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Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Gustavo Tolosa: Dr Doug Lisle, PhD QA Session
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okay question is sort of how fast is it does it take to unwind us out of the pleasure truck and the answer is that to become probably completely clean and clear of the pleasure trap is probably one for months based on the research that we have for from chemical census studies however just as with with all things in addiction it's not linear so for example the first month is much more impactful than the next three months and of that by that same token the first month is much harder than the next three months so you start out with a lot of disincentive in other words the food is not that sharp and dissipation that good because of your senses being essentially dulled and it's going to take time for that to to unwind and I would say that my observation although nobody has evidence on this to the best of my knowledge my observation is that within a couple of weeks you're probably halfway out of the trap in two weeks you're probably three quarters of the way out of the trap in a month and then you will spend the next three months on slowly getting more and more acclimated so it happens reasonably quickly but thirty days is actually a long time it can be difficult for people are very challenging for people to even go two or three or four days of eating food that is healthy choices as opposed to pleasure trap type food so the the most important thing that I want people to be focused on rather than the pleasure trap specifically is essentially their self-esteem mechanism your self-esteem mechanism works in such a way that you have an internal audience that is watching you and it's watching how well you do things and if you do things quite well then within about a week it starts to rise in other words your self-esteem starts to respect the fact that you have made some choices that you weren't making before and so even though the pleasure trap is still pulling at you to go off course your self-esteem mechanism if you notice it if you watch carefully you will start to feel better about yourself and that can become an important source of motivation if you understand why it's happening sometimes people don't quite understand that that's a major motivating force of all goal attainment is actually self-esteem everybody is naturally focused on the outcome for example of the weight loss and how great we're going to look when we drop 30 pounds but the most important thing from my standpoint is not that goal even though that that is the goal we're aiming at in principle the most important goal that I have for people when they make changes is to be looking about a week or two down the road and looking like a hawk I want you watching very carefully that is you diligently work at a program you will watch your self-esteem rise and and that that because it will also fall when you when you go off course that's okay it's a fair judge of how well you are doing at worthwhile goals you don't need to be perfect but you need to be good you need to be essentially a little bit better than maybe you thought you could have been or would have been and as you push yourself to making good decisions the self-esteem mechanism will give you a feedback that is probably the most important feedback that there is in maintaining a motivational force when things get difficult and so that's more than the pleasure trap and more than the sensitivity that will come but but the most important thing to look for and the quickest thing to look for is the wind at your back that you will get from increasing self-respect for doing something that is is difficult to do yes they could schedule a phone consultation that our very good friend chef AJ has a program that you can join and get a lot of support and a lot of information it's really you know it's I think it's the best outreach program that we know of and so that that's where I would go it's not for everybody she's pretty intense and she's pretty fastidious and she's pretty determined but if you are determined and you were struggling I would certainly recommend that you as a more global issue I would say that one of the things that the the reason I wrote this book is because it's a it's a 240 page treatise that is basically saying we are under estimating this problem the the tagline is mastering the hidden force that undermines health and happiness it's a I think people they believe that human beings should be so smart and so adaptive that all you have to do is know about something and then you should be able to diffuse it you have to understand that the pleasure trap mechanism which is what what a pleasure trap is is that you have natural machinery that is telling you what to do you have survival instincts and those survival instincts were shaped to help you survive and thrive in an environment that that those instincts you've all been so you were designed for an environment that didn't have any processed food in it and so if we put you in an environment with processed food there is there is what I'm going to call survival instinct number one survival instinct number one is eat the richest food in the environment that survival instinct is in every animal so it is an absolute relentless force to guide behavior it is the it's the smartest most sophisticated thing that you can imagine you can think of trillions of animals making choices between one set of foodstuff or another 1/2 or another on you know one person's blood or another if you're a flea who has the ridges blood there is all creatures are looking to try to figure out where is the richest fit in the environment so that is a relentless sophisticated survival instinct and we are basically saying don't follow it don't follow survival instinct number one and so then people say okay well now I understand about the pleasure trap and so I understand that I got to go against my instincts okay so now I go about my daily life and I'm having trouble doing it of course you're having trouble doing this is the main instinctual survival force in you so you can expect it to be very difficult and so we have we have prescriptions for this that say essentially this this is not a problem inside you