#136: Why Are We Addicted to Food and What Can We Do About It? with Glenn Livingston

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Hi, I'm Dr. Tabatha, the Gutsy Gynecologist. I'm a triple board-certified OB-GYN and functional medicine physician. I've embraced the world of functional medicine and wellness through my own personal health journey, and I'm super excited to share my wisdom and unique perspective as it pertains to women's health. After caring for thousands of women, I've come to realize that your gut health determines your gyn health and your overall And it's a super gutsy thing for me to go against conventional gynecology practice to bring you the truth. No more Band-Aid medicine, ladies. We're talking root cause resolution on this show. So if you're struggling with hormone imbalance, weight gain, period issues, anxiety, insomnia, you name it, then you've come to the right place. And I want to be your gutsy gynecologist. So welcome. Oh my gosh, I'm super pumped about this episode. I've been wanting my guests on here for a while because the food industry is duping us. And I didn't realize this even as a physician. We are not taught any of this about how food is created in this country, how it's manipulated, and how it's really Manipulated in a way to create addiction. And so my guest today has the inside scoop on all of that. And more importantly, he has figured out how to stop the addiction and how to break the cycle of binge eating and eating the garbage foods and always reaching for the potato chips or eating the food without thinking and then feeling guilty afterward. And like, All of it, all the shame around food, all the emotional eating that we do. And he comes from a traditional world of psychology where you try to, you know, heal all the emotional stuff and figure out why you're overeating and making bad food choices and all of this stuff. And it's, it's very much powerless. For you. It's like you have to work through all this trauma and all the things that happen and figure out why you're making bad choices. And what he is saying is, no, that is not the problem. The problem is what the food industry has done to our food and how it has taken over our body and how we can take back control of it. And so it's super powerful. And like, when I heard him the first time, I don't know, 6 or 8 months ago, I was like, yes, this makes total sense. And everything he talks about is a version of what I did to break up with sugar and get off my sugar addiction. So I'm just really excited to bring you this information today because it's a game changer. And I think we all have a little bit of disordered eating every now and then, depending on if we're overworked, overstressed, we're sad, we're frustrated, or we're happy. You know, Most of us have these issues and then some of us have it like it's controlling our lives. We really can't break up with sugar. We really can't give up the potato chips or the pop or different things. And my guest today is going to help you with that. It's amazing what he's created through his journey of figuring all of this out and losing a ton of weight himself and just getting control of this. So Let me tell you about him because this is a great episode and you need to hear it. So let's get on with it. So Dr. Glenn Livingston is a PhD veteran psychologist. He was a longtime CEO of a multimillion-dollar consulting firm which serviced several Fortune 500 clients in the food industry. So he had the inside scoop of how food is made in this country. So Dr. Glenn's work, theories, and research have been published in major periodicals like the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Sun-Times. He was disillusioned by what traditional psychology had to offer for overweight and food-obsessed individuals. So Dr. Livingston has spent several decades researching the nature of binge eating, overeating, and All of the above, through his work with his own patients and a self-funded research program of more than 40,000 participants. So he knows what he's talking about, you guys. Most important, however, was his own personal journey out of obesity and food prison to a normal, healthy weight and a much more lighthearted relationship with food. So you're going to be touched by his story. And unfortunately, I think a lot of us have similar stories and we get into these scenarios and these cycles of having food issues. And I like that he says he was food obsessed. You know, I, I think I had a sugar addiction. Whether, whatever you want to call it, is we need to take care of it. So. Dr. Glenn teaches why binge eating and overeating is such a popular problem, and he focuses on the food industry and how addiction medicine really fails to give us back our power and help us take care of this issue. So he's actually going to give you real tips on how to start, you know, changing this and shifting this right now. He has amazing programs and all kinds of stuff. You can get his book for free. The links are in in the show notes, but he's going to literally tell you right now how you can take control of this and change everything. So let's get on with it. I'm super excited. Well, welcome, Glenn, to the Gutsy Gynecologist Show.

Thank you. I couldn't wait to be here, and I enjoyed telling people I was going to do this.

Good, because I need you to get your message out to the world. When I first heard you, I was like, oh my gosh, this is everything that I've lived and experienced with myself and my patients. And I just think the majority of people don't really know that the food industry is duping them and that food addiction is real, right?

Oh, yeah. We have a perfect storm in our country, really the whole world, for people to get hooked with their lizard brain, their reptilian brain, on these hyperpalatable food-like substances that You know, these concentrations of starch and sugar and fat and excitotoxins and salt, and, and it's all aimed at hitting the bliss point in the reptilian brain without giving you enough nutrition to feel satisfied. And there are probably billions of dollars that go into hiring rocket scientists and engineers to put this all together so they can turn off your hungry and full meters. And every time you're looking for love at the bottom of a bag or a box or container, there's some fat cat in a white suit with a mustache laughing all the way to the bank, which is a little bit of an exaggeration, but not much.

Yeah, not really. I mean, I will tell you, I am a conventionally trained physician. I went through medical school, I went through residency. We learned minimum about nutrition and we learned nothing about how food is actually created in this country. And just hearing you talk about it, You know, just makes so much sense to me. So, you know, I was an OB-GYN, so I was sleep-deprived, delivering babies all night, running around all day trying to crank out patients and doing surgeries. And so it was very common for me to grab whatever was available on the run and just eat it on the go. And I got to the point where literally I was living on Donuts and bagels for breakfast, coffee, Mountain Dew, M&M's at the nurse's station, licorice. Like, my body just chose all of those quick processed foods over anything that was real and healthy. And I got to a point where I realized that I had an addiction, you know? And some people would laugh and be like, oh, you can't— that's not a real addiction, and things like this. But I would love for you to explain to my listeners, like, How the food industry has manipulated our food, and it really does create an addictive habit for us.

