How to Stop Overeating, Stress Eating, and/or Binge Eating and Stick to Any Diet: 41

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Heal, Nourish, Grow podcast. Today I am joined by Dr. Glen Livingston, and this is a topic that you're all going to be really excited to hear about because a lot of my audience here, we're very focused on nutrition and particularly weight loss or changing our body composition. And that is what Dr. Livingston is all about. So I'm really excited for you to share some of this practical knowledge. But first, I would love to hear a little bit about your backstory because I think you have a really interesting kind of proposition where that you led you into this work. Because you had previously experienced some health challenges yourself.

I did, I did, yeah. Well, um, I guess the best way to describe it is, um, I'm not just a doctor who chose to work with overweight people, but if you'd ever been to the Woodbury Country Deli in Woodbury, New York, Long Island, and they're out of pizza or Pop-Tarts, the odds are that I was there before you. I had a rather serious eating problem myself. I'm 6'4", I'm honestly muscular. I hover, you know, in the 200 to 210 range most of the time now. I was probably closer to 300 at the height of my eating. And it developed because I figured out that, you know, because of my physique, if I just worked out a little bit, a couple hours a day, I could eat whatever I wanted to. And it really, if it wasn't nailed down, then it's fair game for me. And I didn't think it was a problem. I could eat multiple pizzas. I could eat, you know, boxes of Pop-Tarts. I could have bags of chocolate bars. I didn't think it was a problem until I got older. And when I got a little older, I was 22, 23 years old, and I was traveling 2 hours in each direction to go to graduate school and see patients. I found that the— I didn't have the time to work out, but I found that the food had a hold of me. Like, it's had a mind of its own. And so I'd be sitting and working with a suicidal patient or with a couple on the verge of a divorce, and I'd be thinking, when can I get to the deli? When can I get my next pizza? And that really bothered me because I'm a psychologist from a family of 17 psychologists, and all I ever wanted to do was be a great psychologist. All I ever wanted to do. And psychology is not really— it's not like a jigsaw puzzle. I used to think people would present the puzzle of their lives. You'd say, rotate this here, rotate this there, this is the missing piece. And they'd say, thanks, Doc, I'll get right on that. But it's really a lot more like getting people to love and trust you enough to leave their comfort zone. And they don't do that unless you lend them your soul. You have to be 100% present. And I just wasn't. So I, you know, coming from the family that I came from, I took a traditional approach and I went to the best psychologist and psychiatrist. And I figured there must be something hurting my heart. I must have a hole in my heart. And if I could fill the hole in my heart, then I wouldn't have to fill the hole in my stomach. Like I thought I just must not be loving myself enough. That's why I'm doing this. And, you know, I went to Overeaters Anonymous, went on kind of a spiritual journey. I saw nutritionists, I took medication for a while. I did everything you could imagine. And I don't regret the journey. I learned a lot about myself. I learned to be more kindhearted. I forgave myself in a lot of ways, but I'd get a little thinner and then a lot fatter, a little thinner and a lot fatter, a little thinner, a lot fatter. Um, there were a couple of things in my life that caused me to flip the paradigm. To thinking less about nurturing my inner wounded child back to health and more about being the alpha dog in my own personal psychology and dealing with this challenger for leadership. And you know, when an alpha wolf is challenged for leadership, it doesn't go, oh my goodness, someone needs a hug. It kind of growls and snarls and says, get back in line or I'll kill you, right? And I realized that I had to flip the paradigm and think about there is this part of me that didn't care about all of my goals and dreams, this part of me that, you know, didn't care about my weight loss or my fitness level or my health or my loved ones or anything like that. It just, you know, was a hand over the chocolate and nobody gets hurt kind of part of me. And I was going to have to take control. So here's what happened to flip the paradigm for me. First, my wife at the time was— I'm divorced now, but she was traveling for business a lot. And so I had an awful lot of time in my hands, and I developed a second career which is related to her career. We, um, we were consulting for a lot of big companies in the food industry, names that you'd recognize, but which I'm not going to mention so I don't get sued. And, um, I saw over time that they were engineering these hyperpalatable concentrations of starch and sugar and fat and excitotoxins and salt, and, and it was all aimed at hitting the bliss point in the reptilian brain without giving us enough nutrition to feel satisfied. And the result of that is addiction, that you just want more and more and more and you're never satisfied. But every time you're looking for love at the bottom of a bag or a box or a container, there's some fat cat in a white suit and a mustache that's laughing all the way to the bank. But what really struck me about that was that it was aimed at the reptilian brain, at the seat of the feast and famine emergency response system, and that that part of the brain doesn't really know love. The reptilian brain looks at something in the environment and it says, do I mate with it? Do I eat it? Or do I kill it? Eat, mate, or kill, like a bad college drinking game. If this is the reptilian brain, then it's the mammalian brain that's on top of that that says, wait a minute, before you eat, mate, or kill that thing, what impact does this have on the people that you love, on your tribe, on community