A Conversation about Overeating and Binge Eating

Welcome to the Living to 100 Club Podcast. Here's our host, Dr. Joseph Casciani.

Well, greetings to everyone. I'm Joe Casciani, your host for the Living to 100 Club Podcast. Our conversations are all about aging well and doing what it takes mentally and physically to live longer and healthier. Our guests share insights and recommendations about successful aging, stories of perseverance, and inspiration about our future. Our guest for this podcast is Glenn Livingston, a veteran psychologist and CEO of a multi-million dollar consulting firm servicing clients in the food industry. We take a deep dive into the practice of overeating and binge eating, and why it's so prevalent in our culture today. Glenn also shares his own personal journey out of obesity and food prison to a normal healthy weight. First, a little background on Dr. Livingston. Glenn Livingston, PhD, is a veteran psychologist and was a longtime CEO of a multi-million dollar consulting firm which has serviced several Fortune 500 clients in the food industry. You may have seen his or his company's previous work, theories, and research in major periodicals like the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Indiana Star-Ledger, the New York Daily News, American Demographics, or any other major media outlet. You may have also heard him on ABC, WGN, and CBS Radio, or UPN-TV. Disillusioned by what traditional psychology had to offer overweight and/or food-obsessed individuals. Dr. Livingston spent several decades researching the nature of bingeing and overeating via work with his own patients and a self-funded research program with more than 40,000 participants. 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. Glenn, welcome to our podcast.

Thank you for having me here, Dr. Joe. It's been, um, looking forward to it all week.

Great. Yeah, me too, me too. So I always like to open by asking our guests to tell us a little bit about the journey that brought you to where you are today. You've had a long history in this industry, but give us the highlights.

Yeah, and you'll have to stop me when you want to because I could talk for an hour about that.

Okay.

You know, long story short is that I'm a clinical psychologist by training who had a dual career. My ex-wife was traveling for business all the time, so we didn't have kids, and I had time for a second career, and I didn't commute. So I also worked in the food industry and pharmaceutical industry doing advertising research. I, I was what you'd call now a hidden persuader. I actually feel guilty about it. I feel like I was on the wrong side of the war. But, you know, I'm trying to make up for it now. Yeah, I didn't set out to be an eating disorder psychologist— or that was a Freudian slip— eating disorders psychologist, because I wasn't eating disorder psychologist. That's why I had a problem myself. I work with children and family instead, and I began my problem with food when I was 16 or 17 years old, and I figured out that because I'm 6'4" and modestly muscular genetically without having to do anything about it, is that I, um, I could work out for a couple hours a day and eat whatever I wanted to— pizzas and boxes of muffins, boxes of chocolate bars, whatever you could imagine. And I didn't think it was a problem. It felt like Doug Graham says, a superpower, until I was 22 or 23 years old and I was married and commuting, you know, 2 hours each way to go to graduate school and see patients and study. And I get home late at night, and then I'd have to work on the business with my, my wife at the time. And I didn't have, you know, 2 minutes to work out, much less 2 hours a day.

Sure.

But I found that the food still had a hold on me. And, you know, I'd be sitting and working with a suicidal patient, and I'd be thinking when can I get the next pizza, or when can I get the deli and dislodge my jaw and open up the deli tray into it, right? And that really bothered me even more than the weight I was gaining, because, um, I come from a family of 17 psychotherapists and psychologists and social workers, and being a great doctor was always most important to me. And Joe, you know that Being a great psychologist is a lot more than an intellectual endeavor. Like, you've heard, you got to be present and lend people your soul, or they don't think new thoughts or have the courage to act on them. And I just couldn't do it. I was— I mean, thankfully I never lost anybody, and I worked with a lot of, you know, divorcing couples, and only two of them ever got divorced. And, you know, I think I was pretty good anyway because I studied really hard, but I wasn't really there. And I wasn't having the experience that I wanted to, and I wasn't being the best that I could be in the world, and it really disturbed me. Yeah, given the family I came from, I had a very psychological outlook on how that I could solve the problem, and that outlook could be boiled down to nurturing my inner wounded child or loving myself thin. I figured that I must have a hole in my heart from something that happened to me Either I'm upset in the marriage or something happened with my mom or something. And, and if I could fill that hole in my heart, then I wouldn't have to keep trying to fill the hole in my stomach. And the next two decades or so trying to solve this was a roller coaster of, um, getting a little thinner and a lot fatter, a little thinner and a lot fatter. As with one notable exception, you know, as I talked to the best psychiatrists and psychologists and took medication and went to Overeaters Anonymous and did spiritual pursuits. And all of this, it helped me as a person. I wound up, I think, being more compassionate to myself as a— and others. I wound up understanding myself better, and I can tell you stories about that if you want. I wound up understanding how the problem with food developed, but it didn't help me to solve it in any way. Like I said, I get a little better and a lot fatter.

