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Gustavo Tolosa: Dr Jen Howk, PhD What is the Pleasure Trap and How Can We Escape It
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well hello and welcome everyone my name is Gustavo Tolosa I'm a professional musician as many of you know but besides my passion for music my other passion is we been able to to regain your health with a whole food plant-based diet and many of you have already subscribed to my youtube channel which is under the name Gustavo tolosa and my facebook page which is doctor starch and I just upload new videos every week they're free you've seen many of the videos we look from Miele cetera and chefs and today we have a very special guest I've been wanting to have on the show and her name is dr. Jennifer hock and she's going to be talking to us about something very interesting which is the pleasure trap which actually is the name of a book maybe she can mention a little bit about that and what it is and how do we get out of this so let me tell you a little bit about dr. Hawk she's an author a researcher and an interdisciplinary social scientist who uses the powerful insights of steam dynamics does the name of the website steam dynamics calm both academically and clinically and she earned her BA with honors from the University of Washington in Seattle and then completed her master of art and her PhD in political science at Harvard University dr. Hawks graduate work on an ongoing research explore questions at the intersection of social vulnerability resilience and well-being she was born and raised Alaskan and she now calls Santa Rosa Calif her hall where she works as both director of True North health foundation and a lecturer and psychology coach who applies the steam dynamics framework to a variety of clinical problems and her clinical interests are wide ranging but she especially passionate about helping clients through problems of his team processes romantic misery addiction and recovery and mastering the pathways of human motivation and you can actually get a one-on-one phone consultation with her if you go to steam dynamics comm and I will type that in a minute here in the chat so thank you everybody for being here tonight or today wherever you are and thank you dr. Hawk for being here with us how are you doing oh I'm doing very well it's a joy to find me here after we had to reschedule it so I'm really happy to finally be here with you on my little my little patio so I am I've been trying to move for several months but this is a very difficult time to be trying to relocate so I'm kind of hopscotching around so I'm at this very cute little Airbnb where I have this nice outdoor experience and so until I can move to my new forever home I am I am just kind of wandering the earth with my this is a big upgrade from where I've been sort of in hotel rooms because I'm chosen you know in this holding pattern waiting for waiting for a flight it's like a it's like a movie I just wanted I wanted to get in a situation where I could be outside so you'll find me outside if there's any options I recall correctly you and I had lunch outside once yes yes okay I'm absolutely anybody who's been to Chu North knows what a great courtyard that is and it's such a it's such a great spot I do have one little correction on that bio the bio must be out of date I should have Tina I'm no longer director of the Foundation there but I do continue to lecture and see patients that's I that's a good note to me to update my internet didn't want anybody to try to send me money for you know a donation which you should send money to the so today we are going to discuss something that some people know something about this and for some people is quite a mystery when we talk about the pleasure trap and what is it and of course everybody I think should get a copy of that book written by dr. Lyle and dr. Goldhamer and read it it is a brilliant book something I think it is a couple of readings because it's dense it's very dense yes very academic you with your wonderful way of putting things because you know I love to interview different people on the same talk topic because everybody has a different way of saying it it's like you know every piano does recording and you know you can teach the same thing and each teacher will present it and teach it in a different way so I'm interested in hearing I have interviewed the dr. Goldhamer I have interviewed dr. Lisle about this and now I'm interested in hearing how you put it for us in in simple terms and then we could allow people that are logging in here and thank you everybody for logging in to actually ask questions and this is what's fun about these webinars because we can interact so any questions dr. Hakka our what is the pleasure trap and number two and then I will get out of the screen here and number two is how do we get out of it so it's not all that's all people learning it was how to escape the pleasure trap well that's no problem so yeah I'm very happy to talk about this and it's it's it is sort of a different perspective but because I I know you know I work very closely with dr. Lisle those of you who are watching who are familiar with his work we we're collaborators and so if you go to a steam dynamics comm you can book a session with either of us and learn about what both of us are up to see videos by both of us read read things that we've written and he and I are co-authoring his next book together so the the pleasure trap you know came out about 20 years ago 15 years ago with dr. Alan Goldhamer and so that really is if you are interested in understanding the the ancestral history of what really the nitty-gritty of the pleasure trap and you either you this resonates with you and you really want to get a better grip on all of the the parts of your brain that are working against you that book is is the original source material to really really understand the problem in depth but I don't think you need to get a PhD in pleasure trap studies to really understand the basic dynamics of what's going on here and I say that both as somebody who talks about this all the time and works with clients on it but also someone who's really lived pleasure trap realities in a way that dr. Lisle and dr. Goldhamer have not you know they and that that's going to get us into a big part of the pleasure trap discussion which is personality so we couldn't just like bookmark that because we'll be coming back to personality a lot if you really want to understand who you are