most people fail their diets and the 99 of the Reason by the way where people most people fail their diets because they get hungry for tasty food hey folks Dr Mike here for Renaissance periodization and today's topic is to ask a question and answer it of course why are diet Cravings so intense we're going to take a deep dive deep dive real deep dive back to biology class and I know you slept through bio or just stared at that one girl in your biology class the whole time applied bio observational I suppose you learn nothing
I didn't have any friends I paid attention I studied really hard at night so don't worry I'll break this down for you it will cost you Lamborghinis um but I like Lamborghinis and you like to click on ads yes but click on some ads damn it and uh let's get to learning so here's the thing from biology class every component of your body and brain has an evolutionary ancestral history and some components of your brain and body but we're done talking about the body now some components of your brain have a much more recent evolutionary
history than others some have evolved to their current functions much more recently and some have been around a very very very long time and some of them that have evolved more recently are usually not as powerful and don't affect your behaviors nearly as powerfully as the ones that evolved a long time ago actually affect your behaviors so why the hell am I talking about this the drive to eat food when hungry or really the hunger drive and the food seeking Behavior it results in is one of the oldest neural drives in the entire Animal Kingdom
for animals that have nervous systems so this is an ancestral Drive the drive to essentially import macromolecules from the environment which is really what scaled up Hunger is is up there with temperature seeking like animals know when it's too cold or hot because it's unlikely that you're going to leave your cat outside in Las Vegas and 110 degrees and he's not going to try to find a cooler place if he doesn't your cat is broken and he's going to go up to hang out and Cat haven't got the video guy do cats go to heaven
all dogs do we know at least that and that's empirically validated so another one Is acidity regulating optimal acidity is another huge Drive injury avoidance reproduction Etc basic unbelievably High tier low tier depending on how you think about drives that get you to do what you have to do to survive these are super deep they're super integrated into every other part of your nervous system and this affects your mind like crazy what's on your mind is a secretion in some sense of your brain it's a product if your brain is like a laptop a computer
system your mind is like the software that runs on it and the thing is is these ancestral drives to begin to seek food when you get hungry especially tasty food they affect you in a major major major way now if you just have these ancestral drives you would be like wow much more like your dog your dog will not execute a well-organized hypertrophy based program for himself he will not execute a diet for himself wolf is not going to resist a whole lot of treats unless you're there like doing the whole thing where you start
with the treat and then you move away 15 feet you say okay go and if your dog is smart he eats it then if your dog is our dog Gwen who is a Old English Bulldog they can't teach her anything because she's really stupid but adorable in any case pretty much all dogs won't have the ability to say you know I want to eat this bowl of kibble but I really have been gaining a bit extra weight I'm I'm gonna look ahead and imagine a future self that's leaner sexier for dogs and I'm gonna eat
half this bowl of kibble and then half later today I'm not gonna eat two whole bowls of kibble today just one your dog doesn't do that your dog has an unbelievably rudimentary forward-seeing mechanism and barely that at all but what do you have you're human so you're unique among the animals that you have a well-developed mechanism by which you know in some of these structures have been located in the prefrontal cortex for example Christine tiny and these structures and these functions allow you to see ahead plan and restrict your Cravings or say you know what
you basically allows you to drink your Cravings like like that I know I know that I'm hungry but I have a plan and a goal so I won't eat just what I want but the mechanisms that allow you to do that that forward planning Forward Thinking mechanism in ancestral time of evolution how long it's been How Deeply integrated it is into the rest of your mind and brain is like a sliver it's you know cheese at charitably 10 million years old maybe a little older than that depending on how you cut off which primates are
impressively Forward Thinking which are not me I I have yet to see a chimpanzee who is going to restrict their own food intake on purpose they can do forward planning like oh I'm Gonna Knock something off a tree but not much further than that so your ability to restrict yourself from these unbelievable powerful ancestral desires is like you're talking about 10 million versus hundreds of millions of years old it's not even close it's not even close which is a big deal and that sets up the Battle of your Primal drives like the drive to eat
