In this interview, Dr. Oz sits down with Dr. Douglas Lisle, a renowned psychologist whose work focuses on how food affects the way we think. Together, they explore the biggest misconceptions about fat in our diet, and how we can all lose weight, without losing out minds. Plus, Dr. Lisle talks about how to reset your taste buds to stop craving foods that give you a temporary mood boost, at the expense of extra calories! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
There's a reason why people are overweight and sick, and that's because they're doing things that gratify the short-term systems.
Basically what this is is a hyperactivation or an artificial activation of the dopamine pathway.
Your mind was designed by nature to seek the stimulation, and when you overstimulate it, it feels better.
And it's hard to get people to realize they must sacrifice that sort of short-term gratification in order for longer-term gains.
Hey, everyone.
I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
We'll be right back.
There are folks who have spent their professional life working on the psychology of fat, an area that intrigues me, because unlike some addictions, where you can just say, you know, don't do that.
You know, you can actually live life and never smoke a cigarette.
I've never smoked a cigarette.
You can go through life never having done harsh drugs, but you can't go through life not eating.
You've never smoked a cigarette?
Nope.
Never smoked a cigarette.
Not one?
Not one.
Not between, behind the barn someplace?
No, I've taken a whiff of a cigarette.
It's called a puff.
A puff.
I have problems.
I'm going to subscribe to English, the second language.
Someone's going to send a picture of you in college with a cigarette in your hand.
No, I never smoked.
I've had cigars, so I never smoked a cigarette.
My English as a Second Language show today is going to focus a little bit on the psychology.
We brought a gentleman in, Dr. Doug Lyle, who's a psychologist in Santa Rosa, California.
And is one of the most innovative and curious minds in this arena.
You've done well in your professional education, but you've also spent a lot of time working at the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders, where you're on staff.
You've spent a fair amount of time as a forensic psychologist.
Doug, what is a forensic psychologist?
It's criminal work.
Tell me a curious case you've been involved in.
How does that work?
No names.
No games.
Oh, I don't know.
The worst of the worst.
So you just start figuring out what's wrong with their heads?
Yeah, it's pretty hopeless, but you try anyway.
You do the best you can.
Do the detectives call you?
Does Sergeant Friday call up and say, Doug, I've got a real winner here.
He's doing these crazy things?
Actually, a lot of my career I spent doing evaluations for judges.
Judges would ask what we should do with people.
And so trying to figure out what the best move was for the criminal justice system in an individual case.
You mean, is it worth putting him in jail, institutionalizing him?
Was he really insane or not?
Jail would be the light thing.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Whether they need to go to the big house for a long time or how long, etc.
Or whether there's any hope at all.
Are there people you say it's hopeless?
They might put them in a, you know, electrocute them kind of thing?
No, no.
I wasn't involved in any cases of that magnitude.
Okay, okay.
Although we're not talking about that today, we may come back to that theme.
But he's actually lectured nationally to health professionals, physicians, and others on topics including evolutionary psychology and a lot of the other psychological therapies that might actually play a role in folks who are trying to lose weight.
And so his book, The Pleasure Trap, Mastering the Hidden Force that Undermines Health and Happiness, is going to be a topic.
Why did you write the book?
I think I wrote the book because of probably the same struggles that a lot of doctors have.
When you have people in front of you that are trying to reach very important goals for themselves.
So if you're Doug Lyle tucked away in Santa Rosa and you have a woman that's coming in that's trying to lose weight so that she can look better and feel better about herself...
Or if you're Mehmet Oz and you're a world-famous heart surgeon and you're going to try to talk to somebody about what they need to do to save their life.
The point is that we run into the same problem, which is that it's very difficult for people, even once they know the right thing to do, to actually do it.
As I read through the big summaries that we get for these books, I was struck by this concept of the pleasure trap.
If you just walk us through how something that, from an evolutionary perspective, makes so much sense might actually be maladaptive in modern society.
Well, the thing is that we lived in a completely different environment than we do today.
Or I wouldn't say completely different, but very significantly different.
In 10,000 years ago, our biggest problem was scarcity.