in relation to this problem and how it's affecting your success or your your difficulty with success with losing weight and developing healthy habits so as somebody who has struggled with the pleasure trap both with food and with alcohol addictions so anybody who's followed me for any amount of time I talk very openly about the fact that I struggled with alcohol for a long time I've now been sober for nearly seven years but you can think of alcohol or any drug addiction as sort of a more extreme version of the same exact process that's going on with the pleasure trap of food it's really just another the pleasure trap is just a sort of flowery term for an addictive process and it's describing the the nature of the trap you were more likely to fall into this addictive process in in this modern environment we live in because of the nature of the food that is available to us this is not the nature of the food that we are adapted to as a species at all it's a completely unique experience just really in the last hundred years or so for most of us on planet Earth that we not only have a tremendous abundance of calories available to us but they are very highly processed calories they are engineered in an extreme way by the Giants of the food industry to be extremely palatable and to hit what they call our Bliss points to essentially release a huge amount of pleasure chemicals in the brain so the pleasure trap all the pleasure trap is is its it's describing the trap that you are likely to get into where your brain and the and the structures of your brain that were beautifully evolved throughout our ancestral evolution to help you make good decisions for your survival and reproduction all of that circuitry and all of that machinery that you have which for generation after generation after generation after generation always was driving you toward finding food finding really calorie dense food because that was very rare and slurping up as much of it as you possibly could in one sitting and and and occasionally stuffing yourself if you really got into something rich that was what kept your ancestors alive if they hadn't had that mechanical instinct to go after really rich food and to seek it out at as a really strong preference to lower calorie density food they would not have survived to reproduce their genes to become the generation that became the next generation of ancestors and on down the line to you so if you are on planet earth right now is a very good chance that you have salmon proof genes which means that you lived through a lot of crap you lived through a lot of starvation starvation kills more of our ancestors than anything else it wasn't saber-toothed Tigers it wasn't disease really it was an old age it was starvation that's that's what really took most of us out and so the species is adapted just exquisitely to the problem of starvation and how do you adapt to the problem of starvation well you make very effective use of the calories that are available in your environment particularly if they are scarce we just find ourselves in an environment in the modern environment which offers us many other benefits like not knock in the modern environment it's got a lot of things to recommend it but this food abundance and the in the artificial calorie density of the food that's available to us is hijacking these pleasure pathways so you you have pleasure chemicals in your brain that are released when you do things that are really good for your survival and or your reproduction so this is why we call dr. Lyle and I call what we do and it's it's evolutionary psychology we're looking through an evolutionary lens that the kind of animal we are and how we try to solve problems as an animal within a certain constraints of primarily survival but also reproduction getting those genes into the next generation so this is the really this is the most important thing that we're doing so you have built-in systems in your brain which tell you whether you're on track or not with whatever you're doing for your survival and reproduction goals and those are primarily linked to food and sex so those are the two most relevant things that humans can do to ensure their survival and to ensure their reproduction you kind of it turns out you can't reproduce by yourself and it turns out you can't survive without food so we are built to recognize and to receive innate pleasure from from pursuing those things that are going to contribute to to higher odds of survival and reproduction and so even you will get pleasure chemicals you will get dopamine released in your brain if you eat whole natural food you can eat a carrot stick and you get a nice little jolt of dopamine but it's a normal amount it's the amount that you're supposed to receive that's letting you know that was a good choice you made you you did well that was worth all of the effort that it took to go munch on that go dig it out of the ground and brush off the dirt and chew it up and it's it's like it's there's some labor involved with chewing that carrot but there's some calories as payoff and so it was overall it was worth it so good job we're gonna give you a little nice little shot of good chemicals to reaffirm and to condition that behavior the the with whole natural food the more you go up the calorie density scale the more dopamine you get in your brain as a nice little nice little reward to tell you that was an even better trade for all of the chewing and the effort that it took to get that food out of the environment so so people who are attempting to eat healthfully know this intuitively you if you've got in your kitchen you've got carrot sticks and you've got mangoes and you've got roasted chickpeas those are all whole plant foods but you are almost everybody who's listening to this unless you like a real fruit fiends which some people are they're gonna go for those roasted chickpeas first or they're even gonna go for a bowl of oatmeal first they're certainly gonna go for something like a piece of whole-wheat toast and some peanut butter before they're interested in eating the mango and they're going to be interested in eating the mango before they're interested in eating the carrot stick and they're gonna be interested in the carrot stick before they're interested in the leaf of kale so this is what calorie density is it's how many calories per bite of this thing how many calories per pound how much chewing how much effort is involved so your pleasure chemicals are moving in tune up the continuum of the bang