So I don't know if I'm the ultimate expert on that, but I did consult for the food industry for a lot of years in my 20s and 30s. I did, and I saw what was happening. And, you know, they know where our evolutionary buttons are. I feel like I was on the wrong side of the war. They know where our evolutionary buttons are. They know, for example, that if they manufacture a bag of chips, they have very slight variations in flavor, that in nature we've evolved to seek variations in flavor because there will be variations in micronutrients that are available and we're more likely to acquire the micronutrients that we need if we look for a variety of sources. And so when they manufacture a bag of chips, they will do it on a multitude of assembly lines and it kind of all goes into one bag and people have no idea that this is what's going on. And it's not like there is a plethora of micronutrients in a bag of potato chips, right? And there's not really any— there's not really much difference in the micronutrients that are available from chip to chip to chip. It's just kind of faking out the brand. The advertising industry will— I remember a food bar manufacturer that I worked with, and guy became kind of a friend of mine, and he's a VP of marketing. As he was leaving the company, He kind of hung his head in shame and he said, I got to tell you something, Glenn. The most profitable thing we ever did was to take the vitamins out of the bar. We took the vitamins out of the bar and we put it in the packaging instead, and we made it multicolored and shiny and diverse. Because also in nature, you know, you're told to eat the rainbow for a reason. If you find a multicolored source of fruits and vegetables, the odds are that you're going to get a variety of good Micronutrients, right?

Right.

A yellow carrot and green lettuce and blueberries and cherry red tomatoes, you put that all on a plate, you're probably getting some really good nutrition. Well, in this case, they actually took the nutrition out of it and they're faking you out and pretending like it's there instead. So those are the kind of things that go on. And the other thing that they do is they take advantage of what you'd call plausible deniability, because people don't necessarily really want to eat healthy, they want to believe that they're eating healthy while they're eating a whole bunch of junk. And so, you know, you put a little bit of vitamin E oil in potato chips as an example, right, then you can advertise, now with vitamin E, as if that doesn't mean it's got almost no nutrition and a flood of carcinogens from the heated oil and the acrylamides and all the things that are created when you make potato chips. I don't mean to ruin potato chips for everybody forever. I think that, you know, our society makes some very flavorful things, and if you want to indulge once in a while, you know, more power to you. But these things do contribute to the greasing of the chute, to the justification of the idea that you can eat this. And people start to think that it's nutritious, and people start to think they're not really doing themselves that much damage, but they really, really are. And then you take into account the fact that the nervous system goes through a phenomenon called downregulation and upregulation, which means that when you overstimulate your senses, they turn the volume down. They don't respond as thoroughly. So for example, I used to sleep underneath the subway in graduate school. And for the first couple of weeks I couldn't sleep at all. A couple of months later I didn't even know the subway was there. My brain turned down that supersized stimulus. The pleasure system will do the same thing with regards to your food and your taste. So if you have a chocolate bar every single day, by the end of a month you probably don't like the taste of an apple anymore, right? Because you're—

Yes, I remember that clearly when I gave up sugar. I substituted with fruit because I couldn't quit cold turkey. And that fruit was not that great. I didn't enjoy it that much, but I just thought, okay, just eat the fruit. Don't eat that other stuff. And after a few weeks, the fruit got a lot sweeter and I got to the point— I remember eating my first piece of cake after like 2 months and I could only have one bite. It was literally that sweet.

Yes.

Very eye-opening to me that I had gone through that downregulation and shift of everything.

And the good news is that you upregulated also when you stopped eating sugar. You got to the point that the apple tasted good again and the cake doesn't taste so good.

Yes.

But it takes a while. It takes a while. But it's good news though because the body does upregulate. I think there's research that says within 6 to 8 weeks If you remove the supersized stimuli for your taste buds, that they double in sensitivity about 6 to 8 weeks later. So there's hope. People get stuck in the addictive cycle because they then believe that they don't like fruit and vegetables.

Yes. Oh my goodness. Yeah.

So I'm never going to lose weight because I just don't like fruit and vegetables. And everybody knows, regardless of whether you're ketogenic or whole foods plant-based or high carb or low carb, everybody knows you have to eat more whole foods and at least vegetables To, to get thin. And people think it's impossible because they don't like fruits and vegetables. Well, your senses have been downregulated. That's why you don't like fruits and vegetables. There's hope, but the only way out is through. You have to— yeah, you got to go through that.

Yeah, exactly. Well, you— okay, so you mentioned the bliss point in the brain and how companies really change the food products to maximize bliss point. You know, I've heard a lot of talk about how they remove all the good, healthy fats. They put in a lot of sugar substitutes to make it taste better again. Can you explain the bliss point to my listeners? Because I found that really helpful in being able to just recognize that it's not just me and my lack of willpower and I'm a bad person because I give in to these things.