So we needed to be tuned, or our senses needed to be tuned, to even very subtle differences, for example, in caloric density of food.
So we were really good at detecting the difference between an apple that might be 70 calories a pound, or excuse me, 70 calorie apple, and one that's 75. And that'd be the difference between one that's a little bit tart and one that's sweet.
So now if you put next to that, with the very same machinery that's really there to save your life, to detect even subtle differences in calories, 70 to 75 calories, right next to it you put a chocolate apple that's 750 calories.
Right.
And that's what the problem is.
So how do you escape?
How do you get out of the pleasure trap?
Well, I think the first thing you have to do is recognize a trap.
It's everywhere.
It's our whole environment now is organized to try to play into our evolutionarily built tendencies.
So we're designed to be ferreting out the most pleasurable stuff with the least amount of pain and the least amount of effort.
And those tendencies that we call the motivational triad, pleasure-seeking, pain-avoidance, and energy conservation, those are running the show.
And even though they were extremely important tendencies in the natural world, they've now put us in a situation where in the modern world they're going to take us off course.
You need to know what these traps are.
You need to be able to recognize them.
It's like being...
Playing chess and having a friend who's better than you keep setting the same trap over and over again.
Once you start to recognize the trap, you can do things to avoid it.
Let's go over the motivational trial again.
You said it briefly.
You want to seek pleasure.
Yes.
We all try to do that.
You want to avoid pain.
It makes sense.
You want to conserve energy.
Right.
Which seems slovenly.
Yes.
And see, the thing is, we're designed by nature to be, I guess you'd call it, lazy.
Not really lazy, but you had to take every shortcut possible in order to survive.
If you look at Canadian geese, for example, when they fly south for the winter, they draft on each other, and they have to do that in order to save a few precious calories that'll make the difference between success and failure.
That's why they fly in that characteristic bee pattern.
But you tie this into the emotional link as well, right?
So that all makes biologic sense to me.
Yes.
But that doesn't mean you're happy necessarily.
Right.
So how does happiness figure into this and differentiate happiness from pleasure and all the other words we use to make ourselves think we understand what these words really mean?
Yes.
I think that was one of the big clarifications for me when I was writing The Pleasure Trap, was to try to sort of get a distinction as to why pleasure was so important and why it becomes the thing that we can't seem to give up, even though we need to, when we need to get on the right track.
And I think it's because we have a whole system, the way our psychology is engineered, is to use good, we're really seeking good feelings.
And anything that feels bad is really a sign of biological failure.
Happiness is a set of experiences that are mood states that come as a result of successes.
And those successes were designed by nature to try to tell us that we're on our way to pleasure.
So, for example, if you're a young guy in a chemistry class in college and you're trying to hit on the girl next to you, if she wants to go out with you or she says, yes, you're happy, it's a mood of happiness.
But happiness isn't really what you're after.
It's pleasure what you're ultimately after.
And so the problem is if we can short-circuit our way to the pleasure...
It feels like that's the most important thing to do.
So people are very often willing to basically short-circuit themselves to intensive pleasure experiences in drugs, in processed food, whatever it is.
And in doing so, they'll undermine their happiness because you need to look good, feeling good, and being healthy to really be happy.
Doug, how does avoiding pain fit into this?
And is pain ever avoidable?
I mean, totally avoidable.
Well, you're designed to certainly look to pain as a signal to tell you to avoid something.
And so when things are unpleasant in any way, we try to get out of it and weasel our way out.
That's a big problem with modern medicine.
you could see this coming.
As soon as human beings got smart enough to figure out how to use substances that would block pain, there was going to be, on the first hand, certainly a great relief that could be incredibly useful.
I wouldn't want to live in a world without Novocaine.
But at the same time, it sets us up for a big problem, which is that thinking that the pain is gone tells us that the warning light is off.
And that's our problem today, that we can use some of the genius of modern medicine to block pain or block symptoms, but that creates its own pleasure trap.
Why is it that we have a disconnect between what medicine seems to know about these realities?
Your book, for example, it's called The Pleasure Trap, by the way, and we're speaking with Doug Lyle.