tasty food versus your intellect which can tell you uh hold on that's not a part of what I want to do it's not a great idea you could say now hold on a sec we know what we should be eating and we know when to not eat and we know how to diet and lose fat we know to do that so it's not you know the Cravings yeah whatever but like when we know something like it's good we're there but that system that allows us to know stuff is super recent and actually it's not just
system based the system inside your brain that allows for rational predictive plan thought to occur means a lot of well sort of large language model training basically to use a current parlance we know a lot about diet and training and how to restrict your eating and all that stuff not because we're born with it but because it's culturally Acquired and many people don't even have that a lot of people don't really know what to eat when to lose fat most people intuitively develop an understanding through observation that if they eat less food they become less
fat and eat um you know more food they become fat but even that's not super clear in all individuals we had a ton of brain Evolution to allow us to accept this knowledge in a ton of cultural Insight most of which came really in the last 100 years that allows us to understand diet nutrition so uh it's you think sometimes that the reason you eat three meals a day is because you decided like oh yeah like three meals a day that's a good idea but the reality is that almost all of us naturally without a
very a very well thought out plan eat because we're hungry right it is by no means clear that most animals most mammals uh know intellectually that they have to have food in fact it's probably true that most animals don't know anything intellectually they are very complex input output systems that don't have an explanatory framework ability in their minds so they can't actually sit down and think and plan out what the universal around them looks like and move it around and think okay I should eat at this time this time this time right they they don't
have that they don't have a concept of meals they don't have a concept of food they just know that when they smell food or seafood or their tummy starts rumbling they feel like they need to go get some food and the thing is we think we're very different from the animals and we are but we're also super similar so your reason that you eat food is like 97 you get hungry or you smell tasty stuff versus maybe three percent like oh yeah intellectually I know that eating is a good idea right one thing one easy
way to see this is if you take and give people drugs that shut down their hunger drives they just don't really eat much and they'll pass out and stuff like that because they'll forget to eat the people who are on methamphetamine for example they don't eat for 36 hours straight they think well wouldn't they have a better trip if they ate a bit of food and had more energy yes but when they don't feel like it that animistic response that instinct instinctual response food is not even on their mind and they might even intellectually think
oh I should eat no I don't feel like it that's how powerful these feelings are right hunger and cravings are not this extra thing that's annoying to deal with the diet hunger and Cravings are the Baseline system that's there it's the old system it's the powerful system it's the system that for 99 out of 100 people on this earth right now is the thing telling them what to eat and when and that one percent three percent whatever it is that's the prefrontal cortex powered so to speak a bit of a murky concept there but that's
that forward-thinking planning ability that humans have and it's super new and TBH it is a revolution in the evolution of life is nothing like it has ever existed before it is what gives birth to all of technology and that next evolution of of how life works on Earth but but it's very very weak in any given human compared to those ancestral drives right when we think about it this way we come to an understanding that I promise we'll get back to exercise science sports science stuff in a sec we get to an understanding that there
is going to be a Clash between the hunger cravings instinctual part of your mind and the pre-planned I should be eating what the RP diet coach app tells me to eat part of your mind there's one system telling you it has a very explicit goal to keep you exactly whatever weight you're at roughly and or to just really eat tasty food until you feel full that's its goal and anything that violates this goal you have to expect that it's going to run in to some really really really big problems this idea that we're super logical
and super rational like the fucking what's that Star Trek shit not the Borg although I guess they were irrational as well not Klingon Scott you watch a lot of Star Trek you don't watch a lot of Star Trek you had friends growing up you were a cool person yo you had sex with people unusual for a Star Trek fan just kidding folks um good God the fuck am I blanking on this not the Klingons not the romulans Spock is a fucking Vulcan God damn it stupid make believe nonsense anyway we are not the Vulcans we