That's such an important point. I want to touch on that in a little bit. So the insight helped in, in many ways, but it did not necessarily help with the weight loss.

It didn't help with the weight loss. It didn't help with the behavior.

Yeah, yeah, right.

Yeah. And people often get confused and think that, you know, if you can figure out what started the fire, then you're going to be better at putting it out, but Right. Sometimes if your house is on fire, you just want to be a fireman and not a detective, right?

Right, right, right. Yeah, so the dynamics may be helpful, but that in and of itself does not change the behavior, right? That's good. That's great. Exactly. I understand. Yeah, so let's jump right into this, Glenn. So why are overeating and binge eating so prevalent in our culture today? I mean, we just see it all around. What's going on?

Well, the big food industry is spending billions of dollars to engineer these hyperpalatable concentrations of starch and sugar and fat and excitotoxins and salt designed to hit the bliss point in your reptilian brain without giving you enough nutrition to feel satisfied. And when you put that all together, 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 with a mustache laughing all the way to the back, right? Yeah. And so this is a very powerful external force that everyone's exposed to that really doesn't have anything to do with, um, you know, with your internal psychology. The big advertising industry is very good at making you believe that their stuff is nutritious and delicious and it's what you need to survive. They were kind of facilitating this biological error. But for example, I remember working for a large food bar manufacturer who will remain nameless so I don't get sued. And the VP told me as he was leaving the company that he was kind of ashamed, but the most profitable thing they did was to take the vitamins out of the bar and put the money into the packaging instead. And I said, wait a minute, so you're telling me you're faking us out? He said, yeah. He said the multicolored diverse Packaging hits an evolutionary button in nature which tells you to eat the rainbow. You know, if you found a multicolored, diverse food source in nature, like, you know, red leaf lettuce and, you know, green lettuce and red tomatoes and blueberries and cabbage, purple cabbage, yellow carrots, you'd be finding a diversity of micronutrients. And that's why we have this philosophy of eating the rainbow to get that. But in this case, they were signaling that to the reptilian brain, but they'd actually taken the micronutrients out. And that kind of thing goes on across the industry. There are also things like, you know, when you— when you're eating a bag of chips, those chips probably aren't manufactured on a unitary assembly line, but probably on a multitude of assembly lines because if they have slight variations in flavor, you are triggering a diversity impulse. Because in nature, if you found a diversity of flavor, you'd also be finding a diversity of macronutrients. And so it was a survival advantage to keep searching when you encountered a diversity of flavor. But now they're heating that artificially without giving you the diversity of micronutrients. So it just goes on and on and on. And the advertising industry was good at making you believe that, that this was the good stuff, that you, you really needed this.

Yeah, go ahead.

Um, well, and then, you know, the, the addiction industry will tell you that there's no cure for food addiction or any other kind of addiction, and that the best you could do is abstain one day at a time, and that it's really a chronic, progressive, mysterious disease. But I still haven't seen the evidence for that. They quote some brain studies which show like different physiological responses to substances, but it's not clear to me, and I think it's pretty unclear actually, that it's reflecting anything more than learning. You know, this— the same centers of the brain that light up when an alcoholic sees alcohol also light up when a taxi driver sees a taxi. Are we going to say that there are chronic progressive mysterious disease that causes people to Drive taxis? I, I don't think so. And so I, you know, and the results of those addiction programs are not great. And nevertheless, it seems like the more compassionate thing to do for your doctor to say, well, this person is not an alcoholic, he's sick, or they're not really a food addict, it's a disease, you know, and send them to a 12-step program. Or it seems like the more compassionate thing to do, but what they're really doing there is adopting a philosophy of powerlessness and helplessness. And it's like a devil made me do it attitude. And that's rampant in the culture. So I think these 3 things combined, it's a perfect storm.