for the buck that you're getting with the with the effort that you're expending to source the food eat the food digest the food this is there's a lot of labor involved especially when you're dealing with whole natural food so you this is how the machine works and this is how the reward mechanism is supposed to go but we have completely interrupted this process by introducing completely unnatural food this extremely processed food which completely hijacks those pleasure pathways so now instead of getting a normal nice little dose of dopamine for eating some chickpeas you need a slice of pizza and you're dealing with thousands of calories per pound instead of the the natural stone age Stone Age equilibrium which would have topped out at you know eight hundred something like that looks like ancestrally we were eating about 700 on average that included a little bit of meat that included a little bit of honey these higher calorie things but it also included a lot of roughage a lot of fruit a lot of tubers and so you start dialing the calorie density of food up by grinding it into flour by adding a bunch of oil that doesn't register any satiety mechanisms by putting a bunch of salt on it which makes it even tastier so you want to eat even more of it than you normally would all of these things contribute to you essentially ingesting more calories than you otherwise would if you were left to your own devices in a natural food environment and so we systematically overeat and some people because of their both of their sort of physiological genetic profile and also because of their personality profile which is also genetic they are more prone to overeat to fall into this trap to have trouble getting out of the trap they have more addictive personalities all kinds of things begin to interact when you watch people you put humans in front of this very modern problem it's it's the fact that we walk around and not everybody is the same amount of overweight you know you see some people who are twenty pounds some people who are fifty some people who are 100 some people who are 400 some people who are not overweight at all that is the natural variation of the species because more or less everybody's eating the same food we we get this notion in the in am this kind of plant-based world that we all spend all of our time in that everybody's you know having big complicated discussions that whether it's it's um it's better to eat your your fruit hole or to grind it up into a smoothie first in our year like this that is it - easily absorbable and all of these we forget that this like this is not even a subject of discussion for the vast majority of people who are wandering around in this modern food environment who are just really eating whatever is available to them and eating a standard American diet which is a whole notch more ridiculous than anything that people in the in the whole food plant-based world are eating even if it's somewhat somewhat processed in calorie nuts so that's basically how it works and the more you artificially concentrate a pleasure releasing substance whether it's food or a drug or anything that's going to operate in that same way the more you were walking your way into a potential addictive process that's going to be very difficult to get out of and more difficult for some people to get out of than others for a variety of reasons all right thank you very much I was I was listening here in the background like many people have expressed here you have a wonderful way of putting is difficult and concept in easy-to-understand terms and thank you hoping to do yes Wow you have to be very intimate and brilliant to be able to do that so we are you can listening even listening to those old webinars it's dr. lamell where he talks how important status is you're just giving me statuses I think a long warm and fuzzy inside like to take a difficult concept and being able to to you know bring it and condense it it it thanks a lot so thank you everybody appreciate that really so we understand that I think and if not please feel free to put questions here so how how do you get out what kind of things can we do me to to get out of this even though it's kind of like going against our nature right yeah it's absolutely not just going against your nature but you're going against the strongest instincts that you have as an animal so so like we're asking you've got to remember that you you're just a souped-up chimp you're not you're not this is this is all you really are I mean this is sort of the evolutionary lens that we bring to everything is that we have this these animal drives for survival and reproduction and we're going to pursue them and are really in predictable ways you know not just with the pleasure trap and and the food environment like we're talking about today but but everything that dr. Lyle and I talked about if this this extends to the range of human behavior and relationships work issues all of these things you can once you sort of put them under the magnifying glass of evolutionary thinking and and the ways in which we're always seeking to sort of maximize our the benefit of any particular situation relative to the cost of it that is sort of the the engine of human decision-making and motivation and how we go through life so that's that's that's really what's going on so the the getting out of the pleasure trap requires you to go against the entire history of the species which has developed these incredibly strong instincts to seek out and and eat the most calorie dense food in the environment that it can find and this is not a matter of willpower folks this is like this is not a question of like oh well I'm just really gonna grit my teeth and I'm really gonna do it you might be able to grit your teeth and do it for a while particularly if you have a really unusual degree of motivation which some people will have in a really high degree of what we call conscientiousness which is the personality trait that is probably most relevant to being able to tackle this problem but the main thing with if you need to get out of the pleasure trap if you are truly in the pleasure trap and you were you were eating highly processed food and you can't stop you know I think a lot of people in the in the space will will still consider themselves in the pleasure trap if they eat you know a little too much avocado or a little like they're still eating whole natural plant food and they're trying to get ever more perfect so that's we want to make sure that we're