that you're trying to be part of. And then the neocortex says, before you eat, move, or kill that thing, wait a minute, what impact does that have on your longer-term goals and the kind of person you're trying to be? I said, so all these years I'm trying to love myself thin, and every time I'm in front of a chocolate bar at Starbucks and I hear this voice that says, you know, wait a minute, chocolate comes from a cocoa bean, so really it's a vegetable, and you can just start tomorrow. Every time that, that happens, I'm thinking, oh my God, I have to love myself more. I'm letting go. I'm, I'm moving myself. I, I'm basically giving license to this reptilian brain to do what it wants to do. So between those understandings, between our research into alternative addiction treatment and understanding some problems in the addiction treatment industry, for example, they're saying that there's no, um, there's no cure and that you can't hope to abstain from this problem yourself. You know, there's no human defense for this, um, on and on and on. And the fact that the, that the advertising industry was extremely powerful too, that everybody thinks advertising doesn't affect them, but it affects you more when you think it doesn't affect you because your sales resistance is down. And they are very good. We could talk about how they hit the evolutionary buttons with their, you know, packaging and design and commercials. They're very good at making you think that you need this stuff to survive, that this is actually where the good stuff is. When I put that all together, I said, wait a minute, these are external forces. This has nothing to do with the fact that my mama didn't love me enough and, you know, I was in a bad marriage and that I was lonely a lot. Nothing to do with that. This had to do with these external forces that were mounting a very strong offense against my reptilian brain. And I had to step back and figure out what to do about that. I read a book called Rational Recovery, which was basically about how to do something similar in alcohol. And he had recommended thinking about the brain in two parts. There was the lower brain, the reptilian brain, and the upper brain. Um, and he kind of recommended this Alpha Wolf approach, but it didn't really work for food at the time. Um, at least not for me and a lot of other people I talked to. Because food is not a black and white addiction. You have to take the lion out of the cage and walk it around the block a couple of times, a couple of times a day, right? Um, and, and so it was necessary to think about some modifications of ways to do a little bit differently. But basically, I got to this point where I, um, I decided I had to do things differently. Oh, I'm sorry, there was one more part. I did a very long I was getting paid a lot of money to do surveys. And back then the internet clicks were really cheap. So I set one up for myself. And over a couple of years, I had 40,000 people tell me about their cravings, the things they had trouble resisting, and tell me a bit about their personality style and what they were feeling stressed about in their life. And I ran a bunch of correlations and factor analyses. And I figured out that people who couldn't resist chocolate, like me, I always started my binges with chocolate, they tended to be a little lonely or brokenhearted. People who struggled with soft, chewy, starchy things like bread or bagels or even pizza, they tended to be stressed at work— I'm sorry, stressed at home. And people who struggle with crunchy chips and pretzels and things like that, they tended to be stressed at work. And so before I started talking about that publicly or even applying it to myself, I called my mom because she was also a psychotherapist, and I said, Mom, I found out this really cool thing about chocolate. Because my mother has trouble with chocolate. They say that we're really lonely or brokenhearted or depressed. And she gets this horrible look on her face. She says, I'm so sorry, I am so sorry. And I said, Mom, what is it? She said, well, I have to tell you something about, um, you know, how you got addicted to chocolate. I said, Mom, what is it? She could— I said, look, it was 40 years ago. This is in my early 40s. It's 40 years ago. I don't care. I just want to figure this out. You got to tell me. She said, well, 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. We were trying to get pregnant with your sister. I figured I'm going to be an Army widow with 2 little ones on the way, 2 little ones and no way to take care of them. And at the same time, my father, your grandfather, had just gotten out of prison. And I didn't know he was doing these things. We had no idea where he was for 2 years. And we, um, you know, I was devastated. So she said, Glenn, half the time when you were 1 year old, I didn't have the wherewithal to love you and play with you and feed you healthy things. I was just sitting and staring at the wall most of the time, 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, a little refrigerator on the floor. And you'd come running to me for a hug or for some love or to play or some healthy food. And I'd say, "Glen, go get your Bosco." And you'd go running over, crawling over to the little refrigerator, you'd take out the bottle of Bosco, you'd open the cap, you'd suck on the bottle, and you'd go into a chocolate sugar coma. And that's where it came from. And I said, "Mom, you know what I mean?" If it were a movie at that point, we'd have a big hug and a big cry, and neither one of us would ever have trouble with chocolate again. But what actually happened was my chocolate eating got worse. Because there was this crazy little voice inside me and it said something like, you know what, Glenn, you're right. Our mama didn't love us enough. And she left a great big chocolate-sized hole in her heart. And until we can find the love of our life and get out of this bad marriage, we're going to have to keep on binging on chocolate. Yippee, let's go get some right now. And I said this phrase.