Yeah, that's huge. Yeah. So there is a certain kind of enabling process that goes on when we say— I mean, I'm not an addiction specialist and I understand the seriousness of it, but to call it a disease, a food addiction is a disease. That does take our own sense of power, willpower away from it, and it deprives us of our own decision-making, right?

I don't think that we overeaters have diseases. I think what we are— I think what overeating is caused by is, um, you know, industrial profit— profiteers that are taking advantage of our evolutionary impulses and, you know, hearty appetites for profit. That's That's what I think. Yeah, there wasn't— there wasn't— I, I don't think there was food addiction 100,000 years ago. I don't think that, you know, on the savanna when we could have fruit, vegetables, and, you know, maybe some lean meat, I don't— I don't think there was a guy sitting around saying, oh my God, I had, you know, too much mammoth. I think it's an artifact of the fact that we have all these, you know, chips and pastas and bars and I think it's an artifact of industrial food.

Yeah, so that's interesting. With your experience in the food industry, then you, you've seen how the forces, uh, really, uh, can generate that kind of pressure. And through advertising, packaging, TV commercials, everything, we see it all the time that these foods are good for us and, you know, fill up our cravings and all this. And in fact It's really a distortion, right, of what's really there in the product. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you talked about this, uh, bliss point when you and I spoke, and I think you just touched on it earlier. So how do, how do they discover this bliss point? I mean, what is it? How does it give them some leverage on getting people to overeat?

Well, in their research and development process they play with different formulations. And so, you know, there are rating scales, and there are— sometimes they actually wire people to, you know, galvanic skin response machines and look at pupillary dilation and stuff like that. But that's not really my expertise. I don't want to misrepresent myself at all. It was more in the advertising research. But in the, you know, R&D process, you know, they'll X amount of vanilla in a cookie, and then they'll establish people's response to it, and then they'll put x plus 1 amount of vanilla in a cookie and look at people's response for it. And they'll find that the response goes up to a certain point and then it starts to come down if you add more. So there's a, there's an almost perfect amount of vanilla you can add to a cookie to make it taste just right. Same thing for saltiness, same thing for bitterness. You know, there's an almost exact right combination that works to maximize the Reptilian Brain's response, and, um, and it's worth their while to figure it out.

So this is done with all food types, um, packaged products, processed foods, fast foods?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're also—

that's a lot of research. I mean, it really must really pay for the industry to conduct this research to, to reach that bliss point in all the foods they put together.

I forget what the size of the industry is, but it's Unbelievable. Yeah, it's unbelievable. I know from the amount of money they wasted on us, I mean, they would just pour ridiculous amounts of money on us to figure this out with consumers, the advertising part of it.

Well, well, so let's get back to the Insight question because I, I think this is a conversation in itself. Of course, we don't have enough time, but Insight, you, you know, you learned, you, you went through a lot of, um, uh, mental health professionals, psychiatrists, support groups, family members, professionals with a lot of influence and guidance and support. And yet that insight, understanding why you may have overeaten most of your— much of your adult life, that insight wasn't enough to change it. It wasn't enough to actually change the behavior. Let's talk about that a little bit. What's going on there? Why, why do we spend so much time to try and understand what the cause is when it doesn't matter.