It's spelled L-I-S-L-E, by the way.
If you search for his name under the singer Lyle, you won't find him.
L-I-S-L-E. Why is it that this isn't becoming more pervasive in our medical knowledge?
Why aren't doctors talking about this?
I think this is a hard thing for doctors to deal with.
I think many doctors know the direction that people should be going.
But people are going to fight you tooth and nail.
And I think it wears doctors down.
The truth of the matter is people want a quick fix.
It isn't because they're bad.
It doesn't because they're slovenly.
It doesn't mean that they're undisciplined.
It's that they're designed by nature.
Make me feel better as fast as I can.
And it's like a magnet for human behavior.
And so I'm not surprised that doctors get tired of trying to coach and educate people to do things that are health-supporting.
Is there really a way around this?
It would seem to me, and you put out in the book, that we're biologically programmed to reproduce.
So we've got to do things that require us to survive so we can reproduce.
And some of the things that we naturally would not seek out, unhappiness.
Which is a warning symptom, actually, to us, not to go that direction anymore.
To stop trying to swim across the river.
Don't let you get yourself anymore.
Aren't really provided a role to us millennia ago.
But in today's environment, when you can short-circuit them, we don't need those kinds of warning symptoms anymore.
We just go for the end game.
I'm not sure just talking to someone about it can change the way they think about it.
Well, I think that this is what educational forums like your show and books and educators, this is what we try to get across, is for people to realize that the endgame, if they ignore this, is very dangerous and very serious, that they will undermine their health and happiness.
There's a reason why people are overweight and sick, and that's because they're doing things that gratify the short-term systems.
Basically what this is is a hyperactivation or an artificial activation of the dopamine pathway.
Your mind was designed by nature to seek the stimulation, and when you overstimulate it, it feels better.
And it's hard to get people to realize they must sacrifice that sort of short-term gratification in order for longer-term gains.
It's worth doing.
But this is, I think in a way, you're resetting what pleasure feels like.
Is that true?
Yeah, this is very important.
When people think about, if they got advice from you that what they needed to do is to change their diet, and they were going to change their diet from a conventional, very high caloric diet, a lot of salt, a lot of oil, a lot of fat, a lot of sugar.
If they were to do that and to move towards a more whole natural foods diet, they will experience a reduction in pleasure.
They absolutely will.
In the same way that when you go from a very bright outside and then you go into a movie theater and it seems dim.
In that same way the taste buds are going dim on you.
But it's not permanent.
And people need to know that it's not permanent.
You were designed by nature to then re-adapt to the appropriate level of stimulation, which for us in food is whole natural food.
If you think that, for example, you could not eat asparagus without salting it, that you couldn't eat corn without buttering it, you're in the pleasure trap.
That's your signal to tell you that your taste nerves are not working as they were designed.
There's a lot more where that came from, but first, a quick break.
The evolutionary diet that you're espousing, and you mentioned in the book several folks that are well-known.
We've had a bunch of them on the show.
This is a diet that, you know, Lisa's a vegetarian.
I have my, what are these, millet, ham, what are these, honey?
What are you feeding me today?
Millet, hogar, carrots, beets with cumin.
But they taste like hamburgers.
Yes.
They're really good.
Not really.
But we've talked about this before on the show, and you bring it up beautifully, the infantilization of our taste buds.
We end up with the three-year-old taste buds that serve us well when we can afford to have a lot of simple carbs, in theory, where we should have craved them because we're growing rapidly.
They're still there when we're 25 years old.
There's something wrong there.
And I am intrigued that you say you can reset those taste buds.
How long do you think it takes?
I think we know.
I think chemical census studies have actually told us.
In the same way that visual nerves, for example, take about 10 minutes.
When you walk outside out of that movie theater, when you walk outside, it's about 10 minutes that the sun seems really bright until you get used to it.
In the same way that your nerves will tell you if you go into the hot tub, it's going to seem really hot for about 10 minutes.
And for the smelling, if you go into someone's house at Christmas time and there's a tree in there that smells great, it only smells great for about 10 minutes.
Unfortunately, taste buds will take about 10 weeks.
