conditioned then even when you try to stop you have cravings and you have to face an extinction burst at the top of that withdrawal process and that will beat people up and then even if you get through that there's going to be spontaneous recovery moments where if you reinforce them then it puts you back up the lining book when you actually look at all of the features of how it is that this works it's literally the devil himself couldn't have put together a better set of forces to actually keep us in this trap you know when I looked at it and Alan Goldhamer and I sat down and listed this all out we were just shaking our heads like no wonder this is so hard it's a miracle how well how many people do and and we looked at this and we thought you know this is amazing that there are so many of these forces and of course there are these forces the pleasure trap energy conservation social arrestor of particular the cram circuit extinction burst and spontaneous recovery these are all engineered by your biology to make sure that you don't starve to death in an environment of scarcity and so of course they are brilliantly engineered except that they're now working against you and so once we understand this we can we quit beating ourselves up over thinking that there's something wrong with us that are struggling now our emotional issues on the table maybe they are and I'm willing to keep an open mind about any individuals case and and where their emotional history might play a factor but remember whatever factors that they play we must subtract out the proportion of variance is being explained by these other seven factors first hey and then we can talk about that and I think that even you can easily see that if we look at the behavior of animals we're going to find that these other factors are dominating the show in almost the last slide if we want to look at just the potency of just the pleasure drop this is an experiment that was done in about 2009 so this was done about six years after Alan and I published the photograph and it's too bad that they did this this would have been a beautiful study to talk about in the book the this is a bunch of rats and what the experimenters did was they fed them healthy rat chow which they were used to and then one day they decided we're gonna feed you standard the standard American diet so cheeseburgers french fries chocolate shakes whatever they threw the stuff in the rat cage for a month and the rats ate all they wanted and you can imagine what happened there was very excited rats starting to get overweight in a heck of a hurry at the end of that month what they did was they took that Chow out and they put their healthy rat chow back in and what happened was fascinating they watched these rats carefully the average rat refused to eat for 14 days they were totally on strike they're basically like no we're not going to eat this food that is of lower calorie density forget it in fact on very close videotape analysis you can see one of the rats giving a gesture to do the experimenter the this is this is Talan you just the force involved with one number one of those eight explanations so keep in mind that that we have a you're struggling we've got a formidable set of forces that we have to master you can do it very often people have done pieces of it for a while sometimes they put it all together for a while now I think with an understanding that some of your after-dinner cravings are classically conditioned and they will pass get yourself distracted for an hour go for a walk play ping pong I don't care what you do but don't give in once you have finished your healthy dinner walk away from that table and if you do this repetitively for several nights in a row your nervous system will fight you for a while but then you'll get the inner peace that will come and it won't bother you this focus is how we get the life we deserve this is the life you deserve you are you are close many of you have put 75% of this puzzle together and you've done a very good job in stretches this is I believe is the last smile that many people need and it is also the answer to people that inch people that are binging are in fact classically conditioned to the binge so the Descent stomach is actually signalling the craving for additional leading we must do exactly the same thing that I'm talking about and if you grit your teeth and get yourself through the extinction verse you can find relief and peace away from this bubble thank you very good and ladies and gentlemen do you all agree with me that dr. Lisle is the genius all right yes okay so but now all of this lecture that you did today that is not included or is it in the book the pleasure trap information that we just put together over this last year and so this is we presented this at a J's shindig in Las Vegas and I just presented this at the MacDougall three-day program and so we're just getting this out and so this webinar was important to bring this to the MacDougal world you know and and of course everybody remembered that this webinar that you just watched is always these webinars are we've recorded so you can watch it as many times as you want it's going to be posted tomorrow afternoon or evening on dr. McDougall website under the webinar page dr. Lyle wood you can just maybe we have like four minutes or five minutes answer a couple of questions if we got a quick one okay all right this let's just do one and then maybe next month we could pick up the same topic but with questions then so it's everybody if you don't mind emailing your questions to webinar at dr. McDougall comm and put on the subject line the cram circuit then or dr. lie or something like that so we know that it's for questions so there is a question here that says does everyone cram or is this seen mostly on overweight people and dieters I have never seen my husband or China or children overeat or eat at night yes I don't think it's it's not just overweight people it's so I think this is just a individual differences