Well, I'll tell you a story to kind of drive the point home. Right around my early 40s, which was a turning point for me when I finally figured it out, I'd done a very large study on the internet. I think I got over 40,000 people to answer a survey over a couple of years, and I would intercept them when they were searching for solutions to stress because I wanted to figure out what people did with stress eating. And I would ask them what they were stressed about, and I would ask them what do they struggle with overeating when they're stressed. And I had a whole list of things they could choose, and, um, I discovered 3 interesting things, one of which really applied to me. One thing was that when people struggled with salty, crunchy things, they tended to be stressed at work. If they struggled with chewy things like, you know, soft starches and bagels and breads and pastas or pizza, they tended to be stressed at home. And when they struggled with chocolate like I did— chocolate was always the first thing I would binge on— they tended to be more lonely or depressed. And so I figured, okay, maybe it's because I'm not happy in the marriage, maybe it's because I was, you know, raised badly, and— or something— not really badly, but something went wrong. So I called my mom, who's also a psychotherapist, and I said, Mom, I said, look, this was 40 years ago, because at the time I was in my early 40s. I'm 58 now. And I said, why do you think— looks like people who struggle with chocolate tend to be a little depressed or lonely. Why do you think that could be the case? How did this pattern get set up? And she got this horrible look on her face. This is Skype call. And she said, I'm so sorry, honey. And I said, Mom, it's okay. It's 40 years ago. I was 1 year old. I'm just trying to figure this out. I forgive you, I love you, I just want to figure this out. So she said, well, when you were 1 year old in 1965, your dad was a captain in the Army and they were talking about sending him to Vietnam. And frankly, I was terrified. We're trying to have your sister and I was terrified I was going to be an Army widow with 2 little kids. At the same time, my father, your grandfather, had just gotten out of jail. And I didn't know where he was for several years. I certainly didn't know he was a criminal, and I was horribly depressed. So between the two, I would be sitting and staring, staring at the wall most of the time, feeling depressed and anxious. And I didn't have it in me to love you and play with you and feed you when you'd come running for food and love and play. So what I often did is I kept a bottle of chocolate Bosco syrup in a refrigerator on the floor. And I'd say, "Glenn, go get your Bosco," and you'd go running over to the refrigerator— crawling over, it's more accurate— and you'd open the refrigerator and you'd take out the bottle and you'd suck on the top and you go into a chocolate sugar coma. And, you know, Joe, if, if this were a movie and if insight really was the cure, then at that point, Mama and I would have a big hug and a big cry and I'd never have trouble with chocolate again, right?

Right, right.

Well, I mean, we, we had a metaphorical hug, and it was a good conversation to have. I, I found I was softer to myself. I didn't hate myself as much after that, and I certainly learned an awful lot of things about my mom that I never knew before, which is really nice for me in the last part of her life. But my chocolate eating actually got worse, and the reason it got worse— and this can kind of show you how It's not insight, but what you do with the insight, or what you really— how you really— I'll just tell you, it's like there was this voice inside of me that said, you know what, Glenn, you're right. Our mama didn't love us enough. She left a great big chocolate-sized hole in our heart. And until you can get out of this marriage and make yourself happy, you're gonna have to keep on binging on chocolate. Yippee, let's go get some right now. And there was this voice of justification that made it possible for me to binge more. And so then I thought to myself, what if— and this is around the same time I was studying Jack Trimpey's work, who, you know, bifurcates the brain into the reptilian brain and the human brain, and, you know, tells people to separate their thoughts into constructive versus destructive. And I said, maybe I can apply that in some way. A lot of ways I had to modify it to make it work in the long run, but maybe I can apply that. And so I did something kind of crazy. I said to myself, What if I make a really clear, bright line so that I know what divides healthy eating from unhealthy eating, and I can recognize the moment that my reptilian brain is active? So for example, one of my first rules was that I'll never have chocolate on a weekday again. And that way, if I was in a Starbucks on a Thursday and I heard a little voice in my head that said, you know what, Glenn, I know it's a Thursday, but you worked out hard enough, you're not going to gain any weight. A little bit of chocolate won't hurt, one bar of chocolate won't hurt, and you can start again tomorrow. I would say, wait a minute, that's not me, that's my inner pig squealing for pig slop. I don't need pig slop. I don't let farm animals tell me what to do. And what I was doing with that, which works sometimes and didn't work other times, it was— what it would actually do is wake me up at the moment of impulse and give me this extra microseconds I needed to make the right choice if I wanted to. But I was really severing the link between emotions and overeating. So rather than curing the emotional conflict or putting out the fire, I was fixing the holes in the fireplace so that it didn't matter if I had a raging emotional conflict. It didn't matter if I was horribly depressed or lonely. It didn't matter if I was really angry or whatever it happened to be. I wasn't going to let the ashes get out of the fireplace and burn down the house. Right.