have a tiny ability to exert some reason and some logic and some restraint and in a comfortable homeostatic environment it's pretty powerful because there's no other Drive really pushing and pulling at it but if you get really thirsty you are now in a sense a slave to your thirst drive you will do crazy fucking shit to get some water if you're hungry you will do crazy fucking shit to get some water how many of you guys have driven like taking a two-hour road trip in the middle of the day because one of your girls hit
you up and she's like sex and you're like yes drop everything Drive have sex what the hell that's like four hours of like well you know sex takes 30 seconds or roughly four hours of time wasted to do what you're not even trying to reproduce the drives are super super powerful right and we have to expect that the hunger and Cravings Drive is going to be super powerful we have to plan for it and actually we have to know that the evidence for how powerful it is is that most people fail their diets and the
people that don't fail their diets that actually get down to the weight that they wanted and then 99 of the Reason by the way what people most people fail their diets is because they get hungry for tasty food just like the ancestral part of the brain is telling them to do muscle growth is never going to be the same it's not a mystery all I shouldn't you see about access to resources food deserts that's all been flayed in and out it holds basically no water people fail to lose weight in a diet because food tastes
too goddamn good when you get hungry period there's a few other cursory reasons and enabling factors there that's really just it and if they succeed at losing weight most of them regain it within several weeks or months because that drive it's not logical is ultra Ultra powerful that's something we have to have to realize because our drive to eat our hunger and Cravings are so powerful and primal we have to give it a crapload of respect and before we engage in the dietary process we have to contextualize what that respect really means and prepare so
that we give ourselves the best chance right you don't want to do this thing where it's like hey like let's go take over the Death Star sweet two people and you know two phaser guns we should be able to do it like you do know what the Death Star is there is there are like I don't know several million people that man it and are all combat trained the thing is a fucking giant laser it's a military base you don't just go in there with a few blasters unless you Luke Skywalker and his crew um
Scott the video guy are we in talaya back in the day did she get out Vote or down vote up vote even with the buns with the hair are we letting that hair down like just let it all out or we will be doing it with the hair up both work once with the hair up and then when later when she wakes up again with the hair down oh yeah Jabba outfit I actually went um Dr James Hoffman from RP went as Jabba one Halloween and I went with him as Slave Leia good luck finding
those pictures online yeesh in any case you don't come up against an insanely powerful enemy and just think ah this is going to be easy you respect the shit out of the enemy and try to give yourself the best chances it doesn't mean you say oh this is you know no problem it's a problem and there are a few ways which we can prepare for that prop first expecting hunger and Cravings to be a core predictable feature of dieting versus being shocked by them if you coach individuals or if you've done this yourself before you'll
get this thing where a lot of people actually do this they'll go oh man like so I started a diet right a couple weeks in like I'm like really hungry is that normal bitch yes it's fucking normal the fuck were you thinking no I don't mean to yell just kidding but you guys know what I'm saying like if we understand that this conceptual framework of a super powerful super ancestral deep drive to eat when you're hungry eat when you're losing any weight eat more food than you need to regain your weight if that's a given
in our ability to control it is very small when the hunger cravings show up it's almost like being surprised like hey we tried to walk into the Death Star like just park our ship in the front port and like people with guns came out strange it's like they were expecting us come on right so number one expect hunger and cravings and expect to be them to be a big deal so when you get hunger cravings for the first time you go okay here we go here we go right we planned for the Death Star Stormtroopers
to start shooting at us when we were in this building or whatever part of the Death Star and just the same way we totally planned hunger and crazies were gonna be a big deal absolutely second we want to try to develop ways in which to diet that minimize and help us control hunger and Cravings versus trying to look for a diet method that eliminates hunger and Cravings altogether and you'll see ads for this kind of shit stupid fucking assholes like liver king or whatever the fuck you know I'm saying I don't call him by his