I mean, I'm just— people that aren't watching the video, and I'm sorry to interrupt you, Dr. Loewyssen, but This is just like touching my heart so much. I'm not laughing because it's funny, because it's not. It's just, it's touching. And I feel like a lot of people experience this, right? And it's not a laughing matter at all, but it just makes me like just hurt for you because that is such a— it's not unusual, unfortunately, I think, for parents to comfort their children with food. And It's such a process of people realizing this. And I love how you're tying it together with the, you know, sort of the binge behavior with the childhood stuff. And then on top of it, what the food industry really does to us to entice us to eat these things that we know that we shouldn't have very often, just because they're hitting that bliss point in your brain. So anyway, sorry to interrupt. That's just an aside.

I'm honored that you feel touched by that. Thank you. Yes. Hugs. Yeah, I know.

I just wanted— that's like what it felt like to me. It's just like, oh, it's so heartbreaking. But at the same time, like amazing that you figured all this out and that your mom finally shared that with you and that you had all this data to sort of back that up and be like, this, this is other people's experience as well.

But Cheryl, the thing is the solution is not what you would think. You would think that understanding why I was addicted would give me a solution. But it didn't. It didn't. It actually made it worse. Because there was this voice of justification that just kept saying, our mama didn't love us enough, and we've got a chocolate-sized hole in our heart, and you just go ahead and do that. And so at this point, I did something a little crazy. And I was not necessarily going to share this. I really wanted to get better myself first. So I never thought I'd be talking about this. I decided that I kind of had to fictionalize this part of me inside that was getting activated and striving to break my best leg plans. So I decided I was going to call that my inner pig. I should have called it a food monster, or I shouldn't have done that, but it was a private thing, and I wasn't a vegan at that time. It was just, um, it was a different person. I decided I was going to call it my inner pig. And that I would draw a very clear line in the sand so that I would know when it was pressing me to cross it. So I think my first rule was I will never have chocolate on a weekday again. That way, if my pig was saying, gee, you worked out hard enough even though it's a Wednesday, you're not going to gain any weight, you can have a little chocolate bar, just start again tomorrow. I would say, wait a minute, that's not me. That's my inner pig squealing for slop. Chocolate is pig slop on a weekday. I don't eat chocolate on a weekday. And I don't listen to farm animals tell me what to do. As ridiculous as that sounds, as primitive— and I'm a very sophisticated psychologist. I've been published in all these journals, and I've been in New York Times and the Queens New York. I've been everywhere. I've been everywhere. But what started to buy me those extra microseconds at the moment of impulse to make the right decision was I don't eat pig slop. I don't let farm animals tell me what to do. It was a very primitive emotional expression of, I'm sick of this. I'm sick of being talked out of my own best judgment. I'm not putting up with it anymore. I'm the boss. I'm fed up. I'm going to do it. And then I realized that it's not without parallel in our world. So we have a lot of other very powerful bodily impulses that we're required to restrain, sublimate, or direct in a civil way in our society. For example, if I really had to pee right now, I would tell my bladder, "Okay, I hear you, but I'm talking to Cheryl. I have to finish this meeting. We'll go pee afterwards." I don't have to pee, don't worry. But if I did, I'm a responsible member of society and I'm a doctor and I'm conducting an interview. You don't go and kiss attractive people on the street just because they're attractive, right? You don't get out of your car when you're furious at the person that cut you off and pull them out of the car and throw them on the road. I mean, occasionally people do, but you get in a lot of trouble if you do that, right? So there are a lot of very powerful impulses that we have to deal with as human beings that we're expected to deal with in our day-to-day basis. Why not this one? Why not this one also? We just have to recognize when it's happening. Now, there are a couple of other things that I discovered along the way. This gets more into the practical knowledge, if that's okay.