Well, there's a There's a certain level of stimulus, whether you're talking about vanilla or salt or sugar or starch, that is experienced as maximally satisfying, and when you go beyond that point, people start to report that they are not as interested and they won't eat as much, and so there's a lot of testing that goes on to figure out exactly how much vanilla has to go into that vanilla pudding in order to hit the best bliss point, and at what point does it start to become unpleasant for people. And so they can replicate that bliss point with things that aren't necessarily nutritious. So they can replicate that with chemicals and, you know, excitotoxins and things like that. And that's often cheaper, more shelf-stable, more effective and efficient for them to manufacture and scale, and that's where the profits are, than it would be to, you know, put the real vanilla bean in or, you know, or the real fruit or the real vegetables or the real, you know, chicken or whatever it happens to be. Whatever it happens to be. So yeah, it's a sad state of affairs. And then, you know, the advertising industry is very good at figuring out how to slip through your sales defenses. And most people think that Advertising doesn't affect them, but it actually affects you more if you think it doesn't affect you because that's when your sales defense is down. So they're particularly good. And I think the last study I saw, there were like 6,000 messages a year that are about food beamed at us on the airwaves and the internet, and maybe half a dozen of them are about eating more fruits, vegetables, and whole foods, right?

Mm-hmm.

So We come to believe that it's normal to eat like that. And then we live in a society where we're not really living a natural life in accord with nature. We're sitting between 4 walls staring at a computer screen and hoping electrons flow into our bank account, right?

Yeah.

And so people don't really have the time to— we certainly don't have the time to gather and chop and harvest and do the kinds of things that we did a long time ago, so we don't require any real activity to get our nutrition, and then we, you know, we're confronted with a barrage of decisions to make all day long. Turns out decisions wear down your willpower. People have trouble resisting marshmallows in studies if you make them do math problems first, so it's not just food decisions that wear down your willpower, but— Decisions in general. And how many decisions do you have to make every day? You get an email. Do I spam it? Do I delegate it? Do I defer it? Do I take care of it myself? Do I respond or report it to someone? Right? One email. You have to go through that and burn a lot of brain glucose to do that. Then, you know, who's going to take the kids to soccer practice and what's for dinner tonight? And then you are— you step outside. And I once heard Lewis Black say that he knew the end of the world was coming because he walked out of a Starbucks and across the street was another Starbucks. I mean, you could walk out of a Burger King and across the street there's a McDonald's. You can walk out of a Taco Bell, across the street there's Dunkin' Donuts. We're barraged by these bright colors and slogans and very intense stimuli that are designed to make us believe that this is what we need and we don't have the time to prepare healthy food for ourselves, so we're living in a fast food world. And then everybody makes jokes about it. There's a lot of social pressure But really what's happening is that people are— it's like there's a tacit agreement to slowly kill yourself with food. Like it feels like the only way that people can get by is to do this. It's not true, but you know, J. Cardo Krishnamurti said it's no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. And that's what's going on. So that's why you have this, you know, perfect storm.

Yeah.

And then the addiction industry will say that you can't resist even if you wanted to, the best you can do is abstain one day at a time, you know, you can't quit sugar, you can't quit chocolate, you can't, and there's no evidence that that's true, there's really no evidence that's right. I'm not advocating that everybody has to quit sugar or chocolate but there's no evidence that you can't. They're mostly told, I mean, let's take binge eating for example, most of the evidence for the efficacy of treatment for binge eating has to do with cognitive behavioral therapy and maybe some SSRI antidepressants, But the thing that's popular among most mental health professionals who are working with eating disorders is to say, you can't distinguish between good and bad foods, eat everything in moderation, learn how to eat intuitively. And it's not a good idea to get crazy obsessive with food rules and things like that. However, a rule can eliminate decision-making, right? A rule can preserve your willpower. If I say I will never have chocolate on a weekday again, then I don't have to make chocolate decisions all week long. I only have to make chocolate decisions on the weekend. My willpower is preserved. If I say I'm just going to have chocolate 10% of the time and I'll avoid it 90% of the time, so I'll do the best I can, anything in moderation, well, it's good in theory. But every time I'm in front of a chocolate bar with my name on it, I have to make another food decision. I have to make another chocolate decision. And so hard and fast rules actually can turn out to work a lot better than this kind of squishy, do the best you can, indulge yourself 10% of the time kind of thing. And while being— I'm sorry, do you want to say something? I get all excited about this stuff.

No, I couldn't agree more. Like, literally, that's how I gave up sugar. I just made the decision that I don't eat that crap anymore and I'm going to be a healthier person. And so I couldn't agree more. And I would love for you to explain to my listeners how you went through this and made this discovery because your story is so powerful. Like, you, you've done it. You figured it out.

Yeah. So I'm not just a doctor that worked with the food industry and decided to work with overeaters. I used to be probably almost 300 pounds. I stopped weighing myself at 267, but the odds are I was close to 300.

Yeah.

And it started when I was a teenager. And I'm 6'4, I'm modestly muscular, just kind of naturally. And I figured out that if I work out really hard for a couple hours a day, at least back then, that I could eat whatever I wanted to. And I didn't think it was a problem. Like Doug Graham says, I thought it was a superpower. Multiple pizzas, boxes of muffins, boxes of chocolate bars. Mostly I started with chocolate and then I would go on to pizza and muffins and things like that. And coming from a family of 17 psychologists, when I got a little older and it started to bother me, I went the psychological route. I figured there must be something bothering me. There must be a hole in my heart. And if I can figure out how to fill that hole in my heart, then I'll stop filling the hole in my stomach. And I went on this decades-long journey to figure that out. I saw the best psychologists and psychiatrists. I took medication for a little while. I went to Overeaters Anonymous for many years. I even conducted a very large study on my own. I got 40,000 people over the course of many years to take a survey on the internet when internet clicks were cheap. It was all about what they were stressed about and what they couldn't stop eating. And over that period, I learned an awful lot about myself. I think it made me a more compassionate person. I think it dissolved a lot of the self-hatred. So it was a worthwhile journey, but it didn't solve the problem. I would get a little thinner, a lot fatter, a little thinner, a lot fatter. Finally, kind of, there are these 3 things that happened around the same time that Made me flip the paradigm. So instead of trying to nurture my inner wounded child back to health and love myself thin, I decided it was more of a tough love approach and I had to be like the alpha dog of my own eating brain. When an alpha wolf is challenged for leadership, it doesn't go, oh my goodness, someone needs a hug. It growls and it snarls and it says, you know, get back in line or I'll kill you. Right?

