- I'm not telling you what the situation is in your body.
I mean, that would be against the principles
of intuitive eating, right?
Each person has to decide for themself what feels good.
What I do is help you connect with what's actually happening
and to start to differentiate between
things that are going on that are mental activities
and what's actually happening kind of in your body.
- It's just people like to hear good news
about the bad habits.
So if you wanna sell books, you wanna make money,
do you tell people to eat bacon and butter,
or you tell people to eat broccoli?
I mean it's really that simple.
You wanna sell magazines?
What are you gonna put on your cover?
And so, that's I think one of the reasons
these low carb diets, the rapid water weight,
they call it the $33 billion diet gimmick.
That you also see with these low carb diets,
'cause you deplete your glycogen stores
and you have to of course, pee out all those ketones.
You lose a lot of wrap of weight,
but you're actually not losing body fat.
And that's really what we care about
when it comes to weight loss.
And of course, just like any other macronutrients
with carbs, you can't talk about carbohydrates,
you have to talk about foods.
So carbohydrates is lentils or lollipops,
jelly beans or kidney beans, right?
Those are all carbohydrates,
but have vastly different effects on the body.
And same thing with protein,
where are you gonna get protein?
Pork rinds are protein, so are kidney beans.
Fat could be lard or it could be walnuts.
And so you really can't talk
about macronutrients in isolation.
You have to talk about what foods are healthier,
what foods are less healthy.
And there are interventional studies.
There are studies that actually put this to the test
and you can test, are walnuts healthy or not, period,
regardless of their macronutrient makeup.
- [Chef AJ] Also think it's the lack of starch,
so many people when they're quote "being good",
they go on a diet and they're just gonna eat
fruits and vegetables, which are wonderful.
You should eat them every day, whether you're vegan or not.
But if that's all you eat, you're gonna be hungry.
And they forget whole food groups, like sweet potatoes
and beans and quinoa
and the starch is what creates the satiety.
And that's what often I see in people that continue bingeing
is because they're afraid to eat starch,
and we've gotta change that.
And I love what you guys said about this research
you did into the hospitals, not allowing vegan.
In my work where I deal a lot with food addiction,
I'll sometimes interview experts that are not plant-based
because they have knowledge in food addiction.
And so many of them say, "oh, you can't do this
without animal protein", bullshit.
That has nothing to do with it.
- It's not about will, it's about conflicts
with our human nature.
Dieting conflicts with our basic drive to survive.
And so what we see as eating disorder behaviors
are our bodies trying to protect us.
And that turnaround for me, changes everything.
The binge in response to the restriction
is just the body trying to protect you.
It's a completely rational,
completely understandable response.
- If you ask people the question, what's more important,
calories in, calories out?
Remarkably people, in fact even doctors,
you ask doctors that, they say they're equivalent
or exercise is more important, which is blatantly false.
I mean, just think about it.
Like in a minute you could consume hundreds of calories.
Whether you're biting into a donut or something,
hundreds of calories per minute, where it can take,
you can only burn, some people may only burn
a hundred calories per hour.
Doing kinda moderate types of exercises.
You could see how rapidly, if you actually calculated
how many times you'd have to run up and down
the empire state building to burn off whatever,
calorie dense meal is coming to you.
You realize the imbalance and how,
what we have so much more control over calories in
and since most of the calories out
for people who are not athletes
is actually just our metabolism rather than our exercise.
So we actually only have control over
a small portion of the pie of calories out,
whereas calories in, we have almost total control.
- [Chef AJ] If somebody is not under the threat
of a surgeon's knife or going on medications,
we don't have to do this really quickly.
We can start getting some of this whole natural food
in them, in the form of even things like green smoothies.
Even if there's a little bit of dates
or cocoa powder in them, just to get them
their endothelials flooded with these greens
so that they start really eating some healthy foods--
- [Woman] Those are cells.
- [Chef AJ] Yeah, exactly .
So that they go in there, nourished and nurtured
without just changing their diet drastically overnight.
And that's what happens around the holidays.
People are eating this crappy standard American diet,
and then they go on like a strict weighing and measuring,
very restrictive plan.
And it's like, oh my God, no, you don't have to do it
that quickly, but just start eating more fruits
and vegetables right now.
Even if you're bingeing, even if you're eating crap,
make a decision that you're going to eat more fruits
and vegetables, the more you do it, the more you'll like it.
And you're so right,
'cause you said earlier about food cravings,
what you eat today, you will crave tomorrow.
And that is a fact.
So if you eat sugar today, you'll crave it tomorrow.
If you eat Brussels sprouts today,
you'll crave Brussels sprouts tomorrow.
So just find ways to eat more fruits and vegetables,
especially vegetables.
And this is the best thing I'm gonna say.
- If we're going long periods of time
without feeding ourselves,
we're gonna have erratic thoughts
and behaviors about food.
And so we can't address the emotional issues around food
without first addressing the physical body,
the human body that needs basic things to be okay.
It needs sleep, it needs water it needs food regularly,
it needs fun and relaxation, right?
There's a lot of things that we need that we sort of,
maybe don't always consider.
And a lot of these things influence our relationship
with food and body.