not we're not doing too much of that you want to deal with the the big problems first which is you know are you eating something that came in that plastic bag from the store or something there's a long ingredients list something that has been essentially engineered by a corporation to be extremely exciting to your to your nervous system so that's that that's the that's the main thing and we think of this as this is relentless this never goes away this never you never just get to sort of get out of the pleasure trap and then that's it and you never have to think about it again because these things don't lose their power over you in the sense that you're not ever going if your thing if your drug of choice is Cinnabon you're never going to walk through an airport food court and not think to yourself mmm at Cinnabon you know it's it's a it's not the worst idea in the world because you've you've experienced the super normal pleasure that Cinnabon can give you if you if you have it so it's not that it goes away entirely but you can really dial down the intensity of it so you know one good way to understand this is people who have either quit smoking cigarettes or quit drinking so I quit drinking seven years ago if I still craved a drink like I did when I first quit drinking for the first week or two that sort of intense white-knuckle and craving where you're like constantly having the discussion with your with yourself with the the devil and angels on your shoulder like oh just one more time I can quit tomorrow it's what's the harm like it's no big deal if that were a constant presence in my reality I would never stay sober nobody would ever stay sober because that would be so depleting to my willpower over time which is this finite resource that I I wouldn't be able to hold up to it you've got barbarians at the gate that are have been trying to beat down the door every day when you're when you're in an active addiction like that and it's just nobody even even Alan Goldhamer would not have the wherewithal to hold it at bay if he were maintaining just a little bit of the addictive process so so the key with alcohol is that you get out of the acute withdrawal process and you begin this process of acclimating to whole natural food and the the your taste buds adapt to the innate pleasure that you're supposed to get from whole natural plant food because you're supposed to get plenty you're supposed to really enjoy your food as as an organism as otherwise you wouldn't be motivated to go and get it and you would die and natural selection would pick you off and your ancestors would not have survived long enough to make you possible so you have adapted in a context that is amply rewarded by whole natural food you just don't know it because you've blown out all your pleasure circuits with with bonbons and pizza and all of the other things that people will get into so if you give yourself a chance if you get completely out of that super normal food environment for some amount of time and that's gonna vary for individuals to some people it takes two or three days some people it might take a week some people it might be a better part of a month it's probably not going to be longer than that even if you're at the real tail end of the weirdos at the end of the bell curve who to take a really long time to normalize and you're going to be most of the way there after three or four days so if you can abstain from real garbage for the better part of a week you you're more than halfway there in terms of your neural adaptation and you're and you're the sort of acute withdrawal process being behind you but if you have a little bit for most people when they when they're sort of beginning this process and it's like oh I'll just have one slice of pizza that my husband brings home or I'll just you know I bought snacks for the kids lunches and so I'll just get into that a little bit you it's like this drip this little drip of addiction it would be like if I was trying to quit drinking alcohol and I just had half a glass of wine with dinner my brain doesn't work that way my brain has half a glass of wine and it wants the whole bottle it wants to go out and get more and that's the same thing that's gonna happen with most people when they're dealing with the pleasure trap not everybody obviously some people have a very we all know people I know chef AJ of people watching no chef AJ her husband is notorious for this for being able to like he'll have two bites of cheesecake or vegan cheesecake and be super full like oh I'm done couldn't possibly eat more so he doesn't have the same sort of whatever's going on with the dopamine signaling and the satiety signaling he's just a different animal and so the problem is not the same for him that it is for her and for a lot of other people so but you don't you don't even have a chance at really defeating the pleasure trap if you're in the thick of it and you're really really struggling with it you've got to get fully out of withdrawal and it's not gonna be nice it's not gonna be friendly your nervous system is gonna throw a giant fit it's gonna go through all the stages with you it's gonna bargain it's gonna scream it's gonna cry it's gonna try to get your sympathy it's gonna try to come up with all kinds of really good excuses about why it doesn't make sense to start yet and you should start next week it's gonna run through all of the different things that it can do to continue to get you to to use the the super normal food that's in your environment so that's step number one is is strapping yourself in for the withdrawal process and white-knuckling your way out for however long it takes to give yourself a fighting chance at learning it's sort of literally learning in like teaching your brain that the whole natural food is the source of pleasure because if you've been deep in the pleasure trap your brain doesn't know that right now so you've got it you've got to give it a chance and that has everything to do with what we call controlling your environment so the other thing with the pleasure trap is that unless you have a very unusually conscientious personality which most people who find themselves in the pleasure trap to begin with probably don't have like a super mega crazy Alan Goldhamer style 99th percentile conscientious personality you're all shots your only chance at beating this long-term on on balance with occasional lapses here and there which are almost guaranteed but your your only shot at long-term success is to get your environment