And that's our problem, that people will take a plate full of whole natural food, and if you were to say, look, this is the solution to your cardiovascular problem, this is the solution to your weight problem, and they'll dive in for about 10 seconds and they'll say, forget it, I'm not willing to do this.
They don't know just how...
Short term, this problem really is.
The diseases of the kings, which you talk about as well, we've mentioned on the show, was the reality that folks who were more affluent a thousand years ago actually had more problems because they would eat more of the foods that we know today to be associated with rapid, frequent happiness and pleasure, but because they reset our expectations to a different level, they wreak other havoc upon our body.
Now, if we're talking about the modern society where everybody has that same illness program, we're left with the reality, as one of your chapters says, that we're looking for health in all the wrong places.
So how do we go about taking the 10-week process that you're arguing is required to retrain our taste buds and make it feasible?
How do we wake people up who are not used to delayed gratification to the possibility that that may actually bring them greater pleasure down the road?
Well, I think the first thing is they have to know that this is going to happen.
Your intuition is that it won't, because people believe that their taste buds are constant.
They think that what they like is what they like, and that they could never like it any different.
So they must understand that they have basically adapted to this very high-density diet, and that a lower-caloric-density diet, Calories per pound, basically.
When we put the fiber and all the natural stuff back into the food, it's going to turn out that you can, in fact, enjoy that food a great deal.
You were designed to have that food to be tantalizing.
And so it's important to know that.
But also, so you have to realize that that is really the keys to the prison door.
If your self-esteem is locked into and behind a trap that has put 50 extra pounds on you...
If you're on a bunch of pills to deal with your heart condition or high cholesterol or high blood pressure, if you are dealing with all kinds of the problems that most of our population gets sick and literally dies from, this is the solution.
This is the way home.
If I understand correctly, I think you said it very artfully in the book, that we often want to add things, right?
You don't feel well, we want to give you a pill, have you do something.
In fact, the true solution might be the opposite.
It's almost homeopathic in a way, that you want to give as little as possible, or in fact, take something away, the subtraction model.
Yes, we're really designed by nature to actually want to add things, to do something.
That's a very common natural bias inside of the way minds work.
It's not just our minds.
You'll find it throughout the animal kingdom.
Often the best solution seems to be the default solution is to do something towards more stimulation.
So if you're going to try to train a pigeon to flutter its feathers and you're going to have...
We're going to use like keys to have it peck the keys when it flutters its feathers.
If you light the key, they'll learn it.
But if you go from a lit key to a darkened key, they won't learn.
So when you increase the stimulus, everybody's excited.
When you add something, creatures are excited.
When you take things away, if that's the solution, very difficult to grasp.
One of the solutions you offer, and we're talking with Dr. Lyle, is fasting with just water.
Yes.
Which, I must say, we've never had anyone on the show who's argued for the kinds of fasts that you're a proponent of.
Yes.
Walk us through how someone can fast for a week or 20 days or even longer with just water.
How does that work?
Well, it works surprisingly well.
If you actually look at the fact that we were built genetically to store fat, there's a reason for that.
The reason is that we're also designed by nature to have to go through periods of periodic deprivation.
That's the only reason you've got fat stores.
And so the fat stores are an adaptation to our species having to go through periods where they might go two, three, four weeks without food.
Now we never do that.
So the polar opposite of that is water-only fasting.
It's the period of time where there is no calories out there in the environment and the body makes use of the existing fat stores.
And while it does that, We now know that it takes advantage of that opportunity and does a tremendous amount of internal housekeeping.
So a lot of, actually today, probably more than ever, we need this solution or need to use it.
It's a solution that's sitting right under our nose, but we would never think of it.
You would never go out looking for a period of deprivation.
It would find you.
And yet, if we invoke this now voluntarily, it turns out that a lot of problems, particular problems of dietary excess, get better, and they get better fast.
Let's play this through a little bit if you don't mind.
How long have you ever fasted for with just water?
A week.
So during that period, I would gather for some folks, there would be a concern that if you started the fast in a nutritionally depleted state, if you go from having kielbasa at the Cubs games to a fast, then you're probably starting off actually nutritionally depleted.