So you can identify those primitive impulses, the reptilian brain, as you say, and recognize when it's speaking, when it's affecting you. And then you can make some choices, you make some decision. All right, I'm not going to listen. I'm going to switch and I'm going to do something that is avoiding this reptilian brain speech.

Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Great. Great. Wow. Yeah. So, um, you were successful obviously at reducing the weight problem, and now you're at a healthy weight, and you still follow some of these same practices, I'm sure, to change the behavior, because we all have the impulses. I know when I was learning about behavior modification, we talked about trying to stop smoking, or you start by reducing some of the locations where you smoke, or you stop— start by reducing some of the, uh, the days when you smoke, just like you did with the chocolate. So we still have those impulses though, right?

Yeah, they still have the impulses. They— yeah, when you constrain them with specific rules and contexts, but especially if you give up something entirely, your reptilian brain starts aiming at something else. You, you don't, um, you don't have to have the rule in place indefinitely. Eventually you just become a person who doesn't have chocolate.

That's good. Yeah, it takes a while.

And, and whenever I want to do something new, like, you know, at the moment I'm trying to get myself to analyze my dreams every day. So I will have a rule about, you know, I always analyze at least one fragment of a dream every day. Then my pig starts squealing again and I have to use the techniques all over again when I'm doing something new, right? Right. I look at it as a procedure of installing new behaviors. And those behaviors become automatic, and then I can go on to the next one.

Yeah, well, that's great. I mean, the reptilian brain, as you say, then doesn't go away. It looks for new targets, and we come up with some new ways to protect against it.

Yeah, yeah.

So what's the, um, when you talk about flipping the paradigm and, you know, propose an alternative approach to eating disorders, tell us about that. What do you, what do you recommend then?

Well, you know, the reptilian brain doesn't know love. When the reptilian brain looks at something in the environment, essentially it says, do I eat it, do I mate with it, or do I kill it? There's some exceptions to that, but it's, it's almost, almost 99% eat, mate, or kill, like a bad college drinking game. It's, it's the mammalian brain on top of that, and really the neocortex, where what we think of as human connection and love exists. It's also where long-term goals and strategies like health and fitness exist. And so I went from a love yourself thin approach or nurture your inner wounded child approach to more like an be the alpha wolf superior being in my own eating ahead approach. So when an alpha wolf is challenged for leadership, it doesn't go, oh my goodness, someone needs a hug. It snarls and it growls and it asserts its superiority and says, get back in line or I'll kill you. Right? That's how an alpha wolf approaches it. And I thought to myself, there are other bodily impulses to which we're expected in a civilized society to control with our upper brain. Like, if I really, really had to pee right now, which I don't, but if I did, I would tell my bladder that, look, I'm doing an interview with Dr. Joe. And I'll get to it when— after I'm peeing. I'm superior. I can decide, even though I have a strong biological urge to pee, I can decide not to do that right now, and I can figure out how and when and what capacity that comes out. Similarly, if there is a really pretty girl walking on the sidewalk, I don't just run up and kiss her, right?

Right.

There's some kind of shy— run the other way. But in our society, we're expected to control our sexual impulses even though our testicles might want us to do otherwise. So, and you could go on with that. There are a number of different biological urges which we're expected to restrain and direct. And I said, why can't eating just be another one of those urges? And it turns out that it is. You can't ignore it entirely, just like you can't ignore your bladder entirely. You have to, you know, flood your body with nutrition at a slight caloric deficit on a regular, consistent basis if you want to lose weight. But it's not your master. It's not creating the binge. It just creates an urge, um, just like your body creates an urge. That's what I mean by shifting the paradigm from love yourself thin to be the awful wolf of your own brain.