government name what's his government name Brian Johnson or some shit like that can you Google that real quick I'm about to you're about to be my that guy who's on Joe Rogan's show that Google stuff Brian Johnson motherfucker I call you by your government name fuck you lying ass motherfucker anyway guys like that will say shit like oh yeah like if you eat fucking whatever liver fucking raw eggs you can just diet and have no Cravings bullshit bullshit looking for a diet that doesn't give you hunger and Cravings but will lose you a notable amount
of fat and weight and let you keep it off will come standard with hunger and Cravings but based on how you execute a specific kind of diet you can reduce the hunger and craving substantially the idea that you're gonna make them go away is insane that's like someone telling you hey like you know you can actually get to a place where you can do 36 hours without water never feel thirsty okay next you're going to tell me I can walk into a supermarket and not get horny supermarket my parole officer said don't talk about that
it was a big misunderstanding I thought I was in a strip club it was a very large strip club Vegas next Point number three we have to prepare for this battle with hunger and cravings right so what we have to do is try to develop understand and deploy anti-hunger and anti-craving strategies as much as possible and at RP if you just type in anti-hunger Dr Mike or something into YouTube we have like three or four videos on the ship and one big ass video on how to control hunger while dining control contextualize not eliminate never
make that claim there's more on that to say with pharmacology eventually we can eliminate it to the extent that you ever want to you probably just want to reduce it but we have to understand that we're going into a big ass War so to speak we're going to need weapons we're gonna need strategies it's like again I'll just keep the Death Star takeover analogy Death Star infiltration analogy it's uh you know it's like saying hey look what's the plan with the Death Star how are we getting in there they're like yeah yeah we'll just go
let's go in and weighing it there's got to be a reactor we can shoot with a phaser and the whole thing blows up like don't you want to do some research on what that shit looks like where the defense is heaviest where it's lightest Etc how you can sneak in just the same way with a diet you have to come prepared with as many anti-hunger strategies as possible number four just like in an infiltration Mission if you stay in the danger zone for long enough you will get the Swarm on you fucking Stormtroopers from every
single fucking hallway and since you know the Death Star is three-dimensional motherfuckers like six hallways and shit's coming from up and down everywhere so you got to get in and out and you have a certain time zone a certain time frame just the same way if you are dieting to lose fat you have to understand that the longer you diet and the more extreme the magnitude of the weight loss is during that time the more profound these Cravings will be like if they have you know a claimed some Stormtroopers and they're like I think there's
people like running around the halls they don't they're not with us they'll be like yeah send a squad right but if it's confirmed that they toasted the squad and they're still advancing you get a battalion set next or some shit they start locking the floors down just the same way if you lose 10 pounds your body's like whoa whoa whoa whoa hunger cravings get in there fix that shit but if hunger crazy comes back a bit we're still losing weight like oh motherfucker you want to play that shit double double the effort and then in
week 17 of your diet you're looking at your fingernails you're like these look pretty good to eat just swallow and consume maybe I could eat my own fingers too shit gets crazy and you have to know that so before you plan a 24-week fat loss phase or before you step on the scale of 300 pounds and be like yeah I'll just die at one continuous phase down to 200 pounds you have to realize take small goals break them up take breaks do not get overly ambitious because you have to know that diets have to stop
short of a failure point and here's the other big sub point of this every diet for every person has a fail point maybe not every some Monk in India can just willfully diet himself into death just just food everywhere he's doing this day after day drinking water and eventually he sits there and just dies of fucking anorexia that is an impossibility for almost everyone which means at some point you will fucking snap and you will eat everything you'll be like holy shit right you have to understand that that failure point is somewhere for everyone don't
walk into it don't walk into it stop well short of it and then that leads us to the next point understanding that once you stop your diet your hunger and Cravings still there to try to pull you back up to your old weight they're gonna try to get there right it's um a sort of decent analogy here it's like you get into the Death Star and you put your phaser at the main reactor and boom it starts to shut down like auto destruct in 30 irreversible and construct it's like the Stormtroopers that ran up to