If you have muscle mass and you have caloric stores, but you might not have the right amount of vitamin E or C or omega-3 fatty acids for that fast.
So you supplement them during the fast at all?
Not at all.
It turns out that these things, vitamins, minerals, etc., are so critical that they're generally overly abundantly supplied.
So people are not walking in with any serious nutritional deficiencies.
Maybe they might be on a rare occasion and that would show up in blood tests before you would do this.
We'd only recommend fasting be done in a medically supervised environment, which is what ours is at our True North Health facility in California.
What does that mean?
Excuse me, what does that mean, medically supervised?
We have a medical doctor, Dr. Peter Sultana, who's actually supervising this process.
But what does he do?
I mean, what does he check for?
I've always been curious about what that means.
I mean, I'm a doctor.
I mean, if you came to me and said, I'm fasting, I'd say, all right, go take the room to the top left.
I'll bring some water up.
What else would I check?
I guess I'd look for dehydration.
Yeah, we have blood and urine tests.
We're looking for all sorts of parameters and watching them change.
We know how they work and how they change so that when something looks a little out of line under a rare circumstance where someone may not be tolerating a fast well, for example, potassium may drop a little bit too quickly.
So we know we've got an electrolyte imbalance.
That can show up in some people maybe by week two.
Okay, so...
Then you take them off to fast or do you supplement to the imbalance?
We don't supplement the imbalance.
Our colleague, Dr. Joel Fuhrman, who's also an authority on fasting, he would oftentimes choose to supplement that imbalance and continue the fast because he considered the continued fast to be highly valuable.
We don't do that.
We let the parameters sort of tell us.
So we don't have strong opinions about that, but we tend to err on the side of being conservative in this.
And so when the body starts throwing up a red flag, we'll go ahead and end the fast at that point.
And do they stay at the center during the entire fast?
Yes, they do.
And what do they do?
I mean, obviously you don't have to feed them, so you house them.
It's quite inexpensive.
There's nothing actually what we do.
So they hear me preach and nag to them about how they're going to face their friends and relatives as they try to head home and dealing with the basically environmental crush that comes from doing things very differently than everyone else.
So we try to get them ready psychologically for trying to go back into the world and live healthfully.
And it allows for a period of reflection on other parts of their life where they can kind of really think things through and really take some time out to set their priorities in place.
So you wouldn't recommend people do this at home, just— Just say, I'm not going to eat for the next week.
I don't think that that's such a good idea.
Sometimes the responses to water fasting, the body really basically takes the opportunity and goes for broke.
You will sometimes find some rather acute responses.
There may be diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, etc.
I mean, fasting is hard work, and the body will take this opportunity to go through sometimes a rather vigorous detox.
What about the boomerang effect?
Because I've gone to a place where we did a fast, and I know the day I got out of there, and I was all calm, and I felt...
It wasn't really all water.
We did enzymes, and we had some green, but not a lot, green juices.
But...
The day I got out, and I was in California, In-N-Out Burger for an animal-style cheese sandwich.
I mean, immediately.
That happens, I think, pretty commonly, doesn't it?
People want to stuff themselves when they're done fasting.
Well, that's why we have people stay with us after the fast ends, and we reintroduce them to a whole natural foods diet.
At the end of the water fast, believe me, there's nothing like going a week on water.
Pretty soon you're dreaming about the carrots and the watermelon.
Your taste buds are so sensitive that whole natural food finally tastes the way it was supposed to always taste.
And people enjoy tremendously their food at that point.
And really, at that time, can't imagine going back to the kind of food that they were eating that got them into trouble in the first place.
Again, I'm curious about the fasting because Mike and I have talked about it quite a bit.
We've had some hesitation because of concerns that folks use it as a weight loss tool.
And I do see some merit in the way you're arguing that it could play a benefit in resetting our taste buds.
So let's say you did make it practical for elders that are out there.
They want to do a three-day fast, which you can probably do without much medical supervision.
And at the end of that three-day process, you reintroduce now foods that are wholesome in your best interest.
But during that three-day fast, you're probably gonna be driven by your biology of blubber to think, as you said, about nothing but food.