Right, right. So you, you have talked about, um, this kind of self-definition. We can define ourselves as a permanently thin person. And that's one way to create this new image and to, I would guess, exert control over these primitive impulses.

How do we do that?

How do we think of ourselves as a permanently thin person?

Well, the first thing you have to do is move this from being just a diet, or get away from the idea that you're just installing these Nazi food policemen in your head. To understand that what you're really doing is building character. So it's not a diet because we're not trying to lose weight quickly, and we're trying to adopt the principle of controlling difficult food decisions with our intellect rather than our emotions and whims. That's what Never Binge Again is about. It's about shifting important food decisions to your head rather than making them impulsively, whimsically, emotionally. And then when you're at the moment of impulse, you want to— there's a process of disempowering the reptilian brain in the moment. It has to do with, you know, breathing out for longer than you breathe in for. Has to do with looking at specifically what the destructive thoughts are saying. Sort of example, if it says you can just start your diet tomorrow, you can say, well, you know, according to neuroplasticity, the way the brain works Is that what fires together wires together? So if I have a craving for chocolate today and I say just start tomorrow, and then I binge on chocolate, I'm going to be more likely to have that craving tomorrow. I'm going to be more likely to have that thought tomorrow. So the only time I can ever eat healthy is the present. So you learn how to disempower those justifications. And then when you do that, you ask yourself, what would make me a happier, better person if I stayed with my plan right now? So I know every bone in my body says I should have the chocolate or nobody gets hurt, but what if I didn't? How would that make me happier, better? And you focus on, you know, for me it has to do with being a, you know, a tall, thin man in the world who can be present for relationships and be a good uncle and hike tall mountains and really enjoy life to the fullest. You think about all the ways that having the character trait of not having chocolate or only having it on Saturdays really feeds everything that you want in this world. And you do that enough times and then it just becomes a part of you. Not because Daddy's going to spank you if you have chocolate, but because this is who you want to be.

Right. You come to own that new self-definition. You own it. It's yours.

Yeah.

You're not creating it anymore. It's finally yours.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, that's great. That's great. And what about— I know we also talked about Psychology of Winners, and where does the powerlessness and confusion start to dissipate for this mindset?

So in our culture, we're told that perfectionism is a bad thing, and we're led to believe it's impossible to let go of it entirely. But it turns out that the energy of perfectionism is very powerful in the psychology of winners. It's just that they use it differently in different contexts than people who are struggling with addiction use it. So the right context is to commit with perfection but forgive yourself with dignity. So when an Olympic archer, successful Olympic archer, is aiming at the bullseye, they actually kind of become one with the bullseye before they let go of the arrow. They, they're not thinking, maybe I'll hit it, maybe I won't, I'll do the best I can. They see the arrow going into the bullseye before they let go. If they miss the bullseye, they ask themselves, by how much, in what direction, what adjustments do I need to make? Then they forgive themselves with dignity and they recommit with perfection. This allows them to purge their mind of doubt and uncertainty, which really serve no purpose when aiming at a goal. It drains your energy, it stops you from focusing. So winners commit with perfection and forgive themselves with dignity. Our— do you want to say something? I'm sorry, Joe.

No, so it's really the visualization, uh, kind of in advance. I remember hearing the story about the professional downhill skier who had visualized a successful run before she did it, and over and over and over in her mind. And when she was actually making the run It was all just getting back in touch with that same visualization. So that's just talking about having the arrow hit the bullseye. Yeah, yeah.

But it's important to recognize that overeaters typically do the opposite. They will say, I'm gonna do the best I can, you know, I'm just gonna— I'm gonna try as hard as I can. And then if they don't make it, their inner pig says, oh gee, you're pathetic, you obviously don't know what you're doing, you can't possibly comply with this silly rule, just give up and eat as much chocolate as you want to.

Right.