clean you cannot tempt yourself with having stuff around whether it's your spouse's stuff whether it's for your kids whether it's the the cafeteria at the the lunchroom at work wherever you get into trouble with supernormal pleasure trap food you've got to find a way to not put that in front of yourself every day it's like my dog's I have two big dogs I mean if I if I tried to bargain with them and even if I really trained them very like really worked with them I can't leave them alone in a room with a bunch of open canned food sitting there and expect that they're not going to get into it they're gonna get into it immediately they're gonna get into it the second I walk out of the room it's actually amazing to watch their sort of calorie calorie density recognition circuits work because if I if I have canned food and dry food in front of those dogs they will desperately eat all the canned food and ignore the dry food to the point where they finish their own canned food and then they go check the other dogs bowl to see if there's any canned food over in that bowl before they're like fine I'll eat the kibble I'll eat the dry food because it's more it's more chewing it's fewer calories per bite it's not as innately rewarding that's why it doesn't taste as good that's why things taste good they taste good because this is like appealing to our innate energy conservation we're getting really really good payoff for the effort that we're investing in that process those are the signals that we get as far as like what tastes good what feels good anything in life that that we get a positive signal from it's because we are inferring at the level of our nervous system that we're doing the right thing for survival and reproduction and if we feel bad we're getting the signal that we're doing the wrong thing so all things equal your feelings are essentially a barometer for your survival and reproduction odds at any given moment and that applies across the board but they're there it can be it can be tricked and it can be tricked by super normal food which is actually quite detrimental to our health and happiness which is the subtitle of the pleasure trap book but it feels like the right thing to do it feels like you're absolutely making the right choice to to survive and to get those genes and some generation because it has been the correct thing to do for the entirety of human history it's just in in the modern world in the last century that it's been the wrong thing to do for most of us yes and you know that to me that is a key point when I talk to people because it's like humans have forgotten that this this present time in the in the whole range of history it's just tiny tiny blip in in an in an ocean of incredible poverty that people think that that there were supermarkets and refrigerators 2,000 years ago no with the environment what you just said what's totally different and it's so you mentioned those two things and so do you think that the calorie density is one of the strong points here to to underline to get out although we know we never really get out but oh yeah calorie density is sort of your guiding principle for you know how weight how you should be orienting your shopping habits in your particularly if you're trying to lose weight I mean there are people who want to get out of a closure trap just because they recognize that it's detrimental to their health um and they're not necessarily looking to lose weight but the the thing with calorie density is that you can eat a lot more bulk you can eat a lot more food for fewer calories so so a lot of people in this in this space that we talked to you know AJ myself like a lot of people are kind of what we would call volume eaters they would like they'd like to have a big plate of food which is there's nothing wrong with that but there's a big difference between a big plate of cheesy nachos and a big plate of kale salad it's the same amount of bulk but you're dealing with a whole different reality as far as how many calories are actually in that in that plate at any given time so the idea is you want to be eating a lot of sort of bulky fibrous raw veggies steamed veggies soups things that are very low in calorie density too to fill up if you if you need to do that before you eat up the calorie density scale but that's really getting into kind of the how to hack the system if you if you've kind of gotten yourself out of a pleasure trap and you're you're looking to kind of lose those last 20 pounds those last 10 pounds then we start talking about like how can we really tighten the screws on calorie density and really like bring bring people into a space where they're able to eat a lot more for a lot less calories most people who are new to this are you don't need to tighten the screws that much to see a lot of success you just need to get out of the really super normal food you need to get out of out of the food that it has been engineered for your pleasure right okay very good very good thank you so in questions let's see so someone is saying is there a recommended step-by-step process for getting out of the pressure trap that you have seen work well for people yeah I mean it's really it's a you know there's a I spend a lot of time in 12-step when I was getting sober and so they the the one of the jokes not jokes in 12-step is yeah the only rule is that you don't pick up so you don't you don't pick up the the alcohol you just don't drink it that's the only rule it's very very easy or as they say it's very simple even if it's not easy so yeah the biggest step is I I would say getting your environment clean if you were relying on your willpower to solve this problem even though you've got a house full of super normal food that you know is a problem for you you're studying yourself up to fail like I don't care how motivated you are how conscientious you are how how much you think you can do it because the thing is that people and I have lived this reality where you you start off with a lot of motivation if you've gotten yourself all all geared up you've read all about it you you read your copy of the pleasure trap you you you understand the process you're like this time I'm gonna do it and you go buy a bunch of healthy food but you don't necessarily trash all of the unhealthy food you keep a couple of things around because the spouse likes them or because you don't want to waste the food or whatever it is and and so that's problem number one people get into problem number two is that they systematically