you and are running up to you right now after you did that you're like hey fellas I won the reactor's gone the whole thing's gonna blow up they're not gonna be like oh yeah hey good job it's like a video game see ya they're gonna be like motherfucker and they're still gonna try to kill you you're still in there so when your leanest point of a diet you're in a fucking bad place so know this don't have a plan of well I'm just gonna get to 190 pounds from 220 and then I'm gonna stop the
diet and just live like a normal person bullshit because if you live like a normal person what did we learn earlier in this presentation I don't mean to be pedantic about that that normal people do well they eat mostly according to hunger and Cravings just watch any normal person what they do like when people go to Olive Garden they try to order off the menu they're like What's Nutrition a good idea what they're like what I feel like right now five menu items boom boom boom boom all the way it's back up after a diet
plan for maintenance phase that's like two-thirds as long as the diet was in which you slowly reintroduce more food and slowly reintroduce junk food or cheat meals so that that known not a powerful hunger and craving system doesn't pull you back up expect that it will try really really hard and that's a huge Revelation because for years and years and years come and diet wisdom and knowledge in our industry was focused on how to make the best diets that get you from here to here but now there's a change where we realized this is tough
maintaining after is very tough also so know that the hunger cravings won't just go away like oh you won we're good just stay 190 forever that's not going to happen and Point number six is if you're a coach and many of you who who listen to this channel are or watch the channel yes I'm waving my pretend hair around what kind of hair I mean do you guys ever dream about having just like flowing locks just long hair rich and free when I'm rich in the financial sense maybe I should buy hair therapy I'll do
that right after this video next video I promise I'm gonna have long flowing Rockstar locks in any case many of you guys are coaches you need to know this stuff and you do you have to try to get to your clients to understand it to tell them hey look like this fat loss plan to lose 15 pounds it looks great let's get it done but I want you to know Mr Mrs client this can get rough it could get really rough because there are tons of mechanisms in your brain to try to get you to
get the fuck off this diet and get onto some pizza physically onto a pizza I'm a big enough Pizza yeah sounds fun slip on a pepperoni soon Pizza Hut expect them sorry get them to expect that it's going to be tough both on the fat loss side and the maintenance side and then they'll be much better prepared just like you so if you want to learn about anti-hunger mechanisms how to eat how to train how to organize your sleep and your work etc supplements to take that can make hunger more manageable make a more successful
diet we've got tons of videos we've got tons of books at RP we have a whole certification coaching course that really buries that shit for you so there's lots of good stuff to get your learn going on and just respect your hunger and Cravings they have a deep ancestral evolutionary place they're the thing that keep all the animals and humans alive if you somehow like magic wand zap the Earth and every animal lost its hunger instinct all the animals would die within several weeks or months the fat animals would die in several months and uh
gee whiz almost all human beings would die as well um certainly all unattended children would die and uh that's how powerful those things are so we need a hunger and creating signaling mechanism but ours is sensitive because we evolved in a time of sporadic starvation and so when you have tasty food around your body wants to eat it and when you lose weight it your body is your brain's ancestral evolutionary mechanism they'll know that oh it's the 21st century and fitness is a hobby we're all so rich that being fat is a problem I don't
know any of that shit so understand where that side of you is coming from and respect the living shit out of it don't pretend you're some willpower generating you know cyborg could be sweet one day for sure use your willpower use your intelligence but respect the shit out of hunger cravings because they're the real deal anyone who tells you oh I got this diet that eliminates them completely just powder your hand and slap them right in the face and before they have a chance to react even if the reaction is my word you powder the
back side of that shit and go bam not hard just enough to let them know you've had it with them and lastly like comment if you want if you want to get them get them comments subscribe hit that subscribe button people say things on other YouTube channels about a notification Bell should I be saying that Scott to video guy it's got the video guy says uh you know we don't want to bother you with bells going off RP hit the notification Bell if you really insist that you want to hear what we have to say
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