Right.

It asserts its superiority. And I said, well, Maybe this is the same thing with food. Maybe there's this organ in my brain not dissimilar to how my bladder would say, hey Glenn, you really have to pee now. And I would say, well look, I'm talking to Tabatha, I can't do that now. I'm the superior entity here. I'll take care of you when we're done with the interview. Right? Because I'm living in a civilized society and I have other commitments and things that I'm trying to accomplish. Why is this really any different? Why isn't it just about the urge? Well, what got me to that paradigm— and that's the paradigm that started to work, and I'll tell you something kind of embarrassing, which is how I actually got it to work for me— but the way I got there was partially from the food and advertising industries, because I would say these are very powerful external forces that have nothing to do with the fact that I was in a bad marriage, that my mama didn't love me enough. This is an outside force having nothing to do with me. Then I'd studied a little bit of neurology and actually read some alternative addiction treatment literature. A guy named Jack Trimpey who wrote a book called Rational Recovery that taught me that the reptilian brain doesn't really know love. And it's the reptilian brain that's the seat of the feast and famine response. You know, the just hand over the chocolate and nobody gets hurt response. It's a misfiring of the emergency system inside of us that's designed to protect us from dying. Like, so if we go through an environment where there's a lot of famine and suddenly there's food available, we're supposed to hoard as much as we can. That's, that's where this response comes from.

And we still have that reptilian brain in our brain, right? Down—

can't get rid of it.

Even though we have a frontal brain, we have critical thinking abilities, we are advanced, we still have that in our nature. Right.

And if the emergency act, if the emergency system is activated at too strong a level, all the other stuff goes out the window.

Yeah.

If there's a hungry bear chasing you, it doesn't matter what diet book you read yesterday. It doesn't matter what your plans were. Like Michael Tyson said, is it Mike Tyson? Yeah, he said, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. You know, if there's a real emergency, Your brain is set up to take over and say screw all that rational stuff. Forget who you are in the world. Forget your family. Like this is survival time, and I think that's what's happening at the moment of impulse. So the reptilian brain doesn't know love. It's it's it's the mammalian brain on top of that that says wait a minute before you eat, mate, or kill that thing because that's how the reptilian brain assesses stimuli in the environment. It says, you know, should I eat it? Or should I mate with it? Or should I kill it? It's like a bad college drinking game, right?

Yeah.

But then the mammalian brain says before you eat, mate, or kill that thing, wait a minute. What about the people that you love? What impact is this going to have on your tribe and your family? And then the neocortex says wait, before you eat, mate, or kill that thing, what about your long-term goals like health and fitness but also your contribution to society, the kind of person you're trying to be, you know, your spirituality, your music, your art, your broader connections to the world and your work and everything. And I said, so what was happening was at the moment of impulse, this thing was getting a lot stronger and all the rest of the stuff was going out the window. And so it didn't matter how much I loved myself or hated myself for that matter. It didn't matter what my long-term goals were. The problem was that there was this event Which revved up the reptilian brain and made it want to override everything else. So the last thing that kind of brought this together for me was the survey that I told you about. When I analyzed the survey, 40,000 people, I found out that people who struggled with chocolate, who said they couldn't stop eating chocolate when they were stressed, they tended to be stressed in their relationship. They felt a little lonely or brokenhearted. People who struggled with salty chewy things, you know, like starchy chewy things like bread and bagels and pasta or pizza, they tended to be stressed at home, and people who struggled with crunchy salty things like pretzels and potato chips, they tended to be stressed at work. It's very interesting, not a perfect correlation, not a perfect study either, but definitely something there. And so I called my mom because she was a therapist and she happened to have raised me and she also has a problem with chocolate. So I called my mom and I said, Mom, can you please help me understand what could have happened to get me to run to chocolate when I feel lonely or brokenhearted? Because, you know, I'm not in a great marriage. I'm not happy. And, you know, I know you have trouble with chocolate also when you kind of go through these bouts of depression sometimes. And you know what, why do we do that? What happened? And she gets this horrible look on her face and she says, honey, I'm so sorry. And I said, Mom, it's okay. This was over Skype. I said, it's okay. I was about 42 at the time or something. I said, look, this is 40 years ago. Whatever you're talking about, it was 40 years ago. I forgive you. I love you. I just want to know what happened. And she said, I'm so sorry, honey, but in 1965 when you were 1 year old, Your dad was a captain in the Army and they were talking about sending him to Vietnam. And I was terrified. I was a young mother, another one on the way, hopefully. We're trying to get pregnant and they're talking about sending him to Vietnam. I thought, I'm going to be an Army widow. At the same time, my father, your grandfather, had just gotten out of prison. And I didn't know that he was guilty. He had disappeared for 2 years and I had idolized him prior to that. And my whole world fell apart. And so half the time when you came to me for love or to play or, you know, just to get a hug, I didn't have the wherewithal to give it to you. I was sitting and staring at the wall feeling anxious and depressed. So what I did was I got a big bottle of chocolate Bosco syrup and I put it in a refrigerator on the floor. And I would say, Glenn, go get your Bosco. And you'd go crawling over or running over to the— I was crawling over at that time. to the refrigerator, you take out the bottle, you open it up, you'd suck on the bottle, and you go into a chocolate sugar coma, and I could resume staring at the wall. Very sad. Um, was a good conversation to have. I learned a lot about my mom.