it's a problem with your environment so your environment is eliciting behavior out of you that is in your best interest if you're in an environment of scarcity which is where all of your ancestors were until now and so now what we have to do is we have to understand oh my goodness I have to reshape my environment but that's going to take energy and forethought and determination um so we don't want to say okay well what I'm going to do is I'm going to get myself hungry heading for a plane in trouble and then I'm going to plan on my understanding of the pleasure trap in my willpower to ride me out on this thing and not succumb to temptation not a very good program here's a better program better program would be like what Jeff Novick does which is he will pack food on and he'll when he gets on the plane he's got food all over the place so he's ready for the problem and he controls his own environment so that he doesn't run into this kind of problem so that's how I would do things I would focus more on your environment than you do on yourself and if you would like more social support and more tips and education on how to do this and how to keep focused on this look at the chef AJ's for that's a that's a very good support system for people on let's say several questions mom excuse me kicked my computer uh flight en insomnia uh let's let's just talk about that what anxiety is is it's a message from the mind saying that we are anticipating some significant loss and so anxiety is usually not a problem for most people unless they are facing a potentially significant loss if someone has chronic anxiety on that is very high enough to cause them to be have insomnia then it could be that they essentially are someone that is overestimating a lot of threats so this is very typical of extremely conscientious people in fact what what very high conscientiousness is is the over estimation of the worst case scenario so there are techniques that that we can use to coach people that through this process to make them put them in a better position to go to sleep and so I could talk about those in the next few minutes just to give you a flavor for those they won't it won't take us too long the so I don't think that there is a reason to use medications for anxiety and insomnia the it's one thing if a person has this kind of a problem two or three times a year and they essentially this is characteristic of them that this will arise on occasion and that if they use some kind of a some kind of a sleep aid a few times a year then this is all the devil amounts to and this helps them fine I don't have a problem with that this person isn't describing that they're describing a more chronic condition of anxiety and asan insomnia at which point there's no we're going to use medications because that would mean that we're going to be using them consistently and all that's going to happen is the brain will worm its way around the influence of these medications and then we're going to wind up dependent on those medications etc so the medications have a horrendous track record whenever we're going to use them on any consistent basis the only time when we're going to use any psychoactive medications it's going to be at a relatively rare circumstances where it is extremely short term and then we're out out of it do I do things other than food yes in fact most of what I do I'm talking to people is about self esteem and about relationship satisfaction and about problems with work career etc in other words the social dynamics that make up most people's lives so that is that is what I do mostly as a psychologist and then as a is a fairly significant aside there all these issues about food and eating issues and self-esteem about these issues etcetera all right now I forget what else was in that question it's gone out of my head oh I was going to talk about how do we know how to facking the problems of a of insomniac that is that it struggles at night first of all what we're going to do is we're going to do some rather significant exercise and we're going to do it more than three hours before bedtime so we're going to do that in order to dissipate a bunch of stress because what anxiety does is it sort of drives up adrenaline levels and so we want to dissipate that out of the system so that's one thing we're going to do another thing we're going to do is we're going to have a notebook you know hardbound notebook that you're going to have next to your bed at night and when you are spinning you're going to essentially have a journal that you can write in maybe not every day but anytime when you're up and spinning you take that journal out and you and you write you might write for 15-20 minutes 30 minutes and you're going to write about whatever it is bothering you including we're going to use the following technique this technique we're taking right out of cognitive therapy it's called down arrow and the down arrow technique is a technique where what we do is we work our way through the very worst case scenario that our mind is essentially spinning on so let's talk about how insomnia acts very often and high anxiety high conscientious people sort of a lot of the suffering that they're doing what they're doing is is that their mind is is working over and over again the worst case scenario but as it starts to get starts to come close to what that worst-case scenario is it recognizes that it's absurd and then it veers away from it because it doesn't seem worthwhile so they'll be worried about what their boss thinks of something at work and whether or not they're going to be in trouble behind this but then what happens is that they realize well I'm probably going to be okay and then they spin off of it and their mind goes elsewhere and then thirty seconds later it comes back to it and they don't ever go down through the very worst case scenario and get extremely comfortable with that so let's talk about how we would do that so if we were anxious because we're a hyper conscientious person and we have a boss who's a little bit difficult to please and we are up at night spinning on that issue could be any issue might not be your boss but this is just an example so the person is spinning about this and about what could happen then what we're going to do is what we would like to do is we would like