under eat so they try to they they try to eat too low on the calorie then to the scale to sim so you don't want to be depriving yourself of especially what we call the whet starches which are the the water rich hydrated starchy foods that should be the staple of your diet and the heart of the bulk of the calories that you're getting so things like oatmeal things like rice things like potatoes things like squash beans these things are a little more calorie rich they're still not they're not calorie intense but compared to raw greens which are about a hundred calories a pound you start getting up to something like chickpeas which are you know more like 500 or 600 calories a pound so you're getting you're getting more it's it's there's more incentive to eat them and it's going to actually fill you up more so people need to be very careful that they are not depriving themselves and eating a lot of bulk but systematically eating under the hunger Drive because both that process and keeping some junk in the house will interact with each other to at some point I don't know if it'll happen on day four if it'll happen on day 14 if it happened on day 40 but at some point you get out of your groove you have a bad day or you can't get home at the normal time or instacart can't deliver the spinach or whatever it is something takes you out of your groove and that's enough of a disruption to the cost-benefit analysis that you find yourself face down and a jar of almond butter you're going to go to something that is incredibly calorie rich because your mind is trying to solve the survival and reproduction problem and if it is if it gets sort of confused and it doesn't know what to do in the moment it's it's gonna look at its options and be like the surest thing that I could do to really guarantee my survival and reproduction is to eat something that's a couple fouler a couple thousand calories per pound because that is a guaranteed good choice to make and if you have that source of 2,000 calorie per pound stuff in your house even if it's up in a cabinet even if it's hidden away and you don't think that you're ever going to get into it again because you've got this dialed in and you've turned your life around if it's there you're you're very likely gonna get into it particularly if you're fairly new in the transitional withdrawal process yeah yeah and here we get into a very difficult I think the situation so some people know this but I lost 65 68 pounds but I came home from a 10-day program and I just wiped out everything from the house all the time I talked to so many clients you come fast at TrueNorth for you know for ten days and they lose a ton of weight and then they they get home and it's immediately into the calorie rich food totally so the the the recommendation that I always give people is when you like whether you're just starting off and you're trying to get out of the pleasure trap and you're trying to clean up your diet in general or if you have done like a ten day program or a FAFSA TrueNorth or something like that it doesn't really matter what the circumstances are you always want to be eating to satiety on a lot of starches right like fill your belly up with those starches they're very satiating like the test after test like satiety test shows that the single-most satiating food for humans is like a boiled potato boiled or steamed potato it's just if this really works and so don't ever get yourself in a situation where you're thinking that you've over eaten on the wet starches it's really not possible it's you might eat a lot today if you give yourself permission to eat as many potatoes as you want today you're going to go to town on the potatoes particularly if you've been fasting or depriving yourself of calories and you will actually see the number on the scale will likely go up because you you have a bunch of glycogen in your system and you're gonna be retaining more water so people get like all this kind of superstitious thinking about that like oh I ate too many potatoes yesterday and then gained three pounds overnight and not me I can't eat potatoes because I gain weight when I eat potatoes this is I mean my colleague and good friend Doug would use a expletive term at this point but this is just not true it doesn't work this way you have more water weight because you've eaten a lot more glucose and you have a lot more glycogen in your system but you have not gained fat from those potatoes you probably lost fat that day you just don't see it yet so don't get into superstitious thinking with the scale always eat to satiety on the starches because that is what's going to keep you out of trouble later on when you go to the potluck and there's pizza or there's you know there's whatever nachos or whatever it is whatever your drug of choice is if you've got a belly full of potatoes you're gonna be a lot better armed to command mark I want to clarify that what I said earlier was when I came when I went home I do think bad out of the covers oh I I believe one of the things chef AJ says that is funny but it's so true it's if it's your house it's in your mouth it's in your house it's in your mouth it's so true that should be everybody's mantra and it applies to if it's within striking distance of your house so you know we dr. Lisle tells a story about a client who lived across the street from a 7-eleven and came came and said oh I did you know help me develop the willpower to not go to the 7-eleven at 3:00 a.m. and get a bunch of Ho Hos and and actually I was like I'm sorry like it's in your environment it's effectively in your house because it's 24 hours it's across the street the energy expenditure to go over there so low relative potential benefit that you're gonna you're hosed you're gonna go over there it's like it's really it's you've got to move yeah so that's I've actually had people if they're in that kind of situation and they can't move or they don't want to move you can go you can bring a photo of yourself to the manager of the store and be like put me on your do not serve list like throw it let me in here if you see me and usually this sort of implied shame of that is enough to keep them out they don't want to run the risk of actually being escorted out challenge that people have always and even here they're mentioning is having somebody in the Hat win like when you're the only one in the house that is trying to switch this way of eating and the rest so it's not possible to get everything out of the house that you're not supposed to