Yeah, absolutely.

It turned out that this would happen at the point— it would often happen at a point where I hadn't taken care of some authentic biological need. Sometimes it's a psychological need, but usually biological. So maybe I skipped breakfast or I did a big workout and I didn't have a recovery meal, or I didn't get enough sleep or something like that. And I started to notice that my pig would squeal louder at those times. And I said, that's interesting. Maybe this is part of the survival drive, but it's just going awry. And the chocolate bar seems like the easiest, quickest way to get a fix of fat and sugar and calories cuz my body needs something to, to survive. That turned out to be at least partially true. When I would have these cravings, I would say, wait a minute, I know everyone in my body wants chocolate, but let me go make myself a kale banana smoothie. Or, you know, let me just have some celery juice and see if that settles. And I know this is keto.

I'm not really a keto person, but it's all things health and wellness and everybody gets there differently, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

And I don't preach any particular, like, I work with lots of keto people. I work with lots of whole foods people. My program is diet agnostic. So I discovered that I really had to attend to my physical wellbeing if I wanted to manage these moments. But I also discovered that at that moment, I could build a fireplace between the impulse and the living room, right? If you think of the emotion or the impulse or that drive to have the chocolate as a fire, Up until that point, I was thinking I had to put out the fire in order to get better. But it turned out that I could just build a fireplace that could disempower the logic that the pig was using to justify going from stimulus to response. So when the pig said, "It'll be just as easy to start tomorrow, and you worked out hard enough, so one bar's not going to hurt you," I would pause and say, "You know what? First of all, it's probably not going to be just one bar, because it's never just one bar." Secondly, the principles of neuroplasticity, the way the brain works, says that if I have a craving for chocolate and I eat the chocolate right now, I'm gonna have a stronger craving for chocolate tomorrow because what fires together wires together, right? Thirdly, the principle of neuroplasticity works for thoughts as well. So if I think, let's just start tomorrow, and I reward that thought with a chocolate bar, I'm more likely to think, let's just start tomorrow, tomorrow, and it cycles downwards. So I can only use the present moment to be healthy. Every bite counts. And now is the only moment that I can put healthy food in my mouth. So I went through a lot of work to come up with these logical refutations of all the crazy things that my pig said. I kept a journal for 8 years, "Me Versus My Pig." And over that time, I got healthy. I didn't— it wasn't a miracle. You know, I— what was a miracle was I suddenly no longer felt confused and powerless. I suddenly said, okay, I know what's going on. I've restored my sense of free will. Sometimes I would still make the wrong choice, but at least I felt like I was in control. And then I started playing with the rules and I realized, well, why don't I start with rules that I actually will follow? I know how to wake up and get my free will back. I want to start with things that I actually will do. And I made the rules easier. And slowly but surely, I kind of adjusted them so I would lose the weight. You know, I'd make some mistakes along the way, and then I'd figure out what the pig said that I didn't recognize, and I would dispute that, and I would dispute that. And I kept this journal for 8 years. And as I was getting divorced, I was a minor partner in a publishing company from all my business contacts.. And the CEO called me and said, we really need to publish our own book because we need to do some marketing experiments and show people we know what we're doing so we could attract better authors. And I said, well, I've got some time and I'm kind of in the middle of divorce and I have, um, I have this journal I kept for 8 years. It's the, about me versus my inner pig. And he goes, I love it. I don't wanna hear anything else. Turn it into a book. So I, I took that summer and I, I wrote the book and, um, I sent it off to him. He calls me back all excited 2 weeks later, says, "Glen, donuts or pig slop? I don't eat pig slop. I don't live on a farm. I don't want you to tell me what to do." He proceeds to lose 100 pounds. And along the way, we published it and it kind of took off. And now we have more reviews than "The Da Vinci Code" and over a million readers. And I walk around saying, "I've got a pig inside me. Maybe you do too." And it resonates with a lot of people, apparently. There's a lot more to the method. There are a lot more practical things we could talk about, but that's—