And that's what you don't want to do. That's the equivalent of accidentally touching a hot stove and saying, you know what, I'm pathetic, I'm a pathetic hot stove toucher. I should put my hand out, whole hand down on the stove because I'm never going to get this right. So people who are struggling kind of don't have a psychology of winning. They analyze mistakes with perfection as if they're expected not to be human. But then they commit looking for progress and not perfection. And they're— in so doing, they're relinquishing the positive energy of perfection and emphasizing the negative energy of perfection. You want to do just the opposite.

Yeah, yeah, that's a great description. That's great.

And Joe, if I could just say one more thing, because you asked me when does the powerlessness and confusion start to dissipate. The powerlessness and confusion start to dissipate when you do this and you recognize that you need to be asking what you did right more so than what you did wrong, so you collect evidence of success and you're once again able to make the most of every learning experience. We are learning machines. Human beings are built as learning machines. What prevents us from getting better and better with our eating is that we get stuck and confused. We don't define a really clear target to aim for because we're frightened we might miss it, and pressure ourselves, and then we torture ourselves if we do miss it, which does even more damage. Whereas if you just aim at the bullseye, figure out what you can learn from the mistakes, get up and do it again, you can't help but get better. You can't. We are learning machines.

Yeah, that's what I— when I talk about journaling and helping people to change their behaviors, whatever it is, it's really focusing at the end of the day on what I did right and compared to what I used to do, or How today's reaction or conversation was an improvement over where I was 6 months ago. So we can focus on that progress. We can make a record of the movement toward our goal rather than kind of faulting ourselves. Oh gee, I snapped at somebody, or oh gee, I made another bad decision. So we look at the— and we make a record of it in our journal about the progress.

You collect the evidence of success.

Yeah, that's what you're talking about. That's great.

Are there a set of specific prompts that you have people go through to focus them on evidence of success?

No, it's really, you know, when I look at talking about kind of improving their attitudes about aging and, you know, accepting some of the setbacks and, you know, maybe in the past they would have, you know, kind of faulted themselves or pointed their finger, you know, at what they did wrong. And now today it's like, okay, let's recognize I did this better today. I handled this setback better today. And that's the record of the success that I encourage. Gotcha.

I love it. Yeah, I love it.

So tell us about your book, Never Binge Again. Why did you— oh boy, you have a great, great history and so much insight and experience to share. But tell us about the book.

It's kind of a fluke that I did write it. So I didn't set out to be an eating disorders doctor. I mean, a long time ago I had a little foray, which was really awful, into it. But really, I'd given up on that idea. I just wanted to get better myself. And so I kept the journal for 8 years, which was all of the crazy things my pig would say, all the lies it would tell me, and then how I would rationally disempower it. And through my business dealings, I'd wound up as a minor partner in a publishing company. And I would talk to the CEO every now and then. He'd become a friend of mine. And he said, "Glenn, we really need to publish our own book so we can do some marketing experiments and show, attract more popular authors to show them we really know what we're doing. We have a unique method we know we're doing." And I said, "Well, I'm kind of thinking about getting divorced and I have this journal that I wrote for 8 years. It's really kind of crazy. It's me versus my inner pig." He said, "I love it. Turn it into a book." So over that summer, I wrote the book, got a whole bunch of feedback on it, and I sent it to him. He reads it. He was 100 pounds overweight at the time. And he calls me back 2 weeks later and he says, "This is a good book." He said, "I don't eat donuts and I don't let farm animals tell me what to do. Donuts are pig slop. I don't eat pig slop. I'm not going to let farm animals tell me what to do." So he followed a fairly similar course that I did. It took him about 18 months and he lost lost most of the weight. And along the way, we published the book. And, you know, he knew what he was doing, and I knew what I was doing in marketing also, from all of our years of experience. And but still in all, we had no idea it was going to take off the way that it took off. Well, and now we've got 15,000 reviews, and, um, you know, which is more than The Da Vinci Code. And people don't recognize me by, by name, but they'll point at me and say, aren't you the pig guy? You're the pig guy.

So that's a great story. Congratulations. That's super. That's a great, great success. Great.

Thanks.

Well, I see we're almost out of time, but let me ask you, what would you like our listeners to take away from our conversation, Glenn?

Well, I'd like philosophically something I'd like them to take away, and I would like them to also have a free copy of the book, if that's okay with you.