Is it possible to do that at home?
I think it is, and I think if people were going to do a three-day fast, I might not use a water fast.
I might do a juice fast, for example.
And in doing a juice fast, what we wind up doing is taking all the salt out of the diet, basically, and all the fat out of the diet.
So two of the three big receptor sites on the tongue are now put to sleep.
They're put in sensory deprivation.
It's all about getting sensory deprivation that then rekindles their sensitivity.
Just like if we shut off all the lights, then when we bring even back a candle after 10 minutes, a candle seems bright.
If we shut off all the lights on the salt receptors and the fat receptors, when we come back three days later with a bowl of oatmeal and some bananas and raisins, that's going to taste very good.
Is the third one carbohydrates?
What's the...
Yes, in other words, right.
We're leaving that one alone.
In other words, by using juice, we're keeping you on glucose metabolism.
So we're going to leave those sugar receptors alone.
But if we get rid of the fat and salt receptors, we can do an awful lot of good in even three days.
Why wouldn't you just do a water fast in three days?
Why is it better to do a water fast for longer?
Oh, you could do a water fast in three days.
I'm just not too wild about doing a water fast on your own.
I think it's a good idea because you will, if people do things at home, they're going to keep moving around, they're going to go to work, etc.
If you would kind of lie around in bed and water fast for three days, that would be fine.
But people want to keep, they get bored and they want to get up and moving and we don't want to be doing that sort of musculoskeletal contraction.
You don't want to be burning muscle by moving around when you're on a water fast.
What juices would you recommend?
Oh, I don't know.
Fresh whole juices.
I'd use something like carrot apple or carrot apple celery, things like that.
We have a lot more to talk about, but first, let's take a quick break.
Mastering the hidden force that undermines health and happiness.
Many of you think there are multiple forces that do that.
Doug argues that there are actually a few simple principles.
And one of the ones that's very practical that we're going to talk about in some detail is the juicing fast that might be worth doing for a lot of you out there.
You can do it at home for about three days.
You said it could be carrot, apple, celery, or some combination.
That way you don't have to buy a juicer.
You can buy those in the health food store.
And then Mike was asking you about retreating of the taste buds.
Now you said earlier that, and it's actually very, Interesting because it does sort of bring back some realities about how our reflexes change.
But you go from a dark area to a light area.
Within a few minutes, you adjust.
Same goes if you have different taste buds in your mouth.
And that period you said was 10 weeks overall.
But I'm sure you begin to adjust much more rapidly than that.
But yet, Lisa can go off for three days on a perfectly humane fast at an elegant spa, and then she goes out to In-N-Out Burger, which is known for being, I guess you take it in quickly and it comes out quickly.
No, it's just so delicious.
They're very fresh stuff.
Yeah, they are fresh.
Yes, well, I mean, that's certainly going to be a problem, a potential problem, and that is that once you've sensitized those nerves, you're going to get an even bigger bang out of the dopamine hit than you did before.
So that's why we need really sometimes a longer, more comprehensive process of staying in line because then you really get to see that you can fully enjoy whole natural food just the way you were designed.
And, of course, the pleasure trap is always out there.
In other words, when you go from, say, strawberries to strawberry ice cream, you're going to see a difference because you're going from 300 calorie pound food to, you know, 1500 calorie pound food.
And so that hit is there.
It's always out there.
The reason why people are having such trouble is that everything you do that feels really good is the wrong thing.
And when you go from, when you do the right thing, it doesn't feel good.
When you go the direction, the other direction from high density food to low density food, So basically, your instincts are setting you up for this problem.
It's hard to get out of it.
You know, I was reading through the book, and there was one segment of the book where you start talking about modern foods and how they create this pleasure trap.
And it talks specifically about neuroadaptation.
Yes.
And I thought about the scene in Super Size Me when the protagonist...
He's been on the fast foods for about three or four days, and he's in the room, in the car, rather.
He says, you know, I don't feel so good.
I think I'm going to...
And then he up-chucks.
And it was just so poignant, as you saw him get sick, as he began to retrain his body for a different food style than it had been used to.