Yeah, I'm sure that's covered in the book, obviously, at some point. But one of the things I just really wanted to ask, and I didn't, I didn't share this with you before we got on this call, but my background is actually in psychology as well. I don't have any of the letters behind my name. I only got through a year of graduate school before that ended, unfortunately. But this is a thing that's a huge interest to me because also my minor was in addiction studies. And so some of the questions that are coming to my mind when you're talking about this are Number 1, do you feel like this can be applied to multiple addictions? And number 2, I was thinking about what you're saying about the reptilian brain, and you were talking about finding that example of the pig, like, just striking you, like, on a very visceral level, like, "No, I don't do that." And I'm wondering if it's more tied into kind of getting at those more base-level demands that your body is making from the reptilian brain. Do you know what I mean? Like, so instead of— I think we can get all cerebral, especially as people in psychology and and kind of go to these higher and higher levels. But I'm wondering if you feel like you just nailed it on that base level because—

I'm just turning my phone off.

Oh yeah, no worries. If you just related to that base level, like, no, we don't do that. Like making it very simple to kind of like, kind of just have that impact on the reptilian brain. Because the reptilian brain is just driven, needs-driven, right? Or just like base animal instinct. So I just feel like you tied that together so well. But anyway, any thoughts around number one with other addictions and number two, Why do you feel that worked for you? And if it's not the reptilian brain, maybe it's something else, but I'm just curious to hear more about that.

I do think that this simplification was a big deal. I think I was living in an ivory tower. I think a lot of psychology kind of gets like that sometimes. And the evidence about the treatment of eating disorders, especially binge eating, suggests that You know, cognitive behavioral therapy, like identifying the destructive thoughts and then figuring out what's wrong with them and correcting them. I mean, maybe a little bit of SSRI treatment. That's what the evidence says works. It's not really what everybody does. That's what the evidence says really, really works. So I, I do think that, um, getting down to brass tacks and simplifying things was a big part of it. And You know, being smart is one of the only things that I'm actually confident about in myself. I was never confident with women. I wasn't confident with sports, but I was always confident that I was really smart. But I think that in some ways I was too smart for my own good and went down all these esoteric roads. And, you know, when you're— I was brought up in a family with 17 psychotherapists. So something breaks in the household, nobody knows how to fix it. We all ask it how it feels. And so Sometimes you have a hammer and everything looks like a nail. And so I was taking, you know, the approach you would expect me to take coming from an environment like that. And I don't mean to be down on psychology because there's a lot of really great stuff that comes from that also.

Oh, absolutely.

But the solution for this was a lot simpler than I thought it was going to be. And it does have to do with the really base needs and, you know, being that alpha wolf. Sometimes people have difficulty recognizing them. That's the hardest part. They think it's really coming from their higher brain when it's not coming from their higher brain. The higher brain is just kind of putting words onto these lower impulses. And so they merge with it. And so that's why you need a very clear rule, a very clear line in the sand. I always put my fork down between bites. Well, once you say that, there's going to be a voice in your head that says, oh, don't bother, Jeff. Oh, don't bother now. This is silly, you don't have the time. Then you can say, OK, that is generated by my reptilian brain. My higher brain is putting some words on it that's really generated by my— so then you have a method of recognizing it. Some people can just ignore it at that point. And it's different for the different types of things that people try to regulate. So sometimes you could easily ignore it for chocolate, but you'd have a harder time when you're talking about a bagel. And you don't have to give these things up. You can find ways to regulate them. But when people can't just ignore it, then it's usually because there's something in what their reptilian brain, something in that justification that sounds logical to them. You know, like you could just start again tomorrow because you worked out hard enough today and you won't gain weight. That's half true. Like, if I only had one chocolate bar after a really big workout, I probably would be okay. The problem is that the craving would get stronger and I won't stop at a bar and I'll have it again tomorrow. So it turns out that the PIG operates on half-truths with a bigger lie. And often you really need to identify what the lie is in order to be able to ignore it the next time. So people think you're inviting it to have a debate with you. It's more like an operation where you're exposing its cancerous logic and then excising that logic, um, so that you can live with the truth instead. Um, yeah, there are other things on a very primitive level that you need to do that makes this all easier. Um, one of them is actually feed yourself healthy food, flood your body with nutrition, at a slight caloric deficit if you want to lose weight. Don't let your brain perceive that you're in a feast and famine mode. Yeah, right. Keep a regular, reliable course of nutrition going through your body at all times. The other thing is there are certain types of breathing that will take you out of your emergency response system. So if a hungry bear is chasing you, you would probably be going, getting as much oxygen as you could so you had the ability to pump your legs and pump your heart and move fast. If you breathe in for a count of 7 and breathe out for a count of 11— I'm not going to do it now because it takes a lot of time— then, and you do that a couple of times, your brain says, okay, there's no emergency. There's probably not a hungry bear chasing this guy at this time. We can relinquish the emergency response system. This is a time when we can rest and digest and strategize and be more in our rational brains. So I tell people to try— when they recognize the pig is active, before they do anything, take a few 7-Eleven breaths. 7-Eleven breath is a term I got from Laurie Hammond. The other thing we can do is don't do this all in your head. Write it down. There are a couple of things that are good about that. But along the lines of what we're speaking, When you write down what the pig is saying, writing is an upper brain activity. You couldn't be, you couldn't be taking notes while that bear was chasing you either, right? So writing is an upper brain activity. It tells your brain, this is not an emergency. There's time to think things through. Let's be rational about this. So you can do those types of things as you're trying to dispel the pig's cancerous logic. And this whole thing It's just about severing the link between impulse and action. Like, you know, so you're trying to gain the ability not to fix all your emotions, not to solve all your problems, but to insert this space between stimulus and response so you can remember who you are, why you wanted to make these choices, and have the opportunity to exercise your free will. That's what this is all about.