to actually step our way through the worst case scenario so the worst case scenario is the boss is going to be very upset about this situation in fact they're going to give the person a poor performance review okay that's the worst thing and then what could be the worst thing after that well they could be fired okay well what's the worst thing after that well we're not going to have any income and what's the worst thing after that well I'm going to lose my house or apartment hey what's the worst thing after that well then then the family is going to be homeless okay what's the worst thing after that well we're going to have to go live with my in-laws in their garage apartment okay and what's the worst thing after that I'm going to be fighting with my mother-in-law it's unpleasant it's at a rillette to change school for the kids okay and what's the worst thing after that nothing that's the worst thing that there is so now what we do is we allow the mines go all the way down to how the problem will be solved if every worst-case scenario happens and once we essentially force the mine down through the worst-case scenario then what happens is is that the person starts to relax because they can see that in fact even though it's going to be kind of embarrassing and inconvenient that essentially the only big crisis is going to be embarrassment and inconvenience and if once we face the embarrassment and inconvenience and realize that that's of limited stress then we're done okay so then the mind starts shutting down it's spinning and you get a respite from that kind of anxiety that keeps people up so this is this is down arrow and so this is a technique that essentially what we do is we grind our way down through the worst case scenario we do not veer off of it and by grinding our way through the worst case scenario we get some inner peace for a while until the hyper conscientious chip fires up again at some later time and we do the same thing oh okay probably how long does it take it if sugar cravings really well but I can't seem to get away from honey on my oatmeal would water only fasting help I wouldn't be too worried about honey on your oatmeal the evidence from Richard Wrangham the brilliant harbor professor has indicates that probably somewhere between five and fifteen percent of human calories across history of from honey so our sweet tooth for honey on your oatmeal is completely reasonable and if that if that is stopping you from keeping out of Dunkin Donuts that's one thing but if what you're really worried about is just keeping out of the honey out of your oatmeal don't bother it's a perfectly reasonable thing to put on your oatmeal okay all right all right this way I can't focus because you're from the paper so let's see here I've just discovered I'm 5 weeks pregnant my D 12 supplement is good all in good order but I'm dreading talking to my doctors and family members that I don't want any other supplement I don't have the team strategy don't pull my mother-in-law how can I deal with them any other advice for expecting plant-based skin on that's interesting so this person is very worried about everybody micromanaging her pregnancy and and so apparently she's worried about the cross-examination I guess if her diet if she's going to be on a vegan diet everybody is going to be descending on her and and essentially saying that she's mismanaging her her situation now so I think that that this is kind of how it is that I would handle this and I would invite this person to to have a consult with me if they want more detail in terms of giving me information about the personalities and the circumstances beyond essentially though that my attitude would be that you'd be you'd be interested in in anything because you want to do things right you understand that you want to do things well do they have any evidence there's being a problem so you say I'm open and you put it on them okay and if they'll if they'll bring you peer-reviewed literature that suggests that vegan diet is is has a problem for outcomes of childbearing you'll you're all ears and that your experts tell you that that this is fine and everything should be fine and but you're you're open and that that's how I would I would put that and and then there's a trick card in the deck for your mother-in-law if you want which is the following it's like well I might screw it up oh well okay you have a trick card in the deck it's your child it's not her child and you get to do what you want to do so two issues we are friendly in saying that we are we're open to the evidence but but you're the doctors that you're listening to like dr. mcdougal tells you that this should be fun this is the way he did his children and they all turned out great and that you you think that this is fine but you're open and then if she wants to argue with you about this that's not what anybody else does you you stay right on that tactic like well I'm open I want the best evidence so if you've got any other evidence I would like to see it thank but if she pushes you and it gets nasty about it that you're just doing wrong you're being irresponsible I the trick card is could be right oh well okay we're just going to have to live with it and go ahead and let her scheme and chew on that because what we're doing is is that we are signaling that we have the right to be wrong and you do you absolutely have the right to be wrong everybody else is okay everybody else is wrong about their diet everybody else is clogging up their artery since token their cancer everybody else is feeding their kids rich food that's going to contribute to increase the likelihood of those children being crippled and maimed for life behind autoimmune disease everybody else is doing it wrong so you have the right to be wrong just as everybody else has the right to belong and so we can communicate this with a very very this is what this is what we call confess and avoid I confess that I could be wrong so therefore I'm going to avoid any further discussion about this and and we leave it right there but you could be right I could mess it up could be a disaster oh well we'll deal that with that when we get there and that's that's how I handle it after I have been more than reasonable at asking for their support for their position and their concern in