He'd been in pretty good shape ahead of time.
I don't know if you saw the movie.
Yes, I did.
I don't personally feel good when I eat that kind of food.
Are there some people who naturally don't like that?
Are those the guys that are naturally thin because they actually don't feel better when they have a high saturated fat hamburger?
Well, I think that most of us would get used to the high saturated hamburger after a while.
You're going to have a lot of little changes that are going to take place, including the whole taste preference mechanism.
So we're designed by nature to be pulled towards the more high-caloric-dense foods.
That's an internal compass that tells us how we're going to make sure we get enough to survive in the natural world.
The problem is that what we don't see is what it's going to take to get back.
And that's a process that's going to take a few weeks.
And as my friend, Dr. Greg Young, a psychiatrist, says, the big problem people have with instant gratification is that it takes too long.
If I can push a bit harder on this, when I sit down for a meal that's not going to be so good for me, I keep thinking, you know, I'm not going to like this in an hour or two.
And so for most folks, I would think you tend to shy away.
Most people don't think that way, though.
Most people think this is delicious.
If I fed a cat toxic material...
Absolutely.
No, you know what?
That's a good example because last night I had the exact same experience.
I bought this organic, actually raw meat cat food for the cats because I didn't want them getting all those things from China, those wheats and everything that they were getting.
When they were so addicted to the bad cat food, the kinds that were killing the cats and giving them kidney poisoning, if you put both down, they won't even look at the cat food that's good for them.
They absolutely will kill themselves eating the poisonous cat food.
This is all about dopamine.
In other words, even though you may know and you've made the connection that an hour later you're going to be in a little low-grade pain, you'll actually watch people, or I watch myself even after I'm full, if there's some really high calorically dense dessert there, you'll literally watch the pleasure-seeking mechanisms and the pain-avoidance mechanisms do battle in your own head.
And one more bite, is it still worth it?
Oh, now my stomach's hurting.
And you'll watch these processes at play.
So for many folks out there that are listening who are thinking about doing a three-day juice fast, you get up in the morning, you do some ceremony the night before and say, I'm done.
Pin your ears back.
Pin your ears back.
Sacrifice a flower.
Yeah.
And then you wake up in the morning and say, okay, I'm going to juice fast.
I've already bought the juices.
You go out and buy them in the morning.
Sure.
And then you drink it.
Whenever you feel thirsty, you drink.
Sure.
Absolutely.
You can put down a couple thousand calories with these juices.
That's okay.
You probably wouldn't, but it doesn't matter if you did because we don't really care about that.
What we care about is retraining those taste nerves.
We want those things back to much more close to where they were designed so that when you go back to whole foods, they taste good and you're willing to stick with it.
And three days is enough time to start that process, you think?
Oh yes, absolutely.
Just in the same way that an alcoholic will be way better off after a year of abstinence, they can start to feel that their life is much better even after a week.
And so it's a process that we're on here.
It's a direction.
And if you can just get yourself going for a little while, sometimes you can build the momentum if you know that the process can be completed.
Let me shift gears now to the actual weight loss issue, which is obviously one that tends to be popular on this program and just on any other media endeavor these days.
How do you lose weight without losing your mind?
Talk a little bit about the law of satiety.
What's that?
Well, the way you're designed is your mind is designed by nature to keep you in natural balance.
That's why you don't have to worry and think about breathing.
That's why actually you just trust your satiety centers and the hypothalamus for drinking enough water, etc.
You certainly sleep to satiety.
Animals all over the world do this.
Animals all over the world eat to satiety.
They eat as much as they want.
They don't have to worry about sitting at the edge of your vegetable garden worrying about that gopher thinking maybe it ate one too many tomatoes.
Right.
Yeah, they just do what they want.
And so it's mighty suspicious.
You've got two million species on the planet.
Three of them are having weight problems.
Humans, dogs, and cats.
That's because they're eating processed food.
And what we need to do is if we eat, if we can get people to eat...
Unprocessed food, large amounts of whole natural food, maybe completely not perfect, but if they can get a lot of salads, steamed vegetables, fruit, whole grains, if they can get those things into their diet, then they can eat to satiation and they will not have weight problems.