Do you— Do you think that you mentioned early on in the conversation that we, you know, we experience this in other areas of our life where we realize that certain things are not societally accepted. And so there's this, there's this almost automatic, we've obviously learned it at some point, but this, the separation between the stimulus, like, like you mentioned, what you see an attractive person, you don't just run up and kiss them, you like, relax, and you think, you think things through, you're like, well, that would probably get me arrested. And, and, you you know, we kind of go through the repercussions of actions. Why do you think that that is so much harder for people to do with food, for example?

Well, we live in a society which tacitly agrees to commit slow suicide with food. If you look at the way most people eat and when you go out to eat with other people, the things that they're putting into their bodies and kind of push aside the idea that, um, You know, half of us are suffering a horrible second half of our life from diet-preventable or diet-reversible diseases. You know, there's— in many ways, we live an unnatural life. We're required to spend most of our day between four walls staring at screens. We live with an overwhelming amount of input. We have, you know, many more scene changes, for example, in every show that we watch today than we did 30 years ago. We live with overstimulation of our pleasure centers and our nervous system. And so our body downregulates its response. If you sleep underneath the subway, the first week you can't get any sleep. I know this because I did it in graduate school. But 4 weeks later, your brain has habituated to the sound of the subway. It downregulated its response. Same thing happens with food. You have a chocolate bar every day or a bag of Doritos every day, um, a month later an apple is not going to taste as sweet because your body downregulates its response to pleasurable stimuli that exist in nature. And as a consequence, there's this addictive process where, um, it's difficult to get pleasure from what you're supposed to get pleasure from. So now everybody's walking around in this state where they kind of feel like they need the chocolate bar to feel normal.

Right?

And so you take that and you take the, um, you know, the cultural, cultural cooperation in slow suicide. You take the fact that, um, it's difficult to get solid nutritional knowledge. There's a lot of junk science out there and there's a lot of people peddling things that are, you know, half true. Um, and there's a lot of controversy about, you know, what's good and what's bad. And you can't get 10 people in a room to agree on exactly what you're supposed to eat. And so people say, screw it, I'm just gonna eat what tastes good. So it all kind of adds together. There are 5,000 messages per year, 5,000 to 7,000 messages per year beamed at us over the airwaves and the internet about food. How many of those do you think are about eating whole fruits and vegetables?

Right, this show is—

there you go.

I try, I do my best. But that's what I always say to people, like, you know, as you mentioned, you know, a lot of this audience is keto. But one of the things I've said over and over again, if people would just eat whole real foods, no matter what that choice looks like for you, that would be 90% of the battle right there.

But yeah, like, so what, why argue about keto versus plant-based? Why not just eat whole real foods and it would be so much better?

Yeah, that's, I think that's always a take-home from this.

But you know, Cheryl, the advertising industry also fakes us out. For example, I work for a food bar manufacturer and I became very friendly with one of the VPs there. And as he was leaving the company, he kind of hung his head in shame and told me something. He said, Glenn, I gotta tell you, our biggest secret to profitability was taking the vitamins out of the bar. We took the vitamins out of the bar because they were expensive and they made it taste a little worse. And we put the money into the packaging instead. So we made it look vibrant and multicolored and people were responding to that. So I said, wait a minute, you know, a multicolored food source in nature would represent a diversity of micronutrients, you know, blueberries and green lettuce and yellow carrots and, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, red tomatoes. That would be a diverse source of micronutrients. But you're telling me you took the micronutrients out and you're faking us out?