a way that is respectful in a way where I am welcoming of it and essentially I'm daring them not naturally but I'm daring them to educate me and if they can't do it and they get nasty then we have we sort of ended the civil interchange and we come back to me signaling that I have the right to be wrong and that's where the discussion ends let me see it ah limit foods such as nuts or avocados in your diet affect you psychologically or thinking clarity since the brain requires some fat in other words can you take in too little fat ah I don't know and I doubt it in it's limiting necks or that is not going to be a problem at all so that that's a way off into the weeds the could you potentially have a diet that could keep you alive but would be too low in fat possibly I think you would probably have artificial you have to be getting calories from artificial food most of those calories from artificial food in other words I think if you eat a natural foods diet I don't think that there's any way to get a diet that's essential fatty acid efficient so and then you know impact on the brain etc so this all gets to be very very speculative and theoretical and no evidence and you know under just the right conditions you know if if I flew past the speed of light and and I was going backwards you know just the clock around there's all kinds of theory but folks forget about it the as we said in a you know one of our main chapters in the pleasure trap is called looking for health in all the wrong places and the the concept is that the problem here is dietary excess the problems are not deficiency so we probably filled a hundred questions about deficiencies for every question that we feel about dietary excess uh maybe a thousand to one in other words human beings are inherently fascinated with deficiency they are not particularly interested in excess because dietary excesses have never been a problem for any species however they are overwhelmingly the number one problem for this species so people are worried about their brain health we don't need to be worried about eating nuts we need to be worried about all the oil and animal food that people are eating that are causing vascular damage which will throw little clots and wind up with 50 year olds having cat scans showing thousands of miniature strokes all of the brain and so the brain health is essentially the same health as is taking place throughout the organism and the main issues are making sure that we don't have dietary excesses deficiencies you know if you're going to be a very strict vegan the deficiency you need to be worried about is b12 other than that you need to be worried about vitamin D D make sure that you get enough sunshine or some possible source of vitamin D but other than those two issues I think deficiencies of any kind are going to be rare overwhelming the problems or excess and let's keep our focus there incidentally people are worried about essential fatty acids and worried about nuts and all the the the issues about that listen to Jeff Novak's lectures and if they he has several of them I think you can purchase several of them this these are definitive lectures on these issues and so we can turn to a world-class expert that has investigated the science down in great detail there go there and give yourself a break if you're anxious about this which there's really no need for this anxiety okay what else important ok here we go ah do I have to fast to reset auto immune cells back to immune cells and if I don't where the cells always remain autoimmune you know I'm not not neither am I an expert in autoimmune disease and I'm not sure that what the person is thinking is necessarily tracking with our understanding of the problem so immune immune problems can be reduced significantly from a healthier diet sometimes you need to have a diet that is on that is beneficial towards reducing gut leakage which we believe is a major problem with autoimmune disease and so sometimes we have to have diets that are not simply a vegan diet but we also have diets that are diet such that gluten and other particular chemicals are less likely to be involved in gut leakage and in stokin autoimmune response so do you have to fast to get these benefits not necessarily sometimes though you might want to have professional instruction and someone look over your situation that is knowledgeable about these issues the I don't think dr. McDougall has the time to deal with thousand phone calls on this issue but there are doctors they do and I don't know I think Anthony Lim may take phone consultations well it's a TrueNorth I'm not sure about this dr. Klapper is extremely knowledgeable about these types of issues about modifying diets of people with autoimmune disease in you know in such a fashion now is water fasting useful yes often very useful it is a method that can be very helpful for calming down autoimmune disease before we start reintroducing food so the a complicated question and every every individual hat is facing a different problem so I can't give you a stereotyped response for what will be the solution for you but the question is can diet alone or must you have fasting to solve these problems and the answers often diet alone is enough oh please it's getting extended the free consultation or fee consultation no yeah I don't do free consultation I do consultations on my website called scheme dynamics org one word scheme dynamics you can schedule either a half an hour or one hour consultation a half hour seventy-five dollars in an hour's $150 I set aside 12 slots every week for people that want to just schedule those consultations and that that's what we do and it's all set up there with a of course a scheduling program that is much more complex than it should be but this is not my fault this is modern technology and there's no way to stop these people from making things complicated which is why my mother it's a hard time watching her polite because I have to have the genius of a nine-year-old to run a television set these days okay so I'll talk about the exercise paradox just sort of for anybody that hasn't heard about this this is a major advance in our understanding of physiology and it's important and it's important for us so that we put exercise in context of health in a way sort of once and for all