Of course. Wow.

Philosophically, I want you to understand that what Jim Rohn said is true, right? A life of discipline is better than a life of regret. And freedom actually sits on top of discipline, not opposed to it. Some people are frightened to implement these rules because they're taking something away from themselves. But you wouldn't have the freedom to drive if it wasn't for the discipline of the engineers who make sure that your wheels turn, 30 degrees when you turn the steering wheel 30 degrees, and that tremendously opens up your radius of locomotion and your mobility, and it really adds a lot of freedom to your life. You wouldn't have the freedom to play the piano and improvise your soul if you didn't study the scales first. Every discipline that you integrate into your life adds even more freedom. It doesn't take it away. So I think that's really important. And then Peter McWilliams said that you can have anything you want, but you can't have everything you want. And if you are going to choose to continue eating donuts, like, you know, my partner Yoav, right, head of the publishing company, was doing up until they read the book, then he's giving up the freedom of not having donuts. He's giving up the freedom of living in a thin body and, you know, feeling like he's going to live a long life for his kids and be free of cardiovascular worries and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so it's not really a matter— and Jeanine Roth is the first to point this out— not really a matter of being deprived. It's a matter of choosing which deprivation you want. You want the deprivation of being a slave to your impulses and a slave to the donut, or do you want the deprivation of not having the donut and being a, you know, free person to live your life and do as you please in a, in a healthy body? So Which kind of deprivation are you going to choose? Beautiful.

I love that.

I love that.

Giving people choices, helping them stay informed of their choices.

Yeah.

And that freedom, that's the freedom. Yeah.

So would you like me to tell people where to get the book?

Oh, that'd be great. Yes, please.

You go to neverbingeagain.com and click on the big red button. You sign up for the reader bonus list. You can get a free copy in Kindle, Nook, or PDF format.

Wow.

We've made that free, all the electronic copies. The Audible and the paperback, there's a charge for, but it's reasonable. And when you sign up there, I'll give you two extra things that you don't get if you go right to Amazon. You'll get a free copy of the food plan starter templates. So the program is diet agnostic. It works regardless of what dietary philosophy you have, as long as it's reasonable and nutritious. So you could be ketogenic or a whole foods person, high carb, low carb, point counter, calorie counter. It doesn't matter. We thought through a set of food plan starter templates that will give you some rules that would support you if you adopt them to your own style. We won't take responsibility for it because we're not medical doctors or dietitians. But, and the last thing I'll give you is a set of recorded coaching sessions. Because I want you to hear how this works in practice. You must be thinking, why does Dr. Joe have a crazy psychologist on who has a pig inside of him? But it sounds kind of harsh, but it's actually a very compassionate process which takes people from feeling, uh, powerless and confused and hopeless, despairing, feeling confident and excited and able to do it in just one session. I want you to hear to hear how that works. So, uh, neverbingegain.com.

Very thoughtful. That's very thoughtful and generous. So these are available on your website. They can go to Amazon for the book, uh, copy of the book. But, uh, the website—

you can get everything on the website, neverbingegain.com. Okay, but the big red button.

Well, super. Thank you for that. So sorry to say we're out of time, but, uh, before we wrap up, I just want to remind our listeners to visit my website, livingto100.club. Sign up for my email list, and download a free copy of my 9 Tips to Make Living Longer Enjoyable. While you're on the website, be sure to peruse my library of blogs and podcasts. Glenn Livingston, thanks so much for being a guest on our show today. I really appreciate it. It was a great conversation. I know our audience will get a lot out of it. Thank you.

Thank you for having me, John. It was very enjoyable.

Great. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. Hope to see you next time.

Hi, I'm Laurie LeBay, and I wanted to tell you about Alzheimer Speaks, which is another great podcast. You see, my own mother lived with dementia for 30 years, and I felt lost. Did you know every 3 seconds someone in the world is being diagnosed with dementia, odds are it's going to hit your families too. We want to help you connect to services, products, tools, research, and stories so you can be prepared. Please subscribe to Alzheimer Speaks on your favorite podcast platform.