Yes.

Yeah. So, so, and you know, we could single them out, but there's no reason to. That goes on across the industry.

They all do it.

They, they, they all, they all do it. It's legal. And so people are just confused about what's healthy. Their reptilian brains are bombarded with messages designed to push their evolutionary buttons without actually giving them what those evolutionary buttons were designed to get. They walk around micronutrient deficient, so they've got extraordinary cravings they don't need to have. And, and then everybody tells them They give them the wrong advice. They tell them that the best thing to do is eat healthy 90% of the time and indulge 10% of the time. But nobody, nobody tells you how to discern the 10% from the 90%. So as a result, you're constantly making food decisions all day long. And the thing is that decisions wear down your willpower. We know that people have people have trouble resisting marshmallows if we make them do math problems beforehand because they made too many decisions before they got the marshmallows, right? This is why you have difficulty, by the way, making food decisions at night, where you can be good all day and then screw up just before you go to bed. And what— why, if you, uh, take out a piece of Tupperware and make your food decisions for the nighttime in the morning and have it all ready and waiting for you, you know, to just pop in the microwave or something when you get home, you'll do better. It's because your willpower is worn down by the end of the day. And so people are given the wrong advice. They're told that you really shouldn't make hard and fast rules. They're told to strive for progress as opposed to perfection, which is only partially true. There's an energy in perfectionism that helps you to aim at the goal. When an Olympic archer is aiming at the bullseye, they see the arrow going into the bullseye before they let go of the arrow. They're not thinking, maybe I'll hit it, maybe I won't, I'll just do the best I can. They say, no, I see the arrow going into the bullseye. I can therefore purge my mind of doubt and insecurity so that that energy is available to aim at the goal. If I miss the goal, I'm not going to shoot the rest of the arrows up in the air into the audience. I'm going to say, by how much, because I know exactly where the bullseye is, and in what direction did I miss? I'm going to use that feedback to aim again. So I'm going to aim with perfection, but I'm going to forgive myself with dignity. Most people just kind of, kind of sort of try to do the best they can, which, which when you're talking about a toxic pleasurable substance really means you're going to try for a little while until you don't feel like it anymore. Right. That's what that means.

No, and I don't think I've ever heard it explained quite so well because I've struggled with this my entire life, I'm definitely one of those people who has a tendency towards perfectionist tendencies. But I want to say that I really feel like it has served me well for the most part. I do forgive myself, but I am always striving. And that's what people have talked about, like, with my diet in the past. And I've done it all. I was like low-fat. I was vegetarian for 7 years. I've experimented with vegan. I mean, it's— but for me, almost having some of those restrictions I think is it takes some of the decision fatigue out, right? Because if you just become a person that's like, I don't eat donuts or I don't eat cookies or whatever it is, not to say that you're never gonna do it again, or like you say, you might slip up and occasionally whatever, but I, I feel like it really does give you a better chance at it other than saying, well, everything in moderation. And then you kind of just, you get sucked in by the packaging and the, the lack of nutrients and it, it just feeds on itself. It just like makes you want more. Whereas if you become this person that doesn't do that, to me, that's, It's almost better, but I've, I've heard other binge expert people kind of say that they don't like, you know, any restrictive diets, but I'm thinking like, I don't know if that quite makes sense. Can you add some commentary to that?

I can add a lot, a lot of commentary to that. Yeah. First of all, you could use a kitchen knife to chop vegetables or you could use it to kill people, right? So there, it depends upon how you use the tool. It's possible to use hard and fast rules to create an overly restrictive diet, and I do believe that that causes binge eating later. So I tell people, you know, aim for about a pound a week. If you want to lose weight, aim for about a pound a week. Check with a dietitian or nutritionist or medical professional about, about your diet overall. Are you missing anything? Are you flooding your body with nutrition? But somewhere around a pound a week is about about the level of hunger that people can tolerate and, you know, consistently lose weight without going back to the binge behavior. I also tell them to wait for 4 to 6 months before they reintroduce intermittent fasting. There are a lot of medical benefits for intermittent fasting. I don't dispute that at all, but I find that people who've really had trouble overeating, they have these patterns that have to be broken first. And so the best way to break that is to keep the cravings at a fairly low level. And I know that when you get fat adapted, that the cravings tend to go away. The problem is that doesn't seem to happen well enough for people who have a lot of fat and sugar and salt and junk in their system. So it seems like people have to be— in my experience, we've worked with almost 2,000 clients. In my experience, we do a lot better if people will eat regular meals for a while. Bring me back to the original question then, because I think there was more— oh, I know what it was.