Yeah.

And, um, and so I stopped torturing myself as much at that point, but my chocolate eating got worse. You think if it were a movie we'd have this big hug and a big cry and everything would be okay, but, um, you know, I, I learned a lot, like I said, about my mom, and I forgave myself, but My chocolate eating got worse. And the reason it got worse is for a kind of a crazy reason, which is embarrassing as a sophisticated psychologist who's been, you know, my credentials. But I was not going to talk to anybody about this. I decided to do a little experiment. So the experiment was I was going to draw very clear lines in the sand. So for example, I will never have chocolate on a weekday again was one of the first things that I did. And I decided that if I was at Starbucks and I heard a little voice in my head that said, go ahead, you worked out hard enough, one chocolate bar is not going to kill you, you're not going to gain any weight, it'll be just as easy to start again tomorrow. Besides, chocolate comes from a plant and therefore it's a vegetable. I would say, that's not me, right? It's a Wednesday. I don't eat chocolate on Wednesday. So that's not me. That's my inner pig. I call my reptilian brain my inner pig. I should have called it something different, but I called it my inner pig. I said, that's my inner pig squealing for pig slop. Chocolate is pig slop on a Wednesday. I don't eat pig slop. I don't let farm animals tell me what to do. As ridiculous and crude as that sounds, it would wake me up at the moment of impulse. And I wish I could say that I was immediately better. That wasn't a miracle. That took some time. What was immediately better was all the confusion went away. There was no longer this voice of justification. I didn't think I had some mysterious progressive chronic disease. I didn't think that I was, you know, struggling with food because my mama didn't love me enough and because I was in a bad marriage. I just said, no, there's a vent going on. There's this thing going on where my inner pig or my reptilian brain is getting activated, and then it's drawing on all these justifications. I could remove those justifications. I bet I could remove those justifications and it would be like building a fireplace between the fire and the house. So I could have a roaring fire. It wouldn't matter how emotional I was, what I was upset about, what was going on in my life. I would sever the link between the emotion and overeating. And so I began to do that by looking specifically at what my pig would say. So for example, if it said It'll be just as easy to start again tomorrow. It's actually not.

Everybody's pig says— everybody's pig tells them that. Start it tomorrow, right?

And the problem with that is that on a neurological basis, we have this principle called neuroplasticity, which means that what fires together wires together. If you crave chocolate and you eat chocolate today, That association is going to be stronger tomorrow. The craving will be stronger and the association between the craving and the action will be stronger tomorrow. So you're actually digging a deeper hole for yourself. If you're in a hole, you should stop digging. The best thing to do is always use the present moment to be healthy. It's the only time you can eat healthy is in the present moment.

Yes.

Over the next few years, I played with a lot of different rules. You know, some things I try to give up totally. Some things I would say I will only have pretzels at a Major League Baseball park. And I got better at it. I would make some mistakes. I'd write down what the pig said to get me to make the mistake. I'd figure out what was wrong with what it said. And I kept this journal for 8 years. I got thin. My triglycerides went down. My psoriasis went away, etc., etc., etc. And then in 2015, while I was getting divorced, I was a minor partner in a publishing company based on all the little business contacts that I had. And the CEO calls me and he says, Glenn, do you think you could write a book? Because we need to prove to the other authors that we know what we're doing with marketing and I want to do some experiments and, you know, I can't really do that on just anybody's book. Do you think you could write a book?

Mm-hmm.

And I said, I have this crazy journal between me and the pig. He says, perfect. So I whip it up into a book, you know, I think it was 8 years in the making, and I send it to him. And 2 weeks later he calls me back and he says, Glenn, donuts are pig slop. I don't eat donuts. I don't let farm animals tell me what to do. And he proceeds to lose almost 100 pounds over the next 18 months. And we published it. And, you know, I have to say, we both knew marketing really well. And, you know, he was previously running the publishing company. And so I had a leg up in a lot of ways, and I had some contacts that got me started. But we just plugged away doing all the things we knew how to do, and then it just took off on its own. And now we have well over a million readers, and people don't quite know me by name, but if they see me at a bookstore, they kind of point at me and they say, um, big guy, big guy, which is a lot of fun on a first date, by the way. So yeah.

Well, I don't think it's just your marketing. I think like you cracked the code. You figured out why people are addicted to foods and why their behaviors run their lives and really how to put a stop to it. Because I've agreed with, like, literally everything you've said. You have to just make a decision and you have to stand by that decision and give your pig or your reptilian brain tough love, right? And how long did you go back and forth figuring that out until it felt like you had conquered it and were changed?