Losing weight doesn't mean trying to gnaw on your knuckle and not eat as much as you want.
That's losing your mind.
You need to learn that you can relax and eat to satiation and you can actually normalize your weight just fine.
Is it possible that your normalized weight may not be the model thin weight that we attribute with being thin these days?
I think that's true, but I think that you're going to find if you look around nature, you're going to see that animals have very modest amounts of fat stores, and the amount of fat stores you would find on people if they're eating a whole natural foods diet would be aesthetically very pleasing.
Some women would be a little curvier than other women.
Some men would be a little bit more robust and stronger, but all of them would look good.
They would look good because they would be good.
You're pretty thin.
Yes.
Do you ever go on a diet?
Do you ever think about food?
Do you just eat what you want to eat?
I just try to keep myself out of the pleasure trap.
I bat for 90 to 95%.
I try to do a real good job there and I let it take care of itself.
Do you eat out?
We have a good friend who we did a show with.
He's Steve Ross, a yoga master.
Steve came out of the house.
He was doing this event for my birthday a few months ago.
He didn't Trust a lot of the foods.
Not that we...
Because he didn't know us that well, but he brought his own food.
He traveled with his own food.
Now, he's also as youth then.
He didn't seem like he was fasting.
He just was eating regular foods.
Yeah, but he only does raw food.
Yeah, he only eats raw food as well.
Right.
No, I eat out, but what I try to do is I try to eat in order.
I eat in the order of caloric density.
So I'll eat salad first, then vegetables second, then whatever concentrated food, like carbohydrate or whatever, I'm going to eat third.
And so by doing that, I make sure I get a lot of low-density food.
Salad's 100 calories a pound, without the dressing, that is.
And vegetables are 200 calories a pound.
Fruits, 300 calories a pound.
Concentrated starch, carbohydrate, potatoes, rice, etc.
Those are 600 calories a pound.
If you go in order of caloric density, your taste buds like it that way.
If you start with the concentrated food, you won't want to go back and eat the less concentrated food.
So I just simply follow this simple little rule over and over again, and it keeps me in a good groove.
Dessert?
Fruit, mostly.
Things like that.
Once in a while at the McDougal program at Santa Rosa, they have some really cool chocolate vegan pudding.
I look forward to that all month.
That's made with avocado, right?
What's that?
Is that the one made with avocado?
I don't know what Mary McDougall does, but it's great.
We have one that's with avocado that you'll be dreaming up.
You'll wake up with nightmares if you're not near one.
Beverages?
Water, juice, just take it easy.
Nothing special.
So you'll have OJ or grapefruit juice?
Sure, absolutely.
It's not a problem.
Do you drink coffee?
No, I don't.
Why not?
I think there's evidence that there's all kinds of little problems.
These are relatively powerful nervous system stimulants.
It's a sleep disruptor.
You can see the disruption in stage 4 deep sleep.
Even, you know, the night that people have used even half a cup of coffee.
I mean, these are little possible disruptors.
Do you eat meat?
No, I don't.
And how about nuts?
Ah, yes.
I'll have some nuts.
Not a lot.
It's just sort of around the others.
Salted or not?
Roasted or not?
I don't eat salted nuts, actually.
But you do roast them?
I'll have some roasted nuts on occasion.
Gotcha.
Lisa and I have a debate about that.
I obviously think roasted nuts taste better.
I don't think you should cook your oils, especially omega-3 essential fatty acids.
Well, I was concerned about that.
I specifically asked T. Colin Campbell that very question, and he assured me that I was safe there.
Especially if you roast your own nuts.
Yeah.
I don't know what the truth is on that.
I think you're better off with raw.
I'm sure that's probably true.
How about physical activity?
What role does that play here?
I think certainly it's a significant part of any overall health program.
And so diet, exercise, sleep, fasting, these are all parts of a set of things that are very useful to help the body renormalize and reintegrate and get itself healthy.
Exercise, I think, is very important and key.
However...
When it comes to losing weight, specifically, the most important thing people need to do is they need to get out of the pleasure trap.