It's probably around perfection.

So there is a movement in the eating disorders community that says you should just try to eat mindfully and, um, and, you know, do the best that you can and don't make any hard and fast rules that distinguish good foods from bad foods or healthy eating behavior from unhealthy eating behavior. As long as you're eating mindfully, your body will adjust. Now, I think there's some good in that, and I think there's some falsehood in that. The good in that is that it is better to eat mindfully. It's always better to eat mindfully. If you're going to eat something, it's better to be there. There are studies that suggest that you absorb more nutrition when you're there. It's more enjoyable. You digest things better. If you're going to eat, then be there. It's a good idea. However, it's almost impossible to eat when you're hungry and stop when you're full consistently, mindfully, because first of all, we don't live in a very mindful world. We have a lot of demands on us. It's very difficult to be mindful all the time. And secondly, the industry is creating things that break our hunger and full meters. So the idea of mindful eating a bag of potato chips when there are likely— there are likely chemicals in those potato chips that are designed to turn off the sensors in your intestines that sense when you're full, it's a little crazy, right? I think that having no rules and eating mindfully all the time would have worked 100,000 years ago on the savannah. I don't think I would have a job 100,000— I don't think Thad was sitting around saying, "Oh, eat too much mammoth." I think that food addiction is really a byproduct of concentrated sources of things that aren't concentrated like that in nature, and the downregulation of the pleasure system, and all the things that we talked about. Um, as a practical result, some people do better without rules. There are some people who do better with the mindful intuitive eating approach. Often they'll complain to me that they're not eating as healthy as they want to. They're not binging. They feel like they're in control again. They're very happy, like they're doing observably better than they did before, but they would like to go a level beyond that and be able to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy behavior. And I think that the justification for not having rules is that rules make you feel too rebellious and that then you're going to have to binge to quell the rebellion. I think that's It's kind of a low view of human nature. I think we have the ability to recognize, sublimate, and control our emotions. I think that, um, our methodology is designed to sever the link between emotion and overeating. So you could be super depressed, you could be super happy, you could be angry, you could be super anxious, and you don't have to eat. I think rebellion is just another emotion. And why do you want to be a slave to your emotions? I think, you know, when we were 2 years old, then, you know, you don't want to get it. You don't want to stimulate a 2-year-old's rebellion because, you know, God help you.

Right.

But, but we're, you know, as, as healthy, mature adults, do we want to, do we want to reify that 2-year-old inside of us, or do we want to say this is just a feeling? I'm going to make choices about my important food decision using my intellect instead. So I think that's the goal. That's the way that I think about it. There are some people who react negatively to our approach. They say it's too rules-driven and, you know, they feel like it triggers them, quote unquote. I don't even like that.

Oh, I hate that word. I'm so glad you said that. That annoys me. But that's a whole different story. But I can see that. Do you think it's partially like knowing yourself? Because I'm a rules follower. I'm not afraid to say that. I'm not a person that like gets nervous if I have to try to break rules. So I think for me it works really well. And so maybe there's something about just, you know, knowing your own personal psychology, knowing if your method might work really well for someone versus this very sort of free and easy mindful, you know, eating kind of thing. I think it's— either one's bad, it's just certain ones might work better for certain people.

Yes, if you're a rules-based person, this will work better.

Okay, good for people to know.

We have a really strong following in Germany.

German ancestry, so I probably come by it honestly. But That's probably a great segue into sharing a little bit more about your, your book, your method, your programs, how people can work with you, how they can most easily find you and, um, you know, sort of lead us into all the good things that you have to offer.

It all starts, it all starts with a free copy of the book at neverbingeagain.com. Click the big red button. And, um, when you do that, I'll give you two other things. You will get a set of food plan starter templates. Put a lot of thought into the rules that people use based upon different dietary philosophies. And we are diet agnostic, so it doesn't matter what philosophy you follow as long as you're not trying to be a breatharian or the 1,300 calorie diet or something like that. If, if you're eating a reasonable amount of food