Um, there were a couple of other pieces of the puzzle that I had to put together. Um, eventually I realized it wasn't just about disempowering the logic but understanding how to shift nervous systems. So there is a piece of the puzzle that was missing there where you had to do some particular kind of breathing and writing at the moment of impulse to shift the system. So what I tell people to do now is start with one simple rule, and then when you hear the pig inside telling you that you should break the rule, take a breath. Breathe in for a count of 7, breathe out for a count of 11. It's important that you breathe out for longer than you breathe in. Probably 7-11 breaths. Laurie Hammond gave me that moniker. So take, take some 7-Eleven breaths, and that starts to shift you from the sympathetic nervous system— you can tell me if I have this wrong, I think I have this right— from the sympathetic nervous system, which is the emergency response system that gets you prepared for action if a hungry bear is chasing you, to the parasympathetic system, which says it's okay to rest and digest and use your rational thinking and planning. And that's what you want to do with a moment of impulse, is be able to shift. You want to be able to shift nervous systems. The reason the breathing works is that, I think, if you were being chased by a hungry bear, you wouldn't have time to breathe out for longer than you were breathing in. You'd be going—

Yeah, yeah.

Right? So when you breathe out for longer than you're breathing in, you're signaling the brain that there's no emergency. This is not a time that it's necessary to take emergency action. Then if you write down what the pig is saying, you ask the pig, okay, I took my 7-Eleven breaths, I'm thinking a little more clearly, why do you want me to break my rules and binge? And that's when it will say, well, you could just start tomorrow, or one bite's not going to hurt, or, you know, all those kind of things we talked about. Write that down in full. Write down exactly what it's saying. Writing is more of an upper brain activity. And binging is more of a lower brain activity. Overeating is more of a lower brain activity. So write it down in full. Then you can dispute what the pig has to say. Then you can rationally disempower and excise that cancerous logic. And then finally take another breath like that and link it to the person you're trying to become in the world.

Yes.

What's going to make you a happier, better person if you stay with your plan now as opposed to giving into the impulse. I lied, there's one more piece to it. The other piece to it is that there's often an authentic physiological or psychological need. More often physiological than psychological. So people will tell me they get these overwhelming cravings usually when they skipped breakfast or had too little for breakfast or they worked out and they didn't plan their recovery well or They didn't get enough sleep and they're impinged upon to make decisions all day long. And so you have to attend to that also. What really got me off of chocolate eventually, because I evolved to the point that I just don't have chocolate at all, was having a kale banana smoothie instead. When I would have the craving, I experimented with all these different fruit and vegetable combinations, and eventually I came to kale and bananas. Sometimes with some celery juice. And, um, I think there must have been some type of a micronutrient deficiency that was part of what was driving—

For sure.

Do you know what it is in the cantaloupe bananas that would be—

I don't specifically off the top of my head, but I, you know, when you were talking about chocolate versus salty versus sweet, I mean, it makes so much sense. Usually salty goes with overstress and adrenal dysfunction. And so it's like electrolyte imbalances— sodium, potassium, magnesium, selenium— whereas chocolate is more, um, chemicals in the brains, like to make dopamine and GABA and all your pleasure hormones and things like that.

Wow.

And so it makes total sense to me, like everything that you've come to understand. And if we can figure out what are we missing, what are we lacking, Yeah, and put that in. So that makes perfect sense.

So just as an aside, I want to say that I figured out the salt cravings were usually caused when I didn't have enough vegetables, particularly leafy greens. If I had enough leafy greens in my diet and enough— started making a vegetable soup without any salt, then I wouldn't crave the salt. It was pretty amazing. But the principle here is more important. I'm not a medical doctor. I guess you are, but I'm not. The principle is, what's the authentic bodily need behind it? If you understand that the emergency response system is making an error because it perceives itself to be living in an environment of feast and famine, then you have to correct both sides of that environment. So how are you going to flood your body with nutrition at a slight caloric deficit if you want to lose weight? This flies in the face of what a lot of people want to do with intermittent fasting and things like that, and I tell them I don't dispute the benefit of intermittent fasting, but it's hard to stop bingeing while you're doing that, so I ask them if they could have 3 meals a day and flood their body with nutrition on a regular basis for 4, 6, 8 months until the bingeing and overeating is out of their system, and then if they want to reintroduce intermittent fasting, that tends to work better. I've spoken to some intermittent fasting experts and they tell me that they find something similar if people have been eating a lot of processed carbohydrates, that their body doesn't get fat adapted well enough and it takes longer for them to get used to the intermittent fasting, so they prefer people to get the— often they'll say they prefer them to get the processed foods out of their system for a few months first.

Yeah, without a doubt. I think you lose that metabolic flexibility and you do need to transition over to whole foods, You can eat an entire bag of Doritos and not be satisfied and continue to eat it, yet you can't eat more than like a cup of broccoli because you feel full. And it's literally because you get those nutrients and vitamins that you need and your body turns off their hunger signals, right? Where you don't get the turnoff of those signals with the garbage.

Yeah.

And so you have to fill your meals with nutrient-dense food. We have millions of people who are hugely obese but malnourished. And like, that's not a picture that we grew up with. We grew up with malnourished equals scrawny ribs, you know, in Ethiopia, whereas malnourished literally in this country is like you were, 300 pounds and not healthy and not having those nutrients.

Right.

So yeah, I love the idea of like, get in the nutrient-dense food, clean up your diet, and then we can work on tightening up your eating window or adding in some intermittent fasting. But I've yet to meet a person who doesn't lose weight just cleaning up their diet. I mean—

Right. Yeah. And sometimes people do well. Sometimes they can't bear to give anything up. So They'll start with a rule that will say, I always start my day with, you know, a big green smoothie so I fill up my body with healthy goodness. And then they start to crowd out the bad stuff.