where it makes it makes sense what we've been observing so for thirty years John McDougall has said I don't try to exercise as your weight off its the food and then go for a walk around the block amazingly this is one of those things where an expert observer simply has his fingers on the pulse of something that that his intuition was just better than everybody else is thinking so it turns out that this is exactly late and this wasn't demonstrated until fairly recently where where extensive investigations were done that showed that hunter-gatherers who are doing far more exercise than any professional athlete in the world that these people were burning only slightly more calories than I will burn today chasing my cats around the house so this is this is an extraordinary advance in our understanding of how this works now it's not that like let's suppose that in principle an average man Burns has a calorie budget of about 2,500 calories a day and an average woman has a calorie budget of 1900 so let's suppose that in principle sometimes sort of below average on everything we're going to assume that my calorie budget 2,300 dollars a day now if I don't do anything if I just sit in front of the television and get up to the refrigerator I will probably burn about 2,000 so I will not burn up to my budget in other words I could have I could have burned more calories than the calories that I did burn now if it turns out that I do intermediate level exercise and I go jog around the block or walk around the block or play a little basketball etc then I'm going to get up to my budget I don't have to do a whole lot to get there so I'll get up to my budget of 2300 now the question is what if I go run two marathons back-to-back well I don't think I could do that in a day but in principle somebody could so what would happen then the answer is I would probably burn I would burn actually a few more calories not a lot unbelievably small amount more so when people maybe on the order of maybe 200 more hours so if I ran a marathon I might I might burn about 200 more calories that day now we've had no idea what those numbers were so people were just making things up so the notion that you sit on your exercise bike for another half an hour and burn 125 calories turns out to be ludicrous like just is not the case so the so all of the the fitbit's and all of the the extra cycles that are keeping track of these things are vastly in error the so the person's question about what about athletes this and what about that these are all these are all be as people are checking their own logic on this and and seeing something that seems so outrageously different than everything that they thought they're looking for exceptions that we disprove this rule the the answer is go to the Scientific American website find out the guy's name like forgot his hundred college and then go to YouTube or wherever it was that he gave his speech and you listen to that man's speech for half an hour as he presents this evidence and when you do your questions will be answered in full I'm a trained scientist I looked at his data I listened to his presentation I looked at all the dots on his graph and the extraordinary explanation that not only explained the evidence that he collected but also evidence about everything we know about animal behavior and animal physiology and it's going to turn out that what he has discovered is extraordinary the human beings relative to other primates have extraordinarily high calorie budgets and the only way we got away with having extremely high calorie budget Sicily because we organized social systems in order to share food and so this this has profound implications for human social psychology and the evolution of the human hyper sociality that we see today and so and also also explains the extraordinary touchiness that's involved in us reject other people's food and how much pleasure we have in sharing our food with other people and wanting them to enjoy it in other words food sharing and winds up being a massively important process of ensuring each other against death from starvation by having evolved very high calorie budgets as a species enabling us to do things that other other animals cannot do including running a brain that has massively greater cork needs than any other animal Sprint's so all of it is beautifully explored and explained by this by this terrific character I'm looking somebody knows who he is I'm getting of all the names and science that I know I'm embarrassed that I have not memorized this many things yet it's I'm just getting used to his work but go to the internet do your own research listen to the evidence from the horse's mouth and of all questions will be limited let's see I can't see it you tell them that it's a Thurman concert Berman Pond sir I'm going on I didn't open it up so any any naysayers that are having trouble wrapping their head around this which believe me for the next 10 years the world of exercise and fitness will come to curse this guy who can only imagine if I was the CEO of Fitbit I would be I would be plotting something against this man who is nothing other than a very sweet brilliant academic who has now found something that is going to change our vision of of how this all works together and the extraordinary thing for me is to know I know firsthand the dr. MacDougall has been saying it's the food it's the food it's the food it's the food oh you need to exercise walk around the block I've been hearing that for 20 years firsthand and it turned out the great doctor was right on to it oh yeah somebody else just put something here it actually got shown to have this what benefit yes we aren't we aren't in no way saying negative things about exercise but as the doc says in Scientific American you can't outrun a bad diet so it's not the solution to weight loss it's an important adjunct to make sure you do a reasonable amount of exercise but it is not the solution it has other ancillary benefits that are fine but this is this is the important point so we don't want to we don't want to leave on on a distortion about what we think about exercise it's a fine thing but it's not the solution and thank you don't rely on a map thanks good to see everybody all right provide back
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