eat and so that challenge I don't know how to fix it do you do you have any there's no there's no Pat easy answer for that it depends on the circumstances it depends on your circumstances and your goals and it depends on the nature of your relationships and and what what kind of like what are we talking about are we talking about a husband who refuses to give up his pork rinds because you know he can't live without them or are we talking about some kids who want a cod Oh in their lunch and so you have that around like there's their degrees of variation here that people will have different iterations of it but if it's a case where it's it's some sort of trigger food where you know that it's a problem for you and that you're going to be likely to get into it under circumstances where you're stressed and out of your groove you either work with the the cohabitant of your living space to essentially lock it up you know like like put it in a like we will do this we will we will have people like get some sort of tub that you can lock and keep your stash at super normal food in there if you've got to have it like if that's the dynamic that that relationship has to settle in for everybody to stay happy then that's what that's the solution that you have to have the the thing with this is that there's always a solution there's always a way to figure it out whether it's locking up the food whether it's moving to a new house whether it's hiring a chef to come to your house to to make batch cook every week there's always a solution to the problem it's just a your willingness to pay the cost both the financial cost and the interpersonal cost like are you are you willing to sort of make yourself difficult in your relationships to really defend yourself against the nature of this trap or not and if there are plenty of good reasons why you might not want to be like if it's really an issue of contention with your spouse and and you're like your husband doesn't want to give up his indulgent foods which continue to be a problem for you and you don't want to have that sort of that's just an internal conflict in your desires for your health in your body and yourself and his desires for himself and so that that is what it is it's not getting necessary but there was no easy comfortable answer to that you've got to walk through that conflict and figure out well what is the solution that we can come up with which is probably not going to be ideal for either of us but it is something that will solve the problem and just understand it's not it's that this is it's not a normal problem it's not a problem that we've adapted to solve and so it requires unusual solutions in it for certain personalities for certain biology's if this is if this is really a problem for you you've got to think outside the box you've got it you're not supposed to be able to solve this problem you can't be an alcoholic working in a bar no and then we have to throw in another another you know topic here which is no the different genetics of everyone sure Oh probably I think that as a society we think that you know what works for it that person works for me but it it doesn't so that's no well in the sense that you know this sort of the same general diet is going to be optimal for everyone a whole a whole point right there diet is sort of the best best diet for basically everything for weight loss for heart disease reversal for diabetes reversal for everything that we would sort of be dealing with in terms of our health right but sure I mean personality this is and this is something this is you know the world is just now waking up to what's called behavioral genetics which is this idea that so so much of who it is that we are is really determined by our genes in fact there's just I just saw an article today about we have researchers looking at genetic markers for higher susceptibility to Co vat19 so so like if you're it like the likelihood of having a really rough course and being placed on a ventilator they're starting to identify little genetic markers for that so all of these things like who you are genetically is having this huge effect on both the nature of the struggle like how how likely are you to put on and keep on weight like how as dr. Lisle says you know how sort of thick are your genes because some people they can eat a lot more food they can eat a lot sort of junkier food they don't have the same problem he's one of them you know he can have his carrot cake because he's notorious for and he's not been gaining weight like I would if I were to eat that carrot cake every day so there's a ton of variation there but there's also as actually up to between 80 and 90 percent of the variance of whether people are likely to become obese or not is genetically determined we know this from really well controlled identical twin studies they've been over 15 million of them replicated again and again that the the huge amount of what is determining whether you grow up to be overweight and how overweight you're likely to be no matter what kind of environment you were raised in no matter how often your parents took you on hikes no matter how much wheat germ they they fed you instead of frosted flakes it doesn't it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things when all of that data washes out it's totally the genes there's a tiny amount of leverage obviously or everybody would there wouldn't be any way that you could lose weight at all but it's it's not it's this is mostly a genetic game so that's happening at the biological and physical level but it's also happening at the personality level so your your personality is also profoundly genetically influenced so how conscientious you are which is one of the most important personality traits that we look at in what we call the big five there are five key personality traits that we look at in evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics how open you are to new experiences how conscientious you are how extroverted you are how agreeable you are and how emotionally stable you are so if I know those five things about you I really I have a very good sense of who you are as a person and how you're likely to deal with a wide variety of problems and the greatest predictor of success with getting out of the pleasure trap is how conscientious you are so you will see like all of the people in this space who have lost a lot of weight who are successful sort of spokespeople for AJ Goldhammer or yourself these are these are highly conscientious people