Yes, I love that. Just crowd out the bad stuff. So you've done all of this journey on yourself. You've come full circle. You've figured it all out and now you're helping other people. So I would love for you to tell me about your program? And like, how are you working with people to overcome this?

Well, we have a lot of resources. If you go to neverbingeagain.com, our website, and click the big red button, you'll get a bunch of resources that'll help you. And we usually like people to start with the free resources so they know how we work. And it's kind of odd when I come on a podcast and I say, hi, I'm Dr. Glenn. I have a pig inside me. People think I'm a little crazy and that it is a harsh theory or that we're going to call them a pig or something. And so, you know, you'll get some recorded coaching sessions to download and listen to for free and food plan starter templates and a whole bunch of free stuff to start with. You can get a copy of the book in Kindle Nook or PDF format there also. That's all free. There are, you know, there's the paid versions and the Audible and the paperback if you want them. And we have a free forum where you can talk to other readers and see what people are doing. But then we do have paid programs. We have, I think I have 10 coaches working for me now.

Wow, that's awesome.

I should probably say with me because they teach me as much as I teach them. And our results are almost exactly the same. We track results and, you know, we're very careful about only letting coaches stay who get results. And it's pretty close. It's pretty close. You know, and so we offer traditional coaching one-on-one, but we have a program where you get one-on-one email coaching, and then we have 6 groups a week, 6 online groups a week, and people come on and ask for support there. I run one of them, my business partner runs another, and then the Master Coaches run the other ones. So you're never really more than a day or 2 away from getting the online support. And, you know, we have educational lectures and we have tools that we've developed, but it essentially works like this. And you don't have to pay me for anything to know how to do this. You start with one simple rule. It turns out that part of the reptilian brain strategy when you're trying to be good is to say, okay, I'll let you be good, but you better be really, really, really, really, really, really good. Kind of like that nursery rhyme, when she was good she was very, very good, but when she was bad she was horrid. So the pig will set the bar way too high for you to sustain and then you'll crash. And so people get into this binge-restrict cycle.

Yeah.

So we want to kill that right away. So what's one simple thing you could do that would make a difference but it wouldn't be too onerous or difficult to implement? Examples might be, well, there's a guy Eventually lost 150 pounds and he started with, I won't go back for seconds. I'm a truck driver. I need to eat fast food 3 times a day, but I won't go back for seconds. And just that one shift made such a difference in his life that he got motivated and started moving other things around. Or maybe it's, I always put my fork down between bites, or I'll never eat in front of a screen again. Or, you know, I will only ever have chocolate on Saturdays and Sundays, or I'll never drink more than one drink at a buffet again, or whatever your personal nemesis is. Is there one thing you could do? Go to kindergarten before you go to college. Don't worry about losing weight unless your doctor says it's urgent. Don't worry about losing weight the first couple of weeks. Just set up a line in the sand. Set up a rule that you're willing to follow and step back and watch your reptilian brain. Whatever you want to call it. I call it my pig still. Watch your pig try to talk you out of following that one simple rule.

Mm-hmm.

Learn how to play this game. Then go through the procedure that we talked about. Take your 7-11 breaths. Write down, you know, like with a pen and paper or smartphone exactly what it's saying. Write down why it's wrong. Ask yourself, how will life be better if I abstain from this indulgence the pig wants? And Teach yourself how to use that process and that tool to stick to the rule. You do that for even 10 days' time, you're going to feel so much more powerful and so much more hopeful about what you're doing. And then consider, you know, if you want to work with us in the more in-depth programs and have all that support and everything like that. We do get, as of today— what's this, July 2022? Our stats are about a 90% reduction in binge eating in the first month of the program, and it seems to stabilize somewhere around 55 or 60 at the 6-month mark. We don't have as good data because it's hard to reach everyone, and there could be some biases there, but we're doing better, I think, than most programs do there. And, you know, considering that most people are spending several hundred dollars a month on binge food and losing at least a day of their life every time that they do, because They got to sit and sweat and bloat on the couch to recover, you know, and then they hide and they aren't productive and they don't go out socially. And considering how much it costs, we always feel like our programs pay for themselves within a month or 2. But, you know, they're all guaranteed. I usually don't pitch the program too much. I'd rather people start with the free materials and see if it's for them.

Well, I just think this is such an amazing resource because we've been told for so long that You know, you have to sit and talk about it and heal the inner child and do all this work for years on end to figure out why you're binge eating or eating your feelings, you know? And it sounds like you're saying it doesn't really matter. Like, just stop the reptilian brain from being in control, take back some power over what you're putting in your mouth, and it's totally doable. And that's just, that's really exciting.

You can solve the problem without solving your emotional issues. You can do that. There is a relationship between emotional discomfort and overeating, and there is a, you know, a historical relationship. You can trace back people's particular patterns to things that happened and what went on in their life, but it's kind of like, you know, it's like if the house is burning down, you don't want to be a detective to figure out why the house is burning down. You want to put out the fire.

Right.

Right. And you can, you can put out the fire before you know how the fire started. Later on, if you want to figure that out, more power to you. I learned a lot from my journey like that.

Yeah, I think that's an amazing way to think about it. And I would love your thoughts on like kids because, you know, you were too young to make those decisions with the Bosco and everything else. But what about, you know, 10-year-olds, 15-year-olds who they have been trained to eat their feelings by their parents, and so they've created these bad habits and all they have is bad options in the house, you know, where do they even begin to start? Or is this something that you have to have more of an adult brain to be able to comprehend and override this reptilian brain?