can people can wander into this I have very often crammed in stretches for whatever reasons so my my carrot cake cramming period is well known and there's been under such there's been other since cramming period so I didn't actually know what was happening at the time so this is but it for me it happens to go in stretches and then some little thing will change in my life circumstances then I'll get away from it and so it's not a this isn't this isn't morphing it's it's not even cigarettes it's it's but what it is is it's a mild you would almost call it a habit but if you called it a habit you would not actually learn the important message which is that you're designed by nature to honor your cravings and those crazy things are a message that has been that is essentially programmed into you in this case by a cram circuit that is being indulged repeatedly in a way that the cram circuit of our ancestors was never in those repeatedly so that craving is something that you are naturally going to honor unless you know that it's there and that it's bogus so this is not the same thing by the way as what do you call it weighing and measuring and portion control you can see why these ideas over the last 20 years we didn't have that popularity because accidentally it's people using these things or intermittent fasting you can see that these ideas have accidentally sometimes kicked people out of a a condition gram circuit so now that we understand the problem better we don't have to be using some of these measures which are actually not directly addressing the problem they're actually accidentally addressing the problem so this is the this is the correct way of viewing this problem and so we don't need to be weighing and measuring that's a even though people have success with that but not because of weighing and measuring is an answer it's because that has actually caused some people to counter condition they're friends with it the same thing is true with intermittent fasting so having little borders on when we eat I wouldn't have borders on when I eat you finish dinner when you finish dinner and you are full and you're satisfied if you want a little treat at the end have your little treat whatever it is you know and then you get up and you walk away from that table and you do not come back to the kitchen yeah don't sit that is the solution it isn't it isn't a specific timing window it's actually counter conditioning this very particular circuit right so to try one more thing because I think this is interesting as someone is saying a few people are mentioning that if having a full stomach is a trigger to eat more then it is the remedy then not to eat until full or just way - right before we go to bed or like you said just walk away and not come back we have to remember once you counter condition this thing it's not going to be a problem you're designed to eat to satiety and you should eat to satiety just like we've always said you should need to saw at sky and help you fit and then we're not going to have a problem the only problem we have now is you have a conditioned crammed circuit and that conditioned cram circuit is never supposed to have happen the the the instinct is there to cramp folks it's there to cram and so it's business eight the circuit says if there's rich food in my environment even when I'm full I should cram it in that's not a problem if you only had rich food in your environment once a month but that if that was the all it was that you would never wind up with a classically conditioned circuit because once a month isn't going to condition it okay but if you every time after you finish your healthy food in your you are comfortably full and then you are able to condition you're able to cram in a bunch of richer food if you do that night after night after night then pretty soon you condition the fact that you are full is a reliable cue that we're going to eat some more all you have to do is stop that behavior if you stop that behavior and you do not indulge that craving then what's going to happen after a short period of time a week or two you're not going to have that craving it's going to go away I have done that many times I I craved whole wheat Fig Newtons for probably six months just I crammed these things I remember I remember this I was living with dr. Alan Goldhamer we were waiting the flusher drought and I couldn't understand why I was doing and he just said well you're skinny or probably just need the capper hahaha I mean it down all right now I look back on it then I got to move out once we finish the book that was my that was our deal life behind a beautiful there's work that was done when it was down and moved out and I'm away from the store that had those things and so once I moved away from the store I quit buying them and when I quit buying and I quit doing it so it the crammed the condition crammed circuit drifted away but for but for probably a year I did this because they were in the house and they were there yeah we didn't think anything of it they were pretty healthy food I didn't know what was going on and so now it's a condition gram circuit so I've been in and out of that conditioning process many times right always on you know good good healthy treats or good healthy rich food but it's been it's been an additional time no question that was a processed food until someone was mentioning popcorn and so is maybe instead of eating popcorn you eat the corn on the cob right well yeah you want gram corn on the cob right popcorn popcorn is a lot more calories per pound than corn on the cob well thank you dr. Lila and I know that everybody here will benefit from listening to this webinar a few more times because there was a lot of information to process and so I encourage everybody to watch it get some really good questions for our next webinar the second Tuesday of October and we'll see you then dr. Maia it is great to see Gustavo ok thank you so much yeah all right
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