unusually conscientious people so all of these traits they fall on what's called a bell curve which is you may remember from your PTSD from a stats class that you took in college it's like a normal curve it's a distribution of data where most people are right in the middle but you have people at the other tail end a few at either tail end save a few extreme flakes who are not conscientious at all those are the people who just never pay their electrical bill they forget to feed their cat they just they're like out to lunch all the time and then you have people at the other end of the spectrum who are extremely conscientious and those people if you're above like well above average for conscientiousness this is just easier for you to solve this problem it just comes more naturally because conscientiousness is how how much of a rule follower you are how important it is to you to do the right thing whatever the right thing may be so if there's a particular diet that you know is optimal for your health and happiness if you're more conscientious you are more likely to be following that diet and to stick to it and to be less likely to deviate all things equal so if you're if you're very highly conscientious you have a much higher degree of being successful over time but you don't have control over how Conchi you are contrary to a whole self-help industry that writes books about you know all of these different plans to rewire your brain and become sort of like the you know super habits and all of these different things there were of course ways that you can optimize and work with what you have and develop systems to make yourself more effective but your baseline level of conscientiousness is determined by your genetics and so if you are very low in conscientiousness you're gonna you're just gonna struggle more it's just freaking unfair but that is the way that it is right and a lot of people here and asking you when is your own book coming out I'm finishing the book that I'm cooperating with dr. Lisle which is sort of an overview of evolutionary psychology both we've been calling it kind of half self-help and half textbook so it's a lot of the history of the field and how to think about things but then we apply it to clinical problems that he's been dealing with with doc for decades and that I work with with clients on as well and then after that I also have my book which will be an adaptation of my PhD dissertation but that's probably we're looking at you know 2023 or so for that one so well very good I know we have a lot of questions here and maybe we could do from now we could do another webinar very happy to yeah because it's just impossible to cram so much you know people have questions about personality types I have done a webinar with dr. Lisle about personality types so a for you and I it may be this in the steam dynamics comm website I don't know but we we definitely have some clips and we're about to have if people kind of stay tuned at esteem dynamics calm in the next week or so we're releasing we're actually releasing a great amount of video and new material that people haven't seen before so stay tuned for that it's not up quite yet but maybe by the time people are watching this it'll it'll be available but the main on YouTube you can find I don't know if he did it as a webinar with you but I know that there's a lecture that dr. Lyle did called the perfect personality we give to people when they check in at true north to watch so he's he's done a few iterations of that talk he gave it at the fasting escape with doctor makers felt and you know he's talked about it with you and then he's there's a there's several different versions of it but it's talking all about like what would be the perfect for what would be the perfect personality to sort of escape the pleasure trap and he goes through each of the five characteristics and discovers that lo and behold it is a personality type that is identical to Ellen Goldhammer but a message that people need to understand is that okay so that's the ideal personality for this problem this is a freakish unusual problem it doesn't mean that that's the perfect personality to have for life at all everybody has their own sort of niche picking your personality whatever it is and whatever the kind of problems with your personality may be cuz everybody everybody wants to be more conscientious everybody wants to be more open everybody wants to be more extroverted like all of these things but whoever it is that you are there there is a very you where you do have the perfect personality for that niche so the main of the core of the advice that we give to people whether it's about diet or whether it's about relationships work or anything else is you've got to understand who you are and then engineer your environment to fit you don't try to change yourself to fit the environment because if you do that you're in a really losing game just like you would be with the pleasure trap you can't change yourself to be to have more willpower with regard to the pleasure trap you need to get that environment clean you need to make it as easy for yourself as possible because this is the hardest thing that you have to do you're you're fighting against your strongest instincts right well thank you very much i I'm sorry to disappoint anybody here if we haven't answered your question but I promise you that in the future whoa whoa schedule another please email me questions output the output the email in the screen but it's born for health at gmail.com and it's born and with a number and then a number for and then health anyway we can do that and we're back still we have learned so much today and I really appreciate the time that you have given us oh no it's it's a joy to be here and you know people can I have I have a youtube channel dr. Lyle and I share one at esteemed dynamics as well where I post a bunch of across post a bunch of stuff but I do have some things on mine that are only there so yeah you know put on your little your stocking hat and Google me and you can find different discussions on all okay yeah so find you yeah well but I know the esteem dynamics channel is just youtube.com slash esteem dynamics I think mine has a more bizarre YouTube URL but but it's very searchable okay one well thank you again and we look forward to another time in the future Oh beautiful this it was a pleasure but not a trap thank you for appreciating thank you guys have a great night a game
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