The best thing that parents can do is recover themselves and set a great example. That's the best you're— and generally speaking, you will have more influence on the people that you love by being the change that you want to see in the world than by trying to preach the change that you want to see in the world.

Yes.

When kids are motivated, like, you know, when the mother or their father— it's usually the mom— has made this dramatic change and there are healthier foods in the house and they start to get interested, then they're capable of beginning to use this when they reach the stage of formal reasoning, which is, you know, somewhere in like the 10 to 13-year-old range. They're not quite as good as people who are in their 20s and have full reasoning capabilities, you know, developed, but they're capable of doing it. We are kind of working on Never Binge Again for kids and we don't have it totally figured out, But the 2 things we know are that sometimes if they think about a school kid that, you know, is bothering them or they don't like or something like that, and they think of that, that kid as being the reptilian brain, sometimes that works for them. And also, if they have any aspirational models, like sometimes you can look at American Ninja Warriors and, you know, there's some— there's someone they're a fan of and You can go and look for that person's YouTube channel and maybe they're talking about eating healthy and that seems to get kids all riled up and wanting to eat like that. So looking for aspirational models and helping them to define that inner enemy however they want to define the inner enemy. Gotta be a little careful because it could border on bullying because you don't want them to be talking about that other kid in school. They cannot understand it's an internal thing. And You know, but those are the little tricks we found. But mostly, you know, if mom changes and stays changed and continues to grow and glow, then the kids come along.

I love that.

A year or two later. A year or two later. It takes some time.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I love it. Lead by example. That's all you can do, right?

So yeah.

Oh my gosh. Well, you're just a wealth of knowledge on this. I love it all, and I love— I women feel empowered that, you know, if they can figure out what the heck they're putting in their body, maybe they can actually get some control over it. And what are they thinking about what they're putting in their body? So like you said, take the breaths, write it down, do all the steps, and you can start to create some new actions which lead to new behaviors and new outcomes.

Can I say 2 more things that are particularly important?

Yes, please.

When you make a mistake, yeah, you want to adopt the model that you're committing with perfection but forgiving yourself with dignity. It's like an Olympic archer aiming at a bullseye archery target. When they're aiming, they're not thinking, I'll do the best I can, maybe I'll hit it, maybe I won't. They wait until they experience the arrow going into the bullseye before they let go of the arrow. They got to see it. They got to see it and they have to purge their mind of all that doubt and insecurity. If they miss, they don't say, I'm a pathetic archer. I'm going to shoot all the rest of the arrows up in the air. They make an assessment of by how much did I miss and in what direction and therefore what adjustments should I make. And then they forgive themselves with dignity. They don't beat themselves up. And they get up and they aim again with perfection. That's the way to do this. You want to collect, you want to pay attention to the mistakes and the failures, you want to learn whatever you can from them, but perseverating on the guilt makes the bingeing worse. It makes you feel too weak to resist in the next binge and it makes you want to give up.

Yeah.

So to get out of that, you collect evidence of success. What in any way was better this time than last time? How did you eat 5 cupcakes instead of 15? You ate a whole pizza but you didn't eat the box. What's your, um, what's the evidence of success? And then your brain will start to develop a success identity rather than perseverating on the failure. It's very, very, very important. Okay, that's all I want to tell you.

No, I love that. And I think it's like you're saying, the pig is the one talking. That's That's the one who's beating you up and berating you for your failure and because he's trying to get fed again. So stop listening to that guy, really. Oh my gosh, great advice. I love it so much. So I will have all your resources in the show notes because I have a feeling there are women who need you and this is the answer. So thank you so much. This is awesome.

Thank you, Dr. Tabatha. That was very nice. Thank you.

Oh my gosh, I know you got something out of that episode. I went through that sugar breakup, I don't know, 7 years ago now, and I still need reminders. I still need new tools and tricks, but what Glen is saying works. It literally does. I did a little bit different version of that originally where I wrote down everything I was eating and held myself accountable and stopped to think about, do I need to be putting this in my mouth? But I like that he talks to the reptilian brain and just doesn't listen to it anymore. And once you figure out, you take the deep breaths, you get out of that sympathetic mode I need, I need, I need. You get back into the parasympathetic mode so your frontal brain can actually think cognitively and have advanced thoughts and not be stuck in the reptilian brain, then you're going to make some progress. Then you're going to write down everything that you're thinking about that food and why you really need it. And I would say, if you don't have it readily available to grab and eat, this is more likely to be successful because you have time. Like, I literally wanted to drive to get ice cream 2 nights ago, and it took a lot to talk myself out of it. But I was having that discussion and I was so glad I didn't have it in the house because what had happened was for 2 days before that, I had eaten cookies.

Oh, no.

Cookies and crap that my daughter had made. So I had started the cravings back up, you know. I was feeding the yeast in my gut and the bad bacteria, and I was feeding the addiction centers in my brain. And you have to get mindful. You have to break that process, that, that cycle that you get thrown right back into. And So I really love the tools that Glenn offered us, and I know he's got a lot more in-depth help and support if this really is something that you need to tackle with some professionals. So check out the resources in the show notes, and hopefully you got some good golden nuggets out of this. I, I know I did. So, all right, ladies, go have an amazing kick-ass week. Love ya. Bye.